I just realized this past week that there is currently no way to export your contact information out of Facebook. A few applications that built this functionality have been taken off-line by request for TOS violations.

Which got me thinking: What would happen if Facebook lost my information? Having gone to college in the Facebook age, would I even know who my college friends were, and how to get in touch with them? (Honestly, probably not)

I sent this question off to Facebook support. Jamie replied:
"Unfortunately, the feature you are requesting is not presently available. We will keep your suggestion in mind, however, as we continue to improve the site. Let me know if you have any further questions."

With all of this excitement over Platform -- even more data in -- how do we find it acceptable that we're unable to back-up any data, at all? In 20 years, will I ever be able to get access to all of the interactions and information that I put into Facebook?

And how do we find it acceptable that Facebook is actively working against us getting any information out?

Edit: Alex3917 on news.YC posts: "There used to be an option to export to CSV. Looks like they got rid of it. The fact that they are actually removing functionality says something."

4 Comments
 
New Header Image 07/19/2007
 

Matt Brezina made a good point -- the last header image had to go. This one was taken while driving cross country from State College to San Francisco.

 
 

Woke up to a great sunny view on the bay today. It's a nice surprise, because we've been getting more fog than we did Jan-Apr (although someone said we were supposed to get rain then?).

I've just started waking up without using an alarm clock -- sometimes, it's more effective to just sleep as much as you need to, as you get more done during the day than you would have if you gained an extra hour. Just read Time's interview with Mark Zuckerberg today too, where he mentions the same thing.

3 Comments
 
 

When we started raising our angel round, the first thing people told us was "Keep working!" We started to realize why very quickly: It's pretty difficult to code and raise money at the same time. I also started to try and figure out why doing both at the same time was hard -- it seems like it shouldn't be. Since most companies have to go through this at least once, and some companies go through the process multiple times, it's probably worth trying to optimize.

Different people have different ways to deal with the inefficiency. Y Combinator makes the process as short as possible: literally, less than 8 hours total time spent. Many companies choose one founder to raise money, and others to continue programming. Even so, it can be really exciting to meet with investors (especially if it's your first time). In our case, we each added to the team, and we thought bringing all three of us would work best.

From my experience, there were a couple reasons getting work done was difficult:

1. Meetings break up your day and schedule. Getting in the zone is tough when you have a meeting at 3pm in Palo Alto, an hour away. Add 1-2 hours debriefing after the meeting, and your day has been split up into smaller, less work-friendly chunks of time. Somehow, we always ended up with exactly one meeting per day, the entire week.

2. Raising money is exciting. Much more exciting than fixing that bug that doesn't event really matter because it's not that bad and only 5 people use that feature anyway. The meetings were pretty much all we wanted to talk about.

3. Raising money makes you look at the big picture. We were looking at our business from a mile up. From that perspective, you're talking about major initiatives and the entire direction of the company. You can't even see the day-to-day stuff from that high.

4. Last but not least: Selling and coding are opposites. I work my best when I get in a zone where I lose track of time and manage to fit every exact detail of what I'm working on in my head all at once. If I get too excited, I want to sit down and talk about how we're going to do x-and-y and it's going to be amazing, and it's much harder to concentrate.

There was one moment in particular that illustrates the last point, and when it hit me how opposite the two roles were. We had closed our initial round, and the definitives were signed, but we had left a smaller portion open for a potential investor that would be in a second closing. We had gotten all of the selling and raising money stuff out of our heads, and had been pulling 24+ hour shifts all that week, working on some time-sensitive new features. We woke up, drove to Stanford, and talked the entire way about our daily progress.

When we got there, things started off slowly: we weren't selling our product, we were answering questions with factual replies about it's current state -- mostly in a dry, factual manner. Little by little, we started to warm up and started getting back in the flow: Explaining how cool a certain feature was, talking about the potential markets, selling the vision on where we wanted to go, and getting ourselves really excited about what we had coming. The meeting went well (the investor later told us he was in), we got back in the car, and talked all the way home about all the cool things we were going to do. We decided to eat lunch out, and we probably went food shopping, got a haircut, took a bike ride... Anything that wasn't coding -- because that was boring, and we were really excited.

So how do you get work done while raising money? If we had to do it again, I would:

- Understand the process, and why I'm likely to get distracted.
- Try to organize most meetings in 1 or 2 days of the week.
- Do my best not to feel entitled to breaks, just because I have been talking to investors.
- Do my best not to feel entitled to breaks, just because everyone told me I wouldn't get work done.
- Set hard deadlines for feature releases that have to be met.
- Raise money as quickly as possible (you might get a higher valuation by shopping for 2 months, but what's the opportunity cost?)

If you've been through the experience, be sure to chime in and comment.

And on a side note, I just re-published my feed through Feedburner. If you've added this blog to your feed reader, please update to the new feed.

2 Comments
 
 

I've heard many entrepreneurs make a decision based on reasoning that goes something like this: "If I do that, I'll grow too fast, and I'll run out of money to pay for hosting."

It's an easy trap to fall into, because you're probably convinced everybody is dying to use your product (if you're not, why are you making it?). For me, it was when we were sitting on the closed side of our beta, and had no idea how we were going to scale. Our decision was whether to continue with an invitation only-beta, or open public. We also thought that an invitation-only beta could encourage some kind of exclusivity or competition to gain access to our app, which could fuel growth (we were wrong, more on that in a future post).

It ends up that you probably won't grow that fast, and if you do, you'll be damn lucky. There's basically two opposite scenarios: One, you'll grow really, really fast and you'll need more servers and have a hosting bill you can't pay (sounds bad, right?). Two, you're not growing that fast and you'll be perfectly fine with the infrastructure you have right now. Now just picture that you can make a decision that gives either scenario A or B, depending on what you choose -- or even just makes one or the other more likely.

In the first case, you are growing really quickly. That's great! Your idea has been (more or less) validated, because you're solving a need for a bunch of people. But your servers are on fire. There's good news, though: call any investor in the valley and tell them "I'm growing so fast and I need $15,000 to pay for servers and hosting" and you'll have convertible note paperwork signed by the end of the week. (If you don't know any investors and are growing so fast you're running out of money, email me). That 15k buys some new servers and gets you a couple months to go out and raise a round.
End result: You are now the proud (co-)owner of a business well on its way to success. Your website survived and you raised a couple million dollars two months later at a terrific valuation.

In the second case, your growth is slow. You probably run out of money because you're not making enough to pay rent (you don't have enough people using your site!) and you're having a hard time convincing investors to give you money.
End result: Your website isn't growing fast, and your life sucks.

I should qualify this scenario just a little bit: This generally applies to most startups, especially those where there is a decent chance of generating enough revenue to cover your costs at some point. (It's probably a bad sign if that's not the case)

It doesn't sound realistic but it tends to be true: money will kind of appear when you're on the right track. In the short-term, there's also probably a few friends or family members that will loan you a couple grand. The much larger risk: not growing as fast as you can, or at all.

In our case, we were growing by 5-10 users a day in an invitation-only beta. PG convinced us to open it up, and 3 days later, we were covered by TechCrunch and had over 4000 users sign up in a couple days.

To sum it up: since growth is key to your success, make decisions that favor growth over some short-term problem.

If you haven't read it already, there's a great story about how HotOrNot dealt with growing extremely rapidly in Founders At Work.

11 Comments
 
First Post! 07/07/2007
 

This is the first post of many on my new blog. As soon as I get things situated here, I'll start writing something interesting.

2 Comments