Nov 19

Having just completed the 54-hr-whirlwind journey of launching a startup company from scratch in a weekend here in San Francisco, I wanted to share some thoughts about what worked and what didn’t. I was fortunate enough to be able to interview the founder of startup weekend Andrew Hyde and one of his dramatic cohorts, Michael Gruen. It’s a short/sweet 30min conversation and gets at the heart of what they’re trying to do with these weekends.

Let me just say that in every respect this was an amazing event. It condensed a year long product dev and launch cycle into just 2.5 days and it began on a Friday night with a room full of 132 complete strangers. The fact they were able to keep the wheels on the bus and deliver a working alpha by midnight on Sunday was an impressive feat in itself, but what was even more impressive was to see how leaders emerged and groups solved problems. The company we launched, HelpHookup.com managed last night to make the homepage of Techcrunch (something we still haven’t achieved in our year of lobbying efforts with JumpBox).

What worked well

The selection process was well-run. Ideas that had been proposed prior via the web site were pitched by their originators and every fourth idea the room broke into small groups of four to discuss. Someone called it “speed dating for nerds” and I suppose that was an accurate description of that frenzy. The selection was ultimately whittled down to just three ideas. Oddly enough, none of them won and one of the lesser-voted ideas re-emerged to win the selection process. I proposed a mutation of my Feelrz concept based on a genius twist that Josh Knowles had. Unfortunately the idea didn’t make the cut. The room divided into functional groups (development, creative, marketing, bizdev, legal, usability) and I gravitated to the marketing group initially. Being that I wasn’t super-stoked on the idea that got selected, I made the decision about 30min into it to play the weekend a bit differently than most would. Rather than lock into one group and engage vertically, I would bounce around and assume a horizontal role observing the activities across all functional teams. Granted, the weekend wouldn’t work if everyone were to do this but I had the unique opportunity to assume more of a “press” role and observe how the teams worked and communicated with the larger group.

The majority of comments on the TechCrunch article were positive but there were a handful of haters that derided the weekend pointing to the unlikelihood of anything material benefit for the attendees. This position is understandable if the person attending the event goes in with the expectation that the sole value of the event is in the shares one receives in the startup that emerges. The true value of this weekend as I saw it was:

  1. A firehose of practical knowledge – wandering around the room absorbing all the dialogue and interaction between usability people, developers, marketers, etc. I couldn’t help but think of that scene in the Matrix in which Trinity is asked if she knows how to fly a helicopter and she responds “not yet.” Moments later a lifetime of flight experience is dumped into her brain and she has what she needs. The value of the collective experience from the folks that were interacting in that room was incredible. For anyone who’s entertaining doing a startup, attending a weekend like this would be invaluable in getting a taste for what’s involved.
  2. A connection bonanza – given the nature of the event and who decides to stick around until day 3, it’s no surprise that the solid people filter through and you meet incredible individuals that share the same passion for the industry as you. I met some kick-ass people this weekend (Jeff, Mike, Andrew, Chris and Jeremy).
  3. Lessons in leadership – you get to see first hand how certain people emerge as leaders, how the stew of different personality traits creates pockets of different styles and how natual selection naturally takes care of the wacko’s.

Suggestions for improvement

I do have some suggestions what modifications that could make the weekend better:

  1. Allow multiple ideas – I know this is counter to the mission of picking one idea and having everyone rally around it but there was 50% attrition each day and I attribute this to lack of interest in the chosen idea on the part of those that left. I was more interested in the event itself but I probably would have not returned the second day if I was purely there on valuation of the chosen idea itself. I would urge the organizers to experiment with one weekend where the group is permitted to organically self-form around any ideas. There will naturally be one or two that are more popular but I would expect to see great things from a small 4-person team if they were passionate about the concept. Plus, some of the functional groups could work across ideas (creative for instance should necessarily be partitioned and constrained to working in 4 different silos in the event 4 ideas are chosen – dev makes sense to split into teams however). This is the biggest qualm I had. I understand the counter argument to this approach in that it might fragment folks and detract from the community aspect which is the primary goal, but I don’t believe that would happen if it were glued together properly and certain teams worked horizonally across multiple projects.
  2. Phone tree buddy system to reduce attrition – so obviously this is the “stick” as opposed to the “carrot” method above for mitigating the attrition problem but implementing some kind of buddy system in which you got a phone call the next day from someone in your group saying “hey where are you? we need you to do xyz” would keep more people there the same way having a workout partner at the gym is just enough to make you go back to the gym. This is a challenging problem and one we encountered first-hand with Grid7 Labs – when people aren’t on the hook to deliver it’s easy for them to blow it off. I would expect this problem to lessen if suggestion #1 is followed.
  3. Better ad hoc infrastructure – this is a shameless self-plug for our stuff but a would be ideal instead of the hour it took them to get a subversion repository setup. The dev team also would have had access to the ticket system in Trac at that point which would make the accountability and assignment of tasks much more efficient. I showed Andrew the Trac JumpBox and it sounds like they’ll be using it in the future. This is precisely the scenario it was made for. Likewise, the talks I heard about securing a hosting account early in the event could have been avoided by merely serving it from a virtualized instance on someone’s laptop in the room and deferring the hosting issue until it was necessary. If the weekend is mapped time-wise to a year of the life of a startup, deferring the hosting decision translates to month’s of saved hosting fees plus the access to the local machine is much snappier than hitting a remote box over the internet during dev.
  4. Connectivity – this is just an issue of over crowding on a connection that wasn’t intended to have 130 people accessing it simultaneously but connectivity needs to made more reliable. Perhaps getting multiple EVDO cards and having alternative shared connections via that would help? I’m not sure of a silver bullet for this problem but solutions should definitely be explored.

Anyways, the weekend was fantastic and much props to all the people that labored to put it together. I met some great people and plan to stay in touch.

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Nov 17

Ahhh the trials and travails of couch surfing in San Francisco.

It’s alright though, Scoble dug the demo and I’ve met some awesome people so far.

And for better or worse I’ve succumbed to peer pressure and taken the plunge today of signing up for a Twitter account. Curse you Ev Williams, I waste enough time as it is ;-)

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Nov 14
  • There are no gas stations in downtown San Francisco. If you enter the downtown area on an empty tank your best bet for finding gas is to park in a garage, buy a gallon of milk, dump it out and take the BART 5 mi west. In AZ there will be at least 3 gas stations on each corner so I usually rely upon the low-gas warning light to tell me when I need to fill up. Bad idea here. Plus the problem is greatly compounded when you don’t know where you’re going. It’s gotta be an economics issue that the real estate is too valuable in the downtown district to permit a low-margin business like a gas station to survive. Still has to be some kind of opportunity here for a “taco-stand style” mobile unit that offers a small emergency amount of gas for a ridiculously high price. I’ll pitch this concept at Startup Weekend on Friday.
  • Gmail + iMAP + iPhone = Happiness. Gmail recently added iMAP support so now you don’t have to POP your mail from your mobile device. My Treo 650 recently bricked after i sent a regular ole text message- and this only a year after it learned to swim. I happened to be rebuilding my laptop from scratch that same day from a new Leopard install so I took the opportunity to make the switch and buy an iPhone and so far it’s been a beautiful device that does just about everything but make my bed. It makes the Android OS look incredibly lame.
  • The flavor in SF goes up to eleven. Are the taste buds of chefs in AZ somehow not as evolved Presumably the food here is more flavorful because all the ethnic dishes are cooked by people that were actually born in the place where the recipe was invented. Going back to chain restaurants and second-generation food preparers after this trip will be hard.
  • Walking everywhere keeps you from being fat. So to offset the effects of all the good food they have here, they do this think called “walking.” It’s a fairly simple and obvious observation but I’m blown away by how few obese people there are in this city. Scottsdale still has some of the most physically beautiful women on the planet but there are also a great deal of obese people there as well. Thinking about the dense cities my brother and I visited in Europe, this walking thing consistently appears to be the determining factor of fitness. Given how spread out Phx is and that it’s 120 deg three months of the year, I don’t see this problem resolving soon but simple daily walking appears to have a huge beneficial effect for the average person to stay in shape.
  • Parking is scarce. So yeah, another braindead obvious one for anyone who lives in a dense city but I’ve never lived in a place where water is so plentiful and parking so scarce. It makes sense to me now why my buddies from NYC think valet parking is so great- it gives them something precious they’re not used to rather than taking away something plentiful and charging for it. Being from AZ I see it as an absolute racket and a scourge on the city that a private company can come in and take all the empty parking spots and then sell them back to you. Here in SF though valet for $5 would be a godsend. The car manufacturer that figures out how to create the transformer car that do a head-stand and consume a parking surface of 5sqft has a billion-dollar opportunity if he/she figures it out. Seriously.

That’s about it. This is an amazing area. I’ll be posting pics of the trip in progress to my Flickr acct. If you live in the Bay Area or know someone interesting who does, let’s have lunch! I have about 3 more weeks left here and my goal is to make the most of each day and meet all the interesting people I can find.

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Nov 14

We just launched what we call the “Proving Grounds” for JumpBox. It’s a private invite-only community that gets access to use unlocked, pre-release JumpBoxes. We added the following eight new open source server applications and have a bunch more on the way:

  • Alfresco CMS
  • Joomla 1.5 CMS
  • OTRS Trouble Ticket System
  • OpenLDAP Directory Server
  • Bugzilla Bug Tracker
  • Silverstripe CMS
  • Mantis Bug Tracker
  • Project Pier (fork of ActiveCollab) Project Management
  • There’s already a decent velocity of member signups – we’ll probably throttle back membership at some point so grab an invite code while we’re handing them out freely.

    ProvingGroundsHeader.jpg

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    Nov 07

    I’m moderating a panel tomorrow on Innovation at the Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference and then jumping in my truck and driving up to San Francisco. I’ll be staying in the Bay Area for a month couch surfing and hitting various conferences and user groups. Here’s the tenative itinerary:

    SFeventsCalendar.gif

    If you’re in the Bay Area, drop me a line and let’s meet for lunch. My whole goal is to get “in the mix” and meet progressive tech people in the area and see what everyone is doing. We’re somewhat isolated from the real action down here in AZ and I’m looking forward to traveling around Silicon Valley to meet folks and spread the word about some of the great things that we’re doing with JumpBox.

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    Nov 04

    Wow, the volume of commentary around the OpenSocial announcement last week is enormous. Let me explain why all the doomsday predictions for Facebook are off the mark. Here is an analogy:

    Saying OpenSocial will kill Facebook is like predicting that Orbitz will kill SouthWest Airlines.

    SWA still has superior value and user experience to any airline in the Orbitz consortium when it comes to reliable, affordable travel. And at the end of the day as a consumer of air travel you’re just buying a ticket and getting on a plane. Twenty-two competitors that have second-rate products don’t unite to form Voltron and having a bargain shopping aggregator doesn’t kill off the vendor who refuses to participate if he still has the best bargain for the customer. Likewise, having “one API to rule them all” is nice for developers writing applications for social networks but it takes more than that to make users of the abstaining network flee the place where all their friends are.

    Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb wrote an excellent analysis. Opening the platform and appealing to the developers to build applications is a tactic Facebook used to amplify their power and deliver the ultimate user experience while offloading the burden of developing compelling apps to external developers. Think of it as the development equivalent to a company’s reseller program only instead of leveraging external sales forces, they’re leveraging external development forces.

    I share the same concern that Marshall Kirkpatrick expressed – for all the hype of OpenSocial, it doesn’t sound like it will truly be a 2-way street of open-ness as the name implies. It will be interesting to see how FB rolls with the punches but they shouldn’t have any more fear of OpenSocial than SWA has of Orbitz. They’ll participate when it makes sense. Maybe someone will write an abstraction layer that sits above FBML and OpenSocial XML? Maybe not and instead developers will have to write to both systems (like software vendors that write native Mac and PC installers)… Ultimately users go to the “clean well-lit place” that provides the best experience. As the industry moves inexorably towards open the underlying social network fabric becomes irrelevant (think IM channels – Gtalk, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, ICQ- irrelevant since Adium or Gaim is the interface that masks the underlying complexity). That Adium-equivalent for social networks will be the interesting piece at that point; a single dashboard that gives me one place to manage my digital identity easily in the way that Adium lets me forget what IM services I’m using and talk transparently to my friends regardless of the service they’re on.

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