orianmarx

I'm with you on this. I'm looking for implementation, which is why I'm writing about ideas. Nobody can adopt something that doesn't exist.

It is a large effort, which is precisely why the post is relatively vague :)

Yup, I'm not trying to usurp this work. I'm trying to support it and also learn more about it. Thanks for the links!

I agree that this is very much an issue of identity, something I wrote about in my previous post: http://www.orianmarx.com/2012/07/24/a-better-social-web/

I haven't clarified this yet, but what I'm really advocating is a combination of protocol and hosting, which when put together is, in my mind, something like a distributed virtual OS for startups to build social services upon. OS is probably not the right term, but I think it conveys the scope better to non-developer than "protocol" does. I'm not trying to confuse - I'm trying to think of something better.

Obviously I can't give an unbiased representation of all the facts... so, I did my best to convey what I felt was behind what went down. I appreciate that you see the nuance in this. What I can say is that we spent a lot of time talking about all our concerns, on many different occasions. So on the one hand, this is part of why I was a little surprised by what happened in the end, and on the other, it's why I feel there probably wasn't much to be done to save the company at that point.

Heh, I haven't quite settled that yet. It will be on the blog eventually :)

Yup. How was the summer?

Thanks for the feedback. I quoted you a bunch in a follow-up post.

Will do :-)

But YC also requires you to be in the same location as the other startups and to attend two dinners each week, plus it encourages visiting the YC partners during "office hours".

A collaborative, relevance-aware feed reader. I'll save more detail for the future :-)

So one question in light of this... if you have unequal ownership do you have unequal rights in decision making?

The first one left with no ill will. We are still friends. It's the rest of us that left in disgust :-)

Thanks to everyone for their feedback. I'm a bit overwhelmed by the response. I've done a follow-up post to more concretely respond to some of the main threads here.

http://www.orianmarx.com/2008/10/16/reflections-of-a-y-combi...

No, the conflict points that are being discussed here a lot were not sufficiently important to stake the startup on at the time when we were faced with having to walk away. The real point was that by the time we went to Boston to meet with PG and get some advice, my partner had decided he could no longer trust me or my judgment and wanted to leave, and I felt the same way about him. While I wish that could have been avoided, I don't think anything that could have been done at that point would have changed the ultimate outcome for this team.

After spending a few months thinking "okay, so how did it get to that point, and I didn't even realize it" I wrote my reflections. I still think the startup has a good chance of success, but not with the dynamics that were at play then.

It's very interesting reading through your blog. I'm surprised I hadn't come across it before, and I'm glad you put it out there.

Well, if it's doing some good for the greater community then I must be doing some good for myself. There are going to be a lot of people that disagree with what I'm saying in my posts and probably would want to steer clear of me. Then again hopefully there will be a few interesting people that I get to connect with through this that I wouldn't have otherwise, and that is worth it to me.

I think you should be blogging :)

I don't really think this is fair, but I can see why it can come across that way. I wouldn't step down as CEO to keep a team together that did not want to be together. This is not to be confused with being unable to step aside for someone who is more suited for the position. That wasn't what was going on here.

I placed a great deal of trust in my team for nearly a year and some of that came back to bite me. Yes I did list a lot of flaws, but they were not flaws that everyone had in common, they were the things that stood out to me as being problematic across the length of the venture and, well, I thought I mentioned a lot of things I thought I should do differently. But I am open to hearing more.

I am inexperienced, and I probably wasn't ready to be the CEO for this venture.

It seems that a lot of people here took my posts to be me just blaming my partners, but that must be a light reading because I definitely talk about my own shortcomings, and I take responsibility for what ultimately happened. I've been looking in the mirror constantly for the last three months, and posting here is part of that process of reflection too.

You know, maybe I didn't make it clear enough that I thought we had a great thing going right up to the end. But what happened when we landed YC was that a lot of stuff came to the surface that hadn't been addressed well enough before, including a partner's belief that a lot of my effort up to that point had been worthless and he didn't trust me to do any better going forward. That was a pretty rough pill to swallow, especially after being responsible for most of the YC application, leading the three interviews we did to get accepted and building the front end for what we demoed.

I certainly may have killed the startup by emphasizing things that I thought were important, but it doesn't make any sense to think I was actively trying to kill it. My point was that I was blindsided by what happened in the end, so now I've gone back to think about how we got there and, you know, these are some of the conclusions I've drawn and of course they could still be wrong.

I agree that "professional networking" is often a waste of time, but meeting other startups and potential users and sharing ideas has always been valuable to me. That's what I was trying to say by referring to "connecting" and not just "networking". Maybe there's a better word...

Well, that really depends on what you define as value. There are plenty of tech companies out there that created tons of "valuable" code but were not successful because somebody else got the attention or was able to strike one critical deal.

As for allocating resources to networking before there is a working product, check out www.path101.com. I met these guys when they did an open brainstorming session with nothing but a preliminary pitch deck and not a line of code. Being open from very early on enabled them to find angel investors and their first employees, and when it came time to doing an alpha launch they had tons of people that had been eager to try the thing out for months.

Yeah I'm worried that it reads like I'm trashing my co-founders, but it's not my intent. I don't think there is any way to reflect on what you learned about what works and what doesn't work in a team environment without the some people interpreting that as trash talking your partners.

A couple of things I should probably point out: the SXSW was supposed to be a team trip and the point was for everyone to have the experience of interacting with a bunch of top notch startup people (we aren't from the valley) and I only proposed it a few weeks ahead of time after we had a lot of people telling us that it was the single most useful thing to attend all year (I didn't even know about it before then). Only two of us ended up going, but that wasn't my intention.

When we landed the YC interview, it meant flying from NYC to LAX for a ten minute interview. We were told that only I needed to fly out, but I said everyone should go because they deserved the trip. This was obviously not the cost-efficient approach, but I think it was a lot better for the team.

As for the Goldman comment, I find this to be a typical programmer retort to any questioning of what they are doing: "If you're so great, why don't you do it yourself?" In fact, I didn't question what he was doing for way too long precisely for that reason, and I think that was a mistake. Now as for doing it myself... there are some areas of technical knowledge that I do not have, which is why I brought people on. Now that I'm on my own again, I'm doing my best to get it done myself.

Hey, you probably wouldn't want me as a cofounder, fair enough. I appreciate the better luck next time comment though.