After participating and helping organize the February 2011 Houston Startup Weekend, I’ve thought a lot about what a new startup can accomplish in a weekend. As a participant and an organizer I got a great view into how all the teams were spending their time. I felt that, in general, pretty much all the teams (including mine) were spending a considerable amount of time trying to figure out what to do and they had no clear guidance.

Note: Consider this a ‘draft’ blog post. I just wanted to put it in front of people to get feedback and hopefully provide a bit of value. I will be updating the contents of this post over time.

What NOT to spend time on

Here are some of the thoughts that ran through my mind and the discussions I saw teams having last time around:

• Should I be writing a business plan?
• Do I need to think through financing?
• Do I need a marketing / PR strategy?
• What kind of legal structure do I need?
• How can I build an architecturally sound application in such a short time?
• How do I deal with customer support and bug tracking?
• Do I need to think through a sales strategy?

Inspired by Startup Weekend, I’ve been focusing on two startup projects for the last six months or so. While taking a deep dive into the startup world, I decided to read through several of the most popular startup-related books and blogs. My view now is that all of these things are *completely* useless until you’ve proven that you have an idea worth pursuing. They are especially useless when you only have 54 hours to figure out if your idea is worth pursing. That being said, these things are necessary when you have an idea that you’ve validated is worth your effort to grow and continue building into a real business. The thing is that you’re probably not going to reach this point during Startup Weekend, so my opinions is, why waste your time?

Bringing together what I’ve learned of all the books, lectures, and blogs I’ve been reading, I put together an outline of what I think teams should be focusing on during the next Startup Weekend.
In short, the first thing you need to do is define a problem that people have, then come up with a solution to solve that problem. Then you need to validate that the solution is something that people are willing to spend money on. That’s it. Sounds simple, right?

Honestly, at Startup Weekend you don’t need to market anything (in a traditional sense anyways), do press releases, create a C-corporation or LLC, write a business plan, or write an employee handbook. You don’t need to talk to an accountant, a design firm, SEO expert, or investors. You basically just need to get in front of as many of your potential customers as possible and talk to them. You need to find out if you understand their problem, if they understand your solution, and if they are willing to pay for your solution.

You *may* need to talk to an attorney, but not to set up a business structure. Don’t waste your time getting advice on the differences between all the different types of corporations and partnerships you could choose from. The only thing you’d want clarification on from an attorney is if some aspect of you business model may have certain legal ramifications. For example, if you want to set up a business to crowd-fund investments, you may want to talk to an attorney about the legal regulations on that. There is no sense in building a business model around something that is illegal or doesn’t abide by regulations.

What to spend time on

On the startupweekend.org FAQ ( http://startupweekend.org/about/faq/ ) it lists the three main judging criteria at the end of the weekend as business model, customer validation, and execution. My opinion is that you can demonstrate progress in these three areas as follows:

• Business Model - Create a Lean Canvas or Business Model Canvas
• Customer Validation - Show the results of your problem, solution, and product interviews and sign up as many paying customers as you can.
• Execution - Build a really good high-fidelity mock up or a working Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Here is a summary of what I think you need to accomplish over the course of the weekend:

• Outline who your customers are, the top 3 problems you think they have, and the simplest possible solution(s) to those problems that you could implement quickly. A Business Model Canvas or Lean Canvas works remarkably well here.
• Interview potential customers to validate the problem you think they have
• Create a set of mock ups, narrow in on early adopters, and interview them them on your solution
• Create a Minimum Viable Product, which implements (as simply as possible) the solution
• Narrow in on early adopters and interview them, showing them your MVP. Ask them to pay for it up front.

Startup Weekend Schedule Overview

Here is a high-level overview of the schedule I’ve put together. There is a pretty good chance that you will not follow this schedule exactly. Your specific Startup Weekend event schedule, team availability during the weekend, rate of progress, and venue hours will all impact your specific schedule. What I’m offering is a starting point that you can modify to fit your team’s needs.

Before Startup Weekend

• Buy your ticket
• Read Running Lean
• Find a team
• Prepare yourself for building your Business Model Canvas / Lean Canvas
• Prepare yourself for building your mockups
• Prepare yourself for building your product

Friday

8:45pm - 9:30pm
- Choose a team

9:30pm - 10:00pm
- Make a set of explicit agreements with your team

10:00pm - 11:00pm
- Do a Business Model Canvas or a Lean Canvas

11:00pm - 11:30pm
- Prepare your problem interview scripts

11:30pm - 12:00am
- List out potential customers

Saturday

8:00am - 11:00am
- Do as many problem interviews as you can
- Set up development environment

11:00am - 11:15am
- Pivot or Persevere

11:15am - 2:15pm
- Create mockups
- Narrow in on early adopters
- Prepare solution interviews

2:15pm - 5:15pm
- Do solution interviews

5:15pm - 5:30pm
- Have the ‘Pivot or Persevere’ meeting again

5:30pm - 12:00am
- Build Minimum Viable Product
- Narrow in on early adopters
- Prepare MVP interview scripts
- Prepare presentation

Sunday

8:00am - 2:00pm
- Finish MVP
- Do MVP interviews and sign up as many people as you can

2:00pm - presentation deadline
- Update presentation

Startup Weekend Schedule Details

Here are the details of my proposed weekend gameplan:

Before Friday

Buy your ticket

Read Running Lean
Purchase Running Lean by Ash Maurya and read through as much of it as you can. This book is a practical, step-by-step guide to running a “Lean Startup”. It is rooted in the Lean Startup methodology popularized by Eric Reis. There are several other good books out there that I think you should read as well, but if you only have time to read one book, it should be Running Lean. If you have time to read a few more, these are the ones you should read, in this order:

- Running Lean - http://www.runningleanhq.com
- Business Model Generation - http://amzn.to/rDfCwg
- The Lean Startup - http://amzn.to/v5ruBc
- Four Steps to the Epiphany - http://amzn.to/tGQR9Z

Find a team
If you can organize a team before the event, you’ll be able to hit the floor running (remember, no existing product allowed, so don’t start building your product before

Prepare yourself for building your Business Model Canvas / Lean Canvas
Your two options are two go with the Business Model Generation book, which shows you how to create a Business Model Canvas, or the Running Lean book that shows you how to create a Lean Canvas. I reference both of these books below. I recommend getting Running Lean. Print out some templates and walk through one or two “existing” businesses and do some canvases so you get the general idea.

Prepare yourself for building your mockups

• Become familiar with a wireframing tool. I like using Keynote on the Mac. You can use PowerPoint as well.
• Purchase any wireframing stencils you might need (http://keynotekungfu.com)
• Practice building a mockup or two

Prepare yourself for building your product

• Development environment (IDE, version control, databases, libraries, build scripts)
• Deployment / Hosting environment (Amazon, Heroku, Wordpress, etc.)
• Domain name and DNS mappings (if you already have an idea / brand in mind)

Friday

8:45pm - 9:30pm
Choose a team
This is one of the hardest parts, so I would recommend forming your team before you come to the event if possible. At least try to find one other person that you know to come to the event with you.

9:30pm - 10:00pm
Make a set of explicit agreements with your team
I like this set of agreements:
- Nobody on the team has to continue working on the startup after the weekend
- Anybody can run with the idea on their own after the event is over if they want. More specifically, if different people in the group don’t want to work together but want to separately pursue the idea, they are free to do so.
- Whoever pays for something (like a domain name) owns it
- All documentation, source code, materials, etc. will be accessible by the entire team after the event, indefinitely.
- Any money that the team makes off of the product over the course of the weekend will be evenly divided among team members. The money will be divided before the end of the event.
- After the weekend, a followup meeting will be set up to determine who wants to continue working together if anybody. All team members will be invited to that meeting.

E-mail this out to everyone on your team, and have them e-mail back with “I AGREE to these terms”.

10:00pm - 11:00pm
Do a Business Model Canvas or a Lean Canvas
A Business Model Canvas is a tool to quickly communicate a business idea without having to write out an entire business plan. It is defined in the Business Model Generation book that I listed above. The Business Model Canvas is a bit generic in that it can be used to outline any kind of business. In Running Lean, Ash Maurya outlines a modified version of the Business Model Canvas that is more relevant to online businesses. The best advice I can give you here is to read through the appropriate sections in Running Lean and do a Lean Canvas. Here is the template for the Lean Canvas:

[Click on image to see full size]

11:00pm - 11:30pm
Prepare your problem interview scripts
The focus of the problem interview is to go to people who are potential customer and validate that they actually have the problems you think they have. The script should be about 30 minutes long. You should introduce yourself and the format of the interview, then ask some questions to help categorize the customer. Afterwards you list out what you think are the top 3 problems they’re having and ask if those problems resonate with them. Find out how important those are to them and have them rank them. If there are other problems that are more important, have them clarify what those are. Then have them talk about each of the problems and just sit back and listen. Don’t try to sell them anything (yet). You can find advice for how to run these by searching online. The book Four Steps to the Epiphany gives great guidance in this area, and Running Lean gives you sample scripts that you can use.

11:30pm - 12:00am
List out potential customers
Start with people at the venue, because if your potential customer base is in the building, then you can run through your interviews more quickly. If you must, get out of the building and go talk to people directly outside, at coffee shops, or in your personal network. If you know who your potential customers may be and have some personal relationships with them, you could invite them to come to the venue. Interviews are better done in person, but if your customers are people in other geographies, then try to interview them through video-chat.

Saturday

8:00am - 11:00am
Do as many problem interviews as you can
Try to interview 5-10 people. Divide an conquer with your team. Do the interviews in pairs with one person interviewing and the other observing and reminding the interviewer if they forgot about something. Take notes as the customer talks and compare notes afterwards.

Set up development environment
The developer(s) on your team should start getting their development environment prepared. If you have enough people to run the interviews and prep the environments at the same time, then you’re in good shape. If not, then you need to be very efficient with your time.

Remember, the key isn’t to have perfect production-quality system. You just want to get something functional up as fast as possible. If you can use a content management platform or blogging platform to implement a simple version of your product, do that. You don’t have to build everything from scratch. Try to use Wordpress or Drupal. If you’re using a web framework (RoR, PHP, Django, Grails, etc) then get everything set up for development and deployment. Things you need to think about are:

- Version Control - github works well
- Deployment environment - heroku
- Domain name registration / DNS mapping - Dotster or GoDaddy
- IDE setup (create new project structure)
- Database creation
- Download any third-part libraries and tools

If you don’t have any developers on your team, then just get your system ready to do mocks. I find it best to use Keynote or PowerPoint along with a set of stencils ( KeynoteKungFu is good - http://keynotekungfu.com ).

11:00am - 11:15am
Pivot or Persevere
Have a meeting with your team to decide whether you should move forward with this idea or change it. If you feel that you’re on to something because you’re getting consistent and positive feedback on the problem from your interviews, then move forward with your mockups and solution. If not, you need to “pivot” and define a new problem that you can validate. Hopefully you weren’t so off base that you need to start from scratch. You should be able to tweak your canvas and your scripts a little bit, hit up a few more people, and quickly feel comfortable about your new direction.

11:15am - 2:15pm
Create mockups
Have one part of your team pull up Keynote or PowerPoint and get a set of stencils (like Keynote Kung Fu - http://keynotekungfu.com/ ) and start whacking away. Keep it simple. Try to just have 3-4 mockup screens that show your solution to the problems you’ve defined. Leave off all the bells and whistles.

Narrow in on early adopters
While one part of the group is working on the mockups, have the other part of the group narrow down your list of interviewees and create a profile of the type of person who is likely to pay for your product before it is fully featured. They are the people who will put up with the problems of an early product and are willing to pay full price because it solves a problem that they really need solved. Also screen a few more people that fit your “early adopter” definition and get a solid list of 7-10 people.

Prepare solution interviews
After the mockups are ready, create a new script that reiterates the problems and shows your solution. Ask the interviewees if they feel that the solution you’re showing them solves their problem.

2:15pm - 5:15pm
Do solution interviews
Run another set of interviews with your new list of potential early adopters. Listen and get feedback. Keep notes on their thoughts and suggestions. Remember divide and conquer to get these done as quickly as possible.

One of the most important outputs of this meeting is to find out what someone might pay for this. An old trick from Steve Blank (author of Four Steps to the Epiphany) is to first ask them, “Would you use the product if it were free?”. Then ask them, “Would you use the product if it were $1,000,000?”. Finally say, “What would you pay for it?”. The price you ultimately go with should be a price where some people say they would pay, and other say they wouldn’t.

5:15pm - 5:30pm
Have the ‘Pivot or Persevere’ meeting again
If you’ve gone through all the problem and solution interviews and have determined that your solution doesn’t really solve a problem that people are willing to pay for, you may have to pivot to a different solution or different problem. If that’s the case, you may have to start the process all over. There is no sense in building a product that people aren’t willing to pay for. Don’t feel obligated to move forward with building something that people won’t pay for just so you can show a product during the demo. Again, hopefully you weren’t so off base that you have to start completely from scratch. You may be able to adjust things a bit on your canvas, scripts, and mockups then go run a few more solution interviews to validate that your new direction will work.

5:30pm - 12:00am
Build Minimum Viable Product
Start building your Minimum Viable Product. This is the minimum set of features you need to solve the problem. Remember, you’re focusing on providing something to early adopters. There are people who are willing to pay full price to get early access to your product, while still dealing with bugs and lack of robust features. Don’t go overboard. Build an app that only has 3-4 screens and does little more than what you showed in your mockups. If you’re questioning whether a feature, button, tab, image, or text should go in, leave it out. If its not a core part of solving the problem that your customers have identified, leave it out. For example, you don’t have to have build functionality for things like online billing, security, email responders, or search unless its core to your product.

If you don’t have the programming capabilities on your team, and nobody knows how to configure use a content management system (like Drupal) or blogging platform (like Wordpress) to implement your solution, then I would refine the mockups to make them more high-fidelity. Make them look as close to what they will look like on the screen. Make the buttons and links on the mockup be anchors to other pages in your Keynote or Powerpoint presentation, so you can actually click on them and you can see the navigation.

Narrow in on early adopters
Again, you need to take the list of people you interviewed and cull through it to eliminate people who don’t just “get it”. If you have to push to convince them of the merits of your product and the solution, then they’re not your early adopters. Adjust your profile of what an early adopter looks like based on the results of your solution interview and then update your list with as many people as you can think of that would fit that profile. Hopefully you can list 10s or 100s of people that might fit your profile.

Prepare MVP interview scripts
Your going to prepare one more set of scripts. You’ll describe the problem again, but this time you’re going to show them the MVP you built when you talk about the solution.

Prepare presentation
Remember the judging criteria: Business Model, Customer Validation, Execution. Here is the order in which I would do the presentation.

• Problem - Describe the problem that your customers have. No bullet point slides here. Perhaps show pictures or screenshots that describe the problem and existing solutions.
• Execution - I think the important thing to do is to demo your product or mockups first. No powerpoint slides here. Practice your presentation workflow so you don’t waste time.
• Business Model - Next you want to summarize your business model. You probably shouldn’t show your canvas, because its too much to read during such a short presentation, but quickly go over the key parts.
• Customer Validation - Finally, you want to talk about the result of what you learned about your customers through your interviews over the course of the weekend. Talk about any money that you made and what the profile of you early adopters looks like. Talk about how what you learned reinforces the business model you just described.

Sunday

8:00am - 2:00pm
Finish MVP
Keep coding…

Do MVP interviews and sign up as many people as you can
At the end of this interview ask the interviewee if they want to sign up for early access right now. If you’re not sure you’ll continue with the idea, just get their contact information. Assuming you know you’re going to continue with your business, collect the money on the spot.

2:00pm - presentation deadline
Update presentation
Tweak and update your presentation as the MVP is finalized.

Good Luck!

Technorati Tags: startup weekend, startups

Short version - Import Facebook contacts into Yahoo, then import Yahoo contacts into Google Plus.

Long version…

1. Create a Yahoo Mail account if you don’t already have one



2. Log in to Yahoo Mail and go to the Contacts tab



3. Click on the Import Contacts button



4. Click on the Facebook button



5. Login to Facebook



6. Confirm sharing contacts with Yahoo



7. Watch the import magic happen



8. Wait for it to finish.



9. Login in to Google+, then click on the Circles button at the top and then on Find and Invite



10. Click on the Yahoo! button next to Find Friends



11. Authorize Yahoo! to import your contacts



12. And you’re done! All of the contacts that were imported from Yahoo have a little Y! icon on them

Technorati Tags: facebook, google+

Adding a person to a Circle in Google Plus

1. Go to the person’s page using the friend search



2. Hover over the “Circles” or button on the top right



3. Click on the circles to which you want to add the person, or create a new list on the spot.

Adding a person to a List in Facebook

1. Go to the person’s page using friend search



2. Look around for minutes to try and figure out how to put the person into a list
3. Realize that you can’t add a person to lists or even see what lists they’re a part of from their profile page (which is completely non-obvious, but OK)
4. Take a wild guess and click on the Account button at the top, hoping that there is some way to manage lists from there



5. Click on the Edit Friends button (which is still a guess, because the link says nothing about friend “lists”, but its worth a try).



6. OK, we’re finally on a page that looks right, (even though the only indication that this page has anything to do with managing Lists is the Create a List button). So now you can finally filter for the person’s name.



7. Have a WTF moment!? You just want to create a list of Tech Journalists to add all the “Public Figures” that write about tech new, but it only let’s you add people who are your friends (as opposed to people whose fan pages you follow). This is ridiculously stupid, but fine, let’s see what it takes to add someone who is a “friend friend”.



8. Sit there puzzled, because there is no indication of how you could do anything to that user, besides clicking on their name, which would probably just take you back to their profile page.
9. Go to click on the link anyways, hoping that it won’t take you to their profile page, but rather will give you options to change their list, but.. SURPRISE!! Take notice of the “Edit Lists” button that magically and unexpectedly appeared on the right side of the search result for your friend.



10. Sit back and pat yourself on the back for unlocking the completely unintuitive UI that facebook put in place for managing friend lists
11. Hover over the Edit Lists button to realize that it doesn’t auto-expand
12. Click on the Edit Lists button to see all of the lists to which your friend can be added



13. Add your friend to one of your existing lists
14. Oh, but wait, did you want to add them to a new list? Go out of the Edit Lists view and click on the Create a List button, type in the name of the list, then filter for your friends name and add them to your list.



15. Unless… you were already looking in an existing list, whereby the Create a List button doesn’t even appear on top of the screen anymore. Therefore, you have to click on the Friends link at the top to show all your friends again, after which the Create a List button appears again, then you can go find your friend again, and add them to the new list.. Psshew!

Sending a message to a Circle in Google Plus

1. Type your message
2. Use the circles bar below the message to add which circles your post should be sent to

Sending a message to a List in Facebook

1. You can’t Click on the lock icon



2. Click on the “These People” dropdown (and chuckle while reminiscing about classic Bill Cosby standup)



3. Counterintuitively click on “Specific People” (ya, call me crazy, but I don’t think “lists of people” when I see “Specific People”)



4. Sit there and wonder what this random unlabeled textbox that appeared below the dropdown is supposed to be



5. Click in the textbox and start typing random characters to see what it does and notice that it starts auto-completing the names of your friends and SURPRISE… your lists.



6. Poke around for a little while longer searching for a way to get Facebook to show you all of your lists so you can choose the ones you want
7. Sit there disappointed after you realize that they provide no mechanism to do this
8. Add the lists you want by trying to remember them (or pull up a different browser window and follow the complex list of steps listed above to see all of your lists)



9. Click the Save Settings button



10. Sit there and wonder if your changes took effect since there was no indication on the lock icon and you were sent back to the posting page.



11. Hover over the lock icon and cry for joy as you see the indication that your changes took effect.

Winner (by leaps and bounds):

Google Plus

Last month, in my post entitled A Programming Course For Kids, I wrote about how I started writing a computer programming course for young kids. Since then, I’ve made much progress on both the development and the branding for the course.

With regard to the branding, I’ve settled on the name My Kid Can Code: Computer Programming for Kids. The URL for the book is MyKidCanCode.com.

Currently, the site just has a mailing list registration form, but I am in the process of building a more elegant landing page where I will sell the book after its available. If you’re interested in keeping up with the progress on the book, please sign up for the mailing list and follow the Twitter account @MyKidCanCode.

I’ve also decided to offer an Early Access Program for people who want to purchase the book early. In a nutshell, the program will allow you to purchase the book at a discounted price and let you download early versions before I make the final release available. Join the mailing list to learn about the details when the program launches.

As for the actual progress of the book, I’ve written about 12 lessons and programming exercises, with a target of over 20 lessons. I’m currently working on games and exercises to teach kids about concepts such as equality, greater than, less than, and understanding variables. The exciting thing that I’m learning as I’m building these lessons (and using my own 5 year old as a guinea pig) is that after going through this course, children will have a significant leg up in future math classes. The course covers several topics that will help children understand fundamentals in Geometry and Algebra before they’re even 10 years old.

Technorati Tags: edtech, edutech, ict, kids, MyKidCanCode, programming

Not to say that there is no technology startup community; Houston has a number of startup-focused events and meetups. I have been a regular attendee and promoter of Houston’s startup-focused meetup groups and events for a few years now. I routinely attend two of Houston most active startup-community meetups: Houston OpenCoffee Club and GroundUP Houston. I also helped organize the Houston Startup Weekend, a weekend-long event where people formed into adhoc groups and created a startup in a weekend. There are also other nascent groups that are forming such as the Houston Cofounders Wanted meetup group that recently had its first event.

Houston also has a number of technology startups at varying levels of growth. One of the more well known startups in Houston is a company called 80legs.com, a company that offers web crawling services and data feeds for data aggregators and consumers. The CEO, Shion Deysarkar, recently blogged about how Houston lacks a hacker culture that is shepherding and bolstering the tech startup scene. In particular, he says that:

Right now most of the regular entrepreneur events in Houston are driven by non-technology people. I.e., consultants, service professionals, etc. This leads to events that tend to be:

• Purely networking events lacking any hard substance
• Attended primarily by people that are at the “idea” stage at best
• Lacking any real takeaways or knowledge gained

We need to have more events that are driven by tech people. This means events organized by a tech company, engineering folks and the like. Events should center around cool technologies being built by these companies or a specific technology topic.

Deysarkar ends his blog post with:

Here’s what it comes down to for me: Hackers Unite. You Know Who You Are. Everyone else, you are at best our lawyers and accountants.

This triggered a chain of private and public retorts from a handful of local startup community leaders. One response from Marc Nathan, one of Houston’s most well-known startup community organizers, took issue with Shion’s tone, but ultimately agreed with the fundamental points. Marc decided to not break down the arguments in Shion’s post, to respond to them individually, but I’ll dig a little deeper into the specific points.

While there is truth in what Shion says about these events, some of what he says is not entirely true, and some is by design. The first thing to mention is that there is support and regular attendance in these groups from technologists (myself included). At any given meetup, there are a number of Java, C, Python, PHP, and Ruby developers present. Not to mention that outside of the startup community, these technology communities are very hacker-driven and strong in their own right.

These startup meetups are specifically meant to be unstructured and informal gatherings for the purpose of networking. So, by design, they are not meant to provide any hard substance. The meetups are not education or training sessions, pitch competitions, or cofounder speed-dating platforms. Not that these formats are bad, but that is just not the intention of the OpenCoffee Club and GroundUP Houston. Because the meetups are meant for informal networking, I would say that the takeaways and knowledge gained depend on how well you network and interact with people. For example, I have met many great contacts at these events over the last few years.

With regard to the notion that the events are attended by people who are “idea” stage because they are led by non-technologists, I would argue that correlation does not imply causation. This type of attendance is just a reflection of Houston’s entrepreneurial composition. Houston has too few technologists who have caught the entrepreneurial bug. We have plenty of developers, plenty of hackers, and plenty of smart and creative people. We just don’t have enough people who chose to stay here and dive into doing startups? People who are passionate about startups leave. Otherwise, people stick around here and work on enterprise software.

Why? I can think of many reasons, some of which were listed in Shion and Marc’s posts, but there is one key issue which I argue is the crux of the whole thing, and which is somewhat of a Catch-22: there are not enough tech startups in Houston. Houston doesn’t have many startups to inspire developers to want to work for or (better yet) start their own startup. Creating a community requires inspiration through example. There is no greater mechanism by which someone is inspired than through the jealously they endure when they see a friend or acquaintance succeed. I say that tongue in cheek, but ultimately, whether inspiration is born out of jealously, pride, respect, or curiosity people are more inspired when they’re closer to something. Listening to a recording of a pianist likely won’t inspire you to take piano lessons, but watching a skilled pianist play a masterpiece right in front of you likely would.

So if we want to inspire new startups to emerge, we have to keep existing startups. As Houston Chronicle techblog author Purva Patel has written, a slew of Houston Startups have been leaving Houston to go to cities with larger startup communities. These include companies such as NutshellMail, Giftiki, and perhaps RecycleMatch and Wawadoo. On one hand, I can’t blame startups for leaving, because from many perspectives it is easier to grow a startup in a city with an established startup community: finding investors, finding employees, finding an initial user base. On the other hand, if you dig a bit and weigh things out, I think Houston has a lot to offer, including a rapidly growing mobile development community, a low cost of living, a huge pool of talented developers, reasonable wages, business friendly licensing and taxation, and a large and diverse local economy.

What we need to do is provide more incentive for companies to stay after they get their first big break and start heading down the path of growth. Part of what can be done to convince startups to stay here is to integrate them more into the startup and technology communities. If we create a support network to help provide startups with what they need to thrive, then there is more of a chance that they will stay. We need to grow these communities with more meetups, more events, and more discussion on blogs and local news sites. Hacker-led or not, having these groups in place and working to grow them is important. A centralized calendar that mashes together all of the technology and startup-oriented meetups would be a great starting point where we can start integrating these two communities. Helping these companies meet up more regularly for CEO roundtables focused on technology startups would be another great thing. These should be free, invitation only, and should be void of any service providers.

The talent pool in Houston is actually quite incredible, but many startup companies just don’t know where to look for developers. I know, because as a software consultant, I spend a lot of time trying to recruit local talent for projects. Many talented developers are working for investment banks, energy companies, enterprise software companies, biotech companies, and medical technology or service companies. There are also quite a few highly-respected consulting, web design, and application development service providers here in Houston. A job board or list focused on Houston startups and developers interested in working for technology startups would be a great start. There are a few out there, but for any one of them to grow to the point of usefulness it must be free and many volunteer (wo)man-hours must go in to growing and promoting it to the point where it is well known and pervasively used.

Another way to inspire startups to stay in Houston is to create more funds, incubators, and support networks that incentivize small technology startups. The Founder Institute offered a single semester in Houston, but hasn’t offered a second. I suspect the reason is because the attendance or success rate was low. I think there is a hump that we have to get over, so the tolerance has to be high, and the barrier to entry has to be low. National organizations may not have this level of tolerance, so the local community will have to volunteer to create these support networks at little to no cost. This can be as simple as a local startup or technology company offering one or two small startups some office space, and scheduling a handful of mentors to give them one-on-one guidance a few times a week.

Another thing that several people have mentioned during this whole discussion is that universities tend to be a crucial part of what it takes to foment positive change within the entrepreneurial community. While I know there is much truth to this, I feel like sitting back and waiting for (or even funding) the universities to be the main catalyst is a cop-out. Local service providers, technologists, startups, and corporations all have to step in to help fill the void and help provide what universities in other cities offer their communities: lecture series, hosting of startup events, business-plan review, mentoring, etc.

One disadvantage that we have is that Houston is a very geographically dispersed city. As a large commuter city, it is hard for entrepreneurs from around town to meet at the same time and place. But if there is enough value in making the trip to a certain part of town, people will make it. Midtown has become somewhat of a central hub for the startup community. More of a concerted effort must go into growing midtown as the center of the startup community. We need coffee shops where startups and entrepreneurs hang out regularly. We need more coworking spaces like Caroline Collective and the Houston Technology Center.

There are many ideas I’ve summarized here, but ultimately, I think that Houston has the start of what it needs to grow its startup community. I think we just need to build, support, and keep a few more growth oriented technology startups here in town and we’ll be in good shape. Make sure you attend the meetups. If you have a better idea, tell me about it and I’ll help you start a new meetup. I see no reason why Houston cannot outpace Austin in the technology startup space, and I’m more than willing to help us get there.

Technorati Tags: houston, startups

He was comfortable and excited to have me teach him, so my wife and I started looking into other courses that we could start him on. We looked into math, science, reading, spelling, history, and other subject areas. After looking around, it seemed that the best and easiest courses for us were geared towards homeschool students. The reason I say this is because they have a comprehensive curriculum, but are scripted so that most parents can pick up the course and hit the floor running. The scripts are written to make it very easy on the parents. They tell you to do or perform some action in one color or formatting style (depending on the book), then they tell you what to tell your child verbatim in another color or style.

This ability to start teaching my son immediately, without having to do a bunch of research and become an expert in each subject area made a lot of sense to me. The idea quickly jumped into my head to find a computer science or programming curriculum like this, but after looking around a bit, I didn’t find anything that impressed me. Of course, there may be something out there, but there was nothing that seemed to be mainstream besides some various online tutorials, and several books that were targeting kids who were a little older. I was looking for a complete and scripted curriculum that I could use to start a 5-8 year old child on.

After starting on a few of these courses and getting a better feel for the methodology and the format, I started visualizing what a programming course of this nature might look like. So, I started outlining the course. Then, I started writing a few sections to see how it would go. Once I got some momentum, I couldn’t stop.

I only have time to work on this project on the weekends, but I’m making good progress. I’ve written about 10 lessons so far, and I’m starting to formalize everything into an e-book structure. I’m planning on an initial set of 15-20 lessons, which will hopefully be available in the next 2-3 months. I will be beta testing the content with my (non-technical) wife and my 5 year old son before releasing it to the world. I also have a group of other people lined up who want to test it out with their kids.

I’m going to sell the e-book for a reasonable price on http://softwaredevelopmentschool.com, which is currently just a landing page where you can sign up for future announcements. I’ll be dropping a new site in place soon, which will host the e-book.

I’ll post more details about the course in the coming months and keep you updated on the status. Just to give you a little teaser, The course will focus on two programming languages: Scratch & Python. You will teach your child through a series of conceptual games and lessons in addition to programming exercises done at the end of each lesson.

Stay tuned on this site and on http://softwaredevelopmentschool.com.

Technorati Tags: children, education, kids, python, scratch

Startup Weekend is a 54 hour startup event that provides networking, resources, and incentives for individuals and teams to go from idea to launch. Get connected with local developers, innovators and entrepreneurs. Build Community. Start Companies.

If you’re a developer in the Houston area, I highly recommend checking out the event. The site is http://houston.startupweekend.org/.

Technorati Tags: houston, startup weekend, startups

Note: Click on the full-screen button in the player when watching the screencast.

In this screencast on Apache Maven, you’ll learn how to gernate a basic web application and run it inside of the Tomcat web container. You’ll explore the file structure and pom file for a web application, learn how to import the Servlet API into your project, and how to add resource files to your source code.

You can find all of my screencasts on my Screencasts page which is linked off the top-level navigation for the site.

Technorati Tags: apache, build, maven, screencast, servlet

Note: Click on the full-screen button in the player when watching the screencast.

This screencast explains the basics of how Maven repositories and artifact dependencies work. In this lesson you’ll learn how Maven coordinates are defined for an artifact in the Project Object Model (POM) file. Then you’ll learn how to reference a dependent artifact using the coordinate system. We’ll take a look at local and remote repositories and how they interact. We’ll also learn how artifacts are installed into the local repository and play around on the command line to see all of these features in action.

You can find all of my screencasts on my Screencasts page which is linked off the top-level navigation for the site.

Technorati Tags: apache, build, maven, screencast

I’m giving away a copy of my book, JBoss in Action, on twitter.com. To enter you have to follow me and then retweet a message that I have prepared (see below). I’m sure people have done this sort of thing before on Twitter, but due to my naivety, and my neologistic tendencies, I’ll just call this a “Follow-Retweet-Contest” or FoRC since that lends itself to the idea that you are “forking” your message when others retweet it.

I’m doing this in part because I want to promote my book and make more people in the JBoss community aware of its existence. But I’m also doing this as a social experiment. I want to see how virulent a $50 USD item giveaway can be for a product that has limited interest (not everybody codes in Java and uses JBoss AS). My hypothesis is that if I were to FoRC somwhere on the order of $1,000,000 USD cash that I would get significant media coverage, tens of thousands of followers (fast), and so much retweeting that practically every user of Twitter would have the promotion in their update list. If I were to do the same promotion for $50 USD cash, I wouldn’t get the media coverage or the the broad/pervasive exposure in Twitter, but I’d still get a few followers (perhaps into the hundreds).

Anyways, I don’t have a million dollars, and I’m not looking to throw out money just to gain followers, but I do I have a few copies of my book laying around, so I thought I’d try it out and see what happens. Here are the rules:

1. Follow me on Twitter: @javidjamae (yes you’ll need an account if you don’t already have one)
2. Retweet the following:
   

   RT @javidjamae Win a copy of my book JBoss in Action. Follow me and retweet this to enter. I’ll pay shipping up to $20 USD. #java #jboss

I will pick a random participant from the users who have entered and will pay up to $20 USD to ship the book anywhere internationally. I’ll wait until I have about 20 or so new followers from the promotion before I declare a winner.

Let’s see what happens.

Technorati Tags: jboss, jbossinaction, twitter