Blog

• Is There a Silver Lining in this Economy?

  I’ve debated chiming in on the economic climate. It’s obvious that folks who’ve devoted their entire academic and professional careers are unable to rationalize what’s going on. What more can I add to the discussion?

  There are a few thoughts I can add and those have to do with how bad economic conditions impact startups and how startups might want to navigate these difficult times.

  The first reality that people need to come to terms with is that bad economic circumstances impact different companies differently, based on the stage of where the company is. For example, startups that had planned to raise an A round in late 2008 or early 2009 will likely fail at capitalizing their businesses in this climate. Second funding rounds will be equally hard, especially for companies that don’t show strong traction. Companies that recently closed rounds, however, might be in good shape to ride out the downturn.

  My advice to startups is to be smart about turning a bad economy into a positive for your company. Here’s what I recommend:

  1. Focus on making your best existing customers even more ecstatic. In politics they call this your base constituency, but in business these are your core customers. Keep them happy. They are making tough decisions too.
  2. Reduce expenses to extend your runway. The quickest way to reduce expenses is by reducing payroll. Re-evaluate every individual in every role. Are they vital for your existence over the next 6 to 12 months? Are these individuals the ones you’d start the next company with? If the answer is “no” decide whether it makes sense to shrink the team a little.
  3. Take advantage of the opportunity to catch up to the competition. Startups already know how to be productive even when resources aren’t abundant. Use your efficiency as a competitive advantage.
  4. Accelerate your plans to generate revenue.
  5. Nurture and develop strategic, long term business relationships. During boom times it’s easy to be distracted by all that’s going on, often at the expense of business development relationships that amplify distribution and reach. In slow periods, potential partners have time and you have time, so make the best of it.
  6. Opportunistically upgrade the caliber of the team. If you have an underperformer or two, there may now be much stronger candidates in the market now. The goal is to come out of tough times even stronger than before.
  7. Focus the team on core, top priorities. Now’s not the time to work around the margins.
  8. Defer your external capitalization plans. If you have not already received a term sheet, assume angel or venture funding will not happen in the next 12 months.
  9. Defer thoughts about your exit strategy.

  I do believe there can be a silver lining in bad economic times. I founded MessageRite, an email archiving service, in late 2002. We felt we were able to catch up to our much bigger competition quickly in part because they were all stopped in their tracks, dealing with shrinking revenues and rounds of layoffs. Additionally we failed at raising capital during that economic climate, which forced us to figure out how to succeed with very modest resources. That meant that when we were ultimately acquired, the founding employees of the company owned all the equity which resulted in a much bigger payday for everyone involved. It was also interesting to note that our acquirer was one of the business partners we started working with during the tough times.

  

  October 6th, 2008 · No comments
• blist: Church directory, Bible study

  We’ve found that a lot of people are using blist to keep track of things related to their church: things like church directories, church finances, and just generally the usual things that an organization needs to organize.

  The First Baptist Church of O’Fallon, Illinois has been using blist for a few things. Here is FBC Youth Ministry Assistant, Rachel Blankenship in her own words:

  “We have been using blist pretty actively in the Youth Department here at First Baptist.  blist has been useful to us in event planning. We like blist because it keeps us all connected.  We can share it easily with people in and out of the office and the information is easy to read.  I also like the viewer/contributor feature. Generally, we use blist for event planning.  We have youth events that require tracking on those signed up.  I make lists of all our students and track their money, forms and other information.  I am currently using blist to Budget for an upcoming event.  We are also looking to use blist to do attendance for an off-campus Bible Study so that the attendance can be done from a computer during the Study. Before blist, we were using Excel and Access.”

  We’d be honored if you gave blist a try too: www.blist.com

  

  September 30th, 2008 · No comments
• Task Panel, Sharing, and Improved Lens Workflow

  Today we are happy to announce the release of three new improvements to blist. We’re dedicated to making the user experience of creating lists and databases as easy as possible.

  Task Panel

  In order to simplify the user experience with blist, we added a task panel that contains all blist level controls. Now it’s easier to add a new column to a blist, add/filter row tags, and describe your blist (blist Information pane).  Kudos to Jeff for the excellent work.

  

  Sharing

  After a series of usability tests and feedback from the blist community (thanks everyone!), Matt greatly simplified the sharing experience in blist. One of the most noticeable changes is the switch to a role-based permissions model. Now when you share a blist, you can set your contact to either a Contributor or Viewer role.

  • Contributors: Can edit a blist
  • Viewers: Can read, but not edit a blist

  Also, you’ll notice that the UX of sharing a blist has been greatly simplified.

  Just (1) enter an email address or select a contact/group, (2) set permissions, and (3) click share.

  

  Lens Workflow

  Justin has been working on a really important workflow improvement to blist. Now you can create a lens from a blist or lens that someone has shared with you. We use blist to run our business, and this is a feature we’ve really needed in our day-to-day use of blist.

  The team has put a lot of effort into these features and we thank you for all of the feedback. Please let us know what you think!

  

  September 26th, 2008 · No comments
• How People Use blist

  One of the most fascinating characteristics of software is that it often can be used in unexpected ways. It’s one of the reasons I love being in the software industry today and one of the reasons I loved being a programmer earlier in my career.

  Six years ago I founded a company that developed and operated an email archiving service. We captured all of a company’s email and stored it for 3 to 7 years. Typically a company with 100 employees would store about 5GB of email per month. One little company was archiving ten times that amount. We researched and called the company in order to figure it out. One of the administrators in the company’s I.T. department had written a script that located all the changed files on the network, zipped them up, and emailed them to a special internal mailbox. The administrator knew that these emails would be archived by us, offsite, “in the cloud.” It was a creative solution to his problem and one we hadn’t foreseen when we developed the service.

  Over the last few days I’ve been emailing back and forth helping a user of blist. He’s setting up an expense tracker to share with his wife and daughter. His daughter is a college freshman and just moved away to live in the dorms. blist is an easy way for them to keep everything centralized.

  After we got everything just right in his blist, he emailed me a final quick note of thanks. Without solicitation he shared with me how he first started using blist. The story moved me and I wanted to share it with a larger audience.

  The man’s father had recently passed away. The son (our blist user) thought that his dad would want the siblings to decide how to divide the furniture, family keepsakes and heirlooms and other sentimental items. So he created a blist and entered all of the items. He photographed each item and embedded the pictures in a photo column in the blist. He included an empty field for each sibling to fill in their name if they wanted an item. He then used blist’s sharing mechanism to share the blist with his siblings. Though the siblings each live in different parts of the country, they were able to see all of the sentimental items and heirlooms and decide which ones they’d like to have to help remember their dad.

  The ways people are using blist never ceases to amaze me. It makes me happy and proud. We’ll share more stories about how people use blist in the near future. When possible, we’ll ask the owner of the blist to let us highlight the blist itself, showing you what it looks like so you can see it for yourself.

  If you use blist in an unusual way, we would love to hear about it. Feel free to send me a note. My email address is kevin dot merritt at blist.com.

  

  September 20th, 2008 · No comments
• Why Yammer Matters

  Earlier this week Yammer won best-in-show at TechCrunch 50.

  Yammer is important and I want to tell you why.

  Tell me, what do you know as a starting point? You know what the phone is, what voice mail is, what email is, right? OK, good. You know what IM and texting are, right? Kinda sorta but not really. OK, let me remind you. Instant messaging - IM for short - is a way for you and me to type messages to each other in real time. Early on their were private networks, most notably ICG and AOL Instant Messenger, where we both had to be on the same network to type messages to each other. As a result, many of us opened free accounts on AIM, MSN and Yahoo! Two of the shortcomings of IM are that If you’re offline I can’t IM you andIf I’m offline, you can’t IM me. And you can tell if I’m online, so I can’t hide from you when you really want to reach me.

  Texting is like IM, but instead of a computer you use a cell phone. It’s so bad only teenage girls use it. (kidding)

  Twitter is like broadcast IM, limited to 140 characters - about a sentence and a half. The only people who see your broadcast twitter messages (called tweets) are those who elect to follow you. The tweets are so short, they are officially called status updates. There’s only enough room to provide an update about your status to the people who follow you. Examples might be “Working on the version 2.3 of the latest release of software” or “At FX McRory’s for happy hour with some of the team - drop by if you’re in the area.”

  I started using twitter a couple of months ago and find it useful and valuable. Several of us at blist use twitter and follow each other. Often twitter is the most effecient way to broadcast a message such as “build number 2944a is on staging and ready to test.” But there’s a problem. We would never post that because that’s not a message we want to share outside the team.

  That’s where Yammer comes in. Quite simply, Yammer is a private, all employee opt-in chat line. It replaces the times when you really want to send a message to all employees but you really don’t want to send it to the all_employees@mycompany.com email distribution list. Most of us weigh the seriousness of sending an email to everyone in the company. “Will the inconsiderate dolt who left his tuna sandwich in the fridge all weekend please throw it away as soon as possible?”

  There are a few reasons that email is the wrong medium for some of these lightweight messages. Most significantly is that the one guy or gal you intend to reach benefits, but everyone else has the chance of being annoyed and losing productivity.  The all_employees@ email list is typically maintained by I.T. or whomever manages your email server. You can’t control whether you’re included in the list, so you get all of the emails.

  Yammer is like an opt-in version of all_employees@mycompany.com. It’s like undirected group chat, but within only within the company. The beauty of this communication system is that it works as long as some people listen. As long as a few people get the message, they’ll spread it - either verbally or by other means.

  Companies are becoming more and more virtual. I know of a few highly productive companies that are entirely virtual - they don’t have an office. The biggest downside to that model is lack of proximity to your colleagues when you want to bounce ideas off them. Yammer can really help here as it’s “always on” and not nearly as much an interruption as IM. With twitter, and I assume it will be the same with Yammer, there’s no expectation of a response. I only respond if what you said matters to me and I have the bandwidth and appetite to respond. If you ask “Anyone know the equivalent of [Windows]-D to see your desktop on a Mac?” and I don’t know, I’ll just ignore it. But if you IM me and ask the same, I kind of feel obligated to help you.

  Technologists like to think of new technologies replacing old, but communication doesn’t work that way. New communication modes usually augment - they don’t replace - existing ones. The more ways we have to communicate, the better. Here’s how I do/would use all of these communication avenues:

  *) F2F (face-to-face): When the most important outcome is nurturing the relationship itself.

  *) V2V (voice-to-voice): When F2F is not possible and we’re going to talk about something I think we’ll disagree on or which I think might make you uncomfortable and I think hearing your intonation will help me better understand how you really feel.

  *) Voice Mail: I don’t use voice mail anymore. If I want to talk to someone V2V and I call and get their voice mail, I’ll usually hang up and send a short email telling them that I’d like to set up a time to have a call - and give them a little context.

  *) email: When I want to send a directed, asynchronous message and give you the time to think about it, process it and give me your feedback.

  *) blog: When I want to share my lengthier thoughts with an audience that has elected to hear my thoughts. The people who subscribe to the blog are company insiders, outsiders, fans of our software, other entrepreneurs, prospective employees, etc.

  *) IM: When I want to send a directed, synchronous message and timeliness of your response is more important than the depth of your response.

  *) Group Chat: When 3 or more of us need to have a real-time discussion about a topic. Note that I use group chat in both impromptu and scheduled ways. “Let’s meet Thursday at 3:00 in a group chat session to discuss the API spec.”

  *) Yammer: When I want to send a quick private update, which probably is time sensitive, to the entire team hoping that at least a few will respond.

  *) SMS (Texting): I only use texting in two circumstances and only with people who have previously texted me. I’ll use it for real-time status updates for time sensitive appointments. For example, if I’m meeting someone for lunch I might text them to tell them “parking now. See you in 5 mins”. I also use text to keep up to date with my teenage daughters and wife. They seem to prefer this mode of communication and that’s reason enough for me to embrace it casually.

  *) Twitter: When I want to send a quick status update or brief observation to anyone who cares - inside or out the company.

  People are justifiably agonizing about information and communication overload. But that’s why I’m optimistic about Yammer. I think it has a terrific opportunity to eliminate a lot of email and IM that goes on today, simply because there’s no better lightweight means of communication.

  By the way, if you aren’t already, I’d love for you to subscribe to this blog via RSS or get it delivered by email and/or follow me on twitter.

  What do you think about Yammer? Let me know in comments.

  

  September 13th, 2008 · No comments
• Gray is the New Black

  Since our beta launch earlier this year blist has had a gorgeous black and chrome, glassy skin which has generally been lauded upon first look. To refresh your memory, blist currently looks like this:

  

  Come late Monday morning Seattle time we’ll push out the new look and feel of blist. Other than the obvious color change from black to gray, it’s hard to recognize the changes simply by comparing two screen grabs. Say hello to the new look of blist:

  

  What’s less obvious than the color change are a few subtle but much more important changes:

  *) The font size is larger

  *) The rows in the grid are taller

  *) There’s more white space within cells, around the data you enter

  The motive for these changes was pure and simple usability. Our usability research showed that the black theme, smaller font and absence of adequate white space around text resulted in insufficient contrast, leading to eye strain over time. Yikes. Our software was causing fatigue!

  By redesigning the look and feel we’ve inverted the focus from our application’s “chrome” to your data. And that’s a good thing. Your data tells a story and hopefully by diminishing the focus on the app that story will be easier to hear.

  We’ll continue to streamline the interface and continue to focus on usability. We’re convinced that the democratization of working with data begins with the user experience.

  Give the new skin a try and let us know what you think.

  

  September 5th, 2008 · No comments
• Office 2.0 Here I Come

  

  I’ll be in the San Francisco bay area Thursday and Friday for the Office 2.0 conference - my first time attending this event focusing on web 2.0 software for business. It should be a lot of fun. I’ll be on the GTD panel with Mr. GTD himself David Allen, as well as Doreen Hartzell of Enleiten and Neil Mendelson of MindJet. After my panel engagement is over, I’m looking forward to meeting some smart people from some really fantastic companies.  The roster is pretty impressive - here are just a few of the names that caught my attention:

  Loic Lemeur of Seesmic/Twhirl

  Aaron Forth of mint.com

  Vance Checketts of Mozy (EMC)

  Mitch Grasso of SlideRocket - if you haven’t seen Mitch give a demo, don’t miss it!

  Jim Groff of PBWiki

  Sam Lawrence of Jive Software

  Andreas Weigand (was Amazon’s first CTO)

  Zoli Erdos of the blog by the same name

  If you are in San Francisco late this week, you should plan to attend Office 2.0. It looks like it’s going to be a great event.  And if you do, be sure to introduce yourself.

  

  September 3rd, 2008 · No comments
• Summer’s Over - Fall’s a Great Time to Run

  I love a good run.

  Summer’s great, but it’s hard to keep a schedule. The kids are out of school. Vacations interrupt our week-in-and-week-out routines. It’s hard to keep a predictable running regimen.

  Fall is great for getting back into a rhythm. Community 5K runs are a quadruple treat: 1) they motivate me (and they’ll motivate you too) to run on my own between events; 2) they’re a lot of fun; 3) they almost always benefit a good cause; and 4) they almost always give you a t-shirt and lots of other fun shwag just for joining in the festivities.

  If you’re in the Seattle area, here’s a blist of upcoming runs. This little “widget” is read only, but I’ve made the underlying blist publicly modifiable. Feel free to add other runs in your area. Just click on the [Full Screen] icon at the bottom to open it up in blist.

  
  

  5K Runs
  
  Powered by blist

  
  

  I look forward to seeing you on the trails and roads around Seattle or hearing about the runs in your area.

  

  September 2nd, 2008 · No comments
• What You Missed at Gnomedex

  

  On Friday and Saturday I attended my first Gnomedex. I met Chris Pirillo for the first time last week and like him a lot. I really hope his event becomes even more successful than it already has over eight years running. The big question is “What is Gnomedex?” and despite my enjoyment of the event and my feelings for Chris, by not answering this question well enough Gnomedex hasn’t yet enjoyed the reach it could or should. Chris calls it “Human Circuitry” but that’s just way too vague and intangible.

  Quite simply and in my own terms, Gnomedex is an event that shows how technology can be applied to scale humanity. So often we see technology as a means to get work done or to entertain us, and in both cases the motivation is often profit. Gnomedex is a stage for passionate folks to share with the world how their using technology to make people’s lives better, even when profit isn’t the motive.

  Gnomedex reminds me of two other conferences which I hold in high regard. The first is TED, which is a conference about technology, education and design (T.E.D.) and which carries the tagline “ideas worth spreading” which fits it perfectly. The second is Mark Anderson’s FiRe - Future in Review conference - which draws some of the most distinguished speakers.

  In a very good way, the best presentations at Gnomedex remind me of that famous Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) quote from the movie Say Anything: “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.”

  Most of the speakers were infectiously passionate about something that matters to them. And they found a way to use technology to scale the impact on humanity they could have in their area of passion. One of the things I loved is how often I thought a talk wouldn’t be relevant to me personally and how personally moved I was by the talk. Here are a few of the talks you missed if you didn’t attend Gnomedex:

  Kris Krug gave a talk on how to take great pictures. This is one of the talks I thought wouldn’t move me but really did. He covered a lot of ground and his two loves really came through: 1) he wants to take great pictures that you will love and remember; 2) he wants you to be as good as he is. Two simple tips he gave was very humane. When taking pictures of someone for the first time, start without the camera. Just get to know the subject and put them at ease. Second, after you take a picture or two, have them take a peek at the image. In Kris’ words “People don’t dislike being photographed. They dislike bad photos. Show them how good they look and they’ll open up.”

  I’m one of about 5 people on the planet not fully enamored by icanhascheezeburger but I thoroughly enjoyed Ben Huh’s talk on how the LolCats site came to be, how it grew and how it spread to a franchise now comprised of seven sites. They are on track to reach 100 million page views per month within a month or two.

  Many of you already know, respect and admire Beth Kanter. She didn’t disappoint in person. Full of energy and passion she gave a wonderful talk on using social media for good causes. She walked the walk and talked the talk live, simultaneously giving her presentation while running an online fundraiser and an in-the-audience pass-the-fez fundraiser to raise scholarship help for deserving Cambodian students. The point of her talk, and a theme echoed by a few other presenters, is that technology and the Internet are amplifiers which can boost the signal of your message to a much larger audience than your voice can alone. Embrace it.

  I was incredibly moved by Amanda Koster’s story and her causes. She’s a professional photographer who donates much of her own time and professional skills to spreading the word of important causes through photo essays. She’s now scaling her previously individual efforts through Salaam Garage, which provides an opportunity for indviduals like me and you to go with her and get involved. It’s Amanda’s realization that technology has democratized the media - we’re all now part of the media and together we get to decide what issues to promote.

  It seems every conference has to have its celebrity guest speaker and Sarah Lacy filled the bill in this regard. Sarah led a town hall discussion about the transformation of blogging and social media from representing the views of the everyman to becoming the “big media” that it despised so much. This session got a lot of people talking and twittering, but I think it was over-manufactured myself. We blog because we have things we want to say. Some become fixated on traffic and subscribership and there’s no doubt some blogs have become media companies. But we all blog because it fulfills an agenda. The agenda ranges from making money to generating leads to attracting employees to relieving writer’s cramp writing in a journal. While I think Sarah and I would disagree about whether there really is a problem here, I think Sarah did a great job engaging the audience and stimulating a healthy discussion.

  Eve Maler, a.k.a. xmlgrrl, told us that technology can empower us to shop promiscuously. OK. Maybe she didn’t quite say it that way. She led a talk about online vendor relationship management, discussing the many tradeoffs we consumers face - the convenience of having online stores remember a lot about us (a committed online relationship) vs our desire that sometimes they remember absolutely nothing about us (a shopping experience more like a one night stand). I think of VRM more as ‘cross the web identity management than vendor relationship management,  but regardless it’s an interesting topic championed by Doc Searls in his work at the Harvard Berkman Center and Eve’s talk was terrific.

  University of Washington electrical engineering grad student Jon Malkin wowed the room with a demonstration of a voice joystick he and his colleagues at UW are creating. It was impressive. It allows someone to move a mouse pointer around with their voice, using vowel tones (aaaahh, eeehhh, ooooh, ihhh) to “push” the mouse in one direction or another.

  Another UW grad student, Ethan Katz-Bassett, gave an interesting talk about black holes on the Internet. As we learned last year when much of Egypt dropped off the Internet due to a cable cut near the Straights of Gibraltar, sometimes destinations can be unreachable for extended periods. The Hubble Project tries to find and explain these black holes through some interesting maps and data.

  The most commercial talk was Dave Mathews of Boxee and I wouldn’t mention it other than the technology really is cool and Dave did an awesome job. Boxee is what Windows Media Center and Apple TV should be if they were done right. It’s a software application that runs on the Mac or Linux to fully control your media - TV, music, movies, etc. The user interface is gorgeous. The most interesting part of Boxee is that it’s social. In a world with “500 channels and nothing’s on” the best guide for what to watch and listen to is the implicit and explicit recommendations of people we know.

  The talk that drew the most engaged, passionate response seemed to be Scott Maxwell’s presentation dubbed “Mars 3.0″ in which he wondered how might the Internet change space exploration. Scott’s talked moved me not so much because of what the future held, but by how much he made space exploration so tangible and meaningful to us today. Scott works for JPL and his job is to drive the Mars Exploration Rover via remote control. The array of questions from the audience was dizzying and the way in which Scott answered each in terms we all understand was awesome. He shared some of the most spectacular photographs I’ve ever seen. Scott has a great knack for making things relevant. He first showed a spectacular photo of Victoria Crater at Meridiani Planum on Mars, then brought down the house showing a lolcat curled up in it (photo above).

  Besides the great talks, Gnomedex is great for mingling, meeting and greeting. It’s such a laid back, low key venue that everyone feels comfortable talking with each other.

  So if you are interested in applying technology to scale humanity and promote causes about which you’re passionate, don’t miss Gnomedex next year. It’s really a terrific conference.

  

  August 26th, 2008 · No comments
• Printing in blist

  At blist, we think about three core scenarios as relates to working with data: getting data in; analyzing, massaging, querying and generally working with data when it’s in blist; and getting data out.

  We’re happy to introduce blist PDF printing via this blog post. It’s a big help in the “getting data out” category. For those who don’t know, most browsers have the a built-in print method which can be invoked programmatically. It takes about 5 minutes to wire up. Candidly, the output you get from the browser looks like it took about 5 minutes to wire up and that’s why for most of our beta period we haven’t supported printing at all. Who wants to spend a lot of time getting the data looking visually compelling only to have it look like a garbled mess when it prints?

  What we did at blist was take the long road toward investing in creating exceptional paper output. We’re happy to introduce high fidelity PDF output. To print any blist or lens, click on the [Print] icon in the toolbar:

  

  You’ll see a print dialog that allows you to configure basic output options:

  

  After you click the print button, we’ll generate a PDF file and stream it back to your browser. It’s very fast and the output looks terrific. Here’s an example:

  

  Click on the image above to see the actual PDF. Because the output we generate is PDF, you can do all the normal things you can do with any PDF: email it, save it to your hard drive and of course - send it to your local printer.

  

  August 21st, 2008 · No comments