The year was two thousand and seventeen and I made a formal decree that I would
not engage in any new side projects that year. They were distracting and I
already had a full plate with my existing projects as well as the goals I had
laid out for myself.
Then May came around and my buddy Justin came to me with an idea for a
product he wanted to needed and wanted to build. Sure, it was a side project,
but it felt like something I should be pursuing.
Not because it felt like a great idea, but because he’s on my shortlist of
people I like to and want to work with. Our last project ended somewhat abruptly
and it was time for us to grind again.
And grind we did!
That project ended up being a whirlwind ride in 2017. It brought Justin to
Austin where we filmed our pitch video for Y Combinator.
We got invited to interview and in November we were eating Tartine sourdough by
Steve Jobs’ childhood home before our interview at Y Combinator HQ.
But we didn’t get in #sadtrombone
Was quite the gut check at the time but the feedback shaped the rest of the year
for the best.
The major takeaway was that regardless of how good our idea may be (we got
called out to interview, so it’s not the worst idea ;), we’d have a hard time
taking it to the next level if we were splitting our time with other projects /
our day jobs and such.
With that, one of the biggest things to happen in 2017 is that I left my job at
Sumo.com to pursue CrowdSync on a full-time basis!
Enough with the prose, here are some other high(and low)lights from my 2017:
- Lost 10lbs over 12 months (post to come 😉
- Dealt with our first dog (and my favorite) passing
- Did 10,000 burpees (sometimes kickbacks as I was battling some hand pain)
- Read from a book every single day of the year
- Moved from South Austin to North Austin (if you even want to call it Austin)
- Consumed (read/listened) to 76 books (over 13k pages and 247 hours)
- And survived the Austin Blizzard of 2017!
Hoping you had as an exciting 2017 as I did.
Here’s to 2018, Happy New Year!!
