What has driven me to do a startup?

The last two weeks were amazingly hectic and physically taxing. Most days meant sleeping for 1-2 hr post the day job and staying awake until the sun came up to make critical product decisions with partners and communicate them to our overseas development team. It has all been quite a feat, but I can confidently say working to create value for my business gave me joyous flow and that made all of this was a lot of fun.

The struggle was actually being at the day job and addressing the egos and politics of the corporate work place. At the corporate workplace people aren’t in it for final value to customers. For management, advancement of personal ego drives most business conversations and processes. Both managers and direct reports act like ingratiating yes-men and women when communicating to their own managers. Innovation is low if it exists at all, due to the high fear of business risk in general and being zapped by one’s manager in particular.

By contrast my startup meetings with my partners are driven by the purpose of creating an offering that adds value for our customers. Everything is fair for discussion, everyone speaks up and risks disagreement since the good of the business is more important than personal ego. Conflicts get resolved much faster than I have ever seen in the corporate world since we all trust that what the other is saying comes from a place of strong belief in the merits of an idea, so we actively work to build the best possible solution.

After tasting this, why would I or anyone else ever go back to corporate America with its egos and politics that kill innovation and work satisfaction?

FB CHAT! OMG!@

So I knew this was coming. But when I saw the familiar little green and red balls gchat uses for status as a bar near the end of my Facebook page it was a moment of pure love!

My first conversation is with friend I haven’t talked to him ages. You know the kind of person who is a friend who doesn’t use any of your other chat networks but happens to be on FB a lot. Yeah those.

The experience was superb. My only suggestions to FB–get better smileys. The current ones look pretty demented and some of them down right scary. Also prevent the window from flickering when I send a message. Of course I know I’m typing a message honey, I’m not that drunk…yet. Happy Fri readers!

April Web2NewYork

Some great sites were featured at this week's Web2NewYork, a more casual and smaller NY Tech.

• Tabbery
• Sosauce
• Zubka
• Drawn by pain

Tabbery

Tabbery is web app that allows you to upload different tabs of your desktop onto the Tabbery website to share it with friends. This made me wonder how does this really help me. I already have basic collaborative tools via google docs. During the presentation I changed my mind. This thing is fantastic!

I can have different themes for different tabs. So if I want my BF to look at the websites I have for travel plans I can have him look at one tab. If I want my partners to see other websites whose design I like I can share a different tab with them. This small app also remembers the size, location, and order of windows. Amazing, I no longer have to do an incorrect mozilla exit to have it remember what web windows I want opened when I begin work again tomorrow. And goodness me the app also caches thumbnails so I can easily remember which is which. The only draw back to the tabbery is that currently all tabs are saved on public domain so if you have some highly sensitive business plans and designs in the works, don't share those with tabbery just yet. In the near future though, they will be allowing greater control.

Sosauce

Remember the days pre-FaceBook open API? remember how darn excited us techies used to be at each new feature? Even post open API we still got excited about cool apps. Although some apps are still exciting, they lack integration of features across the site plus the apps like much of FB don't represent data that is portable.

I like that travel app but I can't add it on my blog page about my travels. Now this is where sosauce comes in. I can show a map of where I've been and integrate it with journal text and photos. These photos don't need to be hosted elsewhere and manually embedded with code for your journal. Instead they are a click drop away.* Also, sosauce lets you send syndicated content back to your existing social graph on FB. At the moment the syndicated content is just a thumbnail and to see your content your FB friend will have to become a sosauce member.

I gave founder the idea to allow a small photo or other load to facebook with a sosauce URL which will allow FB users to get a glimpse at how powerful sosauce is. He's going to look into it. Whatever gateway they are using to get their minifeeds to FB, my guess is an app should make this possible also.

Zubka

In the last 2 months I've had two head hunters and 1 corporate recruiter find me on linkedin and contact me so that I would forward a job description to my peers. In most cases I didn't forward, I mean none of my friends are unemployed or looking for anything. My thinking about who in my network might be interested in something just doesn't seem worth the effort. Especially since these head hunters who are strangers aren't giving me anything.

Zubka is changing this. It helps people like you and I get paid to help our friends find jobs. It fulfills obvious needs in its market--hirer finds the right person fast and at a low cost (only 6-10% cut), helps your friends get jobs, and helps you make money in the process. Oh and if you are holier than moi (which isn't that hard) you can give your money to a charity.

In future they will include a hirer and referrer rating so both parties can make smarter decisions about their time. Plus with their RSS feed/widget you can even advertise open jobs on your blog space. Sounds amazonish/ebayish doesn't it? Well that's cause it is. Red Herring called it the ebay for jobs last year.

Drawn by Pain

A very different presentation than what I am used to seeing at tech meetups was from the director of "Drawn by Pain," a Web TV series. It was different because when I walk into these things I usually don't watch clips of metaphysical, anime/film combos. I also rarely meet directors like Jesse Cowell talk about passion, good content, and humbling experiences.

In the words of the website: “Drawn By Pain engages its audience by leading them through an episodic spiral into one woman’s search for salvation as her animated madness fights for her sanity in the real world." The animation with film combo makes the film surreal and metaphysical while still capturing the protagonists' inner demons with startling clarity. Its become my regular dinner TV, why don't you give it a try.

Great presentations and even more interesting people.

Until next time,
Spunky

*Travel isn't the only sosauce feature though there are others.

NY Tech Meetup April 1--Featured startups

1. Trendr
2. Kluster
3. Twiddla
4. Muxtape
5. Bricabox

Trendr

A snazzy trend tracking website. You can track # of blog posts from googleblogs or technorati, stock tickers, particular job queries in specific cities on craigslist and monster, google news items, amazon sales ranks, number of Ebay auctions, flickr photos for specified query, stats for a particular video and the list goes on. You can also track custom data sets by uploading by hand or using their API.

Most interesting to me is the ability to collects stats from a given profile in myspace such as --Number of Friends, Number of Comments, and Profile Views Per Day. Now granted this does not have facebook yet but it is the beginning of tools that are slowly getting us closer to being able to measure influence on social networks, and perhaps new business models around social rank (see Sanford Dickert's notes from NYC Bar Camp 3).

But do have fun with this tool too. For example check out the number of times the youtube song called I have a crush on Obama got favorited.

Kluster

Introduced by founder Ben Kaufman as an online decision making and collaboration platform that can be used to facilitate large group decision-making during product development, marketing/advertising initiatives, and event planning. Any kluster member can login as a user and then start or participate in a project which meets their skills. A spark is an idea on how to proceed further. While an amp is a suggestion or a refinement.

A highly interesting biz idea and even greater potential for the many startups out their who can use it. I'm going to start one of my app ideas out there as a project to see if user contribution is valuable. Since I am good at ideas but not a designer, I'd love some design feedback. Lucky for me since Ben told me that most of the 10k members of the site they got in the 3 weeks since launch are designers.

Twiddla

A few weeks ago when my partners and I were trying to mindmap our site flow ideas needed to be thought out by one person and emailed for comments or if done on spot we had to wait until 1 person finished his changes before another could make some. If we tried making changes simultaneously google doc and mindomo discarded someone's changes.

Online meetings just weren't as fast as each of our thinking. Too much waiting around, which as most of you know means a loss of great ideas since the rest of the team couldn't see and build on all the individual ideas. I prayed for some way more efficient then this.

Twiddla is the answer to many my prayers. A whiteboarding service at it core, but one with the ability to co-browse. No more telling partners to go to the link, do x to see what I mean. With cobrowsing we can all be on the same page or mind map or photo or site template and simply mark it up. To check it out you don't even have to sign in, you can work as a guest.

Muxtape

I wanna share my music tastes with this new guy I am dating, but I don't necessarily want him to hear some of the trance I listen to every day. Passing on my pandora or lastfm login names will mean doing exactly that. But now with muxtape I can easily create and share mixtapes online of songs I know might work for him (without damaging his impressions of me). Once created he can click on any particular song or listen to all 12 tracks in each playlist in the order I place them.

Heck once Muxtape offers a link to itunes and a commission for my forwarding ppl to itunes I might even be able to make some money. A great way for me to make money of my recommendations and a great way to see if this guy I'm dating is worth it. :)

Brickabox

Is a platform where one can easily create one's own social content site in mins. There are some premade templates for web review sites, mashup sites, video review sites etc. You can also create your own layout from scratch. Great tool for new organizations. The only other thing I could wish for would be an interface that connects with facebook.

Until next time. Love, Spunky