Desire Determines Destiny

2011 turned out to a frenetic year of hope, opportunity and energy. We had 18 students work with us to create Carddit. For many it was their first jobs as co-op students. Beyond teaching them design and coding, I hoped they learned about passion, desire and perseverance.

John Maxwell has an article of passion being the fuel of persistence. He said, 'desire determines destiny' and the winning side is usually the team that 'wanted it more'. Passionate people use their passion to inspire them to clear roadblocks, to do the seemingly impossible. Dispassionate people find reasons to doubt, looking for reasons to stop instead of ones to push on.

2012 is for me the year of persistence. Enthusiasm doesn't pay the bills, neither does vision unfortunately. But what keeps us coming back day after day is the desire to achieve something special together. I'd like to look back and know I've made a mark no matter how small, I've made a difference to the life of at least one person, hopefully many.

In the darkest hours, the fuel of persistence is our passion, our desire, our beliefs. Without that, we, as a group and as a company would be without a soul. The internet does not scare us, but it inspires us and motivates us to participate. I truly hope that our desire is enough to determine our destiny.

I'd like to think last year, we made a difference to many lives of students that passed through Play Dynamics. This year, I'd like to think we'll make a difference to the people who are with me in creating this great company.

What do politicians and programmers have in common?

Not all politicians are evil, I do believe some really mean well. They look at the current government and all its limitations and shortcomings and are inspired to do better. They stand on their soap box and tell people they will reduce taxes, create jobs, offer free healthcare. All good stuff. Some even have a plan of how to do it, finding excess and surplus and build efficiencies.

The reality is once they are in office, all the aspirations are met with a wall of complexity built by many governments that have gone before. They are faced with rules, lack of infrastructure, fear, regulations and practicalities. Often they leave office several years later having met very little of their campaign promises. As tax payers we'd like to think they were incompetent, but how can that be when many of our leaders were respected and successful lawyers, businessmen, accountants before they were politicians. They were killed by the unpredictability that comes with complexity.

Programming is pretty much the same. Having been on both sides of the fence, programming and managing, there is very little I haven't seen. Yes, there is posturing, pet projects, politics even in software. The hardest thing to accept that in software, everything takes about 6x longer than anyone anticipates (that's 2 x pi for the geek-minded). Anyone, whether a manager or a programmer looking at a problem from the outside will say the infamous 5 word phrase, "How hard can it be?". We don't understand why putting a button on a screen may take a day. Alas it's the iceberg effect.

In software, 90% of the complexity is never seen by anyone except those toil into the night. That one little button could in fact pack a whole of functionality, making the implementer change the order of the workflow, create new database tables, dependencies and even unanticipated side-effects (we sometimes call bugs). Like a new car, software degrades from the day it is shipped. New specifications, customer demands, changes in scope, changes in the market make us do unspeakable things to an otherwise perfect and beautiful system until weeks, months and years later we look back and say, "What on earth was he thinking?"

The answer is of course, the programmer was only thinking as far as he could see and chances are if he saw any further, he would have built a behemoth that would never have shipped on time. Even as a seasoned software developer, I have on occasion looked over the shoulder of my peers and muttered underneath my breath, "How hard can this be?" only to realize a week later that while the feature is simple, the system complexity made the implementation speed totally unpredictable.

Priceless

Need I say more?

Little girl kisses kitten

Wil Power

Yes, that's not typo. Wil Wheaton gave us some love today and brought our Carddit site down. That's what we call Wil Power.

Just before noon, my co-founder Sharleen sent Wil a Carddit deck that she made. It's an awesome deck. (She has many, you should check out her other decks. Sharleen's Decks).

Within minutes, our site went down, horribly. Attempts to bring it back was futile, the servers were dragged down like bloodied boxers in the final round of a losing match. Realizing we were running out of database connections, we took the servers completely offline except for a page just showing Wil's jazz hands. It was just the type of humor we needed in the office and for all the disappointed visitors to our site.

The problem wasn't that we weren't designed to be scalable. We had load balancers, multiple servers and redundant database service all hosted in a cloud. We already off-loaded all our assets to Amazon S3 a long time ago.

It was a question of finances. As a small company we could ill-afford to have a massively redundant architecture on standby. Frankly the popularity of Wil and the love his followers showed took us by surprise. But we were back up within the hour, with a much more powerful database server and 4 front-end web servers. Zero coding and a bit of reconfiguration. I'm particular proud of our team, Sharleen, Tony and John.

We pride ourselves as being an agile team. Today we showed it. Hopefully, more people will see our labour of love, Carddit. It really is the best way to collect the best of the web, and take it with you (today on your iPhone, iPod Touch), soon on your Android.

So tonight, for the first time many moneys, I've downed my dev. tools to reflect on this moment. It's a small but important validation of our work.

There is so much more to come.

The gods smile upon us

About an hour ago, I was doing payroll, a very depressing activity given that we're bootstrapped (aka survival) mode. I'm very proud of our team, the sacrifices they've made in time and money. But worrying about our financial future is a perpetual state of mind. I deeply feel my responsibility as CEO to provide for our team and our families. Even the bravest and strongest have doubts in moments of battle.

15 minutes ago, I took a casual look at the iTunes Appstore. Our app Carddit made it to the New and Noteworthy section in social networking. We're featured in #2 spot. For many this may seem unimportant but for every app developer out (the many tens of thousands) to be listed in New and Noteworthy or Featured App area of iTunes is a holy grail.

I often wondered whether we took too long to develop Carddit. There's the quick and dirty approach of throwing a dozen apps and see what sticks. As a consultant, that's what I would have probably recommended. Instead, Carddit took the team 6 months to build. We fussed over every interaction, every screen. Debated every feature. We often joked, that this wasn't version 1.0 it was more like 4.0. And maybe, just maybe, someone saw the love and attention that went into the app and gave us back some of that love. We are truly, truly humbled and grateful to be recognized.

I think I know why. On Saturday I spent the day with the family at the botanical gardens. My daughter had her digital SLR and I had an iPhone. As we walked around, I decided to drink my own kool-aid and started to take a couple of pictures and make 1 or 2 cards. I ended up making over 20, totally voluntary. I shared my cards on Facebook, more activity in my account in one afternoon than in the last 6 months! I got lost in the moment. Today we heard that same comment from someone else. "I lost track of time playing with your app". I think we definitely did one or two things right.

Carddit isn't perfect, yet. Version 1.1 is already in testing with some added features and minor bug fixes. We've already have plans for 2.0. I hope the world sees why Carddit embodies everything we believe in about play.

Carddit is simply about favorites, our photos, our memes, our memories kept in a familiar paradigm, decks of cards. Allowing us to curate, collect and share. Tony, my wise friend once said, the true success of an app not whether we get a million downloads (that is for the world to decide), but whether we want to use it ourselves everyday. I do.

Our fate is in the Cards

Finally I can announce the first (hopefully many) Play Project from Play Dynamics. It's called Carddit. You can find it here in the Apple AppStore

Why Carddit? Play Dynamics has always been about Play. We wanted to pick something that would embody our vision, culture and ideas. We chose cards because everyone understands how cards, decks, deals, and trades work. We weren't teaching a new concept. We also thought that photos today should be more than just a post with a filter. It should be about wrapping the photo in a frame (in our case it's a card). Add the stuff the matters, the date, a title, a description. And then to treasure that card in your deck. Finally to share that treasure with others and of course, collect it from others too.

Too often our applications are developed to make us more efficient, make stuff faster but we lose the moment, we lose the play. Imagine that last loving kiss on your date was just a peck on your cheek. Imagine eating lobster and steak at your fast food joint. Imagine ice-cream came in a pill. It's all efficient but what happened to the experience?

With Carddit, we took so long (maybe too long) obsessing about the experience. It had to make you feel good before you even shared the photo. It had to make you feel good receiving one. I hope we succeeded. The best test is whether we would want to use it. My co-founder Sharleen made 1,500 cards during our testing. They weren't just the same picture of a coffee cup but while it was for testing, each had some personal relevance. Some were there because it made her laugh (like the memes), some made her cry (because they brought back poignant moments in her life) and some made her sigh (like albums, um decks, of her children as they grew up.

So if Carddit doesn't make you smile, sigh or cry (not because of the bugs), please drop us a line and let us know because then we failed in our intent. They laughed at me at the beginning when I said my measure of success would be that every user touched Carddit at least once a day. If you could see our feature list for the next 3 versions, you'll realize despite how audacious it may sound, it is plausible.

My parents are in the 80's. This is the very first software product, I feel I can explain and load on their iPad and get them to use. I can't wait to show them. Perhaps that sentiment is all I validation I need, "did I do the right thing?"

It's a long post, but I need to make a quick shoutout to all the people who participated in the dream. Many have taken huge drops in salary to make it happen. Along the journey, I've picked up some of the smartest people I know. We've given 15 students an incredible insight of what it means to be in a startup and learn to write for web and iphones.

So many thanks to all my friends/colleagues/advisers at Play Dynamics. Sharleen (my co-founder), Tony, John, Bert, Emily, Ke, Emily, Robert, Tim, Javier, Roy, Aaron, Lily, Abbas, Sinthu, Zac, Mubushir, Sanghoon, Rajan. And yes to my family (Karen, Nick, Courtney and Mozart-the Carddit Cat), I will finally be home for dinner.

Now that the cards have been dealt, it finally feels Play Dynamics is on its way.

This is my favorite card of the day

Pi after midnight

It isn't quite four score and twenty years but it has been a long time since I updated this blog. Elvis hadn't left the building. On the contrary, his lack of appearance was because he was building a skyscraper.

Frankly, I could have done with a 48 hour day but we make do with what we have. Since we launched our Play Dynamics website in March, we've been frantically building our first product. With a lot of help from my friends...

We grew from 2 to 13 during that time, put 13 co-op students through our company, did much consulting to pay the bills and still managed to finish our product. Finish may be the wrong word because it is just the end of the beginning.

Last night we did the obligatory all-nighter, finding last minute bugs and issues the defied our intelligence. There is some software law that says all software is shipped after 1am. We did it. Well after midnight, we submitted our first app under the Play Dynamics banner to Apple. I'm eager to share what we did but I guess I'll have to wait a little longer.

From the get-go, we built this company in the most unorthodox manner. We run it the same way that we write our code. Serious play. We play hard. For many it will feel like work. Funnily enough, despite the 16 days, 7 days a week, we rarely call it that.

It has something to do with the way we interact and support each other. The way we brainstorm ideas. Involve and mentor students. We're in constant play, challenging each other, living in the flow. It can be done, we did it.

If you go out to build your skyscraper or follow your dream, surround yourself with the right people. The wise men who have done it many times before. The partners who aren't afraid to challenge or be challenged. People who love ideas, who dream, who are curious. People with energy and tenacity. People who don't know what "can't" or "won't" means. People filled with possibility. I'm blessed to be surrounded by such people.

This is a milestone not only for Play Dynamics but for my life. I've shipped many products for many companies. This one is both special and personal. I did it my way. We did it our way.

More to come but for now, it's time to do all the stuff that piled up, ignored because shipping was the most important thing.

And why Pi after midnight?

It seems appropriate at least for the geek in me, that we shipped at 3.14am, ergo, pi after midnight.

Win-win is always the best way

Friday saw the last day of our current group of co-op students. On Monday, we have a new group starting their first co-op term with us. I'm particular proud about what we were able to do for these fine young men. Sure, they were raw, inexperienced but they were enthusiastic, smart and willing. In keeping with our culture at Play Dynamics, I think we succeeded in creating an environment that allowed them to learn, grow and play and in return we have over half-a-dozen prototypes waiting for integration into our new product.

So often, it's easy to look at the bottom-line and to wonder whether it was worth the thousands of dollars we invested in these individuals only to release them back to their studies several months later. But in life you have to look beyond the bottom-line. It's about giving back and investing in the system. To recognize that the past months may have been the most important in their careers, because beyond giving them great technical skills, we taught them by example the passion within startups, the hunger to write the best code possible and the agility we need to survive in the Internet world. Unlike school where often the problem is simply a restatement of a known and previously taught solution, startups are adventures in the unknown both in market and technology. Giving back has been our biggest payback. The fact we have significant more code ready to deploy is the icing on the top.

Most importantly we taught you can have fun at work. Play without work is pointless and work without play is meaningless. They played at work and worked at play.

Best of luck to Sinthu, Abbas, Rajan, Zac, Sanghoon and Mubushir. May you continue riding the momentum you found at Play Dynamics to be far more than even you could imagine.

Wear your PD t-shirts with pride because we are very proud of you.

Moving around a mess only makes a tidier mess

I've been thinking a lot about social curation these days. Remember how blogs flooded the Internet and we then had blog aggregators to try and solve the problem. It succeeded to a certain extent but didn't do two things, remove the noise (albeit was less noisy) or the volume. For someone to read 100 blog posts each day instead of 1000 posts doesn't solve the problem and I'm not sure it even makes it better. In fact the illusion that it solved the problem actually causes you to waste time filtering the 80 out of the 100 you didn't want to read. So what did we end up doing, most of us pick the 10 bloggers we love the most and just stayed with them. Because fundamentally that's all we can handle. It's not wonder the long tail for blogs is a characteristic that has not gone away. We tried to solve the problem at TheGoodBlogs by random showing you blogs that never made it to your radar and we did manage to connect readers to interesting blogs that you would have never found.

Back to social curation. There are simply too many startups that claim to solve the social noise issue by following a similar strategy. Social noise is even worse than blogs because the dynamic here is very small soundbites but a lot more of them. Tweets will probably one day exceed the number of blog posts created on a daily basis, if it hasn't already. So if we attack social curation by simply grouping stuff and republishing it, we are not really solving the problem. At best it is a large bandaid just like it was for the blogs. So instead of having to follow a 10,000 tweets a day, you follow 500 and yes there are all the other pieces of social noise like Facebook posts, LinkedIn updates etc, etc. Essentially, after social curation (as it is done by many today), you have smaller piles of organized social noise.

So when you're faced with an ever increasing social entropy, you either end up spinning your wheels trying to keep up, stop being active in your least favorite accounts and probably resort to finding out what's happening from trusted sources at lunch or pub.

There's an interesting TV series on extreme hoarding, how people uncontrollably collect and hoard physical stuff. I would propose that digital hoarding is even worse because it is less obvious and far easier to fall into. Is it because we are fundamentally voyeurs who thirst to know what everyone else is doing. Not knowing simply drives us up the wall. Add to that, telling someone something they didn't know enhances our status and influence in our peer group. We didn't invent gossip, it is as old as time when Eve told Adam what the serpent told her, eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge.

Like they say, money is not the root of all evil, it is the love of money. Well, knowledge is not the root of all digital evil either, perhaps it is the love of knowledge. Didn't someone says knowledge is power.

Creating your A-team

There's a lot of talk in the blogosphere about startups and hiring the smartest people you know and creating the A-team. Unfortunately 'A' seems to be always associated with smart and knowledge. I beg to differ. The A-player is package deal. Here's what I look for.

A = ability. That's a given, there must be some level of skills that you bring to the table. However, it is important to remember that in all likelihood, the skills that you have today are insufficient for tomorrow.

A = aptitude. My definition, the readiness and quickness to learn. Speed is everything, long gestation of talent eats up resources and opportunities.

A = attitude. In a start-up there is no job description, it's about getting the job done. I look for people who sees gaps and fills them on a regular basis.

A = agility. Being able to change course on a dime. What you are asked to do tomorrow may not be the same as what you are doing today. Markets, trends, products change on the Internet so rapidly, we require people who can react, retool and reinvent continuously.

Startups are in generally in a continuous state of reinvention

Balance is luxury not the norm. As I'm writing this, I realize what I'm asking for. People who are fearless, passionate and proud about what they do. People who love what they do. And the 'DO' part is not software development, or marketing or any of the extrinsic job descriptions. 'DO' means people who are continually motivated to create, challenge, refactor, discover, explore and in the course of their journey, they may just create milestones that are simply awesome.