Monday, May 31, 2010

Team versus Idea

A friend of mine has a job offer from a small technology startup. They just got funding and he's considering joining the ten or so other folks working there. His worry: what if their main product doesn't work out? What if it's a market failure? What then? Is he stuck looking for work again?

With the right team the answer is: no. The ideas will evolve quickly, and the team will land on something which is really going to work. It needn't look at all like the product they're building today, and that's OK. In fact a slavish adherence to the original plan, in the face of market ambivalence, is an extremely common failure mode for startups.

There are a number of great examples of adaptability from technology startup history. Here are two.

Exhibit A: Twitter. Here's how TechCrunch reported the debut of "Twttr" back in summer 2006.

...the fact that this is coming from Odeo makes me wonder—what is this company doing to make their core offering compelling? How do their shareholders feel about side projects like Twttr when their primary product line is, besides the excellent design, a total snoozer?
The point being that Twttr at the time was indeed a side project of Odeo—a company which was doing something completely different. Three months later Obvious Corporation (founded by Ev and Biz and Jack, now familiar as the inventors of Twitter) acquired Odeo, as well as the Twttr product, and six months after that Twitter was spun off as its own company. (Disclaimer: I work for Twitter)

Exhibit B: I'll let Cory Doctorow tell the story, as he told it on This Week in Tech last week.

Here’s what I mean by innovative, fast, smart development.

When I was dating the woman who is now my wife, Alice, I was on the board of a company called Ludicorp and they made a little flash game that was really fun. Alice lived in London, I lived in San Francisco and we had this long-distance relationship, and one day the Founder of Ludicorp came over to my place in San Francisco and said how’s it going with Alice? And I said you know, it’s going great and we share these photos of our days as we go through the day, but it’s a pain to do it, and he said, Oh! we’ve got photo sharing coming in the game, we’ll accelerate that feature.

And people really liked it. So they were revving the game a lot, like every 30 minutes, and eventually that feature grew to eclipse the game and they retitled the service Flickr.
And funnily enough you can see the vestige today in Flickr URLs like http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne. Originally the .gne stood for "game neverending", the Flash game which was the Flickr precursor.

This is an old concept: the 'A' team with a 'B' idea versus a 'B' team with an 'A' idea. Investors tend to prefer the former. Why? Because there's a good chance they'll improve upon the 'B' idea to make it great—whereas the 'B' team will most likely simply fail to execute on their 'A' idea.

I'm excited for my friend. I happen to think that the startup in question has a great team and will find success even if it's not based on their current product.

Unrelated: a photo from this weekend:

Serve

Saturday, May 29, 2010

WAT IS LIFE

Astonishing. I found this on Lamebook and felt compelled to post it here.

Shared on Facebook by "Steven", with whom I suspect it would be very interesting to spend some time:

BEEN TRYIN 2 WRITE MY THOUGHTS MORE SO CHCK THIS.

WAT IS LIFE? IS IT JUST THE OPPOSITE OF DETH OR IS IT SUMTHING MORE. WE KNO IT IS ON ALL THINGS LIKE FROGS AND STICKS AND SHIT BUT WHERE DOES THE LIFE GO WHEN THOSE THINGS DIE. I KNO FOR CERTIN THAT WHEN I DIE I AM RIDING WITH FUCKIN JESUS BUT EVEN THAT HAS GOT ME ASKIN QUESTIONS. LIKE WAT R WE GONNA DO FOR ETERNITY. IS ME AN JESUS JUST GOIN 2 PRETTY MUCH CONSTANTLY FIGHT DEMONS? DO THEY NEVER DIE? WTF R WE SUPPOSED 2 DO IF WE KILL ALL THE DEMONS AND DEVILS AND SHIT AFTER A THOUSAND YEARS. THERES STILL GONNA BE MILLIONS OF YEARS LEFT. MY PAPS USED 2 TELL ME THAT WED BE ROLLIN IN MEDOWS WITH FLOWERS AND SHIT BUT I DO THAT HERE AND IT GETS BORING AFTER LIKE 10 MINETS AND MAYBE IF I TRIED REALLY REALLY FUCKIN HARD I COULD ROLL ROUND IN A GRASSY FIELD FOR LIKE MAYBE 30 OR 40 MINETS BUT HOW THE FUCK AM I GONNA DO THAT SHIT FOR MILLIONS OF FUCKIN YEARS. SO I GUESS I HAVE 2 END THIS DA SAME WAY AS I STARTED WAT IS LIFE.

The mind boggles.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Maker Faire

According to Wikipedia, Maker Faire is an event created by Make Magazine to "celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset". According to me, it's a festival of creativity. Every year I've been there I've been blown away by the ingenuity, the friendliness, the innovation, the enthusiasm, and—especially the last couple of years with it attracting a more mainstream crowd—the excitement of hundreds of wide-eyed kids. It's enormously energizing.

There are homemade human-powered vehicles, cars modified to get 100mpg+, science experiments, flames and kinetics, lasers, Tesla coils, soldering workshops and surface-mounting classes. There's a life-sized mousetrap setup, neon light glass-blowing, wooden computers, high-speed photography, metalworking, and much more. It's a unique and phenomenal gathering of geeks, artists, and imaginative souls.

Witness "Deus Ex Machina, a large-scale swing with a computer controlled interactive water plane that makes shapes and text. Using water released from solenoid valves, a plane is created in front of the swing rider. A sensor tells the machine the rider's position as shapes and messages descend in the rider's path". Amazingly clever (see the video) and huge fun for kids:

Swing

There was also The Ant, an enormous interactive installation spewing fire out of its arched back. Eight pads at ground level, amenable to pounding by adrenalized children, controlled fiery emissions from eight separate flame-throwers mounted high above:

The Ant

Check out the crazy piano, too. I'm not even quite sure what this is or how it related to the central Maypole but it was pretty cool:

Steampunk Piano

Steampunk is quite a "thing" at Maker Faire and it prompted me to do some research on what it is and where it's from. Short story, my interpretation: an alternate future projected forward from the pre-electronic mid-1800s. Intricate and clever gadgets abound, but powered by springs or steam. If nothing else it reminds you of the pointlessness of projecting a century forward from where you are. Nigh impossible to predict the upcoming technological revolutions.

Steampunk

Like many a faire, there's ice cream:

Kid at Ice Cream Store

Wendy enjoyed this aspect too.

Wendy Eats

Full set of photos on Flickr.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Andrea's Birthday

Andrea's a dear dear friend and we went to Oakland for her birthday. OAK-LAND!

She has a roof garden above her apartment and we hung out in the sunshine. At 4pm you could see the San Francisco skyline across the Bay. By 6pm the city was covered in fog but the deck was warm and sunny and glorious.

Birthday cupcakes:

Cupcakes
Me:
Isaac
Andrea:
Andrea

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Afternoon Ballgame

My team at work went to an afternoon baseball game this week. Courtesy of a generous donor, we had a box for the midday game between the San Francisco Giants and the San Diego Padres at AT&T Park.

AT&T Park

As an Englishman who didn't grow up with the sport, and recent drug scandals notwithstanding, I have a strong feeling for the romance of the game. Fifty years older than American football (yes, that's what Wikipedia calls it), and the subject of such wonderfully schmaltzy movies as Field Of Dreams, baseball seems somehow quintessentially American like no other sport.

An informal survey reveals answers to the question "who's the most famous player of all time?" for various sports:

Spot the outlier? The guy who was born 50 years before any of the others? That's because baseball is special. Its history lends it a definite eminence—or at least in the eyes of this immigrant.

Nonetheless, my own history with baseball doesn't go quite so deep. I went to a Yankees game in New York in 1998, maybe a dozen Rockies games while living in Denver 2003–2005, but until this week I'd never been to see the Giants play in San Francisco. Thursday's work outing was a chance to see the AT&T Park at its best: a glorious sunny day and a close game.

The field itself is great, too. Lovely view of the San Francisco Bay stretching out to Oakland:

Bay
and the view of the action was fantastic, with the Bay Bridge visible top-right:
Pitch

The Giants lost 0–1, but what a lovely way to spend a weekday afternoon.

Mark

Full set of photos on Flickr.

Monday, May 10, 2010

Bernal Heights

Following on from my last post about Bernal being a photographic inspiration, here's a picture from our walk yesterday:

Bernal Heights

I mean seriously, how could you not love these wilds being on your doorstep?

Sunday, May 09, 2010

Walking up Bernal

Saturdays and Sundays Wendy and I like to walk up and over Bernal, rambling over the peak and through the surrounding neighborhoods. The top of the hill is rich and wild with great views of the city; on clear days you can see the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge from a single vantage point.

The area round the edge of the park is threaded with tangled streets, often winding up vertiginous slopes (it's a little-known fact that San Francisco's steepest street section is on Bernal).

It's a constantphotographicinspiration, even after five years of living here.

Powhattan & Nevada
Flowers
VW Van
Flowers
Gate
Alabama Street
Photo Opp

Saturday, May 08, 2010

Wendy and Balloons

Wendy in Bernal sunshine. Taken last week.

Wendy and Balloons

Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Google Replay

Sad but true: in 3½ years at Google I never compiled a protocol buffer. I also never contributed directly to the launch of a consumer product on google.com. Making up for lost time at Twitter, though, in my first few weeks there I've done both.

Enter Google Replay.

Search for Bieber on Google Replay and it'll show you a chart of the volume of Justin Bieber tweets this month. If you wonder what the spike is on April 10th, you can drill down by clicking on the timeline, and then again, to individual tweets about the JB sketch on SNL. Pretty cool! See also: results for Chirp, the Twitter developer conference.

Puzzler: below is a chart showing tweet volume (from Google Replay) for a two-word search term over the last few months. Notice the pattern of weekends (green) and the anomaly (red). Name the search term.

Screen shot 2010-04-28 at 11.29.11 PM.png