Boston
I ended up in Boston over the weekend via a JetBlue redeye, tickets purchased the day prior. Danny, Justin, and I arrived at 5:05 am for an 11:45 presentation/interview thingy with the WFP. We napped by gate 35 for a few minutes before we got into gear. We woke up and hunted for awhile until we found an adequate place to bust out the travel iron. Turned out to be right on a pedestrian dense walkway. We got a few laughs and strange looks as we ironed our clothes for the meeting on a table we managed to clean with oxy-pads. Let the weekend begin.
After a quick wardrobe change in the airport bathroom, we caught the silver line and took that over to the red line which brought us smack dab into Harvard Square. Good Will Hunting anyone? I love that movie. We settled at a chaotic coffee shop in Cambridge to go over our presentation that we weren’t even sure was supposed to be a presentation. Two hours later we caught a cab over to Y Combinator and settled at a park to continue our conversations…A bit nervous, and getting rather warm, I shed my jacket and attached it my backpack (*note for future reference).
At the meeting we sat with WFP folks and chatted about our ideas, talked about our experience, and answered a few questions. At the end of the meeting, Paul asked us if we had a demo. Upon our answer of “Nope”, he challenged us to build one in 24 hours. “Que?”, we were all thinking. “Oh, come on, you know you can do it…” Yeah, he was right, we all knew we could do it, but also we hadn’t been to Boston before. It would have been nice to see the city. We walked away with giant question marks above our heads. Justin soon asked out loud, “Should we do it?” Silence. “Yep, yeah we should.” We could come to Boston anytime anyday, how many times would we have the opportunity that was sitting before us? Maybe once…
*ten minutes later, while at another park, changing our clothes once again, I realized I had lost my new iPod Nano; it was supposed to be in the chest pocket of that darned jacket. So, if you are reading this, and you recently found a nano that says “Ryan R. Roth \n 303.641.5094″ on it, know that i’m poor and I saved up for months for that thing. And if you keep it, I don’t like you very much.
We found a hotel with Wi-Fi, The Harvard Square Hotel, and hunkered down for 24 hours of hacking. PHP, JavaScript, & Coffee became our new best friends. They helped us through it all. We took naps at about 7am, all the way until 8am. Woke up and wrote some more code. Sent that sucker in circa 1pm Sunday. We were happy with it, obviously not our final product, but a good start for the future. Get ready for ImpacTV - sorry I’m only sharing the splash page for now.
Deliriously we cruised the streets of Boston with our tour guide and friend Laurie. We nailed downtown Boston, MIT, and the ghetto[?] in one fell swoop. We received rejection a few minutes before plane boarding, but we all agreed - the best rejection one who gets rejected could hope for. We’ll keep building, dreaming, thinking, and revamping. We’re going to get it. Expect it.
And then JetBlue gave us free drinks the whole way home…
[Click on the Flickr Image on the right to see photos from the trip]
Filed by ryanroth at November 7th, 2005 under Geke