Blogging Bonfire

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Rejection is a Sour Beast

We just had our YC interview last Saturday.

They rejected us. I think we're still licking our wounds, but tomorrow it'll be back to work and back to optimism.

The one thing I've discovered about Start Ups is that rejections come often and come fast and they absolutely SUCK, but Optimism keeps your team moving forward, and your happiness level high.

We're awesome- We'll show them.

[bloggingbonfire]

A Collaborative Economy

A few weeks ago, I attended a lecture given at MIT by Robin Chase, founder of Zipcar.

Fascinating. Her topic illuminated the difference between the following companies:

    Hotels vs AirBnB, cable tv vs YouTube, and mainstream media vs Twitter.

In other words, the difference between companies under industrial capitalism and ones in a collaborative economy. In reflection, I realized that this is how disruption occurs. While the goal of industrial capitalism is profit, the goal of a collaborative economy is participation. Here is a visual representation she showed to illustrate her point that I've recreated. Industrial capitalism looks like this: Collaborative economy looks like this: What’s really cool is that right side of the bell curve - the side that serendipitously delights and wows us. This is the content that we yearn for and are almost always willing to go through all the crap and bs that’s on the left side in hopes of stumbling upon a rare hidden gem on the right. It’s probably a good thing that they aren’t too common and all the noise puts us in perspective, so that when we do discover something great, we can appreciate it that much more.

As an example, think about all the nonsense that is currently on Youtube. Yet, we've all seen on there video clips that really inspires us, or really entertain us - this is why we keep coming back to the site.

In some sense, collaborative economies are helping to optimize the market to achieve “efficiency” by producing something useful out of the excess. We are trying to find those with that excess knowledge of interesting things to do and share their thoughts with everybody else.

[bloggingbonfire]

So much to do, so little time

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

- Red Queen, Alice through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

This is exactly what we're trying to do- run as fast as we can just to stay in the same place. What I didn't realize in beginning a start up (even one so early stage as ours) is that it's a snowball effect. People tell you that it is, but you don't realize that you're on top of a snowball barreling down the mountain until you actually do it- and it's all you can do to just keep up.

We're super excited about getting a YC interview, but at the same time we have so much to do to get even remotely prepared. Getting the interview was essentially a catalyst for us to ramp it 2000x up. New ideas are bountiful now that we know we have exactly 1.5 weeks to get our act together.

Pretty up our product

Add features

Get more users

Show traction

All this while practice interviewing (hopefully with YC alumni that we know). Though the team has four people, we're all working at 130% in order to get ready for the shortest 10 minutes of our lives. If this is any indication of how the next three months are going to pan out, we're in for the run of our lives....

[bloggingbonfire]

The Problem with Company Scale

This is why money inevitably becomes the primary focus of any large company. Look at Google and now Facebook. Two companies that used to be the champions of clean, simple, and elegant user experience are now trying to persuade you that it’s okay to be looking at a lot of ads, all the time.

(Just for the record, I am a huge fan of Google. I think they have completely revolutionized the way we live our lives by using technology. If I could create a product that has a fraction of the impact of Google, I think my life’s mission would be complete) They have thousands of employees whose livelihoods depend on the profitability of the company. With this magnitude of financial responsibility, can anyone blame them for wanting to make more money? This is why I don’t ever want my company to be larger than say a hundred people. I know this might sound naive, but I don’t ever want to sacrifice the quality of my product for the sake of just making more money.

[bloggingbonfire]

Countdown Begins & Hopefully Options Await

The Bonfire team just applied to Y Combinator earlier this month and we are anxiously awaiting the interview invitations which come out Monday.

Y Combinator (YC) and other start up accelerators like it are currently in vogue. By that I don't mean that they're useless or a fad (obviously not because we've just applied to the Summer 2012 round for a lot of them), but that they're currently validating the "good ideas" from the "bad ideas" (or really maybe the "good founders" from the "bad founders") in the tech world.

If you're in, something magical happens. Suddenly you're in a community of people who have been through a similar process, and who are willing to help the "Fraternity"/family members in need. It is a stamp of credibility as well as a self esteem boost for making it in.

Sound familiar? If you're thinking "hey, that's what my undergrad/grad school application and acceptance processes felt like," you'd not be too far off. Paul Graham, a founder of YC, wrote an article before about how the undergraduate college you go to doesn't really matter (http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html).

But similarly doesn't that also apply to incubators and accelerators? If Tech Stars or YC rejects me, does that inherently mean that I've got a poor founding team or poor idea? Of course not, just as it doesn't inherently mean that if you get accepted, you have a perfect product. Do you learn a lot through the process? Absolutely, but you'd learn a lot just by doing it anyway.

Brand name is just a good way to weed through the masses. On an individual scale, it's true that brand name does not automatically equal intelligence or great product. However, on an aggregate level, there's something to be said about the power of a brand for signaling quality candidates.

Do we have a good idea? We don't know- we're currently pressure testing that now. Do we have a good team? Hell yes. Do we still want YC, you bet your ass we do, and if you don't understand why, ask yourself if you would want to attend Harvard (Undergrad/Med/Law/Business/etc) if they wanted you, and then realize that getting into YC is probably twice as hard.

If we don't get it, we'll be pretty devastated and drink a lot, but the following morning, shake things off, and start coding again.

[bloggingbonfire]

The Problem With Social Networking

Facebook allows you to see what your friends are up to. Twitter allows you to reach a huge following. Pinterest allows you to organize your interests. My question is does it actually help you get stuff done? We all know that social media sites are fantastic for connecting people and making communication easy. In moderation, it makes certain times in life more interesting, engaging, and convenient... and that’s great. For certain tasks, social networking sites really do help you accomplish a goal since they let you do very specific things. Twitter enables you to spread information very effectively, LinkedIn helps you get a job, and Quora allows you to get answers from experts directly. But how much of your time is spent on social media sites everyday? The latest Nielson studies say around 20 minutes. But that’s just the average. I know you power users can spend up to half your day on a site and maybe you’ll eventually get up for a run or something because at some point you start to feel a bit guilty. But then when you get back, the cycle repeats all over again. So let’s be honest here- there comes a certain time where you just simply have better ways to spend your time than on a social network (like how about actually going to visit a friend in person?) Whether you realize it or not, but as soon as you cross this time limit, your incentives and the incentives of these social networks immediately come into conflict. This is because all these sites want you to do is keep spending more time on their sites to drive ad revenue. I know people who stay off social networking sites just because they are afraid of getting sucked into this vicious cycle and therefore would miss out on maximizing their productivity. If you already spend so much time on these social networks, why not use it to boost your daily productivity? We want to create a social network that does just this. Stay tuned.

Be interested to hear your thoughts.