The Gong Show

Computer Science Resource Management Opportunity

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:57:30 -0400

When I wrote code in college, I started in C. And in C, a regular concern is memory management: malloc() and free(). The core problem is making sure my program can fit into available memory, and then there are a bunch of ancillary bugs that emerge because of manual memory management.

Later in school, higher order languages grew in popularity and these memory management issues became substantially reduced (though not non-existent). malloc() and free() were out of sight, but some of the core issues of fitting a program into a single box still exist.

When I hear problems modern data-obsessed startups face, my rookie Computer Science experience serves as a nice analogy to a real business opportunity today. These companies are still worried about resource management, but now instead of stressing over fitting a program into the RAM on a single box, they stress about fitting an app into a cost-reasonable number of EC2 instances and low enough i/o to make S3 affordable. It’s still the resource management game, but it’s now at cloud scale.

Building your app in such a way that its resource footprint automatically scales itself up or down to your current needs in an affordable way is a solvable problem (just like memory management on a single box program was quite solvable), but it requires a bunch of extra code and cognitive overhead for the developer.

We are in the “C” days of building software across multiple boxes in the cloud. We are making “malloc()” and “free()”-esque decisions every time we need to manually choose to spin up/down a new instance (or not).

It’s time for higher order cloud languages. Like garbage collected languages on a single box, a higher order cloud language (or more likely, a platform) would scale cleanly to your app’s demands, and make smart decisions so that you don’t wake up to a $100K bill next week.

Heroku started to scratch this opportunity by making scaling a web app as simple as dragging slider bars in a very well designed interface. But it’s still all manual and still requires cognitive overhead on behalf of the developer (err… devops?). That doesn’t sound like it goes far enough to me. From what I can tell, Google App Engine is a good cut at this vision, but I think requiring developers to use their own proprietary BigTable-esque data model was a misstep. Developers want to use whatever data model and data storage tools they want, and scaling underneath those choices should happen automatically.

I’m sure there’s a field of startups already chasing this opportunity, and I don’t I’m the right investor for them because I’m clueless in infrastructure and in enterprise sales. But I know when cross-computer programming is cleanly abstracted to the point that it feels the same as garbage collected memory, there will be a wave of new developers and companies taking advantage of this fundamentally simple approach to cloud computing. This will be big.

Will You Be Missed?

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 18:11:08 -0400

When I opened my email this morning, my inbox was littered newsletters and deals. Not Spam, but “Bacn.” At first I was confused why it was such an unusual mess, and then I realized that SaneBox must be down, the tool I use to filter signal from noise in my inbox. I immediately missed SaneBox, but I also knew that with patience it would be back online shortly and would catch up on the mess that accumulated in its absence.

The fact that I missed SaneBox is a great positive signal for its product quality.

If I were filling out a customer feedback survey for SaneBox, they might ask me a question along the lines of “If SaneBox were no longer available, how much would you miss it? (Scale 1 - 5).” And I could try to answer them truthfully. But the silver lining of downtime for any startup is establishing Ground Truth on this typical feedback question, instead of just relying on self-reported survey data.

No one wants their service to go down, ever. It’s incredibly stressful. But once you’re back online, a quick scan of your customer support email or Twitter mentions will give you a good gut check on just how much you’re missed.

Cyber-Weapons

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 11:23:13 -0400

I apologize for going a bit “dark” with this post, but in the context of increasing cyber warfare resources and NSA spying, this scenario has been rattling around in my mind recently:

Imagine it’s WWII, but with today’s information architecture and data dependencies.

The US is at war and is working on the Manhattan Project, but also simultaneously working on a virus capable of crippling and deleting a country’s data. Imagine a virus like Stuxnet, except instead of crippling militarized nuclear installations, it’s designed to infiltrate banks and delete every corporate transaction of a specific currency (in the context of WWII, it’s the Yen). I guess the best analogy is the MacGuffin-side of the plot of Fight Club, but with a virus instead of bombing financial company buildings.

You are Truman. Which is more humane? One bomb can level a single city, demoralize an army, and kills hundreds of thousands in the process. The other can destroy the livelihoods of millions and destabilize a nation, but the loss of life would be only indirect: from subsequent rioting.

I don’t mean to be so dark or overly-dramatic, but in a post-atom-bomb reality, many new moral questions and international tensions emerged. I think we are arriving at a similar crossroads over the next 5 years as all economies move digital.

Related Digression: Five years ago I was talking to a WoW addict about the virtual gold in his account. I asked him if he was nervous about have so much value in something that is just a number on a game server in the cloud. He responded: “What do you think your bank account is?”

On the NSA Spying Scandal

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:46:16 -0400

The big news of last night and this morning is the NSA project PRISM, which monitors all major Internet communication systems (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, etc) for terrorist threats. In theory the program is not used to spy on US citizens domestically, but, using Occam’s Razor, of course US citizen data is stored and monitored by PRISM: it would be too difficult to isolate only international data.

I worry a bit that public social networks has put Americans into a bit if a daze when it comes to their privacy. Think about how much more we live in public now than previously:

Showing someone your Résumé used to be sensitive data and a sign you were job hunting. Now we all broadcast it publicly on LinkedIn all the time.

Showing someone your photos from your wedding used to require breaking out the physical photo album in your home. Now, any of the friends of people tagged in the wedding photos on Facebook have full access. Which means roughly 200 (avg wedding guests?) * 400 (avg FB friends?) = 80,000 people have access to your wedding photos.

Sure, there are privacy setting to restrict access. But who really changes default settings ever? At most 3-5% of a user base.

So in a world where we choose to live in public, the shock of the NSA spying program loses its edge. It kinda feels like just another FB stalker. And that’s wrong.

Public Metrics

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:45:55 -0400

When stalking website growth as an outsider, I’ve used some combination of Alexa, Compete and Quantcast over the past seven years. As the FB app ecosystem emerged, I added AppData to the mix. Now that mobile has become a primary distribution channel for many companies, I now rely on AppAnnie regularly for competitive intelligence. When looking at open source technology companies, I track GitHub Stars, Forks, and PRs.

What tools am I missing? Anyone else have best practices they’d like to share for public metrics tracking?

"If Ian Curtis had recorded Unknown Pleasures and Closer, and then lived to create three decades’..."

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 07:40:26 -0400

“If Ian Curtis had recorded Unknown Pleasures and Closer, and then lived to create three decades’ worth of half-assed Joy Division songs that made Unknown Pleasures and Closer seem like flukes, he’d be Rivers Cuomo.”

- After 30 years, should we consider Phish a great band? - Grantland (via gregcohn)

Ouch.

Of course this begs to question, do the Blue Album and Pinkerton rock less simply because everything Weezer has released since then sucks? Maybe? When was the last time you thought “Man I want to listen to that awesome Bad Religion song!” probably not since ‘92. But what if No Control was the last record they ever put out? It might be a lot more often. What if Red Hot Chili Peppers broke up after The Uplift Mofo Party Plan? Would you want to die right there on the spot anytime a DJ says he’s playing one of their songs next?

But who’s to say Joy Division would have started release half assed songs? When The Mars Volta and Sparta rose from the ashes of At The Drive In it was pretty damn obvious where the talent was and wasn’t. But New Order’s catalog (especially the first 10 years or so) suggests that the all songwriting genius didn’t die with Ian. We lost his lyrics of course, but he was a pretty morbid fucked up guy to begin with and I think it’s a stretch to suggest if he’d lived he would have cheered up somehow. I mean, Rivers Cuomo is a weird guy too, but come on now, does anyone think there’s a world where Ian Curtis could have written the equivalent to ‘Heart Songs’ or ‘We Are All On Drugs’ or ‘Cold Dark World’ or named an album something like Raditude?

FFS.
(via seanbonner)
See also: the peak-end rule:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak–end_rule
Aka “go out with a bang not a whimper” rule.
(via bustr)
Of all the evil things Harvard has done (say… killing my bracket this year, educating the countless Goldman execs that ruined out economy), I still think their most evil act was the brainwashing of Rivers Cuomo. Pre-Harvard Rivers was epic. Post-Harvard Rivers cannot possibly be the same songwriter. It was either brainwashing or alien abduction.

Product vs Marketing Dollars Trade-offs

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 10:26:00 -0400

According to a quick scan of financial history in Google, Tesla has raised roughly $1.8BN in a combination of equity and debt over the past 4 years. The vast majority has gone to R&D, Manufacturing, Capex, etc…

In that same time frame Ford has spent roughly $16BN on just Ads and Marketing alone.

That’s an order of magnitude larger. And I think Tesla is in a much more interesting strategic position for the next ten years than Ford is.

Sometimes, as a big company, it’s just easier to tell people you have a better product (over and over again… with a Tom Brady cameo) than it is to actually build a better product. But this is always a short term solution.

It’s a classic trade-off that even the earliest startups face. Every dollar you invest in marketing is a dollar you didn’t use to build a better mousetrap.

I’m not saying, “Don’t market your product.” Instead, I’m stressing the importance of capital efficiency in marketing. Paying for users is a drug that is very hard to ween yourself off of later.

The Mental Model of Verbs in App Design

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 08:18:51 -0400

When I talk to people that use web apps infrequently, they are often surprised by the way the “like” verb works inside Facebook. People don’t say they are surprised explicitly… but its clear there is confusion when you tease it out via conversation.

Like in Facebook: it is intuitive that “Like” should be a statement of appreciation because that’s how we all use the verb “Like” in every day language. Here is how most people first encounter the “like” link for the first time in Facebook:

[Some Facebook News Feed post goes here]

“Like - Comment - Share“

That simple three-link “bar” is affixed below all updates in the Facebook news feed is where most people first encounter “Like”. They fact that these three links are juxtaposed implies that they do materially different thinks from each other. Intuitively, if I want to share this post with my friends, I would click “Share”, and if I only want to show appreciation, I’d click “Like”.

But, a quick scan of your news feed (assuming you have enough active Facebook friends), shows you page after page of things people have “liked”. So if you tie this “liked” verb back to the “Like” action previously seen, then you start to unpack just what “Like”ing something does. It sends the content to your friends’ news feeds.

So, “Like” starts to take on a new meaning. It means now, I appreciate this, but I also want to send it to all my friends too. If you’ve arrived at this mental model, you now understand how the “Like” verb works in the news feed. But wait… there’s another “Like” elsewhere:

Go to any fan page. How about this one from Dove. The call to action on the page is to “Like” it. So, using our newly acquired mental model of “Like,” this means I will be both showing appreciation and sending it to my friends. But, this “Like” on a fan page is now going to do a third thing: it’s going to sign me up for a subscription to all of Dove’s updates in my news feed. Again, not intuitive… until you do it once and hopefully when you see Dove updates in your news feed, you then mentally tie it back to the action of liking the page.

So now we have three meanings: A) sign of appreciation B) send this to my friends and C) subscribe me to future updates (but only if I’m on a fan page).

In Other Apps: The various meanings of “Like” are made less intuitive in the social web in general because they vary between different social apps. In Twitter, the “heart” was ambiguous for years because some users used “heart” to bookmark items for themselves later. It used to be that when you “heart”ed a Twitter update that contained a link, you could get other Read Later apps to suck it up. But then Twitter flipped a switch so you could see when other users hit “heart” on your tweets, and suddenly “heart” became the “signal of appreciation” it always should have been.

Perhaps the best (worst?) verb choice of all was Last.fm, who was doing quite new, innovative stuff in the primordial days of the social web. They invented a verb to cover their key behavior: scrobble. As far as I’m aware, that one never made it into the OED.

Other Verbs in Facebook: For a brief period in Facebook about a year ago, other verbs were even trickier. ”Watch”ing a video or “Read”ing an article would syndicate it to all your friends’ news feeds… and they would not involving clicking a link. It was all implicit sharing. This is how Viddy and Socialcam blew up a year ago… and then came back down to earth when Facebook realized that implicit sharing from app-defined verbs like “Watch” or “Read” was causing users to inadvertently share things they didn’t want to share… which is a bad user experience.

The moral is this. If you’re building a web app, choose your verbs carefully. They bring prior meaning… both from how they work on other apps and how they are used in common language. To Facebook, the fact that the word “Like” implies “appreciation” but doesn’t imply “share this with my friends” is probably a feature not a bug… because it leads to more sharing, intentional or otherwise. But be careful about walking this slightly spammy line in your own app. Facebook gets to do things other apps can’t because of their sheer scale and network effect.

Inspired by this timehop’d tweet from today I thought...

Fri, 31 May 2013 07:52:02 -0400

Inspired by this timehop’d tweet from today I thought I’d muse a bit on how I use startups for business travel.

I tried airbnb 4 times before I gave in and switched back to hotels. I liked the novelty of staying in people’s homes. But the two big pain points that made me switch back were one: 1) booking requires a conversation, it’s not just on-demand and 2) the key swap stage of an airbnb stay is annoying. Sometimes I’m running around all day and don’t actually get to my hotel room until 12am. That doesn’t work with airbnb.

I now use HotelTonight exclusively for all my business travel. I love it and have sung their praises on this blog before.

I avoid cabs whenever possible. Public transit FTW. That said, when I have to take a cab I usually book in advance instead of on-demand services like Uber or Hailo. I love the Hailo workflow, it’s an awesome user experience. But when I need a cab at 4am, it must come at 4am exactly. Hailo/Uber can’t nail that use case for me yet.

If I’m going somewhere that has no public transit and it’s a round trip, ill try to zipcar instead of cab in general.

For travel around Boston, I use Hubway all day long. It’s the Boston Citibike, which we’ve had for 2 years now. I’m completely hooked.

For information on where to go, I rely on Foursquare domestically on-the-spot and TripAdvisor for more international and planning use cases.

I still use Tripit to parse all my travel emails. It’s on autopilot, automatically scanning my inbox.

What travel related services do you all love?

Local + Cloud Sync Apparently Dropbox went down today, but I...

Thu, 30 May 2013 10:53:00 -0400

Local + Cloud Sync

Apparently Dropbox went down today, but I didn’t even noticd. All the files I was working on were local and worked perfectly in the interim downtime. This is the value of local caching plus cloud storage and sync. It’s magic.

2011 was the year when every VC banged the drum “What are you doing about the transition to mobile?”

2014 will be the year when everyone bangs the drum: “What are you doing about multi-device?”

Cloud storage with local, multi-device sync will be table stakes soon for any great internet-delivered service.

(photo from Dropbox Error Page via Dropbox Currently Experiencing Widespread Service Outage | TechCrunch)

"About 10 percent of the Netflix subscribers… finished the entire season of “Arrested Development” on..."

Thu, 30 May 2013 08:33:55 -0400

“About 10 percent of the Netflix subscribers… finished the entire season of “Arrested Development” on Sunday.”

- - SAI

So the reviews for Arrested Development are poor… but holy crap is that an amazing statistic.

Lets do the math. 30 million total subscribers * 10% * 15 episodes * 28 minutes per episode / 60 minutes = 21,000,000 hours of TV watched in one day.

And that’s ONLY the people that finished all the episodes. I’m sure there’s a long tail of the netflix subscriber base that watched only a couple episodes…. that’s crazy.

My own $0.02: after watching the first two episodes I was a little disappointed, but after watching 5 episodes I completely loved the new season. It’s very layered… if you want to get all the jokes you have to pay close attention to details you don’t quite grasp yet to fully enjoy the following episode. It’s clever. I rarely get to use my brain at all when watching a sitcom.

What Software Do You Pay Foward?

Wed, 29 May 2013 06:58:00 -0400

Every modern Internet company has been built standing on top of the shoulders of giants. With the very rare exception of a full Microsoft stack company (1 in 1000 pitches I see), everyone relies on open source technologies to power their web stack.

Because companies that leverage open source tech get so much value for free, I think they all owe it back to the community to either A) allow their engineers to contribute back to the projects they use or B) open source some piece of their stack themselves. For example Twitter did a wonderful job of this with Twitter Bootstrap.

It’s the Pay It Forward rule of software development.

Ars Technica has a great article today on attacking one-way...

Tue, 28 May 2013 15:31:40 -0400

Ars Technica has a great article today on attacking one-way hashed password lists. They fed a list of 16,000 hashed passwords to three expert crackers; who defeated 90% of the list in under a day.

The whole article is both intellectually fascinating and also horrifying. Salting passwords (the process of appending a text snippet to a password before one-way hashing it) is apparently nearly useless, despite being an industry standard best practice.

The list that Ars fed to the crackers was MD5 encrypted. MD5 has been banned in use at Microsoft engineering (clearly with good reason). So, one big lesson is stop using MD5 and instead switch to a one-way hash that can scale over time, such as bcrypt.

The picture above shows the benefit of using long passwords; complexity in cracking via brute force methods spikes to the sky once you get to double-digit password lengths.

(via Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” | Ars Technica)

Now that trading is all electronic, computers matching bids, why...

Fri, 24 May 2013 18:47:11 -0400

Now that trading is all electronic, computers matching bids, why don’t markets stay open 24 hours to prevent nonsense like this?

Two days ago was my three year anniversary with @DrDiver. We...

Fri, 24 May 2013 07:40:00 -0400

Two days ago was my three year anniversary with @DrDiver. We had a small wedding along the coast of RI, and we loved every second of it.

When I woke up two days ago, I did what I usually do within the first 15 minutes of pulling myself out of bed and back into the real (and digital) world: I loaded Timehop.

This screen cap above was what I saw. I got a chance to take 5 mins in my morning routine to sit and reflect on this awesome day by scanning through a bunch of photos that were pulled in from my Dropbox.

When Jonathan and Benny started Timehop (then called 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo), they painted for me a vision of the value in all the social content we are creating together online, after the content falls past the 24-hour shelf life of news feeds and timelines.

The company’s latest feature, launched yesterday, goes a step further than social feeds: you can now pull all your private photos into Timehop, so you can relive them on each anniversary.

My morning two days ago was such a killer experience. Not only was it a wonderful shot of nostalgia and emotion, but additionally I emailed off a couple photos from the app to relevant people, so it sparked me to reconnect with my closest friends and family too. I highly recommend you start syncing up your photos and try it yourself.

One final reason: this will be great ammo for #tbt!

MOOC Sports... Proud Home of Digital Scholar Athletes

Thu, 23 May 2013 17:38:13 -0400

How long before a MOOC provider attempts to field a NCAA sports team?

The Coursera Cosmonauts… Udacity Kumquats… EdX Oxen… endless possibilities. :)

I give it 3 years before someone tries this, likely in parody. Over/Under anyone?

Hard Tech Challenges Are Great, But Not Necessary

Thu, 23 May 2013 08:33:14 -0400

I met a set of founders recently that were solving a real problem for a known market. So far so good.

The solution the team implemented was technically trivial. It was a simple CRUD app that, if built on top of a web framework like Rails or Django, could probably be implemented in 7-10 days by a developer and designer paired up. And it probably was.

The solution was effective. Initial user testing showed that the solution addressed the problem well, and the customers were providing enthusiastic feedback.

I think the Andrew from 6 or 7 years ago would get really hung up on the trivial technical challenge. “This is so simple… Won’t 5 clone competitors popup overnight?” I might have said.

This is a classic pitfall that engineers often stumble into, myself included. But the triviality is irrelevant to product-market-fit, and that fit is paramount early on in a startup.

I love it when engineers push the boundaries of what’s possible with technology. Elegant hacks to difficult engineering challenges are inherently sexy. But, they are neither necessary nor sufficient to build a big company.

Innovators Patent Agreement

Wed, 22 May 2013 07:32:13 -0400

I love the Innovators Patent Agreement (IPA). I think it perfectly captures the spirit of how intellectual property should work in today’s era. Rather than butcher the description with my own short hand, here’s a concise description right from the GitHub page where the IPA is hosted:

The Innovators Patent Agreement (IPA) is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from a company to its employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. The company will not use the patents in offensive litigation without the permission of the inventors. This control flows with the patents, so if the company sells the patents to others, the assignee can only use the patents as the inventor intended.

I’m delighted that four Spark Capital portfolio companies have already embraced the IPA: Lift, Jelly, Stack Exchange, and Twitter. If I were an engineer considering multiple job offers, I know the IPA would factor in my decision-making. I’ve seen countless inventors embarrassed by how their patents have been used offensively without their permission, absurdly long after their date of invention and leaving their company.

While I hope more Spark portfolio companies will follow, that’s up to the companies to make that decision, and, along the same lines, please don’t confuse the musing on my own blog with Spark’s official stance. I sweep the floors there.

I feel strongly that offensive usage of patents is net-innovation-destructive. It’s not a position i’ve come to lightly; I’ve arrived over 5-7 years of consideration and internal debate.

garychou: This is a sign of a healthy and prosperous Yahoo!...

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:57:37 -0400

garychou:

This is a sign of a healthy and prosperous Yahoo! Group.

People totally underestimate the asset Yahoo has in Yahoo Groups. Once they build a killer mobile app to access these communities, they’ll realize the Ning vision that Ning never could. Networks of networks.

Self-Driving Cars: Software Will Eat Auto Makers

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:03:13 -0400

The auto industry is on the edge of a revolution. Self-driving cars are on the path to commercial viability, and once they arrive, the industry will go through the same transition that cellular phones, portable music players, cameras, and publishing have all experienced. Software will become the competitive differentiation in car choices, eating lagging manufacturers inside-out.

Google’s demo of a self-driving car taking a blind man on his first drive around town in the driver’s seat was amazing. More importantly, it was the bang of the starting pistol. And since then, Audi, Lexus and Mercedes have all demoed their own versions of self-driving car technology, built by themselves in competition with Google.

Some might applaud Audi, Lexus and Mercedes for being quick to respond and recognizing the threat early. From my view having watched the cellular industry struggle with this type of transition, I think they’re all mistaken.

The auto manufacturer that’s going to win the next decade of innovation and consumer adoption is going to complete the following SAT analogy:

Apple iPhone:AT&T::Google Self Driving Technology:_______

Who will fill in the blank with their own name? There is a distribution deal to be done *yesterday* that involves partnering with Google on commercializing their self-driving technology in exchange for exclusivity. I’m sure it would be expensive and create substantial new marginal costs in manufacturing (like AT&T gave up big marginal cost on every iPhone activated). I’m sure it would require giving Google total autonomy to their part of the project. I’m sure it would be painful in ways I can’t even think of right now.

But an auto manufacturer currently in the second-to-third tier of popularity with nothing to lose and everything to gain (just like AT&T seven years ago) is going to make this painful bet, and I think this to-be-identified-company will end up looking brilliant when it happens.