Facebook, the Hacker Way, and Microsoft
Stories about the early days of new companies are fascinating. As an 8th grader in 1994, I was leaning toward skipping high school with a 1-year University of Washington Early Entrance Program. (I wasn't attracted to girls and knew 4 years of high school dances and sexual repression was not going to be fun or beneficial.)
Then I read Gates, the gripping biography of Bill Gates' introduction to computers at the private Lakeside School in my hometown of Seattle. Lakeside was one of the only schools that had access to a computer in 1968, and Bill Gates learned how to code and met his future cofounder of Microsoft there. It was an inspiring story, so I chose Lakeside.
I graduated 20 years after Bill Gates, and his class was having a 25th reunion in the same room as my 5th reunion. A few people from my class started talking with Bill and he regaled us with the wilder stories of his youth. Bill was so much more interesting in person that I didn't think other people would believe the story, so I asked him to sign my business card:
Then Bill started talking about how fascinated he was by a rapidly growing social networking site. The site was the main topic of conversation for an hour, and the following day he left a note of one of my classmates' profiles. (I took a screenshot of his profile – which had the 1978 group photo of Microsoft as his profile photo -- but sadly it died when a worm exploited a buffer overrun in Windows 2000 server and took over the whole server. Firewalls aren't just for paranoid companies...)
Since Bill went to Harvard before starting Microsoft, and Facebook launched at Harvard, one would think he was taking about Facebook. read more
Macbook Air or Pro?
When the Macbook Air was released in January 2008, I was a skeptical that it could take the place of a developer's Macbook Pro. The founder of RealSelf bought the first model and endured countless trips to the Apple Store to have the hard drive replaced and other technical issues resolved. I dubbed it the "Macbook Error". read moreToo Much Coffee? Switch to Matcha Green Tea
Growing up in Seattle with Starbucks and other coffee stores on every corner, it was easy to develop a serious coffee habit. Every company I've worked for since college has provided automatic coffee machines which grind and brew a fresh cup at the press of a button.
Standard green tea bags are okay if the tea leaves are high quality, but plain tea is too thin to be a replacement for coffee. Three years ago I found a sample of DoMatcha tea at Whole Foods. continued
Drupal to Yii Migration Tips
So you've gotten fed up with the coding contortions required to scale Drupal and you've decided to switch to Yii. Now comes the daunting task of deciding what and how to migrate.
Read our tips first and save yourself time and frustration.A Great Idea Before its Time (and Dropbox)
In 2001, I tried to start a business based on code I had developed for Yale to enable online registration and management of yearly class reunions. Reunions are multi-million dollar events, and the system I developed in 1999-2001 is still running Yale’s reunions today.
I used AP credits to skip a semester and flesh out the idea further. I set up an office in my mom’s basement and set to work writing the business plan. Ultimately, I concluded that universities were so slow moving that I would need a partner (or acquirer) for help with the sales process. My colleagues at Yale helped arrange a meeting with the company who was building their alumni network. The dot-com bust was already in full force, and then 9/11 happened. The company thanked me for my presentation but passed. I wasn’t passionate about event registration, and there was already a well-funded competitor (Cvent.com) that I correctly predicted would dominate the space.
As with most startups, my initial idea wasn’t great. On the bright side, I identified a problem that most people had yet to experience – synchronizing documents across multiple devices. You’ve heard of DropBox, right? Well, this was 2002, and DropBox was founded 5 years later.
Sure, you could use rsync to sync your files, but it was too complicated for 99.999% of people. The primary reason for DropBox’s success is its simplicity. Rsync is complicated to configure, prevents people from sharing files with friends and won't let you access files on a public computer.
I decided to start from scratch and create a synchronization system that used the protocol that web browsers and web sites use to communicate so you could access your files with any browser.
Continue reading for the ironic conclusion
Why this Boom isn't Bubble 2.0
John Battelle and Fred Wilson have written great posts explaining why the surge in valuations and VC rounds raised by Internet companies is very different from the 1999-2000 bubble.
Most entrepreneurs are naturally optimistic. I’ve been working at startups for 15 of my 30 years, and I’ve seen a lot of companies fail outright or fail to reach their potential. That includes shutting down a fledgling business I started in 2001 because timing wasn't right for the idea. So believe me when I say I'm more pessimistic than most entrepreneurs.
It's easy to forget the details from 10 years ago, so I scanned a list of the 100 Dumbest Moments from 2000 to put the current boom into perspective.
7 reasons to switch from Drupal to Yii
Drupal 7 is about to be released, so many organizations need to decide whether to upgrade from Drupal 5 or 6. Drupal is fine if you're building lots of websites and need to create new sites quickly without much coding, or if you just need a blog-on-steroids content site.
Running on Drupal is like living in a double-wide: it's the best solution if you can't afford a custom home. If you have a site that started on Drupal and has grown enough to employ full-time developers, you should consider migrating your site to the Yii PHP framework. (PHP haters can follow The Onion and use the Django Python framework, although it will take more time to change frameworks and programming languages.)
I'm the CTO of a site that switched from Drupal to Yii on April 30th 2010. It was hard to find information when we were debating a rewrite and there wasn't even a book about Yii yet. There were a few comments about switching from Drupal to Yii but they didn't include enough data to reassure me. I was worried that Yii might be slower than our heavily-optimized install of Drupal, so I decided to rewrite the core 20% of our site (which provided 80% of our functionality) in 30 days. It seemed like a great way to test the productivity and performance of the Yii framework, and if Yii wasn't an improvement after that month we could always switch back to Drupal and copy over any new data.
Yii was much faster than Drupal for our site with 150,000 nodes (each with a rewritten URL) and 50,000 visitors per day. Yes, we were working crazy hours for those 30 days (and the following 15), but it was worth it. The time that we previously spent working around Drupal's slow queries was put to better use, and it was a lot more fun to develop on Yii than on Drupal. The real benefit of Yii came later when we redesigned our site. With Yii's MVC, we only had to change 2 layout files vs a few dozen in Drupal.
I just wish we switched a year earlier.