Teens in Tech Conference this Saturday
Teens in Tech Conference this Saturday 1/31
I'm going to be on my first panel this weekend for the Teens in Tech Conference! I'll be on the Developer Panel with a few other young guys (much smarter than myself) talking about the following:
- How we learned our skills without a CS degree
- How a hobby can become a career
- How to find good developer communities
- What technologies we are personally into
You can register for the conference here - I'm really looking forward to meeting teens that are as into tech as I have been over the last few years.
Also, I've been using Twitter a lot more recently, follow me here.
This Valley is my Hollywood
I had waited all year to see Radiohead and paid through the nose for a ticket. Finally, I was there, Thom Yorke and crew performing in front of me. This was supposed to be the best show of my life – but I was caught in a dilemma: 10 minutes into their show I got a text message from a friend saying Sean Parker was at this party I had been invited to. What should I do?
I started programming when I was 11 or 12 - Netscape Composer is to blame for me falling in love with the internet and technology. I read stories about these young entrepreneurs with their new technologies and websites, raising millions in funding and making millions in turn. To me, Silicon Valley was a fantasy land. Products like Napster and Netscape inspired me to stay up all night writing code and learning everything I could about programming so I could one day build something just as innovative. Fast forward 6 years and I'm here, living it.
I've been in the tech scene full time for about a year now, and I'm beginning to understand how it all works. Everyone knows everyone. There's all the cool kids that hang out with the Digg crowd and go rock climbing at Mission Cliffs. There's the big YCombinator crowd full of smart kids from MIT and Stanford (who kill me in poker). There's the Facebook app developer crowd, and the iPhone app developers. Most of these people either went to a top 20 university or dropped out of school and came here, some of the brightest, most forward thinking people in the world.
But then there are the people that you see very rarely at any of these events. They're generally the people with net worths north of 8 figures and are probably off on a yacht or busy filing their IPO paperwork. These are the people that I follow religiously in the blogosphere/party gossip. The short list includes Sean Parker, Mark Cuban, Peter Thiel, Nick Denton, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, and a few others. This list is made up of people who have gone against what the corporate world said was possible – Peter and Max starting PayPal, Sean starting Napster, Marc starting Netscape, Denton starting Gawker Media, Cuban starting Broadcast.com, and Zuckerberg with good ol' Facebook. These are the guys that looked impossible in the face and knocked it out in the first round.
So back to the Radiohead show. I ran a quick cost/benefit analysis of leaving the Radiohead concert early; it was an easy choice, I had to meet Sean. I hopped in the first cab I could find (town car, cost me $50) and headed over to the Marina. Once I arrived I walked past the bodyguards (on the guest list? check.) and immediately recognized him. I shook his hand and said, "it's good to meet you", then caught myself and corrected, "no, it's GREAT to meet you!" I had read so many things and heard so many stories about him, I was standing in the presence of greatness. A guy who turned the multi billion dollar recording industry upside down with Napster, was founding president at Facebook, and now a partner in The Founder's Fund - the best VC in the world by a long shot. I talked to him for a while and he told me, "what are you doing?! Get back to Radiohead!!" So to capture the moment, I got a picture and he took off to catch his flight.
In closing (this went on way too long!). These are the people I dream of becoming: a Sean Parker, a Mark Cuban, a Peter Thiel. Someone that doesn't accept the norm and bucks the trends, even if it makes people and industries hate you. There is nothing more fulfilling than creating and being the best [insert Ayn Rand diatribe here: joking, I will spare you]. Now I'm at a startup that's trying to do something on a similar scale - YouNoodle. But seriously readers (especially the ones in the Valley, and especially my too-occasional commenters), I love the Valley. I love the internet. I love the people. I love the parties. I love the City. I have found my home.
Would be very interested if anyone feels the same way about the Valley? Comment!
Discussion over on FriendFeed (Scoble commented!)
Quality vs Efficiency
Walter Chrysler once said, "Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it." Companies succeed because of the "laziness" trait found in people - I think of it in a more positive way as the endless search for absolute efficiency. Nearly every electronic device you own and website you go to were built with the intention of making your life more efficient. If people didn't care about getting from A to B the fastest, Google wouldn't have a 200B market cap, Tumblr wouldn't exist, you'd do meetings in person instead of IM, cell phone cameras would have never taken off, and for that matter cell phones probably would have never taken off (cost:efficiency ratio wouldn't be justified by consumers).
This has become very real for me recently after buying a Canon EOS 20D camera (digital SLR). I could get into the camera and spend 10 minutes talking about all the features, how much fun it is to shoot with, how well the pictures turn out (here's my Flickr), etc., but I still don't use it a tenth as much as I use the always-out-of-focus-and-way-too-pixelated camera on my BlackBerry Pearl. It's a very simple equation in my head: walk around all day with an expensive bulky camera strapped around your neck (not to mention how lame you look going to parties with an SLR) OR pull out a hand sized device and snap a picture in 3 seconds.
Forget the quality of the photos for a second; what is my goal in taking photos? Personally, the photos *I want* are moments frozen in time that I will be able to go back to in 5, 10, 20 years to see how much I've changed. I feel the best way to do this is to always have the camera on my cell phone ready to fire, because the moments that you remember come and go so fast it's hard to know when you should have your digital SLR ready to freeze a moment. I also think that when you are dragging around a SLR to an event/concert/function you miss out on a lot of the fun because you're so engaged in taking pictures of other people having fun and sights that you forget to live in the moment. A cell phone camera lets you live in the moment and capture an image to prove that it happened/you were there.
The most important part of the photography efficiency war is ease of publishing. Taking the photo is only the beginning. With an SLR you generally do some post production on the RAW files and then spend an hour or two uploading them to Flickr/Facebook/your blog. With a cell phone camera the process is: snap -> email -> done. This process takes about 12 seconds for me. If you have a Tumblr account you know what I mean. I've become so used to emailing photos to my Tumblr that anytime I compose an email on my BlackBerry I begin writing "Tu" in the TO field of the message.
And I've come to realize - the photos I find most interesting on the internet are ones snapped with cell phones. The quality on all phones are terrible right now (even the Nokia N95 is pretty bad), but in the next few years I expect the cell phone companies to come out with major improvements on their cameras. This will hopefully end the barrage of people at tech events walking around with their bulky SLRs and making sure to capture moments - along with 30 other photographers - of a few people having fun. There is still a need for artistic photography which will never run dry, but that will eventually find its place too.
Whatever product you are building or thinking of building, keep in mind that the you can sacrifice quality for efficiency. The biggest proof for that has been the huge success of cell phone cameras even though SLRs are in a similar price range and take exponentially higher quality photos.
On a final note, there are still very obvious efficiency holes that need to be patched up (governments and education are #1 and #2 on the need list). I am talking about your next startup.
7 months into it
It's been a long time since I sat down and wrote about what's been going on. It's been a little over 7 months since I joined YouNoodle and came to Silicon Valley.
In high school, I always had this picture of Silicon Valley -- I thought of it as some magical playground for nerds and crazy libertarians. I heard a lot of different things about what goes on here, but my overall impression was that people were good to eachother and everyone was getting rich. Well, I think this is one of the few times that my first impressions were right.
I got my first taste of how the whole networking shindig works in July of 07 (a few months before moving out) at the Pownce Launch Party. I met a load of people that night that I run into all the time. All the cool kids hang out in this big crowd, and they're super welcoming to new people. It's like high school cliques except it's one unified clique all trying to change the world and make tons of money. I've heard people say SV is a big rich family, it really is. It's funny because I was at the YCombinator dinner for Startup School last night and I took a step back and realized how many people I've met in such a short period of time. (As a side note... I love the networking events where you wear name tags because people come up to you and look at your name tag and analyze whether or not it's worth meeting you.)
I've gotten to know some pretty awesome people but I don't feel like name dropping cause that's already been done by Jason Calacanis. But I will say that all the WeGame guys rule.
Some of the highlights in the last two months:
- Publicly launching YouNoodle (two months ago yesterday)
- Ski trip in Tahoe
- Cinnamon rolls from Specialty's
- Giants games
- Angel Island Segway tour with Team Noodle
- Boxing Jeff from WeGame
- Ferry rides
- YCombinator networking events
- Meeting Jakob Lodwick
- Meeting like 30 people on CalTrain (I make sure to meet someone new each ride)
- Golf
- Moving to a new office in South Park
- Eating really, really good food
- Spring break with the cousins
- Learning something new every day
Now that I look at it, I've done a ton of stuff in the last two months. Coming up in the next few weeks, I have a few things planned (though the majority of what I do is planned day-of)
- Sailing lessons
- Giants games
- Getting fit (personal trainer)
- Dance classes (maaybe)
- Giants games
- Vacation to Bucharest, Romania to finally meet Okapi
- Web 2.0 Conference with the friends from Zambino
- Golf
- Giants games
One last thing! I'd like to say thanks to my grandparents for making so much possible these last few months, you guys are the best.
Check the Tumblr for updates
I'm having so much fun with Tumblr... Sign up for it if you've got nothing else to do.
My Tumblr: http://sampurtill.tumblr.com/
The internet *is* boring
Every time I open up Firefox, I only go to four sites:
In that order. Beyond those four sites, I don't really have the need to visit anything else. When I have a question about Rails, I search in Google, that is probably the only other site I frequently visit. So that's 5 sites. I recently added one more site to that list, Mint.com, which is gearing up for a massive launch on September 18th. Mint has the coolest technology I have *ever* seen on the internet, beating out Flash and the PageRank algorithm respectively.
So 6 sites. Out of hundreds of millions of sites out there. Only 6 currently make the cut. To make something that will work from now on you have to be 1) extremely niche and 2) has paying customers (this is just opinion). 37signals have done it right.
Amazon just announced something HUGE
I just got an email from Amazon that announced their Flexible Payments Service, or FPS. Now my blog can have a new meaning, 31 flexible payments service, cause I'm going to be testing out the service really soon here. It's over on Scobleizer already (beat me to it). This is really something huge, because there isn't a service out there that can compete with what Amazon is doing.
Taken from the FPS details page on Amazon:
Pricing
There are no minimum fees and no start-up charges to use Amazon FPS. In addition, use of the Amazon FPS Sandbox is free of charge.
Goes on to talk about the pricing, and they have a great scheme so far. I think that makes it beat Google Checkout, PayPal, and Authorize.net.
Amazon really understands how the tech world works; when it comes to meetings, the developers are the one who have the most say as to what payment gateway is going to be used. In this case, it is going to add tons of money to Amazon's bottom line, which should propel their stock in the 4th quarter or 1st quarter of next year.
Amazon has just become THE place for developers of internet applications. Good job Amazon, you've got some really smart people working in your organization. I will be testing it out very soon.
DRY: My New Favorite Acronym
One of the core principles of Django is DRY. DRY stands for Don't Repeat Yourself.
I have written hundreds of lines of code on the current Client Management System I am building for one of Okapi's clients, and I keep finding ways to not repeat myself in Python. Every time I state a static variable twice, I realize, that's repeating myself. It's time to write a function to return this variable!
I'm: Tired. Working hard. A mess.
Justin.tv is so tight…
Justin.tv just came out yesterday... Around the same time Adobe Apollo was released. Two of the biggest technological innovations of our day happening simultaneously :D.
I just called Justin, bought the Justin.tv shirt, sent em a text message to sign it, and now I'm going to bed. I'll be sure to take pics with the shirt once I get it.
Yee! I've been deep in Django these last few days. Love it.