How do you know if your code is fast enough?
One of the big pains I’ve seen while at PR and X is dealing with customers, managers, and critics who go off on performance.
- When you click here, it takes too long!
- When you start up, it takes forever!
- When this page loads, I can go get a cup of coffee and it’s still loading!
All are valid concerns, but it gets a little ridiculous when you hear someone say “it needs to be 0.2 seconds faster” or “we have to be at least as fast as before even though we’re doing 10 times more processing”.
Perception, a qualitiative measure, is more important than quantitative measurement.
Given that Internet connection speeds vary, that client computers can be a few years old, and that humans can be sedated or caffeinated, it’s even more important to move beyond simple clock-watching.
David Weiss discusses performance on his blog and mentions a classification scheme for timing perception:
- Instantaneous (0.1 to 0.2 seconds)
- Immediate (0.5 to 1.0 seconds)
- Continuous (2 to 5 seconds)
- Captive (7 to 10 seconds)
So instead of simply whining about how things have gotten slower by 0.1 seconds, determine where your feature (broken down into actions or features or events, but that’s another topic) falls. Now, are you within range?
The other difficulty is deciding which category the feature should be in. This is where user studies matter. Your boss is not the ultimate arbiter. You are not the ultimate arbiter. Make sure your typical set of users would be happy with your choice by faking time delays in a mockup.
The Brilliance of Starbucks
I’m sitting in a Starbucks right now, and it has been packed all day. Why? Because the company is giving everyone who voted a free coffee today. All you have to do is say you voted and boom – you get a free cup.
Two interesting observations:
1. No one has just a coffee. It looks like nearly everyone (including me) is picking up some sort of pastry to go with the coffee.
2. People are talking and hanging out, both about the election and other stuff.
The second point is key because it falls in line with Howard Schultz’s vision for Starbucks. Here is a Business Week article on what Starbucks is all about. It’s not just coffee – Starbucks is trying to be the hub of your community. The place where you gather, hang out, snack, discuss, etc. Capitalism in a community-building move.
Why does Starbucks succeed where companies like Dunkin Donuts or McDonald’s fail? It’s because of this emphasis on messaging to the community that it’s a participant. Go vote! Come see the local art! If you’re a local group, ask us for donations! If you’re a cop, come hang out! (Maybe that’s just at this Starbucks.) Schultz’s vision of anchoring the neighborhood is definitely true here.
By the way, you did vote, right?
Which angel should I talk to?
Crunchbase is a TechCrunch property that has a bunch of information on companies and startups. It’s user-edited (and based on a lot of TC’s posts). They also have an API, so I decided to work with the data to come determine who to talk to when you’re looking for money or feedback regarding an idea/company/startup.
Angel Suggestions covers some of the initial research. It uses data on people, companies, and investing groups to determine the angels you may want to talk to. There are three key questions it asks to get you started:
- What industry are you in? Obviously you’ll want to talk to someone who is in your area, like web, services, biotech, etc.
- What round are you looking for? If you’re just starting, there are three possibilities.
- seed – Seed funding – you’re looking for something to get off the ground and want a minimal investment.
- angel – Angel funding – you’re looking for a medium sized chunk along with the connections and expertise an angel can provide. He/she may ask for various things like a seat on the board or pictures of you naked.
- a – Series A funding – you’re looking for a large chunk from a venture capital fund and will likely have to cede some control over your company
- How much money do you need? Obviously, this depends a lot on your industry as well as your underlying costs.
I used Ruby on Rails 2.0 to get going with this. It was awesome picking up some Ruby again and the Rails team has added some amazing functionality over the past year. The caching capabilities are much improved. Along with that, going through this helped me learn a bit more about Git, a relatively new version control system (like Subversion and CVS), and Capistrano, a gem for Rails deployment. Cool stuff.
The Four Things You Cannot Do as You Leave a Startup
Due to some recent work drama, I was privy to a list of key things you can’t do when you leave a startup. Here’s the list:
- Don’t poach people (including a co-founder in a new venture)
- Don’t take bizdev, IP, or other insider info
- Don’t blast the company or its VCs in the press/blogs/media
- Don’t shop your shares (exercised options) unless there’s a way to do it through the company
This list was described as a set of “social norms” within the Valley that are a “huge sin” if not followed.
The first item is the most surprising, as I constantly hear stories about friends leaving a company (both big and small) to go work on their own idea. It’s part of the myth of Silicon Valley, isn’t it?
#2 and #3 seem obvious and generally good practice in life. #4 I have no data points on.
If you have any feedback or thoughts, I’d love to hear it.
Naval Ravikant’s Things to Look For in a Startup
Startup2Startup hosted a talk by Naval Ravikant, one of the guys behind Venture Hacks and the original founder of Epinions, a precursor to the PowerReviews idea. Here’s a link to the video, filled with two minutes of great insight on what a startup needs.
Things to look for in a startup:
- the team – some of the best in the field
- the market – must be huge because the first idea rarely works and you need room to maneuver
- proprietary / difficult technology – something that compounds over time into a distinct competitive advantage
- proprietary distribution channel – some sort of viral marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), or partnerships
- direct monetization model – not just joining an ad network
The technology description is important – most ideas I hear (and come up with) are pretty straight-forward. Anyone who knows Python or Ruby on Rails can come up with a basic database-backed site. Is there any real complexity to what you’re trying to do that two folks in an apartment can’t copy in three months?
Random Advice on Finding a College
A friend of a friend contacted me through email today asking some questions on college. In case this is helpful for others, I thought I’d put it up on the web. Any additional thoughts? Please feel free to put them in the comments.
When did you start applying?
The college deadlines are usually during your senior year in December and early January. I remember that UC-Berkeley was really early (November?).
How many colleges did you apply to?
I applied to four. I should have probably applied to seven, which I think is average. It’s a question of which schools you want to apply to and your certainty.
How did you choose Rice over the other schools?
The biggest piece of advice I can give is to go to the campuses, take the tours, and if possible, go to the Admit Days that they have (a weekend where they show prospective students around). You’ll make friends early and get some connections that usually prove useful… and it makes the first week of orientation and classes less awkward.
You should also talk to older classmates and friends who went off to school and get their opinions.
The usual points made up my decision: quality of school (private vs public), name recognition, size (smaller felt nicer to me), location.
How is the campus life at Rice?
Rice was phenomenal, but it depends on whether you want a big school or small. Rice is tiny, so you see the same people over and over again. This also means you have classes with people outside your major/concentration, and a good opportunity to interact with lots of different people. Like Princeton, Rice has a college system, so there are no fraternities or sororities. This means that a freshman gets assigned to one of nine colleges and that group becomes your hub for social activities, friendships, etc.
I was pretty quiet, so having the college system was a great crutch for building friendships. My closest friends all came from the same college and I still keep in touch with them today (10 years later).
How did you adjust to living by yourself?
You don’t live by yourself. Most universities force you to live with roommates during your first year. Some allow you to choose studios for one person, but you shouldn’t do it. You’ll miss out on so many friendships and learning about different lifestyles as well as the annoyances that make for good stories later in life.
In terms of things like food, laundry, taking care of yourself, etc. — that’s part of growing up; it’s awkward but everyone survives.
If you had to do something differently, what would it be?
Socially – get out a lot more. Make more friends who were not engineers.
Academically – find research. Beg, plead, etc., but go ahead and do it. The main reason is that it will help establish contacts, but it’s also important because it will help you determine whether or not you really want to attend graduate school when the time comes.
Grades don’t matter as much as you think they do. Connections and experiences are critical.
How did you write your personal statements?
I just wrote them. They were pretty normal questions. I know things are a lot more competitive nowadays, but if you write in your own voice you’ll get very far.
Tell a story. Have a few teachers and friends proofread for grammar. Don’t be verbose.
From whom did you obtain references / recommendation letters?
You want to have one from a teacher, one from an extracurricular activity, and a third from the community if possible. Mine were from a math teacher, my band director, and one from my physics teacher… which doesn’t follow the advice I just gave you.
One key point: make sure the people you ask have written letters before or are someone you trust. I know that my math teacher ended up writing a short, simplistic recommendation letter that probably cost me admission to one school. Find people who are going to rave about you and will take the time to do it right.
Funding Tips and Random Advice from STIRR’s DealHacks
Sanford Barr and the folks over at STIRR held another Founders’ Hacks night back in May. I finally got around to seeing the DealHacks writeup on their website, and it’s awesome.
Rob Hayes, a partner at First Round Capital and one of Xobni’s main investors, actually gave one of the talks. His main points:
- “I am often wrong but never in doubt.” – ok…
- “Can I work with these people for the next five years?” – founders should also ask this question
- PowerPoint: first – what you do, second – who are you, cover what’s your business model – which slide covers the mutual friendships?
- 1-2 founders, 3 is rough, no more than that
- “don’t ask for $3-5MM just because you hear that’s what you’re supposed to do” – this seems like it’s a response to the rise of angel investors and seeding groups like ycombinator
He goes on to mention angels who want a “restaurant” deal. What do you call VCs who don’t want to be lead investors?
Of course, you have to watch Adeo Ressi’s response – he’s the guy behind The Funded and a great counter-balance to the fluff VCs come up with. I’d pay to hear the stories he’s privy to. The idea of opening up the closed data loop VCs have is one I’m behind 100%.
Positioning a Business
Lance Weatherby had a post on positioning last week that summarized some ideas from Crossing the Chasm. Consider the following template when thinking about positioning your company:
For [target customer], [your company] is a [your category] that [need filled]. Unlike [competitor], we [describe difference].
If you can clearly describe your company using this template, it’s a major positive.
For scientists and engineers, NI is a hardware and software vendor that provides measurement and automation tools. Unlike HP, we focus from the beginning on the software (like LabVIEW), so that scientists and engineers can interact with the hardware in a standard way.
Of course, NI is huge and incredibly successful – they defined their market over the past 30 years. PR and X are new, and both are creating new markets.
For e-commerce merchants and shoppers, PR is a web software company that provides a free review display and mining engine for merchants and a product research website for shoppers. Unlike other shopping websites, the focus is on product research and comparison so that the shopper can find the right product for him/her. The PR review engine is better than competitors because it’s free, in line with merchant interests, and self-hosted.
That is confusing and doesn’t feel tight – the reason is because there are two objectives, and the two aren’t always in sync (the buyer and seller are adversaries). This actually explains a lot about why things weren’t smooth when it came to product timelines and development.
On to X:
For emailers/corporate emailers/power emailers/Outlook users/???, X is a software company that analyzes your inbox to liberate the meaning and data contained within it. Unlike other competitors, the focus is not on better filing or organization of your mail but instead on the people and relationships within it.
Really, all of the blanks are questionable. The company emphasis and vision aren’t clear yet. The great things about both PR and X, though, are clear by doing this exercise – the value added is not just one or two features. If executed correctly, both are establishing new ways of doing things in e-commerce and communication.
When analyzing ideas and future companies/employers, this exercise will definitely be part of the toolkit. If it’s hard to come up with the blanks or if they sound crazy/fluffy, that may be a sign of weakness. If the blanks fill perfectly, though, keep going.
I’m now a Mac not PC
I finally bought a new MacBook this month. After a year of waiting for the rumors to come true (first Leopard, then Santa Rosa, then flash-based ultra-portables), I took the plunge and bought the middle-tier white one.
Moving from PC to Mac is something covered in a lot of locations; the most useful links I found are:
After one week of actually working on this laptop, here is a list of software I installed to get going.
Must Have for Survival
- Firefox
- This is a no-brainer, especially if you’re coming from PC. It’s a browser, it’s familiar, it works, and it has a ton of useful add-ons. I don’t know much about Safari and at this point I don’t really care.
- Adium
- A cross-platform IM client that works with GoogleTalk, AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, and more. It’s beautiful, has no ads, and works with no hitches as long as you’re an IM purist (in other words, you just IM – I don’t know much about the file transfer, video, etc., capabilities).
- Flip4Mac’s Windows Media Components for QuickTime
- For those times when you need to watch a video in Windows Media Player (WMP) format, this plug-in will allow the stream to work with the QuickTime Viewer.
Really Useful
- Growl
- Growl is a System Notifier that other programs plug into. It’s sort of like that little speech bubble that pops up in Windows XP near your clock saying that updates are available. In this case, though, any program can add support for Growl notifications, so you can always see these pop-ups for when people in IM get online, when Firefox has downloaded something, when GMail has a new message, and more. As expected, it looks beautiful.
- VLC
- Every other description calls this a “Swiss Army Knife” for video, so this may be the only thing you need for all of those video formats out there on the Internet.
- Transmission
- A free BitTorrent client so that you can find your favorite files online and get them quickly; if you want more functionality , Azareus also works well.
- CyberDuck
- You can use the command-line if you like, but if you want a pretty GUI for FTP, CyberDuck sounds like the best free choice. There is also a Firefox add-on called FireFTP, but I like my web and FTP client separated.
Memorex and Harry Potter
During my junior year at Clear Creek High School, I had an AP US History teacher named Ms. Cash. One of the vivid memories I have of that year is sitting in class one day while she lectured about some aspect of some event I no longer remember when she suddenly interjected with:
“I’m live not Memorex!” (or something like that)
I was the only one who snickered at the reference. Even Mrs. Cash seemed stunned, as she asked whether anyone knew what she was talking out. I was the only one who responded with a “yeah, it’s an old TV commercial“*.
At this point, she launched into a mini-rant about how you needed to understand pop culture to understand Americans and current events. That message, that pop culture both defines and explains history, has stuck with me ever since.
In the newest Esquire, Chuck Klosterman states that Harry Potter is likely the main shared experience for the majority of teens (and 20-somethings as well, right?), so he, a non-Harry Potter reader, will be clueless about culture in fifteen years as members of this age group becomes leaders in media.
Klosterman summarizes knowledge as belonging to one of three groups:
- Information that you know you know.
- Information that you know you don’t know.
- Information that you don’t know you don’t know.
That third point is why Mrs. Cash’s rant sticks with me – I hate the feeling of having no idea what people are talking about or referencing. That likely explains my reading, TV, and browsing habits.
* That isn’t the commercial I remember; it’s just the first one I could find on YouTube.
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