According to Douglas Adams, there was once an alien race cursed by telepathy. Cursed? Yes, because being aware of every last fleeting, irrelevant thought of their fellow beings was completely unbearable.
The only way that they could block out the noise was by talking loudly and constantly about nothing at all (or by playing host to a Disaster Area concert).
Watch Twittervision for a few minutes and you will understand how they felt.
As you can see, I have been busy building my new company.
OK, we spent a weekend with my wife’s family in Oregon and my father-in-law let me dig big holes in the ground. Try it some time.
But I have been building a company. It has a name, a logo, a co-founder, a first employee, and a first round of financing, and naturally it has its very own blog, where I’ve been moonlighting for the last week or so.
The name is Skydeck. Like it? I do. It is almost but not quite a real word - widely used but not in any dictionary I can find. It means a high platform from which you can see a great distance: the Sears Tower, the roof of an Airstream. So it’s aspirational. But those hard twin Ks make it sound dependable and familiar, like Kodak… I’ll shut up now. The logo was designed by Summer.
My co-founder is Mike Wells, who quit Google in December to work with me on this. Our first employee is Jake Donham, who was either employee number one or two at my last company Vindigo, depending on whom you ask, and who thought Skydeck sounded more interesting than the PhD program he was in at Carnegie Mellon.
More details on our financing later.
Brash.com [update: now JasonDevitt.com] remains my personal blog, and this is where I will write about the trials and tribulations of being an entrepreneur, moving to the Valley, and digging holes in the ground. But I will be writing about the mobile market in general and Skydeck’s plans in particular at our company site, and so will my colleagues. If that is what interests you, grab the feed here.
And finally, we’re hiring. We will happily pay referral bonuses of up to $5,000, so don’t be shy.
