Spencer Fry

I was at the NY Tech Meetup on Tuesday — watching the presentations of Summize, Wirewize, ZocDoc, and others — seated next to a nice gentleman who I started up a conversation with. He’s an inspiring entrepreneur who was in hotel management for 10(?) years, got sick of it, and wants to try his hand at this game. He actually already received funding in January for his idea and is looking to launch in August. He wasn’t specific about what he was doing, but it had to do with video.

As we got to talking, he asked me if I had ever worked a 9 to 5. “No, I guess not,” was my response. And it got me to thinking. I’m very proud of the fact that I’ve never had to work a 9 to 5 job in my life and I hope I never have to — I prefer the 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year job. I did work a few summer jobs when I was younger (three times at a bicycle shop and two as a teaching assistant for a Yale Summer Programs class), but nothing too serious. On the one hand, I would like to know how it feels to not have any work past 5:01 PM, but on the other hand, I prefer to be able to work when inspiration hits me. Long live entrepreneurship!

I just finished up an intense accounting and financial markets one-week class offered by NYU. (And before I go any further: getting up at 7:00 AM is the worst.) The reason I enrolled in this class was to become better familiarized with accounting and financial statement analysis. I don’t have time to dedicate the normal semester of learning to it, but everyone can take a week to better themselves in their field. So that’s what I did.

Overall, I’m really happy with the class offered by instructor John F. Mahoney, CPA. He’s a great, energetic middle-aged guy who is very passionate about accounting practices. He really knows his stuff and that shines through in his teaching method, which includes a lot of his real life experience.

On to the class. We began the class by going through companies’ annual reports, analyzing business transactions (balance sheet and income statement), utilizing T accounts, trial balance, general ledger, and so forth. We continued down the path of complex accounting such as ratio analysis and ended the class with profitability, investors’ ratios, and in-depth cash flow analysis. There was a lot in-between, which I won’t mention here, but you get the general gist. My brain already feels like it’s going to explode with how much we covered.

Sometimes stretching yourself too thinly on a wide range of topics is a bad thing, but in this case I think it was good. We covered 10 chapters of our accounting book (“Financial Reporting and Analysis” by Charles H. Gibson) as well as many handouts and other things. Why I’m happy we skipped around is because I got a taste of a lot of things and I can go back and further my understanding of what’s most important to me on my own. I now know of most of what’s involved, so I can pick and choose. For example, even though we covered preferred and commons stock, that doesn’t really apply to me at this time. Hopefully, it will one day.

The bottom line (see what I did there?) is that it was really nice being able to take this class to increase my knowledge of accounting and financial statement analysis. It’s not often that at my age (24) you’re still given the opportunity to be able to go back and learn something through a teaching program while still working – unless, of course, you’re going to grad or business school. I want to thank Jason and Dave for picking up the slack while I had my head in numbers all week. They’re the best people I’ve ever worked with and you will be in awe with what we’re coming out with soon. More on that later!

Every few months, I come across a really cool website feature that gives me the “wow” feeling. The most recent one happened to me last week when using Flickr for the first time in over a year – so cool that I even upgraded to Pro. The feature is their image uploader. Here’s a screenshot:

Look how you can watch the progress of your upload. I love how it has two progress bars: one for the individual image and one for the total job. I equally love how it grays out finished images and adds a checkmark saying they’re finished. How cool is all that? I think Flickr is really coming along, although, I’m opposed to their recent video addition along with many other people. At least they restricted it to 90 seconds.

Funny how right before last week I blogged about getting back into a regular, healthy schedule and immediately following that I come down with a bad cold. Terrible timing. Last Tuesday, I woke up with a sore throat, which grew into flu like symptoms (a fever, aches, chills, etc.) on Wednesday and didn’t really improve until Sunday. I’m now almost fully recovered, but I still have a runny nose and a small cough. What a pain in the ass getting a cold is. It really sets you back in your work and your life. I’m hoping it’s the last of the year for me. Now all I have are allergies to deal with…

So I’m feeling a bit sick today. I woke up with a sore throat and a bit if a headache. However, I’m trying my best to not let it get to me. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do today and three networking events to attend over the next three days (including the MindPetals event later tonight). I think I’m going to be able to shake this thing, but it hasn’t really gotten much better so far during the day. How do you guys work through the period you’re not feeling well? Do you just take time off/rest, and hope it passes or do you work through it?

I don’t know about you all, but I need my rest and I haven’t been getting any lately. I think since early last week, I haven’t slept more than 5 hours a night and some nights I haven’t even gotten 5 hours. I’ve had insomniac issues since college, but this past week has been really bad — sometimes not falling asleep until 4 AM. Taking my queue from Fred Wilson who felt similar this past week, I’m hitting the reset button on Monday and going to get back to a normal schedule. Wish me luck.

My parents live in Connecticut, which is about two hours from me in New York City. I see them about every three weeks for a night or two. I don’t have a car, so I take the train. I found that I somehow do some of my best work on this train ride. The train is fairly comfortable, but nothing special. Just your standard train. It’s typically packed, so there are tons of people around me and I usually get squeezed in. But with my laptop on my knees and my iPhone’s earbuds in my ears, I type away as ideas flow into my brain like nowhere else I’ve worked.

I really don’t know what it is about this damn train ride, which I loathe, because it’s “boring,” but maybe it’s being surrounded by working people? Maybe it’s the noise? I have no idea, but the train is a godsend to my work and I wish I could replicate the experience elsewhere. Yesterday I pumped out four pages full of concrete, usable ideas in the two hour train ride for something nterface is working on. Choo choo!

Found a cool way to track what people might be saying about your website. Check out Google’s Blog Search. You can search by your company’s name and then click the RSS link on the left hand side to follow it through your RSS reader. I’ve been following Carbonmade for a while now and it allows me to respond and interact with our community.

You may have heard of Startup School, it’s an event run by the Y Combinator people. It’s a free yearly conference run out of Stanford. And this year they’re sharing the videos on the Web. I’ve seen three so far and they’ve all been great: Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon.com, David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals, and Greg McAdoo, Partner at Sequoia Capital. It’s really worth your time if you’re interested in startup stuff. A full list of the talks can be found here.

WOW, getting something out feels so good. We released our first update to Carbonmade in well over a year. It was just a little something, but we all feel great that we got something new out to the world. We added PayPal support (a lot of our customers are overseas), overhauled our entire billing system, re-designed several forms (sign in screen, billing screen, and a few others), updated our Privacy Policy, and a few other things.

Most of the credit goes to Jason for learning the PayPal API from scratch and coding things: a big shoutout to the self-proclaimed eater of oranges! The majority of the changes were behind-the-scenes coding changes as mentioned above, but Dave and I contributed a lot too. What a huge sigh of relief to get something out. I really can’t put it in words how good it feels.

I’m such a huge advocate of rapid iteration for web applications, so this long tenure was killing me. You need to release early and release often to be competitive in this business. Dave often uses the idea of putting something in an “incubator” to allow it to grow and for us to study it. We can see how it’s being used and change things through customer feedback. To be able to do this, though, you need to be constantly iterating. Releasing often also gives you that sense of accomplishment that helps keep you sane. I think we were all going a little batty without a recent release. There’s certainly a lot more we can do, but even something as boring as an overhauled billing system feels satisfying.

I never want to have to go so long without an update again and I don’t think we will. We all agree that we’re going to focus on smaller chunks of work from here on out. Don’t try and perfect your website out of the gate, but let it grow through an incubation process. Find a feature or area you can improve on, spec it out, design it, code it, and release it. As Nike’s famous slogan says: Just do it!