Startupland Information

Once again, the final negotiations happened at the chicken farm. All of the paperwork was expected to go through before mid-night, but it got delayed and conversations dragged out the whole night. I didnt sleep, but it didnt matter. The next day we drove down to the beach at the western side of the peninsula for a barbeque lunch. The weather was fantastic, we were eating new Danish potatoes directly off the grill, and the kids were running around butt naked playing on the shoreline. My father-in-law asked me about what happened the night before. I tried to explain the $6 million investment, but I couldnt make it make sense. How much again? he asked. He was clearly excited about the big number, but also completely perplexed by the nature of the deal. To him, it was so abstract. The world of the Internet is surreal to someone whose work is so grounded in the practical arts of keeping animals. All of his life he got up at 5 a.m. and went to bed at 11 p.m. and worked every hour in between. There was a fixed correlation with how hard you worked and how much money you made. And it was very physical. My work was so different. We worked from anywhere in front of our laptops and connected to people all over the world. There was no physical product to hold or ship, but people, smart people, just invested crazy amounts of money into it. Perhaps the only thing that made sense about it was that it didnt make a whole lot of sense. After we closed the seed round, we publicly celebrated with a press release, which Christoph sent to his network in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. He pitched it to various tech blogs, most notably GigaOM and TechCrunch. GigaOM got back to us pretty quickly and asked for an exclusive. We were thrilled. Om Malik did the interview himself. Then, right before it ran, TechCrunch reached out. We want to run this story. Give us the details. That kick-started an exchange with Michael Arrington that had me shaking in my sneakers. Dont ever email me again, Arrington wrote. I tried to step in and smooth ...