Whiteboards

Startups live on white boards. But if you go to Office Depot or Staples you will discover big white boards are really expensive. We did some pricing, and discovered to entirely cover one of our office walls with white boards would have been a more than thousand dollars (nothing gets the ideas flowing better than an entire wall you can write on). I am way too cheap to pay that much.

Then I discovered Thrifty White Tileboard from Home Depot. A four foot by eight foot sheet of tileboard from Home Depot is $10.97 (a comparable size white board from Staples is about $400). It works like a charm. Rumor is you get some ghosting after a year or so, but it's so cheap you can just replace it then.

That's our tech start up tip for the day. Photos are be forthcoming.

Coffee Achievers

Foneshow's new offices are right over an awesome coffee bar called JavaNet. We opened an account with them. Coffee is an important part of any start up.

I suppose the fact that I remember this video kind of dates me...

Edit: Moronic typo fixed

We're Moving

We're getting new offices. The address is:

Foneshow Inc
39 Exchange Street
3rd Floor
Portland, Maine
04101

You want to see some pictures? Check out the set on Flickr

This is where we are on the map.

An Observation

We recently posted a job listing on Craigslist Maine for an admin/operations person. We got a big bunch of resumes that we're reviewing this weekend. It seems that the vast majority of them (60-70%) are from people who are either currently, or recently employed in the mortgage industry.

I'm no economist, but to a layman, that doesn't seem to bode well for the mortgage industry.

Another Crazy Week

Today (Monday) is pretty quiet. A few meetings and getting our new (sublet) office space in Portland set up.

Tuesday: A few meetings during the day, then a seminar with the Maine Software Developers Association (MESDA) Telecommunications SIG.

Wednesday: Speaking at a lunch in Portland, hop on a plane to Chicago, rent a car and drive to Madison Wisconsin.

Thursday: ONA Regional Conference. Drive back to ORD at the end of the day.

Friday Morning (0400), drop off car and catch 0600 flight to JFK.
Personal Democracy Forum Conference in NY

Saturday: PDF unconference.

Sunday: Fly home

All this time I've also got to be preparing for the following week when we've got some meetings and presentations setting up operational stuff. I'm really glad I got to take the girls to the Seadogs game yesterday (despite the pain of watching them blow a 6-1 lead to lose 12-6).

Update:
At 2 PM yesterday I got an email from a VC we're working with. I thought I had a meeting with the VC and a potential partner at 4PM in Portland, I was wrong, the meeting was at 4PM in Waltham. I drove like mad and just made it. Add an extra 4 hours in the car to the madness.

We're Getting Office Space

It's time.

We're not signing a lease. We're sub-letting some space in Portland from our friends at Goombah.

Our new address is:

Foneshow Inc.
565 Congress Street
Suite 201
Portland, Maine
04101

I'll post some pictures when I get around to it.

Office Space

I used to have an investment strategy centered on using the construction of an office campus as a contra-indicator for near term success. When tech companies start to build buildings everyone gets distracted. Employees moving offices is distracting. Divvying up the new shiny space churns up office politics. Senior level management spends time reviewing renderings and looking at swatches. Focus is lost. Apple nearly died after building Infinite Loop. I think the excite@home temple is still empty. SGI went splat after building their campus (although Google is doing well in the old SGI space). Yahoo!'s glory days were when they were on Central Expressway, not in their new digs in Sunnyvale (not to mention the Santa Monica debacle).

Foneshow is currently virtual and we intend to stay as virtual as we can for as long as we can (although it does look like we'll be subletting some space in the Old Port neighborhood of Portland in the near future). VC Confidential has a great post of the perils of start ups dabbling in real estate. There are a lot of great lessons in there.