Wei's Posterous

Making Quality Stuff

Use your advantages

When I went for Startup School 2010, Adam D'Angelo, the founder of
Quora, gave a talk about using your advantages. He cites some
examples:

  • He used his engineering experience at Facebook to build scalable, powerful technology to power Quora 
  • He and Charlie Cheever, his co-founder at Quora, used their reputations from Facebook to seed the site with big name people from the valley, and to raise money 

You can check out the full talk at
http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272178681

Just last week, Xianhang Zhang wrote a post on Quora
(http://www.quora.com/Xianhang-Zhang/Startup-Advice-Strategy/Disregard-ideas-a...
titled "Disregard ideas, acquire assets". It talks about how many
successful businesses are built on the founders acquiring assets long
before they start their companies e.g. Joel Spolsky & Jeff Atwood
having huge readerships at their respective blogs, and leveraging that
to publicize Stack Overflow. He talks about how acquiring these assets
takes a long time, but that they can potentially become the reason why
your startup makes it.

I used to tend to focus on my disadvantages. I focused on why I
couldn't do something--be it not having enough time, connections,
money. It's easy to find reasons (or excuses) to not be able to do
something. It's also easy to focus on why life sucks--too
much work, too little time. I think I've come a long way in being more
grateful for how fortunate I am. More importantly though, I've learned
to seek out my advantages and make the best use of them.

The process starts with identifying your advantages, then thinking
about how you can use them in the best way possible. For example, when
you're in college, you have access to the college network, to
professors, to students. You can do a lot of things while you're in
college that will become a pain in the ass to do later in life. If the
founders of Facebook were not in college when they launched it, it
would have been much harder to acquire the initial user base at 1
college--you can't send out invites to an entire mailing list, you
don't have connections to the school newspaper, etc.

Catching cheaters

How can you  tell if students are cheating in an exam off each other? (This doesn't work for cheating through internet/mobile communcations/whipping out notes)

1. Were the students sitting close to each other?
Give out the exam with codes such that you can tell who is sitting close enough to another person to cheat.

2. Do the students have a high number of answers that are both wrong in the same way?
Similar correct answers is the goal of every cheater but unfortunately being correct in the same way does not shed enough light on whether they students were copying each other. 

3. Are the students friends on Facebook?
Usually, to trust each other enough to pull this off, students need to be "friends" on some level.

With these three questions, you can build a Baysean Classifier or a way to tell how likely a group of people are to have cheated on an exam.

The problem is that this is probably not enough evidence to accuse students cheating, and because of 2, you can't catch the really good cheaters that can get almost everything right. Either way, it was an interesting thought experiment.

Oddly (and unfortunately) enough, I was thinking more about this during my Psychology exam I had 10 minutes ago rather than focusing on the exam.

Pain Point: Online display advertising hurts user experience

When brainstorming for startup ideas, I find that coming up with solutions without thinking of the problem first tends to yield suboptimal solutions. If I identify the problem first, then I can evaluate the problem to see if it's a big enough problem to solve, consider whether existing solutions are adequate, and only after that try to think of innovative practical solutions.

I'll be writing a few blog posts about different pain points I've experienced that I think can potentially be solved by a startup. To be honest I don't have excellent solutions to any of them, but I'm definitely thinking hard about how these can be or will be solved in the coming years.

Online display advertising hurts user experience

Most of the content we read online is on sites whose main revenue stream is through display advertising e.g. CNN, NYTimes, Huffington Post. I generally find the display advertisements on these sites to either distract me from the content if they are too flashy and jarring e.g. videos or ads that change between bright background colors, or if they're subtle, I tend to ignore them completely. This gives incentives to advertisers to be annoying to get my attention. An even worse case is when I land on a page with a full page age I have to click through to see the content. This really hurts my experience on the site--it pisses me off that I can't get to my content immediately.

Is there a way to align everyone's incentives when it comes to display advertising? Google has done a great job of it through search adveritisng. I find those ads to be more helpful than a hindrance. There are 2 questions here which might not have the same solution--firstly, is there a way for these content based sites to make money without selling distracting ads? Or, is there a way we can make display advertisements more relevant not just to us, but to our intentions? E.g. when we search on Google for "florist", we're actually looking for a florist so the advertising aligns with our incentives. Another way to look at this is to try and understand why people actually like to watch great TV commercials (e.g. during the superbowl). Can we ever have a great experience with ads on the internet?

Biggest Lesson Learned from Askapade: Product Management is not (just) product design

The following post is the one biggest lesson I learned from creating Askapade (http://www.askapade.com). This is not the biggest reason why Askapade didn't work out ("fail" seems too dramatic for a project that we didn't raise money for)--that would be because we're not continuing to iterate on the product.

Product management is about prioritizing themes and features, figuring out what to build next given limited resources. It's also about how best to allocate resources to

  1. figure out what people want
  2. build what people want

For a startup, product management is making the best use of your limited resources in pushing a product towards success.

I ignored that, focusing instead on making the site fulfill the functionality we had laid out from the start, and then making it work well and look pretty. I'm more than satisfied with how it looks, and I'd say the interactions aren't too shabby as well.

But... no one wants to use it. The one biggest reason for startups failing is not being able to find product market fit, or in English, no one wants to use your site/service. The harsh reality is no one really gives a shit about how nice your rounded corners are if they don't find your base product useful.

We didn't optimize to find product market fit, and instead spent a lot of resources--mainly time--on optimizing existing features for their user experience and design. The result is a beautifully useless site. Going ahead, I have a much better idea of how important product management in the sense of allocating resources is. It cost me quite a bit of time and effort to learn this (as opposed to just reading answers on Quora [1]), but it's clearly seared into my mind. 

[1] http://www.quora.com/Product-Management

Internet Treasure

I've been listening to a few talks by Zynga CEO Mark Pincus lately
where he mentions this concept of an "internet treasure" [1]--it's an
idea that resonates deeply with me. Pincus talks about how the earlier
generations were remembered for building skyscrapers, and says that
since our generation is so closely tied to the rise of the internet,
our skyskrapers are really internet companies, or "internet
treasures." He defines an internet treasure as a company that builds
products that you cannot remember life without. Google, Amazon and
Facebook are arguably all internet treasures. Imagine how many
people's lives and work would be disrupted if Google's search went
down for a day.

Why does this resonate so strongly? Building an internet treasure
means you've contributed something great to the world--something that
the world cannot imagine life without. Trying to contribute something
that significant to the world can fill us with a great sense of
purpose and give our lives more meaning. While you're trying to build
one, it gives you reason to wake up in the morning and work your ass
off for it. If you've succeeded, it gives you something to look back
on and be proud of.

Granted, there are probably less than a hundred people who have
succeded at this, but nonetheless, it's an inspiring goal to consider
as I think about my longer term career goals. I hope you can find some
inspiration in these videos too.

[1] Here are links to the videos:
Mark Pincus and Bing Gordon clip on Building Hi-tech Skyscrapers at
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2309
Video for the full talk of that clip at
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2277
John Doerr interviewing Mark Pincus and Bing Gordon at TechCrunch
Disrupt 2010 at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/11126109

Product vs Engineering States of Mind

In the last few weeks, I've been interviewing with a couple of
technology startups in Silicon Valley. At the same time, I've also
been trying to brainstorm for ways to pivot Askapade.com to make it
more useful and compelling for our users, or brand new ideas for a
startup. Also, I've been watching videos and reading articles on how
companies architect their systems, both because I find it fascinating,
and because I might have to do this someday so I'd better learn the
ins and outs earlier.

I noticed that there's a stark difference between my product and
engineering states of mind. When I'm learning about architectures, or
preparing for technical interviews, I'm in my engineering state of
mind--I'm trying to find a solution to a well defined problem, or in
some cases, learning about solutions to well defined problems. On the
other hand, when I'm brainstorming for startup ideas, or looking at
Askapade's data to see how best to improve the product, I'm in my
product state of mind--I'm looking for the best problem to solve.

What's also interesting is that sometimes I have to switch between
both while doing something--specifically, when I'm implementing a
feature for Askapade, I need to look at it from both perspectives.
Here's what my process has been like so far:

1. Figure out a big picture idea with Ailian (http://ailiangan.com/)
(my sister and technical cofounder). We generally get quite specific
on how the pages should look, how the user flows should be like, and
what core functionality should be there. Sometimes we'll even do mock
ups together.
2. Depending on how far we got in 1, I'll fill in the rest of the
gaps, which usually means walking through the user flows and creating
mock ups. Thinking about what could be annoying from a user's point of
view.
3. Implement it on my development server, and try it out for myself.
While I'm implementing it, I'm thinking in both product and
engineering states of mind because I notice design issues that I try
to fix immediately through changing the code.
4. I share it with Ailian through the staging server, and we go
through it together to see whether the user experience and copy makes
sense, and iterate from there.

What I'm wondering is--is switching between these a good idea? Does it
slow down development and iteration time in the end? Should I design,
implement, then design a better version etc. Are the context switches
expensive, or are these 2 different states of mind or ways of looking
at things not mutually exclusive? One could argue that engineering is
designing a solution, and product is engineering a user experience,
and engineering the question.

My goal is to become skilled at both product design and strategy as
well as engineering, but I'm guessing at some point I'll have to
choose which one I want to be truly great at.

On My Internship at Box

I wrote the following entry for Box.net’s recruiting team on what I loved about my internship at Box. I also had the opportunity to share this at our company lunch as an impromptu thank you speech. Upon reading it again, I realized these things are not specific to good internships or even just good jobs, but can be applied to what I think will make me happy in the greater scheme of things. Enjoy!

I’m Wei, a senior at Duke University, and I had the privilege of interning at Box as an iOS (iPad/iPhone) developer this summer. People’s general advice for internships is to “go and make the best of it.” However, when the company you intern for gives you amazing opportunities to contribute, and you also give it your best, you’d be surprised how much you can learn and how much impact you can make in a few months. Here’s what I loved most about my internship at Box.

Awesome Mentor
I worked with Michael Smith, Mobile Product Manager at Box. On the first day of my internship, Michael asked me what my goals for this internship were. From the start, I knew that Michael cared as much about what I got out of this internship as what I could do for Box in my time here. He also understood my interest in both the engineering and product design aspects and not only let me in on mobile product design decisions, but made me an integral part of that process. It was common for me to simply build out certain interface features as I saw fit, and more often than not these would make their way into the final product design.

Michael taught me a ton technically, but more importantly, he truly cared about my learning and my internship experience and gave me autonomy and independence to work on the iOS apps which gave me a strong sense of ownership of the product and the feature I was building.

Ownership
Ownership is a very powerful motivator. As the main developer for the feature to save your files for offline access on the iPhone and iPad, it basically meant that if the feature I built was lackluster, it would reflect poorly on me, but if it was great, it would be something I could be extremely proud of for a long time to come. When your developer “street cred” lies on a release, you’re going to give it your best shot. Ownership and independence gave me the space to find creative solutions to both design and engineering problems. At Box, I felt like I had ownership of the iPad and iPhone apps, and especially of the feature to save files to view offline, and this motivated me to put my best work into these apps.

Impact
As powerful of a motivator as ownership is, what got me most excited about my work was the impact I was making in people’s lives by making Box’s iPad and iPhone apps better. Millions of people use Box.net’s web application to collaborate on content in the cloud. Box’s mobile apps help our users access this content on the go. Knowing that my work is helping make so many people work better is not just important to me, it’s what gets me excited to come to work everyday.

Interning at Box gave me a unique opportunity to learn and contribute. It’s not at every company that an intern gets to contribute so much and make such a big impact, but Box is special like that. I dare say that I couldn’t have asked for a better internship experience (except maybe more free schwag.) Thanks Box, for an amazing and unforgettable summer!

I may be wrong, but I have to believe that at some point, using his own iPad and measuring the true distance he had come to make it real, Steve Jobs must have found himself crying…

No matter what you are trying to do, whether in business or charity or social enterprise, if the thought of it doesn’t scare the hell out of you — and if imagining the manifestation of it doesn’t make you cry — it isn’t worthy of who you truly are.

Dan Pallotta, When Your Goal Is the Impossible

I have just spent over an hour reading Dan Pallotta’s blog archive. ALL his entries are good. Thought-provoking, original, colorful. I have yet to read a single dud. How does the man do it! 

(via ailian)