The Itinerant Engineer

Last year, I co-founded a company. In October, we presented the company to 140 investors at AngelPad’s fall demo day. I noticed investors fall into three general categories:

• Team-driven investors primarily care about the founders themselves: their relationship, what they’ve accomplished prior to starting the company, and why they’re the right mix to tackle the problem at hand. The incubator guys (e.g. Y Combinator, AngelPad) obsess a lot over this stuff, and they’re as well-positioned as anyone to understand, and avoid, the common causes of early death for companies.
• Problem/product-driven investors want to understand the urgency of the problem (“Is this a hair-on-fire problem?”), and how the team intends to solve it. Product orientation seems common among angel investors who made their money as engineers at Zynga/Facebook/Google. These guys believe (rightly in my opinion) that if the problem is sufficiently compelling, and customers get enough value from the solution, that investment and revenue will surely follow.
• Market-driven investors care about the numbers: how many customers, how much revenue from each of them, gross profit, acquisition cost, and churn. Market-driven investors tend to come from finance and banking, and play a large role at later-stage (Series B) funds, where the key question is scalability, rather than founder issues or technology risk.

When trying to raise seed capital, focus on the first two. Most angels and early-stage investors I’ve met believe startups fail because of team and product/market fit issues; they’re far more tolerant of market sizing issues, than, say, lack of a compelling problem, or bad founder chemistry.

I used to think Silicon Valley was crazy for betting on companies without business models, but now I’m not so sure.

(Note: It occurred to me, as I was writing this, that the investors’ concerns form a sort of blueprint for how to start a company. Start with good people, then find a problem, then concentrate on a market — in that order.)

Assume you take a job at a big company. A few months in, you realize your project is a disaster with a snowball’s chance in hell of shipping. Do you

1. Quit the company: burn professional bridges, and leave a black mark on your resume
2. Transfer to another group: kind of like quitting, but looks less bad because you’re at the same company, or
3. Stick it out: see whether things improve while collecting a paycheck and letting your career idle

Faced with this dilemma at Microsoft two years ago, I chose option #1 (quitting). When the ship started to sink, I didn’t pray, I jumped.

An individual’s choice seems highly linked to his risk appetite. Regardless of the long-term consequences, quitting is definitely riskier in the short run.

Idealists tell us to “follow our hearts”. Following one’s heart is romantic, but it doesn’t go over well with venture capitalists, or the parents of significant others.

I’ve always loved the way watches (the kind you wear on your wrist) blend style and utility.

Viewed one way, a watch is nothing more than a device for telling time. But this misses the point: go to any mall or jewelery store, and look inside the case: you’ll see many watches on display, of varying quality, and vastly different prices. From $5 to $5000, all watches share a basic feature: a set of hands, or a digital display, for indicating the time.

There’s more to product design than checking off lists of features. Other things to consider:

• What’s the overall feel of the product: cluttered and busy, or minimal and clean?
• Does it work?
• Is it easy to use?
• Is it fun?

Hard to measure? Absolutely, but so are reputation, brand value, and love–and those are pretty important too, no?

Personally-controlled health records (PCHRs) have great potential. Today, a patient’s “medical record” is actually a fragmented set of charts, discharge records, prescriptions, and more, sharded across the numerous places the patient has received treatment during his lifetime.

PCHRs increase record portability by (1) standardizing the way medical data is stored, and (2) putting it all in one place. Centralization comes with the additional benefit that the patient has full control over who can access his records.

Of course, centralization begets the question of who stores the records. Google, Microsoft, and Dossia are vying for pole position, with three different approaches to the storage and retrieval of health data.

This post recounts my experience getting started with HealthVault, Microsoft’s offering.

About me

I’m pretty average as software developers go: mid-twenties, primary computer is a Mac. I use git for revision control, unfuddle for project tracking, and mostly develop in Rails. I’ve been a professional developer for 3-4 years.
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In technical circles, it’s well known that the smartest people cluster in Silicon Valley. The excellent, the prodigious, the well-off, and the well-educated head to Silicon Valley to find their tribe.

The rate of information exchange in a place like Silicon Valley can be hard for outsiders to fathom. On a recent trip, I serendipitously ran into a Berkeley Ph.D. while waiting for the Caltrain. After a few minutes of conversation, we discovered that he’d known my academic adviser while the two were students at Berkeley. We got into a lengthy, and fascinating, discussion of database semantics which continued on the train, all the way from San Jose to San Francisco. I can’t imagine this kind of thing happens routinely in many other places.

However, Silicon Valley’s hyper-connected, homogeneous population breeds the worst kind of groupthink. So many smart people clustered together, and the best business ideas they can come up with is to make iPhone games? Foursquare just made waves by passing the 2-million-user mark, but let’s not forget, that’s less than 1% of the US population. Adrian Holovaty’s remark a while ago on Signal vs. Noise caught my attention:

Another big plus for working from a non-web-2.0-echo-chamber city is the diversity of people and professions. My friends here in Chicago are furniture makers, architecture students, journalists, professional musicians, philanthropists, cops, lawyers.

While I’d agree that it’d be a great motivator to live in a place saturated with other Web developers, it’s also helpful, from a product focus standpoint, to be around people who don’t know what the f—k RSS is.

A few people have asked what I’ve been up to since leaving Microsoft.

• I’m building an internet service with Dr. Lyle Berkowitz and Aleem Zafar. The service, which we haven’t yet named, will help medical care coordinators manage their caseload. We’re actively researching our customer base and haven’t yet incorporated the company, but I’ll be sure to post details as they develop.
• I’m contracting through Prefiat, my new company created for this purpose. We provide technology implementation services—hardware, software, and websites—to customers of all sizes. The company’s primary place of business is Office Nomads, located at 1617 Boylston Ave in Seattle.
• I’m organizing Barcamp Seattle, a technology/lifestyle/2.0 event to be held in June.
• I’m doing pro bono math tutoring to help struggling high school students succeed.

Suffice to say, I’m definitely keeping busy. There are so many great things to do in the world, and so little time; I can hardly imagine ever being bored.

Let’s have a look at four marketing campaigns I saw recently.

In only 52 seconds, we see: automatic search completion, spelling correction (in French!), maps, translation, definitions, flight times, and consistently high-quality search results. All useful features, tied together with a compelling storyline about a guy falling in love in Paris.

Photo sharing, eBooks, email, web browsing, movies, and calendaring, in just 30 seconds.

AT&T vs. Verizon 3G coverage (image courtesy of Engadget). AT&T wanted this ad taken down so badly, they actually sued Verizon, claiming it misrepresented Verizon’s coverage (it didn’t).

“The New Busy”. What’s the product? Does it make me busier? Do I even want to be busy? (Personally, I consider busy a four-letter word.)

Good advertising explains how a product satisfies a customer need. The first two ads are powerful because they show nothing but the product. The Verizon ad visually depicts the carrier’s coverage, a major concern to high-end data customers, who tend to be quite mobile.

The Hotmail ad, by comparison, feels like a beer / soda commercial; it tries to be catchy because there’s nothing unique or special about the product. I can’t believe Hotmail is really that bad of a product. This ad campaign is terrible. Someone should get fired for this.

I’ve been trying to do a startup for a while. I’ve found one I like, and if something good comes out of our negotiations this week, I’ll be exceedingly pleased.

This job won’t pay cash, so I decided to start another company to do consulting and contracting while I build the startup: Prefiat LLC. The company is a boutique hardware/software agency and is available for hire immediately. I just put up the website today, and I have to say, I’m starting not to suck as badly as I used to at web design.

I received the completed boards from the cerebral palsy project from BatchPCB today. After soldering down all the components, I plugged it in, and it worked right away. As an unexpected bonus, I got eight free copies of the board—I’m guessing they had some free space on the production run, and decided to stick a few small ones (mine) in along the edges.

Next comes experiments with switching and software. I spoke about this project at Ignite last Thursday; I’ll post the talk here when it’s available. In the mean time, check out the media section for the slides.

When I was younger, my father advised me to “try to avoid dealing with the general public” in my professional life. “I really have to hand it to the receptionists, police officers, and DMV workers of the world, for having the patience to put up with rudeness and disrespect all day long, and smile about it. I wouldn’t last a day in a job like that.”

To the extent that one can control who one does business with, there’s a lot of wisdom in that. The average American is overweight, and in debt. Most marriages end in divorce. Entire industries (video rental and credit cards, for example) derive significant revenue from peoples’ inability to follow through on their commitments.

My dad’s not an elitist, he just doesn’t take people at their word, unless he has reason to.

It’s easy for my dad to make a statement like that, though, because he’s spent the majority of his working life dealing with a small number of highly-qualified professional colleagues inside corporate America. When you’re on the outside, selling, things get a lot murkier. To what authority can one appeal, when a customer is being unreasonable? What to do, when someone refuses to pay? And how can one know another’s character, prior to doing business with them?

Doing business with great people is a privilege, something to fight for, not a right.