Werd I/O

I distinctly remember saying, as a young developer a decade ago, that I didn't enjoy the business side of startups. I was very wrong. There is no other side to startups - and engineering a profitable business is at least as challenging and rewarding as creating anything else.

Paul Graham's essay How to Raise Money is excellent: a distillation of the fundraising advice that Y Combinator gives to its classes into an article packed with actionable advice.

If you're running a startup, or are interested in the startup ecosystem, it's a required read. Here's the link again.

Paul says a lot here about the kinds of investors that are valuable, the important things to take away from an investment round (hint: more than enough money to achieve your goals, not necessarily a high valuation), and how to approach investment in the context of building a high-growth company.

But here's something else to take on board:

If someone makes you an acceptable offer, take it. If you have multiple incompatible offers, take the best. Don't reject an acceptable offer in the hope of getting a better one in the future.

This is one of the most important lessons you can learn - about anything, let alone startup funding. If you receive an offer, whether it's a price on a house or a funding offer for a startup, that meets your goals, then take it.

The prerequisite for this, of course, is that you've set goals. You need to have a plan, understand where you are, and have a good idea about what it'll take to get from here to there. Of course, in startups and life, plans tend to change - but then, you adapt the plan. Think of it like a GPS navigation system. You're not legally bound to stick to the path the map lays out for you - but as soon as you deviate from it, the software figures out the best route from where you are now. As an executive or a product manager in a startup, you need to be that GPS navigator.

Paul points out that you should have more than one path mapped out:

And the right strategy, in fundraising, is to have multiple plans depending on how much you can raise. Ideally you should be able to tell investors something like: we can make it to profitability without raising any more money, but if we raise a few hundred thousand we can hire a one or two smart friends, and if we raise a couple million, we can hire a whole engineering team, etc.

To do that, you need data. As Tim O'Reilly pointed out in his post, How I Failed, that means making sure everyone understands you're a business:

Every manager - in fact, every employee - needs to understand the financial side of the business. One of my big mistakes was to let people build products, or do marketing, without forcing them to understand the financial impact of their decisions. This is flying blind — like turning them loose in an automobile without a speedometer or a fuel gauge. Anyone running a group with major financial impact should have their P&L tattooed on their brain, able to answer questions on demand, or within a few moments. It isn’t someone else’s job to pay attention. Financial literacy doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Make sure it’s part of your employee training package, and make sure that people running important business functions are held accountable for their numbers.

Everyone should understand their budgets (and have budgets!), and operate within them. And everyone should have an awareness of what a potential plan will cost, and whether it's actually feasible using the funds and resources available to the team.

The days of raising a huge amount of money and hoping that a business model will arise are over, if they were ever here to begin with. Twitter was famous for this strategy, but you have to remember that its founders had a very solid track record and were trusted in both the industry and the Silicon Valley community; it didn't just happen out of the sky. They were seasoned businesspeople, and had top-tier business development resources available to them.

Bootstrapping - where you grow your company without any investment - remains very interesting to me, but isn't applicable in every scenario. While it's nice to build an engine that makes enough money to support itself from day one, not every business can support this; sometimes investment is required. Equipment, infrastructure, advertising or simple market runway justifications are reasonable - and open up business possibilities that bootstrapping couldn't manage.

However, with controlled growth and a practical starting product, I think bootstrapped startups can manage more than you'd think, although perhaps not in the timeframe of a VC-funded one. Nonetheless, here more than ever, this GPS sense of the business roadmap is required. There isn't a business that isn't, ultimately, tethered to the numbers.

Many developers think of startups in terms of building something cool, and indeed, the product is very important - but it's also the engine of your business. It's what people hopefully buy into and pay for. You can't base a startup on creativity and good intentions alone. Pragmatism, practicality and the ability to face reality head on are requirements.

The good news for entrepreneurial developers is that this isn't a million miles away from the principles of architecting a complicated software application. Certainly, a different set of requirements and skills are involved, but in both cases you're talking about a lot of interconnected pieces and resources that have to work together just so. If you ignore a requirement, or mis-assess your platform resources, your application will be belly-up. That's true of your business, too. The good news is, in both cases, you can monitor resources, iterate and test. Okay, you also need to have empathy, people skills, and a dozen other qualities as a business leader, but guess what? You need those to build great software, too. What kind of application will you build if you can't empathize with the user?

I think of my early developer self, and wonder what I was talking about. Building this machine is an amazing journey - and the rewards, of course, are great.

Google Analytics has announced it will end IE8 support by the end of the year, following Google Apps, which ended support for the browser last November.

Legacy browser support remains one of the hardest problems in web development. For years, Internet Explorer 6 was a bugbear, because enterprise applications were written with it in mind. Sadly, the same is true of its descendent: nobody uses IE8 on the weekend, which means that it's probably forcibly installed on enterprise networks, where users aren't allowed to install their own software.

Internet Explorer lock-in is rife in the enterprise, because of the browser's non-standard web support and ubiquity on Windows computers. Faced with supporting IE8 or web standards as they were actually specified, many enterprise vendors went with IE8, because that's where the customers were.

Compounding the problem, IE8 is the last browser in its line that will run on Windows XP, which is still prevalent in enterprise environments (even if users are slowly making the migration to Windows 7). In other words, to run a better version of Internet Explorer, enterprise IT departments don't just have to give permission for it to be installed; they must upgrade their computers from another operating system first. This is a significant expense.

In the web development community, it's easy to be dismissive and say that these organizations should be running Linux, and shouldn't have got themselves into this situation to begin with. (I've heard this attitude a lot.) That ignores the much broader context that Windows enterprise computing sits in, including the software ecosystem and the support infrastructure that's grown up around it. Most importantly, though, if we want to sell to a customer, it's probably a good idea to support the platforms that they actually use. The larger and more security-conscious the customer, the more reticent they may be to upgrade their platform software more regularly.

So how do you balance the fact that so many customers are on Windows XP with the fact that Internet Explorer 8 is a hideous, insecure platform that must be developed for separately?

One option is to gently suggest Firefox or Chrome, which both work with Windows XP SP2. At latakoo, we'll be doing that increasingly less gently; we've already communicated to our customers that we'll be slowly phasing out support, and we'll soon be adding some visible messaging urging them to switch browsers. However, the pragmatic reality is that many users can't switch, because of their IT rules, and often because of the IE8-specific in-house apps they're running, so we can't simply turn off support, even though maintaining IE8-only code costs us extra.

Moving away from IE8 will be more secure for every organization. (Microsoft is ending support for Windows XP in 2014.) Until then, if you're an enterprise IT manager, I recommend encouraging a two-browser solution: IE8 for the apps that really need it, and a secure, modern browser for everything else (including latakoo).

For developers, there's a lot to be said for increasingly less-subtle messaging explaining why Internet Explorer 8 is a bad choice. You're providing useful advice, while also encouraging your customers to get better value for money out of your service (because more developer time can go into new and more resilient features rather then legacy browser support). But don't switch off support completely - not quite yet at least - lest you leave some of your most important customers out in the cold.

1. I know that my mediumsplaining misogyny adds zero value, so consider this a personal vent rather than a serious attempt to contribute to the conversation.

2. There's a giant misogyny problem in tech, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. I've seen more catcalling here than anywhere else I've ever lived, and been on the periphery of more conversations predicated on traditional gender role assumptions and casual objectification.

2a. That doesn't mean there aren't awesome, progressive people in California; obviously, there are a lot of them, including all of my friends here. And to be clear, I love living here.

2b. I was a teenage boy, and although I've always tried to be respectful of others, I've definitely said some things about people that I'm not at all proud of now. I also know that I'm writing from a position of privilege which is not always visible to me, and while I try not to be a part of the problem, sometimes I probably am.

3. With all of this said, I think it takes a serious lack of self-awareness to get up on a podium at an internationally-famous event and present an app called Titstare.

4. Titstare is disgusting but fleeting. What I care more about is how the wider problem affects my industry, my profession, the environment I live in, and therefore pretty much my entire life. Not to mention the lives of people I care about.

5. Apparently some people need this spelled out: women are not somehow biologically less suited to working in technology, or the sciences, or mathematics. It's worth checking out how the genders break down at, say, a high school level for those things, globally. Or, you know, just using a little common sense and working it out for yourself.

5a. Here's something else that shouldn't need saying: the glass ceiling is a ridiculous relic that should make us all ashamed. I'm a strong believer in equalizing maternity and paternity leave as one way of bringing it to an end. Women are not worth less in the workforce than men. This disparity is not merit-related.

5b. And by the way, the whole concept of a meritocracy is bullshit. It's built on an empathy void, and completely ignores individual context and history.

6. I don't want to work or live in all-male environments, or any other kind of monoculture. I would rather that smart, awesome people who can contribute amazing things didn't feel like they aren't welcome.

7. I honestly believe that a huge part of the problem is that a lot of people in tech are incapable of feeling genuine empathy for people from other contexts. I don't think they can put themselves in someone else's shoes, and see things from their point of view. This is a learned skill, and it is valuable: not just for preventing yourself from being hateful to others, and being a decent human being, but also for your startups, too.

8. Another common geek trope is to be deliberately controversial to get a rise, and to publicly wonder why people are so sensitive. Here is why people are so sensitive: because the controversial things you are saying are tantamount to persecution. Can't understand why that might be hurtful? There's that empathy void again.

9. But without wanting to diminish the previous points, all of this pales compared to the out-of-the-blue requests for sex, the dehumanizing comments, the rape jokes, the abusive emails, the sexual assaults, and the day-to-day slights and injustices that I honestly wouldn't have believed any functioning adult human would stoop to. I can't mediumsplain this, or mansplain it, or explain it, or even come close to understanding why this kind of stuff exists. I can put myself into the shoes of the abusers here - and they are abusers - to try and determine their motivations, but the best I can think of is that it's some kind of sick power game. It's so completely broken as to defy belief, but I do believe it, of course. I don't know how you go about correcting someone who thinks that any of this is in any way okay.

10. These aren't fucking revelations, people. Our industry is supposed to be building the future. I don't want to live in a world where people are discriminated against because of their gender, sexuality, ethnic background, context or class. Solving that for the world is a hard, disruptive problem. Solving that in our industry seems doable. We're not doing a very good job of it so far though.

11. I'm sorry / not sorry for this vent. Selfishly, I wanted to write something down, but there are lots of people who talk about these issues in an informed, eloquent way, which I haven't here. @shanley's Twitter feed is a great jumping-off point; I've learned a lot from the resources and issues she links to.