Want more femgineers?

Looking back 21 years ago I never would have fathomed I would have become a femgineer.  At the age of 8 I had decided I was going to be a lawyer, writer, and professor because I loved to read, write, and speak.  I spent the next 10 years of my life working toward that goal.  In elementary and middle school I wrote short stories, in high school I joined the debate team, and when it was time for college I chose Duke because it has a really great law school.  So where did I get of course and decide to become an engineer, pursuing 2 majors (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) then decide to move to California, work in the tech industry, then join startup, and then start my own company?  Well the truth is I was NEVER encouraged by anyone to become a lawyer.  In fact, as I’ve pointed out in this blog a number of times most of the men in my family are engineers.  And when I told most people I wanted to be a lawyer people were actually shocked that I didn’t want to be a doctor or engineer despite coming from an Indian immigrant family.

But what led up to me actually switching?  While I was growing up no one told me to be an engineer, my family didn’t even push me towards a particular career they just figured I’d end up in finance, engineering, or medicine.  But there were a couple things that were happening on the sidelines.  First my mom and dad really pushed me to excel at math and science mostly because they wanted me to keep up with the other Indian kids, which I didn’t really care about but it did make me more competitive in other areas like high school debate.  Second, I’ll never forget the day I went to my cousin’s house and saw she had a computer, I really wanted one badly… Why?  Because I wanted to play video games, type up my short stories faster, explore on the internet, and submit pretty book reports to my teacher.  I just wanted a computer to live a full life and accomplish goals I had.  Finally, there was the time that my dad took me to see his fab when he worked for Texas Instruments (my dad  has actually worked for a lot of the big players: Sony, TI, Intel, Samsung, and Microchip).  I was just blown away when I saw how the little robotic arm picked up each wafer (computer chip) and moved it over.  I just sat there and stared at it for hours.  Despite the curiosity of how things worked, the lifestyle of being an engineer was not glamorous to me.  I grew up watching Ally McBeal…

So what did finally got me into engineering?  Realizing I was a builder.  I realized that all my life what I really enjoyed more than anything was building and creating things that made life more enjoyable.  I always loved technology, I taught myself how to make my first webpage using Geocities in high school, I used to hang out with the nerdy boys who would burn CDs on the weekends, and spent hours on the internet reading, researching, and of course chatting with people who I wasn’t supposed to (a/s/l ring a bell?!).

I was literally sitting in my freshman economics class bored to tears and tired of just reading and writing papers.  I wanted to build something.  I wanted to create.  And that’s what drove me to taking my first computer science class in college.  The rest is history.

How do you encourage engineering?

But enough about me, this is about how we can encourage young women or girls to become femgineers.  Well let’s start with what it means to be a femgineer.  I coined the term almost 5 years ago and started this blog.  To me being a femgineer means you are an engineer at the core, you enjoy building things in software or hardware, but you are chic and sophisticated, you have a personality beyond being a nerd.  Maybe you like to travel, speak a few languages, play sports, enjoy cooking, and the list goes on.  Its not enough to tell girls what they should become or what society needs, you need to sell them on the vision of what life will be like, and how you affect the world.  In order to that you need to have role models.

When I was growing up there were hardly any women in engineering that were strong role models.  Until I met my college professor Lisa Huettel.  She was the first female engineer who inspired me.  She was young, energetic, and I loved her method of teaching and the time that she took with each student.  She was one of the driving forces for me switching into engineering in college.

We need more role models and we need to showcase them front and center.  Point out their achievements both as an engineer and in life.  Options are available for those individuals looking to make a difference in their life along with ways to help with the cost of an education. There are even opportunities for single mom scholarships to ease the stress from family while earning a degree.  Its important to take a holistic approach, work isn’t everything.

How do you retain engineers?

When I was graduating from college I noticed a lot of my peers actually didn’t go on to become engineers both men and women.  Even people who were better engineers in college than me! What did they go on to become?  Investment bankers and consultants.  Why?  Because they saw absolutely no value in being an engineer.  What they had experienced through internships were dull days of sitting behind a desk coding, little to no social interaction, and forget the opportunity for travel or making bank.  Being a consultant had a glamorous lifestyle at least on face value.

Then I saw the same thing happen at large companies.  Women who were engineers were leaving to become mothers or pursue other jobs where they could meet with people on a daily basis instead of sitting behind a desk.

Those who were initially interested in engineering are  dropping out.  Its not that they don’t like building or problem solving, they’re unhappy with the their job or the lifestyle.  These people initially bought into the vision of building, problem solving, and creating products that improve people’s lives.  But the reality of it was long hours, lack of appreciation, and unhappiness caused by sitting at a desk coding all day.  Being treated like a cog will not inspire or motivate people.

We can encourage young girls and boys to pursue jobs as engineers all we want.  But if we don’t do a good job of keeping them motivated they will drop out at some point whether its high school, college, or even after the enter the industry.  Part of the reason many engineers join startups is because they get to be part of the product, process, and profits.

When children are growing up explain to them what it means to be an engineer, point out the jobs that are out there in hardware, software, and design.  Show them the value in building and creating.  Want more femgineers or mengineers?  Encouragement them every step of the way, its the only way to inspire and motivate anyone!

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2011
09/23
CATEGORY
Uncategorized
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Challenges of Getting Early Adopters, Acquiring Customers & Monetizing

I’ve gotten some requests recently to write a post on how we’ve gotten early adopters at BizeeBee and how we got them at Mint.  I hate to burst everyone’s tech bubble but there is no secret for getting early adopters.  I also want to address two concepts in this posts getting early adopters vs. methods for customer acquisition.  The reason for the dichotomy is that an early adopter is essentially a product tester and product evangelist.  They will stick around forever and are highly critical to the success of your business because they promote your product, but to me they are not really customers.  Why?  Because early adopters are people whom you get by talking to them directly and they help you build out the alpha/beta versions of your product. They’re loyal, and will give you lots of feedback. Customers are the people you pay to acquire through advertising, struggle trying to keep engaged, churn through, and whom early adopters get to buy your product through word of mouth marketing.

Why do you want early adopters? And how to do you get early adopters?

Because early adopters actually prove product/market fit.  Your early adopters are the folks who are going to use your product, give you honest feedback, and will wade through bugs and various iterations.

First you need to figure out who you’re trying to solve a problem for by creating a persona.  Then you need to get out, show them your prototype (preferably one that is paper-based), and then ask them to try out the actual prototype.  Drop-off point #1, people  are busy…  You’ll get a lot of “sure contact me when it’s ready” or “send me access to a demo”.   In reality you need to talk to a lot of folks before you can even get one to respond, play with the product, and give you feedback, which by the way is the whole point of getting early adopters!

The key to getting more early adopters is to think like one.  Figure out where these folks hang out (online and offline), what they read, where they learn about products, and who they learn about products from.  Then go out and talk your product up in these channels.  What you’ll most likely hear is what we heard at BizeeBee a bunch of: “No, we’re not interested.”  So we changed our approach, instead of trying to sell the product to people we started asking “Why don’t you like our product?  Who do you think would be interested in trying this out?” And that’s when things got interesting…

We got some “Well I know this guy in New Orleans who just opened a small studio…” and a “Oh my studio is too big, but our second studio is relatively small…”

Now of course we get “Well I really need this for my vertical, when is it going to be out?” Hook, line, and sinker :)

The final point I’ll make about early adopters is that they’re great for testing out the product’s concept, workflows, and positioning in the market.

And now the challenge begins…

How do you get customers?

When I first moved to the Bay Area in 2004 I’d heard buzz words like social and viral, because Facebook was dominating the market in terms of growth and there were social networks galore.  Now 7 years later I hear countless stories from startups who basically talk about how they hustled by iterating on the product, and finding the right customer base to target until they saw traction like Airbnb and Square.

At Mint we acquired customers through a combination of AdWords, InfoGraphics, and PR in print (blogs, magazines, newspapers, etc.).  PR was the most significant channel but also the most expensive approach, so I don’t know if I’d advocate it for every early stage startup.

What’s more interesting is the approach we took and how we explored various channels, measured the results, measured engagement, and then looked to see a correlation between engagement and monetization.  IMHO you don’t really have a customer until you monetize off of them.

We monetized off of lead gen, which is one tactic amongst a wide array.  The good news is that unlike the early to mid-2000s when everyone was giving away their product in hopes of  making money off of advertising and users were use to everything being free, nowadays users are willing to pay for things on the interwebs, but only for things they absolutely can’t live without…

Acquire first, monetize second?

Call me a capitalist but I’m not sure when the concept of going into business to give stuff away became the norm.  Yes I think you should pay to acquire a customer, that is of course the point of advertising and marketing, but this phenomenon of essentially giving away your product for free in hopes of luring a bunch of users, getting them hooked on the product, and then charging them seems silly to me.  That’s got to be the fastest way to make a hockey stick graph flip 180 degrees on its x-axis…  Even in a platform play there’s going to be a level of engagement (as in click throughs and conversions).   So what’s the point of having a 100k users if you can only monetize off of 1k or worse 1 of them?  You can of course build a cool product to sell it to someone else, in which case that should be your monetization scheme, i.e. exit strategy.

So to summarize:

  • Get some early adopters to fall in love, play with your product, and give you constant feedback.
  • Getting customers is going to be a bit of a shotgun approach, but measure each channel, and test which ones convert to paying.  Be quick about this unless your gut tells you that some channels take longer than others.
  • If you’re going to give something away for free you need to make up the cost of building it somewhere else.

Remember this is a hard process and it takes time.  But it gets easier if you create feedback loops, listen to what your early adopters and customers are telling you.  If the product sucks fix it, if the pricing is confusing make it clearer, if marketing is expensive look for less expensive channels, and if you aren’t building something that people want then figure out what they do want and build that!

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2011
08/19
CATEGORY
My Startup
Startups
2 comments

Cinnamon Spiced Israeli Couscous with Chicken

When I’m crunched for time I love making one-pot meals that have a good balance of protein, complex carbs, and fruits and vegetables.  This dish is great for when you have company over as well because it serves about 4 people, and you can save the left overs in an air tight container in the fridge for a couple days.  I usually make it on fall evenings, but you can make it year round because the ingredients aren’t seasonal.

Prep Time 15 minutes + Cooking Time 15 minutes =  30 minutes

Ingredients

  • 1-2 teaspoons cinnamon
  • 1 cup Israeli couscous
  • 3 boneless skinless chicken breasts (cut into 1 inch pieces) (I’m a bit of an organic fiend so I usually buy organic chicken breasts and I also find they make dishes like this taste better.  You can also skip using chicken altogether and serve this as a vegetarian side.)
  • 1 medium sweet vidalia onion (diced) (I like to use vidalia instead of yellow because the sweetness of it mirrors the sweetness of the rest of the dish.)
  • 1 garlic clove minced (optional)
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil (Tip: substitute with 1 tbsp unsalted butter if you want a richer dish more flavorful dish, which is sometimes nicer for a hearty fall meal.)
  • 1-2 gala or fuji apples (cored & diced – leave the skin on)
  • 1/2 cup dates (pitted and diced)
  • 1 cup water (Tip: if you want to enhance the chicken-y flavor of the dish use low-sodium chicken broth instead of water.)
  • 1/2 chopped cilantro for garnish (optional)
  • handful of sliced almonds (optional)

Directions

  1. Heat a deep pan to medium heat and add olive oil (or butter).
  2. Once the olive oil has been heated (or butter melted) add onion,  garlic, and saute for about 3 minutes until the onion is clear.  (Tip: when sweating onions don’t  over stir, just occasionally stir them around.)
  3. Add cinnamon to the sauteed onion and garlic.
  4. Add diced chicken and cook until white not brown (5-7 minutes) (Tip: to avoid overcooking and drying out the chicken once its white move onto the the next step. The chicken will finish cooking as you cook the couscous.)
  5. Season with a little sea salt and fresh ground pepper
  6. Add diced apple and dates and saute for about 1 minute
  7. Add couscous and roast dry for about 1 minute
  8. Add about 1 cup water to the couscous (or as directed on the package of couscous), may need more water depending on how thick you want the mixture to be.
  9. Cook until couscous is done.
  10. If you want add a little more texture to the dish throw in a handful of sliced almonds once the couscous is done cooking.
  11. I know not everyone loves cilantro so you can leave it out, or use it as a garnish by adding it once you’re done cooking and right before you serve the dish.

You can serve this dish with a light salad or steamed green beans, but I find that its a pretty balanced meal on its own. Bon Apetit :)

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2011
08/16
CATEGORY
Recipes
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Sesame Ahi Tuna with Spicy Mango & Avocado Salad

This is my take on the more traditional ahi tuna tartare that’s served as an appetizer at restaurants with a little bit of kick.  I make it when I’m craving a healthy summer fish dish with a sweet & spicy complement!  I also intensify the flavor of sesame by using seeds and cooking the fish in sesame oil.  Its pretty healthy dish that can be made quickly and easily.  If you’re cooking for one, you can just cut the ingredients in half.

Prep Time 25 minutes + cooking time 5 minutes = total time 30 minutes.

Ingredients for the Tuna Steaks

  • 2 3oz ahi tuna steaks (Fish Tip: I like to buy these fresh from the market & cook them they same day, that way I only have to sear them.  If you keep the steaks for longer then you’ll need to cook them more thoroughly.)
  • 1 tbsp white sesame seeds
  • 2 tbsp sesame oil (I love the flavor of La Tourangelle toasted sesame seed oil, its a little pricey but can be used for cooking and salad dressing.)
  • fresh ground sea salt & black pepper

Ingredients for the Mango & Avocado Salad

  • 1 large ripe mango cut into chunks
  • fresh squeezed lime juice from 1 lime
  • 1/2 cup chopped cilantro
  • 1/2 cup chopped red onion
  • 1 medium ripe avocado cut into chunks
  • 1/2 a jalapeno (seeded and finely chopped)

Directions for spicy mango salad

  1. Throw all salad ingredients into a bowl and gently toss.  (Spicy Tip: if want more heat leave the seeds in the jalapeno and chop it up.)
  2. I like to let the salad sit while I make the steaks, this also melds the sweetness of the mango with the spiciness of the jalapeno.

Directions for tuna steaks

  1. Coat the tuna steaks with 1 tbsp of the sesame oil
  2. Sprinkle sesame seeds over them
  3. Season with ground sea salt & pepper
  4. Start by heating a medium skillet to medium heat, once the pan is heated reduce the heat to low, and add the other tbsp of sesame oil.  (Tip: when you cook with sesame oil you want to cook it with low to medium heat because it heats up very quickly and can splatter & crackle.)
  5. Once the oil has been heated add the steaks to the pan.
  6. Sear the steaks on each side for about 3-5 minutes.  I like mine pretty rare so I do about 3 minutes max.
  7. Once the steaks are done top with the spicy mango salad and enjoy!

And let me know how you liked this recipe, there’s more to come! Bon Apetit! :)

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2011
08/16
CATEGORY
Recipes
1 comment

Getting Your Startup Team to Understand Your Customer

Its been 8 months since we launched our first product at BizeeBee.  When we launched we had 3 customers (yoga studios), they saw the value in what we were building, so much that one studio owner  worked very closely with me for almost year.  Since launching my desire to please customers hasn’t stopped.  The buzz bee and I spend nearly every week talking to customers either on Twitter, Facebook, via email, or on the phone.  I’m always asking for feedback on the product, improving how we react to bugs, and listening to their problems.  Why am I so obsessed with talking to customers?  And why do I care about their business?  Because no one on my team including myself has ever owned or managed a yoga studio!  I’ve worked behind the front desk, and seen how they operate, but I myself have never owned one.  Since none of us have lived the life of a studio owner and we’re designing a product for them, we have to learn to think like them.  Here’s how to cultivate the learning and get your team to understand who you’re building a product for:

1. Develop personas

Sure some would say this is easier said than done because at an early stage the customer is constantly evolving.  But if you’ve gotten some level of product/market fit you should have customers that are using your product everyday, or have some predictable rate of use.  Fortunately for us we have a core group that is using the product everyday, and I know this because I log into the admin I’ve built everyday to see what people are doing.  But here’s the next part that is hard for startup folks to do… pick up the phone and give customers a call.  Yes I know they’re busy, you’re busy, everyone is freakin’ bizee. But I’ve learned more about the nuanced ways in which people use our product by listening to them on the phone or watching them in person.  The other great thing is that once you’ve got them on the call you can learn more about their needs. Its finding out the needs that’s the key to developing personas.

To me a persona is a set of personality traits and problems that a person faces.  We currently have 3 personas that our product works well for, meaning they adopt our product and are relatively happy.  I know those who don’t fit the persona will drop off, and that’s fine too.  Here’s what I do with the persona:

  • I convey it to my team so they develop empathy.  Its that empathy that lets them design and build a product that actually meets the needs of the persona.
  • I use it when talking to potential customers.  When someone calls us, I ask them some pretty basic questions to see if they’re a match.  If they are I try to sell to them, if not I tell them they’d be happy with one of our competitors.
  • I put the personas in ALL of our marketing materials.  I want the world to know who BizeeBee is for and who it isn’t for so that I get a match.

2. Build a Community Brand So You Know What to Build

I’ve always had an issue with the vocal minority and using anecdotes to build features, to avoid it even being an issue I actually took sometime to create a customer feedback forum.  Our customers can post bugs, ideas, and vote up  features.  We use the forum as a guide for what gets built.  There have been a couple times when I have literally dropped everything to build a feature because I saw how popular it was and I was tired of losing leads.

I know there are a lot of founders out there who take a “father know’s best approach” to product development.  That works too.  The reason I chose the community route is because I saw that the people we’re catering to weren’t being heard by our competitors!  The other is that people who have a voice that is being heard are willing to contribute their ideas to improve the product and tell other potential customers about it!

Now the one caveat I will mention is that what gets built still needs to match the main persona.  And this is important, because then your team begins to understand the reason why they are building or refining one feature as opposed to another.

3. Let Ideas Simmer

One of the interesting things I’ve learned about the bees is that on average it has taken each one about 3 months to get into their groove.  By groove I mean building, selling, and communicating with one another.  As a founder you cannot rush this process.  I know it can be painful for them, but watching them go through the process and coaching them through it has actually been really rewarding for me as a founder.  People need time to absorb the vision, adjust to their environment, and let the ideas simmer before they really feel like they get what it is they are working on.  There will be moments of confusion and clarity.  What helps bring clarity is having your teammates talk to customers, read customer emails, and understand the dichotomy of who is and isn’t a customer and why (once again refer to #1).  There will also be a lot of “Why don’t we go after this new group?  Why did so-and-so not convert to a paying customer?”  Instead of answering these questions yourself have the last hire explain the answers.  You’ll be surprised by the results :)

So why is it so important that your team understands your customer, why not just have them shut up and build?  I’m no genius nor am I capable of coming up with solutions to every problem.  I’ll admit I need help selling, building, and running a company.  The more I communicate with my team the more they know what’s going on, and in turn can make educated decisions.  Having direct interactions with customers is even more powerful because part of the reward of being in an early stage startup is seeing that what you build actually matters to people and improves their lives, that’s the greatest motivating factor of all!

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2011
08/03
CATEGORY
My Startup
Product Development
Startups
3 comments

Want a healthy and happy team? Welcome, spot, and resolve conflict.

The wonderful part of being in an early stage startup is that you get to be a part of a small team, you have a voice, you get to build, and you’re all plugging along towards a common goal of creating something that adds value.  There are great problems to solve and you’re all hi-fiving each other after you solve them and go out for beers to celebrate.  These are the precious moments that we all look forward to and its the reason we keep participating and being a part of the team.  But there’s a dark side, one that no one really seems to talk about.  It happens when you least suspect it to.  One moment things are going great and then the next minute bam!  You get sideswiped.  Of course you didn’t see it coming or maybe you did?  What am I talking about?  Conflict.

On every team there is a point in time where one person (instigator) does something that for some reason seems to piss one or more people off.  The pissed of party may hold it in for a period of time but at some point there is going to be an eruption.  Regardless, conflict rears its ugly head and it needs to be addressed.

What I want want to cover in this post are techniques to spotting conflict and how to go about resolving them.

The thing about conflict is that you never know when its going to come up.  So the surest way to minimize it is by taking an emotional pulse of everyone on the team daily.  For a small team having daily scrums is a good way to do this, because it prevents the little annoyances like people being stuck or waiting on each other to complete tasks that can cause conflict to build-up.

Spotting Conflict

The founder of the startup or leader of the team  should also have weekly 1-1s with each team member.  I cannot emphasize this event enough.  If you’re busy, reschedule, but make sure it happens weekly.  As a founder, one of your primary responsibilities is to make sure that everyone on your team is happy and productive.  The first step is to make sure their voice gets heard weekly.  So during each 1-1 checkin to see how things are going.  Everyone is different, and some people may initially be resistant to opening up, which is why you have to treat each 1-1 as a safe haven and treat all things discussed as confidential.  Let each person speak, hear them out first and foremost, duct tape your mouth if you’re a chatty cathy!  Let them have their time to speak no matter how long it takes and then start to address their concern.

The second most important thing you need to be doing as a founder or team lead is addressing concerns of individuals and you have to do it in a timely manner.  Not saying drop everything but the moment they bring something up see if its valid and if so think of ways in which you can resolve the issue before it starts to grow.  Then set realistic expectations for when it can be resolved.  Some problems take time and others can be resolved in a matter of minutes.  I’ve seen too many founders get caught up in their own work or projects to care about the issues of their teammates or be dismissive.  If you want to be dismissive then you shouldn’t have assembled a team and you certainly shouldn’t be the leader, you’d be happier and save others mental anguish by being an individual contributor.  Being a team leader is listening to people’s problems and coming up with a solution together.  Dismissing a problem is not a healthy dynamic for team building.

You also need to create an atmosphere where confrontation is ok.  I’ve seen passive aggressive behavior on many teams, which only compounds conflict.  By passive aggressive behavior I mean: using email or some other form of communication to each other instead of having a face-to-face interaction, ignoring one another in common areas, or exchanging slight jabs or sarcasm while socializing.  All of the above are inappropriate, should never be tolerated, and nipped in the bud.

Resolving Conflict

In general I like to let people resolve conflict amongst themselves, primarily because I like to give people the benefit of the doubt and I hate micro-managing and being micro-managed.  But there are times when there needs to be a mediator because there is an impasse.  When an impasse arises the first thing to do is to calm each person down.  I know this seems silly, but there is no way you can understand what’s going on if people cannot communicate the issue to you.  Next understand the issue, but don’t take sides.  Get to the heart of the problem.  The primary goal isn’t to conclude who is right or wrong, it’s that people have concerns or feel hurt and that needs to be resolved first.

The second goal is to resolve the problem in front of you.  I’d take a two step approach.  First make sure that people are in a calm mindset, that may require taking a break or a moment to calm everyone down.  Once everyone feels good then proceed to solving the problem.  When emotions are high no one is the right frame of mind to resolve anything and there will continue to be discord.

Once you’ve reconciled the conflict the third phase is what I call follow up.  This needs to happen weekly and monthly.  You want to make sure that the solution you put in place is working and that the conflict hasn’t come up again.

Finally, welcome conflict and learn to embrace it, because it means that people are actually passionate, alive, and thinking!  What you don’t want is for there to always be calm waters or people who are too afraid to speak up.  Having a team of complacent individuals does not lead to innovation, its leads to stagnation!  That’s not to say you need to have a team of passionate prima donnas.  There needs to be balance.  To foster that balance you have to allow conflict, be ok with it, and realize its a natural course of human relationships.  What keeps a team together is the way in which they address conflict and move forward towards building a team, a product, and ultimately a company!

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2011
02/26
CATEGORY
Startups
1 comment

SXSW Panel: “That’s Not My Job: Being A Career Generalist”

I will be speaking on a panel Saturday March 12th at 5pm.  Click here for additional details: “That’s Not My Job: Being A Career Generalist”

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2011
02/21
CATEGORY
Talks
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Hiring for a startup? First figure out who and what you want.

About once a week an email shows up in my inbox with question: “Know any engineers?”  followed by the requisite qualifier: “I’m looking for rockstars/hotshots/insert-ego-boosting-title-here.”  Of course, I know people even people I’d consider rockstars or hotshots, but I don’t know what you’re looking for and I don’t know if they’d be interested.  What’s been more interesting to me is that while I could connect people I don’t think that it necessarily translates to a successful hire or startup experience.  An introduction is just the beginning.

Let me tell you a little secret… a candidate is just like a customer, you have to do a good job figuring out if your startup is the right fit for you and them, then you have to sell them on the vision, then you’ll have to onboard them, and finally you’ll have to keep them engaged to avoid turnover!

For now I’m gonna focus this post on a conversation I had with a recent founder about figuring out fit:

1. Get rid of the words  ”hotshot, rockstar, etc” from your job description.

There are a couple issues I have with putting this in a job description.  For starters, you’re a startup you haven’t even proven yourself, what makes you think that even if someone was amazing they’d want to work for you?  Sure you’ve got funding and you’re making headway but still all you can give them is a worthwhile experience.  The second issue I have is it makes people out to be better than they are, yes they maybe fabulous and have a series of successes under their belt or gone to some awesome university, but they haven’t performed for you yet, past performance isn’t always the best indicator of future success.  So save the praise until they’ve checked in their first line of code or better yet until they’ve fought their first fire or shown some initiative at your startup.

2. Don’t look for hotshots look for the hungry.

I cannot emphasize this point enough.  Too many people want to bring in someone because they went to some awesome university or can crank out code.  That’s great if what you want is a workhorse… Remember a startup requires long hours, careful thought, collaboration, and stamina above all else.  I’ve witnessed too many people that come in the first year do their time get promoted and then the second year they coast.  Contrast hotshots to those who are hungry, they’re going to want to keep building, innovating, and have a vested interest in helping you succeed.

To that end my criteria is as follows: first is the person articulate?  They’re gonna need to be able to speak clearly and translate problems to other engineers and to other teams.  Second, are they rigorous when they solve problems, not everyone is going to answer every question correctly, what matters is were they methodical and covered a lot of ground and can they make it through a long interview process. Finally, emotional stability over accuracy this is the last on my list because someone can be really accurate but still fuck up on the job, everyone makes mistakes.  Being an engineer doesn’t mean you’re perfect it just means you can solve problems from multiple angles.  What you want is to figure out how resilient they are and do they keep their cool under fire.  The last thing you need is a loose canon.

3. Figure out your culture as a team.

Its not enough for you as a founder to think you know what the culture is, you need to ask your employees, because they’re the ones who are going to be working with this candidate day in and day out.  One bad hire can really impact the team and throw things off course, not to mention wear people down.  If you’re a sole founder you should still think about the personality traits you’re looking for in that first hire.

When it comes to culture think about the best personality traits that each person exemplifies including the founder, how do people interact with each other, what is the general development process, and most importantly how are conflicts resolved.  These are all selling points, its not enough to say “we have a great culture… we play ping-pong together”.  Sure you might have a great culture but if you all work 100 hours a week, and the founders and constantly bickering with each other, that might not be what a candidate is looking for.  Having this conversation with your team may actually expose some bad things about your culture that you want to fix, and thats ok too.  Just make sure the other person actually fits in with the culture before you hire them, and if you’re on the fence its perfectly ok to have them come work for a few weeks to see if there’s harmony.

You’ll know if they’re a good fit if they buy into the vision, seem interested in the projects people are working on, add immediate value in the form of improvements (suggesting tools, process changes) or want to learn more about the user base.

Someone likened hiring to a marriage.  Its not a marriage, at least not they way I think about marriage being eternal… hiring someone is just building a relationship with them and it can progress and get better or end whenever one or more people feel there are irreconcilable differences, hence divorce.  For each candidate you hire, you’re job as the founder is to make sure that they’re able to learn and grow, that they’re adding value not just to advance the company but to advance the team as well, and that they’re willing to resolve conflicts.

Happy hiring!

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2011
02/05
CATEGORY
Hiring
Startups
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Post-Launch Prep II

After launching BizeeBee I realized that my initial post on what to do after you launch wasn’t enough to cover all the work that the BizeeBee team has done after launching and thought I’d share some of our efforts.  We launched BizeeBee about three weeks ago with a few yoga studios across the nation.  The on-boarding process was pretty smooth, but once we had customers up and running I had an epiphany:  we have paying customers who depend on us for their livelihood, and we are a reflection of their business.  The team’s entire perspective about how we were managing our development process changed!  Here are the key things we added to our process:

1. Backup and Restore

We were responsible for the reliability of our users’ data.  They need this data to understand the health of their business and convey it to their customers.  If something happens we need to be able to retrieve their data and most importantly restore it!  So we started doing backups, initially daily, but will move to hourly.

2. Testing

We could no longer just deploy to production anytime we wanted because our users use our product daily and hourly to run their business.  While continuous deployment is pretty seamless, I was more afraid of introducing a bug during someone’s working hours, so I wanted plenty of time to test and do a hotfix if necessary.  If testing hasn’t been a priority in the alpha or beta, it should become an imperative once you’ve launched.

Even if you don’t have time to setup a full regression suite, you can take a cue from our development process:  we have all our flows documented, and run through all of them manually every night, even if the feature hasn’t been touched in months.  We also test across the three major browsers: Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.  The last thing I want to break is something simple like password recovery or deal with browser interoperability issues.  We’re working on creating an automated suite that will run daily to ensure code quality.

3. Branches

I initially disliked GitHub but now I love it!  It has made branching and merging a breeze because unlike SVN the cost of checking out and switching between branches is very low.  It doesn’t suffer from the same large data footprint that SVN does.  We created 4 categories of branches: master (current development branch), features (one off apps like internal tools), releases, and hotfixes, and also setup a policy of what could be checked into each branch.  For example, once a release branch has been created we can no longer check in new features only bug fixes.  Instituting these kinds of policies minimizes risk of introducing a bug after a release, and people have a good understanding of the ongoing changes in each released version.

4. Track Customer Support Issues

I created an admin tool that lets me login daily to see our user growth count and feature usage.  This also lets myself and my team troubleshoot any issues that customers might be facing.  It has read-only access to their data and the authorization is limited.  If you find yourself constantly querying logs and databases, and have teammates who don’t know SQL or how to query logs then creating a tool that reflects the data empowers them.  And resolving customer support issues as quickly as possible is critical to the quality of your startup!

These are just a few changes we made, but we’ve got even more in the pipeline: more data encryption, site monitoring, and scaling the system based on growth rate.  I’ll post another follow-up once we tackle those shortly.

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2010
12/28
CATEGORY
My Startup
Software Development
Startups
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Presentation Skillz: Handling Audio and Video

Keeping an audience captivated is the number 1 goal of any presenter.  The content of your presentation takes a backseat to being captivating; no one is going to pay attention to what you are saying if you aren’t interesting and engaging!  Being engaging requires energy and enthusiasm, which is easier to do in person because people absorb it through your body language and facial expressions.  But so many presentations today are done across a variety of technology mediums that it become hard to keep people interested.  I’ve done podcasts, videos, and more recently a presentation via Skype and received pretty good reviews.  Here are tips to keeping your audience enthralled through the use of subtle body cues.  Some of these may seem silly or overly obvious, but I’ve seen and hear a lot of bad presenters that didn’t take the time to prep and think about how they were presenting.  The result was an audience that didn’t find them to be credible and tuned out.

1. Audio

If I’m participating in a podcast or phone call where I’m not leading it I will ask for questions and topics that will be covered ahead of time.  I like to understand the context and then run through answers in my head.  Preparing ahead of time helps me to be more articulate and clear in my answers.  Small pauses are good but the last thing you want is dead air, to stutter, or use a lot of “ums” and “uhs”.  To avoid sounding the like drone make sure there is intonation in your voice.

To place emphasis on a point or explain a difficult topic slow your pace down and be a little more deliberate in your delivery.

Its also good to express positive emotion such as enthusiasm through laughter, raising your voice slightly, ending a sentence up tempo, or speeding up your words slightly.

Of course all of these should be sprinkled throughout a presentation, and should come out sounding natural not rehearsed.  So treat an audio presentation like you are having a conversation with a best friend.  Don’t try to sound like a sportscaster or fake the radio voice; people want to be able to connect with you and can only do so if your natural accent and voice come through.

Don’t ramble!  Its ok to have a mix of short and long sentence and take breaks when speaking.  Remember you audience needs time to process what you said.

2. Video

While the key to delivering a good presentation via audio is vocal quality the key for video is facial expression.  Your facial expressions should mirror the emotion you are conveying.

Once again positive emotion is emphasized through a smile, and when you want to highlight a point keep a neutral expression and bow your head slightly.  Be aware of head and eye movements, overuse of either can be distracting and detract from the point you are trying to make.

Keeping eye contact with the camera shows focus and that you are attentive, but at the same time you can come off as intimidating if you don’t break the focus once in awhile.  To do so raise your eyebrows or open your eyes when trying to convey excitement.  No need for a death stare…

Also be aware of your overall posture when doing video.  The way you sit or stand conveys confidence and credibility.

I know people get nervous when giving a presentation, I still have 30 seconds of fear before any presentation I give. Dealing with technology can exacerbate your nervousness.  The key to delivering a relaxed presentation is to prep and practice your delivery.

Finally, once the presentation is done take time to review it.  Watching or listening to your presentation isn’t narcissistic, you need to be aware of how you look and sound to improve for the next time.

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2010
11/27
CATEGORY
Presentations
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