Bob Warfield writes SmoothSpan, about software startups, venture capital, SaaS, cloud platforms, and NoSQL from an entrepreneur's view.
HN commenters link it for his takes on fixing venture capital and the tech IPO market, and for Amazon DevPay. One says DevPay looks like what they need.
Aside from the bit about loneliness, which I regard as his personal problem, this is the lifestyle I aim for. I don't want to be on the road constantly, but my life and I love travel. I'm early on the path (see: http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/a-solo-bootstrapping-odyssey-2012-was-the-year-i-quit-my-day-job/), but it's totally doable. With a laptop and an Internet connection, I've run my business from an Alaskan Cruise Ship Cabin, a Cozumel Mexico dive trip, and a recent trip to Waikiki. Met one of my co-conspirators in Waikiki for dinner.
It's good stuff.
The flip side is I work 24x7. When I'm on a push to get a product out, I've been known to forget what day it is. And I have had to limit myself to doing all my marketing work after 7pm. I do customer service from about 8am-9:30am. So that's a lot of hours in a week.
Wait. How's that different from a startup where I own only a small equity stake instead of 100%?
Hmmmm....
I liked his link about the tech IPO market being dead because of the types of businesses being built not because of lack of interest from the market. Here's the link he was talking about:
http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/04/15/how-to-fix-venture-capital-part-2-the-opening-is-as-important-as-the-endgame/
Does anyone know of any companies that they thought should have been able to IPO but couldn't?
Now we have AWS DevPay too!
http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/01/01/amazon-raises-the-cloud-platform-bar-again-with-devpay
This looks like it could be exactly what I need. Keep up the good work Amazon.