50 Coffees

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“50 coffee meetings. It should stick in your head as a metaphor for networking. For getting outside of your comfort zone. For starting relationships today that won’t pay off for a year. It’s the entrepreneur’s equivalent of 10,000 hours.” (source)

Mark Suster a venture capitalist based in Los Angeles wrote a blog post about how getting out there and meeting people for “50 coffees” will help you build relationships that might not pay off for a year.

We are in San Francisco at least until January 15th 2012 and want to meet with as many people in the tech scene here as we can.  We are looking to meet with VCs, entrepreneurs, developers, media, angels, conference organizers and anyone else doing great things in Silicon Valley.

In this blog, we will document each of these coffee meetings.

Setting Up The San Francisco “Office”

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We have rented a house to set up show in while we are here and part of the setup means transforming part of the house we are in, into a functional office space.  Thankfully, they had a large dinning room table that we have taken over and make it our work space.

One thing we realized quite quickly was that the dinning room chairs were not going to cut it for long days of working away.  About 10 years ago, Mike and I purchased seemingly super expensive chairs called Herman Miller Aeron chairs.  While they are really expensive, over the years they have been proven as the best quality chair on the market.  We have purchased many other chairs from lots of different suppliers only to have them fall apart, loose the stuffing in the arm rests or just break.  The first 2 Aeron chairs that we bought 10 years ago, are still in use and look like new.  So today, we drove over the Bay Bridge in San Francisco to a furniture supplier that was selling hundreds of “used” Aeron chairs.  By used, they said they were bought by Google, for a 3 day conference, and then put on the market to be sold.  So we picked up 4 of them for the PayrollHero.com team.

Luxr.co Day 1

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We have arrived at Luxr.co, for Day 1 of the Lean UX Residency.  We have had a few people ask about how we ended up at Luxr? how did we hear about it?
When starting (OTD) OutsourcingThingsDone.com in Manila my business partner (Mike Stephenson) was having a hard time with payroll, schedules and time tracking.  There were some solutions for some of it, but not one thing that did all that we needed and that we liked.  So, Mike suggested building our own, so we put a few developers on it and built a payroll/time tracking/scheduling software application.  It worked well.  We showed it to a few business owners in Manila, they liked it and wanted to use it.  BOOM – PayrollHero.com was born.  We adjusted the system to work for other companies and began adding Alpha users to the system.
Through Eric Ries (who Mike and I met with up in Whistler) we learned of Luxr.co in San Francisco.  Actually we bought 500 copies (details of that deal) of his new book The Lean Startup and with that package came the Luxr.co entry and a bunch of other slick stuff. Luxr.co is a paid residency program in San Francisco.  There are 4 other companies in it.  The quality of the other Luxr groups are fantastic. And one of them, Lift, has already been funded by Ev and Biz from Twitter.