I saw an article on TechCrunch today about an interested start-up called Snooth. It essentially a very comprehensive Web 2.0 database of wines. While I cannot claim myself to be a wine connoisseur, I admit that I stuck around for a while just browsing the selections and seeing what I can do. It turns out that they do a lot of cool stuff, like user reviews, ratings, and tags, all of which make the experience much more rich than just a database of wines. I wouldn’t know where to even start searching when it comes to wines, but I quickly discovered that you can search for things like “good with pork” or “dessert” or “from france”, which I thought was really cool. Plus, their user interface is elegant and intuitive, which made browsing the site very easy and enjoyable. While I still can’t reveal exactly what we’re doing at HelloMovies, I’ll say that we really like a lot of the elements on Snooth and will seek to replicate the experience to some degree.

Stan

I showed the site to my mom tonight. She thought everything was really cool, although she wasn’t very impressed by the fact that we haven’t indexed the movies so that you can search for foreign movies by their English titles yet. But she did like our browse feature’s functionality and all the cool expanding forms. So take that, Internet! At least our moms thinks our website is cool!

Speaking of moms, I’d like to introduce you to some of the terrible Your Mom jokes that Stan has made while coding together the last few days. Seriously, out of all the people I’ve ever met, Stan is the absolute worst at playing the dozens.

Chris: Do you agree or not?
Stan: Your mom agrees.

Chris: That’s hilarious…though also kind of annoying.
Stan: Your mom’s annoying.

Chris: What’s wrong with the inner join part of this MySQL query?
Stan: Your mom’s an inner join part of a MySQL query.

Chris: Hey, what did I just say that you said ‘your mom’ to?
Stan: …shit, I don’t remember.

I just showed up at Stan’s place about ten minutes ago and saw a couple pizza boxes on the floor. It didn’t look like there were any actual slices left, but there were some little olives and mushroom bits strewn across the greasy ridged paper at the bottom of the box, just enough to sate my morning munchies. So after about five minutes of talking about real things, like design mockups and the new beta signup on the home page — go sign up! — I ask Stan with a subtlety borne of wisdom that far exceeds my twenty years: “Hey, do you have any food?”

He replies, “I don’t know if there are places open. Hold on, let me ask Josh.”

Clearly, he isn’t getting the point here, so I think about a new tack while he learns from Josh that no, nothing around here is open right now. Simple and direct, I decide with a pound of my fist, is the way to go.

“What’s up with that pizza on the floor?”

“Oh. I think that’s from last night.”

Bingo. Breakfast is served.

Steven and I had an interesting conversation late Wednesday night (by the way, we’re roommates)–we were talking about the sub-prime lending meltdown and how it’s affecting the rest of the economy. Earlier that day, I was listening to some guest on NPR’s Fresh Air argue how an American recession is inevitable due to: weakened banks (i.e. sub-prime lending flop), diminishing dollar, and rising oil prices. Not that I believe everything that I hear from the media, but this guy’s arguments did make a lot of sense to me and made me feel a bit paranoid about the future.

However, not everyone is predicting doom and gloom. Today, Mark Hendrickson wrote a cool article on TechCrunch speculating that the current problems in the banking and real estate sectors could actually drive more money to Silicon Valley. In a survey of 862 real estate, mortgage, and financial workers, 56.2% of respondents claimed they were seriously thinking about starting a business within the next six months–many of these people had an eye on starting tech businesses.

So the positive takeaway from this article is that the tech entrepreneurship sector could be doing okay even if other parts of the economy are faltering (principle of creative destruction?); however, Hendrickson raises a great question–do we really want a bunch of big corporation people becoming entrepreneurs?

Let’s see if history repeats itself…

Tons of advice out there on how to best start a startup, just like you can get advice on how to do everything in your life (relationships, work, health, finances, and on and on). Well, much of it is intuitive, but not all, and it is always nice to have validation that you are doing things correctly - at least in one person’s opinion.

Eric’s article he shared “How to start a startup”, mentioned below, is a very good one. The one thing that stood out for me in the assertion that everyone in the startup should be described as an animal, in terms of their devotion and passion for their role in the startup - which is very coincidental:

Steve’s nickname is Fanimal.

Chris is always talking about ‘cool’ animals - he tried to rally around the name MovieLemur but that thankfully didn’t pass.

Stan, Josh, and Chris are all coding and dev animals.

Dave G. is a search animal.

Dave B. is an architect animal.

Eric is a viral animal.

John is just plain animalistic.

and I’m not sure I’m an animal at all, but you might say I’m a business animal - which the author of the article puts down quite a bit, especially since I have an MBA.

Of course as we expand the team we should only look to hire animals…

Matt

When I was an analyst at Goldman Sachs, a lot of my VP’s and MD’s had catch phrases they would use to keep us motivated through difficult times.

“You are living the dream.”

“Great work, guy.”

“U da man.”

“Let’s rage.”

These messages didn’t have as much of an effect on me when I was sleeping on a drool-stained couch in our “quiet room” at 5AM (a power nap before an 8AM conference call). But one phrase has stuck with me through my ride at HelloMovies — “Stay laser-focused.” Smart people will always have brilliant ideas, and the temptation to work on all of them is incredibly strong. I’ve had my share of execution stumbles, but I am laser-focused now. Start basic, launch quickly with something basic, and iterate. Let’s rage.

How’s the rest of the team doing with this philosophy, you ask?  Let’s consult one of my developers’ roommates, the always cool Mr. Aaron Elias Berhanu:

“It seems that every time I come in here, Josh is looking at a black screen with lots of little writing, and Stan is looking at 300. And Chris…Chris is sitting there in the corner rambling or playing Guitar Hero or something.”

….

=(

Recently, I shared a famous article with the HelloMovies team called “How to Start a Startup”. The author, Paul Graham, ran a successful enterprise software startup in the 90s which he subsequently sold for millions. In 2005 he wrote “How to Start a Startup” to chronicle his success and philosophy on entrepreneurship; since then, this article has become somewhat of a Silicon Valley manifesto to all aspiring entrepreneurs.

Graham makes a lot of great points about finding the right ideas, making the right sacrifices, recruiting the right people, etc.–but there is one discussion that particularly struck me when I read his article a few days ago:

Graham asserts that you don’t need to start with a particularly good idea in order to have a successful start up. The idea doesn’t need to be that original, but it just has to “suck less” (borrowing Graham’s words) than the competitors. An example that he cites to support this argument is Google. When Google entered the search engine business, this industry by many measures was already mature. There were tons of big players at the time (Yahoo, Altavista, Excite, Lycos), but Google entered the arena because Sergey and Larry thought they could do search more efficiently than the rest–and they were right.

Bringing it back to HelloMovies–I think that our team has lots of non-sucky ideas, some of which are truly revolutionary and some of which are improvements on what our competitors can do. To draw parallels between HelloMovies and Google (hubris, I know)–our team is also venturing into a relatively mature space, but we feel strongly that we can shake up this market with our fine ideas and excellent products.

Nevertheless, these days I’m not too concerned about the ideas, people, or sacrifices we need to make for our startup; I’m concerned about execution.

As our advisor John Merrells recently warned, it’s easy to start but it’s really difficult to finish. Graham sort of implies this point throughout his article, but he didn’t explicitly address the problem of execution to my satisfaction.

Just to be clear, HelloMovies is chugging along at a decent pace these days and our team is confident that we can execute–however it’s frustrating at times that we can’t move faster and that we have to spend time filling some skill gaps in our team. These are common gripes for all startups, I’m sure.

To those of you who want to start a company: don’t be scared of the initial phases of the project–coming up with an idea and forming a team–that’s the super easy part. Be afraid of the execution! It takes huge commitment across your team and lots of emotional strength to move from idea to product.

Steven drove the meeting, sticking to a tight agenda of discussion items. As you can see, Steven was thinking really hard (indicated by the hand on his chin):

Chris showed up to the meeting late, but still had time to strike a pose for the camera:

Dave sat back in his chair and gently scolded us to get our act together:

Meanwhile, the team continues to build great chemistry. The proof? We are no longer weirded out by the fact that we’re five dudes sitting on Stan’s bed (left to right: Stan, Steven, Eric, Brown Bear, Chris, Josh):