z on life

So I am thinking about writing a series on what I’ve learned over the past 3 years of doing startups. That said, I wanted to give you guys a bit of an idea of what I’ve done in case you’re curious where I got this perspective, or if you’re deciding whether or not to listen to me.

Alright, here we go. Rewind to 2005. I am in school at Carnegie Mellon, 17 years old, finishing up my CS degree, and about to start my MBA the coming year. Even with the MBA, I thought it was pretty likely I would go to some sort of CS grad school, that is, until the entrepreneurial bug bit. It all started when a friend from CMU, Kyle Langworthy, approached me with an idea. We took it, ran with it, and I have never looked back. It’s been startups ever since.

Really quickly, in the 3 years since, I’ve done the following:

• Envivial - 3D virtual retail stores for interactive online shopping
• Eivod - P2P click-to-play on-demand video in the browser
• SlapVid - an innovative online video previewing experience
• Cloudant - super-fast multi-streaming home routers
• My Current Gig - going big in consumer internet (company TBA)

Envivial was my entry point with Kyle and Joe Damato where we learned the ropes, won some business plan competitions, and really ground out our first real startup experience. After that, Joe and I continued on to found Eivod with Wei An Wang and Bob DiMaggio where we built our first really technically hard product, one that got us into Y-Combinator. SlapVid was our product we launched in YC as a test platform for this P2P stuff and a great user experience on top of YouTube. When that didn’t quite work out, we turned P2P on its head, and used our networking expertise to make multi-streaming routers in Cloudant and pitched this at the YC demo day. After demo day, we decided it was best not to continue and it was back to the MBA, but only for a short time. Only 2 months later, I was swept out to the west coast into the current gig with Andrew Chen, Matt Rubens, and very soon thereafter Aman Gupta. Now we’re just cranking away.

Anyway, it’s been a dense few years of learning. In this time, I finished my CS degree and will get my MBA in a few weeks (assuming I pass, knock on wood). I’ve iterated on the startup experience, and learned an enormous amount about technology, building companies, and life in general. In the posts to come, I will discuss some of that learning.

PS: In hindsight, I realize the need to give mad props to Kyle for getting this ball rolling.