The road less traveled

Special thanks to Steve and Alexis of Reddit.com, who stopped by McIntire last week to talk about their startup experience.

The presentation went over well with everyone, except Alexis's old communications professor, Marcia Pentz-Harris :) I could hear audible groans coming from that side of the room as Alexis ignored a year's worth of presenting advice and started cracking jokes with the audience.

Regardless, it was a great time :)

To the guy taking photos at the talk: Leave a comment! I'd love to either link to your photos or put them online on the VEO wiki.

I've recently invited Steve & Alexis to come down and speak @ UVA. The talk should be a lot of fun, it will be great to hear the story of these two guys, who, IMHO, founded Y Combintor's most successful startup.

If you're reading this in time, you're more then you're more than welcome to come!

Here's the flyer:
===================================
Steve and Alexis of Reddit.com, 5PM on Monday in Room 122
(Click the link for more info)

What's it like to found a startup?
Are you interested in the "startup life?" Come this Monday to hear the story of two UVa grads who pulled it off, founding Reddit.com. Today Reddit has 160,000 unique daily visitors, and is one of the top 250 most visited US sites on the net.

Background:
Steve graduated from the E-school in 2005, Alexis graduated from McIntire the same year. After raising less than $100,000 in VC funding, Reddit was recently acquired by Conde Nast (publishers of Wired Magazine). Press about the site is here.

When: Monday, March 19th at 5PM.
Where: McIntire Room 122
Sponsored by: Virginia Entrepreneurship Organization and AKPsi

COME EARLY FOR FREE PIZZA!!!!
======================================

About 2 years ago I purchased a dell server, naming it mother...

Well as it turns out, I'm pretty happy with my setup. I've spent a LOT of time customizing / optimizing it (as usually is the case with Gentoo).

But there's just one small problem: I'm beginning to realize that I've come so far, I don't remember how I got here! I'm not sure how long it would take for me to rebuild everything if this server ever went down. I'm not even sure if I'd remember all the customizations / installs I've made, let alone HOW I made them...

So, in that light, I've decided to carefully "blog" all the changes I make to my server on its wiki page (http://bluwiki.com/go/BluWiki:Mother). Hopefully this will help me figure out what I've done, if I ever need to do it again. As an added benefit, it might also help others do the same...

I guess this shows how insulated I am... I never really expected BluWiki to get serious usage outside of the US.

In fact, , wikis are getting much more (normalized) attention in other parts of the world. The US doesn't even rank in the top 10 countries searching for the term wiki:


My experience with BluWiki confirms this... Of all the sites I run, it is the most "international." Only 55% of visits are from within the US. While this might sound high, for comparison, the traffic to every other site I own is at least 97% domestic.

This is a cool idea: Charity Checks. Give them to your family / friends, and they can give them to a charity of their choice.

Mom, Dad, and everyone else who doesn't know what to get me - I would love to receive one of these!

Read more about them here: The Gift of Giving.

So I've arrived back from San Francisco, the Innovator's dinner was great. I've never seen so many respected professionals in one place.

I sat next to Nancy Dickenson, a senior director of eBay. It was funny, she was telling stories of Meg Whitman, and I couldn't help but contrast this conversation to my experiences on the East coast. In Virginia, I'll be lucky to talk to someone who recognizes Meg's name - and here I was having a conversation with one of Meg's good friends.

So apparently I've been invited to the Innovator's Dinner, hosted by Creative Good. I'm not exactly sure why I was invited, but its quite an honor. I'm really excited, there will be executives from some of the companies I respect most there.

So I'm supposed to pick 5 people that I want to network with during the conference. The only one I've come up with is John Smith, the VP of Wikipedia. Any suggestions?

Here's an abbreviated list of the dinner's attendees:

• Dae Mellencamp - SVP, Product Management (About.com)
  
• Bob Baxley - Director of Design, Apple Store Online (Apple)
• Ralph Zazula - Director, Apple Store Online Engineering (Apple)
• David Schrieberg - VP, Content & Programming (AOL Europe)
  
• Scott Helbing - EVP, Entertainment Services (AT&T)
• Debbie Podberesky - VP (Banana Republic)
  
• Maheesh Jain - VP, Sales & Marketing (CafePress.com)
• Shawn Budde - VP, Enterprise Customer Management (Capital One)
• Teri Felix - SVP, Database Marketing & Customer Research (Charles Schwab)
• Andy Gill - SVP, Client Experience Group (Charles Schwab)
• Dawn vonBechmann - VP, Multi-Channel Experience (Circuit City )
• Jennifer Vos - VP, Online Strategy and Customer Experience (Citigroup)
  
• Justin Miller - Senior Director Product, Europe (eBay)
• Karl Wiley - Senior Director (eBay)
• Marissa Mayer - VP, Search Products & User Experience Design (Google)
• John McAteer - Head of Retail (Google)
• Chris Sacca - Head of Strategic Projects (Google)
• Alex Bard - President & CEO (Goowy Media)
• Gary Bennit - COO (Goowy Media)
• Marten Mickos - CEO (MySQL)
• Howard Tong - VP, Marketing (Newegg.com)
• Don Fotsch - VP, User Experience & Product Planning (Paypal)
• Stephanie Tilenius - VP & GM (Paypal)
• Doug Galen - SVP, Business & Corporate Development (Shutterfly)
• Ben Nelson - GM (Snapfish)
• Gail Griffin - VP, GM (Wall Street Journal)
• John Smith - VP, Product & Engineering (Wikipedia)
• Bradley Horowitz - VP, Advanced Products (Yahoo!)
• Entire list here
  

This is a list of online resources for entrepreneurs. I use this stuff on a daily basis and find it extremely helpful.

• Office tools:
• • Quickbooks Online - I do all my business accounting using QBOE. It's a cheap way to use the Quickbooks software. Downside: $20 / month & only works on Windows / MSIE.
  • AnswerConnect - I get a lot of calls. I'm not always around to take them, but I want don't want the customer get the impression that no one is here. For $100 / month, AnswerConnect answers my calls 24/7 when I'm not around. Best part: when they pick up the phone, they act like they're OdioWorks employees. It might not be worth it unless you have high-paying customers that you really want to take care of.
  • Harvest - Great for time tracking, but there's got to be something free out there that does the same thing. Plans start @ $5 / month.
  • Vonage - I use vonage for business phone, comes with an toll free number for $30 / month. Today, you might be able to use skype for a lot less - although it doesn't have as many features. Downside: you need a rock-solid ISP.
    
• Advertising:
• • - top of the list, of course. Great for PPC advertising.
  • Overture - Google's main competitor
    
  • PayPerPost - a cool site that will get your product / service mentioned in blogs
  • SEO Tutorial - this how I got myTeks.com first for the search "virginia computer repair" on Google.
    
• Site analytics:
  
• • - all I can say is, wow. I can't believe this is free.
    
  • Alexa web traffic - a great way to evaluate the traffic of your competitors
• Site publishing / hosting:
• • OSWD - Open source web design. It's where I get all my web templates these days. When making a new site, I start with a free template from OSWD and modify it in photoshop. Works great, costs nothing.
    
  • NameCheap - I use them for all my domain name hosting. They're cheap ($8.88 / yr) and have a ton of features (like URL / Email forwarding).
    
  • EveryDns - When I create custom DNS records, I use this place. It's free & reliable.
  • Mosso - great hosting solution, if you have the money. Otherwise, use DreamHost.
  • If you're interested in running your own servers, I love gentoo. Almost all my sites are run off my own servers, but fair warning: don't try this if you don't have time & money.
  • BluWiki is great if you want to make a quick site for free (of course I had to put this in there!). See an example of what you can do @ .
    
• News / other stuff:
• • techcrunch - web 2.0 blog. A must read for any web startup
    
  • paulgraham - a great resource for undergraduate entrepreneurs. This guy is my idle - he funds early stage startups, like reddit.com & wufoo.com. I suggest you start with his articles.
  • Young Entrepreneur Journey - a cool blog of one entrepreneur's experiences
    

Its not much, but BluWiki's traffic has nearly doubled in the last month. The site is finally getting some use. I'm excited!

The recent spike in traffic is mainly due to three new wikis: DVRMSToolbox User Guide, BGS video, and the The Red Reporter. I'd love to see more large sites using BluWiki - it seems to be a great way to attract traffic. Nothing more rewarding than to see the site growing :)

I can only wonder what the traffic would have been like if I hadn't let the site go offline for over a week in May. Oh well - I don't think it'll happen again, I have a backup server standing by 24/7.

I'm kicking myself for not putting more time into BluWiki, my free wiki web host. I started BluWiki almost 2 years ago, but only now am I realizing how much demand there is out there for wiki hosting sites.



Hopefully, its not too late. I've been putting a lot of work into the site recently, including redesigning its look. The new skin is much more lightweight, which should be great for my users. Pages hosted on BluWiki will now take up the entire page, since I took out the menus on the top and the left.

My next goal is to support BluWiki sub-domains and allow users to create an entire wiki - instead of just pages on the main wiki.

In my previous post, I was complaining about how my MacBook seemed so slooow. Well 2GB of Ram has definitely helped. In intel-native applications, the system is much faster than my powerbook. However the MS Office suite is still annoyingly slow. Thankfully, now when I'm running a non-native app, at least it doesn't slow down the rest of the computer.

However, based on my experience - if you're doing a lot of work in Word / Excel / Powerpoint - stick with a PowerBook, at least until the new office suite comes out.

Below is my ram usage when multitasking:


I haven't yet been able to use the full 2GB - the system almost allways has 512MB or more free. This is good, since it means there aren't any "page outs" - the system doesn't have to wait to load memory from the hard drive.

It also means the system would probably improve significantly with just a 1GB upgrade, since my MacBook doens't often make much use of the second GB, even though its available.

So I just dropped $1,500 on a MacBook, less than a year after I bought a PowerBook. Based on all the benchmarks - I expected the MacBook to be considerably faster than the machine it was replacing. This is good, since I felt the Powerbook struggled when I attached it to Apple's 27" screen.

Well, so far I've been seriously disappointed. I usually multitask, and when I have several applications open, the MacBook doesn't seem any faster than my PowerBook. Granted, the MacBook only has 512MB of Ram (verses the PowerBook's 1.25 GB) - but I would still think the Core Duo would make it feel faster.

The Macbook seems fast enough when I just have 1 application running. However, when I'm running 3-5 apps (like iPhoto, iTunes, Mail.app, iChat, and Safari), the Macbook is painfully slow. It can take 5-20 seconds for the Mac to respond to mouse clicks.

However, its REALLY bad with non-universal apps. It seems these apps (which haven't been redesigned for the intel processor) slow the entire system down. The entire system can often take 30 secs - 2 minutes to respond.

Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Microsoft's Remote Desktop Client are some of the applications that cause the problem. As I'm writing this, I'm trying to open these apps to test them, and they won't even start! UGH! I never thought I would be going back to my PB to edit a freggin' word document.

I'll let you know what happens when I upgrade the RAM to 2GB, but I suspect it won't be much...

Pretty cool huh?

In my previous post I already told you that the Longwood University Administration drove me crazy.

I've decided to pay their $35.15. But I'm not going to let them steal $160 from my roommate and me, without saying anything. I've already written the president and several other administrators @ Longwood - but they don't seem to care.

Since I can't really escalate the issue to anyone else, or complain to the FTC / BBB (Longwood isn't a company), I'm doing the only other thing I really can - starting a website. It's online at www.Longwood-University-Sucks.org. On the site I chronicle my frustrations with Longwood, and encourage others to do the same.

From what I can tell, starting this website is the only way to get the Longwood administration to listen to its students.

It looks like it's getting some use. Right now there are about 25 "horror stories" - descriptions of horrible experiences Longwood University students have suffered through.

I think I'm going to take the $160 Longwood took from us, and put it towards online advertising for the site. Hopefully this will get the administration's attention.

Who knows, maybe we'll even see some positive change?

So I'm kind of ashamed to be posting this - but I'm really bothered by Longwood University's administration. Their the essence of a bloated, bureaucratic organization that really doesn't care about its client - the student body. They accomplish this through a myriad of rules and regulations which they thoughtlessly enforce. This creates tremendous amounts of collateral damage for students.

For example, it's almost impossible to learn something new or excel above & beyond their peers (it's usually expressly prohibited):

• 
  
• I couldn't explore wireless (WIFI) technologies, because wireless networks are expressly prohibited
• 
  
• I couldn't use antennas for satellite or radio signals, because antennas are prohibited
• 
  
• I couldn't build a internet server, because only one device can be connected to Longwood's network at a time. The reprimand you for just having networking equipment in your room - even if you're not using it.
• 
  
• Before I came to Longwood, I supported myself with my internet businesses (OdioWorks, LLC). I couldn't run it @ Longwood, because running a business out of your dorm room is prohibited. Instead, they recommended I shut it down and work for minimum wage at Longwood (let's see - $20,000 in tuition, living expenses, & taxes - that's about 74+ hrs / week)
• 
  
• And to really add insult to injury, they won't let you have a car until Sophomore year and won't let you move off campus until your Junior or Senior year (meaning you're stuck living in their world for the majority of your college career).
• 
  

These are just some examples of the collateral damage caused by the thoughtless enforcement of Longwood's regulations. I learned about each of those rules the hard way. I tried to do each, not knowing I couldn't, and was severely reprimanded by the University each time.

But what really put me over the edge was Longwood charging my roommate and me $160 in illegitimate fees when we moved out of our dorm room. They took my damage deposit, but still wanted $35.15 more. After writing about 6 letters to the Longwood Administration, they refused to drop the charges. They even threatened to report me to the credit bureau if I didn't stop disputing the charge and pay up! What?! Report me for $35.15?!?!?!

I'm pretty sure that's bad business - most companies would NEVER get away with that. In business, when the customer writes to the president complaining about a balance of $35.15, you refund it - no questions asked. It's a lot cheaper than dealing with an angry customer. Or in Longwood's case, an angry student.