Episode 3 of The Founders: TechStars Boulder is up on the web. This week’s episode includes special guest Dave Morin from Facebook.
I’ve been an Internet email user since early 1984 when I got my first Project Athena account as an undergraduate at MIT. Notwithstanding all the “email is dead” messages over the years, I continue to use email as my primary online communication mechanism. There are an enormous number of things that frustrate me about email, most notably the lack of fundamental innovation in email clients and servers. That said, as a messaging tool – it still dominates for me.
Several years ago I started saying that “my social graph is in email.” I found it interesting that Facebook and LinkedIn used email as a primary messaging layer to remind me to come back to Facebook and LinkedIn respectively to check what was going on. This signaled confirmation to me that these systems were making sure they were using the most persistent messaging layer to build and reinforce their social graphs.
For whatever reason, the primary email product providers have been either painfully slow at realizing this or have decided to ignore this. Facebook and LinkedIn have benefitted massively from this, but the biggest recipient of this neglect is Twitter which has created an entirely new messaging protocol (think Twitter API as analogous to SMTP).
Suddenly, in the past year, entrepreneurs have woken up to the potential of the email social graph. As I’ve mentioned before, we invested in Gist to directly address this opportunity. Xobni is another well known company that is attacking this. But another intriguing fact is the number of younger entrepreneurs that are working on this problem. Each of the TechStars locations (Boulder and Boston) has a company that – at its core – is built around the premise of email as the original social graph. In addition, as a mentor in the fbFund Rev 2009 program, I’ve recently started working with another company working on yet a different angle to this problem.
Now, these companies aren’t creating new email clients. They are working on products or web services that take advantage of all the implicit information generated by your email activity. They aren’t limited to just email (if you are a Gist user, you understand this well), but use email (name@domain.com) as a key information pivot point. If you step back and think about it, while https://www.facebook.com/bfeld is new and full of yummy chocolaty goodness, brad@feld.com is really my “unique” identifier.
I’m not going to talk about the three new companies I’m working with on this problem yet – I’ll let them “launch” on their own timetable and I’ll talk about them when they are ready. In the mean time, I’ve continuing to look to talk to more people that share this premise. If that’s you, feel free to email me.
I love data. And I adore playing with it graphically, as I learn a lot from graphing longitudinal data about things I’m involved in. However, I find that almost all of the web services I use suck at providing visualization / graphing tools for their data. For example, I’ve never really found any of the graphing options in any of the running software I use satisfying or useful.
I’ve known about Tableau Software for a long time. The CEO and founder is Christian Chabot – we worked together at Softbank Venture Capital. Tableau has built a significant software company and when Christian called me up to ask if they could play around with some of my running data as part of their launch of their new web-based services, I agreed.
The hardest part of this exercise was getting granular running data out of the various systems that I keep it in. I use a Garmin watch and have very detailed GPS and heart rate data on every run I do. However, the two primary systems I store this data in (MotionBased and TrainingPeaks) have abysmal data export systems. After fighting with them for a while, I eventually did the equivalent of “scraping” the data by exporting the data underlying a bunch of individual runs.
Once I got the data out, Tableau was pretty amazing. It was extremely easy to use (in comparison – say – to Microsoft Excel where you can spend hours and still not get the format you want.) And – it was extremely fast.
After I played around it with some, the data wizards at Tableau took over and created the widget that you see above. There are a few things to note about it:
Tableau has been around for years and has thousands of customers, but visualizations like these are still in private beta as they make sure they hammer out all the bugs on their latest release. I’m not an investor, but based on what I see I wish I was. Nicely done Tableau (and Christian).
I’ve never been great with remembering names the first time I meet someone. I’ve tried all the usual tricks and haven’t found one that works. For me, it’s a matter of regular meeting – eventually I’ll start to remember your name.
The most embarrassing part is forgetting the names of spouses that I work with. For whatever reason, I only have room in my brain for one of the two names (gender doesn’t matter). I’ve solved this by referring to wives as “Tifanny” and husbands as “Herman”. So far, 100% of the time, I get the correct name out of the spouse, along with a chuckle. I figure that on the day that I don’t, that person’s name is actually either Tiffany or Herman.
For a while I managed to associated names with images of people in my head and use that to help me a little. I realized that all the faces on the Internet has completely ruined this for me. The namespace in my brain is now full of name:image pairs and – in addition to no longer having room for names, I no longer have room for images either. I went to the Apple Store the other day and asked for some extra memory, but they didn’t have a type that was technically compatible with my brain.
So – please don’t be offended when I call you Tiffany or Herman. More importantly, when you come up to me and say hi, if you don’t get a “hey <correct name>” back, remind me of your name and affiliation. If it’s comfortable, I’ll often say “remind me who you are”, although there are many circumstances where this either doesn’t work or I forget.
As Tim discovered the other day, if you say “hi, I’m Tim” enough times, I’ll eventually replace some other name:image pair in my brain with yours.
On Wednesday I did my final One-on-One with Phil Weiser on the topic of Work-Life Balance.
Rocky Radar did a great job of summarizing it in the post Feld on Life Balance: “Accomplish What You Want, Not What You Think You Have to”. w3w3.com recorded it – you can listen to it here.
Since it was at 5:30 and on a beautiful evening, I figured there would probably only be 10 people in the audience. The room was packed and the questions were really fun. Hopefully everyone got something out of it.
Last year we got connected to some guys from Hollywood who talked to us (I can’t decide if we pitched them or they pitched us) on doing a “TechStars Reality Show.” The whole thing seemed seriously sketchy to me, but I knew it was a no-op when they made us a proposal for us to do all the work, come up with all the money, and they would get all the revenue. Clearly I don’t understand how things work in Hollywood. So we punted.
But the idea remained. We’ve been doing plenty of TechStars related video (all up on TechStars.tv) and just kept coming back to the idea of a weekly web series. A few weeks ago, David and I decided “screw it – let’s just give it a shot.” Five minutes a segment, one a week.
The first two segments are up. Week 1 is “The Selected Few”
The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 1 "The Selected Few" from Andrew on Vimeo.
Week 2 is “Orientation”
The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 2 "Orientation" from Andrew on Vimeo.
Tell me what you think.
I have a new Windows 7 computer at my loft in Boulder that I’ve been working on for the past 24 hours. It’s the same exact configuration as my desktop (except for Windows 7 instead of Vista) and “my IT guy Ross” images all the machines the same so I get the same base config. The amount of configuration in the image is substantial – it probably cuts out a full day of install, wait, download, configure, reboot shit.
I still find that piles of things don’t work quite right. I can’t remember my password to the automatic password sync system I use, so I have no passwords. Firefox isn’t set up the way I want it. Outlook isn’t set up the way I want it. Snipping Tool still crashes when I close it. I can’t get to the shared drives in my office because I’m on a different ISP (Comcast) and things weren’t set up quite right. And the list goes on and on. And I’m really good at this! Gronk.
I’ve been obsessing about user experience lately. Human Computer Interaction and Digital Life are big themes of ours – an underlying premise of both of these themes is that the computer and technology should fade into the background. And the premise of our Implicit Web theme is that the computer should do the work for you, figure out what you really want, and get smarted about this over time.
I got an email this morning from my long time friend and business partner Dave Jilk that made me smile. Dave was my co-founder at my first company – Feld Technologies – and is now co-founder/CEO of Standing Cloud, a new company that we funded at the beginning of 2009. The email – which is Dave’s review of his experience with the Pogoplug – is uniquely Dave as his goal was to, in his words, “make it hard on myself and do a more complicated configuration immediately.” I’m proud to say that Dave’s conclusion was “Awesome setup. Nice OOB experience. IP-fu. No blood. Joe Bob says check it out.” (nice Joe Bob Briggs reference Dave.)
At this risk of over-pimping Pogoplug (since I just wrote about it yesterday in Pogoplug Getting Props from My Favorite Gadget Nerds, here’s the email (republished with Dave’s permission):
“I received my Pogoplug yesterday and installed it. Since everyone raves about how easy it is, I figured I would make it hard on myself and do a more complicated configuration immediately. I wanted to keep my "Cloud drive" setup in my basement, and I happened to have a Linksys wireless bridge (WET54G) lying around (don’t ask). So I connected the RJ45 cable into that and fired the bridge up. Then I connected a USB hub to the Pogoplug USB port and just put a USB key in the hub to try it out. I did not really expect this configuration to work the first time – will the bridge IP addresses confuse the Pogoplug? Will I have trouble with the initial setup given that I’m using a hub? When, after all, was the last time I connected *anything* to a computer and had it work the first time? But no, it installed trivially, without any problems. You don’t even have to type in the long id code they give you – it just connects. I then downloaded the "Windows drive" software onto my laptop and opened it up, and that worked immediately as well (I found this almost creepy. I’m running Vista. I should at least have to reboot, right?)
All that didn’t take very long, making the experience mildly unsatisfying. So I went back downstairs, unplugged the network cable while the Pogoplug was running and reconnected it to my Sonos music player, which can act as a wireless bridge also; and I added a USB hard drive to the hub. This couldn’t possibly go well – the Pogoplug is going to get a new IP address. Yet when I refreshed the browser window, there was the new drive. It took me a moment to figure out how to refresh the Explorer window to show the new drive – you have to go to the Pogoplug system tray icon and select "Reload" – but it worked fine once I found it. Each device shows up as a top-level subdirectory of the Pogoplug drive.
The only thing I really found confusing is that the Pogoplug comes with a power cord and also has a power plug directly on the device. It looks like the plug should come off (there is an arrow), but after a number of tries it did not slide off. I was afraid of breaking it, so I posted a question to the forum, which had an answer this morning: it’s just sticky, push hard. Probably they should have a sticker on the device that says this. One other minor complaint, to use the forum you have to create a *separate* user account, which is annoying. After all, I’m probably never going to use the forum again, given how simple the device is, so really the initial account setup should also set me up to use the forum.
Awesome setup. Nice OOB experience. IP-fu. No blood. Joe Bob says check it out.”
Nice.
My friends at Rocky Radar have launched a Colorado Company Index. It’s a free resource designed to catalog the technology companies working within the state, from IT to Life Science to Clean Tech. Thanks also to the guys at SurveyGizmo for helping out here.
They are currently bootstrapping the index – submit your company info here.
We are super psyched about our investment in Pogoplug. Generally, I hate self-referential tech analogies as a way of describing a product, but in Pogoplug’s case it’s easy: “Pogoplug is a Slingbox for your hard drive.” Our big insight about Sling as an investment was that it was “a bunch of magic software packaged in a cool plastic box that just works.” Similarly, Pogoplug is “a bunch of magic software packaged in a cool plastic box that just works.”
While it’s easy to pimp our own investments, it’s better when others do. I came home from vacation to Tim Wolters (co-founder Collective Intellect; previously co-founder/CTO Dante Group) post on Pogoplug (yes – I stuck one in his hand after we talked about it.) He was skeptical, but nails the use case and asks for my favorite “on the roadmap” feature – automagical data sync.
In April, Todd Vernon (co-founder/CEO of Lijit; previously co-founder/CTO Raindance) also had a great Pogoplug review. Todd is a consumer electronics junkie (he makes me look tame) and is notoriously hard on products and companies. Praise from Todd is high praise indeed.
And – to top it off – Om Malik referred to his new Pogoplug as “My MacBook Air’s Second New Best Friend.” He then went on to interview Brad Dietrich, Pogoplug’s CTO, on How Pogoplug Works.
Hell – my dad even likes his! And – yes – all of my data is now on a drive attached to a Pogoplug sitting in a cabinet in my house, available to me from anywhere at anytime. It’s conceivable that I’ll even get Amy to like it.