We finally made it to San Francisco - after an insane couple of weeks back home arranging everything and moving out of our Yaletown place. The drive down was long, but interesting and the SoMa apartment here is super-super cool (thanks again to Kevin for doing the due diligence on it and letting us close the deal literally within hours). More than anything, I feel like the development of MOBIFY is moving even faster than back home - there is more space, more sunlight and more feedback waiting for us here.

The overall impression of the SF tech scene after the first couple of days: it’s like if somebody gave you a tasty treat and then punched you in the face.

It’s amazing to see the quality of the execution even on spare time projects. Stunning when 4 crazy, complete project demos in a JavaScript meetup are an unusually “short meeting”. When the guy sitting next to you is on his 6th startup. Here, it’s for real. And we haven’t even touched the surface of the deal flow of the Bay Area.

The result of this is a heightened sense of urgency combined with an awareness of how competitive the Web game is here… It doesn’t get any more challenging.

But when the going gets tough, the tough get going - that’s something we’ve always believed in.

Come visit us in San Francisco.

It will be one hell of a summer.

The quote above is key for everybody who is aspiring to be or is an entrepreneur.

If you work really, really hard without achieving what you want, it could be possible that the strategy you’ve chosen is not working. In order to keep moving, it will be necessary to either adjust the goals or start doing things differently.

The problem is this - hard, passionate work feels rewarding, blocking out negative reinforcement. If I am working so hard, sacrificing so much and enjoying what I do, one day I will certainly succeed, right?

Wrong.

At least, if you’re building a growth business, which has to do with meeting milestones, growing revenue, closing deals and other measurable objectives. Passion is a necessity in order to keep going, but accountability - to yourself and your team - is just as crucial.

Today, my wish to every entrepreneur is to have the guts to address the Achilles’ Heel of their business. It is always somewhere in the back of our heads, drowned by the great joys of freedom, creativity and self-improvement that building a business brings. Only through confronting the uncomfortable we can achieve something great and lasting, something that improves the lives of others in a significant way.

Somewhere around July 1st our core team will be moving to San Francisco. No, not forever - most likely for 3 months, the maximum term allowed by our B-1 “business development” visa. It’s a very exciting time - everything has aligned on both personal and company fronts to allow us to do this.

The reasons are quite clear to anybody following our work at MOBIFY. Vancouver is fantastic for recruiting top talent and now with Bootup the entrance barrier to starting a company is further lowered. However, to make it through the chasm of customer development to a good exit, a long journey has to take place. The Valley ecosystem is ripe with events, networking, funding and partners that Vancouver doesn’t have today. As a startup, we want to maximize our chances and hit our growth targets - San Francisco has some of the missing pieces of the puzzle. Having the R&D base in Vancouver is a perfect complement to this move.

On that note, does anybody have friends that would rent out a good live/work space to 4-5 guys in downtown SFO? We’ll be forever grateful.

Thanks for your support, Vancouver, let’s hang out this June as we prepare to take on the Bay Area! We’ll be back.

Today, 2^6 years ago, on May 9th, 1945 Nazi Germany has unconditionally surrendered in World War 2.

This victory came at a staggering cost - USSR alone lost between 20 and 30 million people.

I just got off the phone with a few veterans who went through that war and saw the horrors of it with their own eyes. It’s great to have them around us today.

The closest I’ve been to the War is looking at crash sites of American fighter jets which my grandfather, a geologist in Siberia, has found. USA provided lots of vehicles to USSR through its lend-lease program - the airplanes were flown through the vastness of Alaska and Siberia by young guys my age, without radars or GPS. Many didn’t make it, to be found decades later in the cold Russian tundra.

Let that be a reminder of how easy life is for many of us today, no matter how hard we work. Let’s thank Russian, Canadian and American veterans for fighting for us, more than half a century ago.

С ДНЕМ ПОБЕДЫ!

Disclaimer: I am one as well.

Many people starting a business in the Web space for the first time put a lot of emphasis on their idea. Idea seems to be that golden nugget which will attract funding, a great team and result in a nice exit after being executed well. That’s exactly how we started two years ago.

Being technology-obsessed, we tend to look for an idea asking ourselves these or similar questions:

Wouldn’t it be cool if I could have the XYZ feature on my iPhone/BlackBerry/Palm/Mac/PC?

The new XYZ technology/API looks very disruptive. What could I build on it that hasn’t been done before?

There is A in B market, but not C in D market. Can that be fixed via technology?

Most of the time, this leads to the well-known case of “solutions looking for problems” - beautiful technology that can’t become a profitable business.

Best ideas are a side-effect from solving significant problems that the entrepreneurs themselves experience, observe and intimately understand. As young Web entrepreneurs, we aren’t sufficiently aware of important real-world problems, since our life mostly consists of hacking, coffee and occasional entertainment.

There are plenty of examples. Larry Page didn’t set out to build the best Web search engine - as a Ph.D student he designed PageRank to help analyze importance of academic papers based on how they reference each other. Club Penguin, British Columbia’s underrated 700$ million acquisition, was started after the founders couldn’t find good online entertainment for their own children. Steve Jobs wanted to build a computer that could show the beautiful typography that he likes so much.

This isn’t anywhere close to being a rule. However, seeing yet another social restaurant search with status feeds, a Google Map, microformats, video uploads and widgets makes me wonder what ingenious products would the team come up with had their problem been bigger than finding new food to eat.

It took us two years to arrive to Mobify, which is shaping into a great product. Prior to that, we spent too long chasing ideas that were “cool” but wouldn’t stand a chance for making money. With the right kind of guidance, that could have been avoided!

There is a lot of potential for a start-up incubator that looks to match the creative force of young Web guys with experience of the tech-agnostic (but entrepreneurial) older generation - as equal partners. Specifically, the knowledge of life & business outside the IT bubble and the fundamental inefficiencies that can be swept away with the Web.

There’s lots of those left.