trendpreneur

It’s strange being back in Edinburgh after six months away. The city feels comfortable, like an old pair of shoes you forgot you had; the weather isn’t a patch on the South Bay, of course, though it’s not too dissimilar from San Francisco. Minus the wind.

I’m fortunate enough to have lived in and around three lovely cities in my lifetime; Brighton, Edinburgh and San Francisco. Cambridge was pretty nice, too, inspiring yet overwhelming (and suffocating) in its way. Recently, my management coach (for I am growed up and have such things) advised me to travel as much as I can now — to visit the places I’ve always wanted to visit, to live in new countries, to have these sought-after experiences.

So, I shall.

Living in a different country is a fun experience, no matter how similar the country to your own. Even living in Scotland was a change from England — accents, customs, friendliness, the health service… America is a step beyond, a strange mirror country where things are sort-of-but-not-quite the same. On returning to the UK, I see it clearer than ever before. It’s not just that cars drive on the wrong side of the road, it’s the traffic customs around crossing in certain places. It’s not that the health service is totally different, it’s that doctors’ offices have credit card terminals at the front.

Stephen Fry puts it far better than I ever could, and hits the nail on the head — it’s not just that things are superficially different, but under the skin, that’s where it’s interesting.

The next adventure is to go somewhere totally different. In a way, it seems that it would be easier to learn a completely new culture than to do a botch job of assimilating one slightly but not quite the same. But we shall see. For now, I am enjoying the comfort of an old friend in Edinburgh, and secretly plotting my eventual growing of roots here.

I love this productivity tip from Mark Twain via Gina Trapani (amongst others): eat your frog!

What this means is to do your worst task first, every day. Identify the day before what you really don’t want to get around to doing the next day, the task you secretly hope you’ll run out of time for so you don’t have to do it. Do it at the start of the day (it can’t be worse than eating a live frog) and then it’s done, you feel great, and you don’t have it dragging you down all day.

A couple of modifications: I don’t do this every single day (I don’t always have a particularly unpleasant frog!) so the days when I do do it, it really feels good. Also, making a list of the one or two things I really want to get done the next day, the night before, really helps. And finally, think GTD-style – maybe the task is so big and horrible because it’s large, amorphous and uncontrolled. If you only have half an hour before that morning meeting, why not break the task down into small pieces, do anything that’s quick and easy, and come back to it later? You’ll feel good because you’ve met your frog head-on.

27 is my lucky number. Today I turn 28, and the last year has been the most exciting one yet. I have a slight feeling of having passed the top of the rollercoaster, but then I look ahead and realise how unrealistic that is.

In the last year: I ‘graduated’ from EPIS, launched FestBuzz, visited Silicon Valley twice and then moved here, learnt to pitch and spent a lot of time doing it, spoke at TechCrunch, hammered out my business idea and execution in the forges of Astia, Cambridge University, Informatics Ventures/Ken Morse workshops, NESTA, UKTI and countless other events, and had some eye-opening and enlightening moments at various conferences, especially concerning the marketplace and competition.

The high points of the last year encompass all of the above, and more; small achievements (quitting World of Warcraft cold-turkey due to having absolutely no spare time; learning to run and completing two 5Ks) and improvements in my personal life all add up to an amazing year. I couldn’t have asked for more.

Moving to Silicon Valley has been a hectic and interesting experience so far, and it’s set to make my 28th year very interesting indeed. (Or is that 29th? One’s first year is when one is age zero…)

Having so much on the proverbial doorstep is at once overwhelming and inducive of complacency. The echo chamber is intimidating and shallow. And yet there’s something in the air; some ‘zeal’ carried in the water supply. When people ask you at events “What does your startup do?”, not “What do you do?”, it’s strangely liberating.

There’s also a difference in attitude. Everyone here thinks their startup is the next Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. When asked, I have a tendency to hedge and mumble; “Oh, it’s a Scottish social media AI startup, you probably won’t have heard of it”. When I’m truly attuned to the Silicon Valley frequency, I’ll be answering “We’re reinventing information, and if you read TechCrunch you’ve probably read about us”.

I’m hard-pressed to keep a straight face with some of the startups I run into; although Europe is characterised as having a lot of “me-too-in-Deutsch” type companies, me-toos definitely exist in the Bay Area! “We’re Facebook for dog-lovers”, etc. Despite the melting-pot nature of the area, there are also quite a few startups working on very inward-focused areas, jumping on technology bandwagons (though there are plenty of tech-for-techies startups, many funded by YC, that will probably do quite well in their niches).

Plenty of people design for themselves, for their Silicon Valley lifestyle/friends/needs/itches, and don’t look outwards. I haven’t met enough startups to really put a finger on how prevalent this is, but every so often I’ll run into someone and my first thought will be: “This wouldn’t work in Edinburgh”. (This even applies to some of Google’s ideas, it’s not just the small guys). I’m hoping that my experience of living in a country without free wi-fi, prevalent plug outlets, geographic population density/early-adopter critical mass, reliable 3G/GPS, a good public transport and healthcare system, and Topshop (I miss Topshop) will help some people here.

My mind has been buzzing with ideas since I landed, and there’s nothing quite as inspirational as your own personal itches/problems/difficulties as a newbie in a strange land armed with a Linode server and terminal. Being out of my comfort zone and living in a strange country has been an interesting start to the year, and I actually recommend it. It definitely broadens the mind.

Much as I miss Edinburgh and all the wonderful people there, and even the opportunities I’ve given up or walked away from, I believe the connections and knowledge to be had over here are invaluable. Hopefully I can bring a piece of Silicon Valley back!

I’ve spent a while, recently, sifting through the joy that is Craigslist’s apartment listings, and noticed a few things that I thought I’d share. Note, a lot of this can be applied to Gumtree — and probably others — as well. I’ve specifically been looking for a room in an existing place, not a whole place by myself, so some of this may vary.

Got a room to rent? Here’s how to get replies:

A picture speaks a thousand words. No, really. There are a lot of listings, and anything that gives an idea of your place is a bonus. Double points if you link to a Flickr slideshow or Picasa album (these seem oddly popular) with more photos. I even replied to a couple of ads with bad photos.

Answer everyone’s questions. I’ve seen many ads with one crucial piece of information missing. How many other people live there? Where is it? When is it available? Is it furnished? (Although the norm is for it not to be, in the UK it’s the other way round, and my first few emails to people with pictures of beautifully-furnished rooms were less than successful.)

Convey personality. Why do you love the place? What do you do? Self-effacing humour about your terrible photos goes down well. Some ads I’ve read and immediately got a real sense of what the atmosphere must be like at the apartment.

Sell, sell, sell. Some people (myself included) are looking for things like a big kitchen, lots of light, etc. Don’t leave this stuff out! In the interests of honesty, do say if the room is small or has some other weird feature, but avoid negative language (“This crappy little place…”) if possible.

Finally, and this is really important, remember your apartment isn’t the centre of the universe. I got an email today from a Craigslist poster I’d contacted. “Sure, you can come see the place if you’re still interested”. WTF? How on earth am I supposed to know which place he means? If he’d replied to my email, I’d have been fine (see below)…

So you want somewhere to live but you’re losing track of all the ads:

The volume of ads is pretty stupendous. I dealt with it by looking in a few very specific places, by doing searches on key words (loft, hardwood, claw-foot) to ensure I’d not missed any stunners, by restricting searches to ads with images, and by google-mapping everything before emailing to check if it was a no-go or not. (Ads without any hint to location: grr!)

A crucial thing for me was being able to reference emails to ads. I initially added a line near the top of my emails that read something like “In response to your Craigslist ad: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/blah”. It sounded a bit poncy, so I changed it to just have the link at the bottom of my email. It’s easy to remember if you paste it in before even writing “Hi”. This makes it super easy to figure out what listing the replies are referring to, unless they send you a brand new email (grr!), and to keep track of what you’ve actually contacted.

Sometimes the listing will expire, so if you’re really keen, you can just paste the body text in a new mail, same thread, change the to: address to your own.

Writing successful emails is a matter of individual style, really. I wanted to include a bit about myself, because you always want some idea of who’s coming round. In cases where the ad was particularly appealing, I’d write a bit more about how I might fit in and why it appealed to me. Some ads specifically ask for a few paragraphs about yourself etc, but I think writing too much can be a red flag as well. For ads I wasn’t sure about, such as the couple that sounded nice but didn’t post a location/availability/etc, I wrote a much shorter mail with the key question first and then a two-sentence “about” to initiate the conversation.

Another matter of personal taste, I included my voicemail number in my signature, but never got too far with the few people who insisted on calling it (or who replied to my email with “Call me on…”). I get that some people are way more “phone” than “email”-y, but the awkwardness of not having a decent US phone and the fact I’m more or less on email 24/7 meant that I definitely leaned towards those respondents who a) used email and b) did so promptly. After all, I’m going to be living with these people, it helps to have them on the same sort of communications wavelength. So if the poster has a phone number and you’re a phone person, that’s probably great, but if they say “Call me on xxx (or email)” and you email, be prepared to not quite mesh so well.

I think that’s it. There are some lovely places in San Francisco; I’ve been to dope-smoking dens and high-ceilinged wonders, to a modern “retro-geek” house and a flat that looked like it might fall apart at any moment. I’ve met some crazy people and some remarkably nice ones. Here’s hoping the apartment I finally went for works out!

Growing up, my family finances revolved around cheques. Routinely, we’d go food shopping three days before payday and hand over a bit of paper promising that, once the cheque cleared, we’d actually have the money to pay for the things we were taking home. My mother used to call this “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, borrowing from our future selves to enable us to eat today. This led to a vicious cycle; on payday, all the money would be pre-spent, leaving us with nothing for another two weeks until the next cheque could be written.

Of course, credit cards started becoming available to even those of dubious financial standing, and chequebooks somehow fell by the wayside. Why pay in full for something three days early when you could pay it off bit by bit over months or years? Hardly “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, more “giving Paul a PlayStation and making Peter put in overtime to keep up with the interest”.

Laid out bluntly, the maxim “don’t spend what you don’t have” is incredibly simple. Yet it’s also incredibly hard to keep to, or so it seems. I’ve fallen prey to it in the worst possible way — expecting birthday money, for example, I’d spend my existing cash in advance to get an immediate kick, then once the money arrived, spend that as well because it was my birthday. It’s pretty easy to do, especially if you’re not that connected to your personal finances and avoid looking at your online bank statements.

So, why don’t I do that any more? What’s made me realise I did it in the first place? Actually, it was teasing from people close to me who were familiar with my spending pattern and a little worried about it. I’m not the sort of person who announces my bank balance to friends at the drop of a hat, but they’d picked up on my money mismanagement from offhand comments and new purchases. If someone close to you seems to follow this pattern, it’s seriously useful to pick them up on it, though obviously calling an intervention on someone you don’t know too well is a bit much.

How to stop this unfortunate habit? It’s kind of easy, really: own up to your finances and therefore own your finances. Once you know you’re doing it, stop spending money you don’t have yet, or simply money you don’t have.

Keep your balance.
Know how much you’ve got in your accounts and when that number is going to change — set up Mint or Kublax, log on to your internet banking every day (force yourself for a while and it stops becoming scary; at that point, you can stop logging on daily, but still keep checking regularly).

Plan, but don’t spend.
When you have a windfall coming in, plan what you are going to buy, but don’t buy it. This has the added tried-and-tested advantage of giving you time to reflect on the decision, make the best possible purchase and even change your mind. Imagine yourself owning the item. Are you really happier?

Know where it’s going.
Using Mint, a spreadsheet or the back of an envelope, figure out what your finances generally look like, so you can work out when you have spare cash to spend — and when you don’t. Spending the remainder of your current account balance the day before your rent’s due? That’s money you don’t have. Finance automation is a great help — my income is pretty sporadic, so I squirrelled away my upcoming quarter’s rent and bills into a separate account, making my current account far more reflective of the actual money I had.

Cut up the credit card.
Seriously, they have their uses, but my life’s become so much better (financially speaking) since I stopped using my credit card. If you insist on keeping yours, be super, super aware of what goes in and out, how much that interest is really costing you, and pay it back before you buy new things. Far easier said than done, which is why ditching it worked for me.

Forget the numbers.
Finally, if you’re like me, you have an unfortunate habit of remembering your card numbers, making payments online far too easy. Stop yourself buying things by forgetting your card numbers (or rather, getting a new card and not learning it in the first place), unlinking your bank account from PayPal (no more impulse eBay shopping) and the like. Having to physically look at the card really makes you remember you’re spending money.

This post was originally going to be about more than money, as we “rob Peter to pay Paul” in more aspects of our lives than just the financial. Ever pigged out on food, skipped a day of exercise, procastinated on a deadline or pulled a sickie at work? We’re constantly living in the now, leaving our future selves to pick up the bill, and that’s before we even start to think about the state we’re leaving the planet in for our future generations…