Two Guys One Cup

Obviously when you devote 15 hours a day to a self-funded venture, you're going to have to skimp a little. Over the course of three years, I think we've gotten very, very good at the whole bootstrapping thing. I'm writing this post because of our latest hilarious episode of being extremely 'cost effective'.

We work on our startup at Starbucks everyday. Our strict weekday regiment consists of:

-Meeting at Starbucks at 7AM
-Leaving to eat lunch at 1PM
-Going to another Starbucks at 2PM
-Exercise at 7PM
-Eat at 8PM
-Finish up at another Starbucks at 8:30PM

I know what you people are saying. "Three visits to Starbucks??!?? That's a lot of drinks! Instead of paying Starbucks all that money, why don't you just rent out an apartment and code there?" No no, young grasshopper. Here we take advantage of a slight Starbucks loophole and spend about $2 per person per day.

Starbucks has a very generous refill policy on iced teas and iced coffees. It's only $0.50 per refill, so in the morning, ONE of us buys a $2.10 venti iced tea and we SHARE the drink. I drink from the cup, Daishin drinks from the straw. We take turns buying refills. When it's time to leave, we take the usually empty cup with us and save it for the next location.

Of course, you must have very little shame when doing this. We work at Starbucks so often that most of the employees know us, and sometimes they automatically give us two straws when we order. It's kind of hilarious and sad at the same time, but hey, extreme bootstrapping is a hard skill to master.

I'm writing this post today because of an incident that happened at Starbucks 10 minutes ago. My ears are finely tuned to hearing the word 'Free', so at the peak of Starbucks rush hour, I hear these magical words from Stephanie, one of the baristas, "Anyone want a free venti Frappaccino?". I immediately tell Daishin to run over to the bar and grab it. Like Barry Sanders in his prime, Daishin jukes and weaves past the slower, more sensible patrons and proudly asks the barista, "Did I hear something about a Frappaccino?" In another embarrassing moment, the barista laughs and says, "Yeah, I thought you would hear that. Go ahead and take it".

I think all the customers were still in shock at the speed and shamelessness of claiming the drink, but whatever. We were able to score the Starbucks gold standard, the $4.30 Venti Frappaccino, for free. And it will allow us to extend our bootstrapping by another day. Thanks Starbucks!

Never Eat Alone

You know that popular business networking/motivational book "Never Eat Alone"? Well I've never read it, but I'm pretty sure I don't have to pay $14.95 to get the point. Other books the author should write are "Never Watch a Movie Alone", "Never Play Board Games Alone", and "Never Get Stranded on an Iceberg While Being Chased By Six Polar Bears Alone". Anyway, the point is that many things suck if you're doing it alone, but eating alone really sucks.

In grade school, my favorite classes were lunch and recess. In college, my favorite classes were lunch and sleep. When I started my career in Consulting, my favorite time was definitely lunch, when 12 of your favorite coworkers would spend 1-2 hours not doing work. When I decided to work at an Investment Bank, lunch consisted of going across the street to pick up food, then running back to your desk to eat alone and stare at the screen for another 12 hours. It was the first time that lunch wasn't fun.

Food is such an important component of our lives that we should definitely enjoy it whenever we can. I've had my fair share of dinners alone in my apartment and it's never pleasant. Since I'm only cooking for myself, I'm too lazy to cook up fresh food and end up getting take-out or heating up some Lean Cuisine. That's why we're creating this site.

We're creating a place where anyone can basically create a restaurant at their home, center it around an activity (such as watching the NBA Finals - Go Lakers!!), and have your paying guests and new friends come over to eat a great home cooked meal. Never Eat Alone!

We do not want to live online

First post from our new startup! Can't show it to you yet (since we haven't finished building it..), but we'll be unfolding it here over the next few weeks. For now, we're going to tell you how it all happened.

It's hard to quantify how many ideas we've had and how many times we've started a project and written a bunch of code, only to realize that we had a better idea and should work on that idea instead. I think we've had around 11 serious concepts, but GrubWithUs was the lone survivor. Why?

We do not want to live online.

Sure, you can have a good time on Facebook by stalking your thousands of 'friends' everyday or peruse Twitter to find out when your favorite celebrities are having more fun than you are, but we'd rather have some physical interaction. Heck, I'm so off the online life bandwagon that I just created a Facebook account last week and that was because I wanted to reserve my vanity url. Of course, every url I really wanted was taken because everyone was sitting alone on a Friday night reserving their url!!

I may sound like an old timer and not 'with the times', but is it too much to ask to physically meet new people these days? Can we get away from the Super Poke for a few hours and enjoy a great meal at a real friend's house? Maybe many people out there enjoy human - computer - human interaction, but GrubWithUs is here to take out the middle man!

We're building this site to fill a need of ours and who knows if it'll catch on, but here's to hope that we're not just a society of zombies and vampiers and mobsters and that we actually like talking to real people!