Two days

On Saturday classicaljunkie had a birthday party and lo the games were busted out. Wait, didn't this happen last weekend too? Boy am I confused. Actually the games were not busted out until several hours after start of festivities because it was a BBQ and there was as much eating and hanging around outside as is appropriate to such a venue. I didn't even know that the junkie and the dictator555 (who orchestrated this multiple-birthday calamity thing) had an outside, so that was pretty swell. I have never had an outside! I am jealous.

After the business of tamping a truly uncharacteristic amount of seared flesh down my howling maw was concluded, I turned to games. The ones I played included Don, a simple bidding game I liked even though I lost hard at it (as I do with all bidding games), Hoopla, a party game by the Cranium people that's fun even though it was flawed in a couple of ways, and Bang!, a silly, violent, and quite enjoyable card game that I brought.

Also another game i can't quite recall the name of, "Logico" or "Logistica" or something, where you move colored wooden blocks around a world map with cute little wooden vehicles. It looked like a promising brain-burner but I ended up not really liking it much. However, it burned my brain anyway, which is why I played only silly games for the rest of the evening.

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I have not written about Tuesday yet even though it was interesting. After one of our angel contacts suggested it to us, Zarf and I attended a Boston Post-Mortem gathering at the Skellig in Waltham.

It was not what I expected. From applying personal experience to the description on the website, I was envisioning a few tables at the pub pushed together and filled with geeks continually arriving in small groups and confusedly placing asynchronous food orders. In fact, when we arrived, I spotted a crowded corner booth with some likely types at it (one guy with an EFF T-shirt, anyway) and started to approach them when an employee used his nerddar on us or something and said "You guys here for the post-mortem?" while gesturing down a different corridor.

The event was in a large function room in the back, with its own bar and two bartenders working at breakneck pace, and from whom I procured cheeseburger and beer. It turned out to be basically a networking-with-a-scheduled-presentation event just like all the MIT Forum events I've been attending, except it was just games people. Wow! So this is where they have all been hiding. I actually felt a little foolish to have taken so long to find it. (I did come across their website months ago but it didn't make it clear that the meeting are, overtly, all about networking.)

I knew we were in the right crowd when someone recognized Zarf on sight, within seconds of our entrance. It was a CMU connection rather than a games one, but close enough. I had to laugh. I myself ran into a familiar face from the old Mostly Looney Game Night crowd too, so both of us ended up with immediate initial contacts into the crowd. From there we both talked to a bunch of other people. I didn't meet anyone who I wanted to follow up with as soon as I got home, but passed out a lot of cards anyway, and learned a lot of random stuff. It was a good time, enjoying a beer while a complete stranger is confiding in me how Nintendo really works. Looking forward to the next one.

Second angel meeting

The meeting with angel #2 (from same outfit as angel #1, and no relation to VC dood) was interesting. Still no resolution as to our ultimate fate but we picked up some clues and heard some unexpected things about fundraising from the mouth of a potential investor (who has the ear of many more people like him).

Take-aways:
* To paraphrase, "WTF, your spreadsheet has you spending two million dollars in 18 months? You don't need to buy the Internets before you publish to them, you know. Fix this."
* Our expectations for funding delivery does not reflect the world as this angel group understands it to be. Rather than write a check for half a mil and calling it done, they'd rather see a plan where they can drip in a bit at each milestone.

He has bade me to rework some stuff and get back to him. Our ideas and our overall business plan are great and well-defined, but now people are looking at our numbers and our timeline, and seeing that AFATCT they are either wrong or missing. OK, fine. We can fix that.

I am full of energy and it is very strange energy. Up until now the promise of funding has been a psychological fence between where we are now and setting up the revenue-earning stuff. I will take this fence down now; we need to press ahead. Things will get Interesting, after Origins.

I think we can make this work. I have... a lot to do.

Unavoidably this leads again into thoughts of "shit I wish we had another employee". A challenge ahead is selling all this to the Andys, especially the part-timer who I will undoubtedly try to convince to quit his lucrative day job before we have six digits in the bank. There may be no giant bag of money, maybe instead a twilit trail of smaller ones winding through the wood, but either way we really need him. He's the air element of our Invisibles cell.

What's plain-and-simple bad news is that I am nearly out of personal savings. If we don't get some solid funding by next month, but we switch to a more gradual funding scheme, then I'm still going to have to pick up a programming contract or something. If I am careful and wise about it - I have done this before - then will not result in overall slowdowns in Volity. It's too bad I may need to do it this way, though.