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.

Chuck in Design showed me the pages that he’s working on - they’ve got the design worked out and are starting to push out content. Someone else in Design is working with Dev on the functional UI and they’re preparing to mash that all together so that it works and looks good.

So if you want a better flavor of the event - complete with pictures - I highly recommend you check out Anthony’s blog. He’s got great insights.

Nevertheless, mad props to the three Django guys who spent the whole day acting as roving professors — I overheard some of their conversations and they are awesomely critical to the success of the weekend. Great job!

and

The UX team (Cassie, Bob, Adam, Jocelyn, a couple others whose names I didn’t know) did an AWESOME job of putting together a functional diagram for our website, with help from Matt on our team. Everyone loved the specs, especially the developers, who now know what they are supposed to break.

You can also check out Matthew’s blog, which is also has some cool observations.

Okay, the funniest thing for me so far - aside from the laptop I use that constantly causes people to joke about ED pharmaceuticals - is that Elizabeth and I keep missing each other. In fact, I’m not even sure I know what she looks like - perhaps we’ve already spoken and I don’t know it yet?

Anyway, what I want to say about Elizabeth is that it’s completely awesome that she’s churning out posts on the Dev efforts from time to time. It makes me not feel quite so bad that the Dev work is still pretty black box to me.

I did get Matt (Dev Liaison) and Adam (Legal) to explain to me the IP patent opportunity, and I have to say that I agree - it’s totally do-able and cool. Best of all, it’s the kind of thing that really does realistically open up new business opportunities.

I keep thinking that I’ll write up something about skillbit - what our product is and what we do - and I haven’t yet. I’ve been trying to think of best how to describe this exciting new thing. I have finally decided that contrary to how a lot of executive summaries come across - more static than enthusiastically engaged - our crackerjack team has come up with a solid description that finds the right balance of excitement without the usual accompaniment of hyperbole. I hate hyperbole.

So here it is…

Small businesses, project teams, and DnD weenies are missing out. They have incredible skill and talent among their members, but the team leaders simply don’t know what resources they have access to within their own group. Money is wasted on consultants, bloated knowledge management software, and simple inefficiencies of communication. Of course, the team members are missing out, too. They have coaches, assistants, mentors, and friends sitting next to them and they don’t even know it.

What if a tool were created to help these teams of people build up a database of team skills? Searchable, lean, flexible, and powerful: You know your employees but with skillbit, you can also know what they know.

What makes this compelling is that skillbit lives in that smaller space where teams are big enough to not know everyone intimately and small enough to not want to have to spend big to be able to know and use the kind of information we make accessible.

The short version - teams no longer have to choose between working blind and spending big.

There is so much here that makes what we’re doing sound big, exciting, and powerful. And what’s particularly cool about it is that Dev is actually coding this. The breaking news is that we already have some patent pending technology in the works.

Wow.

I came in thinking about how I was going to immediately start posting. Instead, before I even had my jacket off and stuff set down, I was in two quick back-to-back meetings. The first was on support costs for the financial model and the second was looking at next steps in BizDev, which includes synching up the actions and public-facing language.

The public-facing language is important - once we got past the thrashing and wheel-spinning yesterday, we started moving pretty quickly, albeit very organically - and the result is a mish-mash of language that’s not yet cohesive. In fact, there were some branding errors that went out in last night’s press releases that have to be corrected now today. Oops. And you know what - these things happen in real life too, so it’s good to notice now, fix it, and move on.

Maybe that’s the motto for how we work - Notice, Fix, Move On

I managed to get some tea in there somewhere too, and some awesome Costco bagels, courtesy nPost, and while I was still not yet set up and connected on the laptop, I took the opportunity to wander through and see what everyone else is up to already this morning.

UserEx is continuing to hash out look and feel with Design and functional specs with Dev Liaison while the Dev folks are off in their corner doing what they do to “make it work”. Wish I could provide more detail on exactly how that’s happening except that in my effort to mostly leave them alone to do their work and as a result, it’s mostly black box to me at the moment. Heck, I only just learned that the D in Django is not silent. Silly me.

While the larger Dev work is underway and the rest of everyone is making progress on other major initiatives, the quick hit focus is on making a splash page so that when the press releases go out, we have something besides a parked page to show off.

Current thinking is that the splash page doesn’t even really have to be ‘finished’ as watching it evolve will show movement. Movement is good.

So - after running around asking each group what they feel is necessary to put up a splash page, the answers are:

• Dev is ready. If design send them some html, they can push it out
• Design has a logo about finished and thinks it would be good to have a tagline to go with it
• Marketing has some tag lines under consideration and we’re waiting for the coffee break folks to come back to either let us know which one we should use or hold off on the tagline for a later iteration of the splash page
• Back to the folks sending out press releases (which are being queued up in draft mode so that they’re all set to go once we’re ready to pull the trigger), they want an email address.
• Dev will let me know as soon as they have the email hosting part worked out.

And so it goes - these are exactly the kinds of dependencies that crop up in any project. It’s exciting to be going through it all in fast forward.

- Kimm