I got an email yesterday about some MIT students from my fraternity creating a balloon for $150 with no custom electronics that took pictures from 80,000 ft in the air.
Here's one of their photos. See their website for more.
I love technology!!!
I was at a conference last weekend with a lot of non-tech entrepreneurs. It can be refreshing to get outside the valley and into a pool with different kinds of fish. It was a lot of fun.
My favorite question to ask new people was: How did you get into your business?
Now, these guys do things like importing soy sauce and related goods from Asia, or designing and manufacturing green buildings all across the US. It's really quite varied.
Most folks said they got into their industry because of someone in their family.
That's pretty cool if you sit down and think about it. It's a pretty robust way to allocate human capital in a distributed way. I doubt many journalists are telling their kids to go into journalism, but I'd bet most energy scientists are thinking that their offspring should consider following in their footsteps.
It seems slow as a mechanism of action, but probably only to those in highly volatile industries like high tech. On the grand scale of things it's probably about right in terms of balancing too fast with too slow.
And your family members can train you.
How many of your friends in real estate got into it because someone in their family showed them the ropes? Right.
Same thing with teaching. We have several public school teachers in my family. The ones in the business show the new entrants how to get certification, how to find a good job, what to expect, and so on.
My dad buys and sells used truck and heavy construction equipment. He got into the business thirty years ago because that's what my mom's dad was doing.
This is an amazing system!!
This doesn't seem to happen as much in high tech. We're certainly in a new field that hasn't had a lot of time to replicate through families. I know that Trip Adler, the founder of Scribd, was born to a doctor who started a company that later became public.
Topher Conway just started working with his dad, Ron Conway, who is the most prolific angel investor in the world.
So if you're looking for the next step in your career, look around you at your close friends and family. They're the ones who will give you the honest and informed skinny, and they'll be the most likely to help you out along the way.
How about you? Do you know anyone who has entered a career because of a family member or close friend? Let me know in the comments!
Editor's note: I still intend on wrapping up my series on hiring soon. Also, more ways MIT didn't prepare me for startups are on the way! Subscribe via RSS to stay in touch!
In part 1 of this series we talked about how to find people who might be rockstars. So how can you tell if someone is going to knock balls out of the park for you and your team?
Hard to say. :)
Here's the process we take a candidate through when hiring. Some of what I'm going to say is particular to interviewing developers, which is what I have the most experience with. Most will be general.
Resumes
First, read the resume.
The first thing I look for is experience at a software products company. So the company’s main gig has to be software, and their goods are sold as products not services/consulting. E.g. Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, etc. These are the companies that write production code as their core competency.
How long do they stay at jobs? Three or more years at a job is good. One to two is okay provided it's not the pattern. Less than one year is bad.
Next I look at their career trajectory, if they have one.
If they have less than three years of experience, look at their education. Small points for attending a top university for their field. Extra points if they seemed to really push themselves with grad classes, research, etc.
Lots of buzz words or acronyms in a resume is a bad sign.
It's great if they have a list of personal projects. It shows initiative and creativity. It's also good fodder for interviews down the road.
These are just some of my if-then rules. You'll end up growing your own set of rules over time.
Be very picky at this stage if the resume came from a job board or recruiter. You can read 100 resumes in the time it takes you to do a phone interview, so the cost of going to the next stage is quite high. Only do it for great candidates.
Resume Extra Credit
Smg on Hacker News suggested in response to part 1 that you can use online coding problems to help filter through the wave of resumes you'll get from job boards and optionally recruiters.
Justin.tv does this has some pretty neat problems on their jobs page.
Phone Interviews
40-60 minutes.
The most important thing is to have them write code or otherwise demonstrate what they'd actually be doing day to day.
Just to be clear, the most important part of ANY interview is where they demo what they'll be doing every day. It's not their resume, and it's not the stories about their old teams. It's actually asking them to write code, or actually asking a product manager to walk you through a product they've built.
You'd be surprised how many interviews I've been through where the candidate was doing wonderfully, right up to the skill demo where they bomb.
This doesn't mean you can start right off with the coding questions, though. You want the candidate to get comfortable first so they can show you their best colors.
Ergo I split my interviews into three parts: first, I have them walk me through their resume. Then we do "more interviewy type stuff," as I call it. And finally they get to ask me any questions they have about us and what we're up to.
I tell them upfront that's the game plan so they know what to expect.
Having them walk me through their resume helps them settle in. The most important things to dig into during the resume review stage are why they left each position, and try to triangulate what their manager thought of them. This should take about ten minutes.
Then comes the skill demo.
For developers I'll start with something easy like “Are you familiar with the singleton design pattern?" And then go right into my coding question. I have them write their code on a piece of paper, and have them read it back to me token by token when they're done. I copy it down on my end of the phone, and then we talk about it.
The code you have them write should be ten to twenty lines long. They can use any language of their choice, but it should compile. (For all you youngsters, "compile" is something that used to be done to code back in the day.)
It should be one function, with a loop, and have at least one or two edge cases.
It's amazing how much information such a short question can give you. Some candidates will nail the code in 30 seconds, others will take 15-25 minutes. There's at least an order of magnitude difference in the variation of outcomes for a simple 15 lines of code. That's awesome interview power and the most effective signal per minute part of the interview.
On the other hand I haven't found logic puzzles to be useful. I will follow up the coding question with some algorithmic questions if they're doing well.
Third part is where they get to ask you questions. Everyone they talk to should give them this opportunity at each interview. Usually doesn’t take more than 5 minutes.
Score the candidate.
One phone interview should be enough to decide whether to bring them on site, save for extraordinary circumstances.
Onsite Interviews
Three or four interviews, usually three. If an early interviewer gets negative feedback we send the candidate on their way so we don’t tell them up front what their interview schedule will be. Just ask them to be available all day.
Plan the interview loop out beforehand.
We also give the candidates a binder at the beginning with a picture and bio for everyone in the company. That's a great way to help them connect with and understand your team.
Have fun! Start with a big smile! Ask them if they'd like anything to drink. When you're done tell they can take a short break to stretch or use the bathroom. Being interviewed is hard work so try to make it as pleasant as possible. Eat lunch with them. Give them a t shirt!
Have them hack on a 1-3 hour onsite project working on your problems. They are allowed to ask questions, of course. You only want to do this if they’ve done well on the interviews and you expect them to do well.
After the on site interview you should be ready to make a hire / no hire decision.
How do you decide if you should make an offer? The obvious aside, there are a few things you should be aware of.
Setting the bar too high
People often preach the virtues of having high hiring standards. There's lots of theory out there about this but it's true in practice, too. Companies die regularly because they try to "staff up". That's undeniable.
But there is an opposite side of the coin that people don't talk about. 95% of hiring managers need to be told to "have high standards" and they'll iterate into the sweet spot from there.
But 5% of people need to be told to "have lower standards" and iterate into the sweet spot from the too-high direction.
We were one of those five-percenters. Xobni was originally VERY picky. There are a few reasons we loosened up.
The most important reason is that above a certain threshold of signal it's just impossible to predict how well someone will perform on the job.
There are so many random variables like your product, your team, your technology, your culture, their experience, etc that go into success or failure.
I've been surprised in both directions before. There have been people I had high hopes for who didn't work out. We've also hired people who have performed way above expectations.
So if you are too picky you eventually just start measuring noise.
Moreover, your interview time has diminishing returns. If you learn one unit of info during the first 60 minute phone interview, you'll learn only one more unit during the next full day of interviews. The next unit will come from a week of working together. And so on.
If you're interviewing a cofounder by all means spend two months working together before making a call. But otherwise your candidates will expect you to make a decision inside of eight hours of interview time.
Reminder: most people should probably have higher interview standards. Just be aware of pressures in the other direction. They do exist.
Hiring entrepreneurs versus hiring for patience
When we first took money from Vinod Khosla he told us "All of the first 20 employees at Sun went on to start their own companies or become CEOs of major companies. You want to hire those kinds of people."
I agree but disagree.
If you're a Sun or a Google or a Facebook then sure, hire these hyper ambitious folks. Or at least consider it.
But if you're not a rocketship, and most companies aren't, then be careful with hiring someone who's hyperambitious and thinking on short time scales.
The problem is that building a company takes a long time. It's a long haul. And you need the early employees to stick around for the long haul because they understand the broadest breadth of your company's culture, early decisions, code base, customer development, and so on.
So if your first hires want to start their own companies in the next two years you're not optimally set up for success.
Ambition is good in early hires, just not combined with antsy-ness. You want to invest in those people's companies, just not hire them for your own.
Your culture
So you really want ambition combined with patience. How about culture? How do you hire for that?
I'm not sure. I knew from the beginning how to spot great developers and have picked up bits and pieces about identifying other skill sets.
But I'm still working on hiring for culture fit. Here are a few examples I've been learning from.
Example one, just having fun.
Greg Thatcher is one of our many great developers. He runs a web site called gregthatcher dot com. He has several apps on there including a bank routing number lookup utility. Gregthatcher.com often comes up in office jokes.
Now check out gregthatcherdotcomfanclub.com, made by our very own Ryan Gerard. How fun is this stuff?!?!
I don't know the formal definition of company culture but even if this is completely unrelated I still wanted to share it because it's ninja awesome!
And that's part of why I come to work every day.
Example two, traditions. Every Friday we order the best pizza in San Francisco into the office for lunch. It's one of the things I look forward to every week. Yes, I'm that easy folks.
Example three, recognition. Beyond our universal recognition of gregthatcher.com as a jewel given to humanity, every Thursday at our company meeting we give out the Zombie award. It's given to an individual who has done something awesome every week. Everyone is encouraged to email Skyler, who organizes the award, throughout the week when someone does something outright baller. Then the winner is selected through an intricate set of informal procedures -- mostly banter and wit. The award comes with a large rubberish lego brick that the various offices can accrue and assemble.
I know, sounds a lot like the infamous Microsoft Ship-It award. It really is much cooler, though -- trust me.
All of this "culture" creates trust among your team, which is great for productivity, retention, new hiring, karma, fun, and your soul!
How do you build such a culture? Look for people who are passionate, positive, and creative. Then ask them to help you add spice. Empower them where appropriate, and wallah! That seems to be the formula Zappos has followed, anyway.
If you want a recipe for creating mistrust, hire people who are always cynical. That will weaken an organization like nothing else. They will drag down others around them, which gives them positive feedback so they make cynicism a stronger part of their identity, and the spiral downward continues. That won't end well.
Netscape's really-bad-attitude might be a counter example, but I don't think so. It seems to have been more of a way to blow off steam than to fester. Not sure.
Speaking of which, I'd love to hear war stories or lessons from folks in the comments on building culture. I'm very interested in learning more here!
Part 3
...is coming soon! Feel free to subscribe via RSS so you don't miss it!
I'm going to talk about how to woo and close candidates you want to hire, the basics of figuring out compensation, roles, titles, and a couple of other meta details that I hope will be helpful!
Nothing matters more to your success than the skill and determination of your team. So, how do you find and recruit these folks who will make you incredibly successful?
First, what experience have I had hiring and building teams? Moderate. I've directly hired about twenty folks and have been involved with but not responsible for hiring about ten or fifteen others. I've found that you can hire well without experience but you'll be about 3x more efficient with experience and you'll call fewer false negatives. So I hope to describe some of the patterns I've picked up over the past four years.
Prime Directive
Your first job is not to hire bad people. Prefer false negatives to false positives. I'll come back to this later but it's an important foundation to the whole discussion.
Finding Talent
The easiest way to find talent is through your networks. I knew this going in but didn't know how to reduce it to practice.
As an MIT engineer I don't have natural networking skills. Some think this means it's hard for me to mingle at social events, which you get used to, but the more damning result is that you don't have the mental gestures of thinking in terms of your "network." Network itself feels like a dirty word.
But network just means your friends. So when you need to "find talent through your networks," that just means reaching out to people you did school projects with at MIT. It's not really that bad.
Paul Graham originally told me to "shake my friend tree" when looking for a cofounder, which is certainly friendlier terms than "use your network." So shake your friend tree.
I can only think of two real group projects I did at MIT, and both of my teammates from one of those projects are or have worked at Xobni before. How awesome is that!?
If you don't have a network, hire folks who do. I hired three or four pros from my immediate friend tree into Xobni, but we've hired 15 to 20 folks from networks in general.
Example: we hired Bryan Kennedy after meeting him through Y Combinator. Bryan is our founding web engineer and is the mastermind behind all of our web properties.
Bryan referred in one of our next employees, Ryan Gerard, through a friend of a friend. Matt, my cofounder, and I were having lunch one Sunday and we got a call from Ryan. We gave him the Xobni pitch over the phone and the rest is history.
This is how it happens.
It seems remarkably inefficient that most hiring happens through friend trees and not through more merit based approaches. We'll probably have better approaches in 30 years but for now this is what we're stuck with.
Recruiters and job boards
Recruiters and job boards don't work well either. They are supposed to fix this problem, and despite the gobs of money people are willing to pay they are still unable to deliver in general.
First, bad people (heretofore "unqualified workers") stay on the market longer and cycle their resume around 500x more often than a great employee in the lifetime of their career.
I kid you not. How many times do you think the top 1% of developers send their resume to companies? Maybe 15 times during college, they get an initial job, and get to pick where they work from there out based on reputation. So maybe 30 resume-sends over their lifetime.
Whereas unqualified workers will be on the job market say 15 times, each time spamming their Java resume (sorry -- couldn't help myself) out to 100 places each time before getting hired.
Someone check me on the math, but it sure feels like a 500x difference.
Recruiters won't save you, either. They get paid when you hire someone. They do not PAY YOU for consuming your time.
So a classic first time entrepreneur mistake, which I made, goes like this. You raise a bunch of money, and the recruiters come calling. Paul Graham didn't talk about recruiters, so you don't know what to do. (!) You listen to their tale, and they tell you they don't get paid unless you hire one of their people. So you can't lose. You sign a simple contract and go to sleep.
Then you wake up the next morning with seven resumes in your inbox. You'll get another seven the next day. And they'll keep coming until you interview someone. They will wear you down.
What happens next determines whether your company will fail or live on to fight other battles.
If you are looking to "staff up" you will look at the number of resumes you've read, and you'll say to yourself:
"Self, you've looked at 200 resumes and interviewed ten of them. You've worked hard. You certainly deserve to pull the trigger and soak in some celebration and accomplishment."
And repeat until you've hired an engineering team full of people playing the part and burning your cash.
Seriously, I've seen a company do this. Needless to say they sank without a trace.
Instead, if you maintain your hiring standards you will wisen up and dump the recruiters. That's what happened to me but I hope you can one-up me and avoid spending time on recruiters overall.
Now this isn't true of all recruiters. Your mileage may vary. What usually happens is the good recruiters move up and do executive recruiting, so most staff recruiters are crappy. I don't have enough direct experience with executive recruiters to speak about them.
There are good staff recruiters too, but they are very rare. At the very least ask for some clause to be changed in their contract and see if they have the organizational power to do it. If not you're dealing with a chop shop / call center. It's also a bad sign if they anonymize the resumes they send you. Most do.
Back to job boards: I have found that the Joel On Software job board doesn't have the spam problem. A typical Xobni post there nets us two good resumes, one bad resume, and that's it. Not cost effective but at least not spammy.
Craigslist can also work for hiring some roles, particularly where skill is easy to measure and there isn't much variation among choices, i.e. not developers, not product people, and not business people.
When you do use Craigslist run a bulk recruiting process. Post once on craigslist, ask everyone who emails you to answer a few questions on a form, and invite those that respond and read well to your office at thirty minute intervals across one day. Have all of the decision makers available and at the office on that day.
Finally, use jobs@yourcompany.com on your home page but use different email addresses for any job board postings you do. Blind emails to jobs@ from your home page will tend to be high quality, so you'll want them in separate buckets.
Finding folks using your network
Building a network and using it to find the best people is a long term play. CEOs who knew lots of people at Yahoo got a windfall when Yahoo started faltering, for example. These events are rare and hard to predict.
You also can't predict when you'll get a phone call from a friend of a friend who isn't happy at his current gig.
The best you can do is try to encourage these random events. Meet lots of people, spread the word about what you're doing, and be so awesome and excited that people remember you and your enterprise.
This is a great strategy overall, and will result in more frequent coincidences that result in positive results.
For more on this topic, go read Never Eat Alone and this blog post.
Loose in the socket
I originally assumed that people's happiness at a job falls along a spectrum, maybe in a bell shaped curve. Not so. It seems to be binary: either someone is happy, or they're not and open to a switcheroo. I call the latter group loose in the socket.
Also, the really good and intrinsically motivated folks won't come work for you because you offer a higher salary.
At the end of the day, it's disproportionally harder to recruit someone who is happy than someone who is loose in the socket.
This is not to say you shouldn't talk to good people you know who are happy in their current job. Just realize they are long term plays as mentioned above. If someone is happy where they are, your best shot is to (a) have a really compelling product and team, (b) tell them you have an open door for them and would love to tell them more about what you're doing at any time in the future, and (c) hire their friends or people they know are good. These long term bets can work over the long term, and are bets worth placing, but you can't count on them in your pipeline.
Part 2
Part 2 and beyond will be coming soon, and will touch on topics like:
...among other things! Check out the RSS feed to stay in touch!
I was at MIT for a few days last week for the MIT Startup Bootcamp. One thing I love about MIT entrepreneurs is how scrappy and motivated they are. Compared to the iconic facebook chasing social media west coast entrepreneurs, these guys are Rocky Balboas. They stay in the game when others would have given up, and they tackle substantive problems.
MIT graduates still come out with several learned habits that will work against them though. Hopefully I'm wrong and it's just me, and I wouldn't be surprised, but I do think these are more general.
One such habit is to obsess over everything. At MIT there's a very finite set of material to study at any time in any given class. The hard core students among us make sure that the curve is attrociously high. You might spend 20 hours studying a small set of material.
So the onus was on expertness. Of everything.
This doesn't work in an early stage startup where everyone has to be a generalist and work on seven different projects per day.
You don't want to be an expert in your series A docs. If you are negotiating the finer points in a legal negotiation, you are losing.
If you are worrying about your computers costing $800 versus $1200, you are losing.
I know the MIT obsessive in you wants to optimize everything, but just don't.
On the other hand, hit REALLY high notes on the important things.=
HubSpot is a startup that's all about bringing new Internet marketing to the long tail of small and medium businesses. It's a huge opportunity and a huge deal. Their biggest challenge is educating the 100 million small business owners about this new world.
For HubSpot, educating their market is incredibly important to their success.
So they put on a conference. Their founders wrote a book. They've released several free and easy tools like TwitterGrader and WebsiteGrader. They take this stuff seriously, and they should. Their MIT'ness is shining through!
So, for folks like me, half the battle is identifying where to hit the high notes and where to swing for the B team. And when it comes time for the B team, swallow your pride and show 'em how impressively unimpressive you can be.
Now, I am no public speaker. In 2007 I got a chance to say some words at Startup School along with several other Y Combinator founders. My voice was cracking and I spoke at ten thousand words a second I was so nervous.
Which is why I was excited to give a talk to eight hundred people at this last weekend’s MIT Startup Bootcamp. This was a chance to redeem myself. I’ve been taking acting classes for the past six months to work on my communication and presence skills, so this was a perfect mid-term exam.
I put about 30 hours into the talk. I wanted to test how far my skills could take me so that meant putting in an excess of time to make sure I took the best possible shot. I wrote a full twelve page script that I memorized. I rehearsed with my acting teacher for three or four hours. I spent a hours on a couple different versions of my slides.
I’m calling this one a success! It was the least nervous I have ever been doing public speaking. Part of that might have been that I only got three hours of sleep the night before and just had no energy to be nervous; I’m not sure. I had gone to sleep at 1am, woke up at 4am, and couldn’t go back to sleep until it was time to get up!
But, without further adieu, here are the thirteen things I learned that went into my public speaking improvements, in no particular order:
What do you think? Any other good tips for MIT personality public speaking?
I got an email yesterday about some MIT students from my fraternity creating a balloon for $150 with no custom electronics that took pictures from 80,000 ft in the air.
In defiance of California state law, when I hear a new jam on my car radio I pull out my IPhone, launch Shazam, and use it to "tag" the song. Then I scroll down, press "Share This Tag," type in my email address, and return my eyes to the road. Any number of days/weeks later, I download the mp3 and have it added to my collection.
A friend recently wrote and asked for opinions about a web site idea he had. The idea was "yelp meets international backpackers" - reviews for restaurants, places to stay, etc. The tripadvisor for post college travelers.
Howdy,
Rock on dude! I've always been curious about the backpacker traveling industry so this is a cool way to find out more about it.
I looked on compete.com and compared the traffic of hostelworld and couchsurfing. They each get about 100,000 unique visitors per month. Hostelworld apparently has 20 employees based on their home page. I'm not sure if they are all local or international / what their average wages are, but I'd venture to guess that their burn rate is about 2M per year, and I'd guess that their revenue is just north of that...maybe 2.5M or 3M per year, optimistically. If they have 1M users per year (somewhat optimistic based on their monthly traffic, but (a) they probably have lots of turnover in their user base, and (b) multiple people using the site from the same hostel probably only counts as one 'visitor') that's about 2.5 dollars in revenue per user per year (ARPU), which sounds about right given how close they are to the transaction.
Couchsurfing died a couple of years ago in a major data loss and only started back 'recently' so their growth is a little bit misleading. Anyway couchsurfing isn't in the middle of a transaction so they almost certainly have a harder time making money. They ask for donations essentially.
Much better to be airbnb than couchsurfing, if you're in it to build a big business. Airbnb is couchsurfing but with financial transactions. They got started with $15k from the same investors who gave Xobni our first money, so I don't know them but they are very close in my social network.
Anyway, it's just helpful to understand the comparables so you know what you're getting into!
Yelp on the other hand has 25M unique visitors per month, and growing! The yelp CEO mentions international growth here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-9884023-36.html. More likely, though, they are more focused on generating revenue from those 25M users much more than growing internationally.
Anyway, I would focus on the following questions:
1) how will you acquire new users?
2) if successful, how will you make money?The risks there seem large, but they always do at the beginning of any successful venture. :)
The other day I submitted my recent blog post, Steve Ballmer, International Security, and Us Little Folk, to Hacker News. It got one upvote and one comment:
I found absolutely no point in the article. Confused.
"fyi"
"My mother, bless her soul, thinks about our product in the shower. She came up with the idea below. It could be a useful addition to the next release. I think our eskimo users would appreciate this feature."
I was thinking this morning about blogs and the pictures adorn their home pages. They must reflect what's important to the authors, I suspected.
I started going through them in my head....
Me: I climb in trees and enjoy nature. (truth: I do enjoy nature but not often enough!)
Fred Wilson: I enjoy my family.
Jeff Atwood: This is a silly blog!
Jeff Bonforte (Xobni CEO): I love my dog.
Dharmesh Shah: where's your photo man?! you need a karate photo of you versus an old, wise kung fu master!
Paul Graham: Here's some good art. (home page)
Mini Microsoft: Microsoft-ish blocks-on-blocks image; needs a ninja.
Auren Hoffman: don't mess with me.
Rick Segal: (more to the point than Auren) better watch out!...
Here's a snip of consciousness from a late night last week...
It was the first week of my first semester at MIT. At the time every class was full of excitement from the pass/fail grading, new friends, and fresh love interests. I went to my political science class, American Foreign Policy, and this one was no different. I spotted the cute girl from my dorm and took a seat.
The brilliant aprofessor, Stephen Van Evera, started talking about political science as a science. It’s a different kind of science, he said. In contrast to physics or chemistry, we’re dealing with:
“Consider Annie Oakley’s central role in world history,” our notes said. Annie Oakley was a famed rifle shooter; probably the best in the world in the early twentieth century. She was in Europe and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany challenged her to shoot out a cigarette he was going to put in his mouth. She hit it right on target but supposedly regretted for the rest of her life not taking him out. He was largely responsible for World War I.
In such a science we’re basically left with history to learn from, and history is noisy. It’s a primitive science.
I noticed a parallel when watching Steve Ballmer’s talk to Stanford student entrepreneurs. Ballmer was talking about business strategy and mentioned a case study about the Kodak-Polaroid wars in the 1970s:
It’s an interesting case. If you read it, think through your thoughts and then you can read on the web about what actually happened after 1976 where the case study leaves off.
But more than not I just get the sense that business strategy and international policy are both hard.
For example, I wonder if Ballmer thought he could easily kill Google in 2005. Again, low n. Microsoft has killed many companies in the past, but Netscape seems to be the only one of recent memory that was a sizable competitor. Microsoft was able to beat Netscape but largely because Netscape self destructed with a complete code rewrite and misguided aspirations to kills the Windows franchise.
Well Google isn’t biting that bait.
But most of this doesn’t matter for small time software entrepreneurs like us. In a USA versus USSR situation you better believe people are doing their game theory and acting at least somewhat rational.
Same thing with MSFT – if they’re doing a bear hug you better believe they’ve crossed their t’s.
Okay, okay – certainly all governments are stupid in some ways and big companies can be too. But you don’t see countries like the USA running 500% daily inflation rates or razing whole neighborhoods and leaving people homeless, as we see in smaller regimes like Zimbabwe.
That’s where we are, my friends! We’re in the millions not the billions. Polaroid and Kodak case studies are less likely to be helpful than making a good product and waiting for your competition to self destruct.
Good products make a philosophically positive difference.
Good products mean, by definition, giving people what they want.
For example: Now you can talk to your grandparents, who are a hundred miles away, IN REAL TIME! Now you can see a picture to help you relive the moment with your niece was born. And so on.
Should you care about giving people what they want?
Well, how about the opposite: should you care about taking away something people already have and enjoy? This is called stealing, interestingly. Steve Jobs is the opposite of a robber.
Which is probably why successful societies reward these opposite-of-a-robbers. As Paul Graham has said, "Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world."
In fact, the US takes it up one level further: innovators aren't only rewarded financially; they also receive social capital. That's why, for example, Steve Jobs was able to wake up one day and just "give" Leslie Feist citizenship.
Paul Graham essentially bootstrapped Y Combinator with the social capital he received from his successful writings. Now, of course, it's clear that was an investment not an expenditure. He has more social capital now than before YC!
This is a great system!
(This blog entry is based on a long comment I posted recently on Hacker News.)
Last week Xobni announced that we’ve added the Blackberry Fund to our series B financing.
We also released a new version of our software alongside that announcement. The release got less attention because there aren’t any user visible features.
Truth be told, though, we invested about a million dollars into that release! And the investment will be critical to the success of Xobni.
So how is it possible to invest so much, on something so important, without adding new features?
If you’ve read the title of this post then you already know the answer. Other than consuming ungodly amounts of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, we worked on two things -- performance and stability.
Outlook is a hostile environment for a product like Xobni. It has several different APIs, each with different quirky interfaces, side effects, and threading models.
There's no way around having complex APIs for Outlook. They expose programmatic access to the most complicated email application ever built. Just like Excel and MS Word, it's really hard to underestimate how feature rich this program is.
As evidence, I’d suggest you check out this unusual peak into the depths of Outlook's complexity.
Scroll down to the section titled "Individual bugs that are fixed." Wow!
Let's run through my favorite example of how complex these APIs are.
Imagine you have an ID for a message, and you want to open a draft reply to that message so the user can type in their reply and press send. It should work just as if the user hit the Reply button, or pressed Ctrl-R.
Easy right? That's what I thought, too...
The first API I tried seemed to work, but when the user pressed send the icon for the original message didn't change to the purple arrow to indicate that it had been replied to.
I found a second approach that didn't have that bug, except it turned out to save the draft of the message (if it is being composed for more than five minutes, or the user explicitly presses Save) STRAIGHT INTO THE INBOX, instead of the Drafts folder. It looked funky -- no sender name, no sent time, etc. Ouch.
I found another API to use. It set the right icon -- good -- and seemed to save drafts into the Drafts folder. Double check. Unfortunately as soon as the user started typing it showed up in Times New Roman, 12pt, as the default font. Doh.
One of these three approaches also wouldn't pre-populate the user's email signature.
Fourth API was a charm!
…not to mention that the ID for a message is allowed to change under certain circumstances, such as when it gets moved to a different folder.
I could really talk about the complexity of Outlook and the scenarios we've ran into for days. Below are some example bugs I pulled from the Outlook feb-09 cumulative update document linked above. Each of these can hide weird race conditions, thread starvations, or just plain old corner cases that only show up when the moon is in the seventh house.
* Inefficient processing occurs in a loop during intermittent network connectivity. * If the store providers are disconnected early, the Outlook.exe process becomes unresponsive for a very long time. * When you right-click an item, the whole item is loaded into memory more frequently than necessary. * Unnecessary disk reads are performed for every time that a custom form icon is rendered.
One of the fun side effects of doing this work is that you end up seeing all of the bugs you've come across in OTHER Outlook addins. I was using TechSmith's Snag-It the other day and smiled when I saw a draft it had opened save to the Inbox before I pressed send. They were using API #2. :-)
Not to mention that all of these other addins are accessing the same APIs, sometimes with "interesting interactions."
And on top of these challenges there are several users who have giant mailboxes. We've seen users with almost a million emails loaded into Outlook at the same time.
Usually these are the people with 12" laptops, 2 GBs of RAM, and 5400 RPM hard drives.
When this happens, all bets are off. Outlook takes a long time to load their twelve PST files. If an addin is trying to load its stuff at the same time you get heavy disk contention and "sequential" read throughputs plummet to 1 MB per second. And god help you if Outlook needs to "repair" any of these PSTs.
..the list goes on and on. We've been on a four month odyssey.
The sad truth is that there are still issues with our performance and stability. We fixed all of the reproducible issues but there still remain computers out there with all kind of weird registry permissions issues, combinations of other addins that can conflict with Xobni, and so on. It’s not the wild west out there, but bandits do pop up from time to time.
It's been both tough and fun. I love my team. We’ve hit some real high notes together.
I think we do it for our users. Not to be trite, but I think it’s true. Everyone on the engineering team feels a pinch of pain when users have problems. [1]
But, the other side of the coin is that we have a lot of fun with the code. There is some pretty awesome stuff going on under the covers. I'll give three quick examples..
1) Xobni's data store sits strictly underneath the sidebar code in the stack. It was originally built to support Xobni Analytics, our first product from 2006 that bombed. Fortunately we got to leverage the same data store when creating the Xobni sidebar. It's very cool. When someone is building software leveraging our backend, say the sidebar, or the Invite Your Friends feature, the code ends up looking like this:
foreach(var mail in new MailIterator()) { Console.WriteLine(mail.Subject); }
This code will print 10k subjects per second, from disk! And it's from a key-value store, so it's easy to add new data fields and types.
Our data store is darn useful. Just two days ago I wrote some code against it to get some important data for a new project we’re working on. It looks like pseudocode!
2) Not only that, but the data store is built to be client agnostic above "layer 1" where we interface with the mail client. So when we wanted to integrate Yahoo Mail all we had to do was build the adapter piece that knew how to speak Yahoo's language, and suddenly the mail floats all the way up the stack and appears in the sidebar right next to Outlook emails. :-)
3) The areas where we display information from Facebook, LinkedIn, etc are all little embedded instances of Internet Explorer. The code for those extensions is all just HTML and Javascript. When the user changes the current email we invoke a specific JS function called updatePerson(), and there's a callback object the JS can use to make HTTP calls and write lines to the log file. This architecture, which was invented by someone smarter than me, allows us to pump these babies out quickly and without much QA risk to the other parts of the program.
It just doesn't get any cooler than this!
Anyway, back to the main subject of the blog post: performance and stability and the road ahead..
I think we’re all excited with what we've done, but mostly we're already starting to look look forward to the next generation of features for our customers. It's going to be an exciting rest-of-2009 ahead!
Stay tuned!
(Commercial: if you're a developer and are interested in being part of the team, send your resume to jobs@xobni.com!)
Host software services. This is a pretty big deal for entrepreneurs looking for business opportunities. Let’s look at some examples.
LogMeIn, which filed to go public in 2008 is basically VNC with a web only client side and central servers that will facilitate NAT traversal across firewalls. Various VNC developers had written software to do this but nobody was willing to maintain the servers. That’s created a business opportunity and a competitive advantage against open source alternatives.
Fog Creek Copilot took advantage of the same opportunity, and in this case they actually used VNC software.
What about a place to host your MP3 play history for other people to see and for other software to mine? Audioscrobbler started to do this, but morphed into a startup called Last.fm.
I’m sure open source blogging software was around when Evan Williams launched Blogger.com. …and look what happened to Blogger. I wonder what percent of blogs today are ran in the old fashioned way: someone went to SourceForge.net and installed it on their shared server, versus using a company set up to host the blog for them. I’d bet in favor of the hosted service.
It’s too bad, really. There’s no doubt we’d have better software today if open source projects could get servers and operational resources for free. We’d probably all be using an IM client built around Jabber.
But it’s an opportunity for entrepreneurs, and one that will grow in the age of web services and web experiences. Ask yourself: what open source software exists that solves a big problem in a large market? Can you add value by hosting it in the cloud?
A friend just asked about spending at an early stage startup. I thought I'd post my response in case it's useful to others.
Seed stage (a) should be easy; it’s just the rent for your area. In Cambridge we had a 3br apartment near Harvard Square for $2200 per month, but we subletted out one of the rooms for $800 per month and had Drew working from our living room for about $400 per month. In Crystal Towers we paid $2600 for our 2br and then we had a stint of working out of my single which was also about $2600 per month.
I don’t know Seed stage (b) as much because I just didn’t keep track. But I can triangulate based on our out of cash dates. We were making $12,000 last four months, though that includes some consulting revenue from Matt working a weekend or two per month @ NASA for $55 per hour. It was super low. We ate bagels in the morning with cream cheese, and made turkey sandwiches with avocado for lunch. Dinner was usually the Italian sandwich/pasta place next door.
Our burn was so low partially because we were working so hard. When you’re working seven days a week for 14 hours per day that leaves little time else to get out and spend money.
Needless to say, we weren’t drawing a salary. The company was essentially paying for everything. Our philosophy was that we put our bank accounts into long term storage, like a secret agent on a 10 year mission would. We didn’t withdraw from or deposit into our personal accounts.
Once VC stage hit we were slow to accelerate burn, which was smart in some ways and dumb in others. Matt still didn’t want to spend the money for window AC units (dumb). We raised our salaries to $72k (smart). We continued to work out of my apartment until we outgrew it by headcount, not by bank balance (smart).
Matt was a champion for conserving cash. Him plus our lowly roots made us, as a board member put it, “remarkably capital efficient.”
It caused me some cognitive dissonance, though, to see different spending habits WITHIN rounds. When we were launching at TechCrunch 40 I had a hired hand we flew in sleep on my couch at home, but a year later while we were still series A we wouldn’t have hesitated to put him up in a hotel. The people in the company had changed; it wasn’t related to being in series X.
So I guess to answer your VC stage (a) we got a lease for 3200 sq ft for $5000 per month by looking on craigslist. A steal.
For VC stage (b), we paid all personal expenses by salary. The salary could be low because we were working so much of the day.
That’s the prevailing effect. High salaries in a startup are probably exactly correlated with low time in front of a computer.