Where am I?

Reasons Collective Intellect is the best

I was in a meeting earlier this week strategizing on an RFP response.
My 9 year old daughter was at the office with me and asked me to
explain what we were trying to do. I told her we wanted to explain to
the other company why we were the best solution. Several minutes
later she pushed a notebook towards me (see above). Incredible! I'm
going to have to put her on payroll...


Looks like the pic is kinda hard to read so here's the list:

1. The best employies [sic]
2. They pull the best info together
3. They pick the finest blogs
4. They give information about everything
5. They give info about the company, it's competitors, and the company's stregths [sic]

truly awesome :)

Interview

I was interviewed the other day by local Colorado marketing blogger Marie Rotter about how Collective Intellect is helping companies track, understand, and engage with social media. It's fun doing interviews with bloggers who are trying to spread the social media word. Very meta I guess. Social media on social media.

I also, ordered Charlene Li's book called, "GroundSwell" off of Amazon today. I recently sat on a panel with Charlene, looks like it has great reviews, and am looking forward to sitting down with it somewhere over America in the near future.

Instapaper

Found this gem on Metzger's blog this morning. Instapaper let's you store things in a folder that you want to read later. It sort of a simple workflow that just creates a list of things and let's you work through it, crossing things off as you've read them. Great idea and much better than bookmarking. The only things it's currently missing IMHO are tagging and sharing. I want to tag things inside to delicious so that I can retrieve them again in the future and I'd like to either share my whole folder, or tag items as shared and share that folder with the public, or email one or more of the items in my list to other people. These shared lists I would then like to widgetize and put up on my blog or facebook page. Let's see if Instapaper is listening...

CTO Series - Out of the Goo

At the outset a company needs a huge amount of energy from a very small set of people to have any sort of chance of making it through the first year. My companies have been fairly complicated software affairs and so much of the energy input has been in the initial product buildout to sufficiently demonstrate the idea. So, in those early heady days of whiteboard brainstorming, myth making, protean moneyless, nothing-else-exists, insomniac haze, everything draws your attention. Servers need to be built. There is no data center so the servers sit half tilted on the desk next to you humming away. Source control needs to be set up. The beginnings of an architecture need to be laid down. You set up the company's email and website. There is no marketing, no sales department, no one booking your flights. You beg and borrow from friend's time to help with various aspects. You push friends and family to the limits of their patience. And you code like crazy, pulling all nighters when you're on a roll and some thorny problem is nearly within your grasp. You're in every aspect of the product, pushing each just far enough along to get that primal system to crawl up out of the digital goo limping into reality.

Key take-aways:

• The early days of startups can get you distracted in a thousand directions so build a plan
• The plan should be optimized to get you into discussions with *real* customers as soon as possible to validate the value
• Don't fall in love with your plan, it will change, perhaps daily some weeks
  
• Build top 10 lists. There's a hell of a lot to accomplish. Figure out what matters most to the plan and create a top 10 list.
  
• In the list take on the hard problems yourself, delegate the easy ones
• Lead by example. Push people but don't expect them to work harder than you do.
• Have someone tend to the business. Incorporation, setting up health insurance, getting office space, chairs, and printers, and a checking account are not where you add value
• Communicate. Constantly elaborate on the vision to any one who will listen and primarily anyone in your startup. This will help you in the evangelism phase later. Things that seem like really great ideas in your head sometimes fail the test when you have to communicate them out loud. This forces you to think through the problem in greater detail.
  
• Don't get distracted. Don't look at your email when you're focusing on the product. If someone has a question that doesn't need to be addressed right away tell them you'll get back to them. Let people know when it's ok or not ok to come ask you questions. Wear a set of headphones when you don't want to be interrupted even if you're not listening to anything. Most people won't bother you if you have headphones on (same as on a flight).
  

Once this is accomplished the road show begins and you spend a lot more time talking to people than writing code. In order for your company to survive you must raise money, either by selling some form of the product, or taking in venture capital. This slows you down to a crawl but gives a lot of perspective on the value of your creation and gives you time to digest the market and what might be important. It also preps you for the next stage in the company's development, R&D growth. Rest here on the bank for a just a moment. There's a lot more evolution coming.

Twitter Micro Markup

Just like the semantic web I think Twitter would benefit tremendously from introducing a micro markup language that monitoring tools could use to pick up data more accurately. It's a fairly hard problem to parse blogs and tag them with semantic and qualitative data. Now think about shrinking that text down to 140 characters and you really don't have a hell of a lot to work with. If we introduce an abbreviated name-value system inside our tweets we can convey a ton of rich information that will be easier to get the message across to the companies and services that anger and overjoy us, events we're attending, observations we make, etc. It's time to take the next step with Twitter.



I think it would be simplest to put an abbreviated 2 letter type code at the start of the message with a sentiment symbol next (+ = good, - = bad, / = neutral), and the subject that you will be talking about. For instance I just got back from a trip to Minneapolis. My flight was delayed again (probably my fourth flight in a row on United that was delayed).

I twittered the following: "RV-UAL another trip, another flight delay on United". In the first 6 characters I know that this is a review of United Airlines and it is negative. Simple, brief, easy for both humans and machines to parse and interpret.

The codes I'm thinking of are:
OB = observation
EV = Event
RV = Review

If it's an event, perhaps the standard could be to create the event in facebook and snurl it for the event subject. what are some others? Let me know what you think!

Horoscope du jour

You know how sometimes you check your horoscope and it just seems so dead on it's freaky. I was out at a local coffee shop (my favorite, The Cup) and happened to glance down at today's Boulder Weekly while waiting for my delicious sandwich. It was the horoscope page and being a person of superstition I picked it up. Here's what it said:

This would be a perfect time for you to write your ultimate personal manifesto. I'm talking about composing a sweeping statement of the core ideas that fuel your lust for life. To get you in the mood, take a look at the following lyris from Danny Schmidt's song "Company of Friends."

I believe in restless hunger
I believe in private thunder
I believe in inspiration
I believe in slow creation
I believe in lips on ears
I believe in being wrong
I believe in contradiction
I believe in being smitten
I believe our book is written by our company of friends

This could be the song of my life over the past year. I need to get to work on that manifesto right away.

The Idea

I wanted to start writing a little bit about the role of a CTO in a startup company. There's a wide range of behaviors in that role from the more execution oriented engineering manager to inventing a fair amount of the technology to a visionary steward who directs the company towards the optimum market value. I have played many roles in multiple companies across this continuum and wanted to get a few thoughts down that may be of help to others out there trying to make sense of this elusive function.

A CTO is the Chief Technology Officer in the company. In more well established companies this is a contributing role that would typically report up through the Chief Information Officer (CIO). In a technology startup, the CTO role is critical for the successful launch of the company. It all starts with the idea, and in many cases the CTO is not only the founder but the individual who had the idea and the knowledge to determine whether implementing the idea is likely. For the moment though I would like to set aside the notion of solution probability.

Ideas often start with personal pain. Engineers, or rather inventors are inherently lazy. When confronted with a problem, an inventor will ironically go to great lengths, often expending much more energy than giving in to the brute force approach, to try to find a short cut solution. The brainstorming that follows traverses a series of what if's with numerous cerebral dead ends. The beauty of this stage is in the search for the possible and you may have no f*cking clue how likely a solution is but are making probability guesses based upon incomplete knowledge. For instance, in my last company, Dante Software, I had just finished reading the O'Reilly book on Perl for Bionformatics. I was currently the CTO of a Web 1.5 services company where we built Commerce, Content, and Community sites. I'm going to give myself a smallish bit of credit here for incorporating community directly in the site, although I didn't recognize the importance it was going to play in the future. Anyway, we would continually have issues with system performance and outages that impacted the business. The aha moment came after reading the bioinformatics book and realizing that the web business and it's integration to traditional parts of the business had become specialized and the interactions complicated enough that a similar model in bioinformatics to track protein-protein interactions for disease detection was not all that far off from what I was trying to solve. That is, I wanted to detect problem conditions that could impact the business before they became problems for my customers without having to know what alert thresholds to place on every possible metric in the underlaying IT stack.

Now I have a big hairy problem. There's nothing out there solving it (as far as we know). And there's a solution model in a completely different space that looks like it might be adaptable or at least used as a guide for my problem. Aha, idea born. This could work! The next step is to reverse engineer the problem and map to the proposed solution to come up with a reasonable guess as to how it might work. Then researching whether something already exists that may be close enough or could get there faster than you. And SWAG (silly wild ass guess) how long it would take you to prototype. But these are market and time to market questions. I'll address those later. It's a great feeling just to sit with your idea for a bit and relish the brilliance of it before taking that next scary step of analysis. This will be a long road. Right now you need to build up your confidence to herculean levels :)

I remember once telling a VC at this stage about an idea and they said how about company X, haven't they been working on something similar for the last few months. Knowing the people in the other company and having an inflated sense of confidence in my ability to get this idea off the ground, I looked him straight in the eye and said "We'll crush them". ;)

History of Wikipedia

One of the things we monitor at Collective Intellect is Web 2.0 technology and trends. I came across this video using our tool today. It's a great piece on the history of wikipedia and how Web 2.0 changes our collective future. Web 2.0 is the ultimate democratization of information on the planet and that changes everything. It is indeed an exciting time to be alive!

the moon has no name

My daughter Emma was working on a science project today focusing on the solar system. She was wondering whether the moon had any other name than "moon." As it turns out, no. Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia.

Unlike the moons of other planets, the moon of the Earth has no proper English name other than "the Moon

This struck her as grossly unfair. Being a person of action she decided to campaign for our moon to be named and added the following to the wikipedia discussion page on the moon.

etymology addendum

I propose that the moon be given the name lyftstan (pronounced lift-stan). This would roughly translate into the phrase sky rock in Anglo-Saxon. Since the earth derives its name from Anglo-Saxon and unfairly does not have its own name this seems like a good choice. Any other thoughts?