Looking back, written on the morning of the first elimination day. Part 2 of 5 of the Launchpad series.
Launchpad, part 2: "Your system has run out of application memory"
New York, a bus from Times Square, a camp in the woods and two nights in which first the laptops and then we hit our limits.
“Your system has run out of application memory.” That’s what my MacBook told me on our first night at camp. Terminal, Chrome and my dictation tool crashed at the same time. It was just the beginning.
Back up a bit. On Saturday we landed in New York, my first time there. We walked down Broadway, had a few shots, took a lot of photos. We slept three to a double bed in a hostel to save money. Nils has since turned that into a post that’s doing pretty well.
On Sunday at 9 am the bus left Times Square for the Poconos. The camp is in the middle of the woods: cabins, a big barn as headquarters where every team gets a round table, a lodge for food, a lake with fog on it in the morning. The nights are cold. We wear purple hoodies with the Kobe logo on the back, and the energy on day one was completely over the top.
At 9:36 pm our plan for the first challenge was set, 24 hours of social media. Nils does the posts and the video. René and I build an alpha we can actually demo by Tuesday morning. I’m deliberately not in the video so I can keep building. On paper, a clean split.
In practice René and I spent a whole night at the same table building past each other. Under pressure, the communication just broke down. Add the laptops, which kept giving up for lack of memory.
Then at midnight came the scare. We thought the first elimination already depended on the first challenge and the daily points, and that we’d be out the next day. We’d just read the rules wrong.
What we changed: three standups a day from now on. Going through specs together before anyone starts building. Talking openly, even when it’s late. Sounds obvious. Under pressure you forget it anyway.
Monday was the first challenge: three posts in one day, founder story, problem, reach. We put the launch video live at 11:30 pm US time, so it would land in Germany in the morning.
And at night the app was broken again. The candidate search froze on Nils’s MacBook Air while everything ran fine on mine. So I connected to his machine over Tailscale and went through the logs on staging, from one end of the barn to the other. At some point all I said was that I just want a normal software process, with testing and everything. And that I’d love to rebuild the whole thing in slow motion, properly robust.
Tuesday, 3:28 am. I’m still dictating features into my laptop: retry, sign out and restart for every integration on its own, because the setups keep getting stuck in loops. A coach walks by and just says: “Marvin, your alarm goes off at 8.”
The strange part is that I’d still rate the whole thing close to 9 out of 10 so far. Nils put it pretty well that night: it’s really good that we’re here, it brings so much power into the whole thing.
Today is the first elimination day. The laptops are holding up. For now.