Over the last few weeks, two articles stirred up a lot of conversations around an identity crisis here in Boston: “The Road to Awesome” from Scott Kirsner and “Dear Boston: Stop Outsourcing The News” from Galen Moore. Both articles (essentially) discuss how Boston needs to be cool like Silicon Valley and create more consumer tech companies.

I don’t know about you. To me,  Boston is cool and Boston is awesome. From where I see (through my little office window at Canal Park in Cambridge), I see many cool companies that are vibrant and hip(cross street from where I am is Hubspot and ZipCar. I am jealous of both), though a little bit more rumor about them from the media would certainly help. More importantly, I see Boston playing the leading role in many really important areas. One of such areas is web performance.

Web performance is a big deal. To website owners, improving site speed reduces operating costs. More importantly, faster website speed improves top line results.  Yahoo found that a 400ms improvement to the speed of their site increased their page views by 9%.  Firefox shaved 2.2 seconds off their average page load time and increased download conversions by 15.4%.  Shopzilla reduced their loading time from 7 seconds to 2 and increased their page views by 25% and revenue by 7-12%( see “Secret Sauce for Successful Web Site: Web Performance Optimization (WPO)” for sources). Furthermore, in June 2010,  Google publicly announced that it had begun to incorporate a website’s speed into its search ranking algorithm. To web visitors, web performance is obviously a big deal. When a site is slow, user experience suffers. If all web pages load one second slower, how many man years are we losing?

Let’s face it, the web is still too slow. Though Internet connectivity has been improving, the complexity of web applications and the volume of web traffic increased many more times.  How many times have you abandoned a site because it took forever to load? Fortunately, there is a recent movement towards a faster web.  Boston is leading this movement.

First of all,  there is Akamai in Cambridge. If you use the Internet for anything – to download music or software, check the headlines, book a flight, you probably benefited from some  performance boost through Akamai. Though a little bit older than most web 2.0 companies and some injection of web 2.0 culture can be helpful, Akamai dominates the multi-billion dollar content delivery network (CDN) market in helping to make the web faster.

One of the reasons for the web speed movement actually comes from Google.  Everyone knows that Google has always been obsessed with its site speed. But in the last couple of years, Google openly stated that making the entire web faster is  one of its key missions.  It believes a faster web is critical to Google’s own future and started to invest heavily to help make web faster.

Aha! No, Google is a Silicon Valley company, not a Boston company, as you would say. True. However, one of main Google projects to help make the web faster is called “Page Speed” and the Google Page Speed team is actually based in Cambridge. Page Speed project includes a browser plugin that provides performance recommendations similar to YSlow,  an Apache web server module called “mod_pagespeed” that performs speed optimizations for web pages and Page Speed Online that provides recommendations online. I reached out to Bryan McQuade (who is leading Page Speed at Google Cambridge) for comments. He said: “Page Speed is all about helping make the web faster. Our Cambridge team is glad to be part of this web speed movement.”

Of course there is W3C at MIT. In the summer of 2010, the W3C formed a “Web Performance Working Group” with a mission to “provide methods to measure aspects of application performance of user agent features and APIs”. One of the first output from this group is Navigation Timing API, which enables developers to measure the speed of web pages on supported browsers. Currently Navigation Timing API is supported by Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome 6+ already(source: Chris Weekly, W3C Navigation Timing API: Better Page Load Time Measurements in Chrome and IE).

Web performance is what my company Yottaa is about. Based in Cambridge,  Yottaa makes websites faster by providing cloud services to help website owners assess, benchmark, monitor and optimize their websites. We build some deeply sophisticated cloud stuff that runs on many cloud computing providers all over the world. But never mind that, all the complexities are hidden away under a consumer web 2.0 like user experience. With just a few clicks,  Yottaa can double the speed of your website. But we are definitely not the only start-up in the web performance space:

There are plenty of news for better web performance. Waltham based Zixi announced $4M financing for speeding up video delivery over the Internet in April 2011. My company Yottaa recently announced Yottaa Optimizer, a cloud service that enables web sites and web applications to double their speed with just a few clicks. Yottaa Optimizer is the industry’s first real time web performance optimization service. Feel free to give it a try at http://www.yottaa.com/optimizer-trial.

Come to think about it, making the web faster directly impacts billions of consumers. What else can match this scale of social impact. Isn’t it cool? Isn’t it awesome?

More importantly, Bostonians, we have incredible stuff going on here in our street corners, from industry leaders to innovative startups.  We are leading the wave in many hugely important areas.  For this faster web movement,  Boston is at the epicenter. We are leading the wave that can benefit billions of consumers. How cool is that? How awesome is that?

Image source: http://fbfund.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/speed.jpg

To apply, please send an email to coach at yottaa.com with the job’s title as the subject line. Tell us what your favorite color is, what make you really proud when running an engineering team, and, oh yeah, please include your resume too. Bonus points if you have a blog or twitter handle. Check out the details below.

At Yottaa, we are passionate about making the Web better, faster and smarter. We are focused on web performance optimization. We built deeply sophisticated technology and large distributed cloud systems. On the other side, we are passionate about hiding all these complexity away from users: with a clean UI, users can quickly get educated, make assessments, run benchmarks and carry out optimizations for their web sites, without getting lost in the technology maze that is powering the web. We are led by an experienced team of entrepreneurs and funded by top tier venture capital firms. We have offices in Boston and Beijing. You can take a look at what we have built so far at http://www.yottaa.com

We are looking for a head of engineering that can lead a team of 20-50 engineers. The team is made up of different disciplines (Web development, Networking, Distributed Computing, System and Application Design, Java, Ruby, C/C++, EC2, Open Source).

The ability to lead a team of 20+ 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 areas, you need to have an understanding as well as an appreciation of the technology.

We are looking for a leader that can build and maintain a development culture that is highly productive as well as enjoyable to be a part of. The head of engineering needs to be able to help create a culture of people working for intrinsic goals rather than extrinsic ones.

We want someone that can implement an agile development process in an organization, and thrive in a distributed team environment.

Communication within the team as well as throughout the rest of the cross culture organization is a key component of the job. The ability to speak Chinese is important as is the understanding of US and Chinese cultures and how to work productively in both.

The location of this position is primarily based in Beijing, and requires a lot travel between Boston and Beijing.

We offer a competitive compensation package.

Interested in a lot of work, tons of challenges, and ups and downs as part of the normal course of life(at least it won’t be boring)? Interested in building something amazing and achieving something special? Let’s connect!

Web development, Ajax coding, web architect, ruby hacking, however you want to say it, you love to build amazing web apps! If you get fired up writing web applications that perform wonderfully across browsers, operating systems, languages and devices and your resulting maintainable code looks like well-documented poetry, then we want to talk to you.

To apply, please send an email to hr at yottaa.com with the job’s title as the subject line. Tell us what your favorite color is, what makes you smile and, oh yeah, please include your resume too. Bonus points if you tell us your twitter handle. Check out the details below.

At Yottaa, we are passionate about making the Web better, faster and smarter. We built deeply sophisticated technology and large distributed cloud systems spanning across the globe with hundreds of servers. On the other side, we are passionate about hiding all these complexity away from users: with a clean UI, users can quickly get educated, make assessments, run benchmarks and carry out optimizations for their web sites, without getting lost in the technology maze that is powering the web. You can take a look at what we have built so far at http://www.yottaa.com.

We have a track record of innovation to build on and a strong desire to radically improve the Web. If you are passionate about web performance, front end engineering, and if you’ve ever wanted to have a big impact, this is it.

Yottaa is committed to equal opportunity. We love robots, big data, solving difficult problems (and make them look easy), Red Sox, Patriots, etc. How about you?

Yottaa provides cloud services to help web site owners analyze, monitor and optimize their web performance. Yottaa is a well-funded startup, with offices located in Boston and Beijing. We are focused on building a world-class company, and we do so by drinking lots of coffee (ok, drinking coffee alone isn’t enough).

Responsibilities:
1. Marketing Leadership: bring marketing leadership into the team, establish and communicate marketing plans, orchestrate and execute such plans.
2. Community: Engage in conversations that surround our content and brand on Twitter, forums and blogs; build a community of passionate followers and enthusiasts who engage in dialogue with and about Yottaa.
3. PR: Orchestrate and manage PR activities; Conduct outreach and build relationships with top bloggers, media outlets and community sites.
4. Yottaa.com: Create and own the Yottaa web sites, manage content.
5. Customer engagement tools: Write and produce video case studies, success stories, customer testimonials, newsletters and press releases.

Requirements:
1. Experience in leading online marketing and PR activities in a startup environment
2. Strong organizational skills and the ability to handle multiple projects simultaneously while meeting deadlines
3. Analytical and data driven
4. Immersed in social media universe including Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon, Facebook, forums and blogs
5. Strong personal interest in web technology
6. Strong writing skills and the ability to crank writing output

Bonus Points: coding background in any computer language, or experience in running a web site.

Yottaa offers competitive salaries, equity, health benefits plan, and the opportunity and joy to make impossible things happen along with a smart, motivated team.

Sound like an opportunity you’d thrive? We’d love to hear from you. Send us your Twitter username and a brief bio. You can contact us by either DMing @yottaa or email to hr at yottaa dot com.

Start-ups are where the job-creation action really occurs.

Research published last month by three economists has found that once the age of the businesses is taken into account, “size plays virtually no role,” says John C. Haltiwanger, a co-author of the study and an economist at the University of Maryland. “start-ups are where the job-creation action really occurs.”

A few weeks ago, I wrote about job creation, the importance of startups and how the government policy has been failing a few weeks ago at Yottaa’s blog site. In the article, I pointed out a few examples that the “extra hardship” government policy is bringing to the startup community. Further, I asked: What is the role of government and where should their priority be? Should they be helping jobs creation and drive economic recovery or should they be creating laws that limit that growth?

In an economy where official unemployment rate at 9.5% (the real unemployment rate is probably much higher), all politicians talk about job creation. The government is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to “stimulate” the economy. -However, the main job creation engine, startups, has never received proper attention.

With only a small portion of the almost trillion dollar designed for “stimulus” and wall street, the government could make a real difference in the startup community and a real sustainable job creation engine to transform the economy for years to come. Here is the list of things that the government can do:

1. Make it possible for early stage startups to get bank loans and line of credit – both are impossible for early stage startups right now.

   While it was important for the government to step in helping consumer mortgage, it is equally important for the government to step in creating incentives for banks to change their attitude about startups. While innovation-minded countries such as Singapore and China have implemented policies to provide many forms of financial support to startups, US startups are very much left on their own (and maybe their venture investors) – these are the things that government policy can make a real difference.

   (A side note: I highly recommend you read the Zappos story and Tony Hsieh’s book “Delivering Happiness”. The difference between success and failure can be awfully small. A few month’s cash flow can make the difference between a $1.2B exit and bankruptcy).

2. Make it easier and more economical for early stage startups to provide benefits to employees.

   I went through this process at Yottaa recently and at Nexaweb a few years ago. -Boy, let me just say that the smaller the newer a company is, the worse deals you get.

3. Make patent less “deterring” to startups.

   The patent system deter startup innovations? Sound strange but it is true. there are lots of issues with the current patent system in general. The big issues for startups in particular are that It takes hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars to apply for a patent and tt take 4 to 7 years to get a patent granted – during this eternity, startups don’t get any patent protection.

 

I am aware of some other initiatives (such as the Startup Visa Act). I personally think the above would be my top three. What do you think?

It’s as simple as that honestly – I love it. I have been an active Foursquare user for quite a while. Certainly not an early adopter, but during the last many months, I have experienced quite a bit. From Boston to Washington DC, San Francisco to Tokyo and NYC to Beijing – I have been busy checking into places every chance I get and am amazed at the number of people and venues that Foursquare is tracking.

For instance, I’ve earned and lost Mayorships for several locations, but have had a great experience. As I travel quite a bit to Beijing for Yottaa, I’ve checked into numerous places in China. For some time I was Mayor of Mao LiveHouse in Beijing, which was a great night club that has since shut down. Even months after closing, I remained Mayor! Luckily that was one achievement for which I didn’t have to keep fighting.

Currently I have 11 friends, received 11 badges, and am still Mayor of Yottaa HQ in Cambridge. The wonderful @forjared has either given up challenging me for the title or given up on Foursquare altogether.

To me, Foursquare is charting a new market opportunity: location based social media and social gaming. Although it is not entirely earth shattering, it is comparable to how MySpace and Facebook charted social networking and where Twitter was with microblogging a few years ago. Readers should check out Ben Horowitz’s excellent article on Foursquare “Why Andeerssen Horowitz Invested in Foursquare”. There is great potential for innovators like Foursquare to own the market around location based social media and gaming.

Then there was the announcement of Facebook Places…

Much like Foursquare, I wanted to give Facebook Places a trial run. I created a Yottaa check-in and checked myself into our Cambridge office. Although similar to the Foursquare model, the implementation for Facebook Places is not well done. The user experience is not as good and many features are missing. For instance after I created the Yottaa check-in, it was listed at the wrong address and yet there is no apparent means to change that. On the other hand, I already have more friends using it and am seeing more frequent check-ins from more people going to more places.

In case you haven’t experience either service yet, here are two interesting articles covering both sides of the argument:

1. “Why Facebook Places Will Make Foursquare into a Footnote”
2. “Facebook Places Dull Enough Not to Pose a Threat to Foursquare, Gowalla?”

This debate reminds me of the fear that software companies had towards Microsoft in the 1990s. During that period the announcement of Microsoft working on competing products was the beginning of the end for other software developers. A simple rumor alone could stop startups from getting funding, hiring key personnel or establishing a customer base. Everyone knew the first few iterations of a new Microsoft product would more than likely be broken – if it came out at all. That didn’t matter though because customers trusted Microsoft and they believe Microsoft will be the winner in the long term.

Platform giants like Microsoft during the 1990s had a huge competitive advantage. These behemoths possess so much influence and almost nothing can compete against them.

Successfully starting a company is a difficult art. On one end, you need to aim for a large and promising market opportunity. You have to prove to the world that this market exists and that this new market cares about your product or services. On the other side, once this new market opportunity is revealed other players start competing with you. Platform giants might come lumbering in, “copy” your model and then steal the market opportunity away by leveraging their unfair advantages – all before you have time to react.

Fortunately the Microsoft of 2010 is not such a company any more as software development has shifted away from desktops and onto the web. Unfortunately, new platform giants have emerged. Google is one example and although some won’t admit it, Google can also strike fear in the web community almost as much as Microsoft did in the PC era.

Facebook is another example of the new generation of platform giants.

Facebook has built an empire with 500 million users. This empire now possesses influence unmatched by any other company on the market today. Foursquare may have innovated and showed the promise of location-based social media/gaming, but the Facebook behemoth is starting to move into that space as well. Despite strong growth, better features and over 3 million users, Foursquare is going to be challenged to compete against a brand that commands 500 million users.

I still feel that Facebook Places has a long way to go to catch up to what Foursquare has already built and implemented. From a user experience stand point, Foursquare wins hands down. It is also entirely possible that Facebook Places never gets the system right and squanders the opportunity (Remember when they tried and failed to compete against Twitter?).

The question becomes – if Facebook gets its act right, then what happens to Foursquare? They still might become a highly successful startup in terms of an exit (For example, “My bet is that Foursquare devolves over time to a location-based game, or set of games”, as pointed out by @payne92 at Repeat After Me: “Location” is a Feature, not a Product) :

It is a fascinating race to watch and many entrepreneurs like me are asking the big question:

“Does Facebook Places mean the beginning of the end for the big dreams of companies like Foursquare and Gowalla?”

Only time will tell, but I’ll leave you with this:

Fellow entrepreneurs, remember the past and the dangers of playing with fire.

Two words: UX (User Experience) and cloudInno (Cloud Innovation)

Yottaa is focused on building a better user experience through innovative cloud solutions – we want to make Internet User Experience ‘yottaarific’ and we are doing so by innovating at the forefront of cloud computing.

Not clear? Let me explain a bit more:

1. UX (User Experience) – Back in 2000 I was compelled by a vision for a richer web beyond the document-centric HTML ‘click and reload’ model. So I left my role at EMC to start Nexaweb , a pioneer in Ajax and Rich Internet Application technology to begin my journey. Fast forward to 2009 when I founded Yottaa and the idea of ‘a better Internet experience’ became the driving focus for what we would build. Here I was again focused on striving to evolve user experience again, though tackling totally different problems from a totally different perspective.
2. cloudInno (Cloud Innovation) – Today numerous exciting things are happening ‘in the cloud’: Amazon EC2, Hadoop, MandoDB, Microsoft Azure and Google AppEngine to name a few. However to me the most exciting things are not ‘in the cloud’, but ‘on the cloud’ – meaning those innovations that are enabled by cloud computing. There are tremendous disruptive innovation possibilities unleashed by the power of cloud computing and here at Yottaa we have been busy working on some of them.

We started Yottaa in 2009 and since then it has been a very busy, but very fun ride:

Boy, what a crazy day!	Lunch and Learn
Two cookies?	Hmm, Duck…

Here at Yottaa we are very excited about the upcoming release of the public Beta for our initial product offering, yottaa Insight. yottaa Insight is an open data, free service that allows users to monitor, measure and analyze web performance. Below is a screen shot:

Using yottaa Insight to analyze www.Google.com

Please give it a try and let us know what you think – there are a few bugs and we have a good list of features we want to enhance, but nothing beats real feedback from real users.

Let’s be yottaarific!

On the 23rd of May 2010, Lei reached the summit of Everest and became the first Chinese woman, as well as the first Asian-American woman to climb the highest mountain on every continent and to ski to both the North and South Poles. She successfully completed her “7+2″ conquest.

Known as the “Seven Plus Two” challenge, this grueling mission consists of reaching nine of the most extreme points in the world: the highest peak on each continent – called the Seven Summits – and crossing the last degrees of the icy, snowy North and South poles on cross-country skis.

Before her, there were only 9 people in the world that have finished “7+2″. Now Lei becomes the 10th.

Lei is an average woman. A Boston resident, 36-year old, 5’2”, you wouldn’t associate her with such athleticism and madness if you just meet her. Before this, her life story was very similar to a lot of people (In particular, in my own life and the high tech world). Born in China, immigrated to US, she went to good schools (Tsinghua University in Beijing and Wharton for MBA) and had good jobs in high tech and financing. Her life story would have been just like the rest of us…

Except that she had a dream and she wouldn’t let her dream die. In 2004, she decided to pursue her dream. It was not an easy process. As she wrote, when she was in her 20s, the longest distance she ran was just about 1000 meters. Now in mid 30s, she can easily keep her training at half marathon to full marathon intensity. Being short and small, she used to easily allow herself to fall behind others; now she takes pride in competing in running and climbing, and ignoring the physical advantages of her competitors. On a mountaineering trip, everyone has to carry about the same load of gear and food. A 60 lb pack may be only 1/3 of a normal man’s body weight, but it is more than 50% of her weight. So she just has to be stronger!

I have heard about Lei many times. Over the last few months when she set out for Mount Everest, my friends in Boston couldn’t stop but cheering for her and wishing her success. Every time when I think about her story, it gives me so much power to push for my own limit and pursue my own dreams. Average people can achieve amazing things. The dream lives on, as famously stated by Ted Kennedy.

Congratulations to Lei on her amazing accomplishment!

• Support Lei’s 2010 Everest climb – Donate on Paypal;
• Lei and Mount Everest on Facebook;
• More about Lei: http://www.LeisVentures.com

Lei, thank you for being such an inspiration to the rest of us.

With hundreds of thousands of servers, Yottaa has a highly distributed cloud infrastructure spanning across many data centers in many geographic locations globally. Yottaa is looking for a Director of Operations to help set up and run such an infrastructure.

Besides the technical responsibilities, this role also requires managing vendor relationships, optimizing infrastructure costs and leading a team of system engineers to validate, test, and deploy Yottaa’s software onto its massive cloud infrastructure.

Responsibilities:

• Select and negotiate with network providers, hosting providers and infrastructure providers;
• Maintain relationship with the above providers;
• Monitor and optimize infrastructure costs;
• Lead a team of system engineers to:
  • Validate and test Yottaa’s software.
  • Set up and manage policies, procedures and tools related to reliability, availability and security
  • Roll out new services to production environment
  • Operate, monitor and manage large scale web systems that may contain thousands of servers distributed at many global locations

Requirements:

• Familiarity with network providers and hosting providers
• Hands on experience in network operations and administration
• Hands on experience testing and deploying large scale server software
• Hands on experience in managing large scale web infrastructure
• Expert knowledge of unit testing, load testing and automated testing

This position is Boston based.

If you are passionate about running one of the largest computing infrastructures on earth, please contact coach at yottaa.com. Yottaa is a Boston and Beijing based company building some amazingly cool and fun stuff related to cloud computing. We look forward to hearing from you.

Here are the patterns that I identified and use:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Passion. Starting a new business is hard, and you’d better love it for what it is. Having the passion for solving a particular problem and being compelled by the vision of how better the world would be if the business succeeds are the key reasons that one would get up every morning and fight against all the odds to make it happen.
4. Intelligence. Someone who is highly intelligent. Intelligence is the basic foundation upon which everything else is built. Passion without intelligence is called romance. And it is a good idea to stay away from those with strong will power but without the smarts.

Interesting that post from Vivek Wadhwa on TechCrunch about “Can Entrepreneurs Be Made”. I would disagree with Vivek. No, you cannot teach someone to have passion for something. You can not teach strong will power, intelligence or being relentlessly resourceful. I hear about “pattern recognition” from VCs and other people a lot as well. I have never seem anyone use “gene” as part of the pattern recognition. Nobody judges an entrepreneur by whether his father or mother started a business before or not. On this regard, Vivek’s study is flawed as his article is based on survey results related to family genes as evidence to dispute against pattern recognition.

On the other side, is there value to teach entrepreneurship and is there value for programs like Kauffman Labs as Vivek mentioned in his article? Yes, absolutely. There are millions of people who do have the intelligence, are resourceful, have strong minds and have passion for a certain things, but just haven’t made the jump yet. Surrounding them with other entrepreneurs, mentors and a startup atmosphere is the best way to light up their inner fire. For many reasons (not the least that Wall Street and Google hire tons of smart people to golden hand cuffs), only a tiny percentage of “qualified people” (those who have the ingredients to be entrepreneurs) would become an entrepreneur. So there is a large pool of people (in the order of millions) that entrepreneurship programs, ranging from MIT Sloan Entrepreneurship Center to Kauffman Foundation to TechStars, can make a big difference for.

Fred Wilson has a post on this subject as well: Nature vs Nurture and Entrepreneurship. He listed five attributes for entrepreneurs:

1. A stubborn belief in one’s self
2. A confidence bordering on arrogance
3. A desire to accept risk and ambiguity, and the ability to live with them
4. An ability to construct a vision and sell it to many others
5. A magnet for talent

These attributes are very much along the similar lines as mine, though I would disagree with the “stubborn” and “arrogance” thing. Vivek rightfully pointed out “Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant”. No. There are plenty of successful entrepreneurs who are very humble and very flexible. It is not about being stubborn. It is about having the strong will power to make something happen. In doing so, many entrepreneurs are perfectly happy for being the opposite of “stubborn” about a lot of other things. It is not about being “arrogant”. Arrogant people are those who haven’t seem enough yet. Good entrepreneurs are confident but also have keen ears and eyes to learn from other people.