Eric Simons: evaluation

Transcript context

…The statutes of limitations are expended. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But yeah, for a while I was like, "I have to do something more notable than living at AOL. This can't be what I'm known for." But now people are like, "Oh, wait. You're the StackBlitz guy, and you're the AOL guy?" So when I first came out to Silicon Valley, we got into a, I was building a K12 education startup at the time, and this is back during the days where Y Combinator, they only gave you like 20 grand, and so there was this offshoot of Y Combinator called Imagine K12, it was Jeff Ralston who, I think he was CEO of YC a couple of years back. And then Imagine K12 merged into Y Combinator a couple of years after Rob went through it, but anyways, they had an office space at AOL. At the time, AOL was trying to reinvigorate the company and they were like, "Hey, we should get young startup blood in here, so let's rent out office space to teenagers," basically. So I was there, and we ended up running out of money. 20 grand doesn't go very far in the Valley, so three or four months in, we were like, "Oh God, what do we do?" And I was going to the AOL office multiple times a week, because we had access cards to get in to get to the investors' offices. And I realized, I was like, "You know, they have couches here, and they have food. There's ramen that you can microwave, and there's a gym where there's a shower, and even you can do laundry." And then, so I was like, "I don't know, maybe while I figure this out, I'll just live out of here." And so that's what I ended up doing for, I think, four or five months. I was living out of this headquarters over on Page Mill in El Camino, in Palo Alto. And then, I got away with it for a while just because the guards, the security guards, they worked 12-hour shifts. And so the guys that, when I was there at night... And I was coding, all day every day, basically. So the guys at night just were like, "Dang, this guy works really hard." And then in the morning they'd be like, "Wow, this guy is working really hard." And I became friends with some of them, and then eventually, I think there were also a whole bunch of Stanford students that I think they put bunks in one of the aisles. It was just started getting out control, so I think they started cracking down. And then one morning, at like 4:00 in the morning, a guard came in and threw me out. I'm from Chicago. I don't know anyone. At that point I'm like, "I know no one in the Bay Area." So I went to a Starbucks, which was not open. I slept on the table outside of the thing. And I think I hit up one of the other entrepreneurs that was in the program. I was like, "Do you have a couch? I think I kind of need it, at this point." Yeah, the press got wind of it, and it was this worldwide story. But I lived on a dollar a day. That was the crazy thing. My burn rate was a dollar a day, at that time. What did you use that dollar for?…

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