Marcelo Calbucci

Last Saturday was my 12-year anniversary of moving to the US. Microsoft brought me here. Contrary to a lot of immigrants, while in Brazil, I never felt the need to move to the US. It actually never crossed my mind to move here. But once an amazing job opportunity presented itself, I took it and here I am. There are lots of pros and cons of living in the US, and lots of pros and cons of being an immigrant, but for now I just want to enumerate twelve reasons I think the US is great (for me) in no particular order:


#1 English Language: My first language is Portuguese, but we Brazilians learn (bad) English at school since the first grade until the end of high-school. English is a great language because contrary to Romance languages (Portuguese, French, Italian, etc.) the syntax is very simple. But the most interesting thing about English is not the language itself, but the cultural tolerance Americans have to adapt the English language. Fax and Email can be used as verbs, so can Google. In Portuguese that would never happen. Scholars, professors and politicians hate new words (like the French) and they don’t want the language to change. English is flexible and adaptive to the existing culture.

#2 Diversity: My view of the US is the view from Seattle, a hot pot of culture and races. If you go to a mall and listen attentively, you’ll hear at least a dozen different languages being spoken. With that diversity, not only comes a feeling of how small this world is, but also the diversity in food, which brings me to my next point…

#3 BigMac & Foie Gras: Yes, I confess: I love BigMac. I also love Foie Gras, Salmon, Lamb, Sashimi, and every kind of food. If you go to the supermarket here you can find pretty much everything. And if there is something you want that you can’t find at your QFC or Whole Foods, there’s certainly a boutique market with it. The restaurants are also amazing.

#4 Money is clean: By that I mean “money” is not a dirty word. If you are an American you might not realize this, but a lot of other places in the word people feel somewhat ashamed of having too much money, because money is associated with corruption, cheating or unethical behaviors.

#5 Accountability & Meritocracy: I don’t think there is any society anywhere else in the world that treats meritocracy as seriously as the US. It’s not perfect, but there is a feeling that performance-based rewards are the right thing. With that comes accountability, in other words, you’re responsible for your actions, good or bad. There is a lot of injustice and criminals in the US, but check out the rest of the world. It’s a lot worse.

#6 Hollywood: You actually don’t have to live in the US to enjoy the amazing (and awful) movies produced by Hollywood. Movies can move mountains. They can change cultures. They can affect the course of history and bring awareness to causes (think “Rwanda”).

#7 Pro Sports: The US is the strongest force in professional sports in the world (except for Soccer). It starts by giving opportunities to those kids who have the potential, sprinkle the sponsorship and support structure, and year after year there is a wave of amazing athletes making it.

#8 Shiny Objects: It’s a culture of consumption and innovation that brings the coolest products to market at an accessible price. All the electronics, shiny cars, video games, boats, and whatever you crave is available for you…

#9 Access to Capital: Whether you want to buy a house, a car, a new digital camera or open a business, there is no other place in the world with this kind of access to capital. From credit cards to home loans, from car loans to business financing, the capital industry is in place and functions pretty well. It certainly could be better.

#10 Entrepreneurship: Being an entrepreneur in the US is a great thing. I actually know a lot of people who moved to the US because they wanted to establish their own business, and there was no better place in the world. There is no other country that has produced as many innovations and fantastic companies as the US has. World-wide people use Microsoft Windows, Google search, Yahoo mail, Apple iPods, use the vaccines and medicine produced by Pfizer and Merck, fly on Boeing 777, use printers by Hewlett-Packard and computers by Dell, and use the diapers, detergent and toilet papers of Proctor & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson.

#11 Visa, Green Card & Citizenship: You hear the news of all the illegal immigrants moving into the US, but you never hear about all the legal immigrants coming here from all over the world to work on the high-tech industry, or to study, or to do science research and a lot more. The US is actually a pretty friendly country to immigrants, IMO, if you’re bringing value here – as it should be.

#12 Opportunity: It’s true! The US is the land of opportunity. The opportunity to be the best you can be. From having a career and climbing the corporate latter to opening your own business, from working on scientific research to have a mid-life change of heart and decide to become a painter. You have the opportunity here like nowhere else. And that is exactly the most important reason for me to be living here.

So, thanks Uncle Sam for allowing me to live here.

This blog post is an unfinished thought on why you should not hire entrepreneurs to work at your startup. I’m sure it will come back to haunt me if I’m ever looking for a job at a startup. It was on my queue of posts to write, which I tend to wait for a while until I have some good points and answers, but it got “rushed” because of a friend made a comment about looking for a “developer-entrepreneur” he’s hiring.

I want to make sure for the rest of this post you understand my meaning of the word “entrepreneur” means someone who wants is creating a business of their own.

First of all, the word “entrepreneur” and “hire” contradict each other. By definition, you can’t hire an entrepreneur. You can hire an entrepreneur who’s not being an entrepreneur at the current moment, but by hiring them, they stop being entrepreneurs and become employees. Even if they own a good chunk of the company and have a critical contribution to the success of it.

But that’s just a small part of the issue. The two bigger issues are: focus and focus.

The first “focus” refers to the fact that entrepreneurs – you know the one I’m talking about – are idea people. They can’t control themselves and they just have ideas for new businesses and projects. Most likely, they already have a side project they started before they joined your startup. Startup success requires focus. You don’t want to hire someone who is not spending every working minute thinking about your startup.

The second “focus” refers to scope of work.  Entrepreneurs tend to be more generalists, which in general is a good thing for startups, but can they be a specialist when you need them to? Will your jack-of-all-trades-entrepreneur-developer be comfortable becoming an exclusive front-end developer?

I’ve worked with some great developer-entrepreneurs, but they come with a baggage that’s not ideal for a startup. At your startup, you are much better off finding the best foot-soldier who works well in a startup environment, than hiring an entrepreneur.



Feel free to disagree with me on the comments below. As I said, I'm still thinking about this topic and I don't have the answers yet.

It’s pretty amazing the number of people who say they’re not good with ideas for new products or businesses. Over the last week or so I had several conversations about this many times during lunches, dinners and other meetings.

I just came back from lunch with 4 other folks and on the span of probably one hour we mentioned about two dozens cool apps and services we’d like to see to make our lives easier. And we weren’t even trying hard.

Ideas that come from personal pain are easy. You think of something you don’t like, and imagine a solution for it. Done. But there are dozens of other ways to come up with good ideas for products and businesses. I think the key to have a great idea is to have lots of them, even try to execute a few of them to have an understanding of what makes a good idea into a great product or business.

Even if you pick an idea to execute on, and later you find out it’s a terrible idea, a new great idea might come out of that. But the more you isolate yourself, the less you live, the less you try to do things… the less ideas you’ll have.

Another reason people think they don’t have good ideas is because they either have too many ideas and lack the necessary focus to add more depth to the ideas, or because they over-think each individual idea to the point they surface all the flaws and hide all the virtues of that idea.

The bottom-line is simple:

1. Have lots of ideas, preferably with other folks
2. Filter them by potential & execution (can you do it?)
3. Don’t over-think and just do it
4. Morph your idea into a better idea, even if it means losing 90% of work done.

You know when you have a day you feel very productive, your Inbox message count goes down quite a bit, you made progress on several areas and it just feels good? Yeah, yesterday was just like that for me. I ended the day with 4 messages on my inbox. I had 5 high-priority items to take care of before the end of the day, and I did all of them.


Turned out the solution for great productivity were no meetings. But that’s not news. You know that. I know that. We all know when we have a whole day without meetings, phone calls or other distractions we will be more productive. However, I realized something even more interesting. Mondays are particular well suited for no-meeting day. You have a backlog of emails and issues that might have accumulated over the previous week or even during the weekend, and if you can knock them off your list on Monday you’ll have a much better week.

But I can’t do this alone. A meeting or a conference-call involves multiple people, so the more people who are onboard on this idea of no meetings on Monday, the better the productivity of all of us will be. Now shout on your Twitter and Facebook: “No meetings on Monday! #MeetinglessMonday”

I have a lot of friends who are addicted to “Web 2.0” and “Social Media”. But I have a lot more friends telling me they don’t get it. Why would I spend time on Twitter? Or Facebook? Or LinkedIn? They say.

I’ll not try to make you join Twitter, or start putting status update on Facebook, but I must warn you, you are missing a lot of great opportunities on your life, personal and professional, if you are not doing a few very simple things.

I want to compare not being part of the “social Web” as not being alphabetized. If you can’t read you don’t see the sign that says “50% off”, or “Help Wanted”, or “We are closed on Mondays”. You just miss a lot of things you don’t even know you were missing. Not being part of the social Web is like that. You don’t know what you are missing. And I can guarantee you, you are missing it.

• On career: I don’t care if you already have a job, are happy and making an awesome salary. There might be someone desperately seeking your skills out there. The moment you least need to seek for a job is the moment you are better positioned to take the best job opportunities.
• On friends: You might not be aware of it, but your friends are chatting and writing on each other’s walls (a reference to Facebook). If you are not being part of that, you’ll be missing on the inside jokes. Saying that you have a very active social life is no excuse either because your friends not only have that, but they are also using a unique communication channel.
• On hobbies: You’d be surprised to find out that you are not the only one on your social circle who likes playing badminton, or singing opera, or swing dancing. Once you are part of the social web, and someone learns you just “checked in” (a reference to Foursquare) on “Impulse Ballroom on Bellevue”, they might connect you with another friend who also likes dancing.

I could create a very long list of situations where the social Web can change your life, but I’ll stop at those above. Use your imagination to think of more ways you might be missing. Now, let’s get practical and give you a few real world tips.



#1 Join LinkedIn


#2 Update your Facebook Profile
You are probably already on Facebook, but you might not be using it or your information might be incomplete. Facebook is absolutely great to keep up with what your friends are doing, where they are travelling, the pictures they took, and reconnect with long lost friends (if you want to). There are three things you must do on Facebook: First, you need to make sure your profile is up-to-date. A lot of people forget to update their Facebook profile and it still has the old city, job or girlfriend. Update your profile and remind yourself to update it every 6 months or so. The second thing is to make sure you have the friendships there. The third thing is the Mobile Apps for Facebook (iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, Windows Phone, etc.) The cool thing about these apps is they provide phone directory functionality. This means if you updated your Facebook profile with your phone number (no worries, since only your friends can see it), your friends can use their Mobile Facebook App to find your phone number. Actually, on the iPhone it can automatically synchronize with your address book, so when your friend gets a new phone number, you don’t have to do anything!


For the Advanced

#3 Blogging
You don’t have to be an amazing writer, write perfect English (cough, cough) or be a story teller to have a blog. All that you need is an interest or a passion. Once you start writing about something you care amazing things start to happen. Suddenly on your “Car Enthusiast” blog you get invited by the local Tesla dealer for an exclusive sneak peek at their next model, or on your “Baby Blog” Pampers send you a sample package of their new redesigned diaper. Companies are listening, but that’s not the coolest part. The coolest part is when you have a blog for several months writing about something you like, and you go to a social or professional event, and someone you never met before has read a blog post you wrote. That opens a whole new dimension of relationship and reputation.

#4 Twitter
Facebook is for everyone. LinkedIn is for workers. Blogging is for businesses or hobbies. Twitter is… not for everyone. By now you are sick and tired of hearing about Twitter on TV, radio, newspapers, blogs, and everywhere else. There is a lot of value on Twitter, both for personal and professional reasons, but it does take you to do things that don’t come natural to a lot of people. Making random updates about your life or witty comments on a public setting can be awkward for some folks. Give it a try, but make sure you use a client app (Seesmic or TweetDeck) and a Mobile App, otherwise the experience is not great.

#5 Foursquare
Contrary to Twitter, I think Foursquare is for everyone. Foursquare is a mobile application. Once you enter a restaurant, shopping mall, gas station or any other venue, you pick up your phone and “check-in” into that venue. As soon as you check-in all your friends on Foursquare are notified where you are (your phone beeps or vibrates telling “Marcelo @ Safeco Field”). In other words, you might have a friend who is at the same bar you are and once you check-in he can look for you. There is a lot more little things on Foursquare that makes it more interesting, like tips (a lot of people put Wi-Fi passwords on Foursquare tips), and a few places (bars, restaurants, stores) are starting to offer discount through it, depending on the number of times you visited the place or if you are nearby their store. The secret to Foursquare is to keep your list of Friends small and only the people you really care to know where they are, and vice-versa.

I know this is somewhat of a longer blog post, but I hope that you leave here with a few lessons; the most important of them all is to update your Facebook and LinkedIn profile and connections. What are you waiting for? Opportunities are being missed as we speak!

I’ve sold TweepML a couple of weeks ago, then I announced Jennifer Cabala is taking over Seattle 2.0. Now what?

That’s a big question and the answer is two fold. I’m helping people and startups through consulting as a temporary gig to pay the bills, and I’m working on a new startup concept.

This is a short (meta) post telling you that I’ll be doing a lot more blogging over the next few months, describing the challenges of building a startup for the second time. There is a lot of differences already and this will be a valuable journal for other entrepreneurs out there, so you might as well subscribe to my blog.

More next week.

[Read part 1, part 2 and part 3]

I never sold a business or a website before so everything about selling TweepML would be a new thing for me. I was determined to sell it through an auction website, but before doing that I thought it would be smart to try to find a buyer amongst people I knew who would find value on TweepML as a complement to their service. So, I created a list with about 50 names of entrepreneurs, executives and startup investors and sent them an email.

In less than 24 hours I’ve got 12 people asking “how much?” How much? How much? The value of a product is very complicated. Just a few things to consider is traffic, brand, team, technology, leverage, lift, revenue and interest by multiple buyers. Instead of using any specific metric, I decide to use my gut feeling of how much they would be willing to pay. Initially I was asking $25,000, but then I raised to $35,000, because $25K for a PageRank 6, good brand, with hundreds of thousands of Page-view service seemed too little.


Flippa Sucks





The Auction




I sold it and here is a tip for you...

• I put on the listing we were making $200 a month in Adsense. I should have put ZERO. Once you put such a low CPM value, people who have an understanding of web advertising (i.e., the target buyer for TweepML) start to ask all kinds of questions, which derails the discussion about the real value of the service.  
• I didn’t mention what the future of TweepML could have been. I purposefully withdrawn any information that could indicate which features would make the service more interesting. The reason was because I thought there was value in this knowledge to the buyer, so I only wanted to share with the buyer and not with potential competitors. The problem is that it’s very hard for buyers to have the strategic thinking I had for the last 6-months, so I should have put it all out there.

I’m going through the last moments of transferring TweepML to the new owner (to be announced soon) and turned out to be more work than I was expecting because there’s so many little things to take care of, like Facebook pages, blog, the domains transfer, the code and service, documents, database, etc.

Can you make a business of selling web services?

[Read part 1 and part 2]

You certainly need some context to understand where I’m coming from. In September of 2009 it was just a few weeks after my last day of work at Sampa. Life wasn’t great and the last thing I wanted was a long term commitment to another startup. Compare this to being married to someone for 4 years, getting a divorce and asking someone to marry you just a few weeks after the divorce is complete. No way would I call TweepML my next startup. I just wanted to fool around. Screw it if the service doesn’t work, screw it if I don’t make money, screw it if I don’t have a long term plan.


So I put all that in my head and went careless about the service. But the service kept growing, I started getting more emails about opportunities for partnerships, I started to realize I was leaving money on the table because there was no monetization at the time, etc.

At the same time I was doing TweepML I was working on Seattle 2.0’s StartupDay event, trying to grow Seattle 2.0 and bouncing ideas around with few investors and entrepreneurs of what should I do next. Soon it became clear I had too much on my plate and not enough focus. I looked at everything I was doing and Seattle 2.0 was profitable and growing, so I decided to put more wood behind that fire. Stop the search for the next startup and either sell or ignore TweepML. And, as soon as I got the first interested party in acquiring TweepML …

Twitter announced Twitter List about 4 weeks after TweepML came out and launched the feature a month after that. That was a bucket of cold water on the enthusiasm around TweepML. Although there was enough differences between Twitter List and TweepML.org that today we have a better understanding, at that time there was enough uncertainty about TweepML viability that not only people interested in acquiring us went into wait-and-see mode, but users started to question if their work creating lists would be wasted by duplication of the services functionality.

Well, I don’t want to claim credit for the Twitter List feature idea, but it seems very peculiar that Twitter would announce their list feature shortly after I launched TweepML.org. Just kidding. Most likely they had “lists” as one of the features to add for a long time, but the demand for TweepML probably made they realize they should bump it up.

Without an acquirer and without much interest from me to invest on monetization and other interesting features to keep TweepML running the service was completely ignored by me in November and December of last year. In December I’ve made the decision the best for TweepML was to auction the service as soon as I came back from vacation.

That’s when I… [to be continued on part 4 of 4]

[Read part 1 here]

I’ve learned how to do PR on my previous startup, Sampa. We had a few PR hits, a few PR misses, but the more PR we did, the better we became at understanding how to do it right. For TweepML, I did it all backwards, mostly because I had a good feeling about getting a lot of press. Because bloggers would be target users of TweepML, I asked a few of them how they would feel about a service that would allow you to create a list of Twitter users so others could follow all of them at once. This is what a prominent blogger replied told me:

M.A.: “I’ve always wanted this and wondered why it didn’t exist”.

At the time the service was not even close to launch, but if the most in-the-known blogger never heard of anything like that *and* he wants it, it means there is something good here, so I better hurry.

I’ve got the service ready to launch (or as ready as I thought it needed to be for launch) on Monday August 31st, but then it hit me: I need to get white-listed by Twitter otherwise the API calls would fail. So I submitted the request to Twitter. But the service was ready and there was no reason I couldn’t tell a few people. Well, I picked the 30+ most influential bloggers in the world and invited them to try the service, and said “hey, you can’t write about it yet because Twitter has not white-listed us yet”.

Have you seen a blogger drooling? I’ve seen it. They just loved the service. Many of them had blog posts ready to go as soon as I told them we were white-listed. A few kept emailing me almost daily for the next week or so asking for an update. Finally, on September 9 shortly after my lunch I learned Twitter had officially white-listed our server and we were good to go. Instead of sending a press release, which at that point was meaningless since they’ve been using the service, I wrote a personal email explaining a few more details about the service and send it out at around 4 PM that day.

After sending the email I went to pick up my kids at daycare and the family went to Ooba’s, the best Mexican restaurant I've been to. As I arrived there around 6 PM I started checking Google Reader for the posts and they started coming… TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, GigaOm, TechFlash, and on, and on, and on.

The service was buggy, but who cared. There was such a demand for it that people just looked the other way. That night – a Wednesday night – between 6 PM and midnight we’ve got 3,500 visits. The next day we’ve got 14,000 visitors, then it stabilized between 4,000 and 5,000 visitors a day. I was shocked. I know it would be good, but not that good. In the 21 days of September TweepML had more than 100,000 unique visitors!

If I could pinpoint a single reason under my control for the instantaneous success of the service was simplicity. I kept everything very simple. The UI was clean and beautifully design by the team at Design Commission. The user experience was just brain-dead simple. TweepML did just one thing and it did really well.

But what I didn’t do was… [to be continued on part 3 of 4]

The Seattle 2.0 has always been known as a great place to find things related to startup. We had a list of startups and sites, a list of bloggers, a list of events, so it became obvious that we should have a list of entrepreneurs and startups on Twitter. On June of 2009 we launched the Seattle Startup Twitter Directory. You can read John Cook’s blog post about it. People really loved it, particularly the feature where you could enter your Twitter username and we would tell you who you were not following on that list and allowed you to follow them very easily.

Less than a day after we launched that I thought about creating an OPML of that list so people could use it. As I was implementing the OPML to that list I realized OPML was not a great format to represent Twitter users (or people in general). OPML has attributes and elements that had nothing to do with Twitter and it wasn’t much extensible. So it wasn’t that hard to come up in my mind with the TweepML concept.

The first thing I did was to ask Damon Cortesi and Adam Loving, two Seattle-based entrepreneurs who built successful Twitter services, if they knew anything like that. No, they didn’t. I wrote a draft and send it to them, incorporated some feedback and started coding it. As a side note, Damon is the one that came up with the “TweepML” name and the talk was like this:

Me: Hey Damon, do you know any OPML format for lists of Twitter users?
Damon: Not really.
Me: What you think about creating one?
Damon: You mean like a TweepML format?
Me: [Me buying the domain on eNom] That’s a great name. I just bought the domain.
Damon: Damn, you’re fast.

At the time, I thought the format was the end product. Create a TweepML spec, put on the web and tell people about it. That was the plan. It became obvious that I had to “test” the format, so I wrote a C# library to create and manipulate TweepML and Damon created a Ruby library. Then it became clear you had to show how TweepML could be used and that’s how I came up with the TweepML.org service.

I launched the service on Wednesday, September 9 after a few weeks of testing. And then, something really big happened… [to be continued on part 2 of 4]

Every once in a while I post my agenda on my blog to make it easier for people to know where I’ll be. There is quite a bit happening on the next 7 days, so here it is:


Tuesday (3/2) – 5pm = Entrepreneurs Organization Accelerator program Social at Joey’s in South Lake Union. If you are interested in joining EO Accelerator you should attend and get to know some of the attendees.

Thursday (3/4) – 2pm = Blogger Roundtable after Vivek Kundra (Obama’s CIO) speech at UW at Café Solstice.

Thursday (3/4) – 6pm = WTIA Industry Achievement Awards at Showbox SODO.

Monday (3/8) – All day = 140tc Conference at Bell Harbor.