sayangel-blog

[sayangel-blog]

TYIL - This Year I Learned

What a year. I am beyond grateful for all the countless opportunities I've received in the last 365 days. I think 2014 was the year of "just doing." Here are the highlights:

Bought an Oculus ("The 10 year old in me tells me this is the best investment. Ever." - Me in February... little did I know.)

Organized Hack Red Hook

Won the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in NYC

Quit my first job

Swept up a ton of prizes @ YC Hacks

Joined Orbital Bootcamp (shout out to Gary and the other Orbital advisors and classmates for being so awesome)

Started a Masters in CS @ Columbia

Got a fellowship to pay for my tuition

Went to Oculus Connect and met Palmer Luckey

Selected as Kairos K50

Left the Masters program

Started a company

In all honesty I never expected a lot of those things to be in the same year. But if there's anything I learned this year it's that there's no particular way things should be. They just are and learning to adapt is part of the fun.

The months leading up to my graduation in 2013 and thereafter were a bit emotionally tumultuous. I had always been one to have a set plan and avoid deviating too far from the path written in the books, or what people had told me, etc. At the beginning of the year I had become a bit disillusioned by my first job out of college (I wasn't the only one of my friends... it happens). It wasn't a bad gig, but it wasn't for me. However, I had nowhere else to go and being "funemployed" was not what I had envisioned after college, so I stayed and tried to make the best of it. 

My biggest issue was that I felt like I wasn't learning anything. And maybe it's because I'm naive and was expecting a lot out of my first job, but I was learning more (at least technical things) through hackathons and side projects. It was difficult and confusing because what I wanted to be doing and what I needed to be doing, at least to survive, weren't the same. Everyone always tells you to follow you heart and do what makes you happy, but I always had the counter argument that happiness doesn't pay the bills.

And this is still true, but one thing I learned this year is that with enough patience and persistence you can survive doing what makes you happy. For a while it sucked and I looked for a way out of my job. I interviewed with several other companies (former employer: if you're reading this SORRY!). So I had a full-time job, was searching for a new job, and spent most of my "free" tinkering with code or at a hackathon trying to learn something new. I don't know how my girlfriend puts up with it, but I am VERY thankful. Bentley, you are beyond amazing.

the next part is an account of the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon which I never wrote down so you can skip this wall of text if you so choose.

Then on May 4th something totally unexpected happened. On May 3rd, I woke up with very little motivation, but had tickets to the NYC TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. I was having second thoughts about going and instead wanted to just stay under the covers. My girlfriend encouraged me to go and it took every ounce of motivation that was left in me to throw on some clothes, put on my bag, and grab my Oculus case before heading to the Manhattan Center. I ended up hacking on a VR app to visualize urban project proposals. I remember texting my girlfriend with the idea and getting something along the lines of "wow that's such a serious hack for you." I hadn't really done 3D graphics before, but tried it anyway. It took me a couple of hours to get it off the ground and I almost gave up at one point, but eventually I had something working. My girlfriend came to the presentations the next day and she can attest to how nervous I was. I wasn't a CS major, I had just started doing all this web dev stuff, and everyone around me was some startup coding "ninja" or "guru" or seasoned hacker. Not to mention this was hosted by TechCrunch so I felt like there was no room for funny business, everyone was here to win. I went up to present and it was a disaster. I had 60 seconds. I was switching between my laptop, my phone, and the Oculus. And I had barely rehearsed because a) I didn't think I stood a chance, but thought I should at least showcase what I stayed up making b) do better when I don't overthink what I'm going to say. I got off stage and my hands were shaky and I remember telling my girlfriend how terribly I thought it went. I thought I had a really good shot at the Esri sponsor prize, but after the presentation I thought I had messed that up too. Well to cut to the chase, I ended up winning the Esri prize, but I also won 1st place the hackathon. I was in utter disbelief. And maybe this isn't as big a deal as I make it out to be, but to me it meant a lot. It gave me confidence. It gave me flexibility. It opened up doors. I remember my mom called me crying because she was watching the livestream after I had told her what I was doing. 

</techcrunch recap>

I could finally quit my job without having to worry about how I'd maintain financial stability for the next couple of months or feel guilty about letting my parents down by being out of a job for a while. So I did. 

I had no idea what I was doing and in retrospect winning a hackathon is not validation for whether or not you have a viable business on your hands. But I'm glad I was delusional enough to think so. Shortly after, I was lucky enough to be a part of the first Orbital Bootcamp, which led me to start this blog, but also pushed me out of my comfort zone and deflated my post TC Disrupt ego. In a good way! Gary's mentorship and advice helped me realize the importance of talking to people, embracing struggles, and learning to learn. This really helps to sum up everything I've learned this year. I was always looking for what I should be doing next. I sought advice from people, books, websites, etc. in hopes that one of them would have the answer. I've always been a sucker for self-help books. But being lost and finding your own way out is awesome. At the time it may suck, but once you're out you really appreciate it for what it is. That's not to say taking advice is bad, but that there is no cookie cutter advice. 

Vrban was created 7 months ago. Today it's more than a URL to some hack made in 24 hours. It's become a journey and part of who I am. It's also more than just me now. It's also Russell. It's also our beta users and everyone else who has sat down to hear our spiel and give it a chance. It's everyone who has given me feedback and advice.

There are certainly days where I feel more lost than I did the day before, but I know that if I can rough it out I'll come out knowing something new. To everyone who has helped me through it all thank you. Your support means everything.

Thank you Russell for being an awesome co-founder. Thank you Bentley for talking sense into me every day and putting up with my shenanigans and delusions (the list of everything she does for me is way longer than this and I can't thank her enough in a couple of sentences). Thank you parents for being so supportive. Thank you friends for helping me keep my head up. Thank you Gary for the opportunity and endless advice. Thank you everyone @ Orbital.

You've all helped me become comfortable excited with not knowing what's next. 

2014 was awesome and I can't wait to see what happens in 2015. Stay tuned!

[sayangel-blog]

The "Right Answer" is the Wrong One

This will probably be my last reflective post as part of my 12 weeks at Orbital bootcamp. It's been an extremely rewarding experience to say the least. Yesterday, I went in for office hours with Gary and after chatting about vrban for a while he asked me what the most valuable part of the bootcamp was for me.

So here it is:

The most important thing I learned this summer was that there are no answers floating around that will make it easy to build your product, service, or whatever else you're working on. There are tools, mentors, communities, and plentiful resources, but no answers. When Gary first mentioned the bootcamp to me I think I was excited for the wrong reasons.

I knew that Gary and the list of advisors had worked at startups and with startups, so I thought all my prayers would be answered as I struggled with the question of whether or not I was doing the right thing by quitting my job and building out a VR platform. I was committing to something with 0 certainty and I had very little experience doing this sort of thing, so naturally I was terrified.

I don't think there's a universal recipe, but that's a beautiful thing. I've written about this before, but one of the things I've picked up recently is meditation. Once again, I find myself drawing parallels between developing a product and meditating. The value and answers are in the experience itself. Trying really hard to relax is more stressful than simply accepting that you're overwhelmed. And you learn more in observing your stressful thoughts than ignoring them and trying to replace them. Likewise, trying to find easy answers to "how can I get more users?" or "should I build X?" is less valuable then engaging with users directly and finding out for yourself.

One of our final readings was an interview with Emmet Gowin, a photographer and one of Gary's former instructors. He says

"That's what you have to give up, the authority of an answer and replace it with the authenticity of the experience."

And that's just what I learned this summer. I'm still guilty of this, but I try to catch myself doing it more often: I look for answers on Hacker News, or TechCrunch, or hope that some founder will be able to tell me exactly what I need to do. If someone else could tell me exactly what to build, I'd not only deprive myself of an experience, but I'd strip vrban of the input that will help make it something that people love. I could've spent my summer meeting with other founders and hearing about their startups and trying to directly apply their advice to vrban, but I'm grateful that the bootcamp instead challenged me to talk to users, listen, and learn. 

The questions won't stop. And I'll certainly make mistakes when trying to answer them. But if I've learned anything it's that the only wrong answer is not doing anything at all.

[sayangel-blog]

[sayangel-blog]

Writing to Strangers

I've got some catching up to do! I've completed a few Orbital assignments but haven't written about my experience completing each one, so I'll be doing that the next couple of days.

The first assignment I'll be writing about is the following:

Send a cold email that introduces yourself to someone you’d like to meet, and set up an in-person, phone, or video meeting with this person. Write and publish and blog post about the experience.  Submit the URL to the post.

First I attempted this with Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit among other things, but I didn't get a response (if you're reading this and you're Alexis Ohanian or could make an introduction that would be awesome!!!!). I thought he'd be a great person to try to meet for several reasons.

First, I had just finished his book Without Their Permission in which he discusses the importance of the internet in empowering people to do what they want, whether that's start a company or gather followers for a cause. You don't need anyone's permission, just your ambition and laptop. It was very appropriate reading for my summer. In fact I have a signed copy that I got during a crowdtilt campaign he did:

He also just seems like an awesome guy. He cares about internet freedom and expanding tech education. Two things I'm also a big fan of and think are important for our future. Finally, as a redditor it would've been awesome to sit down with the OG redditor.

Unfortunately after reaching out via a contact form on his site I didn't get a response. One interesting thing about trying to get in touch with him was that the form on his about.me site was that it was limited to 1000 characters. It was an interesting challenge to try to engage with him in such few words. Admittedly I didn't try anything beyond this form, but I didn't want to be a spammer. Maybe this blog post will help?

Anyway, I ended up emailing Nicolas Zimmer, founder of Liber.io, who I successfully engaged with a couple of weeks later. A while ago I decided to integrate Google drive to allow people to view 3D models stored in the cloud w/ the Oculus. Gary mentioned liber.io, a platform that had just launched that allowed people to self-publish e-books from docs stored on their google drive. They make it easy for people who write to publish/share and I want to make it easy for people who do 3D modeling to publish and share. I figured it'd be good to hear about the founder's experience and get his advice on things like google integration, getting people to upload, etc.

Before emailing I tweeted a couple of things to get on their radar and ensure a response:

Tweeted @liberio saying I liked the idea.

https://twitter.com/sayangel/status/494213954797699073

After seeing that the founder favorited the tweet, I tweeted at him saying I'd sent him an email and would love to hear his thoughts on a couple of things:

https://twitter.com/sayangel/status/494249869981147140

Shortly after, he responded to my emails and he has been helpful in providing advice on working with the Google APIs. It was interesting to hear his perspective on why Google drive was a good first approach for them. He also provided some guidance on integrating with the API and handling data storage, which is something I've been struggling with the past couple of weeks.

While I didn't get Alexis Ohanian, I still learned a bit in the process of completing the assignment. I wonder if I would've gotten a response form the Liberio founder even if I hadn't sent those tweets. Regardless, it was a good example of giving some to get some. I publicly expressed admiration for what he had built and in return I got my email answered - and finished an assignment!

[sayangel-blog]

Orbital Bootcamp Assignment #3: Acquire 20 RTs on a post - check! 

[sayangel-blog]

Not Sure How to Do Something... Someone Else Has Figured It Out

This week I opened up an "alpha" version of vrban to a couple of close friends for usability testing. I just sent them a link, had them sign up, and waited for emails whenever they got stuck on something or found bugs. 

This didn't seem like the right way to do things. Then by some strange miracle I got an email from ChallengePost earlier this week asking if I'd be willing to go into their HQ for an hour and do some usability testing for a couple of bucks. Perfect!

So this morning I helped them with usability testing on their site and in return I got insight into the testing process from a company with the resources to hire a Usability Tester. I could've read books or articles on how to do this stuff, but experiencing first hand was a much more valuable experience.

This has got to be my hack of the week. I got paid to learn something I needed to learn. Awesome! Of course, there's always something to be given in return and I gave my 100% honest feedback to ChallengePost and hope I was a good  test subject!

[sayangel-blog]

Make Something Then Make Something People Want

Recently I’ve been feeling uncertain about what I’ve been spending time building out. After a period of listening rather than doing, I finally got around to coding a more refined prototype. However I wasn’t sure if I had done enough listening. I was afraid I was building something nobody would want.

I expressed these concerns to Gary and some of the awesome guest advisors at last night’s orbital class and I was reminded to adhere to a philosophy I’m a big fan of: Fuck it Ship it. I must’ve forgotten to read the sticker on my laptop. Gary mentioned that maybe I’m letting all these hackathon successes get to my head. Maybe I’m so used to getting my ideas “validated” with prizes and what not that I didn’t want to put out something people aren’t interested in.

But building something nobody uses is a success in itself because you learn what people don’t want. That’s why building fast and experimenting is so important. Learning that people don’t want one feature you spent less than a week building is way better than learning people don’t want a platform with 42 features you spent a year building.

This helped me realize that the only way to make something people want is to start by making something. Anything. And putting it out there. The first iteration won’t be the last.

In other words, fuck it ship it. Here we go!

[sayangel-blog]

Reddit Research

I check the r/Oculus subreddit quite frequently to check out new VR developments and see what cool projects people are working on. I've recently come across some interesting posts that help validate a couple of assumptions I've had. I'll soon have a prototype for people to try out and I'm excited to share it with this community since 1) they have Oculus Rifts so they can test out the VR aspect 2) it's a great way to start conversations online with people with specific interests. So next time someone walks by and my screen is on Reddit... I promise it's research.

TL;DR My favorite comment from r/Oculus. This sums up the friction in going from 3D to VR quite nicely. It's "simple.":

[sayangel-blog]

"Speak So Slowly It's Almost Awkward"

This weekend I went to YC hacks, YC's inaugural hackathon. It was hosted at their Mountain View offices and was filled with tons of great mentorship, collaboration, and good ol' fashion hacking.

My teammates and I built vrniture, a virtual reality web app that lets you visualize furniture arrangements - basically you get the IKEA experience without every leaving your couch. This prevents people from guessing what furniture not only looks best, but actually fits, before bringing it all home. We integrated this with the Myo armband so that furniture could be arranged by waving your arm and placing it where you wanted. Multiple people could simultaneously design the layout, so you could theoretically get help from a professional interior designer and make better furniture purchases! Once you were satisfied with your arrangement you could verify furniture you've placed and check out easily. 

Check out our ChallengePost submission and video demo: http://challengepost.com/software/vrniture

We first demonstrated our hack to everyone in a science fair style expo along with 130 other hacks. We had about an hour to show our hack to all the attendees and impress the judges. Finally, Ryan Rowe, co-founder of Kimono Labs, came up to our table and told us "come with me. You're finalists and have 20 minutes to prepare your 2 minute pitch for the judges." Yes! We all excitedly packed into one of the YC offices and Ryan helped us prepare our pitch (shout out for being such an awesome mentor!). I was the one pitching so I nervously kept practicing and at one point he said: "slow down. You've got to speak so slowly it's almost awkward. That's what PG would always tell us." I was trying to pack as much information as I could into two minutes, but the key was to be concise and clear, which is a lot harder than it sounds. I was so glad to have had his help in preparing for the pitch and in the end we walked away with 3rd place overall along with 4 other API prizes. The prizes were awesome, but my favorite part of the weekend was being able to work alongside such talented individuals and learn from everyone around me. The ambiance at the event was incredible - people were friendly, knowledgable, and so passionate about what they were building. Not to mention I got to present in front of YC partners, Airbnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk, Reddit co-founder Alex Ohanian, Sam Altman, and even PG himself! Quite the weekend!

Does the idea behind vrniture sound familiar? It's not urban planning, but it's yet another application where VR comes in handy and provides much better communication about spatial arrangements.

The way I see it, this was another experiment. And the initial version of vrban was experiment number 1 before I even knew it. Virtual Reality will be useful tool for many people and industries. At the core, what vrban has become is a communication tool for ideas involving a specific amount of spatial ability. There are many other features I think can be built in, but I won't build them without confirming it's something people want. If there's anything I took away from my weekend hacking at YC it's this:

1) "Build something people want." This only reiterates everything we've been learning at Orbital NYC. This is why experiments and customer interviews are so important.

2) Remember to take it slow. At the hackathon I had to work as fast as possible to ship something in 24 hours. But when it came to presenting it had to be a slow and clear pitch. When building out vrban, or any product for that matter, speed is key to getting things tested, but stopping to think about user data and input is just as important. 

[sayangel-blog]

Check CitiBike availability with a simple YO!

I went to a YO hackathon this weekend and made this. The idea is that you could find out if your local citibike station has available bikes with a simple push notification. You can set which stations you want to ping by going to the website and then check availability anytime by YOing YOCITIBIKE. If you get a response, you're good to go!

Think of it as the internet of things meets the simplicity of YO.

[sayangel-blog]

Protip: Start making a list of all the people you talk to about your project, so you can follow up and periodically keep them on-board

(via rememberlenny)

[sayangel-blog]

From 0 to 60... different ideas.

Things can really pick up in a week. From following up with people I met at the Esri UC to meeting with people in NYC, I've been learning a lot about how vrban could complement different areas of work. There are a lot of use cases that weren't on my radar before and some exciting opportunities.

However, having so many different people actually wanting to use what you're building doesn't feel quite like I thought it would. It's confusing.

There are people who want to pay, but want a very specialized version of the tool. There are people who don't want to pay, but also want a very specialized version of the tool. There are people who want a very simple version of the tool. There are people who like the prototype just the way it is. There are people who want to use it! Yay!

Sometimes a conversation results in several new paths for where the project could go. And this isn't just during customer interviews. Sometimes, after sitting down with Orbital advisors I find myself second-guessing my decisions or perhaps with another dozen ideas for what I want to do. It's tough, but extremely valuable to be presented with so much data and feedback at such an early stage. I'd rather struggle with the plethora of data and really think about the direction I want to go in now than at a later stage when the ball is rolling and turning back isn't an option.

One of this week's Orbital readings was Brad Feld's response to Fred Wilson's post on mentor whiplash, which is essentially the constant advising and feedback that startups get at an early stage. Both authors had great pieces of advice. We'll start with Fred:

"You have to learn to hear that feedback but not react to it."

"take as many meetings as you can get. Solicit feedback. Listen to it. Write it down. But do not act on it immediately. It is advice not direction."

"...the market will tell you what to do if you listen carefully enough. And Mr Market is the best advisor you can have.

However, he thinks advisors should tone down the advice they give early stage startups because of the confusion and loss of direction that it may cause. Brad, on the other hand, thinks bombarding startups with advice is a good thing because most people don't have the ability to do what Fred says and not reacting is a tough thing to do. People have to learn to filter out noise and the best way to do so is to practice. 

If you don’t build your own muscle around collecting, synthesizing, dealing with, and decided what to do with all the data that is coming at you, then you are going to have massive problems as your company scales up.

I found this particular topic really interesting because this past year I've been learning to meditate and one of the key points of meditation is to just sit with your mind and listen to your thoughts. Specifically, not react. Similarly, it's not something that you can achieve over night and it takes practice. I didn't really expect to find so many interesting parallels between meditating and the ability to collect and analyze data. 

To summarize, here's what reacting before thinking about things in an early stage looks like in GIF form:

[sayangel-blog]

Talking To Users @ Esri UC

I just got back from the Esri User Conference in San Diego and this is the first time I'm sitting down to gather my thoughts. About 15,000 people travelled to the San Diego Convention Center for a week long conference on Geographic Information Systems (GIS). It was like the mecca for anyone interested in 2D and 3D visualizations of geographic data sets.

On Monday, there were mostly talks at the plenary session. The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) gave a great talk on the redevelopment of Singapore and discussed their use of Esri's CityEngine to quickly mock up 3D visualizations that they could share with stakeholders and citizens who'd be impacted by the changes. I immediately thought this would be a great use case for vrban!

The rest of the week I was lucky enough to have a booth in the Startup Zone with 30 other startups and got to engage with hundreds of potential users.

By putting the Oculus in front of them I got to hear a lot about what they wish to do (there were a lot of things I hadn't even considered). The people interested ranged from firefighters, to disaster management experts, to academics, to architects. My early focus was solely on city governments, but this weekend I discovered the value that this may bring to other industries. As exciting as this was, I know I have to be careful about trying to do too much and building something that is too general. But for now I think I know where I have to go in the coming weeks.

I could not have asked for better feedback in only 3 days. Being able to meet face to face with potential users and have them try out an early prototype was an invaluable experience. They raised concerns, expressed what they liked about the early prototype, and were generally excited about the things they could do with virtual reality. The range of potential users I met and things I learned was well worth the trip to San Diego.

And a huge thanks to russelvarriale who helped hold down the fort!

[sayangel-blog]

There seems to be a void in the market for intermediate level learners. Maybe they’ve gone through Codecademy’s tracks or even something more extensive like General Assembly’s Front End Web Development course. What do they do next? The narrative drops off at this point.

d.rell: The Problem  (via garychou)

[sayangel-blog]

It's Not Rocket Science, But It Is Science!

This week I've been doing a lot of asking and it's been a great experience! There's a lot to learn about how virtual reality can enhance people's work, but taking it one small hypothesis at a time can help break down the problem and give me a good sense of direction.

I got to present my prototype to about 15 people from the NYC Department of City Planning and got some good responses to a lot of my questions. 

The biggest lesson was learning that a couple of the things I thought were really important were not at the top of their priority list. I was overcomplicating things and a simple solution may be the best solution.

I also attended a VR meetup on Thursday and got to meet a lot of people working on cool VR projects. However, the most valuable interaction that night was with an interior designer who was interested in learning how he could use VR in his workflow. While he may not need all the features an urban designer needs, a lot of the basics are very similar and I'm excited to explore that use case as well!

[sayangel-blog]

It's A Learning Process

This week's Orbital Bootcamp reading included a talk by Jessica Mah, co-founder of inDinero, on the journey of founding your own startup. She touches upon being a young founder, failure, getting into YC, picking the right investors, hiring and firing, and a lot of other things that are typically re-iterated by many founders. It's all good advice, but there are a couple of points in particular that stood out to me:

1) Press = dangerous && press != signups.

I think a lot of founders (I'm certainly guilty of this) can get caught up with press. Two months ago, after only 24 hours of hacking I had somehow managed to get my face on the front page of TechCrunch. It was certainly something I wasn't expecting, but boy did it feel good. After that came a slew of other press that talked about my VR hack that blew my ego through the roof. 

Why would I want it to stop? If someone wants to interview you because they think you're awesome why wouldn't you do it?

Because you have a product to build. One should certainly feel accomplished for this sort of stuff, but that's not the end of the road. For me, it was only the beginning. 

2) It's OK to Struggle

Failure, depression, and the struggles of founding your own startup are something that have recently received a little more attention and are very important. The press can talk you up for being young, raising $1 Million, and starting a company, but Jessica discusses how difficult it was to tell her friends the truth about the struggle behind starting a company.

Behind the scenes bugs are appearing in your code base, customers are frustrated, people are quitting, you're firing people, but nobody can know this because you're the awesome 20 year old who just launched his or her company and is going to take over the world. False. It's hard, confusing, and frustrating and that's ok. 

3) Build Something Useful

This one may seem really obvious, but I've overlooked it before. I've certainly built useless things before. Just because something CAN be built doesn't mean it SHOULD be built. This is something I'm working on getting better at and I'm starting to spend less time building and more time getting to know the people I'm building for. I thought I was going to spend the summer coding 24/7, but that would probably result in a product that was built entirely out of my imagination and what I thought people needed.

Jessica talks about how she and her co-founder thought they had to learn everything about accounting, take the CPA exam, and rebuild Quickbooks. A month ago I thought I'd have to rebuild and compete with some of the best 3D modeling software out there. After some customer interviews, Jessica learned that people were still using Excel and anything better than that would be a win. Talking to people is important and focusing on other people's software limits you.

This made me think of a passage from Peter Thiel's upcoming book Zero To One and this is what I'll end on. This was a long post so if you didn't read any of the stuff above at least read this:

"[...]disruption has recently transmogrified into a self-congratulatory buzzword for anything trendy and new. This seemingly trivial fad matters because it distorts an entrepreneur's self-understanding in an inherently competitive way. The concept was coined to describe threats to incumbent companies, so startups' obsession with disruption means they see themselves through older firms' eyes.

If you think of yourself as an insurgent battling dark forces, it's easy to become unduly fixated on the obstacles in your path. But if you truly want to make something new, the act of creation is far more important than the old industries that might not like what you create."

[sayangel-blog]

YO yoplaysflappy to get started.

I always enjoy working on fun side projects and while they can be distracting I think taking a step back from what you spend all week thinking about can be really helpful.

This is something I built with a buddy of mine this weekend and I learned quite a bit, including using PhantomJS and the YO API for the first time.