Day 5

It's the afternoon of day 5 - I'm actually blogging the day on the day - afternoon here, and basically day 5 was pretty good.  We had a huge thunderstorm last night - early morning actually, and Whitewater area is still out of electricity.  But in the office we made real progress on the business plan.  We will certainly be ready to start showing it next week.

So, five days ago, we were looking for an office, and now we are looking for investors.  Not too bad, but I worry about being self-congratulatory when so much is riding on sticking with it and getting the most done.

I should take some time and explain a few basics:  (1)  "we" are Ben and Karl - Ben is my son, and we are starting a business called Time Trails.  (2) The business is an internet startup.  We have a great idea having to do with history and web visualizations, and we are trying to build it up from nothing - literally, since we are both basically broke right now.  (3) The idea actually started in around 1999 or so, when Ben was 13.  We called it "History Lab" and I tried to program it using the tools I had back then.  It was cool (we had the Civil War and a few other things showing up), but we never figured out how to keep going with it.  Now, ten years later, we're back on it.  (4) I have actually been working on the prototype for about three months straight by now (which is one reason I'm broke!).  There's a lot more to it all, but those are some basic preliminaries.

What is "Every Day Counted"?  It's a mantra - Guy Kawasaki says you need a mantra for your startup.  We got the mantra on day 2.  I said "every day counts" meaning I was afraid if we stopped pushing the whole venture would grind to a stop and never recover.  Then Ben said "every day counted."  From trivial to timeless.

What's it mean?  Just what it says.  We're counting every day of our startup, that's true, from the time we had a working prototype (which is another story - but it's B.P. - Before Prototype).  

But what it really means is this: You are related (descended from) a bunch of people who were living on every day in all of human history (just ponder that if you think I'm full of it).  Every day counted for them.  Every day something happened, someone was born, someone died, someone overcame, someone did something extraordinary.  That's what history is.  We may not be descended from kings, but we are descended.  And every day counted, somehow, for someone.