Dijital Life

Can Entrepreneurs Be Made?

February 27, 2010 – 6:29 pm by coachwei

What are the unique characteristics of entrepreneurs? It is a subject that I think about from time to time. Over the years, I identified a few patterns and I use such patterns in judging other people whether they are entrepreneurs or not. Here are the patterns that I identified and use: Strong will power: Someone who is persistent in his/her pursuit and won't give up easily, whatever the pursuit might be. It is not entirely accidental that a lot of entrepreneurs are avid long distance runners because long distance running like marathon is more about having a strong mind than anything else. Relentlessly resourceful: Someone who is able to figure out how to make things happen against all the odds. Someone who would try from many different angles and perspectives in order to achieve a goal and take failed attempts as input for finding better ways. Passion. Starting a new business is hard, ...more »

Posted in startup | 1 Comment »

Yottaa Looking for Rock Star UX Architect

January 15, 2010 – 4:29 pm by coachwei

Yottaa is looking for a rock star UX architect who can help make deliver an amazing user experience for various web applications. Yottaa Inc (http://www.yottaa.com) is a Boston and Beijing based cloud computing company building a new generation of cloud services revolutionizing what we know about the Internet. With venture backing from institutional investors and a cross culture team, Yottaa aims to build a new kind of software company that leverages the best of China and US. We are building some amazing technology that would make life better for millions of web users. We need your help in making the millions of users amazed, by the experience, not by the technology. Contact coach at yottaa.com if you are interested or have suggestions. Responsibilities Create the vision for the Yottaa user experience, including interaction design, information architecture, and visual design Interaction design for various software-as-a-service web applications and web sites Work closely with various entities, mark up product ...more »

Posted in Main Page, WebDev, Yottaa, startup | No Comments »

Boston Area Startups to Watch

January 3, 2010 – 11:31 am by coachwei

Nine venture-backed startups IPO'd in 2009, but just one of them was based in Silicon Valley: Sunnyvale security firm Fortinet Inc. (Note that Fortinet is led by Tsinghua University alumni, also co-founder of NetScreen). Close-by, San Francisco's Open Table IPO'd in May. Otherwise, it was all Massachusetts, Chicago, Seattle, and Texas. Massachusetts tops the list in 2009. 2010 should look different as we wouldn't be surprised to see Silicon Valley-based startups Yelp, Zynga, Playdom, Tesla, Facebook and LiveOps IPO. However, east coast does have a list of really good firms up and coming, not necessarily achieving stardom in 2010, but maybe in the next 2-5 years? Here is a short list of Boston based firms to watch for in the next few years in my humble opinion: BrightCove: Internet video platform. Jeremy and co have done really well and BrightCove is on the way to stardom (Thanks Dharmesh for the suggestion) Hubspot: marketing ...more »

Posted in Main Page, startup | 3 Comments »

The World According to Americans and Chinese

November 25, 2009 – 10:08 pm by coachwei

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Saw this cartoon in the morning today. It is really funny and couldn't resist to re-post it here: The World According to Americans (Credit: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/world-accordign-to-USA.jpg) The next cartoon is also quite funny: (Credit: http://kelsocartography.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/the-world-according-to-ronald-reagan.jpg) Unfortunately I couldn't find a good cartoon for Chinese. So here is one that I sorta assembled (I can think of tons of funny cartoon ideas. I wish i know how to draw them!): The World According to Chinese more »

Posted in Main Page, humor | 1 Comment »

A Geek’s Guide to Startup Banking – What do you do after you close financing

November 23, 2009 – 4:00 pm by coachwei

This is my 2nd post in the “Geek’s Guide” series about all the things that entrepreneurs hate to do, are not good at doing them, but have to do them anyway. These things include office space (My first post is on this topic), legal, HR, administration, banking, accounting, insurance, payroll, etc. I am going through these things myself at Yottaa. This is my 2nd time in going through these things. My first time was around 2000 to 2001 when I started Nexaweb. Nobody was doing blogging at the time. Frankly, I wish I blogged about what I learned at the time. Because when I need this knowledge again, I remember absolutely nothing about these things. ---We are genetically programmed to suck at such stuff and our memory got erased quickly even if we force ourselves through a learning process. Anyway, through Yottaa, I think that I’ve become a semi-expert in ...more »

Posted in Main Page, Tips, Yottaa, startup | 5 Comments »

Is The Tide Turning?

November 14, 2009 – 7:58 pm by coachwei

Though unemployment rate is hitting 10%+ in US, things are looking up from what I see: IPO market start to open up for venture backed startups: A123 System, LogMeIn, SolarWind, etc. Notable M&A exits: Cisco/Tanderberg ($3B), Cisco/Starent ($2.9B), Cisco/ScanSafe ($160M), Cisco/DVN($40M), Compuware/Gomez($296M),HP/3Com($6B), Google/Admob($750M), EA/Playfish($300M+)... Good activities from VCs: Though the VC industry is still showing signs of struggling in general, quite a few VCs are quietly doing lots of things including raising new fund (notably Andreessen & Horowitz) and doing deals. Another notable example that I love is Founder Collective launched by folks like Chris Dixon. I myself saw quite a few good Series A deals done over the last 4 months. China's growth rate is going to be 8%+, despite its target of "only" 7% early in the year. Coincidentally, my friends at RTMAsia reported that "Since September, RTM Asia has seen a strong ...more »

Posted in Yottaa, startup | 5 Comments »

A Geek’s Guide to Startup Office Space

November 9, 2009 – 11:58 am by coachwei

An interesting benefit for me in starting up Yottaa is to become a semi-expert in unexpected domains such as startup office space in Boston area, banking, HR and administration etc. I've learned some tips and thought they might be useful for my fellow entrepreneurs. This post focuses on office space. 1. Stay virtual for as long as you could When I started Nexaweb in 2000, I rented an office almost immediately - 849 Mass Avenue in Central Square, two rooms, right above Starbucks! It was a fantastic startup office! Starbucks was our conference room and we had so much coffee! The rent was about $2000/month, which really hurt when we had no funding. In contrast, we deliberately decided to be virtual when we started Yottaa in early 2009. For a long time, Yottaa conference room #1 was my dinning room. Cambridge Center Starbucks served very well as Yottaa conference #2, and ...more »

Posted in Main Page, Tips, startup | 4 Comments »

Social Expeditions Looking for CTO

October 22, 2009 – 8:28 pm by coachwei

My friends at Social Expeditions are looking for a CTO. Below is what they are looking for: Social Expeditions is a company behind blockbusters on Facebook and MySpace. Millions use our products. We are profitable. This is no coincidence because we are obsessed with our customers. While many features start with intuitions and mechanics we have seen work, everything is put to customer development testing. We rely on our own multivariate experimentation system and carry out extremely rapid testing and iteration (sometimes on the order of 30-60 minutes). Our goal is to continue producing great social games and applications that excite, entertain and inspire millions. We're an engineering-led organization You will be joining a still-very-lean global crew (with foci in San Francisco and Tel Aviv) that convenes for 2-3 week hackathons every several months at awesome locations (recent stop: Croatia, next stop: Tokyo). On our team everybody is ...more »

Posted in startup | 1 Comment »

A Bad Weekend

October 11, 2009 – 9:12 pm by coachwei

October 11th 2009 looks like a bad weekend. It turned out to be a really bad one: RedSox - what can you say? Swept. Soul crushed. Ortiz, Bay and Youk combined with 2-3 hits over three games. and Papelbon fell from the cliff. Patriots - Ok. This one is not a big deal. For some reason, Brady lost his capability to throw the ball after the first quarter? Pats will bounce back. Obama Won Nobel Peace Prize - This is a big one. My respect for the Nobel Peace Prize committee dropped to the same level that RedSox would get a hit facing a playoff pitcher. These cartoons are better than any words that I can assemble together on this subject. My favorite one is below: Obama Won Nobel Peace Prize Google Waves - This looks like a classic example of a technology searching for a problem to solve, which happens and it is ...more »

Posted in Main Page, Yottaa, google, humor, politics | 1 Comment »

Yottaa Looking for Head of Engineering

September 18, 2009 – 7:50 am by coachwei

Based in Boston and Beijing, yottaa is a stealth mode startup in the area of cloud computing. We are not saying too much about what we do in public yet, but we can say that you will enjoy the deep computer science as well as the plenty “lost in translation” moments in our cross culture geek environment. We are looking for a head of engineering that can build and lead a team of 10-50 engineers.  The team is made up of different disciplines (Web development, Networking, Yottaa-scale Distributed Computing, System and Application Design, Ruby, Java, C/C++, Open Source). The ability to go from zero engineers to 10 with an extremely high talent concentration is critical.  If you have a big brain, that’s great and we'd love to know that.  More importantly, we are looking for someone who attracts even bigger brains. Though you don’t have to be an expert in all technical ...more »

Posted in Main Page, Yottaa, asia, cloud, startup | 5 Comments »

Plymouth Half Marathon

September 13, 2009 – 11:05 am by coachwei

Our little running team "white knees" (last year it was "red knees" for Toronto Marathon) ran the 15th annual Run To The Rock Half Marathon yesterday September 12 2009. Together with about 600 runners, the course started from the nearby town of Cedarville northward toward the home of the famous landmark Plymouth Rock, where the pilgrims of the Mayflower landed in the early 1600s. The race raises money for and awareness of Plymouth's Boys & Girls Club After School fitness programs. Described by participants as a course with "big, rolling hills", the course wasn't friendly to folks like me who train on flat trails along the Charles River. The first 5 miles was the most difficult for me, given the heavy rain and the winding slopes. It eventually became a pleasant run after gaining some self composure and warming up to the rain. The white knees finished the race happy ...more »

Posted in Main Page, marathon | No Comments »

SaaS Go-to-market Framework

August 19, 2009 – 7:28 pm by coachwei

OK, you are building a great SaaS company that will change the world. How do you actually get there? Ok, so we have to think really hard about how to go to market. What is the framework that one should follow? Here is a list of things that I have been thinking about  as a guiding framework - really look forward to comments and appreciate feedback (I admit that I'm an idiot and are still learning the basic grammars): Market Visibility - you want your firm to be heard and to be known in its target marketplace.  Traditional marketing would aim for visibility as well, though the means to get there may be different. So what are the means that you are going to take to make your SaaS service visible? Positive Branding - you want your firm to be associated with a positive reputation, thought leadership, and credibility. ...more »

Posted in software business model, startup | 3 Comments »

Build High Performance Web Apps

July 2, 2009 – 7:37 pm by coachwei

Below are the slides for a recent techstars session: It covers some basic stuff for web performance, scalability and availability, such as: Common architecture pattern for horizontal scalability; How to do load balancing; Cost effective load balancing options; Cloud computing does not solve scalability issue; how to optimize web performance; A list of free tools available are also mentioned, such as YSlow, RockStar Web Profiler and RockStar Optimizer. more »

Posted in WebDev, cloud | No Comments »

Cloud Providers and Locations

June 6, 2009 – 12:01 am by coachwei

Below is my list of cloud infrastructure providers and their data center locations (as of May 2009): Cloud Infrasturcture Providers US: Amazon EC2, RackSpace, GoGrid, SoftLayer, NewServers, ATT, Verizon, Sun Cloud; EU: FlexiScale, ElasticHosts, Amazon EC2, ATT, Verizon; Asia: ATT, Verizon(?), RackSpace(?), 21ViaNet' CloudEx(?); Further: RackSpace has data centers in US, Europe (London) and Asia(Hongkong), but does not tell you which data center(s) offer cloud computing capability. I suspect it is only within 1-2 US data centers now(update: RackSpace supports cloud computing at its Dallas and San Antonio data centers at this moment, according to RackSpace twitter response); Savvis claims support for cloud computing, but one can not find anything meaningful from their website (the site is almost designed for anti-communications); Sun Microsystem made a big deal announcing Sun Cloud, in particular, saying that they will provide a storage service(similar to S3) and a compute service (similar to EC2). Is this real? Is it still ...more »

Posted in cloud | 1 Comment »

Web Profiler Got Acquired

April 1, 2009 – 12:28 am by coachwei

Some of the folks may know that I wrote some code last year (when I was really bored). One of them is called "Web Profiler", a 3-D web profiling tool that produces deep information about web performance. Part of the inspiration of Web Profiler is due to my years of work related to Ajax and web 2.0. Starting from many years ago when I wrote an Ajax-based world processor to my Rich Internet Application tenure, I always loved what Ajax can do for my web apps, but I was also always intrigued by its performance implications. Further, every time when I look at web performance, I got puzzled and mad. The tools, technology and offering people use today to gauge web performance are essentially what they were 10 years ago, despite that the web has changed so much. From big vendors to small shops, most web performance tools and ...more »

Posted in Main Page, WebDev, startup, web 2.0 | 1 Comment »