Jeffrey Veen

Building Typekit on relationships

2011-11-17T00:00:00-08:00

There are lots of reasons to do a startup. Sometimes, there’s an idea you just can’t stop thinking about — a thing you absolutely want to exist in the world. Or sometimes you see a gap in how an industry is evolving, and with a small team of talented people you think you can fill that gap much faster than the big companies can.

Both of these things were true when we started Typekit three years ago. Web browsers started implementing @font-face and a lot of people started wringing their hands over the issue of intellectual property and typefaces. A debate sprang up: Web designers were embracing new CSS features like never before, but font designers worried that their craft would go the way of Napster and BitTorrent. It was a recipe for disruption and opportunity, and we jumped in.

For us, so much was uncharted. The four of us who founded the company had worked together and built products before, but we’d never been down the venture capital path. We scratched up a little cash putting on a conference and doing some work with our friends at Twitter. Still, it was clear that if we wanted to build Typekit at the scale we imagined, we’d need some real money.

It takes a team

Cloud computing has really made it inexpensive to try out new ideas. I mean, seriously, it’s crazy cheap now. Case in point: when we started Measure Map in 2005, the table stakes were about $25,000 for a rack of Dell servers just to see if it would work. The machines were shipped to us and we took them to a data center and opened all the boxes and plugged them in and spent a few days configuring everything. Six years later, that feels as antiquated as starting your car by turning a crank.

So yes, it’s true that cloud computing has changed the startup world. It’s cheap to build stuff now, and that makes things less risky. But a great team costs money, and that hasn’t changed — nor should it. Experienced designers and engineers can’t pay their kids' tuition for 10 cents an hour or spin down health insurance when it’s not utilized.

You need a team. I don’t believe you can do it all yourself, or even with a co-founder camped out in your parents' garage. Examples to the contrary are the exception. It’s rare that one person can write all the code, craft an exceptional user experience, communicate transparently with customers, and manage the financial health of the business. Yes, you can build tangible proof of your idea. You can even launch it and get traction. But to really build something that has broad reach and significant impact, most of us need the diversity of talent and experience that comes with a team of collaborators.

So when we started Typekit, we did some math. Given our track record and how much we believed in the idea of fonts on the web, how much of the theoretical future value of the company should we take in advance? With that up-front capital, could we actually put together the team we wanted and move fast enough to get a compelling product to an audience that would pay for it? And even if we could, would it generate enough revenue to both share with our partners (since we didn’t actually have any fonts for our font service) and grow into a sustainable business?

When I say “math” above, I run the risk of implying some rational process. Sometimes, I wished there was a simple algorithm or an actuary table for startups — plug in your numbers and out comes the answer. Unfortunately, it’s nothing like that. Financing a startup has as much to do with timing as it does with the track record of the founders or the attractiveness of the idea. The first browsers implemented CSS font linking just around the same time as the 2008 financial meltdown. Was that good for us? Was that bad? Tough call, but it certainly was relevant. We iterated our business model as much as we did our interface.

There are other models for getting started, of course. We bootstrapped Measure Map with the profits of Adaptive Path’s vibrant consulting practice, following the model we saw 37signals forging. When you’re a consultant, you trade your time for money and once you’ve done the work, you can pretty much do whatever you want with the cash. But it’s distracting. For me, doing my best possible work requires complete focus on a single problem. I couldn’t solve other people’s problems to make money and build a great product at the same time. To do that, I needed — again! — a great team. So at Adaptive Path, some of the people earned the cash, while others burned through it building a product using — again! — the same sort of undocumented math as a VC-backed startup.

Ultimately, we did what might be called a traditional round of funding for Typekit: A VC firm led the round that included a number of angel investors.

A True story

Our lead investor was Tony Conrad. I first met Tony when he was one of Adaptive Path’s clients a bunch of years ago. He was on the entrepreneur side of things back then as the CEO of Sphere, and was looking for help with visualizing his product concept through Adaptive Path’s user-centered design process. This was during the time I was transitioning to Google, so we didn’t get the chance to do day-to-day work together, but we did spend a lot of time talking about the product and how he was designing the business to support it.

It was immediately clear that Tony put a lot of work into surrounding himself with very talented people, regardless of whether he could convince them to actually take a job at his company. In every project he’s taken on, I’ve watched him build up a network of advisors, and then trust what they would tell him. Later, when he launched about.me, the product’s initial growth was driven through Twitter. His group of advisors collectively had millions of followers to help him get the word out.

It was through Tony that we meet everyone else at True Ventures. He’s a partner there now, and when I left Google and started thinking about doing something with Bryan, True was our first call. They were one of the early VC funds, about five years ago, to focus exclusively on seed-stage companies — small teams that haven’t taken a formal round of financing yet. These companies are the riskiest investments since the team usually hasn’t even started building their idea. True focuses not just on giving them money to give it a go, but reducing the overall risk by attempting to eliminate as many of the factors that tank a company in the first year.

Specifically, True puts a tremendous amount of effort into the community of founders with whom they work. They host frequent events, bring in experienced and inspiratiional speakers, and help the entrepreneurs they’ve funded connect with each other. We knew we could pick up the phone and talk not only to the partners, but to any of the other founders and we’d find someone who’d been through whatever we were facing that day.

The most interesting dinner party ever

I may have lots of experience developing products, but navigating the ambiguity of a startup is a very different set of skills. I learned while working on Typekit that both the product and the business benefit from a user-centered philosophy. When you’re stuck with a problem and don’t know what to do next, talk to people. Ask them what they think. Collect a bunch of perspectives. Filter what they say through your own intuition and experience. Then ask them who else you should ask. Keep going and never stop. To put it simply: Great products are built on solid relationships.

So we took Tony’s advice and surrounded ourselves with people we respected. And it turns out that the best way to get someone’s continued attention is to take their money. We set aside a portion of our first round equity for a group of angel investors who, in Bryan’s words, “Would make the most interesting dinner party ever.” And, as soon as we’d got everyone signed on, we sat down for dinner with Evan Williams, Caterina Fake, Matt Mullenweg, Chris Sacca, Josh Felzer, David Samuel, and the legendary Ron Conway. Some of them I’d known for years, like Ev and Caterina who had both been clients at Adaptive Path. Matt became a friend back while I was working on getting Measure Map integrated with WordPress. I worked with Chris at Google and he helped me to think about how things can get really, really big. But Josh, David, and Ron were new relationships we developed and I’m grateful we did. Everyone’s combined experience — and their willingness to share it — was both a tremendous head start and a reassuring saftey net for us.

My only regret in this whole funding process was that we weren’t able to work with twice as many people as did. We had so many great meetings and offers for support. In the end, we had to find a balance between how much of the company we were willing to part with and the number of investors who would end up with a reasonable stake. It was amazing that so many people believed in us, but it was difficult to make the final decision.

If I were an advice-giving guy, I’d tell entrepreneurs this: Raising money for your startup is not about the money. It’s about finding people to work with that you like and trust. Someone you wouldn’t hesitate to ask anything, and won’t make you feel stupid when you do. Use this test: Imagine your phone ringing; does the name on the screen make you feel eager to answer? Not nervous. Not dreading the call. Excited.

If you do go down the VC path, choose wisely. Your investors are one of the most important hiring decisions you’ll make.

Video: Designing for Big Data

2009-04-21T00:00:00-07:00

This is a 20-minute talk I gave at the Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco a couple weeks ago. In it, I describe two trends: how we’re shifting as a culture from consumers to participants, and how technology has enabled massive amounts of data to be recorded, stored, and analyzed. Putting those things together has resulted in some fascinating innovations that echo data visualization work that’s been happening for centuries.

I’ve given this talk a few times now, but this particular delivery really went well. Only having 20 minutes forced me to really stay focus, and the large audience was very engaged. I’ll be giving an extended version of this talk in June at the UX London conference, with a deeper look at how we integrated design and research while I was at Google.

Announcing Wikirank: Tracking what's popular on Wikipedia

2009-03-26T00:00:00-07:00

A few months ago, the four of us in Small Batch Inc were kicking around ideas for what we should build next. We had just launched the Twitter Election site — a fun real-time data visualization project — and wanted to keep building things that help people make sense of the enormous amount of information that bombards us each day. Late one night soon after, I followed a link to a repository of Wikipedia server logs. There were gigabytes of data sitting there just begging to be visualized. We got to work.

The result is Wikirank, a tool for exploring what’s popular on Wikipedia, discovering comparisons between topics, and sharing them with the world. We launched it yesterday, happily coinciding with the 14th anniversary with Ward Cunningham’s invention of the wiki.

There are a bunch of reasons why I think Wikirank is cool, but my favorite is how it helps people find stories in the data. One of the great things about the web is how measuring tiny behaviors reveals patterns that tell stories. The data we get from Wikipedia is no different; as we started playing around with the numbers, we saw loads of interesting shapes emerge in the charts.

For example, big news stories show up as dramatic spikes where there there was no data before. When the astounding story broke that an airliner had made an emergency landing in the Hudson, a page was created on Wikipedia within minutes. Over the next two days, that page was one of the most popular on the site.

US Airways Flight 1549 on Wikirank

The shape takes a different angle as we watch the marketing buzz and fan excitement build towards the release of the Watchmen movie earlier this month.

Watchmen (film) on Wikirank

Comparisons are where Wikirank really shines, however. The weekly viewing habits of television watchers comes into clear view — as do the day on which the shows air — when we compare Heroes to Lost. (It’s also my guess that the occasionally perplexing plotlines of both of those shows leads a fair number of people to Wikipedia to find out what the heck just happened.)

Lost (TV series) and Heroes (TV series) on Wikirank

I’m really pleased with how this project came out. I’ll write more about the technology behind the project in a followup post, but the reality is this launch represents a pretty big shift in how we build web apps. With only a couple developers and a rack of rented machines in the cloud, we pulled this all together in just a few weeks. That simply wasn’t possible the last time we did this.

The team behind all of this includes my long-time friends and business partners Bryan Mason, Ryan Carver, and Greg Veen. We were also extremely fortunate to be able to work with Dan Cederholm of Simplebits, who helped us with visual design and identity. Dan rocks.

We’d love to know what you think. You can join the discussion at Get Satisfaction.

Update: On March 10, 2010, Wikirank was acquired by Thing Labs, Inc. The were, in turn, acquired by AOL later that year. Priorities change when little companies are subsumed by big companies and, sadly, Wikirank has been retired.

Conference hack: Embracing the backchannel at Start

2008-07-25T00:00:00-07:00

I had a very interesting experience a few months ago while participating in a panel discussion. Once again, I realized that the content on stage is merely the spark of a broader conversation, and that the backchannel is rapidly becoming the whole point. So we’ve decided to try an experiment at the Start Conference in a couple weeks to see how we might hack traditional presentations.

But let me back up a bit first. I was on a panel at this year’s South by Southwest talking about the role of analytics in design. With me were two veterans of the advertising industry who’s work included some of the biggest ad campaigns of the past few years – some really amazing stuff. I started the conversation by saying how the remarkable amount of audience data available to us gives designers tremendous power to affect user experiences. My collegues suggested my approach sucked the creativity out of design. I countered that they were mistaking preferential research from behavioral. The argument heated up.

While this was happening, my phone was buzzing non-stop. I slipped it out of my pocket to discretely turn it off, but noticed a stream of Twitters going by – many from audience members in the room. So I set the phone down on the table in front of me and kept an eye on it. I’m so glad I did.

As the conversation on stage continued, the stream of questions and comments from the audience intensified. I changed my tactics based on what I saw. I asked questions the audience was asking, and I immediately felt the tenor of the room shift towards my favor. It felt a bit like cheating on an exam.

I guess it really wasn’t cheating, but it does illustrate one of the frustrations I’ve had at conferences lately. Most of the events I attend have a rich conversation happening in the room, yet the only people not able to participate are those on stage. A couple times, I’ve seen organizers project a live IRC channel, but that usually bring out the worst in people (“First!!!111”) – and is terribly distracting. So I’ve been wondering for a while if there was something smart we could do at our conference.

Apparently, Bryan had the same idea. As we were planning Start, he said, “We should have someone onstage the whole time to represent the audience. Like an ombudsman does for a newspaper.”

So we decided to put a desk on stage and have our friend George Oates fill that roll. She’ll be on Twitter, IM, and email listening to what people are talking about. (We’ll also have volunteers collecting index cards for those not wanting to be online during the sessions.) And she’ll synthesize questions, interrupt us if we get boring, and call bullshit if something sounds like it. George has been the designer at Flickr since it started; her personality has always shown through there, and will be a great fit for what we’re trying to do.

What do you think? I’ve never really seen a conference do something like this before. Have you?

Robot Cross Stitch

2008-07-22T00:00:00-07:00

This was a project I started a couple years back that I lost between moving, packing and unpacking. I found it a few days ago and finished stitching it over the weekend. It was inspired by my favorite t-shirt back then.

I like cross stitching for it’s obvious connection to pixelated icons and images from the web. I made the pattern by grabbing a picture of the shirt, knocking out the background, and posterizing the colors down to just red, yellow, and black. Then I blew up the image 400% and added a grid to show each stitch. Now, you can just upload an image here and have it spit out a pattern. You’ll still need to spend time simplifying and sizing the source file, though.

I’ve always liked images of robots – especially mid-20th Century anthropomorphic representations. I like that style, but I also like the metaphor. Robots represent our approach to technology and, frankly, how wrong we usually are. We had hoped to create tech in our own image, like Rosie, the Jetson’s maid who zipped around the house cleaning and cooking. We hoped that robots would enable a life of pure leisure – walking, talking butlers that do our bidding.

Our present reality is far from those idealistic days, but in a way I’m grateful for that. Instead of technology serving us, we’ve created powerful tools that amplify our abilities. We use computers to make us smarter, the web as an outboard brain, networks to stay connected. Rather than building robots as better humans, we’ve used technology to become better ourselves.

But that’s just me at my most optimistic. The truth is I like to stitch things like this to get me away from the damn computer. I think I’ll start another project…

Who is John Snow?

2008-07-07T00:00:00-07:00

Last month, while attending the fantastic @Media conference in London, we paid a quick touristy visit to a street corner in the heart of Soho. There, we found a small monument – an old hand-drawn water pump on a stone pedestal, its handle notably missing. We climbed up on it, had our photo taken, then ducked across the street for a pint in an old pub named The John Snow.

The pub’s name was interesting to me for a couple reasons. I had just finished the Steven Johnson book, “The Ghost Map,” a riveting account of the neighborhood’s 1854 cholera outbreak. Johnson tells the story of Dr. John Snow, who had lived near where we had our picture taken, and how he followed a hunch that the disease could be spread by water, rather than being airborne. After days of investigation, Snow proved to London’s health commission that this Broad Street well was the source of the outbreak, convincing them to remove the handle. It was an early instance of science and evidence winning against superstition and prejudice.

But even more interesting to me was one of the tools he used in his work – a data visualization showing cholera deaths marked on a map correlated to the location of the pump. In the speech I gave that week, I pointed out how his graphic techniques are still a model for good design over 150 years later. Contrary to the popular myth, Snow didn’t create that famous map; he was working from an existing visualization first drawn by sanitation engineer Edmund Cooper months earlier. Snow did, however, redesign the work by carefully eliminating elements and emphasizing the casualty data until the narrative of what had happened was perfectly clear. You can’t look at that map without thinking, “Yikes! Stay away from that pump!” Snow’s early geo-mashup can still inspire.

So back to the eponymous pub. As we stood near the crowded bar, I decided to do a little experiment. Even though there was a plaque on the wall detailing the establishment’s history and namesake, I started asking the folks around me, “Hey, why is this place called ‘The John Snow’?” hoping to find fans of the historic story – or maybe even someone interested in the visualization. Instead, here’s what I got:

The tall Irish guy with a ponytail: “No bloody idea, brother.”

The group of women laughing in the corner: “Oh, he’s some wanker on the telly who bought this place years ago.” (They were thinking of this Jon Snow, who is actually quite respected.)

The bartender, who came close, but really should know better: “Before this was a pub, there was a hospital here and he was the doctor in charge of it.”

How quickly history fades – especially after a few drinks.

Stories we'll hear at the Start Conference

2008-06-24T00:00:00-07:00

One of the nice things about organizing your own conference is getting to choose who you want on stage. That’s been particularly fun these last couple weeks as Bryan and I have been thinking about who we’d like to talk to and what we’d like them to tell us.

We started with some good friends whom we’ve worked with and respect. Ev Williams, for example, was an easy choice. We’ve known him forever, and worked on a redesign of Blogger together a few years ago. We’re talking to him about how his new thing, Twitter, is growing and evolving, what the challenges and opportunities are, and the lessons he’s learned so far. I’ve had similar conversations recently with both Matt Mullengweg of WordPress and Mena Trott of 6apart. Their stories have interesting parallels, but even better divergence.

So, yeah, a lot of our friends are in the blogging world. But we do know a few people outside of that world. Julie Davidson and Narendra Rocherolle, for example, are joining us to talk about their unique partnership, both in business and in life. They’ve built Webshots, one of the first photo sharing apps, as well as 30boxes, a fantastic calendar app that stands as a fantastic example of how to do the Right Thing when building on the web.

On the other end of the entrepreneurial spectrum is our pal Merlin Mann. He’s built a solid brand out of his productivity site 43Folders and we’re looking forward to talking to him about how he did that. But also, I’m particularly interested in his ideas for how small teams can find the best ways to work together and communicate with each other. Also, he is a bit, um, energetic on stage. We should have a good time.

We’ve got a bunch more people joining us on stage – people who follow the industry, comment on it, invest in it, and help companies get started. I’ll post more on them soon. I hope you can join us.

Introducing the Start Conference

2008-06-11T00:00:00-07:00

When I recently decided to leave my job, I began a little personal project I called “100 Lunches.” I wanted to sit down with a bunch of people over a meal and just listen. What was interesting to them these days? What where they building? Were they nervous about the state of the industry? Excited by all the new opportunity?

As I started the project, I quickly realized that the stories I was hearing needed a wider audience. My friends and colleagues told tales of late nights, harrowing server crashes, exhilarating growth, and touching emails from their users. Not one of them knew what they were getting into, nor would any of them change their paths.

Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if everyone could hear these amazing start up stories?

So I got together with my long-time friend and business partner Bryan Mason and started planning. We decided to get a great group of entrepreneurs, investors, and other people associated with new web companies together for a day of discussion and advice. And that’s how the Start Conference came to be.

So here’s the deal: On August 7, we’ll spend the day at the beautiful Fort Mason Center talking about starting companies. We’ve got a lot of fun things planned, including a fantastic party on the Bay afterwards. And we’re making it cheap – just $200. We didn’t want to turn this into a conference filled with investors hunting for the next big thing. We wanted something for people who make web apps and dream of starting their own thing. (Also, we understand that you probably won’t want to submit an expense report for a conference that encourages you to quit your job.)

If you’ve ever thought of staking out on your own, we hope you’ll join us. It’s going to be great fun.

All the details are on the Start Conference web site. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments here.

Welcome back Webmonkey

2008-05-19T00:00:00-07:00

Isn’t it nice to get reacquainted with an old friend?

This morning, the fine folks over at Wired relaunched Webmonkey. Somehow, they managed to pry it out of the dying hands of Lycos and revive it as a collaborative site based on MediaWiki. I couldn’t be happier to see the site come back; I’ve just spent a nostalgic afternoon digging through everything that’s there.

The original site was founded at HotWired back in 1996 by my friend June Cohen. She pulled a small team together and started publishing tutorials, news, and opinions about how to make the web. They asked me to write a column, which I did for a couple years, and eventually I joined them to redesign the site. I loved that project – it was one of the first sites we built that was dynamically driven through templates rather than as static HTML files – a real separation of content and presentation. It was a big deal for us back then, and it influenced a lot of my future work.

The new site is equally dynamic, but in a much more contemporary way. As a collaborative wiki, it embraces openness in a way that really resonates with the original mission of Webmonkey. The team wrote about it in the new site’s introduction:

When Webmonkey debuted in 1996, the site was sort of a soapbox for HotWired’s engineers and designers — a place for them to evangelize emerging web standards, rate the newest browsers and demonstrate their bleeding-edge code hacks. Those engineers also produced stacks and stacks of tutorials on all aspects of building for the web. […]

Faced with the prospect of going back into the archives to continuously update and rewrite the older articles, we decided to turn Webmonkey into a collaborative project. It was an easy decision.

I completely agree. And I’m thankful that we have another chapter to follow what really looked like the end.

Charles Joseph Minard's visual stories

2008-05-14T00:00:00-07:00

You may not be familiar with the name Charles Joseph Minard, but it’s likely you’ve seen his work. He served as a civil engineer in 19th century France and developed an interest in cartography later in life. In particular, he was intrigued with showing variable data on maps — how quantities of shipped goods moved along waterways, for example, and later troop movements in military maneuvers.

Minard started drawing in his mid 60s and didn’t create his most famous work until he was 80 years old. In it, he shows the progression of Napoleon and his army to Moscow and back in the campaign of 1812. This chart was renown as a masterpiece of economy and insight, and imortalized in Edward Tufte’s “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” — a virtual bible for information design since its publication 26 years ago. Tufte even sells the chart in poster form from his web site, making it a staple in designers' cubes at nearly every creative office I’ve ever visited.

So I was researching Minard a bit more deeply for a presentation I’ve been giving and came across the following quote. In it, he talks about his “carte figuratives” — a phrase referring to his particular style of data visualization mixed with geography:

The aim of my carte figurative is … to convey promptly to the eye the relation not given quickly by numbers requiring mental calculation."

I really like how this idea of making something visually apparent while reducing intellectual work — a sort of cognitive ergonomics. Minard was suggesting that stories and meaning can be found in any collection of data. It’s up to us to uncover those stories and tell them clearly and accurately.

It’s a strong lesson for much of the work we do today. Much like the patterns in data visualization, designers seek out stories and meaning when crafting interfaces. Well designed sites “convey promptly to the eye” what’s possible, while doing so intuitively as to avoid “requiring mental calculation.” That’s not to say we should treat people as stupid. Rather, we should help them focus on what they’re trying to do, rather than struggle with the means for achieving it.

Or, another way, don’t make me think.