adamsmith

Users have found people search to be very useful, as you mentioned. If you're not on the latest version then you're also missing LinkedIn and Facebook, including pulling photos from either of those services. We'll be auto-updating old users to this version over the next couple of weeks. (If you want to get on the latest version right away, just download the installer and it will detect the existing installation and just update you instead of a fresh reinstallation.)

EDIT: For the curious, I thought I'd take the opportunity to give more background on what we've been up to from the engineering side.

Some might notice that the Linkedin / Facebook / Hoovers / Yahoo Mail / Skype integrations I mentioned above were launched on 19-nov-08. So what have we been up to over the past four months? Well, other than consuming ungodly amounts of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, it's been two things -- performance and stability.

Outlook is a hostile environment for a product like Xobni. It has several different APIs, each with different quirky interfaces, side effects, and threading models.

There's no way around having complex APIs for Outlook. They expose programmatic access to the most complicated email application ever built. Just like Excel and MS Word, it's really hard to underestimate how feature rich this program is.

(As evidence, I submit to you: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=968009 . Scroll down to the section titled "Individual bugs that are fixed." Wow!)

Let's run through one example of how complex these APIs are.

This one's my favorite!

Imagine you have an ID for a message, and you want to open a draft reply to that message so the user can type in their reply and press send. It should work just as if the user hit the Reply button, or pressed Ctrl-R.

Easy right? That's what I thought, too...

The first API I tried seemed to work, but when the user pressed send the icon for the original message didn't change to the purple arrow to indicate that it had been replied to.

I found a second approach that didn't have that bug, except it turned out to save the draft of the message (if it is being composed for more than five minutes, or the user explicitly presses Save) STRAIGHT INTO THE INBOX, instead of the Drafts folder. It looked funky -- no sender name, no sent time, etc. Ouch.

I found another API to use. It set the right icon -- good -- and seemed to save drafts into the Drafts folder. Double check. Unfortunately as soon as the user started typing it showed up in Times New Roman, 12pt, as the default font. Doh.

One of these three approaches also wouldn't pre-populate the user's email signature.

Fourth API was a charm!

I could really talk about the complexity of Outlook and the scenarios we've ran into for days. Below are some example bugs I pulled from the Outlook feb-09 cumulative update document linked above. Each of these can hide weird race conditions, thread starvations, or just plain old corner cases that only show up when the moon is in the seventh house.

  * Inefficient processing occurs in a loop during intermittent network connectivity.
  * If the store providers are disconnected early, the Outlook.exe process becomes unresponsive for a very long time.
  * When you right-click an item, the whole item is loaded into memory more frequently than necessary.
  * Unnecessary disk reads are performed for every time that a custom form icon is rendered.

Not to mention that all of these other addins are accessing the same APIs, sometimes with "interesting interactions."

And on top of these challenges there are several users who have giant mailboxes. We've seen users with almost a million emails loaded into Outlook at the same time.

Usually these are the people with 12" laptops, 2 GBs of RAM, and 5400 RPM hard drives.

When this happens, all bets are off. Outlook takes a long time to load their twelve PST files. If an addin is trying to load its stuff at the same time you get heavy disk contention and "sequential" read throughputs plummet to 1 MB per second. And god help you if Outlook needs to "repair" any of these PSTs.

..the list goes on and on. We've been on a four month odyssey.

It's been both tough and fun. I love my team. We've hit some high notes together.

That said, I think we're all looking forward to working on the next generation of features for our customers. It's going to be an exciting rest-of-2009 ahead.

> Angels are the limiting reagent in startup formation.

I'd like to claim that I would have started startups even if YC didn't accept Xobni for the summer of 2006 class. I had already failed at a half-startup. I was doing consulting for another startup called Siteadvisor. Etc.

Yet YC was the catalyst for dropping out of grad school.

Paul certainly gets a unique view into startup creation. I just wonder what the second and third order terms are of this equation.

How broadly do you think about "selling?" What kind of on-the-job training did you do? How good can one get in twelve months?

Thanks!

> Never ever surrender

> Reaching March 2008 levels of confidence again. This is on

> super proud of the progress being made by Imperial Entrepreneurs

> Oh man - so excited by the prospect of hustling again.

You are an animal!

Or we could just go with Bill Gates for President in 2016.

I would have guessed that this phase in a language's evolution would come much earlier in the adoption curve. ...like, five years ago for python. Interesting!

Here's to further optimizations!

In any larger company the downside isn't just potentially larger, it's probably larger in expectation. The employee might sue.

In a startup that's just not even considered. Interesting.

That said, my uninformed reaction is to consider this a good move. The last thing Yahoo needs is another project with no clear business model, regardless how cool. This is the kind of work that should be funded by massive donations like wikipedia. If it's going to be supported by a company, it shouldn't be one on life support.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1LiATYSajw&feature=relat...

There are many other examples of the "open source business model," such as Dries Buytaert who runs Drupal and Acquia.

The point is that contributors to open source projects are willing to write code for free but not willing to wear the beepers that go off when the servers go down.

BTW I feel like the TC article didn't communicate the key point very well. They didn't mention virtualization until eight sentences in.

That's why my two favorite startup books are High Stakes No Prisoners and Founders at Work.

Your fan, Adam

If so there are various ways to fix it, from win32 stuff to more intelligent sync'ing to using new sync APIs in certain cases.

We've been working on this kind of stuff for two years, and still have a ways to go. : ) Looking forward to hearing how it goes!!

Best, Adam

RE slow during normal Outlook usage, please email me if you'd like to try it again with level 3 support. I'd love to figure out what's going on in your case. adam dot smith at startup-name.com. Thanks.

(a la http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/moving_a_petabyte_of_dat...)

You may not need to be as explicit as a different computer on the other side of the room. I wonder if it would be enough just to theme your firefox windows. You could have the circuitboard theme for work firefox windows, and the carebears theme for play windows. The theme could change depending on what tabs are open in the window.

I can only seem to remember events related to girls, programming, and church. I don't remember particular conversations I had with my parents or teachers. Conversations with my favorite grandfather seem to stick out.

It seems like I should sit down and try to remember past realizations and conversations. I've never explicitly tried that.

We used that as a model when we wrote our first business plan.

Powerset has many employees. If the deal goes through it'd be interesting to see if MSFT gets them all to move.

Either way I wish those guys luck. Their founder Barney Pell seems like a cool guy.

I dropped out of my master's program after getting accepted into YC. It was a no brainer; I flew back to Boston and met with my adviser the same day to tell him I was dropping out. I had already published with him so we were good friends.

With few exceptions, people in the tech industry rarely care about graduate degrees.

Beware of opportunity cost when reading posts saying it's only one year, or you can make $x more / year with a master's degree. It sounds like you're going to learn much more in the first year of your venture than you would in school.

That said, startups will benefit from the same treatment.

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H1B_visa#Quotas_and_changes_in_...)