“… We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.”

So, on Aaron’s suggestion, I am now almost done reading Masters of Doom by David Kushner: the gripping and very inspiring tale about the guys that founded id software and their journey. This is an absolute must read for any startup founder. Told through through the eyes of John Carmack, John Romero, et al. (although in 3rd person), this book uncovers the many peaks and valleys that a startup will encounter in its early days and even in its most successful times. Although I don’t have the time to write a full post right now (working on an fb app), here’s the basic summary of what it takes, in the words of John Carmack himself:

The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers.

For more, read the book… you will not regret it!

“Startups are Like Medieval Monasteries”

While reading the blog of Scott Heiferman (co-founder of Meetup.com), I noticed a trackback to Marc Andreessen’s blog. Marc, in turn passed this quote on from Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin, who wrote on the blog of Guy Kawasaki. Anyway, now that all the introductions and credits are out of the way, I would like to finally share this quote with our readers:

In the early days, start-ups focus on how great it’s going to be when they succeed; but the moment they do, they start talking about how great it was before they did. Whenever I get this way, I remember the Venerable Bede’s complaint that his eighth century contemporaries had lost the fervor of seventh century monks. Even in the darkest of the Dark Ages, people were nostalgic for…the Dark Ages. Start-ups are like medieval monasteries: always convinced that paradise is just ahead or that things only recently got worse. If you can begin to enjoy the process of building a start-up rather than the outcome, you’ll be a better leader.

This is a very refreshing quote. Whenever you find yourself dreaming of buying a 10 million home in Barbados, or wondering how it could possibly be that your users rejected your latest and greatest as pure garbage, think of what Glenn said. And then, think why it was that Scott Heiferman, Marc Andreessen, and Guy Kawasaki agree with him. Oh, and if you tell me that all three of the above are now super successful and that they don’t count, well then I have no more words for you, except this humble plea: “re-read that quote again.”

No Sleep or Another Name for…

… getting the Startup Bug. It’s currently 1AM PST (as of the beginning of the writing of this post). It’s also about 30hrs till our self imposed goal of releasing what we expect to be a viral facebook app, and, eventually, a platform outside of facebook. It’s also bed-time, to get those precious 4-6 hrs of sleep that will enable me to actually meet that deadline. But, of course, sleep is not an option, because my head is suddenly spinning with ideas that I haven’t thought of prior to the impending release. I come out of my room, and surely my co-founder Jessica, who has just finished reading Citizen Marketers, is not sleeping either! I tell her what is going on through my head, and she responds with a resounding rant of both approval and constructive criticism. She tells me about the power of people, the power of groups, and the power of ideas. And that is really what our latest stuff is all about — bringing people into tight-knit communities, which generate powerful ideas (collective intelligence, that works). Since this blog is not meant for self-promotional posts, I will leave the readers with that and a promise of something groundbreaking in the coming months.

But, I think it’s time to get some shut-eye. Why? I have answered this before, and I will answer it again: no matter how much we brainstorm, it will ultimately be the users who will decide how groundbreaking our stuff truly is.

I might lose some sleep over that thought too… but that’s why I have the Startup Bug!

Alex Notov has been writing code since the age 10. He is a web application developer since the age of 17. Now 23, he is managing editor at Startupism.com, and Chief Geek (he isn’t a fan of formal titles) and co-founder of a Silicon Valley startup.

On Software and its Features

Our buddy Siqi, coder of Facebook Mafia, and RoR developer with our friends at Powerset, wrote a comment to Aaron’s last post. This stirred me to write my own (software developer’s) analysis of designing and writing software and picking the “right” features.

In The Republic Plato reminds us that “Necessity is the mother of invention.” This rings as true for invention, as it does for software. Or, at least, that’s how it should be in the ideal world. At the two extremes of the set of all bad software (web or otherwise), there are applications that 1) have a small array of features, but fail to fill any real a need/necessity or 2) have a ton of features, attempting to address a swiss-army knife set of problems and/or needs. In general, I believe in this: software that addresses a highly specific necessity and addresses the individual subsets of that necessity, on a feature-by-feature basis, is good software. To avoid philosophical discussions on the aspect of good vs bad interface design, accessibility of said features is a feature in itself, and thus a part of that subset.

So, as software developers, both web-based, and otherwise, how do we solve the above dilemma? I think one could write a doctorate paper on this subject. I, however, will humbly attempt to stick to the basic facts of my understanding of the matter. Good software begins, by definition, with an analysis of need. Unfortunately, software developers can never truly predict how their users will actually respond to their feature set. This is precisely why software should be designed incrementally with the core features that address specific problems. In my conversation with Siqi a few weeks ago, he posed an interesting interview question that he had been asked in the past (while the interviewer handed him nothing more than a piece of blank paper and a pencil): “Please build me a house!” Not surprisingly, Siqi informed me that the majority of candidates would begin their response by taking said piece of paper and drawing a proposal for the construction of a house! What is wrong with this picture?!?! In one of his witty cartoons Hans Bjordahl does a very good job at answering this question:

The idea here is that to write good software, it is the developers responsibility to first completely understand the need on its very basic level. In the case of the house, questions like “What size is the plot of land on which the house needs to be built?” or “How many rooms are needed?” are the types of questions a developer should ask when faced with the task of writing software — drawing a box with a triangle for a roof doesn’t quite cut it! I am surely going to use Siqi’s interview question when interviewing developers for our startup.

After the basic need is understood, very specific features should be designed/coded to address this specific need. Everything else comes through the maturity of the product, and the products’ users are the only ones to dictate that maturity. All in all, the design and coding of software is a highly iterative process. It requires user input at every step of the way. Thus, sticking to the core features first, and changing and building along the way is probably the only way to go — at least for startups. This methodology, however, does not only apply to smaller companies and startups. If it’s working at Google (12000+ employees, last I checked), it can work anywhere!

Iterative development is a subset of XP (eXtreme Programming). For more on XP, please start with the Wikipedia article. If you or someone you know chooses to write a detailed paper on the subject of software development using XP methodologies, I’d love to hear about it.

Alex Notov has been writing code since the age 10. He is a web application developer since the age of 17. Now 23, he is managing editor at Startupism.com, and Chief Geek (he isn’t a fan of formal titles) and co-founder of a Silicon Valley startup.

Facebook Users’ Collective Buying Power (a mini-rant)

So, as of my latest perusal of facebook’s usage statistics (as per Zuckerberg’s f8 speech), the number of daily returning users is “24 million and growing, 24 million and growing…” < If you read that last phrase out loud, it may have sounded like something Zuckerberg said in his f8 speech. Indeed, it may sound very funny! But, I believe quite strongly that this phrase is actually profound enough to be repeated twice, in fact thrice, four times, and maybe as many times as possible, till it rings clearly. This is not just another rant, so please read on…

Although I cannot claim to be a marketing guru, a sales professional, or a visionary of the future, one thing should seem fairly obvious to anyone, as it does to me. That is, if even a small percentage of these returning visitors had even the slightest real reason to pull out their credit card, debit card, or paypal account information, they would. It is no secret that more than 50% of the current facebook demographic are out of college (source: http://static.ak.facebook.com/press/facebook_statistics.pdf). Why do so many people insist that these are poor college students and that their buying power is not high enough to justify real apps? That is such bull$%#@! As soon as someone finds a business case for these users, and stops thinking about how to make the next widget, I will personally pull out my credit card/debit card (linked to dwindling bank account — ahhh, the joy of being a startup founder), and enter the 16 digits, followed by the expiration date, and the security code. And, please, don’t tell me, you (if you are a facebook user) won’t do the same, when faced with a facebook app that actually does something useful.

Alex Notov has been writing code since the age 10. He is a web application developer since the age of 17. Now 23, he is managing editor at Startupism.com, and Chief Geek (he isn’t a fan of formal titles) and co-founder of a Silicon Valley startup.

Startup - the Final Frontier…

… or so I hope as the co-founder of a new startup. Although not meant to be a self-indulgent post, I cannot help but be very thrilled to have finally made my move from my corporate/1099 consulting life in New York to the new and very exciting landscape of Silicon Valley.

For me, it came as a natural progression of things. My last two years had mostly been occupied by various consulting and contracting endeavors. The move from corporate work to contractual was my intermediary step to what I’ve always wanted to do — create something from scratch, make it truly my own. Having just come off a six-month project @ Adobe (http://kuler.adobe.com), and looking for the next exciting thing, I met Jessica Mah. And here I am — the Bay Area, coding what she and I strongly believe will eventually become a global services community and marketplace.

For many, the step to becoming a startup founder is not as logical or ideal. Most of us who have grand ideas and visions are often thwarted on the road to their realization by one factor or another, or a combination of a few: be it family, debt, a cushy job, a girlfriend back home, friends, a car lease, a recent passing of a family member… any of these, others, or a combination thereof. Only from the ones I listed (and there were others), I personally had 5. That is, until now. I had decidedly told myself that none of these should stop me from giving it a real shot — from diving into the water — because it truly is warm (if you choose to make it warm).

For all of you out there, who want to start your own business — for all budding entrepreneurs with a dream — there will always be reasons why you will tell yourself you can’t take this next step now. And while it is true that the waters you will chose to eventually tread are uncharted and often unexplored, that is precisely the reason why you should explore them! It is what makes us founders — it is that precise step into the unknown that potentially makes each of us the next Jobs, the next Gates, the next Larry, the next Sergei, and oh-so-many others =)

With these words, I wish all of us lots of success and luck (”luck is the residue of design”) in the coming days, weeks, months, and years, as explorers, visionaries, and bold conquerors of the final frontier.

Alex Notov has been writing code since the age 10. He is a web application developer since the age of 17. Now 23, he is managing editor at Startupism.com, and Chief Geek (he isn’t a fan of formal titles) and co-founder of a Silicon Valley startup.