Oh, dare to do it, Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you shipping a something, an anything, an app, a website, a server, that was really and truly after your own heart.

With apologies to J.D. Salinger

N.B. If you are writing software to make a living, not just for the pleasure of it, you should also talk to your users. Lots of them.

David is the only entrepreneur I personally know who simultaneously leads two very successful companies he co-founded, and has bootstrapped both. To my surprise[2], I learned that early on, Hannon Hill’s focused on selling to Universities, just as with RideCell.

We are going through a very interesting time at RideCell because we are trying to decide what is an appropriate growth pace to aim for. Being a fan of Warren Buffet’s “infinite horizon” approach to investing money, I take an identical approach to investing my time: I invest my time in RideCell with the intention of building a company that will last, and generate a lot of value on an ongoing basis for customers, and hopefully excellent returns for me eventually. But even when you take a long term outlook on things, there are opportunities when you must decide if you want to capitalize on short term environmental conditions to accelerate growth. The challenge is doing this only when the intended outcome is in line with your long term vision for the company, and not merely a a play for short term gains.

David’s success in both building companies that have lasted, and in generating impressive returns, quite likely stems from his nearly 100,000 hours of deliberate hard work on his startups and his focus on the long term vision.  I hope to incorporate two things I learned from David into my daily routine:

(a) To be more deliberate and thoughtful about business decisions, especially those aimed at accelerating growth

(b) To write daily, and deliberately, starting with a daily blog post such as this one.

What do you think? What is your take on the balance between growing fast and staying true to the vision? [3]

[1] The title of David’s blog is rooted in the thesis that no one is born an expert. Expertise requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Malcolm Gladwell popularized this thesis in his book Outliers but this idea and others that are equally interesting, along with a ton of supporting evidence, come from The Cambride Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. It is a thick but interesting tome, with paper after paper shows that deliberate practice for an extended period of time results in expertise in domains as divergent as computer science and ballet. If you are associated with Georgia Tech, borrow it from the library (via Galileo) like I did, instead of paying $73.00 for it.

[2] ..and a bit of embarrassment because I didn’t notice this earlier

[3] Although I started copying David’s style of ending with a question here just in jest,  I realized that the questions he ends with serve both as a succinct summary, and a call to action for his readers. Smart!

What is your workflow? Why?

NB: Credit for all good things in this post (and our process) to the rest of the RideCell team (Arun, Ram, Derek, Kartik, Darren, JJ, Bhumi and Venkat) and to to my friend Sujoy Gupta who leads the awesome engineering team at www.topprospect.com. Blame for all the mistakes almost certainly rests with me!

Aarjav Trivedi

[Going out to everyone at RideCell]

Riders,

As we discussed today in office, we have redesigned our approach to defining, prioritizing, measuring and shipping what we do at RideCell. These are major changes, so please read this email carefully.

Our core measurable goals as a company are:

1) Increase customers: Sell to new Fleets: Universities, Public Transit and Private

2) Increase users and usage: Users are riders, dispatchers, drivers and managers. Recruit new users at existing customers via word of mouth, training, marketing, network effects. Get more of them to be active. Increase happiness of active users.

3) Increase performance: Performance is customer performance, internal technology performance, and internal human performance. Customer performance is core metrics customers care about such as automation %, average time, no shows, cancels, etc. Technology performance is increased by reducing exceptions, optimizing code for quality and speed, getting more performance out of fewer resources. Human performance is optimized by better tools, better co-ordination, helping each other and working together more effectively.

Our trac workflow made it harder to achieve the above goals because, with it:

1) Company goals are not linked to daily tasks: Individual tickets are not linked to any of the above goals directly. They are linked to features and releases that we hope will affect the above in positive way, but that we cannot measure. I think that as a developer you should know exactly how the ticket you are working on will help the company, and if you feel that it is based on a faulty assumption, you should be able to challenge it.

2) Progress cannot be measured for an individual or for us as a group: Because our task estimation happens “offline” and is an arbitrary guess made by the “owner” of the ticket with his inherent bias. There is no “feedback loop” other than one off comments. We seem work in fits and starts and are driven by project deadlines.

3) Ticket assignment creates lack of shared ownership and wastes time: We spend 2-3 hours each week assigning tickets to everyone while everyone else is present. Most people are bored when we discuss other people’s tickets because when the week rolls by they are going to look only at their own tickets for 5 days. This also creates silos that discourages people from getting broader knowledge.

4) There is no forum to regularly discuss items that are causing people to be happy (good news), unhappy (bad news) or confused.

5) There are no predictable schedules for anyone causing whatever general organization system we build to breakdown from time to time.

We are going to incorporate the following changes to address this:

(1) Groups that own metrics: We form 3 groups in the company, each responsible for the 3 goals listed at the top. Above all, their performance will be rated on how effectively we achieve those goals.

Group membership will be based on expertise and job profile (JJ and I, as sales guys, will be part of “Increase Customers” group by default) and/or interest (Ram will be part of increase sales group if he has an express interest in it).

(2) Use of a Pivotal as a Master task list. You have been sent an invite to pivotal, please sign up and log in. Here is our pivotal workflow:

It is explained in more detail below:

For each iteration of 1 week, each group meets and identifies the most important/urgent things they think need to be done to meet their goal that week. They will add these new stories to an “IceBox” list which is a master list of all tasks that need to be done for that goal. They will then prioritize the icebox. The group will take a vote on how many hours each task should take and mark it based on the majority opinion. Only people who have some knowledge of the task should vote. Majority wins. This will help us recalibrate ourselves. No story should be a task that would take longer than 4 hours. 6/8 hour tasks are allowed but discouraged.

Once the groups have sorted their goals, for each iteration, I will take the IceBox list for each group, and, with help from someone in the group if needed, put some of the tasks from the icebox into a “Backlog” which is a Universal prioritized task list for that iteration shared by the whole team across groups. Backlog will contain tickets worth X + n points where X is the expected velocity of our team based on past performance and n is the number of team members. This means that if we got 40 points worth of work done last week as a team, we will have 46 points of work assigned this week, adding 1 point per customer. We will naturally identify our plateau and stabilize there.

Each day, each developer will finish his story at hand and pick a story from the top of the “Backlog” list. So, no “assigning” of tickets, people take ownership themselves and also know what others will be working on that day.

Completed stories will be marked by developer as “finished” and assigned for review to one or more reviewers when they commit their code and use “[fixes #12345] to reviewer1,reviewer2″ in the commit message. One of the reviewers will review the code and mark it as submitted in reviewboard and as delivered in Pivotal if it looks good. If not, they will mark it as rejected and the developer will have to restart the ticket.

Weekly testers will take delivered tickets and mark them as “accepted” or “rejected” based on whether the y test ok. Tickets rejected by testers will have to be restarted

If bugs are filed during the week, Critical (core functionality not working or crash type) bugs will be put on top of Backlog queue. All other bugs, when urgent will go to back of Backlog queue. If not urgent, they will go to the Icebox in the appropriate group, usually “Increase performance”

(3) We will have the following short meetings to create our “Feedback loop” and continuously improve as a company:

a) IceBox filling: Groups meet separately to add new stories to their icebox, prioritize stories in their icebox based on importance and urgency and assign points to stories

Aarjav will move stuff from IceBox -> Backlog: Usually Aarjav only + Group expert (if required) move things to Backlog and prioritize them across groups

b) Retrospective -> End of week meeting to discuss our stats associated with each group including velocity that week. Also discuss things we love, hate and are confused about as a company. [ the ":) :$ " meeting ]

c) Standup emails and meeting: By 10.30 a.m. everyday, everyone should send out a scrum email letting everyone know what they plan to work on that day based on the top backlog tickets, and any critical items they want others to know about. A’s email will include a list of part time people who are not working that day. At 11:00 am A, D and whoever else is working that day will do a quick 15 minute standup meeting to discuss scrum emails.

We will practice this work flow on Monday and all this week. Please please email me or talk to me, R or A in person if you have questions or doubts or concerns.

Sincerely,

Aarjav

Courage, they say, is not the lack of fear
but looking fear in its eye
feeling its piercing glance
and moving on regardless.

Yes, I am afraid
yet, I will move on
to wherever life takes me
for I have seen the unmoving life
and a fearful ascent is better.

But where art thou my force of will?
Perhaps, like the line connecting these dots,
you are visible only in hindsight.

-ajt

Perspective:

I wrote this 3 years ago, almost to the day, and rediscovered it while moving computers. The “fear” likely refers to the fear of quitting my job to take the plunge. It took me another year and a quarter before I did it. I don’t remember what the schadenfreude refers to. Like all negative thoughts, it was a waste of time. I learned that force of will is never visible only in hindsight. When I finally overcame my fears and plunged into my startup full time, it was plenty visible in foresight.

One of the advantages of starting up is that you get to choose where your office is. RideCell’s office is at the edge of the Georgia Tech campus and a 5 minute walk from the nearest MARTA (subway) station. I enjoy taking the train to work, having the luxury of basking in the beautiful sight that is Atlanta’s skyline in the morning sun. The 15 minute ride also gives me an opportunity to think about the “big picture” of our day to day labors.

These days while Arun, Venkat and Sahiti handle a bulk of our coding, I spend a lot of time selling. I do at least five and some times fifteen calls most days with transportation and campus security folks at Universities around the country. Some are cold calls, some are qualified leads. What is encouraging is almost everyone I talk to agrees to see a demo and (literally) every one I have given a demo thinks we have a really useful product. What is frustrating is how long it takes to go from “This is an amazing product, we need it yesterday!” to “Let’s sign a contract”. Weeks, at least. Months, usually.

This was on my mind today as I walked out of the MARTA Midtown station and sat down on a bench outside to wait for the Tech Trolley. About 15 feet away from me was an angry looking man, standing next to a large copper drum, waving pamphlets in the air and shouting. At first I thought he was a salesman, but turned out he was an angry preacher denouncing fake gods and chastising folks to follow him or burn in eternity.

The brand of spirituality that he was selling: “my way or hell”, if it can be called that, was hardly to my liking. Neither was his style, in fact: I don’t like angry strangers who shout at me. But then it occurred to me: how many deals do you think this man ‘closes’ in a day? Heck, how many people actually even pay attention to him? Yet here he is, standing in a public place, selling his ‘product’, shouting at the top of his voice day after day. On the other hand, most of my potential customers actually take an hour out of their busy lives to see a demo, and even praise what I am selling. So it takes a few weeks to close the deal, big deal! I believe in the utility of my product more than he believes in his. Heck, unlike him, I got stats to back up my beliefs! So if he can stand out there, shouting hour after hour at people who ignore him in the hopes that even if he doesn’t ever get to know about it, may be one of them will look into his brand of spirituality, what right do I have to complain?

TL:DR; When you get frustrated with long sales cycles, think of how bad it is for the angry subway preacher!

It has been over a year and a half since we started RideCell, less than six months since we pivoted into building a product which has brought us non-trivial revenues and less than three months since I started working full time on RideCell. Here are a few things I have learnt so far:

0) Advice is useful, but mostly after the fact.

If you are sitting there on the couch, with an idea in your head, and you have never built or tried to sell a product, stop reading this article and go do that first. Seriously.

All the ideas, advice, articles, anecdotes, books and events about startups are not very different from a novel. The vicarious pleasure they provide you is as fleeting as infatuation and over almost as soon as you are done reading. A real startup is like marriage. A lot more hard work and much more satisfying.

Get out of the house/office/classroom and talk to the people who you think want your product. Build  a minimum viable product. (Try to) Sell it. It is scary, but doable, and a lot more exciting than reading. It is the real stuff of startups. Try not to indulge in reading about startups or fantasizing about new ideas till you have built and tried to sell the first version of your product.

Advice is 10x more useful after you have tried to accomplish something instead of just thinking about it. I know this for a fact. The rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.

1) You are building a palace in the air. And that is o.k.

If you are feeling scared about the fact that you have only an idea, don’t be. Be concerned. Act. But don’t be afraid. If you focus on talking to potential customers and building what they want, you’ll find yourself a few months [or weeks, if you use python ] down the line with your first user singing paeans to your product (followed, almost certainly, by 10 feature requests).

Build fast. Talk to your customers constantly. Don’t worry too much about potential competitors.

2) Know that inertia doesn’t love you any more.

If you are doing this right out of school or a job at a big company, starting a startup may feel a bit like swimming up stream to you. In school or at a large company, you have your teacher or your boss constantly telling you what they expect you to do next. If you find yourself depressed one Monday morning, everything around you is not going to stop. Meetings will still happen, your boss will still ask for status at the end of the day, and almost counter intuitively, this can be a good thing. If you start working on something because you have to, you forget about the things bothering you and if you do something productive, you become happy again.

At your startup, if you stop, the company stops. You decide what you need to do next, so if you are depressed one Monday, there won’t be a boss or a teacher to tell you to can your self pitying and get shit done. Tuesday will be bleaker because you got nothing done on Monday. So this kind of thing can become a bad self reinforcing cycle.

To fix this, get a good co-founder who can kick your ass into gear or drag you out for ice-cream if you are slacking/sulking. Learn to recognize inertia, self pitying and other self reinforcing cycles of doom in yourself and respond to them with merciless action. Inertia is your enemy now. Pick a task, any task, and get it done.

3)  Re-examine all your virtues.

Anything, taken to the extreme is dangerous. So it is with all virtues. Take perfectionism. As a startup and a two (one?) person team, you are not going to ship the next best thing since sliced bread at version 1.0. In fact, chances are, many aspects of your product will be cringe worthy. As long as your product is still useful, that is o.k. Cut the right corners.

Perfectionism is just an easy example. Re-examine other virtues also: Are you too flexible? Do you always want to say yes to all customers? Is that scalable?  Do you want to build a framework that will scale to a million simultaneous user sessions before you ship your first version? Are your first 100 users going to pay for that?

4) You are two people: Maker and Manager

Makers need to focus on one thing at a time in long stretches. For example, when I code, I always feel like I need at least a couple of hours to get anything significant done. Managers need to focus on fighting a hundred fires and pursuing a hundred fleeting opportunities. If I focused on trying to recruit one customer per day, it would take me years to be cash-flow positive.

It is hard for makers and managers to even work together. But when you are playing both roles, it’s like having full blown multiple personality disorder. The only way I have found to manage it is by setting aside specific chunks of time to do maker type stuff.

5)  Keep an eye on the roller coaster, or it will kill you

The startup roller coaster has higher highs and lower lows than you can imagine. On days you hear positive feedback from one of the leading institutions in the world, you will feel like a young Sergey Brin. When you don’t hear back from them for a couple of weeks, you will feel like the biggest loser in the world. The only way to deal with this is to recognize and acknowledge the roller coaster. “This too shall pass” should be your daily mantra. When you are feeling high, spend no more than a few minutes basking in your imagined glory. When you are feeling low, know that something will likely happen soon that will cause you to feel positively glorious again. Through everything, always, always, keep working.

6) Either your ego dies or your startup dies

At a startup you will spend much of your time either talking to customers or working with your team. It is important that you keep your ego out of these interactions because they will make or break your startup.

Customers: Recruit customers who are helpful and willing to talk. Then listen to them like they are the smartest people in the world. These are people telling you exactly what you need to do to make money from them. If you have chosen your field wisely, this is work you really like doing. So these people are telling you how to do what you like and make money doing it! Sure, you are probably an ace hacker and maybe even a world-class expert in technology. Forget that for the moment and listen to what the customer wants. All the technology in the world is worth bupkiss if the customer doesn’t get what she wants.

Team: Recruit only people who are smarter than you at what they do. When they talk about it, listen to them. Unless your goal in life is pay people to listen to you brag about your superiority, the reasons for this should be obvious.

7) It’s hard to be king. If it’s not, you are doing it wrong.

If you have people reporting to you, you should know that being a boss is a lot more than just “delegating work”. Sure, not having to do everything yourself is awesome; but presumably you have had a boss before; did you want them to treat you like a cog in the machine, just assigning you work and squeezing everything out of you? I didn’t. When that happened, I quit.

Take care of your people. Different people need different things from their boss. Try to understand what. Your job is to try to give them what they need to get their work done and then get out of their way. Think of yourself as their problem solver. Sometimes this may involve guidance with personal problems. Sometimes they will just need technical guidance. Sometimes they will need you to understand what you are doing wrong as a boss without taking it personally. Sometimes they’ll just need to vent. This kind of stuff is supposed to be hard. If it’s not, you are doing it wrong.

8.) Your startup will try to kill every other aspect of your life (again, and again, and again)

The CEO of Coca Cola said it better than I can:

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them – Work, Family, Health, Friends and Spirit and you’re keeping all of these in the Air.

You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back.

But the other four Balls – Family, Health, Friends and Spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these; they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for it.

Except that at a startup, the work ball has expanded and will continue to expand until you make it stop. It is your decision where to make it stop. Naturally, if you expect work to take less time than going out with friends, a startup may be the wrong place for you. Ever so often, think of your friends, family, health and spirit and examine if the balance between these things is where you want it to be.

9) Be relentlessly resourceful

PG said it better than I can. Being Relentless is your hammer, Being resourceful is how well you wield it and where you aim it.

10) Pivot

If your (potential) customers tell you you are working on a problem they don’t have, and/or help you identify a problem they do have, pivot to solve it. Eric Ries said it much better than I can: Pivot, don’t jump to a new vision.