scrollinondubs

bummer - apparently my hosting provider had a DNS outage last night that cut the site down in its prime while it was on the homepage of HN. It's back up now.

Yeah I used Dapper.net to scrape the homepage and have it return an XML result set. Here's the Dap: http://www.dapper.net/dapp-howto-use.php?dappName=HNhomepage You can have it output JSON, RSS, XML, whatever...

sean

how about making an intelligent response to the facts and arguments put forth in those films instead of an empty, snide remark? Which sounds more like the product of a stoned freshman, my post or your comment?

sean

Solid list. I've read maybe 1/5th of those. There were some glaring omissions though:

-Strategy & Innovation: to leave off Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" and "Innovator's Solution" books is sacrilege -Psychology: Roger Dawson's "Power Negotiating" audio series is a must-listen for pysch and negotiating tactics -Business History/Ref: Founders at Work by YCombinator's own Jessica Livingston is a must-read for tech startup founders

There's digests on handful of others I recommend here: http://www.scrollinondubs.com/notes

But it's a binary choice for a company to select one method of accounting or the other. I know you can get both views from within QB but for tax filing purposes you're either cash or accrual.

If we've elected to use accrual-basis accounting then when we sign the contract for a deal we book that revenue immediately (whereas if we're cash basis it's not on the books until it's in our bank acct). But by using a P&L report that shows us as having made all that money which can be dangerous if you're using those numbers to plan.

I'm just wondering what the conditions are under which it's desirable for a startup to elect to use accrual-basis accounting for their books? You can get the cash-basis view in QB while being an accrual-basis company but what's the advantage of introducing that complexity?

so this is not < 64 words and less of a description of OO and more to your solicitation of "inspire me" of why you should care about it. The critical distinction IMHO:

Procedural programming is like a recipe- you program a sequence of instructions and while there can be if/then, loop and other logic constructs, it still runs like a "choose your own adventure" book. Since you have an imperfect view of the world and how requirements will evolve and you're providing what are essentially sequential instructions, it's brittle and unforgiving to unanticipated requirements.

OO is less about writing instructions and more about creating a representation of the world (or at least the aspects you care about) as objects and having them interact with each other to achieve things. Because you're modeling the entities involved and having them interact rather than imposing a prescriptive set of instructions from above, it's cleaner and more resilient to unanticipated requirements.

Granted it's overkill to use OO for simple tasks when a script will suffice. But if you're building a system that involves interaction of different entities and will need to be adapted & maintained it will almost certainly be more productive to use an OO approach. Btw, I found this book provides the most concise and useful primer on OO I've seen: http://www.amazon.com/Object-Technology-Managers-David-Taylo...

sean

the other advantages not listed here: -the JumpBox is portable across virtualization systems -the JumpBox can be brought up on EC2 if need be -you can use the backup/restore feature to create an archive of the delta of what changes you've made to the LAMP stack and just keep that. if you need a new copy, get a blank jumpbox and inject the backup into it and you're back where you were -we have a Rails stack as well as a LAMP stack which is even more of a time saver-> http://www.jumpbox.com/app/rubyonrails -the backup system integrates with your S3 acct so you have an offsite emergency copy while you're on the road

sean

fyi: there's a step-by-step tutorial here on how to move the JumpBox to EC2 once you have your app deployed-> http://blog.jumpbox.com/2008/06/27/a-beginners-guide-to-runn...

yes- same goal, different approach. They do install wizards to quickly get OSS apps running in the native environment. We do virtual appliances that are self-contained so they're portable and won't muck up the system. There are advantages to each approach but see a lot of interesting possibilities for value-adds once you control the environment in which the app lives.

sean

Well the VM's are running Ubuntu but the idea of a "virtual appliance" is slightly different than a traditional virtual machine in that you needn't think about the OS. Instead you focus on using the application and for all you know it's BSD or Linux or whatever under the hood but you're managing it via a web interface so you don't care.

to your 2nd question- JumpBoxes support the major virtualization technologies right now: VMware, Parallels, Xen, Virtual Iron, MS Virtual PC and Virtual Server. They'll also run on KVM, Qemu and Virtual Box though we don't officially support those.

I'm glad you dig what we're doing. If you try one out and really like it I would welcome any suggestions you have on how to better spread the word. We have this weird challenge where the people who use it rave about how great it is. We're not at a loss for a killer product- we're challenged in how we spread awareness of its existence.

thanks again

sean

true. I picture the scene at a user group where I myself would recommend a service or product to somebody and that recommendation is always strictly based on if I think it would be valuable for them given their situation. So I'm inclined to agree with you.

re: buying ads- We've experimented with google ads and stumbleupon so far (no print yet) and while we've seen plenty of traffic, there is a high educational component associated with our stuff for ads to be truly effective at this point (ie. visitor has to know the value of open source, be using virtualization, etc).

The good news is people who like JumpBox _love_ it because it removes so much pain. So the word is spreading, just not as fast as we'd like. We're evaluating the best way to "light the strategic fires" to accelerate adoption. Thanks for the advice.

sean

guys, lemme clarify this- when i said "deferring calls from his wife," he was politely saying "honey, gimme 15 more min" because he was so into it. It really wasn't rude at all and perhaps I should have better explained it or left that out altogether.

sean

sure, in generic terms. Our lawyer was instrumental in getting 3 - we splurged a bit and hired a very reputable firm in Palo Alto that is well-connected. We paid more than we would have liked for the legal work a year ago but it's paying dividends now in terms of introductions. The other intros came from just random networking. We live in AZ but I drove my truck up to SF and couch surfed the past month just going to events, shaking hands and meeting people. I had a list of people I know through various user group involvement and presence on listserv's so i contacted them and tried to have a different lunch lined up everyday. I used Meetup, Upcoming and googled "Bay Area User Groups" and tried to lineup a different event every night. I actively used Facebook and my blog to solicit intros and tell people what I was doing, switching my network to Silicon Valley temporarily and finding events via that. I met great contacts at the Startup Weekend that was held in SF. And the whole time I was writing a series of posts on my trip essentially live-blogging it to meet more contacts. You can read those here if you're interested-> http://www.scrollinondubs.com/tags/sfroadtrip

There is no "typical intro" to describe - they happened in the most unpredictable/serendipitous ways, but having the conversation-starter of "so I drove here from Phoenix and have been sleeping on friends couches so i can be in the mix for our startup" was a powerful lead-in to be able to talk with people and get them to listen.

I know PG is a big fan of the idea you should really be in the Bay Area to give your startup the best chance of success. We have our company in AZ right now and moving wasn't an option so this was the next best thing we figured we could do. Definitely very happy with the choice.

sean

dhouston- good call on having a big story. The VC's could literally care less about the features of your product, they want to know how it's going to be thing that will be a common-place word in 4 yrs and you have to paint that picture vividly for them.

I would disagree on the pitching in front of a mirror thing. And actually i should add this as #14- I recommend that you _don't_ have a scripted pitch. Have a deck of slides that serves as a framework for the conversation but just talk about it naturally. If you truly believe in it, this should become second nature and they'll smell the candidness whereas a scripted pitch comes off as brittle and less engaging. You want it to be anything but mechanical IMHO.

sean

sure thing. And actually one more: #21 Inkling Markets-> http://www.grid7.com/archives/171_podcast-21-adam-siegel-of-...

sean

I just did a screencast (ironically it's the item just above this one right now- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=54774). We pursued your "option 2" initially and ended up doing just the screencast for our homepage demo on jumpbox.com.

I work on a Mac and used iShowU for the capture and edited and produced it in iMovie. Our homepage video is just a quicktime file. For the screencast in the tutorial above I used the Adobe Flash FLV converter to turn it into an flv and wrote a small custom media playback swf to do what you see here-> http://video.jumpbox.com/?app=trac

good luck sean

not a reality TV show but i've put several of the ideas I don't have time to pursue up on Cambrian House->

http://www.cambrianhouse.com/member/scrollinondubs/

I've taken 2nd in a couple of their Ideawarz tournaments but have not won yet. They had the Dragons' Den guy (Sean Wise) join their board not long ago.

sean

Camtasia is the de facto one for PC. I use iShowU on the Mac and produce it in iMovie. The default settings in iMovie hose it (i wrote a short tutorial here with the settings I've found to work best-> http://www.scrollinondubs.com/2007/06/12/produce-a-clear-scr...) I've also heard that Snapz is good on the Mac but have not used it personally.

sean

jackpipe- yea we know that page is admittedly weak right now ;-) we're replacing the about page with a distilled 5-point tour that explains the concept better and more visually. RE: the vanilla preconfigured stacks- the VirtualAppliances.net guys and Spike Source are doing a pretty good job now with putting out lean versions of the basic software stacks so we're targeting the end-to-end apps for now. We'll hit those up down the road though. thanks for the feedback.

sean

I just finished reading this essay and there were so many sentances that resonated for me that I may have to frame the whole friggin thing. We had originally applied a year ago for the Y Combinator summer program of 06. We didn't make it but we did the startup on our own instead and it continues to be the most rewarding experience of my life: JumpBox.com Paul, you are an absolute beacon in this industry. I look forward to reading all these comments on this post next...