Adventures in start-up land: part 2

After 6 months at a startup building an eco-friendly database of product and company information, I have decided to move on, to another startup focusing on deployment and auto-scaling platforms for cloud computing systems. Part of my motivation is that the company moved offices in an unfortunate way for me, increasing my commute to 2-2.5 hours each way (which is rough but could be workable). But also, while an eco-friendly database and search engine is really cool, I've realized that it also falls under a very risky category of funding and possible business plans. Would a product like this really take off in a recession economy? And how will it make money? The answer to this last question (at least for most website startups) is usually "advertising," but user traffic is fickle, the switching cost for search engines is 0, and name-brand advertising companies have very specific and strict requirements for user demographics and traffic patterns. It's a noble goal, but perhaps too risky for me personally to justify the commute or relocation...

Also, I'm pretty excited about the cloud computing space. Last November Amazon launched the Elastic Compute Cloud, a pay-per-use linux server farm built on Amazon's existing, successful, massively scalable data center management infrastructure. Since then many startups have deployed onto EC2 (I personally deployed my previous startup onto it), and have seen drastic cost savings and flexibility compared to traditional hosted deployment models.

In the past, companies either had too much hardware or too little. If they needed to save money, they would purchase too little, and a sudden burst of unexpected traffic would take their site down, usually taking hours or days to recover from. The safe but costly alternative was to buy more hardware than you need, and let it sit idle most of the time, but utilize it when the traffic surge occurred. This was very expensive.

A good analogy for this problem is figuring out how many active cash registers to have at a store at any given time. If there are 20 people and 1 cash register at a store, the line to the cash register will take so long that people will leave without buying stuff, and the store won't make as much money. If you open up 4 more cash registers, then the lines get short enough that the people stick around and make their purchases, and the store makes more money. But if you have 5 cash registers open all the time when there aren't many people, this costs the store more without additional gain, so how do you know how many cash registers to keep open at any given time?

With a cloud computing system like EC2, you set up your production website architecture on the number of machines you need to handle your current load of traffic. For most startups this is the bare minimum needed to ensure redundancy and eliminate single points of failure. Then you set up monitoring to notify you when your traffic starts to spike up. When it does, you can automatically (or manually) scale out your application fleet to handle the traffic by booting more machine instances of your application server. When the traffic subsides, scale the fleet down by terminating the extra machine instances. In the EC2 model you only pay for what you use, so you only pay the high cost of running many machines for the time period in which you need them. The tricky part is how to automatically scale in an efficient way that minimizes cost, minimizes downtime, and adheres to your SLAs? That's where my new startup comes in. :)

Santa Cruz and elephant seals

Spent labor day weekend in Santa Cruz, a very mellow beach town filled with surfers and tourists. They have a boardwalk there that rivals Ocean City NJ in its novelty food stands and amusement part style midway. They had the boardwalk snack classics: funnel cake and garlic fries, as well as some more frightening fare like deep fried twinkies. Seriously- a whole stand dedicated to deep-friend twinkies.

The beach and boardwalk were ridiculously crowded, but the we found the beaches a few miles north of Santa Cruz to be more sparse and clean, and did some swimming and sunning there.

A few miles south of Santa Cruz is a beach park called Ano Nuevo, which is an elephant seal sanctuary this time of year. We took a hike down to the beach and did in fact see lots of elephant seals- they are the big gray lumps on the beach in the photo. They are huge- they can weigh up to 4000 pounds!

Also in Chile: rapa nui, theoretical penguins, cartoon irony

Easter Island is about 2000 miles off the western coast of Chile. Unfortunately we didn't get a chance to go there- it would have taken 4 days out of our 8 day trip, and another $1000 for tickets. But we did visit a museum about the island, where this Moai statue sits, in the shrubberies, guarding the residential streets of Vina del Mar. Unlike most museums (that don't want to scare children or disturb sensitive people) this one did not gloss over Easter Island's brutal history. Civil wars, colonialism, and mismanagement of ecological resources led to famine, death, and the near total destruction of the native people. So little of the culture from before the late 1800s European invasions was preserved that the Rapa Nui language from before that period remains undecifered.

Also in this very blunt museum was an installation describing, in great detail, the ritual of creating shrunken heads, with actual shrunken heads behind the glass! This was not a mystical process: the skin was removed from the human head, wrapped around a monkey skull, and dried until it shrunk to fit the smaller skull. Clever.

80% of the world's population of Humboldt penguins nest on a protected island off the coast of Chile, in a suburb of the town of Zapallar, a few hours north of Vina del Mar. I was very excited to go see the penguins, figuring it would probably be my only chance to ever see them in the wild. But unfortunately the penguin island was obscured by fog. Can you find the penguins in this photo?






In Valparaiso we found the Mirador de Lukas House Museum, a collection of the cartoons and journalism of Renzo Pecchenino ("Lukas"), a political cartoonist in the 1960s.

Hey! Ho! Yo voy!

In late June we went to Chile! We spent 2 days in Santiago, the capital, a day in Colina (a little mountain town north of Santiago) and 3 days in Vina del Mar and Valparaiso on the coast. Santiago is huge! 7 million people, roaring traffic, bustling streets, hoards of goth teenagers stylishly ignoring you. On the first day, we wandered around the city, and discovered a Ramones poster in Spanish with the tag line "Hey! Ho! Yo voy!" which literally means "Hey! Ho! I go." Hmm... I guess "yo voy" sounds catchier than "vamonos"? Not that I remotely mastered enough Spanish to get by before I went. I really meant to- bought Rosetta Stone and everything, but work was so busy right before I left (the whole 16 hour a day startup crunch-mode business), I didn't find the time. So I did a lot of deciphering of street signs and menus. Pointing at things on menus and smiling politely worked out quite well. I discovered lots of interesting food. I think my favorite dish was pastel de choclo- a corn pie. Found a recipe for it after getting home and tried to make it myself, and it came out quite well (I used double the amount of corn specified in the recipe though). But navigation was quite difficult. I learned that when lost, go to hotels to ask directions- usually there's someone behind the desk who speaks your language. Asking, say, goth teenagers or nuns on the street does not work so well. Generally the people we approached seemed to be afraid of us strange english speaking gringos.

My favorite city was Valparaiso- a city of artists on the coast. The buildings are all painted with fantastic murals, and the streets are checkered with artisan shops. Wild friendly dogs roam the streets. We stumbled upon lots of interesting cafes and art galleries, and ate more than our fair share of empanadas (note to self: never order more than one empanada ever). Noticed that everywhere we went the sound of american 80s music filled the room. I swear I heard Madonna in elevators, hipster cafes, grocery stores, art galleries, and restaurants. The Chileans love 80s music. We went out dancing one night, and every single song played was American 80s music. Very few Chileans we met spoke fluent English, but all the kids in the club knew all the words to Like A Virgin. The seminal 80s music moment was when we were eating lunch at a cafe, served by a few tough-looking tattooed guys, and a Mariah Carey MTV special came on the tv. The tough waiter teared up, and sang along to every song.

the perils of dirty, hetereogenous data sources

The company I work for is building a gi-normous database of everything you ever wanted to know about any product, company, or ingredient you've ever heard of. As it turns out, getting lots of data isn't hard, but combining it all together is pretty hard, and making sense of it is very hard. There's a lot of data in the world, no perfect universal product identifier (UPC isn't specific enough for our purposes, and most data sets we get don't include it), and the data is very dirty. In the process of building smarter data ingestion systems and massaging the data, we often come across some hilarious bits of it.

Some things that have turned up on ingredient lists (aside from the usual cryptic 12 syllable chemicals):

• dust mite
• panther fur (in a bath soap, of course)
  
• air
  
• tobacco dust
  
• bone oil
• thistle
• DNA
  
• "explosives" (no further elaboration)
  
• care (but, surprisingly, not love)
  

There are also some hilarious mispellings, often of "deionized." My favorite was "demonized water." You gotta watch out for that stuff.

And there are also the hazard lists. Hilarity ensues when bored government workers have to make official lists. Workplace hazards include "shift work that involves circadian disruption" and "adding machines."

There is a cereal and milk bistro in Berkeley!

There is a new 'Cereal and Milk Bistro' near Telegraph and Channing in Berkeley, and while I was skeptical about the concept after just seeing the Coming Soon signs, after a taste test I must say I am impressed.

The bistro carries a full range of cereals, from Fruit Loops to Muesli, and in your bowl you can get two scoops of cereals (preferably mixing healthy and junky). Next comes toppings- these also range elaborately from healthy to junky, from fruit to chocolate chips. They had more toppings than your average frozen yogurt joint.


And finally, you get your choice of milks- skim, 2%, whole (no chocolate yet, but I hear it's often requested). Your bowl thoughtfully comes with a straw, so you can sip up all the remaining milk when you finish your cereal.

Overall, it's a fun idea, though definitely one that will be dependent on business from all the nearby college carb-o-tarians.

Recycling

All I can say is, my pepper plants are happy. Right to left we have some habanero peppers, a tomatilla, and a poblano pepper. Putting the California sunshine to work.