Kevin Rose is a high profile Silicon Valley figure. Anything he does is going to get attention. Even things that aren’t very good. The same is true for anyone like him.

That means that he could launch something totally lame and some small number of people will actually use it. I’m not saying Oink was totally lame, but I think it’s fair to say it was not totally awesome (yet).

It’s very possible Oink could have been built up into something big. Almost certain in my mind. It’s solving a real problem (finding good Things at local merchants). It would have taken 2+ years probably to bear fruit.

My guess at why he decided to close it down is because he’s just not passionate about it and that is the single best reason to kill a startup idea.

Passion is a prerequisite. You can be passion about the idea or even just passionate about the idea of running a company. Either way seems to work.

For someone like Kevin Rose though, he probably needs to be passionate about the idea. He’s already got some cash and has already started a company. It’s a given for him that he can have his own company. Investors will give him a million dollars per year every year until he tells them to stop. So he need an exciting idea to get him out of bed in the morning.

The easy thing to do would have been to keep Oink alive on life support. Just assign one or two junior guys on the team to keep working on it. He didn’t do that. He took the harder route. He knew he’d take flack for it too.

I’m just disappointed at how much flack he seems to be receiving. As if he did something wrong or evil.

Some of those chastising him are using the idea of users getting hurt as the reason. The ol’  ”think of the children” chestnut. Users will be perfectly okay. Oink wasn’t an integral part of anyone’s life yet. No one is getting hurt.

One of the biggest differentiators of The Silicon Valley Way is the reduced consequences of failure. Kevin Rose should be praised for doing the right thing — not admonished.

He’s a notch up in my book.

Saw an awesome little nugget of wisdom on Hacker News. DHH, from 37 signals, was explaining why the new version of Basecamp doesn’t have some features of the previous/alternate version:

“We weren’t happy with the time tracking integration in Classic. It was usable, but it wasn’t great. We want to take our time to either come up with a better built-in solution or an integration with another tool or something else.

This is a big part of why we’re keeping Basecamp Classic around for a very long time. Basecamp Next was not going to launch with all the features that Classic already has. So it’s OK that it’s not a perfect fit for all existing customers on Day 1.
The iPhone didn’t have copy’n'paste for a while, either. There’s just so much you can do for launch, if you want to ship.”

jballanc chimed in with this:

“The iPhone anecdote is such an important one. Probably the most important lesson I learned working at Apple was: people don’t remember that a feature was missing once you implement it, but they remember broken features long after you’ve fixed them.”

Comment thread

This is the kind of thing I have a ton of sympathy for. DHH is creating a new product the correct way: releasing a minimal (but useful) version 1.0 and beginning the iteration cycle.

To do iterative development you have to build up a thick skin for exactly this type of negative feedback.

Users will suggest obviously-good features, like time tracking or copy/paste(!), but for whatever reason it’s not going to be your highest priority. Either there are simply too many more important things to do or there’s no good way to implement the feature yet.

One impulse to this kind of legitimate feedback is to let it control you. Users are complaining! And you agree with their complaints! Quick —  whip something up!

If you do that though, you’ve probably made mistake: by implementing something that’s less important than other things, or by doing a half-assed job.

There are definitely times when you have to do things like that. Sometimes your judgement is wrong and users are shouting until you listen. But most of the time you have the clearer picture — you can see what decisions will have the biggest pay off for the most users.

Apple seems to have the toughest skin of just about any company. Sometimes they even take it too far, straight into denial. “The antenna is fine — stop acting crazy!”

It’s tough to develop software in public with real users. Sometimes their feedback can be negative and correct, but you can’t do anything about it yet other than accept it gracefully.

You have to be responsive to feedback and able to stick to your guns — and know when to do which one.

Reddit’s IAMA Sub-Reddit

One of the greatest things about Reddit is the IAMA sub-reddit. The idea is that people post things like:

I Am A (Cardiologist|Photographer|Fisherman) Ask Me Anything!

And people pose questions to them. It’s usually anonymous (except when the point is that they’re famous) so you tend to get an amazingly unvarnished look through their eyes.

For example, maybe someone works at a Chili’s or an Outback Steakhouse as a server, you can ask them whether the burgers are fresh or frozen, the best dishes, how things are made, and even what to avoid. These are the kinds of questions you could ask in the restaurant and the positive things they might even tell you (Our burgers are fresh!) but the atmosphere is very different.

For one thing it’s less likely that they’ll lie in a public forum and even less likely that someone won’t point it out if they do. You’ll often see two or more current/former employees comparing notes. The biggest advantage is that there’s no manager watching over them, no chance they’ll get caught for telling a customer the truth instead of the marketing spiel.

You’re getting the kind of behind-the-scenes look at a business that is usually reserved only for friends.

Tonight I saw on Twitter that @pud (Philip Kaplan) asked whether he should eat at Outback Steakhouse or Chili’s and I semi-jokingly suggested he read the relevant Reddit IAMA threads to make his decision.

The truth is that it’s not a very practical use-case. He’s probably driving around with his wife trying to make a decision. He can’t spend 20 minutes poring over Reddit comments. Those are not the best threads either, just the two I could find quickly.

Other times Reddit is more than good enough as-is. For example medical patients will often post talking about their illnesses. Doctors post as well. If you have the time go digging there’s a wealth of knowledge available.

Someone I know was recently interested in the idea of becoming a pharmacy technician. My first thought? Check Reddit. The results?

1. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/i0j4u/iama_pharmacist_bored_at_work_who_will_actually/
2. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fzenl/iama_pharmacy_technician_ama/
3. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dozsm/iama_pharmacy_tech_with_over_10_years_experience/
4. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hzzhm/iama_pharmacy_student_with_one_more_year_to_go/
5. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/hckaw/iama_recent_graduate_who_just_received_a_doctor/
6. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/h6bv2/iama_pharmacy_tech/
7. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fwome/iama_20yo_fibromyalgia_patient_and_have_been/
8. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/f2wu0/iama_doctor_of_pharmacy_and_neuropharmacology_ama/

After reading those you’ll feel like you know what the job is really like. Compare that to Googling and reading a bunch of SEO’d pages.

The Startup Idea

Imagine a site that collected/organized/filtered/structured/verified/summarized and did all the other muck-work necessary to make this kind of data instantly searchable and quickly readable to anyone who wanted it?

The the next time you needed a locksmith you could search under “locksmith” to find all the do’s-and-dont’s when dealing with them. Or moving companies, doctors, restaurants, dentists, clothing shops, electronics shops, etc, etc.

It would be like having “a friend that works” there for every business that you ever deal with. If the service became large enough it would become immensely powerful. Companies would have to get better because they wouldn’t be able to get away with doing anything bad that employees knew about.

Name/branding ideas I like are based around getting “the inside scoop” or having “a friend that works there.”

Scoop.com — Your friend on the inside.

That kind of thing. I haven’t given it a ton of thought, but that’s the general idea. It could also be a single vertical. Maybe just restaurants or professional services. It could also be completely open-ended. Probably would be wise to start with The Bowling Pin Strategy regardless of your eventual ambitions.

Now. It’s got problems. How do you collect all that data? Do you pay people for it? Do you make it an altruistic thing? Do you verify the data? How do you handle disputes? And more…

There are a lot of challenges to overcome. I think Reddit IAMA proves that it’s possible to create an amazingly valuable resource, that people are willing to contribute this kind of information, and that people are hungry for it. It shows “proxy for demand”.

The only hard part is in the execution. Heh.

This article: Steve Jobs was right: Dropbox is a feature, not a product (pandodaily.com) argues that Dropbox’s functionality will be replicated by the major companies.

I’ve been a fan of Dropbox since the day Drew Houston posted a demo link on Hacker News. I think it solves an important problem in a really great way. It’s a great business too. Charging for storage works quite well.

I have to agree with the article’s title at least. I don’t really see how Dropbox has a great shot at surviving in the post-file world that is rapidly approaching.

The truth is that all I really use Dropbox for is as a redundant backup solution and a way to easily transfer files.

I find myself actually using it actively less than once or twice a month. When I do use it I appreciate it greatly — I would certainly miss it if it was gone ,but I really don’t need it that badly or that frequently.

The real issue is mobile devices. How are tablets and smart phones going to store your data and sync it to the cloud so it’s instantly available on any of your other devices?

Dropbox is certainly the right kind of technology, but what we really need is an open platform.

The same way you plug in your email account to an iPhone you could just as easily plug in your cloud storage provider. An open protocol is all that’s required and it could be defined really quite simply. Dropbox could probably write up an RFC in a month.

The alternative (and perhaps more likely) outcome is that Google will create a service and everyone on Android will use that, everyone on iOS will use iCloud, and both of the people using Windows phones will use Microsoft’s solution.

I remember reading that the reason Google gave up on creating something like Dropbox (dubbed GDrive) was that they didn’t want to continue to support the file as a thing. They wanted to incentivize and support users who moved their “files” into the cloud as Documents in Google Docs and the like.

I think Google made the right bet. They probably should have created GDrive anyway, just to get their grubby little hands in the cloud storage pot earlier, to learn more about how users still rely on files, and even to help users move their stuff into the cloud. How easy would it be for Dropbox to sync all of your MS Office files to Google Docs if they really wanted to? That could have been Google’s option.

Dropbox is an awesome company but there’s no reason to suspect that they’ll be the #1 cloud storage company going forward. I’ll probably end up using Google’s storage service just because I trust their technical expertise more Dropbox (who have made some dumb mistakes like any new company is bound to). The biggest reason though is just that I already have all my eggs in Google’s basket. All my stuff is there and they’re likely to integrate everything together in ways Dropbox won’t have the ability to.

At best Dropbox will become the biggest third-party cloud storage service and Google/Apple will split the majority of the market.

The Hubris of traditional Silicon Valley investors

The primary job of an investor is to find the best possible companies to invest in. Yet nearly all of them proudly ignore any company that hasn’t been referred by someone they know. You’ve heard it a million times:

“I get sooo many deals. I can only talk to the ones who are referred by someone I know.”

It’s completely illogical. It doesn’t follow that because you have one good source for companies that you wouldn’t want more good sources.

Their reply would be:

“I already have enough deals to look at.”

But do they have enough good deals to look at? If they’re ignoring a huge portion of potential deal flow how could they possibly?

The other common retort is:

“Anyone worth their salt will find a way to get a referral to me.”

Really? How would you know what you’re missing out on? Maybe they’ll just talk to more accessible people. Maybe they can’t find someone you know, but they can find someone another investor knows? Or maybe they’ll just get into Y Combinator and then you’ll pay a big premium to invest in them.

Y Combinator’s Secret Weapon

Y Combinator is by far the most successful and prominent investor in Silicon Valley now. Quite a few things make them different from traditional investors, but the one thing that makes them different from virtually every single investor, including many “accelerators”, is that they take applications for funding over the transom.

It’s not easy for them. They spend weeks and weeks sifting through thousands of applications to find the 5% that are worth talking to in person. Then they pay tens of thousands to fly those people out just to talk to them. They don’t really really care where they’re from, what schools they went to, or particularly: who they know.

Some of the very biggest YC successes have come in like this. Probably the majority of their best companies have. Even in cases where they had a referral it probably helped a lot to have a formalized application process. It forces companies to properly and fully pitch their idea.

Y Combinator’s formalized and meritocratic application process means the best companies rise to the top — not just the ones with the best referral, resume, or slickest elevator pitch.

Is it any wonder that Silicon Valley was so easily disrupted? A few good hackers took a close look at the problem and decided rightly to re-define it.

Opportunity for a new wave of Silicon Valley investors

Some smart VC is going to realize that one of the most important parts of YC is quite easily replicated and they’re going to make a killing doing it.

They’re going to put up a thorough application on the web like YC does, institute a rigorous process for evaluating them, and start treating that source of deals as their primary and best source of deal flow. They’ll start telling their referrals to “submit an application”.

And founders will hear about it. They’ll hear that there’s a VC who you can pitch without knowing his cousin’s friend who founded a company that failed 3 years ago. One who evaluates companies based on the fundamentals of the company and not whether other VCs are interested or not, or how slick you are.

It won’t be magic of course. The VC will still have to be smart enough to pick good companies and good at supporting them. They’ll have to offer competitive deal terms and have a great reputation.

Probably it will be some VC that’s new to the game. Someone with nothing to lose. Someone like what YC was like when they first started.

It’s the future

I think it’s inevitable that this will happen for all VCs. The world of handshakes and connections is great, but it creates an inefficient market. The ability to network and schmooze is not a requisite skill to building a great company. Certainly not in the early stages where it’s purely a game of finding product/market fit. Users don’t care who you know, where you went to school, or that you have Ron Conway on speed dial.

A lot of VCs are trying to use YC like a filter. The problem is that a lot of VCs are using YC as a filter. That means the top deals in every YC class are highly competitive. That’s why you’re hearing about inflated YC valuations.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with using YC like that, but if everyone is doing it you’re not going to have much of an advantage unless you’re offering overly-generous deal terms or one of a very few top firms.

Just like no technology company should outsource their technology no VC should be outsource their deal flow. Finding the best deals is the core of their entire business.

I predict that either all VCs will learn to accept and evaluate applications for funding over the transom or a select few will and they’ll outperform all but the very best schmooze-only VCs.

AngelList is already forcing their hand, and that levels the playing field even more for the best companies, but it’s more of a formalization of the “social proof”-based investing that VCs are currently relying on.

Have feedback? Comment on Hacker News >

People sometimes refer to startups as “lotteries”, as if everyone who participates in the game has roughly the same odds of winning.

The Misconception

There are two primary causes for this misconception:

Luck does play a huge role in every company’s outcome.

It’s true. Not a single founder that’s succeeded couldn’t have also lost miserably. If one was all-knowing, and had the power to travel in time, it would not be difficult to completely throw off a company’s trajectory with one tiny change to the timeline. A missed phone call. A little extra traffic on the way to an important meeting. That’s all it would take to have prevented Microsoft or Intel from becoming the behemoths they are.

Sometimes it really is almost purely luck.

It’s not nice to point it out, but some founders really did just stumble blindly into a lucky situation. Even in those cases it’s not as if they don’t deserve their success. After all, they had to overcome fear enough to start the company and they had to actually try (which is far more than most people do). But there really are some people who just got unbelievably lucky. It happens.

Game of Skill

Startups are far more like poker than roulette. Sometimes luck dominates temporarily, but in the long term the game is won mostly based on the skill, intelligence, and determination of the player. Luck can make or break you, but it rarely does. At the end of the day you’re far more likely to be the cause of your own success or failure.

Look at the players

Most people would have no chance at playing poker professionally. They lack the determination, intelligence, drive, and whatever else it is that separates those guys from the rest of the world. Anyone can learn how to play poker in 20 minutes. Very few people could ever play professionally.

It’s easy to start a hand of poker. It’s easy to know your goal is (“get all the chips!”). The hard part is knowing how to play every new hand as it’s dealt and keeping that up until you’ve won.

It’s the same with startups. Anyone can throw up a RoR CRUD app for their new real-time-mobile-social-marketplace-for-college-student-dating. How many can actually figure out how to make it work? How many of those can actually put in the necessary work to see it through?

There was an article today in FastCompany about a cool company called Stripe. They’re a dead simple credit card processing gateway. In just a few minutes any web developer could sign up and add credit card processing to their site for a flat rate of 2.9% + $0.30 fee.

The thing is: you could already do that. PayPal already has this product. It’s called Web Site Payments Pro and the sign up process is easy. No merchant account required. It does cost $30/mo, but the rate is the same (or cheaper with volume) and their Name-Value Pair API is just about as simple.

Almost every popular language has a client library already, which means it’s really just as simple to get started.

Here’s some official clients on their site: https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/library_download_sdks

PayPal

curl https://api-3t.sandbox.paypal.com/nvp -d
METHOD=DoDirectPayment
&VERSION=XX.0
&USER=API_username
&PWD=API_password
&SIGNATURE=API_signature
&AMT=400
&CREDITCARDTYPE=Visa
&EXPDATE=022018
&...

Stripe:

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/charges -u vtUQeOtUnYr7PGCLQ96Ul4zqpDUO4sOE: 
-d amount=400
-d currency=usd
-d card=tok_x9vhXvDM3LuscU
-d "description=Charge for site@stripe.com"

So what is Stripe doing that’s better?

1. They’re not PayPal.

2. Their product is focused and looks simpler. Stripe sounds better than Website Payments Pro.

3. Much better reporting.

4. Much better documentation.

5. Faster account activation. PayPal does let you get started with very minimal info, but they have bugged me one time for more as an anti-fraud measure. I predict Stripe will do that as well eventually.

At the end of the day though, what they created already existed and not in some complicated form. It was just a little obscured and required a little knowledge to find/use.

I thought PayPal sucked as a credit card gateway until I discovered the Website Payments Pro service and NVP API for it. Turns out it works quite well.

Which brings me back to the title of this post. This reminds me a lot of what Hipmunk did. They took an idea that was buried in the back of ITA and focused all of their effort on improving it and marketing it better than ITA ever did (which had its own reasons for not doing that).

Stripe is doing the same thing to PayPal and I don’t for one second want to claim that it’s a bad thing. I think it’s one of the best possible recipes for startup success: find some high quality, but under-polished/under-promoted, product that a big company is offering and polish, improve, and promote it.

I know I’ll be using Stripe the next time I need credit card processing. It’s definitely nicer than PayPal’s solution. It’s not so much better though that I’d be willing to pay significantly more to use it, so if PayPal saved me a lot more money at volume I’d certainly switch to them.

When you’re working on a solution to a problem for a long time there’s a tendency to become very intellectual about it. You understand how it feels to have the problem, you can explain it easily enough, you can prove its existence with data. The only thing you can’t do is expect to actually feel the problem on a non-stop basis. Nothing short of physical ailments are going to truly bother you all the time. The problem can start to become an abstract concept.

Then, as you’re going about your daily life, something magical happens: You have the actual problem, just like a user would. This is your opportunity to learn a lot, get inspired, and cut through your intellectualized version of reality.

During the time you’re experiencing the problem and attempting to solve it with existing solutions make sure you spawn off a separate process in your brain to observe and record as much data as possible. You can learn more in 10 minutes like that than 5 hour discussions with really smart people.

Every time I find myself experiencing the actual problems of a user I feel like I’ve been temporarily granted godlike insight. I never walk away without at least one or two really significant ideas for improvements or decisions about problems that have been vexing me.

It can also reinvigorate your resolve to solve the problem and bring you back down to earth. It instantly turns your intellectual thing back into a visceral pain again.

It reminds me of the “The Great Teacher” from the Star Trek episode “Spock’s Brain”, which temporarily grants a person increased intelligence to do its bidding.

Everything becomes so simple, so clear, a child could do it!

Posted this on Hacker News http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3472638

I use Blekko a couple times a week, but never to do real web searches. I use it for their /seo feature.

http://blekko.com/ws/news.ycombinator.com+/seo

It’s a great way to see inbound links, duplicate content, and generally see what a site looks like to a search engine.

Blekko is probably the most comprehensive independent search engine. They’re crawling the entire web already. They’re not quite doing what Google is, but they’re pretty close.

If they dedicated themselves to creating an accurate Google Ranking Algorithm Simulator they would have an earth-shattering product.

Imagine if you could enter a site into Blekko and immediately know what Google’s algorithms think of it, the way Matt Cutts can? There’s nothing even close to doing that today.

They could put every SEO consultant out of business, by removing all the mystery. The millions of companies that pay them would happily switch to something that’s self-serve and algorithmic.

SEOMoz is probably the most well-known company trying to do this, and they’re making millions in revenue per year. Still, they a consultancy trying to become a technology company. A hard core technology company, like Blekko, would probably have a far better chance at keeping up with Google.

They should give up on trying to shave off a tiny little slice of the search engine market. This would be far more valuable.

And a nice bonus: their terrible name wouldn’t have to change. Businesses don’t care about brand names the way consumers do.

On Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3142074

♫ I’m coming out…of anonymity ♫

Hi fellow HNers,

My name is Jake Gold and on Hacker News I go by the name “staunch”.

It feels really weird to say that. I never went through any real trouble to remain anonymous. I’m sure a crafty person probably could have figured out who I am, but still, I did make a conscious decision not to openly reveal it.

I made the choice to use an alias when I first signed up over 4 1/2 years ago. I worked for a few different companies as a contractor and as a full-time employee and had vague concerns that maybe I’d say something that would get me in trouble in some way.

I realize now that it was a mistaken idea. I’ve definitely made stupid comments and I’d take some of them back, but I’ve never said anything so off my real character or opinion that I wouldn’t be willing to apologize or stand behind it.

In that time I’ve probably embarrassed myself in real life, in front of people I actually know a bunch of times, why should I care if I do it online occasionally?

If there are any consequences in the future I’m fine with it. I’m going to give this “live in public” idea a shot.

Why now?

For a long time I’ve wanted to do my own startup so bad it hurt. Over the last 5 years I got to work for two, and created a couple cool side projects that got traction and made me a bit of money. Nothing that was “my” startup though.

Now I’ve finally done it. A friend of mine that I’ve known for 7 years, and worked with at two different companies, finally got together to start a real startup of our own.

I want to be able to talk about it on HN openly, as myself, and ask questions and get help from the people who I’ve already been talking to for years now.

My Startup

The site we’re creating is called Get.com

Although we only realized it after the fact we’re quite narrowly focused on solving Paul Graham’s #20  http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

20. Shopping guides. Like news, shopping used to be constrained by geography. You went to your local store and chose from what they had. Now the space of possibilities is bewilderingly large, and people need help navigating it. If you already know what you want, Bountii can find you the best price. But how do you decide what you want? Hint: One answer is related to number 3.

(emphasis mine)

Our brief description:

Get.com is a community web site and product discovery platform that helps people make faster and smarter purchasing decisions. It solves the same problem for products that Yelp and TripAdvisor do for local services and travel respectively.

Anyone who has spent hours reading reviews and pouring over product specs on Amazon or CNET can relate to the frustration and difficulty in searching for the best product for their needs.

We announced publicly last week, and got some great coverage, including a listing on the “paper of record”, TechCrunch:

A New Product Discovery Site Emerges, With A Killer Domain And $1M In Funding: Get.com

We also got coverage on LifeHacker, VentureBeat, FoxBusiness, and a bunch of other great places.

Initially we’ve launched a Q&A platform to start, which is our first step in solving this problem. We’re aiming very high and we’ve got some exciting ideas about where to go with it.

We’ve already had thousands of signups, received some amazing feedback, and started pumping out changes and improvements at a pace that only a two-man startup can.

So far it’s everything I hoped for in doing a startup. It’s every bit the rollercoaster everyone says it is, but it’s exactly what I want.

Disclaimer

I’m aware that this post may seem narcissistic. I really don’t mean it to be. It’s just something I wanted to announce publicly.

I posted it on Hacker News http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3032071