Personal Blog

Seeing as it's my birthday (the big 2 5... I'm getting fucking old right?!), I figured it would be an appropriate time to write my first blog post. I struggled to figure out what my blog should be about. An amalgamation of artistic expressions? How about the musings of an entrepreneur? Got it! A content portal for everything startup tech! (Well that would have been a horrible idea since I can't write for shit... I mean well). 

Even as right this post right now, I still don't know what this will become or what will come from it.  If I've learned anything over the past few years is that you can have all the plans in the world but life takes you where you need to in order to reach your goals. With that being said I'm going to leave this first post with a quote from Calvin Coolidge I was first introduced to when I was 19 (breaking the rules already... A quote post in a text post. I can hear the other tumbleloggers yelling blasphemy already!). It is something that at the time struck a chord and continues to 'til this day. Anything worth fighting for (success, love, etc.) requires persistence. The world will not be handed to you on a silver platter.

I was watching Fahreed Zakaria GPS this weekend on CNN (one of the few cable news programs I can bare to watch these days) and he was interviewing Reid Hoffman. For those of you who don't know who Reid is, he is an author, investor and entrepreneur. He's most notable for co-founding LinkedIn and being one of the first board members (and later employees) of PayPal. Needless to say he is extremely bright and fabulously wealthy, so when someone of his stature and success speaks, I often listen.

One issue that was brought up during the interview was the lack of skilled employees in the marketplace (specifically tech). Reid argued the premise that higher education in the US is not teaching students the necessary skills to become productive employees right out the gate. This has been a somewhat hot button topic over the past couple years (especially with recent boom in the tech industry).

While I have the utmost respect for Reid, I would have to disagree with his premise. College is an institution for teaching individuals the skill sets they will need to become successful in their careers (e.g. critical thinking, creative thinking, etc.) with a slight tilt towards learning more about a specific discipline. The introduction to topics and methods we experience in college is just that... an introduction. It's up to the companies to foster and develop the base foundational knowledge we gain in college in order for individuals to become successful not only in their career but in their position within the company. 

I've held positions with both private and public companies in multiple industries and the common denominator between them all has always been that the companies invest a de minimis amount in their employees' development even as they proclaim employee advancement and growth. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of companies who actually practice what they preach, but not as many as one would hope. 

This is a pseudo-response to Alexey Komissarouk's article in Techcrunch this week entitled Stop Looking For A Technical Co-Founder.

In his article, Alexey argues the premise that "Most quality software engineers today have offers of amazing work environments and 6-figure salaries from the likes of Google and Facebook. Few are crazy enough to say no to that. Those that do typically have their own ideas, aren’t sure they need you, and have heard enough cliche pitches to ignore you by default.

Your odds are bad. If you don’t have a strong track record, your odds are terrible. Not a startup-is-a- mosquito terrible, ‘waste of your time’ terrible. So stop looking for a technical co-founder." 

I couldn't agree with him more. Just the act of trying to hire a freelancer to do work on your project can seem like an epic waste of time. The great/good engineers are already working on other projects and most of the remaining talent in the engineering pool are either amateurs or write in languages from when Netscape was the bell of the ball. If you are fortunate enough to find a great/good engineer, you're chances of on-boarding this person is slim to none.

To combat the lack of supply in the engineering pool, Alexey suggest either:

Learn to code   -or-

Hire an external team

While both of these are valid options, #1 is the only feasible option, in my mind, when it comes to starting a company these days.  

When you hire an external team, you can have some great engineers work on your project. However, there are some major downsides:

It's Fucking Expensive!!

         Ever take economics? Remember that whole supply/demand thing we all learned? Well as demand has been increasing for talented software engineers and supply has remained stagnate (or decreased, arguably), the cost/hr for engineers has increased dramatically. And guess what? This price increase is spilling over into development firms too. In one year, we saw price increase of 17.5% with a firm we had worked with initially to get Lokalite's MVP up and running.

What's Their Incentive?

         You can definitely work with some great engineers at development firms but what incentive do they have to bust ass and build your baby, your startup? If you don't give them any equity, none! You're just another client to them. This is not to bash on development firms at all. I've had great and not so great experiences with them, but it isn't like their going to call you 1, 2, 3... months later to see if you need any help on your startup. Once they've satisfied the SOW (Scope Of Work) the relationship between your company and theirs is over. Remember, at the end of the day, it's only business.

They aren't mind readers and you don't know dick about code. Sounds like a recipe for disaster.

         Non-engineers and engineers speak two totally different languages and if you try to have them build anything for you, something will always get lost in translation. ALWAYS!!! (Unless of course you are looking over their shoulders the entire time they're working on your project but that is unbelievably inefficient and annoying). Enough said.

After a hectic month of houseguests and entertaining visitors, I finally have some time to sit down and write a blog post. Between MicroBrews For The Environment and a visit from Destroyak, it has been an exhausting/interesting month. However, through all the ‘noise,’ I was able to find a very interesting article on Lemnos Labs. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Lemnos, they are essentially applying the software incubator model (e.g. TechStars , Y-Combinator, etc.) to hardware.  This made me think… “What if all industries were as ‘open’ as software (and now hardware) incubators?”

First, let me explain what I mean by ‘open’.  What makes these incubators amazing for both innovation and the entrepreneurs involved isn’t a single factor of talent aggregation, funding resources, mentors, or PR but an amalgamation of all these.

Talent is willing to ‘open’ their cognitive bank to help be part of a truly unique experience, participate in innovative startups and potentially become a team member for one of these startups.

VCs are more willing to ‘open’ their actual bank accounts and fund these startups at an expedited pace which increases the pace of innovation. (Of course there are a number of reasons for VCs doing this but the result is what matters here not their motivations).

Mentors are willing to ‘open’ both their cognitive bank and rolodex to help the startup do more faster.  It is never more evident than when you try to start a company whom you know becomes increasingly important. Also, helping entrepreneurs avoid common pitfalls can help save time and money, and in some cases also the company.

Publications are willing to ‘open’ their audience to these startups, which helps these companies gain a much-needed early user base.  The only other form of marketing more influential than PR is WOM. A well-placed article could easily help propel your startup to stardom. 

With the success of this model in the technical space, it seems quite amazing to me that other industries whether it be entertainment, agriculture, or whatever haven’t or are just beginning to apply this model to their industry. 

With the pace of innovation that has occurred in tech in the past 5-7 years alone (Y-Combinator, the first tech startup incubator, started in 2005), imagining the possibilities the incubator model could bring to other industries is almost unimaginable.  I dare say it could even potentially lead to a new age of enlightenment.

Every day I usually start my breakfast, lunch, and dinner by meandering about the startup blogosphere and finding out about the new and exciting startups coming to market. Through all the noise of this firm funding startup A, startup B reaching X milestone, and startup C launching Y feature, I've noticed a fairly interesting trend. Some startups are starting to base their business models around servicing a particular part of a website. In other words, startups are beginning to outsource non-core technological functions of their websites.

In my mind, this the beginning of a potentially huge sea change when it comes to web based development. For a few reasons:

With plug-n-play services that can do search, analytics, content management, and other 'non-essential' competencies, time to market will significantly decrease, allowing startups to spend time focusing on what truly matters and what is going to lead to startup success... differentiation (and we all know that's the fun part of building a startup)

I didn't think it possible but the cost of building a web based startup or MVP (Minimum Viable Product) will begin to decrease even more than it has over the past 20 years. I don't know about you but I would much rather pay $50/month (or whatever it may cost) to copy and paste a few lines of code into my web app that automagically works instead of paying a developer or myself to build, maintain, or improve features. 

If more startups begin to follow this model, we could see a huge wave of new web based startups that are started by non-traditional programmers. Lowering the barriers to entry even further could actually give people the courage to take their idea and run with it (especially if they won't have to commit a significant amount of time to get up and running).

I'm a huge proponent of outsourcing non-core competencies, especially if the incremental cost is significantly lower. This actually led to a major change (I won't say pivot) in Lokalite's strategy in how we think about distribution and we're even applying this to our website. In the next couple of weeks, we're going to implement Swiftype to replace our search. We've even worked with the guys over at ReportGrid to supply our customers with custom analytics (we've since changed our strategy but can't say enough good things about ReportGrid... we highly recommend them if you're looking for custom analytics). Hell you can even test a quick version of your site with Verify (all you need is some screenshots or mockups) and sign up beta testers with BetaBait. And I'm sure there are numerous other services out there that I have yet to find that will help anyone get started with their startup idea.

I know I've been leaving you all hanging the past couple of weeks without imparting some tumblelogging loveliness but its about that time when my girlfriend and I had to find a new place to live (our lease expires in a month... talk about last minute). But dont worry, after weeks of headaches and stress, we found a great condo not too far from where we live now. But I digress. 

Instead of my typical posts regarding the current startup environment, I figured I would share something a little more technical I came across this week that may be helpful in working on your website: Regular Expressions.

Wikipedia defines regular expressions as a way to provide "concise and flexible means to 'match' (specify and recognize) strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters"

Something like this is particularly handy when you want to validate an input field, such as an email field on a sign up form. 

When we built Lokalite, we actually had users validate their email addresses via an email we sent to the emails they provided. However, after testing and researching the usability of this feature, we saw this as a major (and unnecessary) barrier to users accessing our site and opted to remove it. 

Email registration was going smoothly without this feature until we noticed a user had signed up and their email ended in '.edy' instead of '.edu'. Not fixing this problem could have had huge implications. What's the point of having a user sign up if it doesn't facilitate one-on-one communication, you aren't able to drive traffic to your site via email marketing, etc.?

How did we decide to solve this problem in the near term?

A simple email regular expression that validated the email string. Now I know some will say that doing it this way will not handle all potential scenarios and doesn't allow for the application to imply and suggest what a user meant to place in the field if the input is invalid. I completely agree. This is only a near term solution for a web application that is localized to a specific geographic region, doesn't have massive amounts of registrations everyday, and for those who don't have the technical savvy to implement a complete state engine (which is well beyond my current technical competency).

Our Solution

Here is the regular expression we're currently using to validate email registration: 

/^([a-zA-Z0-9_\.\-\'\+])+\@(([a-zA-Z0-9\-])+\.)+(?:[a-zA-Z0-9]{2}|aero|asia|biz|cat|com|coop|info|int|jobs|mobi|museum|name|net|org|pro|tel|travel|xxx|edu|gov|mil|nom|firm|gen|idv\.)$/

What the hell does all of this mean?

   1.  ([a-zA-Z0-9_\.\-\'\+]) 

This pattern matches anything that has 'one of more of' a through z (lowercase and/or uppercase), 0 through 9, an underscore (_), a dot (.), an apostrophe (') or a hyphen(-). 

   2.  +\@ 

Then followed by a required @ symbol. 

   3.  (([a-zA-Z0-9\-])+\.) 

Then followed by a through z (upper and/or lower), and/or 0 through 9, and/or a hyphen followed by a required dot (.). 

   4.  +(?:[a-zA-Z0-9]{2}|aero|asia|biz|cat|com|coop|info|int|jobs|mobi|museum|name|net|org|pro|tel|travel|xxx|edu|gov|mil|nom|firm|gen|idv\.)  

Then lastly followed by an alpha-numeric string that is 2 characters long (to handle country domains and 2 character TLD's), all current US TLD's, a couple one off non-US TLD's (nom, firm, gen, and idv), and/or a dot (.) followed by a 2 character long alpha numeric string (to handle TLD extensions). 

This regular expression should satisfy most cases but needs to become more refined as your application's user base grows. This is just a start and there are definitely areas to make this more refined. I welcome anyone to use and add to this expression... just make sure to share the love.

I was skimming through the Techcrunch articles today and came across funny article about How Google Punk'd The Oatmeal. As a synopsis, The Oatmeal essentially was poking fun at how the engagement on Google's social network, Google Plus, is lackluster to say the least. He was also complaining about how he isn't able to “set up a fancy profile URL so I don’t have to link people to this” - a fictitious URL incase you were wondering (or is it?!).

Instead of coming back about how glorious Google's user growth has been or any other typical vanity metric that does nothing to describe how the new social network is actually doing, Google engineers decided to have a little fun at The Oatmeal's expense. The "fictitious" URL now redirects The Oatmeal's Google+ page.

As my amusement ensued, I decided to hop on over to Google+ since I haven't been there in awhile, and it got me to thinking. If Google is going "all in" on social at every level, why do they still treat each of the social products (e.g. Blogger, YouTube, Gmail, etc. ) as separate destinations on the web? 

Google could roll up each of their social products into Google+, which would make it the number one social destination across the web. This would far and away blow out Facebook and Twitter in the battle for social. By rolling up their most prominent social products (Gmail and YouTube) into the platform, engagement with Google+ would double overnight. 

Case in point: I'm on Gmail all day, everyday. I literally don't even bother closing the tab on my Chrome browser. Now I know I may be either the exception or the rule, but imagine if instead of having Gmail open all the time, I instead had to engage with Google+ to send and receive emails. This instantly places me at the point of engagement with Google+'s other features, which would be near impossible not to engage with (it's like going to Facebook to send a message and not taking a minute (or 20) to check out your News Feed).

Now I know what some of you might say. 1. Gmail isn't social. 2. You would piss people off and instantaneously lose users. 3. I wouldn't engage with Google+ if they did this because I have more self-control (or whatever other reason you want to tell yourself).

You know what I say to all of that... BULLSHIT!

1. Gmail is probably the most successful and social product Google has (next to YouTube). Social is simply jargon for facilitating an interactive communicative experience between users. That experience can be as complex as Google Hangouts or as simply as Gmail. 

2. Innovation and progression is all about pissing people off. The vast majority of people don't like changing from the status quo, especially if they are comfortable with the way things work today. It's not until this new way of doing things is forced upon them that they then start to realize the new way is better. Also, how many times has Facebook pissed off its' users with design, feature, and legal changes? A shit ton and you know what... users don't go anywhere. If the product is a necessity to users, they will adapt. And trust me Gmail and YouTube are a necessity to most users.

3. The problem Google has been having with Google+ is that the friction in getting users to switch social networks is a tremendous feat. However, if users are forced to engage with Google+ in order to use Gmail or whatever else, the friction of engaging with the other features is significantly decreased and exponentially more likely to occur.

With Google's somewhat recent combining of their Terms and Service's and Privacy Policy's across their web properties, it wouldn't be a stretch to see Google start rolling up social products into Google+. 

With the recent string of tech meetups (e.g. TC Disrupt, Dreamforce, etc.), there has been a plethora of interesting topics to dwell on but Jim Goetz of Sequoia Capital made the most poignant one.

Entrepreneurs are not only leaving billions of dollars on the table with regards to enterprise solutions but hundreds of millions on the table by not addressing the needs of SMBs (Small to Medium-size Businesses). In the past twenty years, as we have been ushered into the digital age, many SMBs have been hesitant to adopt new forms of bottom-line impacting web and mobile-based innovations for a multitude of reasons. However, they have slowly found out that in order to compete in this new digital era, they are going to have to at least try these new forms of innovation.

There’s one problem though:

For once, tech entrepreneurs are late to SMB solutions party.

Now I’m not saying entrepreneurs shouldn’t try to create the next multi-billion dollar company by focusing on enterprise or whatever else. But what I am saying is that big name companies aren’t going to adopt 99.99% of new solutions (at least not at first), so why not start by targeting SMBs.

They’re more likely to adopt new solutions given the current competitive market

They’re more willing to provide valuable insight and feedback on the solution

They don’t expect a perfect solution right out of the box

Some individuals within the entrepreneurial ecosystem have started to realize the value of serving a monetarily smaller (and worthwhile) customer base but there is still a lot of room for growth. One of these entrepreneurs is Dave McClure (technically he’s a VC but he’s innovating the hell out of the VC game so I consider him an entrepreneur, but I digress). Dave has always said, “…we [500Startups] like to hit singles and doubles, occasionally we’ll hit a home run.”

Many of the companies he has invested in at 500Startups are doing exactly that. They are trying to provide simple solutions for smaller addressable markets. This isn’t to say that they don’t want to hang with the big boys (and girls), but they realize the path to that ballgame is by batting in the minors first.