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.

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.

Supposedly I slept last night. I even took some kind of nighttime pain reliever to make sure of it. It sure didn’t feel like sleep though - still so much to think about regarding communications, architecture, future plans, etc.  At least this time the clock seemed to jump a lot farther each time I looked at it.

I’m not alone in feeling a bit tired. Although enthusiasm is still high - especially because people are sensing that we really are creating something - when asked how they are, the most common response is, “tired,” and, “it’s way too early!”

Hey, there’s time to get caught up on sleep next weekend.  This is one of those rare experiences where you really get to feel like you’re part of creating something for real - from scratch.

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.

Given how long it’s taken us to find agreement and acceptability on some things, it should be nothing short of miraculous that we have a tagline we’re willing to use.

You’re Team’s Potential, Now.

And… it’s on the skillbit ™ website!

Gives you chills…

It’s nearing the end of the first full day of the Seattle Startup Weekend. I didn’t get a chance to post every update, because I got too distracted with the learning process. You’re probably thinking that’s not a great excuse! But imagine, if you were expecting to be completely behind technologically, and blogging away in a corner, and instead there were other folks following through with tutorials and things you have already done, you’d be a little distracted too. I was over in the dev wing. Our fearless leaders (not sure if they were appointed, or have natural abilities, or what, but for sure they were fearless) prevented the marketing, UI, program management, product management folks from coming over for quick chats. Productivity lay flat while the learning curve soared. While that can be uncomfortable giving a status report, it was the honest truth. It seemed everyone was jazzing on Django and doing a crackerjack job of putting together the pieces to support a real product.

I’d like to write a quick sidebar of things that did not go so well so far. And for this I blame Seattle itself, due to our consensus based culture, which inhibits leadership and leads to crowdspeak and crowdact and eventually a lemming type of existence. (Lemmings with lattes, that is). The main thing that did not work well was the choice of project. Projects were promoted to the front on the basis of if they were “gotten” (as in “I don’t get it”). Other than this simple I get it or I don’t get it, it was very hard to set attributes on a project or a group of project ideas because we were each only looking at a small few at a time. The attributes should have been scope, originality, competitive landscape, viral, the list might go on. The narrowing down process resulted in some finalists that were explainable, but failed on the attribute level. Many other ideas that had better attributes, but lower explainability to that specific table, were sent home. Here’s the rub. If Seattle planned on flunking out an idea because it had a poor competitive landscape (two other players already failing at the same mission), then we should have performed the competitive analysis on a range of projects before the idea was selected. There could be a 20 minute analysis performed on each one, and we’d gain much from their report. On the flip side, if it’s OK for Seattle to pick an idea without doing a competitive analysis, then we’re saying we won’t change the idea if the analysis comes up short. But that’s exactly what we did. This goes along with the “act first, review later” type of pattern that brings me to my second point. An initial data structure was used for the database. This data structure was not reviewed, but we did not expect much and we limped along with what we had. Then another, better data structure came along. The thing is, if we had focused our energy on writing and reviewing the data strucutre in its initial iteration, or even the second, we would have smoothed the learning curve for many people, myself included. As Seattleites who are shy of confrontation and of authority, it makes sense that we would want the idea process to go as quick as possible (regardless of result), and it makes sense that if someone hands us a data structure we say thank-you and work with it. What should have happened? A more dogmatic group would have added a checkpoint and determined what the bar for entry was, and whether this met it. Yet, we’re from Seattle, we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, and setting up a dogmatic structure like that sounds, well, not very nice. Let’s just all agree on something and get on with things. Yet it’s these checkpoints that we cite as the thing missing in the postmortem.

Many process points did go well today. The majority. Practically all. We broke into tables that took certain areas of the product. (You can read about the idea we’re doing in other posts). Some tables had people that needed to work on the whiteboard, or with other groups. Others had subject matter experts at the table, while some did not. (My table did not, and sadly I was behind even them, but still ahead of those doing tutorials, for the moment at least). A contribution was sometimes doing a svn up and seeing if anyone had broken the build (or more likely the synchdb). Other times, a contribution was dropping in the logo, or adding a new menu item. Someone gave an excellent talk on some Django basics, before we got too mired trying to think about problems in SQL that weren’t necessary. Several more advanced folks were on-call and roaming, with a helpful “Ask me about Django” scribbled on their nametag. It didn’t make up for not having the schema locked earlier, but many tables made enough progress that by the end of the session they were done until there was a big delivery from a different table. Most people had the basics of basecamp, subversion, python, and django installed, and tricky environment stuff was posted to whiteboards and to the wiki.

Sitting over in the dev side, I occasionally looked up to see the energy in the rest of the room that we were being so effectively shielded from. I’m usually a program manager, which encompasses project management, UI and interaction design, sitemap, requirements, and scoping. I knew those people were out there and wondered what they were talking about. I was happy I made the choice to be a dev for the weekend, or at least sit in the chair and synch to the latest build.

Given that I’m already feeling sleep-deprived midway through the second day, there have been times when things have not gone particularly smoothly in this process, and that some people have found themselves less than enthusiastic about the idea we’re taking forward, I’ve been spending some time thinking about why a person might spend a weekend doing this.  The short answer is that you get out of it what you want.

As I walked in this morning, I thought about all of the conferences I’ve gone to in the past where I have spent hundreds of dollars and hardly slept, all in the name of learning new skills and ideas and meeting new people. There is every opportunity here to learn and to meet new people and do without sleep - for considerably less money - and in the end, maybe even have something more or less tangible to show for it.

All of the chaos that we have experienced thus far, the team storming, the confusion, the thrashing and issues that arise between different strong personalities - these things all happen in real life too. I see this as an opportunity to learn how to work through it.

One of my favorite expressions now, I’ve learned from someone else who was part of conversations I’ve had with people, trying to convince them - give them ‘permission’ if they felt they needed it - to step in where they see something not flowing smoothly and they have some insight needed to get things on track again. Each time, as doubt was expressed regarding whether getting involved was warranted or whether it would even be helpful, the person next to me said, “And worst case is, what…  30 people die?”

Not everyone realized it was a facetious rhetorical question. The answer is, no one dies so go ahead and take the risk - what have you got to lose? Oh wait, that’s another rhetorical question. You get the idea.

However it’s happened, we’re finding our stride. It’s awesome to see. and yes, there are strong personalities. And the quieter personalities are learning where they fit too.

- Kimm

Needing some grease and centralized communication - PM’s best for that.

UserEx update - quick run-through of basic feature set being discussed.

Dev update -  teams set and now ready to start making things.  Technology decided.

BizDev - - revenue model - Software service subscription model chosen (surprise!)

Marketing - elevator pitch

Details to come in separate posts

- Kimm

Interesting dynamic happening - not everyone is seeing the use and value of PM’s, so they’re not exactly inviting them to participate and some PM’s are feeling a bit left out.

Coming from a tech support world where not everyone understands the value of tech support except as a way of protecting developers from the great unwashed, I can empathize.

The solution, however, has to be to educate and show value. Believing people who don’t know the difference is not the best way to go. Or, as one colleague pointed out to me recently, “Don’t wait upon the victim for instructions”

Attrition is normal at this event - for a variety of reasons - hopefully the people who are left are a dedicated core of folks capable of getting the job done.

- Kimm