The Flaky VC

So now it's two days later and I'm scanning for consulting gigs on Craigslist in LA. I've been sort of living in Pasadena for a while, trying to get Expat Software ( http://www.expatsoftware.com/ ) to the point where I can skip the country again with a full load of work.

Crazy RFP

There's an overly enthusiastic ad from a guy wanting to build a MySpace clone, so I send off an overly enthusiastic response asking for more info. It turns out he wants to build a travel site, with maps and itineraries and community spaces and a huge database of everything in the world that a traveler might want to know. It was actually a pretty cool concept, but it had one fatal flaw. It would have taken an army of data-entry monkeys a year to compile enough information on cool places and sights to make it a worthwhile place for a traveler to hang out and do research.

The one thing that I brought away from the 2 weeks of proposal writing to this increasingly flaky prospect was a heads up on the existence of the Google Maps API. Holy Crap! That's Cool! I'm gonna build this guy a couple prototypes!

I ended up writing the seed that would eventually sprout into the Trip Builder. Naturally, the money never showed up and the flaky VC evaporated, but now I was inspired enough to keep going. I figured if the guy ever came back, I'd offer to cut him in on the action (though I'm still convinced there never will be any profit from this thing), and until then I'd just take this on as a hobby, building the site that I wish I'd found back when I was building http://www.jasonkester.com/ .

Pasadena, United States