akrish

Another post that should have been several months ago…

In April of this year, I headed down to Stanford for something called Startup School. I didn’t really know what to expect but it’s hosted by Y-combinator so I knew it would be pretty cool. It turned out to be a bunch of talks by successful entrepreneurs, lawyers, and venture capitalists and all in all I learned a lot over there. Also it was way for entrepreneurs from all over the place to gather and meet each other, look for teammates, competition and all that stuff.

Since I wasn’t currently working on anything, and since I was one of the younger people there (most of the attendees were out of college) I wasn’t that interested in meeting a lot of other people, except to find out what they were working on, which I always think is very interesting. I was there pretty much to hear the talks, and hopefully take something from them that I could use maybe later on when I do try my hand at a startup.

Of all the talks (I believe all of them are on justin.tv), the most interesting, and most entertaining on was by David Heinemeier Hansson. DHH is I think the head developer of ruby on rails (or something like that) and now he’s working for 37 signals, which is doing exactly what he recommends (which you’ll know about if you either watch his talk or read the rest of my post). Here is his talk. I definitely recommend that you watch it if only for entertainment purposes (he’s really funny). But of all the talks, I think I learned the most from his as well.

His main point was that rather than trying to provide your product for free, charge a little bit. Then you don’t have to struggle to make ends meet, you don’t have to work so hard to monetize (by ads or whatever) and you get to make money. And granted most ordinary people are no longer willing to pay for your service, but almost all companies are willing to pay you if you are providing them a valuable service and doing it really well. So the real trick is to find something that companies need, make it, and then charge them for it and you’ve got yourself a pretty good startup.

So that’s the underlying idea, but there are a couple of problems with that. When you’re charging for your product, you’re held to a much higher standard, so you’d arguably have to work harder. This is even more the case when you’re making something for companies. But arguably this may actually be a good thing. When you’re trying to get something out to users (even if it’s free), the only way you’re going to be successful is if you hold yourself to a high standard, but it’s a lot easier to let things slide when there is no external force here. For example, If your free website is of the highest quality, you’re not going to get any traffic, and you’re not going to get any revenue from ads or whatever monetizing scheme you’ve thought of, so you have to do this anyway. The fact that you’re selling your product means that there’s an external force (namely your customers) holding you to that high standard and they definitely won’t let you slip up. Charging your customers is just force that keeps you working well.

The other problem and solution is talked about here. I won’t go into much detail there, just read that.

So I’ve become a convert to this thinking, I’m now looking for things that I could sell to companies and hoping to form my startup around one of these ideas. But it’s definitely much harder to find pain points of companies than it is to find pain points of ordinary people, so I’ve been looking for awhile without much success. I’ll still look for more consumer facing ideas, but I find that they are much easier to shoot down quickly and so I’m not sure if I’ll be working on something like that in the near future.

And that was pretty much startup school. If you’re interested, watch the talks; most of them are pretty interesting and they offer a lot of different perspectives from pretty big shots (Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreesen, and others). Definitely will be going again next year.

During this break, I’ve had a pretty hard to keeping myself occupied. I’ve been playing a lot of music and hanging out with my friends a lot, but I haven’t really been in touch with my nerdy programming self apart from this company that I’m working on. At the same time, my brother has been talking about this whole “viral” movement and we’ve been discussing strategies to get your product out to tons of users with minimal effort. One of the obvious solutions is to make a Facebook application which is immediately available to the however-many-million users there are on Facebook and is also easily spreadable via the invitation process. I decided that I too would jump on this all-too-techie bandwagon and make myself a Facebook application.

Over the summer, I was very against the whole Facebook platform movement (you can read about it here) and I’m still not really happy with a lot of things that I’ve heard about Facebook, but I made this app more for entertainment than for anything else. I’m also not very good at using client libraries and api’s and whatnot (I’m really impatient and don’t like to read things) so I figured this would give some practice at working with an api that I definitely needed for the success of my app.

I’ll cut to the chase. You should add this application. Now you may ask: what exactly is it? Well, it’s called Rumor Mill and essentially it’s a way for you to make up, or publicize rumors about your friends. It’ll also keep you up to date with all the latest rumors (real or not) about your friends and let you determine if the rumor is true or not. Once you make this judgment, it’ll show you what other people thought about the rumor. So, why should you add it? Well first of all, what’s the harm? It’s very unobtrusive; it takes no space on your profile page and it remains dormant until someone makes up a rumor about you, when you’ll get a mini-feed notification about aforementioned rumor. Secondly, it’s fun; who doesn’t enjoy make up random stories about your friends and seeing what other people think about them? I think that there’s tons of potential in this application and hope to see the subscriptions skyrocket in the near future.

In reality, I didn’t spend that much time making the application (Sunday and Monday) and I don’t really plan to spend much more fixing it or doing any other Facebook development. I kind of wanted to see what all the commotion about Facebook development was about. I thought I could see how popular it gets (you should add it! and use it!). I also want to switch hosting companies and this other company has a discount (it’s free) if you’re hosting a facebook app on your server.

Anyway that’s my little bit of publicity, add the Rumor Mill!

Alan Turing is hailed as the father of computer science. Yet he lived more than half a century ago, in a time when computers were incredibly different from what we recognize today. I’m taking a introduction to cs theory course this semester and we’ve been talking about some of Turing’s (and other theoretician’s) discoveries. The fact that most of the discoveries were made in the 30s and 40s truly boggles my mind. How can people make claims like, “There are functions that cannot be expressed by any programming language,” when the concept of a computer or a programming language has barely been defined? What’s even more amazing to me, is that many of these theories were correct and their proofs are still accepted today.

This train of thought got me thinking about what our lives would be like without technology, or at least without computers (There isn’t much correlation, I know). No doubt most of our lives would be drastically different. I spend tons of time in front of a computer hacking, reading news, email, and relaxing. Maybe it’s because I’m a computer science student that really enjoys programming, or maybe it’s because I’m a college student who gets most of his resources through his computer (via the internet). Whatever it is, my computer plays an integral role in my life and I can’t even imagine life would be like without one.

Maybe life would be a lot simpler. I’d wake up, have a cup of tea while reading the newspaper and walk over to class rather than wake up and immediately check my email (aka work). My deadlines would be a lot more relaxed because it’s harder to do things without the aid of computers. I wouldn’t be under as much stress (not that I’m really stressed out now) because my superiors (manager, professor, etc.) could not set incredibly high expectations for my performance. I read an article about how technology makes life more stressful awhile ago and in many respects I agree with it. Unfortunately, I can’t direct you to the article because I forgot pretty much everything about it.

At the same time, social dynamics would change. Rather than spend time IMing my friends or writing on their Facebook wall, I’d actually see my friends and spend time with them. There would be a lot more “quality” time with your friends because we’d all have more free time (I think) and we wouldn’t spend that time idly on the internet (because it wouldn’t exist). This sounds like a really good thing and one of my problems with computers is that it makes us (well me) a lot more anti-social.

Yet computers can’t be all bad. They make information much more accessible to the public, they make interaction and communication much easier and the also foster innovation. Without a computer, I’d master the Dewey Decimal system and know all the ins and outs of my campus library system. Now, I just use Wikipedia. The internet makes it easy for professors to post lecture notes and course information for the class to see, thus discouraging students from attending lectures, but nonetheless, communication is greatly facilitated. This company that I’m starting revolves entirely around computers. Obviously we’d have no business idea if computers didn’t exist. Certainly these are all good things.

So I’m sort of at odds. In some respects computers are really good but life seems like it would be so simple and wholesome if we didn’t have them. I guess the conflict doesn’t really matter since computers are here to stay anyway, but it’s interesting to think about what I’d be like if there weren’t computers. What would I be studying? What kinds of things would I enjoy doing? Would I spend more time outside? I don’t really know but it’s fun to take a break from reading about databases to think about these things.

Last.fm, a London based company that started a couple of years ago (I think), has pretty much revolutionized music for a lot of youngsters. Their website is essentially a social networking web application organized around music and the music people listen to.

Last.fm records and stores information about all the music that you listen to on your computer or portable music device and makes that information available online to other users. They use pretty interesting software to interface with a variety of media libraries and devices, and they’re constantly extending to support others. The “last.fm” application interfaces with your last.fm account and encompasses all of the “scrobbling” (collecting of song data). It also allows the user to listen to tailored radio stations that play only the music that the user is looking for. I’ve found that their radio stations work just as well as Pandora.

On top of all these interesting music features, their website provides all the standard social networking stuff. They have hundreds (maybe thousands) of groups, forums, messaging, public posting, profiles, blogging, and pretty much everything you could want in a social networking website. What’s interesting is that I think they’ve really thought through the social networking side of things and done it really well (at least a lot better than myspace). You don’t see a lot of flaming in discussion threads, and there’s very little vulgar content, but they still do a great job of connecting people with each other. They’ve clearly done something right on the social networking side of things.

I’ve read a couple of articles about social networking, and I know some of the common pitfalls and whatnot, but I haven’t been able to figure out how Last.fm works so nicely. Almost all content is universally readable and writable, and their user base is mostly teenagers who are usually the problem demography in social networks. What’s more, they don’t have any noticeable moderation of content. Everything seems to just work.

Moving away from the technical side of things, Last.fm really has some useful tools. They provide event listings (mostly concerts) that allow users to physically meet each other and socialize. They also have a really useful “related artist” feature that lists other artists that are musically similar to a given artist. I almost always use this feature to browse for new music that I may want to get. There are a lot more interesting things that Last.fm offers, but I can’t say I’m a very active user (apart from listening to a lot of music), so I don’t really know much about them.

I’ve used Last.fm for a couple of years now, and I’ve watched them grow steadily, adding features and increasing membership. They’ve done a good job, adding features that relate to their core goal rather than expanding into other sectors (which I think a lot of growing companies tend to do). All this time, they’ve been very successful. I highly recommend their service to anyone who listens to a lot of music.

Sadly, this is the only book I’ve actually finished this summer (and yes, I haven’t read the new Harry Potter). However, this book is absolutely amazing, and I highly recommend it to any hacker or anyone else remotely interested in programming. Spolsky selected a great set of articles that are very relevant to modern day entrepreneurship, management, and programming. It’s a pretty easy read; most of the articles are fairly short, but it does get technical in parts (I didn’t understand some of the articles), so it might not be very accessible to non-programmers.

The book is a compilation of articles, blog entries, and talks, written and presented by some of the leading software developers in the world. Joel Spolsky is a pretty famous blogger, and he did a great job gathering some really good software articles that cover most of the things a programmer cares about. The articles vary in subject from very technical articles about programming languages, to talks about various companies and managerial tactics, to analysis of online social networking sites. A lot of the article authors are pretty famous bloggers: Paul Ford, Aaron Swartz, and of course Paul Graham. To top it all off, the articles and Spolsky’s commentary are peppered with sarcasm and humor.

The work Spolsky did in the novel was quite good. His ordering of articles makes the book flow very well, even though it’s a compilation of disconnected articles. He has grouped articles in sets, one set being more about software and programming, one set being about teamwork, management, and hiring, and one set being about social networks. To add to that, he’s injected humorous elements like cartoons and sarcastic articles to lighten the technical mood. His introduction to the articles do a good job of presenting a high-level abstract for the article without getting to in-depth and repetitive. He also often includes his own opinions and short anecdotes which provide a different perspective from the writer of the article. All in all, Spolsky’s done a great job as editor of “The Best Software Writing I”.

The articles themselves are for the most part excellent. Again, some of them are quite technical, but they can easily be skimmed over or skipped entirely. Most of them are very accessible, and don’t actually talk about programming, or even software. These articles are mostly about management, hiring, or social networking. These were my favorite articles because I’m currently designing a site with social networking concepts (Wenote) and also because I’m going to be looking for internships and a job pretty soon. They’re probably the most relevant to me. I could relate to most of the articles, which made the book a lot more interesting on the whole. There were a few bad articles though. The last article: a short Ruby tutorial tried too hard to be funny (it really wasn’t funny), and didn’t really provide any insight.

On the whole, the book was an excellent read. Part of this may be because I’m really interested in software development and pretty much every topic addressed in the book, but even still, every article is very well written. If you’re interested in programming languages, software, how companies operate, managerial tactics, or social networking, pick up this book and at least read the articles that you care about.

Rating: 9/10

Pros: Funny, insightful, relevant

Cons: small audience, too technical at times