RoadsAfar

I picked up Jessica Livingston’s book Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days the other day and started reading through it for inspiration. I had always noticed Jessica’s name at the bottom of Paul Graham’s essays in the acknowledgements section. Paul’s essays have been like a shot of startup adrenaline: whenever I need a little bit of entrepreneurial fuel, I read (or reread) one of the essays to get pumped up. I suppose it’s kind of like listening to Metallica before a football game or something. Anyways, The book contains a series of interviews with startup founders. The first one is an interview with Max Levchin, cofounder and CTO at PayPal. A couple of things jumped out while reading the interview with Max that I wanted to touch on.

1. Startups are about people. Finding good cofounders really matters. Finding good employees at the start really matters. “If you have a good team, you are halfway there.”
2. Determination matters. Max was absolutely determined to get his technology to work. He pulled all-nighters. He coded until it got done. 
3. Naivete can be a strength. Max wasn’t aware of the technical challenges they were going to come up against in dealing with fraud, but was confident they would solve the problems as they came up. “People like Citibank and other large financial institutions that also competed with us that understood the fraud thing very well–they knew from years of practice that this was going to become a huge problem–didn’t really approach it with the same happy abandon that we did. … We thought, ‘we don’t know how to do this; let’s just invent it.’” Sometimes not knowing how hard a problem is can be a blessing. You may approach the solution from a different angle or try something that others had been unwilling to try because it appeared to daunting.
4. Entrepreneurs just want to start something. Perhaps my favorite quote was about his drive to start a company: “I think the hallmark of a really good entrepreneur is … you realize one day that you can’t really work for anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn’t matter what that thing is.” I know exactly the feeling. There is something empowering about working at the startup level. It’s like programming in assembly–you have access to the bare metal, no abstractions or obstructions.

Max has continued to show his drive for starting something as he has moved on to work on Slide and Yelp.

An extension of the well-known quote “the unexamined life is not worth living”:

The man who has no refuge in himself, who lives, so to speak, in his front rooms, in the outer whirlwind of things and opinions, is not properly a personality at all. He floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions–such a man is a mere article of furniture–a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being–an echo, not a voice. The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air at rest, and the weathercock the humble servant of the air in motion. -Henri-Frédéric Amiel

So the iPhone SDK was released yesterday to much excitement. I’m downloading the SDK right now and have a couple of apps in mind. Michael Arrington on TechCrunch collects some of the limitations on third-party apps, stating that “for now, whole classes of applications are useless, or are significantly less useful than they otherwise would be.”

The major restriction that seems to be getting attention is:

Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits. (p. 16)

There are only two types of interactions that this limits that I can think of:

• The iPhone needs to do some processing in the background, for example, triangulating coordinates to see where you are and storing that information for later.
• The iPhone needs to check the internet in the background for periodically updating information, possibly notifying the user. Examples include an IM client notifying the iPhone owner of an incoming message.

While annoying, I think some common applications can still be implemented but what will have to happen is the paradigm will have to change slightly. In the case of an IM client, rather than having a constant signal represent “being online”, someone will have to create an iPhone-Online mode where messages sent to the user are queued up on a server somewhere until the iPhone user opens the application and pulls down the most recent messages. This could be done as a layer that sits between the iPhone and AIM or the IM clients themselves could implement this functionality.

In the case of a lot of applications, the actual processing can take place on the server or only while the application is open. When the user opens the application, processing can take place on the iPhone and the state can be saved in a local sqlite database or on a remote server. When the application is reopened, any additional processing done server-side can be downloaded.

For example, for a time logging application, the user can open the iPhone application and “punch the timecard” so to speak. The application can store the punch time on the phone and the user can then turn the phone off. Whenever the user is connected to the internet and the application is opened, the time log can be synced with a server.

This limitation isn’t a deal-breaker, but it will force developers to rethink the concept of “always on” that we’ve gotten used to with normal applications and web applications alike. The solution will end up being something similar to Google Gears.

“Constraints are a designer’s best friend. They’re signposts, not shackles. In a sense, constraints amount to the solution half-built.” -Andy Rutledge

I’ve been working with some close friends on a business called JustNeem. The idea is simple: make high quality body care products out of this awesome plant called the neem tree and then sell them here in the United States. Buy the neem from Mauritania, Africa at fair market prices, providing jobs for Mauritanians. Finally, plant a tree in Africa for each soap we sell.  It’s a great product with a great purpose.

We put together a JustNeem page on Facebook tonight for the company where we intend to post events, pictures, videos, and comments on our progress as a company. This is something of an experiment to let people see what goes on behind the scenes at JustNeem as well as what life is like in Mauritania. I’ll be writing about how this experiment goes over time.