When I read that Weebly was pushing forward profitably, I recalled the interview I did with David Rusenko several months ago. Weebly doesn’t get talked about a lot, but it’s one of those startups I really wanted to do when I was in college. I even applied to Weebly as a sophomore in school and got turned down because they weren’t looking for summer interns at the time. I remember thinking at the time: creating web sites online really sucks; the best thing that exists is Macromedia Contribute and that’s a huge piece of software that you have to purchase just to make it work. This was back in the old days, when software came shrink-wrapped and you didn’t download entire operating systems as an upgrade.

Here are a few things that stuck out from the interview:

Designers are the new programmers.

By that, I mean that finding them is difficult, and UI work is challenging. A friend of mine from UIUC who is a designer (who also taught himself iOS development) recently e-mailed saying he wanted to move to Silicon Valley and join a startup. I sent a few e-mails and within 24 hours, I had 30 different startups–nearly all of them well-known and well-funded–clamoring for an introduction to him. Frameworks like Ruby on Rails have made it much easier to quickly build applications. A lot of the issues for web developers in the past, such as sessions, injections, XSS, server deployment, scaling, and to some degree cross-browser compatibility have been taken care of by various frameworks and services. We’ve figured out ways to automate a majority of the back-end work, but the real bottleneck is UI (or more generally front-end), and it still acts as one of the distinguishing factors between good applications and bad ones.

We look for people who can make magic happen. So far, we mostly hire front-end guys because the back-end stuff is not a lot of work and most of it is pretty easy. So we hire a lot of front-end guys and we are also really looking for productive people. People who can just get an abnormal amount of things done in a week and not everyone is like that. But I think a lot of people, put in the right environment without distractions—without any meetings or anything like that—can focus and crank out new features, new code.

Appreciate modest growth early on.

You aren’t going to build a Dropbox or Airbnb-scale business overnight. Of course you’re going to want hockey stick growth, but you need to listen to your early users and make sure you’re making them as excited about your product as you are.

One thing that really helped us was that we appreciated modest growth in the early days. We were driven by this sort of naïve excitement about getting 200 new users a day. It was awesome for us and it was one of those things that you can’t un-see; you can’t go back to the norm once you get to that level. That makes it really tough because you never want to discount any growth but once you get to the levels we’re at today—I mean, one hundred seems like a joke. But, at the time, 200 new users a day was absolutely amazing.

Having said that, there were a ton of ‘oh shit’ moments. Before we raised our angel round at the end of April 2007, I think we had about $45 in our bank account and couldn’t make the next month’s rent, which was coming up in a couple of weeks.Or in December 2008—we were close to being profitable but knew at the rate we were going we’d be pretty far from making next month’s payroll. We just had to keep looking at our expenses and trying to figure out where we could play with them to make it work. It was a really tight month where we basically squeezed by and then things really started picking up so it wasn’t a problem after that. But there definitely have been some pretty scary moments along the way.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to deal with any founder conflicts. We’ve always been really good friends—I would imagine it would be a lot tougher if you were just business partners and not friends. I think at least for us it has worked out very, very well because we were friends for a few years first and then began working on a startup together. That way, throughout the whole thing, if there’s ever any tension you just go out and grab a few beers and it kind of rolls off your back. We never had any major conflicts and there was sort of this assumption that you’re sticking it out together and no one is going to bail.

I write every single new user of OfficeHours.TV a thank you note shortly after they sign up (and it’s not one of those scripts that generates them; I take time out of every day to type them up and it’s part of my routine; it’s something I really enjoy doing).

What does Weebly attribute their financial success to? Small, incremental improvements. Nothing drastic.

There was a point when revenue started to take off. That’s when we actually started charging money for things and revenue growth has been absolutely phenomenal ever since we launched paid features in mid-2008. We are very profitable at this point and there’s no one specific moment that I can say we did this one thing. It’s just a lot of incremental work and incremental improvements; just a lot of individual things that have collectively built massive revenue.

Students: you don’t need to be religious about your GPA.

Not to be confused with: you don’t have to be learning in school. You do, but even when I was in school, the work/grade tradeoff was logarithmic: the jump to a 4.0 was much harder than simply maintaining a 3.75.

Realistically, I’m just not sure there are many other points in life when it’s socially acceptable to spend that much of your time having fun, without a whole lot of responsibility. I think it’s definitely something to take advantage of. In terms of classes and then trying to balance the startup life with classes—and this is just my perspective—you don’t actually need to spend that much time in your classes actually doing the work. You obviously want to try to master material that you think is going to be important to you, but in most classes you just need to get by, and there are a lot of different ways to do that. I mean, aim for, let’s say, a 3.75 instead of a 4.0 GPA and you save a whole lot of time. That was my strategy. I graduated with a 3.76 and didn’t actually have to spend that much time doing class work or attending classes, but I still managed to master the material that I knew would be most helpful to me outside of school.

Start and close your funding round quickly. Fundraising requires a completely different mindset.

Investors don’t want to hear your problems, they want to hear how awesome your product is, and how you’re going to build a massive business from it. The problem is the mindset of programming versus fundraising is different and conflicting.

When you’re programming you think about all the problems with your system, how to solve them, and then how to build the solutions. When you’re fundraising you can’t think about the problems—how would you feel if you met someone and all they were talking about was the problems with their startup? So it’s really hard to get work done when you’re struggling to balance that sort of business versus programming mindset. That constant struggle and the fact that it takes up so much of your time is why so many people just try to start and close; get it done as quickly as possible.

Startups take time to grow. Don’t shut your site down 3 months into it.

I’ve been guilty of this one before in many projects. I felt good about building something, but I didn’t want to promote it. And that’s not good enough. After I wrote a book recently, I distinctly remember saying “okay, because I’ve done this so many times before and failed, I will now mentally tell myself I’m only 50% there. There’s no satisfaction from stopping now. The rest of the 50% is promoting this thing.” And I had put in a lot of time up to that point. But it’s true, look at your product as a halfway point. It might even be more imbalanced than that: maybe product is merely 20% and growth is 80% of the work, especially if you’re building a marketplace.

I think there is a different user-growth story for every start up, which is super frustrating because it’s maybe the number two or three problem for any startup. Our user growth has been slow and meticulous, and I wrote a blog post about this that basically said, “Even if you have a great product, it can take a lot of time to get the word out.”

You see too many people that spend three or four months working on a product, launch it, and shut it down a month later, when the problem is just that it hasn’t had enough time to reach people; to get that awareness out. So that’s definitely something to think about. There are those rare success stories, where user growth is just exponential from day one, but I think for the vast majority of companies that’s not the case and it’s something that you just have to work incredibly hard at.

I’m having the same experience while I’m building OfficeHours.TV. Instead of making one giant announcement, I’ve intentionally added high-profile Senseis and announced them individually (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). This not only allows me to draw out the press, but it makes people focus on one person at a time: the bids increase, it’s an interesting story people want to hear about, and it generates more traffic.

If you liked this article, you’ll enjoy reading Startups Open Sourced.

Andrew Hsu, AiryLabs.com Co-founder

I got really excited when I first read about the Thiel 20 Under 20. I had some hesitation about speaking to some of the Fellows for Startups Open Sourced because I tend to look for founders who have at least experienced their trough of sorrow, but Andrew Hsu really jumped off the list of Fellows when I looked it over. He hasn’t experienced a trough of sorrow yet, but he has an interesting perspective on education and his startup is aimed at improving the model of learning for kids.

Warning: personal rant on education here; skip ahead a few paragraphs if you’re interested in getting to the interview. These are my personal opinions (not Andrew Hsu’s) in the next few paragraphs from my own experience. The Andrew Hsu interview is below in the Q&A format. I’ve always been interested in education because I’ve always had this sneaking suspicion that it was horribly broken. I’ve always struggled communicating what exactly is wrong with public education aside from personal rants, but after talking to Andrew, everything he says about education reflects how I’ve thought about it.

When I was 10 years old, I would constantly complain to my parents that I felt unchallenged and everything moved slowly. I had straight A’s, but I felt like I wasn’t learning anything useful. It was boring memorizing all of the states in America and where they went on a map. Really, if I want to know I’ll just pull up a map like normal people do, what’s the point in memorizing them? It’s the same argument where CS professors ask their students to memorize the runtime of various algorithms. In real life, people are going to look it up on Wikipedia; the actual importance is designing and understanding how the algorithms work, not quoting verbatim the runtimes of 25 different algorithms in a 50 minute span of time on a written test. If you’re a doctor, you might need to memorize lethal doses in an emergency room so you don’t give a patient too much morphine; it might matter in that case. I found out about Montessori schools after I started reading In the Plex–both Larry and Sergey attended Montessori schools–and that looked like an attractive model.

I’ve been a fan of how Khan Academy works (watch my interview with John Resig where he discusses this). I think the current model of public education resembles an assembly line too much. Everyone goes in at a certain age, they come out at a certain age. They all progress at the same pace and learn the exact same material. They also have no say in what they’re learning, they just take whatever is handed to them in the textbooks and that’s what they learn. Students sit in classrooms for 6 or 7 hours a day, which was never a good way to learn. You have a teacher who talks at an entire class, and when one student has a question, it blocks the whole class from moving forward. On the other hand, you also see the classes where nobody asks questions and some students just fall behind; there’s an implicit pressure to be quiet because you might risk looking stupid if you raise your hand. That might go away if students helping each other was baked in, which is part of both Khan Academy and now Airy Labs’ educational models. It feels more natural. Any time I ever got help from other students it was far more helpful than how the teacher was trying to present it.

And then there’s the issue of popularity, which some say is healthy because it teaches you important social skills. That might be true, but what ends up happening is people become so distracted with managing popularity that they lose the focus on the actual purpose of being in school: the education. Anyone who has read Why Nerds are Unpopular recognizes that smart people are penalized for their intelligence, and that’s something I got distracted with in school. I think I hold a little resentment to this day for how schools have degraded into a popularity contest rather than a place where we teach the next generation to build the next wave of innovative technologies. I’m not saying I didn’t drink and go to parties in college, but the problem feels much worse in high school than in college. In college, there’s far less social pressure to maintain popularity, and you’re actually valued for your intelligence.

The major difference to me in high school vs. college is the work in college–for me at least–is actually challenging and intellectually interesting. There were times when I got frustrated with how the specs were written, but otherwise you were given an assignment and there was a part of your mind that worried “will I be able to do this? Will I make the deadline for the first submission?” This is a healthy assignment because it pushes your limits. You have no idea how you’ll write this C++ image processing library that creates a collage of images based on a single input image. You’re taught the algorithms and data structures, and then you go off and figure out the rest with your partner.

End of rant–skip to here if you want the interview. There are lots of things broken with the model of public education and I think we’re in a period of time where that is changing. Andrew Hsu is one of the people who wants to change education by making it fun and introducing newer forms of media to teach.

Andrew has done a few impressive things, which makes me particularly interested in his outlook on education:

• Labeled as a “genius” from IQ testing at 6 years old
• Completed high school at 9 years old
• Passed ACT with a 99% score at 11 years old
• 3 B.S. degrees at 16 years old in neurobiology, biochemistry, and chemistry (with a minor in math)
• Started Stanford Ph.D. at 16 years old, dropped out at 19
• Accepted into the Peter Thiel 20 Under 20 Fellowship at 19 years old to create Airy Labs

Q: School is a very interesting topic to me; it’s something I talk about with all founders interviewed for Startups Open Sourced. How did you progress from K through 12?

Sure. So I’m originally from Seattle, where I went to public elementary school up until 4^th grade and I was 7 years old at that point. I skipped a few grades by then and I was in some more advanced math classes, as well as the gifted program. The story there is: in 4^th grade, my parents and teachers discovered I was so far ahead that I was making trouble and getting distracted. My parents finally made the incredibly wise decision to homeschool me. My homeschooling experience was done right because first off, we had my private teachers who my parents hired, my parents also taught me, and I also learned by myself. I did online virtual school type of curricula. Washington State has a very high concentration of homeschooling families, so we attended a co-op in this mega church called Legacy School.

A lot of the teachers also happened to be parents, and some of them were college professors. The classes were segregated by ability rather than by age, which is great. All of my classmates were much older than me, but I was at the right intellectual level. I was homeschooled from ages 7 to 11. When I was 10, I decided I wanted to become a biologist and run my own lab. I convinced a professor at the University of Washington to let me work in his microbiology lab for a year. While I was in that lab, I entered a project into the Washington State Science & Engineering Fair, and I won the grand prize there. I eventually went to the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair—this is when the SARS scare was happening, so China and Taiwan didn’t show up.

Eventually, I applied to the University of Washington and a lot of other colleges, but the others insisted that freshman live in dorms the first year and my mother said “no” to that. From 12 to 16 years-old (2003-2007), I got three degrees: neurobiology, biochemistry, and chemistry, and I also minored in math. After that in 2007, I knew I wanted to start a business but I didn’t know what the timing was. So I ended up going to Stanford and studied neurobiology. I didn’t go to M.I.T. because—and I am trying to choose my words carefully because I don’t want to offend anyone—I felt like people were a little bit more friendly at Stanford and it’s in Silicon Valley. I didn’t want to deal with the Boston weather. When I interviewed at M.I.T. I was wearing a winter coat, and it was still extremely cold there.

At Stanford, I was doing my neuroscience Ph.D. and I just left in January of 2011 to incorporate my company, which happened in April. We just raised some seed funding, so that’s the quick overview. The reason I dropped out was because I felt I had enough education as it was; I knew the timing was right to do a startup. I was happy to get out of there after 3 years because the time it takes to complete a Ph.D. is about 6.5 years. Whatever I did, I knew I wanted to be sure it had a major impact on the world. I wanted to build products that people would immediately use.

Q: To me, the most impressive thing is how quickly you completed school. You were done with high school at 11. What’s your secret? Was it the homeschooling?

A lot of people ask me this. When I started college, I was really young so I received a lot of media attention. I received an offer from a publisher in China to write a memoir autobiography when I was 12, which won the national children’s book award and they all ask this same question. To be honest, I don’t have a complete answer. I think genetics play a small role. I’m naturally smart and I have the ability to absorb information pretty quickly just by reading. But that only counts for a small part. I’ve read a lot of self-help books, but there are a lot of rigorous and diligent systems that I make sure I follow in order to get things done.

At the end of every day, you measure yourself by your productivity and how much you get done. There are systems to ensure I stay productive.

Q: Do you have any particular daily habits that you use or do you have a favorite book?

I’m trying to setup systems right now to maximize productivity, and the major part of that is goal setting. Most people just don’t know how to do proper goal setting. It’s important to plan for the next day what you want to get done.

What is proper goal setting? Most people when they set goals, if they want to learn a scripting language like Lua, they’ll say “I want to learn Lua today.” But proper goal setting is about using numbers, quantities, and times. Be as specific as you can, and set very specific goals for every single day. What are you trying to accomplish by the end of the day? Do it the night before. At the end of the day, it’s okay if you don’t accomplish all of your goals—that might even be good; it means you might be setting a high bar for yourself.

At the end of every day, review your productivity for the day. Then you set your goals for the next day. That’s the cycle and the ritual I’ve built up over time. I think it’s psychologically very effective because it gives you a specific set of things to do and it sets up a structure for doing them. There are a lot of myths people believe about planning about how it stifles creativity and innovation: they think it creates too much rigor, so you can’t be imaginative. That’s a false dichotomy.

So every day, do you basically wake up and say “last night I told myself I have to do these three things” and then you figure out at the end of the day what works?

Yeah, the core of setting goals and getting those goals done works for me, and I’ve told people about it and it works for them. I’m trying to use the same strategy in the company because it’s a tremendous tactic to be successful.

Q: How do you deal with distractions though? I think a lot of people set goals and they want to be productive, but then distractions get in the way: you have TV, Starcraft, games, all of that stuff.

I’m running a game company. I love games—I played so many games in college it was ridiculous. I could have had much better grades if I didn’t play games. My time is very limited now, so I play them every once in a while. I don’t own a TV, but I watch stuff on Hulu occasionally.

But when you set specific goals, you just know what you need to do. It affects your psychology. You’re less prone to be distracted. I’m pretty athletic, so I enjoy all types of things—sports, computer games, hanging out with friends. I don’t have a magical way of dealing with all of it, but I just set goals for myself and I try very hard to strive to complete those goals. The goals I set for myself are slightly unrealistic because it helps me push the envelope and be more productive.

For distractions, I just try to deal with them as they come. For e-mails, I try to respond to them immediately. I read an article by the person who started Slideshare, and she always replies to e-mails on the spot because if you don’t, you are taking up more mental capacity to read once and then again later.

Q: Do you think the public school system is broken in any way? You were homeschooled; do you think there’s anything that public schools can learn from that model?

I have very strong views on the education system. I’ve done non-profit stuff my whole life, but one I’m currently setting up is to create a series of public charter schools around the world starting in northern or southern California. They’d use the mechanics of games, technology, and neuroscience to transform the curriculum. More people are talking about “how do we revamp the industrial age educational model” and what I saw at the Legacy School co-op was an important split according to skill, not age. The caveat is there needs to be proper socialization. This wasn’t a problem for me because I was athletic from a young age, so that worked to my advantage, but a lot of parents aren’t cognizant of this. Parents want to homeschool their kids for the wrong reasons, like they don’t want their kids to learn about evolution; that’s terrible.

Here’s where I see an ideal school heading, hopefully in the next 5 years or so. The actual physical size of the school will shrink. The types of spaces present will become areas where kids need to socialize—for example the gym. There’s going to be a blend of physical schooling and online virtual schools. This will help democratize education because kids will be able to get the best education from the best teachers around the world. This is similar to what Mega Study is doing in Korea. The teacher’s role transforms from a one-way faucet of information into a manager and curator education. At some point, they’ll use newer technology—think iPads—to track analytics. The parents will also have access to the analytics to see how the kids progress. There are companies working on this right now, but this is where it’s headed. I think technological tracking of educational analytics and advancement plus the use of powerful gaming mechanics to make it engaging is what I see the ideal future of the school becoming.

Q: Do you think the Khan Academy is the right model?

I think the videos are a little bit archaic. I think there will be an evolution into a much richer multimedia experience. Beyond video, there will be games and interactive experiences.

Q: Is this the gap you’re filling in with your startup?

Yes. My mission is to change the world by changing education. I love games and I think it’s how education will be transformed.

Q: I recently read an article about studying how people might focus on memorization, while others will link it to existing knowledge. What approach did you take?

This gets interesting because there’s some application to neuroscience here. There’s a principle called the “binding principle” which states if you’re trying to learn new information, your brain retains it if you have a previous cognitive schema or memory to bind the new information to. Let’s use kids an example: let’s say you’re about to teach your kids a new lesson, have them create an advanced organizer. This organizer is a diagram or set of diagrams of what the student already knows about this topic. As you teach them the new information, they can think about it in the context of what they already know and they can make mental links to their existing knowledge. It increases learning effectiveness significantly.

Q: What’s the name of your startup and what are you building?

The startup is called Airy Labs and we make social learning games for young children. The idea is that educational games mostly suck and we want to make them fun. I see games as these enormous opportunities for learning because games are simply abstract rules based on new systems. We want to make massively popular games that tens of millions of kids will play and the parents will actually support it. We’re trying to align the parents’ and children’s interests.

Most games we’re setting up now are learning agnostic. I think we can teach anything with games, and we’ll start off with math, English, biology, and memory training. Some parents have e-mailed asking about anti-bullying conflict resolution type of games. A leader from a youth golf organization e-mailed and there’s a lot of etiquette that we can teach there, for example.

We want to be the Zynga of games, but on the long-term act more like Disney where we have a strong brand that parents trust and kids love using. I want to build a larger scale business around making learning fun.

Q: How many games are working on now? What language are you using to build this? How will the games look and feel?

We’re in the prototyping stage right now. We’ll aim to release something within 6 months. Those decisions are still up in the air, but right now we’re starting with Corona SDK (Lua). This was a fairly impulsive decision, so it might change.

Mostly, we’re trying to encourage social pressure to play and learn. That’s the social part that is exciting. We’ll have 2d or 3d vector graphics as part of it, we want to have a high bar visually.

Q: You said it was scary to drop out, since you have dropped out have there been any low points?

The fundraising was stressful up until the end because I was doing it alone. It eventually got finished, but there’s enormous trust placed in me because they invest in me. Now that it’s done, I have to deliver and not screw things up. That’s my next goal: not screwing things up! I have to pay back that trust.

There were people who turned me down, and my personal opinion is I don’t think it’s a smart decision. You just ignore that and move on.

Q: What’s your biggest challenge right now?

The single most challenging thing is hiring good designers. I have an opinion that great designers are very rare. There are lots of mediocre designers, but finding the top designers is difficult.

If you enjoyed reading excerpts from this interview, you’ll enjoy reading Startups Open Sourced.

Hermione Way

There was an article written by Hermione Way called “The problem with Silicon Valley is Itself.” The article can best be summarized in Hermione’s own words:

Living in San Francisco since January, I’ve interviewed around two hundred startups and there’s only two, out of two hundred, I think are game changers… Everyone is doing something amazing and trying to change the world, but in reality much of the technology being built here is not changing the world at all…

The problem with this type of thinking and the actual irony is how shortsighted these observations are. I’ve interviewed close to 40 successful startup founders at length, and almost all of them look like they started out as some cute little toy or some neat and easily dismissible feature. And that’s the pattern most startups follow.

Grooveshark was just another Napster where you upload music and other people can listen to it; Airbnb was some silly air mattress thing that had two people book while they launched at SXSW (and one of the people booking was the founder); WePay was just a way to share expenses with your roommates. I’m listening to Grooveshark while I write this, and I’ll be listening to it on my jailbroken iPhone when I have to go to the store tomorrow; I’m using Airbnb when I travel to London next week and staying with someone on their site for a full week; and I’m using WePay to manage everything anyone owes me and for a charity project that I’m working on right now. All of these products started out as these simple things that few expected would go anywhere.

On my Facebook feed, people from the barbeque are saying that the conversations weren’t anything like what Hermione portrayed them as. I’m not one to say whether this is sensationalism or not, because I wasn’t there. I can only judge based on what I read, but when I read stuff like this it makes me wonder what the purpose is. This is Silicon Valley, where people are willing to take the risk in the first place to be unconventional by the world’s standards and take a leap of faith to do something. They know their little projects are going to be scrutinized by people like this, but that won’t stop them.

The reality is, many of the best ideas don’t look like “game changers” when they start out. That’s why the smart investors focus on the founders, because we don’t actually know what ideas will work or not. The best we can do is build something we want out of our own frustration, and that’s usually what happens. But just because you don’t want to use it or you don’t find it interesting in its infant stage doesn’t make Silicon Valley a “problem”–it only makes you disillusioned. If you hang out in the midwest, it’s a completely different culture. Getting people to do a startup would be a feat, let alone getting someone to work on something “truly revolutionary” (are we talking about colonizing Mars here? I could understand Groupon clones, but at least we know that hardware companies are particularly slow and expensive to start).

Marshall Mathers' first startup didn't earn him any Grammy awards.

There was a 14 year-old kid who started out selling his services drawing graffiti on jeans and jackets in a Detroit neighborhood. This would have looked like a stupid idea, but it his entry into the entertainment industry. His name is Eminem and he went on to become the best-selling artist of our decade. He holds the record for the most successive #1 albums from a solo artist. Did he change the world? Who knows, although he donated more than I could ever afford to charity through the Marshall Mathers Foundation and that’s good enough for me. There’s the headfake: you don’t focus on the kid drawing graffiti on jackets, you look at the kid and see he has enough passion that he’s going to do something great even if it takes him a few years to get there. Elon Musk didn’t just start out building orbital spacecraft for NASA, electric cars, and solar panels; he started out in “financial services” moving money between two e-mail addresses at X.com. He wouldn’t have been able to convince investors to fund some college dropout to start SpaceX or Tesla Motors, so he invested all of his money earned from the PayPal acquisition into those ventures.

Good ideas start small. They focus on a small group of people and make them really excited about your product. Ignore the people who will discount your ideas as a mere toy; they’ll be the same people writing about how “awesome and game changing” your idea is after the fact.

I’ve always been a fan of John Resig (Wikipedia, Personal site). It might be safe to say that anyone web developer out there owes Resig a huge thanks for making web app development much easier. We take for granted that we no longer need to worry about hand-writing 5 different versions of XMLHttpRequest and maintaining all of them separately for each browser. The same could be said of the countless contributions that lie within the jQuery library: method chaining, selectors, traversal, animations, the list goes on.

Today, jQuery is the undisputed leading client-side Javascript library being used in 43% of the top 10,000 most visited web sites. jQuery has become so ubiquitous that it has replaced Prototype as the default Javascript library shipping with Rails 3.1 (although we all know we were switching to jQuery much earlier than that).

Highlights

• Quick background: started out in high school designing web sites for friends and freelance work. Initially used Perl and CGI.
• Where did the idea for jQuery come from? Resig was scratching his own itch. Didn’t do client scripting until 2004. Idea started at a branding firm internship when Resig was asked to create a customized scrollbar. Resig argued against it because the complexities of cross-browser compatibility support.
• Where did inspiration come from? Prototype, Dojo, Mochikit were good but not easier and simpler. Focus on reducing cross browser issues. Inspiration came from Prototype’s behavior library. New library used CSS selectors, event binding and animations. First released in 2006 while Resig was in school.
• What set jQuery apart, why did it succeed? jQuery was the first client side library released with documentation. Prototype didn’t get any documentation until 2007.
• How did jQuery grow post-launch? Lots of blogging, commenting on other people’s blogs, responding to bug requests, strong focus on community answering every single support question on the mailing list. Tried to get promoted on Delicious and Digg and it performed very well on both sites. There were some inflection points, but mostly a gradual increase over time. It was around 2009 where jQuery became the undisputed leading library.
• Getting into Y Combinator: Resig left college in 2006 to do a startup in Y Combinator with two of his friends. He was writing a book, releasing jQuery, and the startup all at the same time. He was rejected from the first batch using one of his college side projects (Schedule Maker), but applied again the following summer with a new idea that was accepted (JumpChat). The idea was to send messages to groups of friends regardless of medium (text message, e-mail, etc). The idea failed because they could not raise money and eventually ran out of money, but was a great learning experience.
• How does the jQuery team work remotely and stay productive? The main issue is with communication. The team has changed apps numerous times, but currently they hold all meetings publicly and in IRC. All of the subteams (jQuery UI, Core, Grid, etc) are responsible for maintaining their own blogs of weekly updates.
• What is the jQuery release process like from idea to released code? It’s mainly by group consensus from the core committers. They collaborate and try to understand how many blockers or major issues there are or where the focus should be. Deadlines are set based on those discussions. jQuery 1.7 in progress and holds open forums allowing proposals (bug fixes, feature requests, etc). 81 submissions were submitted for jQuery 1.7 and jQuery team decides “yes”, “no”, or “I don’t care.” They get ranked and then assign people to specific tasks. Critical issues are called “blockers” and the release won’t go live until those are all addressed.
• What’s the design philosophy behind jQuery? Keep the code simple, above all else. Simple code that works with fewer use cases is superior to more complex code that handles more use cases. Everything must be documented. Everything is immensely clear as to what is going on. Cross-platform compatibility is also very important.
• How are feature request conflicts or contentions handled? If someone really wants a specific feature, it becomes their job to make the changes and improvements.
• What’s the next big thing? Node.JS looks promising; there’s lots of room for improvement in many spaces.
• Where do you see Javascript and jQuery 5 or 10 years down the road? It will be very difficult for Javascript to go away. It will become more ubiquitous because it holds on to the ideal of simplicity and compatibility.
• Are there universal traits you look for when deciding to work with someone? Depending on the project, the person must have a deep understanding of their field (e.g. Prototypal inheritance, functions, closures, as well as how the DOM works, browser quirks from IE 6/7/8, etc). In general, Resig looks for people who go above and beyond. Many students from M.I.T. were very smart and had good grades, but they did nothing outside of class; they knew Java and LISP, but they might not show initiative to do anything else. Looking at another candidate who does something like building several projects in Ruby on Rails is much more competitive and appealing to work with. Don’t be content to do the bare minimum. GPA is not a good indication (Resig had a bad GPA in college).
• Student advice: If you contribute to an open source project, employers can see the code you write, how well you work with others, the documentation you write, how clear your API is, etc. Compared to someone who doesn’t have the same experience, it becomes much easier to hire you. You can go from “just another college student” to someone far above and beyond that. Nothing else matters except code in the end; it’s a complete meritocracy in the software industry.
• Why leave Mozilla? Resig saw a job posting on Hacker News and thought about it briefly. He realized this would be absolutely amazing to work with them. jQuery is in a great position where Resig doesn’t need to spend as much time to keep it running smoothly, so looking to get back into application development, Resig reached out. There are lots of interesting technical challenges (building a mobile application as well as a framework for building exercises) and social problems (how to get people involved and contributing). Resig says it’s a huge opportunity to help people learn.
• Will Khan Academy add computer science curricula such as data structures and algorithms? It’s definitely feasible—more of a matter of “when” rather than “if”. This might something done in Resig’s spare time.
• What is your job at Khan Academy? Doing both coding and looking for contributors (e.g. people who contribute exercises to some of the courses). There are 3 developers and 1 designer right now at Khan Academy (including Resig). The development stack is Python on Google App Engine and front-end Javascript + jQuery (using jQuery Mobile for the mobile app).
• Khan Academy is hiring. Looking for well-rounded developers (server-side and client-side). Front-end development is very hard; some server-side developers just can’t hack it.

Mike Lamond AKA Husky Starcraft (Wikipedia, YouTube) is a popular e-sports broadcaster with nearly 500,000 subscribers and close to 200 million upload views. I had a chance to talk to him about college life, the early Husky Starcraft days, current challenges, collaboration with other casters, growth, how introverts can use their personality to work to their advantage (Husky is an introvert, though most people don’t realize that), thoughts on how to beat Spanishiwa, and more.

The audio has been edited down in order to be hosted on YouTube. For the full, unedited version with the transcript, check out the Startups Open Sourced e-book which interviews the founders of your favorite web sites (Grooveshark, reddit, Airbnb, foursquare, etc).

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Here are some highlights from the interview:

• College experience: attended a community college and eventually University of Oregon, where he dropped out to pursue casting full-time. He didn’t enjoy being told what to do or the formal structure of the college system.
• Work schedule: 80 hours per week is spent on gaming or casting, with most of it related to casting.
• Getting started: started out as a hobby with roommates, several weeks in thought it would be something he’d focus on doing more.
• There’s no beef: Despite many users who vote up comments on YouTube that might suggest there’s a rivalry between major casters, there isn’t any contention. They ‘re all supportive of each other and have busy schedules, which prohibits them from collaborating closely. Casting between multiple people is often difficult to watch as well, since casters aren’t always synched up and may be looking at different screens.
• Motivation: He’s not driven by money, he is driven by the passion and excitement of casting.
• From 100 to 10,000 subscribers: Husky made all of his friends subscribe to his videos (in a non-intimidating way). When Team Liquid mentioned Husky in a news article, Husky landed his first 100 subscribers. Eventually, there was a semi-exclusive tournament without a caster during Starcraft 1. When Husky casted that tournament and several others after that, he worked consistently and eventually gained his first 10,000 subscribers. Once he reached that point, the number kept growing naturally, although gradually.
• Be genuine with your community: Husky doesn’t fake his reactions or persona on YouTube, that’s how he naturally is and it’s important that you be genuine if you’re trying to build a community.
• Deep domain knowledge: Husky has played every Blizzard game to date, and he knows the space really well. He has been following gaming from a very young age.
• Stay lean, stay determined: If Husky can’t make enough money from YouTube, he’ll move back to Oregon and work at fast food again so that he can continue to do casting and make it work. He doesn’t get stressed out about failure because he doesn’t focus on business goals or achievements; he’s just interested in having fun and being passionate about casting. He focuses full-time on casting right now. You can save money by having inexpensive hobbies (gaming) and living in less popular cities.
• Working with others: Whether it’s Justin.TV hooking Husky up with a Lamborghini for a music video, or working with competitive sports organizations such as GSL or MLG, it’s important to do your networking and work with others. Husky chooses people based on who he thinks seems normal and nerdy, and he rejects deals that are purely profit-driven because those aren’t his intentions.
• If you’re passionate, there’s a business to be made: The only thing that matters is enjoying what you do (find something you love), and from there a business and money can be made.
• Don’t underestimate the effort involved, time management is critical: Husky spends 4 hours per 20 minutes of casting. Between rendering, recording, selecting, and uploading 1-2GB files, it takes a lot of time to produce the casts. Husky does not preview games before he decides to cast them, so he may spend 40 minutes recording a cast, only to delete it later if he thinks it’s boring. Husky also works on music videos on his other channels and travels to live events. Managing your time is very important.
• E-sports future looks very good: The e-sports is broadcasted globally, unlike sports such as American football. Justin.TV is well positioned to help live-stream where there are 50,000 to 60,000 people watching Husky’s casts at a single time (with an estimated 100,000+ viewing over the whole session). There are millions of views on Starcraft content every day, as Husky is consistently ranked in the top 10 or 20 most viewed videos on YouTube.
• Are you introverted? If so, that works to your advantage. Advice for aspiring casters: Being an introvert isn’t a dealbreaker, it’s actually really good; Husky Starcraft is an introvert, despite being very energetic and upbeat in his videos, and that shouldn’t discourage others from recording on YouTube. Husky is extroverted when it comes to meeting his fans, but otherwise he gets charged up by being on the computer and playing or casting Starcraft. Husky was criticized in school for talking too quickly, but he has the last laugh now because that’s part of his unique casting style that people find interesting.

The Banelings video where Husky Starcraft was able to get help from Justin.TV to borrow a Lamborghini

Interesting behind the scenes look at creating the video:

You may have just read the news that Airbnb raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, but what you may not know is what happened before all of that. When I read that story, I wasn’t too surprised having interviewed Brian Chesky and seeing how his mind works in Startups Open Sourced.

You may not realize that Brian Chesky had no idea he’d be making headlines or even living in Silicon Valley if you asked him. Just a couple of years ago, Brian was designing toilet seats in Los Angeles, with no plans to be in San Francisco until his nagging cofounder persisted for over 2 years to get him to relocate. Here are some lessons we can learn from Brian:

Brian Chesky, Founder/CEO Airbnb.com

Don’t give up when you experience your trough of sorrow moment.

Everyone goes through it, and everyone deals with it differently. But everyone persists through it and figures out a way to change what they’re doing. For Airbnb, it was all about figuring out how to make the experience less awkward. That was a pivotal moment in Airbnb’s history where the company could have easily stagnated or failed.

Q: So your SXSW launch went pretty well?

Actually not really, not many people noticed. No, I think we only had two people book rooms and I was one of the two people. So it was cool but we realized that we had a lot of work to do. We had not nailed the product yet; this wasn’t something that was just going to take off. We regrouped and thought about the vision, then we started using the product and through using the product we realized that the vision we had come up with was too narrow. There were a few observations I made. So I used the product and I stayed with a guy who was a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. We hadn’t built payments yet, so we still had to transact through cash just like Craigslist.

So I showed up at this guy’s house; I had a great experience. His girlfriend prepared a Vietnamese dinner for me, the whole thing was really funny and kind of cool and so I had a great time with him. I think later at night before we went to bed he asked me where his money was. It was kind of a cold exchange, only because, here it was, it felt very personal, suddenly it immediately felt very financial and I also think I didn’t even have the money at the time! I had forgotten to go to the ATM and I just remember the experience feeling not very streamlined and not very great overall. You have to exchange the cash, then you’ve got to get change, and there was no real transactional record of what was happening. The whole thing just felt very illegitimate and under the table and so we realized that we had to build payments and we thought building payments would be the thing that really created our business and so that was the first thing.

You don’t have to be a programmer to make it big in the Valley.

Brian Chesky is an artist, not a programmer. He attended RISD, a top design school. What makes Chesky succeed is his drive to create the perfect user experience and his ideology that every problem has a creative solution on the other side of it.

Joe and I were primarily the ones pitching investors and we had never—Joe had done a web startup before, but Joe and I are both first-time founders. Both of us were trying to do something very ambitious and we both have unorthodox backgrounds—we come from design—so I’m not sure in the early days that our backgrounds were viewed as strengths. I think today maybe they are. People might look our site and say “oh, that’s why the site is great, it’s well-designed” and things like that. But in the early days, I think people were concerned that we didn’t have the technical background. I remember some investors saying “you have a lack of a technical team” and of course we had Nate, but they were used to seeing multiple technical founders. I think investors were not seeing the whole picture: first, they were undervaluing design by saying that, but also they were not recognizing that when you build a marketplace, all the nontechnical challenges exist to build it. It’s one thing to technically build our web site—that’s the easy part. Get the marketplace going, get traction, and build a community—that’s the hard part.

Things aren’t impossible, they are only seemingly impossible.

When Brian attended RISD, he said he was given a seemingly impossible task, and that helped prepare him for his job at Airbnb where he and his employees approach tasks with the same attitude:

I remember one of the first days of class we got a project, one of the projects RISD is most famous for. First, they give you an assignment to do a self-portrait. You can draw yourself using any medium you want and you have a week to do it. On the first day of class, everyone wants to impress everyone else, so they’re going to do really over the top drawings, put in a lot of work and a lot of time. When we came to class the next week we presented what we had done during a crit, short for critique—every week you have a crit, freshman year.

So the teacher critiqued everything and then gave us the next week’s assignment. If he had asked for another self-portrait we would have spent another 10 hours doing another self portrait and he knew that, so, what he said instead was, “what I want you to do for next week is 200 self-portraits”; that kind of teaches you to develop a new process. In other words, it’s a seemingly impossible assignment. It’s not actually possible to do 200 self-portraits under normal means in a week. It could take a year, so you have to come up with a new process to get to 200. It’s an entire sketchpad.

I think the lesson was that things that seem impossible aren’t impossible; there’s always a creative solution to them.

The only thing that separates you from Brian Chesky is the willingness to act on your ideas.

When Brian was designing products at a consulting firm, he talks about his breakthrough moment where he realized what separated him from everyone else doing something:

I was a designer on a reality TV show on ABC that Simon Cowell produced called American Inventor. Basically there were contestants—I wasn’t a contestant—and they had these inventions. Over the course of the show they turned their inventions or their prototypes into much more functional prototypes that resembled a real product, to eventually get manufactured. We had to essentially design the final prototype before it got manufactured. The whole process was really funny; we all went to a hotel room and I think they rented out 20 different rooms in a hotel. So 20 designers bid on the work and each design company got a hotel room as their presentation room, like musical chairs. The contestant would go from room to room presenting what they had in a few minutes and then we would show them our portfolio and they selected which firm they liked the most.Each inventor would come in and basically just present what they were working on. We bid and they bid, and eventually I got matched with a guy—funny enough there always seem to be people with toilet inventions—who had this invention for a new toilet seat for people with suppressed immune systems, primarily in hospitals or adult homes. It was a funny project but I actually was pretty proud of the result that we came up with.

So essentially the job was: people would come into the office with either ideas—whether they were established corporations or aspiring entrepreneurs with just a little bit of capital—and they’d want to turn their visions into functioning products and prototypes. We would have to think through their vision, what kind of problem they were trying to solve, what markets they could go after, and develop a strategy for a product and bring it to market. After having practiced at that for a couple of years, I was sort of thinking to myself, what is really stopping me from releasing a product of my own? And the only difference between them, and me, was that they had done it and I hadn’t. It was literally just a decision. They decided to do it and I had not decided to. I hadn’t taken that leap yet and that was really the only difference.

Go out and meet your users. Talk to them, understand them.

When Paul Graham wrote about the Airbnb founders, he told Fred Wilson, “It just seemed a very good sign to me that these guys were actually on the ground in NYC hunting down (and understanding) their users.On top of several previous good signs.” This is exactly what they did:

Q: For me, this is where Airbnb’s story gets exciting because I see New York as your major turning point. This is the tipping point where Airbnb made it out of the trough of sorrow and exploded into the successful model that we hear about in the news today. When Paul Graham told you to focus on cities instead of events, you went to New York. Can you talk about how you started Airbnb in New York?

We literally would fly to New York every Thursday or Friday during Y Combinator. We did this every week and we would be there throughout the weekend. There were a myriad of tactics we used—we went as far as knocking on people’s doors. We did everything we could think of. We would stay until Monday and fly back Tuesday. Sometimes we’d be going straight to Y Combinator with our luggage.

Q: How did you find those first few people to get started using Airbnb?

Because of the Democratic National Conventions, some people were using the site in New York and listing places. What we would do is reach out to the very few people we had and basically talk to them, get to know them, figure out what products they needed and what we could offer them. We tried to build loyalty knowing that if we did that, they would tell their friends. We’d host parties and meetups and all sorts of different things. We’d just visit all of our users, we’d go to their homes and talk to them and do interviews.

Through that process, they’d get very excited and tell their friends about Airbnb. It was mostly about generating as much buzz and excitement to get them to tell their friends about us.

Q: Did you guys ever dress up in gorilla suits or pass out fliers on the streets?

We never dressed up in gorilla suits but we passed out fliers in coffee shops, train stations—we did all sorts of things. I don’t know what tactics worked more than others, but I think press was always the number one tactic for us. The press would spark another group of users, then we’d go visit those people and talk to them and get them excited. It was a pattern that repeated itself.

Live and die by who you hire. Preserve your company culture.

I had the same discussion about “company breakage” with Foursquare. The crucial point for startups seem to be around 50 employees. You need to be sure you’re finding the right people who will help preserve the startup and founders’ culture for years to come.

Q: You and Foursquare seem to be on the same level of scale. Dennis Crowley mentioned that was a big challenge: adding people to the organization without things breaking. Can you elaborate there? Is it a matter of cultural fit; are there potential problems from hiring a certain type of individual?

There are a number of things, and these are all going through my head right now. The first thing is finding the talent. When you start to build an organization, you need to have seen your talent. It’s not as hard to find the talent, it’s knowing: when you see someone really good, how do you know they’re good? How do you know when you meet a director of marketing that they’re actually a good director of marketing? How do you know when you meet a communications person that they’re the best communications person in the world or that they’re merely average? How would you know? How do you know if they’re the right stage person for the stage your company is at? I could go down a list—like staff accountant. Clearly, it’s one thing if you’re an engineer or a designer. You’ve done the job and you feel like you can evaluate people, but what if you’ve never done the job yourself? What if nobody in the company has done the job and you don’t even know what you need? There’s a certain leap of faith even being able to evaluate who the people are that you need. Then you have to ask yourself, “do I now need young generalists or do I need specialists? Do I need senior people? How senior should they be?” These are all interesting questions we wrestle with very frequently.

And then there’s integrating them, whether they’re junior or senior. Keeping the culture—if you’re growing quickly, there’s going to be a point where a majority of the people in the room are not going to know much about your company; they’re not going to know much about the history. Some people will not have been there from the start. If you’re doubling in size every quarter like what we’re doing, what that means is 3 months from now, if the people in that room haven’t been fully assimilated and trained, half the room isn’t fully on board culturally. When the organization changes that quickly, it has a profound impact on people’s positions, responsibilities, who everyone works with, and so on. You have to manage all the things that happen with those changes, whether they’re good or bad.

Q: Can you talk about culture a little bit? What’s it like working or being at Airbnb? Are there lots of meetings, for example? Is the floor plan open?

We have an open floor plan. We have a weekly product meeting and a weekly engineering meeting. There may be daily meetings, but those are impromptu for a few minutes where you just huddle together over a computer and call that a product meeting. We really believe in sharing ideas—a meeting can mean a lot of things, it could be a very formal accountability meeting where things don’t get done, or it could be a few people having a conversation about a challenge. Depending on your definition, I’d say we only have formal meetings a few times a week. The collaborative meetings happen very frequently and they’re usually not scheduled. This probably has to do with our open floor plan. We’re moving into a new office and that new office also has an open plan, so there are no private offices. People could work from the kitchen if they wanted.
We don’t typically have set hours. Most people get here by 9 AM and leave at 6 or 7 PM. It varies though. Some people are here during weekends, but it’s very flexible. People’s schedules are dictated by the projects they’re working on and the deadlines they have.

Q: Are there any cultural values you’re afraid of losing in all of the hiring you’re doing?

Yeah, I worry about losing values. I think there are a couple of things: it’s important for us to hire people who are passionate about Airbnb and the community and our mission. When you’re growing fast and becoming a hot company, there are numerous things that can attract a person to a company. When you’re really small and not successful, you can argue that the only thing that attracts people to you is you can pay them and they need a job—that’s also not a good motivation. To an extent it’s easy to be passionate about Airbnb: people in Silicon Valley are very ambitious and they want to be successful. They see this could be a vehicle to them having a lot of responsibility and becoming very successful.

You want to hire the right people who are very ambitious. Would they truly want to work here over any other hot company if they had the exact same offer? That’s something we ask ourselves a lot.

We have a lot of core values that we measure people on that affect hiring, but one thing that’s hard to understand is: how do you know you’re hiring the right person given the stage you’re in? For instance, if we need a finance person, should we hire the CFO of Google? Would that make sense at this stage of the company? There are a lot of questions to ask from there. There’s a risk of hiring people who are too senior to “roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty” as some people might say.The other risk is hiring people into positions with lots of responsibility if the individual isn’t as experienced—they can get overwhelmed too quickly. That’s the challenge: keeping a balance somewhere in the middle.

I think it’s hard to stand by your values and have the same level of standards when you need to hire quickly. What if you really need someone for a position, you have 3 candidates, and none of them are perfect, what do you do? Do you say “no” to all 3 and then wait? What if saying “no” to all 3 means waiting months? What if waiting months could cost you millions of dollars in opportunity costs? This is what’s going through my head when I’m interviewing people.

If you enjoy this article, you’ll enjoy reading Startups Open Sourced, an Amazon bestseller that interviews founders of successful startups.

Are you trying to land a job at these startups? Have you read Infiltrating Any Startup? For a great example of someone who is doing more than just sending a resume, check out LorenBurton.com, which has resulted in Brian Chesky contacting him (verified).

Before Dennis Crowley created foursquare, he started Dodgeball. The circumstances of being laid off at the same time as his cofounder led them to work together which would set off the chain of events that led to Dodgeball’s creation. Eventually, Dennis went on to create foursquare with someone he met at Google, just after Dodgeball was shut down. If Dennis didn’t get laid off, it’s more likely that he would not have reconnected with Alex Rainert in graduate school, which means Dodgeball wouldn’t have been started. He also wouldn’t have met Naveen Selvadurai at Google, his current cofounder at foursquare.

GitHub was started over nights and weekends because Tom didn’t know anyone in San Francisco. A lonely guy whose wife was doing fieldwork in Costa Rica, Tom was forced to do something with his time. It’s possible that GitHub might not have ever finished if Tom was always hanging out with friends; he had a full-time job at PowerSet so his nights and weekends were all he had free–PowerSet was eventually acquired by Microsoft and they went on to build Bing. Being lonely or not having a lot of friends worked to Tom’s advantage.

In Dennis’ case, getting laid off turned out to be great for him. Tom eventually met people by going to Ruby meetups. Even the idea for GitHub wasn’t necessarily started by Tom. It was Dave Fayram–a coworker from PowerSet–who approached Tom and introduced him to Git. Several Ruby meetups later, Tom decided to centralize the way Git repositories were managed.

For most of my college experience, I approached the idea of finding cofounders as something I was very intentional about doing. But that’s not how it has to be done, and I think this is something business students should pay attention to. The business students I know are set on finding cofounders, often being more direct than I was. I knew business students who tried to recruit my same cofounder by lying to him. One business student changed his domain names to make it look like their project was much more impressive than it actually was and told my cofounder he had until the weekend to make a decision on whether to join or not.

Business students don’t have to be deceptive or use aggressive tactics to score a technical cofounder. LikeALittle is a case where the business cofounder, Evan Reas, was able to find exceptionally smart people: one is the top student from the leading university in India, IIT-Delhi and a world physics Olympiad gold medalist; the other is ranked #1 in India at TopCoder, the youngest Google Code Jam world finalist, twice, and an ACM world finalist, twice. Evan doesn’t know how to program and he graduated from Stanford’s Business School. He says don’t be forceful about finding cofounders; be genuine about it and stop approaching programmers as mere monkeys. Most business students I know still approach students that way and it doesn’t work. Maybe they should just start hanging out with students casually instead of pushing ideas on them, as backwards as that sounds to conventional wisdom.

If you’re in Dennis or Tom’s position of being laid off or having no friends in a new city, it might be the best thing that ever happened to you (at least after you’ve connected the dots). If you’re a business student, you should spend time doing things other than just talking about all of your business ideas to computer science students. And never lie to anyone about the progress you’ve made, it’s only going to cause them to write long blog posts about you later down the road. Paul Buchheit says that serendipity is the more fun way to live life. But it’s actually possible that it’s just more effective. Let me know if it works better for you.

The Luck Factor Studies

There was a study conducted in 2003 by Richard Wiseman called The Luck Factor where he asked participants to look through a newspaper and tell him how many photographs were inside. The unlucky people took 2 minutes to complete the task, while the lucky people took seconds. What the unlucky people missed was the second page of the newspaper which read “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” According to Wiseman, the message “took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2 inches high.” The answer hit anyone in the face who was willing to slow down and look at it, rather than tunnel vision themselves just aggressively trying to find photos.

Conclusion? “Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people’s ability to notice the unexpected… And so it is with luck–unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain types of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.”

Other founder examples

Here are some other great examples where founders had no idea they’d even be doing a startup while they were in school. Serendipity found them.

• Alexis Ohanian wanted to be a lawyer before he created reddit.
• Tom Preston-Warner wanted to be a theoretical particle physics researcher, dropped out sophomore year, and turned down $300,000 from Microsoft to start GitHub.
• Brian Chesky was vaguely interested in entrepreneurship but had no interest or background in the web–he was an industrial designer creating things like sanitary toilet seats for contestants on the TV show American Inventor. As an industrial design student at RISD, he had no clue he’d wind up starting Airbnb, which has just booked 1.5 million nights and continues to disrupt the entire travel industry. Brian was dragged into moving to San Francisco from Los Angeles by his other cofounder, Joe Gebbia, who nagged him for two years straight before Brian gave in and quit his design firm job.
• Kevin Hale wanted to graduate with an MFA and teach art to hippies, and he went on to start Wufoo which recently sold for $35 million.
• After quitting varsity soccer for Stanford, Ashvin Kumar decided to build a Twitter app which grew so quickly it got banned, and Ashvin later created a series of profitable projects and what would become Blippy, a service that now tracks over half a million dollars in purchases every day.

If you liked these stories, you’d love Startups Open Sourced, now a best seller in the Amazon Kindle Store.

I read an article tonight on TechCrunch about Octopart, and it left me with some dissatisfaction. It’s not that TechCrunch is bad at writing about startups, and in fact I’m glad that they’ve chosen to focus on less sexy startups who should serve as the role models for working diligently and consistently hard.

Having read the full story in my own book from Andres Morey himself, I got through reading the article and thought, “That was it?” They gave a pretty short summary and it had the same effect that most media stories have. If I knew nothing about Octopart, I might be more jealous of their success. Having read the full story, I have an admiration for the effort they put into it and it would inspire me not to give up too quickly on a startup because I know how difficult it was for them.

Every single person that I’ve spoken to about this book almost immediately remarks on how open, honest and candid the interviews are in Startups Open Sourced. This includes the people who have reviewed my book and the people on Twitter who have commented on it. When I went into writing the book, I had no idea what to expect. In fact, when I sent out my first batch of invites, I was worried that nobody would agree to be interviewed. Being an entrepreneur myself, I knew I had a few risks:

• There’s a stigma against doing things other than working. This includes things like reading news, reading blogs, talking to the press, and so forth. Why would you be talking to someone for a book when you could be talking to your customers, improving your product, growing your user base, writing code, scaling your servers, hiring engineers, or a hundred other things a startup founder has to remember to do?
• Founders are emotionally unstable. Bipolar would best describe their personalities while they’re early in their startups. I can actually recall one founder who told me: “Look man, I’m too stressed out to do this interview with you. I’m really depressed about something that happened, and this isn’t a good time. Can you get back to me in a few weeks?” I suspect that several of the founders I never heard back from were in the same position. I know what that’s like, and for every entrepreneur who agreed to be interviewed I’m sure there’s another one who didn’t get to raise the amount of capital they wanted and were just too depressed to talk. Why would someone want to be written about, only to possibly have their startup fail weeks or months later? These are the kind of thoughts going through some founders’ heads.
• Some founders are just too busy, especially in the later stage. Airbnb and foursquare were the two most difficult interviews to get. Brian Chesky and Dennis Crowley both required probably more than 20 e-mails just to get an interview scheduled. I also struggled to get my first interview with Jack Abraham, the founder of Milo (acquired by eBay for $75 million). Interviewing with some guy they’ve never heard of would basically be doing me a favor because they have other things to worry about: hiring their next 5 engineers, dealing with how to scale their servers with the rise in traffic, answering the 500 e-mails sitting in their inbox, writing code or getting stuff done, raising money, etc.

Having landed the interviews, I was surprised at how open founders were. They talked more about emotions than any other interviews I’ve read of founders. Why did this happen? I think I can point to a few things:

• I told founders this book wouldn’t be popular, and it’d only be read by students. This is probably the single most important factor, if I had to guess. The entire statement is true. The original idea for this book wasn’t even to be a book, it was a collection of essays I planned to release online on my blog. I can’t remember for certain when it turned into a book–I believe I used the book as a hack to approach more successful founders in order to improve my chances of getting to interview them. Maybe they’d take time to do an interview for a book because that implies more effort and promotion, but just some collection of open essays, I’m not sure they would have taken me seriously for that. Before that, I started writing essays about things I wish I would have told myself before I did my first startup, with the intent of giving that to students somehow. Once I settled on using the interviews in a book format, the first title of the book was something like “Founders in School” because I ask every founder to talk about their lives in high school and college. The title was a little misleading because it wasn’t about founders who were in school, it was about founders talking about what their high school and college experience was like. Turns out I ended up having the same problem by using “open sourced” in the current title, which goes to show that you can’t please everyone (or maybe I’m just bad at coming up with book names, who knows). Either way, when I wrote up my list of questions, I told every founder the goal of the book: to talk to students and educate and inspire them about the startup world. That might have disarmed the founders and caused them to open up a bit more than they normally would have because now they were talking to a bunch of students who are inherently interested in learning as much as they can about startups. Their attention span reading a book isn’t limited to 5 minutes, they really want to know all the details, rather than read some media story with only interesting bits of information.
• The founders don’t have an agenda, which is the case when they talk to the media. When a founder talks to the media, they’re not doing it for themselves. They have an objective, which is either to increase awareness or increase sales. If you’re Indinero, Jessica Mah has explicitly said the only reason they talk to media is because that results in more sales. In fact, I read a blog she wrote that basically said “I don’t like doing random interviews because it doesn’t help my startup out at all.” I felt awkward going into that interview because I knew I wasn’t doing anything to help her out, but she did talk about reasons why she was doing it anyway on that same blog. It’s like when ABC News had Chris Brown on and the anchor asked Chris Brown to talk about his history with Rihanna. Did you notice the reaction? Chris Brown was not there to talk about personal stuff, he was there to push album sales and perform as an entertainer. Do people want to know what happened and get all the details? Sure. But that’s not what Chris Brown went there for. It’s the same with founders. They aren’t there to feel good or brag, they are there to increase their page rank because they know an interview is going to link to their web site and that makes them more competitive in a Google search. They want sales and awareness. You’re not going to get sincere, personal, and honest stories when that’s the main agenda. TechCrunch and the other blogs are great to give you news, but that’s the extent of what they can offer.
• Some of the founders knew me personally. I actually am not too sure how much this helped. Most of the interviews seemed pretty honest and open, and I didn’t know all of the founders beforehand. Here are the companies I interviewed where I knew the founders personally: Greplin, AppSumo, Little App Factory, Mixpanel, Djangy, Divvyshot, Justin.TV, Blippy, Bump, WePay, Dailybooth, Gobble, Noteleaf, One Llama, Crowdbooster, Listia, OrangeQC, Camino Real, and One. That means I didn’t know the following founders personally: Grooveshark, reddit, GitHub, foursquare, Airbnb, Weebly, Wufoo, LikeALittle, KISSmetrics, Omnisio, Cloudkick, Octopart, Hipmunk, and Indinero. I believe all of them were very open and honest, all to varying degrees but relatively more than most interviews with the founders.
• I had a full hour with each founder. Again, not sure how much this helped, but I imagine that most interviews with founders are around 15 minutes, and that’s just not enough time to get the proper context of the startup and the founders’ background. With 15 minutes, I was barely finishing with their personal and educational background, talking about things like how they got started with entrepreneurship, what school they went to, and who inspired them while they were in school. Some interviews went over the 1 hour mark. I believe Airbnb’s interview was about 2 hours, for example. Some interviews ran short because the founders were just incredibly busy; Divvyshot was a mere 20 minutes long.

I’m still trying to figure out how this happened. I can’t say that it’s a bad thing at all. It turned out much better than I expected. I remember wanting to release an interview each day for a full week, but the first person I asked had requested that I not publicly release the interview because too many personal details were included in the original interview. This affirms that there are things in the book that just won’t get talked about otherwise because the founders opened up quite a bit.

The net effect the depth and honesty of the interviews has on people seems to be admiration rather than jealousy. When you read headlines that talk about how a company raised a few million dollars or just got acquired, it’s easy to say “well I could do that if they did it.” But you don’t see how much work went on, and then when you go to do your own startup, you feel like you’ve been lied to. It was like the media was telling you this was supposed to be easy because they wrote a one page summary on how everyone else did it. You think you’re doing something wrong and you’re the only person, but it turns out that nearly every single founder is going through or will go through the exact same thing you are as an early stage startup founder.

At the same time, I can’t bash the media too much. Companies have been started by those same headlines. They started companies like Mixpanel who saw Kevin Rose on the cover of BusinessWeek and the founder said “well if that nerd can do it, so can I. Piece of cake.” Granted, the founders had a healthy dose of reality when they actually took the plunge, but those same headlines got the wheels spinning.

Here’s the full paginated list, there’s also a list compiled below for faster viewing.

For our annual survey of the most promising technology entrepreneurs, Bloomberg Businessweek’s editors and writers weighed input from venture capitalists, angel investors, and other representatives of startups. We also relied on an ongoing direct dialogue with readers and startup founders and on the expertise of our editorial staff. Each slide lists the company name, executives aged 30 and under, a business description, and the wisest funding decision that executives feel they have made.

LearnVest – Alexa von Tobel; 27; $4.5 million
Meraki – Sanjit Biswas (29); $40 million
Wealthfront – Dan Carroll (29); $10 million
Tutorspree – Aaron Harris (26); Ryan Bednar (25); Josh Abrams (27); $1 million
TrialPay – Alex Rampbell (29); $30 million
GroupMe – Jared Hecht (24); Steve Martocci (29); $11.5 million
Automattic/WordPress – Matt Mullenweg (27); $30.6 million
Quora – Adam D’Angelo (26); Charlie Cleever (29)
Hearsay – Clara Shih (29); Steve Garrity (29); $3.1 million
WePay – Rich Aberman (26); Bill Clerico (25); $9.2 million
Bump – Jake Mintz (28); David Lieb (30); $20 million
Greplin – Daniel Gross (19); Robby Walker (27); $4.8 million
ADstruc – John Laramie (26); $1.1 million
OnSwipe – Jason Baptiste (26); $1 million
Hipmunk – Adam Goldstein (23); Steve Huffman (27); $5.2 million
Groupon – Andrew Mason (30); $1.1 billion
Path – Dave Morin (30); $11.2 million
Instagram – Kevin Systrom (27); Mike Krieger (25); $7.5 million
Disqus – Daniel Ha (25); $14.5 million
LivingSocial – Tim O’Shaughnessy (29); $632 million

Congratulations founders!

A special congrats to Ooshma at Gobble — she has just raised $1.2 million according to TechCrunch. I remember when I first heard the idea for Gobble and I brainstormed with Ooshma to try and calculate how feasible the idea–or the delivery aspect at least–was on some paper napkins in Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto. It’s impressive as a single founder that she’s been able to make all of this happen on her own–goes to show that having a cofounder isn’t required to build something great.

It’s important to remember that while you read these headlines, there has been a lot of work behind the scenes that you don’t see. I think Gobble started out as a side project while Ooshma was working on Anapata, and it wasn’t something that launched immediately, there was a lot of testing done in advance before they publicly launched and raised money.

I think it helped me with fundraising when investors heard that I actually went to the chefs’ houses and watched them cook and then sat in the delivery drivers’ cars and watched them carry food to companies. We actually delivered the wrong number of meals to one place and I even spilled a meal on myself when I was walking across the street. What do you do when you’re delivering food to a venture capital firm and some parts of those meals are missing? That experience really instructed my thought process in managing failure modes; setting up the best practices for chefs on our website and understanding the full spectrum of what we would have to control online so that everything would work in reality, for the consumer experience. It helped us make a better product and get better investors because they knew that I wasn’t just hypothesizing.

Q: So for the VC that didn’t get his lunch that day—what do you do in a situation like that?

We carefully made an extra meal by taking a little bit from all the other meals. That was very stressful. Now, we ask all chefs to make an extra meal; if all the meals survive the delivery, then the delivery driver can keep a meal and that’s a bonus. The extra meal has come in handy a lot because spills continue to happen. The bonus meal is a huge incentive for the driver. It’s worth so much more than the meal costs because the food is so delicious and it’s home cooked and now there’s a big difference between the value people see in working as a delivery driver for us versus for somebody else who might give them a few more tip dollars, so we’re applying these sorts of incentives to other parts of the company. Tony Hsieh talks about ‘wow moments’ that are non-monetary but great, goodwill-creating incentives or practices for employees and customers. Just yesterday, we brainstormed on how to create more ‘wow moments’ at Gobble.