Leaving Corporate

This blog has a lot of catching up to do. I will attempt to do a lot of it in this post. We originally started 6 weeks ago when we moved out the the Valley and planned on journalling our whole experience of leaving IBM, starting a startup, living in Palo Alto and participating in the amazing opportunities of Y Combinator. The whole environment has proven so motivating though that we’ve both been torching the candle at both ends and haven’t had a chance to write anything other than Javascript and Python.

The first thing I realized when we got accepted into Y Combinator was that it was going to be an amazing experience. Actually that was probably more of an affirmation than a realization. So I guess the first thing I actually realized was that probably half of the other YC-funded startups were a lot further along than us. We had only written a simple demo to show at our interview, while another group was already launched and still others were getting close. The other YC startups aren’t our competition, but we certainly want to shine at demo day and really wanted to show that a couple of guys from the Midwest could keep up in the Valley. We quickly decided that we were going to work our asses off.

We rented the closest place we could find to University Ave in Palo Alto, the epicenter of Silicon Valley. Our apartment only has 1 bedroom so I sleep on a girl’s day bed in the living room/office/dining room/kitchen. It’s in the back lot of an old pink house and I swear it looked 10x larger on Craigslist. Luckily such accommodations only run about 24 hundred a month!

The location is freaking sweet though. University Ave has the only places in the Valley open after 8pm. There is a great vibe here of hard working people doing startups and Stanford students. The two major coffeeshops, University Cafe, and Coupa Cafe, double as boardrooms, and give an incredible energy.

Facebook is about 5 blocks away, and sometimes we walk past Mark Zuckerberg on the street. Stanford is also just 8 blocks away. I took my last masters class there and still have WiFi access and a few friends around. We code there almost every day because they have nice office chairs, desks, and a motivating environment that really puts our kitchen table and wood chairs to shame.

Of possibly equal importance, we live 5 blocks from a 7-Eleven that is open 24 hours a day. I cannot, yet probably will (brain twister) overstate the importance of the 7-Eleven. I can go there at any point in the day and buy a super gulp and a quarter pound hot dog for just over 3 dollars! Sometimes, usually on very little sleep, I sit and eat one of those dogs and wonder whether the true success of Palo Alto isn’t the easy access to such an impressive hotdog grill.

Despite the tiny digs, killer rent, and insane hours, we’ve loved our Silicon Valley experience, and completely recognize the importance of starting your business where the action is. The area’s energy, intelligence, and constant possibility of a serendipitous meeting with an investor clearly put it a step (or 20) ahead of anywhere else in the world. When so much of a startup’s success is up in the air to begin with, it’s important to maximize the odds that you do have control over. Living in the location that gives you the best chance to succeed should be a top priority.

A few weeks ago we needed to set up a quick and simple server to Alpha launch 8aweek to our friends. I installed Django with Apache2 mod_python on a box in my friend’s dorm room at Stanford. We went to the Y Combinator dinner pumped to show everyone our hard work and get loads of feedback. Unfortunately, something or someone bumped the dorm room server and our plans for the big Alpha release were spoiled.

We decided that, even for our Alpha, we needed something a little more … reliable, but something not as expensive or time consuming as our planned deployment for launch. A fellow Django-using YCer recommended SliceHost. I checked them out and they’re fantastic. Its only $20 a month (3 month minimum) for a 256mb slice with your choice of several operating systems. The best part is, I just entered my credit card info, and 10 seconds later I was emailed an IP, and root password. We were back on track for Alpha!

I love Ubuntu/Debian over any other distro because of the simplicity of the apt-get install. The popularity of Ubuntu also creates a ton of very specific documentation and support. To streamline the already easy Django setup I followed Jeff Baier’s step by step “Installing Django on an Ubuntu Linux Server.”

I had to change two things, as I was installing a deployment server and not a development one. Don’t include “MaxRequestsPerChild 1″ in your httpd.conf, and instead declare your server name at the top.

Servername yoururl.com

Next log into manage.slicehost.com and select DNS. Here you set up the slicehost Dynamic Name Server to point to your registered domain. Put the url of your site in there. It will tell you to point your Domain Registrar to

ns1.slicehost.net.
ns2.slicehost.net.
ns3.slicehost.net.

This is a confusing part — you’re not done configuring the DNS after giving them your site domain. You have to log a few more “records”. To do so, follow the instructions here.

Now log into the domain registrar and follow their instructions on forwarding to those DNS servers.

The whole process, including writing this article, took me about two hours. Super simple, cheap, and a lot more stable than a computer in a dorm room.

Welcome to Leaving Corporate, our blog about startups and Silicon Valley.  We (Zack & Dave) are two entrepreneurs who left cushy jobs at IBM in the Midwest to follow our startup dreams in Silicon Valley. Does this sound like you, or something you’ve wanted to do? If so, we think you’ll relate to us! We’ll post about startups, life in Silicon Valley, our startup 8aweek, the Y Combinator startup program, and tech hacks that we encounter along the way.

Bookmark us, add the RSS feed, leave comments, and check back often. We look forward to hearing from you!