4 ms·

Hi. I'm Tom and I am the co-founder at TS and you know what, you're right -- I am not passionate about tickets. I'm not even passionate about sports. In fact, t

by tdavis 18y ago

Hi. I'm Tom and I am the co-founder at TS and you know what, you're right -- I am not passionate about tickets. I'm not even passionate about sports. In fact, the only sport I care about is hockey; the rest I essentially hate. I am still very passionate about the project, however, because it has been very entertaining from a technical perspective and has been a great opportunity to not only take part in YC, but build a company with a very old friend. I'm very passionate about the site, but not because I necessarily want to make my own ticket-buying experience better. I like TS because it's a useful service for other people, presents challenging work, and has been an opportunity to work with very large volumes of data, among other reasons. I may not find tickets or sports exciting, but not once since the start of this project have I thought to myself, "I really wish I was working on something else." Edit: Once we have concert listings I suppose I can meet the artificial requirement of building something I would use because there's little I'm more passionate about than music.

maxklein 18y ago
Tom, are you using your own site? If you are interested in working with large volumes of data, then you are not struggling with the real issue - which involves all the different ways people interact with the site and how it solves different needs. This is the reason open source software so often sucks - because people want to solve the difficult technical problems (to prove themselves or why, I don't know), and they are not solving the most important problem - which is knowing all the different ways users want to use your site and making sure each and every way is so smooth it's sweet. That's a core of passion - you create a little baby, and you want that baby to be perfect, so you do the little things - smooth out the icons here, make sure that the window pops up just right, test it 30 different times to see if the flow is smooth and obvious, you ask people what they think of it, and how exactly it can be made better. It's like when you finish a painting, then you take a step back, look at it to see how a stranger would look at it. Then you squint your eyes to see how the colors look on their own. Then you go up close to see how the shadow on the little corner box looks, then you think what color of frame would properly offset the color on the inside.... That's passion.
- nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
  I don't think the creator of an interface can ever objectively measure the usability of the interface, no matter how much they use it; they don't ever have to learn it, because they created it in the first place.
  - maxklein 18y ago
    A great artists knows when his painting is ugly, a great musician can tell when his song sucks.
    - nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
      There's gigantic gap between beauty and usability...
      - maxklein 18y ago
        No, it's the same thing. The purpose of a painting is not to have gleaming edges or colorful patches - it's to awaken emotions. The point of a software application is to allow us get work done as easily as possible. The point of a car is to transport us from one place to another as painlessly as possible. Success is when a creation achieves the goal of what it is supposed to be. Being great in what you do is the ability to create something that achieves that goal. Software applications are like paintings. It's easy to create a mediocre painting, and the difficulty in the magnificent paintings lie in the attention to detail. If you really think usability is not the CORE of any software application, then you are not just on the wrong path, you are going in the opposite direction.
        shard 18y ago
        It seems like you are defining beauty AS usability. To me they are orthogonal. Beauty is a quality that appeals to my aesthetic sense, and usability is a quality that appeals to my practicality. There are beautiful websites that are unusable, and ugly websites that are very usable, I'm sure you can think of examples for both cases.

by tdavis 18y ago

maxklein 18y ago

Tom, are you using your own site? If you are interested in working with large volumes of data, then you are not struggling with the real issue - which involves all the different ways people interact with the site and how it solves different needs. This is the reason open source software so often sucks - because people want to solve the difficult technical problems (to prove themselves or why, I don't know), and they are not solving the most important problem - which is knowing all the different ways users want to use your site and making sure each and every way is so smooth it's sweet. That's a core of passion - you create a little baby, and you want that baby to be perfect, so you do the little things - smooth out the icons here, make sure that the window pops up just right, test it 30 different times to see if the flow is smooth and obvious, you ask people what they think of it, and how exactly it can be made better. It's like when you finish a painting, then you take a step back, look at it to see how a stranger would look at it. Then you squint your eyes to see how the colors look on their own. Then you go up close to see how the shadow on the little corner box looks, then you think what color of frame would properly offset the color on the inside.... That's passion.

nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
I don't think the creator of an interface can ever objectively measure the usability of the interface, no matter how much they use it; they don't ever have to learn it, because they created it in the first place.
- maxklein 18y ago
  A great artists knows when his painting is ugly, a great musician can tell when his song sucks.
  - nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
    There's gigantic gap between beauty and usability...
    - maxklein 18y ago
      No, it's the same thing. The purpose of a painting is not to have gleaming edges or colorful patches - it's to awaken emotions. The point of a software application is to allow us get work done as easily as possible. The point of a car is to transport us from one place to another as painlessly as possible. Success is when a creation achieves the goal of what it is supposed to be. Being great in what you do is the ability to create something that achieves that goal. Software applications are like paintings. It's easy to create a mediocre painting, and the difficulty in the magnificent paintings lie in the attention to detail. If you really think usability is not the CORE of any software application, then you are not just on the wrong path, you are going in the opposite direction.
      - shard 18y ago
        It seems like you are defining beauty AS usability. To me they are orthogonal. Beauty is a quality that appeals to my aesthetic sense, and usability is a quality that appeals to my practicality. There are beautiful websites that are unusable, and ugly websites that are very usable, I'm sure you can think of examples for both cases.