Tonight’s e-mail brought a reminder from Gaurav about the Seattle Tech Startups meeting next Wednesday, March 10th, at the Douglas Forum at the Executive Education Center at the UW Business School.

Michael Miller from Cloundant (YC S08) will be on hand to discuss CouchDB and their commercial offering. We’ll also have Eric Peters from Frugal Mechanic (Founders Co-op) to talk about Cassandra. We’re going to have one more speaker and would ideally like it to be someone who can discuss MongoDB. The sponsor behind MongoDB, 10Gen, is helping us find a speaker in Seattle in time for the meeting, but if you know someone who could fit the bill, please drop us a note.

The topic is relevant, timely, and should be of interest to a lot of geeky Seattleites.  I’ve played around in the last year with non-relational cloud offerings from Microsoft and Amazon and also had a geek crush for a long time on Google’s BigTable technology.  While I’m not convinced of the universal applicability of non-relational databases, I think that they definitely have a place in the massively-scalable technology environment.  And the tooling and support infrastructure has grown leaps and bounds in the last year or two, to the point where working with them is no longer a huge pain.

Hope to see you there!

The next STS topic has been announced: “discuss trends and opportunities for tech entrepreneurs in 2010.”

The speakers are great:

We’re excited to share that we’ve lined up three great speakers to share their views on this topic: Chris DeVore (Founders’ Co-op), Michael Schutzler (BlueSeven Partners), and Bill Bryant (Draper Fisher Jurvetson). All of them are investors, advisors and board members to startups, and bring unique perspectives to the table. Visit the website for details on the speakers and their topics.

Bill Bryant in particular has been among the most active contributors to the STS discussion group since I joined it a couple years ago.  Can’t wait to hear what these guys have to say about 2010.  I’m hoping to pull some insights and motivation from them as I work hard to get the next revision of Crowdify out the door.

Wednesday, January 13th, at 7 PM at the Douglas Forum in the Bank of America Executive Education Center at the UW.

See you there!

UPDATE: Tony Wright posted his slides to SlideShare.

So what’s been happening over the last couple days….

First, last night’s STS presentation was stellar. Two great speakers – Chris Hopf and Tony Wright – gave two great presentations, Chris on the Freemium business model, and Tony on profit and conversion metrics. Chris has already posted his Freemium presentation slides up on his blog, and I suspect that, based on the frequency of Tony’s blog posts on his personal blog at http://tonywright.com, it may be a while before you see his slides The STS wiki will probably have links to video before too long, so keep checking there.

Next: kickball. Tonight was the first playoff game for PPA’s summer kickball league, and unfortunately….we had to forfeit, for lack of female players. We think they got scared away by the huge rainstorms that occurred right before the match. Massive bummer, but stuff happens. We ended up playing an exhibition match against the Steve Pool Sluggers, and had fun, tying 7-7 after seven innings. Overall I had a great time this season. My teammates were fun and competitive, and I’ll look forward to next year if I’m still with PPA.

Third: project work is progressing nicely. I’m doing some new stuff with LINQ and Expression Trees which is bearing immediate fruit. I would have spent some time tonight programming, but for….

Fourth: personal. Another down day, thinking of things that could have been; lost opportunities; missing elements in my life, etc. etc. ad nauseum. By the end of the workday, after an unanticipated surprise, I really did feel like throwing up my hands, wrapping up the entire day and returning it to sender. What I’d like to do is go back in time a couple months and rewrite history according to my needs and desires; of course that’s impossible. We have to take life as it happens, not as we wish it would have happened. But I’m sort of wondering when I’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel. As they say, every light lately has turned out to be an oncoming train.

Careful readers will suspect, and rightly so, that most of what I’m going through right now is self-created, but knowing that you put the rake down in the yard doesn’t make your nose feel any better when you end up stepping on it. Not the first time, nor the tenth time. Nor (god forbid) the hundredth time. Frankly I just want all the rakes to go away. I’m continually considering, and constantly (thus far) rejecting, making big changes in my life – personal, professional, you name it – to, in effect, force changes where none seem to be organically occurring. A good friend has counseled me that “the grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence.”. That could be true, but remember, it’s a relative formulation. And, in truth, the bright emerald green you see just over the white picket fence could truly be the most earth-shattering green lawn you’ve ever experienced.

You just never know.

So? You wonder about direction, solutions, probable tangents on the road to re-acquiring health and/or a healthy outlook, and I just don’t know. Burying myself in work – both day job and side projects – seems to be the most likely option; burying myself in an exercise program – to, in effect, try to become the Fittest Geek in Seattle – is another. My initial 30-day program is over next week, and I think I’ll pick up another 30-day program immediately. Re-invigorating myself with a serious round of tech/networking participation is a third option. Unfortunately, none of those things are my first choice; my first choice is now and forever blocked to me, so items 2-infinity will have to serve as pale replacements of the original need.

More to come later, as the inspiration strikes…

August’s Seattle Tech Startups meeting topic is “monetization”, which is your fancy geek-speak for “selling stuff to people.”   As usual, it will be held at the Douglas Form at the Executive Education Center, 4th floor, and there’s typically a good turnout, so get there early!

The speakers are Chris Hopf of http://pricingwire.com/, whom I’ve not yet had the pleasure of meeting, and Tony Wright, who is one of my favorite STS types for all the time and attention he devotes to the STS mailing list.  Oh, and his avatar used to be this bitching pose of him with a pipe, which was at once trendy and anachronistic.  He took it down and replaced it with a more vanilla “Hey!  I run an up-and-coming tech company!” avatar, which was like a TOTAL sellout.  Nevertheless, he’s a really great guy, an engaging speaker, and well worth the 90 minutes of your time.

Oh, and they have a community drink-a-thon over at the Big Time Brewery after every STS meeting, so, if you’re so inclined, you can network over some of the University District’s finest ales.

See you there!

Tomorrow night (June 10th), Jeff Lawson of Twilio will be giving a talk on Cloud Computing at the monthly Seattle Tech Startups meeting. Apparently Jeff gave a similar talk at the June 4th Amazon AWS Start-Up Tour which was very well received, according to comments I read on the STS mailing list.

The STS Wiki has details on when and where, if you’re interested in going. Should be a great talk, following up on last month’s great discussion!

UPDATE:Here are Vanessa Fox’s slides and here is Scott Porad’s slide deck.

Last night at STS Vanessa Fox of Nine By Blue gave a great talk on SEO – she really, *really* knows her stuff and is one of the acknowledged worldwide experts on the topic. Scott Porad of Pet Holdings (I Can Has Cheezburger, and other sites) then talked about User-Generated Content and wove together a lot of great thoughts into a very interesting presentation.

Mike Koss of StartPad has posted both videos here for your viewing pleasure. Highly recommended!

On the Seattle Tech Startups mailing list, there’s been a discussion recently about the pros and cons of various development platforms.  Eventually it devolved, as many of these discussions do, into a general throwing up of hands and a recommendation by several people to avoid development stack debates, because it inevitably leads nowhere.

I’m not so sure I agree with the proscription.

It seems to me that there are few things in play:

1. Very few developers know more than a few stacks well enough to assess whether or not they are REALLY better or worse for certain tasks.  For example, I don’t have enough Python or Ruby experience to be able to pass on anything other than secondhand knowledge (and my own guesses) about their true capabilities relative to, say, .NET.
2. There are intrinsic and extrinsic factors that can be evaluated for each stack.  Intrinsic factors are things like readability, breadth and depth of built-in libraries, expressiveness, flexibility, etc.  Extrinsic factors are things like cost, availability of developers, vendor support, etc.
3. The notion that each common stack is as good as the other is bunk, in my opinion.  Maybe it’s my latent objectivist streak, but just as C# is objectively more productive than assembler for web development, you could pit any two languages, and – given perfect information – come up with a rank-ordered list for any required scenario.

Someone on the STS list asked the reasonable question: “where do I go to get information about the various choices?”  I agree with the commenter who thought listservs like STS are a great place to go in theory.  It’s mostly working professionals, in or near the startup experience, and refreshing lacks the anonymous yahoos that flame away on Google Groups tech lists.

I’ve been hearing Robert Scoble yak for months, nay, years, about the “walled garden” metaphor in social networking. This is where a vendor, say, Facebook, locks in users by restricting their ability to move their social graph to other, possibly competing services.

It appears that the trend is slowly moving in the direction of portability, which is a win for average Janes and Joes, not to mention the Scobles and Calacanises of the world who have about 1.0*10^12 friends apiece and who are singularly responsible for recent Twitter downtime, among other horrible crimes.
There’s a larger issue, which is almost the reverse of the walled garden issue, and that is, how valuable are silo networks in the first place? The item that got me thinking was a post by Ken Ross on the Seattle Tech Startups list about his new venture called ExpertCEO:

We’re writing to invite CEO’s, COO’s and Presidents to join ExpertCEO, a private on-line community where senior executives can confidentially exchange ideas with peers, locate trusted resources, ask questions of experts across a range of disciplines, and quickly solve real-world business problems. The site combines social networking technology with concepts proven by CEO membership organizations like Vistage and YPO

I was immediately brought back to 1992, when I was the store manager for a Mailboxes, Etc. franchise, and a guy who had a mailbox there invited me to join a similar organization. His gig was to go around to different cities, set up an irresistable buzz among the wanna-be CEOs, collect his membership dues, then hand over the managerial reins to some clueless schlub and go on to the next town.

The thing was, I was 20 years old at the time and had no executive experience of any sort. I was a struggling student who happened, by dint of responsible behavior, to land this slightly less crappy job than most of the other students. But when he invited me to join his super-CEO group, I was thinking something along the lines of “I wouldn’t want to join any organization that would want to have me as a member.” I went to one introductory meeting and it was a roomful of mostly clueless, mostly preening young guys who had big ambition but not much in the way of real mentoring, or anyone they could ask to see “is this thing really worth my time?”

I’ve been fortunate since to have a couple older mentors who have taught me a lot – often through osmosis – and so now, when I see the ExpertCEO pitch, I immediately reject it. But let’s assume for the moment that this guy, Ken Ross, is a decent guy who really thinks that this idea has legs. He might be thinking along the lines of the job-hunting site for “people making over 100K a year”, TheLadders.com

Does it have legs? Do “communities of interest” have a place?

I get a lot of value out of my self-selected network(s): Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. I also get a lot of value out of special-interest groups I belong to (formally or informally), such as the Seattle Tech Startups group itself. What’s worth paying for, and what’s not? Is Twitter worth paying for? Is Biznik? Is ExpertCEO?

Recently on STS there was a long series of discussions about whether it was useful for startup founders to subscribe (pay for) membership in the various Angel and VC funding organizations, like NWEN, Alliance of Angels, Keiretsu, etc. There were strong sentiments on both sides of that argument.

What do you think?

I’ve neglected to put up the slides from my recent Seattle Tech Startups presentation. Find them over at SlideShare.net.

Title of presentation “Get Faster While You’re Getting Better”. The presentation is about how to integrate Agile concepts into your startup software development process.

Last night I went to (and presented at) the Seattle Tech Startups monthly meetup at the Seattle Public Library on Capitol Hill. I had a fantastic time. The crowd started at about 30 and maxed out at probably 50, as people straggled in partway through. And, strangely enough, speaking in front of 50 strangers didn’t make me freeze up and start drooling (I think). My presentation went well. My topic was a bit dry – especially compared to Hillel Cooperman’s inspiring talk — but that’s the nuts and bolts of software development for you. SOMEONE has to be boring.

Mostly I’m just glad I put myself out there and gave a talk about something that I know and love and do pretty good work in. I put myself in the arena. Throughout my life I’ve tended not to be that person, but this startup experience is so fulfilling that I find myself actively enjoying things that I normally avoided before.

Hillel Cooperman presented after I completed. Listening to Hillel was a revelation. I’ve heard of him, obviously, most memorably when he was ranked the #1 Entrepreneur Blogger in Seattle by Marcelo Calbucci of Sampa. He’s got a great thing going at Jackson Fish Market, not in terms of producing 1,000,000 dollars a month, but in terms of having a viable, fun business built on terms set by the founders. No outside funding. Lots of creativity. Lots of, well, thinking about what makes cool products and services, then actually going out and getting it done. If I was 21 I would gobble up one of the intern spots JFM is offering this summer.

Afterwards I met quite a few super-interesting people, and put some faces to Twitter friends’ names, which was very neat. I’ll definitely be a regular attendee at STS meetups in the future.

Maybe the best part? Seeing the Seattle Startup Weekend crowd roll in. Shout out to Marina, Adam, Scott, Leo, Rob, Adam, Jocelyn, Nathan, and I’m sure I’m missing one or two.

p.s. My slide show can be found on SlideShare.