Socrata

Today is February 29. It’s a bonus day that comes but once every four years. Each of us remembers by name that one kid from elementary school whose birthday is February 29.

It’s a special day on the calendar, unlike any other.

It’s like when the record skips for a few seconds and then re-engages, but on a universal scale.

It’s a day in which we get to contribute to the numerator without paying the tax of the denominator.

Do something remarkable. Make it count.

“I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent with wild success.”

Steve Martin, Born Standing Up, 2007.

That’s closer to what overnight success really looks like in every sector – comedy, sports and business.

The wickedly smart UW Phd student, Aaron Kimball, will be hosting a talk on cloud computing at the end of April at Google’s Fremont (Seattle area, not California) campus. The talk will include some good discussion on Hadoop, the open source project that aims to democratize Internet scale computing. Hadoop is the open source equivalent of Google’s proprietary key technologies – GFS, MapReduce and BigTable.  The primary contributors to Hadoop are exceptionally capable engineers from Yahoo and Powerset.

I highly encourage you to sign up for the talk. If you just can’t wait to play with Hadoop including HBase, you could always introduce yourself to blist and we might be able to find some way to get you involved in what we’re building. If you’re like our engineers, you’d rather dig in and get your hands dirty. We’re looking for smart folks thinking about challenges at Internet scale.

I’m amused by all of the folks who have been calling since we announced our funding round last week. The pitches are just awful. It’s not quite this bad, but what I hear is along the lines of “Um, I’m just reading how you raised all that money, and, you know what? Um. I want to help you spend it. Cuz I’m really good at that. You know what I mean?”

What kinds of people are calling me?

*) Lots and lots and lots of recruiters. If my phone rings between 12:45 p.m. and 1:30 p.m. there’s a 75% chance it’s a recruiter.

*) Commercial real estate agents wanting to know if we need any new office space.

*) High net worth financial planners. Do they think the money went into my personal bank account?

*) Offshore development shops.

*) Direct mail fulfillment houses.

*) Video marketers.

*) PR agencies.

I have a better idea. Don’t work so hard. Instead of you all calling me, how about if I need any of your services, I’ll search for you? You’ll save money and do less work, and I’ll enjoy getting more work done by being less frequently interrupted. Does that sound like a plan? Cuz I’m really good at coming up with these kind of win-win solutions to really hard problems, you know what I mean?

At blist and throughout my career I’ve received thousands of resumes, most of which have come by email in the last decade. Most cover letters are either omitted or too long. They almost always simply restate what’s in the resume. Today I received an unsolicited resume with a brief cover note that really caught my attention because of how succinct and crisp it is. Here it is:

Subject: Vote for xxxxxx for Software Engineer @ blist

I want to contribute at blist because I can see the product is a great disruptive alternative to current database solutions. My core motivation that drives me to produce is being able to make a difference in software products that people want to use and that make their lives better. Working on blists’ small team on a relatively new product is ideal for me.

I can contribute at blist because I have strong software engineering skills and experience with a variety of relevant languages, platforms and technologies including Java, C++, Ruby, SQL/RDBMS, REST, JavaScript, JSON and Linux.

I am currently employed at Microsoft but can take a day off as needed to interview if you think I would be a good candidate.

In one catchy subject and three short paragraphs he tells me all I really need to know:

a) That he has a personality

b) Why he’s passionate about coming to work for us

c) What he brings to the table

d) That he’s committed to explore this employment opportunity with seriousness

The most powerful aspect of his introduction is how it’s cleverly written relative to blist, not himself. Most cover letters are written in the style of “I have worked here and here and here and I’ve used this and that and that too.” This cover note is all about how he’s both excited and comes prepared to contribute at blist.

I’ve long observed that really successful people developed an impressive work ethic before they could even drive a car. I read a study once that said that the percentage of Fortune 500 CEO’s who had paper routes as adolescents was greater than half. Most of the really successful adults I know were hard workers as pre-teens and teens.

Last week I learned of even more anecdotal evidence. I was talking with a young entrepreneur who has really impressed me since I came to know of him a year ago. I was telling him that I hoped my own kids became entrepreneurs and he said if I was serious, I should do what his father did. When he and his siblings were adolescents, their father offered them each the same deal. If the teen would go door to door offering to paint house numbers on the curb of each homeowner, he would pay for all of the supplies and even do all of the painting work. It drove home two key points: 1) that to be successful as an entrepreneur you needed to develop the ability to sell; and 2) in order to sell successfully, you need to figure out how to communicate the value proposition of the service you offer.

This young man took his dad up on the offer and made a lot of money one summer during high school. More importantly, it planted the seed of entrepreneurship that is now starting to bear terrific fruit.

My birthday was a few days ago and my wife gave me an iPhone. It was a total surprise. I hadn’t asked for it. Given all that’s going on with blist, I really didn’t want the “time suck” of converting cell phones and carriers. Well I decided to set up the iPhone today, and all I can say is “Wow!” I’m very impressed with three things already: A) the iPhone itself; B) the voice quality and C) the activation process, including converting from Verizon to AT&T while keeping my old cell phone number.

This isn’t meant to be an iPhone review. There are a lot of those. Here are a few comments about it though:

* The iPhone is a little heavier than I thought, but quickly it becomes worth it.

* I hadn’t planned to sync my email as I have more than 5 GB in Outlook, but after just a few hours I’m thinking about it.

* As a cell phone, the voice/audio quality is excellent. I don’t know if that’s because AT&T has better coverage than Verizon near my house or if it’s in the electronics of the phone, but it’s noticeably better than my Motorola RAZR on Verizon.

* Syncing up with the hands free bluetooth on my car was a snap and the audio/voice quality through it is better than with my old phone.

* Browsing the web with Safari on the iPhone is better than anticipated.

* The activation software was the best activation process I’ve ever gone through. EVER! It set up my iPhone, converted me from Verizon to AT&T, carried my existing phone number over and didn’t whack out my wife’s phone, which was part of a family plan on Verizon (and she’s not moving to AT&T just yet). Absolutely flawless. My wife even called Verizon to promote her phone from secondary to primary and they commented that they already see my phone had been ported over to AT&T.

* I haven’t yet found a single device that could be my cell phone and email device. I previously loved my RAZR as a phone and while I haven’t had a Blackberry of late, it’s a great email device but not such a great phone. The iPhone may be the first device that gets the distinction of being my cell phone and email device.

Now that we have a demanding blist user owning an iPhone and loving it, hopefully support for blist on the iPhone isn’t too far away. Playing with my blists on a iPhone sounds like a wonderful thing to me. How about you?

Many of you have heard the good word by now, that blist recently closed a series A funding round, led by Morgenthaler Ventures and Frazier Technology Ventures. Two really smart men, Ken Gullicksen and Scott Darling, have joined our board and are already making great suggestions to improve the product and grow the company.

What most of you don’t know is that I almost had a movie star investor in MessageRite, my first company. The first salesperson I hired at MessageRite became really excited about our potential and asked if I was looking to raise any capital. A little baffled, I told him that I was talking to a consortium of angel investors. He then told me who his best friend was and that his friend is always looking for places to invest some money. The two had been best friends since 1st grade and have remained close through the years. I agreed to explore the idea.

The size of investment this guy was looking to make was very large. In one shot, I could raise more than I could with 20 or 30 angel investors. That would be great, I thought. At the last minute, he accepted a part in a film being shot in Europe and apologetically backed out (but gave me a bunch of autographed 8 x 10′s for my kids). Disappointed initially, I toiled on and everything worked out fabulously.

Now that we have real investors at blist, I’m recognizing how fortunate it was that Mr. Movie Star hadn’t invested in MessageRite. When you write a big check, you often get a board seat and some influence. It’s wonderful having the influence of two skilled and successful businessmen as directors at blist. I could only imagine the randomizing advice I would have received at MessageRite had our primary investor been Mr. Hollywood. It’s funny to think about now.

Conventional wisdom in corporate computing is to invest in sturdy, well performing hardware. Database servers are a good example. As the business grows, so does the storage pool and the computing demands. Every two or three years a new, sturdier, more powerful server is purchased. As the database becomes mission critical efforts are made to make it fault tolerant and to some degree it works.

Unfortunately that model doesn’t scale to Internet scale in either availability or performance. To reach internet scale, you do almost the opposite of what is instinctual in corporate computing. Much better availability and performance are achieved by purchasing a bunch of commodity servers and running them as parallel but entirely independent nodes.

It might be easier to understand this idea in terms of something more tangible than computing. Let’s translate Internet scale computing to the world of cars.

Reliability

(1 * ) = (4* )

The most reliable car according to Forbes is the Lexus LS, which costs about $60,000. How reliable is it? I don’t know, but it’s slightly less than 100%. Flat tire. Battery drained. Out of gas. Any of the above and the car won’t run. Is the Lexus LS more reliable than a Toyota Corolla? Certainly. But what about 4 Corollas? At $15,000 each, you could buy four Corollas for the price of the Lexus. What’s the probability that when you leave for work in the morning all four won’t start? Probably almost zero. So, four inexpensive cars combined are more reliable than one super reliable car.

Performance

(1 * ) = (7 * )

What about performance? Very few cars are faster than the $105,000 Porsche GT3. In the real world, you seldom drive a 1/4 mile in a straight line. More realistic is going to the grocery store, picking up the dry cleaning, dropping off a library book, driving Bryce to soccer practice, picking up Rachel from her piano lesson, dropping the cat off at the vet and going to the post office. What would do those tasks faster, a GT3 or our Toyota Corolla from before? For sure the GT3. But what if you had 7 Corollas with 7 drivers? Which car would complete the errands faster? I’m picking the 7 Corollas. So by working in parallel, seven inexpensive cars are faster than one super fast car.

That’s roughly how computing at Internet scale works. Buy servers that are less expensive, but buy more of them, which boosts both reliability and performance. Of course you need a fabric of software to make these independent nodes work together. Google has its proprietary triumvirate of GFS, MapReduce and BigTable, to which the open source community has responded with Hadoop. This stuff really excites us at blist. And you thought we were only interested in great user interfaces.

Over the weekend, someone wearing a blist shirt was spotted in Napa almost a thousand miles from Seattle. OK. It was me. Just doing my part to spread the good word.