Starting Up Without Owing Anyone

An editor by trade, a writer by avocation and an Expert by some cosmic practical joke, ericpete puts together the newsletter for Experts Exchange.

Our buddy Guy sent us a link the other day to a blog post by Kyle Neath, one of the designers of GitHub, a company that has a system for collaborative code development. The post itself doesn't say anything that is overly ground-breaking (frankly, 37signals' owners are more eloquent), but it reiterates the kinds of things we've been saying for a while:

• Have the conversation -- with your staff, your critics, and most of all, your customers -- and don't do all the talking.
• Try it -- get it shipped. If it works, keep it. If it doesn't, junk it.
• Never make a promise you can't keep -- and keep your promises. No excuses.

All of that -- including the details Mr Neath and the good folks at 37signals have filled in -- is all well and good. But the Internet can be a terrible time suck, because when you come across something like Mr Neath's article, because it inevitably leads to something equally compelling, and in this case, the items are a couple of posts by Tom Preston-Werner, Mr Neath's nominal boss at GitHub. Mr Preston-Werner and his partner, Chris Wanstrath, started GitHub a little over three years ago, and it has been profitable for most of that time.

In the first -- originally written in December 2008 as the company was about to celebrate its first anniversary but not posted until a couple of months ago -- Mr Preston-Werner tried to list ten things he learned from his company's first year. Again, some of it isn't really all that new ("paying attention to Twitter" isn't much different from "listen to your customers", and "trusting your team" isn't much different from "hire good people and get out of their way"), but there were a couple of interesting points.

There's a tendency in the development world, apparently, to say "this is what we're going to do, and it's going to take us X weeks/months/quarters/years to release it." The decision-makers say to their subordinates "you're responsible" and they go out and gets teams of people to do this, that and the other thing while everyone is supposedly focused on the goal of completing this major project by some time in the distant future. Microsoft has been doing that for decades now, and hasn't made an initial projected release date since ... DOS 3.1? But there are always issues -- someone wants a new button, "the customers" want something else, and marketing doesn't like the color scheme. There are three predictable results: 1) It's going to be late; 2) it's going to be buggy; and 3) nobody is going to be happy with it. The best example of what's wrong with the hierarchical decision-making and development system that we've heard of lately: Microsoft's Live Meeting crashes Internet Explorer.

Startups, at least the one like Mr Preston-Werner was building, have a couple of advantages. In his case, they were doing something no one else was doing, so there were no real expectations to manage, nor was there an existing customer base whose favorite buttons needed to be in the same places. If you're Microsoft, you can show your latest iteration of Excel to people who have never used it and they'll go "Wow" -- but show it to people who have been using it for years, and their response to the "ribbon" will be more along the lines of "what idiot came up with this piece of insanity". If you're GitHub, you can implement something, see what the reaction and metrics are, and then change it, and your loyal-customer base will grow because you're paying attention.

GitHub loves open source, for obvious reasons; for the uninitiated, Git is the Linux version control system, and GitHub is a repository for projects. Their core functionality isn't open source -- it's too difficult to manage for an ongoing business -- but all of their APIs and tools are. GitHub also uses it to find employees; two of the first three were GitHub users -- what Mr Wanstrath calls "superusers". It's reasonable that people who use a product or system constantly would be the people who are best equipped to determine what features or upgrades will actually be used and how they'll use them.

Mr Preston-Werner isn't a fan of venture capital, either. That makes sense; GitHub is, at a very basic level, his (and his partner's); the two problems with venture capital investment are that 1) someone else -- who controls the checkbook -- might have ideas that don't quite fit with what you want to do and 2) is more interested in what he calls, in his second piece, "optimizing for money" as opposed to doing whatever it is you're doing.

Mr Wanstrath boils making a successful start-up -- in GitHub's case, a website -- down to three pretty simple rules:

1. It has to work.
2. It's not about the site -- it's about what the site does.
3. If someone is a fan, they'll tell people about it.

There are a ton of implications there, to be sure: execution matters ("we were making [GitHub] for ourselves"), don't worry about bells and whistles (he says nobody thinks about the gradients on YouTube, but rather about the video they're watching and sharing ... on YouTube), treat your users well ("be super fanatical about customers"), hire employees who will do great things (GitHub just hired an Australian company to be its system administrators) and so forth.

On the surface, none of this will help you if you're trying to go from AA baseball to the major leagues -- or maybe it will. Mr Wanstrath said that the biggest challenge GitHub faces is in maintaining its small company culture while it is growing. It now has an office and 23 employees; it has a lot more equipment, all of which has to be maintained and upgraded; it has a reputation to protect. He doesn't know the half of it yet; managing 23 people is a lot easier than managing fifty -- or 500.

Growth is a problem for any company. Apple stumbled horribly when Steve Jobs left, and the only solution was to bring him back -- on his terms. Yahoo lost its way and even bringing Jerry Yang back didn't help; we're still betting that sooner or later, it will be absorbed by someone. HP replaced its founders with people selected by a board that was optimizing money; the result was a series of debacles. So what do you do if your company is suffering the doldrums of flat growth curves and competition from other people who say they're going to do what you do, only better?

In a word: Dare. If you know your product, broadcast that vision to the world. Why is the world stopping this week? Because Steve Jobs is speaking at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference. Mark Zuckerberg's words get posted by every tech newsletter and blog. Tony Hsieh is heralded as a prophet because he knows what he wants and tells everyone he can get to listen about it. All of these people are their own evangelists, the tellers of their company's story. If you're going to be successful, someone has to do it; Bill Gates did it for a couple of decades, and when he turned the reins of his company over to Steve Ballmer, the company became less about being the software everyone used to being the software everyone had to buy whether they liked it or not. Good for Microsoft? Not really. It pays a little dividend, but does anyone really consider it innovative or a leader?

Your company needs a champion; it should be you, but that's not your gig, then don't fall into the trap Microsoft did. Consider instead Google's owners, who tabbed Eric Schmidt to lead them through through the maze from smallish, but promising start-up to the kind of dominance seen only by Microsoft in its heyday. Hire only the best people you can find to do the job (wherever they are), and then let them do it. Act as if its life depended on you.

It's your baby, after all.

More News and Notes

I'm glad I'm over 50, or I'd feel like I was missing something: According to a Bank of America study looking at Americans under the age of 50, 94 per cent of them use Facebook. A lot. 82% said that privacy is their biggest concern with Facebook (which begs the question: why are they using it then? ... and don't sweat it, because Mark Zuckerberg says you'll get over it), and the largest plurality said they use it to keep tabs on their friends. In short, the post-baby boomers are a bunch of lazy gossips with nothing better to do. They aren't very smart, either; when The Onion posted a satire saying that Warner Bros. had recut the final Harry Potter film into seven more films, Facebook fans went nuts. Oh -- they don't have particulary polite vocabularies either.

Scary idea of the week: A company is developing a car for blind people. Obviously, he's never been on the 405 at rush hour.

It's a mystery to me: You have to love the people at MIT. Who else would run a synopsis of a paper published by UC San Diego entitled Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain -- in other words, a description of how that fake pill from India gets advertised, sent and paid for. And a related item: Gawker found a real Nigerian scammer.

Cyber-attack tote board: China 1, White House 0. Game 1: Lebanon 1, Sony 0. Anonymous 1, Iran 0. Someone as yet unidentified 2 and maybe 3, Hotmail-Yahoo-Gmail, 0. Game 2: LulzSec 1, Sony 0, and in overtime, LulzSec tacks on a "how-to". Great Britain 1, Al-Qaeda 0, with a bonus for the cupcakes. Apropos of which, we haven't seen the opening line on the match between LulzSec and the FBI, but we'll bet the odds are prohibitive. Syrian people 0, Syrain government 0, early in the first period. Expect that some pretty gruesome videos of a tortured 13-year-old boy that are all over YouTube will play a part in the rest of this set of events.

And while we're on the subject, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that China, which is being linked to the attacks on US defense contractors, is now accusing Google of being a "political tool", based on Google's blog post saying that the recent outburst of phishing campaigns originated in Jinan. But hey, if you're Microsoft or Yahoo or any of a bunch of big companies, it's where the money is.

Forty days and forty nights of wandering in the desert: Sony announced, after being dark for nearly six weeks, that its PlayStation Network should be back up and running by the time this reaches your inbox. We'll make sure and change it before we ship out the newsletter though -- and now you have a little insight into what it's like running a medium that comes out every couple of weeks.

They'd better start thinking of other animals, because they're running out of cats: There probably won't be too many surprises coming out of Apple's World Wide Developer Conference that started Monday; all of the official stuff will center on the newest version of the Mac OS X (Lion), the new version of the mobile operating system (iOS 5, which may address a few issues people have with the iPad2), and iCloud, which will presumably be a cloud-based version of iTunes. iGuess iShould be iExcited, but what would really iMpress me is if Apple took malware protection seriously. Another issue that won't be talked about is the iPhone patent that makes it illegal to make a video of a concert.

And that iPhone4 you bought a couple of weeks ago for $200? You can now get for $147 it at ... [drumroll, please] ... WalMart.

NEW FEATURE: The ANY key: We'll use this space to highlight relatively new instances of governmental agencies that really need to get a clue about technology. This week: France.

Speaking of "Games People Play": Venture Crapital, from the good folks at TechCrunch. Throw money at companies and sell when enough other people have thrown money at the same companies. Speaking of games, a few people are finally beginning to get the picture when it comes to tech companies with no apparent way to turn red numbers into black ones; LinkedIn, which had its IPO a couple of weeks ago, may be the last one, as the GroupOn IPO looks like it is going to have some trouble getting traction, especially since the CEO looks like he's bailing. At least Pandora has a balance sheet that makes some sense. Twitter buying Tweetdeck doesn't, really.

In requieum: James Arness, whose performances in Gunsmoke redefined television series as being more than just shallow melodramas; and Dr. Jack Kervorkian.

And there are still people who wonder why the recording and movie industries get no respect: It's because they clog the courts with "massive" lawsuits that... well... you can imagine what should be done with them.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Twitter tattoos, a kidney for an iPad with no return policy, and Fox News apparently needs fact checkers when using images.

Nata's Corner

It's bad enough when data stored by a credit card processing company or a big retailer or a government agency dealing with benefits gets breached by someone who stealing money on his mind. I can live with it when some numbskull wannabe thinks it's funny to hack into a public television website. But it bothers me a lot when the systems of the US's largest defense contractor are hacked, and the target wasn't the employee personnel files. Even the Pentagon is paying attention.

What makes it even worse is that apparently, even last week's attack on Google accounts wasn't really the result of someone attacking directly. Instead, it was someone using tried and true social engineering attacks; in other words, it shows that people who should know better are probably not smart enough to appear on game shows. It's so frustrating -- even if it's good business for all of you who make a living cleaning up the messes made by people using their computers -- that people keep doing the same things we've been telling them to not do for years.

Speaking of people doing really dumb things, I was going to have something here about the man who put up a website showing the guy who stole his MacBook, but on the day I started getting things together for my column, the Oakland, CA police department arrested the "alleged" thief. Just as ... off-kilter... are the people who -- considering that every news outlet everywhere has been talking about data breaches -- use insanely simple passwords or fall for phishing tweets. Trust me -- next fall, when The Biggest Loser comes back on the air, we will all start seeing Anna Kournikova's name again.

Finally, a new survey says that Americans worry more about Big Business snooping on them than they do about Big Government. That's probably because Big Business usually seems to start out like small business -- there's that whole Harvard dorm room thing with people who know what they want to do and know how to do it, while Big Government always seems to be at least a couple of years behind the curve. Speaking of Facebook, my other half asked me what I thought of the Namesake infographic that contrasts the differences between "transparency" -- having an online identity that is who you are -- and "anonymity" -- being able to use whatever username strikes your fancy (or none at all) to mask your identity. I'm not sure where I come down on this argument, because I can see both sides of it, but I'll bet you one thing: the discussion is just getting started.

Milestones

New Geniuses: nobus became the ninth Experts Exchange member to earn five Genius certificates, picking up one in the Laptops/Notebooks topic area. leakim971 earned his second Genius certificate, this one in AJAX; and ACH1LLES and rhinok earned their first, in Mircrosoft SharePoint and Crystal Reports respectively. Congratulations, folks!

My First Million: May was the month for millionaires, as eleven members of Experts Exchange reached the 7-digit level: fyed, jackieman, ACH1LLES, rhinok, rfc1180, pwindell, BitsBytesandMore, MojoTech, Frosty555, redrumkev and kadaba.

Milestones:

• capricorn1 has earned 22,000,000 points since joining Experts Exchange in January 2001. He has also earned 18,000,000 points in the Microsoft Access topic area.
• Idle_Mind is the 15th member of EE to earn 12,000,000 points overall.
• rorya has earned over 12,000,000 points in the Microsoft Excel topic area.
• peter57r has earned over 2,000,000 points in each of two TAs: Microsoft Access and Crystal Reports.
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• rindi is the 30th member of EE to earn 9,000,000 points overall.
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