jducoeur

For those curious about what the heck I've been doing for the past five years, check out Chris Herot's discussion of the history of the company: it's a brief but good overview of the main things we accomplished. I had my hands in damned near every bit of that: from writing the middleware engine and client/server infrastructure for ASAP, to doing the browser integration for the Salesforce project, to writing the slightly-impossible client widget for Zingdom Relay to serving as Product Manager for Spark.

Despite the headaches (and there were many), it was a good five years. The company had its issues, largely relating to having too much money (which encouraged a more bureaucratic style than we could really afford), but it was refreshingly level-headed in many ways. Being composed almost entirely of refugees from the dotcom burst, who understood the realities of startup life, helped us stay on a fairly even keel. And we had one of the best technical staffs I've ever worked with, on a par with that at Looking Glass. (And that's high praise -- LG had a lot of the most brilliant engineers I've ever known.)

I'll miss it, and I do regret that we never managed to make a big success out of any of our products. (Although I gather that some of the ASAP customers are very annoyed that it's shutting down: it had a modest but loyal cadre of users, and is still hosting a substantial number of meetings every day.) But I think we can take some pride in the fact that that was never because the tech or the ideas weren't there: ASAP alone contained a staggering number of innovations. Indeed, entire companies are being built now by just taking one of the novel ideas that we had in there, like no-download videoconferencing or live emailable links. If anything, our problem was in building an app that was way too complex to *explain* to people -- a lesson well worth keeping in mind for the future.

But now, on to new things...

I haven't been talking much lately. Sorry about that -- work has been sucking my brain, and a lot of it has been stuff I couldn't talk about. In general, saying publically, "I have a nasty feeling we may be going out of business" is a fine way to ensure that you do, so I've simply kept quiet. Today was the end, and it has been really kinda fascinating. This is long, but I need a good diary entry now.

Just before Thanksgiving, it became clear that Zingdom per se was at its end: the investors, quite reasonably, wanted out. We had a fabulous team, and (IMO) an idea with major promise, but it just wasn't what they had signed on for. There was a potential suitor for us to talk to; if that didn't happen promptly, we were probably heading for shutdown.

Yesterday was The Big Conversations -- the CTO of the unnamed suitor came over, and spent a good long time talking individually with me, Tony and Alex. We were really the only people left: Onur (the fourth engineer) was on his way out the door. So we spent over an hour each talking about us, and them, and what each company was like, and all of our expectations. We came out of it none too sanguine: while they didn't look like a terrible company, the fit wasn't great -- Tony felt that the technology didn't fit, Alex felt the processes didn't, and I felt that the strategies didn't. At the end of the day, Chris (our CTO and effectively the head of the company as we saw it) sent an email around saying that we would be talking about "next steps" in the morning. It wasn't clear whether the "next steps" were talking more deeply with the suitors, or arranging a shutdown.

Well, I got up this morning, went to exercise as usual -- and the episode that was up next to watch was The Inner Light. That pretty much answered my question: I can recognize a Portent when it slaps me in the face. For those who don't know ST:TNG, this is one of the best episodes of the series, but also one of the most melancholy. It's a story about the inevitability of fate, the need to both defy it as much as you can and face up to it when you must, and the fact that a bit of our essence can live on after a fashion, if we remember the lessons of life and pass them on. Beautiful stuff, but by the end of the episode I was pretty clear on what I was going to hear when I got in.

The meeting went as expected: Chris told us that the Board had decided to shut things down, effective today. The company won't formally go out of business for months yet, since we still have affairs to unwind, but nearly everybody was getting laid off. Disappointing, but not surprising to anyone. The complex question, particularly for me, is whether the project we've been on for the past two months -- code-named Salon, and Spark, and a bunch of other things depending on who you ask -- can continue. I'm quite passionate about it, and interested in either finding a buyer for the IP (so we can keep going), or starting anew and doing it myself.

The day was something of a whirlwind after that: all of us packing up, me making one or two last tweaks to the product (because there is still something to demo there, and I want to be able to do that), Tony putting it up on the public server, all of us negotiating prices for our laptops with the CFO, me writing up a prospectus for those lovely infrastructure libraries we've been writing, and of course, everyone swapping contact information. I wound up working a full day, getting out at about 5:30 with a full car.

And then I went to pick up my comics, down at Outer Limits. I've been buying my comics from Steve forever -- something like 20 years now -- so I mentioned that I had lost my job. I then mentioned that I was thinking of going it on my own, and how scary it was, and Steve agreed. I started to talk more about the scariness -- I have *always* worked for other people, and the idea of creating my own company for my own vision is slightly terrifying -- when I realized that Steve wasn't actually agreeing with me about *what* was scary. He's always run his own shop, and from his point of view the scary thing is working for others, who can lay you off for their own reasons. Bless him, it was exactly the perspective I needed at that moment: the realization that what I was contemplating isn't necessarily all that much scarier than what I've always done.

So the high points:

• Yes, I'm now unemployed.


• Yes, they gave us some severance -- not vast amounts, but enough to provide some continuity.


• No, I'm not really looking for random programming jobs right now. I appreciate the requests for resumes and offers of leads, but honestly: if it's not in the social-networking-ish space, it's not what I'm looking for this month.

The thing is, I've been focused on social tools for, what, a dozen years now? I was using the term "social tools" long before it was fashionable. I've been doing socially-oriented programming since about '93, and doing it exclusively since '95. Heck, I wrote a patent (fortunately never submitted) on social networking back in 2000. So from my POV, the world has finally caught up with me -- the stuff that I love most, and am so passionate about, is suddenly hot. So I need to see what I can do there.

I'm going to talk to a few companies: it's possible that the right alignment might happen. But for now, I'm assuming that I'll probably need to create something myself this time. And the emphasis is on "need". Honestly, I'm a little burned out on coding for people who I don't think understand this space quite as well as I do: most of them have been smart, but most have been viewing all this social stuff as an interesting way to make money, not as a passion. They don't *care* about it so much, and they haven't really studied it.

So I think it's time to put my money where my mouth is, at least a bit -- time to follow my vision, and try to create something. It's a pain in the ass losing the Zingdom IP: besides the six weeks we put into the application, the Ea libraries are truly a thing of beauty, and I'll miss them, because they make app development so much faster and smoother. Overall, it'll probably cost me two months, and the market windows are probably tight. But I've got an idea between my teeth, and I have to chew on it.

Perhaps the most important high point -- no, I'm really not down about this. I'm annoyed at losing our headstart, but at least we now have resolution: more than anything, the uncertainty was making me bugfuck, swinging between elation at how fast we were making progress and depression that it could end at any moment. Well, now it's ended, but I still have that flute in my hand, and by God I *do* know how to play it.

There'll be self-doubt tomorrow: worries about whether I'm right, whether I can afford this, whether I'm just being self-indulgent. But for tonight, having a new direction actually feels pretty damned good...

It's fascinating, being in the Product Manager role. On the one hand, it's rather different from anything I've done before; on the other, the basic principles of being a good team-oriented programmer are proving really valuable. And perhaps the most valuable lesson is one that may be crucial to any workplace -- to run a good project, you need to have respect flowing in all directions.

Really, I'm kind of surprised at how smoothly it's going. We're trying to develop a system that's hard to define and a bit different from anything else out there, feeling around in the dark. We're a strong-willed bunch, and everybody's got opinions. I essentially arrogated the PM job to myself, declaring that since it was my idea in the first place, I wanted the creative control. It was by no means obvious that I could do the job.

And we do have arguments about how it should work, almost daily. But those arguments aren't lasting long, and we're basically running by consensus. The key to this seems to be the fact that everyone on the team respects each other, and we're all trying to be scrupulous about that. Folks are calmly deferring the final decisions to me, mostly because I'm working very hard to take every argument seriously, consider every angle, and keep my ego out of the way as much as I can. As a result, while the original vision may have been mine, the nuances are coming from all over the team.

It's remarkably pleasant: we're getting a lot more done a lot more quickly, and with little strife. I have to say, it's a bit of a change of pace. While Convoq was a pretty decent company, I think the thick management structure prevented enough communication between the developers and management, and that impeded proper respect on all sides. Folks just didn't interact enough to get to *trust* each other enough.

It's a lesson worth remembering. To really work well, a team needs deep mutual respect and trust. You can't have that without sufficient communication among the players. And the "team" needs to include all active stakeholders, not just the developers. All of which is kind of obvious from the Agile point of view, but seeing it from the "other side" really drives the point home...

Got deferred for the first week of federal jury duty, but it looks like I'm going to have to serve the other two weeks, starting this coming Monday. Please keep fingers crossed for me that I don't wind up on any long, involved cases: as it is, losing two weeks of work at this point is going to hurt like hell, and drawing a two-month trial would be Bad. Expect me to be a little incommunicado for the next couple of weeks, since I'm going to have to do eight hours of jury duty and then at least *some* work each day, so the project doesn't go too far off-course.

That said, at least it involves two holidays that weren't going to be productive anyway, so I'm probably only missing eight workdays.

Question to those who travel through downtown regularly: how bad is traffic on I93 early in the morning? I need to be at the Federal Court House at 8:15 each morning, and I have absolutely no idea how much time I need to allow for traffic at that hour. I know it's horrible by 9am, but I'm hoping it's not quite as bad an hour earlier...

Okay, here's an odd-sounding question for all those of you who use SMS, aka text messaging from your phone -- specifically, those who have ordinary cell phones with normal number pads, not full keyboards. (Those of us with Treos are assumed to not be the usual case.)

We're trying to come up with a concise and easy-to-type SMS syntax -- which means I need to check out what's actually easy to type. So I'd like to know what's under your buttons. If you could take a minute or two to look at your phone and answer this, I'd appreciate it.

I think of the "common" mobile-phone letter layout as being:

• 2: abc


• 3: def


• 4: ghi


• 5: jkl


• 6: mno


• 7: pqrs


• 8: tuv


• 9: wxyz

[Poll #1089759]

One reason I've mostly been fairly quiet lately is that my brain is being positively eaten by work. Being Product Manager is a whole new set of responsibilities to get used to. In particular, while I can traditionally leave my programming at work, and get away from it in the evenings, that's harder now -- a lot of my job is simply thinking about the product in the early mornings and late evenings, continuing to feel around the edges and try to figure out where it needs to go. On the one hand, it's a lot of fun, especially to the world-building side of my brain. OTOH, it's very distracting.

All that said, the shift to being a purer startup is proving excellent for my blood pressure. Yeah, we still have arguments, and they can still get pretty heated, but they're just plain more *manageable* at this size -- they're typically between two or three people, not a whole roomful who are factionalizing. And since the group is now made up more or less entirely of professional programmers, all of whom are decent at getting their egos out of the way, we're tending to resolve the arguments pretty quickly.

And as I'd hoped, we are finally doing something that's credibly Agile. We've dumped most of the tools we were using (including the execrable VersionOne), in favor of keeping track of things mostly on 4x6 index cards taped to the white board. The cost of this is that we lose some precision in keeping track of what's going on and where we're going -- OTOH, I'm not sure we're losing any *accuracy* in that process. Our schedule so far is mainly based on Onur's and my gut-feel about how long things ought to take to implement; so far, that gut-feel looks to be about as accurate as our old heavyweight processes were.

Perhaps most importantly, we don't know exactly what we're building yet, but that's really a feature as far as I'm concerned. Historically, we've tended to spend months agonizing over every detail, nailing down specs in one form or another, implementing to those specs -- and then finding that we were wrong in the first place. Instead, we're attacking the system on a story-by-story basis, making progress far more quickly, and I don't see any evidence that we're heading in any less correct a direction. Rather, I've been drilling home the mantra "Nothing Is Set In Stone". The odd advantage of knowing that we're out on the bleeding edge here, and are going to have to learn as we go, is that we're spending a lot less time making decisions: since every decision may change down the line, we're a lot more willing to try stuff out and see how it goes.

All of which boils down to: yeah, this is why I like working in startups. It's crazier and riskier, but man, it's a lot less soul-deadening.

As for what the product itself is -- I'll probably start talking about that soon. We're not really in stealth mode this time, having decided that that's really not very helpful, but we want to get a little further along before we start shouting it to the rooftops. Basically, we're combining a number of fairly conventional ideas about communication and conversation, stirring in a bunch of little elements that really *ought* to be common but for some reason aren't, and baking it all together into a communications tool that's just plain more *useful* than any other single product out there. If I'm right about this, we'll wind up with a feature set that everyone else will then trip all over themselves trying to copy, and we'll be off to the races...

As Zingdom has turned into a genuine startup over the past month, I've been reflecting on the nature of the game. One thing that has been surprising me in the past few years has been the realization that most people don't seem to share my fondness for the idea.

I mean, there's a lot that I love about tiny startups. There's no bureaucracy to speak of, and each person makes a huge difference. You know everybody in the company, and you can have a great deal of influence if you try. If it's well-run, salary and benefits are generally quite solid. They're usually hanging way out over the bleeding edge technically. And there's usually at least an outside chance of changing the world, and getting rich off the lottery tickets they call "options".

Of course, there are arguably some downsides. Job security is more or less zero: on any given day, you might discover that the company no longer exists. You really can't slack off for any serious period of time, because everyone matters, and the team had better all be grownups or you have a recipe for disaster. You have to be quite disciplined personally, and responsible for yourself, because big brother isn't prodding you in appropriate directions. The hours can get out of hand, although a good company won't demand that too often.

I find myself curious about what people think about this, so it's time for a completely unscientific poll!
[Poll #1078096]

[Happy birthday to bess!]

On the one hand, work is suddenly being rather fun, exciting, and not a little bit scary. And being the de facto product manager is quite intense: I'm in the middle of a whirlwind of discussion, as we flesh out a new product that looks likely to be both useful and maybe a bit cool. (I spent yesterday just sitting in the conference room, working on stories, as meetings coalesced around me on various product topics.)

On the other hand, the intensity leads to almost uncontrollable hamstering in the middle of the night. I'm going to have to find a way to manage that -- I'm not going to be a lot of use at work if I'm not getting any sleep...

Finally -- after six months of discussion and development, I get to talk about what I'm doing again. Stealth mode is exciting, but it can get tiring after a while. But the website went live an hour or two ago, and we just had the company meeting to announce the official name change, so it's time to start down the fun side of the roller coaster.

So: Convoq has changed its name to Zingdom. Yes, it's an awfully Web 2.0 name, but it's easy to remember and (unlike Convoq) easy to spell. And we wound up with the shortest domain I've ever been in, zing.dm.

What's the product? The website gives the official view and a bunch of examples, but basically it's all about providing users with controllable ways to contact each other. The core notion is that people have lots of ways to contact each other (phone, IM, SMS, email, etc), but are understandably leery about simply posting their contact information online. We provide intermediary services so that people can use the communications devices they're used to, but do so privately, keeping control over their communication.

I suspect that some of the tech blogs are going to initially dismiss us as just another phone-anonymizing service (of which a bunch have popped up in recent months), but that misses the point of what's going on here. We're well ahead of the pack in a bunch of ways:

• Unlike all the other services, we're explicitly multi-modal. We're supporting phone and AIM initially, with more to come soon.


• The name of the game for us isn't just anonymity, it's control. So we provide things like scheduling capability: for instance, you can easily allow access to your business phone during work hours, and IM in the evening.


• We really aren't selling just a single service, we're selling a platform. Our system was designed from the very beginning to be API-based, so we're set up to do all kinds of integrations quickly. (But we also have a really slick default UI.)


• We're mainly focused on integrating with sites, providing them with ways to help their users communicate contextually, rather than mainly selling to end users. (Translation: we have a plausible business plan.) Yes, I'm afraid this means you can't just sign up, at least not yet.


• Our name doesn't start with J. (Hey, after Jangl and Jaxtr, the company was unanimously agreed on this one.)

Of course, having revealed ourselves, things only get more interesting from here. We've got a lot of irons in the fire over the next couple of months, both in starting to integrate with partners and trying some cool new experiments of our own. We've only scratched the surface of this project so far: there's an amazing amount we can do with this platform, and it's time to kick the tires and have some fun...

There. After four years of my haranguing about it (and about three months of talking about how to *do* it), we took our first real baby steps in Agile Development today. We took one of the side-projects for the new system (one of the test harnesses), talked through the User Roles involved in it, and began to write the Stories for the feature.

It's going to take a while to get used to it -- much of the time was spent simply getting people on the same page of what a User Story *is* -- but overall it was a good experience, and reasonably productive. Best of all, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, specifically because everyone on the team, including the junior members, were explicitly equal in the process. Management will be responsible for deciding the priorities for these stories, and everyone is quite clear that some of them probably won't ever happen, but everyone got their say. If nothing else, accomplishing that may be worth the pain of changing how we do things.

It does remind me remarkably of Carolingian Great Council, in a way. One of the precepts I've always followed there is that you don't have to *do* what everyone says, but it's very important that everyone get to speak their mind. It produces much more of a sense of involvement in the whole thing...