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This is the full text transcript of my interview with Jay Air, Founder of Anomaly Innovations.  For more information on this interview, please click here.

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Giang Biscan: Hi there, this is Giang Biscan from AsAble.com, a website that empowers startup entrepreneurs. Today I have with me Jay air, he’s from Anomaly Innovations.  Jay, how are you?

Jay Air: I’m fine how about you?

Giang Biscan: I’m good, so I know that you guys have a number of products, what do you have?

Jay Air: So we – essentially Frank and I, we started Anomaly Innovations and decided we need to work on some of the problems that we are having.  We need to come up with some way of solving it that would help out other people as well.  So initially when we set out to do this, this is after we’d graduated from the University of Waterloo in 2008, we said one of the problems that we were having was in the social media space; there’s way too much going on.  I just need some sort of a tool that would help me keep on, stay in touch with everybody.  And so we set out to build a social media client and that’s exactly what View Point was, a social media client that really innovative UI that helps you go through a lot of updates really quickly.

It was built for speed, and the idea is I don’t have too much time in the day so just show me what I need to see and give it to me in a way that I can see it really quickly instead of showing the entire message, just show me a little bit of it so I can scroll through it really quickly.  So that was the idea we were working on for quite a bit.

We put it out, it was in the private beta stage, we had a bunch of people try it, we got some really great feedback for it, but one of the things that we noticed during that time was that people would tell us I really like the product, but what would be one thing that you guys are looking to do – what’s the one defining feature for View Point?  And what we found was that people liked the product, they liked the UI, they liked the service as a whole, but they’re having trouble kind of catching onto it and what that really meant was that the moment they signed on it took them a while to figure out what the product really does.

And so what we did was we said, we can approach this is two ways; we could work on the messaging, the marketing, to try and make sure that people understand this as quickly as possible as the only service as they log on, or what we could do which is the idea we had – I think it was in October 2009, so a couple of months ago, we said how about we take kind of the one feature that we think that is the most value out of View Point and put that out as a separate service and kind of put it out so we’re not competing in the social media client space.  What we found was that there were a ton of competitors, the Tweet decks, the ***, there was a bunch of different services and products out there that were doing essentially what we were doing and had a lot more traction than we did.

So we said, instead of going head on against them let’s figure out a way to just focus on the one thing that we think we do really well, and put that out as kind of like an API, or kind of a service on its own.  That’s essentially how Cadmus came out; we said the one feature that we probably will do really well is we were able to look at the extreme and figure out the duplicate posts and the related posts and kind of put them together.  So you instead of seeing maybe 100 posts, you would see maybe 70 of them and all the others would be grouped together.  So if two people were Tweeting the same link, they would come together.  So, it’s kind of like what Gmail did for email.  Instead of showing you each new email on its own, they would put it together as a conversation.  That’s kind of what we tried to do.  So we put the related posts together, and we will put all the *** that come in to Twitter specifically into a conversation, they group it together for you so you kind of get this summary of your screen.

Giang Biscan: That’s amazing.

Jay Air: That’s essentially how Cadmus started and this was in the last week I think of October in 2009, we put that out and essentially the idea originally with Cadmus was here’s a service, in fact it was more towards API side of things where you give us your stream and we give you back a filtered version of it.  So that’s essentially how it all started for us.

Giang Biscan: That’s really  good because I notice that with my Twitter stream, it’s just so cluttered, there’s just so much stuff in there it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on, so that’s really great.  So this is something that you just started a few months ago after you noticed the other product which is the View Point product.  So what’s going to happen with View Point now?

Jay Air: It’s – initially we had a ton of feedback for it and we started working on it and we said how about we just put Cadmus out and see how it goes.  We really didn’t have high hopes for Cadmus early on.  We said View Point is the one we’re going after, let’s go out and try to execute completely on the plan that we had.  And once we started working on it we realized Cadmus started picking up and started getting some traction.  So there were people using it, and then they had feedback on Cadmus and since – and the approach to Cadmus was, let’s just put it out there publicly, let’s not try to do the beta or any of those things with it.

Just put it out there; let’s see what people think, let’s see what the response is; there’s really not much to lose.  It should be a simple product or service that people should get right away.  It really, again what we were trying to do was understand how do you market products early on?  One of the real lessons that we learned there was that you need to make sure that the moment people come on the service, or the moment they’re on the ***, they get – what is the one thing you guys really do?  That was essentially what Cadmus was, so once you put that out there and start getting feedback, our focus shifted toward Cadmus and we said oh man we’re not having – we didn’t have much time to incorporate all the stuff that we had from View Point, but even then we were leaving View Point in terms of it was still functioning the way it was, and as time moved on in the last couple of months we kept working toward Cadmus and *** issues we had recently we just had fallen behind on View Point.

It’s a two man shop so you can’t split time really well on building the product.  But at some point we do intend to put it out in the sense that it will be – essentially what it really does it feeds off of the Cadmus API, so we have an API on Cadmus which is essentially the Twitter likes API so if you were a Twitter client you could hook into the Cadmus API, just as you are hooking into the Twitter API except we would give you posts sorted by relevance.  So we would show you kind of the top posts from all the people that you’re following.  And so at some point we would like to put out View Point publicly to show off that you could power one of these social media clients off of an API like Cadmus.

Giang Biscan: Right, so by opening it up you’re helping other people build on your product.

Jay Air: Yes, exactly.

Giang Biscan: So what is your revenue model?

Jay Air: With Cadmus, the idea that we have is – so essentially what we’re doing is we’re processing a ton of data.  Our idea here is we would like to help people save time on the social media site so when they’re on Twitter, or any of the other things like blogs, RSS Feeds we support right now, we would like to help them save time.  So we look at that and we go if there are features, and I don’t think we currently have that, but we’re still going in search of it, is that if we’re able to put out the features that we believe help people save time and get some bit of value out of it, so if they were able to analyze the data that they have so if you happen to run a personal ***, if you wanted to figure certain things out about your data, if we would provide some value from all of the data analysis that we’re doing on your stream and all the people that you follow, then we could put out a subscription based model for that.

Essentially we would like to keep what we have now free in the sense that you can find them and you can check your stream just the way that you would in your other clients, except you would get it sorted by relevance.  We would like to keep that free, but at some point we would like to figure out how can we provide value outside of the service that we have now, and kind of charge some money for it.  So that’s – it’s in the early stages, but I think there are some interesting things we can do with the data that we have.

Giang Biscan: So I have to ask something because you mentioned that at some point you’re going to create this product that you hopefully get subscription models for, so you’ve been working on your startup since 2008 when you just graduated from school and the same thing with Frank.  So how are you guys supporting yourselves right now?

Jay Air: That’s a perfectly good question I think.  So when we graduated from the University of Waterloo, it was *** we had student loans to pay off.  We had been kicking – when we were still in school we had been kicking around the idea of a start up.  We started working on some stuff way back then.  That’s kind of what morphed into View Point, but while we were working on this, our idea was let’s try and raise some money early on.  And so, we thought we could get into one of the programs like the *** or the *** and we could kind of go through that process.

But, after we graduated we found that wasn’t really the right fit for us at that time because we were early, early into building our product.  So, what we did – what we ended up doing was we did some part-time consulting for one of the companies that I worked for and so essentially for about a year after we graduated, we were working for this other company for about three days a week, and for the rest of the time we were working on start up.  They were really nice, they helped figure out where we would go with the product, what we would do as a company, kind of mentored us through that period of time while we kind of figured out and worked on our product and at the same time paid off the student loans.  So at the end of that one year span that we had with them, financially we were fine *** from the service for a fair bit of time now, because again *** is really low on these things.  But essentially the problem that we had the moment we graduated was the student loan issue which again, after that we *** so that’s kind of how we went about dealing with the money issue early on.

Giang Biscan: Wow, so do you have any actual funding right now?

Jay Air: We’re talking to a bunch of people right now.  There’s been a ton of interest in Cadmus, and most of it has been really because Twitter has been incredibly supportive.  They put us under the sidebar recently, they’ve spoke about us at chirp, there’s a New York Times article about *** mention of them, there’s a bunch of different places that they’ve promoted our stuff and as a result of that we were fairly thankful there’s been some interest.

And so now what we’re doing is, we’re trying to figure out in the short term and the long term where do we want to go with Cadmus.  We’ve found that this is something that a lot of people want, we need to kind of take it to the next stage, and that’s really – that includes both monetization, includes growth, and so we’re trying to figure out which of the investors, which of the people that we’re talking to will help us out the most moving forward.  I’d like to say we’re in the fortunate position where we’re able to talk to a bunch of different people, that a lot of people are interested in what we’re doing, so again it’s just a matter of finding the right fit at this point.

Giang Biscan: So, I noticed you want, at some point you went to see Y Combinator and you talked to them.  What happened to that?

Jay Air: The Y Combinator story is interesting because first off they’re great guys; we’ve spoken to them a ton of times.  So this goes back to when we were still in school.  When YC was – I think it was when *** had just started the *** and the forums and the community that I was a pretty regular reader right from the get go.  I remember, I think it was three years ago when they were taking their applications, I was a little late to apply to them, but I remember something else that put out a post that said if you guys didn’t get into YC then send me an email about your product.  And I remember talking to them about it and ever since then, we applied to YC for every term.

Every six months or so we would put in our application, and so far the numbers are kind of funny on this, but so far we’ve been rejected by YC about five times straight.  For different ideas every time, but it’s been five times.  We’ve flown down there a couple of times for interviews, again, I’m sure by this time we’ve exchanged a ton of emails I’m sure at this time they probably know us fairly well.  So this time around when we went down we were there last month towards the end of the month or so, so we were there for about a week or so.  We had – we were talking to them, we were talking to one of the other programs as well.  But, I think we walked into the interview and we had a little more experience this time around because we had done the interview sometime back, so we walked into the interview – it seemed like it went well but I think one of the problems or one of the mistakes that we made was that we didn’t kind of explain what our product did in the sense that how is this different from the other social media clients out there?

It’s kind of easy to mistake that, that we are one of the other clients, that we do a bunch of data processing, but the truth is we do a fair bit of analysis and data in real time which kind of sets us apart from a bunch of the other people.  So I think the – I think we were a little too focused on some of the other aspects of the product and we didn’t drill down what exactly made us different.  And the interview is really, really short; it’s a ten minute interview.  You’re in and out really quickly, so we thought we kind of nailed it but unfortunately we didn’t and I think we spoke to them after as well so we were there for the conference a couple of weeks later we had a chance to meet them again.  But you know, it’s just the way things go.  In terms of rejection, I think we’re fairly used to the rejection portion of it, you know five times really does that after a while.

Giang Biscan: I have to say, hats off to you guys, that’s amazing you’re still going at it.  How do you do that?  I mean how do you not feel down getting rejected so many times?

Jay Air: I would say the first time we did – I would say the first couple times they did it; it was a little hard on us.  But, it was very quickly that I realized that when you speak to somebody that you tend to respect and then they give you good honest feedback about your product and your service, and if you don’t have answers to those questions or to the critical feedback that’s given, it’s a time to take a look at your product and go what am I doing wrong?  What is it that these guys are able to see that we’re not able to figure out?  So essentially what ended up happening every time that we applied to them it would be that it would be a tweaked version of what we had done before.

We would have moved on long in the product cycle, or we would have changed some parts around.  Essentially every time we applied to them, it was something slightly different, and every time they had questions about it – it was kind of like every bit of time, you have to take some time off developing the product and you have to take a hard look at yourself and go, are we still on track?  Does this still do what we think it does?  Is this what users are looking for?  And also I think in perspective, you spend a fair bit of time working on something and you’re not seeing as good of results yet, and that was – I would say in some ways that was kind of the reason why we decided to put Cadmus out because we thought that with View Point we were trying to tackle too many problems together.  Apart from the fact that on the messaging and the marketing side of things we weren’t doing a very good job, a part of the reason why we were in that predicament was that we were trying to tackle too many issues together.

So, by putting out just the one thing that we did really well, as Cadmus that also helped us kind of just focus on one issue.  So right now, when we’re working on stuff for Cadmus we know what is the one issue we’re trying to go after.  So, it’s a lot more focused, it’s a lot more direct.  And they kind of helped us realize that as well.  I remember Paul had said on one of the applications that we had, it said you guys are trying to do something that looks very cool but does not serve a practical purpose.  And part of that was again, we’re not able to help people figure out what is it that we really do, so that when they come in, it looks really nice, it looks really attractive, seems like it’s got a lot of great features, but what is the big deal about the product?  That’s something that we’ve figured out along the way.  After about five rejections, you tend to learn quite a few from them.  And again, it really comes down to when you get critical feedback from somebody that you tend to respect, you have to take a hard look at yourself and that’s – if you start doing that every six months, I’m sure at some point it’s going to pay off.  Hopefully we’re at that stage now.

Giang Biscan: Wow, I would say good luck.  I think you – yeah you really deserve it now.  Seriously, all this time, all this effort.  One of the things that I wanted to do in terms of my goal with my interview is I wanted to interview five people that still *** on the sideline thinking, I want to do *** but you know I don’t know how to do it or I don’t want to start on something.  So how did you, you know straight out of school, you started going and do your start up did you always know that?

Jay Air: I would say – the thing that school, I’m not sure how familiar you are but this, but at the University of Waterloo they have this co-op program which essentially is every alternating term or every alternating four months you go out and do an internship at some company.  The good thing about this program was that it’s been around for a little bit, they have an extensive set of contacts with pretty much every big name company in the industry.  So you’ve got students that are doing internships at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and IBM.

All of these big name companies and at the same time they’re doing start ups, I know people used to hire from the University of Waterloo, I know a bunch of other startups that are hire from there as well, but the one thing that it really gives you is it gives you an idea of what you’re going to do once you graduate.  And so, when we were doing the co-op or the internships, at Waterloo, we kind of realized that this is not really what we want to do after we graduate.  Working for another company does not seem like a very good fit for us.  That could be due to multiple reasons, but whatever it was, we found that, that wasn’t something that we wanted to do.  So it was around the third year or so we sat down and said let’s figure out and try to do something more constructive with our time.  As much as, the program was useful, it also shows you kind of the other side of things and so initially it was just an idea about all we know was we wanted to build something of our own.  We didn’t quite know what it was, and just like I’m sure that everybody else at some point you sit down and you go what are the different lists of startup ideas that we could come up with?

Again, you start off by looking at all the things that kind of bother, what are the problems that you have personally, what are the issues that you face, and how can we go about dealing with it?  What was funny was that when we started out there’s always this – because you’re still in school and you don’t have a ton of experience with this stuff, there’s always that feeling that maybe we’re not – maybe we don’t have the right amount of experience, maybe we’re not ready for it.  Maybe the amount of knowledge that we have in terms of some of the programming or UI design, or the marketing is not enough to build a startup off.  And in some ways that’s probably true, but at the same time you’re never going to get it unless you try it.  And so once we started off and we started working on different ideas, the ideas kept morphing as we went along.

So we figured out this is not really the right thing, I don’t think we’re executing the right way on these things, maybe there’s another type of feedback we’re looking for.  Of course, every six months or so when we started applying to YC, we get some more critical feedback and things tend to change, but I think the whole idea is you just need to get started.  If you stay committed to it long enough, at some point it should begin to pay up, hopefully it begins to pay off.  I think that, that is pretty much it.  The alternative isn’t really that great either.  Working at some other company for a really long time is not something very good that your creative skills can be put to good use.

At the end of the day, again, if things don’t go well which is what we always told ourselves, is that if we failed completely at doing the startup, the worst we could do is land ourselves a better job than we would have if we had not – if we had not done the startup.  So that’s what we look at.  As we go into it – at the end of the day what is the worst that could happen?  So that’s the same thing that kind of drives us even now is that we’ve gotten this far, what is the worst that could happen, why not take that little bit more of a risk, why not shoot for kind of a bigger plan.  This is where we’re at now.  We’ve figured out that people kind of need this, how can we take it bigger, and essentially we’re telling ourselves what’s stopping us from taking that bigger risk, shooting for the starts of course why not?  We’ve come this far, what’s the worst that could happen?  I think that will keep you on track as you go on.

Giang Biscan: Yeah, so you and Frank, you met at school?

Jay Air: Yeah, we’ve been together in school for a very long time.  The program I think is it’s almost four years and I think eight months long; essentially almost five years.  So we worked on pretty much every school project together, lived together, shared space for a long time, it’s been a long time and that’s kind of carried on after so the transition really wasn’t that hard.  After we graduated, it still kind of feels like we’re still in school working on some project; the shift really wasn’t that big.  It’s nice having – that’s something that worked pretty well for us.

Giang Biscan: So is there anyone else supporting you guys as an advisor or anything else?

Jay Air: There are – officially no, but we’re still kind of new, we didn’t really know what the advisory board was all about but we had spoken to a couple people, some people that were interested in being a part of what we’re doing.  So far nothing is official but when it does become official I’ll let you know.  So far no, but we’ve had some people that have helped us along the way.

Giang Biscan: What about the startup community in Toronto?

Jay Air: We’d go out to the events once in a while, it’s growing, there’s quite a bit of activity, again around the university, so the University of Toronto has got a fair bit of startup activity.  The University of Waterloo does the same thing as well, we know the guys at ***.com, the University of Toronto, the startup, I’ve been through YC, they’re now in San Francisco, we know the *** guys there, they’re from the University of Waterloo as well, they’re based out of Waterloo.  There are quite a few others, we went to the *** meet up, I think it was a couple days ago maybe and we met a bunch of people, there was quite a bit of new things that are going on so it’s kind of growing but the one thing that I’ve found is it leans towards – if you’re a consumer of a web based product or a web based service, you tend to lean towards, you tend to look towards the value, so you’ve got a lot of people that might not necessarily be participating in the community, but once you get to that you kind of realize hey there’s actually quite a bit of *** activities that you don’t hear about much when you are in Canada, because a lot of people tend to go towards that ***.

Giang Biscan: I thought that was amazing, just you two and you’re working around a year now without that push back, and yeah.  That’s – so you said that you’re trying to arrange some money from *** the one thing I could see to give you guys *** but are you looking at maybe expanding the team or maybe any other things?

Jay Air: Yeah, kind of short term plan for us is scaling up.  We’re having, for the last couple of weeks we have had some scaling issues and part of that is really because we’ve seen quite a bit of traffic coming our way.  So short term, we’re really focused on scaling up, and I think the one thing we’ve found is that if we’re working on scaling issues kind of when we’re trying to figure out and make sure that the server is under control and all that, it doesn’t really matter if you’ve got a really large team.

Rather, to explain it a little different, it would be really hard for us to hire somebody right now, even if we had the money let’s say.  It’s just that getting somebody up to speed while the service is on fire, it would be a little bit hard.  So, short term for us is just get back on top of the scaling issues that we had, have the info tracker in such a place that we know we’ve got some breathing room that we can grow and then probably – we’re trying to build a small *** right now and probably do a *** day probably a couple months down the road when we think things are really more set.

Giang Biscan: And you mentioned that, with your traffic, I look at View Point – the traffic and almost like immediately you got very good levels of traffic.  And you mentioned that you got mentioned by Twitter and that, but what else did you do to build the traffic and even with Cadmus, the new product, you’re getting good traction.

Jay Air: Yeah, with Cadmus I think – so before we were talking about we mentioned that some of the people that were interviewed have been fairly open about this and when we look at what we’ve been through, I’m sure other people will look at it and have a time to learn, so here is the idea, or here is the thing that we’ve seen with Cadmus.  When we launched it in, again, I said it was the last week of October I think in the first week of November *** .com picked us up like right away.  I don’t know how he found us, but he found us right away.  He sent us about, the numbers on this are I think about 250 users for the month of November, which does not seem like much considering the stage we’re at right now.  But, back then, 250 was essentially the biggest number we’d ever seen and we were quite thrilled about what we saw.  I remember sending thank you notes after – I remember meeting him at recently as well and told me the exact same thing as well because he was the first guy that found us, he was the first guy that sent us all that traffic, you know that 250 was huge for us.

What we did in the month of November was we essentially launched Cadmus which was just this one feature.  In the month of December, we added another feature and I can go into detail about this a lot more but all we did was add another feature, contact all the bloggers that we knew, again talk to Lewis Gray again about it, told him we got some new updates, we presented at demo *** in Toronto so that gave us a little bit of traffic as well.  I think we got our total user count was up to about 500 at the end of December.  So again, all it was was adding another feature and working hard on marketing the feature.

Then in January was kind of the exact same pattern.  We pushed another new feature out, worked extremely hard trying to contact all the people, and I have to tell you as much as people talk about *** and we haven’t been on *** or any of the big blogs yet.  But, I remember that all the work that we had to do to talk to pretty much anybody to cover it and essentially we would spend a ton of time, like developing the feature would be the least of our work.  We spent almost, maybe a week developing the feature, Frank would do the back and I would do the front end, then we pushed the feature out for about two weeks or so we’ll spend time trying to get some traction on that feature that we pushed out.

And then if we do end up getting traffic, which we were lucky to get some, we would spend the rest of the month kind of with scaling up;  sort of making sure that we’re set for the next month or meeting the need for this month so I think at the end of January, we got some I forget who it was that covered us but I remember there was some bloggers from France that covered us, that sent us a bunch of traffic, then somebody else covered us as well and that got our user count to about 1,000.  So essentially, it doubled.  And it’s kind of – given those tiny numbers, doubling at some points we were quite happy about it.

Then in February again – same idea, push another feature out, try to get some traction for it, and low and behold, it doubled again so we were at 2,000 at the end of February.  And then when March came around, I think it was mid-march *** we wanted to do something, something different because we felt that there was some sort of *** that a lot of people to be getting ***  we did some sort of promotion or some sort of feature just for that, you’d end up getting some, some traction for that as well.  So we did a feature for it, there was – I remember there was *** from *** that spoke about us at a Tweet house panel in ***, we didn’t get a chance to go; we were strapped for money but, somebody else did talk about us at ***, that sent us a bunch of traffic.

Then, again, around mid-March ***, he’s the director of the platform on Twitter, he gave a talk it was him and ***, they gave a talk at the mix conference in Las Vegas and they mentioned our product they had some really, really nice things to say about us, we were jumping up and down when we saw it on video.  But, essentially that sent a bunch of traffic as well, and I think we got up to about 4,000 at the end of March.  So it kind of doubled every month and again, the plan really was very straightforward at the beginning f the month we would say what is the one big feature that we can do?  What is the one big feature that we think people are going to benefit from?  And kind of keep that goal in mind.

The moment we felt that we had the chance to bring more users in, we would set that target for ourselves; we would say that we would like to double again the numbers were really small but let’s just try to double it, it was one of those things that we wanted to accomplish.  So, we work really hard in developing that feature, making sure that we get it right, that we try to get the messaging right as well, and then we learned quite a few lessons from View Point.  And then we would go out and contact other people and essentially every month as we added more features, we would have more bloggers to talk about – we would have a few more people to contact.  So they would put updates out about our stuff, they would Tweet about our stuff, and really that began to pick up.  But again, the numbers weren’t too spectacular; it was still something, again for something – for people that have never built anything in the past before, it was still something that we were really happy about.

So, essentially that became the pattern we would follow.  Every month just work on one feature, market that feature as much as we can, and try to scale up to meet the needs.  And what we found was that if you set yourself kind of that small goal and then focus on working on features that would be outward facing, that would bring a little more of their traffic, that kind of helps you put those things in focus.  So, you wouldn’t spend time working on features that you might think are cool, but other people don’t get to see.  And I think that was one of the problems that we had done when we were still and school and had graduated and were working on View Point, it was working on the private beta project working on features that probably wouldn’t see the light of day at all.  Probably, nobody is going to ever know this.  So, we wanted to make sure that we were working on the right things, on things that would help people figure out what we do, give them more value and that people can see.  And that’s kind of how it really paid off.

Giang Biscan: That’s a very good learning – that helped you move from View Point to Cadmus.  So before you go, you know, the last question – what is the biggest challenges, and what’s the best thing so far on this journey you and Frank on?

Jay Air: The challenge – I think let me look at the best thing for us.  I think probably the best part has been that it’s essentially uncharted territory; you’re always doing something that you have not done before and there is even the element of is this going to work, but at the same time it does work out even if it doesn’t work out as planned, but it does work out, the payoff is huge.  And that’s something that will keep you going forward.  So when you kind of look back at the last years, sure when I look back and go wow how did I manage to waste two and a half years and how did Frank manage to do it as well.  But the truth is, at every point when we did something we were trying to achieve something that we had not done before.

Whether that was learning a new program language, learning a new environment, for me it was learning UI design because I’ve never done that before.  And kind of getting to that next stage with each one of those things we were working on are all whether it’s working on marketing, trying to figure out what the messaging is like, tiring to understand what users really want, whatever it might be, it was always something that we were doing that we have not done before.  And as you keep doing that, and as you feel the payoff from it, you feel that you’re not wasting time and then there’s a drive for it.  So that’s kind of been the biggest things and when I think about what would have happened if I’d worked a job at some other place, that really would be missing.

It would be – maybe I would be doing the same kind of work, but, you’re not – you wouldn’t have that type of focus.  You wouldn’t have that – this is what I’m trying to accomplish at the end of the week, this is what I want to get done at the end of the month, in some ways it helps you keep things in focus; it keeps that drive alive.  So you can probably live through *** or more for ***.  When you’ve got something at the end of the road, you know this is where we have to get to even if it does not go very well, we learn something at the end of the day.  And I think that’s a good thing let’s see, the challenge.  I think the challenge has really been – one of the things we had, and we keep dealing with it is the idea of time, and I know somebody else mentioned this, but they were saying that when you’re working on a start up, your idea of time is a little bit skewed so for example when I talk to somebody about the stuff that I’ve been working on and they say what have you been up to for the last two years or do you remember let’s say, the Olympics in Beijing. We would go – I don’t really remember that time but I do remember around that time I was working on this feature.  It always goes back to something – the view of the world is sort of skewed.  So in some sense it’s kind of lost.

That works in bad ways as well, when you’re trying to plan features, we’re really poor at planning long term features.  We’re good in planning what are we going to do for this week, but the moment you ask what are we going to do for the next few months, or the next year, it’s really, really hard to put into perspective because the moment somebody would ask about it I’d go, um what feature, what product stage would we be at and usually you don’t have an answer for that right now, so if you put it in perspective of time.  When you’re working for yourself you’re kind of in work drive, everything is moving too fast, you don’t know what’s going on, there’s really not much of a sense of time and that’s kind of been challenging; when you talk to anybody else outside of the startup.

Giang Biscan: You’re deep in the trenches.  Thank you.  I really appreciate you coming on today and talking about your work, I really appreciate that, thank you.

Jay Air: Maybe it is too early to say it, I’m not sure – I’m sure there are more rejections to come but if anybody else kind of hears this, if they’re going through rejections or they’re thinking of getting into this and they’re kind of going how do you guys do it?   When we started off we really had not much and at the same time, you don’t have much to lose either so you might as well get into it, it’s okay.  Other people are going to struggle as well.  It’s not as bad as you would expect; it’s still fun.

Giang Biscan: Keep going, huh?

Jay Air: Yeah, just keep going.

Giang Biscan: Thank you.

Yes, thank you.