The Baydin Blog | Email, Startups, and Search

Sunday’s New York Times included a column under their Ping business technology section that made a pretty convincing argument that the web and mobile technology are stamping out serendipity.  Instead, they argued, the opportunity to discover new things are being replaced with the opportunity to engage in groupthink – to discover only the new things that a carefully selected group of people (Facebook friends, Twitter followees, or an algorithm tuned to your tastes) find interesting. 

Fred Wilson responded (via Twitter) with a link to a 2006 blog post from Stephen Berlin Johnson claiming exactly the opposite.  According to Johnson, the web is the world’s greatest serendipity engine, and he discovered WAY more cool, surprising things from aggregators on the web and from going off on tangential searches than he ever discovered as a graduate student.  After learning about German operas because of an avatar someone had that looked like Julio Lugo, I see Johnson’s point. 

I think what the web’s effect on serendipity has a lot in common with Tyler Cowen’s thinking about globalization’s effect on food.  In short, Tyler thinks the local diversity of food options is increasing, but the global diversity of food options is decreasing.  I can now get Thai food, Malaysian food, Indian food, Southern American food, French food, or Ethiopian food all within a few blocks of our office in Cambridge.  So as globalization increases, my access to different types of cuisine is increasing.  On the other hand, the world’s busiest Pizza Hut is in Hong Kong.  And Thai food, Malaysian food, Indian food, Southern American food, French food, and Ethiopian food are all available in Hong Kong as well.  So the total diversity of food available in Hong Kong starts to look a lot like the total diversity of food available in Boston.  The quality of food in any one place is higher than it has ever been before, but at the same time, something is being lost. 

The web is doing something similar to the diversity of content that I see on the web.  While nobody will argue that the total amount of diversity of information on the web is going anywhere but up, the diversity of content I actually get exposed to is not.  What’s being lost is the stuff that doesn’t fit into my own interests and doesn’t go viral enough for everyone to see it. 

One of the major implications of viral content is that the web has made the huge winner even bigger.  See Susan Boyle, United Breaks Guitars, Autotune the News, and other viral videos.  These are the real winners in Serendipity 2.0, because before the Internet existed, only British folks would have ever seen Susan Boyle, and nobody anywhere would have ever seen United Breaks Guitars.  Short, digestable, and non-offensive pieces of content are what the new serendipity delivers. 

The other type of content that I see is stuff that I already know I will be interested in.  I read Dare Obasanjo’s Tweets because I am interested in his previous stuff.  I subscribe to Paul Krugman’s blog in Google Reader because I liked what he wrote before.  If Paul Krugman or a friend who shares interesting stuff links to something, it’s probably something I know I will be interested in. 

The total knowledge I’m exposed to in some degree of depth is a lot more diverse than it would have been prior to the web.  I don’t think I’d know nearly as much about economics or cooking Thai food without the Internet.  I’d almost certainly not be starting a company.  On the other hand, though, the frequency with which I spent the time to really read something I wasn’t initially interested in is a lot lower than it used to be when I only had whatever magazine I had in front of me. 

I think, in general, having easy access to knowledgeable experts in areas that interest us is hard to see as a bad thing.  Being able to discover content that has a higher-than-average chance of interesting us is a plus too. 

My worry is that we’ll lose the exposure we need to find out if we really like something that is a bit of an acquired taste.  Have you ever heard a song that you really didn’t care for the first time it got played, but then after a few more listens, came to love?  For me, that happened with the Marshall Tucker Band, now some of my favorite music.  Or have you ever read a book that started slowly, but then ended up phenomenal?

What is getting lost in Serendipity 2.0 is the time we need to acquire that taste.  If it’s not designed to be enjoyed in the first fifteen seconds, we’ll just go off and find something else more aligned with our interests, or that provides a better first fifteen seconds. 

Does a world without acquired tastes make us better or worse off?

Small Talk

Shaving is not something I usually think about. Every so often, I would end up clogging the razor and eventually cutting my face. After running into my friend Holly who is a brand manager at Gillette, I learned how to improve my shaving experience with minimal effort. Here’s how it works:

• Run water over the back of the blades. That’s it.

I used to rinse the blade from the front (blades facing me) but it would eventually get clogged. For some reason, the Mach 3 rinses out much better from the back. I haven’t cut my face since — knock on wood.

This got me thinking about the little things that make our lives easier. Microsoft has a way to index shared drives on a network. This is useful because desktop search can now find files on shared drives. We surveyed several companies involved in everything from medical devices to architecture. We discovered close to 100% of the companies used shared network drives to store information. Being able to find documents that your team mates share would be a boon so we posted some directions for Windows XP and Windows Vista on our FAQ. Note that this only works if you have Microsoft Desktop search, which comes with Office 2007 or Microsoft Vista.

Small Talk desktop search, market research

Selling into the Enterprise is still a big business. I attended the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston this week. Besides the excellent booze and hors devours (I consider all free booze excellent) I came away with three lessons.

Customers or the C level executives that ultimately foot the bill for a product/service need to see their return on investment quickly. Amy Vickers, VP of Global Enterprise Solutions at Razorfish says that they expect to see signs of progress within 6 months. The better the product/service can provide them that information, the easier it is for the implementers to justify the project.

The key to success is in integrating a variety of technologies to meet business objectives according to Laurie Buczek, Social Computing Program manager at Intel. The days of closed, all encompassing solutions, are limited. There are many, many enterprise software solutions out in the market. Companies have adopted a variety of them. It takes a significant amount of work to put information into those systems and to get employees to use them. A better product is not going to displace something that works. This point was re-affirmed by talking to some other attendees at the show. Companies want interoperability between software packages. It’s a strong message to enterprise vendors that is best surmised by one of the panelists, “co-exist or fail.”

Stand out. A lot of the demos looked the same. They have what looked like a CSS styled dashboard with news feeds, social media and wikis. One company, caught my eye: Artus Labs. They focus on life science. Yeah, they have collaboration features like everyone else but what the others don’t have is the ability to search through molecular chain drawings. Very cool. Everyone else’s demo has static text next to some sort of instant messenger. Artus Labs in contrast has beautiful molecular compounds drifing across their screens. I had a chance to talk to their Founder and CEO Robin Smith. He’s been around the block and knows what he’s doing. Enterprise 2.0. Good stuff.

Small Talk business, market research

Congratulations!  You aced the phone screen, survived the (potentially grueling) interviews, and your offer letter is in the mail.  Awesome!

You should absolutely go out to celebrate, but before you mail in your acceptance, you may want to figure out what if any strings are attached to the offer.

I was too naive when I got my first job offer to think about things like employment agreements (or even to do a good job negotiating my salary!), but you shouldn’t be.  As part of the program we’re in for startups, we’re meeting with a bunch of lawyers and a bunch of entrepreneurs who left corporate America to start companies.  We’re learning as we go through the program that the employment agreement we signed after only halfway reading it could have caused a lot of trouble.

When my partner and I started at Big Semiconductor Company as part of our first-day schedule, we met with HR.  In addition to handing us a giant stack of documents about the 401K plan and health insurance benefits, they asked us to sign agreements that were incredibly restrictive and waived an awful lot of our rights.   At this point, having accepted their offer and stopped interviewing months before, we had no leverage.  We both needed the money, had no idea what those forms really said, and had no other job offers on the table.  We signed the forms.

I think that was a mistake; if we had started a company doing anything related to our previous work instead of something in a totally different industry, it would have been game over.  According to that employment agreement we signed, Big Semiconductor Company owned any ideas we came up with that related to their business while we were employed, regardless of whether or not we worked on them during work time or free time.

That’s not a big deal at a startup company, where the scope of what relates to the “business interests” is pretty much the product you’re working on – where the company HAS to own the IP you create.  But an agreement with a huge semiconductor company has a much broader scope – pretty much any circuit, big or small, relates in some way to some part of their business.  And if we’d worked at an absolute behemoth like IBM or Cisco, our startup options that don’t relate to their business would pretty much consist of biotech and opening a bar.

If I had it to do over again, I would have asked for all of the agreements up front.  I should have negotiated the terms in the employment agreement when I had the high hand, instead of when Big Semiconductor Company KNEW that they had me where they wanted me.

The moment I received my job offer was my moment of maximum leverage with the big company.  When a big company makes an offer, they’ve already spent all of the effort to screen, interview, and make an offer to someone.  They don’t want to have to spend that effort again.  I hadn’t yet stopped looking for work and interviewing, so my ability to walk away was still reasonably high.  Had I gotten a copy of the employment agreement and crossed out all the parts that were objectionable to me before I accepted their job offer, I wouldn’t have needed to worry.

I also should have done a much better job negotiating my salary.  According to a friend who worked in the hiring department of a big consulting company, it’s not much of a stretch for a new employee to negotiate a 20% increase in starting salary.

Negotiating the salary and the employment agreement will definitely be an awkward conversation, but I’ve never heard of a company that retracted a job offer for negotiating.  It can’t hurt to ask, and it might make things easier down the road.

Small Talk employment agreements, negotiating

Before Baydin, Alex and I started another venture. Without going into too much detail it was a mobile, social game with an end goal of making users feel camaraderie with their fellow guys and gals. Who doesn’t want to make friends and feel the exhilaration of potentially meeting a significant other? We were on a mission to do great things for society, and by society, I mean the 18-30 year old singles who feel alienated after graduating from college and moving into a new city. You know who you are.

At first we were a bit reticent to talk about it. This was the hot segment at the time. What we discovered was that there are very few people who will steal your idea and do something with it. The important part of that last statement is “do something with it.” Turning a concept into reality is hard. Ideas have their own value but it’s worth exchanging that idea for feedback.

We discussed the product concept with our single friends. What we found was that they supported us because they are our friends. However, the concept did not resonate with them because it did not meet their needs. They would have had to change their behavior to use our product. Techno-geeks would have done this but the majority would not. We wanted a large, vibrant, diverse community. The problem was that many of our single friends had limited leisure time and wanted to spend that time actually talking to their date over dinner instead of playing a video game with him or her. Finding a significant other is haphazard enough so they wanted to get to the essence of it immediately.

Our mobile, social, game was retired and we re-directed our effort into a new direction. We’re still talking to people but this time we’ve made it a little further. Our alpha, Baydin ForONE was released on Thursday. It is open to limited users. If you want to be involved in something great, sign-up and we’ll put you on our alpha testers list.

Small Talk experience, ideas, Small Talk

What do an irrational fear of rejection, the inability to talk to girls at a bar, and a startup in “stealth mode” all have in common? 

I was riding the Orange Line en route to our Central Square offices last week, and I saw a sign advertising a study on Social Anxiety Disorder.  They asked if you worry too much about what other people think, worry that people might secretly think you’re stupid, and get more nervous than seems appropriate before meeting people for the first time. 

To be honest, my first thought was that if I didn’t have a company to start, I should go try their study.  But on my second thought, I realized that the same symptoms seem to apply to a lot of startup companies, ours included.

We were very shy at first about sharing our idea – maybe a competitor would get there first, or maybe we wouldn’t be able to deliver.  We got over that one, but it is still terrifying to think that we might do all the marketing right, get press and customers excited about our product, then end up disappointing and/or angering them.  It’s also in the back of our minds that we might “peak too early” and get all of our buzz before the product is ready to impress anyone. 

But the more I think about it, the more I’m starting to think that we shouldn’t worry.  There is so much noise and so much going on that nobody cares what some dinky startup does.  If we put out a product that doesn’t work very well, we won’t get bad press – we just won’t get any press. 

We’re not Microsoft; nobody has the energy or the time to skewer us.  And if they do, nobody has the energy or the time to remember it after they read it.  If we make something subpar, we won’t be noticed.  And if we make something great, then we’ll get customers today.

Some of the evidence from other startups backs this up.  If you tried the first version of Loopt on the iPhone 3G, it was incredibly easy to inadvertently text message every single one of the people in your phone’s contact list with a your location and an invitation for Loopt.  Several of the early versions of Plaxo made it incredibly easy to accidentally email everyone in your address book and ask them to give all their contact info to Plaxo.

Loopt apologized.  So did Plaxo.  Neither of these companies is in the deadpool.  They still have funding, and they still have users.  Aside from a handful of people who make knowing these things their business, my guess is that nobody even remembers. 

An even better example is Hyundai. In 1986 when they released the Excel in the US, it was nothing to write home about. 

Yeah, it looked like that.  I wouldn’t have bought one either.  But by iterating and improving, they’ve turned into an elite car company.  One of our mentors mentioned hearing about how cool the Genesis is on a golf course.  Hyundai really is now a company people associate with luxury cars.  And they had a sense of humor about the whole thing too.

So why are we so worried that our product will fail to impress?  If we make a bad first product, but get better, people will give us another chance.  If our third or fourth version is incredibly useful, they just don’t have time to hold a grudge that our first version wasn’t.  Our biggest problem is going to be apathy, not grudges.  It’s just not personal.  And if we never make the great product that will earn us a second chance, then we shouldn’t succeed.  I believe we’ll get there.

Of course, I have an ulterior motive for bringing this up now.  We’re sending our Baydin ForONE Technology Preview to friends and family on Thursday.  I’ll be honest – it’s not ready.  We have tested it on a whopping two configurations, the results need some work, and the UI isn’t as polished as we’d like.  It also comes with the caveats that it might insult your mother in law, or start crashing some untested, semi-patched versions of Outlook.  Before we’re ready to call it a 1.0 release, we’ll make sure it doesn’t do any of these things.

My arguments about SSAD were only so persuasive, though.  Despite my best efforts to make us a wild man company that releases it to whoever wants it and lets God sort ‘em out, we’re doing a limited release Alpha launch.   If you want to give it a spin, shoot us an email, and I’ll see that you get a download link.

Small Talk experience, philosophy, startup life

I was at a talk, recently, where the speaker mentioned “a lot of data driven people fall into the trap of wanting more information to make a decision. The problem is that the world does not always give you complete information.”

I thought about my own experience. I remember at times presenting a new product idea and getting the feedback, “we need more *fill in the blank* information.” Usually, they asked for more market information. The product concepts we were proposing were in a burgeoning field. We could only show the customers we visited or contacted who demonstrated interest, the competitive solutions out there, how much customers currently pay and the total available market.

Now that I think back, I think I would have had much better luck if I took the decision-makers on strategic customer visits. I remember traveling to several medical accounts with one marketing manager. He was exposed to our customers’ challenges. Enthusiasm would have been an understatement for his reaction. He understood the problems that our customers faced because he stood in their shoes, albeit briefly. When we got back to our headquarters, I didn’t even have to pitch the concept anymore. He was telling everybody that we should build products for that application.

Now that we are pitching products at Baydin, these little experiences bubble back up to consciousness. If I can’t show market numbers because it is nascent, I can at least help investors stand in our customers’ shoes.

So getting back to that talk. Baydin can’t help someone who is not ready make a decision. But we are thinking about and working on the problem of giving you more complete information.

Small Talk baydin, experience, market research

As Baydin has started, I’ve heard a number of different voices on how cheap a startup should be.  Those voices have almost universally concentrated toward the extremes – they advise either being incredibly, incredibly cheap (buy nothing, get furniture from the sidewalk when people throw it out, trade time for money always) or spending money like a sailor in port (buy everything, buy luxury, hire expensive service providers, trade money for time at every opportunity).  Some folks have told me that it’s OK to pick an extreme, but not to be anywhere in the middle.  

I think that sounds like a lousy idea. 

We have some money, but we don’t have a lot.  So spending money like a sailor in port is necessarily out.  We can’t afford Aeron chairs, whether we think they’re a great idea or not.  But at the same time, an hour spent hunting furniture on Craigslist is an hour spent NOT building our product, pushing the date when we start getting revenue an hour further into the future. 

I also have a personal distaste for spending my time on things that don’t yield much value.  If I wanted to do something I hate for minimum wage, I would be a janitor, not founding a startup. 

In my personal life, I found an answer that made “buy it or make it” decisions easy – I just set an hourly rate for my own free time.  If I don’t enjoy doing something for its own sake, I should only do that thing if doing it myself saves me more than my hourly rate. 

Setting that hourly rate was easy.  I looked at my paycheck and read the rate off of there.  If I would rather work an hour than do a task that yielded less than that rate, it wasn’t worth the time. 

That made things that look extraordinarily wasteful actually make a lot of sense.  I bought a $500 portable dishwasher that I wheel up to my sink when I want to wash dishes.  Expensive?  Sure.  But in the year and a month since I bought it, I’ve washed about 75 loads of dishes.  Every single one of those loads would have taken me at least an hour.  At $20 an hour, I’d be up to $1500 in “wages” for doing something I despise. 

I would love to use the same technique for Baydin’s expenses, but I no longer have a paycheck from which to read my hourly rate.  My paycheck is now $0, but my time still has value.  How do I figure out what that value should be?

The web tells me that I need to figure out my burn rate, figure out how long I have until I’m out of cash, figure out how much revenue I can expect to gain versus time, then figure out how much faster an extra hour of coding gets us toward the goal.  Put that into a spreadsheet, regress it to the mean, take 2 standard deviations, and voila! 

But it seems like getting to a reasonable answer is a lot easier.  I quit my job, where I had that steady paycheck, to start this company.  If I didn’t believe every hour I spent working on the company was more valuable than every hour I spent at my old company, I wouldn’t have done that.  So my answer is easy.  My “hourly rate” is exactly what it used to be.  If spending less than that saves me an hour, I should spend the money.  Trading an hour of time to get a computer for $369 instead of $389 just isn’t worth it, even though the overoptimizing engineer part of my brain is screaming at me about every “wasted” penny. 

Of course, to be able to have that flexibility, I needed to build savings before quitting my job.  If I hadn’t spent a few extra months at the job, earning the savings, go cheap would be our only option.  Luckily, we’re at a place where we can afford to make the money-time tradeoff for obvious big wins.  We’ll let you know how it works out for us. 

Small Talk economics, startup life

Alex and I spent some portion of our time phone interviewing potential interns for the summer. Unfortunately, the resume is often an inaccurate indicator of one’s programming ability. In a previous existence, we could throw money at that problem – we’d review a resume and then FLY a candidate in to interview. The candidate would go through nine interviews with various engineers, designers and marketers on-site. At Baydin, we subscribe to Joel Spolsky’s philosophy on hiring creative, capable developers because they can make the difference between success and failure. However, we can’t afford to fly any candidates out for an on-site interview. Here’s how we find the gems.

While a bad resume can knock a candidate out from even getting an interview, a good resume does not guarantee that said candidate is a master programmer. Since we are on a limited budget, Alex came up with a nifty way to see if a potential intern has the right stuff.

On the phone we delve into the details of the candidate’s experience. This is important because it gives us background information. It can tell us if the candidate has experience working with a team, leading a team and how he or she contributes in a project.  It also tells us whether or not the candidate can communicate complex technical information.

We then ask some basic programming questions to see how he or she approaches the problem. Thus far, we’ve had a great experience using EtherPad. The candidate and we can write on a “virtual whiteboard” simultaneously. This allows us to see in real-time how a candidate frames the problem and solves it. We’re looking to see if he or she understands fundamental concepts. In short, it was an effective way to give a technical interview without flying a candidate to our site.

We’ve only posted openings for a week and we’re psyched at the turnout we’ve received thus far. There are some great candidates applying. If you are interested in interning on the ground floor of an exciting startup, then drop us a line.

Small Talk baydin, experience, hiring, interns

Our friends have asked us if we were nervous about going out on our own, especially with the economy as it is. Alex and I have wanted to do our own thing for a while. We call this yearning “not wanting to work for The Man.” We, to a large degree, control our own destiny. That means we need to simultaneously market our company, raise capital, develop the product and run an office. It’s only been two weeks and we’ve learned that when you are The Man, you have to wear many hats.

For most people who work in established companies, these tasks are divided and parceled out amongst numerous specialists. One of the chief complaints I heard from the younger engineers at our old company is that they don’t have a good view of the overall business. What I think they mean to say is that they don’t see the interaction of all the components that make a company run. I was an applications engineer, where I would meet customers, help solve their problems, sometimes at their location, define products and characterize them in end-applications. I thought I had a good view of how the business ran. Boy was I wrong.

There’s a lot of “small” organizational tasks that I took for granted. For example, we had a closet full of pencils and notebooks. We had an amazing field engineering team. We had a healthcare plan. I learned that when you are The Man, you need to know when to take advantage of the sale for a 24 port 10/100Mbps switch. You need to implement a successful distribution system and understand how to deal with healthcare for you and your employees. By the way, Microcenter, has a great deal on a 24 port D-Link switch.

I see PR in a whole new light. At our previous large company, I authored a fair number of webinars and articles. I contributed to ad campaigns for product releases. But at a startup, there is this visceral sense of the direct linkage with the bottom line. It’s where the rubber meets the road. Our web page ranking and the press we get will clearly affect how Baydin takes off. We’re working on a kick-ass product but people need to know about it to buy it.

To our friends who have been writing in to ask us how things are going. The protective cocoon has come off and we’re experiencing the internal clockwork of business. We’re beginning to see things as they are.

Small Talk baydin, experience