Now, with a full year of operational data, I can review the decision to install solar in the first place and compare how my energy production, energy consumption, and other economic and lifestyle assumptions have met reality. If you don't want to read anything and just want to know the punchline: I'm extremely happy with the results! The most surprising result from the last year isn't how much energy I produced, but how much less energy I consumed. Importantly, if you live in the Baltimore, MD metropolitan area I can also gladly recommend my installer, so if you need a recommendation please reach out and I will introduce offline.

System Details

The Roof

We live in a townhome in Maryland with one due-South-facing roof (well 172˚) and one North-facing roof, both pitched at 24 degrees. There are no trees casting shadows on the South-facing roof, but there is a chimney and the firewalls between the neighboring homes also casts a mild shadow in the early / late hours when production would be low anyway.

The Panels

At the recommendation of our installer, we decided to put 16, 405 watt REC Alpha Pure panels on our South-facing roof. One installer we talked to was brand agnostic and wanted to use panels with lower output and cover part of our Northern roof as well, but the installer we went with had a more thesis-driven perspective that we should 1) use these specific REC-brand panels due to the quality of the manufacturer and their strong record of minimizing ecological impact in the production process (a lead-free process); and 2) that we should only put panels on our high-output South-facing roof. It is noteworthy that the cost of panels and the performance of them has gotten good enough that the North-facing roof idea was not totally bogus (there's a valid movement toward putting panels on building exteriors and fences!), but ultimately I felt that minimizing the installation to a high yield area made the most sense for our budget and our needs.

The Inverter/Optimizer system

Our installer used SolarEdge's Wave inverter, and at the panel level we installed SolarEdge's PowerOptimizers. The bigger installer we did not contract with wanted to use a micro-inverter setup using Enphase, but ultimately the smaller installer convinced me – simply by walking me through line-by-line of their technical specs – that there would be too much “ducking” (a reduction of maximum output measured per the system's “temperature coefficient”) on my asphalt shingle roof during the super hot days of the summer when I would want to be creating the most energy possible. So far I've seen nothing that counters this argument, and I have no issues with the system installed so far.

Sense + Solar Energy Monitor

About a month after commissioning the use of my solar panels I was still frustrated with the lack of visibility into my whole home's energy balance. Using my BGE (local utility) app I could see what my net electricity balance was on a given day (their app shows the data within a day or two) and using the Solar Edge app I could see what my gross production was, but if I wanted to focus on my consumption behavior – or make sure I was time-matching my consumption to my production as best as possible – it was impossible to do. The Sense monitor is something anyone can benefit from, regardless of having solar or not, but it has a great upgrade for people with solar panels that makes all of this data easy to understand at second-level accuracy. As I will detail in my analysis of my consumption metrics later in this post, the Sense + Solar device has been one of the best home improvements investments I've made despite it not being a required part of any solar setup.

Electrical Panel Upgrade

Before doing solar, I had a very odd “split bus” 150 amp panel (no main breaker), despite the house having 200 amp service into the meter. While preferable, I did not need to upgrade the panel to do the solar installation. But given all of the electrification I planned on doing or was in the middle of doing (EV charger, induction stove, dryer, water heater, and heat pump), my solar installer offered to combine the work with the install using the same trusted subcontractors that would do the required electrical work. The benefit of doing the upgrade as part of the solar project was that it qualified for the full, un-capped 30% IRA solar tax credit (versus if I did it as part of the heat pump upgrade or another upgrade where there is a cap to the tax credit). To be clear, I left this upgrade out of my payback calculator (linked in next section) because I felt like it was required for my whole home's benefit, including its resale value later on, and so it was highly amortized across everything.

(No) Battery Backup

Solar systems are largely the same no matter what climate you live in (though, as mentioned above, you want to understand how your panels and their inverters or optimizers perform at extreme temperatures). However, in the US you will see wildly different options about whether or not you should have battery backup be a part of your system, and wildly different rate structures and incentives to encourage them (or not). In Appendix 1 below I detail why I I believe it was not economically practical nor socially beneficial for me to include a battery in this setup.

Economic Assumptions

As I was assessing the decision to get solar, and assessing my 3 main options (1 local installer, 1 regional installer, and Community Solar) I created a simple payback calculator. I've posted a version of it here for review (showing just the installer I went with). At a high level, I imagined that getting solar would be worth it financially (vs joining a Community Solar operation that would have insured a flat 10% discount to the retail electric rate) because my model gave me a <10 year payback period, which I thought was quite reasonable given my ability to make long-term investments. I also believed that on an earlier timeframe (at ~4 years) the investment would add recoverable value to the home, as various Real Estate organizations and companies have published estimates for how much of a premium home buyers might add to a home with solar and none that I've seen indicate lower than a 3% premium. Finally, because we had recently sold our Seattle home and moved into a cheaper market (and smaller house), we had the cash available to pay for the solar up front, as any financing option would have likely been at a worse rate than leaving the cash earning 5% in our high yield savings account. Once all incentives / tax credits were accounted for, the system cost us $15,393.

The model I used ended up being incredibly spot on in terms of energy production (thanks to projections from the installer) but quite wrong regarding how much I ended up consuming (thanks to my poor forecasting and a surprising change in behavior). Here, I'll go line-by-line through my summary (located on the linked sheet, but also pasted above).

Solar Production

My solar installer projected that my 16, 405 watt panels would produce 8,551 kWh of energy in their first year of operation and wow was that accurate: my production was 8,526 kWh! I was actually surprised to see how accurate this was in part because of the Canadian wildfire smoke we suffered through from July through August 2023. The sun was visibly dimmer on the smokiest days of the wildfires and as was widely reported every day of any smoke pollution impacted solar production dramatically during a season when they should have been most productive. I am unsure when in the calendar year we made up the difference, or if the algorithm already hedged for such unforeseen issues, but here we are. Obviously I am hoping for fewer wildfires this year, and I am excited to see if we can beat the projected number next year.

Consumption

I modeled my own consumption taking into account my previous year's consumption of 10,654 kWh (above image from my May 2023 bill), plus an assumption that the addition of an EV and Induction stove – all within a few weeks of getting my solar commissioned – would significantly increase my overall consumption. What happened instead was the opposite: instead of consuming ~10.7 MWh or more we brought our consumption way down to 6.6 MWh. How were we so far off and how did we reduce electricity consumption so dramatically? There are likely 3 explanations:

1. Lower utilization of the AC – With no electric being used for any heat process in our home, our heaviest electricity consumer is our AC unit; so the most likely explanation for usage being significantly lower was that we used our AC less. Here are two reasons why that probably occurred:
   1. In the baseline 2022 year we had an older, sick dog at home that was highly sensitive to heat. While he was still alive, to keep him comfortable, we had to keep the home in the mid-to-low 60s. Last summer, however, he was in dog heaven and we relatively healthy humans had a higher tolerance to the heat, allowing us to more opportunistically cool the home at bedtime or just open windows and run the ceiling fans (although with the aforementioned wildfire smoke there were also times we ran the AC to clean the air and kept windows closed despite temperate weather).

   2. 

      That said, one of the least appreciated benefits to adding rooftop solar is how effectively they cool your home. Think about it: instead all of the sun's radiation penetrating your roof and running through your attic insulation, you are converting ~25% of that sunlight into electricity, while radiating back into space a significant portion of what you cannot turn into energy. In less scientific terms: solar panels are shade placed on the part of your roof that previously heated your home the most. At one point I went up in my attic with my infrared camera. In the image to the right (read it bottom left to top right) you can see that the purple area is the South-facing section covered by solar panels, the bright yellow is the South-facing portion uncovered and 143F (!!), and the orange in the top right of the photo is the North-facing, uncovered roof. While our attic is still under-insulated and unsealed, it's clear that solar has actually lowered our energy burden from its ability to shade and reflect.

2. Less incremental electricity usage – I modeled that the addition of our EV and induction stove would add 3,650 kWh of electrical demand (moving over from a hybrid gas car and a natural gas oven and stove-top). In year 1 of owning the EV, we drove 8,994 miles and used 2,633 kWh of energy (~293 Wh / mile); but, because we live in a townhome and do not have a garage, we have to be opportunistic with our charging and sometimes charge at the doctors office or grocery store instead of running our big 240v charging cable 50 ft to the parking lot. We also have put in a good portion of those miles on road-trips, charging either with a fast charger along the way or at our destination. This means only 31% of our charging was actually done at home (33% at Level 2 out of home, and the remainder at fast chargers on road trips), leading to a significantly smaller increase in consumption than modeled. Going forward, we will draw even less from our own meter, as our community gets Level 2 chargers installed nearby. Because of our net metering surplus (making the clunky/extension cable charging method free for us), this will actually increase our overall electricity costs by about $126 next year. Meanwhile, I do not know how much energy I actually used with my induction stove, as the Sense monitor (which has been good at learning the usage patterns from most of my appliances) has had a lot of trouble differentiating consumption from the stove (likely due to the myriad of burners and of energy levels it can draw per burner at each heat level or booster setting).

3. 

   Behavior change - Finally, I believe we consumed a lot less energy in the past year precisely because net metering (ability to “spend” energy you over-produce at any time during the year) made us think a lot more about our overall energy balance. It felt like on days we produced more energy we deserved to use as much as we needed, but we did not want to ever blow past that amount. The real unlock for this behavior change was the Sense monitor, which gave us the needed real time visibility into how we were doing against that balance at a moment-level (remember, the utilty app was always a few days delayed). Call it gamification or call it obsession, the experience I have had with solar + net metering + Sense is the same feeling I've had wearing a Continuous Glucose Monitor: I felt empowered; I felt like the data helped me make better decisions; and, I felt like a winner whenever I could get through a day a net producer of energy vs a net consumer. An example of how this behavior manifested is that some evenings we'd feel pretty hot and want to turn on the AC, but knowing how much the AC would draw, knowing the grid was especially burdened in the evening, and knowing how much of a balance we still had remaining, I would delay turning on the AC unit until closer to bedtime so that we could still be net positive producers on a given day (image to the right is from the Sense app, showing a recent day where we over-produced 13.4 kWh).

A Note on Future Consumption

While I tried to initially model in an increase in electricity from driving an EV and from the induction stove, I did not try to model in my future electrification or home efficiency efforts. That said, this week I did replace my gas dryer with a heat pump dryer, and I do plan on 1) weatherizing my home this summer (we are under contract to air seal the attic and upgrade its insulation from R12 to R49); 2) replacing my gas hot water heater to a heat pump model; and 3) replacing my gas furnace with a heat pump either later this year or next year. How this all nets out, combined with the upcoming changes to how I charge my EV, is too difficult to forecast. The insulation will definitely reduce our heating and cooling requirements while any additional electricity consumed by heating with a heat pump will be partially offset but the far better efficiency we will get from modernizing our cooling in the same install (our present AC unit is 22 years old!). The water heater will be a net new source of electricity consumption as well, but given the above I think we will still come in under our production numbers. Hopefully I will have a clearer picture when I give my Year 2 update next year.

Electricity Revenue / Costs

Because I had assumed an increase in my electric usage, I modeled that I would save $1,351 via my solar production and spend $909 due to my over-consumption. Instead, I spent $0 on electricity consumption and ended up with a $143 check for the wholesale value of how much I overproduced (Maryland “nets out” at the end of March every year, so really that check only covered 10.5 months of production). To be fully transparent, I still do have about $9.43 in monthly utility fees to be connected to the grid (which is fair, since I use the grid), making me more like $30 on top not $143. Going forward, my model assumed an annual 2% increase in the electrical delivery rate. In December 2023 the Maryland Public Service Commission did approve a substantial rate increase to be spread across the next 3 years with an immediate large 14% increase that went into effect a the beginning of the year and smaller increases after. Recently I also became aware of a service called Arbor that helps put you on a lower rate in deregulated energy markets like Maryland's (to see if your market has such offers, use my referral link here), lowering my energy supply rate (if/when I need supply again) to what would only be a 12% increase. Going forward, my payback calculator's revenue or costs for electricity will be highly subject to how my consumption changes (or doesn't) after further weatherization and electrification.

SREC Revenue

SRECs are Solar Renewable Energy Certificates, and they are purchased by utility companies or other companies who may have a state government or self-imposed mandate to have a certain % of their electricity production created by solar energy. When I put together my project's cashflow model both solar install companies warned me that the SREC values were decreasing significantly and would be worthless within a few years, indicating that I should not use the estimated values too heavily in my model (for reference, in 2015 a 1 MWh SREC could be sold for $180 early in the season, forming a major part of someone's cashflow model, but by 2020 the highest level was $70, and last year it was ~$53). That said, I tried some really crude modeling and expected to see $505 in my first year. Instead I've seen $343, and would guess that the number continues to drop, but have not deeply analyzed what's going on in that market.

Maintenance

One thing I failed to model in my payback calculator was maintenance expectations. While all of my major equipment has really incredible warrantees (12 years for the inverter, but 25 years for the panels and micro-optimizers), I still needed to pay my solar installation company to come out and help remove some panels so that my roofers to address a few leaks unrelated to the solar install (and therefore not covered by my 1 year service agreement). What I've learned from this is that, despite having the roof assessed prior to installation, some issues cannot be predicted and should be expected in any model. The solar company is of course more expensive per hour than my roofer, but my roofer will not touch panels so I need to hire both teams to be on site at the same time to do any repairs. I know I have at least 1 more leak to get fixed and so expect to spend a similar amount this year and should add similar line-items into future years. These charges are meaningful and impact my payback periods (as I detail below).

Additional Considerations

One additional benefit for having installed solar is that it has impacted my ability to advocate for and recommend solar to others. While my neighbor likely would have gotten solar without me, I was very happy to be able to share my experience with her while she explored the idea and recommend my installer to her (again, if you're in the Baltimore area feel free to reach out to me and I will introduce you to the company); and it brings me joy to see her rooftop now participating in the clean energy transition.

As I navigate my own career transition into climate tech / clean energy, another ancillary benefit has been the opportunity this process has afforded me in wrapping my head around the overall economics and logistics of solar energy specifically and “distributed energy resources” (DERs) in general. There's real economic value to this literacy, and I hope that in my Year 2 update next year I'll be able to add a note to the payoff calculator about how this process has benefited me in finding a new job or starting a new business. Stay tuned!

Climate Impact

My payoff calculator was meant to be purely an economic exercise, but of course there are other bottom lines and motivations to consider: mainly, our household's impact on climate and our quest to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The positive climate impact solar has provided has manifested in 2 ways beyond the obvious first way of simply displacing electricity from a dirty grid to a clean one (our solar production helped prevent 6 metric tons of CO₂e)!:

1. As mentioned above, solar has encouraged us to consume significantly less energy overall. When we use less energy than we produce, it means the electrons used by our neighbors are cleaner, and we are helping shift the fuel mix for our community not just our home;
2. While we were already committed to to electrifying everything in our home and no longer combusting fossil fuels to create our hot water and air, the timing has always been in question, as we still need to make everything make sense economically (especially after spending so much up-front on solar). When I made my model last year I worried that we would easily consume all the electrons we produced, and so I would simply look at the economics of further electrification as the difference between retail fuel costs and overall fuel use. But now that I have an excess of electricity the operational expenses of future appliances can be modeled at $0 until proven otherwise. This hastens our ability to afford that electrification, again saving money in the long-run but importantly helping lower the climate burden of our home in the short-run by bringing in the timelines for our transition.

Conclusion

Getting solar on our rooftop was a marvelous decision. I learned a lot, have been pleasantly surprised by how accurate the installer's production forecast was, and am absolutely floored by how much we've been able to reduce our energy consumption simply by having a daily scorecard telling us whether we “won” the day or not. More than any other behavior change (including eating less meat), rooftop solar has been the most tangible and effective investment in making me more invested in and thoughtful about the energy transition.

Because of my lower consumption than planned, and unplanned maintenance costs, my cash on cash payback with current usage will likely be around year 10.5 or 11 vs the 8.5 I initially modeled; however, given my plans to electrify and weatherize, that calculation is likely to change significantly between this year and my update next year. Even if the payback period doesn't improve, I believe the economic value these improvements have added to my home will show up in any resale price at an accelerated clip, as the energy transition becomes increasingly front of mind for buyers and retail electric rates continue to increase.

Finally, if you are considering buying a solar system for your home I highly recommend it and would be more than happy to chat with you about my experience or talk through any details of your own setup. Feel free to reach out and let me know if I can help.

Appendix: Why I didn't get a battery backup

I decided against having a battery system for 3 main reasons:

1. Marginal selfish value - There are 2 self-centered reasons to have battery backup: 1) If you cannot live comfortably with the frequency or duration of grid outages in your area; or 2) If the net-metering economics of your system are so bad, and the ability to feed energy back into the grid so attractive, that you can pay yourself back for the investment of the battery system. For us, the occasional electrical outages experienced in Baltimore aren't that bad: much of the local distribution grid is underground so there are limited storm-related issues, and having lived in this home for nearly 3 years we've had probably a total of 24 hours of outage spread across 3 - 4 events. Because the weather is fairly mild, and because we have a good amount of food in the pantry, we don't worry about not being able to eat or heat when the electricity is out (even with electrified cooking). Meanwhile, the net metering in Maryland makes owning a battery a poor financial investment. With annual net metering in our state, the grid is our battery for economic purposes: When I over-produce a kWh during the day, that energy is credited to my account at a 0% loss rate and my neighbor uses the electrons in their home, reducing the amount of natural gas burned 50 miles away at some power plant. At night, yes I'm drawing on a fossil-fuel heavy grid, but I get to use my “credits” (again at a 0% loss rate) from over-producing during the day. If there are a few days or weeks or months of low production due to weather or seasonality, no worries: the true-up happens on an annual basis, so my summer credits help fill in my winter deficits. If I was using a battery in this way, up to 15% of that energy would just be lost to heat and other inefficiencies. Meanwhile, because renewables are still a very small part of the grid in the Mid-Atlantic, there is not a market for feeding battery electricity back into the grid during peak times at any premium. Even if that market would appear, because I installed a relatively small system on a small house, the cost of a battery system would have ballooned overall project costs and made the economics and pay-back period much worse (again, because there's no revenue upside to having the battery now it would only make it worse).
2. Marginal societal value – If you are in California or Texas right now you have a grid where during the day the system is producing too much electricity and then at night things swing back the other way and a bunch of dirty fuel systems need to come online. Thus you could reasonable conclude that it is the most socially responsible thing to have a battery, storing any excess energy you produce during the day, and using that energy (or putting it back into the grid) in the evening and night when there is no sunlight and the electric grid needs support. Beyond it being the right thing to do, and partially because of it, the utility commission in California has made it required to have a battery system in some parts, as new solar installations would continue to overburden the grid when they over-produce. While requiring battery systems increases up-front costs, battery owners can get “paid” by the grid at rates higher than usual retail rates because you are discharging at the highest rate times, making them economical. But here in Maryland we do not have this issue and will not have this issue for another decade at present solar and wind development rates; so rather than helping ease grid congestion and clean it up, installing a battery would only be to my potential benefit during outages, and I'd rather Lithium Ion battery with all its rare earth materials go accelerate the energy transition in someone's new car or a home in California vs using those critical supplies for a small comfort measure. My money is certainly better spent on further electrification in my own home.

I'm happy to report I've by far spent the most time learning and thinking about climate and specifically what folks like me, with a more consumer tech background, can do or build to accelerate the adoption of the most important technologies and behavior changes required to meet USA's aggressive climate goal of achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

There are a number of reasons why climate has captured my attention more than health and politics. Now that I've brushed the dust off this blog, I look forward to blogging a bit about this journey and my calculus. I also plan on blogging more in general but certainly more about climate broadly, as – now a year into my education – I now feel comfortable emerging from "learn-only" mode.

But first, I'm writing here to announce how I've been writing about climate more narrowly:

Introducing Heat Pump Review

One way I'm emerging out of “learn-only” mode is launching a project called Heat Pump Review. Heat Pump Review is one part blog (public today) and one part data resource (launching soon) about heat pump technology and heat pump appliances, and the pace of their adoption, with a focus on consumer-grade heat pump HVAC and water heater systems, but also coverage of some commercial and industrial applications.

Rather than sharing too much more here on this blog about why I've focused on heat pumps, I'd love for you to go read my first post on the site (written last month) and then browse around to see if any of the other articles interest you. I'm proud of a few of them, and even to the average reader new to the world of heat pumps I'd recommend:

1. A post outlining the financial and greenhouse gas accounting you can do to decide whether or not you should replace a new/newish conventional water heater early with a heat pump (TL;DR: by every metric you should).
2. An explainer / deep dive about HSPF2, or Heating Seasonal Performance Factor (the key performance metric for heating with a heat pump). 
3. And a 4000 word article about Building Codes, how they are made and some recent legal and proceedural battles that will set building codes back for years to come.

So, I hope you enjoy the writing over at Heat Pump Review; but if not, that's okay: I'll still be writing about everything else here (and I'd love for you to subscribe to get updates in your inbox, following the Subscribe button found anywhere on this page, or by clicking here).

1. Develop and grow a photos service that had an impact on Amazon's success as a business.
2. Learn to be an intentional operator at Amazon-scale.
3. Build and foster a team that would be vibrant and durable beyond me being there.

These were my 3 professional objectives when I decided to join Amazon more than 8 years ago.

I've achieved these objectives – Chapter 2 has its beginning, middle, and end – and so Friday, January 20th was my last day at Amazon, and now I'm onto Chapter 3.

freeze frame; rewind

Chapter 1

Most readers of this know me from Chapter 1. Chapter 1's beginning started in my early-20s at the point in my life when I was finding out that there was a place for me. In college, neither I nor my advisors nor my parents nor any friends had any or enough awareness of the tech industry and it's roles, opportunities, and personalities to know that that's where I belonged. Some thought I'd be a TV producer. Some a Teach for America teacher. Some didn't push me anywhere, just wanting me to be happy (you can guess who that was). But through my first year out of college - totally lost and working in the wrong industry - daily GChats with my friend Evan slowly introduced me to the world of tech and startups and the earliest phases of what would become called Web 2.0. I started dipping my toe in the water and then in an overnight that actually lasted 8 years I found myself having started a few startups, building an incubator, learning to code, finding a family in the NY tech community, joining and then leading the NY Tech Meetup, becoming boy wonder, advising VCs, meeting my partner Jackie, and was off to the races in a thrilling and fulfilling career in early stage startups.

I could write more about Chapter 1 but actually I did write more about Chapter 1 – all on this blog. One thing I never wrote about was how Chapter 1 ended:

12 years ago I co-founded a startup called Picturelife with two friends. It was only a few months after I learned to code, and my co-founders were far more accomplished than I was, so I started with the least equity and from Day 1 I was tasked with building the backend.

In 2013 I became Picturelife's CEO and quickly focused the company on a major concern of mine: that as a VC-backed business we needed to scale faster than we were, but as a gross-margin negative business in the cloud-storage and processing space scale would crush our runway if we scaled. My plan was to walk and chew gum at the same time, continuing to build out our service's experience while spending 25% of my time with my friend Chris, our CTO, figuring out how to cut costs.

Meanwhile, our peer startups in the space – nearly all of whom were founded the same year we were but raised less capital than we did – all started dropping (due to the same dynamic of slow growth and shit economics), and soon the customers of Snapjoy, Everpix, and I can't even remember who else were flocking to Picturelife as the last remaining hope in the quest for a cloud-based, photo-focused memory preservation platform (hard to remember, but no Google Photos or Amazon Photos existed yet, and Apple Photos was still iPhoto with a bizarre Photostream feature tacked on).

Having only made a dent in our unit economics the new scale wasn't enough to raise a round on immediately but crushed our runway nevertheless. I had wanted to wait to raise another round after we had a profitable product and after were able to test enough in performance marketing to show that our Series B would pay for the healthy, profitable growth that wasn't happening organically – a typical Series B SaaS narrative in those days – but by Q2'14 I knew it was likely we'd be out of cash by the end of the year without those milestones being met, and it was time to start cutting employees and raising funds regardless. You can see how frustrated I was at needing to balance product and product economics at the same time in this Medium post: Finally, Storage Wars.

But while our economics were improving, and we continued to scale steadily (though not quickly) some other countervailing winds started to blow stronger: In 2013 a Yahoo! Flickr (not a direct competitor, but of considerable interest) announced they could just "give" 1TB away for free. We also started to see Google's interest in buying Picasa so many years earlier, as they tacked a Photos tab into Google+ and started launching some pretty neat tech and a solid free storage option inside it. In July 2014, Amazon launched the Fire Phone with Unlimited Photo Storage for photos taken on the phone. Facebook started "privately" storing photos from your phone for free, though I'm not sure anyone was ever naive enough for that one. Either way, the big companies were making moves and their first move was to take cost out of the customer's equation. Dropbox was also pivoting hard away from consumer and into business around then, having stumbled in personal photo storage themselves.

By late summer and 20+ VC meetings later, it was clear a new round was unlikely to happen and a profitable/self-sustaining Picturelife equally unlikely with the unit economics and runway we had left; and so while I tried to find courage/stomach in our existing investors for a bridge round I also started engaging with corp dev teams, including Amazon. In October of 2014 I flew out to Seattle with one of my co-founders and Chris to meet and pitch the Cloud Drive team. It was clear they wanted to pivot into photos and we were the last, great independent product in this space.

At the end of our pitch it was my time to ask questions: "With the Prime membership and your recent addition of other benefits, why isn't storage just free?" The team's GM ran out of the room and came back with a mockup that had been posted in the hallway: "Well you can't tell anyone, but we're launching Unlimited Storage for Prime members in two weeks."

Picturelife had a staggeringly amazing product and product development team, just around $1MM ARR, and a decent freemium customer-base; but with no IP ultimately we were not large enough to get Amazon corp dev beyond a short bout of diligence. "We can't buy you but do you all want to work on this here?" After some long conversations with our lead VCs (the bridge round was a "no"), I circled up the team in New York and told them it was time to accept the fact that this would not be a storybook ending, but we had a shot of still working on this great product - or some version of it - together at a company we all admired. Everyone took the interview, 6 of us got offers, and 4 of us wanted to make the move. We adored Amazon but 6 of us also interviewed at Facebook for good measure. I bombed that one but at least one of the guys who didn't get an Amazon offer found a soft landing with a NYC office at FB. Meanwhile, I had one startup still in the pipeline interested in acquiring the company in its present state - product, tech, customers, liabilities, and all – and while I packed my things in New Jersey, wound-down my NY Tech life, and started researching places to live in Seattle, I closed a deal for for $99 that found Picturelife its next home. Maybe this would have a bittersweet ending after all? Nope. Picturelife's ending had no sweetness at all; a story for another day.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2 is also a story for another day but here's the TL;DR: 8 incredible years at Amazon. In that time we launched Amazon Photos and – in a world where Google and Apple own mobile and leveraged both their privileged position on those devices and their 15-20 year head start with photo software – we made something that *matters* and continues to scale impressively. When I say "matters" of course I mean to our customers but recall personal objective #1 for me: I wanted to make something that mattered to Amazon's business at Amazon's scale, and we have. In that time I also "grew up" as an operator. Chapter 1's subtitle was "fake it 'til you make it." I didn't want to fake it anymore – the most prevailing motivation for trying corporate life – and at Amazon I couldn't. I had a brutal start, almost flunked out, but then found my groove. Ultimately I got good. I felt effective. I wasn't faking it (as much) anymore. I learned how to be a deliberate operator while staying true to who I was. I climbed the ranks and I grew my scope. I met my objective #2. The most important part of being a deliberate operator is building a durable organization and key to that is growing and recruiting the leaders who are so good they make you irrelevant. This was the hardest part of it all - and I have plenty of ink to spill another time - but by April 2022 I knew everything was in place and I told my leadership it was time to take these hard-won lessons back into the startup world I loved and missed: 2022 would be my final year.

And what a year. In April I had no idea how the market would shape up, but at every turn my calculus for leaving was proven out: economic headwinds, hiring freezes, and reductions in force hit the tech sector and even close to home at Amazon, and yet this incredible team operated through it relatively unscathed and seemingly stronger. We beat our most critical goal for 2022 despite unplanned roadblocks. While tough and unfortunate it was incredibly validating: this team can do anything, the future is bright for Amazon Photos, and I can leave.

Chapter 3

This post is titled Chapter 3 and yet there's not much to write about what's next for me. There are three things that scare the shit out of me right now and I'd like to do something about at least one of them:

1. The global climate emergency
2. The global health emergency
3. The US political and civic emergency

I don't know what I'll end up doing and I know that after a 12 year, non-stop marathon - 4 with Picturelife, and 8 with Amazon – I'm going to take this next phase super slowly.

I do know which way I'm leaning: Outside of work, my last 4+ years has been focused on my own health and the health of loved ones. The global COVID pandemic has and continues to shine a light and magnifying glass where I was already looking. More than any other topic, I've found myself reading and listening to as much as I can get my hands on about chronic diseases and what people can do to help themselves in a system rigged against truly helping them. Health inequity is bad and getting worse. So, I do put a slight weight on me doing something in or around personal health and population-scale health solutions. And yet I've also spent some of my recent free time tinkering with ActivityPub, have tinkered with helping fellow operators on Product strategy and operations, and I'll always love building little consumer-y things for myself and friends, so who the heck knows where this ship could land.

Starting today my plan is to prioritize catching up with folks I've lost touch with in my last 8 years (being inside a big company can really insulate you!), and to meet new people of course. I also want to learn to swim, have challenged myself to learn to bake croissants, and have a list of house projects that won't fix themselves. I have the privilege of some near-term flexibility and I plan on taking advantage of it.

During this time I also plan on writing more. So here's the opening to Chapter 3. We'll all need to wait and see what comes of it.

Evidently, Fred argued that Apple is "too rooted in hardware" and that "hardware is a commodity" so in the next several years we'll see the fact that they've largely fumbled on the cloud come back and bite them.

John Gruber's issue with Fred's call here is that while most of the hardware industry is a commodity, there will always be premium hardware product – product that push boundaries in the right ways – and that Apple's stronghold here is firm and relatively permanent, given the competition.

I think Fred and John are both right.

To John's point, Apple's hardware will always have the edge in a hardware world that has edges. Even with all its riches and intel, Samsung and friends can't seem build a phone that doesn't blatantly steal from Apple, and even when they do produce something one can't really tell the difference between what they've produced vs the products of their pals HTC, LG and Motorola. Meanwhile, an Apple device is always distinctive, introduces new UX paradigms (Siri vs whatever weird bump thing Samsung has) and is largely paving its own way (which in turn will be the way for all other device manufacturers, and we the consumers).

In a nutshell: Given the fact that Apple has owned the innovative hardware formula for the past 20 years, and really honed it in the past 10, I don't see how anyone else unseats them as the most important hardware manufacture in the world in that timeframe. And in 20 years, we'll still need, want, and buy hardware. So, Apple is here to stay.

But – and now to Fred's point – Apple has already put a limit on what "here to stay" actually means. By ceding the cloud to Google and other providers, they can own the software experiences most tightly tied (or held back) by the hardware and OS, but have entered a phase where everything else will become unbundled and under someone else's control.

John Borthwick and his team at Betaworks published this analysis of Apple homescreens and reveals just how much Apple has already given up. A potent combination of Google's Maps, Mail (via its own app and via SMTP), Search, and YouTube, mixed with Dropbox and Google Drive for storage, dominate Apple products and Apple's users' experiences with their hardware.

While there are still cloud experiences up for grabs – spoiler alert! photos are one of them, one even John questions if Apple really gets – many of these areas are experiences Apple could have won if they had truly invested in and understood the cloud; more importantly, they could have owned the experience even outside of Apple devices and if they had gone so far as to innovate and win with their Maps, Mail, and Photos in the same cross platform way they won with iTunes in the early 2000s, and in the way Google is winning with the cloud today.

Had Apple used this playbook, they would have been in a much more impressive long-term position then they are today, having to defend themselves "strictly" based on hardware and OS, and not what they could have enjoyed: the one-two punch of device and cloud.

"Strictly" is in quotes of course, because come on: winning in hardware for the next 20 years ain't that bad at all.

Twitter used to be a sort of surrogate newsroom/barroom where you could organize around ideas with people whose opinions you wanted to assess. Maybe you wouldn't agree with everybody, but that was part of the fun. But at some point Twitter narratives started to look the same. The crowd became predictable, and not in a good way. Too much of Twitter was cruel and petty and fake. Everything we know from experience about social publishing platforms—about any publishing platforms—is that they change. And it can be hard to track the interplay between design changes and behavioral ones. In other words, did Twitter change Twitter, or did we?

In the last couple days we've read a lot of negative press about Twitter. Mainly this came from the financial press and analysts who seemed to hate or at least be surprised by their Q1 earnings and growth numbers.

The above "eulogy," by the Atlantic's Adrienne Lafrance and Robinson Meyer, has stood out among all the negativity, however, mainly because it felt so familiar.

Four years ago, nearly to the day, I wrote "Down and Out in the Twitter Ecosystem" due to some platform policy changes I thought would squash the vibrancy of the Twitter I loved – the same vibrancy it seems Adrienne and Robinson are eulogizing.

While back then I was writing about the developer ecosystem's effects on a user's Twitter experiences, changes in the developer and the user base have always had the same net effect: deprecation of parts of the Twitter experience you love, only to be replaced by a new Twitter experience you learn to love.

But Twitter is an amazing force, now more than ever, and what I ultimately concluded in 2010 holds even more true today:

Okay. So maybe I'm crazy and hyperbolic. Maybe Twitter will be a $20B company one day... Twitter got away with what they're up to for the past two years and more than flourished. All the power to them and let's hope for them and others that they continue to flourish while somehow maintaining a healthy ecosystem around them.

Long live Twitter.

When I first got started in tech, Gary Vaynerchuck was one of the first people to take me under his wing.

At the 2008 SXSW conference, Gary introduced me to many of the finest people in tech that I still know today, one of them being Joe Stump.

At the time, Joe was the Lead Architect of Digg, which in 2008 was one of the largest sites on the web. I remember thinking Joe was larger than life. A day after meeting him, I attended the Considerations of Scalable Web Ventures panel that Joe was on -- a panel which included other Internet Incredibles like Cal Henderson, Garret Camp, and Matt Mullenweg.

Though I didn't code yet, I was completely blown away what those guys did. I was especially blow away by Joe's ability to talk about scaling Digg in a way that even I understood, without dumbing it down.

By the end of that SXSWi, I was a Joe Stump fanboy.

Fast forward two and a half years later and Jackie and I found ourselves hitching a ride with Joe back to San Francisco, after attending Gary's Tahoe Tech Talks (we had stayed in touch and hung out since 2008).

During that ride, I told Joe that I was going to learn how to code when I got back from our West Coast trip. We talked for most of the ride from Tahoe to San Francisco about coding, but I'm pretty sure Joe still didn't believe me that I'd actually learn. I knew Joe had heard it all before, and I'm fairly sure I had said it all before.

Nevertheless, a week later, after we got back from San Francisco and armed with the advice of one of the smartest people I knew in the business, I sat down and really learned.

Fast forward three years again and it was my honor to sit down with Joe last summer (before I made the hop to CEO of Picturelife) and talk to him about life as a business-guy-turned-backend-lead. Today, his company Quick Left has posted our interview on their site.

I'm embedding the podcast below, but head to the Quick Left blog to check out the whole thing (and other posts they've done in their The Business of Coding series).

App developers and marketers alike are climbing over each other to update their campaigns and websites to live in a "card" world, while startups like Wildcard are building out the much needed plumbing to help people take advantage of this new design pattern and extend it beyond Twitter's walls.

However, I see a major obstacle standing in the way of "card" adoption, and that's Twitter's separate, favored-nation treatment of photo uploads on their system.

Whereas Twitter only show users a small icon in their streams when a tweet contains a normal "card", Twitter prominently shows when a user (or a brand, or an app developer) uploads a photo. Here's an example from my Twitter stream this morning:

It is completely understandable why Twitter would want to favor user photos -- if your friend took and is sharing a photo, it's likely far more relevant than a visual summary of an article a friend is linking to. Screen space is in short supply, and so Twitter has to decide what to favor.

But, the problem is that this design decision is encouraging a nasty anti-pattern that threatens the future of cards and therefore threatens the future of a more usable, enjoyable Internet.

Because Twitter is so clearly favoriting directly uploaded photos over their own "photo card" format, app developers and publishers are skipping this new open standard and reverting back to direct uploads.

Take Business Insider, as an example. There is a very clear standard for marking up news articles with big images using Twitter Cards. It's appropriately called "Summary Card with Large Image."

However, being the clever company that Business Insider is, it chooses instead to upload the image used in the article, thereby greatly increasing the chances that its followers will actually see the post and click-through. And, while Twitter's photo upload API was clearly meant for users' real pictures, you can't blame Business Insider for "hacking" the use-case and getting more views.

While Business Insider may be one of the more aggressive publishers out there, high-growth, smart startups are also entering the fray, and in some cases are going back in Internet time, going from use of cards to cleverly generated images that look like cards.

Take our good friends at Timehop as an example. Last year they were an early adopter of Twitter's Cards standards, beautifully showing you a summary of your past moment right in your Twitter feed -- if you opened up the card.

Today, however, Timehop seems to have abandoned Twitter Cards, and has joined folks like Business Insider by simply doing a direct upload of their card as a rendered out image -- as if they were a user sharing a photo with friends.

As a user, fan and friend of Timehop (and a very tiny, indirect investor)*, I'm glad they've gone this new route to make sure I see more interesting Timehop content in my Twitter feed.

In fact, as soon as I saw what Timehop was doing I started building a prototype of how Picturelife could do the same thing, instead of using the aforementioned Twitter Photo cards. As with Business Insider, you definitely can't blame the publishers and developers for exploiting a design decision Twitter has made.

However, ultimately steering people away from open standards like "cards" is bad for the Internet and will attract as many bad actors as good actors using the system. It's like what happened with emails in the late 90s and early 2000s. Before best practices followed by Outlook and other popular email clients, web designers just started emailing full-text images of formatted text, eschewing HTML, machine readable text, and open standards for what "just worked."

Today, because email clients and spam filters have gotten better, and because search has become such an important part of email, this anti-pattern has reversed and sending an all-image email is left to the fake Viagra spammers of the world.

The good news is Twitter can get out in front of this quickly and reverse the trend.

The right thing for Twitter to do is not block the Business Insiders, Timehops, and Picturelife's of the world from using their media upload endpoint, it's to stop favoring media uploads over Twitter Cards in their interfaces.

My solution for Twitter would be rather simple: Twitter should invest in generating a quality score for all cards and direct uploads, and smartly obfuscate cards and photos from uploaders with low quality scores, and prominently display full cards and uploads from users, publishers, and developers with higher quality scores.

Twitter can reverse this anti-pattern if they act now. Until then, more of us will just start "hacking" Twitter and upload our cards as static photos.

Disclosure: Wildcard's CEO, Jordan Cooper, is a Partner at Lerer Ventures, an investor in Picturelife. Nate Westheimer is an investor in TechStars, which is an investor in Timehop.

When you're fighting to succeed, it's understandable if you go for the most effective weapon, right?

Well, we think it's wrong and so we're not doing it.

Instead, we've come up with 7 ways to ask for App Store reviews that fit our idea of digital neighborliness.

I've posted about these ideas on Medium.

I bought it at 4:45pm on Saturday, and the last time I read a book front-cover to back-cover like that was several years ago. It was that good.

It was so phenomenal, in fact, that I'm going to be buying a copy for each of my Red Bud CEOs and I'm going to encourage everyone on my team at Picturelife read it.

You don't have to be a CEO to get great information from this book.

But, for as much as I loved Ben's book and the rich, informative, and at times heart-breaking, stories it held, I could help but feel like it missed the mark for me in an important way every single business book seems to miss the mark for me: It wasn't written for me at all.

You see, at least fifty percent of The Hard Things... was only relevant to managing a company much larger, with much different issues than my startup, Picturelife.

Yes, we are a venture-backed, high-growth company (Spark is our lead investor and we have amazing angels like A16Z's own Chris Dixon), but most of Ben's book is centered on his Loudcloud story -- a company which raised $21m out of the gate, and $45m only 2 months after that.

Much of Ben's story was about managing a team of hundreds of people and several layers of bureaucracy within a couple of months of its founding. A company with less than 20 people is not the same.

For me, the hard thing about business books is how few of them actually speak to what I experience in the struggle (Ben's phrase). If it were just me, I wouldn't say anything about it and I would have stopped this post after my glowing review of The Hard Things..., but I think there are actually more venture-backed startups in my position than those in the LoudCloud position, and there aren't enough great stories told by the CEOs of those company who make it to the other side.

I don't want to take away anything from Ben's tremendous book -- it was immensely valuable to me as a new CEO, and ton's of the content was relevant to any manager or innovator -- however, I do want to make this call to the successful CEO community:

If any of you have a story that looks more like most of ours do, please share it. Who else has been 12 people a few years in and made it work?

I promise to write this story when Picturelife has made it to the other side, but in the meantime, who's going to step up to the plate. Who already has?

Yesterday, I ran on my treadmill and listened to John Gruber's The Talk Show for the first time. I had never listened to the show before, but since we've started sponsoring John's blog, I thought I should give his podcast a go. (Also, I've just been listening to tech podcasts more. Hosting one has always been an "owning a cafe"-like dream for me).

Anyway, he had Joanna Stern on last week and they spoke mostly about the limitations of tablets and especially multi-tasking on tablets. Joanna has just written this piece in the WSJ (paywall, so click on the top Google result here to read).

In their conversation, they tried to conceptualize what multi-tasking could look like on the iPad. A lot of attention centered on just enabling "command + tab" for connected keyboards to do Fast App Switching, and I think they are right -- that alone could be awesome.

But, another idea also came to mind as I was running into my 4th mile -- this coming from a critique they, and I, have with what Samsung has done in regard to multi-tasking, namely requiring a completely new and specialized app development framework most developers would never touch since it's not in the core OS. As an app developer it's unlikely I'll want to take valuable development cycles to build something that would only work on their devices.

So my basic idea for the next iOS takes the idea of multi-tasking and mixes it with my frustration with the relative uselessness of the Notification Center. I use the "Missed" notifications tab, but for me "Today" and "All" have been useless. On the iPad, Notification Center seems even more useless, as it's just a full screen version of what's on the iPhone, and has always seemed way, way too big for its purpose.

The idea I had is simple and could be quickly added to the next version of iOS:

1. Make the Notification Center iPhone sized on the iPad,
2. Allow users to take an app from the Fast App Switcher and throw it into a tab in that Notification Center pull-down. Perhaps just let me "star" or favorite an app from the Fast App Switcher to designate it as my secondary app.
3. Most iPad developers have already built an iPhone sized app, mostly in the exact same bundle as their iPad app, so on the developer side there should be no extra work. Your iPhone app is your iPad's secondary/multi-task version.

So that's it. Simple, and not too terribly thought out. But worth writing down and sharing. The image at the top of this post is how I thought it would look, more or less. Let me know what you think.

If you have a deep relationship with the photos you and your family take, can bring a lot to the table marketing wise, and want to make a big difference in a growing company, consider working with us.

If you've been reading me since 2006 (when I coined the 'innonate' moniker and bought this domain) you know I had a great few years of prolific posting. Then, in 2008, I slowly stopped writing at all.

It wasn't just me, of course. Google Reader used to be a thing back then. I used to check my Technorati score and see who visited me on my MyBlogLog.

Today, those things don't exist and I -- along with every other fair weather blogger -- have basically stopped.

In 2014 I want to change that and write more, but in 2014 I think the reality is that probably means I'll be writing in many places other than this blog.

Today I'm trying to write on Medium for the first time. Go read (and please share!) my post on why Picturelife decided to be early in accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment.

Do you still get to code?

While I've certainly had to put other priorities over coding, I am really happy to say I've still gotten to code quite a bit. Actually, what's happened, is that instead of coding substantially less, I'm coding on different aspects of the platform.

What's that mean?

With the shift in my responsibility for the company, I'm become much more focused on hacking on behalf our business success. This means that I've spent less time on our image de-duplication algorithms (good news is we hired someone who does it better than me) and more time on our email communication platform. Instead of working on optimizing our API (good news is we have two awesome people who are better at this than me) I've been hacking on tools which help high-value prospects deeper into our product faster, leading to better conversions.

No place does this shift than what my team and I hacked on yesterday: an import tool for stranded Everpix users. Early yesterday we found out what format the files would be in and less than 24 hours we built a full-featured import tool, sent out press releases, and started seeing new customers roll in.

So yes, I do still get to code, but the coding is a little different. If I didn't get to code I'd probably go nuts (and totally suck at leading the company) but instead I'm super, incredibly happy that my new role has allowed me to keep my keys clackin, gits pulling, and deploys deployin.

If you're in New York and would like to join me on this adventure, I'm excitedly looking for the right engineers, designers, UX leaders, and marketers to continue Picturelife's explosive growth and make Picturelife a household name.

Earlier this year, my investment fund, Red Bud, joined Flybridge, Foundry Group, Bre Pettis, The Box Group and several other angels in backing Dragon Innovation. Today, the Dragon platform is live. 

Until now, Dragon has been behind the scenes helping hackers and entrepreneurs bring to fruition nearly every successful crowd funded hardware project you've seen (like the Pebble watch I love so much!), as well as helping deliver products for well known independent hardware manufacturers like MakerBot and some other companies I can't tell you about but you've surely heard of.

Dragon exists because building a cool prototype and getting it crowdfunded can be easy for some people, but then getting it manufactured at scale, built to last, and delivering on the promises you made to your backers is an entirely other issue, with different skills needed.

It's what separates hardware from software.

With the launch of their platform, Dragon is now open to help even more amazing hardware developers get their ideas made, and made the right way. I can't wait to see them grow and even more I can't wait to back and buy to cool stuff emerging on their platform.

Go check it out or read more here or here.

I haven't been great at writing here lately, so I thought I'd try sharing some photos I've been taking and writing a quick story about them. 

Today I'll start with a photo walk through the Freedom Tunnel I took last week with Bijan Sabat and David Haber. You can see more of my photos from the walk here, Bijan's are here, and David's are here.

My two take aways from the walk were: 

1. I loved the sounds you hear underground. Above the tunnel were parks and streets. At one point people were playing tennis, but it took us a second to figure out what the grunting was. We went at 8am in the morning, so the sounds of people getting to work and starting their days would fall into the tunnel like the beams of light. It was all very disorienting but also cool.
2. Photo walks are cool. I hadn't been on one since Amit Gupta did one in Williamsburg back in 2008 (a few photos). Mostly I take photos because I'm going to be somewhere anyway, but this was intentional photo finding and I really liked it. I think I'll try to do it again soon.

That's it for now. Maybe this will get me blogging again.

But it wasn't until my dad sent me Farhad Manjoo's piece that I felt like I needed to say something. 

First of all, I think Farhad knows that it's hardly journalistic innovation to "weep" for the end of innovation in Silicon Valley. It's a time tested way to get a lot of Techmeme page views; it always works and he knows it. Should we "weep" for journalism?

Beside the hypocrisy of bemoaning the lack of innovation with lack of innovation, I also think all this critique of Facebook and Silicon Valley is short sighted.

Firstly, there's this sense that the Instagram team could have done something awesome like cure cancer instead of making this feature. That's silly. Take it from me, I code but could not come close curing cancer.

Also, there's this sense that Facebook/Instagram is just following Twitter/Vine. That's also silly. Look at me with a straight face and tell me you think the Instagram guys never thought about how to do video before Vine. You really think the inspiration for Instagram's team to do video came from some place else than their inspiration to build the app that got them there in the first place? Silly, silly.

Meanwhile, on the social importance of trying to make short-form video consumption something the masses want to adopt, I think the critics are completely blinded by a shade of smugness about what lasting social change looks like -- about which innovation is "valuable" or worthwhile.

Before Instagram V1 there were cameras on phones and ways to edit photos and way to distribute photos. Tens of thousands of photo apps already existed in the app store. But, something clicked with Instagram V1 and it changed how people take photos on a large scale. More people than ever think they can do something creative, and try. These new creatives see the world and their cameras as an opportunity for artistic expression, not just a way to capture 4 family members standing in a row and literally saying the word "cheese" hoping to make it a better photo. Instagram invented nothing but a user experience that somehow stuck and inspired millions to be creative in a way they weren't inspired to be before.

This will one day happen with video too. Tons of video apps already exist but people don't really use video for more than documenting a moment, taking the proverbial video-cheese shots. But, the smallest UX nuance will one day change that -- and on that day (or maybe yesterday) a tech journalist or 100 tech journalists will mock it.

I, personally, am excited to see what that app is which changes the game for video the same way Instagram changed the game for photos. I don't know that we've seen the app yet, and it will be even more difficult to do than photos. Videos/cinema add the dimension of sound, frame-rate, and composition in a 4th dimension. But, when the average person can upload a Ken Burns quality video from anywhere in the world, and not just what we know now as shaky iReport footage, the world will change.

And, in case my point is missed, I think a society that embraces creativity -- where more people think of themselves as capable of creating art -- even within the confines of a single application, is better than a society that only has dull, non-artistic photos or video in it. More people who think of themselves as creative, or willing to try, probably get that important, worthwhile, and cancer-solving innovation you wish you saw at Facebook's announcement done faster.

We, like any community, are subject to the occasional cliche. In the tech world, one that's always been prevalent is that of the recluse, socially inept, programmer. The frazzled stare, the bloodshot eyes, the occasional stammer before their mind runs off into another world - a world of haunting bugs and the eternal quest for elegance and speed and the victory of achieving both.

I have to tell you, I didn't really understand where this stereotype came from until recently. Now, as a full-time engineer at Picturelife, I feel like I live it.

No two ways about it: In my transformation from "founding business and product guy" to fulltime founding engineer there are specific ways in which my life has changed and I've become a different person. I may have even become a worse friend. Here's how:

Late for everything

As a business guy, I was pretty good at being on time to meetings -- with new colleagues or long-time friends. If something was 20 minutes away, I'd stop working on whatever I was doing 25 minutes before I needed to be there knowing I could just pick up whatever I was doing when I returned.

Now, as a developer, I'm late for everything, and sometimes I bail on meetings/events altogether, with almost no warning to the other party. When this happens, it's usually because of one of these reasons:

1. Shit's crashing/scaling/launching/slow and I need to fix/scale/tweak/deploy it. As an engineer, your finger is much more on the pulse of the NOW of your company. If something's going down, I have a bigger obligation to fix the code/server/whatever than to be at our meeting on time.
2. I'm knee deep in a problem. Sometimes when you're working on a big problem, you can spend hours or days just loading enough relevant information into your brain so that you can actually work on the problem. It's as if your brain is a computer and in order to start processing data you load everything into RAM first. Sometimes you've worked so hard to get information into your head that you're scared to just leave it and head off to a meeting only to come back and have to spend hours or days getting back to the same place you were before. And so you bail.

Endless Priority 1 Work

As a business guy, and even at the height of my involvement in the NY Tech Meetup (i.e. running it fully) and managing a team of 12 engineers in Israel, I could regularly get to Inbox Zero.

I had more on my plate back then, but if you emailed me, you got a reply. If you were a good friend of mine, you even got a reply in minutes or hours.

Today, my inbox is a mess and I regularly permanently blow off emails from people I think of as really good friends.

What's happened?

As an founder + engineer I feel like I have endless work now, without breaks. Before, as a product guy, I could load my engineering team up with tasks and todos, but once I reached their limit for throughput (and mine for a backlog) I could back off and focus on other things. My work was cyclical. I had time to focus on things that weren't my main occupation.

Today, that dynamic is gone. If I can dream it, I can do it, and often I'm exactly the person who needs to do it. That means there is never a time when my time isn't best spend writing more code, debugging for a user, or optimizing our stack. Our dreams for Picturelife are about 15% fulfilled, and so there's always something to code or do.

Because one thing occupies highest priority and doing email is never at the top, I end up blowing people off more than I'd like. It's turned me into a worse friend, but, it's the closeness to the product you can only achieve if you actually write code and do the work. It's what I dreamt up when I decided to learn to code, and so I've accepted that this is the way it "must be" while I'm holding this position at this stage of my company's life.

Higher stakes hand-raising

I've always been one to raise my hand -- to volunteer to get something done. It's the path that led me to lead the NY Tech Meetup, and its something I've done since I was very young.

Now, I'm often the only engineer in a group (or in my family), and so when I raise my hand now it's to build out software, not just organize a BarCamp or edit a newsletter.

While I've had a transference of skills from soft to hard, my hand-raising has gotten me into higher stakes commitments. It's one thing to volunteer to organize a meeting, but a whole other thing to volunteer to build a web platform for a group.

With more powerful super powers, I have to be more careful about showing them off.

Last night I tweeted, asking for ideas on what to blog about, and my friend Jonathan suggested "Working with Charles Forman."

@innonate donglegate. Or living near but not IN nyc. Or life post-learning2code. Or working with Mr Forman. Or how you prioritize features.

— Jonathan Wegener (@jwegener) March 22, 2013

Now, I took that as "Working with Charles Forman, the man, the myth, the legend." But there's a more important and common issue here, and so I'm taking it as "Working with Charles Forman, your friend, long before your business partner."

You see, I come across founders all the time who no longer speak to their fellow co-founders. In some ways its understandable because startups are so high stress that someone's bound to get upset at another person and have a falling out. It's also understandable because we're taught as an industry to value the success of our startup above nearly all else. So for some folks it's sad that a co-founder gets alienated, but hey, it was for the good of the startup, right? We have a fiduciary responsibility above all else, right?

Really, this stuff is just super sad, because if you've lived with eyes wide open long enough you know how few real friends you have out there, and how many companies you get to start in a lifetime. Sure, this industry is packed with nice folks you enjoy talking industry trends and drinking beers with, but how many people do you know in the industry that you'd invite to your wedding, or that you'd share real fears and anxieties with?

Real friends are few and far between. So, what happens when you start a business with one of them?

When you start and run businesses with friends, your priorities should be about preserving the friendship throughout the process. As it turns out, I think great friends make great products and built great businesses, and most especially they build really awesome company cultures together. I think because Charles and I were good friends before we started Picturelife, and especially because Charles and Jacob were such good friends long, long before we started Picturelife, we've been able to build a culture of friendship and mutual respect throughout the company -- not just among the founders.

Nowhere does this dynamic come into play more than in being separated by a timezone. Picturelife is a Chicago company, and 7 of the 9 of us, including Charles and Jacob, live and work in our (amazing) Chicago office. Meanwhile, I live in NYC and Joe, our first employee, lives in Philadelphia. We're on Google Hangout and IRC all day long, but we don't see each other much face to face.

Being far a way from one another could be a bad, bad thing. Nuances in communication is very difficult from far away. Brainstorming is difficult from far away. I'm a big believer in human-to-human interaction, but there's a reason we've worked so well together while being apart: we've relied on our friendship. When we call each other up about a new feature idea or business opportunity, we know where the other person is coming from and what they are thinking because we've taken the time to know the other person and their personality. Doing this with everyone you work with is super important, and will help you work together no matter the distance. See the other person as just a colleague, chances are you'll have issues making great stuff together.

Am I saying everything is always peachy-keen among Charles, Jacob and me? Hell no! We piss each other off all the time. But, we all care about being good to one another in the business, and knowing what's going on in each others' lives outside the business, and so when tough stuff arises we know how to deal with it and push through it in a way that doesn't negatively affect our relationships or our business.

So, that's what it's like working with Charles. It's like working with a friend, whose opinion you value and whose life you care about. It's been an amazing experience doing this with him, and Jacob, and Chris (the other fellow now on our team, who I knew from before founding the company), and I wouldn't change it for the world.