Petar Petrov's Blog

I have a friend of mine who’s blog is named “Live life in shuffle mode.” I will take this metaphor and extend it to my life – my life is on Pause.

Last 4 weeks have been really nuts. We worked really hard to launch feelgood. Then another 2 weeks of bugs fixing, introducing new features, and fixing browser compatibility. Throw in some midterms and some competition deadlines for a business plan to make it a little more spicy. I literally was shuttling between school and my desktop computer. I wake up, work a bit, run off to school, then take the train straight home, get food on the way and work till 4am. There goes my life. Paused.

I haven’t been doing any of the other things in life. My gym membership card sunk under some papers and design sketches. My credit card has got only McDonalds and Chipotle charges instead of drinks at bars. Haven’t seen a movie in a while and my Facebook status has been blaring “Update your status…”

I can’t complain though. This whole time has felt like an incredible run. I have enjoyed every minute of it. Building a product that you enjoy using and seeing the users slowly growing every day is so gratifying! It is such an irony that we have been working a number of years on random projects and never really launched anything even though we have always had the capabilities.

After each run you have to rest though. I have had completely free weekend to resume my life and reflect on the events last month. In a bit I will be ready for another dash.

[Pic by mysza831]

Just by reading TechCrunch every day you can’t help but wonder, “How the hell are there that many companies getting funded?” And that is just the tiny bit that is mentioned on TC. I shared that observation with my friend Alek, who jokingly (or not quite so) answered, “We’re in a Startup bubble :)”

That got me thinking on the issue. There are a million definitions about a bubble, but generally – “a situation where market prices are unsustainably high”[I don’t think there is such a word, but I got it from Wikipedia, so i guess there is]. Usually that happens as a result of overinvestment and development growth due to speculative inertia. Also, it is not explicitly stated, but a bubble is often associated with a Bust. As a matter of fact your are probably reading not because you want to know about the bubble, but because you are afraid of the Bust. But let me explain why there won’t be one.

I don’t need to bring too much data to convince you that Internet Startups are quite hot today. There is an army of angel investors that occupy the range of $0-$1mln along with VC’s that are targeting investments as low as $500,000. News sites keep coming up with brand new company names. Strange simplistic products become hits in an instant[away status products?]. Early stage venture capital companies like Ycombinator seem to be extremely popular lately. Applications grow in times each consecutive year. Even colleges have a standard practice of organizing competitions and funding the winner teams. Ladies and Gents, there is a gold rush if you haven’t noticed yet. But a Bubble & Bust? Nah. Because the internet market is like no other market:

There is a tremendous growth. Just like in real estate where developers build, people happily and readily buy, developers make more money and keep building. The one difference is – in the internet market new people just keep coming. No geographical area has such unbelievable influx of client??le. New people get hooked with bandwidth every second. People that have it increase their use of internet all the time because there is more stuff to do online. And more people means more developers and more products and more stuff to do. When does that end?? When supply of new people dries up. Not any time soon, I will tell ya that. Most of the internet users come for about 15 countries and total less than 1/2 billion. With more than 6.6 billion people there are quite a lot of future entries. With such dynamically increasing demand, how can this market be saturated?

Another interesting characteristic of the internet market is the movement speed of huge masses that can pick their belongings and move in a different building. Switching between products (email clients, social sites, tools, etc) can be done in incredibly short time by incredibly huge masses. Or for that matter adopt a new product/mindset. Think Gmail, YouTube, Friendster-MySpace-Facebook. That means new developments can target not only the tourists but also the locals. True, old buildings get tossed in garbage but so what? Owners made money, now it’s time for another venture or other entrepreneurs.

The third interesting thing is that the internet market sucks off the real world. Or should I try to present it better – is in symbiotic relationships with the real world. There is a constant addition of new ideas that are based on establishing the connection between the real world and the internet. Online TV, USPS online tracking, mp3 (players) and a gazillion other things are being now invented that make a wonderful bridge between the virtual and the touchable. With every new such feature fuels the internet, revamps the market and gives rise to other ingenious ideas. Net has catching up to do with real world and there’s plenty of opportunities for sucks off people and products from the real world.

It would seem naturally to make parallels with the Bubble in 2000. “If it happened then, it may happen now”, you would say. It’s quite different though – 2k was a flop because people realized the power of internet before the audience was ready. Huge speculation positions were taken while nobody believed in the Internet. Everybody jumped into making products that weren’t bad (and would probably have made money today) but the crowd was not convinced that internet will be part of their lives. Today, IT is not only a source of information, but a means of entertainment, and a medium for communication and social enterprises. The internet is becoming more and more an irreplaceable tool for almost everything. Before 2k it wasn’t so. As it happens very often – technology was ahead of mindset. Investors and entrepreneurs got burned. We now know the power of fire though, but we also know how to handle it.

Time IS going to come when there will be a slowdown due to the underdeveloped countries that can’t wire themselves. The big powers that could afford to wire themselves are doing it and when they are done things will indeed slow down. The Balloon will deflate but not Bust. The reason for this is that it has become tremendously cheap to build, scale, and maintain a product. If in the past the main investing players were VC’s with millions, today it is everybody that has an extra 10,000 or 100,000. That has huge implications on the Bubble effect because while before 2K valuing the market was based on few VC investments and few believers and a crazy amount of speculation about the future, today there is one source of information – the internet market. It is the ultimate measuring stick. It is composed of millions of businesses and small websites each of which has a pulse. We can measure that pulse and we can go in hibernate mode if needed. But we won’t default.

So my prediction is that Startup culture will keep growing healthily. It will also make deep changes our perception of careers. As the internet gets more integrated with the real world businesses and as those connections get systematized, it will become quite easy to start a regular business too, like never before. It will become much more common for people to have the mindset of business starters than company employees. No bubble, no bust – just growth, growth, growth.

PS external factors like World War or Net Neutrality, etc. not considered

Tennis is pretty much like any other sport – how good you are depends not only on accuracy and strength but also on the variety of tricks you can pull in different situations. Wider the variety of shots you can perform, the higher the probability you will maximize efficiency by choosing the right one. Now this is where the person’s character begins to matter. Some like to concentrate and master perfectly the basics they have been taught, but others enjoy trying shots between legs, behind their back, demi-volleys etc. Your character defines the way you will behave at training and the type of stuff you will learn. In a match against a smart opponent, your wonderfully mastered forehand doesn’t do much because you will barely get the chance to use it.

Same goes for startups. To be good at a startup you have to have a wide range of tricks under your sleeves. But how do we get them? Well, experience obviously. Here’s one specific way to build experience: we live in a world of rules and laws. A lot of them are written down and can’t be crossed, but there are many many more that are not explicitly stated and under certain circumstances CAN be trespassed. Those are the ones you should be testing, exploring, and sizing. Here is what I mean:

Nobody ‘should’ cut a line in a store. But if you cut a line 10 times you may figure out that 5 out of those times people really don’t mind it. As a whole you are quite ahead of everybody. We can argue about ethics, but here the principle of testing is important. My little brother is extremely good at pushing limits to find the size of the playing field so he can use the whole width of it. He, for example, would drive you nuts just to figure out at what point you break. Then he knows that and can keep you on the edge always, thus maximizing his own proceeds. Again, this is an awkward example, but this applies also for how to deal with investors, negotiation, determining your burn rate and so on.

It’s hard (and probably pointless) to try and name specific steps you should be taking for ‘exploration’ but in any case you should be aware of it and watch out for those opportunities. Easiest way to spot them is when you meet an obstacle. Then you should just turn around and think, “Which soft limits can I cross so that I can get through this?” What is harder is getting at that ‘state of mind’ so you are automatically thinking of what you can do extra and go further even before being roadblocked. It doesn’t come naturally and you have to impose it consciously, but after a while it becomes your nature to see extra solutions, stop less in front of barriers, and enjoy life and all of it’s pleasures to the max. 😉

I just don’t understand how our civilizations are thousands of years old and yet some things in our lives that are so obviously inescapable have so many flaws and opportunity for improvement. Slightly awkward and amusing but quite relevant is the topic of public restrooms. I am not a freak about cleanliness so I do use them but most of them are just so gross that even Shrek is no match for. Here are a few solutions I would love to see:

• How many generations does it take us to understand that men are sensitive about their attributes and even though you put urinals, half of men are always going to prefer to pee on the seating toilet just to get more privacy. The result of people urinating on the seat and people trying to take a shit on the same seat looks about like that:
  
  So instead, you couple one toilet with one urinal (you can see that empty space that we actually have) and you never get that pic again. Btw, that counts for a house with many boys like mine, because its much more easy to pee at a urinal than to aim at the toilet at 6.30 am…

• Oh yeah, don’t you love those transparent toilet papers that rip rather than unroll when you pull them? How can you wipe anything with it anyway? I have to fold it in 2^4. Same for paper towels at drying procedure.

• Flushing systems are just not right. Those handles (seen on pic above) that seem to need to be pulled to flush the toilets are just not having me. People pee on their hands and then what is the first thing they go for? Yeah, the flusher. Or the exit door (assuming that people that pee on their hands are the ones that don’t care washing them. If you can’t pay for sensors then please take a look at Italians’ way: they use pedals! How much more sense does it make?

• Please do not try to convince me that I have to touch anything so that I can wash my hands. Especially the idiotic push-buttons that are one for hot and one for cold water and you actually have to keep them press constantly so that water runs, consequently of which you just can’t possibly wash yourself qualitatively because hands never meet. Oh, and yeah the left one always gets burned while the right one gets cooled to freezing. I’ve seen people try to use their elbows its hilarious, believe me! Anyway. Sensors pls. Or even just regular handles would do fine. I promise, I will not waste a lot of water!
  [UPDATE: A friend of mine hinted that if you press strong enough you can get those push buttons stuck down so you can actually wash your hands. Which is exactly the opposite of saving water, since I do see them ‘broken’ all the time…]

• Blowdryers. Rarely dry completely and still most of them have to be pressed. Dyson so far is the only one that got it right! Or paper towels are fine. Just no crappy dryers that make me sweat more than they dry hands.
  

• Doors! What is the point of going through 15mins drying procedure when I still have to touch that door that is touched by every guy that wiped his ass and didn’t go through the drying procedure (or for that matter washing procedure). Hmm how about at least make doors pushable rather than pullable? How much does that take?

• We can’t change the mindset of a country but my school had a campaign by putting a paper above the toilets, “If you sprinkle when you tinkle, please take the time to wipe it off.” I did take time to do so when it was previously clear [only in that case]. It worked overally but as the papers got tore off, they didn’t get replaced. Cheap solution that works, because if previous person was created incentive to be clean (all of the above points) and leaves the place clean, it is much more likely for you to also clean up your stuff. Usually, generally, probably… but not always of course.

• Another problem girls seem to have – none of them actually sit on the toilet. From numerous discussions about it, it turns out lot of them just squat as low as they can without actually sitting on the toilet which is extremely difficult (I have tried it and I have failed). Still thinking about this one…

As you can see, most of those take a little thinking rather than money, and as a matter of fact they probably save money because of cutting spending on cleaners paychecks.

So if your about to build a facility with public restrooms, get in touch with me – I will consult for free.

(let me know if you have other suggestions)