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Today is Monday April 17th, 2017. It is 9:52AM and I am at my home in Williamsburg.

Jeff is in Disney World this week with this wife and family. In my opinion, Disney World is the ultimate jelly location. I visited when I was a wee lad at 4 years old. My mom and I left my brother and Dad back in Seattle. I didn't want to leave. When I was forced to leave, I begged my Mom to ask my brother and Dad to move with us to Disney World.

We flew back to Seattle. Then, I started planning the move. I saved all travel pamphlets I could get my hands on. I memorized the map. I memorized all the different hotels and kingdoms. I knew when new rides were launching, new worlds being built.

Looking back on it, I found jelly at one specific location inside Epcot Center. As a family, we never moved to Disney World. I had been living there since the age of 4. I became mesmerized with Future World, specifically this one oven that automatically produced fresh chocolate chip cookies ever 14 minutes. This was the future. Unlimited cookies for all of eternity. I thought to myself, this is where I belong.

Inside Future World I also met my first self driving car, flying car, and hands-free butt washing toilet.

I think people should take more vacation and I am really happy that Jeff is. I tell people that I am always on vacation, which I think is true. I also tell people that I am always meditating. No one believes me when I say this

Let's recap last week. Last week we finished our MVP for Project Rewards. I can't say too much about it right now, not because I don't want to tell you, but because I don't want to jynx it. You'll see it live this week.

I tried to start a guerilla marketing campaign called Project Negg. Project Negg failed miserably because I got gravely ill on Friday afternoon. I was stuck at home with a fever for fourty-eight hours. It turns out a good remedy for this is NyQuil, sleep, repeat. I am now at 95%. This is a good reminder that the human body is fragile and I'm not actually invincible

Denny instilled an official puttering time policy last week.

Puttering time is time spent by team members that can be dedicated to other projects that will benefit the company, like interesting side projects or conducting science research.

I spent my puttering time last week at St. Patrick's Cathedral. I attended mass from Palm Sunday until Holy Thursday. I also showed up on Good Friday, which is a day where there is no mass. Few people know that I was raised Catholic. When I was eighteen, I thought it was a good idea to get confirmed. Well, because why not? I justified it as if I was not going to do at eighteen, I probably would never do it. Getting confirmed ended up saving me from getting in trouble with the law at 18, but that is a story for another time.

My parents are very religious. My brother and I spent a lot of time at Sunday School, Wednesday School, at Friday Bible Study (some call it Faith Sharing). Through confirmation I found that I disagree with a lot of things in the Catholic Church. I got confirmed anyways. I am not very religious, but I do enjoy ceremony. My commitment is to Science. I believe there are a lot of lessons that make the Catholic Church successful that can be applied to the larger Open Science Movement. Building community has been an obsession of mine since I was very young.

For me, the size of the community is not the most important. The whole-hearted commitment of a small number of people is more valuable than a membership of a large number of people with minimal effort or care, in my opinion.

This is a common lesson in startups and something I keep reiterating to my startups I'm advising in Startup School:

It is better to make a small number of users love you, than a large number of users like you.

Startup School is going well. I've been assigned about 30 startups, most of which are located in cities in India. I've never been to India and India has never been on my top list of places I want to visit, but now it is on the list. I finished office hours where I video conference with all the students in the course. I think Y Combinator is doing an excellent job experimenting with making their learnings accessible to anyone and everyone that wants to start a company. I hope that soon Experiment will have more time and resources to do the same for anyone and everyone that wants to be a scientist.

After all, if we are to be the place online where all science starts we better get started.

This week is about execution. We have a few big projects coming up that I am very excited about.

I want to mention one last thing before closing this Captain's Log.

As we've grown we've encountered more unexpected obstacles. Years ago we built a direct messaging system on Experiment where users can message each other. Over the years, we've seen some abuse of the platform.

Last week, one bad egg ruined it for all of us. There is one user who is using the messaging system to spam researchers. Because we didn't build in message throttling, there is nothing our admin can do to punish or prevent this behavior.

As Experiment grows there will be more unanticipated things like spammers who will steal my time and our team's time. We will devote engineering time to fix this this week. This is also a reiteration that we are a products company. One of our core competency has to be engineering, and it will be. I can touch on this at a later date, but since the founding of Experiment in 2012 Denny set in stone three important pillars that will never change for the Institution.

Those three pillars are Technology, Design and Science.

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this is where i belong

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