SV Adventure

Email and Calendaring for a Startup

As a startup, we don't have time or money to waste on setting up complex infrastructure.  Mail servers are notoriously complex.  At DataScaler, we wanted to hit the ground running, but also have an email system that would grow with us.  Shared calendaring was also a must-have.  Even with only four people, it's amazing how many schedule conflicts can arise without shared calendaring.

We found Google Apps to be a great fit.  It uses the familiar Gmail user interface and has solid calendaring.  Everything resides under the datascaler.com domain, so our email addresses are all @datascaler.com.  At only $50 per user per year for 10GB of email storage, it's served us well.  It's never been unavailable or had any hiccups.  We can easily invite each other to meetings and manage email. 

We also use the Docs & Spreadsheets app from time to time.  It's not exactly Microsoft Office, though.  It is a bit slow to use over the Internet and cannot import certain documents.  We use it mostly for notepad-type items, but we'll likely move those over to our wiki.  At a prior company, we used a hosted Microsoft Exchange system, but almost 10x more expensive.  After years of using MS Exchange, I don't miss it at all.

We're an all-Mac shop, so we use Spanning Sync to keep our Google Calendars in sync with iCal on our MacBook Pros.  This has worked well for us and the product is also quite inexpensive at $25 per year or $65 forever. 

Another key advantage to using Google Apps is that it requires no VPN.  Since our email is on the internet, it's always available from anywhere.   Between Google Apps, Amazon Web Services, Skype, eFax, Unfuddle, and a few other apps, we are able to run our business quite well without any servers in our office.  We never need a VPN and we don't have to purchase, house, power, and cool a bunch of servers.  As a frequent business traveler, I have come to loathe VPNs, which never seem to be able to connect when you need them to.  The Web truly is a wonderful thing.

Networking is Crucial

I've been amazed at the quality and quantity of networking the DataScaler team has been doing.  We decided to start networking in earnest about 2.5 weeks ago.  In that time, we've met with 30+ individuals with many more to come.  Almost every lunch and breakfast is booked with someone.  We've targeted several types of individuals:

• Sales people who can help us get product validation meetings with customers
• Technical people who can act as advisors and eventually employees
• Strategic advisors from the industry we are targeting
• Professors and PhD students doing research in our area

When you add in the meetings with potential customers, we end up spending a lot of time talking to people.  This has been amazingly helpful.  While this reduces the amount of time we have for product development, it radically increases our chances of creating a product that customers will actually buy when it is released.  So many startups have the "if you build it they will come" philosophy.  We reject that concept and instead believe we have to pre-sell the product while it's being developed.  This is working really well so far.  It's great to see other people get excited about the DataScaler vision.

Skype As An Office Phone System - Part II

As Murphy's Law would have it, just after I blog about how great Skype is as an office phone system, Skype has a big outage.  This definitely affected us at DataScaler.  We were unable to make or receive calls on our "office phones."  The impact was lessened by two factors:

• We are still pre-release, so we didn't have any customers calling us
• We all have cell phones.

Despite the above, we were annoyed not to be able to use our phones.  I had scheduled a vendor to call me on my desk phone, and of course he couldn't get through.  Eventually, he checked his email and called me on another number.

So, what have I learned from this?  I have decided:

• We'll get some (not many) "real" phone lines when we move into our new office in a few months
• We'll connect those lines to an Asterisk PBX and still use soft phones and our Plantronics wireless headsets.  I have loved not having to type numbers into a desk phone.  Soft phones are great, Skype or not.
• We'll still use Skype for most calls. Only Sales, Support, and a few other key inbound numbers will be on the "real" lines.  For most employees, if the phones are down, it's usually a good thing:  No one can interrupt them with a phone call.

So, our experiment with Skype is still a net win; we just won't rely totally on Skype for all our office phone needs.

Skype As An Office Phone System

We use Skype as our phone system at DataScaler.  It works surprisingly well.  Each person has a Plantronics CS50-USB wireless headset.   These high-quality headsets play well with Skype and allow us to wander away from the desk to take calls.  Using SkypeIn and SkypeOut, it's nearly indistinguishable from having a "real" phone.  We save a ton on long distance fees, phone lines, a PBX, and desk phones.  The headsets aren't cheap (~$180), but that's all you need.  A good desk phone will run at least that much if not 2-3x more.

At a previous company, we spent $60,000 on an Avaya PBX and phones for 40 people.  At a subsequent company, we spent $15,000 on an Asterisk-based system for a similar number of people.  We thought that was a killer deal.  Skype will cost us 1/100 of that and we don't need to pay for phone lines.

We also use the Skype Business Control Panel to allow me to centrally manage all the SkypeIn numbers and put SkypeOut credits in the individual accounts.  It works very well.  My only complaints are:

• The Skype website is hard to navigate.  It took me a long time to find what I needed to get started.
• I couldn't use a credit card to pay.  I wanted to buy a large block of SkypeIn numbers, so I needed to spend $200 or so.  In order to do this, I had to open a Moneybookers.com account, then transfer money into it, then transfer the money to Skype.  This process took several days and was a pain.  Apparently, they do this to reduce fraud.

We don't yet have true PBX functionality (dial by name, call transfers, etc.), but we intend to use a managed service on top of Skype to provide that.  More on that when we roll it out.

Goals and Focus

We have some important goals to hit this quarter.  In order to do that, we have a system of quarterly, weekly, and daily goals.  Here's how it breaks down:

• Quarterly Goals: Each DataScaler employee has a big quarterly goal that is crucial to the business' success.  For the technical team, it relates to technology development.  For myself and the business team, it relates to some specific customer-facing activities.

• Weekly Goals:  Each person breaks their quarterly goal into specific weekly goals.  These weekly goals include some demonstrable end result: a technology demo, a summary presentation of customer research, etc.  On Fridays, we have "Demo Fridays" where we each present our demo/presentation related to the week's goal.  There is a weekly prize for the best demo, as voted on by the group.

• Daily Goals and Reports: Every day before leaving, each person takes 5-10 minutes and sends a status report to the team. This report focuses on achieving 1-2 goals per day that lead up to the weekly goal.  It is really easy "get a lot done" without actually moving the ball toward the goal line.  We feel it is far more important to get 1-2 significant things done each day than 10 insignificant ones.  Thus, we limit the daily goals to 2.  By reporting daily on progress, we stay really focused and have the added benefit of increasing communication across the company. The daily report template looks like this:

This Week's Goal
<goal>

Previous Daily Goals (no more than 2)
1- <goal>
2- <goal>

Today's Achievement Toward Goals (no more than 2)
1- <achievement toward goal #1>
2- <achievement toward goal #2>

Other Achievements Today (as many or as few as you like)
1- <achievement>
2- <achievement>
3- <achievement>
4- <achievement>

Goals for Tomorrow (no more than 2)
1- <goal>
2- <goal>

This system of quarterly, weekly, and daily goals has worked really well for us so far.  I'll let you know in a quarter how it's holding up.

Home Sweet Home

After founding and funding DataScaler, we needed to find our first home.  We wanted:

1. ~1000 square feet
2. 6 month lease
3. A large open area with 2 private offices for making phone calls, etc.
4. Running water and bathroom in the suite (this was harder to find than we thought it would be)
5. Mountain View, Sunnyvale, or Cupertino location

We started our search on Craigslist.  We found various properties, but none that fit all 5 criteria.  Since were looking for a small office and a short term lease, I figured the large commercial real estate brokers  would not be much help.  However, I was wrong.

We were about to compromise and go with an office suite where we'd have to go outside the building with a key to use the bathroom.  Luckily, Chase Lyman and Steve Henry at Cornish & Carey found us a great office.   We got a beautiful 1000sf office in Mountain View with a conference room, a kitchen, two bathrooms, lots of light, and a six-month lease.  Chase and Steve really came through for us. 
We'll move into a much larger office soon, so they are smart to do a good job for us on this initial office, even though they made little money on it.

To furnish the office, I gave Derek Taylor, our Director of Hardware Engineering, a budget and told him to go wild. ;-)  Using a combination of Craigslist, furniture liquidators, friends, and an estate sale, Derek was able to get us desks, chairs, bookcases, tables, couches, a refrigerator, whiteboards, a projector screen, and some other goodies for about $1800.  He did an outstanding job.  I snapped a few photos with my Treo:

We went with 30" monitors (more on this in a future post):

One of our investors even donated a nice conference table and chairs:

We love our office; it's nice to have a great place in which to change the world ;-)

The Magic of the Valley

Silicon Valley is unlike any other place on earth.  The weather is great, the hills are beautiful, but most of all, this is the center of the startup universe.  Why is that?  Paul Graham and others have written about their theories on the subject.  I don't pretend to know the "real" answer, but here are one man's observations.  Each of these will likely be posts of their own in upcoming weeks.

Silicon Valley has:

• Abundant venture capital
• A risk-taking culture
• Awesome startup legal expertise
• Experienced startup executives
• Tons of customers, large and small, within a 30 minute drive
• Several major research universities that attract brilliant people
• Great companies that attract brilliant people (which we then recruit away...)
• An amazing network of people involved in technology, entrepreneurship, and business

These elements are stronger here than anywhere else.  This is where dreams are made.

Boot 'em!

Don Jaworski, VP of Product Development at Brocade gave us some good advice yesterday.  The story starts with a band...

Don plays drums in a band, and has played in many, many bands dating back to high school.  When he and his partners formed this band, however, they made a list of verboten behaviors (negativism, flakiness, unprofessional behavior, etc.)  No matter how great a band member was, if he/she displayed any of these behaviors, they would "boot 'em." As a result, this band is awesome.  They have a defined culture and aren't afraid to enforce it swiftly.  Don encouraged us to immediately "boot" anyone who wasn't fitting in.

When choosing our founding team, I knew we could only have people who were brilliant, and more importantly, had a can-do attitude.  Negativity and pessimism have no place in a startup.  By definition, startups are doing the impossible.  In larger companies with established customers, negativism can be healthy and pragmatism can be useful.  However, when you are changing the world, comments like, "That can't be done," etc., aren't going to help.  I am extremely pleased with our team at DataScaler.  We're making the impossible happen.

Mission Statement

Welcome to my personal blog.  Here I will chronicle my adventures as a Silicon Valley startup CEO.  My intentions with this blog are twofold:

• Keep my friends, associates, and family up to date on the DataScaler adventure
• Share my experiences, both good and bad, that might be useful to other entrepreneurs

I hope you enjoy it.

Chad

Disclaimer:  This is my personal blog and I am personally and solely responsible for its content.  Nothing posted here is an official position of DataScaler, Inc.