Luckily The Founder Sleeping In His Car Isn't Crazy Or On Meth

After I read about the guy who moved up from LA, and is living in his car while he finds a co-founder and get his startup off the ground I was pretty floored. Yeah there's some flawed logic there, but that's not the point. The fact that he physically got in his car, drove up to Palo Alto, and now parks at night in secluded dark areas is really impressive to me. It's dangerous but that's part of what makes him cool.

After reading his story the other night, I tracked down his phone number and he happened to be 5-mins away from my house. I invited him over for a warm meal and 60-minutes out of the freezing rain. Kurt Varner is a married designing who is meeting with anyone and everyone in the Valley in hopes of finding a great co-founder or group of people that he can join with to change the world.

Watch and hear him in his own words. 

Kurt is literally sleeping in his car with the backseat down and his legs stretched into the trunk. Best thing about him is he is neither crazy or on drugs (WIN). He's just extremely passionate about getting a startup off the ground. He's also probably cheap and frugal to the extreme.

The product he's working on is called Daily Toaster and he talks about it being a way to make sure you will get out of bed each morning. I normally wouldn't have thought much about it, but after not thinking about the alarm clock business for 5+ years, hours earlier a different entrepreneur also pitched me on an alarm clock app. Prediction: here comes the alarm clock app double bubble!

The other thing that resonated with me about Kurt's thinking is that if you sleep in or hit the snooze button consistently, then by the end of your life you will have wasted an entire year sleeping. Now we're talking real value. If you could get out of bed 30-minutes early every morning what would that be worth to you? Personally I'd pay a lot for it.

Kurt has taken some heat for abandoning LA for SV but the connections he's made in the past 2-weeks have been well worth any negativity he's had to endure. And if you see a bearded fellow sleeping in his car in Palo Alto (it is the only city in the Bay Area where its allowed), buy him a hot dinner and introduce him to someone interesting you know - or maybe offer a shower. He's grinding it out.