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Awesome Live Sets (House Music)

Great site for live club house music sets: http://killingbeats.com.

Succeeding Through Failure

“There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.” - Laurence J. Peter

Today, I failed.  After running the Honolulu Marathon in December I challenged myself by running the 8 mile Great Aloha Run in under an hour.  After all, if I can run twenty-six 10 minute miles in a row, I should be able to run eight 7 minute miles in a row.

I didn’t even come close.  I did, however, learn a lot from the experience.

To train for speed, I started running timed miles on the treadmill at the gym.  Every minute running on the treadmill was excruciatingly boring.  My eyes were glued to clock in front of me.  Watching the seconds tick by killed all my passion and love for the sport.  Running a 7 minute mile was really hard for me.  I could barely do two in a row without feeling like my lungs were going to explode.  Without passion, I simply couldn’t devote the energy needed to succeed.

I didn’t fail because I didn’t enjoy running fast.  Being good at something often requires that you endure some sort of overwhelming hardship to get to where you want to be.  I’ve never been a fast runner, but I want to be - and that desire is enough to get me there.  I failed because I didn’t change my approach when it was clear that what I was doing wasn’t working.

I find this particularly relevant when I communicate with people.  It’s like vigorously trying to change someone’s mind by repeatedly telling them they’re wrong.  Sometimes an approach just won’t work no matter how many times your try it.  That doesn’t mean your goal is unattainable.  It just means you need to be smarter.  Take a step back and get a fresh perspective.  Better yet, get someone else’s opinion.

The irony is that had I just trained normally by running outside like I did for the marathon, I would have done far better than I did.  I would have run at least twice a week for 8 miles at a time, greatly increasing my cardiovascular endurance and speed in the process.  What I did instead was half heartedly run a couple miles a week on the treadmill.

I like to think that if you don’t fail, you’re not trying hard enough.  Some people venture to say that you should fail as often as 50% of the time, just to make sure that you’re trying hard enough.  I don’t know if you need to fail any set amount of times, but I do know that the ultimate failure is not learning from your mistakes.

The Price of Photography

Isn’t it funny that your $300 digital camera needs a $1500 accessory to be properly used?  People used to buy a film camera, take photos with it, and take negatives to the printer.  A simple process that involves one simple device.  Now you have to own a computer if you want to enjoy digital photography.

I wonder how this is reflected in consumer photography trends.  There must be a whole contingent of people out there who don’t own a computer or would have no idea how to use one.  Do those people still take photos?  Are they using film cameras?  Do that have someone to manage their digital photos for them?  Has photography shifted to younger demographic as a result?

Alpha Means Awesome

We’ve been cranking out code for over a year and a half.  It’s been a labor of love building our platform.  This weekend we finally hit our Alpha release.

WOW.  It’s rare that I try something that I think will completely change an industry.  Yes, I’m talking about a product my team has built, but I like to think I can still be objective.  And there’s a big difference between thinking that something is good and  thinking that something is game changing.

iLovePhotos is game changing.  I’ve never seen or used anything like it.  Even though I’ve been closely involved in the development of this software since day one, every time I see a new internal release, I’m blown away.

This isn’t a Twitter meets Flickr meets Facebook meets YouTube clone.  This is a completely original concept.  In a sea of companies trying to build a better mousetrap widget, iLovePhotos is a completely new way of thinking about and interacting with your personal content.
Think text based interface evolved to GUI.  Think Game Cube evolved to Nintendo Wii.  A desktop photo application that automatically organizes your photos and brings them back into your life.  Yes, automatically.  It’s so simple, anyone can use it, even the most tech illiterate of computer users.

I can’t wait to release Beta!

30 Second Update

It’s been so long since I’ve blogged I had trouble remembering my user name and password.

In the last month I’ve…

- run my first marathon

- raised our second round of funding for Blue Lava

- celebrated an amazing new years with my closest friends and family

- not spent enough time with my parents who are visiting from Germany

- met lots of amazing people both professionally and socially

In the next month I’ll…

- Go to the Wayne Brown Venture Capital conference in Utah in early Feb

- See snow (at said conference) and snowboard for the first time in years

- Do some business in SF around mid-Feb

- Do the Great Aloha Run (come join me, it’s only 8 miles!)

- Meet many more amazing people both professionally and socially!

Today, I miss Black Rock City. I’m listening to Burning Man mixes from the Deep End. I can’t wait to go back. Music just sounds better in the desert.

Happy New Year to everyone.  May all your dreams come true this year….

Singapore is Hilarious

Check out this video of the Singapore government trying to encourage more tech companies to set up shop over there. Maybe we should try something like this in Hawaii!

Thanks to TechCrunch for finding this video.

Yahoo Figures Out New Ways to get Ads in my Email

Today I noticed that Yahoo abruptly changed color themes on their beta Yahoo Mail interface. They also rolled out some pretty interesting contextual advertising technology that I’ve never seen in an email client before. They actually detect the names of cities and places in your incoming emails and underline them. If you hold your mouse over the word, it displays a little contextual menu with options to view travel information, maps, and search results.

I could see this being pretty useful if it was integrated with the right services. For example, if I could click on an address and automatically have cheap hotels, airfare, and rental cars suggested to me, I would be be pretty thrilled.  Looking forward to seeing where this is going. It’s interesting to see Yahoo’s “Peanut Butter Manifesto” strategy play out.

Financial Modeling

There’s an awesome post on Guy Kawasaki’s blog about financial projections.  Glenn Kelman, founder of online Real Estate pioneer Redfin.com, shares real life numbers from his business and projections.  Really good info for anyone running a start up.

Doing what you love vs. what you have to do

I like to think that every entrepreneur is in it because they love to do what their doing. Personally, I love the process of creating something from nothing. I really really love creating value where there was none before and all the challenges that come with that.

Part of what I think makes people successful is being able to identify personal weaknesses and delegate those to people who can do it much better. For example, every person I hire is smarter than me. No doubt about it. I mean, honestly, why would I hire them if they weren’t smarter than me in some way?

As I’m preparing to raise our next round of funding for Blue Lava Technologies, I’ve stumbled across a personal weakness. I _hate_ accounting. I mean, I really really hate creating balance, income, and cashflow statements. Don’t get me wrong, I love the data. That’s some of the most important data any entrepreneur has to make good decision and be sure that the business is running well. I just hate putting it all together, which is the job I’ve been tasked with for the last two weeks.

It’s made me really appreciate how much I love everything else I do. It’s also made me realize that I need to hire a CFO to handle this for me in the future. So if you know anyone, let me know.

Oh yeah, we’re also looking for a really good COO and Project Manager.

Photos are blowing up!

To those of you who know me in the real world you might have noticed that I’ve gone into hyper stress mode.  I’m actually not that much fun to be around these days.  My apologies.  We’re about to raise our next round of funding and the perfectionist in me wants to make sure that everything is, well, perfect.

I was doing some research and came across some pretty crazy stats from InfoTrends.  In 2006, a cumulative total of about 330 billion images were saved on a worldwide basis.  This number is expected to jump to about 880 billion by 2010.  On average, U.S. digital camera owners currently have about 1,000 images saved and this number grows larger every day.  By 2010, there will be about a trillion images saved on hard disks, optical media, and other storage devices.

Sharing these photos and finding specific photos out of all these images is becoming a daunting, if not impossible task.