1. Want to startup? Learn to code.

    Startup founders have to wear a lot of hats.  Some days they have to put on the lawyer hat.  Some days they have put on the marketer hat.  Other days they put on the salesman or recruiter hat.  But the most important hat that technology entrepreneurs have to wear is the hacker hat.  They need to learn to build so that they can show product to people and make something people want.  

    But what if you don’t know how to code?  Guess what?  Neither did I, and neither did my co-founder.  But both of us now know enough that we can get out there, find some resources, learn some more, and continue building.  We’re still not experts, but we’ve learned to pour ourselves into it and get the job done.  Much to the credit of my co-founder, Pejman, we pushed ourselves this past year to get to this place.  If you want to learn to code, but don’t know where to start, this is the process that we went through: 

    1. Build something small and controlled 
    Find something small like a simple static website that you want to build. For us, our first project was to put up a website to host some of our previous work: Paperplane Labs.  A simple four page static website where we honed our learning to HTML & CSS.  There are plenty of HTML/CSS resources on the web, and with a handy book or two, it’s totally doable.

    2. Follow a tutorial that walks you through building a web service
    Pejman and I spent a good chunk of time rebuilding twitter from scratch by following Michael Hartl’s Ruby on Rails tutorials.  We got to sink our teeth into object oriented programming, and build an end-to-end service.

    As for other places that are worth checking out: 

    I’d also suggest buy a couple great books in the language of your choice.  I highly recommend Oreilly’s books.  At one point I bought this MySQL/PHP book and it was great.

    3. Cut 80% of of what you want to build and find an easy way to start.
    We tried all sorts of things to start small and continue learning.  We started by building on top of tumblr.  We hacked things together and it got us used to looking at APIs to push and pull data.  When we realized that tumblr isn’t flexible enough for us we moved to self-hosed wordpress and tried hacking some more.  Eventually we rolled out a small core concept that we wanted to test by building on top of Twilio.  By starting small it gave us room to continue to build, feel good about our progress, and actually test real things with real users.

    Getting started is always the hardest part, but knowing that you can build and test things on your own is a great feeling and one of the most important ingredients of any founding team. 

  2. The best products are created with love

    Last week my co-founder, Pejman pointed me to an interview by Dustin Mierau and Dave Morin from Path.  About 30 minutes through the interview this line struck me: “The best products are created with love.”  

    If every product team in the world created products with love, I think we would see a lot more products that are beautiful, and a lot fewer products that just exist.  In risk of stating the obvious, the most important requirement of creating a product that is made with love is having a team that loves what it is creating.  You can put the best designers, developers, and marketers in a room, but if they don’t love what they are doing, the result will likely be less than spectacular.  

    Love for what the team is building is also one of the first things that investors use to vet startups.  Paul Graham’s post on how not to die speaks directly to the importance of this. “If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. That sounds like a joke, but it’s actually a pretty good description of what happens in a typical startup.”  And what’s one way to keep yourself going and not die?  For your team to be driven by love for what they want to make and what difference they want it to have in the world.  

    When I read articles like the Airbnb story where the founders struggled at the beginning, worked from their apartments, ran out of money and yet, kept pushing, I’m convinced that love is part of what drove them. While everyone fears embarrassment and that can drive us not to fail, ultimately it’s love for an idea that drives us to succeed.  Even Paul Graham, who brought Airbnb under his wings through YCombinator, “initially didn’t much care for the idea of the company,” but they kept pushing.

    When building a team, sometimes we focus all of our attention on the getting the right people with the right skills, but I’m an advocate of also insuring that the team loves not only what they are doing, but how they are doing it.   As startups grow, promoting a culture of cooperation between people that love what they doing is not only going to make the team happier, but your product better.  Your team will feel it and your users will thank you for it.  At the end of the day, if your team doesn’t love what it’s making, chances are your users won’t either.

    And if things are going awry, think not just about what you are creating for your users, but the culture that you’ve made for your people who are doing all of the creating. For Path, “Culture, and art really matters to us.  We think that if we can bring art into our culture in an authentic way that it will end up in the product in ways that you wouldn’t aspect.”

  3. Leaving Microsoft to chase a dream that is bigger than me

    Today is an important day for me.  It is my last day at Microsoft and the beginning of another chapter.  I was a Product Manager of Enterprise Social and I spent the past year working with incredibly talented people to figure out how we should pivot one of the largest machines in tech.  I’m leaving to work with one of the best guys I know and dream big about how we can build a company to make the world a little better. For the family and friends who are cheering for us, thank you for the support. We look forward to telling you a bit more about we are doing shortly.    

    So today I’m taking my first step to build a reality out of my dream.  I couldn’t be more excited.  But, I’m not the only dreamer out there - this world is being built on our dreams.  The chatter in our brains and hearts that tell us things.  That paints a picture of a better us.  A better world.  Sometimes this chatter leads us to do incredible things.  Moving countries, changing careers, or starting families. Sometimes this chatter moves us in smaller ways like changing our diet, calling an old friend, or waving to a stranger on the street.

    We remember people for the dreams they’ve chased.  Some of the best ad campaigns have honored people and their dreams - think different is one of my favorites.  At times, these dreams can feel a lot like love.  We can’t explain why we do some of the things we do to follow a dream.  To others our movements can feel radical, uncalculated, mythical.  But we board the roller coaster, and we hold on tight. Rarely does the dreamer understand all of the steps they are going to have to take to make their dream real. Sometimes our dreams require decades of labour before they are realized.  Sometimes we think we know our dream and we are wrong, and we have to correct ourselves.  But we have our cheerleaders and they keep us going. Some of the biggest dreams had entire populations cheering the dream chaser on.

    One of my favorite things is being a cheerleader for people and their dreams.  I love to hear about them, and I love to help people make them come true. My biggest lesson is that when people dream about changing things and making things better I see them more energized, I see people drawn to them, and as a result I find that they are generally more successful. This is why I think when we dream it’s best to chase a dream that is bigger than us.  We get to do something that gives us energy.  We get to do something that makes us feel alive.  But we also get to take a shot to make our world better off too.  Great dreams are always that way.  They do something for both sides of the fence.  

    On this day I wanted to share how the transition from big company to startup life feels and I also wanted to encourage you to follow your heart and to follow your dreams. Go and be yourself and the rest of the world will eventually align to help you.  If you need an extra hand, feel free to drop me a line.  In the meantime, don’t let go. I know the road likes to get bumpy and roller coasters are made to do somersaults, but nothing worth doing is ever that easy. In the words of one of my favorite dream chasers, Steve Jobs: “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.”