So tonight I went to tonight's Ignite Seattle event.
Dude! I mean DUDE!
The talk format is 5 minutes with automagic 15 second slide changes. The talks were GREAT!
The stand outs were Rob Gruhl's talk about "How to Buy a New Car" (strategy), "Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR!" by Dave McClure (my personal favorite), and Leo Dirac's "Venture Capital Term Sheets". These were really great, informative 5 minute talks. You can see the video from the talks and the decks (I think) on the Ignite Seattle site.
One disappointment was Werewolf Strategy by HB Siegel. While he talked about the game, he never really got into the strategy. In part it was disappointing because I guess I had really high expectations for the talk. In retrospect it really wasn't a bad talk (in fact it was really entertaining) I just hoped for more meat about strategy. The game itself is perfectly suited to this short format of talk since in the game there's no objective information that is usable in each round. Thus the game is played at a higher level by playing the players rather than playing the game. If I lost you on that one just drop me a line an we'll play it sometime.
I'm dying to do a talk at one of these. If you have suggestions for a topic that would fit nicely in 5 minutes please leave a comment.
Anyway, I'm exhausted but totally energized by tonight's events. If you get a chance you MUST go. It is one of the best geek-fests I've ever been to.
-------------------
Follow up from 8/11/2007
Dave McClure nicely posted a comment with the deck from his talk. You can find it here at Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR!.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Busy, Busy, Busy
Holy crap I've been busy!
It's been like two months since I last posted and all kinds of stuff has been going on.
First off, it's getting really exciting at LiquidPlanner! We're getting ready to come out of that highly secretive and mysterious "stealth mode" that all really cool start-ups do (well, it seems all cool at the time).
We've re-named "Team46" as "LiquidPlanner" and I've been running around showing the product to anyone who will sit still for two hours and look at my laptop. Patent drafts are about to be handed back from the lawyers and then things will really crank up.
On Friday I drove all the way up to Snohomish to pick up a server rack (well, half-height rack) to go in the office for us to configure our servers before moving them to the co-lo. After all that and dragging the damned thing back and hauling it upstairs to the office I discover that it won't fit the rails we've got for the servers. That's $40 bucks and 3 hours that I'll never get back. Oh well.
I'm SO stoked to get the servers up and running so we can start showing people what we've been building. Just a little longer and we'll start handing out logins to the private Alpha servers so that more folks can take a look and see what they think. I've got to get the forum software up and running too. We're a Rails shop so we've chosen Beast and I think I'm gonna be really happy with it. It seems simple and straightforward while still allowing most of the features that we want.
I've been reading just about everything I can get my hands on about probabilistic scheduling and some of it is at once cool, and nearly incomprehensible. As we work on this and I dig into the subject I become more and more convinced that most scheduling woes in projects are caused by Murphy's law and Parkinson's law (work expands to fill available time) colliding with bad estimates (like saying 10 days instead of giving a range like 8-15 days) and the usual way that Gantt charts get drawn.
There's this industry report called the Standish CHAOS report (gotta love that name) that says that something like 80% of projects miss their schedule, budget, or scope. I think that I understand where that number comes from and here's the kicker... it isn't bad project management. It is the system itself that is causing the misses. You want a hint... it's all about the log-normal distribution.
It's been like two months since I last posted and all kinds of stuff has been going on.
First off, it's getting really exciting at LiquidPlanner! We're getting ready to come out of that highly secretive and mysterious "stealth mode" that all really cool start-ups do (well, it seems all cool at the time).
We've re-named "Team46" as "LiquidPlanner" and I've been running around showing the product to anyone who will sit still for two hours and look at my laptop. Patent drafts are about to be handed back from the lawyers and then things will really crank up.
On Friday I drove all the way up to Snohomish to pick up a server rack (well, half-height rack) to go in the office for us to configure our servers before moving them to the co-lo. After all that and dragging the damned thing back and hauling it upstairs to the office I discover that it won't fit the rails we've got for the servers. That's $40 bucks and 3 hours that I'll never get back. Oh well.I'm SO stoked to get the servers up and running so we can start showing people what we've been building. Just a little longer and we'll start handing out logins to the private Alpha servers so that more folks can take a look and see what they think. I've got to get the forum software up and running too. We're a Rails shop so we've chosen Beast and I think I'm gonna be really happy with it. It seems simple and straightforward while still allowing most of the features that we want.
I've been reading just about everything I can get my hands on about probabilistic scheduling and some of it is at once cool, and nearly incomprehensible. As we work on this and I dig into the subject I become more and more convinced that most scheduling woes in projects are caused by Murphy's law and Parkinson's law (work expands to fill available time) colliding with bad estimates (like saying 10 days instead of giving a range like 8-15 days) and the usual way that Gantt charts get drawn.
There's this industry report called the Standish CHAOS report (gotta love that name) that says that something like 80% of projects miss their schedule, budget, or scope. I think that I understand where that number comes from and here's the kicker... it isn't bad project management. It is the system itself that is causing the misses. You want a hint... it's all about the log-normal distribution.
Friday, June 08, 2007
Writing can save your teeth!
I was going on a writing-fest today. This was only half intentional. Here's what happened...
I was going to a whole friggen big list of sites to see what they were about and how their user communities behaved and what features they had that we want tosteal emulate and I found all these cool topics that I wanted to chime in on.
But the minute that I wanted to dash off a 5 minute note I started thinking about the topic, and that lead me to Wikipedia to research the topic, and before I know it about 2 hours has gone by and I've got about 6 paragraphs of research with friggen footnotes and crap all ready to post to some forum that I've only ever been to once and will probably never visit again except that now I'm getting email responding to my post saying, "That's exactly what I think" or "You're full of crap HotKatie80".
... um... sorry, that was a different forum.
Anyway, what I started to notice was that as I wrote the posts my ideas kept changing. I'd write, think about what I wrote, revise what I wrote, read what I wrote, and that would change what I thought, and...
Yeah... you can see where this is headed.
So now I'm thinking (as I'm writing this) that this might be a really good explanation for why spec reviews are so important.
What!?!?!
Okay, bear with me...
The thing is that a written spec can't "wave its hands" at a problem. You really have to think through how the thing will work and make it all simultaneously consistent. Since a written spec is random access (in a way that a conversation is not) you can compare one section to another easily to find "bugs". So the act of writing the spec is the important thing. And it can't be just for yourself, but for public consumption (or as public as your spec can be which is probably a spec review).
Talk is a high bandwidth but essentially serial access connection with another person's brain. But the written word can be jumped around in really at random. This allows you to put facts side-by-side easily and compare them to see what likely outcomes or problems might arise.
For example, when I was a kid if I had written down that I was going to take my friend's soapbox racer to the top of our (very) steep hill and ride down to stop in the cul-de-sac with no brakes and no plan for how to stop at the end I can tell you that it would have seemed just as dumb as it does now when I stare at it in print.
That's because I can put "steep", "no brakes", "stop", and "cul-de-sac" all side-by-side in a way that just wasn't possible when we talked over this "plan" for the half-hour it took Jon & Dave & my brother & I to put it together and push the soapbox racer sans brakes to the top of the (very) steep hill.
Hell, we even had a "spec review" before we went forward.
Bruce:
"Okay, I'll jump in and you push me off and then I'll drive down to the bottom of the hill and stop in the cul-de-sac."
Dave:
"Sounds good."
Jon:
"Go for it."
My Brother:
"You're an idiot... er... Yeah, go for it!"
If only I'd written it down first.
I might not have done it (okay, it's still a toss up).
I might still have most of my front tooth.
I was going to a whole friggen big list of sites to see what they were about and how their user communities behaved and what features they had that we want to
But the minute that I wanted to dash off a 5 minute note I started thinking about the topic, and that lead me to Wikipedia to research the topic, and before I know it about 2 hours has gone by and I've got about 6 paragraphs of research with friggen footnotes and crap all ready to post to some forum that I've only ever been to once and will probably never visit again except that now I'm getting email responding to my post saying, "That's exactly what I think" or "You're full of crap HotKatie80".
... um... sorry, that was a different forum.
Anyway, what I started to notice was that as I wrote the posts my ideas kept changing. I'd write, think about what I wrote, revise what I wrote, read what I wrote, and that would change what I thought, and...Yeah... you can see where this is headed.
So now I'm thinking (as I'm writing this) that this might be a really good explanation for why spec reviews are so important.
What!?!?!
Okay, bear with me...
The thing is that a written spec can't "wave its hands" at a problem. You really have to think through how the thing will work and make it all simultaneously consistent. Since a written spec is random access (in a way that a conversation is not) you can compare one section to another easily to find "bugs". So the act of writing the spec is the important thing. And it can't be just for yourself, but for public consumption (or as public as your spec can be which is probably a spec review).
Talk is a high bandwidth but essentially serial access connection with another person's brain. But the written word can be jumped around in really at random. This allows you to put facts side-by-side easily and compare them to see what likely outcomes or problems might arise.
For example, when I was a kid if I had written down that I was going to take my friend's soapbox racer to the top of our (very) steep hill and ride down to stop in the cul-de-sac with no brakes and no plan for how to stop at the end I can tell you that it would have seemed just as dumb as it does now when I stare at it in print.
That's because I can put "steep", "no brakes", "stop", and "cul-de-sac" all side-by-side in a way that just wasn't possible when we talked over this "plan" for the half-hour it took Jon & Dave & my brother & I to put it together and push the soapbox racer sans brakes to the top of the (very) steep hill.
Hell, we even had a "spec review" before we went forward.
Bruce:
"Okay, I'll jump in and you push me off and then I'll drive down to the bottom of the hill and stop in the cul-de-sac."
Dave:
"Sounds good."
Jon:
"Go for it."
My Brother:
"You're an idiot... er... Yeah, go for it!"
If only I'd written it down first.
I might not have done it (okay, it's still a toss up).
I might still have most of my front tooth.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
The Joy of Patent Work
I've been trying to get the patent applications in order for the stuff we've been working on at Team46 for the past couple of months. Oh the joy of government legalese!
The US Patent & Trademark Office says:
------------------
“The USPTO will accept color drawings in utility patent applications and statutory invention registrations only after granting a petition explaining why the color drawings are necessary. Any such petition must include the following:
the appropriate fee set forth in 37 CFR §1.17(h)
three sets of color drawings; and
the following language as the first paragraph in that portion of the specification relating to the BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE SEVERAL VIEWS OF THE DRAWING. If the language is not in the specification, an amendment to insert the language must accompany the petition.”
------------------
Blaarghh!!! Please, kill me now.
Oh yeah… and THIS gem…
------------------
“The number of each sheet should be shown by two Arabic numerals placed on either side of an oblique line, with the first being the sheet number and the second being the total number of sheets of drawings, with no other marking.”
------------------
Oh, is that a fancy way of saying number sheets like 2 of 5 in this way; 2/5 ?
An oblique line!!?!? Grrr….
So if you've been tasked with taking care of IP stuff for your start-up let me give you some handy tips that I've come to so far...
Hire a lawyer
No, really. Time is one of your most precious commodities. Don't waste it on crap like trying to figure out the fancy government talk above.
Really prepare to talk to your lawyer
I like to write down all of my ideas, no matter how wacky or obvious, and get them in one big list. I write a short description (like two sentences) so I have a good idea of what I'm talking about. I also include diagrams or screenshots if I have them. Then I print out the list of ideas (with the numbers) as a table of contents and the ideas with their short descriptions with one idea per page. This way I have plenty of whitespace on my pages to take notes on what the lawyer says.
Types and Costs of Filings
There are two types of patent filings; Provisional (PF) and Utility (UF). Utility filings are what people typically think of when they think “patent”.
Figure 1 – Comparison of Provisional and Utility Filings
For Utility filings the costs based upon size and complexity of filing are t-shirt sized like this:
Figure 2 – Estimates of Costs for Utility Filings
One advantage to a Utility Filing is that it forces you to go through the whole process and see what needs to be shored up in any Provisional Filings you want to file.
It may also be worth your while to read through a few actual patents. Once you get past the language you can start to see how they are organized and what they are looking for in terms of specificity and organization. The US Patent Office has a pretty usable patent search site that covers both applications and grated patents.
That's about all I can think of right now. My eyeballs are about to fall out. Time to go home and drink myself to sleep. Thanks Patent Office.
The US Patent & Trademark Office says:
------------------
“The USPTO will accept color drawings in utility patent applications and statutory invention registrations only after granting a petition explaining why the color drawings are necessary. Any such petition must include the following:
the appropriate fee set forth in 37 CFR §1.17(h)
three sets of color drawings; and
the following language as the first paragraph in that portion of the specification relating to the BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE SEVERAL VIEWS OF THE DRAWING. If the language is not in the specification, an amendment to insert the language must accompany the petition.”
------------------
Blaarghh!!! Please, kill me now.
Oh yeah… and THIS gem…
------------------
“The number of each sheet should be shown by two Arabic numerals placed on either side of an oblique line, with the first being the sheet number and the second being the total number of sheets of drawings, with no other marking.”
------------------
Oh, is that a fancy way of saying number sheets like 2 of 5 in this way; 2/5 ?
An oblique line!!?!? Grrr….
So if you've been tasked with taking care of IP stuff for your start-up let me give you some handy tips that I've come to so far...
Hire a lawyer
No, really. Time is one of your most precious commodities. Don't waste it on crap like trying to figure out the fancy government talk above.
Really prepare to talk to your lawyer
I like to write down all of my ideas, no matter how wacky or obvious, and get them in one big list. I write a short description (like two sentences) so I have a good idea of what I'm talking about. I also include diagrams or screenshots if I have them. Then I print out the list of ideas (with the numbers) as a table of contents and the ideas with their short descriptions with one idea per page. This way I have plenty of whitespace on my pages to take notes on what the lawyer says.
Types and Costs of Filings
There are two types of patent filings; Provisional (PF) and Utility (UF). Utility filings are what people typically think of when they think “patent”.
Provisional | Utility |
|---|---|
| Cheaper ($500-$5k) | More expensive (see below) |
| 12 mo. then abandon or file utility | 20 yrs from filing or 17 yrs from issue |
| Establish date for “prior art” | Establish exclusivity protection |
| Cannot be “tweaked” much before U.F. | Can be tweaked or amended significantly |
| Not published | Published |
Figure 1 – Comparison of Provisional and Utility Filings
For Utility filings the costs based upon size and complexity of filing are t-shirt sized like this:
Size & Complexity | Initial Filing | 2-3 Years Later |
|---|---|---|
| Low | $12k +- 2k | $12k |
| Medium | $15k +- 2k | $15k |
| High | $18k +- 2k | $18k |
| Gov.t Fees | $1.5k - $2.5k |
Figure 2 – Estimates of Costs for Utility Filings
One advantage to a Utility Filing is that it forces you to go through the whole process and see what needs to be shored up in any Provisional Filings you want to file.
It may also be worth your while to read through a few actual patents. Once you get past the language you can start to see how they are organized and what they are looking for in terms of specificity and organization. The US Patent Office has a pretty usable patent search site that covers both applications and grated patents.
That's about all I can think of right now. My eyeballs are about to fall out. Time to go home and drink myself to sleep. Thanks Patent Office.
Monday, May 07, 2007
To bug or not to bug
That is the question.
I used to be a software tester. In a way that's like saying, "I used to be an alcoholic." Just because you've moved on doesn't mean it stops defining a lot of your behavior. You see a bug and... well... it bugs you. You want it fixed.
So you see some trivial but vaguely troubling thing on a site and because your fingers can type a bug report on their own without your actually having to tell them to, bada-bing; the site owner gets a little nasty bomb in their inbox.
You're trying to help. You "just want to help them make their site better." But what you're actually doing is sucking the gumption right out of them. It isn't helping, it's hurting.
I did this recently.
The nice folks at Construx (who I think are quite good and who I rather like personally as well as professionally) put up a forums and blogs site for their training & consulting firm.
Now in my defense I wasn't trying to do something completely insane. I created a account, logged in, and could not see the forums or the blogs. This struck me as something they'd like to know about.
And here's where I went wrong. I wrote a bug report...
Why does the bug report have nothing at all to do with not being able to see the forums?
Well, I tried to send that one but as you can see above, if you're not logged in, you can't send email.
So why was I logged out?
Because if I was logged in I couldn't see the forums and so I also couldn't get the link in the forums to send mail.
As Earl says, "Arrrgg!"
This doesn't make me right. It just makes me a dork.
Earl is right (and he calls me on it). It really is a selfish thing to send this kind of crap.
He didn't ask me to test his site. He asked me to use it. To read it. To come play in it. He was my host and I threw rocks through his windows.
I was a poor guest. But it didn't have to be like this.
I just as easily could have sent a conversational, friendly email that said things like, "Hi! How's it going? It's really great that you guys have these blogs and forums and I'm looking forward to reading them." All of which is absolutely true.
"Hey I've noticed that I'm having trouble reading the forums and blogs when I'm signed in. This makes it hard for me to write comments on your blogs or post to the forums. The site looks great though and I'm really happy to see you folks building more of a community around your best practices stuff!"
That's all it would have taken. Just a little conversational civility.
I'm such a dork.
I used to be a software tester. In a way that's like saying, "I used to be an alcoholic." Just because you've moved on doesn't mean it stops defining a lot of your behavior. You see a bug and... well... it bugs you. You want it fixed.
So you see some trivial but vaguely troubling thing on a site and because your fingers can type a bug report on their own without your actually having to tell them to, bada-bing; the site owner gets a little nasty bomb in their inbox.You're trying to help. You "just want to help them make their site better." But what you're actually doing is sucking the gumption right out of them. It isn't helping, it's hurting.
I did this recently.
The nice folks at Construx (who I think are quite good and who I rather like personally as well as professionally) put up a forums and blogs site for their training & consulting firm.
Now in my defense I wasn't trying to do something completely insane. I created a account, logged in, and could not see the forums or the blogs. This struck me as something they'd like to know about.
And here's where I went wrong. I wrote a bug report...
Sent From: brucephenry
Subject: Bug: If not logged in email form blanks after login
__________________________________
Repro:
- goto http://blogs.construx.com/members/EarlBCx.aspx
- Login
- Open another tab in your browser
- Click Send Earl an email link on the right
- In other window logout
- Type your message to Earl and hit [Send Email] button
Result:
Prompt to login followed by a blank email form.
Expected:
Prompt to login followed by "Thanks your email was sent" page (presumably along with sending the email as typed).
Bruce P. Henry
Why does the bug report have nothing at all to do with not being able to see the forums?
Well, I tried to send that one but as you can see above, if you're not logged in, you can't send email.
So why was I logged out?
Because if I was logged in I couldn't see the forums and so I also couldn't get the link in the forums to send mail.
As Earl says, "Arrrgg!"
This doesn't make me right. It just makes me a dork.
Earl is right (and he calls me on it). It really is a selfish thing to send this kind of crap.
He didn't ask me to test his site. He asked me to use it. To read it. To come play in it. He was my host and I threw rocks through his windows.I was a poor guest. But it didn't have to be like this.
I just as easily could have sent a conversational, friendly email that said things like, "Hi! How's it going? It's really great that you guys have these blogs and forums and I'm looking forward to reading them." All of which is absolutely true.
"Hey I've noticed that I'm having trouble reading the forums and blogs when I'm signed in. This makes it hard for me to write comments on your blogs or post to the forums. The site looks great though and I'm really happy to see you folks building more of a community around your best practices stuff!"
That's all it would have taken. Just a little conversational civility.
I'm such a dork.
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