Category: Technology

For a long time I was being secretive about what I was up to. I would tell people that I “had a couple of projects I was working on” or something vague like that. But the truth is I have been very busy working on exactly one thing since about the beginning of December.

A short while after I was let go, I was out in Chicago to see my old friend (and former CS STARS CEO) Bob Petrie. I wanted to catch up and bounce some ideas around, but he had a very specific idea to pitch. Bob had no intention of competing against CS STARS when he was first let go. There were too many friends still there. But after Jeff Markowitz got let go and then the entire NY office (some may not realize, but Bob started the business in NY) Bob’s thinking shifted. Not that we don’t still have friends at CS STARS, we have lots, but it has clearly changed.

Frankly, my first thought after being let go was not, “gee, how can I stay in the insurance risk management industry?”. But Bob’s pitch was compelling. Let’s build a RMIS system that has a subset of the STARS feature set, but the really important US RMIS features. Do them as well or better. Make the implementation/service model simpler and therefore cheaper. Carve out a decent share of the market. Own the business. Make some money. Work for yourself.

So I thought about it for a while. The job market is lame. I have severance pay. But this is a serious v1 software play. Bob’s initial thought was the two of us and some cheap development labor. I realized we needed more than that. We needed partners who knew what they were doing.

As part of my severance deal, I can’t solicit CS STARS employees. But the entire NY office was no longer employed by CS STARS. Including two of the best and two good friends. My pitch back to Bob was simple. Let me talk to Linus and Tim.

It turned out that both were interested. The folks at 37signals have stated that three developers is the optimal number for v1. In this case I think they were absolutely right. But you have to have the right three people.

Linus, Tim and I have probably worked harder in the past four months than ever before. But working together (with Bob, while he isn’t programming, he’s a big part of the project) has been incredibly easy. We all know what we need to do. We discuss, we take on the parts we want to, we go off and we work. We get back together, discuss, rinse, repeat. There is 0% administrative non productive time. Boring conference calls? Stupid paperwork? Mindless time tracking? Non existent.

Did I mention how much fun it has been? First of all, I love to program. But in my role at CS STARS I really hadn’t done real programming in years. And, by the way, it showed for the first couple of months. I was the worst javascript guy ever at first. But use jQuery for a month and suddenly javascript is your friend.

And after a relatively short time, we realized that we could build something pretty cool. Not just something that was ok and cheaper. Linus started with the name Origami and I really liked it because to me it evoked elegant simplicity. That has become our design philosophy.

It’s the 37signals philosophy.

We believe most software is too complex. Too many features, too many promises. Instead, we build simpler web-based software with elegant interfaces and thoughtful features you’ll actually use.

And the classic:

it’s better to make version 1 half a product than a half-assed product

Origami doesn’t do everything. But what it does, it does well. And that is much more fun to work on.

We had the rare opportunity to start from scratch. No legacy issues. SaaS only. Single database. Data model from the ground up with everything we know about what the product needs to do. That last point has been unbelievably huge. Can you imagine running a loss triangle on 2 million claims in less than 30 seconds with no pre-processed data? What else could you do with no legacy constraints?

Who knows where this will take us. At the end of the day, we have to sell it. Can we? We’ll see. But we have a compelling product, a great (if small) team, and we’ve had a lot of fun…

The next chapter has begun…

I can’t decide if this is super cool, way scary, or what. If you are not aware of Google Latitude it is, in typical Google form, easy to use, powerful, and with tremendous privacy implications.

I installed Google Maps on my Blackberry. I do not have a GPS phone. But Google Maps will use information from the cell towers to approximate my location. That’s cool because I can get a map that shows where I am. Useful.

Google Latitude takes this farther. You sign up and now your location is broadcast to whoever you allow via the web. You can see where all your friends are. Sure, sounds innocuous. But think it through.

“Hi hon, I’ll be home soon, I’m picking up some milk”. “Google Latitude shows you at the bar”. “Well, it’s only accurate to a few blocks, I’m really at the store, honest”.

I can see how this could be useful in some cases. But I can’t imagine anyone who would leave it on all the time…

For about an hour Google declared the entire internet to be harmful…

OK, that’s not a title you read every day. If you are at all interested in quantum physics (what? some people aren’t?) the use of quantum physics for incredible calculations and for transmitting information instantaneously across distances is fascinating.

So here’s an article indicating that they’ve done it. Sort of. I must point out that if you don’t have a basic understanding of quantum physics you probably won’t understand the article.

My favorite quote is at the end,

…the efficiency of the procedure is still too low to be useful. Currently, only about one out of every 100 million attempts results in a successful entanglement…

If only I could succeed at something one out of every 100 million tries and have them write an article about me…

I was checking out Mint.com, partly to see how good it was and partly to check out the UI. The interface is nice and easy to use. The product itself seems great at first (if you are a Quicken user, like me, you initially still prefer Quicken but not at the price difference). Then you check out some of the details and you realize that Mint needs some good QA.

One recent example. I logged on to Mint and immediately saw an alert:

This month you spent $700 on gas. Normally you spend $50.

I like that Mint tries to analyze your spending to help you save money. But remember, I live in Brooklyn. I drive twice a month. I don’t spend $700 a year on gas. It turns out that the nearest bank to me (half a block) is Marathon Bank. Apparently Mint thinks this is a gas station (there are, after all, Marathon gas stations). I withdrew $700 this month at that ATM.

So Mint is nice, but clearly not perfect.

But my weekly Mint email had the following tip:

Three Principles of Personal Finance

Personal finance is simple.

1. Spend less than you earn.
2. Make the money you have work for you.
3. Be prepared for the unexpected.

That’s really it. It’s not that complicated.

If you don’t have Quicken or Microsoft Money and don’t want to spend any money on personal finance software, check out Mint. It’s not perfect, but it is free and it’s pretty good.