Mark O'Sullivan • Sticky toffee pudding tastes better than skinny feels.

David Cohen recently announced that Eric Ries is coming to Boulder on August 19th & 20th. For those who don’t know him…

Eric Ries is a serial entrepreneur who has been talking about building Lean Startups in Silicon Valley and on his fantastic blog Startup Lessons Learned. He’s been sharing his ideas about Continuous Deployment, The Five Whys, the Ideas/Code/Data loop, Rapid Split Testing as well as Customer Development. His blog is simply fantastic and all reports are he’s even better in a person.

I’ve signed up for the workshop on the 20th, and I’m eager to learn all about his methods for building lean startups. If you’re in Boulder, you should definitely check it out.

Every time I sit down to write about TechStars, I end up getting up and walking away without putting a single word down. Not because I have nothing to say, quite the contrary, it’s because I have so much to say and I don’t know where to begin. TechStars is all about making connections with people, so I think I’ll tell my story by talking about them:

The Mentors
Do you have a mentor? I bet you do. Before TechStars I had this vision in my head of mentors being these god-like creatures that had knowledge I could never possibly obtain who would swoop in, explain something to me, and leave as quickly and mysteriously as they had arrived. The reality is that I end the Summer in Boulder not with a bunch of mentors that can help me, but with a bunch of amazingly smart friends. Jeffrey Kalmikoff is one of the coolest and cleverest people I have ever met, and I consider myself extremely lucky to call him my friend. Chris Moody is one of the kindest, most giving, and business-savvy guys I’ve ever met, and I consider myself extremely lucky to call him my friend. Micah Baldwin is a God-Damn biz-dev guru. He made me think of human interaction in ways I had never known possible. Again, I consider myself extremely lucky to call him my friend.

The list of people who have helped us throughout the summer is massive, but going in I thought they would be resources that I could leverage when I needed them. Selfish, I know, but that’s what I thought. Coming out of the program I think of them as friends that I can share my experiences with who will, in turn, share back so we can help each other. Mentorship in TechStars isn’t about them giving to us, it’s just as much about us giving back to them. Rob and Emily from Foodzie told me early on into the program to find out from my mentors what they were trying to get out of mentoring, and make sure they get it. When I tried to find out what they all wanted, the answer always came back the same: they wanted to help because it was fun and exciting. So the best thing I could do for them was to keep them as involved as possible so they know exactly what’s going on, and they can see their advice put into action. And this doesn’t end because the program is over. I’m staying in touch with all of my mentors and I hope to get them even more involved as things move forward.

The Founders
One by one the other founders are packing up and leaving Boulder to go back to their respective homes. Today I was at the office and it was silent for the first time that I can remember. The lack of energy there was palpable, and it reminded me of something Kevin Mann said on twitter a few weeks ago when he had to spend a day working at home instead of at the bunker:

Wishing I was working in the Bunker instead of the apartment, missing the energy the other @techstars bring.

At the time I thought he was being melodramatic, but now I see exactly what he was talking about. Never in my life have I been surrounded by so many smart, talented, and determined people who are pouring their souls into their ideas. I can’t imagine I will ever have the honour or privilege of living through this kind of experience with these kinds of people ever again in my life.

The Staff
Imagine having the answer to everything. Better yet, imagine being able to get an answer for everything. And not just an answer, but the correct answer. That is what David and Nicole can do. I can’t think of a single time that I had a question that they didn’t know the answer to, and most of the time, they’d tell me that answer before I finished asking the question.

David Cohen, like Brad Feld, doesn’t like to have his time wasted. I’ve never had a meeting with David that lasted longer than 30 minutes, and believe me, 30 minutes was more than enough time to get all of your questions answered and more. I tend to be a very pensive person. I like to take ideas and sit on them for hours, days, or weeks. Then when I execute, I do it extremely fast. David is the opposite of me in that way: David can see all the angles and make a decision immediately. This was overwhelming and a little scary when I first got to TechStars, and thankfully I didn’t have a serious meeting with Brad until later into the program, because Brad is like that times 10. You know when you’re talking to David or Brad that you better have seriously thought about your questions, or you’re wasting their time. Don’t waste their time.

But aside from the exacting and overwhelming intelligence of these guys, they’re also really funny, and genuinely awesome people. Oh, and David loves getting hugs. Hug him whenever you see him.

Nicole Glaros has been our rock. Always available, kind, and giving. Andrew Hyde is an unending fountain of connections, information, and kindness. Tim and Josh are two of the brightest, most upstanding young guys I’ve ever met.

Friends
So what did I really do over the last three months? 18 hour days, 7 days a week, no sleep, constantly nervous, lost 15 lbs, turned Vanilla into a business. Yes. All of that. But what do I come out of TechStars with besides a business? Friends. Friends for life.

So that’s me now: a TechStar for life.

I plan on writing an epic post about my experience at TechStars after I recover from the wicked hangover I’m experiencing from last night’s founders party at our crappy apartment. In the meantime, I thought I’d post this video interview I did with one of my favourite people in Boulder, Chris Moody. It’s 22 minutes long, and I think watching it you can get a sense of how exhausted I am after the end of TechStars. I can quote Todd saying that TechStars has been “the best experience of my life”, and hopefully that comes across in the interview as well. Here’s Chris’ post about it, and here is the interview:

Vanilla Interview with Mark O’Sullivan from Chris Moody on Vimeo.

I had a brutal summer cold last week that left me bedridden for a few days. I’m finally over it and working away furiously at our task-list.

I’m currently finishing up the new addons site. It’s looking nice!

I was recently interviewed by Jolie O’Dell from Read Write Web. Check it out!

Source: Video Interview with Founder of Vanilla, “A WordPress for Forums”

Jolie did an awesome job of editing so that I didn’t look like an idiot. For example, I am 6’4″ tall, and I accidentally kicked the camera during the interview. She ninja’d that right out of there.

Regarding “A WordPress for Forums”: I’ve heard a lot of people saying that since I got down here to Boulder & TechStars. I think people see the correlation because WordPress and Vanilla are both open source projects, they both focus on delivering something elegant and easy to use, and Vanilla is now trying to do what WordPress has done by turning it into a real business through these various revenue streams. I met Matt Mullenweg this past Monday and joked with him that I had purchased VanillaPress.com!

The bottom line is that WordPress is amazing, and I find the comparison very flattering.

Thanks to Jolie for the interview!

It’s long overdue that I take all my Vanilla & Garden related posts and put them somewhere separate from my personal blog, and that day has finally come. I’m happy to introduce you to The Vanilla Blog.

I’m going to be making my best efforts to post regularly to that blog about anything and everything related to my work with Vanilla.

I’m doing some research for an article I’m writing, and I thought it might be better to once again reach out to the people who use Vanilla.

How do you use Vanilla?

ie. A support forum? A fansite? etc

How has Vanilla been helpful to you in achieving your goals?

ie. My customers got the answers they needed; We grew a great community of fans; etc

Has Vanilla saved you money? time?

Please share as much information as you want. You can post in the comments here on this blog, or email me at mark [at] lussumo [dot] com.

Thanks!

After a very long week of scrambling, Garden & Vanilla 2 are now available on GitHub.

Things you need to know:

1. Garden & Vanilla 2 are currently beta products that contain bugs and incomplete features.
2. Garden & Vanilla 2 should not currently be placed on production servers.
3. There is a first draft of documentation available at gardenplatform.com.
4. You can not currently upgrade your Vanilla 1 database to Vanilla 2 with the code at GitHub (you’ll be able to soon).
5. If you start to use this code, be prepared to erase your Garden/Vanilla database a few times before the codebase is final. Data WILL be lost.

About GitHub

We are absolute newbies to GitHub. We’ve heard fantastical and amazing things about it, and we can’t wait to start working with all of you on patches, fixes, merges, branches, and all that awesome stuff. Please be patient with us as we learn the subtle nuances of GitHub.

Contributor’s Agreements

We’ve been speaking with a number of lawyers and leaders in the open source world since we got to TechStars. These people have helped us to decide upon releasing the code under the GPLv2, just like Vanilla 1 was. They’ve also recommended that we have contributors sign a contributor agreement before we take any code from anyone. So, if you find a bug and want to fix it, you will have to agree to our contributor agreement first. We will be using the industry standard Sun contributor’s agreement. We will be announcing the URL where you can review and agree to the contributor’s agreement next week. You can also just contact us directly and we’ll get the agreement to you. You can review our contributor’s agreement here. Please note that you must have an account at the Lussumo community forum in order to contribute.

Issue Tracking

If you download the code and encounter errors, please use the issue tracker at GitHub. We will be retiring the old one and moving our existing issues over to GitHub this week.

What Next?

Sleep. Glorious Sleep.

A few months ago I posted about how I went down to Boulder, Colorado to attend TechStars for a Day. TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed-stage investment fund. In human terms, it means that they invest a small amount of money in your business and provide mentorship to help you get off the ground in exchange for a small stake in the company.

I stumbled upon TechStars when I decided that it was time to take Vanilla to the next level. Garden and Vanilla 2 were nearing completion, and I realized that without some kind of small investment, I was going to fall back into the pattern of trying to support my open-source efforts by doing side-projects. And inevitably those side-projects become my main project, and Vanilla becomes the side-project in turn. I started emailing and calling everyone I knew asking if they had any ideas for how I might make a real business out of Vanilla. One of my good friends referred me to Jeffrey Kalmikoff at Threadless, and Jeffrey referred me to David Cohen from TechStars.

I honestly didn’t think TechStars was a viable option for me. In my mind I just needed some money so I could continue to develop and pay my monthly bills. Furthermore, I didn’t think that I’d get in if I did apply. After speaking with David, I realized that the money wasn’t the important piece at all – the mentorship was. I decided to attend TechStars for a Day so I could get a better glimpse of what it might be like. Eventually I understood it to be an instant network of people who are all interested in helping me succeed. Living remotely in Saskatchewan, I had nothing of the sort. I could have moved to Toronto or Vancouver and attempted to build a network like this on my own, but getting access to the types of people that TechStars boasted would have taken years.

The most important thing for me was to have the ability to work at Vanilla full-time. I realize that there are so many things about it that could be so much better, and those things would be better if I could just devote 100% of my “office hours” to the job. So, I applied. A few weeks later I discovered that I had been accepted. At that point I scrambled to get as many contract-work hours as I could, scrounged every penny I could, and development on Vanilla ground to a halt.

I’ve been in Boulder now for just over a month, and I still haven’t really had any time to do any development on Garden & Vanilla. The first month was totally devoted to meeting this network of people. I’ve met people from Mozilla, Facebook, Digg, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, AOL, and many many more. All of them have been excited about Vanilla and very supportive of my efforts. They’ve shared advice, support, contacts, and so much more than I really could have imagined.

So, why am I telling you this now?

There are over 300,000 installations of Vanilla out there that I know about. Over 1,000 plugins are downloaded from our addons site every day. Vanilla has been adopted by Mozilla, O’Reilly Media, and many other companies. There are over 10,000 members in the Lussumo Community. I’ve left my wife and family behind in Canada to spend the summer down in Boulder living on beans.

I wanted everyone who uses Vanilla to understand just how committed I am to making Vanilla better.

It is long overdue that I post an update to the Garden & Vanilla 2 development. First: if you find that I’ve not been posting on my blog, you can take it as a good sign meaning that I’m busy doing other things.

Myself and a great friend of mine (Todd Burry) have been working full-time on the project for the last four weeks.

Next week we will be moving our current issue tracker over to GitHub and simultaneously releasing the Garden and Vanilla 2 code there. The code is still under heavy development and is absolutely not ready for production use. However, it does work and we need your help getting it finished.

Although Vanilla 1 is an open source project, I have always been the bottleneck that keeps it from really taking off. I refuse to let this happen with Garden and Vanilla 2. So, we will be doing our best to allow everyone in the 10,000-strong Lussumo community to help us out this time around, and the release of the code on GitHub is just the first of many steps in this direction.

Following the GitHub move, I will be contacting the authors of the most popular plugins for Vanilla 1 and helping them to get their plugins ported to Vanilla 2 so they can be fully functional and compatible for the Vanilla 2 release. If, for some reason, the authors are uninterested in porting their plugins to Vanilla 2, I will be making announcements here to find anyone out there who is interested in picking up where the previous authors left off, so keep your eyes peeled. If you have a new plugin idea that you want implemented for Vanilla 2 and you want a hand with getting Garden, Vanilla 2, and understanding how things are done: feel free to contact me here on this blog, via twitter @navvywavvy, or directly via email at mark [at] lussumodotcom.

The future starts here!