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As a budding entrepreneur and developer I have notebooks for of ideas, servers full of prototypes, and friends and family that are sick of me probing them for user feedback.  The problem is when to know when to push forward with potential businesses and when to send the to pasture.  I mean REALLY send them to pasture.  Databases dropped or deleted, space freed up on servers, notes archived…GONE!

Taking a note from the drop shippers playbook I’ve instituted a 100 hour rule on my startups.  Using a time tracking tool, I’ve started keeping track of how much I’ve spent on a startup idea.  At the 100 hour mark if I don’t have something solid that’s tested positively in the real world then it’s time to walk.  Free of the mental cycles and physical space on servers I’ll be able to look at the next venture with a clearer mind and more resources to give to it.

I’ve adopted this policy with my next venture that I’ve brought to Stanford’s Technological Ventures course.  I’m about 20 hours in already with a very low-fi product so hopefully my hourly constraint isn’t too tight.

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He flew out from the east coast for the event and the guy to my left flew out from Hawaii. Both had worked on mobile games in the past. The theme was common. Most had come from afar on an entrepreneurial pilgrimage to their main place of worship. As I scanned the room I realized that, apart from the women handing out badges and working the projector, everyone in attendance was male. The stereotypes were all present. The brogrammer, the hipster, the hardcore nerd, the vagabond, the business savvy techie guy…all accounted for. The crowd settled down and none other than the man himself, Paul Graham, took the stage to deliver some sage advice.

PG started off by apologizing about the space and its sparseness. They are in the process of remodeling but I didn’t really care too much about the aesthetics. His talk catered to hackers (coders, devs, whatever other moniker you want to give people who actually write code for a living). His first piece of advice really struck home.

1. Don’t be the first tech hire.  If a Harvard MBA or a Google Product Manager has a “great idea” that’s your first cue to GTFO.  He talked about The Social Network movie and other startup movies.  They go into detail about the idea of how it all began and the relationships of the founders, but then insert a montage of energy drinks, code writing, and sleepless nights.  However, this is when all the work actually happens!  Not having a tech partner means that you’re going to have to do all the work that you in that montage and can quickly lose motivation.
2. Equity is directly correlated to risk. The formula he uses is the following. 1 over your EmployeeNumber to some power.  When there are only two employees then it makes sense for you to get ~40% equity.  The idea is new and the business plan isn’t vetted yet.   There are many chances to fail over time.  As the company grows and the revenue model stabilizes, there is less risk and most likely more employees.  If you work at a publicly traded company then forget any hopes of ever getting any real equity.
3. Young guys don’t take risks. You’d think that guys fresh out of school would be the ones jumping to get into a startup.  They are much better suited financially to absorb risk and rebound from it.  The trends show that the opposite is true.  They tend to go to large organizations fresh out of college.  One theory is that they are comfortable navigating institutions (high school, college, etc.) and want to stay in that comfort zone while getting some “solid experience”.  Most guys that end up going to startups have mortgages and families but are fed up with office politics, are burned out, and tired of not shipping code.
4. Trust in the founders. PG went on to talk about how hackers split hairs when percentage of equity is discussed.  The percentages are meaningless if the business fails.  For example, 1% in Google is vastly more valuable than 5% in Zynga.  Much of the success is determined by the founders.  Find good founders and your equity will be worth more regardless of the percentage you own. 

Paul Graham went on to discuss a few other topics that were a bit irrelevant to me like which VCs are the best.  There was also a brief Q&A.  A brave soul asked a question about when a startup isn’t a startup anymore.  Paul mulled it over for a bit and finally said, “When politics win over merit, a startup is doomed.”  I thought that statement was pretty profound. He offered more advice on constantly shipping code and staying far, far away from MBAs and Product Managers.  After a round of applause he released the stage to various founders that came to present.

Although each startup had their own uniqueness, I noticed that common themes began to emerge from their presentations.  I’ll summary those up briefly before moving on to specifics.

1. The Work: They solve complex and interesting problems.  The Stripe guys spoke of their initial problems of payment processing.  Should they charter a bank?  How do you charter a bank?  Do we know anyone that’s chartered a bank?  Do they want to meet for coffee? No?  Ok, let’s try something else.
2. The Team: The team composition seemed to vary from startup to startup but they were all talented in one way or another.  It also seemed like many of the key players could spin a bunch of plates.
3. The Vision: I’ll call this one, “We’re doing X so that we can prove Y and then disrupt Z.”  Every team clearly stated their short and long term vision.
4. The Space: It was amazing to see that almost every single founder had pictures of or spoke to their office space.  From hidden rooms to chill out zones, they all wanted to give you a MTV Cribs style peek at their office space.  They also identified that the office space should feel inviting.  You want your teammates to stick around the space so that organic bonding and problem solving can emerge.
5. The Glory: All had a passion for the industry they are working in.  They want people who are also passionate about the work they’re doing.  They want to be successful.  They also have a scrappiness about them that was contagious.
6. The Perks:  There were some really fun and interesting perks.  Unlimited time off, a company card, catered lunch and dinners, formal Fridays, spontaneous hackathons and parties were all nice.  I was most impressed with AirBnB’s “$500 per quarter to use AirBnB” perk.

Every founder was well prepared and excited about their company.  Many were very charismatic and inspiring.  I’ll capture some of the highlights from some of the stand out presenters.

Exec

The Exec founder, Justin Kan, is a repeat founder.  He had previously founded Twitch.tv and Justin.tv.  He spoke to some lessons learned from his previous startups around managing employees.  He now gives employees ownership over certain areas and gives them goals around those areas.  He is using Exec to prove out an idea in a small vertical and scale it out once it’s been vetted.  This is about as Lean as you can get.  Employees also get dragon hoodies.

Weebly

Weebly conveyed a pretty substantial trust in their employees.  Every employee gets a company card and unlimited vacation.  They have conversations around productivity, not time spent in the office.

AirBnB

Ahhhh AirBnB, so hot right now.  I liked that part of their interview process includes hanging out with their team for a weekend.  They really want to make sure that new employees fit culturally.  In addition to the aforementioned $500/quarter to travel using their service, employees can also look forward to formal Fridays, Hack-Air-Thons, a super fun office layout, and shipping code to production on their first day of employment.

Parse

The Parse team is crazy smart and they work on incredibly difficult problems.  The headcount is around a dozen employees and they still manage to ship features almost daily.

Hipmunk

Steve Huffman, co-founder of Hipmunk, definitely gets the “Most Passionate About His Employees” award.  He had some candid insight that would be good to take to heart for anyone looking to hire.  He almost always likes everyone he meets so they do a lot of coding via shared documents and over the phone before meeting in person.  This makes hiring decisions as objective as possible so that he doesn’t have to “fire his friends”.  He spoke about his days at Reddit when someone told him that he’d never have to write another resume again.  He wants to make sure that their employees get the same recognition for their work.  He also wants to make sure that they love their jobs so much that they’ll never want to leave.

So that was my experience in less than 1,500 words.  The night was filled with passion, charisma, knowledge, and camaraderie.  It definitely felt nice to be among some hackers cut from the same cloth and I am definitely looking forward to instilling similar passion in my workplace and watching those startups grow into even more awesome startups.

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Some sites were painless to get up and running, while others would throw a “redirect loop” error when I tried to load the site.  I noticed that most of the sites were WordPress sites as well.  After poking around in the logs I found a fix.

You’ll need to edit your

wp-config.php

file to include the following lines.

define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://www.yourSiteURL.com');
define('WP_HOME','http://www.yourSiteURL.com');

It seems that if these lines are omitted from your config file then WordPress will barf until you set them.

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Paul Graham kicked off the event with a great monologue about being a hacker at a startup. He went into pretty great detail about what to expect culturally and financially at a startup as well as certain pitfalls and warning signs to be on the lookout for. What really stuck with me though is how much importance he put on the founders of a startup. Want to be successful? Look at the founders. Want to make money? Look at the founders. Your idea is crazy and we don’t think it’ll work? Eh, your founders are scrappy so here’s some cash (AirBnB). He also had some words of caution. Look out for the Harvard MBA with no skills or the Google PMs that want you to be their first tech hire. It makes sense…how many times do you get approached by someone who has the next big idea…they just need you to build it…for sweat equity…

Having played organized sports for the larger portion of my life I tried to compare a startup to a sports team. The goal of a sports team is to win a championship. Your team should have some really top tier talent as well as some role players. In startup terms these would be your hackers, designers, etc. Your team may have an owner that pays your team’s salaries. These would be your angels or VC firm. Or you could be like Green Bay Packers and be crowd funded (Kickstarter). You’ll have fans that will cheer for you or not (Twitter, blogs, bathroom stalls, etc). But most importantly you’ll have a coach.

The founder of your startup will be very similar to a coach of a professional sports team. Ideally they will have played the game before. Most of the best championship caliber coaches have played the game they coach most of their lives and many have won championships themselves. They know what it takes to win because they’ve been there before. The coach will be great at motivating his team. He will inspire and instill passion. He will also be able play to his team’s strengths and put them in positions where they will be able to succeed. He knows the rules of the game inside and out and can find ways to take advantage of situations that arise. He also knows his team’s weaknesses and looks to minimize the impact of said weaknesses. Players will rally around a charismatic coach and avoid bad coaches at all costs.

Much of what makes up a good coach or founder comes from having good communication skills, charisma, fight, and leadership skills. Some of these skills are difficult for some to learn but they can be obtained through practice, research, and perseverance. Whether you’re looking to start a company or continue to grow your startup, there are valuable lessons to learn from competitive sports. The camaraderie I have felt playing on championship caliber sports team often feels identical to a startup that’s firing on all cylinders. In both cases, it was the love and compassion I felt for my team mates that strengthened our bond and caused a unified ascension in productivity, drive, and initiative. A strong familial bond in sports can be mimicked in business. When it’s achieved nothing can stop you.

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Being a Rails dev at heart I had fiddled with Capistrano and Heroku.  After a few hours of messing around with it I was able to get deployments running on EC2.  My guilty pleasure is having .rb files in my PHP project =)

Quick disclaimer.  Be careful with some of this stuff.  You’ll be logged in as root to your EC2 Instance.  You can muck stuff up.  I will not be held responsible for any damage you do to your code or EC2 instance.  My recommendation is that you test this out on a Free Micro instance before trying this on your production box.

First you’ll need to install Capistrano if you haven’t already done so. (If you’re using RVM make sure you’re on your correct Ruby version)

sudo gem install -y capistrano

Next navigate to your Git project in Terminal and we’ll setup the project to use Capistrano

capify .

This step creates a few Capistrano files that we’ll be editing with the most of the work being in /config/deploy.rb

To see what commands are available run cap -T from Terminal.

Open on the deploy.rb file and you’ll see some default setup values. Here’s what mine looks like after some tweaking. Keep in mind this is a very basic version and your file may vary.


set :repository, "."
set :scm, :git
set :application, "YourAppName"

# If you are using Passenger mod_rails uncomment this:
# namespace :deploy do
# task :start do ; end
# task :stop do ; end
# task :restart, :roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do
# run "#{try_sudo} touch #{File.join(current_path,'tmp','restart.txt')}"
# end
# end


A couple of line of note. We set the user to root because this is assuming you’re using the default user setup of the EC2. Also, Capistrano tries to run sudo commands on the box as part of its deployment process so the default_run_options[:pty] option sets a pseudo sudo =). And the path is going to be your path to your web app. Capistrano deploys to a /current subdirectory in that path so make sure you update your conf, vhost, hosts files accordingly.

Alright so now with Capistrano all set up let’s copy our keys to our EC2 instance.

scp -i ~/path/to/your/ec2keypair ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@ec2-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com:/root/.ssh/authorized_keys2

Last but not least run.
cap deploy:setup
cap deploy

Now log into your EC2 and checkout the path to your application. You should have a current and release directories full of files.

Disclosure: I did run into some issues along the way that I did not document here. That said I did run into quite a few snags so if you have any issues post a comment and I’ll try help. You may also need to have Git installed on your EC2 instance. A simple Yum install will suffice while you’re logged in as root.

But if it all worked out gloriously then buy me a beer the next time you see me because I just saved you the cost of hiring an SCM.

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So the error message is pretty descriptive.  I was thinking it had something to do with my ~/.ssh keys so I checked my keypairs in PuTTy and on Github. I even went so far as to regenerate a new keypair. There were a few things wrong so I’ll run down the gamut.

1. Check your keypair on Github.  Make sure it’s still there and functional.
2. If you’re using the GitUI for Windows. Uninstall and re-install and make sure that you select Use Plink during the install process.
3. Add your key to Paegent.  This is where I messed up.  I’m so used to OpenSSH on my Mac that I forgot that not only do you need Paegent RUNNING but you also need to add your key to it.

Hopefully that will give you some things to check out if you run into this error.  If not, leave a comment I’m pretty well versed in all things SSH related on Linux/Mac/Windows (well maybe I’m little rusty with Windows).

Happy coding!

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Connecting to your instance. Setting up your Keypair

During the wizard setup portion of your EC2 setup you’ll create a keypair.  There are a couple things you’ll need to do when working on a Mac to get this to work.

1. You need to change the read/write permissions.chmod 600 ~/path/to/your/keypair.pem
   This will fix any Warning Unprotected Private Key File errors you may get.
2. Add the keypair identity to your

   ~/.ssh

   folder. This is done by running the command

   ssh-add ~/.ssh/keypair.pem

3. Connect using the key pair. Even though you’ve added the keypair to your

   ~/.ssh

   you are still going to need to declare the keypair when you ssh into the box. To ssh into the box the command is

   ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa ec2-user@ip-number-of-your-vmi.amazonaws.com

   The -i flag lets ssh know that you’re using an identity file. Also, notice you log in as an ec2-user and not root. Trying to log in as root will cause the VM to bark at you and hang until you break the connection.

Well that’s it for now. Next step is to set up the box for Rails. I’ll try and update this blog soon with that howto.

Have fun!

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We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

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Here’s a little background about Dan.  Growing up he was an athlete.  For him, education came secondary to swimming and water polo.  He was able to use his physical talents to get a scholarship to Arizona State.  While at ASU, he decided to pursue Electrical Engineering because he had a deep curiosity about the way things worked at their very lowest level.  He started by building circuit boards and realized you need to program chips to get the most of the boards.  Then he realized that to get the most out of the chips you need good software.  To have good software you need good people.  To have good people you need a good company.  To have a good company you need good leadership, etc.  Of course he learned some of this after leaving ASU but he saw that even with a good foundation you need to build each layer on top of the next just as strongly. As you go up and up this stack of process, resources, and technology one thing becomes clear: you need a great combination of leadership to motivate employees.  Dan has answered that call and relishes his position of mentoring, coaching, managing, and leading.

What lights Dan up?

1. Dan is motivated by motivating people.
2. Dan believes in his company’s mission statement of making lives better through education.
1. Education has a direct effect on one’s individual capabilities which has a positive impact on themselves, their family, and their community.
2. Higher education has a direct impact on a person’s ability to generate income.
3. Erik Erikson’s theory of Generativity - Erik Erikson believed that a fulfilling life stems from helping the next generation improve. In short, it feels good to help others.  Dan enjoys mentoring and coaching others and passing on the knowledge he has.

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