Hackbright: Women Can Code
Hackbright teaches coding to women.
Some people are born hackers. They’re drawn to computers, take up coding as soon as they learn to read, and they never stop programming, learning, and developing their skills. I work with some of these people at Evernote. You probably do, too. Maybe you are one.
Geeks and natural coders make up the hacker elite, and create many of the apps and services that we use. But you don’t have to be born a geek to become a coder. That’s good, because there aren’t nearly enough developers now, judging by the job boards in Silicon Valley.
That also makes an opportunity. There is money in creating engineers.
There are several organizations that teach the people who neglected to be prodigies or CS majors programming. One of the most interesting is The Hackbright Academy, which runs 10-week programming courses exclusively for women.
I met Hackbright’s Angie Chang at a Girl Geek dinner she organized that we hosted here at Evernote. So far, she told me, she’s graduated all 28 women that have entered her program, and 90% of them are now employed as software engineers.
“Our goal is to pivot peoples’ careers,” Chang told me. But pivoting women into coding jobs is different from teaching men.
It’s different for girls
I talked with Sara Gottlieb, one of the Hackbright graduates and now a front-end engineer at Survey Monkey. She told me that her psychology degree was “not helping” in the job market. And while she saw the opportunity for technical talent in the Bay Area, she feared, as many people do, that without a lifetime of experience as a geek, she’d never learn enough to get a job in tech.
Gottlieb told me that her college education reinforced the myth of the natural hacker. Even in Intro to Computer Science at her school, University of Vermont, she says, “Nobody was really starting from zero.”
But she found Hackbright, learned Python in the first five weeks, and then the remainder of the term on a personal project. Landing a job was easy, as Survey Monkey reps came to the demo day at the end of the session.
“There’s still a lot for me to learn,” she says. But she’s doing it now from inside a company.
Another Hackbright grad, Nicole Zuckerman, came from background that would appear to be the most nurturing possible for a budding geek. She told me she “grew up with the sound of a modem in my ears.” She took AP calculus and physics. Her parents encouraged her to pursue the sciences.
But, she says, “I don’t think they could conceptualize this [programming] as an option for me.”
She said the message to girls is different. They’re taught to focus on the intrinsics more than on the things they build. “Girls are raised not to screw up. If you don’t make it, it seems more destructive for girls than boys.”
Zuckerman ended up with a job in publishing, and was moving up the management ladder. But she wanted, she told me, “to feel like I was contributing.” She left her job for a Hackbright session.
She codes at Eventbrite now, which gives her the direct job satisfaction she was seeking. “Like, today, I made a thing happen,” she says.
Before Hackbright, she had only taken a few online tutorials in programming. It remained daunting, “I had heard programmers had to start as kids,” she told me. But Hackbright sounded promising, so she thought she’d give it a shot.
At the end of her session, she says, “There were 20-plus companies listening to 16 grads present.” Good odds for an entry-level developer.
We might be in a jobs bubble for developers. But it’s still a skill worth learning, since if you can’t get a job as a programmer, you can always go entrepreneurial and create your own. I’d like to see more Hackbrights, for groups that might learn differently from the way programming is traditionally taught: Women, inner-city kids, older people, journalists (ahem), you name it. There’s a lot of work to be done, and a lot of people who would like to do it.
-Rafe
See also
Codeacademy
Code School
Thinkful
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Talk about an Opportunity: The Evernote Accelerator
Last year, I left the mainstream tech press to come work at Evernote. Not just because I love this product (which I do), but because I wanted to do more for startups then I could ever do as a writer, and Evernote wanted to give me a platform to do that. The project we’re announcing today — my project — is that platform.
Welcome to Evernote Accelerator.
There are a lot of accelerators, incubators, and seed funds for early-stage tech companies. The Evernote Accelerator is a bit different. For one thing, it’s exclusively for developers who are using the Evernote cloud service or APIs. We want to make sure that if an Evernote integration is right for a product, the product is being built as best it can. At this Accelerator, developers will be able to work alongside Evernote’s own engineers, designers, and product managers to fine-tune that integration. The mentors for our accelerator teams will come from Evernote as well.
As I explain in the official blog post announcing Evernote Accelerator, we’re different in two other big ways: First, we’re not taking an investment in Accelerator participants. Our best outcome, for our users and Evernote itself, is that we help launch successful companies with a great Evernote integrations. We’ll help our Accelerator teams meet investors and raise funding, but our Accelerator doesn’t need to participate in financing or have “exits” to be a success.
Second, the admission process for the Accelerator is integrated into our developer competition, the Devcup. You must already have a compelling Evernote product, and win a prize in the Devcup competition, to be eligible for the Accelerator. Participants will be invited from the roles of Devcup winners.
Why me?
Awarding EverClip to top Devcup prize at last year’s Evernote Conference.
Hustle is business, and it starts at the beginning. Just as developers will aggressively re-think and re-code a product to make it work better, the smart startup team will start beta testing its business model (or at least its pricing) as early as possible. For a product to thrive it needs a business to support it. You’d think that’d be obvious, but an excited dev team can regress to what it’s best at, building product, and put off the business side for too long. I’ve seen this pattern too many times.
And while many startup teams know who their competitors are in the current market, I have a historical knowledge of older, forgotten startups that may have tried to address problems similar to theirs in the past. The technology marketplace is always fresh and changing, but very few of the problems that startups are solving today are genuinely new. We can all learn from the success, and especially the failures, of previous ventures.
In 15 years of covering startups (out of 25 covering tech in general), I have collected these and other indicators and patterns, and I want to share what I’ve learned through the Accelerator. I’ll also look forward to helping teams construct sharper pitches and presentations (see my occasional PR tips blog, Pro PR Tips, for a preview).
In addition to whatever it is I have to give, our Accelerator teams will get direct, daily support from the Evernote platform team (there are eight of us), from Evernote execs who will act as mentors, and from the influential Silicon Valley friends of Evernote that I am roping into this new program.
So this is a great opportunity for developers who want to build apps that resonate with Evernote’s 50 million users. And, honestly, it’s a great opp for me too. I can’t wait to meet our teams, help them flourish, and learn alongside them.
-Rafe
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Outbox un-delivers your mail
Outbox collects your paper mail and puts it online for you.
I have seen some crazy startups that try to bring paper mail into the modern, digital era. My longtime favorite is Earth Class Mail, which I first saw in 2007. It’s essentially an alternate inbox for your physical mail: You have your mail sent to their address instead of your house, and they scan it all and send it to you electronically.
Crazy. But “Not crazy enough,” says Evan Baehr, the CEO of Outbox. And he should know from crazy.
Outbox is the bizzaro service that sends a “reverse postman” to your house to pick up your physical mail after it’s already been delivered to you, whisk it off to the Outbox processing center, and then scan it and send it to you electronically.
If you want a piece of mail for real (like a greeting card from a relative), Outbox can send it back to you. Packages and samples never go to the processing center.
What it adds in delay it’s supposed to make up with customization of delivery, automatic filing, and less hassle in dealing with junk mail.
The service is designed for densely-packed cities, where most customers have mail slots or apartment-style mailboxes, not the suburban mailboxes-on-poles that would be easy for Outbox collectors to open up and access. So Outbox provides new mail lockboxes that literally intercept US mail before it hits the customer’s own mail slot.
It’s worth it, say Baehr. “I’d be willing to give you a whole new front door,” he told me. “This is an inroad to a really vibrant marketplace.”
In other words, it’s not just about the end user. Baehr is trying to pull a Facebook on physical mail. The business is about learning users’ mail habits and preferences, and then profiting from that knowledge with marketers. Baehr even talks about building the “mail graph.”
Outbox watches what mail users open and respond to, and sends that data to marketers. Baehr says that this intelligence is otherwise unavailable. Paper mail is a marketing black hole. He says Outbox can help reduce junkmail and even help marketers “deconvert” people from recipients of paper mail to electronic mail.
Unlike Earth Class Mail’s expensive infrastructure, which involves automated warehouses and robots, Outbox can be run for a lot less money. The trial, in San Francisco, has required so far only about $40,000 in capital, for scanners and cars. Furthermore, Outbox fails gracefully: If the service goes out of business, your mail still comes to your house.
I admire the audacity of Outbox, although I still think it’s crazy. Baehr says I’m the crazy one. Physical-to-electronic messages delivered through the system generate more and better responses than plain old mail, he says. And his real goal, I gather, is to integrate into the Postal Service to improve the customer experience, gather marketing data, and lower costs for everybody.
All he has to do right now is convince users that his $5 a month service that sits on top of the postal service is better than the US Mail itself.
I’ll tell you this: Whether Outbox works or not, the team is going to learn a ton about mail, consumers, and marketing. What crazy idea are you learning from?
-Rafe
Pro Tip: If Outbox is a little too extreme for you but you would like to make your physical mail a little more electronic, I’d recommend trying out the bill-tracking service PageOnce, or, for Evernote users, FileThis, which downloads bills and transaction reports from your service providers directly into Evernote notebooks.
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A new tactic in the stuff storage wars: Granularity
First there was the basement. And then we moved into homes with no basements. Then came the storage facility. But they’re inconvenient. So someone came up with storage pods — the storage facility that comes to you. It was a great innovation, but if you wanted to add or remove items from storage, you had to have your crate dropped in front of your house.
Here’s the latest thing: Boxbee, an “urban” storage company that will drop off empty packing boxes at your place, whisk your full boxes of stuff away when you want, and deliver individual boxes back to you quickly as well, within two hours of getting the request.
A new consumer storage play lets you get to your excess stuff within two hours.
The pitch is that space-challenged urbanites can store seasonal or occasional-use items (like snowboards or fancy china) and quickly and somewhat cheaply get these items out of storage, and back in, on their own schedule. It’s more warehousing than straight-up storage, since the service is designed to be used at the granular box level. It’s not all-or-nothing, like a moving service or a pod.
The baseline fee is $3 per month per standard-size packing box. Prices for bigger boxes are higher, but fees go down when you store more.
Boxbee itself owns no trucks or warehouses. “We link consumers to warehouses,” says CEO Kristoph Matthews. Boxes are carted by courier companies or even by TaskRabbit workers, depending on the size and weight of the job.
Matthews told me that, “We’re not a storage company. We’re a stuff-management platform.” That is an eye-roller of a mission, but Boxbee does in fact help you manage your stuff beyond simply warehousing it.
The service helps you keep a database of what’s stored where, for instance. This is important for its upcoming per-box services. For example, if you’ve decided that you are tired of paying for the storage of your box of Hummel figurines, you will be able to direct Boxbee to put the collection on eBay. It will transfer your box to an eBay management company. Should the items not sell, you can then ask Boxbee to donate the things to a local Goodwill. Either way, you never have to see or touch the things again.
Boxbee’s granularity and flexibility — the per-box pricing, quick delivery promise, and the disposal services — should drive users to more actively manage their stuff. They should, in theory, be more likely to stop paying for storage they don’t need (compared to storage units, which often go paid-for and neglected for months or years). They should also use the service more, paying Boxbee for each stuff-management interaction.
Boxbee is an interesting re-think of consumer storage. It is more detailed and data-driven than traditional products, but its extra services may actually lead to consumers saving money.
The service is available now in San Francisco.
-Rafe
Further Reading
Boxbee Wins Best New Startup Prize At Launch
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DealFlicks Bringing Variable Prices to Movies
Suckers pay retail. But what, these days, is a retail price? The concept may be dying. Look at Dealflicks. It brings the demand pricing model to movie theaters, filling seats that would otherwise go unsold.
While most of the U.S. movie industry is based on opening weekend sales, movies do stay in theaters for longer than three days. And most movies stop packing the house pretty quickly. Each of those unfilled seats is a lost revenue opportunity for a theater, and… you know where this is going, right? Just like airfares and seats at sports stadiums, demand-based pricing for movie houses is coming, and it should bring more people to movie theaters than the standard fixed prices.
Can anything get people into the theater to see this movie?
That’s what Dealflicks does. The service, sold so far to individual and independent movie theater owners, lets those owners put together percent-off deals for movie tickets, as well as packages (movies plus concessions). In addition, the design of theDealFlicks online ticket sale process is clean and contemporary, compared to the standard ticket sale sites, Fandango and MovieTickets.com.
CEO Sean Wycliffe says the business was designed to help theaters compete with Netflix. He believes — and the numbers bear it out so far — that movie goers are price-sensitive after the big blockbuster weekend is over. Lower the prices, and they’ll show.
Dealflicks doesn’t set prices automatically or algorithmically yet. Owners have to manually do it. Automatic pricing will come later this year, Wycliffe says, after the company finishes and ships the mobile apps.
How low will Dealflicks deals go, and how variable will they be? That depends on a few factors, some obvious and one that’s diabolically clever. Obvious: Prices will eventually fluctuate based on sales, or on age of the movie in the question, or on time of day.
But my favorite pricing signal is the one that ties the discount level to the Rotten Tomatoes review score. Bad movie? Low price.
What I fear, of course, is that movie ticket prices will also adjust upwards for big blockbuster weekends, creating a social stratification for what is still, to a large degree, a populist media. But it is probably inevitable.
A lot of prices are already demand- or demographically-based. That is the nature of economics, after all. Mass media has led to massively flat pricing structures, but technology is bringing price-setting back to where it’s been for most of human history: There is no price. There are only deals.
-Rafe
Further reading
Oakland startup DealFlicks tries to fill movie seats emptied by Hulu, Netflix (Mercury News)
Hotwire for Theaters Refocuses on Transparent Movie Discount (BetaKit)
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CompStak: Mining Money From the Free Exchange of Data
CompStak helps agents and brokers share and find information about commercial real estate leases.
In the real estate business (as in many others), setting prices is a bit of an art. When pricing a property, agents must take the transaction prices of similar deals into account. In the commercial real estate market, the best way to get data on these comparable prices, or “comps,” is not from any official or commercial resource. It’s from other agents.
Traditionally, agents looking for comps for a property ping their agent friends. They may give their friends some data on their latest deals to get useful data back (or just operate on the understanding that when a friend calls for comps, you share). It’s a human process, and it’s fast and yields current data, but after this social transaction, the data begins to evaporate and age, and it’s not evenly available to other brokers.
The process works, but it’s highly inefficient.
CompStak takes this process and mediates it over the Web. The idea is that if you’re an agent and want to look at some comps, you first put some of your own data in. This gets you credits that you can spend on retrieving information that other agents have put in. The cost to participate in the information network is information itself. CompStak CEO Michael Mandel, a former agent himself, says that the system increases transparency in real estate, improves the efficiency of the market, and should tend to tamp down outlier transactions (those that are too high or too low). I asked him if he thought more transparent pricing would lower prices across the board, and he didn’t believe it would. “Some deals will go higher,” he said, and some lower. Mostly, he said, efficient pricing data will make the market faster.
CompStak is a smart idea, and it’s working. It rolled out in New York in 2012, and now has data on nearly every commercial real estate deal in Manhattan from the last year. Two weeks ago it launched in San Francisco as well. Mendel says that the system already has data on 61% of all the commercial real estate deals in San Francisco from the past twelve months.
CompStak is free for brokers and agents, but this free service is also a money-making business. Mendel sells access to the data to banks, REIT managers, private equity funds, and so on.
The idea of adding technology to a social/business interaction and then profiting from it is not new. But it’s easy to do it wrong. At the 500 Startups event where I met Mandel, people were comparing his service to Jigsaw, which initially (in 2006) let you contribute personal contact information from business cards you collected to get credits to get same from other users. That was a horrible idea, since it broke the social contract around business cards. People don’t give other people their cards expecting the data to be sold or re-gifted. But Jigsaw did eventually tweak the service well enough, and Salesforce acquired the company in 2011 for $142 million.
CompStak is smarter at its start than Jigsaw was when it kicked off, since the data being bartered is financial, not personal, and since CompStak actually improves on an existing process (people do share real estate transaction data; they don’t habitually share business cards). CompStak is mining just one rich vein of historically buried data. There are others.
-Rafe
Further reading
CompStak Knows Exactly How Much Your Office Should Cost (TechCrunch)
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Just.me Holds These Names to be Self-Evident
The Just.me iPhone app borrows an interface idea from Path, but it works with a much larger and more configurable social network.
The communications/social platform Just.me launched into limited beta today. It’s a well thought-out, mobile-focused service for sharing updates and media (including videos) with either tight social groups (family and friends) or wider audiences (like Twitter and Facebook “friends”). It blends some of the best characteristics of email, Twitter, Facebook, Path, and other services into one coherent app. It is ambitious and impressive.
The early beta still has plenty of rough edges, but in concept and design, Just.me is going in the right direction. I like Just.me’s flow for recording or uploading media, and then sending it, very much.
Just.me CEO Keith Teare has been trying to bring coherence to the Internet for years. In 1997 he launched Real Names, his attempt to augment the clunky URL-based address system of the Web with a more human-readable, extension-free naming scheme. With Just.me, Teare’s Border Collie herding instinct emerges again: Just.me is also its own network, one that functionally encompasses, for its users, the features and the address books of other networks. Each Just.me user will also have a Just.me address. Over time, Teare believes these addresses will become more valuable.
So he’s putting effort into creating the concept of the Just.me naming convention. All Just.me users will get a * name, as in *rafe for yours truly. Teare is hoping to follow Twitter in the creation of a self-evident naming system.
Twitter, of course, has the @ locked up. If you see @rafe written down, you know what that’s referring to. In the personal name space, only email itself has managed to achieve that kind of self-evident naming convention. While Google+ has the + all to itself, it’s rarely referenced outside of Google+ itself. Facebook and LinkedIn, like Twitter and Google+, also give users unique or “vanity” Web addresses that are easy to read, but there’s no accepted naming shorthand to designate these URLs.
Just.me’s unique naming scheme won’t matter much unless Just.me becomes a big, important communication platform. But if the service does begin to get traction, the self-branding of the * names could be an important accelerator. It’s a smart move. And it raises the question: What foundations are you laying with your venture that don’t seem to matter much now, but could be key factors in the future?
- Rafe
Related reading
Khosla-Backed Just.me Gears Up For Launch With iOS Beta (TechCrunch)
Just.me App Wants to Be a Switchboard Operator for All Your Messaging Needs (All Things D)
3 Ways to Get Videos of the Kids to Grandma (Opportunity Notes)
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CurbTXT Turns Jerks Into Altruists
Send a text instead of a tow truck. (Click for a local TV news story about CurbTXT.)
Some jerk parked their car in front of my driveway a few weeks ago. I had the car towed. Which made me a jerk, too, completing the cycle of awfulness.
Did it have to be this way? I needed to get my car out of my garage, it’s true, but while I was angry that the driveway was blocked, I really didn’t want to go all nuclear on the poor schmuck who had parked in my way. If there had been a way to reach the driver (and I did try knocking on nearby doors) I would have preferred to go that route. Having the car towed was a horrible punishment for what was likely just an oversight.
Three guys in a San Francisco neighborhood even more crowded than mine are working on a solution: CurbTXT. A small sticker on a user’s car informs others that the owner of the car is reachable through the SMS-based service, using the license plate as a unique identifier. The person sending the note, like “You’re blocking my driveway,” or, “Your meter is expired,” or, “Sorry to tell you someone broke into your car,” does not know the identify of the car owner, nor does the owner know the sender, unless the sender self-identifies in the note.
In other words, it brings the possibility of neighborliness into a situation where it hadn’t been possible before.
Great, right? But there’s a problem: Growth. Also: Business model.
Since launch, in September of 2012, the service has been used to send “dozens” of warning messages, cofounder Ian Sotzing told me. That’s not all too terrible for a service that was launched in one small neighborhood by guys trailing parking officers and sliding flyers under windshields next to parking tickets, but it’s not exactly a rocketship of scalability.
So when I was meeting with Ian, another cofounder, Alex Maxa, was meeting with people from the San Francisco board of supervisors, who, he later told me, were quite interested in the project. Alex tells me that the City doesn’t make revenue from towed cars (the towing company does), and that a service that made it possible to reach car owners before they are towed would be to everyone’s benefit (except the towing company). City support of CurbTXT would greatly help awareness and growth, and potentially provide a little revenue stream.
Our cars are weird havens of anonymity, but they don’t have to be quite so walled-off. A double-blind system that allows communication to car owners while still shielding identity looks like a good way to make cities more livable, by helping turn jerks back into human beings.
-Rafe
See also
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Instacart: Grocery Startup with No Groceries
Instacart offers a very good shopping experience and a predictable delivery window.
When the email came from Instacart, advertising that the site is now letting people order food from local alt grocery chain Trader Joe’s, I sat up and noticed. I had heard about the service a few months before, but I’ve never used any grocery delivery service. And if I was to, I thought, chances are I’d go with the plain vanilla Safeway.com, which delivers that mega chain’s food.
Instacart also delivers Safeway food, so it gives San Franciscans a good choice. But Safeway’s own delivery service was built, in part, on the back of the failure of Webvan: In addition to learning from Webvan’s hard lessons, Safeway acquired some of its assets, like trucks.
So what has Instacart, a third-generation Internet grocery delivery service, learned from its predecessors? I asked CEO Apoorva Mehta to walk me through the business.
Instacart, he tells me, is not a grocery business. Mehta calls Instacart a “marketplace,” but not for food. For labor. The business is built on hiring contractors that go to local grocery stores, pick items that customers order off the shelves, and then drive them, in their own cars, to customers’ houses. It is more TaskRabbit than Webvan.
Instacart’s workers are thoroughly vetted (like Lyft‘s drivers are, Mehta says), and have the use of a special worker-based smartphone app that walks them through stores, aisle by aisle, telling them what to pick up.
Although the core of the business is logistics and QA, Mehta says that it wouldn’t work without the human touch. He says that his smart shoppers know when to make a substitution if an item that the customer wants isn’t on the shelf, or when they need to call the customer for more info. “Our shoppers understand the intent of customers,” he says.
Instacart’s technology and information architecture includes, as I said, store maps for shoppers, and a proprietary system to get and categorize data about food items for display on the customer-facing site and mobile app, but Mehta says, “The hardest thing is the logistics of people, and managing quality of service on a collaborative consumption model.”
Instacart’s business model is still being written. In addition to per-item markup and a per-delivery fee, Instacart recently rolled out an Amazon Prime-like $99 annual fee option for all-you-can-eat deliveries. It’s all in beta, I gather. But Mehta is convinced the model works.
One thing that is certain: Webvan could never have done it this way. It was too early. Instacart, which I think will work, is built on the back of the smartphone industry. It’s only because entrepreneurs like Mehta have access to piecework or hourly contract laborers with their own information terminals that the model functions at all.
-Rafe
See also:
Peapod, Lyft, Uber, Exec, TaskRabbit, Zaarly, GigWalk
Read:
What Webvan Could Have Learned from Tesco
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What Are Deals Worth? Bync Knows
These are pretty good deals, courtesy of Bync.
The coupon site Bync launched yesterday. It’s yet another deals site, but this one has some nice smarts behind it. It raises a big question, though: Will users give the company what it wants, in order to get the deals they want?
Bync’s special power is that it only sends you coupons from the companies you already do business with. And they’re good coupons, too. I tested the service and saw a 20% off coupon for the Amazon site Shoes.com, and a 50% off offer for an iTunes gift card.
How did Bync know that I shopped at Amazon and Apple? Here’s the catch: It knows because it connects to your credit card or bank account to track your transactions. And to connect to those accounts, you have to give it your banking passwords.
Bync, like many other financial services, uses the established and so-far safe Yodlee for financial data, so it’s not like you’re handing over your bank data to a nobody. But even so, and even knowing this, I came to a screeching halt when I started using this system and it asked for my bank login data.
Shouldn’t there be another way? Bync CEO Ryan Bales says he wishes there was, and that the credit card companies have been talking about a protected login system for bank data (kind of like OAuth), although they haven’t delivered on it. But then, Bales told me, “Mint had the large hurdle.” Since that service made people comfortable with giving up their financial login data, it’s become much easier for new financial sites, like Bync, to get users. Bales says he has not seen a lot of abandonment during the sign-up process (although, when I talked to him, the site had been public for only five hours, so stats from non-early adopters aren’t available).
Bales also notes that people give out credit card numbers all the time (for example, at restaurants), although when doing so they don’t also give up their online passwords to those accounts. Ironically, with only a credit card number you can do a lot of direct financial damage; but Bync, even with numbers and associated passwords, only gets access to the names of stores you shop at.
Some large banks and credit card issuers already offer deals based on shopping behavior. Bync makes the same feature available to consumers directly, and eventually it will likely offer a white-label service to credit unions and smaller banks, keeping them competitive.
No matter how safe a site like this is, I am still amazed that people will give up such powerful financial keys just to save a few bucks. It shows you how much opportunity there is in the business of providing discounts.
-Rafe
See also:
Groupon
LivingSocial
RetailMeNot
Slice
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