6 ms·

Three Stories

392 points by tzier 11y ago

jacquesm 11y ago
I can relate to all of these because I've lived through all of these, fortunately not as much in the public eye as Justin and his team (the web was much smaller back then) but this brought back a whole bunch of memories. Thanks Justin (assuming you read HN) for writing these up.
- justin 11y ago
  Thanks for reading!
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Hah :) Cool. I'm sure there are lots of people that can relate to your stories in one way or another but what with us being active in the exact same market (but you did way better on the execution and on the business part) it really hit the spot here.
- stevesearer 11y ago
  Somewhere around 5 years ago I was doing some maintenance on my site's database without really knowing what I was doing. My wedding website was hosted on the same server, so I thought I might as well delete it since the wedding was months before. Dropped that database. Visited my business website a few minutes later and it wasn't working. Apparently both sites were in the same database... Called MediaTemple support and asked if they had a backup. They did! Support guy asked if I wanted him to restore it. Of course I do. He goes on hold. He comes back on and says, "Sir, I'm sorry to say that the last back up actually backed up the blank version of the site so we don't have anything to restore. Is there anything else I can help you with?"... After hanging up, I explained the situation to my wife and she just says, call back and ask someone else. The next support guy tells me that there actually is a way to restore an old archived backup, but there will likely be a loss of data and there will be a fee. Turns out the fee was only $15 and the backup was from the previous day, so no loss of data. I'm still running the same site and I might soon be able to hire my first employee :) My takeaways were to create backups, not monkey around on the database, and to call support back and ask for someone else to verify what the other person told me.
navitronic 11y ago
A modern alternative to the pizza delivery message would be to use uber to book a car near the location and upon the allocation of the driver, contact them and ask them to deliver the message. and then drive around the block a few times for their trouble.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - robzyb 11y ago
    I'm not so sure. A taxi in Melbourne Australia won't even take a booking for a street corner. "I'm sorry sir, it has to be a fixed address." Also taxi companies aren't set up to accept payment over a telephone call. So they'd have to trust the recipient to pay.
- bo1024 11y ago
  Taskrabbit or a similar service --- practically designed for such scenarios.
  - Axsuul 11y ago
    Uber is orders of magnitude better in this scenario. - TaskRabbit: Post job, wait for bids, accept a bid, wait for driver to leave his/her house to deliver message, 2-3 hours later... profit? - Uber: Place pin near address, request ride, driver less than 5 min away accepts, call driver with weird request. 10 min later... profit!
dcx 11y ago
"Gen George C. Marshall received a report from a general on his staff that some of Marshall’s officers had morale problems. General Marshall said, 'Officers don’t have morale problems. Officers cure morale problems in others. No one is looking after my morale.'" (http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a454364.pdf http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a454364.pdf)
- sanderjd 11y ago
  This is a clever way of putting things, but what it is really saying is that leaders shouldn't let the people who are counting on them see their morale problems. But that doesn't mean that they can't have morale problems, or that they can't find support up or sideways on the chain of command.
  - hkmurakami 11y ago
    IIRC there is a section in Horowitz's book that covers this during the doom days of Loudcloud.
- arram 11y ago
  The worst interpretation here is as a justification for lazy leadership. What it really means is that for leaders there is a higher expectation of emotional intelligence, or as Ben Horowitz puts it, your ability to manage your own psychology. http://www.bhorowitz.com/what_s_the_most_difficult_ceo_skill_managing_your_own_psychology http://www.bhorowitz.com/what_s_the_most_difficult_ceo_skill...
cassieramen 11y ago
It's always interesting to think about the key moments in a start-up's life. Those ride or die moments that lead to great success or losing the Jonas Brother. I wonder how many a startup gets? How many are created by action or by luck? Do all startups have a couple of key moments they can look at as lynch pins to their success?
- AznHisoka 11y ago
  I think the ones that do are an anamoly. Most successful businesses become successful in a boring way going through a slow ramp of growth.
- krschultz 11y ago
  The rare make or break moments exist, but most startups thrive on getting their employees to work as if they're in make or break moments 10x more often than they actually are.
- timr 11y ago
  It would be incorrect to take away from these stories that they were "key moments" in the life of JTV. These are fun stories, but there were lots of other moments that Justin could describe that were equally dramatic (if not worse). If anything, these are examples of why most of the stuff that you worry about in a startup turn out to be totally irrelevant in the final analysis. While we were stressing about the Jonas brothers, the "gaming" category was off languishing in its own little corner of the site....
- lkrubner 11y ago
  This is extremely long (12,000 words) but it gets surprisingly dramatic at the end: "What happens when the Board Of Directors begins to panic?" http://www.smashcompany.com/business/what-happens-when-the-board-of-directors-begins-to-panic http://www.smashcompany.com/business/what-happens-when-the-b...
AznHisoka 11y ago
Would there still be any objection to making money from a porn site if it gave them 40% of their revenue?
- tptacek 11y ago
  I wouldn't do it. Without getting into an icky and tedious discussion of pornography in general, my general default setting is that major porn sites are exploitative, and that the ones that pay the most affiliate dollars are likely to be the worst of the bunch. Which is just to say, there are reasons you might not want to have a policy of redirecting users to porn sites for money even if Techcrunch isn't shaming you.
  - AznHisoka 11y ago
    What makes you say the major ones are exploitative? And to who? the actors/actresses or the people watching their movies?
    - stickfigure 11y ago
      I also find this word odd. Usually I think the person being exploited in a financial relationship is the one whose pockets are being emptied.
    - 55555 11y ago
      I'm not sure what he means, but negative-option free-trial scams, credit card banging, fake messages on dating and cam sites to get you to buy credit packs, etc., are pretty run-of-the-mill issues. There are plenty of legit porn sites out there though.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  If you want to deal with corporate America in any way shape or form then any income from porn is right off the table. And if you're getting 40% of your revenue from porn then you are an extension of the porn industry.
pkfrank 11y ago
The pizza delivery messenger service is clever and hilarious.
- sparky_z 11y ago
  Back in the day, some friends of mine were stuck walking home from the movie theater after the buses stopped running. As they were walking past a Domino's, one of them had the idea to order a pizza delivered to their house and then hitch a ride with the driver. It worked.
- livejamie 11y ago
  A startup waiting to happen! ;)
  - Splines 11y ago
    Ubergram
  - cba9 11y ago
    The problem is you don't need fast physical deliveries of short messages that often. For example, a few days ago I was pondering how to reach a particular person on very short notice; I had an address, but nothing else, so I couldn't call them, and while I could spend like $50-100 on international mail, it wouldn't get there faster than 3 days from sending. Ultimately, the best solution I could find was... telegrams. Specifically, their modern email+courier incarnation. It would cost like $70 and probably get to the person in a day or two. I thought this sounded outrageous, but then it occurred to me: when was the last time anyone ever used telegrams? There can't be many uses of them - I've never used one in my entire life - and all the regular costs of a business still need to be paid and the couriers have to be paid and so on.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - patio11 11y ago
      Japan spends far in excess of $500 million on telegrams a year, the overwhelming majority of it because it is traditional to send one if you're invited to a wedding and cannot attend. There exist a variety of circumstances where a business has to put a piece of paper in someone's hand within about 24 hours. It's doable between virtually any two endpoints in the first world. It also costs whatever FedEx/DHL/etc think they can get out of a business which needs to have a document hand delivered on the other side of the world immediately, which is "a lot." (e.g. It's presently midnight on Wednesday in NYC. I can walk next door to a store in Tokyo and hand FedEx a letter. It will arrive at the New York Stock Exchange before the opening bell on Thursday. That will cost ~$125 but it will almost certainly actually work.)
noahlt 11y ago
I've always wondered this about the pizza-delivery story: how did they know the address where Kyle was staying?
- cperciva 11y ago
  From http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2012/10/what-goes-wrong.html http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2012/10/what-goes-wrong... : Let me give you one last example of improvising. The Justin.tv founders were having a lot of scaling issues in the beginning. One weekend their whole video system went down. Kyle was in charge of it, but no one knew where Kyle was. And Kyle wasn't picking up his cell phone. This was live video so it was pretty critical that this get fixed immediately. Michael Siebel called Kyle's friends and found out he was in Lake Tahoe and got the address of the house. So here's a problem for you, you know the address where someone is and he's not answering his phone. How do you get a message to him right away? Michael went on Yelp and looked for a pizza place near the house and called them up and said, "I want to have a pizza delivered. But never mind the pizza. Just send a delivery guy over and say these four words: The site is down." The pizza place was very confused by this, but they send the pizza guy without a pizza, Kyle answers the door, and the pizza guy says, "The site is down." Kyle was able to fix it, and the site was down for less than an hour total from beginning to end. So it sounds like they knew someone who knew where he was staying.
sagargv 11y ago
Where was twitch.tv hosted before the acquisition? Bandwidth on AWS would've costed a bomb.
bambax 11y ago
Great stories and great writing; thanks for sharing.
hamburglar 11y ago
Such a great summary of "unlimited vacation": > Because we were young and terrible managers, we had an “unlimited vacation” policy, which translated into passively discouraging people from taking vacation.
pbreit 11y ago
"we had an “unlimited vacation” policy, which translated into passively discouraging people from taking vacation" I've never heard this described so succinctly and perfectly!

392 points by tzier 11y ago

I can relate to all of these because I've lived through all of these, fortunately not as much in the public eye as Justin and his team (the web was much smaller back then) but this brought back a whole bunch of memories. Thanks Justin (assuming you read HN) for writing these up.

justin 11y ago
Thanks for reading!
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Hah :) Cool. I'm sure there are lots of people that can relate to your stories in one way or another but what with us being active in the exact same market (but you did way better on the execution and on the business part) it really hit the spot here.
stevesearer 11y ago
Somewhere around 5 years ago I was doing some maintenance on my site's database without really knowing what I was doing. My wedding website was hosted on the same server, so I thought I might as well delete it since the wedding was months before. Dropped that database. Visited my business website a few minutes later and it wasn't working. Apparently both sites were in the same database... Called MediaTemple support and asked if they had a backup. They did! Support guy asked if I wanted him to restore it. Of course I do. He goes on hold. He comes back on and says, "Sir, I'm sorry to say that the last back up actually backed up the blank version of the site so we don't have anything to restore. Is there anything else I can help you with?"... After hanging up, I explained the situation to my wife and she just says, call back and ask someone else. The next support guy tells me that there actually is a way to restore an old archived backup, but there will likely be a loss of data and there will be a fee. Turns out the fee was only $15 and the backup was from the previous day, so no loss of data. I'm still running the same site and I might soon be able to hire my first employee :) My takeaways were to create backups, not monkey around on the database, and to call support back and ask for someone else to verify what the other person told me.

navitronic 11y ago

A modern alternative to the pizza delivery message would be to use uber to book a car near the location and upon the allocation of the driver, contact them and ask them to deliver the message. and then drive around the block a few times for their trouble.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- robzyb 11y ago
  I'm not so sure. A taxi in Melbourne Australia won't even take a booking for a street corner. "I'm sorry sir, it has to be a fixed address." Also taxi companies aren't set up to accept payment over a telephone call. So they'd have to trust the recipient to pay.
bo1024 11y ago
Taskrabbit or a similar service --- practically designed for such scenarios.
- Axsuul 11y ago
  Uber is orders of magnitude better in this scenario. - TaskRabbit: Post job, wait for bids, accept a bid, wait for driver to leave his/her house to deliver message, 2-3 hours later... profit? - Uber: Place pin near address, request ride, driver less than 5 min away accepts, call driver with weird request. 10 min later... profit!

dcx 11y ago

"Gen George C. Marshall received a report from a general on his staff that some of Marshall’s officers had morale problems. General Marshall said, 'Officers don’t have morale problems. Officers cure morale problems in others. No one is looking after my morale.'" (http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a454364.pdf http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a454364.pdf)

sanderjd 11y ago
This is a clever way of putting things, but what it is really saying is that leaders shouldn't let the people who are counting on them see their morale problems. But that doesn't mean that they can't have morale problems, or that they can't find support up or sideways on the chain of command.
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  IIRC there is a section in Horowitz's book that covers this during the doom days of Loudcloud.
arram 11y ago
The worst interpretation here is as a justification for lazy leadership. What it really means is that for leaders there is a higher expectation of emotional intelligence, or as Ben Horowitz puts it, your ability to manage your own psychology. http://www.bhorowitz.com/what_s_the_most_difficult_ceo_skill_managing_your_own_psychology http://www.bhorowitz.com/what_s_the_most_difficult_ceo_skill...

cassieramen 11y ago

It's always interesting to think about the key moments in a start-up's life. Those ride or die moments that lead to great success or losing the Jonas Brother. I wonder how many a startup gets? How many are created by action or by luck? Do all startups have a couple of key moments they can look at as lynch pins to their success?

AznHisoka 11y ago
I think the ones that do are an anamoly. Most successful businesses become successful in a boring way going through a slow ramp of growth.
krschultz 11y ago
The rare make or break moments exist, but most startups thrive on getting their employees to work as if they're in make or break moments 10x more often than they actually are.
timr 11y ago
It would be incorrect to take away from these stories that they were "key moments" in the life of JTV. These are fun stories, but there were lots of other moments that Justin could describe that were equally dramatic (if not worse). If anything, these are examples of why most of the stuff that you worry about in a startup turn out to be totally irrelevant in the final analysis. While we were stressing about the Jonas brothers, the "gaming" category was off languishing in its own little corner of the site....
lkrubner 11y ago
This is extremely long (12,000 words) but it gets surprisingly dramatic at the end: "What happens when the Board Of Directors begins to panic?" http://www.smashcompany.com/business/what-happens-when-the-board-of-directors-begins-to-panic http://www.smashcompany.com/business/what-happens-when-the-b...

AznHisoka 11y ago

Would there still be any objection to making money from a porn site if it gave them 40% of their revenue?

tptacek 11y ago
I wouldn't do it. Without getting into an icky and tedious discussion of pornography in general, my general default setting is that major porn sites are exploitative, and that the ones that pay the most affiliate dollars are likely to be the worst of the bunch. Which is just to say, there are reasons you might not want to have a policy of redirecting users to porn sites for money even if Techcrunch isn't shaming you.
- AznHisoka 11y ago
  What makes you say the major ones are exploitative? And to who? the actors/actresses or the people watching their movies?
  - stickfigure 11y ago
    I also find this word odd. Usually I think the person being exploited in a financial relationship is the one whose pockets are being emptied.
  - 55555 11y ago
    I'm not sure what he means, but negative-option free-trial scams, credit card banging, fake messages on dating and cam sites to get you to buy credit packs, etc., are pretty run-of-the-mill issues. There are plenty of legit porn sites out there though.
jacquesm 11y ago
If you want to deal with corporate America in any way shape or form then any income from porn is right off the table. And if you're getting 40% of your revenue from porn then you are an extension of the porn industry.

pkfrank 11y ago

The pizza delivery messenger service is clever and hilarious.

sparky_z 11y ago
Back in the day, some friends of mine were stuck walking home from the movie theater after the buses stopped running. As they were walking past a Domino's, one of them had the idea to order a pizza delivered to their house and then hitch a ride with the driver. It worked.
livejamie 11y ago
A startup waiting to happen! ;)
- Splines 11y ago
  Ubergram
- cba9 11y ago
  The problem is you don't need fast physical deliveries of short messages that often. For example, a few days ago I was pondering how to reach a particular person on very short notice; I had an address, but nothing else, so I couldn't call them, and while I could spend like $50-100 on international mail, it wouldn't get there faster than 3 days from sending. Ultimately, the best solution I could find was... telegrams. Specifically, their modern email+courier incarnation. It would cost like $70 and probably get to the person in a day or two. I thought this sounded outrageous, but then it occurred to me: when was the last time anyone ever used telegrams? There can't be many uses of them - I've never used one in my entire life - and all the regular costs of a business still need to be paid and the couriers have to be paid and so on.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - patio11 11y ago
    Japan spends far in excess of $500 million on telegrams a year, the overwhelming majority of it because it is traditional to send one if you're invited to a wedding and cannot attend. There exist a variety of circumstances where a business has to put a piece of paper in someone's hand within about 24 hours. It's doable between virtually any two endpoints in the first world. It also costs whatever FedEx/DHL/etc think they can get out of a business which needs to have a document hand delivered on the other side of the world immediately, which is "a lot." (e.g. It's presently midnight on Wednesday in NYC. I can walk next door to a store in Tokyo and hand FedEx a letter. It will arrive at the New York Stock Exchange before the opening bell on Thursday. That will cost ~$125 but it will almost certainly actually work.)

noahlt 11y ago

I've always wondered this about the pizza-delivery story: how did they know the address where Kyle was staying?

cperciva 11y ago
From http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2012/10/what-goes-wrong.html http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2012/10/what-goes-wrong... : Let me give you one last example of improvising. The Justin.tv founders were having a lot of scaling issues in the beginning. One weekend their whole video system went down. Kyle was in charge of it, but no one knew where Kyle was. And Kyle wasn't picking up his cell phone. This was live video so it was pretty critical that this get fixed immediately. Michael Siebel called Kyle's friends and found out he was in Lake Tahoe and got the address of the house. So here's a problem for you, you know the address where someone is and he's not answering his phone. How do you get a message to him right away? Michael went on Yelp and looked for a pizza place near the house and called them up and said, "I want to have a pizza delivered. But never mind the pizza. Just send a delivery guy over and say these four words: The site is down." The pizza place was very confused by this, but they send the pizza guy without a pizza, Kyle answers the door, and the pizza guy says, "The site is down." Kyle was able to fix it, and the site was down for less than an hour total from beginning to end. So it sounds like they knew someone who knew where he was staying.

sagargv 11y ago

Where was twitch.tv hosted before the acquisition? Bandwidth on AWS would've costed a bomb.

bambax 11y ago

Great stories and great writing; thanks for sharing.

hamburglar 11y ago

Such a great summary of "unlimited vacation": > Because we were young and terrible managers, we had an “unlimited vacation” policy, which translated into passively discouraging people from taking vacation.

pbreit 11y ago

"we had an “unlimited vacation” policy, which translated into passively discouraging people from taking vacation" I've never heard this described so succinctly and perfectly!