business

Startup = Growth

A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of “exit.” The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.

If you want to start one it’s important to understand that. Startups are so hard that you can’t be pointed off to the side and hope to succeed. You have to know that growth is what you’re after. The good news is, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place. Which means you can use growth like a compass to make almost every decision you face.

Marissa Mayer Has a Secret Weapon

Fascinating!

For the past decade, she has been the doyen of a collection of some of the most talented young engineers and product managers in all of technology. These are the hand-selected prime talents of an accelerated leadership program at Google called Associate Product Manager (APM).

Mayer invented this program, led it and never gave it up. It was a key part of her tenure at Google. And now she may reap some benefits.

Don’t be fooled by the modest title, prefixed by that timid word “associate.” The most coveted entry post at Google is spelled APM. This is an incubation system for tech rock stars. “The APM program is one of our core values — I’d like to think of one of them as the eventual CEO of the company,” Google’s Executive Chair Eric Schmidt once told me.

Consider the first APM, a fresh Stanford grad named Brian Rakowski. He became a key leader of the team that built the Chrome browser and now is the VP of the Chrome operation. The second was Wesley Chan, who made Google Toolbar a success, then launched Google Analytics and Google Voice. He’s now picking winners for Google Ventures. Another early APM was Bret Taylor, who earned his bones by launching Google Maps. He left Google and co-founded Friendfeed, then become the Chief Technical Officer of Facebook.

Though not all APMs achieve such glory, they are generally recognized as elite. At any given time at Google, there are over 40 APMs active in the two-year program. And since Google has been hiring them since the early 2000s there are over 300 who have been through the program.

And the glue to the whole shebang was Marissa Mayer, who was the APM boss, mentor, den mother and role model.

Mayer thought up the program in early 2002. Google had been struggling to find PMs who could work within the peculiar company culture — team leaders who would not be bosses but work consensually with the wizards who produce code. Ideally, a Google product manger would understand the technical issues and sway the team to his or her viewpoint by strong data-backed arguments, and more than a bit of canny psychology. But experienced PMs from places like Microsoft, or those with MBAs, didn’t understand the Google way, and tried to force their views on teams.

So Mayer came up with an idea: Google would hire computer science majors who just graduated or had been in the workplace fewer than 18 months. The ideal applicants must have technical talent, but not be total programming geeks — APMs had to have social finesse and business sense. Essentially they would be in-house entrepreneurs. They would undergo a multi-interview hiring process that made the Harvard admissions regimen look like community college. The chosen ones were thrown into deep water, heading real, important product teams.

Economic impact of open source on small business

Here are a few of the findings we derived from Bluehost data (an EIG company) and follow-on research:

60% of web hosting usage is by SMBs, 71% if you include non-profits. Only 22% of hosted sites are for personal use.

WordPress is a far more important open source product than most people give it credit for. In the SMB hosting market, it is as widely used as MySQL and PHP, far ahead of Joomla and Drupal, the other leading content management systems.

Languages commonly used by high-tech startups, such as Ruby and Python, have little usage in the SMB hosting market, which is dominated by PHP for server-side scripting and JavaScript for client-side scripting.

Open source hosting alternatives have at least a 2:1 cost advantage relative to proprietary solutions.

Given that SMBs are widely thought to generate as much as 50% of GDP, the productivity gains to the economy as a whole that can be attributed to open source software are significant. The most important open source programs contributing to this expansion of opportunity for small businesses include Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, JavaScript, and WordPress. The developers of these open source projects and the communities that support them are truly unsung heroes of the economy!

Via Matt Mullenweg.

First Cyprus hackaton

The guys from The Cypriot Enterprise Link are organizing the first ever hackaton in Cyprus. In case you don’t know what a hackaton is:

hackathon, noun : An event where engineers, designers & ideators come together to intensively and collaboratively build awesome things over a short amount of time.

Neither the venue, nor the exact date and time are announced, but it’s going to take place some time in September. But if you are a programmer, designer, and/or entrepreneur, you should probably follow the news on this one and attend. Even if you don’t want to do anything with coding right now, an event like this will probably be brilliant for networking.

Karma-based pricing models for games

Slashdot links to an interview with Gabe Newell, of the Valve fame. I think this idea is pretty interesting:

The issue that we’re struggling with quite a bit is something I’ve kind of talked about before, which is: how do you properly value people’s contributions to a community? … An example is – and this is something as an industry we should be doing better – is charging customers based on how much fun they are to play with. … “So, in practice, a really likable person in our community should get DOTA 2 for free, because of past behavior in Team Fortress 2. Now, a real jerk that annoys everyone, they can still play, but a game is full price and they have to pay an extra hundred dollars if they want voice.’

Karma-based systems aren’t the easiest ones to figure out. But they have plenty of potential. Given enough will, effort, and tweaking, I think this can be done. How well it will actually work – remains to be seen.