Mountain View Update - 26th May 2014

It's Memorial Day today in America.

Adam has talked me into doing the "Escape from the Rock" duathlon. He's doing the swimming leg (1.5 miles) and I'm doing the running leg (7 miles). This has forced me to start doing the running part of our routine which had fallen by the wayside recently. We'll be competing against Walter (co-founder of Inductly) and Desmond (co-founder of Lumific). They've formed a team that we MUST beat.

I think Adam has got Desmond covered for the swimming leg. So I want to beat Walter on the running leg. We signed up for gym memberships with Jonathan Lai, Walter's co-founder at Inductly, and started training yesterday. I got some good pace and I did better than I thought so I'm looking forward to the event. If nothing else the exercise routine will serve us well for important stuff, the startup.

500 has been good. Still in the routine although feels like there are never enough hours in the day. Other teams are more focused on the number of hours they work. Having been through StartMate we definitely know the value of pacing ourselves. Startups are a marathon of sprints. We have our game plan and we're sticking to it. Once I'm in a good running routine I'll add meditation to the mix.

We've also made friends with a team that just joined 500 recently, Bohemian Guitars. The two brothers behind it, Adam and Shaun Lee, are good fun and they've brought their South African sense of humour with them. I can see them being a massive company. We hang out with them the most at the moment.

From the other teams I've gotten to know Elijah Murray (co-founder at goRefi) better, he's a natural leader and his wicked sense of humour masks a seriously sharp intellect. He also cleaned up at our first poker night (although Cynthia took all my chips). The Canadian guys from pinshape are also making the most of it and I'd have any of them in my life boat.

I've also had some good chats with Finbarr from GiveIt100. Him and Karen are good company. We also sit next to Rahul and Saurabh from TargetingMantra. They're the dark horses of our batch. They're both great guys and they're really stable. They turn up, do the work and get it done. They're also really modest. You can tell they're a really capable team and we have a lot of fun chatting cricket with them.

We also discovered our favourite eating place in Mountain View, Clarke's. I ate there the other day and it was the best burger I've ever had in my life!

That's all for today.