Peter Christensen

What Your Resume Really Says About You

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THE SITUATION

I recently met a guy who was disenchanted with his work and was thinking about leaving the job he had worked at since he graduated 5 years ago. He didn’t know what the job market was like, and he had only landed one full-time job so he never got good at the job search-resume-interview-hire process.
I was glad to meet him because a) he was dissatisfied enough to take some action, and b) despite some rough presentation, there was some good technical meat on his resume. He was open to some advice I could give him that could help him big improvements in his career and personal happiness. In my book, that’s always a good way to spend a half hour.
Here’s a quick version of what I saw when I looked at his resume:
  • Strong Linux admin and Java stack experience – he could get a job in that kind of shop no problem.
  • Evidence of interest in other programming tools – he did a Rails project in 2005(!) for an internship and some Django projects at his main job. This showed awareness of new tech trends and willingness to use the best tool for the job, not just what he’s comfortable with.
  • More emphasis on greenfield, new applications than maintaining or growing existing ones
  • Both desktop and web development projects
  • Capable of integrating other tools and systems as needs (credit card payments, WordPress, SMS, etc)

THE EVALUATION

Based on my first pass at the resume, I said:
  • If he wanted to work in a medium-to-large, non-tech company environment, he had a great set of skills and should be gainfully employed in companies like that for a long time to come
  • I did not think he was well positioned to switch to a Python or Ruby shop or a small startup because most places need someone who can contribute immediately without a lot of training or supervision, and it didn’t look like he had a lot of experience with those. Some, but not enough to hit the ground running
  • Smart and fast growing companies larger than a certain size (say 10 devs) could be a possibility because hiring fast is hard and they need a broad skill set and a fast learner. He appeared to be those things.

THE ADVICE

I recommended that:
  • You might think you’d be happier somewhere else, but bouncing jobs doesn’t always work. I’ve worked at 6 places since I graduated in 2005 and Groupon is the first place I’ve really, really loved. Don’t expect to get it right on the first try, but don’t be afraid to try!
  • Work is a huge part of your life, so it’s worth researching companies beforehand to give yourself a better chance of landing the best job. Find and meet people that work there, visit the office, interact with the blogs/twitter of the people that work there, go to meetups they attend, find connections on LinkedIn, etc. Also try to meet former employees.
  • Bonus tip: if you do those things, then when you apply, you’re no longer a resume, you’re a real person
  • Having a web presence can give a perspective employer a more complete impression of you than can fit on a resume. How you think, how you write, what you’re interested in, etc. Public projects, OSS contributions, etc set you apart from most applicants and turn you from a flat resume into a real person. They are indisputable proof that you can produce things and are engaged in software as more than just a job.
  • Tactical tip – name your resume something like “Resume – Jake Nelson.doc” – it makes the hiring person’s job easier and cuts down the chance that your info gets misplaced.
  • Take a long think about where you want to live. This guy had worked in the same region where he went to school, a couple hours outside a major metro area. Smaller places like that have benefits, but there’s also a lot to gain by moving. You enter a bigger and richer job market and it gives you a chance to reinvent your outlook on life.
  • He was in the Eastern US, so I recommended looking into New York City. For every ten articles I see about how hard it is to hire good developers, 8 of them are about NYC. There have been several Hacker News threads about hiring in NY and how good developers are getting multiple offers. Etsy, Foursquare, Gilt Group, etc are all growing fast.
  • Once you find a place you want to work, don’t worry if you don’t feel qualified to work there:
    • If you take the advice I listed above about getting to know a company, you’ll be a much more attractive candidate and you’ll have an idea beforehand if they would consider you
    • Getting a great job is a discontinuous event in your life. If you can land an awesome that you’re barely qualified for there, then a year or two of working at that job will teach you enough that you’ll be in the same league as the rest of your coworkers. If you sneak into a job at Facebook, then after a year, you’re a Facebook Developer. Ditto for Google, Twitter, Groupon, Foursquare, etc. Those opportunities can change your career trajectory for years to come.

THE CONCLUSION

What’s the moral of the story? Why does advice that one stranger gave to another matter to you, the reader?
You might not be sending the message you think you are.
When he responded, he thanked me but was surprised at my evaluation of his Python, since he considers himself a Python programmer! I looked at his resume and saw one or two mentions of Python in 10 lines describing a 5 year job, so I figured he did that about 10% of the time. It turns out it was his primary tool for the last several years but his Python work could be described succinctly and his Java work took a lot of words to subscribe. (Insert your own programming language joke here).
So after he reworked his resume, the Python work is over half of the space for his main job listing. Now he very clearly looks like a Python/Django programmer with additional experience in the Java web stack, system administration, etc. Now he’s sending the message he wants people to hear. He’s much better positioned to get the kind of job he wants.

EPILOGUE

If you’re reading this and looking for a Python programmer that passes my filters for skills, humility, and initiative, contact me and I can put you in touch with him.

Advice to a college sophomore programmer

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Background: One of the new responsibilities I have at Groupon is getting lots of awesome developers to work here. [If you are or might be an awesome developer, email my work address – peterc@groupon.com – and check out the job openings at http://groupon.com/jobs ] So I’ve put myself out as a representative of Groupon’s dev team, announced hiring, answered questions, etc. In one week, two people have responded asking about summer internships.

[HILARIOUS UPDATE: I left off one sentence that has confused at least one person so far. Groupon doesn’t have an internship program right now. We’re just barely starting on campus recruiting for college graduates. The friendly advice was a consolation prize since I couldn’t help with the internship. Sorry for the confusion!]

Here’s some advice I gave them through email that I thought was worth posting publicly:

  1. If you’re already reaching out to companies when you’re a sophomore , you should be commended for being so on top of your career this early in school. Too many people wait until two months before (or even after) they graduate. Even if you don’t get the internship, you make an impression.
  2. If there’s an established technology you’d like to learn, a book is still a good place to start. There’s a balance of theory and practice, it will be edited and consistent, and give you a complete end-to-end look at the technology. But don’t just read the books, do the exercises in them. If you want to learn Rails, the book Agile Web Development with Rails has you build a complete ecommerce website and you can do it in a week or so. Sometimes doing comes before understanding (or rather, you can’t understand without doing). EDIT: How do you tell the good tech books from the bad? Ask someone who is good at that technology. Too shy? O’Reilly and Pragmatic Programmer books are generally good, and you can often get good recommendations by searching on StackOverflow or SearchYC.
  3. On that note, PLEASE don’t wait for a class to learn a new language or technology. CS classes have their place, giving you a broad foundation of principles and practice in certain specific subjects. But many techniques (e.g. source control), technologies (e.g. server administration, nginx configs, etc), and languages (many schools teach only C and Java) won’t EVER be covered in school. In the workforce, you’ll have to learn stuff on the fly and on your own for your whole career, so you need to start learning things outside of class now if you want to be decent.
  4. Don’t just focus on specific languages or frameworks, learn some general programming skills. Books like Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (free online at http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html) , Clean Code, The Pragmatic Programmer, etc are great for that.
  5. If you glossed over that last point, go back! Reading SICP, watching the video lectures, and doing the exercises will make you a fantastic programmer.
  6. Learn at least one “obscure” language. It will help you learn things that are hard to learn in mainstream languages like Java. I’m partial to Lisp and the book Land of Lisp is a great, fun way to learn that language.
  7. Find a project. It doesn’t have to be something meaningful or important, just do it! Write a scraper to find the nearest Starbucks to you. Make a group management website for your study groups. Write software to control a LEGO mindstorm robot. Just do something, post projects online, put code up on GitHub, and write something about what you did, and put it on a blog. This gives you a public record of interest in programming outside of work, which is very, very appealing to employers and probably the number one thing in getting to an interview. It will also give you practice writing and show you how you improve over time.
  8. Get involved with developers in your area. If there are meetings in your area, you can find them in 5 seconds thanks to the other Big G. If you can’t find any, it’s because those things take time and hassle to arrange. Volunteer to help with the meetings, find locations, etc, or organize your own. That stuff isn’t hard, it just takes time and the confidence to do. That way you will generate a lot of goodwill and make connections with people you can work with and learn from.

So there you go. $100 worth of books to buy, a years worth of homework, and you will have made yourself more appealing to employers than most college graduates!

Bonus points: If someone answers you saying “We’re not ready now but get in touch next year”, make sure you do it!

Observations After A Month At Groupon

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About a month ago, I started working at Groupon. It has been a pretty exciting month since then. Here are some random observations based on that time:

1) Groupon is working on exciting technology problems. Big scale, big data, multi platform, etc. The problem space is straightforward but the scale and importance of every part of the system makes it a worthwhile challenge.

2) Groupon has a principled approach to software development. Pair programming as needed, small, focused teams, meaningful code reviews, sensible testing, operations and deployment options, etc. The team is a mix of permanent employes and long-term consultants, and they support each other. It helps that the consultants come from one of the most excellent companies in Chicago. The product roadmap for the coming year shows a legitimate need to balance short term business needs with building a platform to support continued growth into the future.

Groupon’s technology work isn’t bleeding edge or particularly innovative. It is extremely well done application to a profitable problem and has scaled from a team of inital whiz kids to a medium sized team better than any place I’ve worked or know of, and signs are that it will continue into the future.

3) By a quirk of seating, I sit right behind the CEO, Andrew Mason. I occasionally overhear him talking so I have a tiny bit of insight into the higher up business decisions. Let’s just say that if you’re competing against him an the rest of the exec team, good luck to you. I think a lot of people are fooled by how he comes of as a goofball in his interviews. Don’t get me wrong, he is a goofball, buthe is also a savvy business leader. He knows what’s going on with us, our competitors, the technology, the business, etc. If you still insist on getting into the deal space, build a small niche based on personal relationships, because the chance to be a big player in the deal business is gone and it will not be relinquished.

If you’re interested in more about what it’s like to work at Groupon, leave a comment or email me. If you’re a talented developer interested in working here, email me now.

How To Recruit Developers

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I received a nice email today from someone living outside a major metro that wanted to do a startup but couldn’t find a developer. While I’m no expert on recruiting, I do read a lot. Here’s the response I sent him, slightly edited and cleansed of incriminating info, that can hopefully help someone else.

First question: are you yourself a developer? If not, you’re probably in trouble. You won’t be able to properly evaluate the work done by a developer you hire, and you probably don’t have a network of developers you can talk to.
I would recommend the following things:
  1. Attend all the developer social events you can. User group meetings, hackathons, etc. You’re more likely to find startup-interested people at a Ruby or Python user group but you’re trying to find a specific developer, not a demographic, so don’t be choosy at first. Do some research beforehand on the speaker and their topic so you can participate and ask useful questions. Offer to help the organizers – running these things is a pain in the butt so it’s easy to curry favor by helping out with mundane things. This will give you some credibility within the group which is useful as a non-developer. Even if you don’t find a cofounder, you will make some technical friends that you can use to help you “sniff-test” people you hire/recruit elsewhere.
  2. (if you’re not a developer) Learn to program. You won’t become great, but you do need to be competent. You can build a demo of a product without having a ton of experience. I would recommend either Python/Django or Ruby on Rails. Python is a little cleaner and more consistent, but Rails has a lot of tutorials and a platform called Heroku that makes it super easy to deploy and run a website. Buy this book: http://pragprog.com/titles/rails4/agile-web-development-with-rails and work through it until you’re satisfied with what you have. You should now be able to make a decent website and have some ability to evaluate other developers’ work.
  3. When you find someone, give them some small, finite, measurable deliverables that you pay for (cash or equity) upon completion of each piece. They’re auditioning as a developer, but you’re also auditioning as a boss/partner. Employing a person, let alone taking them on as a partner, is a big commitment, and you want more due diligence than a couple of emails.
  4. Pay. Microeconomics works, so the more money you can offer, the deeper your pool of candidates you’ll have access to. If you want people to believe your stock is going to be worth something, you’d better show some convincing proof. This goes doubly outside of Silicon Valley.
  5. Move, or allow telecommuters. No one is going to move to a somewhat isolated town of 350,000 for you until you’re an established company. Groupon could open an office there and people would flock to it. They won’t do that for you or me. The big tech markets of NYC, SV, Boston, Seattle, Austin, etc have the deepest technical talent, but they also have tight labor markets for developers. Big metros like Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, or Los Angeles have lots of technical workers without the startup culture. Also consider smaller places with high levels of technical talent – Columbus OH, Portland, Research Triangle NC, Pittsburgh, Ithaca, etc.
  6. Consider applying to the SproutBox program (http://www.sproutbox.com/ ). They take a higher % of equity than other incubators, but they co-build companies with you, providing developers and other resources beyond just a little $.

Readers, do you have any other recommendations for an unfunded, unheralded startup trying to find a developer?

iPads are awesome!

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I’ve had my ipad for a couple months now and I love it! This is the first long thing i’ve typed on it so it’s taking me a while and I’m having to fix a lot of typos. But other than that, it’s great!

Most of the obvious things have been said already, so here are some things I’ve noticed but haven’t heard:

1) I bought a DODOcase and it is a wonderful iPad case!It looks great, feels much more comfortable in my hand than the iPad by itself, and it had kept my iPad looking brand new. My only complaint is that the corner foam pads don’t hold the ipad in very well when you’re laying down and the case is vertical or facing downwards.
UPDATE 8/12/2010: DODOcase mailed out a new set of corner pads. I haven’t put them on yet but apparently they are listening 🙂
2) there’s not a great pdf reading solution that i’ve found. Any pdf that’s formatted with wide margins is a problem. iBooks doesn’t preserve zoom across pages so you have to rezoom every page. Goodreader preserves zoom but doesn’t turn the page the same way when the pdf is zoomed. Converting PDFs to epub with calibre can mess up page formatting and stick page headers and footers in the middle of pages (this is probably because the ebb and PDF pages wre different sizes.)
3) My kids love it. Of course they love the Dr Suess books and games, but their absolute favorite? The Elements, especially the song at the beginning. No more “Twinkle twinkle”, their lullaby starts out with “there’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium…”

There’s lots more to say but it has already been said. If you use a computer to entertain yourself, then an ipad will entertain you even better and I would recommend without hesitation that you buy one.

Everybody Hates Jason, or Why We’ll Never Have Robot Cars

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[I had written a better, longer version of this but then WordPress barfed on it. Enjoy the shoddy, hastily retyped version.]

This week, more details came out about the TechCrunch extortion scandal (too boring and non-eventful to link to). The extortee Sam Odio emailed Jason Calacanis explaining that he was the one involved. Jason forwarded the email to someone whose style I find so distasteful that I don’t even want to mention let alone link to them. The backlash against Mr Distasteful and Jason Calacanis was fast and furious – the comments “Calacanis does not seem worth trusting based on this.” and “When did Calacanis ever seem to be worth trusting? He’ll do anything to get attention.” became two of the top 25 highest voted comments on Hacker News, ever. Lots of people just don’t like Jason Calacanis.

This seems wierd to me. I’ve never heard anyone say “I know Jason Calacanis personally and I don’t like him” or “I’ve worked with Jason Calacanis and he’s horrible.” Ever since Jason expressed an interest in GeekStack, I’ve asked people I know how it was working with him, and it has been overwhelmingly positive. For example, last week I emailed him asking for a lawyer recommendation, and he emailed me back within 2 hours with an introduction. I’ve written before about why I think it’s useful for tech entrepreneurs to listen to Jason Calacanis. It’s only people that know of him that hate him (I’m sure there are people that know him and dislike him, I’ve just never heard them speak up).

The short story of what happened is:

  • TC reporter asks for a MacBook Air in exchange for coverage
  • Sam (founder of Divvyshot) hems and haws about it, flustered by the direct extortion
  • Story breaks with limited details
  • Jason writes about it
  • Sam writes an email to Jason confessing his role in it
  • Jason forwards an email to Mr Distasteful
  • Mr Distasteful threatens to expose Sam
  • Sam comes clean, tells story
  • Everyone piles on Jason for forwarding the email

Jason added some details on Hacker News

  • He gets 400-500 emails a day
  • This email was not clearly marked as confidential
  • He didn’t know what Mr Distasteful was going to do with it

Sounds like a simple misunderstanding that we can all learn lessons from:

  • When you want something to be confidential, put CONFIDENTIAL in the subject and first line
  • When emailing a busy person, have useful subject, short body, and clear ask at the end
  • If something seems “hot”, think twice about who you tell about it

Jason and Sam both made some faux pas here, but they’ll both survive. And despite this, Jason does tons to help entrepreneurs. TechCrunch50 has sped lots of great companies on their way to success, TWiST has taught lots of entrepreneurs and helped others directly (yours truly included), and Open Angel Forum has connected 10 (soon to be dozens) of startups with the best angels in the business. This is in addition to the small throwaway things that he does in private, like helping me find a lawyer. This is all in addition to his day job.

What does this have to do with Robot Cars? Just like the preconceived distrust people have for Jason keeps them from seeing the good he does, the distrust people have for technology that takes power away from humans will prevent us from using robot cars. Even if they perform 100x safer per mile, every accident will bring headlines like “2 More Die Due To Robotic Failure”. Fear will keep a net beneficial technology that saves lives from being adopted. Ok, it was a stretch of a point to make, but it was a really fun headline to write.

Good thing Jason has thicker skin than the robots!

Build Your Own Mentor (or Why One Hour of Mixergy Isn’t Enough)

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Lots of people read, liked, and shared my post about Mixergy yesterday (thanks to @prague360, @brentcapello, @kicauan, @technophilis, @antest, @monocat, of course @AndrewWarner, and others for spreading the word). The outpouring of appreciation for Andrew’s work was voluminous and well deserved, and so I thought I’d add some extra thoughts that didn’t make it into the original post.

I knew about Mixergy long before I became a big fan. One of his interviews would get posted at Hacker News, I’d recognize the name and click through, then find a video to download and usually it would end there. I’m a copious podcast listener and one of the greatest moments in my podcast-listening life was when the iPhone OS 2.0 (3.0?) added a “2x” button to podcast playback. This lets me listen to twice as much audio in the same amount of time. But it doesn’t work for video. So Mixergy interviews, while they sounded nice, were already long and because videos can only play back at normal speed, it feels twice as long. This meant Mixergy was a curious footnote and nothing more.

I finally listened to one when I just couldn’t say no to the interviewee (I think it was Jeffrey Kalmikoff of skinnyCorp) and was pleasantly surprised. It was my first exposure to Andrew’s interview style and it was so much more deep and informative than anything I’d heard before. This made me much more ambivalent (no, it doesn’t mean apathetic) about the amount of content Andrew produces once I knew how great it was. But I couldn’t keep up with it and didn’t watch another video for almost 6 months.

The magical moment was when I was reading the HN comments for one interview, someone posted a link to the audio for the interview, and I eventually found that there’s an iTunes-subscribable feed of the audio of all the interviews. This meant I could listen fast and have each interview dropped onto my iPod every day. Since then (around Christmas) I’ve listened to every interview and I realized there’s something different about listening to all of them vs just one. Listening to any given interview will give you some good insights and exposure to one person’s ideas. Some are particularly useful for dealing with a specific topic (like Law 101 for Startups – btw Andrew, many, many entrepreneurs become paralyzed by legal uncertainty and the cost of finding good answers – this was 100x better than reading web pages about law that are either too general or untrustworthy) but usually you don’t get a life-changing experience from one interview, just some spectacular anecdotes.

Listening to 10, 30, or 50+ interviews gives a whole different perspective. You move from anecdotes to data. Andrew goes into such detail that you basically have raw data on a bunch of successful companies, kind of reading business case studies in MBA school. Nobody tells you what you have to do to be successful, but you can weigh your situation against the situation and decisions made by so many others. I’d imagine it’s like the value Paul Graham and YCombinator provide. YC has graduated hundreds of companies and so they have a statistical level of experience with software startups and product development. When pg or any of the YC partners give you advice, it’s not just based on brains or hunches, it’s shaped by more experiences than any single person could accumulate. As detailed as he is, Andrew doesn’t know his interviewees as well as YC knows their companies, but Mixergy is free and open to anyone who takes the time to listen.

For an investment of 30 minutes a day, you learn enough to bounce your own ideas off of a stable full of entrepreneurs. You sort of become your own mentor. If you have access to a real life startup mentor like Paul Graham or Dave Cohen (of TechStars), by all means, use them as much as you can, but if you are locationally challenged, not ready to dive into a startup, not connected, too young, etc, let Mixergy be your mentor. You can come up with reasonable excuses for not moving to Boulder or Mountain View, but if you can’t or won’t take the free, unlimited mentoring that’s available at Mixergy, you’ll be walking blind with only your own untested entrepreneurial instincts.

Critical Fans (or how Mixergy did the Impossible)

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I’m a regular reader of Hacker News from the beginning. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s a community site where people post, vote on, and comment on links that are of interest to hackers. A corollary of that is that people want to find new stuff. For instance, I don’t subscribe to TechCrunch or any of the general tech news sites, I just read the good stuff that makes onto the Hacker News homepage.

Every once in a while, some writer ends up having every thing they write posted to Hacker News for a while. (Well, there are lots of people who get everything they write posted to HN but the problem I’m about to describe only affects those that write frequently). Whether it’s a flurry of good writing, or exposure to new readers that get excited about their archives, they can end up with several links on the front page, or something of theirs posted every day of the week. The problem is that for the HN readers that already have an opinion about this writer, these links are noise. If you like the writer, you’ve already subscribed to their blog, and if you don’t like them, you don’t want to see them every day. So tension builds, snarky or negative comments get posted, and then there’s a backlash against links to that writer. After the backlash, the links from that person slow down and once again, only the best of their stuff gets posted rather than everything they write. I’ve seen it happen with Coding Horror, Seth Godin, 37signals, TechCrunch, and others.

This brings us to Mixergy. Mixergy is a site with daily interviews of successful entrepreneurs. The interviews are broadcast as live video, then available for download in audio or video format later. There are a couple things that make Mixergy special. First, Andrew Warner gets excellent guests. In addition to many big names in tech and enturepreneurship, he finds a constant stream of people with interesting and valuable experiences that you’ve never heard of. Second, it’s very well produced – interviews are at the same time every day, there’s a calendar of upcoming events so you can plan ahead to watch ones you’re interested in, the video and audio recordings are up later that day, and there’s a community-produced transcript for each episode. Third, there’s a strong community that participates in the interviews, suggests and connects new people, and pushes Andrew to continually get better. But the biggest strength by far is Andrew himself.

Most podcasts are somewhere between god-awful and tolerable. The “best” ones are still generally a couple of guys shooting the breeze with maybe something resembling a plan. But Andrew researches each person he’s going to talk to, prepares questions in advance, sends the questions to the interviewee, and has a pre-interview talk with them, including going over which questions won’t be answered (like finaicial figures). Despite all the preparation, Andrew probes for and chases down whatever interesting tidbits come up in conversation, then works his way back to the plan. Nothing gets past him or left out by him. For instance, when he was interviewing Rahul Sood of Voodoo PC, he was very meticulous about the timing of Rahul’s entrepreneurial activities as a teenager, including when he bought an old house in Calgary that he ended up selling later for $1M. If you listen to Andrew talk to someone for an hour, you’ll feel like you’ve known that person for years. And after 200+ interviews, he has his technique down pat.

Those are all great, but the thing that really makes Andrew special is how gracious he is. Listening to him talk makes you feel like he’s shaking your hand, but the really nice handshake where they put their left hand on top of your clasped rights. He’s extremely polite and thankful to all of his guests, his listeners, community, and sponsors. He seeks out, graciously accepts, and implements feedback he receives on his site and other forums. He’s truly a class act, one of those people you want to hate for being so good, but there so good that you can’t help but like them. I haven’t met him but I’m sure if I did, he’d make me feel like a million bucks and that he was the lucky one to get to meet me.

Back to Hacker News, there has been a Mixergy backlash building because his interviews have been posted every day for the last couple of weeks. People were starting to get agitated, but then something amazing happened. One person asked:

Serious question: is Mixergy considered a worthwhile site? Haven’t I seen it dissed on HN before?

I was worried that people were going to pile on, but then 10 people responsed, all positive, some extremely so. Here’s a sample:

I think it’s a life-changing site for sure and you get to hear from industry veterans first hand about a lot of relevant info. What more do you want?

They’re always really useful interviews. It’s like having several more long chapters in the “Founders at work” book.

If there was a Pulitzer for startup interviews, I’d expect Andrew Warner to be nominated.

I’m counting on Andrew’s insightful interview techniques so that he can “conjure” up from interviewees all the knowledge that they’ve build along their entrepreneurial experience so that we can learn from their successes and even failures.

Wow! Google could open source their search algorithms and I don’t think they would get as ringing praise as that from the HN crowd. Andrew, if you’re reading this, please know that you’re doing something very special as Mixergy and there are many, many people who appreciate it. Keep it up!

If you’re not Andrew and you’re interested in entrepreneurship at all, listen to a few of his interviews. While each person’s story is unique, hearing many of them helps you pick out common issues, pitfalls, characteristics, and opportunities. Mixergy lets you walk in the footsteps of giants, rather than fumbling in the dark.

UPDATE: Read the followup about how to Building Your Own Mentor here

A Closed Apple Platform is Inevitable But Temporary

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A big thanks to Chris Dixon for writing “Should Apple be more open?” I was going to write basically the same thing but he saved me the trouble. If you don’t understand what he’s writing, read The Innovator’s Solution. The short answer is that see how the primary criteria customers use to choose a product changes over time because technology improves faster than customer needs.

Dang it, now I’ve started writing so I might as well say the other thing that people haven’t been saying about the iPad. If you can spell “vim” or “emacs” or “ssh”, this computer isn’t for you. It’s for people who don’t use computers much because they’re hard to use. I think this could be as important as the original Macintosh for changing the way people use computers for the next 30 years. Computers as we know them are a super optimized expression of 40 years of progress. (No, seriously, name one thing we have now that wasn’t in Engelbart’s 1968 demo besides more horsepower.) This is wild speculation, but I think the iPad demo could be a similar moment, an expression of another path for computing. Obviously hardware makers think so because everyone with a soldering iron is pushing whatever flat, keyboardless device they threw together in time to ride the iPad media wave.

But to those that already heavily use a computer for specialized tasks, we’re the ones who need to be scared of the Innovator’s Dilemma and Innovator’s Solution. The axis of choice has already shifted away from power to price, and it is in the process of shifting from price to convenience and usability. Arguably there’s no way to fix the major problems with complexity and security that modern OSes have without breaking decades worth of legacy apps. So a clean break, whether it be iPhone OS, Android, ChromeOS, or other, is likely to be the platform of the future? Which one? iPhone OS is clearly the new platform for the immediate future and the iPad is only going to strengthen that, but the convenient, touch-based media consumption model of computing will go through a similar cycle of plausibility, power, price, then convenience. When it shifts from power to price, an open platform will gain advantages over a closed one and Apple will either loosen up or become a profitable niche player in mobile computing as well as legacy computing.

EDIT: Someone else also did a better job of writing what I wanted to: iPad: An Apple for Mom. Thanks, Daniel!

Followup Questions to Strategic SEO for Startups

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Anyone who is doing a startup should be reading Patrick McKenzie’s blog MicroISV on a Shoestring. He’s an American living in Japan and in his spare time over the last few years, he has built his Bingo Card Creator product into a business that has allowed him to quit his day job. He has done this through ruthless efficiency, analytics, SEO, and iterative learning from experience. While Eric Ries of Lean Startups fame talks about the big picture and vision, Patrick gives a boots-on-the-ground account of his experience. The fact that he can support himself selling Bingo Cards has led me to refer to him as the reductio-ad-absurdum of the ability of the Internet to support any product. If he can make it selling bingo cards, your startup can succeed. So if you haven’t already opened his blog in a new tab to read after you finish this, do so now.

His latest post, Stategic SEO for Startups, is a classic Shoestring article. In the longish article, he describes the basics of SEO, why some common conceptions about it are wrong, how it can work to your advantage if done right, and the hallmarks of good startup SEO. Again, read his article but the main takeaway is that you do better by ranking high in lots of specific, niche keywords that relate to your product, and the way to rank high is to start early, iterate, and get links back to your site. Clearly he knows what he’s doing because I’ve already linked to his business blog and his product.

But to show him I really understood the article, I’m responding to his thinly veiled request in the very last article: “I do try to write most people who ask for advice (odds are better if you ask good focused questions, let me get a blog post out of it, etc)…” So Patrick, in the spirit of mutual SEO building, here are some good focused questions that you can answer publicly. If and when you answer them, I’ll happily link to your answers:

  1. In the past you’ve talked about outsourcing your content creation to your “army of freelancers”. What did that consist of on your end? My guess is you looked at terms and topics people were searching for (you mentioned “baby shower bingo” once) and then sent a job to your freelancers to come up with 80 or so baby shower words that you feed into your card generator and sample bingo card landing pages.
  2. How do you analyze and rank your SEO strategies? I see your sample card landing pages have an id that they pass to the registration page so you know how the different landing pages are converting. What other methods do you use to determine which SEO methods are most valuable to you?
  3. Your Bingo Card landing pages allow you to programatically generate tons of pages from content in your product. What other tips do you have for getting lots of good SEO content for a low investment of time/money?

GeekStack is very close to starting playtesting and once there’s some feedback coming in there I’m turning my attention to SEO, marketing, etc, so this is on my mind. Thanks in advance – you’re one of my favorite startup writers and every time I see a “MicroISV on a Shoestring” article on Hacker News of in Google Reader I know I’m getting something good.

UPDATE: Sure enough, Patrick responsed within 16 hours and his reply is here: Followup Questions for “Strategic SEO for Startups” Thanks, Patrick!