Cue: The 10 hour scramble to launch two days early
tech.blog.cueup.com
tech.blog.cueup.com
I think that there's this misconception in the startup world that the shipping of a stable product and its actual introduction in the market are efforts that are in parallel, in real time. In actuality, it makes a lot more sense to implement a lag of roughly one week between finishing a stable product and putting it out to the public. Many shops refer to this as "staging" or "vetting a release candidate". This doesn't seem like something that the folks at Cue considered before diving head-first into a hurried hackathon.
The last thing a responsible organization should do is punish the people responsible for making a stable and useful product by making them rush the last 10% of their efforts. I don't doubt that this kind of hurried time to market will result in another all-nighter down the road. I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that after the 20th time hearing "Y Sin Embargo", the team was fatigued, annoyed, and ready to take shortcuts. So there, we have technical debt that could have been avoided if everyone just agreed to stick to their guns with the original release date. But most likely, the best solution would have been a soft launch preceding the any publication by at least a couple of days.
Let's be honest: if the immediate traffic from a little pre-arranged press is what makes or breaks your product, you're doing it wrong. As an engineer, if I see you have to put your entire organization into crisis mode over something like this, then I'm going to start taking recruiter calls more seriously.
- You have a team that has been working incredibly hard pursuing a dream: that they can build a product, from scratch, that is truly useful to millions and millions of people. This is not an EA requiring engineers to pull insane hours -- this is a labor of love and everyone has considerable equity.
- It's a small team and that means each person has a lot of responsibility. Don't like ever having to pull an all-nighter? Never want to work a minute past 5? That's OK, but it means you have no real responsibility, and you will be compensated accordingly. Others choose more responsibility, and they man up when the shit occasionally hits the fan.
- Have you ever coordinated a massive press push with the top print publications? Then you have no business telling them how it should be done. It's extremely difficult, it requires dates locked down months ahead of time, and with that kind of advanced commitment, planning 100% accurately is beyond difficult.
- After this ordeal, the team posts an honest story from the trenches. Go to any successful startup and you will hear many war stories like this. Nothing is ever perfectly planned, unexpected shit happens. It's frankly awesome that they shared it and gave some insight into what goes on behind the scenes that you don't normally hear about.
- What is your reaction? You shit all over them. Tell them that they're horrible people and that they did it all wrong. Exclaim that you could have done it all right and they have no idea what assholes they are.
I have no idea what drives this extreme negativity on HN, but it's gotten completely out of hand.
I'm glad it worked out for the folks at Cue, but I think they could have avoided a lot of headaches with some better planning. I'm not suggesting some radical technique I just made up; I'm pointing out that there exist practices that would have prevented a needless scramble.
The circumstances of this story should not serve as an example to other startups, but rather a cautionary tale of what can happen to a shop without the proper release cycle and adequate project management in place. My tone may have been a little rough, sure. I probably wouldn't have even commented if the post had addressed what went wrong and what they learned from it.
I guess heroic last-minute efforts amount to a more entertaining story than adequate planning, but I think we can all agree on which method is a more reliable way to run a successful software shop.
Occam's razor says it's just the standard symptom of decline-- i.e. the same thing that afflicts Youtube comments, just on a much smaller scale.
No, that means you work for mature people who have planning and organizational skills. Having to come in at 3am is not a sign of responsibility, it's a sign of immaturity and failure of management.
Yes, it happens. No, you shouldn't laud it. If they were building bridges, people would be dying - but this isn't bridge building, so it's somehow more okay?
A startup is jumping off a cliff and figuring out how to build a plane on your way down.
Suicide, then?
This was a team decision. There was no mandate from on high - we're not abused. It was time to ship, so we made it happen.
Furthermore it's worth pointing out when trying to execute a coordinated media push (especially with traditional media), you have no choice but to give a lead time and put an embargo in place. This is standard practice when dealing with publications.
9 times out of 10 it goes off without a hitch. We were the 10%, so to speak.
It's not that you criticize or critique other people's work, it's that you're consistently a dick about it.
Nearly all your comments are sarcastic and mean-spirited. IMO you're a liability to the Hacker News community.
One of the great things about hacker news is that we can have an open dialogue with the founders of startups. If you're acting like a jerk, they'll stop being so open.
If people like you keep acting like jerks, you're destroying the spirit of HN and the dialogue this community depends upon.
In which thread did I offend you and why can't you just reply there using your real HN-account?
I'm afraid your cry for "open dialogue" doesn't work so well when you plant it in a seemingly random thread using a throw-away account...
2.) Ahhhhh where did you offend me? Here for one.
This isn't random. I think it's mean spirited and insensitive that the Greplin/Cue founders and team members are here. Writing under their own names, their classmate from their YC batch is here writing under their own names and after what seems to be a brutal push with no sleep and lots of stress, all you do is swoop in with "bad management" snark and then swoop out.
Asides from that....
There is this comment:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126285
and this one:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4126422
and this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4106497
and this gem:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4068214
notice a pattern?
your nastiness and at best insensitivity and at worst malicious disregard of others is only matched by your arrogance and superiority.
and of course your oh so witty response to Leo Kim of Foursquare, when he rightly called you out on making tests to make mongo fail .... I reached the same conclusion he did.
Troll.
Let's disregard for a minute, your obvious gaping technical knowledge and your sheer lack of Silicon Valley business acumen. Let's say you managed you convince PG that you aren't a prick and somehow you get into YC. In your weekly meet ups would you ever say any of the above comments to peoples' faces?
HN is suppose to an extension of YC, a place where hackers can come together, take about things of interests, their own projects, start ups, etc. Your entire comment history is subversive to that and completely against the guidelines:
"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." "
Hacker news would be better off without you, you and people like you are bringing a cynical, negative, schadenfreude cloud over what is suppose to a culture centered around idealism, optimism and wanting to change the world- not insulting those that do.
What makes you think this isn't my "real" HN account?
The fact that it will be abandoned shortly after you realize the feebleness of your little vendetta. Yes, I can predict the future! ;)
would you ever say any of the above comments to peoples' faces?
Yes, actually I do. As you can see I even respond to throw-away accounts, I'm just straight-edge like that.
Other than that I'm sorry to break your heart yet again, but I'll probably continue to stick to the voting system for feedback rather than anonymous rants.
You're right, moe probably hasn't shipped anything. I haven't either.
But that doesn't mean that it's okay for you guys to treat engineers like this. Because one of them might just realize how undervalued and mistreated they are, and think about starting their own comapany...
Frankly I'm disappointed that so many folks on hacker news think working long hours on a product is abusive. Newsflash--journalist work long hours to beat deadlines, musicians spend days in the studio recording their music, politicians and their aides spend long hours on the campaign trail, writers write well into the night. If you want to change the world, you going to have to bust your ass doing it.
And p.s. Moe has continually behaved like an ass on this forum, making snide insulting comments to countless people. He's the last person anyone should be white knighting. He's served an entire buffet of "ad hominem" and superiority. It's time he got called out for his dickish ways.
No one should ever be happy about working for free. Being a good team player means sometimes doing it anyways, but the situation that caused it should be rectified first.
Why does "crunching" have to mean working for free? I didn't see anything about that in the article.
I don't know if I agree with that statement.
Which problem does it solve? Maybe I'm not such a busy person. Or maybe the problem is that I don't care too much what is happening outside my email account.
Case in point: this last Wednesday, I had a going away dinner for a friend. This was put on my GCal. This came via a Facebook message. Without me doing anything, it put 2+2 together. When I opened Cue that morning, there was the event, with a link to the message.
When I fly in August, it knows enough to put all my travel info (passes, emails, events, etc) together in the same way.
Search is still there, and it still rocks. The added AI on top of that makes this killer - I would have used Greplin to surface that data, but Cue was smart enough to do it for me. It's solving a roughly analogous problem, but doing it in a much smarter, faster way.
Ultimately, we'd like to make a simple open API for various types of events. How cool would it be if (for example) airline companies attached a machine-readable version of your itinerary to the confirmation emails, the same way they send out HTML and text versions? Then you could integrate that with any tools you like. It would be like the "semantic web", except without all the hand-waving and overly-verbose XML stuff. This would be easy to do -- the budget would be peanuts to them -- but in order to get something like that happening, we need to convince those companies that there's a demand for it, that someone would actually use that machine-readable information if they provide it. Our automated email scraping is an attempt to break the chicken-and-egg dilemma, and hasten the spread of open machine-readable data for things that are currently just auto-generated text, by providing a compelling use for it.
It's really not -- it's just a calendar UI. And at the end of the day, it's about wether you like their UI vs iCal or whatever.
I don't see the calendar entries from my iPhone's calendar - are they supposed to appear? How can I get them?
Couldn't help but notice your logo is sublimely similar to these guys - http://www.cue.com/
Probably wanted their domain name too :) Ah, well. Have you had any problems there? I'm always curious about name clashes and how they're dealt with.
Pls add a big, bold link to cueup.com from your blog to make it easier for readers to check out your product.
The fact you did all that days ahead of schedule is amazing.
Really excited about Cue! Can't wait for the Android version =)
Don't mind me though: I'm always happy when a team changes to a product that is more worth their time, even when I liked the former product.
The product that was previously called Greplin is a subset of Cue. The search functionality is not going away. We have no plans to get rid of it. It isn't an edge case, or legacy functionality - it's a core piece of Cue, and it is going to stay that way.
Is there a plan to support it?
Thanks!
When the iCal support ships, I expect you can use that to keep us sync'd even before we have native exchange support. An exchange endpoint is how google sync keeps my phone up to date with ical events, iirc.
I'm the Kevin Clark from Powerset (and subsequently Bing).