No real organization or theme here today… just a few quick thoughts on a Tuesday.

Rick Astley should seriously consider resurrecting his career.  If you’re out of the loop, here’s some educational material for you.  Pretty slick that I pulled off the Rickroll about Rick Astley, eh?  But if you’re just now finding out what a Rickroll is, you’re later to these things than I am… and that’s sad.  Perhaps not as sad as the fact that I admit that, with all the coverage recently, I’m starting to actually like this song.

I sure miss IT support.  That’s tough to say since I’ve never really loved my IT guy wherever I’ve been.  But I’ve had a devil of a time staying logged in to our company’s VPN.  And when you’re starting something with a small team… anything you pass on to your team takes time away from your devs to build great things.  This would be one of those minor annoyances that makes me ever more eager to get this business cranking so we can actually hire some folks.  In the interim, it’s yet another example of things that the "machine" would take care of for you in a big business.  But it’s all on you in a startup.  Net net, it is one part frustrating, two parts truly empowering.

How as an entrepreneur do you know when your product is "good enough?"  We’ve made a ton of improvements to the usability of our first app.  I think they’re all worthwhile, but it has taken us almost 2 more weeks than I anticipated.  Conventional wisdom is that entrepreneurs should be fast & nimble.

All entrepreneurs are well-versed in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Voltaire’s famous quote "The perfect is the enemy of the good."  But that said, I think there is an art in knowing when you’ve reached "good enough"… and knowing when your feature requests/changes/improvements are in the realm of "perfect."  Admittedly, four years out of the picture has made me a little rusty.  But I’m getting back in the flow of things.

I think it’s something that you just "feel", which I guess is a good thing because it still doesn’t feel like we’re quite there.  But we are very, very close now — probably within a few days.  We are getting a helluva lot smarter.  And I think we know what it takes to get something out the door… which, in retrospect, is a lot farther along than we were say a few weeks ago.  We thought we knew what it would take.  Now we have a much better idea.  We’re constantly learning, and that’s the type of environment I want to create.

Browser compatibility is a *bitch*.  It is the modern flavor of the "OS compatibility problem" from 1995-2000.  We’re going to be dealing with legacy IE6, IE7, and Safari issues for a long, long time.

Partnering with Microsoft is also a *bitch*.  It’s worse that I was there just a few weeks ago.  I helped build some of the innovative Web partner programs.  I know people within Microsoft.  And I still can’t make easy progress.  As it turns out, I’ll probably go park myself over at Redmond for a few days until I get what I need.  But what must it be like for a prospective Silverlight developer from Kansas?  There are some good folks in Redmond working the problems.  I am confident of that.  I just didn’t realize how difficult it is to get things done with Microsoft before you figure out how the system works.

Speaking of Kansas and getting off topic for a moment, but props to Mario Chalmers for nailing the clutch 3 to tie the National Title basketball game against Memphis.  Coming back from 9 down with 2 minutes left is *tough* but it does take a few breaks.  It’s only poetic justice that free throws would doom Memphis.