innonate

Hacking an Internship

Nate Westheimer — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 19:41:11 +0000

This is just an idea. It's not tested. Take it for what it's worth.

As an entrepreneur, I have a problem with having interns, and I'm not alone. I've tried to place interns in startups and it can be like pulling teeth.

The problem is simple: If I'm going to have an intern, I want the experience to be both meaningful for the intern (it's their future we're talking about!) and net-productive for my company. Regardless of skill, any intern requires managerial investment, of which a startup is always in short supply, and so the idea of having an intern feels like a big commitment and is scary. Definite risk, ambiguous reward.

And this is for "engineering" interns. For others, forget about it.

At my weekly Ohours, I inevitably meet at least one undergrad or MBA student looking to "get into startups," starting with an internship at a startup. "But how do I get an internship?" they ask.

Obviously they've noticed that they require managerial load with unknown benefits to the startups. That's why they're coming to me.

And so here's my totally untested advice to them:

STEP 1: Find a startup you love with a product you love that has an API.

STEP 2: Call them up, email them, whatever and propose the following:

You want a desk for the summer. You will come into their office ever day of the summer, building a product/hack with their API that you're excited about. If you already know how to code, great. If you don't, this is how you're going to learn.

All you want in return is the following:

2 hours of a staff developer's time each week, giving you feedback on your code, answering questions, giving advice, etc
A chance to present the hack to the CEO, CTO, and 3 other high level product and/or engineering people in the company at the end of the summer.
Tell their parents, school registrar, professor grandma, whoever that you have an internship with that company.

I think this could be a great hack because you approach a startup with an immediate strategy to limit their risk. 2 hours a week is a lot, but it's beyond manageable and can be shared across people. And for the startup, they get to feel like they are helping you, because they very much are, even without a big investment.

It's obviously perfect because you now have that much needed block of time to just dedicate yourself to learning to code if you don't already. You're going to build something real this summer and develop a skill. Your other friends may end up with more hands on internships, but its hands on coffee pots, not hands on code.

I think this model could be a win / win, and after disclaiming it profusely to the students I've advised to follow it, I've asked them to report back to me how/if this model has worked.

We'll see.

Thoughts on Hiring

Nate Westheimer — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 21:40:49 +0000

I've hired now for 3 separate startups, and I'm still learning. One thing I've just appreciated this time around is how much defending culture matters.

In the past, I'd interview someone promising come away thinking to myself:

Smart person. Qualified person. Would never want to hang out independently of work. Don't be shallow, Nate, let's make them an offer.

So I'd hire them... and we'd just never work brilliantly well together.

I'm out hiring again, and I've come to realize that every time I had compromised on culture in the past, things didn't work out the way I hoped.

This time around, I'm going to fight to keep our culture what it is: a group of friends trying to build something truly amazing. If you want to build amazing and you think we may end up as friends during the process, then let's try and work together. Otherwise, let's not try to force it. It's okay, we'll both find a better fit eventually.

New Home for the Blog

Nate Westheimer — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:16:50 +0000

Before I really learned to code, I always told people I used Wordpress because it gave me a chance to play with code and get my hands dirty with having my own server.

Today, I could spend a little less time wrangling servers and keeping software up to date -- believe me, I have my hands full -- and so I've moved my blog, innonate.com, to Squarespace's amazing new Squarespace 6 platform.

Squarespace 6 is an incredible piece of software. If you weren't at the February 2012 NYTM, you can view their founder and my friend Anthony Casalena demo the software at the 14min mark here. They're still working out some bugs, so it's still in private beta, but as soon as it's available to the public, I recommend you take a look.

~ N

PS: Comments are turned off until Squarespace gets Disqus hooked up to the new platform. They will be back.

PPS: If you read this in my RSS feed, I'm sorry that you got a big dump of old stories as I moved this over!

Normals

Nate Westheimer — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 22:32:45 +0000

My Open Advice to SXSW: Cater to the Makers

Nate Westheimer — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 08:41:44 +0000

I just returned from my 5th SXSW. Relative to some folks, I'm still a SXSW n00b, and to others I'm a veteran. As a frame of reference, my first year was the year AFTER Twitter was the break-out hit there; admittedly, I was a part of the "change" at SXSW that people bemoan. What are people bemoaning and what can SXSW do to ensure their long-term brand stays strong?

People are bemoaning that SXSW's ratio of "makers" to "marketers" has shifted to an unhealthy proportions, making SXSW too much about noise and not enough about signal.

Now, when I say 'marketers' I'm not referring to folks who have that as a job title -- I don't care what your job title and description are and marketers by job title and description are no-doubt super important members of our ecosystem.

When I talk about marketers at SXSW and on other tech "platforms" I'm talking about folks who attend and participate explicitly to promote their wares -- the folks who see SXSW as a "marketing opportunity" rather than an education opportunity.

In my experience from running the NY Tech Meetup, there are two "laws of emerging technology communities" that work against SXSW and similar platforms, including ours.

The first law is that "people who work hardest to get noticed will, by default, get noticed." What's good about this is that it rewards hustle, but what's bad about it is it both rewards budget over quality and rarely makes for the best content (that you can afford someone to promote something says you may have an interesting business, but says little about how interesting your product is). Without fighting against this natural law, the message and feeling of your conference will be dictated by the loudest people.

The second, related law is that "non-makers promote more than makers." This law is true because makers spend their time making tangible things while non-makers spend their time making ephemeral things, like the very "buzz" they want at SXSW. As someone who has been a non-maker for most of his career, I don't believe that non-makers are bad or less smart or less important overall than makers. I do, however, think that you can cater content to non-makers by catering content to makers, and not visa-versa.

And in that I see a solution for SXSW. At NYTM we spend as much energy as possible finding and promoting the makers, developing content for the makers, and working to balance out these two "laws" I outlined above. Even if makers are in the minority (as they are in the NYTM-membership) the entire ecosystem rests on the products of their labor. It's awesome that so many marketing, PR, advertising, investing professionals and service providers come to the NYTM, but they are all there to see what the makers make and what the makers think is cool and exciting.

What's super cool about this dynamic, and what makes life a bit easier for the content curator (SXSW or NYTM) is that even when the content is a bit "too technical" for everyone else, it's still super enjoyable for them. We always encourage demoers to show code, talk about their stack in details, and not once has one of the 600 of our 850 attendees complained that something was over their head. In fact, the more over their head, the more they seem to love it.

And so, my advice to SXSW is to turn its programming next year on its head. Instead of having only a small handful of truly technical sessions, dedicate half your keynotes to technical leads talking about their respective stacks, scaling issues, and lessons learned.

Because makers are less self-selecting than non-makers, go more outside the PanelPicker for this technical content. Just like getting Mark Zuckerberg to do a keynote, you have to work to source it.

Next year, make one keynote from Kellan Elliott-McCrea. (They are doing incredible things at Etsy that every single company can learn from, even if the content is highly technical.) Make another keynote from the tech team at OMGPOP, who just heroically scaled Draw Something to the number 1 free and paid iPhone app globally in just a few short weeks. Make another keynote from Karen Teng, VP of Engineering of GetGlue.

Has anyone ever heard a talk about the tech that supports Wikipedia? I haven't, and I think that would be a fucking awesome keynote.

And it's not just about keynotes. Instead of more sessions about "mobile marketing" or "the future" of something that someone pitched you guys, reach out to Mike Hostetler of appendTo to do another technical session on jQuery, or Aaron Quint, CTO of PaperlessPost, to talk about their scaling.

The thing is, SXSW, none of these people are going raise their hands -- you have to find them -- but the good news for the folks at SXSW is that people are already demanding this:

I walked by and heard of plenty of half-empty conference rooms throughout the conference the year. How can you attend another session on branding and marketing if you're out on the streets marketing your own company?

Meanwhile, the session Vin Vacanti and I did on "Learning to Code" was shoved in a smaller room in the Hilton and still had a line of people outside who weren't not allowed in and waited to get in. Mind you, almost no one at the session had "heard" of either of us... they just wanted the content we were offering. Also note: Our session was at 9:30am on a Sunday -- the day Daylight Savings changed.

That's how bad people wanted "maker" content.

So, SXSW, I'm getting this out there because you still have time to make next year better and different. Re-embrace the maker community that made SXSW a destination in the first place. Keep your content highly focused on makers and issues around making. Get scarily technical in your most mainstream sessions. The SXSW brand is still amazing but if you don't fight the natural laws that favor promoters you'll enjoy the bubble for a few more years, but will ultimately end up with a bust on your hands soon enough.

Change the World

Nate Westheimer — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 09:43:38 +0000

I used to think how you "changed the World" was the most important question for a startup venture looking for commercial success. Looking back, I don't think I was right.

Twitter, Wordpress, Blogger, Reddit... these Internet services have fundamentally changed the way the world works. None of these will make the most money in their class.

I believe the World is an incredibly different place now due to the freedom of blogs and speed of dissemination created by Twitter. I believe the World is also a different place because of a raucous, loosely organized network of Internet users hosted by Reddit and its cousins, like 4chan.

But ultimately, none of these services will be the most commercially successful of their genre or time. Tumblr, which I truly love, has not had near the cultural impact of Wordpress & Blogger; but, it will do far better commercially speaking. Pinterest will also do better (commercially) than Reddit, but it will never be center of a decentralized movement against Congress (SOPA) or define the next generation of cultural icons.

Twitter, we're finding out, may end up being the most significant example of this conundrum. I'm going to go out on a limb and say because of its seamless marriage with Big Media that Twitter has had an incredibly larger impact on the shape of the World than Facebook, but without going out on a limb I'm going to say it won't have near the commercial success.

Is World Change via Internet service at odds with massive commercial success?

There is at least one exception I can find: Google has has perhaps changed the World more than even blogging platforms, AND it has ended up as a massive commercial success.

Why?

One theory I've been working with is that as a people we are consumers of goods only second to being consumers of information. The Wordpresses and Twitters of the world are purely about information, and this is why the world is so fundamentally different with their presence. Google, on the other hand, realized that Search lives at this amazing junction where the flow of Information and the flow of Commerce cross each other quite naturally.

Naturally crossing Commerce and Information, however, is only two thirds of the recipe. The other ingredient is ability to reach World-scale.

The question for "change the world" companies like Kickstarter, which has clearly found some vein here, is whether or not they can achieve this World-scale. Esty and Groupon (a literal example of where Kickstarter could end up) seem to dance with the very same issue too, as both their products appear to get watered down the larger their core products grow.

So who cares, right? Well, I do. I want more "Change the World" companies to exist. I want more Googles who can use the Internet to both make the World a better place while also finding a way to be massively, massively profitable. Off the Internet, but still in the realm of technology, there's no doubt that Microsoft existed in this place as it created the proliferation of Personal Computers in the 80s and 90s (not to mention the bonus of creating a Bill Gates who is fundamentally changing the World again with his strategic donations of tens of billions of dollars he made from the company). Apple didn't produce a Bill Gates, but the iPhone started a new personal computing revolution whose effects we haven't even begun to see at its most scaled form (probably massive proliferation of Android in the developing world).

So I wonder: Who's next? Can the Internet produce another Google? With software produce another Microsoft? Can hardware make another Apple? Let's hope so, and let's work to make it happen.

Digests and Dashboards

Nate Westheimer — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 07:58:28 +0000

Every morning, as I clear out my inbox, I find, and read religiously daily digest emails from News.me, KnowAboutIt, Percolate, and Timehop. When I'm done, I head over to New Relic to see what the worst bugs and slowest queries were in my software app overnight. What similar about all of these services is that they present small amounts of well organized information that has been algorithmically compiled and designed based on my specific interest or needs. Gone are the days of generic real-time streams, feeds, and editor-driven digests. Data Dumps be gone!

Digests and Dashboards are not everything I could know, but everything I probably should know. Instead of being oppressive, like a feed or an inbox or a newspaper, the new smart digests and dashboards are here to help -- they tell you, "It's okay that you were't paying attention at every moment. Here's what you missed."

Right now, the best digests and dashboards are aggregators. They pull from multiple sources or if they don't, they use another service's API.

In the future I think more products will want to provide smart digests and dashboards to their readers. Every blog or newspaper has a "most read" tab. Some have a "most emailed" tab. None of these tabs tie into your social graph and in order to see these you have to be on their site in the first place.

For those services who decide to make this a feature, figure out how to deliver it is key.

My favorite form to get these digests and dashboards in is email, because emails end. On a website you can get lost clicking around and pretty soon you're down a time-suck rabbit hole of the web. With a digest email I can skim through it and when I'm done I'm done, and I can move on. Smart digests and dashboards make me feel like I've accomplished something and that I've been truly more productive, not just entertained in a new medium. Entertainment is not something I need more of; I just want to be productively informed.

I'm building something right now and feeling like I'm really missing a smart dashboard experience with it. This weekend, I may start banging on a weekly digest feature for it. Could be nice to have.

It's not over, but boy am I proud to be a member of this community...

Nate Westheimer — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:35:30 +0000

Photo Credit: Scott Heiferman The fight to stop PIPA and SOPA are far from over. The word we're hearing from Washington is that PIPA's supporters are trying to double down their pressure and make this bill sail through the Senate even faster than before.

We can and will stop this bill, but before we get back to work I want to say how incredibly proud I was to be a part of the NY tech community yesterday.

We did something that's never been done before, in any tech community: Over 2,000 of us -- developers, investors, entrepreneurs, designers, salespeople alike -- came together physically to protest something that we universally agreed would damage our industry and therefore our lives, our City and our World.

No doubt, this is a turning point for us as a community. This won't be the last time we come together and this won't be the last issue we're willing to fight for.

Until the next Meetup, keep hammering away on the phones. MobileCommons has set it up so that you just need to text "PIPA" to 877877 to be connected to the Senators' offices. I called this morning and a Gillibrand staffer said she had no plans of changing her mind. It's not an acceptable answer and so I'll be calling back every day until that answer has changed.

What Senators Schumer & Gillibrand Need to Understand

Nate Westheimer — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:12:16 +0000

Next Wednesday, we are holding an Emergency NY Tech Meetup in front of Senators Schumer and Gillibrand's offices to demonstrate our opposition to PIPA and SOPA. Together, as a NY tech community, we need to come together, so please take a long lunch next Wednesday, bring your co-workers, and let's stop this thing.

Senators Schumer and Gillibrand need to understand that with a single vote in support of PIPA, and without publicly condemning and trying to stop the legislation leading up to the vote, they would be dead to the NY technology industry for good.

Why so harsh?

On patent reform, we understand that we can't get everything we want. We understand that there's a process. We'll press you hard, but we'll also be patient. We understand.

On immigration reform, we understand we can't get everything we want either. While our companies are starved for talent and our Country turns away job creators (who happen to be from a different country themselves) dying to grow the US economy and employ Americans, we will be patient as you try and navigate the political waters on this tough issue.

On capital gains reform, we understand that what's in our best interest as entrepreneurs is not always fair or easy to shoulder for the rest of the country. Again, we understand the process is difficult and ou are doing your best job.

But PIPA is wholly different. We will not understand. We will not accept anything short of public condemnation of the bill in its current form and pledges to vote "No" as long as damaging structural changes to how the Internet works exists in the legislation.

And without that condemnation, Senators Schumer and Gillibrand need to know they will permanently damage any credibility they had built as innovation-friendly representatives. PIPA is an appallingly damaging piece of legislation. Show us you get that.

See everyone next Wednesday. Together, let's stop this horrific bill.

RIP Bob Arihood

Nate Westheimer — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 11:04:57 +0000

It may be surprising, but the blog I've linked to more times in my 5 years of blogging isn't a tech blog: it's the blog of East Village street-anthropologist and photographer Bob Arihood. I was lucky to find Bob's blog in 2006 blog by Googling "Mosaic Man," right after I met the artist in Tompkins Square Park. My view of New York City and the East Village has never been the same.

For years (many years before his blog) Bob told the story of the East Village -- more specifically, the corner of 7th St and Avenue A -- with both his camera and words. A wordsmith he wasn't, but next to his poignant and very personal photos, the reader of his blog was sucked into the complex history of the area and the even more complex and dramatic stories of its people. Reading Bob's blog was better than watching Law and Order... but very much the same. There were common characters, danger, loss... all wrapped up in a story of New York. The big difference, though, was that Bob's characters were very real.

Jewels, a young man who Bob focused on more in the last five years than any other character, was someone you would read about on his blog, but then also see on the streets, sometimes sleeping in his own urin, huddled by a bus stop, and you really knew his story. You knew about this young man's love and marriage (Bob was there)... You knew about this young man's addictions (Bob saw his battles)... and you knew about this young man's arrests (Bob captured most of them, and tried to talk him down from acts that would have caused many more).

Actually, from reading Bob's blog, you probably knew to fear Jewels more than the unsuspecting walker-by.

And there were dozens of characters and people like Jewels who went from people you'd just walk by to people you knew, all because of Bob's work. Mosaic Man, the man behind all of the amazing mosaic work in the East Village, is one of those people. Chronically homeless, the Mosaic Man's plight and contributions were shared to the world by Bob, likely helping Mosaic Man find the home he needed.

Ray's Candy Shop is another amazing and important story covered by Bob Arihood. Chances are, if you've lived in NYC as an under-30 year old in the past 20 years, you've stumbled drunk, late one night, into Ray's Candy Shop on Avenue A for some belgian fries or soft serve ice cream. However, when you did, you probably didn't know Ray's story. Ray has been an undocumented-yet-legal citizen of the US for some time, and an important business establishment in the Lower East Side for years. However, with health department citations, immigration issues, and rent being hiked, old-man-Ray was in a lot of trouble this past year, and needed his community's help to get all his issues sorted out. Bob's blog served as a beacon for this cause, and Ray's is still in business, documented, and on good terms with the health department.

And so it brought me great sadness to hear last week that Bob died last month.

I feel lucky to have lived in New York City with Bob in it. I also feel lucky to have eventually met Bob and become friendly with him. After meeting him in May of 2007, I spent dozens of late nights chatting with Bob on the corner of 7th Street and Avenue A. We shared a passion for photography and the complexities of the East Village's gentrification. Bob was also a fantastic story teller (he could go on and on and on and on) and I was always willing to be a listener. The last time I saw him was in 2010, and he was talking about taking down his blog. He later did, only to come back with it this past Spring.

Anyway, in digging through some emails, I found this email below. It was something I wrote my family and friends the night I first met Bob. Most of the email is more of the stories I told above, but it's still fun for me to read in context of first meeting the first and only truly New York artist I've really ever known.

Rest in Peace, Bob. You will be very, very missed.

Truth be told, Bob Arihood's photo blog is one of the best chronicles of the East Village around. I first found it by Googling "Jim Power" after meeting the "Mosaic Man" himself back in the Fall, while walking in park with Evan. Anyway, Jim shows up a lot on this blog, so I found it; I became hooked, and now follow it religiously.

Bob, originally from a farm in Indiana, has been in the East Village for 30 years (he's 61 years old, but looks 35). He's seen it all, and lucky for us, he's been capturing "everything" on camera for nearly the entire time. After reading his blog and seeing his pictures, you can't walk through the neighborhood the same again. This was illustrated as Sara, Jordan and I walked by a homeless man the other night. To them, he was another homeless man, but because I had seen this man's life chronicled on Bob's blog, I knew him as Jewels (and knew to proceed with caution!).

Anyway, the reason I'm passing on the link again is because I finally met the author/photographer last night, walking back from Alex's place after our Urban Fishing planning session. I had read about Bob's Leica M8 (his camera) on the blog, so when I passed by a fellow with such a fine piece of equipment I knew it was him and introduced myself. Since I had blogged favorably about him before, and he had stumbled upon my praise, when I told him my name was "Nate", he said, "Oh, 'innonate!'". That made me laugh.

I sat around and chatted with him for about an hour, and in that time I learned more about the East Village than I had in my year and a half of living in the City. His perspective on the area is immensely valuable, and so I'm pleased to share the link to his blog. Also, because some of you are involved in art or media, I encourage you to consider how valuable his photos and stories are, and keep him in mind.

The Sweat Lodge

Nate Westheimer — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 09:35:53 +0000

This past weekend was my re-birthday, marking the one year anniversary of leaving the "Sweat Lodge" -- the first step on my important journey of becoming an engineer. Anyway, I need to get back to some pretty sophisticated engineering problem, but I thought I'd acknowledge the anniversary and repost the "Sweat Lodge" section of The Hope Manifesto:

The first key to learning anything is real commitment. How many people have taken years of Spanish classes but can’t speak a word? Meanwhile, we all know people who studied abroad and immersed themselves for a few weeks and came away with the ability to communicate freely (though perhaps difficultly).

Learning to code is no different. If you think you can learn how to code by going to a few classes, being “taught” or sitting down for an hour or so every so often, you’re 100% wrong and will waste your time. If you truly want to learn how to code (or learn any other new skill, for that matter) you must find some serious time to dedicate to the cause. And the cause is teaching yourself, not being taught.

I call this The Sweat Lodge.

When I left AnyClip, I spent a few weeks playing around with online tutorials and reading books about coding. Not surprisingly, I felt like I was as much of a NoPE after a few weeks of this as I did when I began.

My real education started the second to last week of October, when I took five days of my life and commited myself to Change.

For five straight days, I sat at my desk, from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed, and obsessed over my education. I barely showered. I ate at my desk. I obsessed.

I went into my personal Sweat Lodge a NoPE and emerged a HoPE. Did I have all the answers? No. In the weeks and months that followed that week, I’ve learned a huge amount more than what I learned in that week.

But in that week, I taught myself the most important, foundational lessons that allowed me to emerge a new person: the skill of self-sustenance.

So this is your first test: Are you willing to commit to The Sweat Lodge? Are you willing to take 5 days — at least! — of your life to go through mental hell? Do you really want to code or are you just saying you do?

Cory Booker's Big Opportunity

Nate Westheimer — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:06:25 +0000

These are exciting times in NY Tech, and one of the most exciting projects / debates is the City's "Applied Sciences NYC" project. If you want to brush up on the subject, Anil Dash has a fantastic summary of arguments about the project here, and I wrote a little about my opinions here.

Nothing has excited me more in recent months than hearing about the extraordinary interest the City's initiative has generated in the academic community. From what I hear, Standford, Cornell, Stevens, and about every other top-tier engineering school has submitted a proposal to the City. As one City official said to me, "It's like we sent out an invite to a party hoping for a least one person would come, and now we find out everyone wants to come."

This is exciting, but it also makes me worried: I'm worried that despite all this interest in building bigger engineering departments in NYC, this proposal will go to one school and everyone else's passion and interest will be wasted... left on the cutting room floor.

And this, I believe, is Cory Booker and other leaders in neighboring areas' big opportunity. If NYC can't accomodate more than one of these great institutions opening up shop in NYC, than New Jersey should find matching resources to welcome the runners up.

While we are "NYC tech" and the "NY Tech Meetup" and all of our energies end up focused on promoting and investing in the "New York tech ecosystem," the truth is that ecosystem goes beyond the municipal walls of New York City and extends to Long Island, Upstate New York, and Northern New Jersey.

NY Tech is bigger than New York City. Aviary was founded and spent its critical early years in Long Island. Multiple HackNY Hackathon winners have come from Rutgers' computer science labs. Dozens of our best VCs commute from upstate NY. The Hoboken Tech Meetup (now the NJ Tech Meetup, and a closer train ride than much of Brooklyn) has over 1,000 members.

While our City government understandably has to worry about jurisdiction, we do not.

My hope is that, stemming from our City's forward-thinking and important project, our entire region steps up to the plate and works with these fine engineering schools to find them a home in the area, even if that home isn't in the City of New York. While I can't speak for the rest of the community, I know I would do whatever I can, as an entrepreneur and as the leader of the NY Tech Meetup, to welcome new great schools to the area, wherever that is.

Where NY Tech's Culture Comes From (and why we owe Amit Gupta our bone marrow)

Nate Westheimer — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 07:18:53 +0000

As the NY Tech scene has gained momentum over the past few years, I find myself talking to a lot of journalists who are trying to understand what's going on here and how we arrived at this point. In these interviews, I always highlight NY Tech's unique culture, and in so doing I point out that this culture is both native to New York itself, but also cultivated and defined by folks in the tech community 5 to 10 years ago, before this Great Boom showed up in Gap ads and magazine covers.

In my opinion, the culture we have here has been defined by three people:

Scott Heiferman, the NY Tech Meetup, and the culture of building "interesting things."

Let me be clear, I'm talking about the NY Tech Meetup I became a member of, not the one I run now. Scott created a culture, from the very beginning (2004) of "show the demo, not a PowerPoint." Scott set the tone in this City that building amazing software that did amazing things was more important and intellectually interesting than who your investors or partners are. When Scott picked people to demo at the NY Tech Meetup there was never a question of "is this a business" -- it was always, "Is this interesting?"

Charlie O'Donnell, nextNY, and the culture of coordinated, decentralized community.

When I was elected to run the NY Tech Meetup, it was on the platform of supporting a decentralized community, not creating a traditional, monolithic trade association. Saying "no" to doing more, and instead using the NYTM platform to nurture and support other groups (hackNY, TechiesGiveBack, NYHacker.org, etc) is the thing I think we've done best at NYTM. That idea and those values came from the community in nextNY, the non-incorporated, non-hierarchical Google Group-based "organization" Charlie founded in early 2006 and which served as the back-channel conversation and organizational tool for many of the leading entrepreneurs in NYC from 2006 to 2009.

Amit Gupta, Jelly, and the culture of working together.

And this brings me to Amit Gupta. When Amit started Jelly, there were no co-working spaces or hacker spaces or Barcamps or people hosting office hours in NYC. If you wanted to jam out with people about what you were working on you had to show up to a meetup and talk about it, but you'd never just open your laptop, show a stranger some code, and ask for help. Jelly created the idea in NYC that literally opening our homes (or offices) and having other people come work along side us could make us better at what we do and that in turn we could help others do what they do better. We owe the culture of working together to Amit...

AND SO, this brings me to another matter. Recently, Amit was diagnosed with Leukemia.

This Friday, there's a big event in NYC to get people swabbed to see if there's a potential genetic match to donate bone marrow to him. I can't make the event, but I've already followed this link from Seth Godin's blog post on the matter and requested a free home-swab kit.

You see, while chances are slim that I'll be a genetic match for Amit (chances are higher that a South Asian person would be a match) there's absolutely no reason not to get swabbed yourself in honor of Amit, especially given his incredible role in shaping the NY tech community -- a community which supports my career and likely supports yours as well.

So, please, if you're appreciative of what Amit has done for us, do something for him: either attend the swabbing party on Friday or order a kit for yourself today.

It's a super easy way to send a big thanks to Amit for all that he's done and I know you'll feel good doing it.

Meeting Bill Clinton, Remembering Steve Jobs.

Nate Westheimer — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 07:38:00 +0000

I met Bill Clinton last night. Oddly, I get a similar feeling thinking about him as I do Steve Jobs. Maybe it's my association with the roaring 90s, or perhaps the monstrous charisma they both exude. Was balancing the budget the political equivalent to getting all of my music I ever owned on one little, beautiful device? It's all magic to me. Back to the event: I walked over to the President as he and Scott Heiferman were talking about the power of self-organized groups. They got kicked off on their conversation, of course, by talking about what Scott does, but when I fully poked my head into the conversation they were on to crowd funding and all the old regulation getting in the way of more crowd lending programs and domestic micro-finance programs. Super fun fact: President Bill Clinton is a big fan of Kickstarter. Also cool, but not surprising: the President still knows more about policy than 99.999% of people who talk about policy. The extensiveness of his knowledge on these issues was astounding. Details matter and are what good policy is made from.

Anyway, when the President introduced himself to me (he has this whole pivot, look you the in the eye, extend his hand and say 'hello' thing down pretty well), I wasn't quite sure what to say. I told him about the NY Tech Meetup for a moment (was cool to have Scott there next to me), but had actually come to the event knowing exactly what I wanted to say to him, if given the chance. So this is what I told him:

"I just wanted to let you know that when I was 9, in 1992, I had just started playing the saxophone, and to see a presidential candidate play the saxophone on national television was about the coolest thing ever. Thanks."

This is the video of the "Arsenio moment", if you've never seen it:

I've met "famous" people before, but I've never really known what to say, and when I do say something I usually think "I can't believe I said that!" Not this time. Telling him a memory from when I was nine and he wasn't elected president yet felt awesome and I think it was a fun story for him too. Of course, in Cliton's famous style, he followed up my story with an incredibly detailed story about jazz and the Elvis song played (Heartbreak Hotel).

Anyway, now that I have you in the mood, here's another video of the President playing saxophone. This time at the Newport Jazz Festival's 40th Anniversary:

And this brings me to Steve Jobs. If I had ever gotten the chance to meet him I would have told him about the fun my brother and I had playing the Voyage of the Mimi game on our Apple IIe. The game had all these cool peripherals, like a barometer and light meter. It turned our computer into a science kit. While Microsoft embraced business Apple aimed at education. And that's why I've always loved Apple: Spreadsheets? Any computer can run a spreadsheet. Not every computer, at least not ever computer in the mid-80s, made you want to learn something.

Getting Good.

Nate Westheimer — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 07:56:29 +0000

It was 12 months ago last week that my friend Sam Lessin sat me down and gave me the kick in the rear that got me going down this road of learning to code. A year later, and I'm super excited about how good of an engineer I've become.

I got good.

Some day in the future I'll write Chapter Two of the HoPE Manifesto, and go into great detail about phase two of my education as an engineer, but today I want to write about the single biggest factor for "getting good" at something.

Just work.

Just say "no" to coffees, lunches, drinks, events, speaking opportunities, advisory board positions, calls, Skype chats, etc.

Let emails go un-replied.

Wake up at 7am every day -- at the latest -- and get back to working on getting good.

Test your relationships with friends (don't test them with your partner or family).

Be selfish, if selfish means spending more time mastering your craft.

Be generous -- always -- but especially if that means helping other people master your craft with you. You'd be surprised how much you learn teaching others.

The single biggest factor in getting good at something is true devotion.

For the past year, I've devoted myself to getting good as an engineer. It's the first skill I've ever truly devoted myself to, and thus the first skill I can actually say I have.

Lord knows I have a ways, ways ways to go, but today, I feel pretty awesome about how far I've come. And, I can't wait to see where I am one year of devotion from now. I think I'm hooked on this concept of "just work."

Sorry, Emails...

I'm Teaching a SkillShare Class: "Teaching Yourself to Code for N00bs and Product People"

Nate Westheimer — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 08:05:48 +0000

Ever since writing my "learn to code" manifesto, learning to code has been the number one thing people want to talk to me about at my Ohours or whenever I see people out and about. As it turns out, there are a ton of people out there who are just like I was 10 months ago: a n00b, a "product person," someone hopelessly looking for their "technical co-founder."

So, I'm joining the SkillShare revolution and teaching a class called "Teaching Yourself to Code for N00bs and Product People."

The idea of the class is not that you'll come away knowing how to code but that you'll come away from the class knowing how to learn.

Anyway, I'm totally excited about this class, and if all goes well I'll be making it a regular thing.

So, if you're interested, go sign up for my class, and if you're only kinda interested or the date doesn't work for you, follow me on SkillShare or "Watch" the class for when I do it again in the future.

Ohours Finds a Future: Hirelite Acquires Us!

Nate Westheimer — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 11:32:18 +0000

I posted on the Ohours Blog and Hirelite CEO Nathan Hurst posted on his: today we're excited to announce that Hirelite.com has acquired Ohours.org. Obviously this is super exciting for me (baby's first exit!) but I'm mostly excited for the amazing Ohours community. Over the last 6 months, the community has grown to thousands of people while I've simply neglected the platform. I'm just thrilled to see Ohours getting worked on and loved on like it should. As a user I couldn't be more excited about the new features Nathan has planned, and I can't wait to see how -- now that Ohours is being taken care of the way it should be -- this community grows and flourishes and opens more doors for more people.

Please help me celebrate this by going to the new Ohours and schedule some face to face time with someone new!

Lastly, I need to thank everyone who has supported Ohours so far and helped me build the platform to what it is. Kyle Bragger deserves most of the thanks. I started building Ohours with almost no development skills whatsoever and he was there coaching me every step of the way. Vin Vacanti was the first person to tell me he'd be a user of the service and has been an active host ever since. Gary Chou at USV reintroduced Nathan and me and helped us think through the transaction. Christina Cacioppo at USV, David Tisch at TechStars, Ben Siscovick at IA Ventures and Melody Koh at Time Warner led the NYC VC charge, while Spencer Lazar helped bring Ohours to London and the rest of Europe and Andrew Parker brought Ohours to Boston. Meanwhile, Evan Bartlett, Adam Schwartz, and Lis Hubert led the charge with NY tech's professional scene. Andrew Mager got Developer Evangelists rocking on the system. Aaron Cohen, of course, is someone else I have to thank. He was a big cheerleader of mine in this project and brought Ohours to the University market.

I know I'm leaving people out of this thank you (the dangerous thing about thanking people in the first place, and trying to blog quickly!) but I'm just so thankful for everyone's involvement and want to make sure I at least mention a few people by name.

The last person I want to thank is Nathan Hurst. I couldn't imagine a better person to take ownership and custody of this awesome community. If you don't know him yet, meet him. He's a rockstar entrepreneur and hacker and Hirelite is a super innovative company doing incredibly creative and disruptive work in the recruiting space.

The future of Ohours is bright and I'm beaming along with it.

Thanks to everyone again.

What the NYC Startup World Needs (and Doesn't Need)

Nate Westheimer — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 07:05:01 +0000

Chris Dixon wrote a post a few days with the same title as this one. Fred Wilson has chimed in and there's a larger debate on the NY Times. Chris is a well respected guy who obviously thinks about this stuff a lot, but I think he got one or two things wrong in his assessment. Anyway, I wanted to respectfully counter a few of his points and add a few points to the conversation.

The first thing I want to counter is his notion that spending $100M on "Expensive projects like big engineering universities" is a bad idea. As I said Tuesday night at the NY Tech Meetup, I think this project is the first large, truly disruptive, outside the box plan I've seen from the NYC government. I've always advised the City to do things that truly leverage its unique abilities (i.e. stay away from incubators and incremental investment funds, which the market can and is taking care of just fine). Getting a major engineering school to move itself to NYC would return over $100M in value to the greater City in very short order -- we're talking only one big startup coming out of this -- and would change the face of the City in a big way.

Chris also mentioned he thought of other ways to spend $100M. I think he and I would agree that the City should only spend resources on what they can do uniquely and that provides leverage in the market. This plan fits that squarely. I would love to know what suggestions Chris has that also fit that mold.

Lastly, I think Chris may be underestimating the impact the students of a major engineering school will have here. In other places (hi Boston/Stanford culture!) innovation seems to come from the researchers and professors. Two years ago I was also on the record saying how much I hoped innovation would come from our researchers and public/private relationships between startups and universities.

But today it's clear: HackNY has been the single most important thing that's happened in NYC over the past two years. Single most important thing. University-based innovation in NYC will be lead by its students. Hell, startup innovation will be lead by its student interns! And a school the brings in hundreds of new engineers a year to NYC will make a big big difference. I think it's a great investment.

Past the university issue, I totally agree with Chris on what we don't need. On the front of "what we need" I think he left out one huge, huge issue: we need a plug for NYC's leaky M&A bucket.

Much more than "More marquee tech companies opening large tech offices here," we need A marquee tech company to actually be headquartered here -- to be a real NYC company. I wrote about it last year and I still think it's the single biggest vulnerability for our tech ecosystem: when a company gets bought -- and despite this IPO market, that's still what happens for 95% of startup "successes" -- there is not a single TECH company that could buy them in NYC. This is a huge problem.

How huge? I think losing Justin Schafer and Sam Lessin to Facebook was damaging to the NYC startup ecosystem. Sam was making super smart seed investments, driving its culture with Y+30, hiring amazing developers; Justin too was building a world-class team (some of whom are already back out in the market building great companies).

Now Sam and Justin are gone and while we're a vibrant and diverse community here, I feel there was a real hole left behind. And they're just two examples. I'm still worried about what happens when/if Foursquare sells. In 2011 NYC tech is bigger than any one person or company, but these are all damaging, and in the long-run its a problem.

So what to do about it? Our media companies -- for their own sake, not ours -- need to become tech companies. Real exit opportunities for NYC's startups are those that allow them to stay in NYC doing interesting technical things. Last year I wrongly suggested that IAC could be the most-likely-yet-still-unlikely saving grace here. Sadly, and with almost no more faith that I had in IAC, I think AOL is the more likely hero. They say they want to be a media company and so, again, I have very little faith here, but if they would somehow pivot and embrace their technology roots and choose to be a world-class technology company then I think NYC would finally start plugging its M&A hole.

Lastly I should point out that while I have little faith that AOL or IAC will make this shift, despite being the closest of the media companies to being that big tech player, I actually have a lot of faith in the market that SOMEONE will emerge.

Soon enough? We'll see.

But, if you've been at the last few NY Tech Meetups you will notice that Conde-Nast, Hearst, and yes, AOL, have all demoed great skunkworks projects. As Marc Cenedella pointed out at Tuesday's NYTM, Idea Flight isn't your father or mother's big company skunkworks project -- it's elegant, simple, not over-thought. I'm officially on the record with Marc (and smart folks like Anil Dash are too) that this is a very good thing for NY tech (and I think the wider world -- but that's another blog post).

So will it be IAC or AOL? Probably not. But the NY Times has an incredibly impressive R&D team and I'm quite certain that if Conde-Nast and Hearst are smart and 1) keep giving these skunkworks teams as much leeway as they want; and 2) compensate the heck out of these entrepreneurs with serious equity in their own projects, then A big media company could emerge in the next 10 years as a big tech company.

Let's just hope it's not too late.

The Now Neighborhood

Nate Westheimer — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 06:45:02 +0000

One of the biggest privileges of running the NY Tech Meetup and programming its events has been the visibility it gives me on macro and micro-trends in web and personal technology. Next month's event, which I'm calling "The Now Neighborhood," is an example of where seeing the flow of companies looking to demo at the NY Tech Meetup has helped me see that trend. First some background: At the first Meetup I ever hosted (January 2009), I themed the event "Built on Twitter" because I saw an awesome pipeline of real stand-alone companies being built on the platform. That month I had Klout and CoTweet unveil their ground-breaking products, and StockTwits demoed for the first time in NYC (I think my man Howard Lindzon also graced us with some of his vintage standup comedy).

It's pretty cool to think about that time and how much has been defined by companies like those since.

The following month, February of 2009, I themed the event "Mobile Meets Social." Yes, it wasn't until the next month that Foursquare unveiled itself on the NY Tech Meetup stage, but that February we also had Peek, OMGICU, Xtify, Mobile Commons -- all companies innovating in serious ways around the mobile/social revolution that took place in the following 18 months.

Next month's NY Tech Meetup is another one of these moments. Among the demos, we'll have SnapGoods, Zaarly, Taap.it (formerly known as Social Listing), SkillSlate, Spontaneously and CityPockets making up a new macro-trend I'm calling the "Now Neighborhood."

While The Now Web made information instant at at our fingertips -- immediate, personalized, on-demand, and on our devices -- The Now Neighborhood is doing the same thing, but in our real life. Now Neighborhood technology is what I call "School of Heiferman," or technology companies that "Use the Internet to get people off the Internet."

Now, we've seen other School of Heiferman companies demo at the NY Tech Meetup recently, including SkillShare last month and my own Ohours a few months before. But, what's different about Now Neighborhood products vs other School of Heiferman products is that they accelerate and set the pace at which you experience the real world around you... something we started to truly feel in the flash-mob-filled early days of mobile/social platforms like Twitter and Foursquare.

Now Neighborhood products are meant for this kind of activity though, and so as they scale, the experience will persist, and the way we live in our local communities will forever be changed.

CityPockets, for example, represents the entire industry of daily deals sites, which will have you explore local businesses on their terms, not yours. In the Now Neighborhood, "discovering" new places is less about word-of-mouth, and more about the immediacy of the deals around you.

Zaarly, Taap.it, and SkillSlate are all real-time, local marketplaces for goods and services. In the Now Neighborhood, you don't call "your" plumber or have "your" cleaning service clean your house, you go with the highest rated person who responds the fastest with the lowest price to your needs. Having the same person do the same job for you in the future is a "coincidence."

SnapGoods tells you who around you already has the "stuff" you want, or who wants the stuff you may already have. In the Now Neighborhood, you know which neighbor's door to knock on for that cup of sugar: the one who has it in stock.

And Spontaeously represents what's happening to our most social lives. While today we write emails to each other saying "let's hang out"... and then we never hang out, in The Now Neighborhood our friends know our schedules and will just drop by when they see we're down to socialize. Plans-be-damned, our social lives are now "Now."

Let me be clear: many of these changes, trends, and product concepts have been around before. CraigsList itself perhaps covers every one of them. Certainly ZipCar has had this effect. But, it's when I've seen groups of companies like these all vying for spots at the NY Tech Meetup around the same few months that I believe something is starting to congeal. It's what I saw with Twitter-based companies and mobile/social companies in early 2008, and it's something I'm predicting will change the way we live over the next few years starting now.

What are some examples you can think of for The Now Neighborhood? I'd be curious to hear what products are changing your life.

(PS: Hope you see you at the next NY Tech Meetup. More tickets will be available June 27 and July 1.)

How to Demo...

Nate Westheimer — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 08:00:04 +0000

On Thursday I published a longer post about How to Demo your software product. It's a "lessons learned" from MCing, coaching, and seeing the after-effects of 200+ demos at the NY Tech Meetup over the past 2.5 years. Anyway, I'm posting about here because my RSS subscribers don't automatically see what I post as "Pages" on Wordpress; so, I'll leave it at that and hope you enjoy the post and your weekend!