Jon Fox

PlayOn!

Posted by Jon on Jan 5, 2009

I just recently discovered PlayOn! which is a media server that allows you to stream content to your PS3 or Xbox from online sources like Hulu, YouTube, CBS, Netflix and others. Setup is super simple. Just download a small app to one of your computers on the same network as the console, install it, put in your credentials (for the sites that require it), and then browse to the new media server on your PS3. I literally was up and running in about 5 minutes.

So far I really love the service. I’m an active Netflix user and love the “Instant Watch” section. I used to run this through a computer hooked up to my TV, which worked, but was extremely clunky to use. There are separate boxes you can buy to have this same functionality, but why pay for new hardware when the PS3 is already hooked up, network ready, and fully capable. I also really like having Hulu and other mainstream media sites built right in. It’s just one more step in moving to the on-demand, internet ready media systems that are starting to take off.

The only downside to the software is that it’s not free. I’m currently using the free trial, and I’m told that the software will be ~$30 when it’s out of beta and no longer a free trial. A bit of a road block for some, I’m sure, but more than worth it for me to be able to do this completely seamlessly without adding another box to my living room setup.

I’m also planning to give Boxee a try soon. As far as I know there’s no way to stream this to the PS3, but I’d be willing to use a PC for this if it worked well enough. I’d also like to find a nice way to watch video podcasts on my PS3…anyone out there doing this?

Overall a really great piece of software that is super simple to use. Definitely recommend it.

Allow For Creativity

Posted by Jon on Jan 4, 2009

I’m often surprised what other people come up with when given a bit of freedom. If you’re managing anyone be sure to give them a little room for creativity. What they come up with will surprise you and can generate a lot of new ideas. These ideas can then be built on by the rest of the team (if they also have a bit of freedom for creativity). What you end up with might be something totally new and different that you never would’ve come up with on your own and it’s even better because the entire team can “own” it.

Give your team a little room for creativity, and encourage it when it happens…you might be surprised what shakes out of it.

Burnout

Posted by Jon on Jan 3, 2009

I like to work…a lot. One of the dangers of being so passionate about your work is that it’s very easy to get overly wrapped up in it and let it completely take over your life. This of course, leads to burnout. Now I would not have considered myself “burnt out”, but rather just on the edge of burnout…riding it dangerously close, but still maintaining control (at least at some level). Then I read Micah’s recent post about burnout and had to re-examine my current condition. According to him, here are some telling signs that you are experiencing burnout:

• You are tired all the time. No matter how much you sleep, you cant seem to “catch up.”
• You complain more than usual. Everyone is a moron. You are the only person that can get the job done.
• You snap at friends and colleagues. Since they can’t understand the workload you are under, or how unfair that workload is, you snap. You withdraw.
• You start thinking about quitting. It has to be the company. There is a better job with less stress out there. I just made a bad choice of jobs.
• You take little “breaks.” Today, I am going to nothing that pertains to my job. I know its Tuesday, and we have a release coming up, but I can catch up tomorrow.
• When do you get home, you dont take care of personal business. Dude, I just worked for 12 hours straight. Why should I pay bills?
• You wish you can, or you start, working from home more. There are less distractions (and people). I can work at my pace and I do a better job!

Upon reading this list I found that I suffered from more of these symptoms than not and decided maybe it was time to rethink my current burn out status. Turns out I was burnt out…and had been running on empty for some time. So what to do?

Luckily I happened to be in the middle of some unexpected time off from work and had already planned a mini-getaway with my girlfriend Katie. The idea was that our Christmas present to each other would be that we’d both “turn off” work for 2 or 3 days and spend some time with each other doing some of the stuff that we always talked about doing, but never got around to doing. This might sound trivial, but the truth is that neither of us are usually capable of “turning off” work for even a day…often even a few hours at the end of the day, so this was really a pretty drastic change for both of us.

We took a small trip to get away from our bad habits of home and just spent the time together trying to avoid any mention (or thought) of work. We also spent some time doing some of the things we never seem to find time for in our normal schedules, but always talk about doing. It was a really great experience for both of us and I had a wonderful time. I truly had no idea how burnt out I really was until after this trip.

So to all of you who, like me, think that you’re running on the edge of burnout, but still maintaining control - I would encourage you to take a day or two off. Completely turn off whatever is normally burning you out and see how you feel. You might just find that you’re a little more burnt out than you realized. And while when in this state it is incredibly hard to force yourself to take a full day (or more) out of the norm to get a handle on this, it really is worth it in the end. Not only is it necessary for your health/sanity, but it will make you more productive when you get back and you might find you make up for the lost time much sooner than you’d think.

So I turn it to all of you. How do you prevent burnout? And just as importantly, how do you know when you are burnt out?

The Year of Extremes

Posted by Jon on Jan 1, 2009

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

- Opening line of A Tale of Two Cities

This was definitely true for me over this past year. This year has brought on the extremes of my experiences in my relatively short life. From some of the best experiences (building and selling my first company) to some of the worst (losing my father and my grandmother), this has truly been a wild ride. It’s also been one of the years when I feel I have learned the most, both about myself and in general.

This past year has truly shaped my life in amazing ways, and I can’t wait to see / dread what 2009 will bring. In either case though, I’m ready for it.

Measure what matters

Posted by Jon on Dec 14, 2008

It’s tough to improve things you can’t measure (or know when they are improved). If something is worth improving it’s worth trying to find a way to measure it. In a startup you need to be conscious of how you allocate resources. My suggestion is that you determine a few goals for your team, determine what stats measure progress toward those goals, then build the tools to monitor your progress. Get the whole team involved to create a common sense of progress and get everyone thinking about this common goal.

Measure what matters - then improve it.

5 Things You Shouldn’t Do To A Developer Working On Fixing A Major Bug

Posted by Jon on Dec 8, 2008

For all you non-developers out there that work with developers on a regular basis, here are a few quick tips of things NOT to do when the developer is working on fixing a major bug.

1. Ask for attendance at a meeting which we’re not really needed at.
2. Assign other work to us - we need more weight on our shoulders in these stressful moments!
3. Ask for some development work to be done on another project - if we have any available time it’ll be spent fixing the urgent issue, so by definition we don’t have time to work on anything else.
4. Ignore our requests for help solving the problem - it’s top priority for us, but your time is better spent asking for updates than helping…
5. Send us multiple emails pointing out how serious the bug is - if we’re working on fixing it already…as fast as we can…a reminder of how urgent it is doesn’t really help anything.

Follow Through

Posted by Jon on Dec 2, 2008

Do you have “follow through”?

When I say follow through, what I mean is that you can be trusted to do what you say you will do - on your own. One very important lesson I’ve learned is that it’s critical to find people that you can trust to follow through with what they tell you they will do when choosing partners/employees in a startup. It’s also critically important that you can be trusted in this regard as well.

Startups by their very nature have limited resources. Because of this, it is more important than anywhere else that startups are as efficient as possible with these resources. The most valuable resource for a young company is the time of the employees/founders. Since everyone is forced to wear many hats and there is always more to be done, time is often a bottleneck.

If you can’t trust your employees/partners to do what they say they will, then you’re forced to spend cycles on their problems. Suddenly, you need to keep track of their tasks so that you can be sure that they complete them all. You spend extra time checking up on the status of items to make sure they’re being done on time. And most importantly, you can’t give them very much freedom to do their tasks and make them their own because you’re constantly having to check up on them. This ends up wasting a lot of your time and a considerable amount of theirs. You basically end up doubling up your resources on these problems, which is not an efficient way to do things.

Instead, make your first criteria when choosing partners/employees their ability to follow through with what they say they will do. If you can’t trust them enough to assume that they’re doing what they say they will do then you should probably start looking elsewhere. A young company simply can’t afford to have resources piled up on a single problem. You can’t be second guessing other people in the company constantly or you’ll find progress slowing to a halt over time.

Find people you can trust to follow through, then give them the freedom to do it. It’s the most efficient use of company resources, and a lot less likely to cause blow ups between coworkers stepping on each others’ toes.

Here are a couple quick things to test if you trust your coworkers/have follow through:
1.) Do you find yourself frequently doubling back on a task to check the status of an item? For example, do you send a lot of emails like: “What’s the status on ______? Did this ever get resolved?”.
2.) Do you find yourself often asking people to run stuff by you?
3.) Do you find yourself constantly worried about other people’s tasks?

These are solid signs that you don’t trust these people to “follow through” on their required tasks. So make you and your company more efficient; find people you can trust and give them the freedom to complete the tasks on their own. It’ll make all the difference…

The Tough Times

Posted by Jon on Nov 22, 2008

How do you react when the going gets tough?

I find most people fall into one of two categories. The first (and far more common) is a reaction of great distress. When your competitor comes out with something amazing and new, when you have a bad month for growth and stats are down, or when you have trouble raising money and things start to get tight, many people respond by getting depressed, giving up, and/or stressing out. “How are we ever going to compete with this, we might as well close up shop”, “With a month like this, and numbers like these, we’re never going to get the distribution/revenue we need to survive.”, and “How can we make any progress when we don’t even have the money to pay our current bills? If we can’t get some more money together now it’s all over.” are typical responses to these types of situations.

The other category of people respond in the exact opposite way. When times are tough they become more motivated and see the adverse situation as a challenge to overcome, as opposed to a death sentence. These people respond more along the lines of “Our competition might have the leg up now, but we’re going to destroy them when we do….”, “The numbers might be down now, but it just means we need to push a little harder next month and take things to the next level”, and “Money is tight, but that just means we need to trim the fat and figure out what we can do to make a better case to potential investors…we know there’s a business here, we just need to figure out how to convey that to them.”

The truth is every startup is full of ups and downs…it’s unavoidable. The question is, how will you, and the rest of your company, react? When the chips are down, the last thing your company needs is someone reinforcing the bad situation with depressing attitudes and loss of passion. A team full of these people will create a downward spiral of dreadfulness as each member reinforces the rest of the team’s “loss of hope” attitude. Trying to recover from a bad situation and simultaneously rebuild company moral is a daunting task that many don’t overcome.

Instead, the company needs people who will see the current adversity as a challenge to do better. This not only eliminates the need for a team cheerleader to boost company moral, but actually creates a deeper drive to push the envelope. A team full of this type of person actually has a positive feedback loop, as members feed off the energy and ambition of the others to ensure that you beat the competition, have better numbers next month, or close the resource gap. This category of team rises to surmount a challenging situation instead of letting it destroy them.

Admittedly this trait can be tough to spot in an interview. Many people might not even know themselves which type of reaction they’ll have to a situation until they’re actually in it. That being said though, this has become clear to me to be a key determining factor in the performance of a team and can’t be underestimated. The difficult times are what really determine a company’s fate, and having the right personality type on the team is a factor completely within our control that will have a huge impact on this outcome.

So which type of person are you? How would you classify your company’s culture in this respect? It could very well mean the difference between the success or failure of your company.

Uploading vs Downloading

Posted by Jon on Nov 11, 2008

When the internet first started out it was really hard to do much of anything. Browsing in its current form didn’t exist, and just basic navigation around the web was difficult. Fortunately, we’ve gotten really good at downloading. With web browsers, search engines, and news feeds it’s easier than ever to consume tons of content online.

A bit slower to rise was the ease of uploading, or contributing new things, to the web. Although downloading has been easy for the average guy for years, it’s really just now starting to get to a place where uploading is as easy. With the rise of WordPress, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and IntenseDebate (among others) it’s become progressively easier to upload your content to the web (in whatever form) and contribute.

So please, don’t just consume the internet - help build it by being an uploader too.

Automattic Acquires IntenseDebate

Posted by Jon on Sep 23, 2008

I’m very excited to announce the acquisition of IntenseDebate by Automattic. IntenseDebate has been my entire life for the last 1.5 years (and a good chunk of it the 3-6 months before that). If you don’t believe me just ask my girlfriend who had to put up with barely seeing me during this time.

This company has had a hugely significant impact on my life. When I look back to how things were when this project got started it is amazing to think how much has happened in a relatively short time. I’ve learned a lot from this experience (expect to see a series of blog posts elaborating on this), and I consider it a real blessing that it’s worked as well as it has.

I owe a big thanks to David and Brad of TechStars for believing in me (and the rest of the team) and giving us a huge jump start (as well as plenty of advice/help along the way). I also have to thank Josh who helped get this whole thing off the ground and pushed for us to apply to TechStars in the first place. And of course the rest of the current team: Isaac, Michael, Tom, and Austin who all played an integral role in getting us to where we are today.

So now that I’ve made the blog post equivalent of an acceptance speech, let me wrap this up by just restating how great this opportunity has been. I’ve learned a ton (which is really all I wanted out of this company/experience anyways…the rest has been a bonus) and hope to be able to share that with those around me so that someone else can learn the easy way.

This is not an ending, but rather a new begining…and I can’t wait to see where this path takes me.