For the past 12 months, I have been committed to improving my mental and physical well being via a dedicated weight training routine. Prior to this, I have never done any real *serious* weight training in my life.

There was approximately 2 years during University where a couple of mates and I would attend the gym regularly and focus on the most obvious muscle groups such as chest and biceps, but we definitely weren’t working out correctly. We would literally do bicep curls and bench press just about every time we visited the gym, focusing very little on any other muscle groups in our bodies. The result? Just about nothing - our arms and chest would swell up for a day or two after we’d hit them, but we weren’t eating the right foods and training correctly to make any proper gains.

Between 2006 and 2007 I had been working very hard on a web project to the point where I left very little time for my health and day-to-day well being among other things. I was feeling physically stagnant, boxed up and toxic. My focus in life had been way too much in one area of my life, without time for anything else, including my friends. The passion that I had for building web sites and starting a business had consumed me to the point that everything else didn’t matter.

For months I would cling to the mentality of “Its ok that I’m unfit now, I’ll just work even harder to get this project up and running, then once all the work is done, I’ll get fit straight after that.”. It was like hitting my head against a brick wall, the harder I worked on the computer, the less fit I became and the more toxic I felt. The work was never all done, there was always something else that “just needed fixing quickly”.

Pretty soon, I broke. I developed a temporary hatred for my work. I associated work with feeling terrible, not spending enough time with my loved ones and living a heavily unbalanced life. It was like a switch had flicked. I had not lost the passion that drove me so hard into the ground, I still had it. But I had picked it up and pointed it in a different direction entirely, I had learnt a critical lesson in time management, luckily quite early in my life.

I dug up some of the old memories of “working out” during University and couldn’t wait to get back into it, only this time, being about 7 years older, with a more developed physical base to build upon and more of a “do it properly or not at all” attitude. I knew I needed something to bring that well being and buzzing, energetic feeling back. Something that I could use to take me forward, lasting the distance through any number of personal and business challenges that I may be presented with throughout the coming years - there would always be more challenges.

I got a mate, also a qualified personal trainer, to write me up my first program and got started immediately.

That was approximately 12 months ago, and I can honestly say I have hardly missed a day of training since. The same passion that drove me into the ground is now driving me to keep improving my strength and well being. My lifestyle has changed for the better and I am truly addicted to the new routine, but not in a fanatical way. And you know something, my passion for my work has re-surfaced, but in a much more balanced sense.

I see my weight training as simply part of my normal working day - that is, the working day is not yet complete until I have exercised. I don’t get home until work AND exercise have both been completed. I also only train 4 days a week, which I have found to be more than ample for achieving the results and allowing myself plenty of time to rest and grow.

During the past 12 months I have witnessed my own state of mind lift to a much higher, happier and more confident level, as well as my body feeling a lot stronger, nimble and better able to deal with the random challenges that life throws up. In short, I feel like I am going to live a lot longer than I felt 1-2 years ago - and that is a good thing!

Although I learnt this lesson the hard way, its now absolutely a part of who I am. I can’t imagine life without exercise any more and I will never go back to my old ways. I feel I actually have a lot more drive and balance in my life. Its ok to fail, as long as you fail fast and hopefully young so that you can come back harder and stronger before you’re too old. I would seriously encourage any of you passionate and super-dedicated entrepreneur/developers out there who have been neglecting exercise to slap yourself in the face and really put things into perspective - it will improve your productivity and the quality of your work.

How long can you truly sustain the current cycle of continuously feeling weak and drained for?

More along the lines of the Getting Real approach to using the small size of your startup company as an asset, proudly displaying it, Dan and Chip Heath have posted some simple but effective marketing tips on the Elance blog.

If you haven’t read Getting Real yet, I would strongly encourage you to do so. I read that book and was fascinated that some highly successful people were swearing by the way I’ve tried to work all along! It really was a big reenforcement for the beliefs I’ve had around software development from the beginning.

I went and checked this popular event out on Tue 6. This is basically a massive melting pot where heaps of up and coming web developers and entrepreneurs get the courage to get up on stage and present their idea to everyone. Originally, it used to be a really informal/niche type event just consisting of a few geek developers. Now its grown enormously and 400 people attend, so things are a bit more serious. For example, representatives from Google and Facebook spoke about some new stuff they are both respectively working on. The Google girl seemed pretty fixated on the technological terms, the essence of what I got from her was “we’re working on these new things, and it will use AJAX and DHTML and everything, it will be really cool”. That was pretty funny.

The Facebook girl had some interesting things to say though. The most exciting thing I got out of Facebook’s news was that they are trying to partner with third party sites to bring in external snippets into the News Feed. For example, if you purchased a book from amazon.com, perhaps your Facebook news feed would say “Aaron purchased Chopper from amazon.com - click here to buy a copy for yourself”. I loved that idea and think it will go a long way. Their main driver was basically that if your friend buys or does something, then you are probably reasonably likely to be interested in doing the same. So it should attract a much higher conversion rate compared to say traditional contextual advertising such as Adsense.

I saw David Karp, founder of tumblr speak. He was a pretty energetic and passionate guy. He recently raised $750k of Series A funding. Definitely the whole investment scene is on a whole different level over there. Tumblr is basically like a simpler, steamlined and hosted alternative to something like Wordpress. Its just basically a more user friendly way to blog things. Its super quick to sign up to, super quick to use and start posting too. But that’s about as much as I can get from it. It doesn’t revolutionise anything, but it does improve something already in existence, or make it somewhat easier and more efficient. Obviously Spark Capital and Union Square ventures considered that to be worth throwing $750k at. This aspect of New York is probably the most amazing. That so many seemingly simple/generic ideas can attract quite a lot of money. Networking is critical and the first thing these young developers do is try to get mentioned on the prominent US/Silicon Valley blog sites. Once they’re in that little loop, if the product is reasonably good, it just snowballs on from there. There are so many enthusiasts over there who will just sign up to something to give it a shot and play with it.

Jeff Han from Perceptive Pixel presented and I would say that his presentation was by far the most impressive of the group. He is in a niche field effectively competing with similar technologies from Microsoft.

Then this thing was presented, Sleep.FM. Full credit to the guy for getting up there and presenting to the large audience. He certainly believed in his product. Basically, Sleep.FM lets people send messages to you via the internet to wake you up. So the guy was like “Do you sleep? Do your friends sleep? Right. Then Sleep.FM will help them because everyone needs to wake up, right?”. It reminded me exactly of the quote in the movie Office Space “You see, its a conclusion mat, and you would like jump to it”. They do have some interesting plans though to manufacture some “smart” physical alarm clocks that you could put on your bedside table, and it would be monitoring the internet to receive notifications from the Sleep.FM service. This is where I think this whole idea has more potential. But the whole time, I just couldn’t work out why you wouldn’t just say leave MSN Messenger open when you sleep. Its basically the same thing. But being New York, it might just attract $750k in VC funding, you just wouldn’t be surprised over there!

Probably the best thing that I got out of this event was a real ground-level appreciation for the level of enthusiasm and interest that the whole web 2.0 scene has over there. It would be really exciting to have so many passionate developers and entrepreneurs in the one room in Canberra. However, it also made me realise that the guys over there are no different whatsoever to us guys here in Australia doing exactly the same stuff. It made me appreciate the talent we already have here in Australia and realise that you don’t need to be based in New York under the spotlight to get your idea up. Sure it might help, but its also more competitive over there and the playing field is more heavily saturated.

It gave me some renewed energy to basically make things happen in Australia and put the throttle down even harder. Because the group of smart guys that I work with have all the skills and passion of anyone we saw at the New York Tech Meetup. I ended up coming away from the meet just seeing all the NY Meetup guys as equals and great people passionately dedicated to their field just like we are. So that’s basically the world’s web 2.0 epicentre, minus Silicon Valley and sure, it wasn’t some whole big different amazing world, just a bunch of hardcore geeks doing what we’re doing. Inspiring and motivational to say the least.

Go and watch this excellent video interview with Ron Conway, one of the legends in Silicon Valley.

Last Wednesday I attended VC Connect ACT 2007 and was impressed by the impressive line up of speakers considering this was a Canberra event. Anyone who lives in Sydney will tell you how boring Canberra is and how it is purely a city built around Government infrastructure, but seriously, so much of that is changing. Yes, we even have our own local VCs.

What was even more impressive at VC Connect was that many people in the room had just jumped off planes from New York City and the UK, destined for Canberra. There is genuinely a lot of keen interest to invest in Australian innovation particularly in the fields of ICT and Biotech. As Doron Ben-Meir (Principal VC from Jagen) mentioned, one of the reasons that ICT companies more often than not receive venture capital funding, is because technology makes them so scalable. This scalability allows the business to rapidly multiply profits because its basically a write once sell many scenario, as with most forms of technology. This is not to say that traditional businesses are not suitable for venture capital funding. Doron sat at my table, so we got to have a brief chat. Doron seemed highly driven and knew exactly what he looked for in entrepreneurs, he was also quite young to be in the position of handing out money to others for their promising ideas, which was also inspiring.

Rachel Slattery from Slattery IT (The event organiser) ate lunch with us to find out about Rate the PLATE. It was great to meet her and I will simply say she is pretty passionate about the whole VC/startup scene in Australia and knows just about everyone in this field. She publishes a weekly newsletter about the ways in which Australian companies are using technology and about happenings in the Australian technology space - go and subscribe if you haven’t already.

Then there was Bill Bartee - a prominent entrepreneur turned VC who moved to Australia from the US. Bill backed SEEK during the early days as well as Looksmart just to name a couple. Bill made a big point that so often entrepreneurs that he has backed don’t proactively come to him asking for help and that they should. Basically, a VC provides much more than capital - they are a jackpot resource of knowledge and experience that the entrepreneur can call upon to help make the best decisions. Bill did say that when he worked with the SEEK founders, they were basically perfect in anticipating just about everything that he was going to recommend to them. I was going to approach Bill and have a chat, however after his speech, he had to leave straight away.

Also inspiring was seeing Nick McNaughton from Blue Cove Ventures giving his advice. I also caught an interview with Nick in last Sunday’s Canberra Times. Basically, during the past year, Nick has looked at 65 businesses and rejected 62 of them. Another statistic to drum home to entrepreneurs that they must do their homework before approaching a VC. Just because you are passionate about your idea and have a dream like the other ten million people will not convince someone to invest in you. Nick has some excellent dot points outlining roughly what he is looking for. You’ll notice one of the points “Clear ownership of any IP” - Intellectual Property was one of the main things that almost all of the VCs were adamant about. However, John Riedl made a very strong point that IP is one thing, but if you had the choice, don’t spend all your energy protecting your IP, simply build the product. John said that there were two main ways to protect IP. The first being legally through patents etc but the second one being by actually building the product and getting out there and creating a reputation around it so that it is in peoples’ minds. Being first to market was a massive point that John repeatedly kept driving - and other VCs in the room backed this up with examples. If you are not first to market, you can spend the next 2-3 years in overdrive trying to play catchup. John had to be the biggest character in the room, he had a classic grandfather sense of humour and just had a fantastic presence about him.

David Landers from Allen & Buckeridge also had a wealth of experience. He mentioned that once a Term sheet had been signed between the entrepreneur and VC, he can’t remember any instances where the deal was actually abandoned. Basically, this means that if you get to the signed term sheet stage, you have a pretty good guarantee of completing the deal, but not quite 100%. Mike Zimmerman from TVP also said about 80% of his signed term sheets had progressed into completed deals.

Roger Price openly contributed stories from his own learnings about Australians rushing too fast into the US market. He made the analogy that Australia is basically a single, large US state and that you are far better off focusing on getting business locally before committing to the huge effort required to succeed in the US market. Roger said that it takes an Aussie 2-3 years to properly understand the US market after moving to the US and that you are far better off hiring a ‘yank’ to do that job for you. Roger learnt this the best way, first hand, where he lost about $6 million going down this path with a previous company. Although its a big figure, that kind of loss almost directly adds the same amount of value to Roger’s experience. You just can’t beat learning things first hand and you can guarantee he knows exactly what to do next time, while so many others not having gone down the same path may go off and make the same mistake. Mistakes are the way to success.

Matthew Michalewic from SolveIT reinforced the point that there has to be complete transparency between the entrepreneur and VC at all times. Even when something small happens to not go in your favour, you must be totally up front in telling your VC about this straight away. Eventually it is going to all come out in the wash anyway and it takes 2 seconds to ruin your reputation which always precedes you. Tell them the good with the bad at all times and you will always have their full faith and support. Part of running a startup is facing the huge number of challenges and working with the VC to overcome them, the VC probably has experience in overcoming a similar problem anyway. Matthew was inspiringly young for his achievements to date also.

All of the other speakers were very knowledgable, I learnt something from all of them. Overall it a was a great way to get inside the minds of a room full of experienced VCs and entrepreneurs and see what makes them tick and what they are looking for. I would definitely attend again next year and it has influenced our approach with Rate the PLATE.