This week wise investor Paul Graham did an open “office hours” during the Techcrunch Disrupt Conference. He exchanged questions and tried to poke holes in ideas startup founder’s presented to help them refine their companies.

It is fascinating to watch this kind of open constructive questioning. One round and you’ll emerge with a more solidified grasp of your ideas. But make a habit out of this practice and you’ll see enough patterns to walk on water.

Rather than quote the questions out of context, here are some of the kinds of questions Paul asked…

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Yummy Snacks
3 for $3
5 for $5

Why aren’t they just 1 for $1?

Ohhhh you want me to ignore math and logic and buy more. 

I just returned from a Seattle Hacks/Hackers event at Groundwire’s office in downtown Seattle. If you aren’t familiar with Hacks/Hackers, it’s mission is to try and connect hacks (journalists) together with hackers (developers) to work on interesting problems. Because of my journalism and developer background, it’s a group where I feel right at home.

Tonight’s event was a brainstorming session for the Knight-Mozilla Challenge. The night felt just like a hack-a-thon, but without the coding part. After some inspirational demos by Vectorform and Grist we broke into small teams and tried to come up with interesting ideas in the categories of Video, User Engagement and HTML5.

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Two weeks ago at the Seattle 2.0 Awards, tech startup winners were announced in categories from Best Consumer Startup to Best Startup Acquisition.

BigDoor was a nominated under the category of Best B2B Startup… but didn’t win.

However that didn’t stop CTO Jeff Malek from giving his acceptance speech the next day. Jeff posted his “speech” on the official BigDoor blog for all to read. Not to be a sore looser or anything, but to convey his original intention - to say thank you.

In Jeff’s unprovoked and certainly unexpected post he thanks the people that have helped him and the company get to where it is today. How cool is that? (answer: very cool)

Being thankful shouldn’t only come with an award in hand. Jeff saw an opportunity to take pause and give thanks regardless. This goes miles toward a honest and credible company that everyone should want to be a part of.

Learn from Jeff. Go out there and give random acts of thanks.

It started out as a day of innocent wandering around the city but then I stumbled into the Seattle Cheese Festival. Oh darn, tasty tasty cheese. Since my camera has been gathering dust lately, I took a few photos in between bites. 

As someone who doesn’t blog constantly and who typically keep ideas as close to his chest as possible, I’m going to try something fairly bold.

Transparency. (Cue the dramatic music) 

Back when I was a working journalist, Steve Smith, Editor-in-Chief of The Spokesman-Review at the time, pushed transparency hard. The newsroom even had a live webcam for anyone to spy in on our meetings.

Likewise at BigDoor transparency is key once again. Every document created is accessible by anyone in the company. Numbers, facts and figures flow throughout the office for anyone to take advantage. 

It’s a breath of fresh honest air.

But the simple truth is I adore transparency, but never practice it myself.

Then a few weeks ago Brad Feld, one of BigDoor’s investors, came by the office. He dished out wisdom like he was chewing bubble gum.

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Just days ago Matt Shobe, BigDoor’s Chief Design Officer, myself and an ad hoc team of talented individuals were knee deep in code developing a new mobile music app in one weekend.

This was the challenge Startup Weekend proposed to developers, designers, marketers and project managers alike – build and demo a product in less than 54 hours.

It was the pace of a startup, times two, then condensed into one weekend. Sleep was a luxury, and time was our greatest enemy.

The goal was to get something working ASAP. Each team was aiming to build a prototype fast, then iterate on their idea.

In an environment like this you reach for your bag of tricks. Whatever your background you’ll enviably go with what you know will get the job done fast.

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If conditions are right…

It will be 3am. Your feet will be tapping the beats from song you’ve already heard multiple times as you finish your 3rd cup of coffee.

You’ll be straddling the line between brilliance and insanity as you fight to decide if what you’ve just written was pure genius, or if you’ve just been wearing your headphones too tight all night.

Yesterday will be a distant memory and tomorrow… will come eventually. For now, you’ll stay in the moment with total focus.

Later, with your eyes all puffy, you’ll look back on the last few hours and wonder where all the time went. Somehow against all odds you did it all, and then some.

Then it occurs to you. You just had a montage.