Entries Tagged 'startup' ↓

This morning I attended the December MTEB.

A couple of venture capitalists were in attendance, who graciously answered my questions about what is going on with the VC industry. I basically think the industry is big, slow, and doesn’t understand new technology. They’re closely watching the efforts of Montreal Startup, but weary several incubators, seed funds and other schemes have foundered before.

The real surprise was talking with Darrell and the engineers at Stanox. We come from different technology backgrounds: micro-chips, ERP and web. Yet we all have similar attitudes: KISS. YAGNI. Think. Simplify. We’re all fans of Saint-Exupery’s quote on perfection:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

When I griped about a horrible API I might have to integrate (the variable names are inconsistent and ugly) one VC said “well, it can be ugly, but it’s ok if you make money”. The dividing line was obvious. For the engineers, if it’s ugly and verbose it’s probably buggy. For the investors, it’s bearable if it’s profitable.

The folks at Stanox look like they will be successful, and mentioned they may become angel investors in the future. I’m hoping they succeed; we need more angels like that.

Like most geeks, I love puzzles. I solved Google’s infamous puzzle that started with {first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com. I also solved one of Facebook’s puzzles, just for fun.

Today, Jonathan sent me a link to ITA Software’s hiring puzzles. It’s sexy stuff, and Standout Jobs would have some hiring puzzles too if I could come up with something particularly demented. Jonathan suggested an intriguing roman numeral puzzle. Sadly, we both realize that many people can’t even write a simple Fizzbuzz.

Ah well, back to the ITA Software puzzle. Looking at the average length of a few numbers, I estimate there’s a good chance the 51 billionth letter either doesn’t exist, or is very close to the end. Gauss would be amused.

Even if I’m wrong, brute force is obviously out of the question. It would however be nice to start from the end and have the algo run in a fraction of the time. So here’s how I start.

units = %w{ one two three four five six seven eight nine }
tens = %w{ ten twenty thirty fourty fifty sixty seventy eighty ninety }
teens = %w{ ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen }

def sum_string_sizes(units)
units.inject(0) {|memo, unit| memo + unit.size }
end

sum_string_sizes(units)
=> 36
sum_string_sizes(teens)
=> 70

([''] + units).inject(0) {|memo,i| memo + "twenty#{i}".size }
=> 96
'twenty'.size * 10 + sum_string_sizes(units)
=> 96
# sanity check doesn't bounce, wOOt!

sum_string_sizes(tens[1..-1]) * 10 + 8 * sum_string_sizes(units)
=> 758

So for numbers 1 to 99, I get strings of total length 864. I’m certain of my solution up to 999, but I’m not awake enough to be sure I have the rest really nailed. Either way, if there’s more than 51 billion letters, there’s still a fair chunk of work to do.

Have you solved this? If so, do you want to work for Standout Jobs? If not, how would you go about it?

It’s on the company blog, and Marc-André blogged about a typical day here at the office. We need another Ruby developer - either a “Guru” or a “Devotee”. I wasn’t going to blog about it, having sent email / IMs to people to encourage them to apply for work here.

The answers I got were surprising. The main question was around compensation.

Here’s the scoop: pay is above average for Montreal. Plus benefits. Plus stock options. Plus working with an awesome language, a beautiful framework, under good working conditions (read Marc-André’s blog post!)

Now, here’s scoop #2. Marc-André and I will also be interviewing candidates. We have high standards: we are looking for other passionate people. We want people that enjoy coding and are continually learning.

If you don’t have passion, you shouldn’t bother applying. If you do, we expect you’ll have code to show us - although it might be Python, Erlang, Javascript or another cool language.

Campfire / office chat:

Daniel H. : This is annoying:
The name ‘employer’ is reserved by Ruby on Rails.
Please choose an alternative and run this generator again.

Fred N.: emplyer

Daniel H.: what? come on

Fred N.: wait
employr

Daniel H. : Aah yes, spelling 2.0

Daniel Drouet just posted another article in his series on VC capital in Montreal. I like where he’s going with this. There is good talent in Montreal, and VCs and Angels aren’t nearly as active as they could be. He finishes by asking “In a city with limited angel activity, how should entrepreneurs proceed? What should local VCs be doing?”

Here’s my take: invest amounts of $50-$250k, with answers for applicants given in 1 week after the first meeting. I know a few people that could build a good product and be ready for an A round or buy-out with $250,000 - and could get a prototype for $50k. Well, less if he wants to hire students that will eat ramen for 3 months.

He refers to a Union Square Ventures post claiming they’re not staffed to do as many small deals as Charles River Ventures. That sounds like nonsense to me. CRV needs fewer partners to OK a seed investment; they didn’t double their staffing to double the deal flow; they’re putting less work into vetting each opportunity. This is normal, since the risk is inherently spread.

One thing I would change about CRV’s standard QuickStart terms is a clause in the case of a sale. The VC should have an upside if the company gets bought out by Google after an angel investment, so incentives are aligned.

To pull this strategy off, a VC would have to be able to assess the technical chops of hackers as well as the market potential of their idea. It would only take one of those to make Montreal a magnet for new startups, so I hope Montreal Start Up succeeds!

DemoCampMontreal3 already has great wrap-ups by Marc-André and Heri, so I won’t re-hash things here. What struck me was the change in the type of applications shown. Of 4 applications, one was fairly simple (Workcruncher). All the rest were either mash-ups or mashable.

• Vinismo is a semantic wiki with a creative commons license, and an RDF API.
• Defensio’s spam filter is delivered through an API.
• Jerome Paradis‘ Allo Stop for jet planes uses a google map to display information that was extracted from various sources, including a mailing list.

Good APIs and data licenses are good first steps for business cooperation. The more startups like Vinismo and Defensio, the more niche plays like jet-sharing become easy to implement. We need more mashable startups, and I hope these are a sign of more to come.

Today’s O’Reilly Radar has a blog post about Wesabe, Making the web into a banking platform (whether they like it or not). It has some provocative insights, go read it.

I’m looking forward to the next democamp. Jonathan and I should have url_pipe ready by then, tackling another way to loosely couple data providers and consumers.

Ben and Fred at Standoutjobs got me to move from Quebec to Montreal to become a Ruby Guru. I will be guru #2 after the very talented Marc-André Cournoyer. Like him, I now have a standard-issue MacBook Pro with a second screen.

I was very reluctant to leave beautiful Quebec city. I had a great apartment downtown on St-Jean street and was looking forward to a summer chilling on terraces.

They have a convincing pitch, and the project is ambitious. Ben, Fred and Austin have all had previous business success. With such a track record, and by recruiting people like Marc-André, they are very likely to succeed. This should be fun, and a great learning opportunity.

A CEO and HR manager were shocked when a friend of mine asked for $20-30,000 more than he’s currently making.

His current employer has basically indicated that he’s too young to be considered a “senior”. That is perhaps socially acceptable, although it is certainly not legal. They can get away with it because younger programmers have smaller networks and fewer options.

This got me thinking about salaries, and tickled the memory of an article by Malcolm Gladwell, Basketball By The Numbers. In short, we’re terrible at judging how much players contribute to the success of a team.

[The authors of “The Wages of Wins”] argue that traditional talent evaluation over-rates the importance of points scored, and under-rates the importance of turnovers, rebounds and scoring percentage

If we applied similar metrics to a development team, could our win scores go down every time a colleague had to fix bugs caused by your commits, and go up for every useful feature we put in and every test we write? I’m sure you can think of more, but we’ll never have a perfect metric.

Steve Nash has a lower Win Score than Shawn Marion. Gladwell doesn’t think the statistics can tell the whole story:

Nash’s particular, largely unquantifiable; genius is that he manages to make everyone around him much better.

All this should sound very familiar to software developers. We all know the good and bad players on our team. You almost certainly have people you go to for advice, to brainstorm ideas for tough problems. Then again, maybe you spend half your time fixing another colleague’s code.

Salary can be a touchy issue, and it’s all the more controversial in professional sports. The correlation between salary and performance can be very weak in programming as well, especially because there is such a high variance in performance. A coding monkey can be twice as fast and efficient as another. But how do we measure the variance between your average junior and someone like Linus Torvalds? Or between a PHP beginner and David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of rails)?

A framework programmer that can supervise 3 people to do the work of 20 others is someone a manager should be happy to pay 50% more than those with a comparable education.

Since in most large companies managers don’t way to pay their underlings more than other people with the same age and experience or more than they are making the only way for good talent to get what they deserve is join or create a startup.

One blogger wrote that Michael Arrington of Techcrunch said “there’s little value in being “right” with a story if you can’t be “first””.

Arrington is a brilliant marketer and making lots of money. He is also consistently out in left-field when evaluating startups. I’ve unsubscribed from Techcrunch because of all the noise.

Mainstream media are also noisy, so you might as well shut them off. Some people watch an hour of news every day. Even a half hour a day is 180 hours, almost 5 weeks of full-time work. After years of watching all this, what difference does it make? It only made me depressed. To think of all the better things I could have done with that time…

I don’t need to hear about things that don’t affect me, or that I can’t affect. A coup in Thailand? An MP in the UK charged with breaking the law? Yet another softwood lumber accord that’s being disputed, or another cease-fire broken? Noise to me.

I’ll write more about this later, but locus of control and self-efficacy are important issues. The media make people feel less empowered and less able to change the world. They teach helplessness. To value constant data rather than correct information simply adds to that suffering.

Wanting to change the world, or merely being sane requires shutting off most media.

Over at the Instigator Blog, Ben is arguing that startups aren’t necessarily worse than other places for insane hours. I propose we need to start thinking about the part-time startup.

Paul Graham often talks about startup hackers working crazy hours in his essays, as if this was a good thing (See A Students Guide to Startups). Ben’s right that this doesn’t have to be this way, and he’s fighting a battle against a lot of entrenched opinion from some very bright people.

Most VC’s would probably scoff if you said you wanted to work 25 hour weeks. Angels might not want to have anything to do with you. I do have the sneaking suspicion that 5-6 hours of daily and focused work would be far more productive than 80 hours a week.

After an 8 hour day, a hacker working overtime is usually adding more bugs than they are fixing. Startups usually only care about shipping, and ignore the fact that 80% of the cost of software is in maintenance. After binge work, our software not going to be elegant or maintainable. Our code may not even be readable. Smart as we may be, we’re still falling for that near-universal delusion in the Western world that work equals productivity. Busy-ness only masks a lack of efficacy.

Our society is slowly starting to care about overwork. Indeed, 36 hour shifts for medical residents are only now starting to be phased out. Is anyone really surprised that doctors that were put through such a grueling schedule end up unhealthy and making poor decisions? I can’t imagine what my bedside manners would be like after 12 hours of straight work, never mind 36.

Many people join startups hoping for a home-run, wanting to escape the rat-race. I think it could be the exit. Imagine people dropping out of the corporate world after having a child, and joining a startup so they can enjoy more time parenting. That would be my kind of work environment. Hell, that idea might seem sufficiently appealing to a lot of hackers that hiring might become easier.