Lessons from Startup Weekend

I had an exhausting but fun weekend at the Athens Startup Weekend a few days ago. Along with Christos I joined Yannis, Panagiotis Christakos and Babis Makrinikolas on the Newspeek project. When Yannis pitched the idea on Friday night, the main concept was to create a mobile phone application that would provide a better way to view news on the go. I don't believe it was very clear in his mind then, what would constitute a "better" experience, but after some chatting about it we all defined a few key aspects, which we refined later with lots of useful feedback and help from George. Surprisingly, for me at least, in only two days we managed to design, build and present a working prototype in front of the judges and the other teams. And even though the demo wasn't exactly on par with our accomplishments, I'm still amazed at what can be created in such a short time frame.

Newspeek, our product, had a server-side component that periodically collected news items from various news feeds, stored them and provided them to clients through a simple REST API. It also had an iPhone client that fetched the news items and presented them to the user in a way that respected the UI requirements and established UX norms for that device.

So, in the interest of informing future participants about what works and what doesn't work in Startup Weekend, here are the lessons I learned:

1. If you plan to win, work on the business aspect, not on the technology. Personally, I didn't go to ASW with plans to create a startup, so I didn't care that much about winning. I mostly considered the event as a hackathon, and tried my best to end up with a working prototype. Other teams focused more on the business side of things, which is understandable, given the prize. Investors fund teams that have a good chance to return a profit, not the ones with cool technology and (mostly) working demos. Still, the small number of actual working prototypes was a disappointment for me. Even though the developers were the majority in the event, you obviously can't have too many of them in a Startup Weekend.
2. For quick server-side prototyping and hosting, Google App Engine is your friend. Since everyone in the team had Java experience, we could have gone with a JavaEE solution and set up a dedicated server to host the site. But, since I've always wanted to try App Engine for Java and the service architecture mapped nicely to it, we tried a short experiment to see if it could fly. We built a stub service in just a few minutes, so we decided it was well worth it. Building our RESTful service was really fast, scalability was never a concern and the deployment solution was a godsend, since the hosting service provided for free by the event sponsors was evidently overloaded. We're definitely going to use it again for other projects.
3. jQTouch rocks! Since our main deliverable would be an iPhone application, and there were only two of us who had ever built an iPhone application (of the Hello World variety), we knew we had a problem. Fortunately, I had followed the jQTouch development from a reasonable distance and had witnessed the good things people had to say, so I pitched the idea of a web application to the team and it was well received. iPhone applications built with web technologies and jQTouch can be almost indistinguishable from native ones. We all had some experience in building web applications, so the prospect of having a working prototype in only two days seemed within the realm of possibility again. The future option of packaging the application with PhoneGap and selling it in the App Store was also a bonus point for our modest business plan.
4. For ad-hoc collaboration, Mercurial wins. Without time to set up central repositories, a DVCS was the obvious choice, and Mercurial has both bundles and a standalone server that make collaborative coding a breeze. If we had zeroconf/bonjour set up in all of our laptops, we would have used the zeroconf extension for dead easy machine lookup, but even without it things worked flawlessly.
5. You can write code with a netbook. Since I haven't owned a laptop for the last three years, my only portable computer is an Asus EEE PC 901 running Linux. Its original purpose was to allow me to browse the web from the comfort of my couch. Lately however, I'm finding myself using it to write software more than anything else. During the Startup Weekend it had constantly open Eclipse (for server-side code), Firefox (for JavaScript debugging), Chrome (for webkit rendering), gedit (for client-side code) and a terminal, without breaking a sweat.
6. When demoing an iPhone application, whatever you do, don't sweat. Half-way through our presentation, tapping the buttons didn't work reliably all the time, so anxiety ensued. Since we couldn't make a proper presentation due to a missing cable, we opted for a live demo, wherein Yannis held the mic and made the presentation, and I posed as the bimbo that holds the product and clicks around. After a while we ended up both touching the screen, trying to make the bloody buttons click, which ensured the opposite effect. In retrospect, using a cloth occasionally would have made for a smoother demo, plus we could have slipped a joke in there, to keep the spirit up.

All in all it was an awesome experience, where we learned how far we can stretch ourselves, made new friends and caught up with old ones. Next year, I'll make sure I have a napkin, too.

Job hunting is like dating

Paul Buchheit posted an interesting analysis of social networking products, their similarities and differences. In there he has hidden a rare gem:

10. Jobs. Job hunting and hiring are essentially the "professional" analog of dating and seem to work in somewhat similar ways.

Shaking Hands, by Aidan Jones

If you ponder it a bit, it sounds about right, doesn't it? People look for jobs they like and hiring managers look for candidates they like. When there is a match, there is a hire. The parallels are many:

• Dumping/seduction: an employee will dump his current job for a better one, often due to seducing promises from their hiring manager.
• Bachelorhood/marriage: some people change jobs like crazy (especially in the States), while others stick to one for life (quite common in Japan).
  
• Stagnation: employment relationships, like sexual ones, tend to stagnate after a long period of time, when people lose interest in it.
• We might as well admit it, women and work are the two dominant discussion subjects with one's friends, after midnight.
• When one gets caught cheating on his wife/company, they go to court.
• Girls have breasts, jobs have salaries. The bigger, the better.
• People get jealous of their friends who make more money than they do.
  

Now, what does that mean for us? Are you happy with your current girlfr..., er, job? If not, could you perhaps find some new project / technology / tool / sexual position to stimulate your interest? Or is it perhaps time to be on the market again?

The Big Blue Blues

Bob Cringely has a two-part story on IBM's LEAN project. LEAN is a plan conceived by the executive team around CEO Sam Palmisano, to improve profitability by reducing costs. The idea is to offshore and outsource most of IBM's US-based operations to countries like India and China where it has been building up its presence during the last few years. The way this works goes like this: first of all, you pick the most expensive employees on your staff and you fire them. Then you make the remaining staff work overtime unpaid, to take on their responsibilities, so that customers don't start suing. Finally, you bring in new cheap labor to replace the ones who got the boot and hope they'll get the job done.

This is apparently the way you do business in publicly-traded companies these days. Product quality and brand value may go down the drain, but if such things please the stock market, then the executives can eventually cash-in their options and retire to Hawaii. The poor sobs that got the sack will be in a less advantageous position, unfortunately. Trying to find a job at their age is not something one likes to dream about. You see, the ones who get fired are not necessarily the ones with the larger paycheck. If that was the plan, the CEO would probably have to go first. No siree. Executive-types worry the most about having to pay pensions for their retired employees. So, instead of identifying the real blocks for increasing productivity, they just reduce costs and pretend that it's all well and dandy.

Apart from Cringely's excellent analysis, what is even more interesting is the comment section in his first post. Many anonymous IBMers have shed more light into the matter and also into the company's business practices of late. Underbidding contracts, mismanaging projects, lying to customers and 9 layers of management are the ones that stand out for me. The situation appears to be helpless. People come out frustrated, disappointed and in despair. Someone who used to work for DEC in the 80's said it was all too familiar for him. I have also been getting similar signals myself.

I have worked in an IBM project as a subcontractor for the better part of a year. My experience was rather good, all things considered, and I made quite a few friends there. This was a few years ago and the project was apparently a huge success for Big Blue. The team was hard-working, well-organized and included some very talented engineers. We were lucky enough to have probably the best project manager in IBM Greece's payroll, as I was told. And it certainly matched my experience. However, we were the exception. The word on the street was that IBM execution sucked big time. Virtually everyone admitted it. And not just project management, but other layers, too. I heard stories about constant quarrels in the team and lousy interactions with the customers. I know people who were fed up with the company and left. And based on multiple reports as well as personal experience, I wouldn't rate their engineering as first class.

The problem with 800-pound gorillas is their weight. Their greatest strength is eventually their doom.

You don't underbid if you are an 800-pound gorilla. That's common sense. Brand value is expected to be paid for. Startups know all too well how a slim profit feels like. If you miscalculate your expenses, you suffer. It's the risk you have to take to fight against the big boys. But startups have less fat than big firms. They haven't lived long enough to accumulate dysfunctional support layers that help run things but do not contribute to the bottom line. Big corporations can't afford not to make money to support their less profitable units. At least they can't be doing it for a long time.

Then there is the issue of mentality. On every successful project you have one or more champions. The people who are the stakeholders and carry the rest along the path to success. Big organizations have a tendency to dilute responsibilities among many people, without necessarily empowering them or giving them enough room to function. Eventually employees develop a public servant attitude and invest just the necessary effort for a minimally accepted outcome. If project managers were also architects perhaps it could work, but that is very rarely the case in my experience. Startups on the other hand are constantly running like there is now tomorrow. Continuously trying to outperform, outsmart, out-engineer their competitors in order to get a larger piece of the pie. Until they grow, of course, and become gorillas of their own, and age, stagnate and eventually die. Or maybe split up into many smaller groups that can be restructured as a startup again. Like what should have happened with IBM in the 90's, as one poster commented.

It's the same thing as what has already happened to Microsoft. And what will probably happen to Google in, say, 20 years. It's quite normal actually. But sad. And if you are trapped in there you might want to start searching for the emergency exit.

When I was graduating from college, I considered the worst aspect of working for IBM to be the dress code. I didn't wear suits at the time. As I found out, things have improved in that area. Unfortunately, virtually everything else has gone south.

Paul Graham on Startups

When I began this blog I made a deal with myself that I would not post more than once or twice a week, but lately I just can't help it. I could use the excuse that I'm on holidays, I suppose. It's the Orthodox Easter over here, and Greece is covered with a smell of roast lamb. It's a sunny weekend, people walk around at a snail's pace, birds singing, flowers blossoming, you know how it is. I just got inside for a minute to check on my e-mail (I know, I know) and I discovered pure gold: Paul Graham's essays have an RSS feed! I don't know how long it has been out there, but I just stumbled upon it, and man, did that made my day! That and the roast lamb, of course.

After subscribing, I found out there were a few recent essays that I had missed. The one I want to particularly mention is Why to Not Not Start a Startup. Since this is a topic I am very interested in, I read it without even blinking. That alone could explain the tears in my eyes, but there is more to it. I've been a Paul Graham fan for quite some time, even though I'm not into Lisp. His writing style is marvelous and his wealth of experience, invaluable. I would like to take this essay and stick it in the faces of various investors we've met over the years. Not that it would change anything, but it would make me feel better, at least. I had been planning to write about a few of his points myself, but since I could never hope to be so eloquent, go read them straight from The Man.

There were moments of discomfort, I must confess. Like when I read the following:

"If you don't think you're smart enough to start a startup doing something technically difficult, just write enterprise software. Enterprise software companies aren't technology companies, they're sales companies, and sales depends mostly on effort."

Ouch. I know it's true, but it always hurts to admit it.

There are other well-established observations in there, like the consulting-to-product business transformation:

"What you can do, if you have a family and want to start a startup, is start a consulting business you can then gradually turn into a product business. Empirically the chances of pulling that off seem very small. You're never going to produce Google this way. But at least you'll never be without an income."

The chances may be small indeed, but, hey, it worked for Joel.

Also on the well-known territory:

"In a good startup, you don't get told what to do very much. There may be one person whose job title is CEO, but till the company has about twelve people no one should be telling anyone what to do. That's too inefficient. Each person should just do what they need to without anyone telling them."

Yep, I can fondly remember why we started it all.

Envy

"I'm just a jealous guy". Reading the news about Oracle acquiring Tangosol instantly brought John Lennon's voice in my head. It's Tangosol of course that I'm jealous of. As a matter of fact, I don't know of anyone who would be jealous of Oracle. Larry himself is a different story. He's got that ultra-luxurious feng shui mansion of his that I would die for, but I guess that's what you would expect from a gazillionaire. Tangosol, on the other hand are (or at least were) some regular guys just like me, working their asses off developing software. Except that I'm a software developer of the garden-variety, whereas they're of the genius one.

Still, I don't believe that's the only thing that made them filthy rich. At least I hope they are filthy rich. I don't have any inside information, but from what I've seen on the Net, Cameron Purdy & friends are really nice guys and absolutely deserved to be rewarded like Sultans. Something that cannot be said about other Java celebrities, that are now dancing with their red hats in their own dollar ponds. Anyway. Acquisitions are very hot lately with RedHat acquiring JBoss and Exadel, IONA acquiring C24, BEA acquiring SolarMetric, etc. It appears that the dot-com bust days are behind us for good.

What I particularly like about Tangosol is that they appear to have made it without any VC funding. Hats off to them if that is the case. We've been trying to pull the same lonely stunt where I work and it has been really hard so far. Most people we talk to, consider it a raving success that we're still hanging on our own after seven years, in such a small and distorted market. I mean, yeah, in theory we're doing the right thing, but if you consider the way the IT services sector functions in Greece, it's pretty much a leap of faith. The reasons are manifold:

Small market: many small fish can survive in a big pond, but as the pond gets smaller, the big fish have to eat more than their fair share to survive. And if they ever sense the inner fear of survival, then you can forget about level playing fields and gentle sports. Getting a contract gets ugly.
Cost sensitive market: being the best girl in town isn't as important as being the cheapest. You may be providing cutting-edge technology, state-of-the-art solutions, or the cure to world hunger, but unless you can beat their price, you are irrelevant. This should come as no surprise if one considers the characteristics of Greek economy. Large state sector, small private sector. State is a big spender, but non-deterministic in meeting obligations, payments, even deadlines. On the other hand private companies are obsessed with shrinking costs and conservative spending. It is sad how few companies actually consider Information Technology as something that would significally affect their competitiveness, ergo their bottom line.
Risk-averse VCs: VCs, like everybody else around here, would like to make big bucks without doing anything hard or, heaven forbid, risky. Recently I've heard of a successful Greek startup in microelectronics that failed to attract Greek VC funding, despite the exceptional prospects of their business plan. What the VCs told them, was that they couldn't back them, but if they could find foreign VCs willing to invest, then they would ride along. That's like saying, hey, I'm rather incompetent at evaluating business plans, but if you can find someone who knows this stuff and says it's OK, then I'll join you guys! Yeah, like we'll need your sorry arse then. What a bunch of wimps. From personal experience, when we were presenting our business plan to a local VC once, the guy that would evaluate it was at the same time preparing his proposal on a different business plan, from a local tavern. Judging by his eventual comments on our business plan, he must have had a hard time figuring out which is which.

It's funny, but I can't think of a single acquisition in the IT sector in Greece that was made in order to obtain the valuable IP of the acquired company or to enhance the product or solution portfolio of the acquirer. Here, big companies usually buy smaller ones in order to get a grip on their distribution channels, or to expand their customer base and get some more leads.

Maybe they are right. After all, who ever prospered around here by simply being better? Perhaps only in the souvlaki business.

Lucky bastards those Tangosol guys. The Oracle thing was easy. Pfff. Come and pull this stunt in Greece if you dare!