I used to be a healthy, happy, well-nourished young boy.

Now, as I sit here feverishly coding, my face has sunk into a waxy pallor, and my left hand trembles ever so slightly as it reaches to my tray to pick up the slice of watermelon I am eating in the hopes of gaining some measure of revitalization. I also picked up some broccoli, but it tasted so bad that I just couldn’t bring myself to finish.

But it will all be worth it in the end. In just a few short months, the average Joe and Josie will be able to easily find a movie they both want to watch, saving them from a fight at the rental store, a subsequent evening of sitting on opposite sides of the couch with furrowed brows and crossed arms, a grumpy morning afterwards with dark looks at each from across the mirror as they gnash their toothbrushs against their teeth in a furious show of just how angry they are, and a series of escalating arguments that result in a bitter marriage that negatively affects young Joe Jr., who later grows up to sit alone in his room listening to Nine Inch Nails and brooding about how much he hates life, and how the only solution to all his problems is finding a movie that captures the angst he feels inside.

This start-up will save them from all of that.

This is the hope that keeps my spirit alive as I sit here, nursing a belly full of kidney beans and peas as I stare at my screen in a mixture of melancholy and despair. “Why won’t this Javascript work?” I ask myself repeatedly, banging my head against my desk. “Why oh why?” And I realize: These are the forces of evil working against me. Satan himself does not want you to watch a good movie. Satan wants you to rent the utter crap foisted upon us by elaborate marketing campaigns and rental store displays. Satan wants you to cry after watching movies — you know, in the bad way, the way that says “The utter lack of art and entertainment in this film makes me a little more dead inside” and not “My soul has been moved to new heights of human emotion.”

This is a holy battle, my friends, and I will wage it with a vim and vigour unlike any before witnessed in Silicon Valley. With a keyboard in one hand and a stalk of utterly disgusting cafeteria broccoli in the other, I shall fight on for the freedom of movie-lovers everywhere. Nourishment is no object, and health is no obstacle. I have a dream, ladies and gentlemen, and maybe that dream isn’t as grand as the ones you typically hear about in dramatic speeches about racial equality, but it’s still a good dream and we will fight for it, from the shores of Blockbuster to the beaches of Century Cinema, from the jungles of stale popcorn to the valleys of Netflix.

Unless, of course, this broccoli kills me. Damn you, broccoli. Damn you.

Find a movie: simple, sweet, seemingly easy to do and yet we’ve all been to blockbuster or shown up at the theater and looked at the rows and rows of movies and blankly wondered which one to choose. And so you think about the marketing you’ve seen, how you liked an actor in one movie so maybe you’ll like him/her again, or a friend of a friend apparently really liked it.

Finding a movie is a big problem and the goal of our site it to solve it. Easy right?

Not at all. Think of all the genres of movies, the mood you are in and how you’d like to feel after the movie, the sophistication, factor in what you’ve liked and disliked in the past, and on and on…..and all the choices, hundreds of thousands of movies and thousands more each year.

So we’ve dissected the whole process…and we are going to help you find a movie to watch.

 - Matt

I work at a very large Silicon Valley corporation as a product manager. Being a PM at a big company is great in many ways (access to resources, serving a developed market, etc.), but at times it can be a frustrating role–mainly because the pace of work is much slower and it’s difficult to innovate.

In the worst case, a product cycle can look like the following: you come up with a product idea, meet with key stakeholders to get initial buy-in on the idea, prepare a presentation to sell the broader upper management on the idea, finally get signed off on implementing your idea, beg your VP of engineering to provide developers to create your idea, wait until next quarter/next year for the business unit to allocate money and people behind your idea, create a product requirements document, spend weeks debating with your engineering manager and developers over the feasibility of your product requirements, convince your team to put together a proof of concept to test in usability, run usability, use usability data to convince your team/other stakeholders about the pressing business need for your product, achieve shared vision on your product idea, spend months building the product, run more usability, beta test, find critical bugs in your product, strip features, iterate–finally you’re ready to launch!

In this worst case, it can take many months–perhaps even years–to get your idea to market. By the time you launch, you may find that your smaller, more nimble competitors had been innovating other cooler things while you were dragging your feet with process and red tape. (And just to reiterate–I’ve presented the worst case scenario, it’s not always like this.)

Working with the HelloMovies team has been a refreshing change from my day job. Some things I absolutely love:

• The pace of the work is lightning fast. There’s no red tape or product requirements docs–we just talk about ideas with the engineers and they go off and code while figuring it out on the fly.
• We are definitely innovating. I’m not really at liberty to describe in detail what we’re building, but our team is definitely in the forefront of creating a new technology that can benefit a lot of people.
• We are young and ambitious. This team is scrappy and truly believes that we have the capability to build anything we want. Plus, the team is full of great personalities!
• I love movies! This is just my personal thing–but I absolutely love movies, and I feel privileged to be on a project to help other people–YOU–improve their movie watching experiences.

Being at a startup is thrilling and absolutely satisfying. That’s why it’s easy for folks like me and Steven to work a full day on our day jobs and then spend another 7 hours at night in a Stanford dorm room building out this website.

A colleague in the venture business recently sent me a quote:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” — Theodore Roosevelt

“Everytime I read this, I think of entrepreneurs,” she says. I hope that now, in the time of college midterms, company deadlines and travels for work, that our team keeps this in mind despite being stretched thin.

A Summer pose (Me, Josh, Matt and Stan)

Search engines are difficult creatures. (In case you didn’t know, Steven tells me I’m “working” on the search engine for the site.) With minimal work, he’d like the algorithmic engine and database to intuit what we meant — even if it isn’t what we asked. The engine, however, lacks a critical feature that disambiguates statements. Consider the queries “batman” and “val kilmer.” What should a search engine for movies return? Should “batman” return the Val Kilmer actor entry? Should “val kilmer” return the Batman movie entry? Maybe it should just return the phrase “worst batman ever.”

What do you expect? I would expect a search for “batman” to return a list of the Batman movies. Likewise, I would expect a search for “val kilmer” to return his actor page as one of a very small set of results. These results are comparable to going to your movie friend and asking about Batman and Val Kilmer. I like using the phrase Batman to test our search engine. One day, it surprised me and pulled up an actor. No, it wasn’t Val Kilmer, or even Michael Keaton. It was an actor named Batman. I was ready to scream! It was probably around 1am when this was happening, and it most likely meant that my initial database dump had some sort of irregularity that I was picking up in the parsing. So I looked through the raw files. The files showed that Batman really was there. So who is this guy?

IMDB comes to my rescue — http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2533507/

Batman indeed appears in a movie. I have never heard of this movie, but Batman stars in it. What happened here? The engine lacks cultural knowledge! We know of Batman because of the movie (or more likely, the comic) not because of the actor. So should the engine bias the results towards the movie? Such a bias raises troubling questions. As someone who works with data, I think the actor batman is the more interesting result, but it might not agree with what people expect. Therefore, the engine will end up biased towards what most people expect. It’d be better if the search engine really was a baby that we could train just like a person; that way, it’d have the cultural knowledge to answer queries appropriately. (Of course, treating it like a baby raises ethical issues with telling a baby about certain unmentionable movies .)

I was actually going to write this yesterday, but I somehow ended up coding instead of blogging. This happens a lot, and not just with this project. Most of the time, I procrastinate by coding. It’s awesome because I get a lot accomplished this way, but also not so great because (as you might expect if you’ve read Josh’s previous post) I am falling behind in full-time recruiting and classes. Not that I should worry about recruiting, though - this would be an awesome company to work for. Classes, however, I’m not sure. I only have 11 units right now, and that’s including two tennis classes.

I think this past week has been somewhat of a revitalization of the project. Chris, Steven, and I came up with an interesting twist on what we’re doing on Sunday (a week ago). Over the several meetings we’ve had this week, the idea has been polished and refined, even in details of implementation and launch strategy. It’s defined pretty well now, and I think it really is a much better reflection of our vision than our original design. I can’t talk too much about it, but I can tell you that it requires a pretty significant revamp of the site’s design and a compressed timeline for some of the modules. Nonetheless, the whole team is (I think) really excited about this new development, and we’re working hard to bring it public.

As a Senior in college, I can say that the past three years have been fulfilling, fun, and incredibly busy. When you’re overwhelmed and about to collapse from your workload, its really your excitement about your current project(s) that motivates you to keep at it. It’s hard to juggle five classes (four of which are Computer Science classes) among extra-curriculars plus a social life, but recently, it’s been my work on HelloMovies that’s been keeping me going. You know that feeling - you’re working on such a damn cool project that even though you’ve worked through both breakfast and lunch, you don’t notice or care because you just want to get this “last bit” working. At least, I hope you’ve had the pleasure of knowing that feeling. It’s like the geek’s equivalent of a runner’s high or an adrenaline rush. kinda sorta. However you describe it, it’s fun.

And so, I welcome you to my first post, of which I hope there will be many, on our HelloMovies blog, and I hope that you will soon be as excited as I am about HelloMovies. Good night for now.

Like most other subjects on the Internet, the online movie landscape is incredibly competitive. If you take a look at MSN, Yahoo!, IMDB, Rottentomatoes, Moviefone, etc, it’s immediately obvious that there are many large players in the space who have spent years developing strong movie portals. Many of these sites are also backed by huge companies with quite a bit more cash than we have.

Given the competition, we knew we couldn’t immediately start building a product without spending serious time thinking about what users still lack the ability to do on traditional movie websites. Thus, we started brainstorming in April of 2007 without any code being written until July. For three months, all we did was talk about features that other sites offered and what people liked most. MSN and Yahoo! were seen as mainstream, corporate websites with good information on recent movies. IMDB was seen as the number one source for raw movie data. RottenTomatoes was seen as the best place to get user feedback on movies through the Tomatometer.

After deciding on some things that we thought we could improve upon from these sites, we began to build. The Summer of ‘07 was spent working diligently on finding movie content, learning over 5 different programming languages, building up a movie database backbone and above all, scrounging around for food without open dining halls. If any future VCs ever have concerns about our ability to conserve money, all they need to do is go through weeks of Dominoe’s, Quizno’s, and Baja Fresh receipts.

With school starting again, it has definitely been harder to maintain focus. Drawing some cues from Tony D’Amato in Any Given Sunday, I’ve been doing my best to continue rallying the team. It is amazing to me that people can manage multiple problem sets and programming assignments, while still doing their best to build a company. I never had such an opportunity in school, but chances are, I wouldn’t have had the guts to take on the challenge while still trying to maintain my grades. This is a special group that I’ve been extremely proud of.

Below are some photos of the team, hard at work during one of our weekly meetings. Thanks to Eric for volunteering to be our historian.

- Steven

- Josh and Chris have a good laugh.

- Stan and Dave go over design issues as I look over.

- Dave’s son, Callum, reminds us that movies with trains are cool.

I’ve been asked to blog for HelloMovies, which, depending on your point of view, is either a great idea or the worst idea to ever hit the planet since movie theatres started putting trash cans far away from the bathroom door. Whether you sit with the former or the latter camp can largely be determined by how you reacted to that previous sentence. If you agree with my sentiments on theatre bathroom layouts, stick around.

Now unfortunately, HelloMovies can’t fix all the movie theatre bathrooms in the world, but we are out to improve every other part of the movie experience, from figuring out if there’s anything good out right now to finding the closest place to rent a movie, from discovering new films guaranteed to fit your tastes to finally finding out the name of that one movie you watched a long time ago with the totally tripped-out scene where a ninja does this amazing backflip over twenty zombies and ends up falling into a dumpster where he discovers the Magical Can Opener of Eternal Glory. Damn, have we been searching long and hard for that one.

Also, we strongly oppose preteen girls slobbering all over Johnny Depp with poor capitalization and excessive use of exclamation marks. That alone should sway you to our side.

So stay tuned for more exciting news as we get rolling on site development. We’ll let you know how things are going, and maybe even enthuse about Johnny a little…only, you know, real dignified-like.