A Meet and Greet with Tina Fitch of EZRez

A few weeks ago I sat down for an informal chat with Scott Orn of Lighthouse Capital Ventures. After our discussion he kindly introduced me to Tina Fitch who he thought would be a good contact in the travel space. I finally met her yesterday.

Tina is CEO of EZRez Software Inc, a company that helps its clients package and distribute travel related products and services. They have a tremendous value add over other companies that attempt to achieve a similar goal - they use dynamic and proprietary search capabilities along with lower costs and increased efficiencies.

I spent some time looking at providers for this when we were initially thinking about providing booking through our site, and I have to say that EZRez blows away ITN and World Choice Travel. You have an incredible amount of flexibility, control, and data with EZRez. While they aren't exactly competitors, they're a close comparable.

But back to my meeting. Tina was exceptionally bright. She's one of those people you meet and are just blown away by their grasp of a situation and their drive to implement solutions to problems. I don't meet many people who leave me with this impression who combine that with a very down to earth, pragmatic, and candid approach to the world.

I spent an hour and a half speaking with her about all things travel and business as well as her own startup experience. Afterward, she offered up a pretty comprehensive list of people in the industry she though we should chat with. She's spent a lot of time in travel and hospitality and knows just about everyone around. Then we chatted about our own experiences living in Asia... which if you haven't done, is worth its weight in gold. She valued that more than any MBA. I can't say I disagree.

Another slice of morning humble pie... Life as CEO

I woke up this morning and did my usual perusal of the magazines littered throughout the house. It takes me a while to get started in the morning and I find that kicking back on the couch or still in my bed, reading a magazine or the internet, is a good way to get going.

Today I felt a little better after reading Inc. Their December issue has an article titled "Don't bother me, because I'm in the middle of my most important task as CEO - hanging window blinds", by Joel Spolsky, co-founder and CEO of Fog Creek Software. I had to laugh.

The kicker though was this quote: "I'd love to imagine that I'm the most valuable person in the company, that my time is so precious that I have to optimize every minute. But it's not true. At this point, I'm probably the worst developer in the office".

It's a sentiment that I can relate to. As CEO, it's always nice to think that we are invaluable to the company. But the fact of the matter is, there are so many other integral components that drive your success. Namely - the rest of the team. And even those outside the team that place a role in advising or helping to refine your product or company.

Like Joel, I know that I'm the worst developer at our company. Fortunately there are only two of us, so that makes it a little easier to digest.

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a boy solider. My Book Review.

I grabbed this book in the airport just the other day. It looked like an interesting read, but I hadn't heard of it, so I had my usual apprehension about dropping too much money in an airport book store. A Long Way Gone is a firsthand account of a boy's life as a solder during the civil war that fractured Sierra Leone in the early nineties.

Ishmael Beah was just 13 years old when he was "recruited" into the army and given an AK-47. He had lost his entire family to brutal killings by rebel soldiers. They were burned alive, locked in their huts just a short time before Ishmael was to reunite with them. His only hope for survival was the army. Hopped up on cocaine and other stimulants, Ishmael saw and did unimaginable things during that war. Things he should have never known.

It's a story of love, hate, war, and finally, a bit of hope. It takes you from the lowest depths of humanity, to the highest highs.

I had trouble putting this book down. It's well written and a quick read. But it leaves you with lasting memories. Not all of them good.

Install Starling on Windows

We've started performance testing. While a big step in nearing completion of our alpha, we're unfortunately working on two new pieces of functionality. I'll detail later. For performance, we've implemented two new components to get memcache to work really well (Starling and Workling):

Starling: "Starling is a light-weight persistent queue server that speaks the MemCache protocol. It was built to drive Twitter's backend, and is in production across Twitter's cluster." - It was open sourced by the guy's at Twitter, so thanks Twitter.

Workling makes working with Starling easier: "easily do background work in rails, without commiting to a particular runner. comes with starling, bj and spawn runners"

But... I just wanted to post a note to other Rails developers who are trying to install Starling on Windows. The gem fails the install due to C compilation failures. While you could get a C compiler working on your box to make things like this easier, it's not that simple. I've been struggling with integrating a native C compiler with my Rails environment for a while. The Microsoft version would probably work better, but I don't have it. And I'm not paying for it.

Anyway, in order to install Starling, you need to manually install the last eventmachine version that has a windows compiled gem (that's what's failing in the gem starling install), which is version 0.12.0. Thanks Stackoverflow (here)

run this:
gem install eventmachine --version=0.12.0

Once that installs run this:
gem install starling

Voila - set to go.

Another cool project is: Rubyinstaller (here), which aims to take care of the install problems I experienced above. Hope that helps

UPDATE: You will most likely get this error when you try to startup: custom_require.rb:27:in `gem_original_require': no such file to load -- syslog (LoadError)

This has been fixed in version 0.9.9 but is not yet available as a gem. You can download the source and overwrite your existing files. The files you need to overwrite are server.rb and server_runner.rb. The paths' are in the downloaded tarball so you can easily see where to put them.

UPDATE to UPDATE: So it looks like I'll need Cygwin to successfully run this on my Windows box. Why? Because there's no fork() process that's native to Windows. Cygwin fudges one together. This is a bigger pain than I thought. I'll probably take Kenny's advice from his comment and grab myself a Mac. I never thought that would happen.

Ford, Detroit, and the Lions - The Link Between Football and Ford

Do you know what football team is 0-13 this year, on pace for going 0-for? Do you know what football team has had the worst record during the last decade? Or how about what football team gave its CEO, Matt Millen, a 5 year extension last year, even though they've owned the worst record in football? The Detroit Lions. Well, technically he was released this year. Or resigned. It's uncertain. But their performance hasn't improved.

What I find particularly enjoyable about their abysmal performance, isn't really about the team. It's about the ownership. See, they're owned by the Ford family. The very same family who has proven they can't run a car company. The performance trickles down from the top. It's the same theory as Reaganomics - just applied a bit differently.

So what's the Ford family doing wrong? Well, you can see some similarities between the two "companies". They are overpaying their employees to deliver a sub-par product. They've put people in who don't know a thing about their product (Millen had no experience in football operations). They aren't focused on giving their customers what they want. And, of course, they've built their products with parts that don't last. Henry Ford must be rolling around in his grave!

GM - You Gotta Be Kidding Me! Don't Drop the Saturn!

Dear GM,

Please, please, please don't do what you said you'd do. Don't keep running your company like you have been. It won't work. I promise.

Thank you,
A Frustrated US Consumer

It appears that GM is talking about cutting Saturn out of its plans. Yup, shutting down the one bright spot in their company. That's like cutting off your arm to save your finger. Except, you won't be saving your finger, because, well, it's still attached to your arm.

What does GM have with Saturn? It has a very loyal and passionate following (there are tons of Saturn enthusiast forums across the web). It has style... yes, cool cars. It has the potential of a money making product.

What doesn't it have? Profits. But that's not entirely Saturn's fault. They don't have a very large advertising budget and therefore people don't know a whole lot about what's out there. You've probably seen their recent car commercials, so maybe that's changing. And maybe they need to make some of their Saturn's in the US. Their Astra became uncompetitive here because of the dollar (it's made in Belgium). Since we're the largest auto market in the world, I find that surprising. And, they've sort of lost their way. They started making the 8 passenger Outlook SUV when their core market wasn't shopping for those. Saturn was started with the intention of keeping the product line low and delivering cost efficient, fuel efficient vehicles. An 8 passenger SUV doesn't fit the mold.

There's a lot that Saturn would need to do to succeed, but I have to say, I haven't even seen a cool car, like the Sky, come from a US automaker in quite a while. And if you think the PT Cruiser is cool, you're not welcome here anymore. While I admit that the Ford GT is sweet, any car that's $150K can be made cool, even by Ford.

Firefox Add-ons - TooManyTabs

On Thanksgiving (yes, this is a bit late), there was a great post on LifeHacker that discussed all things FireFox and the great add-ons/extensions (here) that can make your browser a pretty powerful tool. Sure, there are all the copy/paste, multiple tab, download helpers, memory managers, skin tweaks, document managers, and hundreds of other add-ons. And those are all great, but the one thing that consistently kills my user experience is having too many tabs open in my browser. It gobbles up memory like it's a job. And I always lose pages that I want to look at later, but not necessarily bookmark, because I'm constantly trying to conserve memory.

Bookmarking is great, I'll give it that. But how many times have you bookmarked stuff never to look for it again? Probably quite often. And since my memory likes to escape me from time to time, I like to have visual queues. Alas, here comes TooManyTabs. This is my favorite extension - and it's well worth it. Extensions are free for those who've never used them.

TooManyTabs (here). I'll leave the description to them:

TooManyTabs allows you to store up to over 50 tabs in multiple extra rows in your browser by a simple click. It saves your browser's space and memory as idle tabs are put aside. The extra rows also help to better prioritize and visualize your tabs.

It's awesome!