The end, I think

Didn't work out with the YC startup. Their offer was actually quite reasonable, and I think that they'll likely succeed, but I just had a strong gut feeling that this was not the place for me. I don't want to put myself or them in a situation where I'm just terribly disgruntled six months down the line and then my leaving screws the company.

The experience of working with a YCombinator startup, even for just a week, was great though. It's amazing how much energy is in that place - it's like a full notch higher than I was working at, and I thought I worked hard.

That brings me back to GameClay, which at this point I think is on life support. And I think it's time to pull the plug. I remember Sam Altman's response to "How do you tell if you really are doomed?" - it was "If nobody cares about what you're doing and nobody on your founding team cares enough to change that, then you're probably in trouble." Well, I think that's basically the point we're at now.

I'm going on vacation in two days, so I think the plan is to create a personal home page, package up all the Diffle stuff that should be open-sourced and open-source it. Then I want to make this blog public, possibly linking to Subversion and Trac (though since my home page will likely be on a shared webhost, I dunno if I can host the live Trac app). I'll also write up a postmortem with some of the lessons learned.

Then, I guess I'll e-mail Paul Buchheit and see if FriendFeed is still hiring. Actually, I want to work a bit on the programming language I abandoned to start Diffle, see if I can get the hard parts done before I start work again. So maybe by August/September, I'll be employed again, and that's the end of (this phase of) my startup journey. Hopefully it won't be the end forever, though - there are second acts, I'm just not ready for them right now.