Marcelo Calbucci

    Before anyone starts asking why am I giving marriage advice, I must say this applies very much to tech and startup life-style!

    Anyway, the secret to a happy marriage is to share less!

    Let me explain by this transcript of a conversation we had Friday night. For context purposes, I have 5 logos for the Seattle 2.0 blog that I wanted some help deciding, so I showed her the logos...


    When I compare us to other couples that we know, and not that is any indication of happiness, we noticed that we rarely talk on the phone. We mostly exchange emails, once or twice a day. And when we get home and go into the "how's your day" routine, none of us ramble for 15 minutes explaining little details of our boring day -- no matter how exciting a news is for you, it'll be an order of magnitude less exciting for anyone else.

    There you have it, my wife doesn't even know I run one of the most popular blogs for tech startups in Seattle!

    And just to avoid any "funny" comments, my wife does know I quit Microsoft and I have a Startup. I told her last month.

     Why not find another way to reduce productivity and kill time. I joined Twitter: http://twitter.com/mcalbucci

     Twitter doesn't let me import my contact list from a CSV file, only from online web-based email services, and since I don't use GMail, Yahoo or Hotmail I don't have an easy way to see which of my friends are on Twitter.

     Do you know any app that would make it easier for me to find who's on Twitter based either on a CSV file, or on my Facebook/LinkedIn profile?

 

    In December last year I did a blog post begging other startups to join me at forcing users to migrate from IE6 to IE7.

 

    Somebody might have heard me and created the Save The Developers organization, which is focused on getting people to stop using IE6. Which is awesome!

 

 

 

    Quick recap:

1. Late 2004: I buy the Sampa.com domain and put up a one page that said "Good things to come..."
2. Mid 2005: I put a 5 content page website talking a bit about Sampa. It was a plain mostly white site.
3. May 2006: I launch a "better" site w/ the sign up pipeline.
4. September 2006: We go into our Blue-phase, with a very blue website.
5. August 2007: We launch the current site, created by our marketing agency.

    Now, March 2008 I'm working on the 6th version of the website with better copy, better images, easier navigation, friendlier to search engines, etc.

 

    The interesting thing is that our main website (www.sampa.com) is just a "marketing vehicle" for you to "buy" (sign up) to Sampa and create your site. After that it's unlikely you'll ever go back to it, which is contrary to most web 2.0 companies where the "core" website is the destination.

 

    All 6 versions might look like a lot of work spent (except by #1), to just re-work it later, but you have to accept change and once you assume no piece of code/design will last longer than 3 years, you start to think differently.

 

    That was my m.o. at Microsoft. Write as if the code will be obsolete in 3 years. At Sampa, I'm a bit more aggressive in some fronts and I don't think our website will last longer than one year.

 

    Because I think like that I could write the code in a way that makes it very easy to drop a new visual on top of it. The hardest re-design which was between #4 and #5, took just about 3 days. And this redesign I expect to take less than 2 days (today and tomorrow).

 

    The one thing I can say if you are a web developer is to do not buy the BS of separation between content and style. If you do that you'll end up w/ a gigantic unmaintainable CSS (I've seen that CSS file in some startups). I write most repeatable styles in CSS and most non-repeating styles in the HTML. The core idea is that you have to keep CSS small and relatively easy to understand, and that you can change the HTML (+Styles), the CSS or the content almost independently of each other.

 

  

 

    Yes, you heard me right. Apple can be brilliant on their design in one hand and just awful in another. Case in point... the iTunes + QuickTime updater.

 

    More specifically, Apple Updater tool is bad because every time there is an update to iTunes or QuickTime I have to download both pieces of software in full. That ranges between 50MB and 70MB. Then there is the whole reboot thing which I just don't get it.

 

    And to makes things worse, today, the stupid updater asked me to install Safari! I don't have Safari and I didn't ask for Safari. Apple is leveraging their monopoly on music players to push for a Web Browser.

 

    Can you imagine if Microsoft was leveraging a monopoly to gain market share with a web browser what would happen?

 

    I'm thinking of selling my house and we are seriously considering using Redfin.

    We read pretty much everything on Redfin's website, talked with many friends that sold/bought houses on the last few months and even talked with a few real estate agents and mortgage brokers.

    There seems to be a consensus that using Redfin to sell your house is a potential liability. I know of no one that has done it, so I'm asking you if you did or know someone that did sell their house using Redfin.

    The flip-side is that most people are "late majority", and view the "unknown" with quite a bit of skepticism.

    Any help is highly appreciated.

 

    I'm not a professional "networker", nor I depend on a large network of people to be successful in my profession, like a recruiter, but I'm getting more and more requests to connect on LinkedIn.

 

    There is only two reasons I accept (and ask for) connections on Linked In:

1. I know the person face-to-face and feel I can ask for a favor (like an introduction to someone else)
2. I don't know the person in person, but exchanged enough emails that feel like I do and I feel I can ask for a favor.

    The "ask for a favor" is a test to know if I feel comfortable adding this person to my network.

 

    The problem is that each person has their own criteria, and, a lot of people are very eager to connect with as many people as possible, or have a low bar to invite others.

 

    That said, I don't feel offended when somebody invites me, but I also will not accept if one of the two reasons above are not met.

 

    By the way, this is my LinkedIn profile.

 

    I just published the Seattle Startup Index for February/2008 on the Seattle 2.0 blog and Sampa is at #31, dropping 1 position which can be attributed to two companies debutting above us on the list.

 

    The thing that made me happy this month is that we moved significantly up on the Compete Ranking (from 34,520 to 28,656).

 

    I think Alexa is very good when you are on the 100,000 to 1,000,000 ranking range because they have a much wider reach than Compete, but after you go below 100,000 ranking, the demographic normalization that Compete does becomes a more stable metric of a company growth.

 

    The downside on Compete is that is US only, and, like many companies, Sampa has about 40% of our users outside of the US and that is not measured by Compete.

 

 

    Over the years, you meet and work with a wide range of characters. Each one with its own goodness and flaws. Today, I'm talking about the "Smart Idiot Expert" (SIE for short).

 

    These are the two key characteristics of the Smart Idiot Expert:

• He is very smart, intelligent and has 10+ years of experience on his/her area;
• He doesn't listen to others opinion, even more so if others are not experts on his/her area.

 

    Have you ever worked with a designer that presented you with a logo, and you tell him that you think the dot on the "I" should be just a bit higher, and he tells you it shouldn't and is just right, even though 3 other people agree with you. That's an Smart Idiot Expert.

 

    I don't mean to pick on designers, and you can find SIEs everywhere: Software developers (lots of them, who refuse to question their own great software architecture skills), UI experts, business consultants, marketers (lots of SIEs here as well), the IT guys, writers, photographers, salesmen, etc.

 

    The opposite of that is when you work with somebody that is a 20+ years expert, unquestionably smart and he presents you with a solution, and you think something should be different, and he listens (!) to you and -- sometimes -- agrees with you.

 

    Are you working with some Smart Idiot Expert? Lose'em. They don't listen to you and they don't listen your customer.