A serious problem affecting tech startups is rarely talked about, and it’s time for that to change. I’m talking, of course, about the epidemic of crappy office Wi-Fi and networks. Too many young companies continue to limp along on consumer-grade network equipment, hoping that their AirPort Extreme router and $100 Best Buy switch will hold out until they can afford to hire an “IT Guy”. I’m hoping that by walking through what we did at Flywheel, someone else will have a better resource when it’s time for their own network upgrade than I did.

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At Flywheel, we often find ourselves filling our free time by coming up with awful puns and armchair-reviewing movies. Lately, though, we’ve pivoted our conversations to a much, much darker topic:

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“Make it simple, but significant.”

The business world has long talked about “Minimum Viable Product”. It’s that final stage of building 1.0 of your product; the point at which you can release it to the wild and be reasonably sure that it’s not going to fall flat on its face. It’s a common philosophy among tech companies, but it’s a blatant betrayal of your customers’ trust in your product.

Your customers – and stop calling them “users”, for chrissakes – are you giving you their time, money, information, and more in exchange for what they are reasonably expecting to be a reliable product with a solid feature set. Instead, many companies are using their 1.0’s as a Kickstarter because they were too lazy to get something worthwhile out the door and rushed their product to market.

You can see this mindset with too many products these days; Facebook’s Slingshot, Google’s Wave/Buzz/Google+/Android One, Apple with a laundry list of software the last two years, and many, many more. Treating your earliest adopters as guinea pigs by throwing half-assed software into the world is a slap in the face to those most willing to be evangelists for your product.

Your customers know that not every feature will be ready on day one, but having major bugs in core features is a sign of disregard for those whose lives you’re trying to improve. So pump the brakes, do some more QA, and focus on getting a Minimum Acceptable Product out the door – one that you and your customers are both happy to say they used the 1.0 of.

I tweeted a thought a few days ago , but since I’m so religiously against the concept of tweetstorms, I decided to collect my thoughts and turn it into a blog post instead. It revolves around the concept of “company culture”, and why so many get the whole idea wrong. Disclaimer, as always: I’m speaking solely for myself here. 

Every company in the world likes to talk about their company culture. It doesn’t matter whether you’re IBM or Airbnb, culture is consistently listed as a major piece of what makes a company, right up next to its product. Too often, though, culture is simply added as a bullet point on a list of cool things about that company, as if having a ping-pong table and 20% time merely checks the box on that particular aspect of building something amazing.  Continue reading →

I had to take stop class a while back. This is the running log of that day. Continue reading →

Over the past few months, I’ve been tweeting out some coupon codes. I’ve created a Storify below to collect some of my favorites. Continue reading →

On the most recent episode of Connected, the hosts talked about this week’s Apple rumor: a new, hyper-skinny, 12” MacBook Air. While a lot of talk about this unicorn of a machine has been focused around its supposed “only one port” design, Stephen and Federico had a short side-conversation about whether Apple would ever get around to hosting Time Machine backups in iCloud. While Stephen was pretty adamantly against the idea and pointed out the differences between OS X backups and iOS backups, Federico seemed a little more willing to entertain the possibility. Both got tantalizingly close to a solution, so I wanted to flesh it out a little more here. Continue reading →

Well, I did it. After spending my entire adult life working in massive corporations, I took the plunge and joined a startup exactly 248 days ago. It’s been a terrifying, exhilarating, exhausting, incredible ride so far, so I wanted to take a minute to write down a few things I’ve learned.

• Amazing people make all the difference. There have been a few moments in the last eight months where I have no idea how I would have made it without the rest of the Flywheel team. When you never have to worry about coworkers carrying their weight, it’s a totally freeing experience.

• Young companies are exhausting. I’ve never worked harder in my life, even when I was helping launch iPhones for Apple. You’re being pulled in a million different directions, and everyone has to wear every hat at various points during the day. I’ve never been more mentally exhausted than after a couple recent projects. I never used to understand how people could get “burnt out” working a job they love, but I get it now. Which is why:

• Culture is critical. When everyone is staying late to work on support tickets, or landing back home at midnight after a whirlwind trip across the country, being just “coworkers” doesn’t cut it. Even little things, like eating lunch together or watching a stupid video helps. Inside jokes, musical tastes, and pronunciation of “GIF” can be just as important as someone’s skill at debugging PHP.

Coming from a couple Fortune 500 companies before this, I was more than a little nervous to work for a young company. It’s a massive change to be given freedom to shape your job and the company you work for, and I can’t imagine not having this freedom ever again.

Bottom line, I’ve never been happier. Here’s to 2015.

The delivery room is clean, a nearly suffocating whiteness enveloping the occupants. The expectant mother, screaming through the agony of labor, begs the engineers for something to dull the pain.
Their silence is deafening.
She screams again; one last push and the first genetically modified human has entered this world.
The engineers look down – the look of disappointment written in their eyes.
“What is it? What’s wrong?!?”
“THIS UPDATE INCLUDES MINOR IMPROVEMENTS.”

The prairie is dry, the ground cracked from a millennia of over-farming. A famished child, stomach distended and covered in filth, crawls through the dirt. She bumps into something soft; a pair of denim pants ending in Adidas sandals.
“We’re so hungry. Have you brought something for us?”
The man’s head almost imperceptibly moves. A nod, only visible from the slight rustling of his hoodie.
He reaches into his pockets, dropping something into the girl’s outstretched hands. It’s small, and impossibly warm.
She considers it, unsure.
“What is it, sir?”, she asks.
“BUG FIXES AND PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS.”

A cattle prod jabs out, a painful reminder of their status as the last humans on Earth.
“Have mercy!”, they plead to the robotic sentries.
No response. Their algorithms are programmed only for improving engagement with the brand, not for sympathy.
“When will the suffering end?!?”, the refugees scream.
The bots pause. They seem to consider the situation. Dusty speakers crackle to life, breaking their hundred-year silence.
“TO MAKE OUR APP BETTER FOR YOU, WE RELEASE UPDATES EVERY TWO WEEKS.” Continue reading →