startup food observations
The Auctomatics are currently back in their respective homelands, which means we get fed. Harj’s observation below made me giggle, because that’s what the past few months have been like.
[13:32] harjeet: ok chaps, time for some lunch
[13:32] harjeet: mummy’s chicken
[13:32] harjeet: its not quite cereal
[13:32] Kulveer: lol
[13:33] harjeet: but close
[13:33] Kulveer: yeah i’ve turned into a fat b*****d
[13:33] Kulveer: was stuffed at 9am today
[13:33] Kulveer: still recovering
[13:33] Kulveer: the food is too tasty
[13:33] kastp: ha!
[13:33] kastp: the collison household is full of food.
[13:35] kastp: it is awesome to eat and not be thinking “oh, gotta go to the store and get more [x] now”
[13:46] harjeet: i still cant get used to this process of
[13:46] harjeet: hunger –> walk two steps –> eat –> sit back down
[13:46] harjeet: its bizarre
[13:46] harjeet: usually its
[13:47] harjeet: hunger –> ignore –> severe hunger –> walk around kitchen –> sit down –> chronic hunger –> ask if someone else is hungry –> indecision –> order pizza –> wait 40 mins –> eat pizza
[13:47] Kulveer: lol
Kastp is Phil Kast, who is currently staying with Patrick in Ireland and helping us out.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment
We’re about to launch Auctomatic at eBay Live in Boston, and it just struck me how much our friends are helping us out/have helped us. So, I decided to outline here the specific help we’ve had, to give an example how powerful your network can be.
1. The Auctomatic journey started with the help of Srini Panguluri of YouOs. He helped us learn how to code, and then helped us build the Auctomatic prototype that we demo’ed at Investor Day. That was critical.
2. Back in January, Boso was having some real issues with page load times (our server was in the UK and latency was a nightmare, it was taking 6-8 seconds to load pages!). Anyway, I knew that one of the YC Winter Fundees were experts in this sort of stuff, so I emailed Joe Cooper of Virtualmin a friendly note asking if he’d take a look at what was so wrong with our set up. What’s cool is that Joe is a leading expert on this, he has a god-damn book about it too, so that was cool. We implemented the suggestions he gave us and sure enough load times shrunk significantly to 20% of what they were before.
3. When we came back from England in April, Crystal Towers were being assy about letting us get a room there, Robby Walker of Zenter was an absolute star and let us crash with him for a week until we sorted out somewhere else to stay. This was really important because we had a big VC pitch that week and staying with him let us work comfortably.
4. Following on with the accommodation theme, Adam and Josh of Tsumobi were extremely generous and donated us their desks, chairs, whiteboards and mattress to help us get started in our new flat. Apart from saving us a bit of money, what was really useful was the time saved in having to get all this stuff for ourself. That’s valuable. Also, Chris Smoak of Shoutfit was kind enough to lend me his jeep to pick the furniture up.
5. Srini (again) drove Patrick to our Colo in Fremont today to help us set up our servers, and he configured Apache for all of them. This close to launching, all the time saved is really valuable (and he’s pretty good at it).
6. In Boston, a bunch of the current Summer Founders of Y Combinator are going to be helping us at the conference. Since the amount of leads we get depends on how many people we have there, I’m really happy about this!
7. Adam of Tsumobi (again) will also be putting us up here in Boston, which again will save us a ton of money in this absurdly-expensive-hotel town.
8. Alexis of Reddit fame has been helping me brainstorm for the marketing we plan on doing. He’s brilliant (and experienced) at it, so this is greatly appreciated. He had the idea of doing a live webcast from eBay Live for the people who can’t watch it around the world, and so we decided to investigate and alas, we hopefully will be doing one thanks to…
9. …Justin, Kyle, Emmett and Michael from Justin.tv – for giving us a camera and the platform to launch our own channel on the network, starting from eBay Live. The turnaround/execution on this idea was superfast, and it’s not 100% that we’ll be able to do it, but if we can, it’ll be huge for us, and it gives us a lot more scope to gain visibility in the market.
10. Matt Brezina of Xobni has been great at sharing his experience of raising investment with us. He’s answering the questions I wouldn’t feel comfortable asking others.
I’m sure I’ve missed out some other examples, but these are the ones at the forefront of my mind at 4.45am in Boston right now. We’ve had a ton of other help, from Obvious and from Naval to name a few, but I wanted to just highlight the power of our peer group (and therefore of Y Combinator) for now.
Filed under: network, Y Combinator | 4 Comments
Tags: auctomatic
The Black Swan, Taleb’s new book
Writing a quick note about Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s new book, The Black Swan, which is being released next week.
I read his previous book Fooled by Randomness a couple of years ago and it was easily one of the best books I’ve read. Perhaps a close second to my favourite How the Mind Works. It’s much better than the fluffy stuff you find in books like “Wisdom of the Crowds”.
Anyway, you should read this. Here’s a synopsis:
A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.” For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them. Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications “The Black Swan” will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. “The Black Swan” is a landmark book – itself a black swan.
And yes, I am recommending a book I haven’t read yet.
Filed under: nassim nicholas taleb, the black swan | Leave a Comment
Tags: fooled by randomness
Startup School 2007 notes
Here are my notes from Saturday’s Startup School at Stanford (cos the world really needed more, but heck I wrote them so might as well share them).
I didn’t make notes for every speaker, as I kept getting distracted by Justin, but I covered Mike Mandel, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, Mark Zuckerberg and Ali Partovi. Hope these make sense.
My favourite talk was Paul Graham’s (‘Why Not Not to Start a Startup’), closely followed by Max’s entertaining talk and Mark Zuckerberg’s.
Thank you to Jessica for all her hard work in setting up the event!
1. Michael Mandel – Chief Economist, BusinessWeek
- The US is at an advantage to the rest of the world because it encourages people to take chances, rewards people well if they succeed, and because it allows businesses that fail to go under
- China’s debt is apparently near $1tr
- Not worried about issues like Social Security, Medicare, the Trade/Budget deficit, but is worried about a slowdown in US productivity growth, which is apparently as low as it has been since 1997.
2. Max Levchin – Founder, Slide, PayPal
Max gave a very useful crash course in product management.
- Engineers aren’t good at the details, hence interfaces become harder than need be
- User Interface is 80% of the problem
- The trick about being a good product manager, is the ability to sit in front of a computer and lose 80% of your IQ, and imagine how a 15 year old may use your site. It’s similar to having an ‘out of body experience’, and being able to think like “she’s not gonna type anything, so we need a big button, which say ‘Get yours now’”
- Recommends everyone takes at least one stats class
- 20 ppl (typical usability testing group size) is not statistically significant sample. Really need to be able to model large scale users behaviour
- MEASURE EVERYTHING. clicks, mouse overs, funnels, exits, you have to build your own tools to do this well. As an engineer you’ll understand the patterns you see in the stats.
- In the stats, tail the logs, graph the results, look for troughs, find the anomalies, because somewhere in there, there’s a hint about what your users want to do
- Definition of an entrepreneur: a person who doesn’t really care what company they are starting, they just want to start a company.
- When metrics are flat, throw in towel, learn how to figure it out
- Don’t confuse things which are hard but not valuable. Most valuable things are hard. Most hard things are worthless
- Friendster’s really complicated friend mapping vs. “Is in my extended network” in MySpace
(I thought this example was hilarious)
- 8.5% Male is red/green colourblind, so don’t use that colour combination on your site
- Blue is reliable as a design colour
- Can design for scrolling now, as most people use scroll wheels now
- When you’re thinking about your product, ask yourself, is this is going to fit into a 7 deadly sins bite?
- When figuring out motivation for users, think about the 7 deadly sins. Think about envy.
- Let the user do some work before getting the payoff. If it’s really simple, they aren’t going to believe it’s valuable.
- Get the trade-off right between overcommitment vs. undercommitment
- eBay’s sign up page has an 80% drop-off rate
3. Ali Partovi – Founder, iLike; CEO, GarageBand.com; Founder, LinkExchange
Ali and his brother discussed the criteria for assessing new business ideas/opportunities.
- Is idea a winner?
Can I easily explain what people want in 1 or 2 sentences. More important to explain a customer need. Better than marketing and so on.
- Does it scale?
Can we double revenues without doubling costs? (increasing returns to scale).
- Am I creating added value?
Co-opetition: Size of pie with me in game vs. without me, does it increase?
- Will users naturally recruit new users?
Pure use of something will naturally cause new people to use it.
- Will the value for each customer increase as new people join?
Network effects.
- Am I passionate about this idea?
“Success is 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration”, Edison
Things an entrepreneur should do:
1. listen to customers (put yourselves in their head), e.g. Zappos, everyone works in customer service for 4 weeks when they join
2. Stack rank top problems and top people every few weeks
3. Frugality is easy without VC money, (think of it as a loan)
4. Moving quickly, split decisions amongst founders
5. Have a strong CEO, it makes a big difference to have the best sales person to deal with outside view of the company, titles are not important internally.
6. Focus, ideas are abundant, don’t spread yourself thin
7. Hiring and recruiting at top of priority list. This is not taught at school, taught stuff like problem sets. Judging people is the most important skill you can learn in life.
Things an entrepreneur should not do:
1. Press – keep it in context, it’s a tool, not the goal. Netscape anecdote, where they became obsessed with press releases and took their focus off the product
2. Company culture – natural tendency is set to become political. At about 20 ppl, it sets in, and then can’t get rid of it. So focus on this early on.
3. Better to have any deal, than none. Make them quick. No need to be perfect.
4. Way better to miss potential good guys than hire potential failures. Firing people is good for morale. Other people figure it out if you have slackers around. Get rid of them quickly.
4. Mitch Kapor, Founder, Lotus
Single most demotivating thing for team, is when you make promises and create expecations that you cannot match. What you can do?
1. Take Culture Seriously
- every action and inaction sends a message
2. Walk the walk yourself
- reduce gap between stated values and actual practice
3. Hold people accountable
- are you tolerating abusive behaviour by star performers?
5. Greg McAdoo, Sequoia Capital
His criteria for assessing entrepreneurs and investment opportunities:
1. How succinct can you be? Can you have clarity with everyone? (investors, customers, partners)
2. Know your business – encapsulate what you do in 5/6 words
3. Define the problem and solution, he is looking for intellectual honesty and the ability to understand the audience. Can you effectively communicate solutions?
4. Get out early and iterate
5. Know your competition – are you thoughtful and honest about them?
6. Understand the market -ecosystem, trends, dynamics, leverage, speed, distribution, customers. What wave are you riding?
7. Size the Market, for Hardware companies, they want to see the opportunity to get to $1bn revenues, for Services, $2-3bn (because of lower margins)
8. Know yourself – the ability for introspection is rare. Do you know if you are a Functional Contributor, interim executive, or want to go for the distance?
9. Don’t try to compete feature for feature with big companies. Look for customers, who’s hair is on fire, and you wanna sell them the firehose.
e.g.
Market size for vitamins $5bn
Pharmaceuticals $156bn
6. Mark Zuckerberg, Founder, Facebook
Mark’s talk was fantastic. He had two themes:
1. The importance of being young
Young people are smart. Young people have simpler lives, they have no family, no mortgage and no car to worry about. This allows you to be idealistic, and focus on the important things.
Never compromise intelligence for experience. Equally important that they care about what you’re doing.
2. The importance of being technical
Anecdote about Matt Cohler, who when they first met, used SQL queries on the database to look at the stats instead of asking Mark lots of questions about it. Being technical gives you leverage.
General points:
- Everyone who you work with, who isn’t young or technical, will likely play it down. Experience has value, but the converse is true as well.
- Don’t add things to the development process that slow things down
- Give power to people who want to iterate
- Facebook is deeply a technical company, they have 1.5bn pageviews a day, and the newsfeed processes 300m news clips a day, which is more news than all other media has had over all time (though of course, it’s a different kind of news)
- Philosophy: break things. If you don’t break things, you aren’t going quickly enough. The way ppl learn is by making mistakes.
- Humanity organises itself through its social ties. Information is filtered through people. Having knowledge of the social graph, is going to be important in knowing what’s relevant in the world
Filed under: ali partovi, entrepreneur advice, mark zuckerberg, max levchin, michael mandel, mitch kapor, Paul Graham, product management, Startup School, Y Combinator | 2 Comments
This is a rushed post because I just realised my second Viewpoint went up on the BBC, and I haven’t actually mentioned Auctomatic yet on this blog.
So, this is the quick pitch:
1) The feedback we got from Boso members was that they used our site because of its easy and simple interface, and this was enough of an incentive not to use eBay
2) On coming to the US, we thought we should tackle this problem in eBay itself
3) After a bit of research, it quickly emerged that this opportunity was too good to ignore, and so we decided to launch Auctomatic.
Srini Panguluri of YouOS fame has been the ninja developer behind this, ably assisted by Harjeet and our new team member, Thomas Schmidt, who recently moved here from Paris, and looks after our interface design.
Our approach is to tackle the ‘low lying apples’ first, so we are building the core and simple tools first, in close communication with some big powersellers. Later, we’ll integrate the more exotic functionality.
Filed under: srini panguluri, thomas schmidt, Y Combinator | 1 Comment
Tags: auctomatic, boso, harjeet taggar, Kulveer Taggar
Justin.tv is live!
Justin.tv has just launched.
It’s the first 24/7 reality internet tv show where the host is not tied to a fixed PC webcam. This is from the same guys who founded Kiko, the online Ajax calender (a previous Y Combinator company).
Briefly, what’s special is these guys have developed a cost-effective way to broadcast video 24/7 to the internet, which is a non-trivial problem to solve. The implications are huge – citizen journalism has potentially entered a new level.
Anyway, I’m bullish on this venture, because:
1. This team has the right experience. Kiko was great software, which managed to hold its own vs. the competiton (ignoring Google Calendar). I personally know the guys and think they have all the important skill sets covered in the founding team. They are a dedicated and very talented bunch.
2. I think this is interesting. Despite the sceptics saying it won’t be interesting to watch a “normal guy” 24/7, it becomes surprisingly addictive, exactly the same way that we watch normal people on Big Brother.
3. This technology is pretty special. Being able to broadcast around the clock, whilst moving around, opens up a whole lot of possibilities for journalism.
4. The ‘platform’ that Justin.tv is enabling is huge. We can all basically become our own tv channel.
5. It’s slightly crazy.
Anyhoo, we’re going to be on Justin.tv at 1.30pm Pacific Time, which is 8.30pm UK time. Message me if you’re watching! (email kul at auctomatic dot com, or via text at +1 415 612 0117).
Nice.
Filed under: emmett shear, justin kan, kiko, kyle vogt, live streaming, michael seibel, video, Y Combinator | Leave a Comment
Tags: justin.tv
Quick links:
1. Facebook Career Center launches, which incidentally I heard about here.
2. Twitter hits a million messages
3. 71miles, the “definitive guide to weekend trips around major cities” launches.
I promise I’m not obsessed with Twitter and/or Facebook.
Filed under: facebook career center, twitter, weekend trips | 2 Comments
Tags: 71miles
I, Robot – coming soon
One of the highlights of the Y Combinator dinners for me was definitely the moment I shook Monty’s hand (one of Trevor‘s robots, you can watch him trying to push over Dexter below). The entire interaction was scarily real. FYI Trevor is one of the co-founders of Viaweb, and a partner in YC.
Anyway, the big news is that Dexter can now walk!
What’s important and historical about this is better explained by PG, but apparently it’s the first bipedal dynamically self-balancing robot.
Congratulations to Trevor, that was 6 years worth of work! I, Robot is a little step closer.
Update: So this week (1/3/07), we got to see Dexter jump one foot off the ground and land perfectly with balance. It crouched like a human does beforehand and then leapt into the air. I’m running out of adjectives, but suffice to say everyone in the room was in awe. This is like Terminator happening before my very eyes!
Filed under: Bipedal robot, Dexter, Monty, Paul Graham, Robots, self-balancing, Trevor Blackwell | Leave a Comment
Tags: Anybots, YCombinator dinners
News.YCombinator
Y Combinator recently launched a news section for startups on their website (here’s why). This is going to be a great resource. I’ve already found some useful articles.
Apparently it’s a lot like how Reddit was in its early days, content wise.
Here are my contributions.
Filed under: News, Paul Graham, startups, YCombinator | Leave a Comment
Facebook doing big things
I went to the “Technology Tasting” event hosted by Facebook on Wednesday. It was fantastic, I got to meet the people that work there, hear the founders Dustin Moskovitz and Mark Zuckerberg speak, and visit their offices, which I must admit I was quite excited about (although this was not the main engineering office). There were probably over a hundred people socialising for about an hour before the founders Dustin Moskovitz and Mark Zuckerberg spoke.
Dustin went through some statistics, and the bits that stood out for me were:
1) the biggest growth demographic is 25-34
2) there is big growth in the 50+ age group
3) facebook serves 70,000 photos a second. A SECOND.
4) they have 700m news stories generated (per month I think)
5) they are adding *half a million* new users each week, which should mean 50 million users by the end of the year
6) they are guesstimating they have 1/10th the number of search queries Google does worldwide internally on facebook
7) over half of their users log in daily (compare to say, 15% ish for MySpace, if they’re lucky)
8) 1% of all internet traffic is generated by facebook (correction: it’s 1% of all internet time is spent on fb)
9) At any given time, there are maybe 1-2 million people online, that’s larger than most US cities
I could go on, but you get the picture. Something incredible is being built at Facebook. I respect the fact that they had enough balls not to sell out, and are thinking big, really big. It was a little moving to hear Zuckerberg talk, here is a guy younger than me building a company which is just behind Google in terms of internet traffic.
Anyhow, congratulations to the guys working there. Keep it up, it’s an inspiration to us all.
**Update: sweet, facebook just officially blogged about the event. Another impressive stat I just remembered, the average page load time is 0.11 seconds, and their target is 0.04 seconds.
Filed under: dustin moskovitz, internet traffic, mark zuckerberg | 2 Comments
Tags: facebook
