When delivering a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty, you need a range of skills.
To help understand what skills are needed in a startup team, I’ve found it useful to think of people’s skills as being spread out along this line.
Consider people you know, and place them on the line. e.g. A UX designer who can also code Javascript is maybe somewhere towards the technical end of product.
You’ve seen it. The red eyes… An ennui for life…
The drained sadness of someone who has been lost for weeks in a customer support ticket tracking system.
At mySociety (the awesome Internet democracy charity I was on the founding team of) we tried using Request Tracker for a while, and quickly fled.
We could flee, because we had the comfort of a simple email based system to return to.
Many British geeks (including me, once) have an instinctive distaste for marketing.
This is wrong - it lets the evil people get all the advantages of marketing. It hides really good and useful products and services from people.
Instead we need a morality to distinguish the good from the bad. The only definition that I’ve come across - and it’s custom designed for geeks - is as follows (this is courtesy of Julian Todd):
Because I work in technology, people are often surprised that I spend 2 weeks a year living in the 16th Century.
The first episode of a new Podcast by Jonathan Deamer and I explains why.
What is Kentwell Hall? Were the Tudors a high technology society? What does it mean to be human? Why do both Jonathan and I have a long file of interesting subjects we never get round to blogging about?
There’s not enough awesomeness in the universe.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s quite a lot. But we could do with a bit more.
That’s why we’re lucky that Tim Hwang set up the Awesome Foundation a few years ago. It began in Boston, and has spread to dozens of cities.
How’s it work? 10 trustees pay $100 a month each to fund a $1000 prize. The prizes are awarded to things that 1) Have a purpose, 2) Are on a budget, 3) Create joy. Things like phones that can make calls without a base station, flooding a whole city with swings, or a stunning weather balloon to monitor the gulf oil spill. Things like that.
It’s as if your best friend had suddenly died and nobody would tell you how.
Heart attack? Car crash? Murder?
This time the afflicted isn’t a person, but a startup called WhipCar.
The idea of WhipCar… Rent your car out for the odd day or weekend to your neighbour to cover its vast cost. Or, if you don’t own a car, rent your neighbour’s car more cheaply and easily than a hire car.
Taller than houses, the uncle passes the top of a street in Anfield, Liverpool
Earlier this year, giants came to Liverpool.
I was rapt. Addicted.
Each day I woke my girlfriend early. A morning taxi to see a giant diver wake up near two football stadiums. Forced rushing after a night’s drinking to see what a little giant girl would do next.
Imagine a vast multi-dimensional space.
Each point of it represents a specific need that a specific person has, an iota of utility.
The dimensions represent crazy things… Is the need in Africa or in Europe? Is the need on a LAN or on the web? Can travel to satisfaction of the need be done by public transport? How much does the need meet each of the basic needs? Is the need for shelter from the weather? Does satisfaction of the need require the skill of programming?
I decided to investigate Heroku’s early years.
You can learn a lot from even quite recent tech history (see my previous article on version control).
My tool? The Internet Archive. It’s an elephant that never forgets your pivots.
1. November 2007 - code in the cloud
Ruby on Rails is riding high. But impossibly hard to deploy.
Y Combinator startup Heroku’s first home page (see right - apologies for the lack of images, which archive.org has not recorded) screams onto the web.
At [mySociety](http://www.mysociety.org/)'s annual retreat I gave a lightning talk about how I've come to realise that products and markets are the same thing. I'd originally intended it to be a blog post, so here you are.
It’s a story of geeks learning. What is a product? It really is magic.
Before the invention of products (whatever that means!) you had to make bespoke things. You want a tool, you have to bash the rocks together to make your own custom tool.