Support System for Entrepreneurs (or Me)

I vaguely remember talking about this before, but just felt the need to spend some more time on the subject. Having a network of support is critical if you're an entrepreneur. I mean, it's probably important as a human being in general, but in order to keep on working towards changing the world, you need people who believe in you. I said early on that this idea was one of the few ideas that I had some support around. Unlike my anti-wrinkle shirt box for business travelers (yea, that's my next infomercial). Not everyone supports it, but that doesn't matter. You can't please everyone anyway. And you need to develop some thick skin to deal with it. Which was tough for me.

It was two months ago when my drive and passion hit an all time low. Sure it's a given that the startup process is lonely and full of ups and downs, but I was below down. I was questioning whether I had enough will to keep going. I felt alone. There were plenty of people helping, but without paying these people, their commitment was/is fleeting. I stuck with it. Because I couldn't give up on something I truly believed in. That's when I jumped back into development - full time. I focused on building the product. Which is what this is all about anyway.

Yesterday I had a follow-up meeting with some people I met with when I first started this venture. And they were asking the same questions. And had the same critiques. The meeting was less than helpful. In fact, it just got me off course and make me think more about the state of the valley. They were saying, "Are people going to use this? Why would someone fill out a survey? I wouldn't do it". I'd like to ask those people if they thought people would leave their credit card numbers online back in '99. Or how about leaving your personal information all over the web? Even two years ago? Or how about accessing banking online? Or a million other things. People would call you crazy. Now they're leaving pictures of their drunken selves on Facebook. So, I'm asking for you to give me some information so I can make your life easier. So I can help you plan a trip, find a restaurant, find a healthcare provider, or find whatever you're looking for. And not just the same trip or the same restaurant that your friend Joe likes. Because you aren't Joe. I want to provide you with personal information filtering. Anyone else realize that the web is constantly growing and won't ever stop? And I've spent a bit more than $10,000 building this. How many other companies can say that?

Wow, I just flew right off topic. Anyway, yesterday the same group of people who critiqued me, also called me afterward to lend their support. They apologized about the meeting which they realized wasn't helpful. They're good friends... so it was important that they were supportive of me.

And my family called, and family can always cheer you up... as long as their supportive too, which isn't always the case. But it is now.

So thanks to both of you. Surround yourself with people who care and it will let you get to where you're going.

Vyoo Questionnaire - Please Help!

For those who know me... well, you probably already received an email from me. For those who don't know me... well, here's the email I wrote to most everyone I know. You are all welcome and encouraged to fill out our questionnaire:

Friends, Friends of Friends, Facebook Friends, Colleagues, Classmates, and of course, Family:

It's been about a year since Rajiv and I started this venture (Vyoo - pronounced View). A long time has passed... and, what may surprise some of you, we're still at it! We're weeks out from launching a very private alpha. And then a beta shortly thereafter. We're incredibly excited about our product. We think it's going to revolutionize the way people get the information they want online. I'll spare the details here, so I can get to the point.

We've been developing our algorithm with an amazing psychometrician - Mark Moulton. In order to refine and complete this algorithm, we need your help. I'm asking you, personally, to fill out our final questionnaire - the actual questionnaire that will be used on our website! And the bonus of actually filling this one out is that we can generate an account for you when we go live (with your permission of course)! This questionnaire is a lot more fun than the previous incarnations, I promise. While long - there's a tangible benefit when we launch (planning and researching a trip will be a whole lot easier) - as well as now:

We're giving away a new 8Gb iPod Nano (chromatic - here) in whatever color you want, as well as 15 - $10 Starbucks cards for completing this.

I'd love your comments after you take the questionnaire - length, enjoyment, style of how the questions are asked, answer choices, or whatever is on your mind. Just and FYI - they'll be presented to you much more pleasantly when on our website.

And finally, the questionnaire:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=JZpgOd8Sd0DHWn7VFV414Q_3d_3d

Thanks so much!
Marc and Rajiv

GoGrid Cloud Comuting vs. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

VS.

I blasted the poor showing of innovative technology at Tech Crunch, and though I didn't talk much about it, I should have spent more time blasting the selection of the winner, Yammer. It was a joke. Sure the service may be decent. One of my friends, a fellow entrepreneur, loves their product, but come on. The winner of Tech Crunch... was a product that copied another product (Twitter) and applied to to a different market (the enterprise). I'm not talking smack about Yammer as much as I'm talking about the poor criteria for selecting a winner.

Without further ado, I just signed up for an account on GoGrid - a cloud computing platform that is competing head to head with Amazon's EC2 service. They had a demo setup at Tech Crunch and spoke to me at length about their offering.

First of all, what is this cloud computing stuff anyway? It's really the idea of having your servers hosted in the cloud (internet). You don't need to have any infrastructure expertise. Just deploy your apps to your virtual servers and the cloud hosting company handles everything else. Load balancing, DNS stuff, mail stuff, scaling, etc.

They charge based on how much stuff you use. There's a charge for having your server on ($72/month for 1 CPU and $72/month for 1Gb/RAM). Of course, as usage increases, so too does your CPU and RAM need. They also charge .10/Gb of bandwidth out and free inbound. Matched up against Amazon, they beat them in pricing and services: GoGrid vs. Amazon.

You could easily spend $40/month and get virtual hosting. But scaling is not trivial with a non-cloud service. And tech support, data storage, and bandwidth are all incrementally more expensive.

I'll update our experience with GoGrid as we progress...

If you need cloud computing, try GoGrid with this promo code (for a $50 credit): GOGOTRIAL50 or call them. I got a $100 credit with a phone call.

The Life of an Entrepreneur. My Dream Job!

You might be thinking that I'm talking about my job as founder of Vyoo. While that's certainly my dream job right now. There are a few other jobs in the past that have sparked my interest. One of those is the oft under-appreciated mixologist. Sure that's a fancy name for a bartender. But a real bartender takes pride in the actual mixing of the beverage - the right ingredients, right mix, right taste, etc. And for the gentlemen out there, who hasn't dreamed of tending bar? Meeting women, forcing people to respect you, I mean, what's there not to like? Even if it hasn't been a "dream" per se, it's definitely been something I've wanted to do ever since I started going to bars.

About 6 months ago I took a bartending class at the San Francisco School of Bartending. I did my research. It was supposed to be a top notch school. Much more respected than any other school around. And the job database they had was full of great jobs. I spent two weeks working behind a mock bar, in a non-descript building in downtown SF, with a rowdy cross section of society: old, young, professionals, and professional non-professionals. I was pouring water mixed with food coloring - I'm not sure how any of my drinks would actually taste. But by the end of the 2nd week, drinks would flash across the monitors and I'd be pouring them at lightning speed.

School ended and the class of newly minted recruits canvassed the town and the job database for leads. Let me say this. The job database was outdated and didn't give me any head start on the competition. So this is what I learned. Bartending school is a useful course for anyone who wants to be a bartender. But it's not going to get you a job. If you're a pretty woman. You'll get a job. Otherwise. Know somebody.

As you can imagine, I didn't find anything. But I made a few friends and learned how to make drinks. Which was cool in its own right. One of my friends had a friend who owned a bar. And he got a job. And so, I had assumed that was it. I started working at Kaplan and Vyoo got closer to completion.

Fast forward about 4 months. My friend from school was bartending at a dive bar in SF. He just started law school and asked if I could take over his shifts. Hell yes! So, with a few phone calls, and the approval of the bar manager (who said she's still looking for women to bartend and that I'll have to make room for them if she finds them), I started my first shift last night. Wow! What a fun job.

I don't remember 99% of the drinks I learned. But... at a sports bar, there's not much to make besides shots, beers, and rum and cokes.

Life is good as an entrepreneur. Not glamorous. Yet. But good.

Come on down to Overtime Sports Bar and Grill on Sunday evenings... I'll mix you up a great Jack and Coke.

Euclidean Distances, Nearest Neighbor, Psychometrics, and a History Lesson

I met with our algorithm guy today (Mark) and had a tremendously educational discussion. We talked calculus, Euclidean distances, neural networks, history, and a lot of other things that would normally make your head spin. Wait, did you just say history? Yup. And lots of it. While it sounds like a pretty strange discussion surrounding Vyoo's approach to the problem we're solving, it will all make sense as I explain.

Mathematics, and all physical sciences for that matter, were originally based upon natural sciences - and thus, natural philosophy. Natural philosophy (experience and discussion) is the objective view of how the earth operated before we understood its physical properties (physics and math). Or really before we could conduct experiments to prove these theoretic models. As you can see... it's really the framework of physical sciences.

What really struck me is that most of the ideas we're using for Vyoo really originated from Gottfried Leibniz, a German polymath who was born in 1646. Yea, you heard me! A guy born in 1646 developed the ideas we're using for Vyoo today. Gottfried has a track record of impressive developments. Matrix, boolean algebra, symbolic logic, infinitesimal calculus (independent of Newton), binary numbers, and the basis for Einstein's theory of relativity. Pretty impressive stuff from a guy you probably haven't heard about before.

As our discussion evolved, we began to talk about an author we're both fascinated with, Neal Stephenson. He's written some of my favorite books, such as Snow Crash, and Cryptonomicon. Now, I'm not recommending these to you, unless you're a fan of a science fiction wrapped in science non-fiction. Vague. Yes. But his books are hard to explain. I tend not to like science fiction, but when there's factual data thrown in, I'm much more forgiving. Snow Crash is a futuristic novel about a time when the internet and real life converge. And Stephenson doesn't take you for a fool (when he speaks about technology - it's real. Not like Tom Clancy throwing the word Gigabits and Etherwebs around just for the hell of it). Cryptonomicon is entrenched in math- but fun math. Codebreaking. It's the story about one of the men who broke the code during WWII (Enigma).

What I found strange and didn't really know before, was that Stephenson's recently released trilogy, called the Baroque Cycle, was all about the thread of history that follows natural philosophers, like Leibniz and Newton. Which strangely tied together these disparate interests I've had over the last 20 years of my life. And it turns out these these natural philosophers are a very understudied and unheralded group of people who have had a tremendous impact on the world. Anyway, sorry to bore must of you... but if you weren't falling asleep, you should definitely read these novels!

  

It's Your Customer, Stupid. Spore Sucks Or At Least EA's DRM Idea Did!

I've had a lot of fire lately - hence the plethora of blog posts. And you know I love to highlight failings more so than successes. Too many people spend their time glowingly writing about things they love. I think, from an entrepreneur's perspective, you can learn a whole lot more understanding where people fail. So, what's the deal with Spore?

A wildly popular and much anticipated video game was released this past week. It's called Spore. And I've been dying for it to come out. It's been years in the making, was developed by Will Wright (of SIMS fame), and was created around the idea of building a civilization from a single cell to world domination (space colonization and beyond). Yea, you can play God. Or at least some Master of the Universe. The concept was amazing. And you were set to be able to compete online with everyone else who's has/is building their own civilization.

Well the game came out, and while it sold very well last week, it has received far more criticism from those who aren't buying it than praise from those who are. Why? In addition to the game lacking any sort of depth or sophisticated game play (supposedly it's pretty elementary - though I admittedly haven't played), they made a larger blunder on something that doesn't even have to do with the game play. They've implemented a DRM system on the game that seems pretty antiquated and out of place. There's a strict 3 install limit. If you install the game on 3 systems...that's it. After that, you need to call EA for permission to use your game. As people have been suggesting, users these days easily have 2 PC's. And if they upgrade machines or need to reinstall the game for some reason (over the life of owning this game!) - they'll hit their 3 use limit. Then it's time to spend, I'm sure, too long on the phone convincing EA to let you use a game that you own. It's a nuisance to say the least. And reports are that customer support handling the additional licenses is a pain in the ass to deal with.

So what now? Well - Spore has the lowest video game ranking on Amazon. Over 2,000 reviewers have reviewed the game 1 star because of the DRM. There's a huge backlash. In fact, a pirated DRM-free version is on the torrents and has been downloaded over 500,000 times. A torrent search should turn this up in no time.

EA could have followed Apple's lead where you can authorize a machine to play the game and then de-authorize it, so that you won't have this customer support nightmare.

EA - time for damage control. And it's time to listen to the little people.

(Supporting article: Washington Post, here)

Learning or Attempting to Learn CSS - and my Dreadful Old Manager at Gap

It's been a while since I did any sort of front-end design. I've never been a fan of it. Mostly because I'm not a great designer. Imagine being born to an artistic mom and having an artistic brother, but not being able to put pen to paper yourself? It's ironic, because I'm left-handed too. We're supposed to be artistic. Anyway, our site relies on a large amount of CSS. Last time I even attempted design - CSS was generally an afterthought for some small design elements. Tables were generally used as the backbone of design and flow control. Times have changed. CSS is now the cornerstone of any website design. And DIV tags have replaced tables adding greater control over the layout of your page.

While not important to really know the details, for you non-technical people, it's good to at least understand the technology if your job is to manage it. This reminds me of a manager of mine who shall remain unnamed. Rumor has it that he/she (I'll use 'he' from now on) was promoted to his position as Senior Manager because he was a terrible developer and would only cause delays to any project he was on. So the idea was to move him up. That way he wouldn't cause any more problems. This course of action was rampant at the Gap. Don't let people go who were dead weight, but move them around and have them slow down other departments, as long as it wasn't yours. Anyway, I lost a lot of faith in the organization when I learned how my manager had moved through the ranks. Not only did it not make sense from another employee perspective. Because it gave you the idea of how people get promoted around here. But it also didn't make sense from the employer perspective. It was a six figure drain every year. Multiple that by however many people this happened to... and you're looking at a million in salary alone for 10 of these people throughout our large organization (which is incredibly likely). Then take into account the negative effects these people had on projects and morale. The costs begin to skyrocket.

My manager, specifically, would give me technical advice and make recommendations about how I should approach my tasks. It frustrated me to no end. How could someone give me direction that didn't know what the hell he was talking about? I went to school for CS, so I wasn't happy that some dead-end manager was telling me how to program. Point of this? Don't be one of these managers. Don't manage people without knowing what they're doing. You don't need to know details, but you should be at least have a high level understanding of their tasks.

Oh... yea, so this is a great CSS book that's been helping me along: The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, and Hacks. By Rachel Andrew.

UPDATE: I was reading slashdot tonight and saw an article that spoke about this post. Well, not this post. But what this post is about. I thought it fitting. Here's an excerpts from the article (Fire Your Boss)

"Because power in IT organizations tends to be based on head count, preserving jobs takes a priority. And when jobs have to be eliminated, they tend to come off the bottom of the organization when they should more logically come off the top -- or at least from near the top. A tech who directly helps users is more important than a manager who can't manage. This is especially true if that manager is making 2-3 times as much as the tech.

If your boss doesn't understand your job enough to describe it in technical detail, that boss is in the wrong job.

If you are managing an IT shop and can't write the code to render "hello world" in C, html, php, and pull "hello world" from a MySQL database using a perl script, then YOU are in the wrong job.

I should point out that these latter tasks can be copied and pasted straight from properly composed Google queries. They aren't a test of programming knowledge at all, just of the ability to use the Internet. Yet many technical managers will fail and should get the boot as a result. You can't manage what you can't understand."