Recently in the "Startup" category...

Apparel I want, but cannot afford.

Brilliant. I also want this one:

Take a look around the site. Their FAQ and pitch are priceless. Well, that’s not actually true. It costs $100,000.

VC Wear. Pure brilliance.

Marcelo Calbucci of Sampa, a local startup, just updated his Seattle Startup Index which now includes more than 200 companies.

Man, there’s a lot of good startup activity here in Seattle!

Greg Linden, founder, developer and writer calls it quits on Findory.

I’ve always liked the site, and visit it regularly. I also met Greg at a Gnomedex once and found him to be hyper-intelligent and fun to talk to.

It must be really hard to just “call it” after four years, even if it is the right decision. Hell, it was hard enough to call it on SwitchGear after eight months (which was also the right decision).

Findory.com launched on January 2, 2004. The website just passed its three year anniversary and, including the early work on the ideas behind Findory, Findory has been in my life for nearly four years.

In the last few months, I have been evaluating new directions for Findory. I asked colleagues I trust for their thoughts and pulled in two senior advisors (thanks, Bill and Dan).

Some good options came out of these discussions, but none lead down a path I am passionate about. I built Findory to follow a passion.

Thanks Greg, and good luck in whatever you do next.

Amazon’s new Elastic Compute Cloud service allows you to effectively instantiate servers in their compute cloud at a whim.

Do you need a server to try out that nifty new web service idea? Wham. It’s there.

Need more servers to handle the increasing load? Wham. Wham. Wham. There they are.

Did your service not work out? No customers? Stupid idea? Poof. Poof. Poof. There go the servers.

With no setup or cancellation fees, just pay as you go, Amazon just made it really easy and cheap to try out new ideas and scale them. EC2 in conjunction with their storage solution S3 is an absolute winner.

If I was in the server hosting business, I’d be real worried right about now.

A nice exit for Grouper and their investors. $65 Million is a nice chunk of change, especially as they only took $5.25 Million in funding. A textbook example of only taking the funding you need.

Another cool thing about the deal is that Nabila and I have friends that work there. Dave and Keith - dinner is on you next time!

In a recent post by Hugh MacLeod, he links to an older post that I remember reading, but only now has it really sunk in.

Hugh talks about the The Kinetic Quality of advertising. I believe that what he’s talking about translates directly over to the startup world.

The often asked question about a new startup is “Why?”. Why would I buy that? Why are you building it? What problem is it solving?

For us, SwitchGear is solving a personal pain. We need to work harder at communicating why we believe everyone else also shares that pain.

They just don’t know it yet.

Our product needs to make our customers smarter.

Startups need to flip Hugh’s explanation of the kinetic quality of marketing to customers around to the “why” of their product.

How is your product going to solve a pain point, and how are you going to get customers to come to you to be educated? Will they be smarter and more informed now that they’ve chosen your product?

Will they feel good about it?

On Tuesday I had the pleasure of meeting up with a bunch of local entrepreneurs at nPost’s monthly event. Thanks to Nathan for organizing it and Redfin for sponsoring it. Man, they seem to sponsor everything around here!

As well as meeting a bunch of cool people I also got to geek out with James Bullock about some programming language issues, including my particular vent on the lack of state as a first class primitive in languages. We chatted about a particular implementation of mine in a language I wrote while at Microsoft (that’ll sadly never see the light of day) that supported thousands of threads and a state based model. I.e. perfect for world simulation (read: game).

Anyhow, this evening there’s a meetup for Seattle startups at the public library put together by Chuck at Bill Monk.

Looking forward to it.

This evening’s entertainment was the TechCrunch Party in downtown Seattle. Nice venue, if a tad hot, and it was cool to see all the local entrepreneurial talent out in force.

I got to catch up with a few people I’d met at various NWEN events and chat to way too many Microsoft people. Is it just me, or did every other person seem to be from Microsoft? :-)

I also, finally, got to meet John Cook in person and thank him for the Stealth Startup of the Week post where he wrote about us.

But the star of the evening was probably the pizza.

I have never seen as much pizza before in my entire life. There must have been at least ten stacks of six boxes of pizza - 20” pizza - and it was constantly being refreshed…

Overall, very cool. The local startup community needs more events like this.

Finally one happens in our neck of the woods.

See you there…

I admit that the last time I did any active *nix development was over ten years ago, when Unicode was just a dream, but can anyone explain to me why Unicode development on OSX is such a cluster?

Joe and I were discussing strings today and the fact that as engineers we go to extreme lengths to avoid having anything to do with them.

Windows Unicode support just works and the APIs are very orthogonol, but in OSX it just seems to be all over the map Char256, UnicodeChar, blah di blah.

Oh and

is 4 bytes. What’s up with that?

Basically we’re looking for XML parsing support that is API compatible across all platforms and Unicode aware. Expat is our current foundation of choice, but it just doesn’t work compiled for Unicode on OSX, buts runs perfectly on Windows.

Note that I’m not ragging on expat - it’s a fine library and Joe has been talking to it’s author, but apparently no one has tried to use it that way before.

Looks like we’ll be making our first contribution to an Open Source project.

Anyhow, anyone got any rationale or pointers?

So there’s a big old hullabaloo about the fact that targetting the techcrunch audience is the wrong thing to do.

That it’s the real customers that count, not the digirati.

Well, I agree, but there’s another point that’s being missed.

To a point, the 53,651 do matter.

They’re your first round sneezers.

So over at SwitchGear we’re working on some pretty cool technology and we’d love to hear from some seriously stellar engineers wanting a piece of the startup action.

We’re looking for people with the ability to get deep with multithreaded code, high performance networking stacks, encryption tech and high availability software services,

The ability to go from kernel to UI is a definite plus, and as we’re cross-platform from day one experience in any (or all) of Windows, OSX and Linux would be ultra-cool.

As we’re bootstrapping the company, compensation will be “interestingly non-conventional” for a while.

The positions will be based at our office in Bellevue, WA.

So if you want to get in on the ground floor, drop me a line at steve@switchgearsoftware.com.

Back when I was at Microsoft, it was a pretty much a regular weekly occurrence that I’d have to massage my Exchange server mailbox as I’d blown through the pitifully small limits that the IT group had set for us.

Then, when we started the new company and I set up the email server I was really happy that I’d never again receive the annoying Exchange nag mail.

Except, of course, when I got it today from my own Exchange server.

Damn!

It looks like I hadn’t actually nuked the default limits!

At least this time, I could connect to the server and blow the limit away… Well, I didn’t exactly blow it completely away - I set it to a reasonable limit.

There’s something to be said for be reminded about a little mailbox hygiene…

Not having a printer was driving us insane at the office, so Joe took a run to Costco and picked up a nice multi-function laser printer - the Brother MFC-8640D. It’s pretty fast; the output is nice; the scanner and copy function work well.

Setup was also a breeze, we connected it via USB to the Windows Server 2003 machine and it printed fine after installing the drivers.

A sweet feature of Windows printing is that you can store the make available drivers for various OSs and the client will download the appropriate driver from the server when you connect the printer to it.

So we shared the printer out and the Windows XP clients worked perfectly, as did the Mac OSX clients.

Now for the kicker.

Our development machines are Windows XP 64bit. No for x64 driver came with the printer, and even though Brother’s website states that they have native x64 support for the printer, I couldn’t find it anywhere.

So for the first time in a very long while, I called the company’s tech support line.

It has to be said, the guy I spoke to went to extreme lengths to resolve the issue, but at the end of the day, he admitted that they don’t support x64 even though the website states that they do.

Then came the unbelievable thing.

Because my problem involved printer sharing, he couldn’t help me any further.

Apparently Brother does not support printer sharing!

This is kinda funny as a bunch of their advertising says “…ideal for home or home office printer sharing…”

Isn’t that probably the highest use scenario for their business customers?

Freaky.

Anyhow, after that unhelpful interlude I thought “what the hell, I’ll just use the x32 driver.”

No such joy. Couldn’t get Windows x64 to recognize it.

One thing the support guy did suggest was to tell Windows that the printer is actually a Brother HL730. That driver comes as a pack-in driver for Windows.

That didn’t help much because at no point during the printer setup did I get the option to pretend that it was another type of printer - presumably because the server had told the client the exact ID of the printer.

Then I had a sneaky idea.

The PowerMac G5 server found the printer and was working fine, so I just shared it out again, this time from the Mac.

I pointed the Windows x64 client at the Mac and it found the printer - this time though, it asked me what type of printer it was, so I said “It’s an HL30. Honest Guv!”

Printer installed.

How amusing is that! To print from my Windows x64 dev machine, the has to be routed via a Mac, which then sends it on to the Windows Server box and to the printer.

Maybe it would have been easier to have just hacked the x32 driver’s installer inf…

Via Jeff Clavier, I found a great new blog by Howard Morgan of First Round Capital. His first real entry is a corker - go and check it out now.

Subscribed.

And while we’re talking about First Round Capital, make sure you check out it’s other blogger, Josh Kopelman. His latest post on Covertible Notes v. Preferred Equity is definitely a must-read.

Will Price’s post Post-close on the value of getting your financial and projection processes in place is a great read.

I’d add that I think it’s never too early to get a large part of this process up and running, and it’s a lot easier to do right at the beginning when you don’t have a lot of data to go back and find, re-enter, etc…

So the phone lines and network cabling are in, so we did a run to Frys to pick up a gigabit switch, wireless router, a few five-port gigabit desk-side hubs and a UPS for the servers.

The monitors arrived a couple of days ago and the main Windows server will be arriving from Dell any day. The Windows box will be serving domain controller and exchange server duties, and we’re adding a PowerMac G5 as a server for source control via Subversion, the Bugzilla bug database and the internal Wiki.

The Mac is already up and running in my house serving those duties and has been for a few months - it should simply be a matter of moving it.

The next thing will be development machines for the office. We’ll probably build these ourselves - it’ll be quicker and probably cheaper.

Oh, and the Ikea furniture all arrived yesterday - it was a “fun” afternoon putting all that together.

Anyhow, back to coding…

Sometimes it feels like I’ve stepped into an episode of James Burke’s Connections.

When we started this adventure, our contacts we’re minimal. We knew we had to start thinking about our investment strategy, legal representation, etc… but didn’t really know where to start.

Then a few things happened.

I read about NWEN in a post by John Cook at the Seattle PI. After perusing their website I signed up for a few of their seminars. The seminars in themselves were very interesting and I learnt a bunch, but I also got some contacts and had some interesting chats. Introductions started.

And those introductions spawned others.

Then John wrote specifically about SwitchGear.

That post generated a lot of contact from the investment community and others.

Those contacts spawned meetings and introductions, including some fine corporate law firms who we met with to chat about having them represent us.

Even though we have to pick only one, these folks still introduced us to others, both potential investors and CEO’s at other startups (some quite spectacularly well known!) who are willing to give us advice.

The classic quote goes “It’s not what you know, but who you know.”

I agree to a point, but when we were starting out I was worried about “how do I get to know the people I need to know?”

The answer?

Have a great idea that is easy to communicate, compelling and be passionate about it.

Find one person to talk to, communicate well and get them on board. It goes exponential from there.

As a postscript, I believe that I owe John Cook a few beers in thanks by now :-)

Yesterday we finally signed the lease on our office space. You can find a few pictures of the space over on Flickr.

Man, was that a protracted process.

Finding the space was only half the battle. Then it was lease negotiations…

We had the legal guy we were using to get the company’s operating agreement set up to look over the lease. Don’t skip this part - it was worth the money…

As the space was recently renovated, we got choice of carpet, colours, cabinets, a new kitchen, etc… It’s also in a great location with plenty of parking and lots of natural, but not direct, sunlight. All in all, I think we did well.

On Tuesday, the phone lines come in and over the upcoming week the landlord is installing extra power outlets and our low-volt guy is coming in to install Cat5e cabling everywhere.

We’re using Cat5e for the phone lines as well as for the network - don’t skimp on this. It’s only a few bucks extra and you never know what you might want to run over those lines.

Then on Friday the final city inspection happens and the process should be over.

So now we need some stuff to put in it and today Joe and I did the trip to Ikea.

It felt like buying stuff to kit out a new apartment! Desks, chairs, kitchen table, table for server stuff, bookcases and cups (I’ll bring in my own teapot). Whee! It all arrives on Monday.

Hopefully by this time next week we’ll be fully operational in the new office.

Not that a ton of progress hasn’t been made in the meantime.

As far as technical stuff goes, the source tree, build system, bug database and internal wiki are all up and running. We’re writing code and getting the full architectural underpinnings in place - stuff is actually running. Finding time for that in amongst the myriad of meetings has been interesting to say the least!

Also, I forgot to mention it when it happened, but we finally signed the LLC’s operating agreement (more on that aspect in another post), accountants are engaged and most importantly we believe we’ve found a cool law firm to work with.

Why do I say most importantly? Well, other than the obvious need for good legal help, those guys come loaded with connections.

Thanks to John Cook over at the Seattle PI for a nice post on his venture blog:

Stealth startup of the week

Two of the brains behind Microsoft’s Flight Simulator game are taking flight with a new startup company called SwitchGear Software.

Steve Lacey and Joe Stacy — who together spent 21 years in various roles at Microsoft — formed the startup in January. They are still very much in the early stages of development — trying to find office space in the Bellevue area (a process Lacey describes as “a pain”). They are also just beginning to meet with angel investors and venture capitalists.

Thanks John! Read the rest over on his blog.