My Half & Full Marathon Training Plan for 2013

Last week I put my training plan for my Half-Marathon in June (Seattle Rock-n-Roll), and my first full Marathon in October (Chicago).

Training plans are a hard thing. Everything on the web is OK, but it's not for you, or for me. I've paid for a few training plans but they were useless. They don't take into account my lifestyle, my vacations, my races in between, and it's pretty hard to adjust if you fall of the plan.

So I spent a few hours analyzing my previous two years of data, mostly from RunKeeper, and looking at some plans to improve speed at Half-Marathon and this book about running your first Marathon. I combined them, added a little bit of push (i.e., made it slightly harder by adding anywhere from 0.5 to 2 miles to each run), and came up with this.

Just to be clear, my goals are to finish a half-marathon under 2h (if I could do it under 1:52 it would be awesome) and to finish a Marathon alive (if I could do it under 5h it would be awesome).

If you scroll to the right you'll see where I am right now and this spreadsheet will actually update with my data (yes, I know the irony of working at a company that track your physical activity and have to create this "low-tech" solution).

Another milestone for EveryMove: $3.5M funding & more

Less than a year ago I wrote about us raising a $2.6M Series A coming on the tails of participating in TechStars. I left part of that story out because I couldn’t tell it at the time, and now I’ll fill the gaps as today we are announcing the second part of the funding, with a $3.5M investment from Sandbox Industries, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Venture Fund and from BCBS Nebraska.

Winter 2011/2012

As we were incredibly busy in the midst of the 3-month long TechStars accelerator program, Russell Benaroya, my co-founder & CEO, scored a meeting with Sandbox Industries in Chicago. Sandbox is a VC which manages the Blue Cross Blue Shield Venture Fund, which is a VC fund from over 20 different Blue Cross plans in the US.

There was some reluctance from Sandbox to meet with us because they heard the same pitch a million times... “Our startup will change the health of your employees and reduce your healthcare costs”. That’s what 99% of the companies in this space are trying to do. They are trying to make unhealthy people healthy by changing their behavior, which is a herculean task. To top it off, there are two groups who have money and interest at making their “members” healthy: Health plans and employers. And that’s the reason so many startups try to do this: Big dollars, big problem, easy to identify sales strategy.

Russell went and met with Sandbox’s Anna Haghgooie and a few more folks and they were intrigued by EveryMove. We had such a different approach to the problem they said they would circle back with us in a week or so.

Just about a week later Russell gets a call from Sandbox basically saying they wanted to invest in us and they wanted to put $3.5M into the company. Holy crap! We hadn’t even launched our beta product yet and this VC wants to invest that much money from the get-go?

If you haven’t proved it yet…

If you know a thing or two about investment or negotiation you understand leverage. Sure, we had a unique solution to a big problem and we were both experienced entrepreneurs, and we had a partnership with Premera Blue Cross, but those were our only leverage points. In other words, the Sandbox valuation was justifiably low.

We were already in the middle of our fund raising, and we had Premera investing more in EveryMove, we had Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska very interested and we had the commitment from several Angel Investors, including Founders Co-op.

Splitting the risk

We could have walked away from Sandbox money and told them to either put a much higher valuation on the company, which would have been unreasonable based on the stage we were in and it could have driven off all the other investors, or we could have told Sandbox, let us build this thing out and then you guys can invest in us.

In a pretty natural way, we thought why not have it both ways? A higher valuation and the money from all existing investors and Sandbox, but do a time shift on the problem. Basically, why not set a Term Sheet that was based on us hitting some milestones and that would increase our valuation.

And that’s what we told Sandbox. Invest a little bit of money right now at a low valuation side by side with the other investors, and put the rest of the money at a higher valuation if we reach certain product and business milestones that we would agree upon.

Bingo!

Twofer: Series A + Series A-1

We negotiated this as a single document with two tranches of funding, called A and A-1. If you are an entrepreneur who has fundraised before you know how much energy and resources it takes to do that. We really didn’t want to be fund raising in 12 months again and have to take the focus away from building the product and the business, so negotiating two funding rounds in a single shot felt right.

The milestones we agreed on were based on Sandbox risk mitigation thought process, and it tried to answer the following questions:

• Will consumers come and care about it?
• Will brands be willing to sponsor rewards to consumers?
• Can you two (me & Russell) build the team and the technology?

It felt like a fair set of questions. Heck, if the answers to those question are “no” a year after we got funding, we might as well stop this train and go find something else to do.

So we negotiated both the metrics and numbers we wanted to track and the terms of the deal and we ended up closing the deal in late April 2012, less than a year ago.

When it rains, it pours

This March has been an incredible busy month. I even had to cancel my trip to SXSW last minute and sacrifice long term biz-dev deals for the deals we had at the table. We launched partnerships with MyFitnessPal and Endomondo. We just launched a pilot with the employees of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska for them to get rewards on EveryMove and we have a very large deal we will announce in about three weeks. To top it off, we’ve been frantically working on our Android App and today we are announcing its official launch.

Android is here!

There is no other “feature” more requested on EveryMove than an Android App, and today we just launched our Android App. It’s pretty easy to understand that physical activity and Mobile go really well together. We are not a tracking app and our goal is to integrate, as deeply as possible, with the great existing tracking apps and devices out there, not to replace them.

If you think about doing physical activity, socializing about it with your friends, checking how many points you earned, earning and claiming a reward, yes, mobile is the way to go. Mobile serves us well on many fronts and it’s already the primary driver of new sign ups on EveryMove and it probably will be 80-90% of our sign ups in the next year. We still have a very complex piece of back-end, and the website still provides a richer experience, particularly around data visualization, but we are doubling-down (tripling-down?) on Mobile this year.

BTW, we are recruiting great mobile developers in Seattle if you know any.

Wild ride

It has been an awesome ride so far, full of ups and downs, but by far what I’m most proud of is the vision we set to execute and the team we built. In a time when each startup and big company is fighting to get the brightest minds, our team seems particularly special. Not only because we have bright minds, but also because we manage to maintain a cohesive culture and attitude that is inspiring and enabling.

What’s next?

We are just beginning at EveryMove. We are building EveryMove into a brand as known and as familiar as American Airlines Miles, Membership Rewards by American Express and My Starbucks Rewards. It’s a loyalty program for your health, on your terms.

We have a world of partnerships and integrations to conquer, and although we have done nearly 100 deals so far – from data partners, rewards, employers, health plans – we have a couple hundred thousand more to go. The challenges are both daunting and achievable. We are on it for the long haul and this round of funding will give us enough runaway to continue to focus and build a multi-billion dollar business. But more than that, it will re-shape how people get recognized and get benefits from their day-to-day healthy choices!

Onward.

LinkedIn is butchering Endorsements the same way Facebook butchered Likes

I found it was brilliant when LinkedIn came out with the Skills & Expertise Endorsement feature. Not so much that I could be endorsed, but that I could endorse my friends – it made me feel good about it – and also because I could more easily search and identify for people with specific skills. A lot of people have a very sparse LinkedIn profile and that feature meant it would be fixed.

And started getting fixed as more people endorsed their connections and all was happy on the land of information until two weeks ago.

Two weeks ago I went to visit my profile and I was blown away. I hadn’t noticed before but I had hundreds of endorsements (as of this writing I have 270 endorsements) for nearly two dozen skills & expertise. Wow, it felt great. How awesome must I be? And a few seconds later you start to realize a lot of that endorsement is semi-bogus. I know something about Agile Methodologies, but 25 people endorsed me for it. Well, maybe these are folks that are worked close with over the last 5 years or so and know me really well. Nope, not really. They are friends, ex-colleagues of a decade ago, investors on my business, entrepreneurs I have beer with or even just met once or twice.

But it gets worse. I also have experience in Mobile Applications (barely), Usability Testing (I never done one), CRM (I swear I don’t know anything about CRM!). All bullshit. Well, maybe I do some of things in there, but people didn't endorse me because they know for sure I know that.

If I can’t trust endorsement where I have real data (my own life), how can I trust endorsement on other people? I can’t.

Where Facebook failed before

To understand why this is failing you have to understand how people get endorsed. Basically if you visit someone’s profile or if you sign into LinkedIn, they might prompt you “Does Russell have these skills or expertise” and a list of 3-5 expertise show up. It’s incredibly easy to endorse a person. It almost feels like a great game. Endorse a friend and get some good mojo back. Endorse for what? Who cares? It’s all good.

This is the same thing with Facebook pushing people to “Like” as many pages as possible. It devalued the meaning of Like. There was no other relationship I could build with a page on Facebook but Like. I can’t have “Interested in”, “I want the news from”, “I have it, but I’ll keep an eye on”, “I despise it, but I want to enter the contest for”. Nope, just “Like” it. And that’s why Open Graph search is so awesome and so awful at the same time.

Stop the madness

LinkedIn is creating a lot of engagement and definitely a lot of endorsement entries, but the long term value of is questionable, if not destructive. It also dawned on me the endorsement feature is much more about popularity than about skills. In theory, two CTOs of companies of similar size with similar background and experiences should have about the same skills, but the one that is more popular will be Endorsed more on LinkedIn.

What LinkedIn created is not an Endorsement feature. It’s an “I Like You” feature. For that, it’s working well. I feel the love. :)

Everyone and their mother are hiring Mobile Developers

And so are we, EveryMove.

Every company will tell you the same things: great perks, great comp, great project and opportunity to learn.

We also offer: a project with a great purpose, a team with a zero-asshole-attitude tolerance, pushing the boundaries on fitness & health technology.

Do you know a friend who would be a great fit?

Google is about to learn a tough lesson

A very common mistake entrepreneurs make is to assume that a feature is not necessary because it doesn’t have a lot of usage, thus it can be safely removed from the product. Sometimes that’s the case, but sometimes, not so much.

Google made a big mistake cancelling Google Reader that will have severe ripple effects to its empire. I know a lot has been written about it, but let me give you a different angle on it.

Microsoft Word, circa mid-90s

This is not my story, but a story of a friend who I worked with at Microsoft. He once told me Microsoft removed the “word count” feature on a Beta Preview version of Word it sent to journalists to review (I can’t recall if it was on purpose, a bug, or the feature was just more hidden). Microsoft knew about it but didn’t care because it had data that showed that feature was just minimally used.

You get the picture to what happen next. Journalists, because of the nature of their work, were obsessed about that one tiny feature. It wasn’t a critical feature that prevented them from doing their job, but it was a feature that made their life that much easier. According to this friend from Microsoft, the reviews of MS Word were awful and the flagship argument was that the new Word didn’t have a word count feature.

Social multiplier

What happens here is simple. Decisions makers and influencers carry a much stronger weight in product decision than the average user. That’s pretty well known on the Enterprise world. You don’t sell MS Outlook by convincing employees of a big company that Outlook is great. You sell Outlook by convincing the CIO and the IT team responsible to evaluate options of email client. They care not only what their employees will use, but also about how easy it will be for them.

Three self-inflicted wounds

First, Google says that it “gets” social, but you can’t “get” social if you don’t get the concept of an influencer. By killing a product that was beloved and heavily used by most influencers, you start to alienate those folks. Killing a product like Picnik with tens of millions of users, might have less impact on the business than killing a product with less than a million users, where most of those users are influencers. The number of users alone is not a metric that should be used to decide which products live or die. You must, at a minimum, include a profit-per-unit-of-effort and the strategic value (the amplifier effect) of the product (and the users of that product). Loss leader is not a bad strategy. Actually, most products at Google are loss leaders.

Second, Google just indirectly wounded many of its products, like Feedburner (which they probably don’t give a shit about it anymore, but they don’t know how to kill it since all those links are out there and it can’t be replaced), but most importantly it wounded Blogger. Google didn’t figure out how to make Blogger into a better product. Tumblr and WordPress continue to grow and dominate the short-form publishing out there. What surprises me is that the more pages and more page-views on the web, the better it’s for Google who primary monetization mechanic is primarily driven by ads (and AdWords / AdSense combo).

Third, and lastly, Google is sending a strong signal to the market that it will have no mercy of killing whatever product it doesn’t think it’s going well. It just told users, professionals and enterprises that we all should not use any product from Google if requires long term commitment (not business-type commitment, but data and emotional commitment) unless we have a sense that’s going to succeed. Now, I have to be in the business of evaluating Google’s product long-term viability before I can commit. Sure, I’m pretty sure Gmail is not going away, but what about Google Talk and Google Wallet? What about Picassa or YouTube?

Oh, and I’m pissed with Google Reader going away. I used it 3-10 times a day to consume about 100+ feeds. It wasn’t the awesome product that I wish it could have been, but it was the best out there.

PS: Irony not lost this blog post is on Blogger and 2,000+ people might read it on Google Reader. Good bye you.

Holy sh*t, my first Marathon ever!

I just registered to run the Chicago Marathon in October 2013. This will be my very first Marathon. I think this is the first time in my life I’m starting something I don’t know I can finish. I actually don’t know and I won’t know unless I try it, so I will.

I think running a Marathon is one of those things, if you can, you should do once in your lifetime. And if I’m doing only once, why not do it at an epic event, with 45,000 running buddies?

The reasons I’m making this a public post are simple: motivation and accountability. Now that everyone knows I’m doing this, I cannot lie. I can quit. I can do it. I can’t pretend I never registered for it.

Why Chicago?

Chicago Marathon is pretty big. If you ever participated in an organized event, you know that you can draw extra energy from the other participants. It’s the second biggest in the US, and, it’s so popular they sell out registrations in just two weeks last year – likely to sell out sooner this year (so if you are thinking about registered, do it fast).

The timing is also perfect, October 13. I’ll be running the Seattle Rock-n-Roll Half-Marathon on late June and I can take July, August and September to grow my endurance from 13.1 to 26.2 miles. The course and weather should also be perfect to increase my chances of finish – it seems much better than the Seattle Marathon, or full Seattle Rock-n-Roll Marathon.

My goal will be to finish, even if I have to walk the last few miles. I’m really hopeful that I can do it under 5 hours as well, but I’ll be happy to just finish it. Want to join me?

The Broken Mobile App Model of Today

Over the last few years the new paradigm of Mobile applications has appeared. Mobile is primarily a Software with an optional (but frequent) online component. This is not new. This is actually how "online" got started. Proprietary and native applications accessing data somewhere else. It works. It's powerful. However, the Mobile App model is inefficient and broken right now and it's not because of fragmentation or multiple technologies -- which cause technical pain. It's because the model prevents rapid iteration, integration, control and experimentation, which are big business pain points.

I'm far down the list of Mobile experts in the world. My experience comes mostly from the investment we've made over the last nine months to make EveryMove available on iOS (in addition to our website) and soon on Android, but also as an avid user of Mobile technology. More than once I had to get a reality check to learn how limited Mobile development is, and it shouldn't be.

It's Apple's Fault!

Apple is a control freak. They believe excessive control over every single bit of a product will yield a better product. Because of that m.o., when they launched their App Store they chose the most controlled way of building apps. Not only Apps had to be built in a fully proprietary language, framework and environment, they also had to comply with an enormous list of rules and they had to be certified and approved by Apple before they would be available for the device. It makes sense to do it this way to deliver an incredible consistent experience. If you were an early iPhone user and installed Apps, you know how they all felt just like the built-in apps.

When Google launched Android they followed the model Apple had set on the industry with more openness. Use an open language, with an open framework, with a tool set you could get from multiple vendors. You still submit the app to their app store, but you could install apps that were not on the app store, except that discoverability of those apps are basically non-existent.

The Early Days of the Web & Java

The Web has always been very open. There is no central organization approving your website to go live. There is no certification process and until this day, discovery of new Web sites (or Web Apps) are done via word of mouth (email, social, etc.), search engines or referrals. When Java came out circa 1994, it promised a world where full applications would be hosted on the cloud, downloaded and cached on the browser and they would have the ability to run online or offline. It was the equivalent of saying you wanted to run "Microsoft Word" and the first time you tried to open a DOC file, MS Word would be downloaded automatically for you and cached. If a new version of Word would be available, the cache would be invalidated and the new version downloaded.

It never happened. It didn't happen because the timing was off and the execution was weak. Bandwidth wasn't fast enough to make that model work. Browser fragmentation and the unavailability of Java built-in on Windows and other OSes made the process painful. Java slowness on those computers made sure no serious applications could be written at the time.

The New Mobile App Model

My argument for this entire post is that Mobile App Model should embrace the Java Model of the mid-90s. I like the idea of an App Store for discovery, but there is no real reason Apps bits couldn't live at the app Developer servers. There is also no reason that Apps couldn't be more modular and instead of a single blob download, be downloaded as components that could be upgraded independently. It's not only good software development practice to componentize your product, but it also makes for faster downloads of changes.

We can still have an App Store. We can still have Certified Apps, similar to getting an SSL certificate. The apps wouldn't be certified for their quality or content, but certified there is a trust chain. It wouldn't also prevent developers who don't own servers to host their content at some other place, but it would be up to the app Developer to decide.

What this model allows for is incredible flexibility for app developers to quickly (hours) to fix and ship new bits. It would allow app developers more analytics information about their app downloads, including "source" information (how did people find my app). It would enable A/B testing! Now I can give every other user a slightly modified version to see how they engage better. I can still do A/B testing in today's App Store, but it's "unnatural" and painful, while A/B testing on the web is easy and magical.

Security wise, phones should give less access to information to app developers. An App by default should be forbidden from accessing my contacts or my photo albums, and only if they get a special certificate, which might require part of the binary to be certified and digitally signed by the OS manufacturer, they could access those APIs.

Finally, the same way that I can do cross-domain AJAX calls today, two apps that want to talk to each other on the phone should be able to do that. If my app wants to expose a local API (i.e., getCurrenUserFullName) I should be able to do that. It would open up Mobile development and provide incredible integration across apps.

And we do some of that today

There are apps that are working around the limitation of the App Store by creating their own infrastructure just like that. They run a Web Control, fetch JavaScript, CSS and HTML from the server, cache it and run the app. If new updates are available, the fetch the new JS/CSS/HTML.  It's a lot of infrastructure and supporting work, just to get the flexibility of quick patches, quick iterations and A/B test.

If App Stores want to embrace the new ultra fast-paced world of startups experimentation (agile, lean, etc.) they will need to adapt a different model. The one we have today is not friendly to startups.