Let’s get 2006 started!
January 7th, 2006 by Jean Sini
With the New Year literally around the corner, and the entire blogosphere abuzz with its healthy bundle or resolutions and predictions, it’d be tempting for me to chime in. Heck, I can certainly cook up a few of each of my own. But I’ll fight the urge, and instead use the extra time to hack on our service. There, everybody wins. After all, if the next web, as I like to call it, is to live up to its promise of being a platform, it had better be hell-bent on delivering value rather than sound-bites.
Still, I thought I’d take a minute to share some of our recent news. For starters, we just closed a round of funding. That means, among other things, that we can now ramp up along two key dimensions: product development and hosting scale. Of course, we all agree with Joe Kraus or Paul Graham, among many others: building a software company has never been cheaper. Still, awesome developers, servers, and appropriate bandwidth aren’t completely free. So our funding is going to make a big difference on these fronts. Oh, incidentally, it also means we’re hiring! Also, we’re incredibly delighted to welcome Esther Dyson on our board of advisors, and Eric Di Benedetto on our board of directors: we feel their insight and guidance will be tremendous, instrumental help.
Most importantly, after our initial, closed alpha, and the fantastic feedback we received from everyone involved, we’re brewing our next update. We’re aiming to release to a larger audience this time: we had to keep out, at first, too many of you who expressed interest, and want the next revision to be open to many more users, even if that means we’re only coming out with a small fraction of the features we envision. You know, release early and often, and demonstrate tangible value at every step. So expect more releases coming up soon! We can’t wait to have you all on board.
About that common and popular wisdom, though, a few words: we’re as excited as the next start up to sacrifice to the next web gods: Early, Often, Valuable. After the ill-fated “get big fast” approach of the pre-bubble days, this clearly feels sane and sound. But let’s face it; this means we’re all engaged in a perilous exercise. Essentially, we all tacitly agree to be the outsourced research lab of the GYM (or even AGILEAMY, according to Brad Feld). In this latest Darwinian twist, take many teams of two guys, a dog, and a server, and have them compete over features. Not over sustainable revenues, not even over large user bases: just watch the features, the beginning of the adoption curve, then pick a winner or roll your own. Let the fittest survive, and you get very cheap, fast, and efficient innovation. But you also get a lot of waste, and you don’t get a whole lot of companies. Shed in this light, in fact, the current, massive wave of energy being poured into this doesn’t feel particularly empowering: at best, if you build well to flip, you get swallowed by one of these big conglomerates.
Not that I have anything, personally or in principle against such an exit. Certainly not personally! But I think it only fosters innovation and real competition in the short run: either individually or as a community, it’s not a sustainable way to build: for every del.icio.us, how many projects never left the garage they were started in, never saw the light, but received nonetheless months of attention from their developers? Not a problem in and of itself, but depending exclusively on this type of projects means we’re only harvesting innovation from spare cycles: kids still in college or fresh out, with no down-side whatsoever (when we’re 22 we’re broke no matter what), and hobbyists with extra time on their hands. Well, most kids soon grow too busy and risk-averse to do this full time, and hobbyists are cycle-constrained to begin with. Also, it only seems to foster the kind of competition that’s good for users: true, the early adopters, the thought-leaders reap the benefits: they’re constantly on the lookout for new features, new ways to mash all this up into their own web, and ferret these projects out immediately. But access for the rest of the users (and even though it’s easy to forget from where we stand in the middle of the valley, they’re the vast majority) is de facto gated by whether or not they’re available on one of the AGILEAMY portals.
What does it mean for us? Have no fear: we’re not going back to the web 1.0 ways. Sorry, no lavish launch party at the Redwood Room ahead. Simply put, we’re all for early, but not too early. Often, yes, but not so much that it hinders the value we deliver. Because value, ultimately, is the one thing we can’t compromise, and we want to be around long enough to deliver all of it. I’d say every good hacker can make great features. But even as we view the web as a platform, we’re aiming to build a company, not a project. So we’re rushing like mad, but we’ll keep things in the oven until they’re at least somewhat cooked. And we’re sharing all we can, but we won’t tip our hand too soon. And I don’t mean this in any pompous, self-righteous way: I think we’re all learning this as we go; there is no single way of the next web, just yet.
Concretely, we’re busy refining the augmented web platform we introduced in October, and not so much adding features as removing some: our immediate goal is simple and fast. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, have a great party tonight; we can’t wait to see you all in 2006!