Posts
The Four Styles of Confidence on a Team
I think of everyone as having a property: How strongly they state their opinions, divided by how right they actually are.
There are four common buckets.
People with high ratios are overconfident. They always pound the table, even when they’re wrong.
Those with low ratios are underconfident. They rarely speak up.
Midlevel-confident people speak up, but never with either conviction or doubt. They are always “mid” confident.
And finally, the proportionally-confident are good at estimating how likely they are to be right, and communicating that confidence level to others. This is an underrated skill.
Beyond the Fairy Tale Narrative
The standard narrative of the entrepreneurial career looks something like this:
Like all fairy tale narratives, this arc is an oversimplification. Here is a more accurate map:
It can be hard to think about the big picture while you’re in the midst of building a startup. After all, that first graphic is so much simpler than the second one. Startup life is also so tough that it’s difficult to reason beyond the horizon of a single startup, and most advice out there is based around the mechanics of building a single startup versus building entrepreneurial careers. But by understanding the realistic outcomes, you’re more likely to make better long-term decisions.
Cryogenics That Work
Let’s say you have a deadly illness, and a cure is on its way but not close enough.
The science fiction of the past would suggest a world where people freeze their bodies to near absolute zero, only to be restored when a cure is at hand.
There are many biological problems with cryogenic “life extension”. For example, water expands when it freezes.
The much better solution to this problem is jumping on a spacecraft and accelerating to near the speed of light. Time will pass more slowly for you relative to planet Earth.
Structured Thinking versus Going With The Flow
Life is full of new situations, and when faced with one, how do you respond?
Most engineers, myself included, have spent time learning mental models that can be used to explain, predict, and reason about these new situations. Every time you learn about a new psychological bias, for example, you’re learning a new mental model that can help you reason.
This approach has been best described by Charlie Munger and Ray Dalio. It’s no surprise that both of these gentlemen come from finance, a world dominated by structured thinking.
Alternative economies within Bitcoin
Imagine you wanted to run your own fork of Bitcoin, for example as part of a next-generation Bittorrent protocol that discouraged freeriding.
Is there any way to do this while taking advantage of the high hashrate (and thus security) of the Bitcoin network?
It seems so. Imagine you start your own sub-economy with 1 Bitcoin. Because transaction histories are a matter of public record, anyone could “follow” that Bitcoin as it or fractions of it flow around to other accounts. Only descendants of that special Bitcoin would be treated as part of your sub-economy/currency.
How To: Go to burning man
So you’d like to go to burning man? Awesome!
Burning man is one of my favorite things I’ve ever done. What follows is a take on what I would tell anyone coming with me to burning man for the first time.
There are many different ways to go to burning man. This is just how I do it.
### Getting a ticket
It’s best if you can get a ticket straight from Burning Man rather than through the secondary market. What it takes to get a ticket has been changing each year as they evolve their system.
E-Readers Should Scroll Smoothly
I predict that e-book readers of the future will use smooth scrolling instead of page turning.
Page turning requires you to reach the end of a text area, decide you have to perform a UI gesture, perform that gesture, wait for the device to respond, and then find the beginning of the new text. Smooth scrolling uses a continuous interaction style that helps you keep your place on the page, and doesn't require you to move your eyes around as much. It encourages flow.
How to: Compete with Amazon S3 without Buying Hardware
You build a storage router.
Given a piece of customer data you want to store, replicate it 2x, and store half a copy's worth across four different raw storage providers. For example, Rackspace gets one half a copy, as does SoftLayer, GoGrid, and Storm on Demand. Keep in mind that you're buying raw storage from each of these guys, not redudant storage. Each provider is just selling you hard drives attached to the Internet.
Grit > Self Control > IQ
When I was at MIT all computer science majors were required to take a class called 6.001. I had a lot of college credit coming to MIT so I was able to place out of many other requirements, including chemistry, biology, and calculus. I also had a long history of programming experience, so I wanted to skip 6.001.
This was impossible, I was told. Nobody had ever done it.
In a saga that unfolded over the next two months, we negotiated a compromise agreement.
Announcing: DesktopBootstrap
DesktopBootstrap is like Twitter Bootstrap, but for desktop apps.
It's the open source project I got to work on over Thanksgiving.
If you've ever written a desktop application before, you probably spent several weeks working on the auto update, installer, and logging mechanisms. Hopefully this will make your next one that much easier!
Towards Better Online Dating
It’s clear that the existing online dating sites are all broken.
I thought about working in this startup space for a few months last year, so I wanted to document my thoughts on the subject.
I ended up deciding against working in this space for now, but I still find it highly interesting and know that for the right kind of entrepreneur it could be a great place to dig in.
Idea: Y Combinator for Startup Recruiting
Recruiting more college students into startups is a constant topic of discussion. Just today Fred Wilson mentioned it as one of the critical ingredients for the NYC community.
It always strikes me that more undergraduate hackers go to Wall Street than the startup community.
Maybe we can do something about it, and that's what I want to explore in this blog post...
Y Combinator is a great hack on the world. It drives $billions of value creation by investing super small amounts. It’s the ultimate in leverage. Could college recruiting for startups be similarly hackable?
Adam's Life Hacks Part Two: The Lean Paper Filing System
“A filing system is absolutely essential.”
–Randy Pausch, Time Management
Unfortunately everyone has to deal with some number of physical papers, CDs, and so on. Enter the personal filing system.
Most filing systems fail out of the gate because they don’t optimize for insert time. Since starting my filing system two years ago I’ve organized 112 documents, and in those two years I’ve probably only retrieved a document five or ten times.
Adam's Life Hacks Part One: Personal Wiki Time!
Warning: personal wikis are much less useful today because we all use smartphones, and editing Mediawiki pages through the mobile web is too difficult. I now use my personal wiki to reference older content, and regretfully use Evernote for everything else. Evernote leaves so much to be desired!
---
I would start with a story about how bad my memory is, except for the small fact that I can’t remember any such stories. Suffice it to say that any significant other of mine can always pull a trump card over me by invoking the “You don’t remember when we XYZ?” But now I'm venting. : )
Seeing Death
I used to think I would live forever.
When you're young, not only is it emotionally comfortable to ignore death, it's also helpful. It makes you plan for the long term. For example, you should get good grades, get a good education, and build good character habits because those things are going to be especially important if you're going to live forever.
This bias continues into adult life. The infinite life abstraction is a good counterbalance to the cognitive bias of going for short term rewards.
I Love MIT!
God MIT is a great place.
Last week I got to speak at a new MIT class, The Founder's Journey. There were 100+ students. Pizza was had. There was a buzz of energy and ideas.
We had a lot of fun, and I'm excited that my friend Drew Houston will be speaking there tonight.
After the class last week some students invited me back to their dorm, Burton Conner. Beers were had. And a jolly time ensued.
Crazy Idea Sunday
"I tell you something that is not right out apparent, but it's getting a huge amount of focus within the company - and it is apparel. We are having a lot of sales growth in apparel. (...) Historically clothing has always been a number one mail order category even pre-internet. And we make it really easy for people to try stuff on - by making it easy to return."
Jeff Bezos, Charlie Rose Interview, July 2010
The More Important Reason Electronic Books Will Be Great
Call me an optimist, but I think we're about to see a change in how books are written and consumed.
There's a ton of data exhaust coming out of electronic book readers describing, most importantly, how much of each book actually gets read.
Imagine looking at a book on Amazon and seeing "We predict that you personally will read 5 pages of this book." Or, on the flip side, "You will read 98% of this book."
Thoughts After Y Combinator Demo Day
There's lots of motion in the ocean in the early stage investing world. TechCrunch has a write-up on the companies that presented at Y Combinator's demo day yesterday. I had several of my own thoughts.
Quality
- The average company quality is up. A much greater fraction of these companies will be singles or doubles compared to years prior. I'm not sure if there will be more % homeruns or not.
- There are also more companies. Xobni's class of 2006 had 15 companies; yesterday's graduating class had 36!
- So there's more early stage investing opportunity at YC than before.
Six Months Later: Seven Major Websites that Send Passwords Unprotected
It's been six months since I first wrote that 7 out of the 36 most popular websites sent login passwords in the clear, without SSL encryption. This basic weakness means your password can be read by anyone who can see your Internet traffic, for example anyone using the same wireless access point as you.
I mentioned that I wanted to bring those seven sites around to having secure logins. This is our six month progress report.
The Upcoming Generation of Lossless Data Compression, Part 2
My last post about the future of lossless compression algorithms was about cross-file content-aware dedupe. (Hint: this is different from what most people think of as just 'dedupe'.)
Part 2 is about lossless compression algorithms and systems that support incremental addition and removal operations.
For example, in NTFS, probably the most popular file system in the world, if I turn compression on and store the same file twice each file will be compressed and stored individually, leaving additional compression opportunities on the table.
The Upcoming Generation of Lossless Data Compression, Part 1
First, yes – there is such a thing as next gen lossless data compression.
Here’s one for starters: cross-file content-aware dedup for images and video.
Take a JPEG image, compress it with your favorite lossless compression algorithm, say BZip2 or LZMA, and you’ll get a larger file. Of course that makes sense, as JPEG itself is written to be compressed out of the box.
Now take a group of, say, 100 JPEGs, and compress them into a single archive. You’ll get no real compression. Even though there are likely redundancies among those photos, JPEG isn't designed to handle cross file compression, and LZMA can't handle it because the redundancies aren't obvious by looking only at the binary patterns.
From Zero to a Million Users - Dropbox and Xobni lessons learned
I just finished a talk at Web 2.0 Expo titled From Zero to a Million Users with Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox. It's about what we wish we had known years ago when it comes to growing your user base from 1 to 1M users. We had a lot of fun with it. The slides are below!
Amazon S3's Pricing Model is Arbitragable, and the Future of Cloud Storage
Here’s what you do.
Amazon S3 charges money for each gigabyte that you store. You go to their top 50 customers, and tell them: we’ll dedup your data with the other top customers, resulting in overall cost savings. We’ll split those cost savings with you 50/50.
You're basically stealing the economies of scale of redundancy elimination from Amazon.
You could also get sophisticated with delta encoding blocks of data that aren’t duplicates but are close. Here’s a paper that goes detail on redundancy elimination.
The Market Opportunity to Undercut Sonos
New technologies often start out serving the high end of the market where quality is more important than price, and over time a new disruptor comes in to serve the lower end of the market. This is a classic part of the innovator’s dilemma.
It’s also pretty universally understood that geeks love their Sonos sound systems. These boxes of magic synchronize music playback across speakers spread around your home, all wirelessly. For example, right now I’m playing music from my PC into a Sonos line-in that gets piped into my living room speakers. If I walk upstairs to do laundry I can pull out my iphone and use the remote control app to route that music into my upstairs speakers as well. Playback is synchronized.
The Great Q&A Wars of 2009 ~ 2014
With Aardvark’s sale to Google last week and StackOverflow’s announcement yesterday that they are going to raise VC funding, we close the first chapter in the Great Q&A Wars of 2009-2014.
The major players are now Quora, StackOverflow, and Hunch. Not to mention incumbents like Yahoo Answers, and likely a bunch of startups that haven't been started yet.
Who are these companies, and what will determine who wins, and who loses?
Quora was started by Adam D’Angelo, who was a cofounder at Facebook, and their CTO. Now that’s horsepower. You can see the Facebook DNA in Quora’s product. It has a news feed, profile pictures abound, and there’s a strong emphasis on ‘following’ people and topics. In round one of the wars Quora amassed a small user base of Silicon Valley who’s-who.
Magic in the software -- what the point and shoot camera industry needs
Point and shoot cameras are being displaced by smartphone cameras, mainly because smartphones are more convenient.
But that isn't the whole story. In the coming years point and shoots will find themselves under attack from a different angle; software will be easier to write for smartphone cameras, enabling use cases that point and shoots will have to scramble to keep up with.
For example, I take pictures on my iphone using the Dropbox app. Pictures I take are immediately copied to all of my computers. Even if point and shoots had internet connections, which they don't, they also don't have app platforms for companies like Dropbox to come in and add value.
Seven Major Websites that Send Passwords Unprotected, and State Sponsored Deep Packet Inspection
I was having a conversation yesterday with my close friend and roommate Anson Tsai about websites that send user passwords in the clear. This only matters, in theory, if there's a man in the middle who can read your traffic.
So it was a huge coincidence that China was accused today of coordinating sophisticated cyberattacks in an attempt to access the GMail accounts of some Chinese human rights activists.
Putting two and two together, I started worrying about China's ability to harvest passwords from Chinese users using deep packet inspection at their Great Firewall.
Technology to circumvent online copyright enforcement
This post could also be called “Why it might become civil disobedience to serve up random data.” You’ll see why in a bit!
Also, this post requires a basic understanding of XOR and how a one-time pad works.
If I serve up Lady GaGa’s latest MP3, I’ll get a takedown notice for copyright violation.
What if a friend and I served up bits that, when XOR’ed together, became the latest Lady GaGa MP3?
A judge would likely find both of us guilty of copyright violation, but it seems like a small stretch of the law. I wonder if there’s something there…
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 4
Hello folks! This is the final part to the four part hiring series. Parts one, two, and three are here, here, and here. As the final part to this series, I want to close us out with a quick thought and links to other great startup hiring reading!
My closing thought is that there are different styles to everything, and your mileage may vary. There's more than one way to skin a cat. And so on.
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 3
This is part three of my series on hiring. The first part covered finding great candidates. The second part covered interviewing. So once you've found someone you'd like to recruit, how do you pull them in?
Recruiting
This is where you switch from "we're hiring" to "we're recruiting" mode. There's no longer any doubt about whether you want the person or not. Your goal is to get them on your team and make sure the relationship is set up for success.
My Startup Bootcamp Talk
The guys behind the MIT Startup Bootcamp have finished posting all of the day's talks online. They were nice enough to invite me to share my experiences and lessons learned starting Xobni at this event.
Overall I thought the talk went pretty well. The first half was slower paced than I would have liked. My favorite part were the questions! Maybe next time I'll just build the whole thing around questions, not sure.
How To Find A Market For Your New Company, Family Edition
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.
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 2
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.
How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Part 1
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.
Early Startups Needs Generalists
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.
13 Ways Acting Classes Improved My Public Speaking Skillz
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.
MIT Students Send Cameras Into Stratosphere, Very Cool!
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.Technology can be so much fun!!!
Wireless Data Everywhere, M2M Communication, and the Radio Tagging Problem
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.
This ain't bad, really. Five years ago I had to remember a lyric or two and use Google searches later to find the song title.But it isn't the way of the future. I want a button on my radio I can press to skip the IPhone and Shazam step, at least. This would require my car radio to have a wireless data connection, which I don't think is far fetched.In 2005 I was involved in a quasi-startup at MIT designing a GPS navigation device with a wireless data connection built in. We came up with all kinds of use cases:
- Intelligent traffic awareness
- Read your car's diagnostics sensors from your web browser
- Send your address book to your car
Not bad. A year or two later a real startup was formed around this idea.But there's so much more you could do with data connections everywhere:
- Stream music from Rhapsody / Last.FM / etc to your car radio.
- Accept credit cards at all vending machines.
- Have a toaster that "toasts" the CNN homepage news onto your bread. Just don't eat too fast!
- Have gym equipment that you log into to have it upload workout data to a web app.
- Use a toilet that does fecal analysis on its way out to extract diet/health info that also gets uploaded to the web.
- Bus stops that show you how far away the next buses are.
- Electric razors that send you an email when the blades need to be replaced.
- Bathroom scales that upload your weight trends to the web.
- While you're at it with the vending machines, why not have them report back their inventory status?
- Not to mention drastically improving all kinds of other emptying/refilling processes: know when to remove coins from parking meters, when newspaper stands need to be refilled, etc. These don't sound like home runs but there are likely to be two or three that are within some vertical.
- While we're at it with the cars, why not have them radio back their position and destination to traffic control, so the stop lights can intelligently shape traffic in real time. E.g. the simple case is if it's late at night there's no reason the system shouldn't be able to give you mostly all green lights.
Etc etc.95% of devices are still not connected to the Internet. (Thin air statistic, but probably the right ballpark.) I hope we've hit that number down a notch or two by the time 2030 rolls around!What about you - what new use scenarios would you like to see for pervasive wireless Internet connections?Some Thoughts: the Online Backpacking Travel Industry
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.
I thought I'd share my reactions, just for fun. Guessing and dreaming is always a kick!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.
Quick Software Company Idea: Remote Real Time Help
Lucky moms have offspring with computer skillz.These gifted kids often grow up to become adults. When they do grow up they often use tools like VNC, copilot.com, or logmein.com to remote control their parent's PC when they get the distress calls about, as Joel Spolsky says, half grey screens.Blogging != Twitter
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.
Ouch!...but actually true. So I added a preamble to the post: "Just a snip of consciousness.." and learned that a stream of consciousness might work on Twitter but not on a blog. Indeed, the top articles on Hacker News are consistently either news or well thought through expositions on a specific topic with a specific point.So today's blog post point: blog posts need points!Coming soon: a quick startup idea.Always Add Polish!
Polish is often the difference between success and failure when getting stuff done. Literally, this is one of the top ten reasons ideas fail.ProductsPolish is why PostScript lost to Adobe PDF. Postscript had an eleven year head start on PDF, not to mention it's free and open source. Try to use it, though, and you'll end up on the command line and downloading extra programs that are GUI wrappers.I ran into this failure mode again last week when I downloaded Microsoft Sandcastle, a documentation system for .NET libraries. It's as powerful as LaTeX but just as user unfriendly. I finally found an open source project called the Sandcastle Help File Builder, which provides a nice UI. There's no doubt in my mind that the extra step costs Sandcastle 80% of its potential users.It's always sad to see a product fail just because the experience lacked polish.I haven't seen Google Android yet but my first reaction when I heard about it was that It will lack the polish of the iPhone, and fail because of it.EmailsImagine you work at a software company and your mom sends over a feature idea for your product. When forwarding the email to your product manager, you could add"fyi"
Character in Blogs
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!
Business & International Security
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:
User Counts Considered Apples and Oranges
Pop quiz time! Sharpen your pencils and put on those reading glasses.
1. Would you rather have...
A. A company that has 1.5 million active users
B. A company that has 110 million active
C. Two million dollars
Smells like a trick question, doesn't it?In this case (A) is Salesforce, a company with 1.5 million users, all of whom are paying about $60 per month. They're a public company and currently valued at $5 billion.
Why Good Products Matter
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.
About Adam
Hi, I'm Adam Smith, a computer hacker, entrepreneur, and the author of this blog.
I'm the founder of a great startup called Xobni. Xobni is the word 'inbox' spelled backwards. We make email software that makes it easier for people to manage relationships and find information in their email. Our product has received a lot of attention from the tech community, including people like Bill Gates. If you use Outlook or an Android phone you should give it a spin!
Investing A Million Bucks Into Performance and Stability
(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.
What Open Source Can't Do
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.
Xobni's Burn in the Early Days
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.
hey adam - what do you think your personal burn rate has been during these stages:
seed stage
- a dollars / month on rent
- b dollars / month on everything else personal
vc stage
- x dollars / month on rent
- y dollars / month on everything else personal.First Reactions from Salesforce Expo
I felt like I was entering another world today when I walked into the Expo floor at the Salesforce “Dreamforce” conference.
The expo is a room full of vendors that are trying to sell their solutions to Salesforce users. I was certainly the most underdressed person in the room. Everyone was in suits, and I was reminded of the cultural rift between sales and tech people.
You can tell how alienated these two groups of people are by listening to how they talk about one another. One person giving me a demo of their solution said “Then we let Todd loose on the problem!” If one group has some amount of disrespect for the other, it’s probably the developers with regards to the sales guys. Sales people certainly respect programmers, even though they don’t understand what they do.
When Will Amazon Start Shipping Cash?
My coworkers and friends know that I buy everything from Amazon, including things like socks, pillows, and laundry detergent.
What don't I get from Amazon? Perishables like milk, drinks are too heavy to ship, and cash from the ATM. But that last one seems silly if you think about it. Why can't I order 20 ten dollar bills from Amazon? Security shouldn't be an issue below a certain amount, say $500; I've ordered more 'expensive' things. Just a funny thought...
"Spin" and Rotational Inertia
I was just talking with Greg, when he coined a new term:
Rotational inertia is what you get when you start "spinning" (selling) something to someone. When circumstances change, and you have to spin in the opposite direction to the same audience, you must overcome and reverse rotational inertia.
:)
Early Stage Investors, Getting Deals Done
This post is a response to Matt Maroon's post today called Poker People. Matt talks about how straightforward poker players are with each other as compared to Silicon Valley investors.
I've been listening to a song by Kanye West called Last Call. It has a nine minute outro where he tells the story about how his career took off. It's worth a listen / read the lyrics. (We can mix things up a bit, right?)
The Most Inspirational Part of Andy Grove's Autobiography
...is when he is a refugee in Austria, escaped from Hungary. He badly wants to go to the United States. I can relate; there have been three or four times in my life when I really wanted something, in the way that you dream about it every night and you put infinite care into every part of getting it. Applying for Y Combinator, to start Xobni, was one of those times for me.
Social Graph and Related Thoughts
I’ve been thinking a lot about APIs lately. Xobni works with MS Outlook; we use its APIs to get to mail data. Xobni’s current value comes from organizing this data in novel ways for our users.
There’s still a ton of great things Xobni can do to (a) tap into other sources of data, including but by no means limited to mail data, and (b) make all of this useful data more accessible to other developers.
A Manifesto
It’s been a while since I’ve written. Life just hasn’t been the same since getting real users. I feel like blogging is kind of like deep sleep – it helps you organize your thoughts and recent things you’ve learned. Since launching at TechCrunch40, though, I’ve been facing all kinds of new challenges. Some of that terrain is behind me now, so I have a long list of great things to write about.
Xobni Recruiting Video
I mentioned in my last blog post that Xobni is looking for great hackers and a senior QA lead. The kind of people we're looking for have basically infinite options when choosing where to commit themselves. Why would they chose to work at Xobni?
Aside from our acclaimed product, superhuman team, and great market, we also have a killer culture. I hope this video helps us show that off.
Click to play!
User Bases, Pricing, Revenue, and the Value of Users
Suppose you wanted to make $1 million per month by selling software. You can either go for a few lucrative customers or lots of low paying ones. A half minute in Excel and you have a table.
Dollars per user per month
Customers needed for $1M / month
$1 1,000k $5 200k $10 100k $50 20k $100 10k $1,000 1k
Ten minutes in MS Paint and you’ve got a nice graph.Squash the Bug, Then Close the Window
I usually edit two pieces of code when I’m squashing a bug. First I fix the specific bug, and then I go on a hunt for ways to prevent similar bugs in the future.
Can I make the code fail faster?
Bugs that happen earlier in the execution path are easier to investigate.
If an invariant was destroyed, the sooner you detect it the better. It’s great if you can check for the invariant right after you modify the data. If you have complex invariants then you might consider adding a CheckInvariants() function that gets called periodically.
I Love Talking in C#
[8:01:54 PM] Gabor Cselle says: public enum Options {
Chipotle,
Subway,
Quiznos,
Other }[8:02:46 PM] Gabor Cselle says: // yes, we're pretty predictable, it's safe to use an enum here
[8:03:36 PM] Adam Smith says:
List open = new List();
foreach(Options option in Enum.GetValues(typeof(Options))) {
if(IsOpenOnLaborDay(option)) {
open.Add(option);
}
}
Adam.OutputStream.WriteLine(Array.Join(open.ToArray(), ", ");[8:05:42 PM] Gabor Cselle says: internal readonly Person k_nerdContestWinner = adam;
Controlled Fires and Source Control
I deleted a big chunk of code recently. It was written months ago and just wasn’t in use, so it needed to go. There’s always an emotional attachment to code, though, so deleting it is like burning up your old love letters. You know you should probably do it, but you’re conflicted and it’s painful.
I bet the people who set off controlled forest fires have a similar feeling. They have to burn down trees and fauna that they helped create. But you’ve got to toss out the old to make room for the new.
Raising Money, Post Script
I forgot an important thought in my previous post, Raising Money.
Sam Altman: "Every morning wake up and say to yourself: 'They need me more than I need them.' Entrepreneurs are the limiting reagent in the startup equation, not investors."Oh so true.
I previously wrote to upcoming Y Combinator companies about:1 - Having courage to face reality and change direction as appropriate
2 - Raising their next round.
Raising Money, Some Data and Tactical Advice, Letter #2 to Graduating YC Companies
Dear YC Graduate,
You’re presenting to a room full of investors this week. What should you know?
First, your demo will probably break, but that’s okay. Our demo broke. I fixed the code between our demo and the mingling. I remember telling investors “Look it works now!” but nobody cared. : )
Follow the introductions. Your lead investor will likely be a friend of an angel who you met through the advisor you met at your girlfriend’s father’s 55th birthday party. Joe Kraus has written about this. He says Take a cookie.
Courage to Change Direction, Letters to Graduating YC Companies, Letter 1
(The latest group of Y Combinator companies graduate in two weeks. There are some thoughts I’d like to share with them. This is the first of a few letters.)
Dear YC Graduate,
First, I hope you’re excited. I remember the rush of the super early days. Wow, what a rush!
It’s important for you to focus on your demo for the next 10 days before demo day. Focus focus focus, and you’ll do great.
The Coolest Hack I've Ever Pulled Off
I was 17 and it was the last lecture of biology class. Dr. Donahue was the lecturer. He was also the academic director of the early college program I was at. And he was retiring. It was the last lecture he would give after a career that was decades long.
Lecture began at 8am. My friend and I snuck into the classroom at 6am. It was a big lecture hall that could hold 300 people. We booted up the lecture computer. I can’t remember how we managed to log in, but we did. I installed the hidden program I had written, and we left.
My Startup Age
My startup self was born on March 14, 2006. It started asexually, created by its only parent, Y Combinator. I was such an infant. I didn’t know how to do anything other than write code. I could write code really well, but that was it.
During my early years I ran into walls and tripped on toys. We spent five months making a product that nobody really wanted. We missed a key hiring opportunity. I was the only one doing software development.
Why Engineers Suck at Selling
I’ve been thinking about why programmers/engineers are bad at selling things – products, ideas, themselves.
First, engineers suck at spin. They deal in facts, not emotions. The suspension bridge is going to stay up or collapse. The software works or it doesn’t, and no amount of framing, rhetoric, or rapport will change the facts. An engineer who spins things to themselves or others would be a bad engineer; facts are king.
The Ugliest Hack I've Ever Pulled Off
Machine learning (6.867) was my favorite class at MIT. I just ran across the report from my final project in that class, which I've uploaded to Scribd: Friendship Prediction on Facebook.
As part of my project, I wrote a web site that allowed someone to type in their name and get back a list of people I thought they were friends with in real life but not on facebook. I put together the web site between about 10pm and 8am the day the report was due. [1]What You Should Be Measuring
The first screen on any web analytics package is visitors over time. That’s a horrible graph! Traffic over time is really produced by two forces, new visitors and stickiness. These two forces are what really matter.
Stickiness
The left and right graphs below are the familiar visitors over time. The middle graph is stickiness; it says how long the average user continues to visit. For example, the blue line expresses that five days after their first visit, only 10% of users are still coming back. The magenta line is better; five days after their first visit, 70% of users are still visiting.
Visceral Advice
I’m now sure that most advice is wasted.
I’ve ran into several problems recently, after which I thought Gosh, so-and-so’s advice was right! The problem is that I never remember so-and-so’s advice when I’m actually in the situation. There’s a bug somewhere between hearing the advice and recalling it in the situation.
I’ve been trying to fix this bug. I’m going to try to imagine two things whenever I hear advice: the experience that generated it, and myself in a situation that calls for the advice.
A Great Day
Yesterday was a tough day. We were distracted by hiring and long meals and meetings.
Today was great. Gabor and I had lunch and coffee for two hours. We talked about how we can improve our hiring process and how we feel about the way things are generally going. We exchanged lots of ideas. It was fun.
Afterwards we got a large shipment from Dell. That was fun too.
I also played some squash tonight with Greg from Snipshot and two guys from XuQa.com who frequent the Bay Club. I won three out of six games. I’m quite a beginner. It’s so much fun when you get to play with someone at your level!
Startup Advice and Lookup Tables
(This post is partially derived from some things I said at Startup School 2007.)
Startup founders really need advice, especially first timers. It’s like you’re put in a big dark room with booby traps, and your only hope of survival is to draw upon the wisdom of those who came before you.
The good news is that you’ll be bombarded with advice. It comes from everywhere – investors, advisors, blogs, books, users, and rap artists. [1] Most startup advice, though, is not relevant to your current situation. You might be thinking about finding a cofounder, but the blog you’re reading is discussing corporate bylaws.
Physics at the Symphony
I really enjoy going to the symphony. I’ve been to the San Francisco Symphony twice since moving here last October. My favorite part is watching the violinists stroke their instruments in unison. This would be artful even without the music, but with beautiful music as a side effect – oh the glory!
Xobni is staying lean, though, so I buy the nose bleed seats. If I’m 300 feet from the orchestra pit, the music is delayed about 300 milliseconds behind what I’m seeing. (Sound travels at about one foot per millisecond.)
Why programmers are bad at spin
Programmers survive by paying attention to the ugliness in their code. If you wake me up in the middle of the night and ask what I’m dreaming about, I’ll probably tell you what the three ugliest parts of our code are, and how I’m going to fix each of them. So when someone asks me about the code, my instinct is to describe the bugs. They’re just the first order of business! I think that’s why programmers have a hard time putting a positive spin on things, as compared to salespeople. We have a natural tendency to look for and focus on the things that are not perfect.
The Life of an Entrepreneur, in 33 Seconds
I was listening to my MP3 collection, and heard one of the theme songs from Aladdin. Its lyrics at the end of the song personify the life of an entrepreneur:
One jump, ahead of the hoofbeats,
One hop, ahead of the hump,
One trick, ahead of disaster,
They're quick, but I'm much faster!Here goes,
Better throw my hand in,
Wish me happy landing,
All I've gotta do is juuuuuuuump!Reinventing Code
When it comes to ideas or products, you want to cover new territory. It's the same in the programming world. You want to build on others' abstractions. Sometimes, though, you just can’t help it. We’re writing our software on the .NET platform. In .NET, all user interface elements have their own window handle in the operating system. Window handles are expensive resources. Parts of our user interface needed a lot of user interface elements, but we couldn’t afford to allocate so many window handles.
So I started writing what a critic would call a reimplementation of the System.Windows.Forms namespace [1], but using a windowless model. Whereas the .NET top level interface element is called Control, ours was called LightControl. We also had LightButton, LightPictureBox, etc. I was only implementing about 2% of the namespace, but I was still nervous. It should set off alarms whenever you’re doing something that is both low level, and similar to something that already exists. But I just couldn’t think of any alternative. This was a few months ago. I was relieved yesterday when I randomly stumbled upon a blog post by Raymond Chen in which he validates my strategy. Raymond Chen is the man. This isn’t the first time this has happened. I wrote our own file system about eight months ago because NTFS didn’t have the right performance characteristics. We needed to store lots of small files, but traditional file systems have horrid performance in this scenario. They seek the disk like crazy! We also didn’t need directories, shortcuts, or any operations other than { create, append, read entire file, delete }. Surprisingly, a good open source implementation didn’t exist, so we bit the bullet.
The Point First, don’t be afraid to code a variant of something that already exists. Do your homework first, but do what you’ve gotta do. Second, if you’re making something new, don’t hide power. You might be able to save someone from having to write new code. [2]
Notes [1] This would take a hundred developers two years to finish. Luckily we don't need all of the functionality, but more importantly we don't need an uncrashable API. [2] I'm not blaming MS on this one. Although many criticize them for not providing a windowless control framework, they couldn’t have done so just by exposing an extra option. They're not hiding power; it's just not there.Reinventing Ideas
About two years ago, I was in the shower. [1] I had an idea: genetic algorithms modify data so as to optimize for something you care about. Lisp encourages programmers to think of programs as data. Why not use genetic algorithms to find the optimal program to achieve something? For example, find the program that is the best at playing checkers! [2]
I enthusiastically proposed the idea to my machine learning professor at our next meeting. She said Ah, that’s a great idea. It’s called evolutionary programming. People have written PhD theses on it. They haven’t gotten much traction because the search space is way too large, unless you’re working on a small problem with a specialized programming language.
Y Combinator, Should You?
I encourage most startups or would-be startups to apply to Y Combinator, our first investors. Most people are really excited about the possibility of getting YC funding.
Of the people who are lukewarm, the number one objection I hear is that the valuations are too low. The number two objection people give is that "We’re too late stage for them."
Baloney.
When someone says that the valuations are low, they're comparing YC to a traditional investment. The rule of thumb usually doesn't apply because the stage is super early (more on this later) and YC isn't investing very much. But even from a higher level, valuations are a tactical matter; you should be thinking about grand strategy when making this decision. If Y Combinator funding increases your expected outcome by 2x, you should be willing to give up 50%, right?The 2006-2007 Pumpkin is Dead
I always buy a pumpkin around Halloween to keep, uncarved, until it dies. They're festive and can really brighten up a room.
This year's pumpkin lasted for about four months.
Rest In Peace, 2006-2007 Pumpkin. (Maybe next year I'll name it something more creative than by year!)
Complaints About Visual Studio
I love Visual Studio 2005. Microsoft repeatedly hits home runs it comes to IDEs. But it isn't perfect; it has two thorns that prick me every day.
First, Visual Studio doesn’t have multimon support. I have three monitors, and only get to write code on one of them. You can open the same solution on multiple VS instances, but that doesn’t work because editing a file in one instance will confuse the other instance.
Top Mistakes in Year One
Sam Altman from loopt was the speaker at the Y Combinator dinner last night. (Sam is a close friend and one of the best entrepreneurs I know.) During Q & A, Paul Graham asked: “What do you wish you’d known when you were at these guys’ early stage?”
I asked myself the same question. What do I wish I could tell my past self?
I think we’ve done a great job so far. That being said, if I had known these things when we began, Xobni might be worth twice its current value.
Well Hello
My name is Adam Smith, and I am the author of this blog. (As a side note, I don’t see why I should be the only author of this blog. Perhaps I should host guest authors at times.)
Xobni Man Walking is about my experiences as an entrepreneur and software developer. Xobni is a year-old startup focused on organizing your personal information, centered around email. We have a company blog.
Xobni only had two people until recently, so it made sense to put all of our thoughts on the company blog. As Xobni grows, so does the difference between ‘I’ and ‘we.’ Enter individual blogs.
