Anthony Panozzo's Blog

Summary: I have done a few startup weekends and customer discovery events in total and have found some common patterns.

Pregame

Make sure you have alerted friends and acquaintances about the weekend so that they know they probably won't see much of you. This helps clear any potential distractions. It definitely helps to clear your plate as much as possible. At one of the competitions I had to fix something at work that couldn't wait, and it took half of Saturday up. As you can imagine, it was frustrating for me and I wasn't much help to the team.

Before the event might be a good time to start eliciting help for electronic voting. Something along the lines of, "hey, I'm doing a business competition this weekend, and part of our final score comes down to people texting a certain number."

For the sake of everyone at the event, if you are pitching an idea, do some basic groundwork on the idea. Nobody wants to hear your pitch if the idea has already been done or is way too big for a startup weekend or is mumbled. You are just wasting everyone's time. If you have an original take on an existing idea, fine. Just make sure you know enough about the environment you are considering working in to actually know about prior art. An hour of your time saves sixty people from hearing and voting on a minute pitch. It might sound equivalent, but it's a net gain in terms of attention and energy. There were about forty pitches at the last startup weekend that needed to later be voted on, which took time.

Pitches

Along the same lines, when at the pitches, listen for ideas that are pretty well-defined and that preferably have some sort of validation already. About the worst thing you can do is spend half of the weekend figuring out what you actually want to work on. About as bad is trying to do something for awhile and then basic research suggests that the idea has already been executed well by someone else. At that point the team flails for a few hours. Not a good start.

I want to put myself in a position where I can fail. While this might not sound very appetizing, I'll make a case that it is.

I could wait two years until someone decides I'm ready for the next level, or I can decide that I'm ready–experience be damned. At a certain point, more book learning or current level learning isn't helpful.

I could talk myself out of taking the next opportunity, or I can just do it and try my very best.

I could whisper to myself that once I learn X, then I'll finally be able to do that thing that fascinates me. (Hint: X usually changes to Y once you know X. Or you say that you don't know X well enough yet. And repeat.) I'd rather try using what I know and learning just-in-time and take a chance that I won't figure it out in time.

Warning: I have revised my thoughts on this subject after reading Pietr Wozniak's excellent breakdown of polyphasic sleep and my own experiences. While my article (this blog post) was not a strong promotion of polyphasic sleep, I thought I would comment that I no longer really agree with cutting out sleep. I think quality sleep is vital to creativity, short- and long-term happiness, and, most importantly, one's health. I am thankful that I had this experience, but would not recommend it to others.

What could you do if you only needed to sleep four hours a day? Assuming you sleep eight hours a day right now, your average day would be 25% longer!

A few summers ago, I tried sleeping 4.5 hours a day while holding a full-time job. Here's what I experienced as the result of doing this.

Preparation

Most people get their sleep in one big chunk, called monophasic sleep. Some get a consistent sleep pattern with two intervals. This biphasic sleep might include slightly shorter nighttime sleep and a siesta during the day. Polyphasic sleepers, on the other hand, split their sleep up into smaller chunks and spread them out throughout the day.

I first found out about polyphasic sleep by reading Steve Pavlina's excellent and detailed series on polyphasic sleep. The idea of getting much greater awake time was compelling to me. Steve used the "uberman" pattern of sleep, which was six naps of twenty minutes stretched in equal parts throughout each day. I researched various polyphasic patterns, and figured out what I thought would be the best pattern based on my schedule. For over a month I tried to stick to the following sleep schedule:

I was happily manually running my cron script on Heroku, when all of a sudden I got

 !   You don't have permissions to manage processses for this app

Note the misspelling of "processes" above. I haven't gotten this before or since. Was wondering if anyone else got something similar and what the solution might be.

Here are some basic notes on how I installed from source on my Ubuntu x86_64 machine.

Generally followed the build from source instructions.

sudo apt-get install ghc6  # this bootstraps so we can build ghc 7

# get latest ghc
wget http://haskell.org/ghc/dist/7.0.3/ghc-7.0.3-src.tar.bz2
tar -jxvf ghc-7.0.3-src.tar.bz2
cd there
./configure
make
sudo make install

# get cabal
wget http://lambda.galois.com/hp-tmp/2011.2.0.1/haskell-platform-2011.2.0.1.tar.gz
tar xvfz haskell-platform-2011.2.0.1.tar.gz
cd there
./configure
make
sudo make install

# get pandoc
# edit ~/.cabal/config to uncomment user-install and set the value to False (so that we get global installation)
sudo cabal install pandoc

pandoc -v