OVERSING – UPDATE, LESSONS LEARNED Iain’s doing our taxes. Seeing how much we’ve

OVERSING – UPDATE, LESSONS LEARNED

Iain’s doing our taxes.

Seeing how much we’ve spent.

It’s not cheap.

I’m crying – sort of – a lot.

I have learned something.

It’s an expensive lesson.

But I couldn’t do it any other way at the time.

And in retrospect, I wouldn’t do it any other way. 🙂

Net is that the savings from being here is not as attractive as it seems.

You only really, all said and done, save about 50%.

What these low burn rates buy you, is the ability to slowly develop the software you want, rather than sprint to develop the software you THINK you want.

We have thrown out the base code twice, and this summer, we even converted to websockets to preserve the user’s experience – and it was very expensive to do that.

So I could not afford, out of pocket, to develop an experimental product like Oversing in the states. It would be impossible at US burn rates (which is why no one does it).

Here I could not develop a product (of this complexity) under US conditions because we just don’t have the experienced people in this country to do it. So it’s not POSSIBLE really to develop a product like Oversing here under normal USA schedule pressure. Because no one knows how.

But if you want to save half the cost, and take half-again or more as long as doing it in the States, then doing development here is awesome. It’s beautiful. I’s ENJOYABLE.

HONESTY:

My health, the work on my philosophy, my state of mind because of my health, were really expensive additions, and the communication barrier was much more expensive than I though – as much as 1/2 or more of the cost to date has been a function of maintaining my stress level so that I could get healthy again (which eventually worked) and the fact that I must incrementally develop the product because of the combination of lack of available UI design analysts and talent, and because it’s just not possible to communicate across these various boundaries that easily. I feel, only in the past four months or so have we achieved that level of transparency and communication that is taken for granted in any west-coast-startup.

I attribute that to the ***CULTURE OF US ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS***. While the USA teaches very little in university of much consequence, it does seem to teach you the important western cultural values of trust, transparency, collaboration and teamwork. (Something I hear from asians pretty regularly.)

But had I been in better condition (Not recovering from my second near-death experience in three years) but also a divorce, and tossing my life upside down, I would have been able to drive the product more consistently.

I am not one to look back and ignore the lessons that life has taught me, and aside from three regrets (my divorce from a perfect wife for me, not staying quit when I resigned as CEO of Ascentium, and not joining the Literature department when they asked me to) I don’t have all that many really.

So life has taught me that I could have done this project in the states for about twice what it has cost me here (about a million here). And that I could have done it for half of that had I been in better health and state of mind.

But that would mean that I had not had the wonderful experience that I have had here, and I would not have the somewhat novel product that I do, and would have only a slightly better version of the product that others have brought to market.

So we are in dead-drop mode here for January,1, and this product will be ready for beta January 1. And it’s time for me to change from repairing myself, while building this product, to the next stage, where we take it to market, and my health and state of mind, have both been recovered.

Cheers.