So close! Aggggh!

We are so close, but we still aren't there yet! AGGHH!

In any case, Jason has been an absolute champ. He works his own full-time job, quite successfully I might add, and in his spare time has put so much energy into our project. He hasn't asked for much and he has been incredibly helpful. Of course, it would be much better if he were available full time, but beggars can't be choosers.

The biggest change is that we are basically ending our relationship with James, our designer and front-end engineer. I have never had a working experience like this in my entire life. Deadlines were crystal clear and self-determined and I can say with confidence that he missed at least 95% or more of them. If not by blatantly ignoring the deadline and not responding to communications about it, then by doing something entirely different than what had been discussed. It took several months to do the simplest things. 7 months of work has produced an extremely extremely stripped down, generic, undesigned template that we will be using and 4 or 5 iterations of half-complete templates we can't use. It has been immensely frustrating. My main primary stress point in the last 7 months has been working with him. Enormously talented, probably the worst work experience of my career in terms of a productive, working relationship. Now, obviously, being a corporate lawyer was miles and miles worse in the fact that it stole every shred of happiness and the will to survive and replaced it with desperation, unhappiness and isolation...but in terms of getting things done productively, this shit was horrendous.

In the end, I blew up at him again. He took affront and we decided just to let the December 31 kill date we put into place go into effect and end everything. Awful. Just awful. I could spend hours just talking about how terrible he is as a project manager, but I will stop. In the end, luckily I have been reading the Dalai Lama's Art of Happiness and decided to end the relationship on a positive note. I will pay him the remaining payment on the contract (minus the bonus), he got a bottle of whiskey from me for Christmas, and we will grab one last drink and just say goodbye. I wish him the best -- but I will never work with him again.

Otherwise, today was pretty uneventful. I stayed home and did about 3 or 4 hours of constant bug bashing on the website. Hopefully it doesn't overwhelm Jason, but fingers crossed that we can be done soon. After that, I met the owner of an artisanal granola manufacturing concern in Brooklyn....finished a post about Mister Hotpot for the blog...and maybe now I will draft up some emails to other businesses.

Here's to closing out a good year where I learned a shit ton, but wasn't able to get much done. Next year is the year.

Kick it up a notch.

So it's clear to me I am not a "serial entrepreneur" stereotype. I am not frenetic and full of energy. I am not infused with some sort of divine inspiration to have a personality where I want to run 10 different businesses at once, sell them and move on. I don't work until 3 am all night fueled by red bull and ambition.

Instead, I am invested in my own business. I want it to work. I want to keep growing it. I want to explore opportunities of making it work well in the world and produce collateral benefits. I think about it most of the time. When it is put to me, what would you do if you had a million dollars, it turns out my answer is to dump half of it into the Company so we could hire developers. In other words, there's nothing else I want to do, despite the frustrations of being here. I work reasonable hours, maybe 8-12 a day. But I am not a frenzy of activity. Maybe I just have a different reference where working 70-80 hour weeks was a grueling horrible experience and I shouldn't expect that. Who knows.

In any case, it is time to kick it up a notch. I think our primary goal for the next few months is to hustle like fucking crazy and get as many clients as we can. Run the model, run the business, put yourself out there and get people to be involved and interested in Villager. No second guessing or pussy footing, just gotta make it work. If we can get the platform up, that is all we need to get this thing going. We can tweak and fix and tweak and fix, but our business requires that we get out there and let people know. Until now there's been too much philosophical abstract quibbling. Need to just start doing. Enough thinking. Fail a little.

Felt like a short day.

But I guess it may be because I spent a lot of it in transit. Working for yourself, you sometimes feel like you could always be working harder. Hm. Maybe I should just be working harder.

Anyway, I woke up and rolled into the office around 10:30 after dealing with some emails. From there I talked with Ben about what we should be discussing with Amy Cortese for our lunch meeting. We settled on a new Meetup concept and journalistic outreach methods. I finished a series of emails to go out to business folks. I reviewed our CMS some more for bugs and made some notes.

We met Amy Cortese and her partner Robert at Apartment 138 in Boerum Hill. Nice restaurant, but super brunchy, which was a little odd. Had a nice lunch, discussed a variety of topics including their own idea for a local investing clearinghouse for information and angel network. Great idea, definitely a need, but I think it would be great to really hone and get down to the core of what they want to do. What they want to build is extraordinarily complex and difficult. She once again reiterated her offer to help us with outreach...which is amazing! She's also got a TEDx speech to give in Hawaii, which is awesome.

I came back to the office and dashed off five emails to Brooklyn businesses. Then went off to meet Marc Schapiro, the owner of Idle Hands bar. We ended up in a bubble tea spot and talked in depth for an hour about how to run a bar and bar finances and his views on financing options and all that jazz. One of the nicest people I've ever met, super intelligent and helpful in all regards. Took oodles of useful notes. Rode my bike home over the Wmburg bridge and came home to take notes. Getting on a call with Jason re: the CMS at 8 pm.

And then I have to do shitty immigration law work all night. Sigh.

Welllll...

Maybe I didn't think this through. My first impulse was to bitch wildly about some people I've been working with. Publicly. Probably not the best idea because they still work for me.

So I guess I'm back to here for awhile.

Updates to come.

Switching Over.

In theory...I am starting on a new blog. A more public one. I want to write some stuff here, but am a little worried about directing people here and letting people read previous posts, many of which are basically private. Hence the complete inability to find this blog elsewhere. That's all.

Anotherjaylee.wordpress.com. It will probably just be Anotherjaylee.com within a week or so. Not like anyone will actually see this link.