When comparing friends’ respective industries, one point of pride for the early stage tech community is the strong focus on giving back and helping those one, two, three billion rungs below you up the venture ladder. I would not be where I am today without the advisors and mentors I’ve connected with – whether I’m on the phone with them every day, or simply exchanged a...
As is common knowledge, competition is an inevitability. There are people with similar ideas as you. There are solutions your desired userbase is already using for the problem at hand. As you grow and start making waves, you’ll be attacked from above, below, and sideways. When first learning about a competitor, I used to think it was game over, and give up. I wasted incalculable years of my...
We’ve hit some big milestones at Contactually recently. We passed a big internal revenue related milestone, something that, at the outset, seemed like an unattainable goal. We raised over $1 million for our seed round. And our team can’t be fed by a couple of pizzas anymore, and we’re actively hiring. In that time, I’ve seen total carnage around us. The perceived...
Everything has to start somewhere. Contactually would not exist without 500 Startups. Rewind back to September 2011. I was running a pretty successful dev shop. Jeff was working for me. Tony had a full time job, and was about accept a position at a later stage startup. Jeff and I had been building the prototype of Contactually since June, a concept that had evolved out of a personal pain I had...
This is a visualization of where Contactually users are, based on location information we can find. Truly around the world.
I’ve been putting all of my time into Contactually. I’m hesitant to state that we’re “killing it” “crushing it” or “doing really well” as, while we are certainly trending upwards on everything that matters, every day is an intense battle amidst a sea of rejection. Due to that, I’ve scaled back my involvement and presence in the DC...
This is one of a series of posts about our honeymoon to Thailand in December 2012, which consisted of Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Pai, Phuket, and a long layover in Tokyo. Scroll down to the bottom to see pictures, and click on any of them to see an enlarged version. This was tapped out on my iPad, so forgive any typos or sentence fragments. 1/1-1/2 – Happy New Year! We packed up, spent the...
This is one of a series of posts about our honeymoon to Thailand in December 2012, which consisted of Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Pai, Phuket, and a long layover in Tokyo. Scroll down to the bottom to see pictures, and click on any of them to see an enlarged version. This was tapped out on my iPad, so forgive any typos or sentence fragments. 12/26 – Travel Day! We said goodbye to Pai and the...
This is one of a series of posts about our honeymoon to Thailand in December 2012, which consisted of Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Pai, Phuket, and a long layover in Tokyo. Scroll down to the bottom to see pictures, and click on any of them to see an enlarged version. This was tapped out on my iPad, so forgive any typos or sentence fragments.  12/24 – Goodbye Chiang Mai! With the one eight...
This is one of a series of posts about our honeymoon to Thailand in December 2012, which consisted of Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Pai, Phuket, and a long layover in Tokyo. Scroll down to the bottom to see pictures, and click on any of them to see an enlarged version. This was tapped out on my iPad, so forgive any typos or sentence fragments. 12/20 – Checked out of the Shanghai Mansion and...