Ooga Labs

We see politics in startups as a disease – once it takes hold, it can spread through the company until it kills.   So we have a No Politics rule.  There are really just two things we do to prevent the disease of politics.

First, don’t hire people who are political by nature.  You can usually spot them in an interview by asking what they liked or disliked about people they worked with in their prior jobs.  You can also spot them by testing how “attracted to drama” they are.  By drama, I don’t mean theater, I mean the basic interpersonal push and pull between people and their perceived interests that characterized junior high school and high school, e.g. “Did you here what she said about him??”  People who are attracted to that sort of thing will create that in their work lives as a way of entertaining themselves. One person I worked with years ago, who dislikes politics, said about another colleague in a shock of realization, “For him, if he goes a day without playing politics, it’s a wasted day.”  Some people are wired to create politics around them, and, in fact, some national cultures seem more wired to create politics than others.  Watch for it.

Second, “expose to daylight” any comment or idea that seems like it’s political.  Here’s what I mean.  The fundamental particle of politics is the simple act of saying different things to different people.  If my VP of Engineering is saying something to me that he won’t tell directly to the Director of Sales, then we have a moment of politics, and the antidote is to have the VP say it directly to the Director of Sales.

In my experience, there are typically three main reasons people don’t say something directly to one person that they will say to another.  1) I’m scared of his/her reaction.  2) It’s not going to do any good, anyway.  3) It doesn’t help me, and it may hurt me if I say something.

To overcome the fears people naturally have to be honest with each other, you have to show people that it turns out OK when they expose these ideas to sunlight.  And you have to do it over and over again, because it’s so easy for us to fall out of genuine, open communication.  Thus, having No Politics starts at the top of your organization.  Look for CEO’s who force daylight through the organization.

Some might say that you can’t get rid of politics entirely for the simple fact we all engage in politics at least a little bit (because we all have our points of view, our fears, and our ambitions).  And that’s true.  But I believe you should make No Politics your policy.  It makes a big difference in how effective and enjoyable your work environment is.

[See the first post in this series and an explanation about where these notes come from]

Notes on Culture & Personnel for Going Fast in start ups:

Get cultural DNA for speed. Make sure the people in your company want to go fast and know how to go fast.  Make it a major part of your interview process and visible culture.  Web 2.0 folks generally get it, but others don’t and they need to be cycled out.  Can you pair fast people with not-fast people and teach the not-fast people how to go fast?  No.  You can’t.  In short, get the right people.

Every engineer ships production code their first day at work. As part of building up the cultural DNA about quickly writing code and pushing it out for users to use,  you should set it up so every engineer writes and pushes live some code to the production servers on their first day of work.  If the site breaks in some way, shame on you for not having it set up avoid that.

Make shipping a fetish.  Make shipping product fast to the right customer the obsession.

Fast is not sloppy. Make sure your team knows the difference.

The best thing to do is the easiest thing to do. But do it right.  That’s speed.

Don’t own the product, own the goal. At Google, teams choose a goal to own, not a feature to own, or even a product to own.  What product solution ends up achieving a goal evolves much more in a business than the goal itself, so the goal is the better target, and gives the team more opportunity for creativity and speed.

Make decisions. Make sure you’re making decisions, not pseudo-decisions or delaying decisions.  Commit to it as a team, and have the team demand it from management.

Ship Fair or Good. Don’t ship Poor, but don’t ship Very Good or Excellent.  And when the Fair-Good is shipped, management is not allowed to send an email out noting the bugs or criticizing it. Get your team to embrace “Good Enough.”  I [heart] good enough. “That which is worth doing is worth doing poorly.”

The book “Built to Last” is excellent. Here’s an excerpt.
“…a key aspect of highly visionary companies: They do not oppress themselves with what we call the ‘Tyranny of the OR.’ The ‘tyranny of the OR’ pushes people to believe that things must be either A OR B, but not both. “OR” thinkers say:

· ‘You can have low cost OR high quality.’
· ‘You can have creative autonomy OR consistency and control.’
· ‘You can make progress by methodical planning OR by opportunistic groping.’
· ‘You can create wealth for your shareholders OR do good for the world.’
· ‘You can be idealistic (values-driven) OR pragmatic (profit-driven).’

Visionary companies liberate themselves with the ‘Genius of the AND’ – the ability to embrace both extremes of a number of dimensions at the same time. Instead of choosing between A OR B, they figure out a way to have both A AND B.

- purpose beyond profit AND pragmatic pursuit of profit

- a relatively fixed core ideology AND vigorous change and movement

- conservatism around the core AND bold, committing, risky moves

- clear vision and sense of direction AND opportunistic groping and experimentation

- audacious goals AND incremental evolutionary progress

- selection of managers steeped in the core AND selection of managers that induce change

- ideological control AND operational autonomy

- extremely tight culture AND ability to change, move, adapt

- investment for the long-term AND demands for short- term performance

- philosophical, visionary, futuristic AND superb daily execution, ‘nuts and bolts’

- organization aligned with a core ideology AND organization adapted to its environment

We’re not talking about mere balance here. ‘Balance’ implies going to the midpoint, fifty-fifty, half and half. A visionary company doesn’t seek balance between short-term and long-term, for example. It seeks to do very well in the short-term and very well in the long- term. A visionary company doesn’t simply balance between idealism and profitability; it seeks to be highly idealistic and highly profitable. A visionary company doesn’t simply balance between preserving a tightly held core ideology and stimulating vigorous change and movement; it does both to an extreme. In short, a highly visionary company doesn’t want to blend yin and yang into gray, indistinguishable circle that is neither highly yin nor highly yang; it aims to be distinctly yin and distinctly yang – both at the same time, all the time.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed out, ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.’ This is exactly what the visionary companies are able to do.”

We’re very happy Kent is here! Here’s the Wall Street Journal coverage. Stan was an Adviser to Friendster while Kent was turning that company around between 2006 and 2008, so we saw Kent’s steady leadership and good judgment up close. During his tenure, Kent recruited a brand new team to rebuild the product, solved Friendster’s significant (and well documented) technical challenges, and refocused the company on the Asian market. In that way, Friendster became the #1 social network in Asia, and the 7th largest website in the world. That turnaround was backed by Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark Capital. As the company regained traction, Lindstrom helped raise more than $30 million to fund growth and recruit the head of Google Asia-Pacific to be Friendster’s new CEO. The chart below says it all.

Kent Lindstrom Friendster Growth

At Ooga, Kent will create a company addressing opportunities in the ‘local’ space, an area currently targeted by consumer Internet businesses like Craigslist, Yelp and Google Latitude.

So welcome to Kent!  And if you’re a CEO or engineer needing a home, and you fit with the Ooga way of doing things, Ooga may be for you.

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Hello world, it’s about time I posted on the Ooga blog. My name is Jon and I go by the title of Talent Czar for Ooga Labs.

I keep hearing from other companies and headhunters that there’s a talent war going on for the best engineers.  My job is easy because we offer something completely different. I probably speak with a dozen engineers from top schools a week.  I just have to lay out the facts about Ooga Labs:

• We’re a team of super intelligent nice people that love to code and build stuff (RoR, PHP, Java, CSS, Python).
• You get a wealth of learning because there are multiple starts under one roof with an open and transparent culture.
• We build mission-driven companies that can change the world.
• We’re viral experts, a successful team and proven management.
• We’re a flat organization, working in small intimate teams in cool offices downtown SF.
• You get equity in every company you work on.
• We’re privately funded; it’s all about the product and our customers.
• We’re a think tank environment with stimulating projects.

The most common comment I get from candidates is about James’ “Don’t make my Mistake” open letter to graduating seniors calling on them to come to the Bay Area and join a startup.  It’s a good (and short) read, and expresses well some of the personality and drive that you feel when you join the team here.

So contact me if you’re a software engineer or web designer/UX person and you think there is any reason we should be talking.  jwong at oogalabs.com

 – Jon Wong, Talent Czar

Tonight, Ooga Labs announced The Medpedia Project!

Press release here

TechCrunch here

Los Angeles Times here

This project has been in development for two years, and the site will launch officially by the end of the year.  It is truly an honor and a privilege to be collaborating with such amazing, supportive, and thoughtful people from the medical world on this.  See the list of them here.  Their vision and ethusiasm are a gift.

Medpedia is a collaborative project in the extreme, so please shoot us any thoughts you have and we’ll try to get them in before the launch of the live site.

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In July 2004, we came up with the idea to create a customizable portal like MyYahoo but have it let people do some good in the world everytime they use it.  I have beliefs, values, and causes I care about… shouldn’t my Internet portal be serving me easy opportunities to make a difference?  I would feel better about myself, the world would get a little better, and my loyalty to the portal would increase. 

 While still working at Tickle inside Monster.com, we launched GoodTree.com in July of 2005.  Monster shut it down in November and I left Monster in January.  I bought the site back from Monster in the spring and relaunched in the Fall of 2006.  We quickly discovered the product and business infrastructure wasn’t ready, so we stopped trying to attract people to it.  In the last year, a small team of dedicated people added a raft of new features:

1. A customizable homepage, the type of which is now familiar from MyYahoo, iGoogle and 10’s of other customizable homepage startups
2. A full social network
3. Causes which people can create, join and suggest actions we all can take to make a difference
4. An area for charities and financial info

The goal of GoodTree is to get 10 million or more people using it as their start page and portal, to make a significant impact on people and causes, and to keep it profitable.  We have a long list of things we want to improve on the product such as the image search and news areas.  But it’s good enough that we’re going to start attracting people to it again, and we’re excited to see what happens. 

From my experience so far, building an enterprise which has a mission to make an impact while maintaining break-even or profitability is significantly more difficult than just trying to make money.  Competitor portals like Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and MyWay have a hard enough time and they aren’t even burdened by pushing a social mission.  Wish us luck and give us support if you get the opportunity. 

STIRR is a notable organization run by Dan Arkind and Sanford Barr that puts on gatherings for founders and entrepreneurs around the Bay Area.  At last Wednesday’s event they had a few of us do 5-minute ”Founder Hack” talks.  It was really fun and the crowd lively.   <see video>

At Ooga, where we’re building 5 separate products (with separate code bases, URL’s, business models, corporate entities, etc.) we develop in what we call Speed Teams.

A Speed Team is composed of two people: an engineer — who is responsible for programming the database, the application, and some of the front end — and a Designer — who is responsible for the look and feel of the site and most of the front end code. Each Speed Team works with me and Stan on a daily basis, and the project is held together with a simple document that lists the tasks and help us prioritize them. No Product Requirement Documents, no Marketing Requirements Documents, just talk and go. We find this gives us maximum freedom to iterate on a project as it moves along. Without a Board of Directors to hold us to a plan we might have come up with in the past, we are free to do what makes sense based on new information, new ideas, or feedback from the users without having to convince anyone, again adding flexibility.

By constantly adjusting to new information, we hope and expect that it will increase our odds of building something that works. Time will tell. In larger companies, they often have large groups of people on a project, each with a designated expertise. We don’t think this makes sense in the consumer Web space.

At our last company, Tickle, where we also were developing about 5 separate products, we got it down to 5 people per project: database, application layer, front end coder, visual designer, and product manager. This was pretty good and pretty fast, but still time consuming to manage everyone.

When you have good people, they all have an opinion, and it takes time to let everyone have a say. So at Ooga, we’ve taken it the next step, down to 2 people per project. Ideally, in the future, we will experiment with getting it down to 1 person, although finding someone who likes doing all layers is rare. (If you are one of these people, let us know.) As a website grows, we’ll add one or two more engineers, keeping the one designer. We’re not sure it gets much faster after 3 engineers + 1 designer, unless you have a business that can be easily modularized. That group of four will then tap into shared Ooga resources for customer service, IS, and revenue.

We’re confident we can grow a business to a significant size with that configuration given the right people. Some of the challenges with this Speed Team approach so far: 1) Having only two people on a team means each person must be learning constantly in several skill areas to be good enough to execute. 2) It’s pretty intense because the whole product rests on each person’s shoulders. There is no hiding. 3) Our one simple document let’s us know what to do on a weekly basis, but doesn’t yet let us break down tasks into sufficiently small chunks where we know what to do on an hourly basis, so we’re changing that.We’ll talk more about this in the future.

And right now we’re looking for people who think this sounds like their cup of tea.

Yesterday there was a great article by Jessica Guynn in the Chron. She did extensive research and jammed a lot into it, and it ended up on the front page, which was really cool. It’s our first public announcement of what we’re up to. My favorite parts were when she compared James to “Timothy Leary the 60’s icon”, and then called the rest of us a “merry band” and an “eclectic clan of nerds.” Heh heh. Story link.