A Sack of Seattle

blogging at Lighter Capital

Phew, in case you didn't hear - TechStars demo day happened last week which was both an awesome event with a lot of great people and another great moment for Seattle startups. For me personally, it marks the end of 3+ months of hectic schedule balancing the whirlwind time I spend running TechStars here in Seattle with my ongoing work at Lighter Capital and Founder's Co-op.

Among the things that I struggle to keep up with (sleep, family time), it's harder for me to find time to blog. So expect me to get back into the swing of things very soon. But as we build Lighter Capital into a full fledged, web-based site, I plan to split my blogging time between here and there. There's stuff I write about here that wouldn't fit for the brand we're building at Lighter Capital, and vice versa. 

As such, today I wrote my first blog post yet on the Lighter Capital blog. Expect more to come, and it may not be of interest to you, but wanted to let you all know that there's now more literary gold from yours truly that you can find over at www.lightercapital.com/blog.

My first post is about fighting financial fraud as a tech-enabled lender. Sound awesome? check it out over there.

My first experience of Quora was awesome

The following is a question and answer I found on Quora in the first 2 minutes of using the site. I am blown away by the quality of content and community on the site.  I am reposting but must attribute the content to Quora and Isaac Hall, Founder of Recurly. 

Question: Why is Dropbox more popular than other tools with similar functionality?

"As a co-founder of Syncplicity, a service that competes with Dropbox, this question has been on my mind for years. We launched within a few weeks of Dropbox, we had multi-folder synchronization & read-only sync, and we were a few years older than the Dropbox kids. I'm very proud of the service we put together and am happy to see the service shift towards businesses, yet Dropbox kicked butt. Here's why:

Before launching their service, Dropbox created a video that had tons of geeky references. It showed off a product that wasn't finished and had a few flaws. It showed a binary diff sync of an image... binary diff is great, but it only works if the file isn't compressed. So, it only works on bitmaps and who the heck is sync'ing bitmaps? The video spread quickly and got their name out before anyone heard of our company. Instead of making our own video, we were upset that binary diff wouldn't do anything for JPEGs or other compressed formats that consumers tended to use. Who the heck is sync'ing images saved from Microsoft Paint?

Next, we had issues getting the press excited at launch. We built a fantastic Windows client. 3 years ago, everyone was running Windows*. We were so excited to show the press, yet they *all* had Macs. Walt Mossberg wouldn't write about our product because it was PC only. Months after we hired our PR agency, we found out that they had never even used our product... because they too only had Macs. It's pretty hard to pitch a service when you haven't used it.

* Actually, I had a Mac and wrote all my code in a Parallels VM on my Mac. It always made me a little sad that we didn't have a native Mac client for a long time. Thankfully, the company has a Mac client today.

For a while, we couldn't believe Dropbox was so viral while we weren't. We opened our beta so anyone could sign up while people had to beg for a Dropbox invite. The closed beta worked incredibly well for Dropbox. We opened up our beta at the insistence of our PR agency -- "No way the New York Times will write about you if you have a closed beta". (It turned out that the NYT also doesn't write about you if you're PC only.) If your service is really popular, having a closed beta helps you create pent up demand and control the number of users joining on a regular basis so you can scale the backend appropriately.

In the end, it really came down to one incredibly genius idea: Dropbox limited its feature set on purpose. It had one folder and that folder always synced without any issues -- it was magic. Syncplicity could sync every folder on your computer until you hit our quota. (Unfortunately, that feature was used to synchronize C:\Windows\ for dozens of users -- doh!) Our company had too many features and this created confusion amongst our customer base. This in turn led to enough customer support issues that we couldn't innovate on the product, we were too busy fixing things.

After I left Syncplicity, I ran into the CEO of Dropbox and asked him my burning question: "Why don't you support multi-folder synchronization?" His answer was classic Dropbox. They built multi-folder support early on and did limited beta testing with it, but they couldn't get the UI right. It confused people and created too many questions. It was too hard for the average consumer to setup. So it got shelved.

If you're starting a new company, the best thing you can do is keep your feature set small and focused. Do one thing as best as you possibly can. Your users will beg and beg for more functionality. They will tell you their problems and ask you to fix it. My philosophy is that they're right if their feature request is right only if it works for 80% of your customers. Until you have a lot of resources, stay focused on your core competency.

The best part about having a simple product is that it's easy to sell & easy to support. If your product is too complicated, you'll spend all day on customer support & bug fixing. I've been there -- it's no fun.

In closing, I want to give props to my previous Syncplicity co-workers. They worked their butts off competing against Dropbox. They're crazy smart and we built a great service together. They're still working on it and they've got a great business solution. As for Dropbox... Drew, Arash and the rest of the team are absolutely brilliant. Their success is no accident. File synchronization is incredibly difficult. Building a product that millions of consumers can easily understand without RTFM is even more challenging. They're my inspiration for my current company.

If you want to understand more, read everything you can about the lean startup movement. And have at least one seriously amazing product person on your staff if that's not you."

If you're mind isn't blown yet -- I don't know what will blow your mind in terms of first experiences. Go logon now to Quora

Comment lurkers playing SEO games

This comment came from Disney World Vacation Rentals:

• "Its really good to see this blog,you have nice information about vacations at Disney.People who are looking for hotels there,you really have good material for them. I got valuable links. I will like too see this blog again."

For those of you who don't know -- this firm is trying got get link value from my blog to their website.  Yes their attempt is weak and I didn't publish their comment but the game they're playing is very real.

Typepad new implementation is very sharp and sexy

I was beginning to wonder what moveable type was doing. It's been a long time since I was impressed as a customer. I have to say that their most recent release is a vast improvement on their core product. It actually may save me from abandoning them for a new platform like wordpress. Features that I have caught my eye after playing with it:

• The overall user expereince has improved. It's easier to blog and track your blog traffic. Every step of the writing process feels more intuitive than it did before.
• Integration with twitter and facebook and a whole host of other platforms like dogster and amazon -- effectively they've implemented a feature that we at Judy's Book used to call write once publish many.
• They've implemented a follow feature very similar to twitter. This makes the prospect of discovering other typepad blogs and other authors much easier.
• They've introduced a question of the day which gives bloggers who don't know what to write about a suggestion of authoring. These questions of the day are sponsored by a company and include a link ot that sponsor. This is very smart revenue creation and allow them to sell unique content and links to lots of companies. This is powerful and smart -- and is also well done. 

Well done guys.  The changes make me happy to be a customer!

What I would splurge on this year to improve my future?

This question was presented to me by Typepad -- the blog platform that I'm still using even though I know I should switch to wordpress.

I'm playing with the Typepad new user interface and one of the things they offer is a question of the day to inspire a post. These questions are sponsored and have a built in link in them (i've include the exact text below):

"What's something you would splurge on this year to improve your future?
Presented by Intel, Sponsors of Tomorrow."

Pretty crafty SEO and monetization strategy -- nice job guys.  Anyway -- I digress. Back to the question of the day - things I'd splurge on:

• More time -- If there was a way to buy more time I would buy it.
• 4 romantic weekends (1 per quarter) with my wife: I'd go to London, Hawaii, Saigon, and Santiago. Oh -- and I'd teleport myself there rather than take the flights.
• I'd get a personal trainer 3 x per week
• I'd get a personal chef and shopper too. They would fold laundry when not making me tasty salads for dinner. 
• I'd go to the magic house outside of LA with my son and I'd go to the best waterpark in the country wth my daughter (I believe it's in AZ).
• I'd buy a convertible lexus
• I'd buy health care for the US -- and introduce medical mal practice reform.
• I'd buy peace of mind.

Tweeting vs. Blogging: you can follow me on twitter at @asackofseattle

I'm wondering if other people are considering tweeting as a viable and attractive alternative to blogging. In the last 30 days I've found the experience of tweeting to be easier and more engaging than blogging. I'm still blogging but the thought of just tweeting is attractive to me. In the end, I think the twitter medium and user experience is just lighter and easier than blogging. 
I suspect I'm not alone in considering a transition to tweeting. In fact, I suspect that there is a significant shift from blogging to tweeting and that this new form of microblogging is likely to far outpace the growth of blogging.
As a friend pointed out, I'm already a fan of the "short" blog post. I generally try to make a point and not belabor it in my blog posts.  If you read this blog, don't worry...I'm not quitting the blog. But I'm interested in my desire to tweet more over blog more and think there's something to the phenomena. I'd also suggest you follow me on twitter #asackofseattle

Lost comments

Sorry to the folks who have been reading and commenting on my blog. I've had an issue with comments and hope to correct it imminently.  Please don't lose faith or stop commenting.

blog serendipity

Blog serendipity happens all the time but in the last 24 hours I've had three instances that made me appreciate it:

1. I was contacted from someone who reads I learned that my friend Tom happened to be in Seattle for 6 hours. He lives in Denver but flew in from San Francisco. I only learned about this from a twit via Facebook.
2. I was contacted by an entrepreneur in NYC who goes to the NYC Open Coffee organized by a friend of mine -- Nicholas Butterworth. He told her to read my blog and contact me. We had a good conversation about her potential business.
3. I was contacted by a Tacoma, WA angel who is a fan of my blog.

Thanks to all of you for reaching out. I love to hear from my readers in blog comment or email!

A little self promotion: Seattle 2.0 best bloggers

I was just voted by the editorial team of Seattle 2.0 as one of the most influential bloggers of Seattle. This honor lives somewhere in between the Fortune 50 Most Influential Bloggers and your mom’s favorite entrepreneur.See the list here

Blog Feedback

I've  been meeting people at web 2.0 and I've had 3 people (seperately) come up to me today and tell me that they enjoyed my blogging about the transition of Judy's Book. It's positive encouragement like this that makes me want to write more of these kind of entries. Thanks for the feedback folks....more good stuff should be on the way