Today was a productive day. K.and I decided to devote tractor beams of intense focus today to get the most painful parts of the Villager process either firmly in motion or firmly resolved.
We got up slightly late (my fault, fuckin' snooze) and got to B&H Lunch counter by 11 am to have some of the best mornin' food in the area. I had a challah grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup and K. had a strange veggie juice and half a whitefish sandwich. We love those guys. The dude behind the counter just had a baby, Hanna, who is now 5 weeks old, which he showed to us on his iPhone. Very cute.
We then took the F train to Dumbo, where we commenced a full-blown assault on a few projects.
1) K. decided to start with my market research on the competition. Unsurprisingly, the success of Kickstarter has spawned a multitude of copycats and crowdfunding investment platforms. She spent some time fixing up my primitive word document and migrating it to a powerful excel platform. She also spent some time looking at 33needs, getting seriously annoyed with the company, and modeling out the important parts of it.
2) I spent two hours trying to understand interest rates, yield, different ways of structuring interest rates and trying to figure out how the various laws worked. It was painful.
3) I then turned my attention to legal documentation. I spent the next 6 hours reading the borrower and registration agreements for Prosper and LendingClub line by line and re-drafting them to match the needs and structure of Villager. That was very painful. It is slightly more fun to re-draft contracts from scratch and make them fit a particular structure...definitely more fun than working within highly constrained highly regularized environments where you are expected to understand things you can't possibly understand...but I still hate spending hours and hours in front of a contract. It is very painful stuff. At least I was able to get a very rough draft of the Borrower Registration Agreement, Promissory Note, Lender Registration Agreement and Terms of Use together. I'm glad I finally turned to it, though, because it certainly raises a lot of issues and complications I am not looking forward to tackling. But need to tackle.
4) Didn't hear back from the folks I emailed yesterday...Rick's Picks, Brooklyn Roasters, Xi'an Famous Foods. The day before I was 3 for 3. Yesterday's batch came back 0 for 3. Shame. We'll see though.
4) Kristen then re-directed her attention to the back-end mechanics spreadsheet. She worked her considerable magical talents on the spreadsheet and was able to build in the concept of monthly compound interest payments. Very impressive stuff and it definitely gets us a long way. Very happy that she's able to make such enormous contributions to the company and do things I could not even dream of doing. It is very good stuff.
5) I polished a blog piece on the Five C's of credit analysis. Still far from ready for public consumption, but it was good to spend some time writing. I enjoy writing. (This blog doesn't count.) When a piece of writing comes together, it always makes me so happy and satisfied . But boy, it certainly hurts like a motherfucker to get a piece to come together.
6) Been in contact with my web developer James throughout the course of the day, so that's been helpful. Gchat is very good for this purpose. You can do what you need to do but not remain locked into face to face discussions for long periods of productive time.
That's all. It's 11:45, so we've gotten about 12 solid hours of work in...but I still feel good, so let's see what I get into next!
We got up slightly late (my fault, fuckin' snooze) and got to B&H Lunch counter by 11 am to have some of the best mornin' food in the area. I had a challah grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup and K. had a strange veggie juice and half a whitefish sandwich. We love those guys. The dude behind the counter just had a baby, Hanna, who is now 5 weeks old, which he showed to us on his iPhone. Very cute.
We then took the F train to Dumbo, where we commenced a full-blown assault on a few projects.
1) K. decided to start with my market research on the competition. Unsurprisingly, the success of Kickstarter has spawned a multitude of copycats and crowdfunding investment platforms. She spent some time fixing up my primitive word document and migrating it to a powerful excel platform. She also spent some time looking at 33needs, getting seriously annoyed with the company, and modeling out the important parts of it.
2) I spent two hours trying to understand interest rates, yield, different ways of structuring interest rates and trying to figure out how the various laws worked. It was painful.
3) I then turned my attention to legal documentation. I spent the next 6 hours reading the borrower and registration agreements for Prosper and LendingClub line by line and re-drafting them to match the needs and structure of Villager. That was very painful. It is slightly more fun to re-draft contracts from scratch and make them fit a particular structure...definitely more fun than working within highly constrained highly regularized environments where you are expected to understand things you can't possibly understand...but I still hate spending hours and hours in front of a contract. It is very painful stuff. At least I was able to get a very rough draft of the Borrower Registration Agreement, Promissory Note, Lender Registration Agreement and Terms of Use together. I'm glad I finally turned to it, though, because it certainly raises a lot of issues and complications I am not looking forward to tackling. But need to tackle.
4) Didn't hear back from the folks I emailed yesterday...Rick's Picks, Brooklyn Roasters, Xi'an Famous Foods. The day before I was 3 for 3. Yesterday's batch came back 0 for 3. Shame. We'll see though.
4) Kristen then re-directed her attention to the back-end mechanics spreadsheet. She worked her considerable magical talents on the spreadsheet and was able to build in the concept of monthly compound interest payments. Very impressive stuff and it definitely gets us a long way. Very happy that she's able to make such enormous contributions to the company and do things I could not even dream of doing. It is very good stuff.
5) I polished a blog piece on the Five C's of credit analysis. Still far from ready for public consumption, but it was good to spend some time writing. I enjoy writing. (This blog doesn't count.) When a piece of writing comes together, it always makes me so happy and satisfied . But boy, it certainly hurts like a motherfucker to get a piece to come together.
6) Been in contact with my web developer James throughout the course of the day, so that's been helpful. Gchat is very good for this purpose. You can do what you need to do but not remain locked into face to face discussions for long periods of productive time.
That's all. It's 11:45, so we've gotten about 12 solid hours of work in...but I still feel good, so let's see what I get into next!
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