larry kubin

I bought myself some nice things recently. I started out buying the Sony LT, which is probably the best computer I’ve ever owned. There is only one power cord and everything else is wireless. It is also equipped with a Blu Ray player and TV functionality that I have yet to use. Check it out on my desk:

But that wasn’t enough. I had to get myself an iMac to balance things out. On an ideal night I have a glass of wine and 3 screens in front of me — one with a text editor and some code, one with Photoshop running, and one with some stock charts open so that I can monitor my trades. It looks exactly like this:

I just filled out an application for Startup School, a free one day conference held at Stanford University. It’s organized by BASES and YCombinator, the venture firm run by Paul Graham and company. The speaker list is solid. I went last year and it was a great experience. It was refreshing to meet a bunch of like-minded folks who were all about quitting their day jobs and starting their own companies. The people I talked to didn’t have a “What if it doesn’t work? Aren’t you afraid?” attitude towards starting a business. They had a nothing-to-lose attitude that was more like “What’s so bad about failing? If it doesn’t work, I’ll just do something else”. Everyone I met was extremely talented, outgoing, and passionate. I even got to have a few drinks with some of them at the Stanford bars, which was very fun.

The event is being held on April 19th this year. This is good because the Web 2.0 Expo is being held from April 22 - 25, and I got a coupon to attend that for free recently, thanks to SXSW. So it appears as though I have some great excuses to go to San Francisco again. I’ve done some research and it looks like it will be fun and cheap to stay at the Pacific Tradewinds Hostel. It was voted the best hostel in North America and it only costs around 20 bucks a night to stay there, so I’ll probably go that route. Should be a blast.

I actually took a video of Paul Graham’s talk last year using my digital camera. The video isn’t worth very much since you can’t see the slides (you mainly see the back of some guy’s head). However, you can hear the audio, which is the most important part. He basically tries to answer the question “Why don’t more people start startups?”. Check it out.

Josh recently moved all of our email to Google Apps, and I must say it’s pretty slick. Now we get all the benefits of the Gmail frontend for our sephirasoft.com email. Plus we no longer have to run our own mail server. Couple that with a shared Google Calendar, collaborative document editing using Google Docs, and chatting using Google Talk, and who needs Microsoft products anymore? These free web applications make it very easy for us to collaborate from remote locations and allow us to keep our overhead very low. Google even lets you brand your apps, as shown in the screenshot to the right.

Now all they need to do is create some time tracking, invoicing, and tax preparation software :).