In Increo’s early days, we didn’t need a vacation policy.  We left when we needed to, came back as soon as we could, and worked while we were gone.

As the team began growing and changing, people started asking me if they could take Friday off or if a working week at home was acceptable.  Eventually came a call for a vacation policy so there were clear guidelines for time away from the office.  We debated — 2 weeks, 3 weeks, working holidays, etc.  Realizing we were splitting hairs, we went back to the most important thing for Increo–that we have an energetic environment and that people make decisions to work when they are most productive and take some time off when they need a recharge.

With that in mind, we made the decision to have the Official Increo Vacation Policy be to use your best judgment.  In other words, there is no “policy” per se.  Let the team know in advance, get your stuff done, and take the time you need to ensure you can contribute daily to Increo’s sense of energy and excitement.  Turns out, given two weeks of vacation time, most people take two weeks.  Given unlimited vacation time, we’ll almost always take just the time we need.

We’re certainly not the first to have no vacation policy–companies before us have tried; some failed, some succeeded.  But for right now, it works for us, makes Increo an exciting place to work and demonstrates an invaluable trust in the team.

The elevator pitch is something Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have come to know and love: your entire mission, your entire raison d’être all wrapped up in 150 words that can be delivered in under a minute. Venture capitalists and people like Michael Arrington and Om Malik can’t get through an hour without hearing one, and those looking for funding or press seemingly can’t pass up the opportunity to give one.

Coming from a world of strictly making software and leaving the pitch to an already-built community of tens of millions of users, it took a while to adjust to the idea of having to always explain what the product is when you start talking about it. Whether you’re at a roundtable with VCs, at a job fair, or just talking to somebody socially, it’s always useful to have that quick pitch crystallized in your head.

In addition to the elevator pitch, you also need its slightly more difficult cousin, the bar pitch. It’s similar in nature, except given the noisy environment of a bar, you have to refine it even further to include only short, clear words that will still make sense when the other party misses half of what you say. You have to phrase it to intrigue people who overhear you instead of focusing on a single listener. You have the opportunity to add wild gesticulations and other physical means of making yourself memorable when those would come across as completely inappropriate in an office setting.

For example, the following elevator pitch that I’ve used recently:

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A few days ago, we took a break from developing our own products and participated in SocialText’s Widget Wednesday, a “distributed hackathon for widgets and mashups.” All this means is that SocialText invited companies to participate in a day of coding micro-applications that would make use of their newly released OpenSocial Widget API. SocialText Widgets are simple tools that sit on your SocialText Dashboard, a personalized homepage for your corporate life, and are analagous to Google Gadgets which sit on your iGoogle homepage — in fact, they leverage Google’s gadgets.* API.

The hackathon was “distributed” in that all the participating teams stayed at their respective company locations and communication was done via an IRC chatroom and dedicated conference calls. For goodwill, SocialText organized it as a competition in which the winning team would win a gift certificate toward kiva.org.

After the opening conference call shenanigans, we dove right into coding. Now, I love what I’m currently working on for Backboard, but getting to work on a miniature side-project was very refreshing. I got to play with technologies I hadn’t yet explored and learned how to make and deploy widgets. One of the tricky things about creating a widget is that it doesn’t sit on your site, so we had to do some refining of our own API in order to format and grab the data we wanted to display. After that, the rest was fun and easy: it turns out that making a widget is as simple as wrapping a little HTML and JavaScript in XML file.

At 4:30 pm (the “deadline” to turn in our projects) we dialed back into the conference call to join the show and tell session and presented our three completed Widgets. “My Backboards” is simply a listing of your backboards with recent activity. “Get Feedback” allows you to upload a document, set permissions, and create a backboard all within the widget. “LOLPirates,” Jim’s masterpiece, cycles through incredibly cute pictures of cats dressed up as pirates. Like Fluffy-beard here.

For young ambitious companies, it’s often hard to be the treated as the underdog, but at Increo we draw confidence from the supportive startup community and believe in giving back in any way we can. Our participation in Widget Wednesday was just one example of our philosophy — we fostered relationships with other startups and simultaneously strengthened Backboard and SocialText Dashboard.

Other first-time entrepreneurs often come to me and tell me they have this great idea that “nobody has ever done before,” a great new approach, a new way of thinking about something.

Great.  That is awesome, it really is.  But it’s not enough, and even people who should know better often forget.

Determining whether a company is investment-worthy (for you and your time, or for someone else and their money) is certainly a complex process, a balanced combination of team, idea, market, and technology.  But you can make it easier–for both you and your investors–even in this time of economic uncertainty.

Before you go out to raise money, find concrete, indisputable evidence that your company will succeed, and succeed ahead of the curve.

Bad ideas with evidence of success will probably be able to raise a round or two, but the “next big thing” without evidence of success will look just like everybody else’s “next big thing.”  With some concrete evidence, your concept stands out from the crowd as an opportunity rather than an annoyance.

It’s against our nature as entrepreneurs.  Our job is to be stubbornly optimistic about our concepts and ideas and to push toward their adoption with everything we have.  Gathering evidence of something we know will succeed seems like an inefficient use of time, or it seems impossible until we have everything built.

What is evidence?  I think of evidence as real users, real customers, or signed deals.  With a solid (and growing) pool of users, your consumer startup looks like a compelling investment opportunity over someone else’s idea.  A couple of deals are the best proof of concept that an enterprise play will work.

Of course, this isn’t always possible.  In a pinch, evidence can be anything that can reasonably stand in for users, customers or deals.  Beta customers are a good example, as are customers on something similar you built (maybe attract people to a very small part of your product that you can launch early).  Live software helps, and so does a proven advisor or team member.  The further away you are from real customers, the harder the sell, but reasonable evidence helps you stand out from the noise.

Combine this evidence with a technology, a market, and an idea that hasn’t been over-pitched (ask a lot of people) and is consistent with someone’s view of the future (again, ask a lot of people), and you’ll position yourself most optimally.

I started at Increo last Monday the 3^rd. I’ve taken over the resident newbie position from Henry and have had many questions over the past week. The thing that has struck me the most in this short time is the ability to make decisions and move quickly.

Prior to joining Increo I was working at a large company with an established product. One of the things about having an established product is that you also have established processes and everyone has their established ways of doing things. People would say that you were ‘ahead of the curve’ if you could get to the point where you could check out the code and build it before the end of the first week. These processes and tools come in handy when you want to maintain the quality of a large codebase or facilitate interactions with other teams, however, they also can slow the development process with their overhead.

Increo, being a small company, avoids most of the overhead that one experiences in a large company. It also has the important side effect of allowing new people to come up to speed quickly since there are not a countless number of ‘standard’ tools to learn. I was able to check in more code for Backboard in my first week here at Increo than I was in the first month at my previous employer.

Please don’t mistake this as a blanket bashing of having established processes and tools since it is important to standardize the way design decisions and code changes get made to keep large projects running smoothly. I’m just saying that upon joining Increo, I was struck by the ability to move quickly by not using a strict process. Being small provides the ability to be flexible, adapt and get stuff done.

We know you’ll all be woefully disappointed to hear this, but the simple truth is that Increo does not have HermanMiller Embody chairs for its employees.

Then again, we’re also not the types to spend fourteen hours straight sitting down; there’s enough action in the office that we’ll be moving around enough to stay healthy.

In fact, while having the world’s most comfortable chair would certainly be enjoyable, we took a different tack: what was the best, most ergonomic setup we could create for six employees for less than the cost of one Embody chair?

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This weekend I sat down and tackled the RAM problem: the amount of memory it takes the server to generate a single page of a website.

For Backboard, we have our server set up to allocate just 16 MB of RAM to PHP for the execution of each request. This allows us maximize the number of Apache processes we can run on a single server and thus maximize the number of users we support. To do this, though, means that the site has to be pretty light on its memory requirements.

Backboard, as a CakePHP application, has a theoretical minimum requirement for RAM: namely, the amount needed to execute a base installation of Cake. In our testing, this falls between 4 and 6 MB. The goal, of course, is to minimize anything above and beyond this.

Here are some concrete steps you can take to limit the RAM needs of your site:

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Last Tuesday, Increo was excited to be able to take part in the ROCKSTAR Startup Fair hosted by DLA Piper and Social Walla. A fun experience, to be sure, and useful to boot, but we took away some very intriguing insights.

Our “booth” was a desk in a small room; there were perhaps a dozen other companies with other desks, all ringing the perimeter of the room.

Lesson #1

Covering your table makes you look good.

When you have no idea what kind of situation you’ll be in, this is a variable you can control. Distracting wood grain? Cheap plastic? No place to stow your stuff? A cheap table cover takes care of all of those problems. The Official Increo Tablecloth isn’t even expensive; it’s just a couple yards of inexpensive suit fabric.

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Over the coming weeks and months, we hope to provide an occasional window into the more technical side of Increo’s products and share some of the more interesting challenges we’ve faced and problems we’ve solved with the greater web developer community.

The topic this week is Flash 10, but please let us know if there is another technical aspect of Backboard that intrigues you and you want to know more about!

Now, to the story:

Starting a few weeks ago, we began hearing some intermittent reports from users that they could no longer create a Backboard by uploading a file. They said they kept clicking the “Select File” button and nothing happened. 

We were understandably disturbed, as the ability to create Backboards is rather critical to the site… but despite numerous attempts, we were unable to reproduce the problem. We were busily working on brand new Backboard functionality, and the reports were infrequent enough that we chalked it up to a potential incompatibility with another browser plugin. Or maybe they just had Flashblock installed and didn’t realize it? Yep, that had to be the problem.

Flash matters because we use the excellent open-source SWFUpload package to handle document uploads on Backboard. This allows us to not only customize the appearance of the upload buttons themselves, but also display informative progress bars as the file is transferred. Being a tight-knit combination of Flash and JavaScript, SWFUpload takes a bit of work to configure and integrate, but the results are well worth it.

A week ago, we located a computer that exhibited the problem, and it was immediately clear that it was an issue we could no longer ignore: the other Flash that we use on the site worked fine, but the Select File button did nothing when clicked.

After a quick check on the SWFUpload forums for news of recent incompatibilities, the cause was immediately apparent. Unfortunately, the solution was anything but…

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So I’ve officially completed my first week as a Software Engineer at Increo and it has been action-packed! After filling out all the boring paper work and setting up my desk and accounts and all that jazz, I was able to jump right into working on Backboard. The first few days I was the resident newbie, asking questions every 15 minutes about this data structure or that control flow. However, by the beginning of this week I was making many fixits and squishing a few ugly bugs. There is definitely a lot of code and I still have a lot of coming up to speed to do, but when I left the office today, I felt I had made some solid progress.

The office culture is a good mix of intense and casual. We’re always pushing ourselves to develop better software and create a productive, enjoyable experience for our users: sometimes it’s through hardcore coding sessions, other times it’s by mocking up user interfaces on the whiteboards. But we’re always able to squeeze in some fun, such as 2-minute dance parties or writing ridiculous phrases on the Increo quote board.

One of the very cool things about working here is that we love using the products we develop. For example, several Backboards a day will be shared with the team to get feedback on virtually anything we’re working on at the moment – from webpage graphics to business card designs to marketing handouts (although I’ll occasionally use the red mark-up pen to draw silly pictures as feedback).

Ultimately, what I value most at Increo is being a part of a close-knit team that works on challenging problems, brainstorms and discusses innovative ideas, and makes important decisions within a fast-paced Silicon Valley startup.