I’m banging away on a bunch of new things these days. I’ve happily switched to a Mac, am halfway through my week of Gmail, and am contemplating what new thing to try next week.
I’ve always been a tech junky and love to play with new stuff. I’m quick to set up an account on a new web service and try it. It’s the best way for me to understand something – much better than an executive summary or a presentation.
I found that my switch to a Mac took two weeks to get really comfortable, but once I crossed the line I was all in. Gmail feels similar – after a few days of it I’m loving it but now running into a few issues (that I’m quickly resolving – such as the email send rate limiting thing that I mentioned last night.) I haven’t yet tried to move my calendar fully over, and I know that moving feld.com to Google Apps is going to be hairy because of all my family members using accounts on feld.com (currently an Exchange server) in a variety of different configs, but that’s part of the fun of this stuff. Well – maybe not.
While it’s obvious to say that “just trying something out” is much simpler than actually incorporating that new thing into your work flow, it occurred to me today that there isn’t enough focus on this on the part of most startups.
I’ve learned the incredible power of focusing on “daily active users” from my investment in Zynga. While I’ve been obsessed with DAU’s for a while now, I haven’t been paying enough attention to the specific DAU’s that come back day after day (rDAU’s – recurring DAUs). While I encourage everyone to measure the number of them, I haven’t been encouraging people to “measure what they actually do.” As I ponder my own behavior, I’m seeing a huge difference in my (a) fly by and try, (b) try and use periodically, and (c) become an rDAU behavior.
Note to everyone I work with – start measuring what your rDAUs actually do. It might surprise you.
My week-long experiment with Gmail continues with my first big bump happening last night at around 9pm. After sending a lot of emails (apparently 500) I received an error message “You have reached a limit for sending mail“. I tried again. This perplexed me. So I clicked on the link.
I read through it and couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong. I tweeted about it and immediately heard back that Gmail had throttled me for up to the next 24 hours because I’d been sending too many emails. I poked around a little to try to figure out if there was a way around this and finally concluded that the solution was to go to sleep and try again in the morning.
When I woke up, email was magically sending again. I guess I got turned back on in less than 24 hours. We’ll see what happens today.
Of course, one solution is to use SendGrid. I’ve just gone and signed up for an account in case I get rate limited again.
In the mean time, Gmail feels slow this morning. I’m getting used to my new friend, the yellow “Working” link at the top middle of the window.
As investors, we believe that the way we interact with computer technology will be radically different 20 years from now. We’ve got a few new investments in our human computer interaction theme that we are in the process of closing so HCI has been on my mind lately.
I just watched a great video from our first HCI investment, Oblong. It’s a 30 minute presentation by Mary Ann de Lares Norris, the Managing Director of Oblong Europe, that is an excellent overview of Oblong’s technology.
The first five minutes are an intro to Mary Ann and how she got connected to Oblong. The next five minutes are an overview of Oblong and a high level demo. From there Mary Ann gets into “Pools & Proteins” and starts talking about the architecture and design philosophy of g-speak and how it works.
She then shows an example of how Oblong’s “common operating picture” works in a real logistics application. Using g-speak, she shows the integration of a VT-100 app, Java app, HTML app, a native g-speak app, and a video conferencing session. Mary Ann then finishes up with a sneak peak at some multi-user / device / screen activity.
Mary Ann de Lares Norris speaking at #TDC10 from Herb Kim on Vimeo.
Last week I co-hosted a lunch for Jared Polis with Kyle Lefkoff at Boulder Ventures which Jud Valeski covered nicely in his post titled Luncheon with Jared Polis. Jared was one of the first people I met when I moved to Boulder (thanks to an introduction from my long time friend Dave Jilk) and we’ve been great friends and partners on a number of fronts ever since.
The attendees at lunch were a bunch of Boulder entrepreneurs in three areas – software / Internet, biotech, and natural foods. While I spend almost all of my time focused on software / Internet, it’s always interesting to hang out with some of the Boulder entrepreneurs in other segments to hear what they are thinking and working on.
During lunch, I reflected some on the number of times I’ve heard in the past year from people outside of Boulder about how Boulder has become a nationally known entrepreneurial center. The comments come from all over and are often followed by the question “how can we do what you guys have accomplished in Boulder in our city?”
While I was listening to everyone and being proud of the little 100,000 person town I call home, I thought of a new phrase that I hadn’t used before: “entrepreneurial density.” I wondered out loud if Boulder was the “highest per capita collection of entrepreneurs in the US.” I have no idea if this is true but from my travels around the US it feels like something that might be true.
On Saturday morning as I was filling my car up with gas, I ran into someone I know that works at Rally Software. This kind of thing happens all the time – I’m constantly running into, sitting next to, or just saying hi as I wander down the street to people that work at startups in Boulder.
Entrepreneurial density isn’t just the “number of entrepreneurs per capita”, but it’s the “number of people that work at entrepreneurial companies per capita.” It gets even bigger when you include students and calculate the “(number of people that work at entrepreneurial companies + the number of students) per capita.
As ED = ((entrepreneurial_emps + students) / adults) approaches 1, you get complete entrepreneurial saturation. I’m going to guess that Boulder’s Entrepreneurial Density using this equation is somewhere between 0.50 and 0.75, but this is just a guess. I’m curious if anyone out there has a real way to calculate this.
In 2009, the word that finally got on my nerves was “space”, as in “our product is in the X space” or “the space we are going after is X.” It seems like the word “space” managed to find its way into every paragraph.
The annoying word of 2010 appears to be “platform”, as in “we are going to be a platform for X” or “our platform for X will solve the following problems.”
In my little corner of the world, the word “platform” is a lot more precious. There are very few platforms. You aren’t a platform until you have a zillion users (well, at least 100 million). Until then, feel free to call yourself a “junior platform” or an “aspiring platform.” Or, call yourself an “application”, which is what you most likely are.
I definitely make this mistake myself (e.g. “Company Y is a platform for X”) and I’ve been self-censoring lately and now saying “Company Y aspires to be a platform for X”).
Ok, I feel better now.
Last week SimpleGeo and their partner Stamen Design jointly released a project they have been working on together called Polymaps. It’s absolutely beautiful and a stunning example of what you can do with the SimpleGeo API. They’ve released the Polymaps source code on GitHub so any developer can quickly see how the API is used, play around with real production code, and modify the base examples for their own use.
When I first started program, it was 1979. I started on an Apple II – I learned BASIC, Pascal, and 6502 Assembler. I studied every page and example in the Apple II Reference Manual (the “Red Book”). Whenever I got source code for any application at a user group meeting, I stared at it, played with it, and tried to understand what it was doing.
When I started programming on an IBM PC in 1983, I did exactly the same thing. I spent a lot of time with Btrieve and there were endless source code examples to build on. I had a few friends that were also using BASIC + the IBM BASIC Compiler + Btrieve so we shared code (by handing each other floppy disks). We built libraries that did specific things and as each of us improved them, we shared them back with each other.
In my first company, we were heavy users of Clarion. While Clarion was compiled, it still came with a solid library of example code, although we quickly built our own libraries that we used throughout the company as we grew. When I started investing in companies that were building Web apps in 1994, it was once again all HTML / source code and examples everywhere. My friends at NetGenesis (mostly Raj Bhargava and Eric Richard) wrote one of the first Web programming books – Build a Web Site: The Programmer’s Guide to Creating, Building and Maintaining a Web Presence – I vaguely remember NetGenesis getting paid something like $25,000 (which was a ton of money to them at the time) to write it.
In the last few months, the phrase “data as a service” has started to be popular. I’m not totally sure I understand what people mean by it and I’ve been involved in several larger discussions about it and even noticed an article today in the New York Times titled “Data on Demand Is an Opportunity.” I’ve invested in several companies that seem to fit within this categorization, including SimpleGeo, Gnip, and BigDoor, but we don’t really think about them as “data as a service” companies (SimpleGeo and Gnip are in our Glue theme; BigDoor is in our Distribution theme).
When I reflect on all of this, it seems painfully obvious to me (and maybe to you also) that the best way to popularize “data as a service” is to start with an API (which creates the revenue model dynamic) and build a bunch of open source examples on top of it. Your goal should be to make it as simple as possible for a developer to immediately start using your API in ways relevant to them. By open sourcing the starting point, you both save an enormous amount of time and give the developers a much more interactive way to learn rather than forcing them to start from scratch and figure out how the API works.
I like how SimpleGeo has done this and realize that this can apply to a bunch of companies we are both investing in and looking at. I’m not sure that it has anything to do with the construct of “data as a service” (which I expect will quickly turn into DaaS) but it does follow from the long legacy of how people have learned from each other around the creation of software, especially around new platforms.
While we are using SFLA (silly four letter acronyms – we’ve got PaaS, and IaaS, along with our old friend SaaS), any ideas what ZaaS is going to stand for?
I had a new experience today. At 7am I had my first MRI at the Boulder Community Hospital. I was a little nervous, although I’m not entirely sure why. I was in and out in 45 minutes – it was fascinating.
I hurt my lower back about five months ago (actually, exactly on March 13th at about 1pm at my parents house in Dallas). I went for a two hour run and then took my dad to Fry’s for his birthday to buy him a new color printer. As I unloaded the printer from the car, I lifted correctly, but then twisted left and immediately knew I’d screwed myself. I rested a week and started running again in advance of a marathon in mid-April in St. Louis. I had a great three hour run in Charlotte the first week of April and thought I was ready to roll. Amy and I drove to Santa Fe the following weekend; when I got out of the car when we got back to Boulder I had enormous lower back pain. I got a massage the next day (big mistake) and when I woke up Tuesday morning in a hotel room in Seattle I couldn’t get up off the toilet, nor could I completely straighten up. Four weeks of rest and three months of intermittent running with regular recurrence of back pain in the same spot after a few days caused me to finally decide that I’m hurt and need to figure out what’s going on.
Boulder is fortunate that it has a great community hospital system. There are plenty of new facilities and the people are very nice. I checked in and got my paperwork. It was already completed via my doctor’s referral. The charge for the MRI was $3,696, my insurance plan allowed $1,078, and there was $0 co-pay or money owed by me. I was completely stunned by this – I expected to at least have to pay a $20 co-pay. The entire billing / checkin thing took about as long as it takes to checkin on FourSquare. I pondered where the difference between the $3,696 and the $1,078 was coming from, or whether it simply vanished into the ether.
I went to the Imaging Center with my Dark Side of the Moon CD, ready to chill out in a tube. I changed into hospital scrubs and was escorted to the MRI machine by a lovely nurse who talked me through everything. The machine I was in didn’t have a CD (it had an MP3 player) but my head was in a cradle that wouldn’t fit the earphones so I punted on the music. I got a little “panic thing” to squeeze if I freaked out and then went into the tube.
I basically had a noisy 20 minute shivasana. They did six scans, most between three and five minutes. The noise was loud, but rhythmic. I had earplugs so it was more like a weird electronica thing. I did my share of isolation tanks in college (I went through an isolation tank phase) – this was much shorter, much more comfortable, but much noisier. As is my practice with shivasana, I dozed off near the end.
They pulled me out, I walked down the hall, and picked up a CD with my scan on it. The software is pretty ancient, doesn’t run on my Mac, but worked fine on a PC. I have no idea what I’m looking at – well – other than my lower back and pelvis region with all the ensuing pieces – but it’s pretty amazing to look at and ponder.
It’s fun to be a human, even when you are hurt.
Ever since I switched to the Mac, I’ve had N (where N is a suitably large number) tell me that I should switch to Gmail from Exchange. I finally decided to try it for a week and see if it works for me. Given my Mac experience – where I had to commit and really use it, I’ve decided to do the same on Gmail.
For now, I’m just going to use Gmail (instead of Google Apps) because I don’t want to go through the hell of switching the feld.com domain since I’ve got a bunch of other people (e.g. my family members) on it in a variety of configurations. That’ll limit me a little as I won’t be able to use the Apps Marketplace, but the benefit is I’ll be able to mess around with a variety of other Gmail stuff.
If you’ve got Gmail addons, hints, tips, and trick, leave them for me here. At the end of next week, I’ll either be switching to Gmail or heading back to Mac Mail against my Exchange server.
I get a lot of inbound resumes from folks looking to relocate to Boulder. I also get a lot of requests from local CEOs for candidates for various positions. I do my best at connecting folks, but I’m sure plenty of connections slip through the cracks.
So – David Cohen of TechStars (who has the same thing happening to him all the time) and I have created a new private email list for CEOs of Boulder-based companies. We have started to email qualified inbound resumes to this list. By qualified, I mean that it’s a real inquiry, rather than a generic “resume spam email” which is the only email I get that I won’t respond to.
If you are a CEO of a Boulder-based company and want to be added to this list, just email me. Alternatively, if you are interested in relocating to Boulder and want to get exposure to the local CEOs, just email me.
Did someone recently say email was dead? Whatever.