Genuine Parts

Shift

In Uncategorized on July 23, 2011
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Our plan for Decurate was to establish retail flash sales at some point. We’ve decided to move ahead now rather than wait. As we looked around we see we that in addition to ourselves, we have many resources in front of us.

My co-founder Jordan and I met and worked together at an online retail provider for hotels. We’re still good friends with many of the people there. They’ll be invaluable in helping us avoid as many issues as possible.

The most important next hire is an account executive to help coordinate vendors. In another amazing, wonderful coincidence, our good friend Tamie and account manager at a games company quit her job this week. She starts with us on Monday.

On the design front, our illustrator should have the first sketches for us Monday.

I’m expecting things to not be this perfect in the future. I’m writing this blog to remind myself it’s OK, we’ve had quite a bit of luck regardless.

Our Third Curator

In Uncategorized on July 18, 2011
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Our next curator is Irene from New York. Welcome. We’ll be sharing more details about them soon.

Another New Curator

In Decurate on July 17, 2011
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We just hired another new content editor, or curator as we call them. Welcome Karyn. Her style is more traditional, but clean and elegant. Her style could be mixed with just about anything modern. We’re lucky and grateful.

Our newest team additions

In Decurate on July 17, 2011
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Before launching Decurate we’re building a team of great content editors, and evolving the design of the site. We were lucky enough to find Brittney from California to be our first design editor. She has a modern, clean style.

We’re just as fortunate to have found an amazing artist to work to help us with graphics work, Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo, from Spain.

More to come.

Santiago

In Chile on July 17, 2011
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We left LAX on July 2, summer, and were lucky enough to be offered exit row seats as we checked in. The seats were mid-center, in front of an aisle. This gave our legs as much room as business class and made the 14 hour flight feel half as long.

Arriving in Santiago on July 3, winter, we were met at the airport by our program’s assigned and gracious padrino at 5:30 AM. We packed our bags, monitors, and Jordan’s snowboard into his car. He dropped us off at the temporary apartment I found on Craigslist at the last minute for a cheap $29/night.

We slept for about two hours until the apartment manager came by to collect a deposit. He gave us a hysterically animated tour of every electronic device, appliance, faucet and kitchen drawer of the 400 square foot space. The portable electric heater that was the only source of warmth, blew a fuse as he was demonstrating how it worked. We managed to sleep for another two hours in the freezing cold. Later, our padrino met us and took us on a tour of the upscale east side of Santiago, with a clear view of the Andes from almost everywhere.

Since then, it’s been a blur. After three days of searching we found a furnished three bedroom apartment in a great neighborhood, Lastarria. That left us free the following weekend to visit Valparaiso, a beautiful city by the ocean 40 miles from Santiago. It’s filled with graffiti, stray dogs, 37 hills with century old inclined elevators, amazing views and architecture. I loved it. We ate at a great restaurant, Bijoux, where you discuss your options and preferences with the chef before deciding on a meal. We feasted on fresh fish caught that day, beef and pisco sours. As we explored the hill around our hostel, we met two local university students and were invited to join them in drinking boxed wine out of cans of Budweiser. I did, while Jordan deferred.

In the two weeks since we landed, we’ve received our Chilean social security numbers, bank accounts, gone through the program introduction, launched the alpha release of our latest project, and hired two people.

Next week we go to the north of Chile to attend a class at a university and share our start up experiences with the students. We’ve set aside some time to see the Atacama desert and will hopefully spend a few days in Bolivia.

I can’t say enough good things about our program and Santiago. Start Up Chile feels like a great opportunity.

New Ideas Rarely Are

In Technology on November 19, 2010
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I was lucky enough to meet Douglas Englebart a few years ago in a seminar at Berkeley. In 1968, he introduced the mouse, hypertext and other ideas to a group of 1000 computer scientists via video conference. It’s amazing how long it takes to see something right in front of us.

Building a Gameboy emulator. In javascript.

In Uncategorized on November 11, 2010
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What can’t you do with JS?

imrannazar.com/

The Electronic Home Library

In Fun, Technology on October 17, 2010
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Why don’t we imagine the future as much as we used to? This article from the Chicago Tribune in 1959 shows an electronic home library where you could project information onto the ceiling. It may not have been correct, but it took a lot of thought to forecast something so far from what technologically possible. Via PaleoFuture.    

Postling

In Technology on October 14, 2010
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I have a new favorite for managing our social media. I tried Postling last week and it was fantastic.

It was designed specifically for posting to other sites and is not another place you need to manage.  It’s a manager for everything else.  For me, it did two things really well.

We have a product blog, a corporate blog and I blog for Decorati.  It connects to any WordPress account you have, whether it’s a WordPress.org or .com site.

In a few seconds I updated two company blogs, twitter, and facebook. It’s nicely set up so as you’re creating an entry it’s streamlined if you choose twitter. You get both a larger form for your blog and facebook, and one just for Twitter.

That alone was good for me but it does one other great thing. It searches across the web for any comments on your posts. And you can respond back directly from one interface.

You can also update your Facebook status and schedule posts for later.

The Unsolvable Math Problem

In Uncategorized on October 13, 2010
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In 1939 George Dantzig showed up late to a math class at Berkeley, saw three equations on the board, and wrote them down.  He found out later only two were homework.

His professor contacted him and let him know the third equation was only for a discussion he had missed.  It was an unproved theorem.

“It happened because during my first year at Berkeley I arrived late one day at one of [Jerzy] Neyman’s classes. On the blackboard there were two problems that I assumed had been assigned for homework. I copied them down. A few days later I apologized to Neyman for taking so long to do the homework — the problems seemed to be a little harder than usual. I asked him if he still wanted it. He told me to throw it on his desk. I did so reluctantly because his desk was covered with such a heap of papers that I feared my homework would be lost there forever. About six weeks later, one Sunday morning about eight o’clock, [my wife] Anne and I were awakened by someone banging on our front door. It was Neyman. He rushed in with papers in hand, all excited: “I’ve just written an introduction to one of your papers. Read it so I can send it out right away for publication.” For a minute I had no idea what he was talking about. To make a long story short, the problems on the blackboard that I had solved thinking they were homework were in fact two famous unsolved problems in statistics. That was the first inkling I had that there was anything special about them.”

This story has been used to show that it’s our own preconceived notions about the difficulty of a problem that keep us from solving it.  Over time the details of this story have been exaggerated but the main idea holds true. I’m about to dig into more of the programming side and this is useful to me.

Another interesting tidbit was this his professor asked him to only submit the solution as his doctoral thesis. Instead having to produce a document in a specific format, the key information was what was most important.

I will wake up at 10 tomorrow and be late.