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The Cringely (Not in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour is less than two weeks from being over yet where is all the video? It’s coming, I promise.

We have so far visited companies in New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Minnesota, North Dakota, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, and are now in Texas. Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina are yet to come. We’ve driven 8,700 miles with about 2,000 to go.

That’s a lot of driving. And there’s the problem. It is hard to shoot video all day and evening, write a blog, be a husband and dad, drive an average of 300 miles per day and do a fair job of editing video segments for the web. Something had to give. And that something has clearly been the video.

Fortunately, I don’t think it will matter much in the end. We’re starting to hack away at the more than two terabytes of video shot so far and will begin posting segments shortly. Once they start they’ll continue through the rest of the year because I’ll be editing, not driving.

This whole project began last summer when we had such a good time driving our RV across the country that my young and lovely wife said, “Let’s find a way to do this again next year but this time get paid for it.” And so we did. But the difference between last year and this is not just the money, it’s the work we’ve had to do to earn the money. TV no longer holds any glamor for my kids.  This has been no vacation.

But it has been an eye-opening experience. I’ve worked on-and-off in tech startups all my adult life, but that didn’t prepare me for an intimate look inside dozens of startups. The role of these companies in our economy and culture has been way underestimated. The general media have little sense that these companies even exist and the tech media, for the most part, doesn’t understand the details. This project is something that has never been done before and may go a long way toward helping America rediscover one of its own greatest strengths. I hope to be doing Startup Tours for many summers to come.

Just don’t ask me to drive.

Tags: Cringely Startup Tour

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 4th, 2010 at 7:43 am and is filed under 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.