Eugene Mandel

Not Another Startup Metaphor! Pulp Fiction - Bar Scene

Startup world metaphors can be found in all kinds of weird places. Lately, the Bar Scene from Pulp Fiction has been ringing somewhat familiar to me :).

Marsellus talking to Butch before giving him the money to throw the fight:

"Thing is, Butch, right now you got ability. But, painful as it may be, ability don't last. And your days are just about over. Now that's a hard motherfucking fact of life. But that's a fact of like your ass is gonna get realistic about.

You see, this profession is filled to the brim with unrealistic motherfuckers. Motherfuckers who thought their ass would age like wine. If you mean it turns to vinegar, it does. If you mean it gets better with age, it don't. Besides, Butch, how many fights you think you go in you, eh? Two? Boxers don't have an old-timers advantage. You came close, but you never made it. But if you were gonna make it, you would have made it before that."

Product, motherf...rs! Product! - The Wire, Stringer Bell's speech

A product guy's battle cry :). From The Wire - String Bell speaking to his troops:

"Game ain't about that no more. It's about product. Yeah... We got best God damn product, so we gonna sell no matter where we are, right? Product, motherfuckers! Product!"

Startup Seinfeld - Episode: The Muffin Tops (Season 8)

Elaine: This is my idea! You stole my idea!

Mr. Lippman: Elaine, these ideas are all in the air. They're in the air!

Elaine: Well, if that air is coming out of this face then it is my air and my idea!

Startup Seinfeld - Episode: The Voice (Season 9)

(Kramer is reading the newspaper at the table)

Kramer: Look at this, they are redoing the Cloud Club.

Jerry: Oh, that restaurant on top of the Chrysler building? Yeah, that’s a good idea.

Kramer: Of course it’s a good idea, it’s my idea. I conceived this whole project two years ago.

Jerry: Which part? The renovating the restaurant you don’t own part or spending the two hundred million you don’t have part?

Kramer: You see I come up with these things, I know they’re gold, but nothing happens. You know why?

Jerry: No resources, no skill, no talent, no ability, no brains.

Kramer: (interrupts) No, no…time! It’s all this meaningless time. Laundry, grocery, shopping, coming in here talking to you. Do you have any idea how much time I waste in this apartment?

Everyday App - a Perfect Example in the Idea vs Execution Arguments

I think I found a perfect example to use in the "idea vs execution" arguments - Everyday for iPhone.

What does it do? Take a picture of your face every day for months (or years) and the app will splice them into a movie that shows how you face changes over that period. This Techcrunch article has more about the company: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/21/everyday-iphone-app/

A simple idea, done before, don't know if it's useful, don't know if it will grow, definitely don't know if these guys will be able to build a business out of it (my $1.99 is probably not going to be enough for them to retire to their own private island), ...BUT

it's so exquisitely done!

To make the video smooth, the face has to be in a more or less same position and pictures must be taken daily. Here are three examples how the app ensures this:

• When you take your first picture, the app shows a grid to align with you eyes, nose and mouth.
• When taking a your next photos, the picture from the previous day is displayed in the camera and helps you place your face correctly.
• Daily reminders.

There is so much pleasure in using products that are well done.

Disclaimer: this is in no way an attempt to endorse the "idea vs execution" arguments. These arguments are silly, useless and better left to "professional pundits". If you catch me engaging in one, please punch me in the face. 

Disclaimer on the disclaimer: this is in no way an invitation to punch me in the face, regardless of what silly arguments you catch me engage in.

Continuous Deployment Basics in One Day - Reading List

Like with any topic, there is just too many resources on Continuous Deployment on the web. I curated a short list of must read links. If you go through the following articles and presentations, you are likely to feel not a complete idiot when it comes to Continuous Deployment. It's a "one day reading list" because you should be able to cover it in under a day.

First, the basics.

When talking about Continuous Deployment and Continuous Integration, everyone refers to a 2006 paper by Martin Fowler of ThoughtWorks: http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html and to posts by Eric Ries: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/06/why-continuous-deployment.html (shorter version: http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/continuous-deployment-5-eas.html).

And now to writings by practitioners.

Eric Ries's writings on CI are based mostly on his experience at IMVU. Here is a talk by Timothy Fitz (Engineering Lead) about IMVU's CI practices (video and slides):
http://saucelabs.com/blog/index.php/2009/09/continuous-deployment%E2%80%94the... and two of his posts - one about the benefits and principles of CI - http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/08/continuous-deployment/ - and another about the process: http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deployment-at-imvu-doi...

Ash Maurya (founder of WiredReach) wrote about his CI deployment. This is a good summary of the post: http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/01/continuous-deployment-trenches, and the full text: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2010/01/case-study-continuous-deployment...

Stephan Schmidt's post and a diagram of his infrastructure: http://codemonkeyism.com/continuous-deployment-setup-2morethings/

kaChing's engineering team did a lot to popularize CI. Here are the best picks:

CI at Kaching - video and slides: http://eng.kaching.com/2010/06/applied-lean-startup-ideas-continuous.html

CI at Kaching (video of another talk - might be redundant): http://eng.kaching.com/2010/06/iterate-like-whirling-dervish.html

More slides from Kaching (might be redundant): http://prezi.com/5zm8xplapff2/continuous-deployment/

Q&A about CI at Kaching with their CTO and Dir Eng: http://dev2ops.org/blog/2010/5/25/qa-continuous-deployment-is-a-reality-at-ka...

CI dashboard at Kaching (video): http://eng.kaching.com/2010/09/devops-cafe-on-continuous-deployment.html

CI infrastructure at Kaching: http://eng.kaching.com/2010/05/deployment-infrastructure-for.html

Enjoy, and let me know if I omitted a must read resource!

Gmail Phone Calls Bring Jaxtr Memories

The announcement of Google's Gmail Phone Calls brought up nice memories from over four years ago when we were just starting Jaxtr. We were discussing various models and hacking prototypes, and our first demo was this:

When your home phone rings while you are sitting somewhere in a coffee shop with your laptop and wifi, you can pick up the incoming call on Google Talk. Google Talk just added the voice feature, and, as far as I know, we were the first to integrate with it.

It did require that you kept a small Sipura 3000 box at your home pugged into your phone line and into your router. Sipura was doing the translation between POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) and SIP - the protocol that powers most of IP telephony. Our software was doing the translation between SIP and Google Talk and all the "magic" in between.

Jaxtr ended up choosing a very different model, but we always warmly remembered our first toy.

With Gmail Phone Calls not only you can call phones (like the name implies), but you can also configure Google Voice to ring your Gmail when your GV number is dialed. Now I can pick up my incoming calls on the computer instead of them going to my iPhone's voicemail - a pretty good way to deal with the spotty AT&T reception at my home.

The familiar Google Talk/Gmail Phone ring sound brought with it the four-year old memories. I even found the dust-covered Sipura box in the closet.

Mixergy Interview - Webs.com CEO

We are big fans of Mixergy - an interview series for "ambitious upstarts". Andrew Warner conducts several interviews with founders a week. He asks his questions in a very unassuming manner, yet he makes the interviewees open up about the details and mechanics of their businesses. This makes Mixergy unique. Beyond simply enjoying it, from listening to the interviews you can pick up practical advice about early marketing, product positioning, partnerships, and other startup issues. The list of past interviewees is who-is-who of the startup world. Here is the latest Mixergy interview: How Webs.com Slowly Grew From Side-Business Into A Giant With 100,000 Paying Customers – with Haroon Mokhtarzada Our application - Buzzworthy - is running in the App Store of Webs.com, so the part where Andrew and Haroon are discussing the App Store was of particular interest to us. Besides, it was very generous of Haroon to mention Buzzworthy as an example of a successful app from a small startup (begins at 37:50 in the video).

Andrew: Do you have an example of one of the small app makers who’s doing well, a guy who had a small business who was able to grow? Haroon: Yeah. There’s a company called Buzzworthy. It’s done a great job of using us in that manner, and they’ve done . . . Andrew: What’s Buzzworthy? Haroon: What it does is it lets you put in topics, and it pulls in sort of what the buzz is on those topics, from the Twitter sphere and the real-time Web. So, if you have a site about something, let’s say you have a site about plumbing or something like that, and you want fresh content on your site. You don’t want to just have static content. You can install this app. It adds a page that is all about the topics that you care about, and it just automatically populates itself. And so, the point is to get more people interested, to get Google seeing that your site is getting updated and things like that. They’ve gone through multiple revs as they’ve gotten feedback on what especially the business users are finding useful for them and running surveys against those users and seeing how much they’d pay for it. And now, they’re going to be rolling it out their premium plans on the platform and all that stuff.

Our Guest Post on Content Curation Marketing Blog

Thanks to Pawan Deshpande of HiveFire, Inc for inviting us to write a guest post on Content Curation Marketing blog. We used the opportunity to share our findings about how news spread on Twitter and why Twitter is a great tool for content curators.

Here is a story of how one article became popular. The article Researchers: HFCS is much worse than table sugar was published in the environmental news magazine Grist earlier this year. It went to be tweeted almost 400 times and reached a significant audience. It achieved what Twitter calls resonance. Let’s trace how it happened. Read more...

Tweet Annotations - a Way to a Metadata Marketplace?

Today at Chirp - Twitter Developers Conference in San Francisco - Ryan Sarver of the platform team announced new feature called Annotations. Twitter clients will be able to annotate the tweets they publish with arbitrary attributes. For example, if the client detects that the author of the tweet mentioned a book, it can attach the ISBN of the book to the tweet - "book.isbn = XYZ". This metadata will be visible to all users who access this tweet via the API. Annotations open the way for Robert Scoble's idea of SuperTweet - "a tweet with a metadata payload". However, the fact that only the client that publishes a tweet can annotate it is a limitation. Imagine all the scenarios that will be possible if anyone could submit metadata to be associated with any tweet. You just call an API, authenticate with your username, and pass it the tweet id and the attribute name/value pair. The platform stores this metadata along with your identity. Then anyone can query the API for metadata for a particular tweet. You can either request all metadata or a particular attribute, or all attributes submitted by a particular user. If you decide that the user who submitted the attribute is trustworthy, you can use the value in your application. For example, Amazon could attach ISBNs to all tweets that mention a book. If you trust Amazon, go ahead and display a link built out of the ISBN next to the tweet when you present it in your UI. An advertiser can submit an ad as a tweet's attribute. If you don't want to show the ad or do not trust this advertiser, ignore it. Opening publishing tweet annotations to anyone will open the way to a marketplace of metadata where client developers, data mining companies and advertisers can add new meaning to Twitter and build innovative businesses.