Geeky Peek

We are looking for an experienced, strong developer to play a significant role in the Peek dev team based in New York. This is probably a better job description than anything below – http://bit.ly/dENtRh

A new twist in our hiring, if you are an entrepreneur and trying to start something up, come work for us… earn cash to pay the bills… and we’ll help you out and introduce you some nice warm introductions to VCs, banks, angels, and entrepreneurs we are close to in New York. Amol runs one of the best founders meetups in New York, and we’re backed by some of the bigger VCs in New York as well.

The role is vast:
-mobile coding (app + embedded level)… this is done in C/C++
-Our Peekway servers that send, receive and store emails, social network, texts, etc. This is done in Java/J2EE (sometimes Spring)
-You will get to actually operate your code, and fix it when it breaks. We run on Amazon AWS on Linux, Apache, My SQL, JBOSS infrastructure
-All of our backend services… care interfaces, billing and so on… you’ll get your hands on that as well
-Crazy stand-alone apps like PeekSocial

We practice agile and devops (you will deploy/rollback/troubleshoot bugs in your own code), we deploy new features fast and furiously. You will have both massive discretion on your own projects, bugs, features that you implement as well as massive input into the future of what you develop on.

We are looking for a good developer and person. What we need:

-we need a developer who can code big, hard projects and made them successful
-languages aren’t crucial, we presume if you are awesome you can remember how to call malloc() and free() in C (if thinking about memory mgmt scares you, this isn’t the role for you) and we presume you can learn how to Autowire in Spring
-You need to have experience with scale… i.e. when you argue architecture, there should be experience backing those words, not just repeating Martin Fowler’s arguments (whoops, I just made fun of myself)
-You get things done… you are both an artist and a duct-tape programmer, you are passionate about both hitting dates and making everything follow a design pattern… you don’t do things like make ugly GUIs because “I’m not a GUI guy”
-You like the warm and fuzzy feeling of writing unit tests, they are like a cool glass of ice tea on a summer day to you
-You like “surprising” people with the new hack you thought of last night and wrote this morning
-You are not an angry asshole, you like human beings and communicating with them in a non-aggressive/violent way… you like working in a team of really smart/energetic people
-You care and have passion, if customers complain about something not working… it hurts deep inside. If there is an outage because of some code you broke, you think about pulling out your samurai sword and emailing a friend to be your second.

Email me at dan at getpeek if you are interested.

I keep hearing nonsense about tech bubbles recently. I think people are losing sight of the opportunity in front of them right now.

There are something like 500mm broadband customers in the world right now. There are over 5b mobile users in the world right now. Of those only about 500m have 3G (i.e. broadband) access.

So there is still something like a market of 5b people right now who will over the next 5-10 years start using the internet as part of their daily lives. With new smartphones & new tablets, price points are reaching levels where broadband will be affordable to all these people. And as broadband becomes available, new internet delivered services & products will be used. MASSIVE OPPORTUNITY.

But thats only part of the story. Basically, still in this day, there are tons of service/industry sectors where the internet is barely used. I’m talking about you health care! There are major major industry changes coming in sectors like government, health care, real estate, law, delivery, etc. Many government services still require paper for submission. Anybody done taxes or applied for a visa – think neither of those two could be done better? Many doctors still rely heavily on pen and paper (prescription pad anybody?). Many legal & financial transactions are still quagmired in a world of yesteryore, completely non-digitized. Anybody bought a house recently? There are multi-billion dollar opportunities here.

On top of riding disruption in many service & industrial sectors, there are still major changes coming in the way we consumers use the internet. Last year e-commerce accounted for 4% of all commerce, and online advertisting was only 13% of all advertisting. Meanwhile the average person is spending more and more time online and consuming more and more internet services, meaning that commerce, advertising & media production will all explode online. MORE BIG OPPORTUNITY.

And, more so, most infrastructure still hasn’t even been hooked up to the internet! Can you turn lights on/off over the internet in your house? Is your car on the internet (driving as a service – DaaS??)? Are large buildings on the internet, can we remotely control them? Are local bridges on the internet throwing off readings from sensors, cameras, etc? How many more devices, buildings, cars, etc can be added to the internet? A few billion++?

And, with 5B people now having access to GSM phones, you think the world of communication isn’t still evolving fast? Want to know why Kik, Color, GroupMe, Beluga, etc are all getting massive amounts of money and its no joke??? When was the last time you sent a text? Was the experience kind of lame (you had to remember a weird 9 digit number that represents that person , type in T9, etc)? Did you pay some stupid amount of money for it – like $20/month for unlimited texting? Were roughly 5 TRILLION texts sent last year globally at revenue of something like 5-7 cents per text – wow a $250B market!!! Has MMS been a total failure with a horrible user experience that nobody outside of Germany ever used to share photos? Did it still generate $31.5B in global revenue last year??? You think its not worth giving a company like Color $41mm to take a crack at that revenue??? If I were a mobile carrier right now I would crap my pants every time I read about one of these companies raising big money. Entrepreneurs & VCs have started a mobile messaging WAR against the carriers – because its a big opportunity, not because they are being stupid.

And hasn’t it gotten cheaper and less riskier to launch new web products & services, like cheaper by several factors. Shouldn’t people invest in big market/low risk opportunities?

And doesn’t Silicon Valley have massive leverage and far more competitive advantage over EVERY WHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD (and maybe New York.. and maybe the collective geographical diaspora known as University of Waterloo graduates). Can China, India, Europe, blah, blah, anywhere really, truly come close to competing with Silicon Valley head to head in making money out of the future of the internet?

So there are BIG massive billion dollar global opportunities. And there are unique advantages in the US globally. And its cheaper and less riskier than ever to invest in these companies.

Isn’t this EXACTLY the policy the people, the government, the investors, the entrepreneurs, the hackers, the inventors and everybody should be endorsing? Is it bad that easy fed printed money/gov’t stimulus cash has trickled down into the valley and created a surge in investment in high-tech? Don’t Americans want to kick ass and win and have most of the new billion dollar companies built here? And isn’t this a true legitimate chance for the country to recover in the long-run? Isn’t it less risky and a better idea than Friedman telling us to invest in better solar panels every day in the New York Times? Where else would you put this money? Building bridges???

I’m not even American, I wish you guys would blow this chance so up here in Canada we’d build the best tech companies! But at least some of the funding will flow to the hands of the our University of Waterloo students who will eventually move home when they have babies.

But in all seriousness, I think every startup who got funded recently, should realize they have a civic responsibility to bust their asses off with HUSTLE AND HACK. These are tough economic times for many, and you have the opportunity to do something about it and make a difference. I don’t want to read articles about the 4 monitors on your desk, or the ipad you got when you joined, blah blah blah. Don’t act like over-privileged, whiny, little bitches spoiled rich kids. Get out there and help re-build.

I’ve had a weird tour of startup incubator spaces in the Toronto area recently that made me shake my head and wonder why people who have no real entrepreneurial/start-up experience (cough cough communitech in Waterloo) are running incubators/tech hubs. Communitech isn’t the only one, I’ve had a few weird run ins with some VC/seed funds spaces.

One incubator had Deloitte accountants as mentors/advisors, available in office hours… and an HR advisor. I guess it makes sense, I always hear about startups failing because they couldn’t keep their books straight and their leave of absence policy binder not being up to snuff…. fail.

Seriously though, if I were starting a company again, and I was completely new to the world of startups with a total weird hindsight is 20/20 view – here is the help I’d want:

1. Somebody to hit me with a shovel when I spend my money like a fricking idiot (e.g. hiring consultants, advertising, grey beards in senior mgmt who aren’t competent, outsource dev shops that suck, double your inventory order, etc).

2. Somebody with real-world marketing & sales advice, gritty street tactics.

3. User design help and tough love feedback on how a feature sucks.

4. Facilitate meeting weird interesting people related to my business.

When I was in New York this happened much more organically. I’d meet other startups in lots of weird ways and then email them and ask them questions. Or I’d go by their place and ask them. They’d be like “wow – you are going to spend $40k on Splunk, you are crazy, how about you do some bash scripting you lazy turd, let me send it to you”.

So, when you design your incubator space and think about “mentorship services”, concentrate on items like the above rather than classic management consulting services (strategy, tech strategy, accounting, etc). And if you really want to make it successful, don’t make it a lame cover for a for profit real estate business. “check out our startup hub, now only $599/month for a desk… with Deloitte accounting advice included!!” Lame, lame, lame…

****One delightful experience I have had recently is with a bunch of startups who are “office-pooling”. David Crowe at Influitive, attachments.me and others reminded me of everything that can be great about a bunch of crazy yahoos sitting in a space together trying to fight the odds.

Sometimes I think tech entrepreneurs get too caught up in doing something new & novel – new technology, new markets, etc. And there’s all this philisophy around lean dev’t, lean startups, incubating, seed money, etc.

Well there’s another way. Identify an existing big market and attack. Yesterday I stumbled across somebody who was doing this. He was going to raise a big amount of money, go after a really big market, compete head to head with giants, with a big name management team. Attack (trumpets blazing)!

More surprising is that I met somebody in Canada doing this. In any given year there are probably only a few people in the US looking to raise $20mm+ to start a business up (like seed/A in the classic fund raising sense). In Canada this is like once every 2-4 years. So it was cool to see somebody not just doing it, but also getting it done.

This article by Fred Wilson, where he deployed some code at Etsy, made me wonder what this would have looked and felt like 5 years ago at most companies (or even today at many companies):

1. Would have applied for a maintenance window somewhere between midnight and 4am (this alone would have had to have been done 2-4 weeks before hand)
2. Would have to have sent several “sign-offs” to show QA completion/readiness, and done at the time of applying for the maintenance window
3. NO CHANGE past that date. So your code sits there as a jar ready to deploy, even if you fix a really dumb bug, it can’t be deployed without repeating sign-off/maintenance windows.
4. An ops engineer would have been assigned to do the deploy. External person wanting to help deploy… SECURITY ALERT, SECURITY ALERT…
5. If it failed…. oh looooorrrdddyyy…. immediate rollback. Large meeting with dev/qa/product team to ridicule them for being useless. Large meeting with ops engineer cause they probably didn’t deploy it right, they would also get ridiculed. Re-try in 6 weeks.
6. Your code base has sat stagnant for 12 weeks (3 months!!!), while you try to get out one lousy build.

You may have noticed from Fred’s post that they mention Etsy never rolls back. I think thats got a lot to do with my last point. For many companies, production code being stagnant for 3 months is VERY expensive, in fact its relatively insane to think about. Because of how Etsy develops (deploy to trunk, etc), if deploys are not possible for even a day or two its relatively expensive since developers can’t really develop and you start to get into big-bang deploys.

Personally I believe in rollbacks. Try to fail forward fast (usually you can). But if the outage is large and/or long, rollback. But you have to create an environment where rollbacks are not viewed as “failures”.

I have a weird take on what Dave McClure is doing in the world of incubating and startups. Maybe its not that weird.

I think one of the dumbest models that still exists as a relic from the Industrial Age is our model of employment. Basically the concept of “hire somebody and pay them their daily wages”. Its both bad for employers and employees who do innovation:

1. Employees are generally a cost sink for employers and most of them return very little money back to the company.

2. Its a complete disincentive to the employee to come up with new ideas, build them cheaply and fight like hell to make them successful.

Instead, if I were say a medium-sized corporation with money, wouldn’t it be smart to run your company like Dave McClure does.

If you were a big company, instead of hiring someone to lead your big new project, wouldn’t it make more sense to give somebody $60k and take 15% of the company?

The risk is this: the idea is dumb and fails, or you invested in a flake. But check this… if the idea is dumb and fails, and/or the entrepreneur is flakey, they are off your books! And all you did was pay them $60k. How many times have you kept an employee for 6 months of 2 years longer than you should have and paid them $100k-$200k more than you should have??? Oh yeah, and you have a crap load of real-world market research/learning that only cost you $60k to get at.

The reward: you make it, everybody gets rich.

The flip-side risk: the idea is gold and the person is awesome. Instead of getting 100% (if they worked for you), you only get 15%. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact you can do follow-on rounds and/or acquire later to make even more money.

So, maybe everybody should run their business like an incubator/micro-angel. Seems like a smarter model than plain-old hiring.

I loved this internal memo from Nokia’s CEO Steven Elop – http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/02/09/full-text-nokia-ceo-stephen-elops-burning-platform-memo/

He basically points to three big fundamental shifts that are hurting Nokia. The first two are no surprises – Android & iPhone. The last one is probably a big surprise to everybody outside of India & China: MediaTek (we do a lot of business in India and love MediaTek as a note).

The MediaTek revolution is massive in China & India right now. MediaTek has built chipsets/platforms at prices not seen before in the world of processors. Because of these platforms, Chinese manufacturers are producing smartphones and media phones which are being retailed in China & India for sub-$100. And some of the hardware is slick – check out http://micromaxinfo.com/ to see some of the devices.

I friend of mine works for Sequoia in India, who are heavily invested in both Sky-mobi (the Chinese “webOS” for MediaTek) as well as MicroMax, one of the big Indian device sellers capitalizing on MediaTek, has been telling me about the MediaTek revolution for several years. This is probably the big first “outing” of what is going on in China & India with MediaTek in the Western Media that I am aware of.

They have built an ecosystem fast – MediaTek chipsets/platforms -> Chinese ODMs -> Indian distributors – and they basically took 5% of mobile phone sales in India in no-time, and almost all of it directly from Nokia’s share. This model will soon be replicated in the Middle East, Africa and other places where handset subsidization isn’t a viable business model. I only wish these devices would come to North America and give real price competition to the never-ending launch of $400 smart phones.

I’ve got several MediaTek phones sitting on my desk here. Chinese ODMs (manufacturers) used to be notorious for creating crappy knock-offs. Well, on the hardware side, the gap has closed. The hardware is nice: innovative and distinct – cool materials like metal face plates and touch nav pads. The base software though… well… it leaves a little something to be desired, and developing for it is basically impossible if you aren’t in China.

Nokia has always performed questionably on high-end phones, its no surprise that Apple and Android have left them in their dust. Nokia though has always been dominant in the developing world. Now, that dominance is being challenged heavily by a big ecosystem of phone manufacturers & distributors powered by MediaTek chipsets.

Signs you may need new developers,executives, dev process, etc…

1. You spend more time writing specs than developing

2. You lose months waiting for specs to *sign-off* before dev starts.

3. You have delivered nothing over x months where x > 1

4. You spend more time doing maintenance than new development, because you didn’t architect it right, keep it up to date on tech, etc in the first place

5. Sales/marketing/executives don’t talk to the dev team… ever.

6. You have more managers than developers (project managers, product managers, dev managers, support managers, etc)

7. After having sat on their own for 6 months coding big new feature x, the developer “delivers it” only to hear “it sucks”, because it does and nobody cared to look at it for 6 months.

8. “Sign-offs” occur on giant spec documents instead of on the working product.

I could go on. It is very unfortunate when a company’s development looks and feels like the above, because it is soooo much easier to do better.

I haven’t written on here in a while. Frankly, our customers have had some reasons to be angry lately and I’ve been trying to do something about it.

Since I last posted, the startup world has changed a bit. Its become all about “seeding”, “incubators”, “early-stage”, etc. Late stage startups… blech… who wants to invest in an actual grittily-run business that is trying to make money and manage burn.

I have a lot of friends from the “startup class” of 2007/2008. Most of them are gone now, exited in one way or another, here’s the list (these are for real):

1. Sold to Facebook. The founder got paid and a new job at FB, the rest of the team got laid off and got nothing. The investors got some money back.

2. Sold to Facebook, investors got a bit, some of the employees got jobs. (note that selling to facebook usually isn’t a good thing)

3. Made $0 after 2 years, hired a new CEO, wiped out the initial founders (and the new CEO raised $20mm in new capital …. buuuhhhh…)

4. Still make $0 in revenue, pay their employees half-wages, maybe a big gov’t deal that could save them is in the works.

5. Shutdown 3 months after launch, couldn’t raise new money and weren’t making money.

6. Everybody got pissed at each other and the company fell apart. There are a few guys left, but shutdown is probably imminent.

The crazy part is this, most of these guys built cool products and raised decent amounts of capital in their A round. Some of them would have been even been viewed as “successful” by the outside world. If I said their names you’d be like “oh yeah, those guys made something cool”.

But the funny part is that at some point, probably about 18 months in, or maybe 6-8 months after you launch and become an going-concern, reality kicks in. YOU RUN A BUSINESS. You are out of the sexy land of “startup and building something cool” and you are running a real-world business.

You have to serve customers. I’m sure it is super bad ass to sit there and dream up whacky new features and architectures and so on. Don’t. Go make your customer’s lives better (again apologies to our current customers whose lives are not “better” right now).

You have to make money and survive. Come down from your “lets build something awesome” startup perch and realize that you have to run your business in a way that it doesn’t blow up. This probably means you spend too much. This probably means you have to lay people off. It probably means you have to do uncomfortable things like negotiate hard with suppliers and customers.

You, the CEO, have to keep going. So many startup CEOs/execs start realizing how hard it is to make a company profitable and how difficult some of the real-world decisions are and they start to disengage. They start to think about starting something new, or that old cushy job they had, or about selling the company and taking a year off. I think its a lie that VCs “kick-out” founding CEOs. I think lots of startup CEOs give up.

And you still have to lead. Put a smile on your face, stop telling people about the 1 bazillion doomsday scenarios that are coming up every day. Take that punch in the gut you just got and roll with it.

So basically I’m venturing out this hypothesis – companies are made (or broken) in months 12-60 when lots of things go wrong. Here’s a graph of survival rates. If you make it past year 5, you have a 75% chance of making it!

So, this graph and everything I know about startups (after doing 3) of them makes me ask “why are investors investing so heavily in early stage startups/seeds?”; and “why do entrepreneurs want money from angels & small investors”?

If I was an investor, doesn’t it make sense to not give money for a bit, and make sure the company is going to last?

If I was an entrepreneur, I’d also want to make sure that I had a partner that was in it to win it for 3-5 years, not just a single round of money. For instance, I’d want to make sure that they could do follow-on inside rounds when times were tough, and that they themselves were going to get more funding and not close up shop.

So, if I were doing this all over again, I’d probably say “no thanks” to the super angels and Dave McClure’s of the world. I’d go knock on RRE’s door (our current lead investor in Peek) and other VCs of repute.

Caveat – I don’t really hate Dave McClure, I’ve never met him and I think he writes all kinds of great, real-world, heavy hitting stuff. I just don’t particularly agree with the over-investment in early-stage companies, thereby ignoring the needs of later stage startups who are more likely to survive and return money to investors.

I fractured my jaw two days ago. Its actually the most painful thing I’ve had happen in my life to date. I’ve blown my ACL twice (and had it repaired it twice), both which really hurt, but the jaw breaking was the first time I have literally cried from pain.

It is my second bad head injury. Both came from playing goalie in soccer, the first was a bad concussion from getting kicked in the head, the second… this one… a broken jaw (maybe also concussion) from getting a point blank shot in the chin.

Both times the results on my ability to work have been dramatic. Inability to focus, heavy need to sleep (every 3-4 hours), weird anxiety (I couldn’t phone people for about 3 weeks after the first injury), and so on. The first injury was really scary, for a few days I couldn’t read. I’d literally stare at words on a page and they’d make no sense to me.

The point of this blog post is this – we (well I) take our own abilities for granted. I am typically extremely productive, no anxiety/fear, able to get things done in thoughtful/deliberate ways. And one little soccer ball to the head I’m half the man I used to be.