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Thank you for being so open and honest. A lot of people look up to you and I think it is a good thing for them to understand that one does not spontaneously bec

Thank you for being so open and honest. A lot of people look up to you and I think it is a good thing for them to understand that one does not spontaneously become a patio11 and that the struggles continue on even after success (however that is measured). I have some questions below, though I understand if you prefer not to address the topics therein. > The components to this include an emulated AVR microcontroller, an emulated hardware device built out of three of those microcontrollers, a scratch-built C compiler, a scratch-built fully-functional debugger, and an in-browser UI to tie everything together. I'd say you guys jumped into the deep end of the pool and your goals from a technology standpoint were ambitious, to put it politely. Do you think that you would have taken a different approach if you could do it over again? Did you have to invent these wheels or where there other options you could have leveraged to accomplish the same goal? Is the technology you are building part of your competitive advantage? Having seen in-browser consoles and programming environments, I just have to wonder what the advantage is of coming at the recruiting problem from a hard computing perspective. As a programmer, that is the way I would approach it as well, since that is where I would feel I am making the most impact, but that would simply be to make me feel useful and not to move the company along, necessarily. Also, I detected a hint of discord in yours and tptacek's posts during and after your release. Would you say that the process has put a strain on relationships, even if temporarily?

patio11 10y ago
Do you think that you would have taken a different approach if you could do it over again? Oh goodness yes. If I had a do-over, I'd run a straight-up recruiting company with ~0 lines of code written for 2~3 months on the strength of our personal networks, figure out how that works, launch a single tech tree far closer in scope to e.g. Stripe CTF 3 than what we launched, fold candidates developed from that into the recruiting stream, then scale engineering and recruiting in parallel. Instead we went into hard-core dev mode for ~10 months to do something which derisked the business a lot less than being recruiters for a month would have. Co-founder relationships are co-founder relationships. It's been a stressful year getting a totally new thing off the ground. I think thats a comes-with-the-territory sort of thing based on the reports of literally every founder I know; it is new territory to me. Maybe someday I'll write more about that, but for the moment, still have to figure out recruiting first.
- alain94040 10y ago
  Totally agreed with your post-mortem. Classic mistake of a founding team: write version 2 of microcorruption, instead of first de-risking the business side (the headhunting business).
  - patio11 10y ago
    Aside: post-mortem is such a funny word choice for our projects, isn't it?
    - curtis 10y ago
      I've heard of people using postpartum instead. Lessons learned is probably the most popular alternative though.
- tyre 10y ago
  First off, this is perfect. Do you think that you would have taken a different approach if you could do it over again? Oh goodness yes. To founders, if you don't answer the question this way, you're not pushing yourself/your team enough. If everything is going perfectly right, be scared or get another job. @patio11 [Unsolicited advice from a fellow founder] > All three of us were working as recruiters for it, but Thomas and Erin were also full-time on development for Jailbreak. Have one person own recruiting, which I'm guessing is you. That is priority number 1, 2, and 3 for you no matter how little you know/like it. It sounds like you learned this really well (we fucked it up initially as well — the dangers of all-technical co-founders.) For other founders: As an early startup, you have two goals: 1) Acquire users. 2) Build something users need. You should always be doing something towards one of those two things. If you have more than one person in the company, there should be one clear owner for each. Set metrics that are just out of your reach. As J. Cole said, "If you don't aim too high, then you aim too low." Do not stop doing either of those two things until either your sleep schedule is on fire (for goal 1) or your servers are on fire (for goal 2.) Do not hire, talk to press, design a new logo, talk to investors, join a softball league, speak at conferences, or bring on a social media manager until shit is on fire. That's what product-market fit feels like. Unless you are building a lifestyle business, you do not have a successful company until your small team is on fire. Then fire yourself from positions (via hiring) to put out the fires.

patio11 10y ago

Do you think that you would have taken a different approach if you could do it over again? Oh goodness yes. If I had a do-over, I'd run a straight-up recruiting company with ~0 lines of code written for 2~3 months on the strength of our personal networks, figure out how that works, launch a single tech tree far closer in scope to e.g. Stripe CTF 3 than what we launched, fold candidates developed from that into the recruiting stream, then scale engineering and recruiting in parallel. Instead we went into hard-core dev mode for ~10 months to do something which derisked the business a lot less than being recruiters for a month would have. Co-founder relationships are co-founder relationships. It's been a stressful year getting a totally new thing off the ground. I think thats a comes-with-the-territory sort of thing based on the reports of literally every founder I know; it is new territory to me. Maybe someday I'll write more about that, but for the moment, still have to figure out recruiting first.

alain94040 10y ago
Totally agreed with your post-mortem. Classic mistake of a founding team: write version 2 of microcorruption, instead of first de-risking the business side (the headhunting business).
- patio11 10y ago
  Aside: post-mortem is such a funny word choice for our projects, isn't it?
  - curtis 10y ago
    I've heard of people using postpartum instead. Lessons learned is probably the most popular alternative though.
tyre 10y ago
First off, this is perfect. Do you think that you would have taken a different approach if you could do it over again? Oh goodness yes. To founders, if you don't answer the question this way, you're not pushing yourself/your team enough. If everything is going perfectly right, be scared or get another job. @patio11 [Unsolicited advice from a fellow founder] > All three of us were working as recruiters for it, but Thomas and Erin were also full-time on development for Jailbreak. Have one person own recruiting, which I'm guessing is you. That is priority number 1, 2, and 3 for you no matter how little you know/like it. It sounds like you learned this really well (we fucked it up initially as well — the dangers of all-technical co-founders.) For other founders: As an early startup, you have two goals: 1) Acquire users. 2) Build something users need. You should always be doing something towards one of those two things. If you have more than one person in the company, there should be one clear owner for each. Set metrics that are just out of your reach. As J. Cole said, "If you don't aim too high, then you aim too low." Do not stop doing either of those two things until either your sleep schedule is on fire (for goal 1) or your servers are on fire (for goal 2.) Do not hire, talk to press, design a new logo, talk to investors, join a softball league, speak at conferences, or bring on a social media manager until shit is on fire. That's what product-market fit feels like. Unless you are building a lifestyle business, you do not have a successful company until your small team is on fire. Then fire yourself from positions (via hiring) to put out the fires.