Socrata

As blist develops and we get closer to launching the service, it’s been fun and rewarding to demo the application to people who have deep opinions and pedigrees in the space in which we plan to operate. Over the last few weeks I’ve been fortunate to conduct two specific demos of this sort. I’ll admit I had some anxiety initially. It’s akin to talking about black holes with Stephen Hawking.

The first demo was with the co-founder and CEO of not one, but two significant database companies. He’s truly a pioneer in the space. He was skeptical of taking a meeting with us initially as he thought he had seen it all and heard it all already. With the help of a persuasive friend of blist, he ultimately accepted our meeting request. In three short weeks he’s gone from doubter to a big believer and a strong advocate. He’s excited about the innovations we showed him and is equally enthusiastic about where we plan to take blist. He shared with me that he’s impressed that we’re thinking and investing at both ends of the database spectrum. At one end, we’re investing in building a database as a service that scales to Internet scale. At the other end, we’re investing and making great advances in usability so that mainstream users can organize data without dependence on a DBA.

His vote of confidence matters to me.

The second demo was to James Hamilton, my boss while I was at Microsoft. James was a core architect of both Microsoft’s SQL Server and IBM’s DB2. He’s the co-author of a number of whitepapers on database theory and internals. He’s one of the smartest technologists I’ve ever known. I gave him a demo of blist and he was impressed with how much we’ve accomplished since starting development earlier this year. James and I share a passion for big scale ops – running really large web services at Internet scale. Most of our conversations over the last two-and-a-half years have been in this area, so I think James was surprised by the significant innovations we’ve made on the user interface. He’s very enthusiastic about blist.

His vote of confidence matters to me.

We’re excited about what we’re building at blist. At the end of the day our success will not be measured by what two industry veterans think, but instead by whether people adopt and embrace blist in large numbers. For now, though, I’m content with two votes of confidence from two people who collectively have more than 50 years of peerless domain experience. And while I generally think most people in this database world are too set in their thinking, these two in particular moved on from the database world because there wasn’t enough new thinking.

Their votes of confidence matter to me.

Last week was a big one for blist. We took a small step towards a future of meeting accelerated milestones and great features rolling into blist.

We added another software engineer to the team.

Big deal you say. Startups add software engineers all the time and it’s not newsworthy. This time was different. It was a big deal for me personally. Chi, my long time colleague, friend and one of my favorite people, joined us at blist.

Chi and I began working together in January, 1997. He was the biggest contributor in building Prospector, which as I’ve shared previously, was an application from whose DNA blist has evolved. In February 2003, Chi became MessageRite’s first employee. When MessageRite was acquired by FrontBridge, Chi came along too. When Microsoft acquired FrontBridge, Chi came along that time too. When I left Microsoft last fall to start laying the foundation for blist, it was the first time in 10 years that Chi and I were no longer colleagues. Chi signed up for a two-year stint at Microsoft and was fulfilling that commitment.

While we still haven’t disclosed too many details of what we’re building at blist, I can say we’re ahead of schedule by almost every measure. The primary reason for this is that we have a phenomenal founding team, all of whom are new to working with me. Every one of the core blist team is an all-star and an argument could be made that we don’t need him. We’ve certainly accomplished much without Chi.

As the CEO, I internally struggled with the thought of having Chi join us. On one hand, he’s a great engineer whose capabilities and talents I know well. On the other hand, the new team was already doing well, in large part because they’ve gelled together. Team chemistry is vastly underrated in the productivity of software engineering teams.

You already know how it turned out. Chi has joined us. I’m excited about his involvement with blist for many reasons, not the least of which is that he’s a great software engineer. But the deciding factor was something far less tangible and much harder to describe. It’s like putting on your high school baseball glove again for the thousandth time and having it feel as good on your hand as it did decades before. It’s the comfort of the familiar.

When assembling your startup team, scour within and beyond your network for the best talent you can find. New people bring energy, fresh perspectives and new skills and you definitely want them. But save a spot or two for friendly, familiar faces. It’s been a week since Chi joined us and it’s already clear that it was the right choice to make.