It all started with Jeff’s tweet from a week and a half ago:

It got me thinking: what, then, does motivate us? My initial reaction was to disagree: nothing is a bigger de-motivator than a project schedule that’s unrealistically short. As soon as I got over my sense of smug satisfaction from having a decent counter-argument, though, I understood what I believe to be Jeff’s real point. I think it comes across better as the converse:

Never miss an opportunity to make something happen quickly and successfully — it will leave you feeling motivated like nothing else can.

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Two weeks ago some of the Increo team took a small field trip to Stanford’s Startup 101 career fair.  I’ve already shared a bit about what impresses me and this time I figured I’d share some of the fun.  I brought a camera  and snapped a few pictures of the team “hard at work”.  Enjoy!

Since Backboard first launched red pen annotation, I’ve been amazed by all the creative ways to leave feedback.  Each member of the Backboard team expresses themselves differently: circles, underlines, big cross-outs, arrows; you name it, we’ve seen it.

Like Carlos, a new Backboard user that posted on our feedback Backboard last week, sometimes you need a little more structure to your drawing.  If you’re not into free form annotation, you can hold down Shift while you’re drawing to create a straight line or the Option (Mac)/Alt (Windows) key for an oval.  The perfectionists out there can use both for a perfect circle.

Lately, the Backboard team has taken annotation to the next level (whether it’s a level up for its creativity or a level down for its ridiculousness is up to you to decide).  After feedback is closed on team Backboards, small red-pen animals, vehicles and other doodles often show up.  Here’s a sample for your enjoyment:

And my personal favorite, TROGDOR the BURNiNATOR burninating the countryside.  On the original Backboard, this is an animation.  Mouse over the first part of the feedback and see TROGDOR brighten.  Mouse over the second part, and see his burninating.

We’d like to share the fun with the Backboard community.  Link me to the Backboard featuring your best feedback art (in the comments) by Wednesday, February 11.  I’ll set the best annotation artist up with a complimentary month of a premium Backboard account.

Almost everyone has experienced that point where you’ve worked for so long and have been thinking so hard that your brain is about to turn to mush. You just can’t possibly think any longer and you’re beginning to stress out. Once you reach that point you become ineffective at what you’re doing. Everything starts to take significantly longer. Maybe you start to watch the clock or you zone in and out of daydreams. It becomes clear that in order to finish the task you started, you need to take a break first.

Wii

In order to facilitate break-taking here at the office, I brought in my Nintendo Wii today.  Henry had an extra TV that he contributed and we plan on hooking it in a few minutes.  Part of the reason for the Wii’s success so far with non-hardcore gamers has been due to the many short and simple party games that are available.  This is also the reason why I think it makes for a great office system to facilitate break-taking.  Many experts recommend taking shorter breaks throughout the day.  Can’t think?  How about a quick race in Mario Kart?  It may seem counter-intuitive but I’m hopeful that having a release like the Wii will help keep our minds clear and make us more productive than before.

Every once in awhile during a normal conversation around the office someone says something so entertaining that it must be recorded. Enter the Official Increo Quote Board — a small whiteboard (which recently became two small whiteboards) that is dedicated to housing the “brilliant” things that we all say during the course of the day. These quotes range from nonsensical to absurd, but it is always clear when one belongs on the board. There will be brief pause after someone says something particularly noteworthy and then someone will blurt out: “That belongs on the board.” Below I’ve included a few of them for your enjoyment.

“We can do pain-in-the-***. We just can’t do impossible.”

“We now have six out of two approvals.”

“My first thought is, someone’s going to jack this yurt.”

“This is because I almost murdered Thelma.” (Thelma, of course, is one of our servers)

“I’m not a human diff, and not only am I sure of that, I’m quite pleased.”

Hopefully this gives you a small idea of some of the fun we have around the office while building great software. Keep an eye out for more office antics in the future!

A few weeks ago Jim wrote about “How to make yourself look good” as a startup presenting at a career fair. I’d like to take the opposite approach and share how a fairgoer can impress me.

Things that impress

1) Passion and excitement

It’s easy to sense excitement in your voice. Tell me about what drives you and what gets you motivated. Take a look at our product during the demo and give some feedback. If you think it’s cool (which it is), say that.

2) Honesty

Don’t tailor your history or experience based on the technology you see in a demo. I’d rather hear about what excites you (#1) and what you have experience doing. If you’ve never worked in the specific technology we’re using, say that; it certainly won’t disqualify you. Dancing around the issue and trying to make it seem like you know more than you do is not worth it as it won’t help your chances.

3) Spend some time chatting, don’t just drop a resume

Nothing shows interest like spending time since everyone is busy. Doing a quick drop of a resume doesn’t leave a favorable impression. Ask some good questions, show some interest and then leave a resume (and make sure to email one in later as well). Now, you shouldn’t take up too much time, but you also shouldn’t take up too little.

Things that don’t impress

1) Obvious answers to questions

“What type of job are you looking for?  One at a startup…” Uh, duh!  You’re at a startup career fair, don’t tell me obvious things. Go back to #1 up above, tell me about your passions.

2) Fancy Clothes

Everyone always says that dressing up shows that you’re interested. I’m more worried about what you say than how you look.  Nice clothes feel stiff and in my eyes, make it seem like you’re trying to distract me with your fanciness. Don’t take this to mean you should wear rags, but I think a shirt and tie are pushing it at a startup fair.

3) Interrupting other people to get your question in

Interrupting people is generally a bad idea (unless of course the sky is actually falling), however, with the time pressure of running around to speak with multiple companies it can be tempting to get your one quick question in. Don’t. Getting that question in will probably cost you the job and just mean that your question was not time well spent.

Monday I was invited to participate on a career panel for Stanford’s Technology Entrepreneurship course.  The panel was primarily Q&A, and just like most other groups of speakers, we were asked “What are three things you wish you would have known as a junior or senior in college?”

The question is cliché, but for good reason.  I’ve learned a lot from such questions, and I thought I’d relay my answer here.

The most valuable tools you have are your status as a student (or other newbie) and your willingness to buy coffee.

While the importance of networking is almost always stressed as a path to success, many people find themselves too busy to set up coffee with an interesting TA or too intimidated to approach a successful professor or venture investor.

Meeting people to become your mentors, investors, and inspiration is incredibly important.  Meet people and begin to form relationships before you need it.  We’ve all seen the guy that walks up to an investor, says hi, and launches into his elevator pitch without any trust or context in the relationship.  Don’t let that be you.  Form meaningful, genuine relationships now and avoid desperate business card exchanges later.

Too busy?  Almost anyone can find enough to do to be “busy”.  Always give up a few questions on a problem set or a perfectly clean apartment for the chance to meet someone new and interesting.

Take the time now; a $3 coffee just might turn out to be your best investment.

Watch next week for “What I wish I would have known… (2 of 3)

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:

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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.