What I Had Done
Warning: This is going to be a very long post. I will update it from time to time. Now, it is only about the first few weeks in Palo Alto. I am going to take my last final tomorrow morning. Time for me to get back to study.
So, summer is coming again. What have you planned for your summer? Last year, around the same time, I knew that I was going to California to participate in YC Summer 2009. My cofounder, Jared, had already found a place where four of us could live at, the HackerHouse. He had the lease from Sam Odio and had everything up properly before we moved in. We were cheap founders. In order to save cost, Jared managed to squeeze other 5 people into that house(joey, nick, mario, dan and alex). It was fun. And, things worked out really well. In the day, joey and alex would be at Google(intern), nick at Facebook(intern), mario at Stanford(graduate) and dan at Techcrunch(intern). So, we owned the whole place in the day. Btw, I hardly awaked in the day. My work schedule usually started about 5pm till about 9am in the morning the next day.
Our adventure started right after my finals last year. I was the only one who flew from Chicago to California. I google'd out the map and took a picture of the route Google Map showed me with my iPhone. I didn't have a data plan because it would be expensive for me to get an iPhone with a data plan since it was only my first year in US. I didn't had SSN, which also mean that I had to pay extra 500 for the deposit. Nikhil, Jared and Dan decided to drive Nikhil's car from Urbana to Palo Alto. Nikhil was graduating as a master. Jared, me and Dan were still undergraduate. My first destination in California was the San Jose Airport. I realized that I had been pronounced "San Jose" wrongly till Jared told me about that when I asked him about it few day later they got to the HackerHouse. When I first reached the airport, I had no idea how to get to the HackerHouse. I had the address and the map on my phone. So, I had to ask people around me to actually figure out how to get there. It was my first time taking public transport(Caltrain and some 10 Northbound bus) in US.
First lesson learned: Thing isn't as hard as you think. You just have to ask.
The first week in Palo Alto was spent on getting our work space up. We went to IKEA to buy our stuffs. But, chairs and tables basically occupied the whole car. Dan and I decided to walk back to HackerHouse from IKEA. It was a fun walk. I really liked the neighborhood of Palo Alto. I heard a lot people saying that you might bump into Steve Jobs here. Btw, Steve Jobs' house was just 20 mins walk away from HackerHouse. Stanford was just 10 mins walk from HackerHouse. HackerHouse was right in the middle of so many amazing ventures in Silicon Valley. It was really fun to walk down University Avenue and overhearing a lot of people talking about startups here. Then, I was part of them. I always thought that wearing the YC "Make Something People Want" tshirt and walking down the street was the coolest thing to do. Sometimes, you might even bump into other yc-founders who were wearing the same shirts too. Next time, if you see someone wearing that tshirt, feel free to say "hi". I might be one of them.
Second lesson learned: SV is the place where you should be if you want to start a tech startup. People here are startup people. We are never afraid of failures.
To be continued...
