Life at a Silicon Valley Startup: PBwiki

March 27 41 Comments latest by Joshua M. Andrews

Warning: Jobs at my startup are available below.

I write a lot about entrepreneurship on iwillteachyoutoberich, but I haven’t written much about my day job, a startup in Silicon Valley called PBwiki that I co-founded. Since we’re hiring, it’s a perfect time to write about life at a startup as a thinly veiled excuse to get you to apply to work here. Done and done!

Last time I wrote a job post for PBwiki here, we ended up hiring Paul Singh, who moved to the Bay Area from Virginia with his wife. He’s now our Director of Support and manages a staff of 6. So I’m hoping that there may be a couple of you who’ll be interested in PBwiki and send me your resumes.

What does PBwiki do?
Wikis are collaborative websites that lots of people can edit (Wikipedia is an example of a wiki-as-encyclopedia). You might use a wiki to plan a project or create an online classroom. Instead of sending 50 emails to coordinate something, you put files and pages in one secure place and let your team collaborate online. Try it out: You can create a PBwiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich (yeah, I said it) at PBwiki.com. As for me, I’m the VP of Community Marketing, meaning I manage the messaging and parts of the product that our millions of users see.

Here’s a great demo of how wikis work:

And wikis are getting more popular: In 2007, “wiki” was searched for more than “blog.”

We started PBwiki in 2005 and have become the world’s largest host of business and educational wikis. The United Nations has used PBwiki. So do over 1/3 of the Fortune 500. Collaboration is a huge market where companies and regular people are willing to invest to solve their communication challenges. And we’ve tried to build a drop-dead simple approach to using it. Just like iwillteachyoutoberich, the most important part is getting started.

How are we doing?
Here are some key PBwiki stats:

• 400% annualized revenue growth since inception
• Over 350% growth in the # of wikis hosted since last year
• We’ve doubled our staff (engineering, marketing, sales, admin) in the last 3 months. Between our Bay Area headquarters and New Hampshire sales office, we now have a small team of 18.
• Raised just over $2 million in venture capital

And we’re looking for a few key people to join us. But first, what’s it like working here?

Working at PBwiki

Kristine and I are doing a hot-sauce eating competition:

Things are getting hot — Paul has the defibrillator handy:

Paintballing on our Colorado retreat. I am the one with a lot of paint on me:

A real-time display of millions of PBwiki users and how they’re using our service:

Dress is casual, we have free lunches/espresso, gym memberships, and stock options for each employee.

But more importantly, working here gives you the chance to make changes that millions of users will see that very same week. Whenever people ask me how they can get started doing something entrepreneurial, I always suggest working at a startup. You learn the ropes and get mentored by experienced people, and you get the freedom to experiment and try to make huge changes very quickly.

How we think about hiring
Straight from our official hiring page…

We value intelligence over workplace experience, and clever independent projects over GPA. We’d much rather talk to someone who started a non-profit in college or led a group of a Presidential campaign interns than someone who got a 1600 on their SATs and a 4.0 in college but never ventured off the beaten path. Tell us that crazy thing that kept you up all weekend.

Hmm…sounds suspiciously like an article I wrote a while back: Your college is not a technical school.

What can you learn here?
Here are some of the things I’ve learned…

• How to raise venture capital and what happens in a board meeting
• How to set up systems so that, if you get hit by a bus tomorrow, the company will still go on
• What key-man insurance is
• How to work with marketing and engineering teams to make quick changes to a product and not get bogged down by process
• How to nurture a community of millions of users and grow a web service without spending any money on advertising

If you have any questions about working at a startup, post a comment here and I’ll respond in the comments. And I’ll post a list of our jobs soon!

[Update: Here’s a list of positions we’re hiring for.]

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41 Comments latest by Joshua M. Andrews

I’m back from vacation, some links I’m reading

March 25 13 Comments latest by Schadenfruede

I’m back from India!

I had a great time in Delhi and Mumbai, and I’ll probably post some of my photos/thoughts a little later. I was also lucky enough to meet up with a few readers (here’s Ranjan’s writeup on meeting me), so thank you to everyone who met up and said hello.

While I’m catching up on stuff, here are some links that caught my attention recently.

• Some women don’t go see their doctor because they’ll be weighed in public. Clueless comments include “Why don’t they just say no?” and “Do something to change it.” As I’ve written, food and weight are similar to personal finance. This is a classic Failure of the Last Mile.

• Great overview of why timeshares are a stupid scam.
• The Entrepreneurship Myth. Author dispels myths about entrepreneurship. You make less $ than working in a company, it’s riskier, and your chances of success depend primarily on the market you enter. Fascinating stuff. DO YOUR RESEARCH BEFORE STARTING ANYTHING.
• What to do if you’re laid off in the 2008 recession. Scoble’s brilliant post on what to do if you’re laid off. We should be doing this anyway.
• Sad, eye-opening article on the plight of American homeowners who got in over their head. This chart shows that the worst is yet to come — a lot worse.
  

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13 Comments latest by Schadenfruede

The Planning Fallacy

March 21 14 Comments latest by Some summer reading

Eliezer Yudkowsky joins us from Overcoming Bias, an econblog devoted to human rationality and the cognitive psychology of mistakes. And if you think that’s interesting, you should see his day job.

The Sydney Opera House is among the most epic construction overruns of all time. Initially slated to be completed in 1963 for $7 million, it was finally completed in 1973 for $102 million. But don’t look down on them: Experiment shows that, deep in our hearts, we all have an inner home improvement contractor.

One study (I’m not going to include the bibliography in this post; but you can find it all here) asked students when they thought they’d complete their academic projects. Specifically, the students were asked for times by which they thought it was 50%, 75%, and 99% probable they would’ve finished already.

Care to guess how many students finished on or before their estimated 50%, 75%, and 99% certain delivery dates? If so, better guess now, because I’m about to tell you:

• 13% of the students finished their project by the time they had assigned a 50% probability;
• 19% finished by the time assigned a 75% probability;
• and only 45% (less than half!) finished by the time of their 99% probability.

This phenomenon is more generally known as the “planning fallacy”. Roughly, the planning fallacy is that people think they can plan.

A clue to the underlying problem was uncovered by researchers who found that asking subjects for their predictions based on realistic “best guess” scenarios, versus asking subjects for their hoped-for “best case” scenarios, produced indistinguishable results.

See, when you ask someone for a “realistic” scenario, they envision every event happening the way they think is normal - which usually means, just like I planned it. No unexpected delays, no unforeseen catastrophes - what people envision by default is the best-case scenario.

Reality, it turns out, usually delivers results somewhat worse than the “worst case”. When you ask people to envision everything that can possibly go wrong, their schedule gets a lot closer to reality - but still not close enough.

Unlike most cognitive biases, the planning fallacy has a simple remedy - though I’ll warn you, you’re not going to like it.

The same researchers asked another group of students to describe highly specific plans for their Christmas shopping - plans that described where, when, and how. Another group was simply asked when they expected to finish their Christmas shopping. The first group, with the detailed plans, expected to finish shopping more than a week before Christmas - the second group expected to finish an average of 4 days before Christmas - and in reality, both groups finished an average of 3 days before Christmas. That’s right: detailed planning made the students more optimistic.

Why? Another study, done in Japan, helps to illuminate the answer: A group of Japanese students expected to finish their essays, on average, 10 days before the deadline. They actually finished 1 day before deadline. Asked when they’d finished previous essays, they said: “One day before deadline.”

You see, you do have a reliable source of information about how well you’ll do. It’s how well you did last time. But the more details you visualize, the more chance you have to be optimistic - to visualize everything going exactly as planned - instead of remembering how long it took last time, when things didn’t go as planned.

A similar finding is that experienced outsiders, who don’t know all the details and all the special reasons why this project is bound to do unusually well, but who do have a lot of experience on projects in that area, tend to be a lot less optimistic and a lot more accurate than the actual planners and implementers.

The “inside view” is when you generate your predictions and time estimates by thinking about all the unique details of how it’s going to go this time - planning where, when, and how.

The “outside view” is when you deliberately avoid thinking about the special features of this project - deliberately avoid fine-tuning your estimate - and remember how long it took you to finish broadly similar projects in the past.

The inside view has its uses. There’s a certain amount to be said for, like, actually planning things ‘n stuff. But figuring out how long your project will really take, is not one of those uses. For schedule estimates, the outside view beats the inside view, hands down, every time.

So there’s a reliable way to fix the planning fallacy, if you’ve got the strength to stomach it. Just ask how long it took you the last few times, without considering any of the special reasons this project will be different. Better yet, ask an experienced outsider how long broadly similar projects have taken (and be sure not to tell them the details).

You’ll get back an answer that sounds hideously long, and clearly reflects no understanding of all sorts of important particulars. This answer is true. Deal with it.

This has been Eliezer Yudkowsky, Research Fellow of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Some say he may be the mad scientist who destroys the world, others say he may be the mad scientist who saves it, a few say he’s just plain mad - but not many people say he’s boring. He’s still blogging at Overcoming Bias; check it out!

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14 Comments latest by Some summer reading

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