Marcelo Calbucci's Blog

My Half & Full Marathon Training Plan for 2013

2013-04-28T12:30:00.001-07:00

Last week I put my training plan for my Half-Marathon in June (Seattle Rock-n-Roll), and my first full Marathon in October (Chicago).

Training plans are a hard thing. Everything on the web is OK, but it's not for you, or for me. I've paid for a few training plans but they were useless. They don't take into account my lifestyle, my vacations, my races in between, and it's pretty hard to adjust if you fall of the plan.

So I spent a few hours analyzing my previous two years of data, mostly from RunKeeper, and looking at some plans to improve speed at Half-Marathon and this book about running your first Marathon. I combined them, added a little bit of push (i.e., made it slightly harder by adding anywhere from 0.5 to 2 miles to each run), and came up with this.

Just to be clear, my goals are to finish a half-marathon under 2h (if I could do it under 1:52 it would be awesome) and to finish a Marathon alive (if I could do it under 5h it would be awesome).

If you scroll to the right you'll see where I am right now and this spreadsheet will actually update with my data (yes, I know the irony of working at a company that track your physical activity and have to create this "low-tech" solution).

Another milestone for EveryMove: $3.5M funding & more

2013-04-04T11:12:00.001-07:00

Less than a year ago I wrote about us raising a $2.6M Series A coming on the tails of participating in TechStars. I left part of that story out because I couldn’t tell it at the time, and now I’ll fill the gaps as today we are announcing the second part of the funding, with a $3.5M investment from Sandbox Industries, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Venture Fund and from BCBS Nebraska.

Winter 2011/2012

As we were incredibly busy in the midst of the 3-month long TechStars accelerator program, Russell Benaroya, my co-founder & CEO, scored a meeting with Sandbox Industries in Chicago. Sandbox is a VC which manages the Blue Cross Blue Shield Venture Fund, which is a VC fund from over 20 different Blue Cross plans in the US.

There was some reluctance from Sandbox to meet with us because they heard the same pitch a million times... “Our startup will change the health of your employees and reduce your healthcare costs”. That’s what 99% of the companies in this space are trying to do. They are trying to make unhealthy people healthy by changing their behavior, which is a herculean task. To top it off, there are two groups who have money and interest at making their “members” healthy: Health plans and employers. And that’s the reason so many startups try to do this: Big dollars, big problem, easy to identify sales strategy.

Russell went and met with Sandbox’s Anna Haghgooie and a few more folks and they were intrigued by EveryMove. We had such a different approach to the problem they said they would circle back with us in a week or so.

Just about a week later Russell gets a call from Sandbox basically saying they wanted to invest in us and they wanted to put $3.5M into the company. Holy crap! We hadn’t even launched our beta product yet and this VC wants to invest that much money from the get-go?

If you haven’t proved it yet…

If you know a thing or two about investment or negotiation you understand leverage. Sure, we had a unique solution to a big problem and we were both experienced entrepreneurs, and we had a partnership with Premera Blue Cross, but those were our only leverage points. In other words, the Sandbox valuation was justifiably low.

We were already in the middle of our fund raising, and we had Premera investing more in EveryMove, we had Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska very interested and we had the commitment from several Angel Investors, including Founders Co-op.

Splitting the risk

We could have walked away from Sandbox money and told them to either put a much higher valuation on the company, which would have been unreasonable based on the stage we were in and it could have driven off all the other investors, or we could have told Sandbox, let us build this thing out and then you guys can invest in us.

In a pretty natural way, we thought why not have it both ways? A higher valuation and the money from all existing investors and Sandbox, but do a time shift on the problem. Basically, why not set a Term Sheet that was based on us hitting some milestones and that would increase our valuation.

And that’s what we told Sandbox. Invest a little bit of money right now at a low valuation side by side with the other investors, and put the rest of the money at a higher valuation if we reach certain product and business milestones that we would agree upon.

Bingo!

Twofer: Series A + Series A-1

We negotiated this as a single document with two tranches of funding, called A and A-1. If you are an entrepreneur who has fundraised before you know how much energy and resources it takes to do that. We really didn’t want to be fund raising in 12 months again and have to take the focus away from building the product and the business, so negotiating two funding rounds in a single shot felt right.

The milestones we agreed on were based on Sandbox risk mitigation thought process, and it tried to answer the following questions:

Will consumers come and care about it?
Will brands be willing to sponsor rewards to consumers?
Can you two (me & Russell) build the team and the technology?

It felt like a fair set of questions. Heck, if the answers to those question are “no” a year after we got funding, we might as well stop this train and go find something else to do.

So we negotiated both the metrics and numbers we wanted to track and the terms of the deal and we ended up closing the deal in late April 2012, less than a year ago.

When it rains, it pours

This March has been an incredible busy month. I even had to cancel my trip to SXSW last minute and sacrifice long term biz-dev deals for the deals we had at the table. We launched partnerships with MyFitnessPal and Endomondo. We just launched a pilot with the employees of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska for them to get rewards on EveryMove and we have a very large deal we will announce in about three weeks. To top it off, we’ve been frantically working on our Android App and today we are announcing its official launch.

Android is here!

There is no other “feature” more requested on EveryMove than an Android App, and today we just launched our Android App. It’s pretty easy to understand that physical activity and Mobile go really well together. We are not a tracking app and our goal is to integrate, as deeply as possible, with the great existing tracking apps and devices out there, not to replace them.

If you think about doing physical activity, socializing about it with your friends, checking how many points you earned, earning and claiming a reward, yes, mobile is the way to go. Mobile serves us well on many fronts and it’s already the primary driver of new sign ups on EveryMove and it probably will be 80-90% of our sign ups in the next year. We still have a very complex piece of back-end, and the website still provides a richer experience, particularly around data visualization, but we are doubling-down (tripling-down?) on Mobile this year.

BTW, we are recruiting great mobile developers in Seattle if you know any.

Wild ride

It has been an awesome ride so far, full of ups and downs, but by far what I’m most proud of is the vision we set to execute and the team we built. In a time when each startup and big company is fighting to get the brightest minds, our team seems particularly special. Not only because we have bright minds, but also because we manage to maintain a cohesive culture and attitude that is inspiring and enabling.

What’s next?

We are just beginning at EveryMove. We are building EveryMove into a brand as known and as familiar as American Airlines Miles, Membership Rewards by American Express and My Starbucks Rewards. It’s a loyalty program for your health, on your terms.

We have a world of partnerships and integrations to conquer, and although we have done nearly 100 deals so far – from data partners, rewards, employers, health plans – we have a couple hundred thousand more to go. The challenges are both daunting and achievable. We are on it for the long haul and this round of funding will give us enough runaway to continue to focus and build a multi-billion dollar business. But more than that, it will re-shape how people get recognized and get benefits from their day-to-day healthy choices!

Onward.

LinkedIn is butchering Endorsements the same way Facebook butchered Likes

2013-03-28T16:32:00.001-07:00

I found it was brilliant when LinkedIn came out with the Skills & Expertise Endorsement feature. Not so much that I could be endorsed, but that I could endorse my friends – it made me feel good about it – and also because I could more easily search and identify for people with specific skills. A lot of people have a very sparse LinkedIn profile and that feature meant it would be fixed.

And started getting fixed as more people endorsed their connections and all was happy on the land of information until two weeks ago.

Two weeks ago I went to visit my profile and I was blown away. I hadn’t noticed before but I had hundreds of endorsements (as of this writing I have 270 endorsements) for nearly two dozen skills & expertise. Wow, it felt great. How awesome must I be? And a few seconds later you start to realize a lot of that endorsement is semi-bogus. I know something about Agile Methodologies, but 25 people endorsed me for it. Well, maybe these are folks that are worked close with over the last 5 years or so and know me really well. Nope, not really. They are friends, ex-colleagues of a decade ago, investors on my business, entrepreneurs I have beer with or even just met once or twice.

But it gets worse. I also have experience in Mobile Applications (barely), Usability Testing (I never done one), CRM (I swear I don’t know anything about CRM!). All bullshit. Well, maybe I do some of things in there, but people didn't endorse me because they know for sure I know that.

If I can’t trust endorsement where I have real data (my own life), how can I trust endorsement on other people? I can’t.

Where Facebook failed before

To understand why this is failing you have to understand how people get endorsed. Basically if you visit someone’s profile or if you sign into LinkedIn, they might prompt you “Does Russell have these skills or expertise” and a list of 3-5 expertise show up. It’s incredibly easy to endorse a person. It almost feels like a great game. Endorse a friend and get some good mojo back. Endorse for what? Who cares? It’s all good.

This is the same thing with Facebook pushing people to “Like” as many pages as possible. It devalued the meaning of Like. There was no other relationship I could build with a page on Facebook but Like. I can’t have “Interested in”, “I want the news from”, “I have it, but I’ll keep an eye on”, “I despise it, but I want to enter the contest for”. Nope, just “Like” it. And that’s why Open Graph search is so awesome and so awful at the same time.

Stop the madness

LinkedIn is creating a lot of engagement and definitely a lot of endorsement entries, but the long term value of is questionable, if not destructive. It also dawned on me the endorsement feature is much more about popularity than about skills. In theory, two CTOs of companies of similar size with similar background and experiences should have about the same skills, but the one that is more popular will be Endorsed more on LinkedIn.

What LinkedIn created is not an Endorsement feature. It’s an “I Like You” feature. For that, it’s working well. I feel the love. :)

Everyone and their mother are hiring Mobile Developers

2013-03-16T08:22:00.001-07:00

And so are we, EveryMove.

Every company will tell you the same things: great perks, great comp, great project and opportunity to learn.

We also offer: a project with a great purpose, a team with a zero-asshole-attitude tolerance, pushing the boundaries on fitness & health technology.

Do you know a friend who would be a great fit?

Google is about to learn a tough lesson

2013-03-15T09:23:00.000-07:00

A very common mistake entrepreneurs make is to assume that a feature is not necessary because it doesn’t have a lot of usage, thus it can be safely removed from the product. Sometimes that’s the case, but sometimes, not so much.

Google made a big mistake cancelling Google Reader that will have severe ripple effects to its empire. I know a lot has been written about it, but let me give you a different angle on it.

Microsoft Word, circa mid-90s

This is not my story, but a story of a friend who I worked with at Microsoft. He once told me Microsoft removed the “word count” feature on a Beta Preview version of Word it sent to journalists to review (I can’t recall if it was on purpose, a bug, or the feature was just more hidden). Microsoft knew about it but didn’t care because it had data that showed that feature was just minimally used.

You get the picture to what happen next. Journalists, because of the nature of their work, were obsessed about that one tiny feature. It wasn’t a critical feature that prevented them from doing their job, but it was a feature that made their life that much easier. According to this friend from Microsoft, the reviews of MS Word were awful and the flagship argument was that the new Word didn’t have a word count feature.

Social multiplier

What happens here is simple. Decisions makers and influencers carry a much stronger weight in product decision than the average user. That’s pretty well known on the Enterprise world. You don’t sell MS Outlook by convincing employees of a big company that Outlook is great. You sell Outlook by convincing the CIO and the IT team responsible to evaluate options of email client. They care not only what their employees will use, but also about how easy it will be for them.

Three self-inflicted wounds

First, Google says that it “gets” social, but you can’t “get” social if you don’t get the concept of an influencer. By killing a product that was beloved and heavily used by most influencers, you start to alienate those folks. Killing a product like Picnik with tens of millions of users, might have less impact on the business than killing a product with less than a million users, where most of those users are influencers. The number of users alone is not a metric that should be used to decide which products live or die. You must, at a minimum, include a profit-per-unit-of-effort and the strategic value (the amplifier effect) of the product (and the users of that product). Loss leader is not a bad strategy. Actually, most products at Google are loss leaders.

Second, Google just indirectly wounded many of its products, like Feedburner (which they probably don’t give a shit about it anymore, but they don’t know how to kill it since all those links are out there and it can’t be replaced), but most importantly it wounded Blogger. Google didn’t figure out how to make Blogger into a better product. Tumblr and WordPress continue to grow and dominate the short-form publishing out there. What surprises me is that the more pages and more page-views on the web, the better it’s for Google who primary monetization mechanic is primarily driven by ads (and AdWords / AdSense combo).

Third, and lastly, Google is sending a strong signal to the market that it will have no mercy of killing whatever product it doesn’t think it’s going well. It just told users, professionals and enterprises that we all should not use any product from Google if requires long term commitment (not business-type commitment, but data and emotional commitment) unless we have a sense that’s going to succeed. Now, I have to be in the business of evaluating Google’s product long-term viability before I can commit. Sure, I’m pretty sure Gmail is not going away, but what about Google Talk and Google Wallet? What about Picassa or YouTube?

Oh, and I’m pissed with Google Reader going away. I used it 3-10 times a day to consume about 100+ feeds. It wasn’t the awesome product that I wish it could have been, but it was the best out there.

PS: Irony not lost this blog post is on Blogger and 2,000+ people might read it on Google Reader. Good bye you.

Holy sh*t, my first Marathon ever!

2013-02-19T17:11:00.001-08:00

I just registered to run the Chicago Marathon in October 2013. This will be my very first Marathon. I think this is the first time in my life I’m starting something I don’t know I can finish. I actually don’t know and I won’t know unless I try it, so I will.

I think running a Marathon is one of those things, if you can, you should do once in your lifetime. And if I’m doing only once, why not do it at an epic event, with 45,000 running buddies?

The reasons I’m making this a public post are simple: motivation and accountability. Now that everyone knows I’m doing this, I cannot lie. I can quit. I can do it. I can’t pretend I never registered for it.

Why Chicago?

Chicago Marathon is pretty big. If you ever participated in an organized event, you know that you can draw extra energy from the other participants. It’s the second biggest in the US, and, it’s so popular they sell out registrations in just two weeks last year – likely to sell out sooner this year (so if you are thinking about registered, do it fast).

The timing is also perfect, October 13. I’ll be running the Seattle Rock-n-Roll Half-Marathon on late June and I can take July, August and September to grow my endurance from 13.1 to 26.2 miles. The course and weather should also be perfect to increase my chances of finish – it seems much better than the Seattle Marathon, or full Seattle Rock-n-Roll Marathon.

My goal will be to finish, even if I have to walk the last few miles. I’m really hopeful that I can do it under 5 hours as well, but I’ll be happy to just finish it. Want to join me?

The Broken Mobile App Model of Today

2013-02-12T15:56:00.003-08:00

Over the last few years the new paradigm of Mobile applications has appeared. Mobile is primarily a Software with an optional (but frequent) online component. This is not new. This is actually how "online" got started. Proprietary and native applications accessing data somewhere else. It works. It's powerful. However, the Mobile App model is inefficient and broken right now and it's not because of fragmentation or multiple technologies -- which cause technical pain. It's because the model prevents rapid iteration, integration, control and experimentation, which are big business pain points.

I'm far down the list of Mobile experts in the world. My experience comes mostly from the investment we've made over the last nine months to make EveryMove available on iOS (in addition to our website) and soon on Android, but also as an avid user of Mobile technology. More than once I had to get a reality check to learn how limited Mobile development is, and it shouldn't be.

It's Apple's Fault!

Apple is a control freak. They believe excessive control over every single bit of a product will yield a better product. Because of that m.o., when they launched their App Store they chose the most controlled way of building apps. Not only Apps had to be built in a fully proprietary language, framework and environment, they also had to comply with an enormous list of rules and they had to be certified and approved by Apple before they would be available for the device. It makes sense to do it this way to deliver an incredible consistent experience. If you were an early iPhone user and installed Apps, you know how they all felt just like the built-in apps.

When Google launched Android they followed the model Apple had set on the industry with more openness. Use an open language, with an open framework, with a tool set you could get from multiple vendors. You still submit the app to their app store, but you could install apps that were not on the app store, except that discoverability of those apps are basically non-existent.

The Early Days of the Web & Java

The Web has always been very open. There is no central organization approving your website to go live. There is no certification process and until this day, discovery of new Web sites (or Web Apps) are done via word of mouth (email, social, etc.), search engines or referrals. When Java came out circa 1994, it promised a world where full applications would be hosted on the cloud, downloaded and cached on the browser and they would have the ability to run online or offline. It was the equivalent of saying you wanted to run "Microsoft Word" and the first time you tried to open a DOC file, MS Word would be downloaded automatically for you and cached. If a new version of Word would be available, the cache would be invalidated and the new version downloaded.

It never happened. It didn't happen because the timing was off and the execution was weak. Bandwidth wasn't fast enough to make that model work. Browser fragmentation and the unavailability of Java built-in on Windows and other OSes made the process painful. Java slowness on those computers made sure no serious applications could be written at the time.

The New Mobile App Model

My argument for this entire post is that Mobile App Model should embrace the Java Model of the mid-90s. I like the idea of an App Store for discovery, but there is no real reason Apps bits couldn't live at the app Developer servers. There is also no reason that Apps couldn't be more modular and instead of a single blob download, be downloaded as components that could be upgraded independently. It's not only good software development practice to componentize your product, but it also makes for faster downloads of changes.

We can still have an App Store. We can still have Certified Apps, similar to getting an SSL certificate. The apps wouldn't be certified for their quality or content, but certified there is a trust chain. It wouldn't also prevent developers who don't own servers to host their content at some other place, but it would be up to the app Developer to decide.

What this model allows for is incredible flexibility for app developers to quickly (hours) to fix and ship new bits. It would allow app developers more analytics information about their app downloads, including "source" information (how did people find my app). It would enable A/B testing! Now I can give every other user a slightly modified version to see how they engage better. I can still do A/B testing in today's App Store, but it's "unnatural" and painful, while A/B testing on the web is easy and magical.

Security wise, phones should give less access to information to app developers. An App by default should be forbidden from accessing my contacts or my photo albums, and only if they get a special certificate, which might require part of the binary to be certified and digitally signed by the OS manufacturer, they could access those APIs.

Finally, the same way that I can do cross-domain AJAX calls today, two apps that want to talk to each other on the phone should be able to do that. If my app wants to expose a local API (i.e., getCurrenUserFullName) I should be able to do that. It would open up Mobile development and provide incredible integration across apps.

And we do some of that today

There are apps that are working around the limitation of the App Store by creating their own infrastructure just like that. They run a Web Control, fetch JavaScript, CSS and HTML from the server, cache it and run the app. If new updates are available, the fetch the new JS/CSS/HTML. It's a lot of infrastructure and supporting work, just to get the flexibility of quick patches, quick iterations and A/B test.

If App Stores want to embrace the new ultra fast-paced world of startups experimentation (agile, lean, etc.) they will need to adapt a different model. The one we have today is not friendly to startups.

Android is the new Windows CE

2013-02-04T17:29:00.004-08:00

I've spent some time visiting family in Brazil back in December. As always, I unlock (so I can run a local carrier SIM card) and jailbreak (so I can use my phone as a hotspot on the beach) my iPhone. I had a hiccup jailbreaking my iPhone 4S and I couldn't make it work. So I borrowed a test Samsung Nexus Android we use on EveryMove for Android development that is already unlocked and I spent two weeks using it as my primary phone.

My conclusion is that while iPhone and Windows Phone are revolutionary smart phones, Android is the closest thing I ever seen to an evolution of Windows CE. Android is the next generation Windows CE.

It has a freakin' Desktop!

Do you have any doubt that Android *is* Windows CE? It has a desktop! A place you drag icons and create shortcuts to apps. Really. It makes the entire experience one order of magnitude more complex than iOS/WP, where the apps are just there (side note: Windows Phone has tiles that can be thought of as shortcuts to apps, but they actually have additional value, contrary to Android plain shortcuts).

Poor Design

The most obvious aspect of people will feel when using an Android is the poor design. I'm not talking about the UX or interaction design -- which I'll comment later -- I'm talking about icons that could have been designed by me! And I suck at it. The "Browser" icon on Android looks like it was found on a free icon collection from 1997. On the other hand, you might say that Android designers were explicitly going after a vintage look, but that isn't true either. There are at least 3 or 4 different styles from the get go for the icons. Some are flat, some are 3D, some are B&W, some have shadows, etc. Both iPhone and Windows Phone are very consistent on their apps and button icons.

"I'm Google, I'm Google, I'm Google"

I tend to think that companies which over-emphasize their own brand or features with no value to users as a low self-esteem issue. Android suffers the problem of over-emphasizing Google's technology but I don't think they have low self-esteem. I think they have the opposite: too much confidence and they've been drinking too much of their Kool-aid.

Android comes with Google Earth in addition to Google Maps and a "Navigation" app. Why? It comes with a "Gmail" app in addition to an Email app -- I don't know how many people are like me, but the first thing I did was setup my email (which is GMail), but I clicked on the email app. When it asked for POP/IMAP and SMTP Server I knew I've done something wrong. Wait, I knew that Google had screwed up the UX somewhere.

It has a "Google" app. Now, if you are not an Android user and you never clicked on it, can you guess what it does? It takes you Google.com. Why?! There is a huge bar taking 10% of the screen on top that does exactly the same thing. It has a "Messaging" app and a "Messenger" app. And then, there is the "app store"…

Where are the apps?

Not only I have low attention span, I'm very busy and pragmatic. I don't like to spend one hour exploring things. I'm totally task oriented. I want to install the Facebook App. I have 3 minutes to get it done. Go! Well, where the heck is the app store on this thing? It took me a while to find out that "Play Store" is the app store. The reason I didn't click on it was because it was next to "Play Books", "Play Magazines", "Play Movies", "Play Music", "Play Store". If you read it like this, you think of "Play Store" as "Game Store" not "App Store". The Android UX team are thinking as engineers, not as users. I know that very well because I worked at Microsoft and we suffered the same problem. Naming and branding features is what we did day-in day-out and once a feature is elevated to a product status (by having a name), you have to treat it like a product. Turns out the line between software and content has been blurred a long time ago and there is no reason to distinguish them. Is Yelp software or content? Is the NYT App software or content? Yes, the iOS App Store suffers a similar issue.

Loved It

First of all, I really like the concept of swipe to "archive" / "dismiss" items that is used in many places and many apps. It's very fast and intuitive. On the iPhone you have to swipe and then press "archive" to archive an email. On Android that's a single motion, with an option to undo. Same thing for notifications on Android. I loved the Tethering feature. That alone might be worth using the phone if you care to not pay the Carrier tax for tethering. I also liked some of the geekier features, like network usage per day and per app, and ability to set alerts if you are getting close to your monthly data transfer limit.

Random rants

PIN number of variable length -- which means I have to click "enter". Since I have an yet to be named psychological condition that requires me to check email every 3 minutes while I'm awake, every time I pulled the phone out of my pocket I have to press 5 buttons, instead of 4. Yeah, nitpicky, but it bothered me enough to write here.
There is a "downloads" app. It's noise. No value.
Photo Album is called "Gallery" -- that's not how people name their personal pictures.
The GMail app crashed several times.
The GMail app also had poor indication of when it last synced or if during sync things were working or not. It felt like sometimes it failed to sync, but gave no indication of it. Also, when I forced sync the animation stopped and it seemed there was no email, and 10 seconds later (after I left the app) the email notification icon would pop. It was liked the app fetched the email but spent 10 seconds rendering it -- or preparing to tell me they were there.
"News & Weather" should have been two apps and the weather part is bad because I'm always checking the weather of multiple cities, particularly when I'm days or weeks from a trip, and it only supported one city.
Search for "Yelp" on the "Play Store" and the first result is "Yelp Lookup for Thrutu by David Drysdale" (doesn't feel like the official Yelp app). Second result is "Maps by Google, Inc" with a special "Editors' Choice". I thought there was no Yelp app for Android until I went to yelp.com and it prompted me to install the Yelp App. Strange. Very strange. NOTE: Turns out that because I've got a SIM Card from Brazil, Google automatically assumed I wanted the "Play Store" from Brazil. That's probably a fringe issue since not many people will face it.
Why the web browsing app is called "Browser" and not "Chrome"?
Google's own Google Reader suck on their Browser app. Every time you click "Next Item" on Google Reader the Browser navigation bar would appear for 3-5 seconds covering the next "Next Item" button making quickly scanning blog posts very annoying.

Android is successful and it will continue to grow

There is a big difference between great products and great businesses. We all want to believe that great products inevitably lead to great business but that's not true. Great value generation is what create great businesses and Android does it. It delivers incredible value to carriers, which allows them to customize and sell smart phones for much cheaper price than iOS or Windows Phone devices, which means value to a huge segment of consumers. It has the technology horse power to be configured in many interesting ways (just like Windows CE had) and, above all, it has not competitor for what it's doing. People who want incredible control and power have no choice of smart phone but Android.

For me, Android doesn't work because I'm way too much focused on getting things done fast. I don't want to have 100% of features I need at the cost of making 90% of my most used features slower or harder to use.

I just learned I’m a Synesthete (pain-color)

2013-01-26T11:08:00.001-08:00

(Personal post for personal reference, not related to tech or entrepreneurship)

I was watching the NOVA Science Now episode on the brain and an interview with David Eagleman who has been studying Synesthesia and suddenly I’m taken back to my childhood memory of seeing colors for pain.

If you don’t know, Synesthesia is a condition where two parts of the brain get “mixed” up. Common symptoms include people who can see colors when they see numbers and letters, people who see colors when they hear sound and things like that. I learned about Synesthesia when my kid entered pre-school, because there is a form of synesthesia that causes some kids to feel incredible discomfort from some simple textures (tactile-emotion synesthesia). My kids didn’t have that, but some kids at his school and some of our friends’ kids did.

Mistakenly, I thought Synesthesia was about mixing senses so I never gave any thought to it, until I saw that NOVA episode and it became clear that it’s potentially any two parts of the brain interfering with each other, and that’s my case. I see colors when I feel pain. I always did, since I was a kid.

Probably around my teenager years I stopped talking about it, because probably it didn’t have any value and I didn’t want people to think I was crazy (which I might still be). “Hey Doc, do you have any medicine for light green pain?” – yeah, I don’t think it would have helped.

I just found it fascinating that something I took for a vivid imagination as a kid is actually a (benign) brain condition.

We are recruiting a few Sr. Mobile Developers. Care to change the world?

2012-11-27T11:57:00.000-08:00

We've investing more and more of our resources toward our Mobile App. I know it might sound "cheesy" -- and you might say "so 90s" -- but our goals it to make EveryMove available on any device and meet the user where they are at. We have launched our iPhone App about 7 weeks ago and we have made an update and we expect to make updates to our Mobile App every 15-30 days. We also have a big deal of work ahead of us, not only to augment the feature set of our iPhone App, but to launch our Android App in early 2013.

Because of that, EveryMove is recruiting Mobile Developers with experience with iOS and/or Android. If you know someone who is passionate about health and fitness and incredibly competent developing Mobile apps, let them know about this opportunity. We are right now facing the biggest change to the healthcare system in our lifetime and the chance to make an impact is now!

Sr. Mobile Developer at EveryMove

Step 2: Launch the product!

2012-10-09T15:00:00.002-07:00

There are three big milestones for a startup: when you start, when you launch your product and when it "ends". Today we achieve milestone number two. We publicly launch EveryMove. Sign up for our health rewards program now or download our iPhone App.

You know how you feel when you are in a rollercoaster and the car moves slowly to the top and it's just about to got into a nearly free fall that you can't see? Yeah, that's how it feels right now.

We managed to hit all the supporting elements to build a successful business so far, from partnerships and funding, to hiring a phenomenal team and building a product. Things never happen as fast as I want, but they happened.

We are far from being a success. We still need to prove many assumptions about consumer adoption and complex partnership integrations, but we've done 6 months of private beta and nearly two dozen partnerships that indicate we are on the right path.

I expect my life to be less steady from now on (don't tell that to my wife). Now we'll need to be more careful when deploying new production code, more concerned about data storage and server availability, when changing features that users have a certain expectation on how they work, on removing or adding new features and what implications they will have on the UX, engagement and virality.

At the same time, this is very exciting because it's the phase where we'll start to use analytics to understand how, when and what features are being used. It's the time to start thinking about A/B testing and reporting. Of establishing baselines of open rates on emails and click-through on Mobile notifications and make sure they are only going up. It's the time to invest (more) resources into Marketing and figure out how to attract more users. It's the time to make sure the value we are delivering for individuals and partners is ever increasing.

I'm looking forward to the next 12 months of EveryMove!

Managing Super Developers (Part 2)

2012-09-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

On Part 1 of this 2-parts post I talked about Motivators for developers. If you don't work on those, the rest might not even matter.

You can influence but you can’t control someone’s intrinsic motivation. However, there are extrinsic factors that as a manager, founder or CEO/CTO/CIO you have tremendous power over and you can, and should, make developers life much easier. These are the “boosters”, they won’t take an unsatisfied developer to the satisfied column, but they will provide an extra boost to their morale and productivity.

These are the 8 boosters for a happier and more focused developer:

Booster #1: Dual-monitor

Here is my story about dual-mon: In 2000 I asked my manager for a dual-monitor at Microsoft. I had a 19” or 20” CRT monitor and I wanted another one. I said it would make me faster because I could have one window open with some documentation while writing code on another. He wasn’t a very good manager and he thought of a “brilliant” plan to turn me down. He asked me to write a business justification for dual monitor – as a shocker to some of you, he was also a developer. It was clear for me that he wouldn’t order another monitor for me, but I felt I wanted him to suck on his own wishes. So I went and I found a research, I believe done by IBM in the early 90s, proving that dual-mon, surprise surprise, actually does increase developer productivity! Duh! Well, what’s true then is still true now. If your developers are not running dual-mon, they are being less productive than they could be. Now, think about this. You pay them $100,000 a year or more, and you are trying to save $500 by not giving them dual-mon?

Booster #2: Keyboard and mouse.

This should be just as clear as why dual-monitor is important. The cost of a decent keyboard and mouse compared to the productivity gain makes this a no-brainer. Don’t prescribe keyboard and mouse! Don’t say everyone has to use Microsoft Natural Keyboard because that’s the company’s standard. Let each developer pick their own keyboard and their own mouse. They know what they like. If you are concerned about money and you have a developer who asks for a $2,000 keyboard, you probably made a mistake recruiting that person anyway.

Booster #3: Computer

For each minute a developer is waiting for something to happen, a process to run, a file to copy, a project to open or whatever, because their computer is slow, you get an exponential loss of productivity. Actually there is research proving this, so I’m not making this up. A person who waits just a few seconds for something to finish, don’t waste any time doing the next step. As the latency increases, the idle time turns into distraction and it takes longer to refocus on what you were doing before. So by saving a couple hundred dollars on a cheaper processor or less RAM won’t really work the way you expect.

Booster #4: Coffee, Drinks & Food

People can’t really work well if their basic physiological needs aren't taken care of. You can’t do much about sleep and hopefully you do have a restroom at the office, but you can provide a variety of drinks and snacks to make sure if a developer feels thirsty or hungry he doesn’t have to spend 30 minutes walking to a nearby coffee house. I find that actually that’s not the bigger killer of productivity. Sometimes taking a break and walking is a great way to be more productive. But early in the morning when you need something to wake up, and late in the evening, when a developer just want to squeeze another hour of work, the extra calories help.

Booster #5: Education

Books, seminars, conferences, meetups, tech talks, online classes and other formats are critical to keep a developer learning and improving. Developers will seek ways to learn new things no matter what, but still is great to know that their peers and managers support them taking time away from work to learn something new, or even to teach something new.

Booster #6: Say “No” to fake metrics

Developers are optimizers. If you put a metric in front of them and say we need to increase that by 10%, you make it too easy for them to stop thinking and start chasing that metric. Metrics like “lines of code”, number of bugs fixed, widgets extensions implemented, etc., are not really valid and will just cause a lot of distraction.

Booster #7: Team Synapses

A huge amount of energy is lost if teams of developers (or even among developers and other disciplines) are not working well together. This can go from the “we have a culture of do not disturb” to the worse cases of “we don’t like each other”. If developers waste 2h chasing an issue that a peer could have solved in 5-minutes because he was afraid of asking the other person, that’s not good. In one hand, you can say that “waste 2h” is not really wasted since they probably learned quite a bit on that process. But developers have to focus on getting things done, not just “learn new things”. A culture of “ship it” cannot be built by chasing small issues for hours just so a developer can learn a new piece of the code, even if that's their natural inclination.

Booster #8: Shielded from Distractions

Just like a writer, painter, builder, designer or mad scientist creating a new super power potion, developers need blocks of uninterrupted time to work on their craft. Interruptions, no matter how long or short, how big or small, how easy or hard, have the same effect: takes the developer mind away from being in the "zone". Even simple things like asking "do you want some coffe?" is an interruption. If you work with developers, you might notice a pattern of using headphones and/or working late nights. We do this because those are aways for us to avoid distraction from outside agents. It doesn't mean that developers can't be interrupted, ever, but minimizing interruption will increase productivity.

Managing Super Developers (Part 1)

2012-09-17T07:30:00.000-07:00

This post is about developer’s productivity. I’ve been meaning to write this a while ago, but I guess it got stuck in a clogged synapse. I have an engineer brain, so my inclination is to think about people in very complex ways, but then I balance that by reading about psychology, behavior and marketing, and I realize people have some simpler needs that are more obvious than the engineer brain thinks. Although a software engineer will appreciate and relate to this post, I’m really talking direct to founders of startups, CIOs, CTOs and other managers of developers who aren’t developers themselves.

Twice as fast

There are just two pieces that you have to understand to get a developer to solve a problem twice as fast: his inner motivation and external factors. Like on any other thing on our life, if we don’t feel like doing something, we drag our feet. On top of that, there are possible impediments or obstacles that make it harder to actually do the work. Managers, leaders, founders and developers themselves should be aware of those, address it and clear the path.

Intrinsic Motivators: 5 Ways to improve it

Which project do you think would get done faster? Project A: a simple dentist website as a school project for a hypothetical dentist with hypothetical requirements and deadlines, which you’ll get a grade at the end; or, Project B: a simple dentist website for a dentist, who you met at a party and you have an amazing crush on her/him, and he/she didn’t know how to do a website for themselves and you jumped right in and volunteered to do it? If you answered Project A, this blog post is wrong for you.

That’s the power of really wanted to do it. Of course, the example above uses an “extrinsic” force (i.e., the probability of getting a date) as a driving force, but still, that doesn’t take away the fact that you really, really wanted to do it.

Here are 5 tips to improve intrinsic motivation in no particular order:

Motivator #1: Build something cool

Nothing, absolutely nothing will get a developer more excited than building something cool. Cool by their standards, not yours, not the business, not the sales team. But what’s cool? It depends. It depends on the developer, on what they want to learn next, how they want to evaluate success, etc. The easiest way is to learn what each developer care the most, inside of the boundaries of what needs to be done, and give it to them. Yes, I absolutely get that component A needs to get done, before component B, but forcing a developer to build something they are not 100% into it will cost you 30%, 50% or 100% more time to get it done.

Motivator #2: Autonomy

The more time someone lives without autonomy on their day-to-day job, the more babysitting they need to get their work done. The more a manager schedule a developers daily bugs, or the details of the features that need to be done, or the meetings a person should attend, the more the manager will need to do it, to the point where the manager thinks he’s surrounded by dependent child-like developers who are incapable of taking any initiative. You get whose fault this it, don’t you? The converse is also true! The more independence and autonomy you give to developers the better they get at being independent self-driven contributors. The better they get at figuring out requirements, getting unblocked, chasing other folks to get their stuff done if there is a dependency, at testing their own code, and lo-and-behold, at understanding why they are building what they are building! Which leads me to...

Motivator #3: Know the Why!

Do you know who are some of the most overworked, underpaid and underappreciated workers of all? Non-profit organization volunteers! They work for free, sometimes under unsavory and unsafe conditions. They don’t do glamorous work and have very little autonomy on what they do. But they know exactly the purpose and meaning of their work! Making money is not a “Why”. Shipping software is not a “Why”. Whose lives is the software being built is going to make better? How is that piece of software connected to that? A developer who gets the “Why” will go further and faster than a developer who doesn’t.

Motivator #4: Newness

The majority of developers get excited like 5-year-old learning how to ride a bike without training wheels if they have to learn a new technology. It’s almost like they dare themselves to learn it and getting good at it. If you go to your average web developer and tell him he’ll have to learn a couple of new technologies to work on the next project, before you are done telling it he’s already thinking about friends who have been using that technology, about books that he’ll buy or online videos and courses he can use, and little side projects he can try with the new tech. That happens almost all the time, unless you have a non-developer pretending to be a developer on your team.

Motivator #5: Impact

For developers, size matters. That’s the market size. When Google, Microsoft or Facebook tell a candidate he’ll be working on a project that will be used by 700 million users, it's a hard selling proposition to beat. OK, not all projects will ever reach that scale, but make sure people feel like either it could reach that scale or, indirectly is reaching a massive scale. Writing software for real estate agents might touch just tens of thousands of people, but once you multiple that by the number of people those real estate agents are helping, you start to talk about the impact of your work in a much larger scale.

The five core motivators that I listed above are critical at getting developers waking up in the morning, excited to go to work and working long and hard to get things done. Part 2 of this post talks about "Boosters" for developers, small things that make a big difference.

The death of research as we know it #qs2012

2012-09-16T12:44:00.002-07:00

I’m sure I’m not the only one who is quite skeptical of research, particularly medical, psychological or economic research. Thankfully, those will be dead sooner than we expect.

These researches usually go like this “Top researchers at the University of [top-university] found that by [action] 37% of people got [reaction]”. Once you explore you see more information about how they've got to that conclusion. Usually is a survey and they asked 300 people in some city in the US and so on and so forth. The skeptical flag on my head goes up instantaneously: 300 people only? In a single region? Using a self-reported data? To which I’ll immediately dismiss the survey finding as unproven (unless of course I want to make a case and I need to point to something even though I don’t believe on it).

Small Samples

The reason researches use small samples, surveys and limited geographic scope is a simple one: money! Research cost money. Lots of money. The more limited the scope, the cheaper it gets. The more “automated” the cheaper it gets, hence the reason they prefer survey to interviews, and interviews to real quantified data. That’s why they survey 300 people instead of 30,000. That's why they prefer to survey top 10 metropolitan cities in the US, instead of the top 1,000 metropolitan cities around the world.

Quantified Self: n=1

Well, maybe it doesn’t matter what researchers find what’s the optimum number of steps you should take every day to lose 5 lbs or to lower your blood pressure. You can find out all by yourself. Get a fitbit or BodyBug, start tracking some food intake with LoseIt or MyFitnessPal, and take your weight and blood pressure every day with Withings, and in a couple of months you’ll have strong data about your own body -- even better if you can do over a year or two. That’s unquestionably good data for you, because it’s your data.

This is what quantified self is about. About you tracking, measuring, collecting and analyzing data about yourself and learning from that data. Of course, some types of data are much harder to collect and analyze and to actually drive learning and conclusions, and even if you have conclusions about that data it still doesn’t mean is actionable, but it’s knowledge nonetheless.

Like your financial advisor might disclose to you: Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. So knowing how you did on the past might not guarantee that using the exact same steps will get you to the same place. But what if someone that had a very similar body type, gender, age, race and lifestyle than you also did the same tracking, and she was a year ahead of you. Could you use that information in a way to turn around a problem you are having? Assuming she had that problem and got to a great place?

n=1,000,000,000

This is the power of a billion people quantifying themselves. Imagine that we had 1 billion people collecting hundreds of data points on a daily basis about their physical activity, nutrition, sleep, lifestyle choices, stress, mood, location, sex, spending, etc. Imagine all that data gets collected into a single database with trillion of data points and anyone can query that data (anonimized of course). Now, instead of sample-based data we have population data. Instead of a handful of data points for the exact demographic and psychographic profile you have, you have thousands of data points. Now you can look at different paths and different outcomes for those individuals even before you choose your own path (btw, PatientsLikeMe is a company doing that for cancer and other 'big' diseases)

That's the future of research. It won't be a one-size fits all. It won't be overarching conclusions about good and bad food, good and bad ways to exercise, good or bad ways to save money for retirement, it will be advice 100% personalized to you, based on your data and the data of a billion people.

Pipe dream? Well, every credit card purchase you make today is logged at Visa, MasterCard, Amex, etc. There are billions of people using credit cards every day. Every phone call you make also gets logged. Not what you said, but who you called and when.More than 2 billion people carry a cellphone on their pocket. Even without GPS, cell-tower triangulation has a pretty good approximation of where you are, and if you are moving, that gets logged too. All saved on a database somewhere. Right now you can't do anything with that data, but the more people quantifying themselves (n=1), the more large companies will see the interest on giving people their data so they can do whatever they want with it.

Some day, over the next five to ten years, hundreds of millions of people will be proactively sharing their data with services and tools to help improve their lives. Their health, their commute time, their finances and much more. The future looks bright and I won't need to pull my hair out when I read another bullshit headline of some medical research (mostly because I won't have any hair left).

The Nascent Industry Paradox #QS2012

2012-09-15T15:06:00.000-07:00

Established industries have very clear boundaries and interfaces between its constituents. Think about the real estate industry. There are land developers, builders, real estate agents, inspectors, appraisers, financiers, buyers, painters, cleaners, owners, landlords, and so on and so forth. How these players communicate, exchange information, pay each other is well understood and established.

If a new player wants to enter the market, either with a disruptive strategy or not, the boundaries are well known. This new competitor can attack one facet of that industry, or multiple facets at once, but the facets are well known.

Nascent industries are a lot more complicated beasts.

Because the boundaries and facets are not clear, two new startups or products might look at each other as competitive, even though they aren’t. Usually it depends on how broadly one defines what they are doing. If you define your product as “making people healthier” you clearly will feel like every company in the health space is a competitor. The most interesting aspect is that the definitions of the boundaries and facets, since there hasn’t been a common agreement on what they are, will differ from person to person, and you might look at another company as a partner, but they might look at you as a competitor.

I’m here at the Quantified Self 2012 Conference and meeting dozens of people who are into self-tracking, self-improvement, etc. Sometimes people track things like productivity or driving routes, but the majority of people think of tracking in terms of improving their health, or helping others improve their health.

Because personal tracking devices and apps were practically non-existent a handful of years ago, this is a fairly young industry and I see how some companies walk in eggshells when talking about what they do. They are afraid you are a competitor.

I think we have an even bigger problem with EveryMove, because we are in the intersection of two nascent industries, the physical activity tracking and the behavior economic industry.

I believe we are 5-10 years away to have clear boundaries on the game we are playing. We’ll lose some partnership opportunities because our “partner-to-be” doesn’t look at us the same way we look at them. On the other hand, the companies that do have clarity at what they want to be in 5-10 years, have a sharper definition of the boundaries and facets of the industry and aren’t afraid to partner with us, if they see fit, or to claim that we are direct competitor, and that clarity is great for all of us.

My advice is that before you dismiss a potential partnership with what you perceive them to be a competitor is to make sure you understand how the industry will shape up to be in the future.

Should my startup try to partner with a health insurance company?

2012-09-14T10:32:00.000-07:00

Not that I’m expert on how the Health Insurance companies work, or how to partner with them, or how to get them to invest on you, despite the fact that we did all those things at EveryMove (actually, Russell is the one who did most of the work there), but I’ve got enough exposure to them and at startups trying to partner with them to see a pattern. The pattern is simple: an awesome startup creates a product that actually works, and it would help insurance companies save millions or increase revenue or profits, so for this eager entrepreneur is a no brainer: “If health insurer A would partner with me, they can add a couple million dollars to their bottom line and I could make a boatload of money”. Yeah, it doesn't work like that.

A couple of weeks ago I’ve got an email from an eager entrepreneur asking to “pick my brain” on how to partner with a health insurance company. She has a great product with a great solution for a real problem, but I had to tell them they would be probably spending a lot of energy on an unlikely outcome. I sent an email to her (see below). She isn't in a competitive space at all, so I wasn’t trying to dodge the introduction, I was just trying to be helpful and point her to a better direction to get to her destination.

Here is the “anonimized” (Kelly is a pseudo-name) version of the email I sent her:

Hi Kelly, interesting product you have.

I'd love to help you, but I think that I'm not the right person to help you and I think that going to insurance companies will be a bad strategy on the beginning.

Let me start by saying that my primary relation to health insurance companies is around the member engagement, marketing and actuarial teams. All my knowledge would not apply to things like [your-product] which would fall into their clinical / product divisions. I know a health insurer from the outside looks like just a big company, but like any big company each division is fairly independent and just because you work with one division doesn't mean much to the other.

Second, health insurance companies have hundreds of problems. I'm fairly familiar with their biggest concerns from a strategic / executive level, and I can tell you saving money on [costly problem] is not one of them. They invest most of their energy, besides running their existing business, in figuring out how to save money with chronic diseases (high blood pressure, diabetes, etc.), how to improve outcomes for treatments and how to get their members to be healthier over a longer period of time.

Let me give you one example. A company that I know of created a [big health problem] program that was incredibly effective. They spent years going after the insurance companies because they thought that it would help them save money. They got nowhere. It takes 2-4 years of hard data for an insurance company to believe this kind of solution and after that it's many other hurdles for each division of the company to understand and buy into the solution. So this company decided to abandon that strategy and go direct to HR departments of large employers. They were incredibly successful because the [big health problem] program worked, it was seen as an HR benefit inside of the company (instead of a benefit of the health plan), and they were acquired for a hefty sum.

Just to give you an idea, if a health insurance would partner with you, it would cost them millions of dollars. It would impact the marketing team, their customer support team, their sales team, their IT team, their member engagement team, their actuarial team, the benefits and product team, the group plan team, the regulation and approval team, and on and on. Then there is how much they would pay directly to you. So, if you charge them $250,000 on year 1, the total cost to them would be that plus the internal costs, which could be a couple million dollars. Let's say the total cost is $1 million.

Would they save at least that amount? Actually, even if they save $1.25 million is not a break-even because they have a much bigger problem to solve so the opportunity cost would be immense for them. They have other initiatives they will invest $2M and save $10M, and then there is another initiative, and another one, and another one. By the time they get to yours, well.... they wouldn't get to yours.

And I know a dozen or so companies who tried to go after the health insurance companies and, almost without exception, they spent 9-18 months of their energy and got nowhere. Most of the companies just disappear, but a few go after the Employer / HR and make it big.

Here's what I would do if I were you. Find a big self-insured employer and figure out how to do a pilot with their HR department. Self-insured companies are the ones that pay for nearly 100% of the health costs of their members, versus the insurance company. Usually the insurance company put their name and administers it, but it's the employer who is paying for (almost) everything.

There are many employers who really look after their employee. I would go after Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and any company that has a [product demographic] base and pitch this as a benefit to "attract more [product demographic] to the your company and save money".

I hope this helps.
-Marcelo

Michelle Obama's speechwriter reads my blog.

2012-09-04T23:06:00.004-07:00

Here is what I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

"...Life success is much more than your exits, bonuses, promos, raises and title. It’s much more than your big house, boat or fancy car. Life success is measured by two things and two things only, so answer these questions: First, and most important, do you live a happy live and you feel you are creating meaning and have a purpose? Second, are you touching others people lives and helping them be happier, create meaning and have purpose?..."

Here is what Michelle Obama said during her DNC speech (watch video below at about 15:50):

"Success isn't about how much money you make is about the difference you make in people's lives."

Sure, it's much better way of saying it, but they make a living of crafting words and I suck at it. Still, same sentiment.

You are welcome, Michelle. Great speech BTW.

Life moves in leaps

2012-08-22T07:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had an epiphany.

I have this routine on informational interviews with candidates which I’ve been using for the last 9 months, since we started recruiting. No matter what position this is for (development, design, marketing, biz-dev, etc.) I start by talking about me, talking about how I met Russell and how EveryMove got started and how we decided to build what we are building. All that as a preamble before the candidate can start talking about themselves and it usually just take me 5 or 6 minutes to tell all that. Yesterday, for the N-th time, I did exactly the same thing, but suddenly it felt different.

In a flash in front of my eyes, I realized how much I’ve grown over the last 18-months.

If you ask yourself every evening before you go to bed how much you learned that day, you might say some days you learn a lot, some days you learn a little, and some days feel like you didn’t learn anything new. You are just the same old you. But are rare the days you say it completely changed your life. It’s usually a big event, trauma, exposure to a thought in a moment you were vulnerable, etc. Because of that, people can go years accumulating the little daily lessons into their life and only after a significant amount of time they look back at some exact point in time and realize they are not the same. Yesterday was that day for me.

As I was telling a person about some of the initial conversations I had with Russell about EveryMove, I remember I thought that occurred on my head back in February of last year on a specific piece of game-mechanic for creating engagement. More specifically I remember how I thought that game-mechanic as bad and it would not actually create long-term engagement. For some reason that only my lizard brain knows, I re-rationalize that problem yesterday and I saw myself, for a split of second, telling my former self how ignorant my thought process was back then.

I’ve spent the past 18 months learning about behavior, game mechanics, incentives, rewards and much more. What Marcelo of today realizes is that Marcelo of yesterday was just looking at the tactics of game-mechanics without understanding the strategy, without understanding the “why”. The funny part of all this is that I still think that was a bad game-mechanic, maybe at an instinctive level I knew it all along, but could not rationalize it the right way. Now I know why.

If you look back enough years on your life you can always find a point where you felt different. I guess the trick is not to find a point 15, 10 or 5 years ago, but make sure those big leaps that move your life forward are happening in even shorter-bursts, of 12, 6 or even 3-months. If you have been doing the same thing, living the same life and feeling like you have not learned anything over the last 2, 3, 5 years or more, shouldn’t you seek change? Isn’t it dangerous to get comfortable at not learning? Is that what being old is like?

Do you know JSON, HTTP, T-SQL, .NET and REST?

2012-08-20T21:01:00.000-07:00

If you think those things on the title are not Greek or garbled text, and you actually know how to architect and use those technologies -- and you are good at it -- EveryMove is looking for you.

Take a look at our Back-end .NET Developer job opening. If you have a friend who might be a great fit, let him or her know as well. It might change their life!

HaikuDeck: Open letter to Dave McClure

2012-08-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

This is a HaikuDeck version of my blog post Open Letter to Dave McClure. Thank you Adam Tratt for making it for me.

Open Letter to Dave McClure: You’re measuring the wrong thing.

2012-07-09T09:42:00.000-07:00

Hey Dave, by now you already got all pats in the back and positive feedback from your incredibly transparent and open-hearted blog post. Maybe someone already told you this, so I shouldn’t have, but I want to make sure you don’t miss this point: You are dead wrong on hoping that your epitaph reads “late bloomer” and not a “failure”.

You are not a late bloomer! And you won’t be one, sorry.

You are not a failure either. You are actually a success. Period.

The problem is that you live among people who measure their legacy by dollars amount and that’s such a fucked up way to measure life. I know it’s the American way. You are not successful unless you have 7, 8 or 9 digits on your bank account is what they say. Bullshit.

Life success is much more than your exits, bonuses, promos, raises and title. It’s much more than your big house, boat or fancy car. Life success is measured by two things and two things only, so answer these questions: First, and most important, do you live a happy live and you feel you are creating meaning and have a purpose? Second, are you touching others people lives and helping them be happier, create meaning and have purpose?

If you answer yes to those two questions, you are a success. Let me emphasize this point. Dear Dave McClure, you are a huge success!!!

In my tiny world, while running the Seattle 2.0 organization I managed to touch the lives of a couple thousand entrepreneurs and investors here in Seattle. Every week I’d get a surprise email or a shake of hand at a coffee shop and someone would thank me because I helped them find a job at a startup, or because they found their entrepreneurial path, or, they found out they weren’t cut to be an entrepreneur. It wasn’t just because of me, but I was a tiny help for them.

You, my friend, did a lot more than that to a lot more people and not in a small corner of this country. You did at a massive scale. You helped, moved, nudged and influenced tens of thousands of people. These people are happier, are creating meaning and felling they have a purpose in life because of you. How can anyone dispute this isn’t a total success?

From now on, keep your head high and just go “fuck yeah, I did it”. For your epitaph, just say it “the world is better because I was here”.

Yours truly,
-Marcelo

Would be possible for Microsoft to totally screw up Xbox BU?

2012-05-18T10:52:00.001-07:00

About two years ago we signed up for Verizon FIOS at our home. Last month, we noticed our bill had jumped from $140 or so per month to almost $200. Silly us, we forgot our contract had expired and they just jacked the price. So we cancel the TV and landline and kept Internet only and that caused a new habit of using Netflix more. Our primary device to watch Netflix is Xbox. It works well, but it feels wrong.

I mostly stopped playing games on Xbox after my kids were born. When I had one kid I could still snick in some Halo between here and there, but after the second kid it became too hard. The Xbox became most for casual games (Kinect stuff) and for music and videos. Now the machine is our primary way for the TV entertainment of the house, it’s clearly showing its weaknesses, among them:

The device gets super hot if you leave it on for too long.
It takes too long to start.
There is this constant disk spinning background noise.
The remote control, wait, the game controller, turns itself off after a while.
The controller is incredibly hard for a kid to use to control Netflix and it’s too easy to click a button and take the Xbox to a whole new world.
The UX is atrocious! Yes, I said it. There are so many clicks and scrolls to get to what you want that’s ridiculous. The bad UX is hidden behind amazing graphics and graphic effects. It’s like going to a bad movie in theaters with amazing 3D special effects. It’s still a bad movie, but pretty.

That made me think how Microsoft is vulnerable on the Xbox business unit. If they don’t launch a new Xbox primarily designed to be the control center of your TV, it will be similar to the Windows Mobile vs. iPhone story. It becomes a catch up game and Microsoft is not the fast-follower it used to be (well, actually they continue to be fast-followers, but the world is moving faster).

The Xbox is incredibly lucky that Apple has not launched a serious iTV contender. Maybe it’s harder than Apple originally predicted, but Apple is revolutionizing software and hardware so much that it wouldn’t surprise me if they launch either a full TV or a set-top-box for an incredible affordable price and take the world by storm with a fully integrated experience. iCloud is the most strong signal this is coming. The existing Apple TV was just an experiment, right now and it shouldn't be taken seriously.

I have two advices to Microsoft. 1) Ship faster the next generation Xbox. 2) Make this new Xbox optimized for Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, listening to music, viewing pictures and playing casual games. Yes, you can still support hard-core gamers, but that should be secondary.

Do you know some amazing UX Designer in need of a change?

2012-05-15T14:46:00.001-07:00

EveryMove is growing and the time has come to grow our 1-person UX team to a team, with two people! The short version is that we have a lot of work ahead of us, a lot of innovation, a lot of experience to be built and a whole mobile app to get it going and we are looking for an awesome UX Designer (Graphic Designer + UX expert) to join EveryMove and help us empower consumers get recognized by their health insurance company, employer and brands for their healthy moves!

If you know a UX Designer who is incredibly talented, passionate, competent and self-driven, and wants to make a big impact in the world, tell them about this job opening at EveryMove. Oh yeah, we are funded, pay well, work in Seattle in an amazing cool space with amazing cool people.

And since I have your attention, we also have a front-end developer position and a mobile developer position at EveryMove. Check out and let your friends know.

Talk about an unpopular blog post

2012-05-10T13:17:00.002-07:00

Yes, I’m sorry, but the answer is no. I’m very busy. I love to meet and mentor entrepreneurs, but right now my life is incredibly busy and I don’t have time for coffee or lunch. I don’t have time for a quick call. I’m fast with email and Twitter, though. I also attend many events in Seattle and you can introduce yourself to me and ask for feedback or input on anything, more than happy to give. I just can’t stop my daily flow. That has to be 100% EveryMove.

Now, if you want to offer me recruiting services, hosting / IT / CDN, help with our social media strategy, banking or wealth management (yeah, like the money went to my bank account) the answer is no. We are set.

On the flip side, if you are a kick-ass .NET developer or UX designer, we have a job for you. If you are an insurance company, employer or brand who believe people should be recognized for their health activity, we have a cool opportunity for you, and, finally, if you are helping people track their physical activity online, on mobile or devices, let’s talk data integration!

Hungry: We just raised $2.6M to build EveryMove

2012-05-09T14:33:00.002-07:00

What can I say? It feels awesome that EveryMove just raised a significant chunk of money to build what will once be a household name on how you get recognized for your healthy lifestyle. We have a great team and the funding will primarily help us recruit another handful of people to build this into a billion dollar business, while improving the health of an entire population. Yeah, no small feat ahead of us (and it might take more a dozen folks to do it).

We haven’t talked publicly about what we are doing, but there isn’t much secret to it. We want to help you get recognized by your health insurance company, your employer and by brands for the healthy lifestyle choices you are making.

The healthy industry is screwed up (f-word would be more like it). Most people just don’t understand it and they blame health insurance companies ever increasing premiums because that’s from whom they get hit with the bill, but the problem is not that simple. In reality, of the entire health industry, the insurance companies are the most regulated piece of the puzzle and the ones making the smallest profit margins. I’m no expert, so don’t quote me on it, but the reality is that we have a system-wide problem and it will take many changes, some traumatic, to fix this. One of those changes is to put accountability and empowerment back at the hands of consumers.

Today, there is very little you can do to make your lifestyle choices impact your out-of-pocket health insurance cost. If you exercise, eat well, sleep eight hours a night and don’t smoke, you are pretty much paying the exact same amount as someone who is living a very unhealthy lifestyle. That’s where EveryMove kicks in. We are playing a very complex technological, regulatory, consumer-oriented, enterprise-enabled game. We’ll enable you, the consumer, to systematically and near frictionless get a discount or cash-backs from your insurer or employer. There is a lot more to it, but you get the gist.

Russell has done a tremendous job since the early days of TechStars; pitching, negotiating, collecting information and commitments and bringing a very complex financing to closure -- it’s complex because it involves private non-profit companies (Premera & BCBS Nebraska), it involves Angel Investors and a VC. Obviously, EveryMove would not exist without Russell and this financing would not had come together if it wasn’t for his personality, persistence and attitude.

BTW, how did I get here?

There is an investor in Seattle who deserves a lot of credit for the existence of EveryMove and for me being here and that person is Andy Liu, co-founder and CEO of BuddyTV and one of the most prolific Angel investors in Seattle, if not in the US. Since my first startup, Sampa, shutdown, Andy and I have been having conversations and holding brainstorming session on what I should do next. The stars aligned and Andy introduce Russell Benaroya, EveryMove’s co-founder & CEO, and I. After a few weeks we were in business.

I have to give Andy Liu lots of props for insisting that I should take a look at this when I was quickly dismissing the idea of working on the health space, and, his investment thesis of betting at entrepreneurs who are hungry. I hope to be at the level of Ben Huh someday, another of Andy’s big bets.

Kick Starting

In March of last year we started building something which we didn’t know what it was, but we knew what we wanted to achieve. We went through TechStars in one of the most intensives experiences of my life and the result is a crystal clear vision for a business and fairly clear vision for the product (i.e., the consumer experience).

Premera Blue Cross was the first to “bet” on EveryMove. They did the initial funding of the company, but more importantly, they showed us the inner workings of the system which enabled us to have an unprecedented access -- by a startup standard -- on how we can fit in and play a role into the complex health industry.

Premera has been so supportive of what we are building at EveryMove they even introduced us to other health insurance plans (most health insurance plans are regional so they don’t see out-of-region plans as competitive). That’s how we got Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska as an investor and customer. We have two other insurance plans we are negotiating with as well and a pipeline of 12 other plans. It takes many, many months of relationship and trust building, and negotiations with these organizations, so if we want a new customer by 2014 we need to start now.

And then came Sandbox

Sandbox was just an unbelievable combination of timing and luck. Let me just start by saying that if you gave me the list of all the VCs in the US and told me to pick which one I wanted to invest on EveryMove, Sandbox would be it. Now, how lucky are you to get the VC you wanted the most? That’s where timing comes in. Let me give a quick explanation that Sandbox Industries are the managers of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Venture Fund. A dozen or so health insurance companies put a couple hundred millions dollars together to invest in disruptive innovation on the health space.

Sandbox, more than any VC in the US, get to see day in day out pitches from startups on the health space. They know what’s going to happen tomorrow, and what’s going to happen two years from now on this industry. They are also very active at helping their portfolio companies to get introductions and make strides to the their Limited Partners (a.k.a., the dozen or so health insurance companies who put their money together). There is no "health-entrepreneur" who doesn't want Sandbox on their side. I feel very lucky and fortunate.

Top top it all, we got some pretty freaking amazing list of Angel Investors who joined this parade and help us propel it forward, folks like Jonathan Sposato (sold 2 companies to Google), Andy Liu (entrepreneur, prolific investor), Chris DeVore and Andy Sack (through Founder’s Co-op), Matt Shobe (sold FeedBurner to Google), Geoff Entress and Rob Martin.

Doubling-down

Let me just tell you something about Geoff Entress and Rob Martin: They hold the very exclusive elite title of being the only two Angel Investors in the world who have bet on me twice. They were investors on my first startup and they are the investors on my second startup, EveryMove. A big shout out for them to continue to believe in me.

Actually, there is one investor who is the person who bet on me the most and that’s my wife. I know this can sound just like an Oscar acceptance speech when people start thanking their spouses or parents for where they are, but that’s the reality. More than anyone in the world, my wife has sacrificed a lot to allow me to do startups. It has been hard at times, frustrating at times and really exciting at times, and always supportive.

And one more thing

We are hiring! Developers. Developers. Developers. Also, designers, marketers and biz-devers. Here is the full list of job openings at EveryMove and if you want to give it a try on our product just drop your email on our homepage. Between now and somewhere at the end of the summer we’ll be opening up to the public.