Summer Update
Dear 
I left Boston about a week after exams were over, and flew back to Virginia for a week, enough time to visit both my family in Norfolk and UVA.
Virginian Dragonfly:
I started work in early June at PhotoRocket, which is a pre-product online photo sharing platform. The company was founded and is managed by a very successful Seattle entrepreneur whose first company led to Microsoft’s largest acquisition, aQuantive.
While the pockets behind PhotoRocket are deep, the company was looking to save a few dollars on housing. As such, I am living with the VP of Product, his wife, a three and five year old, and a Colombian au pair who teaches the children (and me) Spanish. In any one day, there are about 15 people scurrying through the house, including a maid, gardener, a house organizer, the family, nanny, me, and a variety of other workers. Slightly chaotic.
The house’s front porch:
The house’s 1000-bottle wine cellar, me, and a friend from Virginia:
The house’s back porch overlooking Lake Washington and Mount Rainier. Me, the 5 year old, and another friend from Virginia:
Living with two small children has given me a perspective on what it’s like to be a father and raise two children. Despite all of the (paid) assistance, it is still a lot of work, and definitely lifestyle changing.
I’ve shot the children a few times:
The company itself was 10 people when I started, and grew to 14 a week later. It’s a lot of fun working in an agile software development environment. Things happen very quickly, without too much documentation or unnecessary planning. I am personally responsible for developing client personas and writing product features. It involves interviewing persona fits with a small team, discussing underlying user needs (on a very basic level), and drafting what the software feature looks like. But like any 14 person company, I’ve done a lot more than just that. Some highlights from the startup world: wearing shorts, and wine Fridays. The three execs at the company are huge wine snobs: one owns a winery, one owns a wine distributor, and the guy with whom I’m living has a 1000-bottle wine cellar. Needless to say, the wine at wine Fridays is good.
I took a trip up to Whistler, British Columbia for the July 4th weekend with a Bostonian friend. The drive from Vancouver to Whistler was absolutely stunning, as was the town of Whistler itself.
The drive to Whistler:
Hiking around Whistler. The bridge broke, so we had to cross a very fast moving waterfall. The water was just above freezing, and it took me a few minutes to recover feeling in my feet:
Ferns on hike:
Whistler, site of the 2010 winter Olympics:
I spent the past weekend with my host family at their vacation home in Leavenworth, Washington. It’s in the Cascades nestled in between a giant mountain-face and a quickly moving river. Being an East Coast person, I’ve never been exposed to such large mountains in North America. In addition to enjoying the natural beauty, swimming, and jogging, I spent the weekend creating this new website for my photography company, F8NY.
I’m leaving Seattle in two weeks for NYC, and then to an unknown destination. I’ll be vacationing the entire month of August, and am looking forward to it. Then back to a new dorm room in Hamilton at the end of the month.