Damon Cortesi's Blog

This is a continuation of a tweet.

Even in the past 3 days, my reading habits have changed. Still sucking up massive amounts of information, just different types.

There’s an interesting transition I’m going through. I moved to Seattle over three years ago. One of the reasons I moved was the awesome security community, like toorcon and the great security shops here in town. But I’m staying because of the awesome startup community.

I quit my job in 2007 and started a security startup. I took three or four months at that point to explore the Seattle startup world, one I had never lived in, and I got hooked. There were lots of people along the way who offered help, but I still didn’t quite feel like I was part of the community. That’s definitely changed over the course of the past year, especially with events like Seattle Startup Weekend.

There’s one event that’s really changed that, though. And that’s the simple fact that I’m now a founder of a Seattle-based startup. I’ve joined the club, essentially. And in the past few days, I feel a need for a new type of information I previously haven’t – information from my peers in the community that have started their own companies here and have already been through the process. And very many of them are extremely open and willing to help. Whether it’s commenting on the Seattle Tech Startups email list, or grabbing a quick lunch, there’s a strong sense of community in the Seattle startup scene and I feel like I have many shoulders to lean on as I slog the process of taking a startup from nothing to what will hopefully be an awesome company.

I’m really looking forward to the next year.

I’ve been working on this for a while, but figured I should announce it here.

I’m starting a new company to continue my hobby of building Twitter tools. It’s going to be a social media startup and we’ll be building tools for social media professionals. We’ve already built one in a weekend project that we’re calling RowFeeder – a tool to stream real-time tweets into a Google spreadsheet. It’s something we needed and it’s been surprisingly helpful.

I’ll likely be blogging on Untitled Startup more often than here, so feel free to follow along and see what we’re up to. We’re being pretty open and even posting daily videos as we go through the process of starting a company.

I’m also psyched to have finally accepted the fact that my “hobby” was distracting me for the past two years and I can finally work on what I love full-time. It’s not that I didn’t love security, but I hit a point where I wasn’t able to determine what I was going to do next. Perhaps more on that later as that’s always been pretty important to me – work on what you love, because otherwise you’ll just end up hating life. And that’s no fun at all.