Building Feedly

Got the opportunity to have diner last night with the founders of WatZatSong and DreamShake. The demo of WatZatSong was really interesting: you mimic a song and post it on WatZatZong and within a few minutes you have people guessing what the song is. A lot of interesting potential both for search and for fun group activities…and as importantly an idea that people will find fun and worth spreading. I am going to have to look into DreamShake in more detail. Kudos and good luck to both of them!

Here is a great document from Tim Bray summarizing an on-going discussion about how to handle partial updates in RESTful web services. For feeddo, we worked around this problem by breaking down larger resources into composite resources, each of which have their own sub URI. We briefly looked at if and how this pattern could be generalized into Streets but have not found a way to kill that snake without recreating a sophisticated generalized query language around JSON - and I do not think that it would be the best use of our time to focus on that - but it sure it a very interesting topic of discussion.

Jason Calacanis has an post on how different kinds of people react differently when being pitched. I am not 100% convinced by his dichotomy  but it is an interesting read.

Here is a great speech from Steve Jobs. Entrepreneurial spirit at its best!

Bumped into a great essay from Paul Graham on key factors for to keep your startup alive.

Summary: Assume that it is going to be a long path, mined with failures and hard moments. The best way to maintain the fighting spirit and decide to not give up is to, as soon as possible have a set of early adopters: people who will use the product, tell you want they would like to see changed and what they like. And have a single focus: making sure that those users are happy and keep on using your product.

At Collaxa, we had Morgan Stanley as a design partner during our first year. And right after our 1.0 release, we built a developer community with whom we interacted on a daily basic and to whom we provided a build every month. Every month for 36 months. 2.0 b1- 2.0 b24, 2.0rc1-2.0rc12! 36 milestones in 36 months. That was our heartbeat. Having one helped us maintain our focus and weather all the ups and downs - that and having a *great* team.

So if you are a start up, define your heartbeat, measure it -so that everyone can feel it- and make sure that it never stops.

37signals is a great inspiration for us, both in terms of the importance simplicity/design and organizational culture. Here is an interesting video interview of Jason Fried, one of the key brains behind 37signals.

My friend Ludovic pointed me to a post from Mike Cannon-Brooks on their journey scaling Atlassian. The experience is captured in this (great) presentation (1 MB, .pdf). This made me nostalgic about the Collaxa time. It is interesting to bump into this post the same day Jive Software raises $15MB to scale out sales and marketing. Having been on both the Collaxa side and the Oracle side, I think that organic demand driven sales is the only approach for smaller companies to scale and compete against more establis hed vendors. Another justification as to why Joel Spolsky is doing a World Tour to scale out FogBugz.