I was reading a very sad, frank, and wise notice from Russell Beattie about the death of Mowser, his mobile browser project. I know, and you know, that most startups die young, the ones that don't mostly become zombies living on consulting, and the small remaining percentage are bought for peanuts by larger companies lusting after their IP and management team.

But it is still sad.

And before anyone misconstrues anything I am about to say, I've been there, so I am very sympathetic.

The Aftermath

I think Russell can say it better than I can:

Seriously... A salary will be a good thing to have again. I'm *thousands* of dollars in debt to my family and friends, maxed out on every credit card (all of which are in collections), on my last chance for my apartment (if I bounce one more check...), had my car repossessed *twice*, electricity turned off, cellphones switched off, landline canceled outright, and on more than one occasion (this weekend in particular) eaten little more than buttered macaroni as I waited for an overdue PayPal deposit to arrive (3-4 days? Come on!). Having a steady income will be a welcome mental break, believe me.

So, here's the thing, did he make a mistake or, even in hindsight, was this the right way to fund his company?

VC or Credit Card Debt

Well, that's the question, unless you're Guy and have been rich and famous for so long you forget why.

There is no answer. I know that's all very Yoda, but there it is.

The Third Way

Jeff Bezos is supposed to have sat down and gone through all the different items that could plausibly be purchased via the internet (pet food: no) and settled on books.

My last startup we went though a host of things we could startup that had serious FY money potential and that could be started while we were still consulting and earning our basic dough.

You see, we'd both done it the VC way and the credit card way and, since we didn't like the outcome of either, we went for the third way.

India

If I wanted to start a company without going into debt and without selling my soul to a VC, I'd go live in India and insource my project. 

A good mid-level manager who was willing to move to India could easily make $50K USD, which is the equivalent of $400K in SFO.

Take your partner with you, share an inexpensive room. You now have $70K to play with to hire technical people.

Which, in the good old US of A might get you a semi-palatable Flash programmer, but in India one can get a very good technical programmer for $15K.

Bootstrap four or five good programmers and be there to supervise them.

Plus, should things go badly, as they likely will, you now have an impressive resume to take home to the US.

You can rinse and repeat this process in China or Vietnam if you like, but I prefer curry to eel.

Keep A Stiff Upper Lip

Personal advice to Russell and everyone else swimming in the dead pool - it's all very survivable, and likely you'll take another run at the brass ring. I did, and I believe you can catch it if you work hard enough.

Sigh.  Once again they almost avoid being the rotten apple of my eye.  My not so snarky comments in red.

This evening Cari.net will conduct an emergency maintenance window to provide additional protection and redundancy for the C2 Data Center. [Planned emergency maintence window. Nice!] Every attempt is made to provide advance notice of these windows; however, in the interest of our customers ,it has been decided that postponing these actions may subject our customers to undue risk. [We forgot to send the email, we got the Special Post Mortem Version of D&D.]

At 12:00am this evening (Friday, March 28th) [Ooops, 12:00am Friday was this morning, around 18 hours ago.  You probably mean midnight tonight, or Saturday morning.][Wait, what time zone?], Cari.net Network Service Teams will install an additional BGP router [Oooooh.] within the C2 data center. This router will provide load sharing and additional redundancy to this segment of our network.

The maintenance will begin promptly at midnight and is expected to take approximately 15 minutes. Service impact should be minimal, though customers with equipment or services located in C2 may notice brief periods of latency and intermittent loss of connectivity during this short window as BGP tables are recalculated. [Is my stuff in C2?  How would I know.  Don't you know?  Why don't you tell me?] Senior Networking Team members will be onsite managing this event. [Blame will be allocated immediately!]

This work is being done to augment changes made during the March 21st window and to provide protection against additional large-scale network problems in the future. [We are not sure we fixed it right last time.   Now we're pretty sure it's the fuel injectors and not the distributor.] Customers located in Cari.net’s C5 facility will be unaffected by this maintenance window. [Probably.]

 Golly.  I am starting to think that Dilbert's PHB works there.

Well, when I wrote about this handy utility to see if your site was really down, little did I know that I'd really need to know it right away:

Hmmm, could it be the hosting company:

Well, yes it is. I am soooo disappointed in cari.net right now - years of great service and then a very very bad week.

So I give them a call and here is my conversation:

Me: Can you give me a status?

The Guy: Not really, all the network guys are downstairs with the vendor reps so there is nobody to ask.

Me: The vendors are there?

The Guy: Yes, the outage started in one part of the network and has been rolling over our data centers for the last few hours.

Me: Great.

The Guy: Don't worry, they're calling in everyone they can find to come help.

Me: Somehow that is not so reassuring.

I have a nice long post about Google, Digg, Page Rank Penalties, and why we all need a diversification strategy away from the top few social networking and bookmarking sites. But I have to go call all our affected customers (not everything is on Cari.Net - I am professionally paranoid) and tell them what is going on.