Werd I/O

I'm having a good time at the Reclaim Your Domain meetup in Los Angeles this weekend, organized by Jim Groom of University of Mary Washington's Domain of One's Own initiative.

From the initiative's homepage:

A Domain of One's Own provides domain names and Web space to members of the UMW community, encouraging individuals to explore the creation and development of their digital identities.

Reclaim Hosting, which was created by Jim Groom and Tim Owens, supports Known (as well as Elgg). It was set up to provide educators and institutions with an easy way to offer their students domains and web hosting that they own and control.

We're excited to be in the mix, both in terms of the services at UMW and elsewhere, but also in the wider conversation. Schools and universities are in a perfect position to talk about data ownership, so it's inspiring to see them doing just that. While Jim Groom and the other members of the Reclaim Your Domain community are ahead of the curve, I expect many others to follow. Their work provides an obvious benefit to both students and faculty at the institutions that adopt it, in a way that previous eportfolio initiatives didn't necessarily achieve. (Elgg emerged from work Dave Tosh and I were doing on electronic portfolios in education.)

Empowering individuals at institutions to own their online identities makes us very happy. And we're excited to learn from the students and faculty that make their homes on the web using Known.

While Known is an open source application (released under the Apache 2.0 License), institutions that choose to use the software won't be going it alone. They can get full support from us, if they like, as well as software to make it easier to manage Known sites on an organizational basis, and bespoke solutions for their specific use cases. We're keenly aware that one size doesn't fit all, and one institution's (or one school or course's) needs don't necessarily apply generally. Known is a flexible platform that supports a great deal of individual customization.

It's not just for education, of course: anyone can use a Known site, and we're excited to be working in journalism, technology and other verticals. However, edtech is a great example of a community motivated to empower its members to own their data, and we're delighted to help.

Journalism and the indieweb were made for each other.

Because of the way we've been describing Known - particularly focusing on our ability to syndicate content to third-party social networks and important social interactions using brid.gy - we've received a lot of feedback that this is how we should describe ourselves as a business:

Known is a social media marketing application that allows marketing departments to justify ROI using aggregated data from audiences across multiple platforms

For all kinds of reasons, this isn't what we want to do. There are solid business reasons - social media marketing is a crowded market, for one - but there are deeper reasons, too. It's not why we got into this. It's not, on a fundamental level, what we're trying to do.

After all, this is how you could describe the product:

Known lets you own your own social website without having to give up talking to your friends on the web.

I believe in the indieweb as a movement that will empower people to own their own representations on the web. I know that will have broad implications over time, and that the success of these ideas and technologies will make a profound impact on the way the web works. I also think that running a commercial business based on indie web principles is a great thing.

I also think that certain groups of people are ahead of the curve when it comes to privacy and ownership - and journalists are very much among them.

There is a long-term trend towards greater ownership and privacy. Partially this is due to post-Snowden sentiment, but it's also driven by factors like generational differences, a growing commercial dissatisfaction with Facebook, and security breaches at companies like Target. Providing a service that is as easy to use as Facebook, while being respectful to its users, mindful of privacy, and yours, is a good idea. There will be a tipping point where people will be looking for something new, and we will be there for them, alongside other software in the indieweb ecosystem.

But there's also a growing need for this right now. Edward Snowden's whistleblowing was, of course, an important moment in journalism. We participated in a workshop run by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism on newsgathering in a post-Snowden world this week, and were inspired by the renewed focus on protecting sources and swiftly building stories, while being simultaneously dismayed by the lack of effective software to support them. Journalists value ownership, privacy, control and ease of communication - which, of course, are indieweb fundamentals.

We're investigating how Known, and the indieweb, can be effectively harnessed for journalism. This includes heavy research into the workflows people are using today. My experience with latakoo (which is used by professional newsrooms around the world) has told me that every organization is different - but then, my experience with Elgg tells me that it's possible to build a light-touch tool that allows people to customize it for their own needs. In fact, that's what Known already is, whether you take the open source code and build on top of it, or use the hosted service we'll launch this summer.

Journalism is fundamental to democracy. We need to know what's happening in the world around us to make effective democratic decisions. We're also living in a world where journalism is being pinched by changing models and rapidly evolving audiences. If we can help, we would love to.

If you're a journalist, or if you work in a media or news organization, we would love to talk to you. You can email me at ben@withknown.com.

Today, my epicenter is the San Francisco Bay Area, but it wasn't always so: in 1997 I moved to Edinburgh, Scotland, to do my bachelors degree in Computer Science. In the end, I lived there twice: from 1997-2004, and again for a year in 2010. The first time, I started Elgg, the open source social networking platform. The second time, I worked for latakoo and was the first Geek in Residence at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab.

I miss The Forest Cafe, which, to me, is a symbol of Edinburgh's artistic cultural anarchy. I love that about the city: clubs and art shows occupy every nook and cranny. Of course, the big kahuna is the Edinburgh Festivals: twelve official festivals (and more unofficial ones) that double the size of the city and turn it into a melting pot of arts and creativity. The excellent social safety net doesn't hurt: healthcare is basically free, and Scottish students can go to Scottish universities without paying a penny. The marvelous Scottish Book Trusts mails childrens books to every new family, promoting an interest in reading. You can experiment without worrying about what's going to happen to you if you get ill. My circle in Scotland very much fit my values: compassionately left-wing, embracing of diverse sexualities and gender identities, secular, and questioning of cultural norms. Exactly how I would prefer the world to be.

On the other hand, money is tight there. It's just the way it is. You can make a good living, and costs are low (particularly when you factor in health insurance, or the fact that you don't need to own a car). But if you want to form a startup, as I did, you're going to have a harder time.

A sample of things we were told when we tried to get Elgg off the ground:

"It won't work."

"What about your pension?"

"That sounds like it's for teenage girls crying in their bedrooms." [Their words, not mine, I promise.]

I lost count of the number of times people who had started successful businesses told us to move to Silicon Valley. While culturally there was a lot of ambition, business ambition was looked upon less kindly. Scotland - like England - is very heavily influenced by the banking sector, and technology businesses were not a part of that mix. Despite having the opportunity to move to Silicon Valley, I chose to move to Oxford instead. "Why," I thought, stubbornly, "should tech startups have to be in California?" More on this in a bit.

I returned in 2010, shortly after I left Elgg. The environment had dramatically improved, as evidenced by the existence of the Geek in Residence position at the Edinburgh Festivals. When I did my computer science degree, our labs were literally in the basement next to the boiler room. The School of Informatics indicates a renewed focus on technology. Meanwhile, events like TechMeetup provide a focal point for the incredibly-talented local tech scene. The Edinburgh Hack Lab ticks the hackerspace box.

One of the clearest signs that Edinburgh is connecting its unique cultural scene with its technologists is Inspace, which is the Scottish counterpart to the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. The space actually sits inside the University's Informatics building, and is the most amazing playground I've ever seen for artistic technologists, led by Mark Daniels, a passionate, smart curator.

Since I left Edinburgh for the second time, TechCube has opened to provide a space for tech startups. I've heard great things.

There's no less creativity in San Francisco. In fact, it being a much larger area, there's a lot more - but it's different. Whereas the safety net (and other cultural reasons) meant there could be unencumbered creative exploration, here even the art is entrepreneurial. Arts organizations are largely funded not by the government, but by patrons: this changes the dynamic entirely. Whereas in Scotland galleries and museums are free to walk into, here you must pay. Culture has a paywall.

At least sometimes. I've been consistently delighted by Oakland, which has the kind of anarchic, widely-embracing spirit I love. Consider Oakland Nights Live, a live theater variety performance / on-stage talk show: the first time I attended, it was in a backyard, and I walked in to see a man in a viking helmet playing a see-saw like a musical instrument with a saw. Another episode was held on BART, which saw passengers become de facto audience members. These days it's at the Sudo Room, the kind of artistic / technical space that we have in spades here. I also regularly go to music events at the Firehouse Arts Collective, which owns an experimental space on the border between Oakland and Berkeley.

Nonetheless, in San Francisco, most of the art I've seen has had a commercial element. The flipside of that is that most commercial business has an artistic element. While the financial district certainly exists, a lot of the startups and tech businesses can also be thought of as art projects, and many of the great ones have been created by people with an artistic, anarchic bent (even if this is ebbing away with ever-rising costs).

There are intense, worsening social problems here, which have been written about at length elsewhere. I find them jarring. It's hard to walk through a BART station filled with homeless people and not feel some kind of intense emotion (for me, sadness and anger). People seem to have become hard to it, though, or worse, blame the homeless people for being homeless. That's foreign to me, and I find it disgusting. These people need help. (It must also be said that they are getting help, and San Francisco remains a very progressive city, by American standards. I don't understand the American resistance to socialized services, but it's less pronounced here than in most places.)

While it's important to recognize the drawbacks, let's be real. The food is incredible, the city is beautiful, and although I have a lot of ambition to travel and live in different places around the world, I would also be happy if I stayed here for the rest of my life. Just the light is incredible: in Scotland the sun rises at 8:45am and sets at 3:50pm in January. Here it's steadily bright all year long. The people are friendly and helpful. It never freezes, but never gets too hot.

It's also the best possible place to start any kind of technology business. That stubborn resistance to starting a company in Silicon Valley? Ridiculous. Don't repeat my mistake. Just about everyone is here, which means - in combination with the general friendliness - that it's easy to meet just about anyone for a coffee. And people will be interested in what you're doing, and try to connect you with people who can help. There's no cynicism towards ambition, and no desire to put you down. The culture is collaborative and open-minded.

Sometimes, I find this open-mindedness challenging: I'm used to a more secular culture, but the US is much more friendly to religion. In other parts of the country that often translates into conservative bigotry, but not here. It's just friendly. Correspondingly, I'm often challenged by my bias against religion; something I want to acknowledge, and be less of a jerk about. Anil Dash wrote a great piece about this.

I'm glad for my years in Scotland, which gave me a perspective I'm proud of. I sometimes struggle with the more individualistic culture here (and the absurdly hoppy beer). Tef's guide to San Francisco for Londoners is completely accurate. But at the same time, I'm so glad that this is where I landed. The tech industry has some well-publicized problems, but this is a place where you feel like you can make a difference, change the culture, and create a better future. While I feel like a fish out of water a lot of the time, I also feel like I belong.

The other day I got an email from someone asking about being a founding CTO of a tech startup. I replied with some brief advice, but it got me thinking: I've been doing this for a decade now, and was creating projects on the Internet for a full decade before that. A hallmark of the teams I've been lucky enough to work with has been the ability to punch far above our weight: online magazines edited by 15 year olds that ended up being distributed by the established press; the number one linked-to site on Blogdex (remember that?); a social platform used by the most prominent universities in the world, as well as national governments and Fortune 500 companies; and a video platform used by some of the world's largest broadcasters. These are solid achievements for groups and companies that, for the most part, contained fewer than 10 people.

The web is rife with articles giving universal advice based on subjective experience. For whatever reason, there's a tendency for technical people to think, "this worked for me, so why aren't you doing things the same way?" I don't think that's usually truthful or productive, so take this post with a pinch of salt. These are my opinions, not a manual.

Nonetheless, if you're just starting out, with few resources, what advice can I offer? Here are a few things I hold to be true.

Enjoy yourself.

Few things are as exhilarating as creating your own thing from scratch - making something from nothing - and releasing it into the world. People will notice if you're loving the experience. Don't lose your joy.

Focus on people.

For "people", read: your end-users, your customers (if they're different), your coworkers.

Your satisfaction must come from pushing code to the user and building something that creates value, rather than the act of programming itself. If you don't like people, and you don't want to interact with people, don't found a startup. If you're starting a business, you need to be relentlessly social (in the human sense), communicate well, and love getting feedback. Otherwise, do something else.

This is a refrain I'll repeat many times below: communication, communication, communication. You need to communicate clearly, and you need to listen, both to your customers and your team.

This is, of course, in addition to having great technical skills. These things together will allow you to build great software.

Understand your responsibilities.

As a co-founder, you are jointly responsible for the direction of the company, and creating an awesome, valuable product.

As the technical lead, you have a lot of responsibilities and pressures on your shoulders. You need to make sure your product or service is technically as good as it can be. You need to ensure that the technical side of the operation is able to meet business objectives. You need to be a software architect, and an infrastructure architect, and a technical designer, and a lead developer. As you grow, you need to be a product manager, ensuring that everyone in the engineering team understands the business goals (and hits them), and ensuring that everyone in the business team understands the technical challenges (and has a sense of the technical realities of your projects).

Ultimately, the technical buck stops with you. If the technology doesn't work, it's your fault. That's fine, but it's therefore doubly important that you are candid with everyone in the team about technical challenges that you might face, and the requirements for success.

Pick the right cofounder.

Before you begin working on a startup, it's also important that you check if your business co-founder or co-founders are able to bring something to the table to the same degree. If you're doing all of this and picking up a disproportionate degree of the business side, you will find yourself quickly burning out, serving nobody. Be a cog, not the engine.

One particular danger is that people see you as someone who can make their ideas a reality; that you will, essentially, build what they tell you to. (In one particularly toxic situation I was referred to as "the back-room guy".) This is an employee relationship, not a co-founder one. The company needs to be a true collaboration between founders, and everyone must have the skills and focus to participate more or less equally.

An oft-quoted metric for finding technical cofounders is if they have a past record of building things under their own steam, and an understanding of the intersection between business and technology decisions. Well, guess what? That applies to non-technical co-founders, too. Do they have a past record of starting their own ventures? (They don't have to be businesses, but their own projects, and so on.) Do they have an understanding of the intersection between business and technology, and the kinds of trade-offs you have to make? They do? Great.

Build small pieces, loosely joined.

Don't fall into the trap of building elaborate frameworks or overly elegant technical solutions. Your role as a startup founder is to test and change rapidly. By building too much of a framework around your code, you lose the ability to react to customer feedback. The ideal is that you can learn as much as possible from your users, and then shift your code to take these things into account.

Nonetheless: always, always, always make sure code is commented and well-documented, no matter how little time you have to spend. Comments are part of the code, not an afterthought, and the people who tell you that decent programmers should just be able to read the source are flat-out wrong.

That you should use decent source control, issue management software, etc, is obvious. When you're starting out, a paid GitHub account should work fine. (I've used Beanstalk, Assembla, and a bunch of other things, and GitHub is more stable, is easier to use, and has the best ecosystem.)

Be proud of your system's code, but be proud of how small, nimble and well-documented it is. Don't be afraid to plug in existing, well-tested frameworks and libraries, as long as they're well suited to your goals.

Don't be trapped into caring what the cool kids think about programming languages. The only material way your choice of programming language will affect your software (within certain bounds, of course) is in the choice of people you are able to hire.

Remember design.

User experience, interaction and interface design will probably come under your remit to begin with. They are the first impression that your product makes. Don't make the mistake of thinking of them as an afterthought (or, as more than one developer has expressed to me in the past, "pretty pictures"). Design is equally as important as architecture. You need to make sure every one of your engineers - as well as the business team! - is thinking in terms of the impression the product you're all making is having on its users, rather than a list of features and capabilities. If you can, bring a professional in to help you with design. It'll make a disproportionate amount of difference (see my note about the team, below).

Expect to scale.

If you're building technology, build it with an understanding of how it'll work when it has 10,000x the usage it does now. A few years ago, there were a lot of articles warning about premature scaling, which is a danger: you can easily sink all of your time and resources into building infrastructure that scales beautifully, when your focus needs to be on shipping as early and as often as you can. Nonetheless, not paying enough attention to scalability is dangerous. The old programming maxim - never assume you're going to be able to come back to anything - certainly holds true in a startup. Ask yourself what'll happen when you exceed the capacity of one server, or five, or fifty. When scaling becomes a business need, you'll need to do it very quickly. You'll have to do work in each case, but if you've thought about it and prepared while you were building, you'll be much more agile.

Again: small pieces, loosely joined, with queues and late binding. You'll thank me later.

Don't skimp on tech, but don't waste money, either.

I've written before about my long, slow journey to Mac. I just think they're better computers: more reliable, faster, and, crucially, more compatible with the software you're probably running on your servers. They're not more compatible than Linux laptops, of course, but there you'll still run into a world of hardware incompatibilities and time-wasting fiddling that you really can't afford. Leave the tinkering to your spare time. The last thing you want to be doing is fiddling with drivers or mucking about with wifi settings when you should be working on your product or your next pitch.

Think about what you actually need. My first Mac was a 2011 Macbook Pro that I upgraded to 16GB of RAM; theoretically it's blazing fast. In fact, though, the computer I use the most is my Macbook Air, which is less than half the cost, and theoretically vastly underpowered. It just works, and the battery is impressive enough to last a coast-to-coast flight. These things matter.

On the other hand, don't buy a peripheral, or something like an iPod Touch, unless you absolutely need it to test or run your software. You don't need to be awash in computers and technology. Just buy the things that affect your business directly, at least to start with. Most of us are gadget-heads to some degree; resist the temptation to buy cool stuff because it's cool.

Strong milestones are good - but it's okay to change the plan.

A set of strong milestones, with associated tickets, allows anyone in the team to get a good sense of the roadmap. I like arranging tickets onto a kanban board, so you can see what people are working on right now, as well as the backlog. Standups are great for this, too, as long as you follow the rules and do it standing up, for a short period. Don't be tempted to devolve into a long meeting; that's not going to get you anywhere.

Sometimes, you'll find that you need to change the plan completely, perhaps to take advantage of a sales opportunity, or because you've realized you need to take a change in direction. Early on, that's both okay and sometimes necessary. You need to be okay with not sticking to the plan, and you need to reassure your team that this isn't a terrible thing. As ever, good communication is key, and it's a good idea to go into the "why"s.

Your team is everything.

When I was working on Elgg, we knew we needed a designer to help build better interactions and interfaces, and create the brand identity for the company. When we found the person we wanted, we paid him more than our own salaries; we had equity, after all, and adding him to the team would create a huge amount of value for the company.

Do your best to hire well, and never hire someone because they're cheap. Sometimes they won't know their own value and it'll work out, and sometimes you'll find someone who is genuinely under-skilled. Either way, by paying them far below market rate, you're screwing them, and that's a lousy footing to start off a relationship on. It's certainly true that you'll have to pay less than many companies, but you can offset that with the freedom that a startup can offer. (Equity and the promise of value later on isn't enough; at this stage, most potential engineers are wise enough to know that share options are a lottery ticket.) If you're creating a corporate, hierarchical environment with all the resource constraints of a startup, and not offering anything tangible in return as people, you're creating a poor working environment. Freedom, trust, and a creative environment are all motivators. It doesn't have to all be about money, although money really does help; salary should be one of the first things you bring up when you can. Employees who are worrying about making ends meet are needlessly distracted.

It's okay to let go of someone if they're underperforming. You should do it early, both for your and their sakes. Sometimes, it's just not a good fit. Nobody likes working somewhere where they're doing badly, and there's no need to be nasty about it; if it isn't working, it isn't working. It's better to end an unproductive relationship quickly than let it limp on. This is, for me, a very hard thing to do. Nonetheless, it's sometimes necessary.

Be nice, by the way. Steve Jobs was famous for yelling at people, and he wasn't alone. It's completely unnecessary, and creates a poor environment. You and your team are allies, and if something's going wrong, remember where the buck stops?

By the same token, your team has to know that if you're asking them to do something, it's for a reason. While you should always be open to the idea that you could be wrong, and interested in listening to opinions from your whole team, everyone does need to know that you have the final say, and that they need to be adhering to the milestones you've set down. (If those milestones are realistic, of course; you need to be receptive to the idea that they might not be.)

Hire well. Get people excited. Be a steward of their well-being, and give them the space to build amazing things. Don't dictate tasks; your team are your collaborators. Talk them through what needs to be done, and why. Smart people question things, so give them reasons.

One last thing: part of communicating clearly is making sure people feel like they can approach you to talk about anything. Your workplace has to be a safe place. If someone is being harassed, or feels put upon for any reason, or they have any concerns at all, they need to be able to talk to you about it without fear of reprisals. Similarly, they need to feel comfortable. If someone's making sexist jokes, or otherwise making anyone feel uncomfortable, it's down to you to stop it.

Everyone should do support.

By which I mean, everyone in the company. It's important to understand the problems your customers are experiencing, and this is a great way for everyone to get a good handle on that. But it's also important for everyone in the company to understand how the product works - something that non-technical members of the team might have less of an understanding of, as they're not in its guts day in and day out. By ensuring that everyone takes support phone calls (if you take calls) and emails, you ensure good product & customer knowledge throughout the team.

It all comes down to empathy.

Good communication is empathic. You need to be able to understand your customers, your team, and your co-founders, and react when you sense that any of them are unhappy. Tech startups may have technology running through their veins, but more than anything else, they still have people at their core. A little love goes a long way.

Good luck!

1. Elgg

I've written before about how Elgg got its name. I had just recently graduated, and due to an unwise predisposition for flippant humor, I didn't have a single serious email address to my name. I needed one in order to apply for jobs. My full last name is Werdmüller von Elgg, and a brief search revealed that elgg.net was available. I used ben@elgg.net as my email address for years, without any web presence - so when I wrote a prototype social networking platform for education, it made sense to put it there.

Nobody was very comfortable with the name. Alternatives that were suggested over the years included Learning Landscaper, but none of them stuck. Past a certain point, the project was well-known enough that changing its name would have been silly; and anyway, it was a short, easily-memorized domain name.

Imagine, though, if we'd decided to call it Learning Landscaper. While that fit our original idea, Elgg morphed quickly from a social eportfolio engine for capturing informal learning into a multi-purpose engine that anyone could harness in order to create a social networking site. Had we picked a more domain-specific name, we would have limited our scope automatically, and possibly even unconsciously. Had we picked a more rational name (Engine, for example), we would have possibly isolated Elgg's large non-English-speaking userbase, and cut out a huge number of opportunities to talk about it. I lost count of the number of times someone asked us "what does Elgg stand for?" - it was unusual, and people were curious about it.

In fact, my only real regret is that I no longer have use of my ben@elgg.net address.

2. Latakoo

A latakoo is a kind of African lark: a bird that flies high and fast. For a service that allows people to send media footage quicky from and to anywhere in the world, that makes some thematic sense. But there's a good chance you might have never heard of a latakoo before.

When we were brainstorming names, a close contender was Cloud Compressor. The "cloud" was a big innovation back then, and latakoo achieves the bulk of its speed improvements through data compression. On face value, it makes sense. But not only is it a lifeless set of words, like Learning Landscaper, it thematically contrains what the company does.

Today, compression is just one part of the Latakoo service. It's still core to what we do, but we use it hand-in-hand with advanced routing, access permissions, and both service and datacenter integrations. We take media footage via any Internet connection, and deliver it anywhere, in the format it needs to be, securely. That's in no way covered by Cloud Compressor.

Our customers use us as a verb: "latakoo it". That's both a wonderful endorsement of our service and something that would only be possible with the right kind of name. What do you think YouSendIt were after when they changed their name to Hightail? Try to construct an elegant sentence involving sending something with YouSendIt. Now, switch it out to Hightail. "Hightail it". The kind of word you choose matters, because the sentences people use to describe you affect the way they think about you.

3. Idno

Lately, I've been spending some time with Idno, which I started in order to explore what a social publishing engine might look like on today's web.

It's another weird name, whose origins lie in the very unlively term ID node. I lopped off the de, because I wanted the word to phonetically end in a vowel. The idea was to create something that was at once friendly (I think ending in a vowel makes it feel like a nickname), reminiscent of terms like "ID", "id", "know" and "number", and weird. (It's also sometimes used as an acronym for in desperate need of, and a shortened form of I don't know; neither are bad connotations.) My idea is that people would remember idno in a way that they might not remember a more normal name.

We'll see what happens. I've been talking about perhaps changing its name while I can, but part of me likes having a name that's a little unexpected. Maybe that's because I have a bit of a weird name, too, but I genuinely think that standing out and being a bit skew-whiff to everyone else is a positive trait. There are situations where choosing a very conservative name is appropriate - for example, when your customers are, themselves, very conservative - but typically in technology you want to be seen as innovative.

And the way you are perceived starts with what you choose to call yourself.

Rereading the Guardian article about Elgg, I'd forgotten this detail, which is true:

The idea was conceived in late 2003, when Ben Werdmuller and Tosh were working at Edinburgh University developing e-learning and e-portfolio systems. Werdmuller (an avid blogger) persuaded Tosh (who had just started a PhD in e-portfolios) to start a blog of his own to support his studies. Within a week, Tosh had received comments on his blog from people pointing him to relevant resources and others bloggers had begun to link to him.

Dave and I shared an office at the University of Edinburgh. He was skeptical about blogging at that point, so what I told him was this: start a blog, post every day, and leave a meaningful comment on someone else's blog every day.

I wasn't sure that it would work, but thought that it probably would. Sure enough, within a week or two, he was part of the global elearning community, and was participating in conversations with its thought leaders. It was through this medium that we put out the initial white papers (completely unofficially) that provided the basis for Elgg, which went viral in the elearning community.

Could that happen today? I'm not sure.

The turning point for my first startup came one rainy Friday afternoon, in February 2007.

As TechCrunch reported:

A new open source cross-site social networking service called Explode launched today and looks like a very appealing alternative to the now Yahoo! owned MyBlogLog. Built by UK open-source social network provider Curverider (whose primary product, Elgg, is similar to PeopleAggregator), Explode offers an embeddable widget that links out to users’ respective profile pages on any social network but allows commenting and befriending in one aggregated location. I found Explode via Steve O’Hear’s The Social Web, one of my new favorite blogs.

Steve O'Hear had written:

Although comparisons with Yahoo's MyBlogLog are inevitable, Explode isn't primarily intended as a way to turn an existing blog into a social network, nor as a way to monitor traffic. Instead, think of it as a loosely joined network that works on top of existing social networking sites and blogs, to allow a user of one site to 'befriend' and communicate with a user from another.

Curverider co-founder, Ben Werdmuller, says that Explode is very much a 'work in progress', and that they are already working on an API, and also have plans to add support for OpenID.

Dave Tosh and I had been working on Elgg for three or four years at that point, and had obtained a two-person office above a bookstore in Summertown, an affluent area in North Oxford, awash with coffee shops and restaurants. Our startup was fully bootstrapped; not a single penny of investment had been put in, except for our own work, and the non-monetary support of the people around us.

As Februaries in England can sometimes be, it was a cold, overcast day, with nothing to recommend it. Because we were bootstrapping, we had been working hard, as always, and we were exhausted. Also because we were bootstrapping, our waistlines had seen the effects of long hours in front of the computer sustained only by relatively cheap food, so we'd decided to buy ourselves gym memberships and try to go regularly. (I think we managed eight or nine times.)

As we worked out, we decided that, screw it, we weren't going to work on Elgg for the rest of the day. There was nothing to be gained, we were feeling kind of burned out, and surely there had to be something more fun we could do.

Elgg was a full-blown social networking engine, and although we later completely rewrote it, it was still a pretty powerful piece of software used by companies and institutions all over the world. And I had a simple idea.

When we got back, I got to work widgetizing all of Elgg's functionality: writing templates that would take pieces of its output - the friends list, for example - and embed it in JavaScript such that it could be made to display on any website. This was back when people still had websites where people could embed HTML and JavaScript, and the effect would be that any website could be part of a larger social network. That wasn't a small idea: it captured questions people were already having about siloed sites, and would later be tackled by projects like Google Friend Connect. (Of course, the IndieWeb movement is answering those questions today.)

Dave created a template for the site so people could sign up and get their widgets. At the last minute, we created a logo. I made it in about 5 minutes in MS Paint, which seemed appropriate for a hacky site, and we both agreed that a ridiculously bad logo was probably good: it captured the scrappy ethos of the whole afternoon project.

After four hours of work in total, we made it live, and pinged some people we knew, like Marshall Kirkpatrick, who at the time was a TechCrunch writer (now the CEO of the excellent Little Bird), and Steve O'Hear, who had previously written about us in the Guardian. For us, it was a bit of a lighthearted thing we'd put together at the end of the week, and we didn't really expect anyone to cover it. To his credit, Dave proactively got in touch with everyone anyway.

Boom. Steve wrote about us, and then Marshall wrote the story on TechCrunch. This was more coverage than the tech press had ever given us.

The fact that we had executed quickly on our idea, which in turn had developed out of having worked on social networking platforms for years, mattered. The fact that we didn't try and make it perfect, or spend ages putting it through careful design cycles or product feedback loops, was unimportant. We had a working first version, and we put it in front of people, who thought it was compelling. This directly led to many more customers for Curverider, as well as our first investors, who got in touch because they had seen the coverage.

Those four hours of work - and the quick decision to muck about, be creative, and follow our whims for an afternoon - literally changed the fate of our company, and both of our careers.