While I would attribute the mixing of timing and rhythm to the rather odd rhythm my brain is used to, this is not very good for communicating, especially with people who are not used to my speech patterns.

Today I was having yum cha with some relatives who spoke mandarin. I too, speak mandarin, but have often felt people cannot understand my mandarin. Anyway, the relative spoke mandarin to the waitress, who replied in the clearest mandarin I’ve ever heard. I told my partner, that her mandarin accent was as if it was BBC English for mandarin. Then it hit me.

My mind had automatically jumped to BBC English because the newscasters on China’s CCTV and Phoenix channels actually do enunciate, as do most older BBC newscasters. The thing about Received Pronounciation is that every word is well-formed and well-pronounced. A sentence is uttered word by word, carefully, each word with deliberation. As a result, clearer speech patterns form.

What we know as RP today only became popular in the 19th century, where clear diction became a mark of class. The original ‘general’ accents of English sounded more like those on Tangiers Island, Virginia. If one were to analyze the speech patterns, one’d say that the words sort-of blended into one another. Where RP is spoken with discrete pronunciation of words, the original ‘general’ British accent is a continuum of syllables.

Maybe to better communicate, it is better to slow down my mind, and speak slower, and with more deliberation. Word by word.

The bits of me that I don’t quite get about myself is my capacity to become super obsessed with the work. The pattern is the same all the time: I would get excited over the work, and obsessively work on it with little to no rest. My productivity would be at a high, and I would be very very efficient and effective at doing my work. Then comes the crash. The obsession suddenly vaporizes. The motivation drops, and I stop caring. My productivity drops while I slink back into the background.

The worst part is that I could see the drop coming miles away. I know the drop would come, and I would dread it because I know when the drop comes, I won’t be productive. I don’t like being unproductive.

Right now I’m in the middle of a drop. I don’t know how long this will last. Sometimes it lasts a few days, sometimes a few months. After a while, I would find a new obsession and this cycle repeats.

I used to use the period of drops as a down time to pick up new skills. I loved reading statistics, economics and mathematics. I picked up all sorts of skills – lockpicking (for the fun of it), learning enough about electronics to build my own sous vide unit, cipher breaking, drawing up new (and mostly useless) encryption schemes, inventing or reinventing new (and again, mostly useless) communications and identity protocols. Basically, doing trivial stuff like learning a new language without any pressure to do so would often be the key to me finding another new obsession to stick my head into. That was how I spent my drops, until this year.

I’ve had 2 drops so far this year (including this one), and now I realize it is a problem. Previously when learning new skills, I would be able to focus on the tasks at hand. This year though, something changed. I can no longer hold my attention long enough to finish one task. This blog post took 5 days to write, for example. I tried studying homomorphic encryption on the way back from the office today, and my mind could not stop roving.

This year’s drops so far felt different: I felt like I need to move but am somehow unable to move when I attempt to, as if some form of paralysis had taken over my motivation. More than once I thought I had found a new obsession. The moment I tried getting started on it, I find myself unable to start.

I have considered a few things. The first is depression. Having been through a bout in 2007 (and got help), I would say this feels rather different – this doesn’t feel like the dull laziness and apathy, but rather it feels a lot more like frustration that I’m unable to get my arse moving. I’m not by any means feeling sad, or guilty or hopeless, or any of the classical signs of depression. But I shan’t rule it out yet.

Another thing I considered was that I was not doing enough things for myself. Let’s face it, the last 3-4 weeks were pretty much the most miserable I’ve felt in 2013 so far. Not quite the losing-faith-in-humanity miserable (that was more like feeling angry), this 3-4 weeks were pretty much me being upset that I hadn’t done anything to further improve myself. The internal lines of argument would go “instead of spending all your obsessive energy on this ‘consulting gig’, you should be working on something for Pressyo instead”.

But really, I took on the consulting gig because I was interested in the topic at hand – it involved fancy statistics, simulations and game theory – what’s not to like? But really, at the end of it, it was pointless fun. There wasn’t even a reward at the end of the gig. Still did it anyway, had my fun, and walked away.

I thought then perhaps that I should have been doing something meaningful for myself. By then, the drop had hit, and I set off to learn a new language. Nope. Couldn’t focus. Went to read up the latest microeconomics papers. Nope, couldn’t focus. Tried to learn more about homomorphic encryption – couldn’t focus. I had instead found myself very good at whiling my time away.

I am tired of this. I just want a constant productivity. I used to think that the downtimes were good for me, enabling me to learn a wide variety of skills. But if the new down times are just going to be of me being unable to focus, and struggling to get my focus back, I would rather not. I just want it to stop.

Artists and Scientists; Hackers and Painters

When I was a child, my father used to tell me that there were two kinds of people in the world: artists and scientists. Artists, he said, are temperamental and unruly. They do work when they like, slack off when they like. Scientists on the other hand, are methodical, disciplined people. They do work whether or not they like it or not. Being of Asian extraction ^[1], the implication was of course that the artist was to be a counter example of what I should become — the scientist. I should be like a scientist: disciplined, and methodical. I was brought up thus, although as anyone in my family can attest to, I’m the least disciplined of all.

About six years ago now, I came across Paul Graham’s book, Hackers & Painters. In it, the titular essay, Hackers and Painters made a clear connection between hackers and painters. PG argues that hackers are like painters in that they’re both makers of things. And like painters, hackers are often visited by muses, causing work to come in cycles.

In a follow up essay in the book, titled The Good Bad Attitude, PG went further in defining what a hacker does. A hacker, according to PG, are generally disobedient. And this is a good thing, because innovation and disruption can only come from such good bad attitudes.

“Temperamental” (work comes in cycles) and “unruly” (general disobedience) pretty much summed up what my father had called “artist-types”. The comparisons are pretty clear. Except, this was the first time I had read anything that that put these “artist-type” attitudes into good light. I decided that I did indeed fit into that mold called the “hacker”.

The Continuum

In the six years since, I have done a bunch of stuff, and learned a lot more. If you had asked me six years ago, immediately after I had read Hackers and Painters, I’d have told you that people are hackers, or they aren’t. I now think I was mistaken.

Instead, imagine there exists a continuum of personalities dependent upon the level of discipline, or rigour required of one’s work. Over to the left, you would have artists, whose works are relatively free from rigour ^[2], and over to the right, you would have scientists/scholars, whose work is extremely rigourous. In the middle somewhere, you would have hackers and engineers. Conversely, it can also be seen as the art-science continuum of works. If I were to imagine it in picture form, it’d look something like this:

There are no positive or negative connotations associated with rigour, or lack thereof ^[3]. I use rigour here in the sense of academic rigour. In academia, particularly the sciences, one’s work must be able to stand up to the scrutiny of one’s peers, and there are objective ways of doing so. It isn’t so with being an artist. Using pg’s painters as an example, there are so many subjective ways of determining what is a good painting and what isn’t. I do not get Jackson Pollock, but there are many who do.

Objectivity and subjectivity of the work, in my opinion causes rigour. The more objective the work is, the more rigour is required. Rigour is often associated with words like ‘standards’, ‘rigid’ and ‘bureaucracy’. Indeed, ‘rigour’ shares the same root word as ‘rigid’: ‘rigere’, which means “to be stiff”,

At any one point, one’s personality may fall anywhere into one or more bits in the continuum. There may be days when you feel inspired to create something new. There may be days when you feel like sitting down and researching things that had been bugging you. There are days when you feel somewhere in between, and you just get stuff done.

The Engineer

While much has been said about what hackers are, not much has been said about what engineers are. In part, it’s because engineering is a much older endevour than hacking, it’s been more or less formalized, most usually as a profession, not a psychographic. In this essay, I shall try to describe the psychographics of the engineer.

The Engineer is the Hacker’s evil twin ^[4]. They share some features, and differ greatly in others. Where the hacker despise rules, the engineer loves them (or at least loves creating them). To the engineer, a sense of orderliness is good, while the hacker is perfectly okay with chaos. The engineer starts out with established processes and things, and works towards creating original work, much like scientists as described in Hackers and Painters. Hackers work on things that interest them, while engineers are fine with rote. Engineers are thorough, occasionally overly so.

The engineer does share points of commonality with hackers though — both are makers and both get stuff done. While scientists can totally immerse themselves into research and often go into the deep end ^[5], and artists lose themselves in their work of art; hackers and engineers are people who get things done. Yes, both psychographics are prone to yak shaving, but in general, both psychographics try to solve the immediate problem at end.

On the topic of yak shaving, I believe that there is a difference between what artists and scientists do, and what hackers and engineers do. Where artists and scientists get lost in the depths of their work, hackers and engineers who are prone to yak shaving get lost in the breadth of their work. This is a marked difference between painters and hackers, scientists and engineers.

Like the hacker, the engineer is a stickler for details. The engineer’s attention for detail is not driven by a relentless pursuit of beauty, rather, she pursues correctness. She relies on the her knowledge and known conventions to make things. While in some views this would make the engineer a mere implementor without a shred of creativity, I would argue that this is not the case.

Both engineer and hacker tinker and experiment too. They just do it in different ways. The hacker is a freeform tinkerer, while the engineer is a structured tinkerer. Engineers tend to do it in a more methodical manner than the hacker, which is often thought off as more risk-averse than the risk-taking hackers.

Engineers and hackers are essentially alike, and they only differ in methodologies and motivation. My theory is that the level of knowledge determines whether a maker falls into being a hacker or being an engineer,

On Rigour

Scientists were the original hackers. Science as a profession in the earlier centuries, and indeed to the turn of the 20th century were very much undisciplined. Self-experimentation were common — so much that popular fiction has banked upon this as a trope: surely one has heard of the mad scientist?

There is a fascinating book I read once — Guinea Pig Scientists. It is a highly accessible book, and quite well sourced too ^[6]. In it the authors recalled the tales of famous scientists who were keen self-experimenters. What remained in my memory the most was JBS Haldane, partly because he was actually a well known scientist whose works I have read before. Haldane was famous for self-experimentation. He self experimented to the point where he even went deaf trying to decompress, and suffered some damages to his backbone.

Had Haldane been a computer programmer, he would be writing programs by trial and error, debugging all the way. In short, a hacker.

Rigour came much later in the field of science. As more and more information begun to be shared between more scientists in their respective fields, it became clear that a framework of sorts needed. Afterall, if two chemists cannot agree on the same objectives of their experiment, or what constitutes progress in their work, then what is the point? Soon it became solidified into proper rigour. You must do hypothesis testing to do science, for example.

I believe the same is happening with the computer science industry. As the industry matures, it will become more rigourous. Dave Gelperin wrote an article called The Growth of Software Testing [PDF] in 1988. In it he and his co-author pointed out that software development had went from debugging-oriented development to a demonstration-oriented development (in which a software must be shown to satisfy specification), to a destruction-oriented development (in which the goal was to find errors), to a evaluation-oriented development (in which the goal was to be able to measure quality in software), to a prevention-oriented development (in which the goal was to detect and prevent faults).

Today we find an abundance of rigour on testing software — from BDD to TDD. I would wager that this will only solidify until such a point where there is one common set of rigour, much like hypothesis testing is the backbone of rigour in the sciences.

The Hacker

Where does this leave the hacker? The hacker hasn’t gone anywhere. Rather than treating hackers and engineers as static personality archetypes, I imagine being a hacker or an engineer as a hat that people wear — makers especially so. The difference between the hacker and the engineer is what kind of maker a person is, at the given time and place and situation.

In Hackers and Painters, pg railed against the institutions that makes computer science a science. Hackers just want to hack, not write papers, he wrote. By and large, I think that would remain the same. It is also important, in my opinion to separate the field/profession from the psychographic. Being a programmer does not preclude one from wearing a hacker hat. Neither does being a Nobel Prize winning physicist ^[7].

The hacker’s unruliness as previously pointed out, is disruptive. Refusing to abide by conventions often lead to significant breakthrough.

Linus Torvalds bucked all conventional processes of building software. Instead of carefully crafting software in isolation, he opened it up to the world. As recounted by Eric S Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, this was shocking.

Even so, Linus is not a sloppy coder. He is in fact quite the opposite. The source code for the Linux kernel is an amazingly beautiful piece of work. There is clearly discipline involved when it was created. One could almost say that he was wearing an engineer’s hat while hacking away at Linux.

Roles

Six years ago, I would have said that being a hacker or an engineer were inherent qualities of a person, particularly of makers. I now think that we occupy different psychographics for different fields and for different functions.

Startups do not operate in single fields. For example, a search engine startup operates both in a business field (i.e. running the business and doing business admin stuff) and the software development field (i.e. creating the search engine software).

While startups often operate in more than two fields, I will use these two as an example. Imagine that there are two co-founders in a startup. Both are programmers and are maker-types (which is to say they like creating things), but A has more experience and knowledge than B. B however, has had more experience in running a business. When approaching the business side of things, I find B to generally be the engineer, while A would prefer to hack around and play around. B would know more about the pitfalls from what A would suggest, creating a structure/framework from which the startup ventures. For example, B would know that certain taxes would have to be filed in certain ways, but A doesn’t and would come up with a beautiful but illegal hack.

However, when it comes to the software development side of things, their roles would switch. For example, A would have very good reasons to insist a DVCS like git or mercurial is used, whereas the less experienced programmer might see this as a hindrance to his hacking.

When it comes to a solo bootstrapper, it gets interesting. One could be hacking a piece of code out with the knowledge and self-discipline of an engineer. Or one could be engineering a solution, but exploring the solution space like a hacker does. An example for the former case would be Linus Torvalds hacking the Linux kernel — he was hacking around a fork of MINIX when Linux was created. He did so with a lot of engineering precision ^[8]. An example of the latter would be Richard Feynman’s discovery of quantum electrodynamics ^[9].

Switching Roles

The hacker and the engineer, when put in a room and tasked to create something together, will often be at loggerheads. Despite this, I would highly recommend having a good mix of engineer-types and hacker-types in a startup.

Since makers occupy different psychographics (hacker or engineer) depending on situation, this can be put to good use. In fields where there can exist a hacker and an engineer, the hacker serves as fresh eyes to old problems, finding loopholes and interesting fixes, while the engineer serves as a grounding element for the hacker. The tax example from above is a good example of this.

The fact that roles switch depending on context is also a good fact to exploit. pg talked about qualities of empathy required in a hacker. Switching roles is good empathy training. While most of the time the role switch will occur when the startup is in a different operating field (for example, A is a hacker in the field of running a business and an engineer in the field of software development; vice versa for B), it still is good practice if startup co-founders can recognize what roles they’re playing and recognize the need to empathize.

The engineer would feel frustrated that his years of experience goes unheeded by the hacker, and the hacker would feel that her ability to hack is impeded by additional layers of bureaucracy set up by the engineer. When this happen, this would actually be a very good time to empathize with one another — look at the world in the other person’s shoes, maybe walk a mile or two, so to speak.

At this point, I would like to point out that I do not believe everyone to have hacker qualities. There will be always some people who cannot stomach the slightest amount of risk taking or disobedience. There are some people who insist on following rules to a T. These people in my opinion, while they may have a place in a larger ecosystem, do not fit well in a startup. You want people who can switch between being a hacker and an engineer.

On the other hand, if a startup deals with highly mission-critical software (for example things that can cause loss of lives), there should be more engineer-type thinking than hacker-type thinking. I think Mike Taylor’s NASA Supremo analogy is very apt in this scenario. Of course this does not stop a few enterprising hackers to do something crazy with a dynamic language like Python, like controlling 30 tonne heavy equipment with Python.

Conclusion

Hacking is not new. The term is, but hackers have existed for millenia and will exist for millenia to come. From Gallileo to Feynman to Torvalds, there will always be troublemakers who are willing to look outside the box, be disobedient and innovate.

For software, I concur with Paul Graham. We’re living in the glory days of software hacking. But as the industry matures, engineers are starting to rise as a class too. They may not be as glamorous as hacking, but they will be the foundation of software.

Above all, the most important thing is to keep moving. Keep making things. It doesn’t matter if you’re a hacker-type maker or an engineer-type maker. Makers move the world.

1. ^[1] Hey, I’m Asian. I’m allowed to make stereotypical comparison of my people ↩
2. ^[2] see also: post-modernism, and why I keep ragging on it ↩
3. ^[3] Of course, there will be people like Luce Irigaray who could try to claim that I’m making a sexed statement by favouring scientists to the right and oppressing the arts because I labelled it on the left ↩
4. ^[4] edited. The original said “Mirror Universe counterpart” instead of evil twin, but I wasn’t sure if anyone would get the reference. I’m not too sure about the connotations of evil twin either ↩
5. ^[5] How often have you lost yourself in Wikipedia or TVTropes? ↩
6. ^[6] If you’re wondering why I read books for children, I must let you know I have a whole collection of Manga Guides to X ↩
7. ^[7] Again, were Richard Feynman be a software developer, we’d probably consider him to be the god of hackers ↩
8. ^[8] Yes, I am aware that Linus is not solely responsible for the kernel, but he set a very good engineering precedent when he open sourced it and invited users to beta test his kernel ↩
9. ^[9] A well known story by now: He was hacking around with the wobble of frisbees while working on quantum elecctrodynamics. This led to his Nobel Prize. ↩

So far I think I have been able to grasp the fundamentals. I’m still not too interested in the details, simply because there are so many variations, and not one variation actually fits our workflow in my opinion. I’m still struggling very hard to see how to apply certain agile-related activity to running a business ^[1]. But as a fun challenge I thought it would be fun to apply agile on all aspects of my life.

Last night, while lazing in bed, I suggested to my partner we reboot our relationship. Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with our relationship. We are moving apartments, and thought it’d be cool to start a whole new set of routines in the new place. And since routines affect the relationship, rebooting it would be good. We’d get to know one another all over again.

We spent the night discussing. One of the things we talked about was scrum. We decided that for kicks, we’d have a weekly scrum-like discussion about where our relationship was going and our goals for the week. No discussions on velocity though. This should be interesting.

1. ^[1] To which my cofounder credits it as being ‘baggage’ from the past ↩

Imagine a child on a swing and is being pushed by her parent. If the parent pushes the swing at random, the swing would not go very high. However, if the parent were being an irresponsible one and pushes the swing following the rhythm of the swing, the swing would go very high (and in one case I witnessed, went 360 degrees around the top bar, leaving a child that was scared shitless)

Running a startup is like trying to force a system to go into resonance. You first have to find the frequencies that click together. It’s an often repeated saying that people who think alike are people who are of the same wavelength.

That’s usually the easy part, even though much fuss had been made out of it. The difficult part is getting everyone in phase.

Having people being on the same frequency as you is one thing. Having everyone push in the same direction in the same time is another. Resonance is hard.

I count myself very lucky to have found cofounders who are of the same wavelength and are pretty much in every way much more capable than I am. We share the same or similar goals, but the one thing that we haven’t really gotten together is getting in phase with one another.

While we think very much alike, there are many times I feel that some of us are ahead and some of us are behind. Of course, what makes things worse is the positions are not always the same. Sometimes I would be ahead in terms of considering some things, and some times I would be behind.

This leads to high amounts of inefficiencies, especially with communications. An idea has to be communicated multiple times over multiple spans to cater for the different phases of thought processes. This is the main thing that is tiring me right now. I should probably get some mentoring. Then again, I’m so shit with communication I might have burned all my bridges.

We are indeed working hard to find a way to be more in phase with one another. Anyone have any suggestions?

I too have a problem. In real life (as well as online I suppose) I’ve built a reputation of being a stickler for accurate details — often to the point of pedantry I am told — there were quite a few things that he had mentioned that wasn’t quite right (as a lot of the things discussed had already been updated in the latest journals). A personality flaw of mine no doubt, was to point out that there was already updated knowledge about it.

I was later informed that the couple hadn’t been very happy with my visit. I was also told by my fiancee that I would constantly use the phrase “you mean you didn’t know?”. This phrase had become so ingrained to my speech that I hadn’t realized I had said it many times.

The problem with “you mean you didn’t know?” is that it sounds really condescending, even though I was genuinely surprised that someone didn’t know. Of course it could be meant to say that the other party is ill-informed, but it often was an expression of surprise, not one of condescension. Or so I thought anyway.

Explaining Stuff

Communication has never been my strong suite. I will be first to admit that I have had on many occasions, missed obvious sarcasm, and many times, ignored basic facial or contextual cues. Don’t get me wrong though — I am capable of getting sarcasm, and more than capable of reading body language and understanding the situational context. I just don’t do it often. Perhaps the best way for me to explain it is like a circuit that has to be explicitly turned on – it’s just not always switched on. It’s also very tiring to have the circuit switched on constantly.

Speaking of explaining stuff, I still have yet gotten the hang of explaining things. I explain things very well, but my explanations are usually very long-winded or very curt and contextless. There never seems to be a middle ground to it.

When I explain things in a long winded fashion, I usually frame my explanations in a logical argument: start with the premises or axioms, then work towards the induction or deduction of the conclusion. I envision a story structure, having a beginning, climax and end.The beginning is the premise or axioms that lead to the conclusion, the climax is the routes to the conclusion — induction or deduction, and the conclusion is the conclusion itself. This structure works very well with academic journals. Not so much human communication. People tend to fall asleep when explaining premises.

And yet, if you ask my Pressyo cofounders, they will undoubtedly tell you that I am too short, and too curt. I am actually short and curt with my Pressyo cofounders. I use a lot of jargon in explaining things to them, leading most of them to often be clueless about what I am talking about. This habit may actually stem from when I was very young – I hated showing the workings to my mathematics problems: they were more often than not self-evident.

A Way With Words

What prompted this post and indeed a lot of introspection was an incident that happened last week. Earlier last week, we were discussing charisma of great leaders, and I had made a case that Hitler was a charming motherfucker. He knew how to rouse the country out of depression with his speech (obviously, thuggery was involved as well). This trait, I had argued is a mark of a charismatic leader. Almost all charismatic leaders had them. Consider the following:

A great time has just begun. America is awake. We have prepared the nation for a new age and we still have to empower the American people. I know, my fellow Americans, that times are difficult. You desired change that never came. Again and again an appeal had to be made so we could continue our struggle. What we have dreamed for years has become a reality. The most precious possession you have in this world is your own people. We will struggle and fight, and never tire, never lose courage, and never lose our faith. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America

Can you picture in your head that this could be stated by Barack Obama? Consider this then:

A great time has just begun. Germany is awake. We have amassed power for Germany, but we still have to empower the German people. I know, my brothers and sisters, that times are difficult. You desired change that never came. Again and again an appeal had to be made so we could continue our struggle. What we have dreamed for years has become a reality. The most precious possession you have in this world is your own people. We will struggle and fight, and never tire, never lose courage, and never lose our faith.

The paragraph on top was made out of snippets of Hitler’s actual speeches (the second quoted paragraph). I had merely transcribed some bits and merely Americanized the contexts.

I had used this to raise a point in the chatroom — that charismatic leaders have a way with words. Words that can rouse people. Then one of my cofounders put a bullet in this idea. He said “it’s the way it’s communicated that matters”.

I realised then, it was true. If you give the first speech above to Joe Sixpack, he’d probably just flub it out. But at the hands of a master communicator, you would have a hypnotic speech. In fact, after that, I did research a little bit more. Indeed, according to the OSS (Office of Strategic Services — the precursor to the CIA) Hitler was pretty damn good at giving speeches, and had concluded, “It was not, therefore, so much what he said that appealed to his audiences as how he said it.“.

Please do not think that I am writing this in praise of Hitler. I am not. This was a man who has lead a nation to do supremely evil things. To be able to do that, the level of persuasion must have been incredible.

Communications Breakdown

Late last week, after discussing Hitler’s speeches, one of my cofounders told me that he would automatically mentally negate anything I suggest due to the way I put it. This is clearly not optimal in terms of running a startup. Upon further inquiry I discovered that it was my method of suggesting things that put him off. I was accordingly, ‘condescending and patronizing’.

He had also mentioned that the way I talk and explain things feels like I am attempting to whittle everything down to numbers on a spreadsheet, ignoring the human side of things while doing that.

It was in a moment of very frank and raw conversation. It was then I discovered yet another reason why my startup has yet to launch itself into super success — there is a barrier to communication in my startup. A communications breakdown has happened around the things I say, and the way I say it.

Introspection

I spent the weekend away from the computer owing to a minor eye injury. That gave me a lot of free time to introspect upon the way I communicate. Which is what brought about memories of “You mean you didn’t know?”

When I was a much younger person, I was an arrogant little shit. By that I mean mentally, I felt superior to most people. And that most people are beneath me. I like to think that over the past 10 years or so, I have changed for the better. I now no longer feel that people are beneath me. But the speech patterns has been held over from the years gone past.

“You mean you didn’t know?” is a particular phrase that sticks out to me, because it was the first time my fiancee had pointed out this specific flaw to me. There were of course, many to come. “You mean you didn’t know?” does indeed sound very condescending. I have probably developed the habit of saying this from my arrogant little shit years, and never changed my speech patterns.

One may think that I am still an arrogant little shit. Perhaps that is true. But I have not felt superior to people in a long time. In fact I have increasingly felt the obverse. But still this speech pattern holds.

I asked my fiancee if I still say “you mean you didn’t know?” recently. And the answer was a resounding yes. In fact she revealed to me that I still communicate with a lot of derisive-sounding comments.

Asking around, it would appear that my friends do actually think that my penchant for explaining things in a long winded fashion is a form of patronization. However, I do not think it’s patronizing for me to explain the premises or axioms to an argument. I do it mainly for completeness sake — making so-called airtight arguments, not to deride someone else. I guess I feel vulnerable if I don’t make a complete explanation.

Changes Ahoy!

Upon much introspection, I agree that the heavy use of (mostly academic) jargon as shorthand for explaining things to people is often very intimidating. It leads people to think I may be making things up. So that’s one thing to change there. This one is pretty easy.

The much harder thing to change is that arrogant/condescending/patronizing speech patterns that I use. They say your thoughts translates to actions. I would humbly disagree in this case. This, in my opinion, is a case of breaking bad habits. I have worked out a deal with my cofounders to actively remind me when I go into the condescending explanation mode, or arrogant/dismissive statement mode. Upon which I will rephrase my statements to less condescending ones.

Another thing that needs to be changed is the story structure style of explaining things. One obvious thing to do is to ditch some of the explaination of the premises/axioms to the explanation/argument. However, I am so used to structuring my explanations thusly, I must admit I am having difficulties in culling premises to explain. Heck, this 2000 word blog post is pretty much an exercise in what I just mentioned.

I had mentioned earlier in the article that observing things like facial cues and sarcasm is like an explicit routine that I have to run, and that it tires me. I’m not sure what to do about that, but I have a feeling that there is a solution around this, and it might tire me out a lot more.

This should be an interesting one to watch.

Only that it wasn’t. For two weeks now, I have been actively writing code for Fork the Cookbook again. Today I wrote the third shippable feature since a month ago. And yet you will not see those features publicly yet. I have it committed on the dev branches, but they’re not in the master branch yet. In short, they’re not shipped.

I have developed an aversion to shipping code. Not due to laziness or ineffectiveness. It’s something else. I feel like there is some sort of psychological factor that prevents me from typing git merge dev-x. Not quite sure what it is. I’ll need to meditate on it tonight.

Or maybe I am making excuses for myself. Or if I listen to my bitchy critics, I’m just writing a “flawed system”. Who knows, eh?

Here’s what I like about some of the things tracked:

Percentage of the U.S. population that is foreign-born : 13

Percentage that was foreign-born in 1913 : 15

Change in the number of undocumented immigrants living in the United States since 2007 : –900,000

Number of Alabama jury-sentencing recommendations in capital cases that have been overturned by judges since 1976 : 110

Number of those cases in which judges imposed the death penalty after juries recommended life in prison : 100

I think they’re all rather reasonable metrics (aside from the specific state ones) to gauge civil liberties. Don’t you? If only these things were uniformly tracked. Oh well.

It is a heart wrenching tale of a man so passionate about his ideas and gave up so much. Yet despite all his convictions and effort, he pretty much failed.

I posted this video not to point and laugh at Marc, nor do I intend to elicit pity for him. Rather, I’m sharing this video because it serves as a cautionary tale for the intrepid entrepreneur.

Passion

Right now, Pressyo, my startup is going through a heavy rethink. The word passion is thrown out a lot in our discussions. Passion in doing X, passion in language Y. In my personal opinion, passion is really overrated. I work in advertising, and I know exactly how easy it is to stir up passion in people. Grassroots activism is a prime example of passion, but if one has the resources, one can simply “manufacture” said passion. To some the resources are simply personal charm and charisma they have on a person (Hitler ^[1]). To others, it’s money (The Koch Brothers).

Waste Reduction

Marc Griffin had spent 26 years of his life inventing BulletBall. He had dreams of BulletBall being an Olympic level sport. When the judges voted No to his idea, he was visibly crushed. One can imagine – 26 years down the drain.

Since this is a cautionary tale, let’s take a look at where Marc had went wrong. 26 years is a long time. That’s roughly my age^[2]. I don’t know the specifics, but from the video, it was made out that Marc had spent 26 years perfecting the game.

26 years spent perfecting a game is a lot of wasted effort. There I said it. One crucial bit of the lean philosophy is waste reduction. This is one bit many people I have talked to seem to be confused about. Often people think MVPs are shitty products, and their professional self would not allow them to release such products. Only it’s not. Perhaps MVP is not a good phrase to use – a better phrasing would be “what is the product that minimizes wasted effort/money/time one can create to test an assumption”

Of course, the next question (or indeed, the question preceeding that question is): “How do I test the assumption about the product I have in mind?”. Armed with these two questions, I have no doubt that Marc would not have needed to spend 26 years of effort. I suspect like many inventors, the efforts come in bursts, not continuously sustained over 26 years, but either way it’s still a very long time to waste. If indeed efforts on the invention came in bursts, then a “natural” schedule of sorts would be available for testing of assumptions.

The Pivot

Marc’s story did have a somewhat happier ending. BulletBall found its niche in therapeutic sports. This is a clear pivot from the Olympics-level goal that Marc originally had. I was rather happy for the man that he had found his niche despite not being his dream.

In many ways, American Inventor was a test of assumption for Marc. It validated to him that investors would not be interested in even considering his product (the prize money for American Inventor is $1M if I am not mistaken). He did not. He persevered with his idea of a product, and pivoted into a niche. Whether by luck or by sheer brute force of will, he found it.

Of course, Marc Griffin found a niche because a niche exists. And a niche exists large enough for his company to exist. There will be times that niches do not exist. And try as hard as the entrepreneur would like to, he/she would be unable to create said niche. Even Apple, famous for manufacturing demand, could not create enough demand for Macintosh TV in 1993.

Lastly

So the question is this: Do you want to spend years, and countless hours of effort working on your product and end up discovering that it is not wanted? Or do you want to test early and often?

1. ^[1] Based on a real life chat in Pressyo – we were arguing about passion, and then I invoked Godwin’s Law ↩
2. ^[2] In human years. In Time Lord years that roughly translates to 450 years and about 3 regenerations. Oh also, a Gallifreyen year is simultaneously longer and shorter than an Earth year ↩

Say you want to start a startup. Your investor asks you: what’s your business model? And you answer: oh it’s simple – advertising. You see your investor’s face go from to . You wonder what’s up.

Your Users Are Products

Here’s what’s up. When you start a project with advertising as its main business model, you need to be very aware that the product is your audience, not your product or service you are building. Your product can be a content based site (blogs for example), a community based site (forums, social networking sites) or a service (a music streaming service for example), but it must be absolutely clear, and there must be absolutely no doubt about it: if you use advertising as your business model, your product is your audience.

Many startup founders I meet often tell me that they want advertising to be their main business models. Very quickly I would be able to determine if that could work. I have asked founders if they are willing to treat their users as products to be sold, and a number would falter. If you’re the kind who prides yourself in the feature of the service/startup you’re creating and you’re unable to reconcile the fact that your users are the product, don’t use advertising as your monetization plan. You’d have a bad time.

What Next

OK, so you’re ready to accept that your users are the product. So how would you get started? There are mainly three sides to this business model (and the god help you if you’re in one of those situations where there are two sides to the market): the Publisher, the Advertiser, and the product.

You’re the publisher. Your job is to build a product that meets the Advertiser’s demands. You won’t necessarily have one advertiser or advertiser network. In fact it is more than likely you will be rumning a few at the same time to see which advertiser network can pay you the best rates.

Some Math Required

Speaking of rates, here are some terminologies you need to quickly get up to speed:

• CPM: cost per 1000 impressions. This is the most common method of selling ad space. This means you’re selling a fixed space to an advertiser for a fixed rate of X dollars per 1000 ad impressions.
• CPC: cost per click. This means you’re selling a space to the advertiser, but the advertiser will only pay you if your user clicks on the ad.
• CPA: cost per action/acquisition. This means you’re selling a space to the advertiser, but will only get paid if your user clicks on the ad, and completes an action on the advertiser’s site.
• eCPM: effective CPM. Because ad space can be sold in a variety of methods (three of the most common are listed above) at any given time, the eCPM is a good common-ground metric to talk to advertisers about

To keep things simple, we’ll assume that ads are sold purely on a CPM basis – say you have managed to get a decent deal $0.50 CPM for your site at the beginning. Your revenue is simply the amount of impressions multiplied by the CPM. If you put one ad on a page, it’s safe to assume that it’s one impression that gets loaded when the page loads. If you put three ads on one page, that’s three impressions per page load.

Say you run a simple service – say you run 1 Dyno and 1 Worker on Heroku per month for your service ^[2]. That costs $35ish. To break even you would require 70,000 ad impressions per month. Which is not too difficult, if you have three ads per page – you only need about 25,000 page views per month, which is not difficult to achieve with organic traffic. Given the correct social media and SEO strategies, 25,000 page views per month would take about 3-4 months to scale up. Not a problem.

The Underlying Assumption Is Wrong

However, the underlying assumption is wrong, in two parts: 1) $0.50 CPM is a big ask, 2) you’d have to be really lucky, really well connected, or really charming to have a straight CPM deal when you start off.

You probably will not get a guaranteed CPM deal when you start off with an advertiser network. Instead, you would be given a revenue share. In a revenue share, the advertiser network buys a sells your ad space to a bunch of advertisers via different means – CPM, CPC, CPA etc. The advertiser network gets paid by their advertisers they aggregate, and then shares their revenue with you. This is why it is important to understand the eCPM metric.

Getting a $0.50 eCPM is generally a big ask if you’re just starting out – your product (i.e. your users) would have to be a very unique bunch, and would typically have higher engagement rates than normal – this is due to the rise of automated media buying and better targeting options – I will talk about it in a future blog post.

Naturally, there will be ad networks who will tout that they offer high CPM deals. While I do not doubt they have such deals, I doubt that a startup would be able to secure such deals.

Challenges

One of the main challenges is getting to the minimum required page views. Take one of the larger ^[3] ad networks: Tribal Fusion. Tribal Fusion has a requirement that a publisher’s site has a minimum of 500,000 unique page views a month in order to join their network.

To grow your site organically to that amount of unique page views will most certainly take a lot of time and effort. You may be tempted to buy ads to increase the traffic to your page, and then your business model will have pivoted to the advertising arbitrage model, which I will discuss in future blog posts.

Another challenge that you will most certainly face is audience diffusion. Ads by design are meant to distract the user’s attention to it, and preferably click on and leave the current page. If the user does not spend enough time on your site, then how are they expected to return? Your site becomes a spot for transient visitors. Again, there may be temptation to pivot the business model to an ad/attention arbitrage model.

In The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t really want to sell ads in the beginning because Facebook was ‘cool’^[4]. That is the other factor to take into account. Advertising in your startup will bring in revenue, but will make your site lose it’s cool factor (if there were one). Balancing the cool factor and advertising will be a difficult task.

In fact the whole act of managing advertising is hard. Depending on size and breadth of your advertising space and ad networks you engage in, you may need to run your own ad server. You may not need to either.

Desperation

Given the above conditions, it is not surprising you find many websites that plaster ads all over the place. It is indeed tempting to think: more ads = more imps = more revenue. While this is still roughly true, by and large, the online advertising industry is moving more and more towards intelligent audience buying.

Real time bidding engines are getting more and more intelligent, and would be able to guess with quite good results, how valuable a user is to the advertiser. This allows the advertiser to only pay high amounts for audiences that matter to their ROI, while paying low amounts to audiences that don’t.

What happens is then this: a segregation of high paying advertisers and low paying advertisers form. When I say high paying advertisers I mean advertisers who would pay high for the right audience. They will pay significantly higher than the low paying advertisers, who would “spray and pray” their ads in hopes of reaching the right audience.

Here, the path of the startup founder diverges: does she want to go the high paying, quality audience route (requiring fewer ad placements), or does she want to go the low paying, low quality audience route, necessitating plastering of ads?

In my personal opinion, the latter is not sustainable business (in fact the only way to sustain it, at least from a mathematical/financial point of view is to pivot into the aforementioned attention/ad arbitrage model).

You Run A Startup, Right?

Let’s say you want advertisers to pay you high rates. This means you have to provide a quality product to begin with. What is a high quality audience? To put it in simplest terms – high quality audiences means that the audience is valuable to the advertiser – either because they are highly interested in the product the advertiser is advertising, or they engage in the ad.

Either way, the way to build a high quality audience is… through your startup product. That indeed, is the function and purpose of your startup product or service: to build better quality audience. I would even go so far to say this: build just enough of your product/service so that you maximize your ad revenue. If you could add a feature that increases ad revenue, do it. Else, you should not even bother building it.

The Optimization Trap

Balancing audience building vs optimizing for ads is a tough thing to do. Many startups fall into the optimization trap. Sooner or later, they will discover that audiences are the product, and they slowly abandon the actual product/service they’re building in order to earn more money from advertising. You see it all the time: shrewd ad placements meant to generate clicks, disguised ads, etc.

More time will be spent optimizing the ad revenue, and less time is spent on audience building (i.e. you know, actually working on the product/service they’re offering). It’s a vicious cycle, really. As you optimize for ads, your audience quality drops, and your payout rates drop. So in response you optimize for ads even more. The cycle continues. Eventually you will experiment with buying traffic in hopes of them clicking on your ads. Welcome to the attention arbitrage model.

Bullshit Metrics

There is a lot said in recent times about bullshit metrics. If you run a startup with a product or service with advertising as your business model, what is conventionally known as a bullshit metric, i.e. your pageviews and your unique visitor becomes a proper metric to be aware of.

Instead, I would argue, if you run a business with advertising as your monetization plan, other metrics (like user actions) become the bullshit metrics, until such a time when you can correlate those actions with revenue. Remember, your job is to build the product and sell them to the advertiser, and your product is the audience.

Lastly

Lastly, I would like to add that advertising is a long game. If you use advertising as a business model and expect instant revenue growth, I would advise you to change your business model and go for a subscription or sale type model.

Advertising as a business model can be profitable if properly managed. Startups that use advertising as a model play the long game – building out audiences, whether consciously or subconsciously over time, before plunging into monetization. Startups that start straight off the bat with advertising are typically not sustainable as they would fall into the optimization trap.

Next business model that I’ll be talking about: affiliates!

1. ^[1] If you’re a long time reader of this blog (one of the two who are not my parents), you may note a change in writing styles. I am writing this on my own free will. I swear Larry Page is not standing behind me with a gun pointed at my head. ↩
2. ^[2] har har, who does that. You’d typically be looking at a minimum of 2 Dynos and a few Workers. Because you know, your startup is ‘cool’ and you need to be highly available. /sarcasm. ↩
3. ^[3] I personally don’t really like them. No reasons why ↩
4. ^[4] In real life, Facebook DID sell ads in the beginning ↩