Alex Kehayias's Blog

My Journey on the StartupBus

As you may know, I rode the NYC StartupBus last year with a kickass crew of hackers, designers, and hustlers. The Red Bull was plentiful, the sleep was not. I can say without a doubt that the StartupBus had a bigger impact on me than any single tech-related event.

My Story

Things had been going pretty slow at BeanSprout and I have a regular impulse to do ridiculous things that involve transportation vehicles and technology. I met with Justin, who was running that years NYC bus, and before you know it I was on a bus bound for SXSW. 

I pitched my idea, once on the bus, about creating a cheat sheet for pop culture, originally positioned as “Girlfriend Notes.” Essentially, shit your girlfriend expects you to know (amzingly I don’t have a girlfriend) about that you don’t give a shit about watching/reading i.e. last night’s Glee episode. Somehow I convinced three other people to join me and that’s how Whadimiss (as in “What did I miss?”) was born (we are no longer maintaining it). It evolved into an editorial style daily email that summarized major categories of pop culture in witty, bite sized chunks. I still love the idea, and people found it very entertaining (Charlie Sheen was the pop topic at the time), but automating isn’t possible to do well given the current technology (summarizing large chunks of text using NLP). 

The Buspreneurs

It takes a certain kind of person to get on a bus for over 2 days, hack, launch at SXSW and party. I want to be around people like that all day, every day. The crew that was assembled for our bus had the highest quality tech people (by tech I don’t mean coders, just people who are involved in tech) I’ve ever been around. I still keep in touch with the majority of the bus and they’ve helped me along my journey in learning to code. That was the best part of the whole experience. Oh and I drank a lot too at SXSW, in parties that I was never on the list for (thanks Adrianne <3).  

Inspiration

I’ve seen some shit on that bus. Market ready websites, mobile apps, a startup getting thrown a check for angel funding, all built in 2 days that destroy 70% of what I’ve seen other people create in months. When you work at the speed of the StartupBus there really is no going back. If things take me more than a week to do in real life, I think back to the bus, ignore the smells, and think about what’s possible when you push it. Life is a hackathon, and if you aint’ hackin’ you ain’t lastin’.