I had heard the stories of entrepreneurs I look up to working long hours, forgoing a social life, losing girlfriends in the pursuit of their startup.  The value proposition here seemed straight-forward enough.  Given that you are trying to create a profitable, successful business out of nothing but an idea it would make sense that one would need to put in long hours.

So when I heard Jeff Hawkins (founder of Palm and Handspring among others) give a talk entitled: “Inside The Mind of a Reluctant Entrepreneur“, it shocked me into some interesting realizations.  I won’t spoil the whole talk because it’s excellent and you really should listen to it as soon as you can.  But some of his basic tenets include: “Succeeding at a startup means making the right decisions and picking the right priorities; it’s not about the hours you work.”.

Here’s the thing: I’ve always powered through whatever task I’m doing… I have succeeded by outworking others.  In the context of a problem with clear defintion, this is a great approach.  However as the founder and CEO of a funded startup, simply powering through task after task is not what matters.  My investors, employees, and customers expect me to deliver results for them… in the end it doesn’t matter whether I work 1 hour or 20 hours a day as long as I deliver results.

So does this mean I’ve had a magical epiphany and will start working 2 hours a day?  Absolutely not.  In fact, I’ve adjusted my schedule so I have even more time for work.  But what I’m realizing more and more is the importance of setting the right direction for the company and for myself as CEO is incredibly important.  If as a company we are working towards the wrong destination, it’s useless for us.  It doesn’t help our investors, employees or customers.

These revelations started happening when Bilal, our new hire at emptyspaceads started on Monday.  From his outsider’s perspective, he identified the most important task for us to be working on as a company.  And we’re doing that now.  And I’ve never felt so sure we were doing the right thing for the company’s success as I am now.  As we’re working on this new direction, I can see how having too many simultaneous objectives hurt our ability to effective execute on each of them in parallel.  As a small startup with low headcount, you can’t really afford to puruse multiple objectives at once.  Plan, execute, review.  Rinse and repeat.

More to come on this subject.

Gayle our current VP of engineering recently posted on her blog that she’ll likely be leaving Seattle and that we’re focused on hiring her replacement. We’re really going to miss Gayle around here, and she’s done much to help us move to the next iteration of our product ready for publishers. Now we’re actively looking for a Software Engineer now, but someone who can function as our VP of Engineering as we grow.
EmptySpaceAds has a beta product release, funding, and a great network of advisors. Our investors are actively involved - in all the right ways. How many other small startups can say that they have funding? Not many! ;-). Know a rockstar developer - who wants to lead a start-up? Read on for the job posting!

Software Engineer / VP of Engineering at EmptySpaceAds

With over 40% of the space on web page consisting of “empty space” (margins, etc), empty space is the remaining element of the web to be monetized. EmptySpaceAds is turning previously wasted empty space into a growing revenue stream for our web publishers. Publishers no longer have to decide whether to use the margins for ads or for the aesthetic value of empty space - they can do both!

Our Product

EmptySpaceAds allows a website owner to utilize the page margins for both “empty space” (eg, pages look better with a bit of emptiness), and for ads.

How does that work?

Our ads only show up when a visitor’s mouse hovers over the margins of a page. This means that when you visit a web page, it’ll look just as “pretty” as it did before. But, when your mouse hovers over the margins, an ad will (gracefully) fade in behind the margin.

And, here’s the best part: because the ads are reacting to the user’s mouse rather than being always-present, users don’t experience “banner blindness.” Publishers will see high click-through rates.

Who We’re Looking For

We’re looking for someone who is more than an engineer. Someone who can jump in and make decisions. Someone who can prioritize and schedule our product releases. Someone who can lead the engineering effort. Someone who can drive our product’s success.

As employee #2, you will be instrumental to the company’s success!

Here’s why you should join us:

• You will have incredible impact in our company as our first Software Engineer
• You will lead our engineering effort… future developers we hire will report to you
• Learn what it takes to run a startup. Interact with the founder daily and attend meeting with the company’s investors.
• You will reboot your career. You’ll learn more, fail more, succeed more, and take away more than you ever would at the equivalent Big Company experience.

Hard Requirements:

• B.S. Computer Science or equivalent experience
• Minimum two years of professional experience
• Possess initiative, leadership abilities, and the ability to make difficult engineering decisions
• Location: Seattle, WA (Pioneer Square)
• Full Time Only

How To Apply

Please email jobs@emptyspaceads.com with the following information:

• Resume / CV
• [OPTIONAL] Pointers to software you’ve written. Examples: open source contributions, examples of source code you’ve written, examples of live production software you wrote or were a contributor to
• [OPTIONAL] Links to places you discuss software. Examples: your blog, your website, etc

Yes it’s great news for emptyspaceads and the Seattle Tech Startup Community.  Please check out out our jobs page, or read over the PDF job description which is crafted to seduce you or your friends away from a BigCompany.

Keep in mind we offer an enticing, but yet to be revealed referral bonus.  So it’s in your best interests to let everyone you know about this opportunity :).

A couple weeks ago, I signed up at V7N’s webmaster forums because one of our users posted about how they really enjoyed our product. “Ok great!”, I thought. I’ll reply and then start a couple other posts about the subject to garner everyone’s feedback and help make it better. I don’t see any problem with doing any of this because everyone else is looking to promote their own product. And even if there was a problem… the administrators could have stepped in and said something, or emailed me privately. They just deleted my account, my posts, and my goodwill for the forum. In fact its a net loss for them because now I’m telling you all how much they suck.

Here’s the friendly message I see when I try to login:

You have been banned for the following reason:
spam

Date the ban will be lifted: Never

How charming!

I have really enjoyed working at Microsoft in the Windows Mobile Multimedia Group as a Program Manager for the past 15 months. And I’d do it all over again in a heart beat. Windows Mobile was my favorite product group at Microsoft and as a former intern, I was able to specify this is where I wanted to end up. However, you don’t get to decide which team you end up on. Landing on the Multimedia Team was an awesome experience. What’s cooler than working on the multimedia experience on mobile phones? I got to work on interesting features that I can’t really talk about in this blog post. Suffice it to say, it was a good experience.

I left Microsoft on January 4th, to work on emptyspaceads, a company I founded and have been working full time on for the last month… and one that I feel has huge potential. More on that later… but if you’re impatient check out the emptyspaceads blog.

One last thing: if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re broke (like I was in October of 2006 when I started), Microsoft is a pretty great place to be. You can learn new things, build relationships with smart people, and most importantly have time to work on your venture on your own time. I feel start-ups are great, but it’s hard to pursue your own projects while working at one. Microsoft has reached the point in its existence that its employees (in most product groups) don’t work 100 hours/week, freeing you up to pursue your projects.

Recently, I’ve been facing what I thought to be a big problem. I wasn’t getting as much out of my job as I could be… and it was really bumming me out.

I wrote the problem off as something I had to deal with. It wasn’t until I went on a long bike ride to Seward Park and back that I figured it out. I remembered a Stanford Entrepreneurial Podcast from a professor who taught entrepreneurial classes there.

So I’ve turned my problem into a learning opportunity. Here is my execution plan:

• Pick key components of the software business that I want to learn about
• Prioritize these areas
• Spend one month on each of these areas (priority order)
• During the month, learn everything I can. Seek out, meet, and learn from gurus in the area. Read articles and books if needed (do I even have time? :p).
• Make the most of this problem… I mean opportunity

I want to record the lessons I’ve learned so that I don’t forget them. I also want to make sure others can benefit from my mistakes.

• Be ready to work tirelessly to assure the site doesn’t cave under pressure - It takes more effort than you think. Will worked very hard on getting queuing working. Even so, we had thousands of dropped calls. You get *ONE* chance to wow users with your product. If it doesn’t work the first time, they’re not coming back - ever.
• Monitor incoming links - Use software like Google Analytics to monitor incoming links. Know where your traffic is coming from…. by the hour.
• Do damage control early & often - Be prepared to respond on all other blogs and places that mention your product. Thank the reviewer for their time and the readers for reading the story about you. Y ou should be thrilled! Then roll up your sleeves and get ready to handle a bunch of negative comments. Address each one if possible and invite others to come back to your personal/company blog to continue the dialog
• Create many ways of providing feedback - Having a blog to link to, a contact form, and an email address is only a start. Consider having a phone number and a message board. Your web business lives and dies on customer feedback, so keep them happy.
• Create ways for your users to come back - We had no bookmarking feature for our site relying on users to manually bookmark our site. Big mistake. We’ve lost out on thousands of visitors because we didn’t offer these features earlier.
• Ideally have a strategy of monetizing the influx of traffic - the first wave of traffic pretty much caught us unexpected. Before I go telling anyone else about this service I want to have a way we can monetize all the calls we’re making.

Wowsers! Thanks!  A life goal achieved. Thanks for all of your support! Please let me know how I can improve this tool!

*UPDATE*: Uncov Review (the Anti-TechCrunch)