Come for the Ride…

After working with our developers in both India and America over the past month, I have come to think about various differences between the two. I have started to see similarities in people I know here in the US and able to divide them into groups with respect to the skills needed to be an entrepreneur. For example, our American developer is a very independent person who can take an idea and run with it. He lays out a variety of prospective directions to take a project and goes out of his way to present the best solution for a given project. With his knowledge, we’ll be able to use Amazon Web Services and EC2 services to process a large portion of the code we’ll have to run on a daily basis. It will cost us money, but in the long term it may save us quite a bit due to the costs of maintaining hardware and the omnipresent possibility of hardware failure. He’s creative and really knows everything within and surrounding the scope of what we need, allowing us to expand what we would otherwise be able to do.

On the other hand, we have our Indian developers who are very strict about what they do. Any questions and there is constant contact. There is very little initiative and creativity involved in their development. Much of the project is done with a lot of hand holding. There’s not as much initiative. There is, however, consistency. I can expect consistent updates. I can expect questions every few days. And in the end, we do still get excellent code that works.

What this all comes down to is Americans value creativity and innovative thinking well above and beyond most other cultures. I had read an article a long time ago about why startups work in America the best and one reason was our educational system. It’s unique structure often allows for children to go through 21 years of schooling and still not know what they want to do when they grow up. It allows for a higher degree of success (and failure). It values hard work and creativity above pure intelligence (Warren Buffett is a very smart person, but if you’ve read his biography you’ll see that hard work and creativity got him where he is today). That’s what entrepeneurialism is all about: hard work and creativity. It’s the reason you go out and start you own company. It’s the same need for freedom, not the “promise” of security, that drives people to put time and effort into a project that may or may not succeed. It’s faith in something you’re passionate about.

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It’s not easy to find a good team that you know you can trust to build your business on. Early in our companies creation, we had a few discussions that developers have a mindset (I’ve felt this before in my past) that we are the center of any computer / online based startup. Without our coding ability, the company is nothing. We’re irreplaceable and how dare you question our methods for coding? I’m recently realizing that developers are a, for the most part, a unique group of people. They are used to doing things their own way. They often program for their own enjoyment and answer only to themselves for a majority of their coding career (when younger). They have only themselves to rely upon for learning all their programming skills and thus they aren’t used to being led by others.

Going through various sources to find a developer or development team has given me some insight into what the positives and negatives are in going to various sources to find a team of developers.

1. Craistlist - This is where I came from Craigslist is full of a ragtag bunch of developers who are a bit of hit, miss or guess talent. Some people just want some small side projects. Some people are advertising their development companies. Due to the large number of spam messages, Craigslist has a high signal-to-noise ratio though. If you find someone who fits, consider yourself lucky.

2. Guru.com / oDesk.com - Selections are plentiful and you have a lot of great feedback from previous people. They have “tests” that can give you an idea of how good the technical skills are, but then again, there’s only so much a test can tell you about a developer. Right now, our top developer choice is off Guru.com. Though it sounds cliche, they are an offshore development team from India. We started out a bit rocky, but we’re still on target. There were some people who were very flaky from Guru and oDesk about communication and contact in reasonable times. Quotes were all over the place, but they all averaged to a reasonable number that we had projected in our project description. I’d recommend this for anyone looking to hire a freelancer with high reliability.

3. Forums - I’m still getting responses from this source. I believe this is the source that could yield the best deal. The talent here ranges from newbies to actual PHP creators. You’ve got people who are coming to a forum of their own volition to offer advice and get help. The potential for finding talent here (and people who can vouch for them as well as being able to search the forum for their posts, communication skills and others who can recommend them) is immense. I wish we would have come here first, but we’ll see how everything turns out. In the future, I will use this source more to find new talent as well as a source to change and edit code we do ourselves.

4. Friends - Greatest potential to save money here. I really wish I had a few friends who knew PHP. I have no less than 3 friends I would trust without fail to do work with us. However, two of them are more high level developers who work with lower level languages. two of them are steeped in .NET development (we need a neutral platform that we know how to code ourselves in a pinch: PHP) and all three don’t have a high degree of PHP experience. Two friends in particular went through the same software engineering classes at Purdue I did and I would trust them implicitly, however a lack of PHP knowledge seems to be my main stumbling block in using them. Bummer.

Now that I have the luxury of staying up late and waking up at 10, I was actually able to watch NBC last night when Jay and Conan came back for the first time since the writers’ strike. The shows were pretty good if not better than average and I gotta say, I wasn’t surprised.

Having seen old clips of the two from various gigs back in the day, they had already proven themselves as funny comedians. Now they are just doing what they have always done to earn their talk show host status so I don’t understand why many expected them to bomb.

As the shows progressed, I did observe something interesting to note - the shows now look less scripted, and more spontaneous. Whether that’s actually true or not is irrelevant… In the modern media where reality shows and amateur videos are showcased on network TV, YouTube, CNN and pretty much everywhere else on the Internet, many may actually prefer this type of TV vs. the lame scripted ones.

Would Jay have been able to admit he hated and was relieved he didn’t have to scramble to do his “New Years show” in the old format? I don’t know, but with the Peacock watching, I don’t think so.

I would imagine NBC like most large corporate companies are conservative when it comes to taking risks but desperate times call for desperate measures and who knows, this format may just work for the late night shows! Heck, I wouldn’t want to watch anyone during the noon time news spin their wedding rings on the air but because it’s Conan, because it’s at 1 in the morning and I’m wired from Mountain Dew, that type of quality TV just may work!

If you truly know your audience… you can make anything work.

I’m not sure if most developers and entrepreneurs operate the same way as I do, but when I’m in true startup mode, I tend to shut off most if not all distractions. For me, this means no TV during the day, no nights out on the weekends, no early nights before 1am and basically zero fun during the early (development) sprint. Though it’s not a big deal for me, I basically skipped the holidays this year too.

When needed, I’ll take a ramen break if my body stops being productive or watch a movie so my conscious brain and eyes can take a break while the subconscious figures out problems in the background; gotta love the backup brain. In more recent times, I’ve been putting music on… but I think most people do that when they code. Since music doesn’t provide anything new like news or gossip, it doesn’t provide distractions like Digg or Engadget would.

Like a sick marathon runner who repeatedly train and sign up for races, I’ve been down this path a few times without a medal to show off the achievements; but the motivation is still there. In all honesty, I can’t tell you why I like doing this to myself even 15 years later… but I’m doing it. As baffled as I am of the marathon runners, I’m sure my choice is one that most people don’t understand either. For the record, I only run when disasters happen. (e.g. a tornado chasing me)

So this lifestyle takes a toll… a little on me but I’m sure more so for everyone around me. My wife has been a champ; taking care of the house, the dogs and keeping the shelves full of ramen. Well, she’s actually a great cook, but I’ve gotten lazy when it comes to personal nourishment.

My friends have been great though I honestly haven’t seen them in recent times except for holiday gatherings. I’m sure there are about 10 bad movies out there I want to see with them but I’ll have to wait till they’re available on Netflix.

So I guess this post is a question for all the entrepreneurs who are reading this: what do you guys do when you’re working on your idea? Do you try to do a better job at balancing life and work or is it a mad dash every time you start something new? I’d be interested in seeing if successful startups share this craziness or if they approach it more modestly. At this rate if nothing else changes, burnout seems to be the only way this process could end.