20 7 / 2010
#criticism #support #inspiration Day 2.
Thanks to everyone who commented, followed, and voted the article up yesterday! I got 5 hours of sleep- you guys are relentless haha! Few things I learned:
Quality > Quantity. 1 Post a day it will be!
Also, listen to your readers / users for design cues! Apparently there was a problem with the font and CSS with the links? ;)
The main questions I got were:
What is your background? Who is proud n00b or Emile Petrone?
The short answer: I’ve been around the technology industry for the last 4 or 5 years. While at UNC, I founded a company that got a little publicity, and moved to Silicon Valley after it crashed. For the last 2.5 years, I worked at Yelp & TC50 winner, Redbeacon. I know the tech biz- I just don’t know how to build the tech. It’s time to stop sending people wireframes & mockups, and actually build what I believe in.
The longer version:
I grew up in TN to a family of entrepreneurs. Both grandfathers, and my dad started their own companies. One grandfather started Thompson Fishing Lures. If you’ve gone fishing, you’ve fished with a lure my grandfather designed- heard of the Doll Fly?. They made about 27.5 million lures/yr at their peak before he sold the company. My other grandfather started a liquor & wine distributing company that is still run by the family. My dad started a nurse staffing business. To say building companies is in my blood, is an understatement.
While in 5th grade, I got my first Macintosh, and our school got the world wide web. One of my friends and I got hooked on HTML and were in the computer lab every day playing on Geocities and browsing Yahoo for the latest and greatest games. At some point I remember Javascript coming along into our little universe, but we had no idea what to do or where to turn. TN wasn’t exactly a hotbed for technology. I knew it was amazing & would change everything, but I had no idea. The internet was emerging, and I was still on AOL. Wait AOL wasn’t the internet!? True story, I actually asked the hottest girl in school if she’d be my internet girlfriend - I got a NO! Lol. In 8th grade, my family moved to Charlotte, and there weren’t any other people with an interest in the web so my passion just faded as I went into those crazy teenage years.
While at UNC, I rowed on the crew team, was a Political Science major, and took Entrepreneurship courses on the side. One summer I interned on Capitol Hill, and saw real politics in action. Constituents coming in, lobbyist parties, committee hearings, opening the Senator’s mail- I saw it all. Basically I came away from that experience knowing : the government wastes tax dollars, influence comes not from the people but the elite, and business can (mostly) do it faster and cheaper.
That fall (2006) in Ted Zoller’s Entrepreneurship class, I had the idea for a Facebook for researchers. Let people connect across disciplines, create wild discoveries, and change the world! Knowble was started with that ideal, and it got traction early on. $20,000 contract from UNC to build the prototype as a part of a research grant.
Now for the people who say- “Don’t learn how to build it. Find someone else to do it.” I did that. It was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. In all honesty & like any normal (crazy) client, I changed my mind on things midstream many times. However from a client to developers- It is your responsibility to say “NO!” Freelancers- tell your clients your opinion, and back it up with evidence. It will make your life & clients’ lives much easier.
However, we got a site out the door, and it started getting some early adopters & press. I was featured in Fortune Small Business, spoke on the Young Innovators Panel at DEMOfall07, and attended Education Without Borders in Abu Dhabi. All great experiences and they will stick with me the rest of my life. One small problem- I had no more money for changes to the site, and there was 0 revenue (Websites are supposed to make money!?! Who knew!). UNC did not get the grant we tied the site to, and that funding dried up. Being 21 without any more $ to maintain the site & grow the company, Knowble was taken down with little fanfare.
One person I met along the way was Lisa Mitchell at the Kauffman Foundation - the leading non-profit on furthering Entrepreneurship. She invited me to come to the foundation and help them with their research site, the iBridge Network, for getting university innovations into the marketplace. Having just been featured in a magazine, to working on someone else’s site on the ground floor was a tough transition. I have/had, not sure which it is right now, cases of foot-in-mouth disease my whole life. I’d like to think that is a problem of my generation. I left my stint at the foundation in an inglorious fashion, but with an important life lesson: Within organizations, there is a hierarchy for a reason. It isn’t like Mario Bros where you can skip levels. Lisa’s advice to me after Kauffman was, “Go to San Francisco.”
I got an interview for a sales role at Yelp while I was back in Charlotte. I paid for my own flight just for the interview - no assurances I was getting the job. Well I got the job- sold local ads and learned the critical skills of- sourcing leads, cold calling, pitching, and closing deals. Flat out- You need sales experience to start a company. In this time, Yelp went from 8 million to 26 million uniques per month (don’t quote me on exact numbers). I watched the company mature from a startup, into a company. The only problem was I’m not a sales guy. I don’t enjoy ‘hitting the phones’ and I don’t enjoy selling something I’m not intimately involved with building. I left Yelp in Sept 09 with no plan, just knew ‘It’s time to move on.’
Now I wish I could claim I had planned this but i didn’t. 2 weeks later was TechCrunch50, and I watched Redbeacon pitch via the online stream. Having worked in the local space, I got it. In a few years, you’ll be able to book a local service online -just like a dinner reservation- its just a matter of who will do it. In a team of 5 (3 founders, an engineer and me), I was squarely back in a startup. I signed up service providers, answered customer service inquiries, and basically made sure everything worked smoothly. This was my foray into customer service, another skill you should learn. When you are doing it right, it’s easier than sales, but just as delicate, and probably even more important. People have bought into your company- it’s your job to keep it that way.
In such a small team, I saw programming going on first hand. I was also able to throw out some ideas directly to the founders- a huge luxury for small teams. One of those ideas you may have heard of was ‘Friendly Advice.’ It got Rb some nice press and, what I consider to be, my first Techcrunch article. I’m not mentioned in the article, but I’m on the Rb patent application for it, so I think that should count! Any way, the short of it is Rb reopened that itch to build something again. I made one of my New Year’s resolutions ‘to learn how to code,’ and I spent the first half of the year cranking during my free time. But that wasn’t effective. It was too much start/stop, while tethered to Redbeacon as they are about to take off. July 16, 2010 was my last day at Redbeacon. Last week, I kicked off the shore and pointed the bow towards the horizon.
To wrap this up, I’m sorry this was so long! After the comments on Hacker News, I thought I’d set the record straight. I’m not a fly-by-night 49er with grand illusions of being the next Zuckerberg. I was that idiot years ago, but I have had too much experience since then. Enough experience to know: a technical company must have a technical founder. When I start my next company, I’m going to know the technology, and not be dependent upon cash or another person for our success.
I know this process will take years, ie longer than the 11 weeks I set aside for my time outside San Francisco. This is the beginning. I haven’t had a real vacation in years, and since I had a free flight voucher & access to a condo on the beach, why not set August & Sept aside to crank on code?!
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On to the meat of this blog - learning code!
The first few things I have learned are:
If you want to learn a new skill, it is fine to read books & find solutions online. But nothing will ever replace being able to talk with an expert one-on-one. If they are your roommate, even better!
*If you are in San Francisco, Noisebridge is great for their free Python classes -Pyclass.
Second, invest in solid tech books. The tricky part was knowing what I needed since I still don’t know exactly how all the pieces fit together. So far the O’Reilly books are amazing- no surprise there.
*If you live in SF, you can access the Safari Books online free with a library card.
Right now, my little library consists of :
Learning Python: Powerful Object-Oriented Programming
CSS Pocket Reference: Visual Presentation for the Web (Pocket Reference (O’Reilly))
****Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: Making App Store Apps Without Objective-C or Cocoa
(and Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner, 3rd Edition
For docs:
For me personally, the Building iPhone Apps with HTML,CSS, and JavaScript book connected a ton of dots. The last few weeks I have played around with Django as a frame work, working through tutorials- just trying to get a better feel for the environment.
What I am thinking is:
Mobile HTML app run on Django.
Anyone have any problems/advice with that? or references for jQuery?
I’ll have to get much better at my CSS & Javascript…
Gandhi:
A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes.
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