How to Bet Your Life

I'm standing on an abandoned bridge one hundred feet above a stream in the lush rainforest of Costa Rica. Suddenly, I had doubts. It was a great idea when we plan it in the serenity of the hostel. But up there, with the bungee cord tied up around my ankles, the view is a bit wobbly. The theoretical has just become the very real.

That exact feeling is what most people encounter when they're contemplating quitting their corporate job to join an early stage startup.

Startups are hot and everyone wants a piece. A 13-person startup can be sold for a billion dollars. Even hollywood is getting in on the action. Bono is a VC and Ashton is an angel. That's enough to make dreamers out of everyone. But what if suddenly you're offered a chance to join an early stage startup? Are you willing to give up your position in a nice, stable, established corporation for one in a hectic, never-enough-sleep, constantly-dying startup? 

Corporate jobs, especially in high-tech, is nice and cushy. If you're good, you're likely making six-figures in your mid-20s. Not a lot of responsibilities as long as you get your shit done. There will be a smattering of trips, lots of weekend parties, and plenty of time to socialize, get a hobby, or start a family. Now imagine throwing away (or I call it, de-prioritizing) all that for least for a few years. Work-life balance is a nice concept and I try to achieve it when I can, but often reality gets in the way. If you think that sounds bad, then you're not ready.

You're not ready because you're not ready to bet your life. That's what it's like living inside a startup. That's right. You don't work at a startup. You live in it. In poker, you won't double up unless you go all-in; bet all your chips on one hand. This is same in a startup. You go all-in, but you bet with your life. Everything else in your life will take second priority. And just like poker, you shouldn't go all-in unless you're sure that you have the best cards. You should only join a startup if you truly believe in its potential. And as in poker, even with pocket aces, you can still lose. That's why it's called a bet.

A line from the hip-hop preacher that I love:

To achieve success, you have to be ready, at any time, to sacrifice who you are for who you want to be.

There are only two ways to make this kind of bet. The ballsy way and the poor way.

Jeff Bezos did it the ballsy way. He asked himself what he would regret more, doing it or not doing it. And it helps that he's a crazy bastard, intensely driven and cooly logical. I did it the poor way. I bet everything when I had very little to bet with (I was poor). I had no lifestyle to lose, no debt to pay back and no savings to miss. With nothing to lose, I had everything to gain.

I jumped from that bridge in Costa Rica. That was months after I had already gone all-in with my life and sold my first company. After that, bungee jumping seemed too trivial for any second thoughts.

The way we do product development

Our app, Skyvi, released a few months ago, has over 1.5 million downloads and our user base is growing strongly with every update. Skyvi is far from the first product we built. In fact, in the past 4+ years, my partner and I built over 20 products, and most were flops and some are too embarrassing to even list by name. But through those experiences, we developed a methodology to do product development that we believe is correct. And today, I'm sharing it.

The first step, also the hardest to get right, is knowing what to build. This one took us forever to learn because we are engineers. In the beginning, we just built stuff, all kinds of stuff, and it was easy for us. We didn't know if it was going to work, but since it only takes a week for us to build it, it didn't seem like it was going to hurt to try. But it does hurt. Experimentation is sometimes necessary, but it's never an excuse for not thinking. In the beginning we were building very simple products and it can take a week or so. But as things got more complicated, it started to take longer. Our last flop, cost us almost six months! Six months! How many six months do you have in your life? Tell me that's not expensive! So, everything we build now, we think hard about what we're going to build first. An engineer's habit of just going out and build things is very difficult to break. But I believe breaking that habit is absolutely necessary.

The next step we do is to try and estimate feature effectiveness. I think this is quite unique to the way we do things. Suppose a feature is going to say, increase revenues, we explicitly state the amount that the revenue is going to increase by this feature. This may sound impossible to anyone who hasn't tried it, but I assure you, it's very possible. This step forces us to break down the feature from the user's perspective. If we don't know something, we reduce it to something we do know. For example, if we have no idea how many people are going to pay to remove ads, we can break it down into steps based on the feature. How many people are going to see the "remove ads" button? How many are going to click on it? How many are going to click through to the in-app purchase link? How many are going to have a google checkout account? How many are going to finish purchase? We try to find comparable data from our current product, other similar products, and our best guesses at each of these questions. Plug it all in and multiply, out comes your estimate. The more we do this, the better we are at answering these types of questions.

Building the product is what we do best, but it is still not easy. Sometimes a feature is actually several smaller features. They need to be thought through, individually and in aggregate. In a team environment we have used scrum to manage the actual development, but when it's just my partner and I on the project, we use a much lighter weight solution. We cut aggressively. If there's a feature that we think only marginally help with our business objective, and it takes disproportionate time, it won't make it. Proper prioritization is key and everyone agrees on and sticks to the prioritized list. Hitting deadline is absolutely essential, and we don't miss. There's nothing worse than having a great idea, and get usurped in the market because you blew your dev schedule. This is also the step that is the most parallelizable with a team.

After the product or feature is built, it's not quite ready to go out yet. It needs to be tweaked. Product tweaking is a black art and is a specialty of my partner's. He has a very keen nose to sniff out which part of the product needs minor touch ups. Maybe the error messages should to be re-worded, or the activated version of the mic button needs a textured background. I hate this step, because I have no patience for it and the engineering is neither interesting nor particularly challenging. But it's absolutely necessary to take the product from good to great. It's awesome if there's someone on the product team that's especially good at this. All you have to do is give them a few days to do it and don't get in their way. But if you don't have a tweaker on board, time box this step and do as much tweaking as you can.

Lastly, after the product launches, we must measure feature effectiveness. You are collecting data, aren't you? If you don't know if your bullet struck the target, why the hell do you even bother to aim? So, in step two we made estimates, and now we check how close reality is to our estimates. From this, we can see either the feature did exactly what we set it out to do, or a faulty assumption exists somewhere in the chain. And we would know exactly which link of the chain to blame and do better next time. For the last few months, we've found ourselves being able to confirm our prior estimates. To us, it implies that we're getting better.

Not every product you build is going to work in reality. The challenge in product development is to make sure that when a product doesn't work, the fault should be in an assumption that lead up to the product, and not in the product itself. In other words, the product does exactly what it is supposed to do, well made, minimally viable, and released on time. The product failed because people just didn't care for the problem it solved for them. That my friends, is a separate problem all to itself...

I am the egg

Today, flying across my Facebook feed, someone I barely knew, that I met ever briefly, so long ago, posted a link. And it spoke to me in a very meaningful way.

The post was Haruki Murakami's acceptance speech when he won the Jerusalem Prize back in 2009. He delivered a simple personal message, the one thing that he keeps in his mind when he writes fiction. He said,

Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.

In the metaphor, the "high, solid wall" is the System, and the "egg that breaks against it" is the individual. There are many ways the System manifest itself. This takes on meaning both on the greater world stage and in my own humble existence.

In Libya, the system was an authoritarian dictator who for 42 years ruled by violence, persecution and fear. The eggs are the thousands of people, students, farmers and tradesmen that rose against it.

In Zuccotti Park, the system is the impersonal financial and political hegemony maintained by the rich and powerful. The eggs are the laid off workers who have no more to lose, the middle class that watched their dreams squashed, and the retirees whose pension is worth less by the day.

And in my life, as an entrepreneur, the system represents big corporations, other startups with a lot more funding and clout, and users with their established habits and resistance. Up against all that, is me. I am the egg.

I've been smashed against this wall before. But there is hope, there's always hope. If the events in Libya is any indication, sometimes the egg can be stronger than the wall.

2 Years in San Francisco

It's almost exactly 2 years to the day since I moved to San Francisco. Jeff and I just came back from our epic Euro Trip and my luggage was delayed at JFK. I had no clothes and had to buy a t-shirt at the airport souvenir shop. I still had an apartment in Berkeley at the time, but we already signed the lease for our place in SF before we left a month earlier. But since my key was in the luggage that didn't make it, I had to crash on the couch in our new apartment on Van Ness Avenue.

That was two years ago. Memories likes to play funny tricks with the mind. I could remember some things vividly, yet it all seems so distant.

I was just starting my first full time job and still had a Master's project to submit. It felt very different, not being a student anymore. The funny thing is I had no idea what my future held in store for me. I was so different then. Insecure, both financially and emotionally. A little dumb and a lot unwise. I seemed to be okay playing the same game everyone else was playing.

Then, life happened. Someone hit the fast forward button. Was I ready for it? No, absolutely not. But it happened anyways.

Quitting my job and starting our first company together was probably a very stupid thing to do. I was so naive. All we had was a grand idea, a fuzzy path for getting there, and an unshakeable belief in our ability to execute. We didn't think it was going to be easy, but hell, we had no idea it was going to be that hard. Had I known all the obstacles, would I have started?

And that is one secret to be an entrepreneur: dare to be stupid. When Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year, it was probably a stupid idea at the time. The important thing was to take that leap; and that leap is almost always a little stupid. Smart people doing stupid things and somehow wonderful things happen.

That is how it all started.

The unfortunate side-effect is that I never quite got to live in San Francisco. My physical body is here, but only to shuttle myself from home to work and back home again. One of these days, I'll really live in San Francisco. Maybe I'll throw a party to celebrate that occasion...