2,578 karma · joined October 28, 2009
previously cofounder of periscope data
Many customers were able to resolve the domain in the minutes immediately following the switch, and the rest seem to be trickling in.
E.g. 2 founders + 1 investor is very common for Series A stage startups right now. Those with one founder tend to have two votes for the founder and one vote for the investor.
Periscope is a data analysis tool that uses pre-emptive in-memory caching and statistical sampling to run data analyses really, really fast. Customers typically see a 100x-10,000x speedup of their analysis queries on the day they install.
We also write the popular High-Performance SQL Blog (https://periscope.io/blog) which gets tens of thousands of monthly uniques, and espouses our marketing philosophy of helping analysts wherever we can, whether or not they end up buying.
We’re hiring salespeople, designers and engineers! See:
* https://www.periscope.io/relentless-sales-hustler
* https://www.periscope.io/user-experience-designer
* https://www.periscope.io/data-obsessed-engineer
We’re a team of 5 ex-Google and Microsoft engineers and PMs. We have venture funding, paying customers, > 30% m/m revenue growth, and a spacious loft apartment in SF to work out of.
Email me (harry@periscope.io) if you have questions!
The latest rumors are that it'll include silver, gold and gray variants much like the latest iPhones, and will have fanless internals and a trackpad with no mechanical button.
I basically use Freshbooks.com as an invoice generator. This is way cleaner.
Some polish-level things that would make it cleaner to use for a SaaS product:
* There aren't really "quantities" or "rates". You are a customer of my product, which costs $X amount, so there is just a line with cost $X.
* Needs to comma-delimit amounts greater than $1,000
* Want to be able to put my logo where "INVOICE" is.
* Want to be able to include an "Amount Paid" below the "Total", and then have "Amount Due" under that, which is Total - Amount Paid.
Also, I want to be able to save invoices (local storage or server is fine), generate a new one this month from last month's per customer, etc. etc.
Feel free to email me (harry@periscope.io) if you want more feedback or some examples.
Also: Charge your customers money!
> I learned that most startups fail, and that when they fail, the people who end up doing well are the ones who were looking out for their own interests all along.
Can you elaborate on this? How were people "looking out for their own interests", and how did it end up helping them? Could the founders have done things differently to make the outcome more equitable?
Thanks!
Periscope is a data analysis tool that uses pre-emptive in-memory caching and statistical sampling to run data analyses really, really fast. Customers typically see a 100x-10,000x speedup of their analysis queries on the day they install.
We also write the popular High-Performance SQL Blog (https://periscope.io/blog) which gets tens of thousands of monthly uniques, and espouses our marketing philosophy of helping analysts wherever we can, whether or not they end up buying.
We’re hiring marketers, designers and engineers! See:
* https://www.periscope.io/outrageous-marketer
* https://www.periscope.io/user-experience-designer
* https://www.periscope.io/data-obsessed-engineer
We’re a team of 4 ex-Google and Microsoft engineers and PMs. We have venture funding, paying customers, > 25% m/m revenue growth, and a spacious loft apartment in SF to work out of.
Email me (harry@periscope.io) if you have questions!
Periscope is a data analysis tool that uses pre-emptive in-memory caching and statistical sampling to run data analyses really, really fast. Customers typically see a 100x-10,000x speedup of their analysis queries on the day they install.
We also write the popular High-Performance SQL Blog (https://periscope.io/blog) which gets tens of thousands of monthly uniques, and espouses our marketing philosophy of helping analysts wherever we can, whether or not they end up buying.
We’re hiring marketers, designers and engineers! See:
* https://www.periscope.io/outrageous-marketer
* https://www.periscope.io/user-experience-designer
* https://www.periscope.io/data-obsessed-engineer
We’re a team of 4 ex-Google and Microsoft engineers and PMs. We have venture funding, paying customers, > 25% m/m revenue growth, and a spacious loft apartment in SF to work out of.
Email me (harry@periscope.io) if you have questions!
Several of my friends work for him. They all love it. It's great to see him getting his moment in the spotlight.
This is very interesting. If ownership percentages at Series A are trending down, and investor time & emotional investment per company is trending down as a result, but having outside accountability predicts success, then I wonder how the best companies will replicate outside accountability.
Put another way: How could you hack a replacement for a board meeting?
I'm a funded entrepreneur without a board. I've tried nominating advisors and/or very-helpful angels as our "pseudo-board" and meeting monthly. This didn't help very much: There's something about having a lot of skin in the game that makes board members really prepare, take it seriously, and summon courage to have hard conversations with CEOs when things aren't working.
The one thing that worked pretty well was bolting a whiteboard over the desk area with this month's single goal (a revenue number, natch) and value so far. I don't have any board experience to compare it to, but it certainly keeps us focused.
Anyone else have ideas that have worked, or might work?
This sounds really useful. I would love a way to subscribe to these advice posts (RSS, Twitter, email are all fine) without subscribing to the rest of the Stripe blog!
Or do you think an alternate explanation might be more likely? Is it possible that you misunderstood something? Or is it possible that, if Marc is challenging this thesis of portfolio theory, he might be doing so from a place of great experience and be worth listening to?
Pre-product, when customers would say "Yes, I would buy this," we asked them to sign a non-binding LOI to that effect.
Nowadays, if a prospect says they'll buy when we have feature X, we ask them to sign a modified customer contract that says they don't have to pay until we mutually agree that the feature is done.
It has saved countless developer months spent on features that were not the real reason the customer didn't want to buy. And it sometimes causes the prospect to start saying, "well, actually, the issue is..." and then you can get the real feedback.
This is an amazing website! Kudos to the creator(s).
It's exactly the way I wish I could browse Amazon, and since it's currently swallowing the HN firehose, I'm impressed that it's up and working. Given that it's so useful I will actually use it for shopping from now on, I feel like we can definitely cut it some slack on its day-one execution.
Large frameworks are great, but generally I only adopt them when starting a new project; or the occasional large refactoring project.
Whereas targeted problem-solving libraries like this one get adopted all day long. Next time I need to parse a CSV on the client, you can bet the first thing I'll do is Google to see if there's a library I can download and be done with it.
So, great job solving a targeted problem! Keep building things and keep contributing. People will find code like this endlessly useful.
1. Is he asking for your feedback? Founders are forever hearing "that will never work, you should go back to your job." If he's not soliciting your feedback, consider deciding not to pile on.
2. Conversely, if he is asking, give it to him straight. People have a tendency to think "this will never work" while saying things like, "wow, that's cool!" Don't be that guy. He won't appreciate it when he thinks back to the years of time wasted.
3. If you do give feedback, focus on concrete and constructive building blocks, not your value judgments. "How will you solve the chicken and egg problem?" is a far more useful phrasing than "Your latest idea will never work." For bonus points, brainstorm solutions with him. This is harder and more time-consuming, but more helpful for your friend.
4. Remember that the most successful ideas are often the most counterintuitive. Twitter is my favorite example here, but honestly it applies to most huge tech companies. Keep an open mind through the process.
Good luck! Entrepreneurs can seem schizophrenic, balancing logical considerations with the desire to do something extraordinary and contrarian. But helping him navigate this is what makes you a good friend. :)
Also from your link:
"When I put all these things together the conclusion is that StackOverflow is one of those rare companies for which VC can really work."
Customers who are a good fit for the product ask for the core features to work better, faster, and in new situations you haven't thought of yet.
Customers who ask for random features are trying to think of use cases they want solved, because there are none being solved by the product as-is.
If most of your prospects are asking for random features, you don't have product-market fit. Try asking these customers to sign contracts saying they'll pay once the feature is supported. If they will, that's a promising pivot opportunity.
One deal-breaker for me is that it has to feel like it's on my website. This means templates are not enough: I need full CSS customizability (statuspage.io does a good job with this) or iframe ability. The lack of a great, fully customizable product in this space is why I am currently fucking around with Markdown pages.
It's certainly fair to charge a lot more than you're apparently charging in order to get this customizability -- needing it probably predicts a real business that cares about its brand. (If knol.io becomes a big business I bet you'll end up charging a lot more in general.)
Anyway, awesome job with this! Looks like a great product solving a real problem.
"Easy. I stopped reading Techcrunch."
42Floors is a magnitude bigger than my company (http://periscope.io) and has always seemed like one of those runaway startup successes that we aspire to and occasionally despair of. Reading something this is incredibly motivating. Thank you for writing.
* A basically coherent, well-run, thriving place to work; except:
* Lots of executive infighting, especially certain execs; and:
* Larry's eccentric, seemingly bored behavior during high-level reviews.
Larry definitely seemed frustrated and out of touch with the rest of the management team. And Eric seemed to see it as his responsibility to try to manage that dynamic while keeping the ship pointed in a safe direction.
Possibly there is a lot more source material about this phase of Google history for the author to draw from.
The monthly "Who's Hiring" posts and YC company job posts will be great sources these kinds of companies.
For me the most interesting part of the underlying data is the number of Chinese companies.
Periscope is a data analysis tool that uses pre-emptive in-memory caching and statistical sampling to run data analyses really, really fast.
The slick UI and impressive backend speed sell the product, but the most important feature is the way the user experience encourages sharing and collaboration on charts and dashboards. Periscope spreads data throughout an organization, eventually instigating a culture change that makes the company more data-driven.
One customer recently said of Periscope: "It moved our data out of a closet and into a storefront."
We're hiring our first user experience designer, who will own this experience.
About You
- You love the way that great user experience design enables users and makes them feel powerful within the product.
- You have great respect for how the little details impact user behavior and happiness.
- You understand that execution speed is a feature, and are comfortable with tradeoffs and making calls on the fly.
- You have a demonstrated track record of shipping designs in modern web or mobile apps.
- We're a team of 4 ex-Google and Microsoft PMs and engineers with venture funding, paying customers, and a spacious loft apartment in SF to work out of.
- We consider our design that enables frictionless sharing and collaboration to be our most important feature.
- We strongly favor rapid shipping over endless review and iteration.
- We have close relationships with our customers. We see customers several times a month, and email with them several times a week.
More info: https://www.periscope.io/user-experience-designer Us: https://www.periscope.io