One of the best rock and roll bands going these days is The National. The band has been making noise in the indie rock scene for the past few years (especially with their 2005 album, Alligator), and seems on the verge of really breaking out. Tonight was the band’s first of five sold-out shows at the Bowery Ballroom here in New York, and it was incredible. Be sure to check them out if they come through your town.

Note: Link expired.

The National, <"Mistaken for Strangers" (from the band's new album, Boxer) [BUY]

Here’s a couple of pictures from the show. I also have a Flickr page where you can check out all kinds of pictures from the concerts I’ve seen over the last year or so.

Megan McCarthy had an interesting piece over on Valleywag today about “stealth startups”. Her position is that “[s]tealth startup, as a term and a concept, needs to die.” As you can imagine, we don’t really agree with Megan on this point. We are, for all intents and purposes, a “stealth startup” right now, and there are two very valid reasons for it.

First and foremost, we’re in the process of preparing a patent application with our attorneys which goes to the heart of the Rogomo product. The patent rules are very strict, and if we make our invention public before filing our application, we can lose any chance of getting our patent. We can’t let that happen.

Second, there’s a real value to being the first mover in the market. The product we’re going to be rolling out has valuable concepts that we’re simply not ready to share. More importantly, there are big players out there with a lot of money who, if they knew about our idea (and liked it), could throw a few million dollars at the idea and be up and running in short order. Again, we can’t chance it.

So that’s why we’re proud to be a “stealth startup”. That said, we’re not one of those “stealth startups” like the one Megan is talking about that claim that they’re going to be so revolutionary that they can’t even disclose their own name. Our name is Rogomo and will be Rogomo and not Revolution (no offense, Steve Case). We’re just a plain startup trying to make it in the world, not a Web 2.2, 4.7, or Web X company. And, who knows, there’s every chance that if we told you our entire business plan now, you may tell us that we aren’t unique at all. But why give our competitors time to catch up to us if we don’t have to?

So, while Megan may be right that some companies need to calm down a bit and not take themselves so seriously, she should also understand that there are a lot of good reasons for going stealth.

Have a great holiday weekend everybody.

Don’t hold it against me, but before I started Rogomo with Neil a few months ago, I used to work as a lawyer at a large firm in New York. In fact, I spent nearly 8 years in that job, and I gotta tell ya, I disliked just about every minute of it.

That’s not to say that law isn’t a good field for some people — it just wasn’t good for me. I found the practice of law, and especially the litigation practice I was in, to be far too adversarial (duh!) and destructive. Far too often I saw clients and their adversaries, who should have been moving on with their lives and their businesses, getting sidetracked by lengthy, expensive litigation. While it didn’t necessarily destroy their businesses, it definitely distracted many of them from their bottom line and kept them from making the progress they ought to have been making.

One of the things that got me through the day, and through the countless calls with opposing counsel where one or both of us would be yelling, was music. I was lucky enough to have a door to my office I could close, and speakers to my computer that I could turn up (a bit), and drown out the nastiness of litigation with a little rock and roll.

Now that I’m on the other side of the fence, actually trying to build a business and keep our eyes on our goals — and hopefully avoid the morass of litigation — I find that music is just as important to me, but for a different reason. Since we don’t have an office yet, I’m working out of my home. I find that keeping music playing throughout the day keeps things moving pretty well and keeps me from ever feeling too isolated in my apartment. Plus, I can crank it a lot higher than I ever could in the office.

Here’s a few of the songs I’ve been listening to lately. As you’ll see, I’ve been going for a very raw, “garage-y” rock sound lately. If you don’t know any of these bands, I strongly suggest you check them out. While a lot of other, less interesting (IMO) “indie” bands are starting to have a good deal of success (e.g., Death Cab For Cutie, The Shins, The White Stripes), there’s a lot of great, deserving bands out there that haven’t gotten the notice they deserve (yet). These are five of those bands.

Note: Links have expired.

The Broken West, “So It Goes” [BUY]
The Makes Nice, “Cop Killer” [BUY]
The Manhattan Love Suicides, “Suzy Jones” [BUY]
Reigning Sound, “She’s Bored With You” [BUY]
You Am I, “Gunslingers” [BUY]

PS: The title to this post is a reference to one of the greatest movies of all time. Recognize it?

So we’ve been reviewing our 2008 financial plan and trying to anticipate how many employees we’re going to need to hire and which positions they’ll fill. It’s not an easy process.

We’ve been outsourcing our development and expect to keep most of our technology outsourced in 2008, as well as our customer service. However, the time is going to come when we need to expand our team in the United States to help carry the load. We haven’t decided what the first position we’re going hire internally will be, but since we’ll be a small company, obviously any outside hire will need to be someone who can assume multiple roles. If I had to guess, because Rogomo will be driven by our product (a web service) and sales/partnerships, our first hire will be in the sales/marketing or technology/development areas.

One thing is for certain, though. As we ramp up our team, we’re going to need to keep everyone as motivated as we (i.e., the founders) are. Taking a cue from Reebok’s brilliant commercial about Terry Tate, we should think about bringing in our own Office Linebacker.

On a serious note, though, if you’ve gone through this process and have any experience in making the first outside hire, we’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch is no angel, but in this post he’s nailed Silicon Valley’s culture and the adverse effect of the current bubble mini-boom in start-ups.

Hi! My name is Neil and I’m the President of Rogomo. As Steve’s earlier post probably made clear, we here at Rogomo are huge Arrested Development fans (the brilliant FOX show that was canceled due to poor ratings).

So it was no surprise that, when we starting trying to find a name for the company, we relied on a little Bluth wisdom in finding a good name. While a good name will not ensure success, a bad name could ruin an otherwise good business. The reason that picking a name was so difficult is that almost every name (excluding dashes, hyphens and numbers) is already taken. Finding an available name requires some creativity and a lot of diligence.

Before we picked a name, we developed some guidelines:

1. The name must have a positive association. This excerpt from Arrested Development sums up my point:

Michael: What do you think of when you hear the word Sudden Valley?
George Michael: Salad dressing, I think. But for some reason, I don’t want to eat it.
Michael: Right, but Paradise Gardens?
George Michael: Yeah. Okay, I can… I can see marinating a chicken in that.

2. If your business will rely on word of mouth marketing (as ours will), the name must be relatively short. Long names are generally not memorable.

3. The name must be easy to spell.

4. The name should have some significance to your business (more on our name and our business at a later time) but not limit the services you may offer.

5. And finally . . . the name should not be offensive. Some names, when written down, could have unintended pronunciations. To see what I mean, write down Tobias’ title in the below Arrested Development clip.

At the end of the day, we think Rogomo fits these criteria pretty well. We hope you agree!

Whatever your politics, you gotta admit, this is funny. The quick background, in case you missed it, is that not-yet-presidential candidate Fred Thompson criticized Michael Moore for filming part of his new documentary in Cuba. Moore then responded by challenging Thompson to a debate on health care, and criticized Thompson’s habit of smoking cigars (which Moore suggested were Cuban cigars).

This is Thompson’s response. Good stuff. Not sure how presidential it is, but I’ll leave that issue for another day.

As will probably become pretty clear as I add more posts to this blog, I’m a pretty big music fan. In fact, in my spare time, I run a music blog called Baby, You Got a Stew Goin’! (Yep, that’s an Arrested Development reference.) So it only makes sense that, while some of my posts here will definitely discuss Rogomo and other development and Web 2.0-type issues, a number of my posts will talk about music.

To kick things off, I figured it would be a good idea to post a few songs that I’ve been listening to a lot lately. A couple of them are new, a couple are old. If you read my other blog, or any “indie” rock blog for that matter, they’ll probably all be familiar to you. If you don’t, however, you should definitely check them out. I think you’ll like them. After all, “indie” is apparently the new “alternative” these days. Or is it the new “emo”? Or the new Foghat? Whatever, it’s just plain old good music.

Bishop Allen, “Click Click Click Click” (from the July EP) [Buy]

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, “Oregon Girl” (from Broom) [Buy]

Ted Leo, “Where Have All The Rude Boys Gone?” (from Hearts of Oak) [Buy]

The National, “Murder Me Rachael” (from Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers) [Buy]

Voxtrot, “Kid Gloves” (from their new, self-titled album) [Buy]

Hi there! This is Steve from Rogomo. We’re a new company with an exciting web-based tool that we can’t wait to share with the world. Because we’re still in development, though, and because we’re applying for a couple of patents, there’s not a whole lot more we can say - YET!

But keep your eye on this space for some exciting announcements in the coming weeks, as well as some random thoughts and observations from various members of our team. We think you’ll like it.

More soon!

Steve