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Life Spans: A Career in Connections

2012-05-13T02:31:00.001-06:00

All of my programming life has been spent playing with sockets; client and server. The guy that introduced me to the networking stack was Lou Montulli, and he said something to me as an impressionable kid that has driven everything I've done ever since: "the URL is the only thing that matters. If you are writing code with that in mind, you will win." I took that statement to heart and doing so has yielded a priceless life experience so far. There's simplicity in that statement as well as, wisdom, truth, honor, religion, direction, revolution, evolution, complexity, and mantra.

It all started with the Lynx text-browser networking library; an originally serial thing. That library was sucked into Mosaic/Netscape and parallelized in order to accommodate fancy things like images and JavaScript. From there, we struck a performance balance between the desktop's ability to parallelize socket i/o schedules, with the rendering engine's ability to render. Connection speeds started to improve (dial-up to broadband), and TCP stacks standardized; relative network stack homogeneity set in; Cisco, Apache.

Scaling both sides of the socket (client and server) turned into a game of threads, multi-proc, asynchronous/event-driven programming and figuring out how to get as many balls in the air as possible, and how to get them back on the table in an organized manner. The entire system moved to this challenge, and tremendous innovation occurred at the hardware and software level. In the mid-2000s I spent my time trying to optimize AOL's publishing infrastructure to yield thousands of short-lived parallel connections per server in a real-world publishing environment.

Then something unpredictable happened. Social media thrust massive amounts of dynamic, user generated (UGC) content into my world at Gnip. Everything I'd been working for turned around 180 degrees. Instead of optimizing for lots (end consumer browsers) of short-lived, HTTP transactions in a web browser or on an HTTP server, we needed to focus on few (relatively speaking in the world of "enterprise") long-lived HTTP transactions. Dozens of customers per NIC, instead of thousands. State-full transactions instead of state-less. At Gnip we need connections to last weeks on end (and longer), instead of sub-second. Yet, we and our customers want everything to just look and feel like the URL we've all come to know and love.

The result has been a massive engineering exercise that continues today; Gnip. The public Internet has been plumbed out as a system that supports bursty, short-lived, HTTP transactions. Yet, Gnip users want a sustained HTTP transaction that can handle 10x volume spikes sans issue. From highly elastic public cloud hosting solutions, to dedicated hosting providers, we've spent a lot of energy to ensure network clarity to support these needs.

One "feature" that I miss about my old Internet is statelessness. State-full connections cannot break. If they do, bad things happen, and contingencies have to fill the gaps. Traditional queuing theory is the monkey on every Gnip engineer's back. Buffering, backfill, replay, index pointers, sustained throughput volumes, cascading, fanout, MTUs, packet-loss, and processing latency are our domain. I view our system as an aqueduct delivering uninterrupted streams of public consciousness to those who need it. The challenges inherent in building something like this are writing great chapters in the lives of everyone on the team.

I find it curious that while the URL is still the center of my universe, what's behind it has changed dramatically over the course of my career. Something so simple, yet so complex.

"Critical Path" Roles

2012-04-26T10:30:00.002-06:00

During an enlightening conversation with another Boulder entrepreneur yesterday we had a short side conversation that concisely exemplified a concept we're all familiar with, but often get wrong when hiring. In my mind, at the highest level of role characteristics abstraction there are two categories of positions, "critical path" and not.

When evaluating candidates for a given role, you should squarely understand whether or not that role is "critical path," and subsequently whether or not a candidate matches that characteristic. You may be at a stage where all of your open positions are critical path, none are, or somewhere in-between. Bringing someone into a critical path position, who is great at, and wants to be in, critical path roles is a win-win. A mismatch in that headset however will break and neither you, nor the person you hired will be happy.

I'm sure you can call "critical path" many other things, and swap it out with other requirements like "leadership position" (or not), "management position" (or not), "individual contributor" (or not), etc. The point is that you've got to spend time clearly understanding the critical characteristics of a given position, and ensure there's alignment on them between you and a candidate.

Writing the job description for posting is a powerful exercise in vetting what it is you want/need, but I also ask myself "if this person showed up tomorrow, what exactly is it that I'd expect them to be doing?" That's always a great exercise to cut through the crap you may have conjured up, and get down to brass tacks.

Paying for Health: Give Forward

2012-04-17T06:47:00.000-06:00

At Lindzonpalooza this past weekend in Coronado, CA, a handful of companies (varying in stage, though most very early) presented to friends, and potential investors. Give Forward stood out in an interesting way for me. Simply put, they're crowdsourced healthcare financing. They've been at it for awhile, and are doing great.

During the Q&A session Yoni Assia asked an intriguing, upsetting, magical, and innovative question (paraphrasing): "what if I could setup a monthly subscription to the service, and if/when I need the service myself, it covers my healthcare bills for me? kind of like insurance."

Great question, and on the surface it seems like it would work. What upset me about the question is that I was intrigued by it, even though I already shell out untold sums of money every year to "cover my health" yet I'm obviously displeased with the current model to the point that I'd gladly subscribe to the additional service Yoni was proposing. It was yet another moment of realization around how bad healthcare has gotten.

Intriguing to think that Give Forward may actually be solving the healthcare financial mess by simply circumventing the money part of it altogether.

It was also disturbing to hear that the healthcare companies themselves are considering getting into Give Forward's game. Chew on that circular reference for awhile and see how it tastes.

What GF's done is awesome. An incredible story of passionate caring in a for-profit model wherein everybody wins. Evidence that we, the entrepreneurs, will indeed find a way around the broken massive industries that have plagued and sucked the system dry in so many ways.

Discretionary Energy

2012-04-09T06:49:00.000-06:00

"You're investing in a great challenge when you're applying discretionary energy to it."

I don't recall who first told me this, but it has guided me for well over a decade now. It motivates me to select things to work on that I deem "great." It motivates me to ensure the challenges at work are great enough to engage others' discretionary energy such that it's applied to the challenge as well. I'm fully engaged on a challenge when I allocate discretionary energy to it. If the challenge is something I can just "do," that's great and all, but not as fulfilling in the end.

You can gauge a lot about a company, and the people in it, by whether or not anyone there chooses to apply discretionary energy to it. That energy may be expended during business hours, or not. Niether the amount of discretionary energy, nor when/where it is applied are the point of this post. The point is whether any discretionary energy is being allocated.

If the ratio of discretionary energy to paid-for energy is 0:1, then all that is happening is that a crank is being turned. If the company is not profitable, that's a real capital problem because it's likely that nothing creative is going on to get the money printing press going.

If the ratio of discretionary energy to paid-for energy is 1:1, then things are in high-gear. As we all know, that can be good as well as bad (potential imbalance, burnout, call it what you want).

We should strive to ensure we are in work situations with a ratio of >0:1. For some that's 0.0001:1. For others that's 1:1. However, if it's 0:1, you're not pushing yourself; you're not engaged. You could potentially just be punching the clock.

To be clear, I am not making a statement about work/life boundaries. Some of the most amazing people I've had the pleasure to work with cordon off their "work" life from their "personal/home" life, and apply relatively little discretionary energy to challenges at the office.

Be conscious of your discretionary energy ratio, you'll live a more deliberate and aware life.

Scaling Me 2

2012-04-05T20:16:00.000-06:00

This timely post, that I stole the title from, by Matt Blumberg took the words, in a timely manner no less, right out of my mouth. I'm seeking inspiration from Matt (unbeknownst to him) to get some of my "first time CEO" challenges out on paper for therapeutic purposes.

Gnip has grown a lot/fast over the past year or so. I've, idealistically, and at times detrimentally, carried beliefs and values near and dear to me through that growth, thinking they can scale without modification. Some of them scale just fine (e.g. honesty). Some of them don't scale as well.

Transparency

In a smaller team (say ~12 or less) you're all relatively close in proximity, and in thought/conversation, on a day-to-day basis. As a result, there's a general sense of understanding of most topics across the organization. Joe can see Jane's frustration level when she's moving through a challenge. Mark has an ambient sense of how Jenny can power through technical challenges of certain shapes and sizes.

When you move past ~12 people on the team, individuals simply have to compartmentalize more of their thinking, and must drop certain levels/depths of awareness in order to stay productive. The result is less overall context and understanding of everyone else's headspace. To drive the point home, here's an extreme example (something I love to provide, which I'm also learning isn't as effective as the team scales). If your good friend says to you "let's go have some fun," you probably have a decent sense of what that means. If someone less familiar to you says the same thing, you have no idea what that statement means to them. In both cases, the other party was being fully transparent about what they want to do, but without the right context, the latter can leave you dangling. As the team grows, that ambient contextual awareness changes.

As we've grown, it's become clear to me (through direct feedback, and my own observation) that the off-the-cuff transparency I've always enjoyed with my thinking and thought process, can actually be damaging. What I would consider a transparent comment about a certain direction I think we should be going in can be interpreted many was, with many unintended consequences. Matt nails it with the "the CEO said" or the "CEO thinks" points he makes. That stuff can be disruptive, confusing, and derailing.

The result is that more preprocessing (natural for some, unnatural for others; somewhere in-between for me I think) and better awareness of one's surroundings is required. That, to me, can feel less transparent, and my initial reaction to that has been that it is bad. It's required to function however, and therefore I wind up in a place where I view it simply as adaptation to environmental changes.

Staying Connected: Company Update Emails

2012-03-03T07:28:00.001-07:00

About a year ago one of Gnip's employees pulled me aside to ask some pointed questions. This person had noticed a few things happen in the office, and let his imagination run wild to the point of believing Gnip was being acquired. In reality, that was no-where on radar.

We talked for awhile about how he'd gotten so far down that mental path. Why he didn't simply ask about it earlier if it was bothering him. What had changed in us organizationally, as a result of our team growth, such that there was such a disconnect between his concern and reality. So on and so on.

What fell out of the conversation is something that I've completely embraced; a bi-monthly (every two weeks) update email to the entire company. I literally start mine with "what's on my mind..." and then a bulleted list of stuff that is on my mind. When I remember to, I also forward it directly onto the board of directors.

My calendar reminds me every couple of weeks to send it. I never spend more than 5 or 10 minutes composing it (usually 2-3). The feedback I receive after each one is incredibly useful, and clearly indicates it's being digested.

The update emails give everyone on the team a view into what's on my mind; with frequency and regularity. They're light, so I don't have to prep for them. They're honest. They're transparent.

Of course face to face 1on1s or all-hands are better, but they're not always possible with people traveling and people out sick. They also lack regular rhythm and frequency.

When I used to manage smaller teams I sometimes did these, but they weren't as useful as they are as the team grows. In smaller teams everyone's simply closer and more connected to what's going on so you don't necessarily need them.

If you're responsible for larger teams and groups of people, I'm now convinced these are imperative (assuming you can't get the frequent/regular face-time which is preferred). If you're the CEO of a growing company... they're required!

And one more thing; they have to be real. They can't be overwhelmed by corporate communications crap.

Gnip is one (leap) year old!

2012-03-01T13:18:00.001-07:00

Yesterday (leap day!) was Gnip's four year anniversary. It's been a wild ride to be sure. It took awhile to find the groove (Bijan Sabet coincidentally just posted on this topic), but patience and persistence paid off.

Here's a small flickr set of various shots over the past four years; I wish it was more comprehensive, but it's all I could scrape together with limited time.

Here's a memorable, roughy chronological, timeline. I should do a product timeline at some point, but this one's more nostalgically motivated. Tissue please!

Meeting Eric Marcoullier while offic'ing out of Foundry Group's joint.
Two weeks later shaking hands at Amante Coffee across the street from Foundry's office. "Let's do this!"
Wandering the streets of San Francisco for a few months pitching prospective employees, customers, partners, and investors.
Sitting in a "desk for hire" office with Eric, mowing through architecture on a whiteboard.
Waking up at 2am at the Moser Hotel to a party that took over the entire floor of the hotel. We had an investor call/pitch at around 8am the next day. That was the last $100/night hotel I stayed at in the City.
Incorporating Gnip, Inc in the offices of Ropes and Grey in SF with Eric.
Our first meeting with Pivotal Labs (who built Gnip 1.0)
Our first hire, who we parted ways with only a few months after he started. I learned a valuable early-hire lesson there; make damn sure your early hires are generalists and that they carry the same energy/passion for the challenge you're solving as you do.
Offic'ing out of Pivotal Labs SF. Designing/building software w/ pivots.
Realization that the cloud was the future.

Me to a traditional hosting provider: "I need 10 instances please."
them: "when"
me: "now"
them: "how about a few weeks?"
me: "please close my account." (we fired up our first Amazon Ec2 instances that evening and had a dozen running within hours).

My introduction to pair programming and TDD. One of the most beautiful moments of my career.
Our second hire.
Our third hire.
Our first "office" (still my favorite office of all time) in an old brick house behind a pharmacy.
Our plucking of a pivot out of Pivotal to be a Gnip employee.
Eric's and my first fight. We were wandering around the adjacent neighborhood yelling at the top of our lungs about him pulling a feature from the next day's release because it wasn't "ready." We lowered our voices as one of our employees was approaching us on his way to his car to leave for the night.
Sitting on the office porch working.
Sitting on the office porch watching people walk by.
Sitting on the office porch drinking.
Our first paying customer.
The morning a woman from the adjacent office stormed into our office screaming at us about how her car was blocked and she had to go pick her kids up.
The proximity of the bathroom to _everything_ else going on in that first office.
Accidentally cutting the trunk-line ethernet cable to the office switch and killing dev for 30 minutes.
Internal battles around who was going to wash the dishes each day (I won an award for being best dish washer).
Watching the team write disk i/o drivers/protocols for Berkley DB. Moments of "we're going too far here" flashing before my eyes.
Realizing the technical challenge in front of Gnip was going to be much bigger than I originally thought. When you're bursting very fat pipes left and right, you know you're doing something challenging. More. More. More.
Realizing the fragility of the Social Publisher ecosystem.
The realization of how immature the overall commercial data marketplace is.
Watching Publishers accept the pain they were suffering, and that they didn't want our medicine.
Aiming our guns/product at the consumers of social data.
Crystalizing the fact that our "white-hat" approach to the market/business was required for success.
Realizing that Publishers need direct, transparent, relationships with the consumers of their data (regardless of how poorly utilized that relationship actually is/was).
Returning from a family vacation to my partner, Eric, having to convey some heartbreaking news to me (which he did like man; truly exemplary moment I learned a lot from). One of the most amazing engineers I've ever worked with, without warning, approached Eric while I was away and explained how it was going to have to be "him or me." One of us would have to go. Very sad, eye opening, strengthening moment.
Realizing that "only hire the best, most senior, industry leading engineers" actually doesn't work. Too many cooks in the kitchen becomes a real problem. Jr/Sr balance across a team is critical for various reasons. Team dynamics & appropriate team growth to name two.
Moving to our 2nd (current) office.
Putting computers on wheelie chairs and rolling them down the alley to ur new office.
Setting up a real dedicated VoIP telephone system.
Getting dedicated bonded T1s for connectivity.
Realizing we needed to "reset" the company because the market wasn't turning out to be where we were expecting, the software we built wasn't going to work in the new world, and we needed to adjust the culture significantly.
"resetting" - letting go nearly half of the company in a product/people shift.
Moving back to RoR and raw Ruby to start the new architecture.
Having the first person in my career hand me a resignation letter.
Getting my hands all the way back on the keyboard full-time. Joyous.
Knowing we were finding the groove (1.5 years later). Refining the mission.
Rebuilding the team.
Rebuilding the software. Gnip 2.0 was born.
Seeing first glimpse of a potential, tangible, competitor.
Eric leaving the company.
Me taking on full responsibility as CEO.
Looking my new partners in the eye (Chris Hogue and Rob Johnson) that night...

me: "we'll get back together tomorrow morning after we've slept on this, and if any one of us thumbs down the situation, we dissolve the company. I can't do this without you guys."
chris/rob: "ok"
12 hours later back on the porch
me: "so?"
chris/rob: "let's do this!"

Rob making sure I got on the phone w/ every single customer we had at the time to re-up our commitment in the wake of Eric's leaving.
Being approached by a firm re: acquisition.
Killing a major deal that was underway because it would've taken us down the wrong product path (even though there was plenty of money coming along for the ride). "Hi, I'm the new guy, and we're going to back out of this deal." Fun.
Landing the "Twitter deal."
Gnip 2.5 was born. Long live Java.
Dealing with unbelievable inbound demand from customers.
Hiring our first non-engineer/engineering-manager; a sales guy.
Hiring a finance person.
Approached a company about buying them.
Acknowledging we have a competitor.
Scaling the team in ways I'd never done before.
Headcount 10.
First time losing a customer.
Approached another company about buying them.
We no longer have a "splat date."
Now able to see what true demand looks like, the way it looks, the way it feels, realizing that the dreamed potential is actually starting to take shape and become real.
Realizing we needed more experience in the room.
Hiring a COO.
Headcount 20.
Having large numbers of customers is a massive undertaking, and having them means your business runs very differently in ensure they have everything they need to be happy.
Realizing we completely destroyed our 2011 revenue goals.
Keeping the product direction focused on what our current, and prospective, customers are demanding from us, while keeping an eye on what we believe they're going to want/need next.
Ensuring we don't chase every bright shiny object that catches our eye.
First line of C goes into production. What's old is new again.
Realizing we need to address bandwidth challenges by changing our hosting environment.
Landing our 2nd major premium publisher.
Landing our 3rd major premium pub.
Landing more premium publishers.
Realizing that after 3.5 years, the commercial social data ecosystem was actually gaining some steam. Real money was exchanging hands and a marketplace and industry were manifesting right before our eyes. All the players in the system (from Publishers, to middle-men, to Consumers) were participating and starting to understand their roles and value-adds. Dollar amounts were coming into view. Behavior patters were becoming clear (and expectant). Real market dynamics were kicking in.
Realizing Gnip is growing out of its 2nd office.
Headcount 35.
Realizing our growth trajectory means we are going to need a bigger office.
Realizing our bandwidth requirements put us in rarified air.

We've built an amazing product that our customers love. We've built amazing software that blows my mind everyday. We've assembled a team of humans that do uniquely amazing things as a group. Every single day. I've built friendships that will be with me forever.

I am happy, and I everyday I can't wait to get into the office to build more value for our current, and prospective customers.

The Commercial Data Ecosystem's Publisher Phases

2012-02-18T15:38:00.003-07:00

For the purposes of this post "Social Networks" translates to "Publishers." My company, Gnip, brings the public, real-time, activities created by users on Social Networks to our customers. From a vocabulary standpoint, we simplify things and refer to these Social Networks as Publishers.

Over the past four years Gnip has seen a lot of Publishers come and go. Not surprisingly, a pattern has emerged around how they evolve, and the degree to which our customers need their data. There are generally three distinct phases a Publisher goes through, and how they do in each phase impacts how they ultimately participate in the broader social data ecosystem.

Participation in the social data ecosystem can yield a full commercial cycle for the Publisher. This cycle being one combining consumer use (expressing buying intent, or ranting about a product) with commercial engagement (ad buying or addressing a problem with your product).

Phase 1: Consumer Engagement
A Publisher must engage consumers. Whether via a homegrown social graph, or leveraging someone elses (e.g. Facebook Connect), in order for a Social Network to become useful, it needs users. From there, those users need to participate in self-expression (from posting a comment, to re-tweeting a tweet) and generate activity (aka "Publish") on the service. There are a variety of ways to compel users to engage in a social service, but the Publisher itself is responsible for the first experience. The vision of the services' founders yields a web-app or mobile interface that allows us to take action, leveraging the expressions laid out by the app itself (e.g. sharing a photo). If users like the expressions, discovery methods, and sense of "connectedness," you've got a relevant Publisher on your hands.

Phase 2: APIs; Outsourcing Engagement
At some point a successful Publisher realizes the potential for outsourcing the expression metaphors that make the service successful & useful, and they construct an API that allows others to RESTfully engage with the service. In some instances the API is read-only. In some instances the API is write-only; sometimes it's both. What is key is that nine times out of ten, the API is meant to drive core service engagement via other user-facing applications. A classic example of this would the zillions of non-Twitter Inc clients that "tweet" on our behalves everyday. One look at the endless number of tweet "sources" that flow through the Firehose and you'll realize this engagement potential; there are tens of thousands of client apps.

The exceptional API is one that has broader social data engagement ecosystem consumption in its DNA. Typical Publishers consider themselves the center of the universe, and that not only will they capture all consumer engagement, they will be the root of all broader ecosystem engagement as well. However, success with consumer engagement does not guarantee commercial engagement; not by a long-shot. This center-of-the-Universe perspective is highly limiting for everyone involved. A great example of this is simply how you see Facebook and Twitter logos in cafes. The retail outlet couldn't care less about which Publisher du jour is hip. All they care about is reach, and they'll promote any social service they think yields reach; they have zero affinity to your social service.

Some services execute phase 1 and 2 simultaneously these days.

Phase 3: Activity Transparency; Commercial Engagement
Allowing other applications & developers to inject activities into the core service is obviously valuable, however it is only part of the picture. Publishers with broad social and commercial impact have achieved this success by addressing commercial needs for complete, raw, activity availability. For example, in order for someone to effectively deploy resources in a disaster relief scenario, they need to make their own determination as to what victims need, where they are located, and general conditions surrounding the event. The Publisher limiting access to the public activities taking place on the service, by definition, yields an incomplete picture to downstream commercial consumers of the content. The result is a fragmented & hobbled experience for commerce engagement.

The most impactful, useful, and valuable Publishers that Gnip customers leverage for their needs (ad buying, campaign running, stock trading, dissaster releif), are those that acknowledge that they are not an island in the ecosystem. They complete the cycle by providing unfettered access to one of their most significant assets; the public real-time firehose of all the activity taking place on their service. In trade, the relevance of the Publisher itself is maximized because commerce can engage with it. Whether the ecosystem has to pay for that access is a separate topic. The availability of it at all is the finer point.

A good example of how impactful this transparency can be is Twitter. Consider how Twitter is used across new, as well as traditional, media. They've completed the commercial data ecosystem cycle with a strong offering in Phase 3.

All three phases are not required for success, but all three are indeed required for success in the broader social data ecosystem.

David & Goliath; Internet Tech Sector & U.S. Government

2012-02-13T06:58:00.001-07:00

By way of the Silicon Flatirons "The Digital Broadband Migration: The Challenges of Internet Law and Governance" conference last night, I somehow found myself at a reception with a few dozen brains much bigger than mine; thank you Dean Phil Weiser and Brad Bernthal. 1/3 were politicians by trade (even if their primary source of income was commercial/private), and 2/3s were software or broadband infrastructure industry CEOs/leaders. For a more specific sample of who was in the room: Colorado Senator Mark Udall, Edward Felton (CTO, FTC), Daniel Weitzner (deputy CTO for Internet policy), Dave Wright (CEO, SolidFire), Founder CableLabs, an executive from Dish Network, an executive from Comcast, Robert Reich (CEO, OpenSpace), Jim Franklin (CEO, SendGrid), Jason Mendelson (Partner at Foundry Group), Brad Feld (Partner at Foundry Group).

In listening to the conversation during the reception, and prior at the conference, a consistent theme emerged; "voice." Senator Udall (paraphrasing): "make sure your internet tech sector's voice is heard. there are important policies in play. your voice was only heard late in the game on SOPA/PIPA." Phil Weiser (paraphrasing): "traditional industry is used to having frameworks such as trade associations to help them voice their perspective to Congress."

The room was filled with incredibly smart people, yet we were not being heard on incredibly important topics. I'm grateful for Senator Udall having invested several hours into the event; he was fully engaged. I'm speaking more generally about Congress at large. SOPA/PIPA were an eye opener for me. How could such potentially impactful, and broken, legislation have made it down the pike in the first place? That's the question I'm stuck pondering. Unfortunately, I don't like my answer.

At least one of the reasons our voice is indeed not being heard is because we're not speaking the same language that the system has grown up speaking. Phil Weiser was on-point eluding to trade associations' communicative impact on Government. The "internet tech sector" (for lack of a better name) does not lobby the same way more traditional industries do. The result is that our voice does not get heard. Sure some of our peers lobby for their specific interests, but a) they look less and less like the entrepreneurial startup ecosystem everyday (Google, Microsoft, Oracle) and don't represent our interests but 50% of the time anymore, and b) they still spend a pittance relative to the amounts other lobby categories are paid in order to craft/pass legislation. It's a horribly cynical outlook I know, but even Senator Udall implied the success of its Congressional impact during the reception.

SOPA/PIPA illustrated that our collective Internet tech sector approach thus far is going to get us in serious trouble. The Government is going to start passing legislation that has dramatic impact on how we conduct business. They've stayed out of our hair on the direct bill passage front thus far, but that's changing. If we don't get our "voice heard," we'll fall to the giant stalwarts that have dominated Congressional influence to-date.

Because we're a distributed bunch by nature (lots of entrepreneurs, lots of software startups), collective communication is hard. It's even harder when we shove our heads in the sand saying "I'm busy. I've got work to do, and it's hard, and it takes my creative energy. I don't have time to voice my concerns to those perpetuating an archaic system that doesn't apply to me." Well, while true at the moment, the system's applicability to all of us in this space is about to get very personal and direct. If something's not done now, we'll fall later.

What Can Be Done?
We can lobby. We've resisted this thus far, but perhaps it is time for small to mid-sized software "internet tech industry" firms to collectively pony up dues to a more centralized lobby effort and/or trade association that represents our interests. Money talks folks. Always has, always will, and thus far we haven't spent a relative dime trying to have our voice heard.

We can act. PIPA/SOPA was exemplary on this front. However, it was exhausting, inefficient, and it doesn't scale. We can't protest after-the-fact every time bad legislation makes its way through the system.

We can change. While I believe lobbying is the practical/tactical solution, it is broken and wrong in and of itself. The United States is a very different place today. The founding frameworks that have steered elections, law, and legislation to-date simply do not work for such a technologically advanced society. The disconnect between Congress and the people creating jobs and industries today is vast. We can, and need to, change that. Brad Feld made a resonating statement last night at the table, "the compromise approach is inherently flawed. stakeholders need to be problem solving, not compromising." That's a foundational statement that I'd like to see a new system built around. At the same time, it feels revolutionary and that feels hard. It's time for change; execution's always the catch.

Modern Software Labor Challenges: The Perfect Storm

2012-01-13T09:31:00.001-07:00

Many moons ago when I graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in "Computer Science Applications" (the University's attempt at hybridizing Computer Science with a School of Arts theme (Political Science for me); think "double major"), two things were obvious: software engineers were making bank, and software was going to be the foundation for the new economy. Sounded good to me.

The Typhoon
It sounded good to a lot of others at the time too. By the year 2000 "newly declared CS majors" peaked at an all-time high. As with any trend, everyone was late to the party; that was also when the bubble popped. As with any trend, everyone left CS degrees in the dirt. By the fall of 2006, the pursuit of CS degrees had literally dropped by half. Unfortunately, we've been wallowing around ever since then. Industry has been trying to figure out how to economically recover. Smart humans (particularly "knowledge workers") have been trying to figure out how/where to apply their brains. Given the tremendous plummet in demand, as you'd expect, secondary level education around building software has not innovated or kept up with industry's demand for talent. Secondary, even primary (though I'd argue pre-University has always lacked), software education still has 1995 as its base from which it attempts to prepare humans for a 2012 industry.

The Hurricane
Something else coincidentally happened along the way. DHTML (e.g. JavaScript, CSS, better HTML) and LAMP'ish (HTTP server + PHP, Python, Ruby, Rails, Perl, blah blah blah) stacks thrust programming logic outside the compiler. Literally everyone with a computer and text editor could now "write code." In many instances this circumvented the need for "higher education." Back to one of my two "obvious" observations in the first paragraph, in the early 2000's you could "make bank" without even going to school.

The Perfect Storm
Now that the software industry is healthy again, it's in a lurch. There is a dearth of labor that understands, and can solve, the "hard" software challenges. The talent wars over the past couple of years are truly frightening. We're fighting over a dwindling resource.

If the macro system was working, the education system would meet this industry demand by churning out the right brain power, at roughly the right volume. Unfortunately that's not even close to happening. While CS degree pursuit is increasing, it's still not where it needs to be in terms of volume, nor in terms of relevance. Today's software construction environment is radically different than the last wave. The broad adoption of Agile, TDD, and XP methodologies have turned everything on its head (not to mention the advancement of the underlying technologies and programming languages themselves). The education system hasn't adapted or embraced these changes.

Years ago the large software firms defined the curriculum. They did so in Waterfall environments with armies of standardized engineers in homogeneous hardware and software stack environments while making massive platform plays themselves. It is a different world today, and we need different education solutions. I'd love nothing more than our existing public education infrastructure to solve these issues. After putting my eggs in that basket for the past four years, I've have to take them out however; it's not working.

I'm looking forward to the changes that industry is going to force on the system. It will be far from perfect for awhile, but initiatives like The Academy For Software Engineering and Code Academy (two name only two out of certainly dozens) are exemplary of industry solving this challenge on its own. A handful of us are cooking up some solutions in Boulder as well. One of the cool things about this challenge is that we're at the beginning of a sea-change. Those things always yield a good time!

It goes without saying that even in tumultuous times amazing people pop out of sub-par conditions everyday. Even poor education conditions can't hold back true talent.

Partnership

2011-12-22T21:40:00.000-07:00

I had a great conversation about partnerships with Chris Moody this evening. Chris and I have been working closely together for six months now at Gnip. As one of our investors put it, "the company is ending the year having completely exceeded any rational expectations." I personally described our year to my wife as having "f***ing killed it!" One of the contributors to our success so far has been effective partnerships within the company (certainly including ours).

Over the past few years the notion of "co-founders" and "partners" has pervaded much of the entrepreneurial/investment landscape. Techstars pushes the notion of "co-founders" hard. Generally a "technical founder" and a "non-technical founder" are considered essential to success. I have strong opinions around artificially binding two people together in a "partnership." Life-long buddies can yield priceless relationships in business (also disaster of course. it takes a special initial friendship to do business together down the road). However, putting two people in a fishbowl and seeing if they'll thrive together is a hard thing to do. Your odds of successfully partnering are much better if...

the way each party generally wants to spend their day is different.

if partnerA wants to wash the dishes, and partnerB wants to wash the floor, that's good.
if partnerA wants to wash the dishes, and partnerB does too, that's bad.

the line separating responsibilities reflects the parties' interests, and is clearly drawn.

if partnerA wants to wash the dishes, and partnerB wants to wash the floor, and partnerA is responsible for the dishes, and partnerB is responsible for the floors; that's good.
if partnerA wants to wash the dishes, and partnerB wants to wash the floor, and partnerA is responsible for the floor, and partnerB is responsible for the dishes, that's bad.

each party has the skills/ability to do great things in their area of interest.

if partnerA wants to wash the dishes, and partnerB wants to wash the floor, and they're both good at what they want to do, that's good.
if partnerA wants to wash the dishes, and partnerB wants to wash the floor, and one, or both, of them is not good at doing what they want to do, that's bad.

All of this assumes fundamentals like the belief that "two heads are indeed better than one" for a given challenge, honesty, trust, rapport, and overall common interest in the goals.

If you're in a partnership, or considering one, check against the bullets above to make sure the partnership is setup for success.

iTunes vs. Amazon Fire

2011-11-19T21:12:00.001-07:00

I've been intrigued by Amazon's Silk browser and associated Fire product. In the process of talking about it on Twitter and Facebook, one of the software industry's brighter individuals (and former Netscape/Mozilla colleague of mine), Chris Saari, has been asking me good, hard, questions about my thoughts/experiences/impressions/criticisms. He's working on Amazon's A2Z. He got me thinking, and this post is a result of that. He asked "what are the specific features in iTunes that you use?" I took the liberty of translating that into "why do I feel I can't leave iTunes?"

In short, the answer is that iTunes pervades my media consumption life; across devices.

With the advent of iCloud/spotify/rdio/pandora/etc things are changing of course.

I have several thousand dollars invested in iTunes library content (music, tv shows, movies), so part of it is wanting to NOT lose that investment. I'd say that's probably only a small part of it though.

A lot of it is indeed proprietary lock-in stuff. I actually do use voice control/siri to play music on a regular basis... "play artist wombats" on my iphone for example.

I use airplay regularly. I think that's iTunes only.

Toolchain stuff/workflow stuff also has me burned in. I use iMovie each year to build a family video. it "seamlessly" integrates with iphoto/itunes for content creation, and then exports to itunes for sync'ing to appletv and my ios devices. All those nice little integration points are a big deal and add up.

It's a pretty heavy toolchain issue for me. whenever I deviate, life is good for a few days/weeks, then suddenly I go to do something and I can't (or it will take a few more clicks and a new understanding of someone else's UI metaphor set, and I balk and just revert back to itunes' way).

My car stereo knows how to drive itunes on an ios device. I've learned all my car's shortcuts to control basic iTunes manipulation.

Another big one these days for me is offline support. I travel a lot and also spend a fair amount of time in the mountains. In those two cases, I don't have access to network connections and therefore, "streaming" solutions fall down. In a lot of ways I just view itunes as a local-disk sync'ing tool.

There's a big exception; Sonos. 90% of the music I listen to on my home Sonos system is streaming; pandora, rdio, spotify (in that order). pandora when I want to "listen to the radio," rdio when I want to listen to what my cool friends are listening to, and spotify when, in that one in a million random moment when I happen to recall the artist/song I want to be listening to.

My kids know how to drive iTunes (movies on an airplane is a simple scenario that we run into a lot), and that matters a lot. There is nothing more frustrating that trying to give a kid what what they want in a frustrating moment (the reality of traveling w/ children) and either you or they are fumbling with a new UI.

The downsides to iTunes are obviously real. The lockin can be painful, and I often feel like I can't leverage new cool stuff. It doesn't support for 1080i/p HD movies anymore. Movie title availability (and sometimes music) sucks (always). It doesn't support "channels" like Pandora. It doesn't support "heavy rotation" stuff like rdio.

It's hard for me to imagine a world in which I move off of iTunes.

Injury Update

2011-10-31T22:33:00.002-06:00

A year ago I sustained the most significant injury of my life. It has been a truly unbelievable experience. Here's an update on where I am, and how I got here. There will be some detail in here that may seem odd to 99.99999% of you, however the details are breadcrumbs for others struggling with some of these symptoms, and they can matter a lot.

MRI results while trying (unsuccessfully) to identify a stroke

Month 1 through 3: What's wrong with me?
I spent the first few months trying to understand what happened. I dragged in everyone under the sun to help. Neurologists, Eastern Medicine "experts" (nutritional + acupuncturists + spiritual types), Physical Therapists, mental therapists, Specialist-this, and Specialist-that, friends, family. After endless appointments and tests, no-one had a clue, and no therapies were having a positive effect. There were a couple of theories (BPPV, some other vestibular disorder, or brain dammage), but no-one could say with any certainty. By the end of the third month, I was very discouraged. I was considering the prospect that things might not ever change. I might have impeded orientation for the rest of my life. I even backed off of sex while I was trying to sort things out; sex made things worse.

Month 4 through 6: No-one can help me.
By month four, it was clear no-one would be able to diagnose or help my situation. I'd scraped up against online forums and blogs that were pretty scary. There were a handful of people out there who's description of what they were feeling matched mine; not a single one of them could diagnose it, or have it diagnosed. There were some pretty hard stories to read (shocker; gotta love the network). By the end of month six, I'd started to resolve that this could go on forever, and that it was odd that the most common characterization of what I might have, BPPV, could go on for up to "two years." I spent a long time thinking about the "two year" stat that was floating around. How could you actually measure a medical condition going away after such a long duration. I resolved that people suffering from BPPV either killed themselves after two years of pain and suffering, or that they stopped complaining about it and just went on living in the misery indefinitely; falling off of any survey/doctor radar after about two years. Toward the end of month six, the sex cut-back was taking it's toll. I decided to take the condition regression over abstinence.

April
One of the dichotomy's in April's and my relationship is that she is as empathetic as they come, whereas I'm of a different, much more selfish, cloth. We've traditionally been polar opposites in this regard. Her unwavering belief that "things would get better" defied all logic. There was no evidence that things would get better. On the contrary there was a fair amount of evidence to suggest things in fact would not get better. She believed it though, and spent countless hours booking appointments for me, filtering doctors and experts to remove the wheat from the chaff, and most importantly talking me back from the edge. She's magical at this. It is who she is, and one of my favorite things about her.

That said, things were feeling dire. I didn't know how long I could last.

By now I'd bucketed my condition into two buckets. I either was suffering from BPPV, or brain dammage (that wouldn't show up on a scan (MRI, or CAT)) in the occipital region of my brain. I sussed out the BPPV angle, I went six months without caffeine or alcohol. I like to blame a friend of mine for turning me straight after a rough drinking binge at his house one night, but the reality is that I was cutting out chemicals that impacted the viscosity of the unique fluid that fills our inner ears. If the issue was BPPV, you can (not always, but sometimes) actually hack the fluid density/viscosity (which impacts how the calcium crystals move in the fluid) of your inner ear by controlling diet. After six months of cutting out these two substances, and no discernable difference in my condition, I jumped back into coffee and socially drinking (wine, beer, scotch).

If the issue was brain dammage, the scarier of the two in some ways, I'd bank on my brain re-wiring itself to work around the bustage in due time.

London: Inspiration in the oddest places
On a business trip to London I randomly found myself with a business acquaintance and her significant other... in a bar. This guy was five years my senior and about six months earlier had suffered a very severe mountain biking (downhill) accident in Malibu, CA. Clear brain damage, a week in a coma, smashed chest/ribs, punctured lung; the works. This guy was beaming! He'd fought through this mess tooth and nail. We empathized with each other for awhile. War stories. What therapies helped. Which didn't. Then he said something that has stuck with me. Him: "don't you hate it when someone says 'we're getting old' in the context of our injuries!?!" Me: "I sure do." Him: "Bullshit I'm getting old. This is something else, and I'm going to own it, and then I will destroy it." I can't tell you how many times I'd thought to myself "I'm just getting old." He was right. Screw getting old (as true as it was).

Months 7-9: Bottom of the Barrel.
After a couple of months of doing reasonably well, I took a family vacation that involved a plane, followed by a ferry, and ultimately an old house (built mid 1800's) with crooked walls, floors, stairs, etc. I'd been flying every couple of weeks throughout this whole ordeal for work, so I'd resolved flying wasn't an issue. This was my first boat though. When I got off (I was fine while actually on the water) I was a little affected, but not more than a previous large-boat-ride in the Chicago river with some friends. However, after 24 hours in the old-house, I was a mess. It felt like complete regression. This was a tremendous blow given that things were going ok for awhile. I chalked it up to the lacking flat surfaces or right-angles to ground myself in, inside the house. It really threw me.

Upon returning to home, I was in a bad place. A month or two went by with no "good days." Work and family were keeping me distracted so I was getting by. Then, one day...

Boulder Creek: Epiphany
The kids and I regularly bike up into the mountains along the creek to enjoy life. On this particular trip I decided to push past the disorientation and "fuck it." I was going to move and act like it didn't exist. While playing in the water with my daughter I turned my head quickly to catch sight of my son further downstream. I moved so fast that my eyes didn't have a chance to focus and track along the way. When my head stopped, I wasn't dizzy! That move previously would've resulted in some decent disorientation. What happened?!? It clicked. Right then and there it clicked! For 8 months I'd been hyper-controlling my vision and eyes. Every waking moment of every day I'd been focusing as intently as you would if you were trying to read small letters from a distance. I'd been inflicting unbelievable strain on my eyes, the associated muscles, and associated brain matter in order to control the disorientation. Somewhere along the way I'd been actually causing much of my own agony, in an attempt to control whatever was underlying. At that moment I resolved to do the inverse with my vision. I'd actively not bother focusing on things for a couple of days to see if that helped. Turns out it worked like magic! I'd found at least one culprit in what was dragging this mayhem on. Ureka!

Months 10-12:
The past few months have been great. Things are nearly back to normal. There are acute instances in which symptoms appear, but I've learned to live with them or ignore them (they're fleeting at best). I still don't know what's wrong; I'm just as lost as to whether it's some sort of BPPV (or some other vestibular disorder) or actual brain dammage. Multiple MRIs show no evidence of stroke either. I do know after 12 months however, that whatever it is, it hasn't stopped me from being who I am. I've been able to do everything on "my list" of things (tests really) in the past 12 months; _everything_. Well, there's one exception. I haven't been on a trampoline since I realized bouncing on one could aggravate things. If the result of this injury in the end is that I can't jump on trampolines, I'll be really bummed, but I can live with that one for sure.

self plot of perceived severity on scale of 1 (red); bad, 2 (orange); good, 3 (green); great

My To Do List (to validate that the orientation related things were still ok to do)
Swim: check (various pools, lakes and oceans)
Swing Olympic length pool underwater while holding breath: check (multiple times)
Run: check (ran on all sorts of surfaces for many miles. ran the Bolder Boulder)
Bike: check (I've biked a ton, both easy and hard rides)
Wrestle: check (plenty with the kids)
Handle jet-lag: check (several trips to East Coast, and a couple of trips to Europe)
Spiral Staircases while jet-lagged: check (catacombs in Paris)
Fly on airplanes: check (tons of flights)
Drive: check (driven plenty)
Jump off high objects: check (rocks, walls)
Induce Vertigo: check (stood on very narrow rock formations greater than 40' off the ground with sheer drops on either side). I still need to do glass floor at Seattle Space Needle.
Use computers and small devices/screens: check (everyday)
Walk through house in the dark: check
Sit down with eyes closed: check
Ride bike in a straight line indefinitely while head looking off to side (peripheral vision thing): check. this one took awhile, but I'm baaaaaack!
Drive car in straight line indefinitely while head looking off to side (peripheral vision thing): check.
Play Video games: check
Have intense sex: check
Massage: check
Cross Country Ski: check
Downhill Ski: check
Skateboard: check
Balance across logs: check
Everything else that I can't remember at the moment: check

My Extended List: Stuff I've done in my life, but I'm not going to bother repeating.
Trampolining
Fist fight

Finally: Today
Things are not 100% better, but they're 99% better. I've had a few consecutive months of feeling really solid, and I've noticed a true shift in that time period. I can confidently say I'm in a good place now. Even if I regress at some point in the future, I know I can have multiple months of goodness after several months of badness, so if I lapse back into it, I'll have light at the end of my tunnel.

I can empathize with others now to a degree I've never been able to. This is really powerful and I'm really happy about it.

The human mind/spirit prevails. A friend of mine who'd suffered a life-threatening accident on snow a couple of years ago told me "the mind/body will heal itself. calm down." I doubted him gravely, but he was right. The mind/body will find a way.

If you think you're suffering from BPPV (or some sort of vestibular disorder onset), and believe that is what I have/had, then I can tell you things are better now, and none of the reset maneuvers worked; none of them. There was a definite progression from bad to good; granted it took a year to get here. Hang in there.

TechStars Cloud (Skynet)

2011-10-18T06:06:00.000-06:00

Building server-side applications/systems has changed forever thanks to virtualized infrastructure. I'll never forget asking a colleague at Netscape when I'd just started my professional career "why are we thinking about hardware at all?!? Shouldn't software just abstract all of that?" He chuckled at my naiveté. Lo-and-behold ten years later I was able to think about hardware like I did software; disposable resources that I used a command prompt to setup and tear down, script, load, configure, and tightly integrate my software with.

Beyond exciting.

Over the past four years at Gnip, we've used nothing but virtualized hardware for a highly-scalable piece of infrastructure sustaining countless, sustained, high-bandwidth connections to customers all over the planet. The only hardware we own are the laptops we use to write the code. Wow... every time I say that I get chills down my spine; so cool.

I've been a TechStars Boulder mentor for a few years now, and I'm stoked that TechStars spun-up a focused "Cloud" program. I'm excited to be engaged in a more infrastructure focused thread of TechStars (something I've criticized the program for in the past). TechStars is an amazing thing, but I'd always wanted a more explicit systems/infrastructure twist (my bag, frankly, because I think these kinds of plays are more impactful).

If you've considered using TechStars in the past, but thought it might be too consumer focused for your idea, you should consider TechStars Cloud as a mechanism to get your idea squarely into the execution phase. Even if you haven't considered TS in the past, and you're looking for a place to hone your idea into something with traction (or at least die trying), check it out.

You can apply for admission here.

I hope to meet you soon, and to have an opportunity to help you build something cool using our new fangled "infinite resource" that is now Skynet (errr... the Cloud).

Lijit Acquisition

2011-10-04T20:44:00.003-06:00

Wow. What an illustration of how sticking with a company/team through thick and thin can yield big dividends. With a little time, amazing things can happen. I'm overjoyed with what the Lijit team pulled off. After four years (at least) of various strategies, business models, and approaches, they made it rain. I'm just blown away.

It can take years for something to come to fruition. If at first you don't succeed, try try again. We've learned this lesson over at Gnip (my co.) as well. It took a couple of years, but the pistons caught and things are going great. I can only hope for an exit on the order, or greater, than what Lijit just pulled off. Patience.
If you're an employee at a startup, buy every share of stock you have access to, as soon as they become available, no matter how bad things look/feel. If you quit, or are let go, buy everything you have access to. You never know what can happen downstream. To those who left Lijit and didn't acquire your stock, I'm sorry, but you broke the golden rule. You simply can't beat the odds and economies of scale that employee private stock option exercises offer. Sure odds are stacked heavily against a startup, but the potential upside dwarfs anything you can do in open public markets.
Todd & Manny stuck with co-located hardware for their system. I always thought this was odd (still do). Gnip is 100% in the cloud. Lijit does go to show buying/leasing/managing your own iron isn't dead (yet).
Seth Levine at Foundry Group is going on to be a board member of the acquiring/combined company. He's obviously becoming a powerhouse in the adtech space at large. Nice having him in our backyard (even though he trounced me on a gorgeous fall ride the other day).
This was a huge win for the Boulder, CO software community. Undoubtedly big economics involved here, in Boulder.
Hardcore systems engineering == intense value and amazing product. No web-app here folks, just nose-to-the-grindstone engineering (Manny... you and your team are "the [wo]men").
AdTech remains a massive marketplace and economic driver on the internet (whether you like it or not). The deal sizes that continue to happen 15 years after ad networks really kicked in, on 15 yr old frameworks and models, tell me that AdTech is evermore poised to evolve to take into account, or even be overrun by, real-time behavioral frameworks and models that social content enables (go Gnip!) in the AdTech arena. 15 year old models built on cookies and clicks still driving the economy... you've got to be kidding me. Time for change.

I'm proud of the entire Lijit team.

Sate

2011-09-07T21:41:00.002-06:00

I was talking with a friend awhile ago about how I behave under certain circumstances. He was trying to read me and I clarified things by telling him that when I'm notably happy, things are likely very stressful and heading in the wrong direction. When I'm cranky, stressed and a mess, things are likely going unbelievably well. Pretty twisted, I know. To illustrate this another way, when I'm stressed I don't eat and I lose weight. When I'm happy... I'm fat and happy.

I've been lucky enough to have achieved several major personal goals over the past year. Furthermore, I've had some significant (good & bad) personal events hit me over the same timespan. Simply put, a lot has changed for me over the past year, so I've been able to reflect on the personal behavioral hypothesis I posited awhile ago with my friend.

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, I'm realizing there's some void I'm trying to fill. I can't measure its volume, so I can't predict what will fill it. The rate at which I can fill it changes frequently, which therefore complicates the attempts to fill it. This leads to a constant lack of satisfaction. I'm sure this is starting to read like a resume describing how "my biggest weakness is that I work too hard," but this goes way beyond work. It permeates my being.

As my wife can attest, living in the "now" is very hard for me; I'm always somewhere in the future (the past is dead to me the moment the time passes). We walked in the door as a family the other day after a long exhausting, though fun, day, and before I realized it, she was frustrated and blurted out "we haven't been in the house 30 seconds and you're already doing 10 new things." When I wake up in the morning there is no "warm up" period that I hear people talk about, I am just "on."

I used to think this would change with certain milestones being met. Well, I'm "older" now, and while that's certainly had it's impact, it hasn't calmed me down. It hasn't slowed me down. It hasn't shown me any light to make me content.

I don't want to be content. Ever! My highs will be very high, but the trade is that my lows can be very low. Meandering through life with a constant level smile feels boring. Someone at an Ignite Boulder event last year made a remark that stuck with me. Something like "if you want to be content, go take a warm bath!" I do take baths from time to time (sorry Cosmo Kramer), but they're recharge moments, not relaxing experiences.

Every few years I'll have one of these completely blissful moments. They last only a few minutes at the most, but they're truly pure elation. Nothing is wrong in the world, and life is perfect. I haven't had one of those in awhile, but I'm looking forward to the next one. They're so cool.

More please.

Minimally Viable Products & Native vs. Web Apps

2011-08-11T19:00:00.002-06:00

This is unfortunately two blog posts poorly mashed into one. I couldn't reign in my stream of consciousness into something more coherent. I usually don't publish under that circumstance, but I want to get these thoughts out so I can creatively move forward with the thoughts.

I've been on the MVP bandwagon for awhile, but I've realized something of late. Either I need to move up a level on the consumer ladder, out of the low-level, early adopter, stage I've been in forever, or we need to raise the Minimally Viable Product bar (in the consumer app category at a minimum).

Something has shifted over the past few years while standing up Minimally Viable web apps has been the best way to get tight, fast, feedback loops to close with your potential users. That something is that native apps have swung around and crushed web-apps, at least on mobile devices, and end-user expectations around native apps are vastly different (always have, always will be) than web-apps. I had a great meet w/ a new friend in South Park Monday morning who said it well... "Look at Google Spreadsheets... if that's what a small army of engineers at Google can produce using client-side web technologies... we have a big problem." Google realizes this too and is investing in Native Client API; here are my thoughts on that little project.

I'm sick of using products that use Minimally Viable as an excuse. I don't have minimal needs. I have vast and maximus needs.

To get some of those needs out there...

Cross OS/device Synchronization
More of my network use centers around content consumption (probably always has). Twitter, Video, Facebook, Books, IM sessions, email, RSS readers, etc. I consume across probably a half-dozen devices on any given week. Two iPads, an iPhone, Apple TV, my OSX laptop, my home iMac, a friend's laptop at a cafe b/c I forgot mine, a kiosk at an airport, etc. As I chug through all the content I consume (a 30 minute video, a book, the 200 RSS posts I want to skim/read over the course of a day, my Tweet stream... etc), I do so across all these devices that are like little state islands. My reading state is utterly lost across all of these devices and content sources. Scrollbar/word position, partial form fillout, "read-items," "seen-items," etc. I spend way too much time finding the logical pointer into my content when I move to a new device. webmail/IMAP are the only things that have gotten this right over the years.

Kudos to RockMelt (I thought I'd _never_ say that) for getting this sync thing at least partially right across devices/apps. Unfortunately they do that through Facebook API goop, but it's not that big a deal considering as a consumer I get most of the functionality I want.

I've actually started using RockMelt as my primary Twitter client because of this position sync'ing functionality, and it's not even as good as it can be. The high bar I want has gradations as well.

Category/Abstraction Metaphors
Some new photo categorizing service fell out of Y-Combinator the other day (at least onto my radar). The promise is great, but upon digging in I would need to rethink/relearn my photo grouping methodology in order to use it. Yea, right. Conform to _my_, and every other random user's broken way of doing things, way... don't try and tell me your way is better. Only Steve Jobs & Avie have the permission level necessary to do that.

A lot of good software has been written over the past several years, and it has baked its way into millions of users functionality expectations. Embrace that.

Login
Don't you dare try to get me to register a username/password. That's a dead model. Use Twitter for that on the web and Twitter/iOS auth once iOS5 is released. If you can't wait for iOS5 to be released use Facebook Connect for now.

Conclusion
Of course app builders need feedback fast and early, and that's the conundrum. End users want products that meet their needs immediately. There is a threshold that, once reached, demands product release in order to get feedback loops going quickly. Getting the feature/funx combo right before that moment is magic. What I'm getting at is that MVPs need to redefine what "minimal" means across some new functionality categories that consumers (I) have come to expect as truly minimal.

Web Services are starting to feel like a bag of APIs upon which native apps should be built. Reminds me of Marc Andreessen's famous quote about Windows: 'Windows will be reduced down to being a poorly debugged bag of device drivers.' Of course he was referring to what the web would do (and has now done) to Microsoft's OS, and let's not carry the "poorly debugged" bit forward, but it seems like the gap is widening again between native apps and web-apps. Native OS client apps leveraging web services with a native "driver" access to fundamentally networked functionality (sync'ing, login) feels like a good future.

Twitter, Apple & The Most Profound Namespace Network Effect Since The Dawn Of Man

2011-07-12T06:46:00.000-06:00

I've blogged about my feelings regarding the utterly dismal state of authentication on the network, and client-side, today. It's a pain we've all, sadly, just accept. It's also a pain that will soon, partially, go away on iOS devices, and could ultimately go away across the network at large. How you ask? Read on.

iOS Single Sign-On
Everyone's talking about the power of Twitter and Apple's native single sign-on model in iOS 5. While this is a phenomenal coup for both Twitter and Apple, it's only the tip of the iceberg. Having a widespread, networked, account namespace (Twitter) baked in at the operating system level is one of the few things that can truly revolutionize the network again. The splintered efforts on Android devices to accomplish this are well... splintered and therefore the network effect is hobbled; oh the power of owning the software, and the hardware. There is only one condition that has to be met, and it's a big one; though logical.

JavaScript navigator Object
I usually don't talk about client-side JavaScript object model modifications because they're mundane, typically small tweaks to existing functionality, and frankly just very rare. One of the more interesting, and only, ones in recent memory was navigator.geolocation which allows a web-page to consult the client/browser for geo-coding information in order to tailor the user's experience to their "current location." Extremely powerful.

Enter Twitter single sign-on, native JS user objects (e.g. navigator.user), and iOS Safari. I'd be surprised if iOS 5's Safari ships with this, but I believe it ultimately will deliver some incarnation of it. Imagine writing JavaScript that can determine whether or not the viewer is already logged into the client, and if so, access their username. Client-to-web single sign-on achieved! Never again will a web-app have to ask me for a username and password, just like iOS apps that leverage Twitter's namespace for single sign-on won't.

Precedent
While very large social networks have had client-side software installed for years (AOL Instant Messenger for example), and some experimentation around this model has occurred, this is the first time the mobile use case, a widely used social network, and a widespread browser have come together with single sign-on precedent being set across iOS apps natively. The next step is to bridge this into web-apps, and I believe Apple will make this leap with Safari, and that Twitter will gleefully be the namespace upon which it takes place.

Google has hinted at Chrome OS/Chrome Browser single sign-on native integration as evidenced by a checkin Lee Mathews noticed in Chrominium awhile ago. I wonder if iOS5 will push Android Chrome hard in this direction.

New World Order
Even without navigator.user, the native single-sign support between Twitter and Apple in iOS 5 is going to change usability forever more. I can't wait for it to trickle into the network and web-apps. We've needed this for 15 years and it's going to be awesome to watch this evolve over the next several.

Social Graph Overlap After A Week With Google+

2011-07-09T07:27:00.000-06:00

After one week of Google+ being in the mix, here's my reaction to where my "friends" are. This doesn't attempt to say where engagement is. 99% of my "engagement" with "friends" on Facebook is with a tiny set of FB friends. It does say that nearly everyone I'm related to via Circles in Google+, is a Twitter follower or vise versa.

Hiring & Poaching

2011-06-26T17:48:00.000-06:00

We've been doing a lot of hiring at Gnip lately. While I've hired a lot over the years, I've never hired across this broad a role/responsibility spectrum before, nor in such a small geography as Boulder. I pulled this flow chart together as a model for how my thinking has evolved over the years, with some recent, influential, lessons tied in. I hope you find it useful.

Taking Things Head On

2011-05-21T17:25:00.000-06:00

I had two major challenges hit me without notice this past week. One personal, and one business-personal. After working through the immediate associated drama and challenges, and letting the first wave of aftershocks pass through, folks involved with both independent situations made comments to me like "I'm glad you took this head on."

Things were so fresh at the time, and in the throws of the work week proper, that it wasn't until my run today that I had a chance to reflect on the events, and those comments.

I hadn't done anything differently in these heightened scenarios that I haven't done my entire adult life, but I realized that I do tend to take serious situations "head on."

Why is doing so important?
If someone in your world, personal or business, raises a serious issue, and you *don't* engage with it head on, you're sending one of three signals to them. You're saying "this issue actually isn't important to me," that "I'm hiding something," or "I'm not adult enough to face the fire." I'd argue, generally you don't want another party perceiving *any* of those signals.

If the issue isn't that big a deal to you, then it is what it is, and you shouldn't bother taking it head on. The other person might feel slighted, but that may be exactly what you want to convey in the given situation. If you are hiding something, then you have bigger problems on your hands in that relationship and I'd recommend taking the situation head on anyway as to not compound your woes (which is what will undoubtedly happen). With respect to whether or not you are mature enough to face fire, you might not be.

If the issue is a big deal to you, taking it head on lets the real you come out in the process of resolving it, and everyone involved gets to see that, and benefit from it. Pre-processing your position while someone else is in a heightened head-space, prolongs their intensity and the overall situation. Taking too much time to calculate how you feel can often take you down winding roads without all the data, and when you finally emerge at the end, face to face with the situation, you'll likely find that there were critical components of the situation that would have had you turn right instead of left, and thus, you've wasted a bunch of time and mental energy.

I think most of this was taught in Kindergarten, but I'm amazed at how often I see folks chew things without these notions in mind. It takes all kinds I suppose.

If you're avoiding something hard, consider a radical change of course and take it head on.

Sleeping Sweet Spot

2011-05-04T17:19:00.000-06:00

I fall in/out of good/bad sleep periods every several months or so. I'm in a total sweet spot right now (probably a function of my life being so busy since taking on the CEO role at Gnip), and have been for awhile. It feels great! I'm out cold when I hit the mattress, and I'm generally out like a light until the sun starts to peek over the horizon each day. I was poking around my fitbit's sleep data and this chart popped up. Data around my sleep patterns; love it!

Running Straight Into The Abyss

2011-04-23T07:00:00.001-06:00

Time flies. While telecommuting for AOL from Boulder back in 2006 as a Technical Advisor, I realized something had to change. But for a four year stint in Silicon Valley, returning to Boulder in 1999, I'd spent my life in Boulder, yet I'd never really made my business address here. Boulder didn't have enough software brain power up until 2006 (apologies to all those who were crushing it in Boulder with software prior to 2006; you're obviously out there). I had to go elsewhere to do what I wanted to do. Whether it was living in California, or living in Boulder, but working in Mountain View and Dulles, didn't really matter. Airplanes and technology would fill in the gaps.

It was early in 2006 that I realized that I had inadvertently retired. I'd muscled through the ranks of a big company for years, reached peak on the technical career ladder there, was making a truly appallingly large annual salary/bonus, and was effectively on an extended vacation from doing anything really hard with my brain. On a beautiful morning walk to my quaint private office on Pearl St I realized it had to stop. We'd just had our first child and I didn't want him being raised in an environment that showed him being lazy was ok. You can't explain to a child how the work you did long ago was paying off now; they can't piece that together at an early age. This revelation coupled with my passion for my hometown of Boulder, provided impetus for doing something about it.

After talking things through with my wife, we leaped together. It wasn't a solo decision of course. Our livelihood at the time (a crucial time mind you with a baby) was being put into play. I was guaranteed to take a massive AGI hit. I'd be jumping into totally uncharted territory in a geography that had never proven it could thrive in software. Having never worked in Boulder, despite living here nearly my entire life, I had effectively zero network to tap into. This was going to be a total reset. We looked each other in the eyes and said "let's live. let's jump." We did, and five years later, we're both incredibly grateful for having done so.

Step 1: leverage the beast
I sold AOL on building a development team in Boulder. We were going to be their "Web 2.0" group that would tap into all the data web services that were coming online, and build cool products on top of it all. Separate from the mother ship, we could innovate at a better pace, and do great things quickly. The office opened in 2006, but we had to nuke it after six months due to overall shrinkage at AOL. While I still had support for the office, it became clear I was going to have to be on a plane at least once a month out East justifying our existence; no thanks. Zap!

Step 2: think global, act local
Now what? Time to hit the pavement. What exactly was going on in Boulder? Who was innovating? Who were the entrepreneurs? What were the ideas? Who was executing? Where was the capital? Who was the capital? A combination of New Yorkers and Boulderites grounded me at a startup called me.dium. It was a shot at doing everything I'd hoped could be done in Boulder, but it was just too early in our ecosystem. We couldn't get all the pistons to fire at the right intervals. It was a great lesson for the community, and we all grew from it.

Step 3: try again
By 2008 much of the infrastructure was in place. Capital was more of a known quantity. Execution paths had been experienced first hand; the dos and the don'ts were clearing up. Between me.dium and the next thing, I was EIR'ing out of Foundry Group's (a venture capital firm; and current lead investor in Gnip, Inc; my company) offices in Boulder. That intermission brought Eric Marcoullier and myself together, and we ultimately, and quickly, founded Gnip. We split the company's home-base between Boulder (software dev) and San Francisco (everything else). This was my first crack at building the engineering team I knew could be built in Boulder, actually in Boulder. Too much talent, and too much ego, caused us to morph the team in a big, unfortunate, way. Boy had I'd screwed that up. Lesson learned. Next.

Step 4: try again
About a year ago I took on the CEO role at Gnip. Things are going really well at the moment. It's been a year of rebuilding, relearning, refocusing, and executing. A year of very hard work by a hard working team, and it's paying off. A year of applying learned lessons.

When I think back to my wife and I looking at each other and saying "let's live. let's jump," I realize we actually landed on our feet; against all odds.

The past five years have been unreal. How could we have made it through the worst macro economic conditions of our generation, while jumping from a lucrative/secure career into the maelstrom of startups, venture capital, and taking on parenting simultaneously?

Hard work, exercise and luck. I know my need to exercise a lot drives my wife crazy at times, and I suspect some at the office get annoyed too. If I don't keep blood and oxygen flowing well in my body, I'm a mess. I need it to relieve stress and to be productive. If you don't exercise a lot, you should consider it.

The story I can tell my children now, and when they're older, has made this whole escapade worth it even if it crumbles tomorrow.

Greplin: I so want this to work

2011-04-19T10:03:00.000-06:00

This is a quick post to the Greplin crew. If you follow this recipe you will win and win big. This is a huge problem plaguing all of us. Go forth and conquer.

While I don't necessarily like it, the fact is that search is the navigation paradigm of our generation (and probably for several more to come). Blekko is doing some cool stuff for web searching in so far as blending verticalized, curated, search operators into the mix (though operators aren't great for ease of adoption... they're a further necessary evil to get us through this phase). While Blekko takes on the mess that is web search, a few companies have taken a stab at _search_ over the past year or so. The wasteland of companies that have tried broader search approaches over the years is vast, but the past few years have yielded some companies like Greplin. I'll admit I tend to ignore the space a bit because no-one ever comes very close to getting it right, but yesterday Greplin came across my tweet stream from a respected friend, so I dove in head first.

What you have got right so far:

oAuth/oAuth equiv support. I need to be under the illusion of control, and oAuth models give me that warm and fuzzy feeling. Thank you for using technology as it was intended, rather than chumping out with lame credential storage weakness.
Long list of services. I hesitate to mention this one, because the list I actually want is 100x bigger than the one you offer, but, nice job on coming out of the gate with a decent list. Other services I've tried give me a couple of options, and thus, the primary use case isn't satisfied. The goal is _search_ (across it all), not search across a couple of things.
UI. Don't waste my time with a bunch of useless UI. Google got it right with the search box, and you're mirroring that well. Keep it up.
Upgrade model. What you're building will take untold sums of CPU cycles and disk bytes. Charge me for it. Don't do some stupid thing where you think you can support this without billing me real money. You'll die. Charge me for specialized services, and resources. Feels like you're on the right path here.
Native service URL resolution. Rather than building a copy of all the content and pointing me to that, when I click a search result, you take me to the native service. Beautiful. Don't lose track of this. There may be cases in which you don't have a choice but to point me to a local copy, but fight those hard.

What you need to do:

Add all the other services all the users want. My personal short list: pogoplug, my local disks, my mounted disks, backpackit.com (notes), my curated RSS feeds.
Build out operator support. Like everyone else, I have a lot of crap, and searching for "Boulder" across it yields too much data. I need to be able to apply the set of operators you'd expect in order to narrow things. "Boulder last week", "email: boulder", "work-email: boulder", "events: boulder from last month", "documents: boulder", "photos: > 5 stars from last year" "photos: Joe yesterday" "email: has:attachment utility bill" "home-computer: file-size > 1mb soccer flyer". I need the ability to go wide, and go very narrow in order to pull the needle out of the haystack. Giving me the Google equivalent of "first 1-10 out of 1,234,113,554,665,334 results" obviously doesn't help me.
Operator documentation. If you support any operators at all today, I can't find them easily. Search operator usage is complex, and I need to read about how to drive yours.
Native search box integration support. Apple'e working hard to get users to use Spotlight search on iOS and OSX operating systems. This is the right thing to do, and you need to follow suit, build the plugins accordingly, and do low-level native OS search box integration (complete with your syntax/operator support). You may think you have a better way to get users to change their navigation behavior, but you don't. Let the OS vendors fight that battle... ride their coattails. If you haven't dug into the API docs around Spotlight search... dig in... it's impressive stuff.

Looking forward to the progress.

City of Boulder, DBI & Tech Firms

2011-03-18T21:58:00.000-06:00

Trada hosted a meetup today that included downtown Boulder tech firms, and representatives from Downtown Boulder, Inc, and the City of Boulder's Economic Vitality initiative. Thanks for hosting Niel!

A couple of months ago downtown Boulder tech firms made themselves heard after it became clear they were going unnoticed by various groups that work to ensure Boulder is a great place to be. In short, our perspective and interests didn't have a seat at some relevant tables. What's cool, is that we rallied, and we're now at the table. It's just the beginning, so who knows whether we'll ultimately have any impact, but we've gotten to step one which is where you have to start. The cynic in me can't get past a point that Joe Pezzillo made during the meetup: "Downtown Boulder's tax revenues come from retail... not commercial." That said, it's Boulder's commercial base that dumps a ton of money into the system, and we need to be vocal.

Topics that came up while I was there...

Car parking for commuters is a mess.

Monthly passes are expensive.
Parking garages aren't filling up (supply not being consumed though there's heavy demand suggests a pricing problem).

Bike parking for commuters is a mess (this is my personal peeve)

City spends a ton of time/money trying to fix car parking, yet tech firms wind up spending commercial real-estate office space square footage on parking for bike commuter's bikes in the offices they lease.
Can we get some incentives to bike to work instead of drive a car?
Maybe the City should pay attention to bike parking as much as it pays attention to car parking. For those of us with expensive bikes, there are bike locker options that offer security and protection from the weather.
Bike parking corals have been great. Perhaps one per block?

Incredible amount of bike commuters into downtown 2nd floor businesses (e.g. the tech firms).
So much downtown real-estate owned by so few landlords causes unnatural pricing dynamics. Landlords would gladly see great office space sit vacant for years on end instead of leasing it at potentially lower rates.

Disincentives for owning and leaving office space unleased?

Microsoft is about to have a significant impact/presence Downtown.
Eco passes are awesome, but the process to obtain them makes them prohibitive to obtain.
Google doesn't count because they're outside the Downtown District.

I had to leave early, so I'm sure I missed some stuff.

While there's a ton of work to do, it was really neat to see us come together, get the attention of these groups that help define our Downtown world. Boulder Tech has come a long way. So cool.