iggli - Life in a Web 2.0 Start-up

I work for a social music network called iggli. We are a pre-launch, angel-funded, Web 2.0 start-up and spend an insane amount of time steeped in conversation about how music is connected to the social media behavior of 18-24 year olds. I have worked for start-ups for almost fifteen years and you either love it or hate it. For me, I can’t remember a more fascinating time to be involved in the tech industry.

I Twitter in my sleep, have more friends in Facebook than I cumulatively will ever have in real life, and I’m convinced I have a Bluetooth-induced brain tumor worthy of a Grey's Anatomy episode. I can see it now. Laura Dern plays me and Derek fights with Alex over who gets to put my memory back together.

The eight of us here have bonded over late nights on Skype, countless video iChats, and a love-hate relationship with the agile development process. A good day is when our focus group thinks the alpha music player is more interesting than the jalapeno cheetos. A bad day is when I’m wrong about which of the five crusty coffee cups on the desk was the drinkable one. Am I feeling lucky? Its like that scene in the movie Cold Mountain where they come across a rancid deer and have to decide whether to eat it and face getting sick, or skip it and risk starvation. OK, so its not quite that bad...I just like the drama.

What is even more fun than building a company from the ground up is doing it within the imploding mess of the music industry. I like it when no one knows how the story will end. Not Google. Not Apple. Not MySpace or Microsoft. It levels the playing field and creates a great window of opportunity for us little guys sneak up and cause a bit of disruption. If someone had it all figured out already, it wouldn’t be any fun.