Hacker News Reader

jon_dahlon Suster: Should Startups Focus on Profitability or Not?

Tiny, but the payoff is often bigger. :)

jon_dahlon Suster: Should Startups Focus on Profitability or Not?

Eventually, every business wants to make profits. That's kind of the point of Business. The question is when. If you're a startup, you can:

A) Aim at near-term profitability (say, 12 month horizon) by keeping expenses low and focusing on revenue growth

B) Aim at long-term profitability (say, 5-10 year horizon) by raising a lot of money, spending it on sales and marketing, R&D, product, etc.

Each has advantages and disadvantages. My take-away from the article: if a competitor could beat you by raising $30M and focusing on growth at the expense of profitability, B) might be the right option. Otherwise, A) should be the default for most businesses.

jon_dahlon How Zencoder became the largest transcoding service on the market

Hi 9999 - get in touch if you want to go into more detail: http://zencoder.com/contact.

As a short answer, though, we're actually quite cheap for most customers. Major internet publishers use Zencoder for a few hundred dollars/month. Large-volume providers use us for less than the cost of a full-time engineer - and the alternative to Zencoder at large scale is a team, not a single engineer. Mission-critical encoding requires a lot of engineering and operations, even when starting from the excellent open-source libraries available.

Beyond that, we generally do things faster, more reliably, and at higher quality than "default" encoding systems, especially around the edges. That's what happens when you throw >10,000 hours of engineering at this problem. Again, get in touch if you want specifics.

jon_dahlon How Zencoder became the largest transcoding service on the market

> probably biased

Thanks for the trust. ;)

jon_dahlon How Zencoder became the largest transcoding service on the market

This assumes that you can evenly distribute your transcoding load over the course of a month. For most customers, transcoding needs are severely peaky - 10x or more from peak-to-average. So you either buy for the peaks and your hardware goes idle 90% of the time, or buy for the average and see long queue times. For most video publishers, each on-premise machine ends up using only a small fraction of 43,000 minutes each month.

jon_dahlon How Zencoder became the largest transcoding service on the market

Our business isn't professional encoding vs. [unprofessional encoding?]. It's cloud vs. non-cloud. We do what the "professional" non-cloud tools do, but in the cloud, and we have many customers who are investing more than $6,000.

(We're also entirely API-based for programmatic high-volume encoding, so if you're thinking of things like video editing and manual post-production, that's not really what we do.)

jon_dahlon PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

All one needs to do is put a vacation autoresponder on their email account, and then have the self-control to not read email while they're out.

Dave's problem isn't self-control while on vacation. It's the mountain of email he'll have when he gets back. He very well might have a full-time week of just responding to email after a trip.

(A friend of mine just got back from his honeymoon, and it took him two full-time days to clean out his inbox - and he's a startup founder, not an internationally known author/speaker like Dave.)

jon_dahlon PragDave: I'm on vacation, and I've deleted your message—really

This only works if Dave's capacity for responding to email is greater than the amount of email he actually gets. What happens if Dave never wants to spend more than 16 hours per day on email (a reasonable assumption), and his total incoming email volume would require 20 hours per day to get through? Email would queue forever.

For many people, email is an absolute train wreck.

The solution Dave chose is bad because messages get lost

This is the point. Dave would say that his solution is good precisely because messages get lost. Dave is effectively increasing the barrier to receiving an email, and filtering out emails that don't reach that barrier, which is an economically reasonable approach to the problem. (This particular approach may not end up being the right one, but it is worth a try.)

jon_dahlon Pushing the Limits of Amazon S3 Upload Performance

Isn't this ultimately up to the congestion control algorithm that is used alongside of UDP? Aspera and UDT, for example, have tunable congestion control that can be more or less greedy.

I'm not a protocol hacker, so hopefully one will weigh in here. But I do remember some Sky Is Falling discussion over uTorrent's use of UDP for transfer, and the uTorrent line was always that they were implementing UDP transfer in a way that played nice with TCP.

jon_dahlon It’s the founding CEO’s job to personally email the first 1000 users

This automated approach is fine, but only if you don't try to pretend it's personal. SlideRocket does this really well - sign up for SlideRocket and watch the helpful emails roll in. Not too many, and always with a good tone and good content. But none of them pretend to be produced by hand in Gmail.

Sending personal emails to the first 1,000 customers is great, and switching to automated lead nurturing after that is great. Partly for scale - there are a hundred high-value things a CEO can do once a business gets going. But also because customers don't think it's appropriate to get a personal email once you grow to a certain size.

Anecdote: I've been heavily involved in our sales process at Zencoder since the beginning (as CEO), including writing personal emails to 500-1000 signups early on. (We've stopped that by now, but it was the right thing to do early on.) A few months ago, our sales director and I went to meet with a high-value prospect. At that point, their financial value wasn't huge (hundreds per month), but we knew they would grow, and that they'd be a good reference customer. So we pitched them and everything went well.

I ended up meeting with them a second time, and they asked me point-blank: "How is your business viable, if we're only paying you $X00/month?"

The subtext was this: "If we're only paying you $X00/month, and we get the CEO in for two in-person meetings, then you must be small, and we must be a critical customer for you to win." Customers should feel important, but never critical.

This came to a head when we sent them a final proposal. They asked for a price break and concessions, and said explicitly that because they were an important customer for us, we'd give them these things concessions. In reality, they were no more important than 20 other prospects we were working with. But because we brought our CEO into sales meetings on a small deal, they thought we were smaller than we were.

jon_dahlon Benchmarking cloud video encoding: Zencoder, Encoding.com, Sorenson, & Panda

Definitely - this is important as a control.

Every test was done using the same core settings (codecs, profiles, resolution, frame rate, bitrates, two-pass encoding). Beyond that, CloudHarmony used the default settings at each provider. We'll try to publish each video for visual inspection, but suffice it to say that they all look pretty close, especially three of the four, which use the same core encoder (x264) and the same settings. There may be microversion differences and minor variations in settings, but not much. The fourth uses MainConcept, which isn't a bad encoder itself. You'll probably see a bigger spread in audio quality - Encoding.com and Panda rely on faac, I think, which is an abandoned AAC encoder that isn't very good.

jon_dahlon Benchmarking cloud video encoding: Zencoder, Encoding.com, Sorenson, & Panda

Here you go: ffmpeg rules. Zencoder, Panda, and Encoding.com use it. Sorenson doesn't. That's part of the reason why our video quality > Sorenson. Also here: http://zencoder.com/opensource.

Big shout outs to x264, libavcodec, gpac, mediainfo, lftp, curl, mkvtoolnix, oggz, sox, lame, Ubuntu Linux, C, C++, Ruby, Rake, Postgresql, Redis, Dennis Ritchie, Steve Jobs, vim, emacs, and a hundred others. We couldn't have done it without all of you.

jon_dahlon Benchmarking cloud video encoding: Zencoder, Encoding.com, Sorenson, & Panda

Sure, it could be a scam. But for what it's worth, it's not - we absolutely didn't cheat. Cheating in a benchmark might work some places, but it certainly doesn't work for a company that sells to hackers.

If you want to verify the results yourself, we're going to post the benchmarking source code to Github this afternoon. You can review the methodology that CloudHarmony used and run the tests yourself, with your own account, without us having any knowledge that you're testing us. That way, we have no way of cheating. You can even change up the files and use different encoding profiles to be sure that we didn't pick specific files or settings that happen to be faster at Zencoder.

jon_dahlon Do YC funded companies hire non-technical people at all?

YC companies definitely hire non-engineers. But often the first few hires will be engineers; at Zencoder, we were 7 engineers and 1 business/office manager before we hired for sales/marketing.

We're currently looking for a marketing manager. http://zencoder.com/jobs/

jon_dahlon The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)

It took me two or three tries, but now I put 2-6 up there with the first book.

I think the reason people have trouble with 2-6 is that they're ultimately a reversal or deconstruction of the Hero myth. The first book is a fairly typical "Rise of the Superhuman Hero" tale, and that's why it's accessible. Book 2-6 explore the dark side of this myth, which is why they're unique, somewhat inaccessible, and really interesting.

jon_dahlon Ask HN: Who's Hiring? (Intern Edition)

Zencoder, based in San Francisco. We process millions of videos in the cloud, for large and small customers, via awesome APIs.

We're looking for Sales, Marketing, and Engineering interns.

* Engineering interns should know Ruby/Rails with a slight DevOps flavor, or know C and have interest or experience in video processing.

* Marketing interns will work on a range of marketing projects, from SEO and analytics to helping strategize and coordinate marketing campaigns.

* Sales interns will work with our inbound and existing customers, and may participate in some outbound sales.

Internships are paid, and we can help with relocation. Email in my profile.

jon_dahlon Google’s YouTube Uses FFmpeg

Tools like mencoder, On2 Flix Engine, and GStreamer are alternatives, but they share a lot of code with ffmpeg (including the ubiquitous libavcodec).

If you want to avoid this altogether, you have a few options, though none of them are as strong as ffmpeg, like Quicktime, Microsoft (Expression Encoder etc.?), and enterprise software or hardware (Rhozet, Inlet, etc.). But I wouldn't be surprised if enterprise appliances even incorporate libavcodec today.

jon_dahlon Major improvements to audio at Zencoder, and why this matters

Sorry for the slow response. For the most part, it's not tricks, at lest for now - more like using the best available software for resampling, channel mapping, etc. We don't (for instance) automatically mess with normalization/gain, though users can do that though our API.

jon_dahlon Major improvements to audio at Zencoder, and why this matters

Yep, unfortunately we can't right now. Maybe down the road?

jon_dahlon Major improvements to audio at Zencoder, and why this matters

It sounds a bit better outside of Flash, actually. Flash prefers 22050 or 44100 audio and doesn't do a great job of resampling others up to 44100 (which I think is what happens behind the scenes). Give it a listen in Chrome or some such and see what you think.

We aren't using those libraries right now, but we'll check them out. How do they compare to something like SoX?

jon_dahlon Major improvements to audio at Zencoder, and why this matters

Sure. FLAC is great, and it's on our roadmap.

We're in a funny place right now where both higher bitrate and lower bitrate video/audio are becoming increasingly important. Low bitrate because of mobile video and adaptive bitrate streaming, and high bitrate because bandwidth is getting cheaper.

jon_dahlon Major improvements to audio at Zencoder, and why this matters

I'd say this is well known with anyone working with open source video tools. And yet it's still in use all over the place, sadly.

jon_dahlon Major improvements to audio at Zencoder, and why this matters

Yep, we didn't write our own encoder - we evaluated and licensed a third party encoder. Article edited to make this more clear. The problem (at this point at least) is that our software licensing agreement with the third party includes confidentiality, so we can't name the software without permission. Stupid, I know. But you can probably guess, or figure out, what it is. ;)

jon_dahlon Major improvements to audio at Zencoder, and why this matters

Yes - iTunes uses Quicktime, and Quicktime has one of the better AAC encoders. Unfortunately, it's not easily executable (or licensable) on Linux.

jon_dahlon Google Spending Millions to Find the Next Google

I don't think you have to be invited. Though it's probably hard to get a meeting, just like it is with any VC.

Google Ventures is fairly similar to traditional venture capital, but with more support provided to portfolio companies. Andreessen-Horowitz is another VC that follows this model. Besides providing traditional VC help (money, intros, executive recruiting, advice), GV and A16Z have operating folks on staff that can help portfolio companies with things like HR, Bizdev, engineering recruiting, UX, etc.

jon_dahlon Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (July 2011)

San Francisco, CA - Zencoder

Zencoder is putting video infrastructure in the cloud. We're growing, our customers love us, and we have the best technology in the industry.

Always interested in hearing from awesome people, but we're especially looking for a designer.

Web Designer:

  * beautiful design and CSS a must.
  * if you can help with javascript, writing, or marketing projects, that's a plus. 
  * Rails experience wouldn't hurt either.
  * open to experienced designers, early career folks, or interns alike...
  * ...you just have to be really good.

Benefits include catered lunches, full health/vision/dental insurance, retirement matching, an Aeron chair, a great work environment, and the ability to work for a Y Combinator company that is making a real impact in an exploding industry.

More info at http://zencoder.com/jobs/.

jon_dahlon Honestly.com – Not acting so honestly

If he has a board seat, then yes, he should have some say here. But it's really unlikely that he has a board seat.

An early stage investor has very little authority over what a startup does. At best, they may have some advisory influence with the founders, if the founders care about having a good relationship with the investor. But usually, that's about it.

jon_dahlon Startups Are Hard

I'll be moving from Minneapolis to SF soon. Before spending significant time in the Bay Area, I thought that the noise/saturation/and "meh" were a problem, but my experience was different. It's a very supportive environment, with a lot of smart people willing to help out.

There are three problems to the Bay Area:

1. Massive competition for engineering talent. It's probably harder to hire 20 brilliant engineers in SF than in any other major city in North America.

2. Cost. Our burn is increasing by 20%-30% because we're moving.

3. Echo chamber. Ideas tend to get reinforced here. This is often good or neutral; SV will sometimes recognize the significance of something before the rest of the country will. (There are a lot of people who still think Facebook and Twitter are hype and will go bankrupt soon.) But I imagine that there are ideas that make sense in SV that are ultimately bad ideas. And there are ideas that wouldn't resonate in SV that are probably huge opportunities.

This is a little off-topic from the original article, which is fantastic. But circling back: startups are hard, and moving to SV isn't a panacea. It may help a little, but do it with eyes open - because you want to commit to the startup life, and SV is a good place to do that.

jon_dahlon Raising money in the 21st century, or: Why Zencoder raised $2M

We considered that at one point. The problem: if we slow down our encoding, we make more money. If we optimize, we make less money. We want to align our incentives with our customers, and we're focused on being as fast as possible.

That said, at really high volume, an approach like this can make sense.

jon_dahlon Raising money in the 21st century, or: Why Zencoder raised $2M

Nothing at first, though we do validate that frame_rate is <= 300. We'd maybe even applaud you as the first user to try this. (Then we'd ask you to stop.)

A FPS-based pricing change is on our radar, though. In both directions: low frame rate video (like screencasts) should , and we'll formalize that soon for both low and high FPS video.

At some point, there is a fine line between protecting against abuse and having easy-to-understand pricing. 2c/minute is much more user-friendly than 2c per 30 frames. We haven't seen much abuse, and 99.9% of our customers use 20-30fps, so this hasn't been a high priority.