MPD

As you’re about to learn, last week was really crazy. Normally if I had been away this long, I probably wouldn’t bother to write about what happened, but since it was the last week of the summer, I feel like I should cover it to be complete.

On Sunday, August 20, I went back down to the San Jose Jazz Festival for the afternoon. It was another gorgeous day, and I saw thousands of happy people walking around. Unfortunately, no one I knew was there, so I had to listen to the Salsa, Latin, Blues, Big Band, New Orleans, etc. stages by myself. I still had a great time.

Monday was a pretty standard day at work. Matt and I had finished most of the stuff that FindLaw asked us for already, so we went over our code base and documentation with Chris and Gloria, then began working on our news classifier again. This time, our focus was developing a clean training mechanism.

Tuesday was my birthday, so I was planning on going out for a nice lunch or dinner. I was also planning on selling my car at Hayward Mazda during lunch… So I took off work at 11:30 and told Matt to leave to pick me up in half an hour (to give me some time to double check everything and actually get the check).

I got there around noon, talked to Arash (the manager) for a while, and he agreed to buy the car. “15 minutes and we’ll get you the check,” he said. 15 minutes later, the legal guy who was supposed to write the check comes downstairs and says, “Let me see your ID. I cannot write this check.” Turns out the problem is that they didn’t know what to do with a title from a dealership, and they wanted to make sure I didn’t steal the car. So I told them that Dad owned Portage Motors. Then they wanted Dad to be there to sign the bill of sale himself (I guess it’s a California law…). By this time, Matt had arrived and started waiting in his car. I called Dad to tell him what was happening, and he was pretty incredulous.

We talked to the people at Hayward Mazda, some more, and after about half an hour convinced them to accept a faxed copy of the Portage Motors dealer registration and a note from Jerry telling them that I am an authorized representative. They didn’t know what to do with it, though, so they called some lawyers and told me to go out to lunch and come back later.

Matt and I went down to Subway for lunch, and I could tell he was already getting a bit impatient. By this time, it had probably been an hour since he arrived. When we got back to the dealership, they were still waiting on the lawyers, and I just had to keep sitting there. Eventually, the lawyers called back and said that if Dad could get a notarized version, we would be ok. So now Dad had to leave work, drive home to get his notary kit, drive to Portage Motors, and notarize Jerry’s note. This took another 45 minutes, though in the mean time, I was able to start filling out forms to transfer the car.

Finally, I was done and had a check by 4:00, after expecting to be back at work by 1:00. So now, all I had to do was get back to Sunnyvale/Cupertino… But Matt had left because he couldn’t wait any longer to get back to work, so now I had to figure out how to get there. It’s a bit of a drive, so a taxi would have been $60+, and I decided to see if I could take some sort of public transportation.

Little did I know that Hayward is not an easy place to get to from my neck of the woods. After some discussion, I determined that I could take the BART rail system to Union City, the Dumbarton bus over the bay to Palo Alto, the Caltrain to Sunnyvale, then walk to work. I got off the Dumbarton bus at about 5:40 and was about to head for the Caltrain station when I saw another bus coming down El Camino Real. I decided to hop on and see how far I could get. It was getting pretty late, so I decided to just head back to my apartment and skip the rest of work for the day. The number 22 bus got me to Wolfe Road and El Camino, but no closer. I still had a one to two mile walk left (edit: I just checked Google Maps, and it’s actually three miles; note that I couldn’t even take the expressway since I was on foot).

I walked and walked until I was within half a mile of the apartment, walking down Steven’s Creek talking to my mom on the phone. Suddenly I heard a shout from a car driving by, “Mike Daugherty!?” Surprisingly enough, Bryan Shieh was driving by. I hadn’t realized that he was in town starting his full time job yet, so I haven’t seen him all summer. Apparently, he didn’t even know that I was working around there, so he was just as surprised to see me. I ran over to his car when it stopped at a red light and hopped in. I saw his apartment, and we went to eat at In-N-Out, where we talked about work, life, cycling, etc. until about 9:00. Bryan was planning to make a fancy dinner on Wednesday, so he invited me over to eat it with some of his friends.

Overall, not one of my better birthdays, but at least it ended ok – when I finally arrived back at the apartment at 9:30, I found some balloons and a happy birthday card on the door from the people who run the apartment.

For lunch on Wednesday, Chris, Gloria, Matt, and I went to Kam Pai (I think), a new “Japanese-Fusion” restaurant in Sunnyvale. Apparently Japanese-Fusion means Japanese food cooked in a French style; don’t ask me why you would want that… I wasn’t terribly impressed with anything there, even though they were obviously trying very hard. I was reminded very strongly of Chen, however, by the square plates and the waitress admonishing me for setting my plate down in the wrong orientation for their plating.

After work, I went over to Bryan’s place and Matt went to pick his mom up at the airport. Bryan made rack-of-lamb and mashed potatoes. I thought the lamb was delicious and the potatoes were a little salty (but he knew they would be when he spilled the salt into the pot). Overall, though, it was really good. I also met Bryan’s roommate, a coworker, and a woman who graduated from MIT two years ago and is currently a Stanford medical student. I never met a package engineer before, but I guess that’s what Bryan’s coworker is.

Thursday and Friday were pretty quick days at work. We didn’t have much left to do there, but we had a lot to do at the apartment – cleaning, etc. Friday, however, we did sit down with Chris and give him a demonstration of our classification engine along with the training tool we developed. Overall, I’m very happy with it. We’ll have to see if they take our prototype and actually develop it into a part of their infrastructure, but if they don’t it’s their loss.

We spent Friday night cleaning the apartment from top to bottom; after all that work, I sure hope they don’t try to charge us cleaning fees from our security deposit.

Finally, I flew home on Saturday; it was a pretty long day travelling, since I got to the airport really early because I had nothing to do at the empty apartment. I ended up travelling from 10:30am to 11:50pm. Anyway, I thin this is probably a long enough entry for now. Soon I’ll write about my time at home and meeting Diana, my family’s exchange student from South Korea.

So far, this week has been one of the best of the summer. On Wednesday, FindLaw held their annual company picnic. We had a lot of food, then played volleyball, basketball, baseball, and poker. I mainly played volleyball and poker, though I shot a few hoops with Matt as well. We played poker without any real money, so people were pretty loose with their bets; it was really hard to bluff anyone out in this game. I stayed in for a while, but finally lost it all when Gloria got a three of a kind on the river… She went on to win the game.

So, not only was the picnic fun, but it meant that we really only had to work three hours for the day, and we got home early. Even though we basically just relaxed, it’s always a good feeling to come home early. I tried to see if Carter was up for anything, but he already had plans with other people. I’ll just have to see him back at MIT this fall (he’s leaving the bay area this weekend).

Thursday was another good day (though I only logged six hours at work…). For Lunch, Matt and I visited the PSO team at Google. Sanjukta, an MIT student interning with them, invited the other MIT interns in the area over for lunch to check out the Google lifestyle. The people there seemed pretty smart; mostly young, as well. I’m not sure I have a really good idea of what exactly the PSO team does on a day to day basis, but the description I got is that they work with Google partners to support and develop services. For example, they may work with AOL to ensure that there are no problems with the search results that AOL buys from Google. However, they also do more than just support; some of the people I talked to developed internal software tools for CRM and other types of knowledge management.

Lunch ended up taking two hours – the drive there and back wasn’t too bad, but we also spent at least an hour and a half in the cafeteria. What really made the day short, though, is the fact that Matt and I left at 5:15 for the Churchill Club event at the Palo Alto Hills Country Club. The event was scheduled to begin at 6:00, but it’s sort of out of the way, so we left early. Not too many people were there when we first arrived, so we were able to get really good seats right in the middle of the room. After picking out our seats, we got drinks at the bar (I had a Coke with lime, and I mean a real lime, not artificial flavoring), went outside to check out the golf course, and came back just in time for dinner.

Dinner was a little disappointing, I must admit. Of course, had I actually paid the $70 entrance fee, it would have been a lot worse to find out that all they had were two salads and two types of pasta with a choice of sauces. I love pasta, but I would have expected some sort of meat as well, chicken probably. Still, the food was definitely not the reason people attended Startup Success 2006…

I enjoyed talking to the people at our table during dinner, because they all had interesting and varied experiences. There was a young guy from Microsoft, a guy who had just spent three years running a security startup, a manager at SAP, a lady who introduced herself as a “headhunter”, another guy who has done some startups and currently lives in AZ, and three people who didn’t talk to the rest of the table much. The guy who did the security startup (I wish I could remember his name) sat on my left, so I talked to him for quite a while about his experiences and the panel of speakers. He is really into blogging, and seemed to know who nearly everyone was. When I mentioned that I went to MIT, he suggested that I check out a blog by Brad Feld, Feld Thoughts. Brad is an alumnus of MIT who works for Mobias venture capital, and his blog covers topics relevant to today’s startups. I checked out the site and have been pretty impressed.

The panel discussion actually started at 7:00, so dinner continued for about an hour. Guy Kawasaki was the moderator, and the five speakers were Lauren Elliott (founder of Third Rock Mining and creater of the Carmen Sandiego series), Reid Hoffman (co-founder and CEO of LinkedIn), Joe Kraus (co-founder and CEO of JotSpot, better known for Excite.com), Daniel Mattes (co-founder and CTO, Jajah), and Alex Welch (co-founder and CEO of Photobucket). Guy led a fairly relaxed conversation about the thoughts that these five entrepreneurs had about what a successful start up will go through these days.

The two panellists with whom I was most impressed were Reid Hoffman and Joe Kraus. I could tell that Reid is very smart and had thought a lot about consumer internet companies. He made one comment in particular about the importance of a distribution plan for startups that I hadn’t thought too much about before and I think a lot of people overlook. He’s right that if your product needs 10 million users to begin to be useful it will never be successful unless you have a plan for how to get 10 million people to sign up without any immediate benefit. My reaction to this would be that, should I start a company, I need to make sure that there is value at any level of participation. It’s great if the value perhaps goes up tremendously at 10 million users, but I really need to concentrate on the initial benefits as well.

Another comment made by Joe Kraus (but related to something Keith said earlier) was also something I had never considered before. Joe explained that there are lots of buyers for companies in the $1-50 million range, and extremely few past $50 million, but VCs would much prefer that a company hold off for a payout in the $50-250 million range, where it can be extremely hard to find a buyer. Therefore, founders should realize that VC money doesn’t come without costs, and they should think seriously before accepting VC money to ensure they know what they are getting into. I haven’t thought extremely seriously about a startup before, but I guess I always assumed it would be a good thing to get VC money, without thinking too much about the sacrifices in control that a founder would have to give up.

There were many more interesting discussions by the panel, about how many hours per week to work (Keith thought 100 was too much and you’ll burn out, but at the same time, if you’re only doing 60, you should be doing more), how to pay employees in stock/salary, and how soon to release a product (another good quote from Keith: “If you aren’t embarrassed by your initial release, you’re too late to market.”).

Another result of the Startup Success event is that I learned about a few new products to try. I signed up for LinkedIn a few years ago at Simon’s urging, but didn’t find it that interesting at the time (maybe because I was only a sophomore in college and didn’t have many people in my network), but I think I’m going to give it another shot. When asked who was a member, nearly every person in the room raised their hand.

The other one I’ve already recommended to people is Jajah. My family has an exchange student from South Korea living with them this year, and if Jajah works as promised, it could provide a way for her to call home for free. I don’t think they’ve tried it yet; she only arrived Wednesday, and I didn’t tell them about the service until this afternoon, but I’ll be interested to see how it works out.

I’m pretty sure I’m not going to use any of the other three startups. I’m already a member of Flickr and run my own server during the school year, so I don’t have much need for Photobucket. Jotspot seems targetted mainly at corporate customers (plus, MediaWiki is so easy to use, I don’t see why I would want another wiki that I had to pay for). Finally, I didn’t quite understand Lauren Elliott’s new business. It sounds like he’s creating a desktop application for publishing and gathering news, but it’s not RSS, and it’s for people who aren’t too comfortable with the internet. He also mentioned that he thought it would take a long time to develop, so it probably won’t be ready for a few years. I have my doubts about whether he’ll succeed, because the way I see it, he’s entering a diminishing market. Sure there’s no one else in that space, but it doesn’t mean the market isn’t dimishing. More and more people are becoming comfortable with blogs, the internet, and RSS. If he’s planning to wait two to three years, even fewer people will find his product worthwhile than would right now. Perhaps I misunderstand, though, so hopefully he’ll do really well. I even tried going to his website, but I couldn’t find a simple explanation there, either.

Friday marked the beginning of the San Jose Jazz Festival. Luckily, my friend Jaime was in town for the week, so we met down by the Tech Museum to listen to music and get dinner together. Jaime has spent his summer at MIT working with Prof. Earnst extending Java 6′s annotation system. This week, however, he was called back home for jury duty. Apparently he didn’t have to go in a single day all week, so he just had the time off. We talked for a while and agreed to get together more often once I get back to school.

This weekend, Matt went down to LA with his brother, Mick-Dawg. Mickey lives in LA, but he flew up here Wednesday night, stayed at our place for a while, then the two of them drove down to Mick-Dawg’s place via Highway 1 on Friday. This meant that while Matt was hanging out with the models and actors, I had the place to myself. Don’t get me wrong, Matt’s a great guy, but I kind of enjoyed the feeling of being alone in the apartment for a while. It’s very relaxing to lay on the couch and just be by yourself for a while.

Nevertheless, I did want to get out a little bit this weekend (I can’t stand to stay inside all day in this beautiful weather), so I decided to head up to downtown Mountain View and Palo Alto on Saturday night to watch Casablanca. After walking around Mountain View and getting back in the car to continue to Palo Alto, I realized that Casablanca is actually playing next weekend. This weekend was Rebecca and Strangers on a Train – both Hitchcock and not bad, but I really didn’t care to see Rebecca, and Strangers on a Train was never my favorite.

I decided that since I was there, I’d hang out until 10:00 and watch Strangers on a Train anyway. I took the opportunity to walk around the Stanford campus for about half an hour (it really is beautiful). I hadn’t had a chance to do that yet, so I had a good time investigating the mission-style architecture, going down Palm Drive, and enjoying the wooded areas. By this time, it was about 7:00, and I was getting hungry, so I headed to downtown Palo Alto in search of food. After walking through the whole of downtown, I settled on a Gyro for dinner; they’re not too expensive, and since I was by myself I didn’t want to go to a really nice restaurant.

The Lamb/Beef & Chicken Gyro (don’t ask me why they use such strange punctuation) was pretty good. After I finished it, I spent a long time in Borders listening to music and browsing books. It was still only 8:10 or so, and I needed to wait until 10:00 for the movie. Borders took me until about 8:50. Next, I just walked up and down the street for a while; I even stopped to listen to a street performer who I am pretty sure was a college student. By 9:15, though, I had done all there was to do, and I started to get really tired, so I just gave up and came back to the apartment.

Sunday, I was again alone in the apartment, so I did some cleaning, paid some bills, etc. Carter surprised me by calling and inviting me over to his place to bake cookies and watch a movie, and I jumped at the chance. Carter makes some mean chocolate-chip cookies, but I think mine definitely hold their own. His include just a little too much brown sugar, in my opinion. We ended up watching “Shaun of the Dead,” which was quite amusing.

Carter also had some even more surprising news when he announced that our friend Nikki from 6.170 is now working at Google. I had no idea she was even thinking about getting a job directly after school. Carter found her on facebook, however, and set up a time for us to go out to eat together on Monday night.

Therefore, after work on Monday, I picked Carter up and we headed to downtown Mountain View. Nikki works a bit later than either of us, so we were walking around for about half an hour before she even made it to Castro Street. When she finally arrived, we decided on an Italian restaurant for dinner (Don Giovanni’s). It sounds like Nikki is enjoying her job a lot. I guess she was planning on going to grad school in Chicago, but Google offered her a job as a user interface designer in May, so she contacted the school and is now “taking a year off.” One of the more interesting aspects of Google that Nikki mentioned is that the heirarchy is very flat; her direct manager supervises about sixty people, and Nikki is only 3-4 levels away from the CEO. This means that she only sees her manager once or twice a month, and she also has a lot of freedom to choose interesting projects and work in her own style. Sounds like a good work environment to me…

What I’ve seen this summer has definitely convinced me to apply to Google this fall. I think I have a good chance of getting an offer because they are growing so much these days and I can also bring a lot to the table. This fall should be interesting because I’ll be interviewing with so many companies. I don’t know how other people feel starting their senior year, but I’m really excited to find out where I end up. Hopefully I’ll know by Christmas break. It’s hard to believe it’s so close.