Focus

Quitting one’s job to become a full-time entrepreneur is one hell of a time-management tool (although admittedly not for everyone).  When I worked for someone else it was easy to steal away a small amount of time to work on things that perhaps weren’t a huge priority for the company but were simply interesting to me.  Google has their official “20% time” that both acknowledges and encourages this.  I never worked for Google but it could be said that I always implemented my own personal 20% policy in every job I’ve ever had.*  However, that was then.  Things are very different as an entrepreneur.  All hours of the day I find myself thinking “is what I’m doing right this very moment going to help me get more customers (or retain the ones I’ve got)?”  It’s amazing how powerful that question is and how easy it becomes to know what you should be doing at every moment of the day.  In fact, I’m asking myself that question right now and that’s why I’m ending this post.

* Actually in practice it was more like a 120% policy, as in my job consumes 100% and I find another 20% elsewhere for my projects :)

Photo by Ihtatho

Need some input, what exactly constitutes a tech company these days? Is Groupon a tech company?

A lot of businesses these days are claiming to be “tech companies”.  I’m guilty of it too.  I routinely position StorageByMail as a technology company when it suits me.  And I can make a very compelling case when I describe how StorageByMail is the technology layer that connects consumers, delivery companies and operators of major fulfillment centers to deliver a superior storage experience.  But are we really a tech company? Put another way, when we’re a big public company would you say we’re more likely to be compared with Public Storage (NYSE:PSA) or with Salesforce (NYSE:CRM)? My guess would be the former.

I find it strange when I read articles in the media about Groupon.  Reporters all describe Groupon as a tech company.  And the supposed tech blogs seem to agree that Groupon is a tech company judging by the quantity of articles.  I suppose to some extent if Google attempts to buy your company that automatically qualifies you as a tech company.

The point of this post is not to say who is a tech company and who is not.  I don’t know the answer to that question.  And at the end of the day it probably doesn’t matter as long as companies are creating value and delivering on their plan.  But in the interest of satisfying my curiosity I thought I’d write this post to see what others think.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments.  Is Groupon a tech company? What about StorageByMail? Of all the companies covered on TechCrunch, what percentage would you say are truly tech companies?

Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

Here’s a surefire way to spark a heated discussion —- ask a bunch of technology entrepreneurs what they think is the best technology stack on which to build your company.  I did this over and over again before I building StorageByMail.com.  There are those who will make a very compelling case for Ruby on Rails, while others will swear by PHP, Python, or even Microsoft ASP.NET.  Can Rails scale?  Is Microsoft evil? Is the Python developer community robust? I’ve heard all of the arguments and I still can’t answer a single one of these questions.  Nor can I tell you what is the best technology stack.  But I had a decision to make.  I went with Microsoft ASP.NET (and C#), a technology that would rank about one notch above Cobol if one were to rank technologies according to coolness.  Here’s why I made the choice I did:

  1. I don’t have a computer science background and as a newbie I found ASP.NET to be unmatched in terms of documentation, the developer community and the quality of its IDE (Visual Studio).  These things are important if you’re a beginner.
  2. Hiring quality coders on a bootstrapper’s budget is easier for ASP.NET than it is for anything open source.  It just is.  If you go the open source route you have to compete with the all the cool kids (Tumblr, Etsy, etc) for talent whereas with Microsoft products you’re competing with Dundler Mifflin.  It’s not about the quality of the talent.  It’s a simple supply and demand question.
  3. An exit strategy should to some extent inform your technology decisions.  In the case of StorageByMail we’re far more likely to catch the eye of Public Storage or Fedex than Google or Facebook.  I made a list of likely acquirers and then looked at what kind of programming skills they hire for.  It was clear they all favor Microsoft.  All things being equal it seemed logical to do the same.
  4. Upon examining my own personal network I realized that I had a good support network of C# programmers to rely upon.  And I knew that I was going to be asking them a lot of dumb questions when I ran into trouble.  So I might as well work in their language of choice.

At the end of the day things just have to work and customers don’t give a shit what technology you built your site on.  Make a choice and move on.  Looking back it’s probably one of the least significant decisions I’ve made to date (though I do admittedly have a minor case of Rails envy).