Austen Allred

I've thought of doing something similar to that. I might try it at some point, probably just for a chunk of a few months. But I'm thinking more along the lines of buying a more maneuverable VW minivan, and retreating to the Santa Cruz hills or Big Sur over the weekends, because I currently miss nature terribly while living in SF.

A few thoughts (I don't work at Google, but a similar large tech company in the south bay):

1) Yes, $2000 a month is expensive for corporate housing. But if your goal really is to save money, you can find a room in San Francisco for under $1000 in a co-op or such and just take the shuttle to Google every day. It won't be the most beautiful house in the world, but it'll beat a truck.

2) If you like bringing home cute girls/boys, that's going to make things significantly harder.

3) I have a fair amount of expensive equipment (photography + music gear) that I would not be comfortable leaving in a vehicle for extended periods of time. It'd just takes once to lose a pretty significant chunk of cash (probably something like $5k in photography gear and close to $10k in music gear, for me).

4) Even if his name and face were withheld, anyone working at Google will remember that truck very distinctly now. Not the smartest move for him, he's probably going to be found out in the next week or two.

I have friends who did similar things - whether to save money, or to entertain a more minimalistic lifestyle. I'm still very curious about it, mostly for the…

Some useful articles on this topic that may provide inspiration:

http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2013/12/18/successfully-use-blog-commenting-acquire-new-users-without-spammy/?awesm=tnw.to_b0dfT#!qeYNo

http://malcolmbell.net/2014/02/28/my-mailcloud-app-10000-users-in-first-2-weeks/

http://www.fastcolabs.com/3024472/how-we-got-our-first-2000-users-doing-things-that-dont-scale

http://popcornryan.tumblr.com/post/65640245447/how-i-got-my-first-1000-users-in-1-day

http://www.quora.com/Marketing/What-are-key-strategies-to-acquire-first-100K-users-with-zero-marketing-budget/answer/Noah-Kagan?srid=wF

http://blog.yesgraph.com/first-1000/

http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-the-first-1000-users-twitter/

The purpose of our salaries is to keep us alive while we build a great company; what arbitrary number of dollars is required to do that isn't important to me. We have an equal number of shares, because he's an equal partner.

If I take an extra 20k of salary, that's 20k less we can use to hire someone better/smarter. I'd much rather work with smarter people than drive a nicer car. I don't really care for "stuff" anyway.

If you offered to let me stay at this level for the rest of my life and promised I'd always be able to work on something I believed in, I'd take that deal in a heartbeat, even if it's far below market.

http://austenallred.com/everything-you-need/

https://youtu.be/FF-tKLISfPE

Transcription at: https://austenallred.com/steve-jobs-insult-response-transcription-be6df9dd692c

> The hardest thing is, how does that fit into a cohesive larger vision that’s gonna allow you to sell 8 billion dollars — 10 billion dollars of product a year?
One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room, and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.

Way to go Adam (http://twitter.com/Adam_B_Long) for getting covered in The New Yorker!

If it is no secret: did you get in touch with them or did they seek you out? Did you have a press kit[1] ready, or was this done on the fly?

I'd also be interested to hear about the technology you're using, and how it compares to the pattern-based approach of LanguageTool, e.g.,[2].

[1] http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-getting-press/
[2] https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool/blob/master/languagetool-core/src/main/java/org/languagetool/rules/LongSentenceRule.java