Greetings from startup land

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. I'm in the bay area right now, setting up our new offices. Commercial real estate is still a bargain here - we looked at a number of places at around $1 per sq ft, full service. For example, I happened to see a nice 2000 sq ft live-work loft near the Berkeley-Oakland border for only $2k per month. Why buy an $800k house when you can rent a nice space like that? Certainly says something about price to rent ratios here :-)

We ended up renting a place between downtown Oakland and lake Merritt (not far from Chinatown). It's an up and coming area with lots of interesting restaurants. We've filled our 2000 sq ft offices with IKEA office furniture and Dell computers (very happy to be rid of that horrible U-Haul truck). My office here is now nicer than at the university or at home... The last tenants left us a closet filled with switches and some old servers, so they were pretty sophisticated themselves. I guess every small business these days has some network plumbing in the walls.

We're pretty happy with the team we've hired. We found the majority of our guys via Stanford and Berkeley, but struck out this time at Caltech, my alma mater!

Now it's into stealth mode... look for our beta release near the end of the year :-)