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What the Heck is This #OCON Thing?
I’m going to be tweeting a bunch about something with the hashtag #OCON, and I know a lot of people are going to ask me what it is. #OCON stands for Objectivist Summer Conference, and this year’s event is taking place at Red Rock Resort & Casino, about 30 minutes off of the Las Vegas strip.
One of my less public, but very personally significant, interests is philosophy — and I’m particularly interested in the philosophy Objectivism, which was created by the late Ayn Rand. You might remember her, she wrote the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which are required reading in a lot schools.
I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the conference, the ideas discussed there, and other goodness tomorrow through July 10th. I hope you’ll find some of it interesting, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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How I Built a Multi-User Door Buzzer for Our Apartment
Full disclosure: a lot of people have talked about this idea, this is just my implementation of it for our apartment. Â You can check out Buzzeromatic.com if you want someone else to administer yours or post to Elance/oDesk/HackerNews/Twitter to get someone to build it for you. Â Look for something cool from @gregkoberger with all those features I left out (user management, UI, adding new roomies, adding more numbers etc.)
Making a Present for My Roommates
About a month ago, I moved to a 3-story loft in SOMA with my husband Kevin and our good friends Park and Kat.  My sister also graduated college and joined a local startup, so she’ll be moving in with us next week.  With 5 people living here and only 2 master keys to the front door, we had a bit of an access problem right away.  My roommates, knowing I haven’t had a chance to code since the move started, were nice enough to suggest a build an app with my Twilio skills (full disclosure: I work there) and we tested it out last night – it works, so I’d love to share.
How A Call Box Works
If you’ve lived in an apartment with a call box for buzzing people into your apartment before, this will sound pretty familiar. Â There is a list of names and corresponding codes listed on the callbox display, you dial the number and it rings the person who lives there, they press a key and the door is unlocked.
What happens inside the callbox is a little more interesting – because the sound the keypress makes, which is called a DTMF tone, is actually a pretty amazing little thing. Â Tone dialing was arguably one of the earliest massive implementations of human-to-computer communication.
Phreaking Out the Phone with DTMF Tones
There is a long history of phreaking (the image to the right is of a bluebox built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, on display at the Computer History Museum) by playing DTMF tones and other tones (pulses, pins, etc), and the things telecommunications hackers achieved without any kind of API like Twilio is pretty amazing. Â In my case, the call box just requires the person who receives the call to press 6 to open the door, and responds when the 6 DTMF tone is played. Â This tone doesn’t have to come from pressing a key though, Â I can just play the audio file into the phone to mimic the action of a keypress – and the doors opens!The simplest implementation of this is just to have the door automatically open when anyone dials your extension. Â I don’t recommend setting your callbox up this way, because you might accidentally let in people who are messing with the box looking for a way in so they can do bad things. Â My street has a lot of bums and other riff-raff on it, so I wanted something with a couple different types of security. Â So here’s what I did.
Setting Up My Call Box with Twilio
If you haven’t heard of my company, Twilio, before the really quick elevator pitch is that we are the AWS of telecommunications, making it easy to send/receive calls and text messages programmatically and only paying for what you use. Â It’s pretty sweet, its a startup, and I’d love your feedback on it. Â So here we go:- Get a local Twilio number (or you can use the sandbox number for free)
- Tell your building administrator to add your name/number to the box
- Build a simple app that forwards the call to your cell phone so you can make sure the box can recognize DTMF tones passed from a forwarded call
Doing this test before you build your full blown app is really important, it will save you from debugging an issue outside of your control. Â You just need to create this little callbox.xml file, save it somewhere on the web (publicly accessible on Dropbox is a handy option, our try Twimlets)
callbox.xml (replace 415-555-1212 with an actual phone number)
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<Response>
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<Dial>415-555-1212</Dial>
</Response>
If you are using your Twilio trial account, make sure you use the Twilio sandbox number and remember your pin code for testing (or email me at danielle@twilio.com and I can manually remove this restriction from your account). If you run into problems just email help@twilio.com for 24/7 support, or tweet @twilio
Building the Full App
Now that your testing is done, it’s time to build the full app with just a little PHP. Â This took me about 25 minutes to write from scratch in Emacs, probably will take you a whole lot less with all the sample code. Â Here’s the spec for how the app should work:
Need to have:
- visitor or roommate dials our extension in the call box and our Twilio number is called
- menu is read to visitors, giving them the option of which roommate to contact
- roommates have a secret code they can punch in to bypass the menu and open the door
- if the visitor selects one of the roommates from the menu options, that roommate gets a call and presses a number on their cellphone dialpad to buzz in
Nice to have:
- menu selections can be made at anytime, without waiting for the menu to finish, because that is just annoying
- roommates can be simultaneously dialed on multiple numbers (cellphone, work, house phone) if they want
- fun audio files can be played when someone is let in
callbox.php – this file controls what happens when the callbox is dialed
–>
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<?php
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echo “<?xml version=\”1.0\” encoding=\”UTF-8\”?>\n“;
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?>
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<Response>
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<Gather action=”/doorbell_gather.php” method=”POST”>
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<Say voice=”woman”>If you are here for Katrina, press 2.</Say>
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<Say voice=”woman”>For Danielle, press 3.</Say>
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<Say voice=”woman”>For Park, press 4.</Say>
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<Say voice=”woman”>For Kevin, press 5.</Say>
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</Gather>
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</Response>
Two important things to point out here. First, notice that the menu options in the tag are nested within . This is awesome, because it means Twilio is listening for a keypress the entire time and you can interrupt the menu with your selection at anytime. Also, you’ll see if you check out the Twilio example code that usually includes the numDigits parameter, but we’re excluding it on purpose here because we want to accept secret pin codes in addition to single digit selections. You’ll see why in a moment.
doorbell_gather.php – this file determines what to do with the keypad data we just received
Note on this code: There are definitely more elegant ways to write this, but in my mission to convert all my roommates to geeks I’ve opted for something they can easily understand in case they want to change their secret codes without my help. Â All pincodes have been changed for this example.
–>
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<?php
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if($_REQUEST[‘Digits’] == ‘2’) {
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die;
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}
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if($_REQUEST[‘Digits’] == ‘3’) {
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die;
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}
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if($_REQUEST[‘Digits’] == ‘4’) {
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die;
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}
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if($_REQUEST[‘Digits’] == ‘5’) {
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die;
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}
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if($_REQUEST[‘Digits’] == ‘1234’) {
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die;
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}
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if($_REQUEST[‘Digits’] == ‘6677’) {
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die;
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}
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if($_REQUEST[‘Digits’] == ‘9988’) {
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die;
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}
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if($_REQUEST[‘Digits’] == ‘6786’) {
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die;
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}
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echo “<?xml version=\”1.0\” encoding=\”UTF-8\”?>\n“;
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?>
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<Response>
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<Say>I’m sorry, but the person you attempted to reach is unavailable. Â Please try again later.</Say>
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</Response>
So Twilio is passing the keypress data as ‘Digits’ and we’re telling Twilio where to go depending on what was pressed. Pretty simple. The little bit of TwiML at the bottom only plays if the roommate called doesn’t answer their phone.
So now we need to create:
- roommate.xml – which calls the selected roommate so they can buzz in their guest
- secret-roommate.xml – which automatically opens the door when the code is entered
You might be wondering why everyone has their own secret-roommate.xml file, when they all do the same thing. Â I decided it would be fun to prank my roommates with a funny theme song or movie quote before the door would unlock…
To complete this code, you’ll need to get an audio file (.wav or .mp3) of the DTMF tone you want to play back to the machine. Â I used this awesome DTMF generator, and they host the audio file for you.
roommate.xml – the file that calls the selected roommate
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<Response>
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<Say>Connecting you to [Roommate’s Name] now</Say>
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<Dial>415-555-1212</Dial>
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</Response>
secret-roommate.xml – the file that opens the door is the roommate enters the correct pin code. The first <Play>Â contains a fun audio clip from Back to the Future, the second one plays the DTMF tone that will open the door (make sure to change this depending on which tone will open your specific door).
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<Response>
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<Play>http://moviewavs.com/0059305935/WAVS/Movies/Back_To_The_Future/seriousBLEEP.wav</Play>
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<Play>http://www.dialabc.com/i/cache/dtmfgen/wavpcm8.300/6.wav</Play>
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</Response>
So there you go, now you can manage a callbox for a bunch of roommates, add secret pin codes, and even give selective access to delivery people, cleaning staff, or whoever else is coming by to visit. Let me know if you find any bugs or have ideas for how to make this cooler in the comments.
Photo credits:
- Call box: http://www.flickr.com/photos/carol329/300231462/
- Touch Tone Telephones, 1966: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roadsidepictures/3601261522/
- Bluebox: http://www.flickr.com/photos/awarnack/110798864/
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Returning From a Week on the Road
I’m onboard my return flight from D.C. with Kevin and so happy to be coming home to San Francisco. I’ve basically been on the road for two weeks, last week I was in Seattle for the Seattle 2.0 awards and then I made a quick flight back to SF Friday to do a 12 hour turnaround where I repack and jump onboard the redeye to New York with Adam for the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon. Flying the redeye can be painful since usually i don’t fall asleep, but it does save money on a hotel — which is worth it for New York. Fortunately I flew Virgin America, and the sleep deprivation caught up to me and i was asleep before we even took off.
We got to New York, and due to last minute planning we didn’t actually have a place to stay yet. Fortunately, our friend David Lifson from Postling connected with us on Twitter and he and his girlfriend met us over at Dogpatch Labs to drop our backs and grab dim sum. $4 per person dim sum in Manhattan – amazing!
We parted ways with them after lunch (they were headed up to the Apple store to get their iPad!) and headed over to the conference location to get ready for the hackathon. New York is so awesome, jump in a cab and we’re there. So the hacakthon begins, we have a little table for Twilio and try to chat with as many people as we can. Its so amazing having people walk up saying they already use Twilio, and even more incredible when they gush about how much they love the API. By late in the night, a handful of the hacks being created were using the Twilio API (including the Mr.Stabby robot from NYC Resistor!) and everything was going well, but the one problem was we still didn’t have a place to sleep.
Fortunately, the AirBNB folks were at the event too and offered to help us with our search. I had been working the website all day for an affordable place (hotels were coming up on Priceline for a minimum of $600) and around 10pm we got a message back letting us know we could get a 1 bedroom apartment in Soho for just $190 per night ($95 per person!!). I razzed the landlord bait about he bad reviews he got for cleanliness to make sure he would take care of it before we arrived, and we headed out. All in all, when we got there it was clean enough to fall asleep and thats all that really mattered.
The rest of the New York trip went smoothly, including many highlights:
- new friends from SimpleGeo
- Catching up with Jeremiah and the MediaTemple crew
- Awesome app demos from 6 hackathon projewvts using Twilio
- camping out at Fedex off for 5 hours to make sure we got collateral to our friends at TechCrunch by 3am
- A walking tour of parts of New York with Tim from Foursquare, followed by several games of shuffleboard
- delicious steak dinner at Quality Meats, courtesy of Bradley from 2tor
- meeting Cyan, founder of Zivity.com
- extending my streak of awesome iphone photos of the Empire State building to 3 trips in a row (link)
On Tuesday afternoon, with Disrupt still in full swing and the rest of the evangelism team headed to Colorado for Cloudcamp and Gluecon, I hopped my short flight to DC to meet up with my husband and get us all set up to represent at O’Reillys Gov 2.0 Expo at the a washington Convention center. Major discovery: the JetBlue terminal in JFK has these little counters where you can sit and order food to be delivered to you. I didn’t use it this time, but what an awesome idea!
Connected with Kevin at the airport after a three hour wait and we headed to a place i had booked us, a 2 bedroom townhouse within walking distane of the convention center. We arrived in a neighborhood that was pretty rundown (the house next door had all the windows busted out) and were greeted by our host and a friend of hers (a woman) carrying a gun – turns out she is a police officer but i am just not used to that i guess. We were only getting a room, turns out there was a long term tenant in the place and airBNB had listed it wrong. $149 per night for a room in. A house in a crappy neighborhood we couldn’t walk around in at night seemed lame, so we spent one night and switched to a hotel for just $10 per night more and lucked out and got a huge suite because things were slow! Two days of tradeshow goodness, which pretty much amounts to education people about Twilio and cloud technologies in general, collecting businesss cards, and dreaming up new uses cases. I spent Friday in the hotel room catching up on work and that brings me to today, where we worked and went to the National Gallery to check out the sculptures (my favorite medium) before heading back.
And there you have it, links and typo fixes coming later when I’m not on the iPad. Happy to be bak and hope to see many of you soon
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Watching App Demos at TechCrunch Disrupt
I’m here in New York for the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon, which is wrapping up the demos and announcing the winners of a 28 hour hack session that began yesterday and spanned into the early morning hours today.Hacks Using the Twilio API
Adam and I arrived early yesterday to set up a little table and then find out what people wanted to build. We hung out with a lot of different teams, and tried to offer our help and brainstorming skills. Originally, we had been thinking of doing our own hack project but wound up never starting it because we were in so many awesome conversations.
I’ve been liveblogging the demos that involve the Twilio API on the Twilio blog, including snapping quick videos of them with my HD Flip Mino. Congratulations to Groop.ly, NewsCred, FBcall, Phonzy, and Mr.Stabby for successfully creating your projects and demoing on the big stage here.
Mr.Stabby Video!
Check out the videos here, and my blog post on Twilio.
The Winners
The winners will each get to demo on Wednesday to a packed house
- Future Mario
- Twitter Demographics
- WorstPhoneEver
Honorable Mentions:
- iPad Safety Strap
- Mr.Stabby
Now onwards to see which of the 100 startups presenting wins the TechCrunch Disrupt cup during the conference this week!
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iPad in the Wild: Shopping at Ikea
Today I went to Ikea to get new furniture for our loft, and I brought my iPhone and iPad. Â The iPhone battery was at 20% when we walked in, despite sitting on the charger the entire car ride from SOMA to Emeryville. Fortunately, my iPad was a little more up for the game.We wandered the store, discussing colors and motifs that would work with our post dot com crash modern pad. Â A lot of birch was in order, and in fact we were getting a little burned out on the uber-Malm look. Â After looking at the piece I really liked, we realize their might be more furniture in the unique grey-brown color that we hadn’t considered, so I resorted to a quick scan of the Ikea store on my iPad.
I never realized how useful the Ikea website is for in-store experience before! Before I knew it, I was constructing a shopping list and checking the availability of items in the colors I wanted in the store’s stock. Â I even found things I didn’t realize the store had at all, which we then went and tracked down in the store.
Overall, we ended up spending 3x more than we had planned because we found a lot more of what we were looking for than we had bargained for. I remember over a year ago I helped pull together a “Future of Retail” meetup group in Seattle, as a market research for my previous startup, and we discussed how technology could be used to create special in-store experiences.  I think that was early then, but is becoming more and more relevant now with a device like the iPad that I can reasonably carry in my purse and pull out at a moment’s notice.
Bottomline: iPad was very helpful
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My Thoughts on LBS… Almost 3 Years Ago
Someone asked about how I got into all of this marketing and PR stuff, and it began with this unauthorized interview with Mashable about the launch of the Whrrl iPhone app in the summer of 2007. So funny… how LBS was the hot topic then, and it is again now with the looming Foursquare acquisition. I’m happy I’m not working this anymore, but it was a lot of fun and still think offering these kinds of features and localized lead gen for business, footstreaming, location awareness, etc. are cool. Long interview, enjoy…
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Birthday Post: I’m 25 Years Old Today!
Time for some navel gazing, because just a couple hours ago marked 25 years since I entered the world at the first daughter of Daniel and Kathryn Clark. People always remark that life is so short, or life is so long, but lately I’ve been feeling like its just right. I know I travel a ton, work like a maniac, am great at planning for the hyper short term (spontaneous) and super long term (procrastinator) but not as great in the middle, etc. I really love being alive, I love the people I’ve chosen to spend my time on Earth with (Kevin, my family, my friends, my professional colleagues, etc.)
At 20, I wasn’t nearly as self-assured or confident in what I was doing, but I did know that I would be an entrepreneur. In fact, I new I would be an entrepreneur when I was 17 working at McDonalds to pay for garage band gear, and when I was 15 working for the family business, and when I was 12 and visited my Dad’s startup in the Maritime building (heated with steam pipes) or when I was 9 and figured out how to get all the Moms on the block to contribute lemonade to our lemonade stand. At each age, that idea of what I might do in the future took on different forms and when people asked, “what do you want to do when you grow up?” I would grasp around for the words to describe it.
Growing up I wasn’t taught that work was something to dread about adulthood, from my viewpoint it was an exciting adventure that I couldn’t wait to be a part of.  A place where applying your mind to problems earned you more than just a good grade, and more than just money, it earned satisfaction and personal fulfillment. I always knew I would do work that I loved, because I never did anything I didn’t love. The second the smell of McDonald’s Egg McMuffins became too disgusting our the dread mounted in my chest about spending another day helping people ship freight, I made the choice to move on. Often I moved on without knowing what I would do next, fully confident that I could figure out how to make money paying the bills (building random websites, training old people how to use their computers, pulling espresso shots at the neighborhood coffee shop, etc).
I have extraordinary parents, who have stayed married in the face of plenty of challenges from rebellious kids (especially me) to financial hardship (multiple failed companies and near bankruptcy). They’ve taught me so much about love and commitment. I criticized them for staying married when I was younger, because I couldn’t see or understand their romance, but now that I’ve been married to Kevin for almost 3 years it makes a lot more sense. Relationships with human beings are fragile, beautiful things to be treasured and appreciated – and my parents loved me even when I was behaving terribly, when I was their heart walking around in the big bad world they couldn’t protect me from, and they watched in fear as I danced with danger from time to time. Fortunately (miraculously?) I kept on being right about decisions they thought were insane, from attending my senior year of high school part time to pursue my band (I was so ahead on credits) to dropping out of college to join the workforce at a Fortune 500 company, to quitting that kick ass job 2 weeks short of my wedding to join a tech startup.
Beyond my parents, I have the kind of marriage I never could have imagined. Kevin proposed to me when I was 21, and we were married when I was 22. The divorce rates for people married our ages aren’t great (37% chance for me, 22% for him) and a lot of people were skeptical when our on-again off-again relationship turned serious after 2 years of dating. Getting married young is probably the riskiest thing I’ve ever done, and the one agreement we came to was that I needed to have the space and freedom to fully discover who I am – outside the marriage. We weren’t going to be a hyper co-dependent couple, and I wasn’t going to have any kids for a long time (right now the plan is to revisit the topic when I’m 30). Instead, we would travel, live abroad, take turns doing startups, and development independent circles of friends. All the things we saw married couples NOT doing, and then complaining about as they filled out the paperwork for divorce. Not a guarantee of happiness, but certainly helpful. Since our marriage, I’ve worked on 3 startups and Kevin left his long-time role at Microsoft after living in China for 6 months. We’ve lived in separate states and/or countries for 50% of the time we’ve been married, made countless friends, founded a company together and travelled a ton. In short, my marriage is my grandest ongoing adventure.
Looking into the future…
I’m more open about my past, and guarded about my future. The future for my company is probably the most clear, and everything else follows from there. I know that when I leave this startup there are 2 things I will do: 1) take a trip to the remaining continents I haven’t been to with my best friend D’Laina 2) catch up on sleep. Then I’ll probably found a company of my own, I’m ready. Will we continue to live in the Bay Area – probably, since the heart of the tech industry is here. Will we ever move back into our blue house in Kingsgate – probaby, when we’re older? I’d love to have kids there, if I have kids at all. Will my life continue to be full of passionate, adventure and people I love – definitely. And being certain of that is enough for me.
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My Best Friend’s Wedding: The Startup
Update: No, it isn’t TweetToCall – although I love that project (yes, it still works and has a few thousand users now) and do think Twitter is going to become the new phone book. TweetToCall should be a feature of Twitter, and if anyone wants the code etc. I should just open source it.
You know that Julia Roberts movie where she doesn’t realize how much she’s in love with her best friend until he calls to say he’s getting married to someone else, and then falls off that bed? That’s how I feel about my startup idea getting founded and funded by someone else.
To be clear, I’ve probably had thousands of ideas for startups – but I’m a fan of failing fast and most of them have been crappy, or usually technically “cool” but not monetizable. That’s okay. But this idea was actually something I pitched in the few moments I had between leaving Whrrl and joining Twilio. It was something that nabbed me an offer to be an EIR with a reputable VC, which I was honored to receive but ultimately turned down. Most importantly, it was an idea that I am still obsessed with.
Today, I read that someone I know of and respect a great deal received some funding for this business, and is forming a company to execute on it. It haunts me. I know I’ll get over it, and I’ll be watching closely in the next year to observe how it goes as I consider whether or not it is the startup I’ll found someday. I can’t deny part of the pain is over not being first, but that is mainly pride. The rational part of me (or mercifully rationalistic) reminds myself that it may benefit me in the long run not to build a product in a consumer market that will require so much education. Time will tell.
Bottom line: the timing is wrong for me. I love my current company so much, and it is exciting, challenging, fun, growing, amazing — all the things we dream of when we talk about starting companies.
Ideas are a easy to come by, but ideas that you can imagine executing on for YEARS of your life are not. When I learned of Twilio I was immediately intrigued, and when Jeff approached me about joining the company I couldn’t say no. The alignment of market, team, and timing is undeniably awesome. Twilio is an idea I enjoy walking around inside of, thinking about constantly, living and breathing the brand. If I ever found a company as incredible, cohesive, and useful as Twilio I will have succeeded — so for now I’ll have to swallow this momentary pain, and look forward to the exciting future.
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Hitting the Road Again
After a couple weeks at home, except for that quick trip up to Seattle for Valentine’s Day and my going away party, I’ve been free of business travel. I love to travel, but it was good to take some time to be in the office with the team and we got SMS launched. Sometimes its like we run so hard, our feet don’t even touch down. Well, I had my time to touch down briefly. I mean, I did laundry so that means I came home a few nights. My little room is bursting with stuff… clothes and gadgets, but mostly with papers and books and ideas and my anxiousness to become more connected in this new town.
Tomorrow I’m on the road again, headed to Las Vegas for LeadsCon for a couple days, then back home in San Francisco Thursday and then out again to Sunday for a trip to New York where I’ll be doing some speaking and meeting with cool geeks to spread the word about Twilio, host a hackathon, and maybe even find some people we’d like to hire. So I’m back late Thursday night from that trip and home for about a week, then off to South by Southwest. And so it goes.
This song made me think about what its like being on the road. I’m happy, although I do wish I had heeded my Dad’s advice to travel light and hadn’t bough the house back in ’07. Oh well, live and learn I guess. Hopefully I’ll see you in my travels.
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Reflecting on “Stuff”
As I make the move to the Bay Area, dealing with my “stuff” is a big thing. Going from a 4,000 square foot house to a 10′ by 12′ room in a friend’s apartment has been an adjustment both physically and mentally. But more interestingly, its lead me to reflect on all the stuff I have and what it really means to me. This Paul Graham essay on Stuff from 2007 also resonates with me.
The Story of My Stuff
In 2004 I purged everything I owned except for what would fit into the Land Rover I bought, and moved to downtown Seattle. That felt great, and being free of stuff also kept my mind free of clutter as I embarked on the beginning of my career. While I was making $9 as an hour, I had no money for buying anything except for the occasional professional clothing item or meal out with a friend. If I was spending money, it was on experiences.
By 2006 I was making good money, and dating the man who would become my husband. I had moved into a penthouse studio apartment and wanted to impress him (duh) with my taste, as well as enjoy the freedom of not having to conform to the tastes of a roommate. Ikea furniture, books I had been storing at my parent’s house, kitchen utensils, clothes, SHOES… the “stuff” began to accumulate, and soon the studio was feeling pretty cramped.
We got married in the summer of 2007 and moved into his bachelor pad, which had even less personal space than my studio. The cheap Ikea furniture had to go and once again my personal style was subordinated to someone else’s idea of “home” – which at the time was uber-sparse and uber-expensive (and uber-masculine) urban chic. I got rid of my car too, which was wonderful at first but later felt stifling, in favor of his Audi. In all, from a materialistic point of view my entire lifestyle was upgraded when our possessions became shared. All I really brought my ever-growing book collection, and enormous collection of designer shoes and fabulous clothes. For two newlyweds, this was a lot of stuff to manage.
So what did we do? We bought a bigger container for our stuff, in the form of a 4,000 square foot house in the suburbs. What started out as curiousity about what was on the market turning into me finding our dream house. We moved in on Halloween 2007, a mere 3 months after getting married. Our stuff began to expand again… we left all the furniture at the Seattle condo (we were renting it out) and took on a bunch of furniture from my parent’s house that they had been saving for us, as well as piano, 8 person dining room table, and new couches, bar stools, etc. AHHH! We were in stuff acquisition mode, shopping every weekend for stuff to make our not-so-little nest feel like a home.
And then the economy tanked.
I wish I could say that we’d been frugal with our acquisitions, but with Kevin’s job at Microsoft and my investments flying high we weren’t too concerned. I was working for a startup, making a startup income, but we were still a two income household without anyone depending on us. My walk in closet was stocked with fabulous outfits, I wore labels, and we threw dinner parties almost every week. While the market crashed we were in Las Vegas, treating my little sister to a memorable 21st birthday. Looking back, that was probably one of the best ways we spent money that year.
Traveling Sets Me Free of My Stuff
On Friday, I flew from SFO to Seattle with my most important “stuff”: my black Kate Spade purse, MacBook pro, iPhone, engagement ring and necklace my husband gave me for Valentine’s Day this year, my passport and some cash. I could have flown anywhere in the world and started my life from that moment in time with the items in that bag. That’s a pretty empowering thought, and lead me to think that the lack of “stuff” might be part of why people find travel so liberating – it certainly is for me.
What I’ve Learned: Buy Experiences, Not Things
Enabling great experiences and memories, shared with people I enjoy, is the most important leisure activity in my life. My rule of thumb now is that my “stuff” needs to enhance or enable experiences in some way, or it isn’t valid. Additionally, the more expensive the item (both in terms of money and amount of trouble I go to keeping it) it better generate lasting and repeat value.
Another important thing I’ve learned is that owning expensive things is great, but only if you use them. Each time you use them, its a part of the experience of owning something. If you know me, you know that I have a thing for expensive leather purses and shoes, and that’s because when I use/wear them the luxury and stylishness of the items creates an experience for me personally. I love that. It’s the same for things like owning silver and china, or crystal. Use it or give it to someone who will.
10 Things I Need to Travel the World
- Internet (Sprint mifi)
- iPhone & charger (Apple)
- MacBook pro & charger (Apple)
- jeans & a t-shirt
- expensive & indestructible purse (Kate Spade)
- expensive & durable/comfortable shoes (Tory Burch)
- all-in-one makeup kit (Lancome, buy it at the airport)
- passport
- cash (or access to cash via ATM card)
- my wonderful husband Kevin
