RIP Camp Bears
I’m sad to inform you that Camp Bears (the first real-time virtual world for kids on the iPad) has been removed from the iTunes Application store and that I am prohibited from using the code or relaunching the application.
Farewell Bullet Labs
The most amazing reason to work at a startup is not the money that it makes or the product that it creates. Rather, it’s the environment that challenges a team and pushes us farther than what we would’ve accomplished individually.
Our culture
I watched our team grow from two to nine people in twenty months. For many hires, this was their first “real job”, and for others, it was a time to try something new. We moved from a small cubicle which barely fit one person, to a shared workspace fitting six, to an office that spanned half a floor — all while remaining profitable without external funding. We moved between offices using a shopping cart. Every Thursday, we would grab sausages and grilled cheese sandwiches from the Ferry Building. Some Fridays, we’d get Happy Hour together. After gaining some weight, a few of us decided to gym together everyday, and we each lost an average of 15-20 lbs.
Our team
Our designers became experts on illustration, UI/UX, and web design. Our engineers built the first real-time multiplayer virtual worlds on iOS that worked over 3G and all our assets could be added, modified and delivered with a turn key approach. Our marketers could program PHP/Python, scale servers on ec2, and solve difficult math puzzles. Our HR/office admin did consumer research, conducted user interviews, and facilitated a fun team environment. The most valuable experience that I have gained was being able to see all of my team members grow individually. Every single person that we hired exceeded my expectations.
I am sorry that I can no longer stay and it is very hard for me to say goodbye to something I helped create, but I hope that we can work together again someday. I plan to take some time off to reflect, figure out what’s next, and volunteer. I want to stay true to my passions and follow my dreams.
Passion First
Having struggled financially, I embarked on a different journey than most of my peers. After the dotcom crash, my parents did not have the financial luxury to pay for my college education and expenses. Luckily, finding programming at an early age, I learned how to run a consulting business in high school that flourished into college and helped pay for my bills such as tuition, food, and housing.
This didn’t come without expense. Worrying about finances, I compromised my own freedom by working every break that I had — winter and summer. I had to juggle two jobs during school that required me to ditch class and intentionally miss mandatory quizzes. I did everything to optimize my resume and financial success, but I did little to optimize my life. In the past eight years, I don’t think I’ve really taken a step back to really think what I wanted to do. In a sense, I was going with the motions and doing what other people wanted to do and jumping from opportunity to opportunity, but not doing so because I wanted to.
I am an entrepreneur and I will be an entrepreneur no matter where I am in the future. I have to take risks, do new things, learn constantly, and have freedom. These are things that are innate to me and I cannot be happy without them. I think it is really important to figure out what matters to you and stay true to yourself. I was lucky to find these qualities in my first startup, but it was not until recently that I realized the most important quality that I needed was passion.
Passion causes us to care about what we do (even at the sacrifice of our own monetary gain) and creates loyalty. The profit mindset causes us to exploit user satisfaction for immediate gain and fosters distrust. In this battle between passion and profit, it is our job to to balance the two forces (even if you feel like you can’t control it, you can). If we focus purely on passion and give products away for free, the business can not succeed. If we focus solely on profit, no one would trust the business and the brand would diminish. In a way, you could call passion (our superego), profit (our id), and our regulation between the two (our ego), to borrow from Freudian terms.
One company that operates with the profit mindset is Zynga:
“I don’t fucking want innovation,” the ex-employee recalls Pincus saying. “You’re not smarter than your competitor. Just copy what they do and do it until you get their numbers.
One company that operates with passion in mind is Zappos:
Everyone that’s hired, it doesn’t matter what position — you can be an accountant, lawyer, software developer — goes through the exact same training as our call center reps. It’s a four-week training program and then they’re actually on the phone for two weeks taking calls from customers. At the end of that first week of training we make an offer to the entire class that we’ll pay you for the time you’ve already spent training plus a bonus of $2,000 to quit and leave the company right now.
I’m willing to bet that the only way you can find happiness at a company that’s skewed heavily towards profit is through a larger than average consumption of alcohol. I’ve been there.
In my current business (I don’t consider it a startup anymore), we had an interesting journey between profit and passion. We approached business in the following way: Market Size -> Inefficiency -> Solution -> Profit. This allowed us to become bootstrapped profitable and we were able to grow the team to nine people. However, because we focused on profit instead of consumer loyalty, we kept having to find new market inefficiencies and create short-term products to replace old streams that would disappear. While we thought that this would be a temporary process so that we could find a better long-term opportunity, it actually became a full-time job. It took out the life of our work. Since these short-term revenue streams did relatively well, it killed our most recent product and prevented us from really investing in our core product, a kids’ virtual world that the team was really passionate about.
In this journey, I’ve learned some key distinctions between startups and businesses:
- Startups are irrational, businesses are practical
- Startups focus on passion, businesses focus on profit
- Startups fuel people with a vision, businesses fuel people with alcohol
- Startups are built by a team, businesses are built with assets
- Startups innovate, businesses replicate
- Startups thrive on autonomy, businesses excel at micromanagement
- Startups love exploration, businesses love specialization
With this, I don’t really want to be part of a business, but a startup. We’re trying to better optimize passion and profit with our next project, but I want passion to be the primary goal. Passion doesn’t mean that you won’t turn a profit, but it certainly means that you won’t give up. If you could only work at one job for the rest of your life, are you where you want to be?
Startups should be approached this way: Passion -> Problem -> Solution -> Profit?
It’s the only way you’ll have the stomach to see it through.
De-emphasize Age, Refocus on Play
In response to the TechCrunch article, “Silicon Valley’s dark Secret: It’s All About Age“…
I once started a company called HotSwap as the CTO with some of the brightest minds from Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford (including some ACM world finalists). We had a lot going for us — press, partnerships, an amazing platform, Steve Wozniak as our advisor. However, we were young and lacked the business acumen to run a profitable start-up, let alone a proper business model. For many reasons, we had to ultimately close down the company and I had to resign. As young entrepreneurs, we wanted to work on something “cool” as opposed to something that was like a “business.” More recently, I worked with some older Yahoo veterans (Senior VPs and such) who were very experienced in the field. Truth be told, they were just as clueless as we were with our first start-up, and they didn’t quite understand what really mattered (though with more funding, we all had more time to learn it). Until we discover the secret to success, everyone is like a poisoned ant running around in circles with no apparent direction.
From these two experiences, I learned that entrepreneurs are much better equipped after their first venture and specific experiences are a much better predictor than age.
Psychology suggests that there are two components of general intelligence, fluid and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the ability to “think logically and solve problems in novel situations independent of acquired knowledge”. Crystalized intelligence is the ability to “use skills, knowledge and experience” to solve problems, usually those dependent on acquired knowledge. Fluid intelligence generally peaks at the age 25 and then steadily declines while crystalized intelligence increases gradually until age 65.
So then, we must ask ourselves, is building a start-up primarily about fluid, crystalized intelligence, or both? According to the Founder Institute’s entrepreneur test, “openness and fluid intelligence are the key factors” predicting success. Yet, Founder’s also found that the older the entrepreneur is, the better he generally performed when fluid intelligence was taken into account — age was not the best predictor.
Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by Stuart Brown and Christopher Vaughan talks about how play is vital to brain development. They found that employees who have engaged in play throughout their lives outside of work and bring that emotion to the office are able to do well at work-related tasks that at first might seem to have no connection to play. In one case study, even though JPL hired top graduates from top engineering schools like MIT, Stanford, and even Cal Tech itself, the new hires were often missing something. JPL found that “newly minted engineers didn’t do well with taking a complex project from theory to practice”. They had found that the older, problem-solving employees had taken apart clocks to see how they worked, made soapbox derby races, built hi-fi steroes, fixed appliances… during their youth. The young engineering school graduates who had also tinkered around with gadgets were adept at the types of problem solving management sought. Those who hadn’t, generally were not. From that point on, JPL asked questions about applicants’ youthful projects and play during job inteviews.
Contrastingly, these older employees had a higher fluid intelligence than their younger peers, even though fluid intelligence generally diminishes with age. Silicon Valley should soon realize that the unqualified young engineers from top engineering schools are not performing well due to the lack of play, the cultivation of fluid intelligence — not age. Perhaps people are learning to take this information into account, which is probably why YCombinator seems to have an admission process based on the “youthful projects” of applicants. This also means that there is a large chance that fluid intelligence can be altered to improve performance, or that people who have side projects have high fluid intelligence, making it easy to filter out such individuals.
With this knowledge in mind, I am bootstrapping a start-up with very “intelligent” people, a solid business model, and people who have experienced prior start-ups — and my head hurts much less these days.
User-mining: Start at the gym, end up at a bar?
Today, I spent all day “Hacking with Cloudera on CDH3″ at the Cloudera Hackathon understanding people’s location-based activities using Yelp, Foursquare, and Twitter. By analyzing the data algorithmically, I got strikingly similar results to those shown on Going.com, which are based on user-generated and hand-moderated content. I was able to retrieve more data regarding users’ whereabouts each day, even hour. Here are my results:
As expected, most people still go to the park over the weekend. Does this mean that unemployment isn't that bad, considering that no one has time for nature Monday thru Friday?
People generally like the park during the middle of the day. Once again -- expected.
Ahah! People start their weeks going to the gym... and then they get collectively lazier.
Surprisingly enough, Thursday is the most popular day for eating out.
More people travel on Friday, Sunday and Monday more so than on Wednesday and Saturday.
While some people hit the bars early at noon, most people go at night...and then to a lounge.
Remember all those people who gave up on the gym towards the end of the week? They're at the bars.
Thoughts on Domain Acquisition and Branding using AI
Creating a good brand is one of the hardest tasks of an entrepreneur. Aaron Patzer, CEO of Mint, stated that you should “expect to pay $3 to 15k for a 6-8 letter, single word, English domain name.” In fact, he paid $180,000 in equity for “mint.com”, which took over three months of negotiation. A domain name should be spelled unambiguously to prevent losing word-of-mouth referrals. Sean Cheyene of Herbal Ecstasy believes that brand is everything. Without the brand name, it would have been nearly impossible to create a $350 million dollar company from selling a plastic baggy with herbal pills — with no reputation and money.
Today, there are 88,312,535 million top-level “.com” domain names registered, which makes it difficult to purchase a domain like “efax.com”. (To put this in perspective, Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary has 475,000 words.) Thus, any combination of existing words we come up with for a “.com” domain name will probably be taken. We can browse existing domain names for sale at sites like BrandBucket, where they have “brandable business names and unique domain names”. However, a domain name like “Zables.com” goes for $5,000 and I am still not happy with that name. Perhaps then, a good indicator is to look at expiring domains, which I can try to bid for — for only $69.
I recently stumbled upon Namejet, which receives over 16,000 soon-to-expire domain names per day. I can bid on these domains, although it’s difficult to navigate through the list and find a good name, thanks to it being filled with domains like sxwzjhxx.com. Also, we have biased and limited searching capabilities. For example, if I am looking for a real-estate domain, I would try all possible combinations of keywords related to real-estate (as would every other person building a real-estate website) — then find that the names that I’m interested in are overpriced and difficult to win.
Since a company’s success can greatly increase from a good domain name (think Mint vs. Geezeo), I decided to use my machine learning knowledge and build a predictor to determine the probability that a given domain name resembles an English word: P(w=domain_name). After downloading then sorting 340,000 domains with a “score”, I found reasonable domain names with ease: flipcast, drawmash, idealix, shopvolt, swerp, raideye, geekleaf, wirednut, moccah…just to name a few. (I computed the probability score using n-gram letters. If the first 3+ letters of the domain matched the dictionary (e.g. shop in shopvolt), then the probability for that section of the domain is set to 1.0 to handle transitions such as “pv”, which are not found in the English dictionary.)
While it’s still difficult to find a domain name for a specific product, I just found meaningful domain names for a streaming video website (Flipcast), a creative company (Drawmash), a gaming company (Raideye), a shopping CSE (Shopvolt), and some new blogs (Geekleaf, Wirednut). Win.
