If there was a place I’d like to be now…. then it would probably be actually 11 different places. It’s that part of the year, that crazy and incredible people get on a some buses, travel across the US to the SXSW festival, while building companies. Altogether dozens of them. While riding freakin’ buses…. I know, I can still hardly get over my own experience last year, though I don’t want to get over it, I want to cultivate, nurture and expand that feeling. Pretty much the whole last year was about that expansion, and it just continues to motivate me.
Fortunately I still keep in touch with some of the people from there, and when they are on the way right now as I write this, I cannot help but show my affiliations.
Silicon Valley Bus 2011 represent
I’m really glad that I could contribute something as well. One of the core features of their site is the ability to see where everyone is right now. Cheer all the way as they fight through several states towards their destination, how they converge onto Austin, Texas in the end. For this to work, there has to be some way to track those buses. And as it is the tradition – and inevitable if you have a pile of the best hackers together – everything is pretty much custom built. The site, the virtual stock market game, the map – and the tracking app as well. This last thing is made by me, after a few evenings back last year while hanging out in San Francisco before getting on bus. I can’t believe that I even had time for sight-seeing while doing this…. Anyway, it worked like a charm on 6 buses, and I was quite satisfied. Pretty surprised, but also satisfied. It was great, especially because if something, then I didn’t want to let down this guy – one the craziest and most kick-ass person I had a chance to know.
Then again in the winter there was StartupBus Europe, which worked out fine, beautiful trace on the map from the Netherlands, through Scandinavia, then back to the continent all the way to Paris.
For this year’s event, I wanted to change it a bit around, make it more independent from me – and a bit less hackish. I gave up on improving the looks, but the functionality should be better.
Too bad that this time I wasn’t there in SF, working together with the team, inspiring and motivating each other. This made everything much slower for me, and much more “normal”, in the bad sense of the word. In the end I had a new version that worked, and was kinda okay, but wasn’t as well tested as I hoped to.
I wish there was a Taipei bus – not sure how to cross the Pacific, though
Of course bits are rotting when they are not developed, and one year in Android world is more than I’ve expected. Too bad that many of the problems came to light when the buses were about to head off. Turns out that aiming for the oldest version of Android to cover all different versions is not necessarily the right thing to do. I don’t need anything fancy, but the APIs changed a bit, some things got depreciated, and looks like some phones can’t run my very simple app. After all this craziness dies down, will have to investigate and figure out what went wrong.
In the meantime, fortunately 10 out of 11 traces are on the map, there’s only Las Vegas missing last time I’ve checked, and not sure what happened to them. I don’t like unsolved mysteries, especially when it’s my job to get them solved.
Startup Bus buses 2012 on their way
Let’s see if I can get a seat next year again. And also see if that year in the meantime is long enough to figure out some better solution. Will likely need to do things very differently as I was, will likely have to rewrite the whole app onto new foundations, and make it work on iPhones or iPads (do those actually have GPS in them? I actually don’t have any iProducts…), and more reliably work in general. Feels a little sucky, that I’ve let some people down that things didn’t work better. That’s what startups’ life is a little bit as well.
Last day of the year is customarily used for reflection. Very useful artificial boundary that makes us think in a time span (a year) that is still quite manageable for humans. One year is quite long to create change, but still short so most of one’s projects are only on the way and didn’t reach their full potential. Taking time to think about those projects and the change make the good parts more permanent and the bad parts more temporary.
This year was really a game changer for me. It’s different in quantities and qualities as well. I remember thinking at the end of 2010 that I missed a lot of opportunities and time just passed me by for one year. Actually, for quite a few years I think there wasn’t too many things to speak of – though all of them have sown the seeds of the awesomeness that was 2012.
The year is almost out
Let’s take some (probably incomplete) stock.
Writing
This blog itself is almost one year old, I have started it in January. Haven’t written as much this year as I wanted (like how come there’s nothing since October?). This is not good, and it could be conveniently be blamed on being too busy to with all the projects I’ve been up to, but cannot completely. It benefits me greatly to write as much as possible, sometime in an organized way (like here), sometimes completely just in a flow. It is not really an excuse either that “I couldn’t find enough topic”, anyone who talks to me off-line often cannot get me to shut up about a thousand things. So better get to it.
Doing NaNoWriMo was limited to a few days of novel writing for me, got only 10% done, which is almost nothing. I said almost, because in those few days there were times indeed when storytelling was working, never before felt so good about writing, and changed the way I now read other people’s writing. So it’s not a total loss.
Doing 750 words was probably the best influence: write at least 750 words every day, about anything. I signed up for every monthly challenge to write each and every day. I made the first one in October I think, since then I failed every time and often in a stupid way just forgetting about it. Next year I got to get myself off the Wall of Shame again. One thing I learned from it that once something is not perfect (i.e. I missed a day), I tend to let it go and miss more days: failures aggregate if one lets them. A habit worth getting rid of.
Brain stuff
I really enjoy programming, and the Language of the Month series was great, to learn some about Scala, Lua, Prolog, Javascript, and a bit of Go that I haven’t written up yet. It wasn’t every month in the end, so maybe should rethink the project, but I want to continue: there are just too many programming languages and they are awesome way to exercise one’s brain and learn completely new ways of thinking.
I could create a couple of small tools and sites as well, like WatchDoc that I use myself all the time. Nothing too big and still looking for a project that I can build something substantial for. But being able to make your own tools in the online when you need them is just as rewarding as working with your hands offline. The computers/internet is the next generation of Lego if you know how to talk to it.
Took part in the first online Stanford Classes: Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Databases. All three totally worth it, it’s an experience I’m yet to write up, but I’m already using so many things I have learned. Also, my friend’s friends come to me saying “I heard you were doing the Stanford online courses this year, do you want to do it together next year?” There are many more really promising courses announced for the spring semester next year, now I have the problem of having to choose between them. 3 was kinda manageable, so right now I still have to cut down from the 7 noted down.
Somehow I had time to read more this year as well, though I have failed my Yearly Reading Challenge, totaling out at 30 books. I planned one for each week, but it’s just the motivation, the ones I had read this year all really worth it. I have hundreds of books on my to-read list, many of them from friends’ recommendations, so looking forward what will next year’s 52 books be.
Community
The biggest change with regards of community and my drive as a force of change was taking riding the StartupBus. I cannot overstate how much that changed me: the people, the things we did, the travel and sights that were connected. I’m really glad to still be in touch with many of the people there – and hope to get back in touch with quite a few more. It is a community I’m proud to be part of and can’t wait to see what else comes out of it.
The bus set a few different things in motion, one of them ended up being Ignite Taipei. It is probably the single most important thing that I did this year. Or actually did 3 of them, together with the most inspiring people I can ever wish for. It is something I want to continue on for the foreseeable future, and want to grow it, as well as I’m sure I’ll be growing with it.
A small side project that was Geek Dinner, which is getting together, eat, and being able to talk in a way that I don’t have to hold back on anything. Programming, art, social networks, photography, microcontrollers, laptops, phones, all fair game and when you people don’t tune out within 10 seconds. It seems there’s really a need for something like this in Taipei, people were really happy and eager. I hope I can carry it on.
A lot has changed about how do I use communities, how do I interact with people on Facebook/Google+, because I realized a few different things how I prefer to be interacted with. This lead for example to the No-Like Manifesto where I try whenever it’s possible to give a (meaningful) comment and not use likes/+1s, just as a last resort and when that’s meaningful in itself. This lead me to so much more discussion and been able to connect to people better. I can indeed say I know my friends a bit better now than I did before, and in big part because of the 24/7 interaction availability of whatever technology or network there is available for it.
Looking forward
This is just a short summary, I must have missed countless things. Now, however, it is really time to look forward. I’m already feeling so excited about a lot of projects that I’m planning for next year, and if I can carry over the excitement of 2011, it will be extraordinary too. Will include films, art, electronics, definitely include a lot, a LOT of people, friends, a lot of kicking ass.
And hopefully a lot of happiness. ^^ Cheers to You!
Today ’bout 5am in the morning I just thought I just make a mixtape to match my mood.
I was playing around with Grooveshark more and more recently, and today I spent half the night sorting through songs. I guess I really prefer this to YouTube in terms of finding the songs I know and want to listen to again. Not as good for music discovery, but most of the time (say 4 out of 5) it has what I’m looking for. It likely would need some proper cleanup, most if not all artist’s songs are a mess, loads of duplicates and all. One can upload songs too to be able to listen everywhere, but not sure what goes into the main collection. None of the things I uploaded did.
So here’s the mix, give it a try. Mostly things I have already known before, probably the majority of the people don’t. Not very well researched, just something that comes naturally at this wee hour. The sky starts to brighten by now, fortunately it’s a public holiday today in Taiwan, so it won’t make much difference.
I really should have started to write this up about two weeks ago, just after StartupWeekend Taipei really happened. Better late than never (if there was ever a good excuse then this is), so taking some time out on this typhoon weekend, here’s my experience of that good 54 hours.
Start
After StartupBus and the Taiwan Enterpreneurship Challenge, I cannot deny that I have a lot of fun at these kinds of events. So I signed up for Startup Weekend Taipei quite a long time ago, especially since I had a free StartupWeekend voucher from Microsoft BizSpark.
I kept recommending the event to more and more people and it seems there were quite a few of my friends who wanted to come but couldn’t because it was all sold out. “Sold out” in this case is 150 participants. That’s probably about the same number of people as on all the Busses, though this time stationary and all in one place. I wasn’t sure what mixture of people will come, just that it will be quite different as Taiwan still seems to have less of a hacker culture.
It turned out that more than 2/3 of the people were Taiwanese and much smaller proportion of foreigners than I expected. This is great – for Taiwan. For me it was a bit of a roadblock.
25 people went up to the stage to pitch their ideas in the hope of getting a team. Of those, only 5 were in English. After the pitching everyone got their three pieces of voting post-it notes and could mark which ideas they liked the most. Based on the votes, only the most popular 12 pitches were kept and only those people could carry on their ideas. Well, since Taiwanese were really not voting for ideas pitched in English, there were in the end 2 ideas that I could join up with… This time it worked out well (oops, is this a spoiler?), but next time probably the organizers should look at this whether the procedure of setting up teams worked or not.
12 teams for 150 people also meant that every team was huge… At the Bus our team had 8 people and I felt it was pretty big. Certainly if I want to start my own company I would probably get going with less then that.
Actually, that large team count is good for getting things done once we agreed on what’s to be done, but it’s pretty bad for reaching such agreement.
Our team had 7 people: 3 coders, 1 designer, 3 marketing/business planning. One (two) sentence pitch: Restaurant search engine for menu items. Tell us what you wanna eat, we show you where are the restaurants serving that in the neighbourhood.
Whiteboard planning for FoodJing interface and functionality
Simple idea, but with our team we had quite a bit of back and forth when discussing the focus of execution. I tend to get very involved once I’m sold on an idea, maybe a little bit too involved. After a bit of discussion I had the role of back-end designer, creating the infrastructure on which all of the user-facing services can be built. I choose that one, because I felt that’s the part of the architecture where I can add the most in terms of making something that other people can rely on and can build on relatively easily. I do feel that without a good back-end no amount a front-end glitter can save things….
Of course in part I chose this role because on the Bus I worked with a great team who taught me a lot about that and wanted to try myself out.
Exercise for the first evening (Friday night): A long, long discussion about a name. Next up is getting some ideas of the feature set then simplify, cut, reduce and then reduce some more. It’s great, I recommend it to everyone. I think I was a bit too combative at that time (sorry, Dobes!), but at least I realized that and tone back quite a bit. Since at 11pm they closed the venue we went home till the morning. I wanted to get something little done by that time so I can show that off for the team. Of course I slept like a log instead.
Next morning (Saturday) I woke up quite early, earlier than usually on a weekday. That’s a very good sign. At the venue they already had some breakfast prepared for everyone. I was too nervous and excited to eat in the beginning. Then when I tried my bagel an hour later, it was amazing! Run back to the table to get another one, but obviously everyone is enjoyed them a lot and were less nervous. All of them were grabbed up.
Breakfast time at StartupWeekend, these were totally yummy
After some more discussion we got working on an actual thing. The technology used:
Bottle, a Python micro-framework, it’s a single file. I like it a lot, have to check it out more later, especially because there are a swarm of Python micro-frameworks so good to know the strength and weaknesses of each.
MongoDB, through MongoLab, wanted to use for our database and geolocation “nearest place” lookup, but run into some weird Unicode bugs that I couldn’t solve in about an hour. Scratch that, will check it when there’s time
Google AppEngine, hosting and database. Perfect for this kind of thing. Had some problem with data export and import (“list” datatypes are not imported back correctly) so I wrote some custom remote imports and all fine at this level. Oh, and Geomodel, that’s useful.
lots and lots of Javascript (jQuery, Mustache, something for the instant search,…) for the front-end. That wasn’t me, so not exactly sure what else was going on there. I was checking with the front-end people only as much as it affected the schema of the API response.
Most of the day was spent on setting up an API, working out data lookup with the chosen database and structure, making a data input interface, some helper pages, and fixing a lot of bugs. Saturday evening we had basically everything down conceptually that we needed to have working. Going home at night again was a bit of bug fixing (let’s call it The Time of Duh).
Home stretch
Sunday morning getting up pretty early again, I love this kind of inspired work when I just cannot stop myself. All the way to the venue I was thinking how to use this experience to improve my day job (though it is pretty inspired already, so I guess I’m lucky).
Most of the day was spent by fixing more and more bugs, getting the front-end right (not me, fortunately, I have no real sense of design), getting some real data, real restaurants and menus into the database, figuring out and polishing the pitch, working on the feedback from the surveys our marketing people were doing since Friday evening, do some Facebook page based hyping….. This sort of StartupWeekend stuff.
FoodJing team working last minute
I was hoping that we could get an Android app in the end as well, but the person who was working on that I felt over-complicated the thing. Yeah, because I don’t know how much the others must have thought that I’m over-complicating my job… Anyway, I haven’t been writing Android code since the Bus, but actually in about 2.5 hours there it was, an map interface showing real data from our real database. Slap on a search bar and you are golden. There wasn’t any time for finishing that up, but still I was satisfied – it was possible because of a good back-end. (okay, enough of this patting myself on the back, dude)
Then it was finally time to pitch. The panel of judges was impressive. Real investors and business people from Taiwan, US and China, about a dozen of them, maybe more. All very experienced people.
FoodJing team pitching for Judges at StartupWeekend
Our presentation was quite good, because the team really prepared for the questions, really answered the concerns an investor would have and covered all our bases. Many of the other presentations were more emphasizing “fun”, had “pie in the sky” models, or had something that some of the judges already gave them feedback in the development phase and they didn’t fix it. It’s probably mostly down to experience. I haven’t pitched before, so I guess I’m not the most reliable source of useful information about this.
Anyway, the punchline: we got first prize.
A winning team and cheque
Of course it feels pretty good. Some non-monetary things (mostly services by the sponsors), but there was a last minute donation of NT$60.000 (about US$2000) from the judges. That comes handy, my share will run that server I’m renting and pay for some domain names for future projects….
Postscript
The event has been covered on TechOrange and Penn-Olson So two people from the team will actually continue Foodjing. They are based in a different city, and there are some other, administrative issues why I wouldn’t be able to take part in that, but it’s all fine. When they get it done, I’m sure I’ll be an user. And I have plenty of lessons to take home:
I really can get excited about a lot of different ideas. Most ideas do have a useful core that can be developed, so on an event like this, the idea that one chooses almost makes no difference. Choose the team instead of the pitch.
One weekend is perfectly fine to get something done. In the end we had a working (albeit ugly) prototype. If it was done now, can be done any time. Got to use my weekends better.
Talk more to people who can and willing to help. Had a lot of mentors who had great feedback on everything.
This is not a hackathon. I took it as it was one, and my goal was getting something working. Talking to some of the organizers it took me by surprise that this is really business and by real I mean real. That these things we are making are as real as it gets. I was just thinking in terms of fun, have to take things more seriously, but without losing the ability of having a good time.
This time we succeeded. This cannot make me risk-averse that I don’t try anything unless I’m sure to win, cannot go to the next StartupWeekend with the mindset that I have to win again.
There will always be more ideas. For every one of them that fails, or succeeds but goes on without me, there will be 10 more that can be taken up. So where’s my next 10?
All in all, it was a great time and looking forward to the next event like this.
Since my first (crazy) swing at anything business I consider myself “infected”. It seems like that is only a matter of time I start my own venture, for better or worse. It is just too much fun and to difficult to stay out of it.
Challenge
In line with that attitude, now I notice all kinds of related events, and fortunately some of them are in the neighbourhood. So, last Sunday found me at an entrepreneurship challenge – a business plan competition. It was organized by a local startup, Enspyre. It’s founder is a serial entrepreneur who started at the age of 15. The company itself also runs an internship program to find interesting/creative people, and I have no doubt that the event was aimed inspiring young people to start something new – which in turn would boost their own business. I say, double-clever!
The audience was quite mixed, of the 25-30 participants more than half was Taiwanese, mostly students in their sophomore and senior years. The rest of it were strange foreigners (your’s truly is no exception), from Indian software engineer to Filipino Business majors and American expats. The day was supposed to be learning by doing. First, some current entrepreneurs and VCs present their take on what is a business idea and how a business plan and a pitch comes out of it. Then, in the space of a couple of hours, people would form more-or-less random groups, come up with ideas, refine them, do some numbers of how much capital the idea would need, prepare a pitch, deliver it – and see how it flies with the real VC judges. Most of the people did each and every step of this process for the very first time. Sounds intense? It was and also incredibly stimulating.
In the initial “name card exchange” phase I was really slow – or at least slower then the rest of the people. I did want to know a little bit about my potential team mates, so ended up talking more to them than the other (I guess 5 sentences instead of 1). This made me in the end one of the last person to choose a team. That’s not a problem, I like random, usually works out brilliantly.
Out of the 5 members, our team had 4 Taiwanese students (2 business, 1 psychology, 1 medical science) and me. The language posed a little bit of difficulty, but I’d say we worked around it pretty well (I came a long way in terms of patience since I started learning Chinese as well). It was pretty amazing to work with them, especially because we all didn’t know each other, and that I could resist pushing my own things.
Some lessons learned:
The original business ideas were pretty bad. Many of the better ones were maybe a bit too conventional. On the other hand, when we revisited them, each and every was brainstormed into something I could feel excited about and would be totally happy to start working on. It was absolutely awesome to hear and discuss their ideas, to live through the process. Later talking to some other groups, their ideas just grew but none of them changed substantially upon review. Sign that we had a naturally agile team?
The language barrier is pretty big at the moment. Once one gets beyond that, by either having more patience, communicating even a tiny bit in their native language, or letting them discuss things between themselves for a whole, creativity really shines. There’s a lot of potential in this country. (Not that I didn’t know that earlier:)
Feedback from VCs, even – and maybe especially – before pitching is invaluable. That is, if I can say my question clearly and concisely enough. And that gave me a duh moment: of course they want everyone to succeed. If your idea/pitch is boring, they are going to waste the time. If there are few creative people then they will have fewer investment opportunities. So it is their very on selfish interest to do everything for you to succeed. Don’t abuse it (i.e. make it more trouble for them to help then the potential reward) and you have the best teachers.
It’s good to take the back seat sometimes. I didn’t push that our group would develop one idea originating from me, but one that more people in the team liked. I had advantage in the language front so pitching wouldn’t have thought me much, I insisted that the girl (Ping) who came up with our original idea would do the pitch – regardless of her English. She protested first but in the end I’m sure she liked it. This way she had some awesome experience and I could also see (ie. introspect) how do I listen e.g. to a pitch – even our own. I’m sad to say, that I’m a terrible listener. Got to fix that, and glad I had a chance to realize it.
As we were told multiple times during the day, the team is more important than the idea. After working together for a few hours I can certainly see how that comes into play very-very quickly. The business ideas I had these days lack any kind of consideration who would I do them together with – really should think about who else is in my social circle who I should consider because no matter how idealistic I am, I won’t make it completely on my own.
Guess these are just part of what I have realized, the rest of it will probably pop up every now and again in the coming weeks and months.
And now for the punchline: out of the 6 teams we took home the first prize. We came up with an idea that could impress other people who are doing this for a long time (and one of whom were telling us how the salesgirls pamper you much better when buying an Armani suit than at any other boutique – a lifestyle clearly out of my league). Their feedback was that out of the 6 pitches, ours was the one that could be done realistically, on a sane budget, with sane assumptions and might just work! It is an interesting feeling. I want to keep this and continue growing on it. Already started: my part of the bounty for winning went for recovering the entrance fee and “investing” in more resources for my journey (“Technology Ventures”).
