Wish me luck.  I am doing the equivalent of speed dating at web2.0 expo at The Sheraton in NYC this evening.  The format is to give a 5 minute demo over and over for 2 hours to various strangers.  This may define what I have avoided for my whole professional career. But, I decided when I closed Verifiable (my last startup) and started SaneBox (my new startup) that I was going to do everything differently and this is part of it.

My career has mostly been defined by “making stuff work”.  I founded my first company, Gamesville.com, with @stevenkane.  It was just the two of us for quite a while and to avoid killing each other we had a firm allocation of responsibility: I made it work and Steve did everything else.  It was the same way with our second company, GameLogic.  In both cases, I always felt that “making it work” was the harder job - it was 24 hours a day - it always felt like I was rolling a really heavy rock up a steep hill but never quite getting to the top. How hard could that other stuff be?

Well, now that I am doing “everything else” - including this expo, I am painfully aware that I was wrong.  Making stuff work is hard.  I still do that too.  But in a different more binary way than this other stuff.

I absolutely dread this event.

The fashion designer, @danielacorte, the best-wife-in-the-world, in the middle of Boston Fashion Week, 2 days before her big fashion show, is coming for moral support - I’m guessing most of these guys haven’t seen anything like her except on TV so I’m hoping that she will distract them.

So, with the clock ticking down to this event., I would like to thank @stevenkane for every public event, advertiser meeting, interface design review that I didn’t have to attend.  Ahhh… those were the days.