Netizen: Silicon Valley

Showing posts with label Silicon Valley. Show all posts

Friday, May 22, 2015

Reverse Brain Drain?

Best viewed large. The main terminal of the brand new Bangalore International Airport. I was one of the first few people at the airport. My mother arrived on the third flight into this new airport. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Top Indian talent in Silicon Valley moves back home to join star startups

Top Indian talent is moving from globally iconic American technology companies to India's star startups. And homes are being shifted from Bay Area to Bangalore. ...... from Google to Flipkart, from Disney and Facebook to Zomato, from Symantec to Snapdeal ..... Matching dollar salaries and the sheer range of future career opportunities are the hooks India's tech blue chips are offering to Indian talent in Silicon Valley. ...... "The smart entrepreneurs have already returned, tens of thousands more will return over the next 2-3 years" ...... being wooed by at least half-adozen Indian startups valued anywhere between $1 billion and $15 billion. ...... All salaries look handsome and Silicon Valley-competitive in dollar terms, and most assignments involve complex technology solutions for the mobile platform...... startups such as Zomato, whose restaurant discovery app is now present in 22 countries, are articulating their ambitions on a global scale. For Silicon Valley's top talent, nothing attracts more than a mission to dominate the world. "The idea is always world domination, if you speak anything less than that, you are not ambitious enough. ......... Both are being paid Valley salaries too — $5-6 million annual packages. ...... but it's just a whole new level of intensity here ..... "India is at the forefront of the mobile innovation" ...... "I made the decision to move here in less than 30 seconds," said Mani. "Hundreds of millions of Indians will experience the Internet for the first time on a smartphone in the next few years" ........ "India will see a technology boom over the next 5 years that will make the US dotcom boom look lame. There will be dozens of billion-dollar companies emerging from India's ecosystem which will transform business, industry and society." ......... "History is witness to the savviest, smartest and most entrepreneurial people usually going off to crazy places at regular intervals. This is relatively reasonable"

Monday, February 16, 2015

The Valley, Or Not, To Be

Silicon Valley is still the best place for your startup

Every city now seems to have a silicon something or other – whether it be London’s Silicon Roundabout, Berlin’s Silicon Allee or the Silicon Slopes of Salt Lake City....... My own experience with Zendesk, however, leaves me convinced that, at present at least, the original Silicon Valley remains the best place for budding tech startups looking to take their business to the next level. ..... there are deeply rooted cultural issues. Take Denmark’s famous law of Jante – an aversion to seeking or celebrating individual success ..... European startups raised more than $2.8bn in the last quarter of 2014 and are just as likely as their American counterparts to reach the hallowed ground of the Initial Public Offering (IPO). ..... Venture capital invested in US tech reached $8.67bn in 2013 compared with just $1.44bn in Europe. ..... There is still a perception of Europe as being overly bureaucratic, a perception that Europe sometimes reinforces. Take the EU’s tech-hub in San Francisco, catchily named the European Institute of Innovation and Technology Information and Communication Technology Labs (EIT ICT labs to friends). ..... Another thing holding Europe back is the persistent idea that failure is something to be ashamed of. This flies in the face of Silicon Valley’s fail fast, fail often mantra. Speaking from experience, failure has been a necessary and useful step on the road to success. For Americans, failure is a rite of passage. ...... Take SongKick – a great live music startup based in London. London is the world’s biggest live music hub, so why would they want to move?

Goodbye Silicon Valley: why tech startups are flocking to megacities

tech businesses now need the energy, talent and diversity of the world’s megacities to thrive ...... Not a week goes by in the world of tech without someone heralding the globe’s next Silicon Valley – from New York City to Norwich, London to Lagos, the list goes on....... But the real story here is not the next Valley, it’s the death of the tech cluster as we know it...... started with the founders; a concentration of white, middle-class, socially awkward geeks, inseparable from their Macbooks. ....... If you have ever tried to visit the likes of Apple or Google in the heart of Silicon Valley you will know it is not an easy place to get to.... Back in its heyday, the Valley’s isolation from the rest of the status-quo of banks, big business and city life allowed it to thrive, think bigger and build world-changing companies. ...... In the new wave of tech centres no other city has raced ahead of the pack with this trend like New York. ...... In the Far East many look to Hong Kong which draws upon decades of experience as a world financial capital. It also boasts unbeatable access to China, the world’s biggest market. ....... This new generation of tech companies outside the Valley are less fixated with first-world problems like taking a selfie that looks like it has been taken with a vintage camera. These companies are disrupting centuries-old systems put in place by the establishment........ The key here is existing industries. ...... 6.5% of the world’s billion-dollar exits between 2005–12 were companies from Sweden. Again the majority of these success stories draw upon the city’s existing strengths in music, the arts and gaming. ....... Despite being on the doorstep of the Valley, San Francisco has fast become a magnet for tech talent drawn to the big city. The shift away from the Valley has become so strong that the likes of Google and Yahoo based over 30 miles away operate shuttle buses to move employees back and forth to their campuses each day. ...... Isolated clusters cannot fight the tide of talent flocking towards the bright lights of cities. San Francisco’s expensive and unpopular commuter buses are perhaps the best sign of the times, while pundits obsess over the next Silicon Valley, the world’s megacities are marching ahead.

The Vivek Wadhwa I Know Is A Feminist

DAVOS/SWITZERLAND, 28JAN11 - Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, Facebook, USA; Young Global Leader are captured during the session 'Handling Hyper-connectivity' at the Annual Meeting 2011 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 28, 2011. Copyright by World Economic Forum swiss-image.ch/Photo by Jolanda Flubacher (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am not even aware of the full conversation, but I caught a snippet first on his Facebook page, then on Twitter. Strange things are known to happen in social media. You don't have to be female to be feminist. And for me the term is like saying someone is a civil rights activist. Sheryl Sandberg is a feminist, in my book. And Vivek getting called the opposite --- well, it is fun! Really. I am like, really? He is a rare man who makes intelligent, well thought out, numbers supported cases for why women should get more in tech. Few men cheer women, fewer still make strong, well thought out cases. Vivek is in the rare category. That is the truth. But don't let truth get in your way. Enjoy Twitter! It is the experience.

@ElissaBeth having seen backlash @wadhwa has received, I'm not sure it is worth it for men to stand up for women's rights. I hope I'm wrong.
— Sahil M. Bansal (@SMB06) February 15, 2015

Looks like the spat even got colorful!

.@ncweaver And are you helping women by spreading such slander? When professors meet students, is there a threat to the student?
— Vivek Wadhwa (@wadhwa) February 15, 2015

My response to the podcast that unfairly attacked me

Vivek Wadhwa is not just another dude who writes articles. He is the smartest dude in Silicon Valley. Yes, I did say that. He talks in terms of the trillion dollar industries of tomorrow, in ways only a free thinker can. Top tech CEOs in the Valley can not afford to. They need their horse cart blinders to keep their focus on the narrow stretch that is their company.

The funny thing is, he is not only on the cutting edges of innovation, he is also on the cutting edges of gender in tech. Take his name out and circulate his articles on the topic and compare them to writings on the same topic by top rated feminists. His are more effective. He is outdoing wo-men on gender! That is no small feat.

But a little color on Twitter never hurt.

This is a dude that I want sitting on my company's Board at the earliest possible opportunity. For the record.

The Tragedy of Losing Vivek Wadhwa as an Ally

The Unimaginative Motherfuckers Of The Old Economy

They say there is this cultural divide between California and New York City. All of Silicon Valley money comes from NYC. But California has the cultural advantage.

I have been aware of this. But I am staying put. Because, well, this is hometown. Also because the app I am working on -- this city is going to be the number one city for it. It will take your interactions with the city to a whole new plane.

And it is okay for the old economy to be in the backdrop. It is more than okay, it is actually very necessary. The apartment of AirBnb is old economy. Uber's cab is old economy. And they are just scratching the surface. The next wave of innovation in software is industry level. Which means we need people who can reimagine entire industries. Coders can be provided to them.

But when I say the unimaginative motherfuckers of the old economy, I am referring to this other type. Not only do they not get cutting edge innovation, they do not get the fundamentals of a tech startup, they actively act hostile given the opportunity. And there are a ton of those, plenty with Indian/brown faces, just to be fair. But it is equal opportunity, truly so. Like this guy on Wall Street who, believe it or not, wanted to do a tech startup, who would call VC money "funny money." Good luck with that. Or this dude who had a job where success was doubling the money every five years. Point be noted, money doubles on its own every seven years. All you have to do is not mess it up, just stay out of the way. Don't tinker. And he deals with big sums! I guess two years faster is still a margin, but then don't start commentaring on tech startups, in the negative, spilling one ignorance after another.

Very few people will do the tech startup thing. By definition. So it is not like you need 100% participation. And there is an affirmation you seek among other startup types. There is that ecosystem. It is a small island in a sea of the old economy, and that is the way it should be.

You do want to stay close to your average users. You do want to meet regular people.

But the unimaginative motherfuckers are a whole different thing. They lack it. They don't know it. And they will meddle if they can. Heck, they might even start a company!

Race, Gender And Tech Entrepreneurship

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Inequality Deserves A Political Solution

Technology is not the villain. It is technology's job to enhance productivity, and it has. It is the job of politics to bring about a fairer distribution of that wealth. And it has not. Technology is neutral.

Technology and Inequality

in San Jose, the largest city in the Valley, a camp of homeless people known as the Jungle—reputed to be the largest in the country—has taken root along a creek within walking distance of Adobe’s headquarters and the gleaming, ultramodern city hall. ...... The poverty rate in Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, is around 19 percent ..... “You have people begging in the street on University Avenue [Palo Alto’s main street],” says Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance and at Singularity University, an education corporation in Moffett Field with ties to the elites in Silicon Valley. “It’s like what you see in India,” adds Wadhwa, who was born in Delhi. “Silicon Valley is a look at the future we’re creating, and it’s really disturbing.” Many of those made rich by the recent technology boom, he adds, don’t seem to care about “the mess they’re creating.” ....... people are stoning buses transporting Google employees to work from their homes in San Francisco. ...... inflation-adjusted wages for low- and middle-income workers have been flat or declining since the late 1970s in the United States, even as its economy has grown. ..... the richest 1 percent of the population had 34 percent of the accumulated wealth; the top 0.1 percent had some 15 percent. ..... the top 1 percent captured 95 percent of income growth from 2009 to 2012, if capital gains are included. ...... The top 10 percent now accounts for 48 percent of national income; the top 1 percent makes almost 20 percent and the top 0.1 makes nearly 9 percent. ..... Wage inequality in the United States is “probably higher than in any other society at any time in the past, anywhere in the world” ..... About 70 percent of the top 0.1 percent of earners are corporate executives ..... “Above a certain level, it is very hard to find in the data any link between pay and performance.” ...... Privately held wealth in some European countries is now about 500 to 600 percent of annual national income, a level approaching that of the early 1900s. ...... Piketty describes it as the world of Jane Austen, in which people’s lives and fates are determined by their inheritance and not their talents or professional achievements. ...... Income inequality hinders economic opportunity and innovation. ...... the belief that technological progress will lead to “the triumph of human capital over financial capital and real estate, capable managers over fat cat stockholders, and skill over nepotism” is, writes Piketty, “largely illusory.” ...... Brynjolfsson talks of advanced robots and the vast potential of artificial intelligence. While Piketty warns against a return to a world where inherited wealth determines social and political fates, Brynjolfsson worries that a growing share of the workforce could be left behind even as digital technologies increase overall income. ......... Central to Brynjolfsson’s argument is the idea that innovation is rapidly accelerating as trends in computing and networking advance at an exponential rate. Largely as a result of these advances, productivity and GDP continue to increase. But while “the pie is increasing,” he says, not everyone is benefiting. ....... the technology-driven economy greatly favors a small group of successful individuals by amplifying their talent and luck, and dramatically increasing their rewards. ......... As machines increasingly substitute for labor and building a business becomes less capital-intensive—you don’t need a printing plant to produce an online news site, or large investments to create an app—the biggest economic winners will not be those owning conventional capital but, instead, those with the ideas behind innovative new products and successful business models. .......... the small elite that “innovate and create.” ...... demand for highly skilled workers rises, while workers with less education and expertise fall behind. .......... The gap between median earnings for people with a high school diploma and those with a college degree was $17,411 for men and $12,887 for women in 1979; by 2012 it had risen to $34,969 and $23,280. ...... Automation and digital technologies have reduced the need for many production, sales, administrative, and clerical jobs, while demand has increased for low-pay jobs that can’t be automated, such as those in cleaning services and restaurants. The result has been what Autor describes as a “barbell-shaped” job market, with strong demand at the high and low ends and a “hollowing out” of the middle. And despite the increase in demand for workers in service jobs, there is an ample supply of people who need the work and can do these tasks. Hence wages for these jobs dropped throughout much of the 2000s, further worsening income inequality. ....... productivity growth is not in fact accelerating, nor is such growth concentrated in computer-intensive sectors. ..... changes wrought by digital technologies are transforming the economy, but the pace of that change is not necessarily increasing. He says that’s because progress in robotics, artificial intelligence, and such high-profile technologies as Google’s driverless car are happening more slowly than some people may think. ....... “You would be actually pretty hard pressed to find a robot in your day-to-day life” ........ many tasks that people are particularly good at, such as recognizing objects and dealing with suddenly changing environments, will remain difficult or expensive to automate for decades to come. ...... the market for middle-skill jobs may be stabilizing and the earning disparity between low- and high-skill jobs leveling off, albeit “at a very high level.” What’s more, many middle-skill workers could flourish as they increasingly learn to use digital technologies in their jobs. ...... “We have a very skill-driven economy without a very skilled workforce,” Autor says. “If you have the high skills—and that’s a big if—you can make a fortune.” ....... “We used to be a classic middle-class economy. But that’s all gone. There’s no longer a middle class. The economy is bifurcated and there’s nothing in the middle.” ..... “It didn’t happen suddenly, but in 2014 everyone has woken up to it.” ..... Though California’s economy—the world’s eighth-largest—is strong in many sectors, the state has the highest poverty rate in the country ..... there has been no net increase in jobs in Silicon Valley since 1998; digital technologies inevitably mean you can generate billions of dollars from a low employment base. ........ “Piketty says the best predictor of access to universities is parents’ income,” says Miner. “In California, it’s the zip code.” ...... the income gaps between those with different levels of education “account for a good share of the inequality ....... “we know what the solution is. It’s equalizing access to high-quality education. The problem is that we just pay lip service to it.” ..... (Local governments, using property taxes, supply an average of 44 percent of the funding for elementary and secondary schools in the United States, helping to fuel the disparity in educational investments between poor and rich communities.) ...... “If you’re born into a poor neighborhood, you don’t have access to a high-quality preschool, a high-quality primary school, and a high-quality secondary school. And then you’re simply not in position to go to college.” .......... the tax cuts made by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s and early 1980s jump-started the growth of income inequality seen today in Britain and the United States. ...... increasingly progressive taxes, including a global wealth tax, could begin to close the economic gap. ........ The most obvious policy recommendations point to education, including, as social scientists are increasingly learning, pre-kindergarten and other early education programs. ....... differences in educational achievement are now associated more closely with family income than they are with factors that have been more important in the past, including race and ethnic background. And researchers have shown that those differences in achievement levels are already set by the time children enter kindergarten. ........ Inequality in education is not only hurting the chances of poor children to get ahead, says David Grusky. It is also affecting the supply of high-skill labor. By stifling opportunities for countless talented individuals, it artificially restricts the potential pool of those with technological expertise. ...... asking whether technology causes inequality is the wrong question. ...... it makes no sense to blame technology, just as it makes no sense to blame the rich. It is our institutions, including but not only our schools, that need to change. The reforms that experts recommend are numerous and varied, ranging from a higher minimum wage to stronger job protections to modifications of our tax policy. ...... we need improved corporate governance and oversight to more closely tie compensation to executive productivity...... an elite class of the super-rich can both warp our political process and erode our sense of fairness.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Google And Diversity: Fail Whale

The top tech company in the world is not doing it right.

Exposing Hidden Biases at Google to Improve Diversity

Founded by a pair of men, its executive team is overwhelmingly male, and its work force is dominated by men. Over all, seven out of 10 people who work at Google are male. ...... Men make up 83 percent of Google’s engineering employees and 79 percent of its managers. ..... of its 36 executives and highest-ranking managers, just three are women. .... the firm’s poor gender diversity.. the severe underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics among its work force. ...... the centerpiece of which is a series of workshops aimed at making Google’s culture more accepting of diversity. ..... to fight deep-set cultural biases and an insidious frat-house attitude that pervades the tech business. Tech luminaries make sexist comments so often that it has ceased to become news when they do. ....... Google’s disclosure prompted a wave of similar reports across the industry, with Facebook, Apple, Yahoo and several other tech giants issuing similarly dismal numbers about their work forces. ...... Google’s diversity training workshops, which began last year and which more than half of Google’s nearly 49,000 employees have already attended, are based on an emerging field of research in social psychology known as unconscious bias. ...... discrimination must be governed by unconscious cultural biases rather than overt sexism. ..... the more pernicious bias was most likely pervasive and hidden, a deep-set part of the culture rather than the work of a few loudmouth sexists. ...... research that shows diverse teams can be more creative than homogeneous ones ..... a dismal fact: Everyone is a little bit racist or sexist. If you think you’re immune, take the Implicit Association Test, which empirically measures people’s biases. ...... some of the most damaging bias is unconscious; people do the worst stuff without meaning to, or even recognizing that they’re being influenced by their preferences....... The effect of bias is powerful, and it isn’t softened by Silicon Valley’s supposedly meritocratic culture. ..... a computer simulation of how a systematic 1 percent bias against women in performance evaluation scores can trickle up through the ranks, leading to a severe underrepresentation of women in management. ..... we aren’t slaves to our hidden biases. The more we make ourselves aware of the role our unconscious plays on our decision-making, and the more we try to force others to confront their biases, the greater the chance we have to overcome our hidden preferences. ..... a less biased culture as a result of the training. Not long ago the company opened a new building, and someone spotted that all the conference rooms were named after male scientists; in the past, that might have gone unmentioned, but this time the names were changed. ....... the training was working. “Suddenly you go from being completely oblivious to going, ’Oh my god, it’s everywhere,’ ” he said.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

The Pinterest Story

Q+A Ben Silbermann

We started making Pinterest around 2009, when there was a lot of attention being paid to social services that were focused on real-time text-based feeds like Facebook and Twitter. ..... helping people organize things

Introducing the 2 Young Men Who Made Pinterest

Silbermann's first foray into the Silicon Valley tech scene was cartoonishly wide-eyed. He'd feel bolts of excitement reading about start-up company hires and funding round announcements on tech blogs. ...... Silbermann decided he should get his start at Google, and landed an entry-level job at the company’s display-advertising group. ...... November 2009, when he and a college friend, Paul Sciarra, along with Evan Sharp, who had been studying architecture, started working on a site on which people could show collections of things they were interested in, on an interactive pin-board format. ...... "After nine months, Pinterest was still under 10,000 users, and a lot of them weren't using it every day." ..... Silbermann and his team labored long and hard over the most miniscule site details, such as typeface contrast. They fully coded dozens of versions of the pin screen before selecting and launching one in March of 2010. ...... Just last month, a study found Pinterest surpassed Facebook in terms of retail outlets or brands that fans "follow" or "like." A survey by PriceGrabber, a price comparison site, found that 21% of Pinterest users polled had purchased items they spotted on the site. ...... "It's important to have people in your life who can talk to you about other stuff: life, sports. It's going to take a long time to build a big product that'll change the world."

Pinterest founder bemused by sudden rise to fame: Social network site fastest grower so far

Mr. Wamsley, a serial entrepreneur who's been in Silicon Valley since the dot-com era, said he hasn't seen a startup take off overnight like this since Netscape....... Mr. Silbermann's wife, for her part, was key to getting her husband to finally tackle the startup he'd been talking about for years while holding down a customer support job at Google. "She said, 'You should do it or shut up about it,' " Mr. Silbermann told the audience. ...... Pinterest is the 16th most-visited Web site in America -- ahead of CNN.com and ESPN.com -- and the 50th most popular in the world ........ Venture capitalists who, two years ago, didn't understand the startup now are clamoring to follow in the footsteps of Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, whose venture firm in September led a $27 million investment. Big-name media have come calling to interview Mr. Silbermann and been largely rebuffed....... The son of two family-practice physicians in Des Moines, Mr. Silbermann grew up collecting leaves and insects. He went to Yale figuring he'd follow in the family trade, then switched to political science. After graduating in 2003, he landed a consulting job in Washington and joined the firm's technology practice because, he said, that's what was open......... "I felt like the story of my time was happening in California," he told last week's crowd, "and I wanted to be part of it." ...... The Google job, he said, taught him a lot, but as a nonengineer in a company that prizes tech skills, his ceiling was limited. After his wife's tough-love pep talk, he finally took the plunge -- right before the 2008 Wall Street meltdown made it nearly impossible to raise money....... It didn't help that Mr. Silbermann's two co-founders were as nontechnical as he was....... After the site launched in January, 2010, however, the going was slow. Four months in, Pinterest had 200 users; half were Mr. Silbermann's friends in Des Moines....... Then on a whim, he attended a conference of interior designers, who immediately grasped the appeal of a site where they could compile interesting design possibilities gleaned from around the Internet. Thanks to word of mouth and the courting of a handful of bloggers, Pinterest's traffic began growing at 40 to 50 percent each month -- and it hasn't stopped

Pinterest 2010-2011: The True Inside Startup Story

By January 2011 though the site started to explode. “We may have only had something like 40k users, but Pinterest was driving millions and millions of page views. More importantly it was all doubling each month. That’s a lot faster than it’s growing now.” ...... After leaving Pinterest Sahil worked with the TurnTable.fm team to build their iPhone app. He designed and coded the entire application in a matter of weeks. Now he’s taken some funding and is working on his own startup Gumroad. When asked about whether or not leaving Pinterest was a good decision considering the explosive growth curve, Sahil maintains that his greatest work is still ahead and in spite of the lottery-esk financial opportunity, “The satisfaction of working on and building your own product versus working for someone else does not even compare.”

Development of Pinterest began in December 2009, and the site launched as a closed beta in March 2010. The site proceeded to operate in invitation-only open beta....... Silbermann said he personally wrote to the site's first 5,000 users offering his personal phone number and even meeting with some of its users ...... Nine months after the launch the website had 10,000 users. Silbermann and a few programmers operated the site out of a small apartment until the summer of 2011 ...... Early in 2010, the company's investors and co-founder Ben Silbermann tried to encourage a New York-based magazine publishing company to buy Pinterest but the publisher declined to meet with the founders ....... In January 2012, comScore reported the site had 11.7 million unique users, making it the fastest site in history to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark .... the site became the third largest social network in the United States in March 2012, behind Facebook and Twitter ......n October 2013, Pinterest won a $225 million round of equity funding that valued the website at $3.8 billion

Pinterest CEO: Here's How We Became The Web's Next Big Thing [DECK]

grew from 5,000 users in August 2010 to 17 million this month. ...... The 45 minute talk was all about how he abandoned his long held plans to become a doctor, founded Pinterest during the recession, survived early failures, and built a company for the long-run...... When Pinterest launched, Ben sent it to all his friends in California – "and actually, no one got it." .... Most early users came from Des Moines. "I suspect because my Mom was telling all her patients," says Ben. ....... Suddenly people started using Pinterest in ways the company hadn't expected. Like say this board: "Things That Look Like The Deathstar."

Pinterest’s Unlikely Journey To Top Of The Startup Mountain

After leaving Google he spent time working at places like the Hacker Dojo, and every coffee shop in the valley. ...... Four months after launching, Pinterest only had 200 users. Ben has said their product was “in stealth mode but not because we wanted it to be.” The first major pockets of users were in Iowa and Utah and the company wasn’t on any radars in the Valley. ...... It didn’t pop in California for the first year and a half. Ben believes the typical market fit philosophy for technology of having to get early adaptors on board is no longer required. There was no press coverage on the site, but the early users really liked it, and more importantly they used it a lot. “The site grew by the same percentage (40%-50%) every single month. It’s just that the number started so low that it took a while to get going.” ....... The team attempted to raise money, but the non-engineer driven founders had little success. Despite dozens of meetings with “everyone” in Silicon Valley. Most passed on the deal. They worked with a lot of engineers most of which weren’t near the Facebook and Google level of talent they’re getting access to today. ....... Much of what you see on the site today was in the product at the very beginning. They were one of the first sites to do the grid-like layout and they over invested in design. They spent months working on it. “We were obsessive about the product. We were obsessive about all the writing and how it was described. We were obsessive about the community. I personally wrote to the first 5,000-7,000 people that joined the site.”