One concrete tip for the self-employed programmer (that procrastinates)

I just read an article about procrastination that I found interesting (mostly because I agree with it). Procrastination is great - as I explained in the comments:

... procrastination paid my way through school. When you don't start studying for tests until a few hours before, you suddenly find yourself with a lot of time on your hands.

Procrastination teaches you how to work efficiently under pressure - a very important skill to have. The experienced procrastinator becomes a pro at putting out fires, and ironically, quickly getting things done. So why do procrastinators fail at life? Partially because there isn't enough that absolutely needs to get done. Procrastinators need pressure.


So what's a procrastinator to do? Start fires.


In software development this translates to setting artificial deadlines. Make promises - and judge your performance by whether you keep them. Here are some examples:

• Promise your mom that you'll blog at least once per week (I do).
  
• Promise a new feature on your website by a specified date.
  
• Make promises on your blog, to whomever will listen (if you don't keep your promise, publicly apologize too).
  
• Promise your clients you'll have respond to their emails within 12 hours.
  

And here's my favorite example: find someone important to you and make them your boss (I've chosen my girlfriend). At the beginning of every week spend an hour with that person and explain to them what you're going to do in the next week. Make promises. Then, check in with them throughout the week, and at the end of the week, conduct a "performance review." It helps if you can create some sort of incentive to meet your targets (you can be creative here... ).

Using the google maps street view to find startup-related easter eggs

Someone On News.YC found the Anybots / Y Combinator sign on google maps.

I then stumbled across this image, which looks like googlers waving to the camera from the googleplex.

Anybody else find any other startup-related easter eggs? What about Apple's first garage or the dorm room that Sergey Brin & Larry Page worked out of?

First week at Anybots

I just finished my first week working in the valley, and it's been a lot of fun.

Here's my desk/work area. I was able to assemble it out of some spare stuff that was lying around. Don't tell anybody, but I stole Jessica Livingston's sweet Aeron chair. Hopefully she won't miss it while she's in Cambridge!


And here's Trevor, using Monty to pour himself a cup of tea:


Housing is horribly expensive here, so I've been sleeping in a cheap motel down the road until I have find something affordable. This has been an interesting experience. I guess by "nonsmoking room," they don't actually mean you can't smoke - just you don't get an ash tray. That wasn't a huge problem for the previous tenant (who was a chain smoker, judging by the smell of the room); he just used the desk:


The room also has one of those beds that fold into the wall. That's pretty cool, except that the room isn't much larger than the bed. Therefore, when you fold it down, your only options in the room are to either to sit on it, or stand in the doorway:


Ah well, at least they did have wireless internet, so I can't complain much ;)

Y Combinator's Portfolio Performance - over $1MM in cash?

Y Combinator is a relatively new venture firm that's shaking up angel investing. Think of it as startup funding from a microfinance angle - except there's no debt involved.

These days everyone wants to know - is this new model financially viable? It's too early to be sure, but there is some telling data out there. To get an idea of how well YC is doing, I've tried to assemble it all below, making estimates as needed.

Fair warning: there's very little information available about YC's performance, and I've made a TON of educated guesses here. Most are probably wrong.

Methodology:

Valuation:
If acquired or sold, I used the purchase price (obviously). If the company received additional VC funding, I used the published value (if there was one), or made an estimate based on the amount of the funding.

Cost:
Initial funding of $5,000 + $5,000 / founder [1]. YC has been known to invest additional capital after the first 3 months, I made educated guesses about these amounts.

Equity
We don't have any equity data at all - everything has to be extrapolated. We know they generally take 1%-10%[2], so I based my equity estimates on the following criteria:

• 2% - Highest valuation. Rocking team & idea. Startup is already established w/ users. Demonstrated profit potential. Attractive acquisition target.


• 4% - High valuation. Proven, capable team OR solid beta at time of funding, but no significant user base.


• 6% - Standard valuation. Capable team, but possibly unproven. Somewhat functioning beta/alpha.


• 8%-10% - Lower valuation. YC is only valuing the team, and likely rejected the idea / beta (if one existed). If funded, YC probably asked the team to work on something else.

If the startups got additional outside funding, I diluted the numbers as appropriate.

YC Companies that have been acquired / sold:

Reddit
- Valuation: acquired by CondeNast for a reported $12.8 million [3].
- Equity: An initial 8% diluted to 7%, additional 3% in the first round of funding. Justification: They were initially rejected, & YC didn't like their initial idea (hence the high 8%). A year after starting, reddit did seek additional capital (<$100,000). At that time, I'm guessing that they had a premoney valuation of $1MM, meaning their the 8% would be diluted to approximately 7%. My guess is that YC provided at least $30,000 of the this funding, for an additional 3%.
- Invested capital: Initial $15,000 with an investment about a year later of ~$30,000

Kiko
- Valuation: Sold on eBay for $258,100 [4].
- Equity: Initial 6%. Justification: Guessing the average 6%, for lack of other data. Not sure if they got additional financing or not, but it probably wasn't a significant amount.
- Invested capital: Initial $15,000 (2 founders).

YC Companies that have been valued, but not sold:

Loopt
- Valuation: raised $5MM [5], estimating a $10MM premoney value.
- Equity: Initial 3%. Low because YC was apparently impressed with the team, Paul Graham described Loopt as "the most promising of all the startups we've funded so far" [6]. Diluted to 2% after first round financing.
- Invested capital: Initial $15,000. Not sure how they were financed after the first 3 months.

Scribd
- Rumored to have just finished their 1st funding round, valued by VC firm @ $20MM premoney [7].
- Equity: Guessing an initial 6%, diluted to 5.5%
- Invested capital: Initial $12,000. Scribd also got an additional $300,000 in March from Angel investors [7]. Lacking other data, I'm guessing that YC provided none of this. Also, based on the $10-20MM value today, I'm guessing the premoney value in March was pretty high - maybe around $3MM. Therefore, the $300K would dilute YC's current stake to about 5.5%.

Xobni
- Valuation: raised $4.26 million early, estimating a $4.26MM premoney value [8].
- Equity: 6%?
- Invested capital: $15,000 - two initial founders. Not sure if YC put in additional capital before first round financing.

Summary

Based on these numbers, YC has already earned $1.295 million pretax cash revenues on the stakes that have been sold ($1.28MM for reddit, and $15,486 for kiko).

I valued YC's stake in the 3 unsold startups at $1.64MM ($300k for Loopt, 1.08MM for Scribd, and $255,600k for Xobni).

Limitations: I am not at all sure about the equity percentages, which could drastically affect the value of YC's stake. Specifically, I am not sure about the amount of dilution during later funding rounds, and the amount of equity YC received in exchange for any additional operating capital that they provided after the initial $12-$20k.

Also, there are dozens of startups that I want to value, but don't yet haven't enough concrete information to do so. I'll update this post if that changes.

Finally, I have no idea what YC's expenses are. I tried to give them some perspective by including the estimated invested amounts, but obviously there are other operating expenses that YC incurs, which I haven't considered.

If you have any information that would help with these numbers, feel free to leave it in the comments.

Companies I want to value, when I get the chance:
- ClickFacts
- TextPayMe
- SnipShot
- Inkling
- Flagr
- Wufoo
- YouOS
- PollGround
- LikeBetter
- Thinkature
- JamGlue
- Shoutfit
- Weebly
- Buxfer
- Octopart
- Heysan
- Justin.tv
- Iminlikewithyou
- WriteWith

SanFran (Sunday)

Here's the third update for my mom :) -

Sunday morning I took Omar Bohsali with me to have coffee with Trevor Blackwell. Trevor cofounded Viaweb with Paul Graham, and they're also partners of YCombinator. He also recently founded a robotics startup, Anybots. We had a great discussion about the Anybots' business model and what the robotics industry will look like in 10 years.

After that, Omar and I went back to sleep until the afternoon.

At around 6, we all headed over to Adam's apartment in the YScraper. The YScraper is an apartment building in SF that houses a number of YCombinator startups, including Reddit, Justin.tv, and Xobni (Adam's). The place is mad expensive, but has a great view.

Adam knew a great burger place down the street, so we all grabbed dinner there. The burgers were delicious, as promised :) Afterwards, we caught the subway for our flight out of oakland.

San Francisco (Saturday)

On Saturday Omar, Ben, & Ryan woke up early and drove over to Stanford for the Startup School talks. I stayed out pretty late the night before (at the YC Dinner), and as a result missed the first few hours :(

Recordings of the talks are online here.

During the talks - Omar and I had a pretty stimulating talk with Mark Zuckerberg about the future of Facebook.

After the talks @ Startup School, we headed out to SHDH, a hackathon "un-conference" where a bunch of programmer-types geek out for the day. Check out the pictures on on flickr.

We ended up helping the organizers clean up after the event (at around 3 AM!). It was completely worth it, though, because at around 4AM we were able to grab dinner with David Weekly and Tom Harrison. David founded PBWiki, a very successful wiki host.

San Francisco (Finally!)

This is another update for my mom, who's been pestering me for a while about my weekend at Startup School :)

Startup School was a weekend "conference" that we attended in the San Francisco bay area. The event's sponsored by YCombinator, and pretty popular amongst the hacker/startup circles.

During the trip we wrote (and took photos) of our experiences. I've decided I'll post once daily for the next 4 days (Fri - Mon), discussing each day's events at Startup School. Here's what happened on Friday:

Friday
2AM: Leave Charlottesville, after getting no sleep. I pick up Omar, and drive home to Herndon to meet Ben. All three of us leave from my place to get to the airport by 4:30.

6AM: Plane leaves, we're off!


11AM (PST): After 8 hours of flying, we finally get in. Immediately search for free WIFI, and some plugs (withdrawal sucks). Find local Paneras. Yay.

Afternoon: We spend the afternoon getting settled with Ryan Park, an awesome dude who's going to let us crash at his place all weekend. (Thanks, Ryan!)

6PM: We head over to the Startup School reception, while Ryan grabs dinner with some other schoolers. At the reception we bumps into some cool people, including a bunch of the users from News.YC (which I'm pretty active on). It was fun to put faces to names. The highlight of the night, though, is Dexter - a humanoid robot from Anybots.

Here's a video of Dexter jumping - which as far as I know, is a first for any humanoid robot:

Thanks to Steve and Alexis

Special thanks to Steve and Alexis of Reddit.com, who stopped by McIntire last week to talk about their startup experience.

The presentation went over well with everyone, except Alexis's old communications professor, Marcia Pentz-Harris :) I could hear audible groans coming from that side of the room as Alexis ignored a year's worth of presenting advice and started cracking jokes with the audience.

Regardless, it was a great time :)

To the guy taking photos at the talk: Leave a comment! I'd love to either link to your photos or put them online on the VEO wiki.

Meet the founders of Reddit on Monday, March 19th

I've recently invited Steve & Alexis to come down and speak @ UVA. The talk should be a lot of fun, it will be great to hear the story of these two guys, who, IMHO, founded Y Combintor's most successful startup.

If you're reading this in time, you're more then you're more than welcome to come!

Here's the flyer:
===================================
Steve and Alexis of Reddit.com, 5PM on Monday in Room 122
(Click the link for more info)

What's it like to found a startup?
Are you interested in the "startup life?" Come this Monday to hear the story of two UVa grads who pulled it off, founding Reddit.com. Today Reddit has 160,000 unique daily visitors, and is one of the top 250 most visited US sites on the net.

Background:
Steve graduated from the E-school in 2005, Alexis graduated from McIntire the same year. After raising less than $100,000 in VC funding, Reddit was recently acquired by Conde Nast (publishers of Wired Magazine). Press about the site is here.

When: Monday, March 19th at 5PM.
Where: McIntire Room 122
Sponsored by: Virginia Entrepreneurship Organization and AKPsi

COME EARLY FOR FREE PIZZA!!!!
======================================

2006 Innovator's Dinner

So apparently I've been invited to the Innovator's Dinner, hosted by Creative Good. I'm not exactly sure why I was invited, but its quite an honor. I'm really excited, there will be executives from some of the companies I respect most there.

So I'm supposed to pick 5 people that I want to network with during the conference. The only one I've come up with is John Smith, the VP of Wikipedia. Any suggestions?

Here's an abbreviated list of the dinner's attendees:

• Dae Mellencamp - SVP, Product Management (About.com)
  
• Bob Baxley - Director of Design, Apple Store Online (Apple)
• Ralph Zazula - Director, Apple Store Online Engineering (Apple)
• David Schrieberg - VP, Content & Programming (AOL Europe)
  
• Scott Helbing - EVP, Entertainment Services (AT&T)
• Debbie Podberesky - VP (Banana Republic)
  
• Maheesh Jain - VP, Sales & Marketing (CafePress.com)
• Shawn Budde - VP, Enterprise Customer Management (Capital One)
• Teri Felix - SVP, Database Marketing & Customer Research (Charles Schwab)
• Andy Gill - SVP, Client Experience Group (Charles Schwab)
• Dawn vonBechmann - VP, Multi-Channel Experience (Circuit City )
• Jennifer Vos - VP, Online Strategy and Customer Experience (Citigroup)
  
• Justin Miller - Senior Director Product, Europe (eBay)
• Karl Wiley - Senior Director (eBay)
• Marissa Mayer - VP, Search Products & User Experience Design (Google)
• John McAteer - Head of Retail (Google)
• Chris Sacca - Head of Strategic Projects (Google)
• Alex Bard - President & CEO (Goowy Media)
• Gary Bennit - COO (Goowy Media)
• Marten Mickos - CEO (MySQL)
• Howard Tong - VP, Marketing (Newegg.com)
• Don Fotsch - VP, User Experience & Product Planning (Paypal)
• Stephanie Tilenius - VP & GM (Paypal)
• Doug Galen - SVP, Business & Corporate Development (Shutterfly)
• Ben Nelson - GM (Snapfish)
• Gail Griffin - VP, GM (Wall Street Journal)
• John Smith - VP, Product & Engineering (Wikipedia)
• Bradley Horowitz - VP, Advanced Products (Yahoo!)
• Entire list here
  

Arrived at BarCampBoston

Got into Boston today, and the weather really sucks. It was 80 degrees in DC, here its 50 & rainy.

The BarCamp conference is a lot more serious than I had expected. The thing is huge, and occupies about ~15 rooms on 3 floors. I was surprised by the variety of participant's ages & backgrounds. I get the impression that the people here really know what they're talking about - many seem to be experts in their fields.

It's was also much more conferency than I expected, which was a bummer. I was imagining a bunch of geeks sitting around on the floor hacking away on code - kind of like Supper Happy Dev House (shdh.org).

Oh well, there were some great talks. I especially liked the Cool Tools talk, where everyone just talked about their favorite online app. Another great talk was "drop your pants" where participants would describe their startup project and get feedback from the rest of the group. I definitely recommend both for future barcamps.

BarCamp Boston

It's official! I just bought a plane ticket to BarCampBoston It's a pretty cool "un"conference where geeks can hang out and program for a weekend.

If anyone knows of a place I can stay the Sunday night after the camp (June 4th) let me know. My flight doesn't leave until Monday.

Foxfield: a time to party, drink, and... program?

Today is April 29th, the day of the annual Foxfield Races. The races are a venerable UVa tradition when just about everyone takes time out of their rigorous schedules to convene on a field, party, get drunk and do crazy things, like getting paid for jumping in a trough full of piss (foxfield's "bathroom").

Having stayed up till 4 yesterday, I couldn't wake up in time to leave for the races this morning (everyone got up @ 7). Since I wasn't really looking forward to going anyways, I decided not to meet up with them there and instead do some programming in Rails.

So I'm programming in my backyard on my laptop and all these drunk students walk are walking home after the races. I have my ruby on rails book out, and this guy comes up and reads the title, and then exclaims "HEY! 3 Dollar Rails!" I replied with an "uh, yah... you got it."

Its times like that which make me realize how out of place I am, cause at that moment I realized the word "rails" means something entirely different than to the majority of the UVa population. When they hear it, they think cheap drinks; when I hear it, I think a cool programming tool. Guess that makes me a geek.

What's in an idea?

The first step to starting a startup is coming with an idea, right? As I have been meeting with the dozen or so guys that are interested in working in the project, I've been amazed that this is a common theme among almost all of them. They can't understand why I'm focusing on getting the right people, instead of finding the right idea.

Everyone seems to think that the key to a successful startup is that "million dollar idea." However I would bet that most of us wouldn't even recognize a truly great idea when we saw one. For example, if someone came to me in 1999 and told me that (the then novel) blog would revolutionize the web, and Blogger.com would lead this revolution, I would have thought they were crazy. Sure, blogging sounds cool - but it would have been hard to predict that Blogger.com would be one of the 10 most popular websites. After all, anyone who wants a blog can make one on Geocities - the only thing Blogger.com does is make it easier. Same goes with Google, when they started, there were already several search engines out there. The market was mature, and no one was asking for another. Yet google turned searches upside down, and the world will always be different because of it.

So I guess my point is, why are you waiting for that million dollar idea, when its likely you wouldn't even recognize one if it was right in front of you?

In my opinion, the only way to tell weather you have a great idea - or just a good one - is to try it out. Get your hands dirty, develop a prototype, see if people use it. And that's what, it turns out, a good idea is all about - people. All we can hope for is to come up with the best idea possible, and execute it well. But to do either, we need a passionate and brilliant team - which is why my primary focus right now is finding the right people.

In conclusion, why obsess about wasting your time on the wrong idea? Hey, I've spent three months of my life doing worse, and who knows - we might just stumble across something that changes the world.

Starting a startup

So there's alot of advice out there on how to start a startup. This has always been something I've wanted to do. I love the idea of working with a couple other brilliant guys in an apartment somewhere, till 3 AM, such hacking away at some code and blasting music.

But, even though I've already started a company, it hasn't turned out that way... It's been mostly a "one man show." This tends to get a little bit lonely after a while. Think of working where ever you work, but subtract all the social interaction with your coworkers. Trust me, it sucks.

On top of this, the stuff I'm doing @ OdioWorks, like selling dinars and fixing computers, isn't really what I'm passionate about. I'm much more interested in creating a website or application that changes people's lives. Something along the lines of Google, Yahoo, Blogger, Craigslist, WikiPedia, etc.

So, with that goal in mind, I've decided to recruit a couple other guys and found a tech startup. If you're interested in reading about our experience, I've started a blog here.