For the past few months I’ve been noticing that I’ve been unable to poke people I don’t know on facebook. At first I dismissed this as perhaps it being a case of more people disabling the poke feature (and since I was mainly poking hot girls I figured they’d be the most likely to disable the poke feature so it made some logical sense). However slowly I realised that I literally could not poke anyone who was not a friend so I wondered perhaps if facebook and disabled me from poking, though I thought this would be weird since I definitely don’t poke like a spammer.

So I contacted facebook and just go this reply:

“Unfortunately, the “Poke” option is no longer available from search results. You will still be able to poke your friends using the link below their profile picture. However, if you are not able to view an individual’s profile, you will no longer have the option to poke that person. Sorry for any inconvenience. “

In my opinion this is a truly bad decision. Reasons:

- I never poke my friends. Why would I when I can communicate with them via their wall, messaging or now chat? The whole point of the poke is that it’s supposed to be a discovery tool.

- There’s a lot of people who use facebook as a way to meet random girls/guys (which makes sense, the mantra from Jamie Zawinski that you should think about how your software will get you laid is 100% true) and the poke is the perfect way to initialize that communication.

I can honestly imagine the facebook usage time of a quite a few of my friends (no names mentioned) falling dramatically as a result of there being no poke.

The only reason I can think of as to why facebook did this is presumably because of some form of spam problem arising from the poke. Maybe people were creating fake accounts and poking hundreds of people at a time or some variant thereof. This is obviously a problem but I feel that the response here is grossly excessive (if someone knows the actual reason please feel free to end my speculation).

I love facebook but this is the first product decision I’ve actually been genuinely annoyed about. I’m also well aware that by defending the poke so passionately, I leave myself open to a number of jokes but such is life.

Once the dust settled after our acquisition closing, I decided to use the moment as a chance to change my information seeking habits a little. I’d noticed that I was beginning to develop some serious ADD issues - focusing on a single task and seeing it through to completion was becoming increasingly difficult.  This came as a surprise/shock to me - I’m generally quite disciplined when it comes to sitting down and ploughing through work, so my inability to focus was quite troubling.

I self-diagnosed myself as suffering from information overload and challenged myself to take the following steps:

- Turn off my iPhone data plan so I wasn’t permanently checking email every minute of the day

- Turn off my IM support for Twitter and remove the mobile notifications so I was only checking tweets when I went to the site

- When I didn’t have work to do, shut off the laptop and find another activity that didn’t involve staring at a screen.

So after trying that out for the past month, I can safely say that the only one I’ve managed to stick to is turning off IM/mobile support for Twitter. I’ve weened myself off the need to constantly have status updates in real time and so have one less source of interruption in my life. Unfortunately the other two steps didn’t work out so well.  I thought that stopping myself from having access to email 24/7 would make me more efficient and reduce the permanent state of feeling like you’re working and hence lead to less stress. It didn’t work that way.

Not having 24/7 access to email made me feel more stressed than ever, I was constantly worried that I might be missing something important to do with work and found it difficult to relax.Perhaps I could have pushed through but after losing my iPhone in a cab, I’ve ordered a Blackberry Pearl and am switching on my data plan again as of tomorrow (the Pearl is a stop gap until the 3G iPhone comes out in June - if you want to pick up a barely used Pearl in June just let me know).

Also my attempt to reduce the amount of time I spend in front of my laptop failed miserably. The sad truth is I’m addicted to the thing. It’s my source of work/news/entertainment/relaxation and my life pretty much revolved around it. The fact that in some free time I’m sat in front of it blogging is testament to it. This is where I listen to music, download and watch movies and now even watch TV that is streamed by services like BBC iPlayer or Channel 4 on demand.

My failure has made me take a step back and think. There’s certain things that being addicted to are clearly accepted as wrong (drugs being the example that springs to mind for most people). Yet here I am, unable to relax without being plugged into some form of information and cramming more data into brain and no one around me blinks an eyelid. Of course being addicted to email doesn’t have as far reaching social consequences as being addicted to drugs but at the end of the day, an addiction is an addiction. It also makes you wonder whether the human brain was really built to be used in this way and whether we’re putting undue strain on it, or maybe we’re still only utilizing X% of it’s true capacity. Who knows?

Anyway, time to get back to my Google News homepage. It recommends stories I’ll like don’t you know.

Today we announced that my startup,auctomatic, has been acquired by Live Current Media. This marks a huge landmark for Kul, Patrick and myself - we’re obviously massively excited and happy that we can finally announce this (we’ve been in negotiations for almost six months now). Kul has done (as usual) a fantastic job of describing the story with his bbc piece. I plan on blogging more in the coming weeks about why we sold and what we learnt through the process but for now I wanted to make sure that all the people who helped us along the way aren’t forgotten (and trying my hardest not to make it sound like we won an oscar rather than got acquired). Turns out this is a much longer list than I’d initially thought.

The Team The most import thanks goes to the team I’ve been lucky enough to work with. Thanks Kul, Patrick, Phil, Brian and John for some good times.

Investors Of course we couldn’t have gotten anywhere without our investors:

• Our UK angels who first believed in us: Michael Lewis, Patel Family and Harry Clarke
• Y Combinator for taking a punt on two non-hackers and introducing us to Patrick.
• Paul Graham for his candid advice and Jessica Livingston for the countless introductions and help along the way (special note: without Jessica’s help, Kul and I would not have our US visas).
• Paul Buchheit for first beating down our idea each week at YC dinners and then giving us money
• Chris Sacca for teaching us to grow some balls

Advisors We’ve been incredibly lucky to have been advised by some very smart people:

• Judith Clegg - when we were back in the UK Judith did more than anyone to help us with our first fundraising for boso. We owe her massively.
• Naval Ravikant - has the most information conveyed per spoken word of anyone I know. His advice always turned out to be (sometimes frustratingly) correct.
• Evan Williams - gave us two desks in the Twitter offices during our YC program. Pretty much the best welcome to the Valley present possible. He’s also always been an immense source of help and advice all along.
• Allen Morgan - though we didn’t raise a Series A, Allen was always a great source of help and advice
• Katherine Barr - recommended reading “Getting to Yes”, a fantastic book that helped immensely

Peers We’ve also been lucky to have an amazing peer group, especially all the YC guys, some special mentions:

• Robby from Zenter for letting us crash at his place while we were homeless
• Tsumobi’s for hosting us while we were in Boston
• The Zenopy crew for being an incredible source of support and help from the early days
• The Songkicks and other founders who came along to help us pitch at eBay Live
• Srini from YouOS and Project Wedding for being our first hacking tutor (and his dog Amber)
• Bob Goodson and Kirill Makharinsky from Younoodle for showing us the way to Silicon Valley

Everyone else

• Wilson Sonsini, in particular Carolynn Levy, for being our legal counsel from the beginning and doing a great job
• Chris Wright for preparing our all important US visa petitions
• Groovytrain for giving us office space when we were young and still working on boso in London
• All investors we spoke to but didnt close, your advice helped us nontheless - in particular thanks to Mike Maples, Mark Pincus and Rajeev Motwani
• Everyone who signed one of our visa reference letters who’s not already been mentioned - Mitch Kapor, Max Levchin, Chris Anderson and Biz Stone
• Ankur Pansari for his time and insigh as a powerseller
• Thanks to everyone who interned with us, especially Hiroki for coming out to San Francisco, but also all the old boso interns - Keren, Jean, Clarissa and crew
• Friends and family who have supported us along the way

Apologies if I’ve missed anyone, thank you all!

It seems that the press are no longer oblivious to the influx of us British entrepreneur types to Silicon Valley. Wired write about it here and Director Magazine also picks up on it as well. Discussion inevitably turns to the debate about whether you have to move to Silicon Valley in order to build a tech startup, and with the annual Silicon Valley comes to Oxfordevent taking place in the next few weeks (with myself, Kul and our friends Bob and Kirill will be speaking - all of us young guys who made the move out to SV) it’s sure to be picked up on again.

The UK we’ve come back to is very different to the one we left in January. Seedcamp is off the ground, first time entrepreneurs are raising their seed rounds in the UK and things generally seem to be far more buzzing than they were when we were building boso this time last year. Nothing shows the progress that’s been made more than the growth of Zenopy - which started out as a bunch of us working on our first startups reaching out to each other for the support we all desperately needed. The group has come a long way since then - there’s been successful exits, acquisition offers, angel rounds and VC rounds so it’s pretty clear that the trend is heading in the right direction.

Something that’s taken me by surprise though is that whenever I’m back in the UK - I always feel like working on a startup is that bit more difficult than it was in SV. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. Ultimately a lot of that is personal - my family are not overly enthusiastic about what I’m doing but it’s pretty easy to escape that when you’re on the other side of the world and not so much when you’re staying at home with them again. There’s also the fact that returning to the UK also means brief separation from co-founders, which obviously adds to the mental load slightly and a general sense of feeling like you’re away from where you should be i.e. where the network you’ve built up is.

But what I’ve realised is that the bulk of it comes from an age distortion effect I feel when I’m back here. It first struck me when I read this recently, a sentence from an old PG essay:

“If you try something that blows up and leaves you broke at 26, big deal; a lot of 26 year olds are broke”.

I knew there was something that bothered me about that sentence when I first read it. When I read it again it was obvious why - because for my data set (i.e. my peer group/friends) that statement is false. As a result of attending a good university, inevitably most/all of my friends are embarking in lucrative careers whether it’s in banking/law/consultancy/tech. None of them are going to be broke by the time they’re 26 - they’ve still got 3 or 4 years to reach 26 and they’re already talking about mortgage payments and buying apartments or houses. I know that’s not representative of the general population - there are plenty of 26 year olds who are broke in the UK but ultimately we judge ourselves against our peers and not the general population.

What I mean by an age distortion effect is that whenever I come home - I suddenly feel like I aged 5 years and the amount of time I’ve got left to achieve some success is running out. I have to undergo the mental exercise of reminding myself that I’m still young - I’ve only missed out on one years worth of salary (in reality not even that as I’d have spent the past year in legal training if not for doing a startup) and in the grand scheme of things that really is not a big deal. I can afford to stay calm!

However for my peer group in SV - it’s different. Almost everyone is pretty much broke and will carry on being that way unless their startup takes off. Just look at the examples - Evan Williams didn’t start Blogger until he was 27, Paul Graham didn’t form Viaweb until after Grad School, Max Levchin had, I believe, three failed startups before he started work on Paypal. That’s why there’s less mental pressure for a young entrepreneur in SV - there’s social proof.

That social proof is taken to the extreme by Y Combinator - where you’re instantly put into a large group of people in the exact same situation as you. The cross-fertilization that goes on between YC groups that fail and the ones that stay alive only serves to strengthen that. The power of that social proof really can’t be understated - it’s why Y Combinator founders are all so close, it’s like a big fraternity because everyone relies on the support of each other so damn much.

Balancing up the scales on this one will again take time - but hey the first step was getting young people starting companies and getting them funded and that’s happening. As those entrepreneurs fail the next challenge is making sure they learn from their mistakes and stick at it and go onto their second companies. Universities have a massive role to play here - they have to fight the saturation of recruitment material on campus at the top universities (at Oxford it was difficult to walk for very long without seeing another piece of recruitment material thrust in your face) and that’s why organizations like Oxford Entrepreneurs and Imperial Entrepreneurs are so crucial to the effort.