Seattle Startup Weekend

At first blush, it might not seem like snow has that much to do with a product launch, but in the case of skillbit(tm), I was paying very close attention to the weather the entire weekend. Thankfully, the snow held off until today. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

Even people local to Seattle don’t always fully understand the odd dynamic we have with winter weather here, so I’m going to take the liberty of going all weather geek on you all (hey, Andrew hasn’t cut off my blogging access yet, so why not?) and give you a quick rundown.

First, it helps to understand that to get snow around here usually requires two distinct weather events to end up at the same place, at the same time. This hardly ever happens. Quite regularly, we go through an entire winter without getting both the cold from Canada (or more rarely - from the Alaskan gulf) at precisely the same time as we’re also getting moisture from the southwest. It’s tough for us to simply get cold air that also happens to contain the moisture needed for snow.

So maybe this happens once a year. Once in a while, we get two snow events in a single winter. More than that is practically unheard of.

On top of that, because of how we usually get snow, the snow around here usually either sublimates in the extra cold, dry air that sticks around afterward if it was moisture hit by cold… or gets washed away in a warm rain if the weather events came in reverse order. In either case, it’s all gone in a day or two, much to the disappointment of all the kids.

From there, it’s a rather predictable cascading effect. Now - if you were a city official trying to set spending budgets, would you bother with much in the way of snow removal or sanding equipment? No, you would not. So the roads stay slick.

And of course, drivers get hardly any practice driving around in snow, slush, and ice around here. But the real killer is all the hills. Put all three factors together with the understanding that if you just wait 24 hours, it’ll all be gone, of course everyone stays home. And those who don’t almost always have a problem, even if it’s because someone else didn’t know how to stop on the slick roads.

As tempting as the main roads look, all clear because they’re well traveled and well tended to by the snow equipment, the side streets are the biggest issue. Another kind of a “last mile” problem.

And if you’ve gotten this far and are still wondering what this has to do with Startup Weekend and skillbit, it’s this…

First, if the snow had hit over the weekend as had been originally predicted, it could have made it very problematic for people to get to the Adobe offices. In fact, I left the house a bit more rushed than I’d anticipated because I saw some snow start to fall and couldn’t be sure just how bad it would get. As it happened, traveling to and from Fremont remained easy all weekend - even for those of us who celebrated late into the evening Sunday night. For this we are grateful.

Secondly, with all the havoc that snow can wreak in Western Washington and the rarity of such events, anyone hoping for media coverage (as we were) really wants to avoid trying to get anyone’s attention in the face of a healthy snow event.

The media typically gets all in a frenzy over snow and so we were very glad to not be competing with snow yesterday to get airtime. And it’s a good thing too, because sure enough, the airwaves are filled with “all snow all the time” today. It looks like we may have had our few minutes of fame for now.

This is fine - it gives us a moment to catch our breath. Bash some of the more obvious bugs that are of course still evident this early in the launch. Maybe get some more sleep. And of course start figuring out the next steps for our new product and the new community that created it this past weekend.

There’s a lot of all of this happening today amongst the new skillbit family, and a nice quiet snow day is a perfect way to ease back into the real world. For all of you out on the roads, be careful out there.

So - not only am I still alive despite the best attempts of a wrong-way driver on Interstate-5 (let’s just say it’s a good thing I left Brauer’s when I did and not, say, 30 sec. later) - but skillbit(tm) BETA is alive too. I saw skillbit live for myself for the first time last night on Cassie’s iPhone at Brauer’s last night. Then this morning, the news of the URL leaked out even before the news of school delays due to snow (more on that a bit later). 

I promise it’s out there (I confirmed it myself - heck, plenty of you could probably even find it yourselves without my help) and I promise to share it with you just as soon as I a) confirm it’s okay for you to bang on it (gently, please - this is rather new) after I b) get some more sleep now that I’ve been given additional reprieve from mom duty.

For now, I’m going back to bed. Not only is today the first day of skillbit - it’s also the day I change my internal clock back to rejoin the rest of the world, the one where three days equals three days instead of a year.

However you want to describe it, the weekend has been a success. We met each other, got to know one another and did great work together. We have an awesome product underway and the start of an idea of how to carry it forward.

Specifically, the code basically works. You may not be able to see it yet publicly, but we’ll figure out how to change that for you and let you start playing with the skillbit ™ code that lets you mine and manage team skills.

Perhaps the most ironic aspect of our final moments here in the Adobe conference center is that the Patent Office requires an older version of Adobe Acrobat Reader to create the PDF file, when the rest of the world has moved on to a much more recent version. So, even though we have all the documentation ready to file, it’s not currently in a format that is readable by the Patent Office. That piece will simply have to wait until tomorrow to be submitted.

Meaning - while most Startup Weekend blogs are done when we all walk out the door, I plan to at least update these last remaining details before shifting over to the skillbit blog, which should also be up and running soon.

For now - off to Brauer’s to celebrate the successes we have achieved.  It’s important to recognize progress as much as celebrating achievements.

Stay cool out there and let us know what more you want to know.

In the last half-hour or so, a handful of people willing to at least consider taking on greater-than-your average-shareholder/founder-responsibility gathered at the front of the room to briefly discuss becoming members of the core team going forward. We basically have no idea yet exactly what that entails so will have to hash that out.

Patent application is still in progress - apparently there was some kind of lock-up or freeze while trying to submit something or other. I’d ask for details except that it clearly would be like trying to bug a Developer trying to hammer out that last bit of code.

Speaking of which, from what I can overhear, Dev work - for our current needs now - is basically done… with the exception of fixing a handful of last-minute bugs. “Just one more thing” kind of thing. Of course I could totally misunderstand what’s going on, too. I’ll hang out at least long enough to see if I can figure out what’s happening or has happened.

And then, hopefully we’ll all get at least one quick sip at Brauer’s before they close which, for whatever reason, has apparently become the watering hole of choice.

Not only are we debugging, but bugs are going back and forth from dev and test. Assuming you’re OK with the feature set being scalable, this project has a pretty good chance of being released. 

This will be my last post from the official startup weekend, although I’m happy to post followups as the mood strikes. Due to family commitments I must depart these hallowed halls. (I’ll be bringing home some uneaten pizza just to not burden Adobe’s garbage can any more than necessary). The attendance sheet has not gone around but let this be known I showed up on all 3 days, and my big accomplishment (besides learning) was to fix 1 bug involving a major scenario, with the help of Amy.

Seattle Startup alumns, please e-mail me if you want to keep in touch! egrigg9000@yahoo.com

Usually around here, this far north like Seattle is, one would have to be eating exceptionally early or in summertime to be having dinner with the sun… in this case, it’s Sun, and they have kindly provided a nice Thai-inspired meal. Not that I need it.

I purposely waited until others (like the Developers) who are far more worthy, pick up their meals before getting a small leftover something to eat myself. I usually eat only a fraction of what I’ve consumed here each day but there’s been such good food throughout, that it’s been tough to resist.

Thanks for being such awesome hunters and gatherers, guys!

For the benefit of the cities coming up after Seattle who are doing Startup Weekend:

* Consider doing a check on quantities for people signing up for a certain category, and adjusting those on the spot.

* Define the terms project management, product management, and program management for people, allowing them to change their role based on those descriptions.

* Recognize that by Sat am, certain natural leaders may have emerged from the different groups. Areas where I’ve called it out are dev and liaison to dev. These should be the people who inherit the program management role, and dictate to the project managers what degree of reporting will be reasonable for the team.

* Note that startup weekend is by definition a date driven release, so there is less of a need for detailed project management. You can’t lose tons of time here on a person being stuck, because the deadline is so immediate.

There was a funny story which I alluded to yesterday that I want to verify with you with this post. Previously, I claimed that all the program managers had been fired. According to Marina Martin, who was featured on the King 5 spot, on Friday night she observed huge numbers of program managers in the room, way out of proportion to the need, and if they were to do their job they would extinguish the role of the natural leaders. She checked with some other cities, brought back some definitions of the roles (program management, project management, product management) and the upshot is many people who signed up for program management ended up transitioning or going home. (If this was one of you, please write your story in the comments). The way Marina tells it, she did not personally “fire” all the program managers. That didn’t happen. So no matter how much of a cute story it would make, file that under fiction.

Having run out of other more obvious things to do and not having a lot of other updates to offer here (we’re working on it!), I have now been drafted into helping write text descriptions of “flow diagrams” for the patent application.

I already felt I had a pretty good handle on a lot of legal writing from occasionally proofreading my husband’s memos and briefs in the past, but this is a whole new world of writing. I wouldn’t want to try to do this all the time, but it’s definitely interesting. I now have a better understanding of “an exemplary process” and a better appreciation for our skillbit legal team.

Of course I already appreciated your work guys - I just feel like I get it even more.

KING aired a pretty good VO-SOT (voice-over, sound on tape - which means an interview and therefore the next best thing to a full package complete with reporter standup) on the  Startup Weekend event and the creation of skillbit ™ and so the crew here is exceptionally happy.  There was much cheering and clapping, seeing and hearing the story. We can’t wait to see it again so we can pinch ourselves and check to see if it is really for real.

About the same time, John Cook posted an extended story on skillbit too. It’s very nice to have garnered so much media coverage so soon. We’re hoping that it helps us springboard our launch once the code is ready to show off to people. Getting this coverage was seriously a team effort; a number of people here worked very hard to make sure that the right people know about us and understand how cool we are.

We rock.

Could it be? Since about 3:30pm, people here and there have been testing code that Dev has pushed out at the special secret squirrel location. This in itself is amazing.

Proof that even though there are a lot of us, we really are still a startup:  the wireless router we’d been hoping to rely on for non-Dev folks to reach the test site died within minutes of being opened up for that purpose. Now we’re relegated to the few spare hard-wired ports not already used by Developers.

UserEx is handling much of the early testing even though there are a lot of the rest of us anxious to get our hands on the new toys too. For now, though, just a couple of people are in there finding the obvious big rocks kinds of breaks so that they can get fixed and we can begin move on to something more stable.

Ultimately, the goal is still to be able to push out something tonight that you can see for yourselves. And even though it will still be rough, hopefully you’ll agree with us that it is good start to implementing an awesome idea that has great potential to live on past this weekend.