Boomerang

I was at a talk, recently, where the speaker mentioned “a lot of data driven people fall into the trap of wanting more information to make a decision. The problem is that the world does not always give you complete information.” I thought about my own experience. I remember at times presenting a new product idea and getting the feedback, “we need more *fill in the blank* information.” Usually, they asked for...

As Baydin has started, I’ve heard a number of different voices on how cheap a startup should be.  Those voices have almost universally concentrated toward the extremes – they advise either being incredibly, incredibly cheap (buy nothing, get furniture from the sidewalk when people throw it out, trade time for money always) or spending money like a sailor in port (buy everything, buy luxury, hire expensive service providers, trade...

Alex and I spent some portion of our time phone interviewing potential interns for the summer. Unfortunately, the resume is often an inaccurate indicator of one’s programming ability. In a previous existence, we could throw money at that problem – we’d review a resume and then FLY a candidate in to interview. The candidate would go through nine interviews with various engineers, designers and marketers on-site. At...

Our friends have asked us if we were nervous about going out on our own, especially with the economy as it is. Alex and I have wanted to do our own thing for a while. We call this yearning “not wanting to work for The Man.” We, to a large degree, control our own destiny. That means we need to simultaneously market our company, raise capital, develop the product and run an office. It’s only been two weeks and...

A few posts back, we talked about why search on the desktop works a lot better than it did just a few years ago.  In this post, we’ll talk about how desktop search hasn’t kept up as the way we find and consume content on our computers has changed. As recently as 2000, the deluge of emails, files, podcasts, blog posts and everything else that we have to keep track of was more like a drizzle.  The average hard drive held about...

Whenever I ask friends what superpower they would most want, one person would say “I want to read minds.” This can be a double-edged sword. Baydin will get you more than half-way there. We can’t tell you how just yet but I’m curious to know what people think about being so empowered. There’s also a Baydin page on Facebook if you want to join in on the discussion...

As we start Baydin, we wrap up work at our old jobs. I’ve spent the last three weeks trying to “transfer” everything I’ve learned in the greater part of a decade to my colleagues. It’s tough.  Knowledge that’s instilled or discovered over time is conveyed quickly without context. I copied my entire hard disk and passed the external drive around so that everyone could store the information. I gave a...

Desktop search has come a long way in the past few years.  In this post, we’ll explore how the technology behind all of the major desktop search options has changed based on web search innovations.  In the follow-up posts, we’ll talk a little bit about how desktop search is different from web search and how it has both succeeded and failed at making interacting with our computers better.  We’ll share a few tricks for...

Whoa, no way… someone’s actually reading this?  Sweet! Over the next few months, we’ll be using this blog to describe the development (both the software and the business!) of Baydin, our first startup.  For the next month or so, we’re still at our day jobs, but starting May 8th, we’re going to be in it full time. We’ll describe what we’re working on as soon as we get the right words put...