Xobni Man Walking Some thoughts from an entrepreneur

My coworkers and friends know that I buy everything from Amazon, including things like socks, pillows, and laundry detergent.

What don’t I get from Amazon?  Perishables like milk, drinks are too heavy to ship, and cash from the ATM.  But that last one seems silly if you think about it.  Why can’t I order 20 ten dollar bills from Amazon?  Security shouldn’t be an issue below a certain amount, say $500; I’ve ordered more ‘expensive’ things.  Just a funny thought…

P.S. I recommend this life hack.  Be sure to get Amazon Prime.

I was just talking with Greg, when he coined a new term:

Rotational inertia is what you get when you start “spinning” (selling) something to someone.  When circumstances change, and you have to spin in the opposite direction to the same audience, you must overcome and reverse rotational inertia.

It’s been a while since I’ve written. Life just hasn’t been the same since getting real users. I feel like blogging is kind of like deep sleep – it helps you organize your thoughts and recent things you’ve learned. Since launching at TechCrunch40, though, I’ve been facing all kinds of new challenges. Some of that terrain is behind me now, so I have a long list of great things to write about.

I was thinking recently about my grand strategies for life. How do I make really important decisions? What principles do I want to inspire my actions?

First, I want to kick ass. I want to be effective, and that means hitting hard.

I still remember Xobni’s first summer. I worked until about 6am when the sun came up. That forced me to go to sleep. Then I rolled out of bed and started writing code in my boxers. We took a few hours off a week to be social, and we read new Paul Graham essays as they came out, but that was it. That was probably the hardest I’ve ever worked for such a long stretch, and it was really tough. Really tough. But we produced. We laid the ground work for Xobni, and learned a lot about our market, customers, etc. It’s the best and most personal example I have of kicking ass.

Kicking ass is about being effective. The other two principles relate to what I want to kick ass at.

Second, I want to always learn. Most people who join Xobni do so because it’s an amazing learning opportunity. Matt left grad school because he’d learn more starting a company. Gabor left Google because he wanted to escape the politics and big company environment. Etc. It’s a great principle because all of these guys are now better equipped to kick ass.

Finally, I want to be a missionary. [1] Spread the word about what’s good and true. If a new grad is considering two career options, I’d love to offer whatever experience I have to help them make a good decision. If someone is raising money, I want them set up for success.

These are small examples. They get bigger. Look to Bill Gates’ latest philanthropic efforts for an example of a missionary. He has conviction that the world needs to change, and he’s up in arms. That’s an awesome example.

Paul Graham thinks that more young hackers should start startups, so he started Y Combinator. You can tell that he legitimately wants to improve the state of things. It’s just evident to anyone paying attention. He’s not interested in money. He’s interested in spreading what’s good.

Notes

[1] I stole this idea from John Doerr.

I mentioned in my last blog post that Xobni is looking for great hackers and a senior QA lead. The kind of people we’re looking for have basically infinite options when choosing where to commit themselves. Why would they chose to work at Xobni?

Aside from our acclaimed product, superhuman team, and great market, we also have a killer culture. I hope this video helps us show that off.

Click To Play

[8:01:54 PM] Gabor Cselle says: public enum Options {
Chipotle,
Subway,
Quiznos,
Other
}
[8:02:46 PM] Gabor Cselle says: // yes, we’re pretty predictable, it’s safe to use an enum here

[8:03:36 PM] Adam Smith says:
List open = new List();
foreach(Options option in Enum.GetValues(typeof(Options))) {
if(IsOpenOnLaborDay(option)) {
open.Add(option);
}
}

Adam.OutputStream.WriteLine(Array.Join(open.ToArray(), “, “);

[8:05:42 PM] Gabor Cselle says: internal readonly Person k_nerdContestWinner = adam;

I played squash today with Nomi from Peanut Labs. We’ve been playing together since we both started relearning the sport. We played six games and he won four of them.

It’s really good for me to play someone who’s better than me because they bring me up. I think that’s a good strategy for life – challenge yourself.

You know you’re challenging yourself when you lose or make mistakes. It comes with the territory. So if you’re not failing then you can’t be challenging yourself, and that is surely a bad thing.

Let’s apply this to girls instead of startups. If I’m ever more than about 25% successful with girls then I don’t think I’m challenging myself enough. If I’m significantly less than 25% successful, I’m challenging myself too much.

I was 17 and it was the last lecture of biology class. Dr. Donahue was the lecturer. He was also the academic director of the early college program I was at. And he was retiring. It was the last lecture he would give after a career that was decades long.

Lecture began at 8am. My friend and I snuck into the classroom at 6am. It was a big lecture hall that could hold 300 people. We booted up the lecture computer. I can’t remember how we managed to log in, but we did. I installed the hidden program I had written, and we left.

At 8:32am, in the middle of Dr. Donahue’s powerpoint lecture to 200 students, the screen went black. It started flashing, and the following video played.

Some of the inside jokes:

• Dr. Donahue used to erupt “Scoff!” at things he disagreed with
• “Street LSD is not pure. It’s made by biochem dropouts” he used to say

We got the photoshop’ed pictures by posting a black and white photo of him onto somethingawful.com.

Dr. Donahue asked Who did this after the video ended. Aaron Jacobs and I didn’t volunteer ourselves because we didn’t know if he was happy or upset. Afterwards we decided he was happy, and we stepped forward.

What a great hack! I really need to beat it out; seventeen years old was some time ago! Any good ideas?

I recently wrote about the ugliest hack I’ve ever pulled off here.

Machine learning (6.867) was my favorite class at MIT. I just ran across the report from my final project in that class: Friendship Prediction on Facebook.

As part of my project, I wrote a web site that allowed someone to type in their name and get back a list of people I thought they were friends with in real life but not on facebook. I put together the web site between about 10pm and 8am the day the report was due. [1]

The web site was the ugliest hack I’ve ever pulled off; it was in the final hour and I just needed it to work. Once someone entered their name, a task record was created in a MySQL table. I had a Java process polling the DB for new requests. Once pulled, that Java process would create 6000 feature vectors, one for each person at MIT that the query user might be friends with. Those were saved to a file. Then I needed to invoke a program called Weka to evaluate the feature vectors and output yes or no for each one. Trying to do this Shell() from Java wasn’t working, so I had the Java app write out a Windows batch file with the appropriate command. I wrote a VB app to poll for batch files, and execute them as they came up. [2]

I had another Java app poll for result files, parse them, and put them into the DB.

Each request, end to end, would take a couple minutes if there wasn’t any other load. The first java app kept about 1.8 GB of data in RAM that it needed to determine how close two people were in the friendship network.

Meanwhile, the client was being shown a page with a <META REFRESH..> so every 20 seconds it would invoke PHP to poll the MySQL DB for results.

Ah the beauty of throw away code!

Notes

[1] One of my favorite essays talks about the productive pressure of a deadline. Indeed.

[2] Here’s the main part of the VB app!

Private Sub Timer1_Timer()
File1.Refresh
For i = 0 To File1.ListCount - 1
Path = File1.Path & "\" & File1.List(i)
Open Path For Input As #1
Input #1, toexec
Close #1
Kill Path

Dim k As Integer
Math.Randomize
k = Int(Math.Rnd() * 984)
On Error Resume Next
Kill "c:\a" & k & ".bat"
On Error GoTo 0
Open "c:\a" & k & ".bat" For Output As #2
Print #2, toexec
Print #2, ""
Close #2
Shell ("c:\a" & k & ".bat")

Next
End Sub

Yesterday was a tough day. We were distracted by hiring and long meals and meetings.

Today was great. Gabor and I had lunch and coffee for two hours. We talked about how we can improve our hiring process and how we feel about the way things are generally going. We exchanged lots of ideas. It was fun.

Afterwards we got a large shipment from Dell. That was fun too.

I also played some squash tonight with Greg from Snipshot and two guys from XuQa.com who frequent the Bay Club. I won three out of six games. I’m quite a beginner. It’s so much fun when you get to play with someone at your level!

Other than that, I just hacked away. I worked on some code that’s pretty fundamental to a new direction of our product. After refactoring and refactoring to get the right interfaces, I spent lots of time optimizing memory and run times. It’s hella fast.

I have a few emails to respond to, and then I’ve got to convince myself to go to sleep. I hate ending days like today.

I really enjoy going to the symphony. I’ve been to the San Francisco Symphony twice since moving here last October. My favorite part is watching the violinists stroke their instruments in unison. This would be artful even without the music, but with beautiful music as a side effect – oh the glory!

Xobni is staying lean, though, so I buy the nose bleed seats. If I’m 300 feet from the orchestra pit, the music is delayed about 300 milliseconds behind what I’m seeing. (Sound travels at about one foot per millisecond.)

Humans can typically observe delays over 100ms. I might just be imagining it, but I’m pretty sure I can actually notice the delay between what I see and what I hear!