Starting your own company right out of college is not for everyone. It requires the willingness to gain experience in many different areas of business (marketing, law, finance, product development, and others), a supreme passion for what you are building, the resolve to keep on trying in the face of monstrous challenges, and the acceptance of the very real possibility that your endeavor will fail. On the flip side, it provides a unique learning experience, the opportunity to work with a tight-knit team of rock stars, and the potential to change the world.

If you’re fortunate enough to still be a student, here are 5 reasons why you should strongly consider jumping right in:

Read the rest of this entry »

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:

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.

As you’re perusing Increo on Ideas, you might notice references to the OIT (Official Increo Tablecloth), our recent order of OIFs (Official Increo Fleeces) or a mention of the OIVP (Official Increo Vacation Policy).  Walking through the office you’ll see the OIPS, the OIS, and the OIP (Official Increo Paper Shredder, Official Increo Scissors, and Official Increo Projector, respectively).

Adding OI to everything is fun, silly and pokes at the dynamism of a startup.  If being “Official” is nothing more than dubbing it so, we have tremendous flexibility in the way we do things.  Adopting new tools, frameworks and processes, latching onto those that work, and discarding those that don’t has allowed us to find the optimal arrangement.

With that, I’ll pop the tab on an OISD (Official Increo Soft Drink) and return to the OITDL (Official Increo To-Do List).

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

The scene: it’s 8 am on a Thursday morning in a second-floor conference room in a building that’s barely been finished. China Basin, San Francisco, across the street from the ballpark. You, surprisingly awake yet bleary-eyed at the same time, are really just longing for that cup of Philz Coffee you didn’t have time to stop for on the way in. Two venture capitalists have acceded to showing up to talk to a bunch of starry-eyed entrepreneurs in the midst of the meltdown on Wall Street, perhaps to calm some nerves.

Twenty or so people fill the room. You go around the room to do introductions and see the contrasts among the assembled group. Some are doing hardware, some software. Some have funding already, some don’t. Those who don’t appear to be a bit more desperate than the others, surprise surprise.

Some have come from a couple blocks away in the startup hotbed known as South Park. Some have come from the South Bay, like yourself. Some have come from as far away as the other side of the country or around the world. Everybody has one thing in common, though: they love creating amazing new technology.

The message is clear: yes, investors are skittish about putting money in to companies right now, but no, they haven’t run out of funds to invest. The mood is, as our heroes on Wall Street might say, “cautiously optimistic”. Now is the time to innovate! Stop wasting capital and get with the amazingness!

The hour goes on, filled with more venture capital jargon than you can shake a stick at, and you can tell that maybe half the room has glazed over. The sense you get is that what really matters is having an incredible concept and an incredible team to bring that concept to fruition.

This is, of course, what we love for here in Silicon Valley: the chance to meet people who have really great ideas in their heads. People who have a chance to act on their ideas in a place where they can really effect something great. And honestly, nobody in the room is entirely worried, because great ideas live on, regardless of the current funding climate.

Eventually, you walk out of the room an hour and a half later, feeling inspired by the amount of excitement all around you, having made a few connections, ready for that cup of coffee a block over at Philz followed by the short one-hour trip back down to Mountain View.

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.

Increo growing, and recruiting great new team members to come join us.  We’re looking specifically for some great PHP software engineers and someone to coordinate sales and marketing and take on some business development.

Every time I find a bug in our development version of Backboard a little parade goes on in my head.  Or I’m at the circus and I’ve just knocked over an impossible milk bottle pyramid.  I’ve found a flaw that one of our users won’t have to.  It feels great.

As the Business Analyst intern here at Increo, it’s been a wild ride.  I’ve marketed and promoted, I’ve made a screencast video for the Backboard homepage, I’ve represented the company at a marketing forum, and I’ve written about Backboard in blurbs and pieces like this.  That’s all been a blast—but most new and maybe most rewarding has been helping develop Backboard through bug testing.  I’ve joined my co-workers in the eternal struggle to root out errors by hitting the different browsers (cough…IE) with all I’ve got.  And like a fine wine, my appreciation for the process has matured as I’ve realized just how much of a team we really are.  None of us are done until everyone has completed their assigned tasks—and tasks are passed around because of the varying experience and expertise of our team.  All the while I sit, wide-eyed, and hope to feed the Backboard team more and more bugs to seek and destroy.

Beyond finding bugs, I get to partake in our discussions about what we want for the site and for our users.  And it’s cool to think that my suggestions and opinions might touch the lives of people around the world.  Before I start dreaming big though, I should get back to the grind because we have a release to put out.  And I’ll promise this: It’ll be a great one.