#late labs

[kitkats-random-shit]

I hate evening labs!!!

They screw up my eatting scheduale and it takes forever to fix it again

[latelabs]

Round The Table Community Discussions #1 Betabrand

Here's the first interview from our video blog series "Round The Table Community Discussions". For each interview, we'll go to a different startup's office, bring drinks, and talk about community development.

For our first interview we spoke with Betabrand, so we dropped by the Betbrand headquarters in San Francisco. There we spoke with Betabrand's CEO Chris Linland, and Betabrand's CTO Colin Stuart. The beer of choice this time was Anchor Steam's 2012 Christmas Ale, because Anchor Steam is a San Francisco tradition.

Throughout our conversation, Chris and Colin speak about how Betabrand has evolved from a random side project Cordarounds, into the fully-funded Betabrand. Other topics include how does Betabrand speaks with their community, and how do they keep the conversations going in the right directions.

"We are a qualitative approach toward quantitative." – Chris Linland

When speaking, we also discussed how Betabrand deals with user testing. Since they release products very quickly, its hard for them to do traditional approaches. So they have come up with several very interesting and unique ways to answer this.

As a last note. Betabrand is currently growing from around 20 people, to about 40 people over the next year, so they are always looking for great talent, especially in the dev area. If any interest to talk with them, feel free to email them at [email protected]

[el0f]

Equity is the new cash... in the shared economy.

Just reading through this awesome post about trading equity to get stuff done, and can't help but think about how important this is for the shared economy. Equity isn't the new cash... but it is a meaning full trade for someone to get for doing something with their side project time.

You look at a couple of the other companies that were mentioned and it really makes sense. For example, Wahooly is great, people invest a lot of time building their online networks and getting credibility with their audience. If they can use their influence to help a startup get early customers that is absolutely worth something. At the same time, the startup needs every $ they can keep their hands on to run the business. So, sharing a small amount of the company to encourage early traction makes a lot of sense.

Connecting talented like minded people to work together towards a common goal is a logical next iteration in the space. It's not easy, but let's work together to make it happen.