Not quite sure that’s what Matt Jones said by the way. Ah. That’s better, that’s it.
Haircuts have been on my mind of late though. I haven’t had one for a while and clearly it shows. I started thinking a tiny bit more about them this week when I read some posts from the ever thought provoking Dave McClure and my eyes rested on this very lovely picture of a list of “ways to be” from Jack Dorsey and on Dave’s reading of how he felt he did against Jack’s list.
I felt there was so much to think about in there, it was a really fine list contained in a very quiet picture. It’s so unusual to see the world through someone else’s lens, through what they see as important and it’s wonderful to have that pause and ponder your own ideas and your own list.
And in not too short a time my friend Patrick had returned the subject to haircuts. The team that became Artfinder went into stealth back in October, I probably haven’t had a haircut since then if not before. In the choice of how to spend an hour, either writing code, having meetings with partners, having a haircut, or getting home to see family, I know where my priorities lie at the moment, and my startup mullet is a testament to that. We’ve only just begun with what we’re making. The stuff I’ve been doing hasn’t hit yet and I’m keen to get it shipped.
Below is the impromptu task wall on the light and airy windows behind my desk. The top row is things I’m doing this week, with four things in progress at the moment. The row below is the backlog; in features not yet in stories. It’s big and interconnected this opening up art thing and it takes a lot of thought trying to get it right from an emotive and user centric perspective.
And here’s what I’ve done this week, it’s been a good week. A busy week, but one in which huge strides have been made. Two intertwined products heading towards a release point.
So it then amused me (a bit, although not entirely) when an article that was the result of an hour long interview with a journalist got published tonight. An hour, that ironically I could have spent having a good haircut. He introduced himself as being really excited about what we were doing, partly because he was deputy arts editor at the paper (I won’t link to it, he didn’t link to us) and that formerly he helped with research for Brian Sewell (the paper’s infamous Arts columnist and Britain’s most famous and controversial art critic).
Our chap wrote this about us:
Fashion, retail, culture and art also find their natural homes here. I visit the airy offices of an impressive start-up called Artfinder. A team of 20 work quietly on what they hope will be the definitive art database on the web - they had to base themselves in London to be close to the major European galleries. The main developers, three softly spoken men with unstylish haircuts, tell me they hope to create the ‘IMDb of the art world’and look nervous when I ask art, as opposed to tech-related, questions.
That’s why we have art historians on staff. ART HISTORIANS FUCK YEAH. I’ve been a volunteer advisor to a sculpture foundation for over 15 years, I was part of the team that first put sculpture on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square and I have my own views about how we need to open museums and cultural data up, but of course I look nervous when being asked about art by an art editor. I make things. With code. I love art, but I’d not profess to being any more than an informed layman.
On Monday morning, I’ll put an entirely different colour note on the backlog; a note on which will be written “get a haircut”. And you know what, when it’s priority and importance is higher than all the others it can go into an iteration, move to “in progress” and eventually hopefully to “done”. Dave McClure has some great bits of advice in this talk about startups and life priorities, and I’m off again to ponder Jack’s list and get excited and tinker with some features, and think about what I’ll put on my list of how I want to be.
