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Life In a Web Startup

Disqus LogoI spent three days in San Francisco basically living with the founders, Daniel and Jason, of Disqus, a small Y Combinator startup that is building a distributed comment system for online publications (I use it on this blog). The trip was, by far, one of the best experiences of my life. I got a unique look into the micro-economy of the web startup industry. Previous to my trip, I had a wildly glorified image of the “Web 2.0″ startup culture/bubble, mainly based of how it’s portrayed in the blogging community.

I’ve posted pictures from the trip on Flickr.

While in San Francisco, I was able to talk to quite a few startups:

  • Disqus — Distributed comment system.
  • Dropbox — Simple file synchronization.
  • Clickpass — One click login.
  • tipjoy — Easy micro-payments.

What Do They Do?

Many of the said startups were still in the wee-early stages of being a company and their “offices” were also their apartments. They rent apartments month by month so that a move to a real office can be quick and painless. The lines between work and play (no secret) were extremely blurred and work sometimes lasted from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to bed. Days were also filled with all types of coffee shop meetings, from venture capital firms and other startups, to lawyers. The phrase “wearing many different hats” is an understatement for these guys. Not only are these companies building a product, they are building web communities.

Objective: Preemptive Prototyping

Web startups are not necessarily aiming to make fully scaled-up products/services or a completely implemented revenue model. Big beasts like Facebook and Digg are obviously startup anomalies and I don’t think too many web startups actually aspire for such obesity. Essentially, startups are preemptively thinking up new service and product ideas, prototyping the software and web community, and then a company like Google picks and chooses which product it wants to take on.

“The Model Race Car Model”

Model Race Cars

A startup can be thought of as building a model race car. The model car is smaller, only 1/16th the size of a real car and doesn’t have professional racing decals to make money. Google buys the models it fancies and builds them up to make real race cars, decals and all. Many web startups these days show off their potential by rapidly building a large web community or user base. By this metric, Disqus is flourishing. Of course, in reality, this “preemptive prototyping model” applies in varying degrees. Just to be clear, I don’t mean to suggest that startups are building toys, merely that its faster to convey an idea on a smaller scale.

In the end, I decided not work at a startup. At least right now, startup life is not for me. I’ll be moving to Chicago in a few months to work at Allston Trading, an algorithmic trading firm. This was definitely one of the hardest decisions of my life.

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  • I thought you might find this pretty interesting: Valleywag reports the boom may be over. Without any original research, I saw this coming for a long time now.
  • That's very interesting. Sahil and I were just talking last night about the lack of startups going public. It could be that the startups which went public last year had actually been around for quite a while and the startups this year are still starting up.

    The startups based around a community seem to be in a pretty good place right now compared to startup-based technologies.

    Here's the New York Times article for reference.

    Fred Wilson, VC for Disqus, posted an interesting article on the same subject.
  • Google just announced the release of their new product, Google App Engine, which is essentially a scalability back-end for web apps. "Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications." This could completely change the way the web startup bubble operates. It's now affordable to scale so, why not?
  • Dude did you just comment on your own blog? :)

    Google App Engine sounds cool...
  • Absolutely. It's like a footnote but after the fact. Maybe I missed that day when we learned about commenting on our on blogs being against the rules ;-D I've written a full post based on this comment now. I'd like to hear what you think about the topic.
  • As Phil weened me off of facebook, I definitely had to learn that commenting on your own blog is more than acceptable... all the cool kids do it :P Disqus wouldn't be nearly as fun if the threads were one sided (btw I'm so excited for threads).

    As for startups, the paradigm that your proposing sounds good in theory, but what if part of proving your idea involves proving that it's scalable? Just because it works in a microcosm doesn't necessarily mean it can work in the macro. Am I completely off base here?

    Also, what happens to the subscriber base once you sell your idea to Google? I'm a little worried about the fate of my comments, tbqh, once Disqus is bought out.
  • Two very good points.

    First, you're right. Even though startups now have an easier time designing with scalability in mind, it doesn't actually mean any aspect will be scalable when the time comes to have a million users. I suppose Google would try to design their App Engine system in a way to minimize mistakes like this. There's really no way to tell until we actually see some success vs. failure stats.

    Second, I think like Del.icio.us, Grand Central, Blogger, etc, the acquiring company has a lot to save by not changing the community surface of the app at all. Disqus has definitely built a back door for people like though: there's an export feature. From there I can't imagine it would be too hard to add the comments back into your blog system with some PHP and SQL.
  • Wrong decision, you suck............how can you pass an opportunity like this !!!!!!! Dude you are 22, take a chance.
  • You will get your chances as well. No need to live vicariously through me.
  • Not true. In fact, I have a voracious need to live vicariously through you, that's what fandom is all about. Also, this margin is hUUGe. Let this be a lesson that hitting 'reply' is not always the best option :\
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