It is very common for Web 2.0 companies to suffer major performance or scalability issues (usually both). This is not different from outages on the Web 1.0 age. Even major companies like Amazon and eBay suffered a lot of growing pains with reliability of their service.
Recently, a key person at Twitter (a growing Web 2.0 startup) complained about the pain of making Ruby on Rails scale.
About 18 months ago, another entrepreneur from Seattle asked me what he should use to build his new service. He knows quite a lot of technology, but he is not a developer, so, for him, it was a matter of what skills he would be looking for on a developer.
I'm no fanatic. I believe that if you are an expert on PHP, you should build your company on PHP. If you are expert on ASP.NET, you should use ASP.NET. If 50% of your developers know ASP.NET, and 100% know Ruby on Rails, you should use Ruby.
On his case, he was in doubt between Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET. I told him both would be fine, although I don't really know anything about Ruby, except that Ruby on Rails is an unproven technology. It doesn't mean it is not going to work, or it won't scale, or it won't be reliable, etc. It is just there are not enough sites built on it. Nobody questions a website built with Apache and C++ ISAPI. It has been done a million times and it can scale beyond anything imaginable.
He has chosen ASP.NET. His service is running and growing fast and he had not had any problem with scalability of his application or architecture yet. He did had some storage issues though, but that was independent of framework or platform.
The lesson: Build stuff using the tools you know. Better yet if what you know is guaranteed to work.
I think startup culture is very powerful. It can occur on startups, on established company, even on large mamoth corporations. A startup culture foster innovation, creativity at solving day-to-day problems, a higher risk-reward approach, etc.
The flip side is old-company mentality. You know the type of company I'm talking about: Ten layers of bureaucracy, endless unproductive meetings, work scoped so thinly that nobody has true ownership of a piece of the product (nor accountability).
Well, this morning I was reading what was supposed to be a great blog post by Naffziger, a VP of Engineering at Judy's Book, and it talked about when great people don't convert into great teams (for me there is a simple word that describe why this happens: synergy). He gives 5 tips to "fix" that, but the first one was really painful:
"Clearly define responsibilities. Managers need to clearly define the boundaries between responsibilities and ensure those boundaries are upheld. Team members need to be congratulated for excelling in their role and discouraged when they unproductively stray into someone else’s role."
That is a tip that I would expect coming out of Microsoft's Core Competencies cards, not from somebody working in a startup.
My view on this is that if you have people that are "unproductively straying into someone else's role" you have two bad people on your team: the person "straying" for unproductively and the person that is uncapable of receiving input on his/her work.
On startups everybody needs to know what everybody else is doing. More than that, anyone should be able to influence somebody else's work without creating chaos. If they are either creating chaos or being unproductive, they are not fit for a startup.
I would go as far as to say that overlap of responsabilities is a good thing in startups, contrary to well established companies. If both persons are really capable and "hungry", they will not fight, but seek each others input at making their part better. If they fight, there is lack of synergy and it doesn't matter how "A-players" they are, it won't work.
About the other 4 tips that Naffziger gives they are not bad (or great). They are just common sense that some times need to be said (written) out-loud (in a blog): Highlight success, encourage feedback, increase feelings of security and let time work.
UPDATE: Dave Naffziger just added a thoughtful comment making his point clearer.
Actors: Joaquin Phoenix; Reese Witherspoon; Ginnifer Goodwin; Robert Patrick; Dallas Roberts
Ok, it took forever, but we joined the party. Now we have Netflix (like everybody else) and our first movie was Walk the Line. I thought that Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon were very good, but that was it. The story wasn't interesting.
The next question is why am I writing a movie review on my blog, which I never did before? To show off our new Blog About a Movie feature.
As an entrepreneur I'm always look for ways to connect with investors, particularly angel investors. There is a handful of organizations in the Puget Sound that make it easier to connect with those investors, like the Alliance of Angels, Keiretsu Forum and the Puget Sound Venture Club.
Some of these organizations can cost you anywhere between $300 to $5K to present to investors, which for a startup can be a hefty price to pay if there is no good outcome.
After talking with a bunch of entrepreneurs last week, it was a consensus that Zino Society was the worst $1,500 to $5K they ever spent. Why? According to them, not only they didn't get any funding, but they had the feeling that the investors were not that interested in investing at all.
That is pretty bad for Zino Society. For example, Keiretsu and Alliance of Angels are very open about the results startups get presenting at their forum, which is usually around 50% getting funded. Zino Society? Nowhere to be seen any stats about their group.
This morning I thought it was a bug and the MSNBC page didn't load properly. Nope, it did load properly. They decided to add a dashed underline to every link. Yay! Oh, and they also changed the link color from black to a blue. Double Yay! How long it took for them to do that? My guess is a 2-4 months.
That is the problem with old-style Internet businesses (yes, MSNBC is old). They are afraid of taking the jump. They cannot think outside the box anymore and all they do, release to release, is to change colors and graphic elements and that is it.
They refuse to change their layout, content style, or how things are presented to user. Even CNN.com made bigger and bolder changes on the past.
What about user engagement, you know, the new "it"? Nothing new on this front. No surprise.
Yesterday we presented at the Alliance of Angels. As always, Paul did a superb job at explaining why the problem matters, why Sampa has the right solution and why we are uniquely positioned to take advantage of this opportunity.
We got a bit more than half-dozen angels interested in talking with us and a couple of VCs as well.
I'm just about to go to this Amazon event called the Start-up project. I love this idea because it is very likely I'll meet a few entrepreneurs from Seattle, people that I know already and some new ones.
Exchanging idea with somebody that is going through the same thing that you are is the best way to learn something new. Better than books, better than a seminar, better than anything I can imagine. That is why I love this kind of networking events.
This is way bigger than I was expecting. I'm here at the Start-up Project and Jeff Barr just gave the first talk. There are more than 250 entrepreneurs and investors here. Really cool. I wish I had the time to meet with all of them, but it won't be today.
Yesterday I went to the first Amazon Start-Up Project event, which was organized by the AWS team (Amazon Web Services). I did some liveblogging.
By far, this was the best event of the year for entrepreneurs. Why? Because it was a room full of entrepreneurs and investors (and the AWS team), but that was it. Other events always have a lot of service providers (lawyers, consultants, agents, etc.), usually on a rate of 4:1 (4 services providers for each 1 entrepreneur/investor).
Jeff Bar talk was good. It was a great overview of the AWS platform (S3, ECS, Message Queue) and how companies can take advantage of that. It makes a lot of sense.
My only two complaints about the event was the audio that was hard to hear on the back, and the projection screen which was too low and you could not read the bottom 1/3 of it.
There was a short talk by Smartsheet.com and Jamglue.com. After the break Matt McIlwain from Madrona Ventures gave a standard talk about what VCs like to see on companies and he hyped a little the Seattle-area for the great opportunities around here.
Four ex-MSNSearch members were there: Me, Brady Forrest (now at O'Reilly, and he was moderating the panel discussion), Josh Petersen (43 Things et al) and Christopher Payne (ex-MSFT VP of Search, now building his own company).
I also meet some other great people:
Max Ciccotosto, founder of Wishpot.com. We had exchange a few emails on the past but this was the first time we've met face-to-face. Max knows a whole lot about Mobile (Email/SMS/MMS) after spending 7 years on Microsoft Exchange. This is the guy I'll bug when we are implementing SMS features.
Daryn Nakhuda, co-founder of EyeJot. Very nice guy. We are going to get together to talk some ideas that might be beneficial for both of us.
Josh Herst, founder & CEO of TripHub. Geoff Entress from Madrona introduced us. He looked like a nice guy and we didn't have enough time to talk.
Besides those, I also had a chance to catch up with Jeff Barr and Steve Rabuchin, both organizers of the event.
The biggest surprise was the number of startups on the event. Probably more than 100. I need to do some serious updates to Seattle 2.0 blog.
I expected to see a few people that were not there: Kelly Smith (ImageKind), anyone from Twango, anyone from BlueDot, Hans Omli and others. How did you guys miss this?
I hope Amazon does another event like this soon, however I was told they would take this on the road now, so it might take a while until they are back in Seattle.
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by Naffziger, a VP of Engineering at 
October, 2007