Perspectives

One of the most fascinating things I find about business is how difficult it is to measure success.

Coming from an engineering background, most of my problems often have binary solutions, you either can do it, or you can’t. But running a business is a lot more than that. The solution is often no where near binary, and even when you think you have the right solution, the results can often be deceiving. 

In engineering, you’ll know right away when you’ve found the solution to a problem. Often times, a founder will know instantly if he can build the product or not, but can he really be sure that the product have the right market fit?

It’s not as simple. In business, there are 10,000 solutions to your problems. But, most of them are deceiving, because out of that 10,000 solutions, only 1,000 of them will actually lead to anything.

But wait, those 1,000 “solutions” are the really tricky ones, because out of those 1,000, only 10 will truly lead to the path of success. The other 990 “solutions” will just leave you hanging in the valley of false hope.

That’s anything but binary.

Next time when you’re stuck on your product, just know that even the best product visionaries and the fastest growing startups will never know if they found the ultimate solution. 

There was a great post on VentureBeat about how Hardware is dead. The thesis being that since there are so many Chinese manufactures of cheap tablets out there,  the margins are squeezed razor thin, and there is no way a startup can compete on price / scale based on hardware alone.

The fact that Shenzhen can make android tablets for $35 is no doubt amazing. But, there’s a problem here with just analyzing the hardware. The author is using the price of the technology, specifically how much it cost to manufacture, to make assumptions about the viability of the product.

That is just plain wrong. If that’s the case, then I declare software dead, since it costs $0 to manufacture software.

If you want to compare on cost, the real metric to look at should be: how much does it cost to design the product? The truth is, the cost to design is the same whether you’re in Shenzhen or Silicon Valley. If you can design an awesome product that everyone loves, you can also outsource it to Shenzhen so they can make it for $35 a pop.

As manufacturing processes get cheaper, the margins you’re making should be equivalent to the cost of designing the product. If the manufacturers in Shenzhen take the easy route and use reference designs from the chip makers, it makes sense that they’ll have no margin, they didn’t spend any money on designing the actual product!

There you have it, hardware is not dead. Focus on the product, and get back to work.

Discuss this on Hacker News here.

APIs are becoming a common standard for web apps. They silently swept by all the social media photo sharing craze in the web 2.0 revolution, and became the defacto way web apps communicate. Now it’s at the point where the phrase “there’s an API for that” is almost synonymous with “there’s an App for that”, and Fred Wilson recently listed API as one of the key factors in building successful web apps.

So it sounds like the concept of APIs must be a new development right? Wrong. APIs have been around for a long time - POSIX, a popular API among operating systems, was available in the early 90s. Clearly developers have long known about the advantages of having an API.

So why did API suddenly explode? The raise of API is more about a new way of doing business than another programming paradigm. In web apps, an API is as much BizDev as actual Dev, and any company that wants to have anything to do with APIs needs to understand this.

Let’s look at an example. Say you’re Instagram, and you want to work with Facebook to have Instagram photos be automatically displayed on your user’s Facebook Newsfeed. Back in the old days, this would involve a team of business development people and engineers working with Facebook day and night, negotiating the constraints of the partnership, figure out the software, signing the term sheet.. that’s no fun. Now, all it takes is one developer and 30 minutes.

Why? Because APIs are not just about how things fits together technically, they are also about how it fits business wise. The constraints, the terms, everything is all there. By looking at the API, Instagram immediately knows that they indeed can post a picture on someone’s timeline, but they cannot change someone’s profile picture. Essentially, APIs abstract away the human element in BizDev. 

When you’re working with a company’s API, you are working with the company as a business partner. Without the slow human element in the way, you can develop these partnerships much more efficiently.

So now the million dollar question - have APIs made BizDev obsolete?  Definitely not. There are still many unique partnerships out there that need the human element to be defined. But I can say this - APIs are a business revolution. Just like how Heroku, Rails, Node.js, et al. made web development faster, APIs made business development faster, and that’s why APIs are BizDev 2.0.

Discuss this on Hacker News here.

Every once a while, I would meet an energetic entrepreneur who is super excited about his awesome new iPhone app idea, or how his social-local-mobile service is going to revolutionize the cat pictures industry - Pinterest for cats!. I mean, comon, everyone is going to use us, we’re unique in the market, we have no competitors! 

Wait, what? 

While I applaud his excitement, that statement is simply not true, especially in the consumer application space. While it’s true that no one else does exactly what their app does - heck, it doesn’t even have to be exact, Pinterest for dogs! - you have to stop and wonder, what market are you really in? Do you really think people are waking up everyday wondering: gee, I really could use a Pinterest for cats right now..?

In today’s glossy, inutile, consumer app landscape, there’s only one market - the mindshare market. You’re not competing with other Pinterest for cats, you’re competing with every single social-local-mobile app out there, for a piece of everyone’s mindshare that is oh so lucrative.

Sorry to break it to you, but you’re competing with Facebook, Twitter, the actual Pinterest, Instagram.. you name it. Welcome to the big league.

Now that doesn’t mean I don’t like fancy cool social apps, I love them! I think there are a lot of opportunities if you can change a person’s daily behavior. But please, just be careful the next time you say: we have no competitors.

There have been a lot of posts online on how to game today’s Google Doodle, most involves installing a virtual keyboard driver via Python. That’s nice and all, but ultimately, you’re still going to be constrained by the speed of Javascript.

The fastest time in Python is 0.3 seconds, lets see if we can beat this using native Javascript.

Using the console, you can execute any Javascript code you want. To start, lets first pop in jQuery, just to make everything so much easier.

—————————————————————————

var script = document.createElement(‘script’);
script.src = ‘https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js’;
script.type = ‘text/javascript’;
document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)[0].appendChild(script);

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Next, we set an interval timer to continuously trigger the keydown event. We want to be pressing the left and right arrow as fast as we can. Since the Javascript interval timer isn’t exactly too accurate - it only guarantees the interval to be AT LEAST the set time, but it can be much more, we throw a for loop in there to trigger the keydown event as much as possible without slowing down the Javascript. You don’t want to over-do the triggers though, since you can overwhelm the Javascript and lead to a slower time (Wow I spent way too much time figuring this out..).

—————————————————————————

eleft = $.Event(‘keydown’);
eleft.keyCode = 37;
eright = $.Event(‘keydown’);
eright.keyCode = 39;
var el = $(‘#hplogo’);

setInterval(function() {
for(var i = 0; i < 700; i++) { el.trigger(eleft); el.trigger(eright);}
}, 1);

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After that, feel free to press the “play” button, and see your character instantly blink to the finish line!

Note: Depending on how fast your computer is, you might have to adjust the javascript loop. If anyone gets less than 0.2 seconds, let me know!

Here’s what it should look like when it’s done:

What do Path, Hipstamatic, Highlight, Hipster (yes, that’s an app), and Color have in common? They create absolutely nothing of value. All these apps are fueled by the endless blog posts on TechCrunch and Mashable calling them the next big thing.. I mean, how can you not get Highlight? Obviously SoLoMo is the future (you do know what SoLoMo is, right?).

It’s a win-win situation; tech blogs fuel the giant bubble that is useless apps, the app creators get their 5 minutes of fame, then sell out to Facebook and Google, all in the name of entrepreneurship and startups. This is why most of the companies on TechCrunch still end up abandoned or acqhired! 

Listen to this statistic: a month after Path reached 2 million users, Google tried to buy the company for $100 million! Sure, 2 million users is a huge milestone, but is it really worth $50 per user? This kind of hyperinflation is only going to fuel the next wave of photo-sharing-social-everything-media-optimizing app. I’m not sure what I’ll make in the future, but it’s definitely not going to be another Cow Clicker.

I recently had a very insightful chat with a DreamIt Ventures alumnus. I won’t name any names, but his company is currently raking in $4 million dollars a year in revenue, which is a huge achievement in my book. One of the things that I’ve always been curious about is, exactly how good is TechCrunch at predicting a company’s success? Apparently, pretty shitty. The shocking thing is that most of the companies on TechCrunch are abandoned within 6 months.

I’ve always expected this, but somehow it still surprised me. I mean, it’s TechCrunch, don’t they give you, like, 100,000 users in a day? But I thought you got $1 million dollars in funding! Ashton Kutcher invested! In the end, it still comes down to this – if you don’t build something that creates value, it will not succeed. And by the way, you’ll be surprised how fast a company can blow through $1 million dollars, especially in San Francisco – just ask One School.

Guys (and gals), let’s build a real company here, not your own egos.