Archive for January, 2008

Obama for President

Posted in Opinions You Would Agree With If You Weren\'t An Idiot on January 30, 2008 by themaroon

TechCrunch today touched on the real reason I’m personally endorsing Obama for president. It isn’t mainly his inspirational ability, though I think that’s an underrated quality in a leader, especially in tough times, which these certainly are. It’s his stance on technology issues, and specifically net neutrality.

Net neutrality is the most underrepresented issue right now, and certainly one of the most important. Sadly, I’m not sure any of the other candidates truly understand what it means. Even the Senators who are essentially in charge of regulating the Internet say things like:

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.

This is who is controlling the flow of information in our country. People who don’t even know the difference between an email and the Internet, let alone understand how either of them work, are in charge of the most important force in the history of humanity. That’s not only unacceptable, it’s incredibly dangerous.

The Internet is so massively integrated into our lives now that it’s hard for many of us to remember life before it, and most people first experienced it less than a decade ago. It’s influencing more and more of our everyday lives each year. It’s aiding in globalization, and might is beginning to chip away at oppressive regimes in countries like China. It’s probably the most significant invention since the printing press.

Because the Internet is, and for the foreseeable future will be, delivered by wires, telcos and cable operators have monopolies or duopolies in most of our country. Wireless that truly competes with today’s broadband won’t be here for a while. And in the mean time, allowing a couple corporations in each market to have that much control would be a disaster.

Government has long regulated natural monopolies, and the Internet certainly is one. Maybe in some deregulated future multiple ISPs will share the same cable and phone lines, as power companies often do, and the free market will ensure a neutral Internet, but we’re nowhere near that now, and it’s just too much to risk.

Net neutrality is one of the reasons I never could get behind Ron Paul. I’m pretty libertarian, but I still believe the government has to do some things, and regulating natural monopolies is one of them. And the Internet is so massively important to our economy and the future of our democracy that it needs all the protection it can get.

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How to Write Funny

Posted in Pointless Words of Wisdom on January 29, 2008 by themaroon

A couple years back, Scott Adams posted an article called Humor Formula, about how to write funny stuff. He removed his archives when he published his book, but you can see it here courtesy of archive.org. In it he defines 6 elements of humor, which are:

Cute (as in kids and animals)

Naughty

Bizarre

Clever

Recognizable (You’ve been there)

Cruel

He claims that the more elements something has, the funnier it is. It takes two to be funny, four is great, and five is "virtually unheard of".

Since reading that, I’ve been analyzing everything I’ve come across and checking for those six criteria. I think it holds up very well, but I’ve come to realize that one of those categories is far more important than the rest, and that’s Recognizable.

Something that’s recognizable but meets none of the other criteria can still be viewed as funny by a lot of people, especially if not much else is similarly familiar. A great example of this is the web comic XKCD. Viewed from any objective standpoint, that site is about as funny as a partial birth abortion. Take this one for example:

Christmas Back Home

Hahahahahah! A parody of The Night Before Christmas! Never seen that before. How original. And the dude is up at 3 a.m. using a computer! I’m practically dying here. (For those who cant tell, the preceding paragraph was dripping with sarcasm.)

Sadly, that’s above average for that site too, at least from the 5 or 10 I’ve seen. But it’s extremely familiar to it’s audience of uber-geeks, and that’s a group to whom not much humor is catered. So even though that site is not actually funny at all, and I’m allowed to say that because I actually get the "jokes" (parentheses required there), a lot of people enjoy it because it’s a sort of recognizable that little or nothing else is.

The above comic certainly fits none of the other categories. It’s clearly not cute, naughty, or bizarre. Well, it’s bizarre that anyone thinks it’s funny, but that doesn’t count. It’s certainly not clever or cruel. And most of their comics are the same, which means that the site has found a substantial audience through sheer familiarity.

I’ve yet to see anything like this with the other categories. Anyone have any examples of popular humor that fires only on one cylinder? Or something unpopular that does 2 or more?

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Hacking Real World Systems

Posted in Dollar Dollar Bill Y'all on January 27, 2008 by themaroon

Seeing this post on Hacker News reminded me of a great story I should have blogged here long ago. The post is in reference to a question on Y Combinator’s latest application form, which is

“Please tell us about the time you (…) most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage”

Wow, I could write a book on these, as that’s pretty much my one true passion in life, but I’ll give you my favorite. Once upon a time, back when I was a regular player on PartyPoker, they rolled out a new promotion called PartyPoints. The deal was that you got frequent player points (FPP) for certain stuff and could use those to buy things from the FPP store.

Their FPP program was a blatant rip off of PokerStars, who had implemented their own VIP program maybe a year or so earlier. Both gave you points for hands played, tournament buy-ins, etc., but with one major difference. PartyPoker also gave you points whenever you deposited money into your account. The best point to dollar deposited ratio was achieved by depositing $500. You had to deposit the money, wait a week, and then the FPPs were credited.

Their cashier system was web-based and poorly designed, so I noticed right away that you could make one deposit and then just keep hitting refresh to deposit again and again. I made a simple AutoHotKey script to refresh the page over and over at a 30 second interval for a preset number of times depending on how many dollars were in my Neteller account. At one point the number of refreshes was over 100, and they all worked. I’d just start the script and go to dinner or shopping or whatever, and when I got back it would be done. I’d then go about my normal playing for a week, cash it all out as soon as my FPP balance spiked, and repeat.

For a long time their store had nothing but t-shirts and other such junk, so I just held on to the points, assuming that one day they’d mimic PokerStars again and add something worthwhile to the store. Sure enough, they eventually added all sorts of electronics and other assorted goods. I did a quick check on eBay to see which of the items had the highest resale value per FPP and discovered that it was the video games, which was extraordinarily fortunate because eBay has an awesome listing system for them, in which you simply input the ISBN number and it fills out the whole page for you. And they’re the easiest thing imaginable to ship, you just slap them in a bubble mailer and print out a media mail postage label.

I made about 100% ROI in 6 months on a pretty good sum, and got a nice eBay rating in the process. And the best part of the whole story is that Neteller, the service I deposited through, charges large poker sites something like 10% of the transaction as their fee, meaning PartyPoker was eating thousands in cashier fees every week and giving me massive FPPs while getting no extra profit out of me whatsoever. Actually it was probably less, as I couldn’t play while doing the refreshes or waiting for cash-outs to hit my Neteller account.

I don’t know if anyone else ever figured that one out. I never blogged about it or posted it in any forum for fear someone at Party would catch on, and if any other players did spot that particular hack, they were smart enough not to mention it publicly too. Eventually Party removed the deposit bonus and changed the program around a bit. I’m still not sure if it was just a general tightening of the purse strings or if someone had caught on. But it was awesome while it lasted. I still have a PSP (that I’ve only used maybe twice) with a ton of games, an iPod Nano, a poker table, a ton of shirts, some poker books, an entire wardrobe emblazoned with the PartyPoker logo, a kick ass cigar cutter, lighter and travel humidor, business card holder, flask, bar tool set, year’s subscription to 10 different magazines, and I can’t even remember what else to show for it.

 

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TechStars

Posted in Startup on January 21, 2008 by themaroon

I saw on TC that TechStars applications are now open. That organization has been humorous to me since its inception. I had a hard time taking them seriously before I even thought of applying to Y Combinator, and my opinion hasn’t gotten better since.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for learning from stuff that works and incorporating good ideas into your own. All art is derivative, and business is certainly an art. And I also think that YC’s business model is definitely worthy of imitation, at least to some extent. But TechStars copied their application form almost verbatim in the early days (I think they made one minor change). That really made me question their credibility from the start.

They also seem to be sort of aggressive toward Y Combinator, almost openly hostile. In addition to the application being blatantly plagiarized, from what I understand (and I could be wrong about this) they ran theirs early last year, forcing any team that applied to them to accept before even having a chance at Y Combinator’s summer batch. They also scheduled their demo day at the exact same time as Y C’s, which I’m not sure was intentional but certainly seemed to have been. (Either way, it seems incredibly foolish, and was probably a large disservice to their startups.)

And there’s the fact that they’re in Boulder. Really, Boulder Colorado, which I think is about the 48th best startup hub in the U.S., right after Sheboygan, Wisconsin. P.G. has said many times that you aren’t doing anyone in the tech industry favors by asking them to relocate to anywhere other than the Bay Area or Boston, and I even disagree with him about the latter. I can’t imagine Boulder Colorado being of any use to anyone. You might as well seek funding in Butte, Montana.

I think if I were a brand new startup I’d go ahead and pass on TechStars. I’d wait for the next Y Combinator session, or just move to the valley and start hacking away, then decide later. A tech company being anywhere other than SF/The Valley is like an aspiring actress living somewhere other than L.A. It might be possible to make it, but why fight one more uphill battle than you absolutely have to? A startup is hard enough, there’s no sense making it harder.

To be fair you really don’t need either of those two seed funding firms, or any other for that matter. Plenty of successful startups were started by people with few or no industry connections, though these days that seems like the exception rather than the rule. We all love the underdog stories like Plenty of Fish or whateverlife.com, which are tech news sensations. But if you look at the Alexa Top 100, you’ll find far fewer of them, and far more sites that were churned out by the Silicon Valley funding machine or built by publicly traded corporations. In fact, if you don’t include porn, it’s nearly universal.

Still, if you build something people want, the industry will find you, even if you’re in Boulder. Get a million users (or fewer paying ones) and you don’t need any introductions, just come to The Valley and start shaking hands. But for an early-stage startup, Y Combinator adds a lot of value, and I can’t imagine TechStars adds as much as living in BFE subtracts. Maybe I’m wrong, and they are new, so they haven’t had a lot of time to prove themselves yet. But I just can’t see why any startup would apply there.

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Californians

Posted in Stuff That Pisses Me Off on January 15, 2008 by themaroon

One funny thing about Californians is how pathetically they handle weather. Coming from Ohio, it’s downright humorous what happens here whenever it isn’t 75 and sunny.

If it gets down below 60 during the day, they start whining. If it hits 55, the winter coats and long johns come out. Oddly though, unlike anywhere else I’ve been, it can be 85 here at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and by 9 it’s in the high 40′s. That unusual temperature drop is nice because the locals stay inside and the traffic is less bad. It’s always varying degrees of awful, but as soon as the thermometer hits 60, it gets significantly less so as the Californians scramble for shelter.

And when there’s even the slightest rain all hell breaks loose. If they get three days of Ohio’s average April weather in San Fran you can row your boat to work. Apparently nobody here has ever heard of a drain. For any Californians reading, a drain is kind of like a manhole cover but with holes in it. Google it.

Even a little drizzle here causes rolling blackouts, and a 5 mile per hour wind seems to knock about 1 in 5 trees over, generally into the road, where they sit for weeks. They don’t seem to have anyone tasked with picking them up, and the neighbors sure aren’t going outside. In the Midwest we have such cleanup crews, but even though the weather is far more severe there they’re not really needed because our trees are made of wood. I’m pretty sure California trees are composed of Styrofoam.

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Polls

Posted in Opinions You Would Agree With If You Weren\'t An Idiot on January 8, 2008 by themaroon

So I’ve been predicting for a few months that Barack Obama will be our next president. I became of that opinion after I saw him on Letterman last spring. The interview wasn’t anything substantive really, so my opinion wasn’t due to anything he said, and it still isn’t because what politicians say doesn’t really seem to have much effect on their success in elections. It’s more how they say it, and Obama does that better than anyone.

Since then I’ve talked to or read blogs written by people who’ve seen the man speak every so often, and they all refer to the experience the same way someone who saw Martin Luther King might. They’re practically hypnotized when they talk about it, even the ones who don’t agree with his stances. In fact, just the fact that they mention the experience of seeing him speak, rather than what it is he said, shows his aptitude.

And when you look back through modern history and start naming great leaders, pretty much the only common thread is their incredible communication skill. Especially since the advent of television almost all powerful men were great speakers. Guys like MLK, Lincoln, Churchill, FDR, Reagan. They all had that power to put words together in such a way that even if they really said nothing of substance, or maybe even said something you disagreed with, you found yourself cheering, not for what they stood for, but for them.

And that’s Obama. He can talk for an hour, say nothing, and people will nod their heads. That’s the most valuable skill in politics. And, without even knowing what he believed or having the slightest clue what he intended to do if elected, that was enough to convince me that he would be. Not that he should, but that he would.

I even tried to get some money on intrade to try to bet on him when his shares were trading below 20, but I couldn’t get any of my credit cards through, as is often the case on gambling sites. I was planning on betting a grand, which would have returned me about $4,000 in profit as of today. Damn I hate the UIGEA.

So the Iowa results were unsurprising to me, though at the same time, I didn’t really take them as confirmation of anything. Hell, Mike Huckabee won too, and I think he has zero chance, though that may just be wishful thinking on my part. If I thought that I lived in a country where he may one day be president I’d lie awake every night shaking in fear.

I’ve taken what I’ve seen from him since as more evidence though. His victory speech has had an incredible response on the net and in the mainstream media. The amount of links to it I’ve seen in blogs from various niches, even ones which rarely if ever wax political, has been amazing.

I’ve only recently come to an actual opinion on Obama’s stances myself, and for the most part I like the guy. I’ll talk more about individual issues later, but I think the only issue I strongly disagree with him on is government funded health care, but I guess I’m just too libertarian at heart to have faith in the government’s ability to succeed at such a large undertaking.

And what I like best about him is his technological bent. He’s pro science (especially stem cells), and, most importantly, fiercely in favor of net neutrality, which I think is one of the most important economic and civil issues our country has faced in a very long time. (I actually feel that nothing short of an Amendment will suffice there.)

After him I like Clinton (and I’m speaking in terms of chance of winning only, not personal opinion). Edwards is just too hypocritical. He’s ultra-wealthy, yet markets himself almost entirely to the poor. He’s too liberal for the general public and a terrible campaigner.

On the Republican side I like McCain. I think he’s working on a comeback. A year and a half ago I thought he had the presidency locked up, provided Gore didn’t run, but he spent a good twelve months or so shooting himself in the foot. His flip-flopping on torture and support of Bush on the Iraq war have taken a huge toll on his public image, and I think the damage has been too much for him to actually win the Presidency, but he might get to the finals.

Giuliani is going to have a tough time due to all of the skeletons in his closet, and McCain’s experience campaigning, but he’s still a pretty close second due to the nation’s perception of his strong leadership after 9/11.

I like Romney a bit on a personal level, as I trust anyone who made that much money himself to at least act rationally, but I think his being a Mormon makes him unelectable. That’s only one rung below Scientologist on the crazy ladder to most people. Your mythology has to be at least a millennia old before it is socially acceptable, so maybe in another 700 or so years one of his kind can win. Luckily for him the business world isn’t as prejudiced.

So that’s my rundown. It will be interesting to see what happens in New Hampshire and beyond.

 

 

 

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Advice For New Y C Founders

Posted in Startup on January 6, 2008 by themaroon

So you’re one of the teams that got accepted into Y Combinator. Congrats. You’re in for a hell of a ride. I’ll try to give you a little idea what you’re in for over the next three months, and see if I can’t recall all of the things I wish someone had told me beforehand.

First you’ll need to find a place. In Cambridge during the summer there were virtually unlimited sublets on Craigslist. I don’t really know what the situation is like for subletting in Silicon Valley, but the rental outlook is extremely favorable right now due to the terrible real estate market. There are a large number of rentals floating around, many with month to month leases. If you have good credit you should have a pretty easy time of it. If you don’t, it’s going to require some looking and a bit of social engineering, but you can still do it. I have friends with worse credit than you who pulled it off.

Space is probably your number one concern in a rental. Get the biggest reasonably affordable apartment or rental home you can find. We had three people crammed into tiny quarters in Cambridge and it made for a lot of misery. Happiness and productivity are directly related, so don’t skimp. Bonus points if you land somewhere with a fitness facility, and double if you actually use it.

(Unlike the summer founders, air conditioning is not really a concern for you, so be thankful for that. Should anyone from a future summer batch happen upon this, do not wait to resolve that situation, and make sure to find a rental with windows suitable for portable ones. The Y C people will tell you that multiple times, but a lot of people won’t believe them. Trust me, it’s true.)

I highly recommend living down in the Valley, ideally in Mountain View, though Palo Alto and Sunnyvale are fine if you have a car. Living in the city is probably more fun, but you don’t have time for that anymore now that you’re in a startup. You can have fun after demo day. Your life is now focused around preparing for that.

It’s also a long commute from the city to the Y C offices, and you’re going to want to be there once, or often twice each week. Time is in short supply, so live somewhere that will save you a lot of it, which in this case is Mountain View. It’s actually a pretty cool area anyway, especially if you’re near Castro Street.

Y Combinator will be hosting the weekly dinners. Ours were always on Tuesday, I assume yours will be too. My advice is to go to every one of those. You will quickly realize that the most valuable aspect of the program is the community, and those dinners are the focal point. It’s where you will get to know founders from current and previous batches. In fact, since you’re on the West Coast, you’ll get to meet almost every Y C startup that’s still alive and kicking, and maybe some that aren’t. It may be tempting sometimes to lock yourself in a hole and hack away on your project, especially with demo day looming, but in the long run you would be missing out on the most important part of the experience. I never missed a dinner or tea, except when on my honeymoon, and I recommend you don’t either.

Get your legal paperwork done right away. Ideally it should be complete before you even get there. It’s a pain in the ass and took some ungodly amount of my time, but it’s worth it to get it out of the way. Y Combinator’s standard legal forms are pretty helpful and will make your life easier in the future as you seek investment. Take their advice and leave a chunk of your stock unpurchased as sort of a pseudo-options pool. It might come in handy, and if not you can simply purchase it later. We used just under half of ours, and the legal fees it saved made it well worth the slight dilution.

Don’t worry about bringing any nice clothing or the like, Y Combinator is as casual as it gets. You can give your demo in jeans and you won’t be out of place. I lugged a garment bag out there and ended up regretting it.

Live cheaply. You’ll hear this over and over, but might be tempted to ignore it. Don’t. Startups aren’t a sprint, they’re a marathon. Most of the groups won’t receive funding for months after Y C ends, so make what you have last. We all paid for our food ourselves, spending the investment money on nothing but rent, servers, and such, and continue that still. Do that if you can, if not, get used to Ramen Noodles. They’re kind of like shots of cheap vodka, after four or five in a row you stop noticing how bad they are.

Paul may get mad at me for this one because it will cut into his writing time, but spend as much time talking to him as you can. He’s a smart guy who has been studying the startup world intensely for a very long time. He knows a lot about what works and what doesn’t and he will tell you. Get his feedback on your project regularly. Get his feedback on your demo. Pretty much get his feedback on everything. Of course, he’s not infallible, so I’m not suggesting you take his advice as the word of God (some people go a little too far with that) but definitely give it due consideration.

Save him some effort and read every essay he wrote. He’ll appreciate not having to tell you things you should already know. Nobody likes repeating themselves. Also read Founders at Work for the same reason.

Don’t let yourself get burned out. If you need a day off, take one. Go hang out at the beach or play Guitar Hero all day. You’ll be better off in the long run. It takes twice as much down time to recover from burnout as it does to prevent it in the first place. And if you find yourself needing too many days off, perhaps you’re in the wrong line of work.

And last but not least, don’t fear demo day. You’ll hear a lot about how important it is, how it will define you in the eyes of the tech community. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’ll hear the quote “Fear Demo Day” from Paul. The stuff about how important it is may be true to a large extent, but I don’t believe in fear as a motivator. I think the more proper attitude is respect.

Respect the importance of demo day, and as such, work like crazy to have an awesome one. For the most part, that means work on your product. At what point you cut over into working on the demo depends on what you’re building. In our case we were making a multiplayer game that doesn’t look like much outside of the live aspect, and won’t even if it becomes a multibillion dollar corporation.

So we realized long before demo day that our product wasn’t an obvious technological marvel like Weebly or Zenter, where users would be impressed by features. (It’s got its fair share of tech, but mostly behind the scenes.) So we went with something more conceptual, showing our site off only a little and explaining what it was and would become and why it was superior to the competition.

John and I set out to work with the site we had a little early and focused on the presentation. If your site falls more into the Weebly category, you might spend less time on the PowerPoint and more on the product itself. Where the cutoff is is yours to determine.

That’s all I’ve got, though I’ll gladly answer any questions. Now that you’re in Y C, you know how to reach me.

 

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