Steven drove the meeting, sticking to a tight agenda of discussion items. As you can see, Steven was thinking really hard (indicated by the hand on his chin):

Chris showed up to the meeting late, but still had time to strike a pose for the camera:

Dave sat back in his chair and gently scolded us to get our act together:

Meanwhile, the team continues to build great chemistry. The proof? We are no longer weirded out by the fact that we’re five dudes sitting on Stan’s bed (left to right: Stan, Steven, Eric, Brown Bear, Chris, Josh):

I work at a very large Silicon Valley corporation as a product manager. Being a PM at a big company is great in many ways (access to resources, serving a developed market, etc.), but at times it can be a frustrating role–mainly because the pace of work is much slower and it’s difficult to innovate.

In the worst case, a product cycle can look like the following: you come up with a product idea, meet with key stakeholders to get initial buy-in on the idea, prepare a presentation to sell the broader upper management on the idea, finally get signed off on implementing your idea, beg your VP of engineering to provide developers to create your idea, wait until next quarter/next year for the business unit to allocate money and people behind your idea, create a product requirements document, spend weeks debating with your engineering manager and developers over the feasibility of your product requirements, convince your team to put together a proof of concept to test in usability, run usability, use usability data to convince your team/other stakeholders about the pressing business need for your product, achieve shared vision on your product idea, spend months building the product, run more usability, beta test, find critical bugs in your product, strip features, iterate–finally you’re ready to launch!

In this worst case, it can take many months–perhaps even years–to get your idea to market. By the time you launch, you may find that your smaller, more nimble competitors had been innovating other cooler things while you were dragging your feet with process and red tape. (And just to reiterate–I’ve presented the worst case scenario, it’s not always like this.)

Working with the HelloMovies team has been a refreshing change from my day job. Some things I absolutely love:

• The pace of the work is lightning fast. There’s no red tape or product requirements docs–we just talk about ideas with the engineers and they go off and code while figuring it out on the fly.
• We are definitely innovating. I’m not really at liberty to describe in detail what we’re building, but our team is definitely in the forefront of creating a new technology that can benefit a lot of people.
• We are young and ambitious. This team is scrappy and truly believes that we have the capability to build anything we want. Plus, the team is full of great personalities!
• I love movies! This is just my personal thing–but I absolutely love movies, and I feel privileged to be on a project to help other people–YOU–improve their movie watching experiences.

Being at a startup is thrilling and absolutely satisfying. That’s why it’s easy for folks like me and Steven to work a full day on our day jobs and then spend another 7 hours at night in a Stanford dorm room building out this website.

A colleague in the venture business recently sent me a quote:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” — Theodore Roosevelt

“Everytime I read this, I think of entrepreneurs,” she says. I hope that now, in the time of college midterms, company deadlines and travels for work, that our team keeps this in mind despite being stretched thin.

A Summer pose (Me, Josh, Matt and Stan)

As a Senior in college, I can say that the past three years have been fulfilling, fun, and incredibly busy. When you’re overwhelmed and about to collapse from your workload, its really your excitement about your current project(s) that motivates you to keep at it. It’s hard to juggle five classes (four of which are Computer Science classes) among extra-curriculars plus a social life, but recently, it’s been my work on HelloMovies that’s been keeping me going. You know that feeling - you’re working on such a damn cool project that even though you’ve worked through both breakfast and lunch, you don’t notice or care because you just want to get this “last bit” working. At least, I hope you’ve had the pleasure of knowing that feeling. It’s like the geek’s equivalent of a runner’s high or an adrenaline rush. kinda sorta. However you describe it, it’s fun.

And so, I welcome you to my first post, of which I hope there will be many, on our HelloMovies blog, and I hope that you will soon be as excited as I am about HelloMovies. Good night for now.