Like many people in Seattle, when the weather gets nice I like to go for a bike ride. There are some avid gear-heads out there that are always riding somewhere. I’m not one of those: if you’re like me, you find it difficult to balance work, friends and family to get out running, cycling, or whatever outdoor activity you like to do. It takes effort to make it into a habit.

It's hard to start, but it's always worth it.

So I don’t go cycling as much as I’d like. And because getting going is so much more difficult than keeping moving, I have a rule when I go: I set a destination for myself, and until I reach my goal, I don’t get off the bike.

Classical mechanics makes a distinction between “static” friction and “kinetic” friction. The first is the force it takes to get an object to start moving relative to another; the second is the force it takes to get that object to keep moving. For most materials, and for most of us, the cost of starting from zero is much higher than continuing to go forward.

Don’t get off the bike. I keep repeating it, as long as it takes. Every time you stop and rest, you expend more mental and physical energy to get going again. You have less willpower to fight the urge to stop again. Your breaks are longer. (Outside of physics, psychologists call this exhaustion of willpower “ego depletion.”)

If I’m tired, I slow my pace, but keep making forward progress. If I’m hungry, I bring things that I can eat while riding. Is it painful sometimes? Sure. But it would be more painful to stop and start up again. Don’t get off the bike.

At risk of being the guy who just writes in creative analogies to entrepreneurship, I hope you see where I’m going here. Building a startup is almost always described as a long grind: there are countless days where it seems like you’re not going anywhere. It’s definitely painful.

Just as all analogies fail at some point, this isn’t to say that you should continue with something that isn’t going anywhere. The point is to set goals for yourself and have pivot or persevere decisions at those points. In between those goals, don’t stop moving. Once you have a finish line in sight, go as fast as you can.

This may not work for everyone, but it works for me. Find your own analogy to keep moving. Create your own destinations, your own goals, and don’t stop. Don’t get off. Just keep moving and you’ll get there.

In the aftermath, there have been more than a few blogs and pundits teaching us the Great Lesson of Instagram. However, if you’re a first-time entrepreneur thinking about applying these lessons to your business, you should first remember the story of the cargo cults.

The term “cargo cult” originated with pre-industrial tribes who came into first contact with technologically advanced cultures. Most notably, Pacific islanders during World War II who witnessed modern technology when Japanese and Allied forces brought their supplies and wealth from planes onto air bases built on the islands. After the war, the cults would recreate the conditions they saw bringing the wealth, creating mock airplanes and air strips — even performing fake military drills — in a futile attempt to bring back the precious cargo.

Richard Feynman applied the term to non-scientific practices in science as “cargo cult science” and from there the term made its way to the programming world. If you’re a programmer and you find yourself copying code without fully understanding its purpose, you could be guilty of “cargo cult programming.”

First-time entrepreneurs can be particularly susceptible to cargo cult mentality, and there exists plenty of people willing to “help” by offering blog posts or classes that promise wealth and fame. You can tell the particularly bad examples by titles that take the form “How this startup went from 0 to (some massive number) in (some short time).” Is this really how they did it? Is this really going to help your business?

Lessons and case studies are great. I love them, I read a lot of them, and I use them to guide my thinking about what I should be doing in building my business. You should too. If you want a good read on Instagram, be sure to check out “The battle to train a market” by Sasha Pasulka.

However, it’s only by digging deeper, by truly understanding the basic principles that these lessons can be effective. Ask yourself, “does this apply to my business” and “how do I apply it now” and try to understand the real reasons it may help you. If you start saying, “we should do this because Instagram did it,” be careful you’re not joining the startup cargo cult.

In 1997 I was working at the Internet Gaming Zone, Microsoft’s foray into the emerging market of casual online gaming. I was tasked with rewriting the Zone’s batch emailer. Outgoing emails got queued up in a database; my code read the mails, connected to the mail server and sent them to the user.

This was a relatively easy task, even for an intern. Nothing that should have bothered the CEO of the company. Unfortunately, mistakes were made.

Rather than marking each mail as sent directly after successfully sending it, I wrote the code to try to be “efficient” and mark every one of them sent after it had run through the entire batch. However, if there was a problem sending just one of them, the code would break out of the loop. When the loop was run again in a few minutes, it would re-send all the emails from that batch, even if some mails were already successfully sent. The result was that my code ended up repeatedly spamming an unknown number of users.

If this weren’t bad enough, some users weren’t spammed. Those users, feeling cheeky and aware that the Zone didn’t ask you to confirm your address, had signed up with their email address as “billg@microsoft.com.”

Later that morning we got a friendly note from the Office of Bill Gates, asking about all the mails they were receiving (Bill Gates played bridge on the Zone, but probably didn’t need to be spammed by us). I suppose someone got to write a sincere apology email to our users and to BillG, but it wasn’t me.

So what happened next?

I fixed the bug, finished my internship, and a year later went to work for the Zone full-time. Stupid mistakes can be made, but the important part is recognizing the mistake, correcting it, and making sure it never happens again. In the future, I would make every attempt to be in the server room at 6am when my code was going live.

Lessons Learned

In the startup world, you can’t get away from the concept of failure, from lessons learned, and post-mortems. Failure is so popular there’s even a conference for it. Most startups fail, and there is as much of a fixation on dramatic failures as spectacular successes. However, the sad truth is that of the startups that fail, most fail silently.

I’ve been in and around startups my entire career: the Zone, which had been acquired by Microsoft a year before my internship, could have been considered a startup. Some startups succeeded, some failed. Even in those that succeeded, mistakes were made. I use the rhetorical device as a joke, but let me be clear: I made mistakes. Others around me made mistakes. Mistakes were made.

I hope to make this the first of a series: there are too many mistakes I’ve made, mistakes that I’ve been a part of, too many lessons learned. There are enough stories that need to be told, and someone has to tell them. And hopefully you can learn from them. I know I did.

[Update: It's back on GeekWire!]

It’s a quarter past 11. The bar is full. You take a drink. You mentally size up the other singers. Some of them are pretty good. You take another drink. Where’s the server? It’s now just about midnight. Your name is called. You take another swig of your drink and make your way through the crowd. You step up to the mic. For the moment, the bar is yours. It’s your time.

I admit it: karaoke is a fundamentally silly thing to do. You’re not a singer. This isn’t “Glee.” What will people think? You risk both failure and embarrassment.

Street lights. People.

Yes, it is silly. But so is starting your own business. In a startup, your chance of failure is even bigger. Even if you execute well you have to break through the noise and indifference, whether it be in a marketplace crowded with competitors and busy customers, or a bar crowded with people interested only in their own conversations and their next cocktail. In both cases, it’s your job to convince them your product is worth their time.

I love karaoke because it’s exciting, it’s scary, and because it parallels the same drive of a founder and the journey (ahem) of a startup.

Rebecca Lovell of GeekWire, herself an avid karaoke enthusiast, has her own three factors that go into karaoke entrepreneurial success. Here, with my commentary, are Rebecca’s Rules:

1.     20% Vocal talent. It’s true, some people have better singing voices than others, but this doesn’t mean that they automatically get the attention. Having a top-notch team with millions in funding doesn’t necessarily equal success in the marketplace.

2.     40% Song selection. This is the elusive “product/market fit” of the karaoke scene: finding the right song for the right time. What will the crowd react to? If it’s a packed house on a Friday, save the slow songs: you need to have a fast song with a catchy intro that cuts through the noise. (Hint: in this situation, you can hardly go wrong with Guns N’ Roses. Just don’t choose “November Rain.”)

3.    40% Bring it! Make me sit up and take notice. Execution is everything! A great performance can easily make up for bad vocal talent and poor song selection, especially if you do something that is unexpected. I saw someone bring the house down with a version of “Monster Mash.” 

If you’re pitching, there’s no easier way to practice being in front of a large audience. When I pitched my company at NWEN’s First Look Forum in early 2011, I was completely comfortable being on stage in front of strangers because I’d done it many times before at karaoke bars across the city. I could be natural and “present” during pitching.

Making the leap to start your own business can be hard, but being a karaoke startupper is easy. Pick a friendly bar. Find a good song you know and people will like, and keep it short (fail fast). If you do a bad job of it, I guarantee the only person who will be thinking about it 5 minutes later will be you. If you succeed, the entire bar is yours for that time. Can’t do it alone? Find a “co-founder” and sing together. If you’re still not sure about singing in front of strangers, take a few close friends to private room karaoke.

Being an entrepreneur means stepping out of your comfort zone, taking risks, and trying things you’d thought you’d never do. But just like karaoke, it’s possible to succeed. Just don’t stop believin’.

The business of making native apps for mobile devices is dying, crushed by a fragmented market and restrictive business practices. The problems are so bad that the mobile web, despite its many technical drawbacks, is now a better way to deliver new functionality to mobiles.

We've seen this movie before

Since the article was written in February of 2008, 5 months before the release of the iTunes App Store, it’s easy to dismiss this as a prognostication gone horribly wrong. And looking at some of the figures, there are certainly things that happened that were unexpected: the number of native mobile apps exploded with the release of the iPhone SDK and Android SDK, and so far the number of apps keeps growing. But read the article again. Why was the native mobile app market so horribly broken in early 2008? Anyone who was there at the time knows that developing J2ME apps was difficult. Every phone had a different implementation, and more often than not applications needed to have different code and a different release for every phone.

Instead of the flash flood of developers moving to the mobile web, Apple made sure it was all diverted to the iPhone. Native apps changed from being on death’s door to the next big thing. And while some people have been making money at this, there’s really not many. The rest of crowd, already defeated by the App Store, moved onto Android as the next new ground to conquer. Here is where history is repeating itself:

We created a series of elegant technology platforms optimized just for mobile computing. We figured out how to extend battery life, start up the system instantly, conserve precious wireless bandwidth, synchronize to computers all over the planet, and optimize the display of data on a tiny screen. But we never figured out how to help developers make money.

Android is an elegant, developer-friendly system. It’s on track to beat Apple in market share, and it’s closing in quickly on RIM. However, it’s yet to prove that it can make developers money. And while the fragmentation is not nearly as bad as it was with J2ME, there’s no denying that it exists and it is a problem. And when the cost of developing a native iOS and native Android app becomes too great, where do you go? Well, you go to HTML5 and the mobile web.

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not proclaiming the death of anything. But it’s amazing to me that despite how different the mobile marketplace looks, we are still facing the same problems and solutions. Plus ça change?

The New York Times ran an article this week titled “Once a Dynamo, the Tech Sector Is Slow to Hire” that focused on the struggles of some in the tech industry who are having difficulty finding new work after being let go from their jobs. For everyone who has experienced a job loss in this economy, including me, it’s a sad fact that finding new work can be difficult even in the best of circumstances.

So why are recruiters constantly asking me if I know any “good people”? Shouldn’t there be plenty of them out there? It’s not that simple, as I’m certain that the market for engineers varies wildly depending on where you ask the question, so someone in Corvallis may not be finding any job offers while a recruiter in Seattle may be at wits end finding people to fill their positions. As the author writes,

The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost.

However, the very next paragraph suggests another potential reason:

That’s a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry. [Emphasis mine.]

This last sentence is what I have a bit of trouble with. It’s true that the tech industry is fast and, given the pace of mobile, is getting ever faster. But the pace of tech means that an engineer’s skills start depreciating even while they are at their jobs. The skills needed to succeed in the industry change quickly, and if you aren’t learning then you’re stagnating. If you’re stagnating, then when it inevitably comes time for your own search you may not have what the recruiters are looking for.

Got a good job writing C++? Hopefully you also know some Java, or better yet some Python, Ruby or some other higher level scripting language. Do you do databases? If so, then it might interest you to look into the current debate over NoSQL and see if that affects your marketability as an engineer. If you do find yourself out of work, then it’s the perfect time to make sure your skills are not depreciating by learning some new ones.

When my position was eliminated in July last year, I decided I wanted to learn Android. I wrote a simple app that integrated with a service I loved; that app is now used by over 10,000 people daily in the Seattle area. I knew my web development knowledge had holes, so I learned Django. I read developer blogs constantly to get back to the bleeding edge of technology. I still do.

Even in Seattle, the tech sector hasn’t regained the energy it had before the crash. It may never. But the demand for good engineers is still there. By keeping pace with the industry, and constantly learning and trying new things, you can help yourself get ahead of the others looking for that next opportunity.

It’s unfortunate the number of people who chose not to stay for this talk. I think a lot of people who are still relatively new to Android, or who are relatively new to mobile in general, may not concern themselves with frameworks and high-level languages like FLEX or ActionScript. Native apps are the way to go, right? Why write for Android if you’re not writing in Java, or maybe even C++ using the NDK? iOS developers, shouldn’t you be writing in Objective-C?

That may have been true a year or so ago. Today, browser support for HTML5 elements is constantly maturing, and JavaScript performance is getting better with each release of WebKit. The number of mobile web app frameworks is increasing. With AIR, you’ll be able to package a SWF directly into an APK without writing a single line of Java code. The new Netflix app for the iPhone uses a UI front-end implemented entirely in a WebView. Chrome OS is right around the corner, and with it an entirely new app store, where the “native” language is JavaScript.

Personally, I welcome this. If I can write a significant chunk of my app in a device-independent language like JavaScript, that’s code that I’m more likely to be able to reuse moving from the mobile web to Android, or to iOS, or to Chrome OS.

What does this mean for mobile developers? Should we be afraid for our jobs? Probably not. There’s plenty of stuff a browser can’t currently do, and many apps will probably want some level of integration that will warrant some device-specific coding. And anyone who can write Java or Objective-C can pick up JavaScript or ActionScript pretty easily — good developers will always learn new skills as different tools in their tool belt.

Unfortunately many of these apps that use the Dashboard pattern do something really annoying: they prevent the activity from changing from portrait to landscape. This may be acceptable for people sporting a Nexus One, an EVO 4G, or any of the other phones with virtual keyboards. But what about those with a first generation Droid? What about all the rumored phones in the pipeline with physical keyboards?

Sidetappin'

Alas, one of the offending apps is, in fact, Twitter. The new version of Facebook’s app, while adding a cool photo scroll on the bottom, is another culprit. It seems that, rather than make these activities work well in landscape mode, these apps have taken the easy approach that “works” but provides a poor experience for someone who likes using their phone in landscape mode — and serious texters practically live in this mode.

Don’t let a good pattern be let down by half-done implementations. Let’s give some love to landscape mode!

Time to get back on the horse. Hopefully I can continue with my Android tips, but I have some thoughts about general software organizational stuff brewing as well. I just need to pretend it’s not summer anymore.

I think the one clear difference between this and the announcements that we expect from Apple is that this new device is clearly evolutionary, not revolutionary. True, we now have a phone display that exceeds the limits of human perception. But if pixel density is the most interesting thing about a new device, then perhaps there a bit less magic to this announcement.

It’s also clear that this phone is not all that much ahead of its kindred, if it is ahead at all. And that says quite a bit about what is happening with mobile: three years ago the iPhone was proclaimed the “Jesus phone.” Now it is just one of a number of superphones with surely more to come. It’s also no small thing that two of those comparison phones — the EVO 4G and the Droid Incredible — are Android phones, being less than two years after the first Android phone was released.

This is the pace of mobile today. Two years ago, Apple was the clear leader. Today, it’s in the middle of the pack. Who knows what will happen next year?