Life and Tech #2: Betaworks’ innovation weapon: the full-stack developer

NOTE: This is reprinted from my email newsletter, which was sent out on April 16th. A new newsletter from me gets sent out each Thursday night. Subscribe here: https://eepurl.com/bjalx5

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Last week I spent a few hours with John Borthwick, founder of Betaworks, a famous startup studio in New York City (it’s the home ofDigg, Giphy, Instapaper, Dots, Blogloving, Bitly, and lots of other startups).

Here I do one of my first Periscope’s (a live video service owned byTwitter): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv6UgfXyNSg (unfortunately in this recording you can’t see all the chat that was happening on top of the video as I walked around). As thousands of people watched we talked about how he comes up with so many interesting startups and then visited a few of them.

The main takeaway is that he looks for people who are full-stack developers.

What’s that?

A developer who can build an entire product by herself.

What does that mean?

One person needs to know databases, query languages, how to setup cloud infrastructure, ObjectiveC, if building a mobile app, or CSS and Java, if building for the Web, etc etc.

Some advantages, I learned, when developing with such a developer: 

1. They can build very quickly, because they don’t need to waste time on communicating with other team members, or in meetings.

2. The designs they come up with often have a better “voice.” In other words, the app has a holistic design. When apps are developed by teams, sometimes one part of the app feels different than another.

3. When they do start building teams, they understand how each piece of the app or service works, so they can teach others how to integrate or maintain the code.

4. The code has a consistent style.

5. When the founder is asked a question about his/her product they probably know the story of not just how it was built, but what it does, which makes PR easier.

 6. They can get entire products built extremely quickly (the developer who built Meerkat, for instance, did it in eight weeks. The developer who built Yo did it in eight hours). This lets startup studios like Y Combinator build a larger number of products per year, try things out, and see what sticks to the wall.

 Borthwick told me how the developer behind Dots was working on something else, built Dots himself, and it spun out of the project he was originally working on after it became very popular. Now he is running a small team (you see it in the video I shot).

By the time we got around to the fourth company, Blogloving, I started seeing a trend, every employee could talk about the company they were working on with the same authority as the CEO did. Can I do that for every product at Rackspace? No, being a full-stack developer is much harder in a larger, existing company (hard, because we have products from Sharepoint to run your Internet all the way to Object Rocket, which is for developers who are building modern databases on MongoDB that need to run hyper fast). Much easier to do when you are on a small team that has built something smaller and more specific like Instapaper or Dots.

Chris Messina (the guy who came up with hashtags over on Twitter, by the way, but a well regarded developer) takes the full stack developer idea further, to all broader-focused employees. He says that full-stack employees are potentially the key to the future of employment: https://medium.com/@chrismessina/the-full-stack-employee-ed0db089f0a1 Ahh, by Chris’ definition I’m a full-stack employee.

Are you working with full-stack developers? Are you able to hire them? (These rock stars won't work for everyone and on every project). Are you able to change your development methodology to encourage this kind of development in your shop? Let me know and we'll share the best in future newsletters, or on my LinkedIn and Facebook accounts.

COACHELLA TECH REPORT

Over the weekend I hung out with Gopi Sangha at the Coachella music festival. He runs the social and technology teams at GoldenVoice, the folks who put on the Coachella and Stagecoach music festivals near Palm Springs every year. Coachella is largely seen as the most influential music festival in the world. One reason why is it uses more technology than other festivals.

You can find my interview with Gopi on Meerkat, at https://youtu.be/mUJ8Hu-KELs

Some things I learned, have impacts on all of you.

First, most of his customers are on iOS. That shocked me. We all know that nine out of 10 phones sold worldwide are Android, so why were nine out of 10 at Coachella iOS? Gopi figures it’s mostly about demographics. It costs a lot of money to be among the 100,000 each weekend on the festival grounds, and the richer demographics are far more iOS centric. He says he hears that from other brands, as well. Sure explains why startups continue to go after iOS first.

Second, Coachella has 160 Bluetooth Smart Beacons on the field (AKA iBeacons). He uses these for everything from helping you remember where you parked (I got a notification reminding me I was on the Yellow Path, which helped me later when I had to remember which path I needed to go down to get back to my car -- the festival grounds are huge and it’s easy to get lost, especially when you arrive during the day and leave at night).

He also lets you use them to meet up with your friends, get info on schedule changes, and more.

Some advice he has for other business owners? Make sure you don’t become one of the apps that people either delete, because they are too spammy, or turn off notifications on. “It’s extremely difficult to get people to turn notifications back on once they turn them off,” he told me.

Instead, he recommends giving your users nine notifications that have value to them before putting a single ad into the stream. He says for a music festival this is tough to do. Coachella has a ton of partners, like YouTube, Sephora, Twitter, Uber, JBL, Snapchat, etc, and each of these brands desperately wants to shove offers and brand messages to festival goers. He refuses to let them do that. If you visit the brand houses around the festival grounds you’ll notice that they even go further. Brands aren’t even allowed to use their own logos on their buildings. Gopi says they really work on protecting the festival goer from brand advertising to keep the experience as authentic and nice as possible. So many businesses should learn from his example here, especially as we head into a world where retailers will have tons of beacons around the field as well.

One other thing I noticed is how big a deal Uber was here. They had a massive operation, with thousands of cars. Here’s my report about how it did versus the taxi industry: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153209104339655&set=a.18390289654.24496.501319654&type=1 It’s clear Uber is winning customers away from Taxis simply by providing a better experience and no where was that more clear than at Coachella.

DRONE WARS

Last week I attended the DJI Phantom 3 product launch in New York City, and this week I was at NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) to get a look at 3DRobotics new Solo. It’s interesting to see the path both companies are taking. DJI is way out in front, having shipped a 4K drone for months now. 3DRobotics won’t ship until June. But it is interesting to see the different philosophies both have.

DJI is more turnkey. You buy its $1,249 drone and you get everything built in to do 4K video. 3DRobotics? First you buy a $999 drone, then you get a $400 gimbal and a $499 GoPro. But 3DRobotics is more maintainable, and a bit easier to use other sensors underneath. Its software is also more advanced, especially for videographers. How? Well, you can easily tell it where to stop and start a moving shot and then the drone goes and executes what you taught it to do. Here 3DR’s Scott Horn shows me their new drone: https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/videos/vb.501319654/10153209762404655/?type=2&theater

But the real problem for this industry will be regulation. Lots of places, including Coachella, have banned drones (although Gopi’s team worked with DJI to have an Inspire 1 flying overhead for its video crews). To get up to date on the latest drone law, I talked with Brendan Schulman at the DJI event: https://youtu.be/E-N6wL1Kn2Y He pointed out that there are a new set of laws being considered and that we only have until April 24th to influence them. He says “I don't think people recognize the consequences. For example, it appears that all educational and academic uses of model aircraft will become fully regulated and require licenses, thus threatening STEM programs nationwide. Here is a webinar on topics of concern:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl8ZvMe091c&t=10m15s .”

Anyway, the drone space is one where we’re seeing a lot of innovation, and they are just plain fun to fly around. Have a great week, next week I’ll be writing to you from the Cards & Payments expo https://www.terrapinn.com/exhibition/cards-asia/index.stm where I’m giving a keynote. I’ll give you a report from what I learn there next week.


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I read all my email at [email protected] and anything done in response to this newsletter goes to the top of my inbox. I’m also at +1-425-205-1921 or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble. Please let me know how I, or Rackspace, the leading managed cloud company, can be of service to you. Thanks too to Hugh Macleod and team for helping me do art each week for this. We love his work!

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