Go to San Francisco

[chadwhitacre]

I spent 12 days in San Francisco in early November, 2016. I met a lot of people in a lot of different contexts, and started to rebuild some awareness of Gratipay as a going concern. I came up hard against the difficulty in what we're trying to accomplish with funding open source: companies have precious little incentive to pay for value they already possess.

Map

Expense Report

Story

Week 1

Date	Day	Write-up
11-07	Monday	Y Combinator
11-08	Tuesday	Sudo Room
11-09	Wednesday	Amazon Loft w/ @shurcooL
11-10	Thursday	Lunch at HackerOne
11-11	Friday	Lunch at the Internet Archive
11-12	Saturday	Meeting with @nobodxbodon

Week 2

Date	Day	Write-up
11-13	Sunday	Hike!
11-14	Monday	LAUNCH Scale
11-15	Tuesday	LAUNCH Scale p. 2, Jareau, Sheel
11-16	Wednesday	Shareable, Nadia
11-17	Thursday	Mazarine, J.C. & Aza, SELC, Cameron
11-18	Friday	Loft, then Chris Messina, but not Pia—nor Cavalier :)

Original

I had a really good time during All Things Open (#757) getting to hack a lot and then going out to interact with people relevant to Gratipay. Under #836 we've been talking about stopping by YC even if we don't get an invite. Of course there's plenty of other networking to do out there as well even if we never make it to YC.

I'm looking at a trip November 7—19. Right now flights are running just under $600, and I'm finding Airbnbs in the $500 to $1,200 range (depending on how many roommates).

My experience in Raleigh this past week indicates to me that two weeks in San Francisco could be amazingly productive. My tendency is to think that a private room actually in SF would provide the most valuable combination of space to hack and proximity for networking. I've reached out to see about finding a place to stay apart from Airbnb. Assuming that doesn't come through, I think a budget of $2,400 would cover a 12 day trip.

We have about $7,000 in the bank right now and are accumulating about $182/mo (780 - 562 - 36).

We'll need to act pretty quick to lock in the flight and room. Prices could go up drastically tomorrow, for all I know.

Anyone have a strong sense one way or another on this? I just really want to get this candle lit again! :candle:

[chadwhitacre]

I'm at 15% battery. They open in three hours. Back to sleep, I guess!

[nobodxbodon]

@whit537 For my mbp, it happened to me that the partially broken cable on the charger made it charge some of the times but when the cable was bending in such way it wouldn't charge. It would be more of an issue if it's the charging part in the mbp went wrong, but the charger cable is generally more likely the problem AFAIK.

[chadwhitacre]

@nobodxbodon This is a brand new cable, though it sat for a couple years before I started using it. I just started using it on this trip. I've experienced the "gotta have the wire in the right position" symptom before, and this doesn't seem like that to me. The way to diagnose that would be to buy a new cable for $80 and use it for a few days. My old cable is at home. It was working when I left, but is starting to fray, which is why I brought this one instead—how ironic if the cable turns out to be the problem!

[chadwhitacre]

I went to Marianne's last night. It's a sister restaurant to Marlowe, which is where I went on Monday night after YC (I thought I had been in an Irish restaurant in that location the last couple visits, but nope!). I got the Marlowe Burger again. Now I feel like I should also go to Park Tavern and Cavalier and get the Marlowe Burger there as well. I'll have to keep eating pb&j's in the mean time if I'm to afford it. :)

[chadwhitacre]

I'm back at the Apple Store with an appointment in the next hour or two. Perhaps they will be able to run some diagnostic that will determine whether the power supply or other internal component is the problem. Short of that, I guess I will buy a cable and try that out. Hoping at this point to still make it out to meet up with @nobodxbodon in the afternoon.

[chadwhitacre]

Okay! Time to email Wendy ...

[chadwhitacre]

[chadwhitacre]

Turns out he joined on July 5, 2012, a month after we launched.

[chadwhitacre]

Here's the commit where we removed the commemoration in the sidebar: https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com/commit/6cf01623dd6bb4000d68c6915b59cf99e134c1ae.

[chadwhitacre]

Time to email Wendy ...

Sent. 👍

[chadwhitacre]

Wendy and Katie,

Thank you so much for the hospitality and the meeting!

One connection that didn't occur to me yesterday, but which I think is worth mentioning, is that Aaron Swartz had an account on Gratipay. He joined about a month after we launched (back in 2012), and, in fact, I was one of the last people to interact with him on Twitter. I can't think of a reference user that speaks more to the possibility of a relationship between Gratipay and the Internet Archive. We actually had a commemoration on his profile for two years; we removed it as part of letting go of "Gittipay 1.0" after the Gratipocalypse. Perhaps we could bring that back in some way, as part of beginning a relationship with the Archive?

If and when you're ready to move forward, I would invite the Archive to [apply]() to join Gratipay to receive donations. We do have a one-week public review period for new applications. If you have any questions about that, or anything else, please let me know! I'm in town through Friday and would be happy to stop by the Archive again if that's valuable.

Thank you again. I look forward to your decision to proceed! :-)

---

Yes, I botched the "apply" link. :roll_eyes: Followed up with ...

---

Of course, the link I forget is https://gratipay.com/new. My pitch is as good as my business card. :-P

[chadwhitacre]

Okay! @nobodxbodon and I are posted up at Coupa. Here are some questions he sent in private email when it looked like I wasn't going to make it out, so this is our agenda, I guess. :-)

1. was there some user analysis (especially the pre-crisis period, and comparison between post period)? It would give better picture about who was the main target user, and why they don't come back.
2. why approving team takes a week? why not make user accept some terms and let them sign up immediately? Reviewer can still take after-measures anyways, as it will not so influential at this moment. IMO reviewing process beforehand only is necessary when there can be immediate PR issue, like apps in App/Play stores. Of course, if there's critical legal concerns (I'd be very interested in what's it), please ignore this.
3. I know there was discussion about tech stack (Aspen) in previous ticket, and it was closed. However situation has changed, and IMO it's good time to review, especially if you want to encourage more people to contribute to Gratipay source code. I'm not suggesting re-writing existing platforms now, but brand new parts could be better to start with mainstream stack.
4. among all the crowdfunding platforms, bountysource aims at specific issues in projects, which seems like the finest granularity, and kickstarter aims at project level. IIUC Gittip aims at individuals before, so that's a distinguishable feature. I wonder what is now?
5. from the post about difference between Liberapay: https://github.com/liberapay/salon/issues/8, I find the "payment processing fees" part a clear disadvantage (>5%?). Is there any plan to minimize that?

[mattbk]

I have some comments, if you haven't covered them yet.

1. The week isn't in terms, it only seems to be listed in https://github.com/gratipay/team-review. Discussion about changing this at https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/648.
2. There would be less lost in fees if we still kept money in escrow, but in absence of that, rearranging the order of payday seems like it may work (https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com/issues/3666).

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks, @mattbk. We covered a lot! We met for about 2½ hours.

We started off by talking about our market (1), who our users are. I laid out two basic groups:

1. open source software projects
2. consumer-grade "open culture" orgs (Wikipedia, Mozilla, Internet Archive, etc.)

While discussing the characteristics of each, some D-list VC from central casting barged in on our conversation and told us what's what, until his appointment showed and they barged out together. Ah, Coupa Cafe! :-)

We didn't take the questions in order. We went next to (4). Bountysource tried the bounty model and gave up and switched to recurring monthly (Salt), which would seem to be more coarse-grained than Kickstarter: ongoing funding for a company or organization, not just a one-time project.

I think (2) might have been next. I explained some of the history represented by #319 and also #118, and that that's how we got to where we are today with team review. We can look for ways to streamline onboarding (e.g., #648 as @mattbk points out), but in general the earlier we can pull weeds the better, to avoid their growing roots.

Then we zoomed out to talk about the bigger picture, the open work vision:

Relatedly, who are we? What are we trying to accomplish in the world? We're trying to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love. We're not trying to be the cheapest way to send money. We're not trying to stir outrage. We are trying to create open jobs.

Here's my goal (IRC): I want to hit our homepage in five or ten years and find 1,024 projects (teams, companies, whatever) each with a weekly payroll of at least $1,024. I want thousands of people making a living by working on open work through Gratipay. How do we do that?

In some ways we're related to Elance/Odesk/Mechanical Turk. We differ in take-what-you-want compensation. We talked about that for a bit. @nobodxbodon accused us of not innovating in absolutely everything all at once. ;-) "The square of challenges ..."

That brought us to the tech stack question (3). Long story short, @nobodxbodon is really interested in working on our finances ("If not the most critical part, it's definitely one of them"), and we decided to give Django a try for a finances app that would start out by replacing our budget spreadsheet, and could evolve to take over the access dashboard as well. I'll let @nobodxbodon say more when he's ready.

Re: (5), that's a function of Europe vs. U.S. Paying out via PayPal in the U.S. is 2%. Fees beyond that are due to forex, etc. between PayPal and European banks. Finding better options requires that we plug more directly into the global financial system.

We then zoomed back out to talk about strategy some more. I explained that I'm not die-hard about the pwyw model. I think it makes sense for Gratipay right now since it's what we're offering to other people ("Helping people to understand that open source is not free"), but in the long run I'm actually more interested in twyw and open work.

We finished by diving into the finances repo to look at what's already there. @nobodxbodon: In addition to digesting the README and trying out the code there, see #308 for the top of a deeeeeeeep rabbit hole that @kaguillera and I went down, where we looked at Xero and eventually landed on the Ledger-based solution I started showing you today)—and then check out https://github.com/gratipay/finances/issues/22 for the unfinished conversation about converting to GnuCash.

[chadwhitacre]

All in all @nobodxbodon and I had a great meeting, I think. We got to know each other a bit, and I think I was able to start bringing him up to speed on a lot of context.

@nobodxbodon Please feel free to chime in from your perspective with anything I missed or misstated. Thanks for the meetup! :-)

[chadwhitacre]

And with that, I am going to sign off for the night and for the rest of the weekend. My plan is to take the day off tomorrow to do some sightseeing and hiking. I expect to be back online perhaps tomorrow night, otherwise Monday morning ... for week 2 of the Great Gratipay San Francisco Expotition of 2016! 🌉 I picked up another week of pb&j supplies on the walk up from Caltrain, so I've got the jump. ;-)

[nobodxbodon]

@whit537 great sum up! Glad to learn a lot of background and history, to have a clearer view of the big picture. I'll try to start with the financial/accounting part and hopefully integrate it with other contents later. Here's an initial draft of the cost part.

[chadwhitacre]

I hiked almost 20 miles today, to Vista Point and back. A full day, to say the least! O.o

[chadwhitacre]

Whoa!

Thomas’ full name was Thomas Myron Hooker, and based on conversations Dimond had with him, along with his accent, she learned that he was originally from Trinidad.

http://richmondsfblog.com/2016/10/27/thomas-resident-homeless-man-at-funston-clement-passed-away-wednesday-night/

I accidentally sat in his pew for mass this morning.

RIP, Thomas.

cc: @kaguillera

[chadwhitacre]

he was originally from Trinidad.

Hmm ... this documentary has him as an American born in Nicaragua.

[chadwhitacre]

Alright, that was powerful and sobering and a lot to digest, especially when exhausted.

In other news, I just noticed the battery hasn't been charging for the past hour, so I opened the new cord I bought the other day. It works! So I switched back to the old one. It works now, too! O.o

[chadwhitacre]

Unplugged overnight. Now old cord failing, new cord working. 👍

[chadwhitacre]

Legs failing! Pretty stiff.

[chadwhitacre]

I am at Mazarine (grabbed an espresso here before HackerOne—back for more! It's great!). I just met someone starting tomorrow at WalkMe, and I learned from the other person at the table that LAUNCH is having an event this week. Maybe I should go try to meet Jason in person? :)

[chadwhitacre]

Okay! Got the in-person fist-bump, and an entrance band! :-)

I also met Jason's Chief of Staff (just for LAUNCH, I think?), Ashley Whitehurst.

I had a long conversation with Anton Polishko. We touched on a lot of things, with the biggest concrete take-away being that the Founder Institute is another extensive startup community to court, along with YC and LAUNCH.

I am the Lorax of open source. I speak for the projects! I am looking for startup communities to pay attention to the barbaloots!

[chadwhitacre]

[…] the biggest concrete take-away being that the Founder Institute is another extensive startup community to court, along with YC and LAUNCH.

I did a little more digging around. Techstars is in Boulder. Collaborative Fund is in NYC. But 500 Startups is in Mountain View and SF (among lots of other places!) ...

Why is there no Amazon for VC, why is there no Google for VC? Well there is - it's Y Combinator and it's us.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/dave-mcclure-500-startups-the-anti-vc

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[chadwhitacre]

I am thinking I will revisit LAUNCH SCALE again tomorrow, to see if I can ask Ashley's advice on tapping into Jason's network of companies. I'm meeting Jareau at Pinterest in the afternoon.

[chadwhitacre]

I am hitting the doldrums, gang. I want to do a deal before I leave! 😩

I am at LAUNCH Scale (correct capitalization; phew ;). I briefly met John Heltzel after a helpful talk he gave on trust as the foundation of business development.

I ran into Anton again, who introduced me to Katie from Boston.

Then I talked to Matt Hubert for a bit. He co-founded Bitmatica, a nine-person consultancy with a booth here. I said we were working on funding open source, and he was like, "Oh, like, ... um ... Gittip!" :-) So I brought him up to speed and parted ways.

But then I went back to him and was like "How do I sell to you? Bitmatica is exactly who I need on the buyer side." And the answer was basically, "You have to give me something for it, I'm not going to make a donation." Best answer was access to developers, "I want my patch reviewed, I want support." Which is not the answer I/we want to hear, of course. Are we really dependent on the full evolution of companies with a conscience? Talk about the square of challenges! 😩

Matt did advise re: building a marketplace that you have to turn it into a one-sided marketplace by artificially filling the other side, so we're on the right track with https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com/issues/4148.

[chadwhitacre]

Heading out to meet Jareau ...

[chadwhitacre]

Okay! I had a good time catching up with Jareau. We talked for 45 minutes. Balanced shutdown and the Gratipocalypse happened since the last time we hung out, so there was a lot to catch up on. :-)

Jareau was in charge of business development at Balanced, so I was able to double-check some assumptions about LinkedIn (it's important to have as a validator, but email is the best way to actually reach out to people) and the importance of being out here, and of being persistent (Balanced was featured on OctoTales at one time, due to a random encounter + six months of follow-up).

[chadwhitacre]

Afterwards I stopped by 500 Startups. The front door let me in, and there was no registration desk at the office itself. I walked up to Sheel and was like, "This is awkward, but I'm from the Internet." And he was like, "Yeah! I followed you on Twitter but you didn't follow back so I couldn't DM you." Then we had an awkward five minute conversation where I was like "I'm the Lorax, and oh yeah I was the one that wrote that blog post four years ago, and how do we get companies to support open source?" and he was (understandably) like "wtf where is security?" (okay, not really, he was cool) and then I split. Sooooooooo that didn't go so well. 😁

[chadwhitacre]

In retrospect, I should've asked him to schedule something rather than to meet on the spot. I think that would've gone much better.

[chadwhitacre]

Alright! Three more days. Shareable and GitHub tomorrow, maybe SELC on Thursday. Heading home Friday night on the red eye.

What am I learning?

[chadwhitacre]

Alright, I booked a ticket for the SELC dinner, after re-reading https://github.com/gratipay/inside.gratipay.com/issues/72#issuecomment-230070971. They and that scene are part of the story, here.

[chadwhitacre]

Wendy and Katie,

Hope your week is going well! :-)

I've been thinking a lot about something you said last week, Katie, about "how to unite against this horrible front," I think was your phrase. I keep coming back to the idea of a coalition of organizations—Archive, Wikimedia, and Mozilla are the anchors in my mind—that together could perhaps jumpstart something truly new and hopeful in the economy and in society. In the spirit of platform cooperativism, I wonder if there is a future for Gratipay as a cooperative of organizations that share the same open ethos and would find an economic engine useful.

What can you share of the Archive's thinking on how to pursue its mission under this new political regime? I did hear some talk last week about "storing the facts" as a renewed focus. What's the state of the conversation about uniting with like-minded organizations? How can Gratipay help?

[chadwhitacre]

Alright, looks like I'm going to go over-budget. I had hoped to squeak by on pb&j, but now I am buying a Next Space day pass for $25 in order to cowork with the Shareable crew, so that puts me over for sure. Also, I need to eat some fruits and veggies. :-)

My new aim is to keep the trip under $2,600 (8.3% over budget).

[chadwhitacre]

Okay, I'm posted up at http://nextspace.us/union-square. Met the founder of Speaky on the way over. They're a Node.js shop. I gotta work on my pitch. "There's no reason you should give them money" is a really bad pitch. :-)

[chadwhitacre]

I feel like I'm inside my brain. Like, what I mean, is that I feel like the San Francisco Bay Area is my brain. Like all of the problems that I wrestle with in my head are external, like I am walking around inside of them. I am physically experiencing them. I don't need a mindmap. I just walk around.

[chadwhitacre]

"But what do I get for it?" "You already got the thing."

[chadwhitacre]

Found Shareable! :-)

[chadwhitacre]

The more we can make people aware of the value they're already getting, the better. Showing a dependency tree (https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com/pull/4135) is part of that. Could we use one of those algorithm for estimating cost to produce software based on lines of code to display an anchoring number?

[mattbk]

Do you even need lines of code? For a rough guess, a dependency is a dependency, no matter if you call on it once or a thousand times.

[mattbk]

"But what do I get for it?" "You already got the thing."

Without judgment, this is Christianity distilled.

[nobodxbodon]

"But what do I get for it?" "You already got the thing."

IMO there are other things that they can get. At the very least, the owners for the libraries could appreciate the gratitude, which I suppose is part of our mission.

[chadwhitacre]

this is Christianity distilled

That was an accident. :-P

At the very least, the owners for the libraries could appreciate the gratitude, which I suppose is part of our mission.

I was thinking of the companies, actually (are we on the same page?). Like, I was talking to the Bitmatica cofounder yesterday, and he was like "Yeah, we use open source, and we don't pay. There's no pain point. What do I get for paying?"

[chadwhitacre]

I dropped my sweater walking back from GitHub. I trust that someone who needed it picked it up.

[chadwhitacre]

Alright! I just finished watching Nadia's recent talk about funding open source. I spent an hour with her at the GitHub office this afternoon. We covered a lot of ground. The biggest take-away for me was that Open Collective has buzz right now (cf.), and when Gratipay comes up it's like, "Are they still processing?" I think I was able to say "Yes! We're getting the band back together! That's why I'm out here!"

Prior to meeting with Nadia, I spent the morning and early afternoon coworking with five of the Shareable crew. I did a call with Neal a year ago, and I ran into Tom at #314. I'll probably run into Maira tomorrow night at the SELC dinner. I see Shareable as a strategic partner when we're ready to branch out of open source and reach more of the mainstream (same bucket as the Archive). I'm thinking of pitching them on a story about coworking in Pittsburgh—surprisingly, I am finding that Pittsburgh has some coworking gems relative to San Francisco—which could be a chance to reference Gratipay as well.

[chadwhitacre]

Two more nights! 😴

[chadwhitacre]

P.S. So far I've been able to get three hours in for COS each morning. I'm getting a late start today (6:15, usually 5:00 or 5:30), but since we don't have funding it's time I've needed to spend even while out here.

[chadwhitacre]

http://chrismessina.me/contact ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Chris!

I'm cold-contacting you from Gratipay, a really open-source-y startup working on the problem of funding open culture. I'm visiting SF from Pittsburgh in order to meet people and try to rebuild some momentum for Gratipay after the ahem "Gratipocalypse," and this guy I just met at Mazarine that met you once said I reminded him of you. :-)

Here's a couple links to whet your whistle about the stuff I'm working on:

https://changelog.com/posts/open-products http://inside.gratipay.com/big-picture/roadmap

I fly back to Pittsburgh tomorrow (Friday) night. May I buy you lunch at Cavalier before I go? I want to introduce you to Gratipay and see if Uber could be a partner. Cause, you know, it's h*ckin Uber. :P

lmk ...

chad

chad@gratipay.com @whit537 +1-412-925-4220