Zak Homuth

My two new design goals…

One benefits of having meetings with brilliant people, and its really becoming my favourite, is the insight you get into the way they look at the world and in part how they got to be so successful. Its really kinda neat. It helps me to step back and look at the bigger picture. Where our company fits in the world. How we best serve our users. How we win. My favourite little tid-bit recently was a two part point. Think of it as Sun Tzu for web design. And how to win any game of community building, ever. If you can do either of these you are pretty darn close. If you can do both, then you win.

Build something beautiful so people leave the tab open.

Give people a reason to hit refresh.

Think of the tabs you leave open and the pages that you check for updates. These are probably either things that you need to use, or things that you love to use. These are probably sites that have won, or are winning. Maybe its as simple as that.

Upverter in 130 Seconds

Pitch!

You may remember me lamenting trying to describe our business in 30 seconds. Well we have been promoted to 130 seconds now! so here goes again! haha. For lack of a better way to do this - and to save you all from reading a pitch (not a ton of fun), here are the big points as to why we are great, why we are going to win, and ish how we are going to do it.

• We exist in a market made up of real money. And its a huge market, in fact its a little more than 4.6 billion dollars per year. This isn’t twitter or facebook or google. No CPC or impressions. But rather people paying real money for software so that they can design real things, so they can pay money to have them manufactured and then ultimately charge money to sell them. This is like an old school economy thing. and did I mention its huge?

• Our competitors do not understand the internet. In fact they have spent about 10 years trying to wrap their heads around it. Somewhere on the way they figured out what VNC was and I think they stopped looking. Maybe someone told them that web-apps and SaaS just ment running desktop apps through VNC. I dunno, but thats where they are right now. Leaving us a wide open hole to step into the market through.

• There is an unserved market of engineers, students and hobbyists that need better tools. Arduino is taking off, small electronics shops are popping up all over, and people are sick of Eagle and Altium.

• We are following the right models. Look at github and salesforce. The former is becoming the unquestioned focal point of software development and collaboration on the web. While the later built a billion dollar business by disrupting old desktop apps.

• We have a product and demand. People cant wait to use our software. I dont think we could build it fast enough. And more importantly we have built something already that proves what we are doing is possible. It proves we can execute.

• We are the perfect team. Who better than us? We are EE trained. Steve is the best hacker I have ever met. Mike knows the web inside and out. And I can hack hardware. Its perfect.

Open Source Everything!

 Check out todays Upverter blog post on a very cool movement to open source the common tools needed to build things like a tractor. Its very cool.

GitHub & FOSS vs. OSHW

 There was a decent article written about github changing FOSS, so I followed it up with an article comparing github to the upcoming Upverter offering. We are hoping to break down a lot of the same barriers that github broke down for software. Give it a read @ the Upverter blog.

The End of an Era

 I was designated grocery mule last night. So I headed over to the local super-mega-happy-value-mart with duffle bag in hand, and picked up the latest supply of gruel. On my way I had a nice chat with my Ma. We talked a bit about the stress levels of everyone right now, and a bit about our upcoming release, and I got an update on the family back home. It was all great! But amongst the goings on back home was a pretty epic event for our family. My parents had taken Dever to his very last minor hockey game, and by extension their very last minor hockey game. So I thought I would take a minute out of the chaos to look at the numbers for this monumental event.

• Zak: Played for 10 years
• Mitch: Played for 11 years (often on 2+ teams)
• Clint: Played for 8 years
• Jake: Played for 14 years
• Grayson: Played for 10 years
• Denver: Played for 8 years
• Average events per year: 3/wk  x  28 wks

All told equals a somewhat unbelievable 5,124 hockey events. Hats off to my parents, because thats kinda wacko. I can only imagine the surreality that comes with such a prolonged and significant era of life being over. From my part I have to at least say thanks, thanks an incredible sacrifice for their kids, and I’m super grateful! Anyway, thats really it for today. Stuff is crazy busy here trying to crank out a public release - but were making progress, and learning tons, which is great!

The Clock is Ticking…

 Holy wow we have a lot to do, and almost zero time to do it in. Its going to be a very, very crazy 2 weeks. We have signed-up to have an incredible amount done, and we need to pull-through. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

Upverter’s 30 Second Pitch

I want you to imaging 30 seconds (and try to not giggle too much). Its a reasonable amount of time for a lot of things, waiting for a stop light, a car commercial, or showering (Mike would disagree, haha). But describing your business? A 30 second pitch doesn’t really seem right… 7 months of hackery, brainstorming, and great ideas in just 30 seconds?!?! Thats right we have a pitch!

Today is special for us, because today we will be spending a whole 30 seconds chatting with some investors, and we need to make our 30 seconds shine! So you should hop on over to the Upverter blog and hopefully it will give you a pretty good idea of how we are kicking ass and changing the world in a whole 5 sentences / 30 seconds (and if it doen’t TELL ME! cause we have a problem!!!)

Guess Who Made It Into The US?!?!

ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yesterday was probably the most kick-ass day I’ve had in quite a while. After months of headaches, worrying, and fighting with the boys at the US Customs and Border Protection I was finally admitted into the US to visit my partners in Mountain View, attend some meetings/dinners/seminars, raise some money, and take this whole startup thing to the next level! So, at about 6:30 on Monday night my dad drove me to the London train station where I hopped on a train to Toronto.

At this point I hadn’t really slept except for a few hours on Saturday night, so I was pretty wired, but I was just paralyzed with nervousness and fear. It was terrible. I hadn’t been so negatively scared or worried in a really long time. I just kept going over all the stuff that would go bad if I couldn’t make it.

Not fun.

Anyway, I got into Toronto around 10 and hopped on the subway heading for Mike’s mom’s house, where I was gonna crash for a few hours. Mikes mom greeted me when I got there, and we chatted for a little bit, but I was keeping her up pretty late at that point so she headed for bed and me to the basement to do some email, a little blogging and lots of worrying. At about 3 I got a taxi to the airport, then proceeded to twiddle my thumbs for an hour and a half.

First off: Toronto Pearson doesn’t open customs until 4:15 or so in the morning, so dont ever show up much before that!

Second: Checking in online is absolutely useless when you have bags to check, that was a waste of time.

Once I got my bag tag I headed into customs. There was no line so I got my choice of officer, but man was I ever scared (I’m still shaking a little now thinking about it). I ended up with an officer that really only said “bordering pass and passport”, and then after looking at the nasty stamp in my passport, “go to the back room”. Not surprising, but he sure wasn’t a talker! But here’s where it starts to go better. I really only wait 5 minutes before an officer calls me up.

Right off the bat he tells me nothing has changed and that I’m still not aloud to start a business in the US. I let him talk, and explain there has been a misunderstanding, handle the “so the other officers are lying?” question and show him the articles of incorporation. He asks to see a few more things, but generally is very kind, listens to what I have to say, and asked relevant questions.

He we thorough, but he was very receptive to my story lining up, and me having all the right paper work. In the end he checked my bags and sent me on my way. Total time of maybe 20 mins. I really dont know what I did right this time, but it went well! And thats it really! I hopped on a plane, had horrible nightmares about oauth + CBP + Airport security (“I know I forgot to update the twitter application secret key, now they wont let me in the US, and I still don’t have my shoes back on!”, haha). And when I woke up Steve was waiting for me in SFO.

I still can’t really believe it, but I’m here. Were together again. So now I owe you a little tour of our hacker dojo! But in the mean time I hope this whole mess has been insightful. I hope you learn from my mistakes. And I hope you never have to go through any of what I did. Be good, be prepared, be candid, and try to understand the rules - and I think most of the time you should be fine.

Oh, and just to ice the cake after I got off the plane I got a very ironic email from my dad. It was a link to this article by the Globe on how not to cross the border. haha. If only I had this a few months ago!

Upverter: Alpha Live!

Exciting News!!!! We have finally launched the Upverter Alpha. Woot Woot! Thats right! We have a product, users, the works. This is soooo exciting! Check out the announcement at the upverter blog, or the landing page to register for the beta. In other news, I wanted to apologize for going quiet on the wire. I have still been writing, but with the chaos of the Alpha blitz there was no time to fix obscure wordpress issues. The blog should be working again, and I’ll go through and back post my writings.

InMojo

 Today I just wanted to do a quick little plug on our new best friends in the whole world InMojo. These guys are kick-ass. They are an open source hardware marketplace of sorts with a focus on crowd-sourced orders and breaking down the manufacturing and P2P sales problems that OSHW have. I spent an hour or so on the phone with them the other night and it was just a great chat. We talked about how we breathe more life into the movement, what our users need, how our products fit together, and what other startups in the ecosystem we need to prop up. Because at the end of the day we are all trying to make this place, this open source hardware, and hobbyist electronics ecosystem, a better place to hang out. We all want it to be a better place to learn, with better tools and easy ways to share your work with your friends. We want people to understand the open source vision, and that we all get better when we work together. And we want ways to build what we design, ways to make it really, truly come to life, and ways to build them for our friends. We are in the together, and we need to work together, and I’m just so excited that the guys over at InMojo share our vision for the future of electronics and OSHW. If you haven’t yet, you should check out their site. They are adding content all the time, and root them on ‘cause they are a brand new company just like Upverter and we all need your help to make this work!