Unfortunately, I've had to turn on TypeKey comment authentication. I know it's a hassle, and I'm really sorry, but I've been getting far too much annoying comment spam for the last few weeks. I hope it doesn't prove too much an inconvenience.
UPDATED:Here's the full scoop. Short version: $900k ($850k of which came from SAP) bringing their Series B round to a total of $4mm. See my earlier post on that.
According to Matt Marshall of Silicon Beat, SocialText has gotten more funding.
SocialText, the Palo Alto wiki and social software company, has finally scored more backing, this time from software giant SAP — more on this later. Our first story on their funding a few months ago is here. Apparently, now chief executive Ross Mayfield is taking the company back to an open source model.
Haven't seen anything else about yet. I'm sure Ross will comment soon.
Just a quick note to mention that my new employer, Atlassian, is currently hiring some more folk for the new San Francisco office. In particular, they're looking for:
Also, be sure to check out the qualities that Atlassian is looking for in every employee. If you don't know much about the company, you can check out the website and or search back through my blog for the many times that I mentioned the company (prior to being hired there).
If you interested in one of these positions, send email to jobs@atlassian.com as described in the job posting and cc: me. Good luck!
DHH of 37Signals (yes, them again) posts a really eloquent point about the new model for customer service. He says
One of those transitions is the exchange of base-level support from paid vendors to passionate volunteers. It's a trade-off where you often get better-than-before information, but have to give up your I-can-scream-at-you-because-I-pay privileges.
At my previous job, we frequently made decisions based on the comparison that technology A offer a vendor support contract while technology B did not. And while it may have made the people who signed the checks sleep easier at night, in no way did it actually help those of us who had to work with the technology. Because screaming at someone rarely did any good, and certainly didn't get us a solution any faster. In fact, there were several occasions where, had we had access to all the bug information hidden within vendor A's organization, we could have solved our own problem in a matter of hours instead of fighting for weeks with the vendor's tech support.
Which is not to say that all commercial support are doomed to failure. But in my experience, the more information that is available (like source code, bug tracking or support cases) the better the customer and the vendor are able to work together at solving problems. I've been in crises before where systems were down and tensions were high. But the feeling of helplessness and of being kept in the dark virtually guarantees that things will devolve into the client screaming at tech-support.
But DHH's point is really that you'll get a lot further asking nicely for help from someone who wants to give it to you than you will from demanding it from someone who is contractually obligated to do so. And besides, would it be so bad to put things on a more equal footing? Or inject a little civility into these relationships?
A quick report: today was my first day Atlassian. I spent a chunk of the day on HR paperwork and general setup stuff. (By the way, my new work email address is jonathan@atlassian.com. Don't be a stranger.)
Then I worked on getting JIRA building from source and deploying. Thanks to the atlassian-idea maven plugin, it was almost (but not quite) as easy as advertised. The "not quite" took me a while to work through, but I took good notes. And once I'm sure these are really problems, instead of just failures of understanding, I'll look at fixing them. Hopefully the next guy to come along won't have the same difficulties.
Overall, the first day was really fun. Interesting enough to keep me at the computer until 9 o'clock, anyway. It's nice to be diving into unknown territory again. Hopefully tomorrow will be even better.
This is awfully cool. Neal Stephenson, author of some of my very favorite books, has a wiki. He set it up in 2003 with the publication of the first novel of The Baroque Cycle, Quicksilver, and it has grown into a kind of meta-FAQ for the whole series (which, if you haven't read it, takes place in highly accurate and incredibly detailed historical context, to which extensive annotations are well justified, even for the historically knowledgeable reader).
The folks contributing to this wiki have made an admirable effort. But Stephenson's introduction to the project shows that he clearly had larger ambitions for his site.
Why put the information on such a complicated system, when a simple FAQ is easier? Because we are hoping that the annotations of the book on this site will seed a body of knowledge called the Metaweb, which will eventually be something more generally useful than a list of FAQs about one and only one novel.
However, Wikipedia. has fulfilled those goals far more completely than this site has managed to do, in terms of its breadth, depth and number of contributors. The dominance of Wikipedia poses interesting questions for other wiki-communities. I haven't made up my mind about how they should work with each other, but my first instinct is to avoid the duplication of effort and to ensure that added knowledge is shared as widely as possible.
It's something of a dilemma: for example, it wouldn't be appropriate to add commentary on the actions of Sir Christopher Wren, the character in The Baroque Cycle, to the Wikipedia article on Sir Christopher Wren, the historical figure. However, it would be perfectly appropriate to have an entry on Daniel Waterhouse, the character in The Baroque Cycle, in Wikipedia.
If I were involved in this project (or any other fictionally-inspired wiki, like the Star Trek wiki I mentioned previously), I would propose two alternative strategies: either create a sub-category within Wikipedia, such as this one for The Lord of the Rings, and focus one's efforts there; or build your wiki as a wrapper around the Wikipedia article, with the ability to add extra content as it applies to your narrow focus. That way, any improvements one might make in the general article go back to benefit the entire community, but one still has a place to make specific mention of those items relevant only within the context of the literary work.
I haven't settled on an answer. But it is an area we should think about and try to determine some kind of best-practice, if only to save many hours of the community's collective effort.
Bonus link: this is old, but if you haven't read In the Beginning was the Command Line (plus additional comments in 2004), you should do so.
I just got back from a whirlwind tour of California (Los Angeles → SB Wine Country → Hearst Castle → Highway 1 → Monterey → San Francisco → SB) with two friends from school, Michael and Danny. It was Danny's first trip to California, so we tried to hit the highlights. In all honesty, I saw more of California this weekend than I have in my previous five years here. But it was a lot of time in the car.
Anyway, now that I'm back, I wanted to thank you all for your kind words and encouragement as I prepare to start my new gig. I'm looking forward to getting started, and to being able to blog more openly about my job. That will be a nice change. But it means a great deal to hear from you. Thanks for taking the time to send emails and post comments.
Here we go, kids. I am pleased to announce that on September 12th I'll be starting with Atlassian (makers of JIRA and Confluence) as the Director of Developer Relations.
I couldn't be more excited. There are so many reasons why I think this is the perfect job.
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If there is any sense in which one can claim to have a company as a hero, then Atlassian is one of mine. I've returned many times in this blog to the theme of the Open Company. But that entire idea was originally inspired by the experience that I had as an Atlassian customer. They demonstrated to me that buying and using enterprise software didn't have to be painful. Within weeks of downloading the demo of JIRA three years ago, Atlassian had set the bar by which all other software vendors would afterwards be measured.
Atlassian has managed to open up their code, their development process, their support system, their documentation and their community further than all but a handful of companies. And I'm incredibly excited about the working for a company that will let me practice what I've been preaching here for so long. I hope that I have the opportunity to show other developers that there is a better way; that they needn't suffer through the indignities of typical enterprise software vendors.
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Atlassian builds two products in which I believe wholeheartedly. And I'm enthusiastic about both of them, through for different reasons. JIRA is the best bug-tracker I've ever seen. It's beautifully designed (inside and out), well thought-out and a joy to use. I've been using it as a customer for three years, and I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending it for teams large and small.
Confluence shares many of the JIRA's best attributes. But I'm excited about it because it is truly a transformative product. I saw how it changed the way we worked: eliminating the pain of collaboration, making us more efficient, and capturing incredibly valuable knowledge that would have otherwise been lost. And we're not unique: I know that most companies could benefit in the same way. The potential is huge.
I can't wait to show people what can be done with these tools, and to help make JIRA and Confluence even better.
- Atlassian is exactly the kind of company I was looking for. It's young and has a lean, focused team. They're able to react quickly and push their products forward rapidly. And the founders, Mike and Scott, are phenomenally smart, incredibly nice guys. I feel lucky to be invited to work with them. And I can't wait to meet the rest of the team, who I know to be some of the best and brightest programmers in the industry.
- These guys are just getting started. Atlassian has been growing rapidly for the last few years. The products are so good that they have literally sold themselves. There is so much potential here. I can't wait to see where we go next.
This new position with Atlassian will open up a huge new vista for me, personally. Atlassian understands how powerful relationships are in growing your user-base. Interacting with the development community (including blogging) will be an integral part of my job. I'll have the chance to work with talented developers doing interesting work all over the industry.
I'm greatly looking forward to this next phase of my career. I'll be working with a great team, for a company I admire, on products I believe in and in a challenging new role. Stay tuned, and I'll let you know how things go.
One final question I'd like to address: what does this change mean for my blog? I've thought about that question quite a bit, and I'm sure I'll continue to work it out with the other guys from Atlassian as we move forward.
But at this point, I intend to keep writing about wikis — both in general and in particular, including wikis from other software vendors. I will do my utmost to be honest and accurate when I do. If you think I got something wrong, let me know. You can always contact me directly via email or AIM. And I promise that I will always make my affiliations clear. I'll leave it up to my readers to decide how much credence to give to my opinions.
Wikis, as a software category, are brand new: there is still a vast amount of room to grow without sniping at competitors. I strongly believe we're at the "rising tide lifts all boats" stage of development. I am sure that I will continue to be motivated and inspired by the other wiki companies. There is much to admire about the other wikis I've written about, and that won't change just because I'm working at Atlassian.
Yes, dear reader, I have tremendous news to announce: after many months of planning, I am leaving my current employer for a new job. And it's all thanks to my blog. But it's something of a long story, so let me start at the beginning.
I decided late last fall that it was time to start planning my next career move. I felt that I had advanced as far as could in my current position in terms of what I could learn, the technology I was working with, and my own chances for career progress. In any case, I'm really a startup person at heart. And as my company continued to succeed financially and grow larger, it moved ever further away from the kind of environment in which I was excited to work.
I also knew that I was going to be very particular about the kind of job I would be want to take — there was still plenty to like about my current position, and I wasn't ready to leave just for the sake of leaving. For my next job to be better than my current one, I knew that I wanted to work a company that
- was small enough that I could make a difference,
- built a product that I believed in,
- shared my values about Agile development and openness and
- had lots of room for both me and the company to grow.
One of the first things I decided to do was begin this blog. I thought that when I was ready to apply for a job I could point potential employers to the blog as a means of demonstrating that I could communicate, occasionally had good ideas and was passionate about technology and where the industry was headed. My expectations for the blog were not high, but things quickly started to get interesting.
Within two months of my first post, I had already seen comments from people at several of the small companies I had been writing about. They were universally supportive and seemed genuinely interested in my opinions. It was nothing concrete, but I hoped that they might remember my name if I ever decided to apply for a job.
However, what would happen over the next few months completely blew me away. I continued to write about the companies and products that I found interesting. During the spring I was contacted by people from several of those companies asking me if I was interested in a spot on their team. By the beginning of the summer, I found myself in fairly serious talks with two of them.
This was so much beyond my expectations that I scarcely believed it: I never sent my resume to any of these companies.1 I didn't initiate contact with any of them, except by blogging about their products. I was well outside of Silicon Valley. I didn't attend any of the big conferences. I had never met any of these folk personally. There is absolutely nothing to which I can attribute this attention except the blog.
What followed was months of waiting and more months of negotiation, none of which is all that interesting. It was a long process, but I finally managed to work out all the details a few weeks ago — I have a exciting new job with an outstanding company, and have my blog to thank for it.
Believe me, as I now know from first-hand experience, this blogging thing works. It gave me the chance to engage in a conversation with a huge network of people, most of whom I had never met. It let the potential employers decide that I might be a fit for their company and come to me (rather than the traditional approach which would have had me shotgunning resumes to anyone with a job posting, only to have them ignored or lost in the stack). And it gave those potential employers a much deeper understanding of who I was, how I thought and what I cared about than a resume possibly could.2
And so I am thrilled to announce that I'll be starting a new gig very soon. If you're in the SB area, pop on over to Pub Quiz on Wednesday and help me celebrate the next chapter in my career.
Careful readers will note that I have yet to reveal the name of my new employer. (Yes, I'm crafty like that.) Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll tell you exactly where I'm heading and what I'll be doing when I get there. So stick around.
1. Though it was linked from the blog. Interestingly, the one company to whom I did send a resume (SixApart) never contacted me at all.
2. Over the last few months, when I've had the opportunity to talk with friends about their own career plans, the first thing I've told them is, "Find the field in which you want to work and start blogging about it." I know that we're still on the leading edge of the blogging curve and that one can't expect to generate this kind of attention forever. But right now, if you pick the right niche, you can command an audience far more powerful than the traditional job seeker.
Changes are afoot, dear reader. A new sense of excitement has been running through the tech community this past year, about which I wrote back in March. I've been watching new technology (or old tech put to new use) break out at a rate I haven't seen since 1996. The level of collaboration among those in the community reminds me of those days, as well. I read about new startups debuting every other day; some getting funded, some getting acquired, but mostly small teams of dedicated developers trying to do something innovative with this raft of technologies that we've decided to call Web 2.0.
Truthfully, I'm more enthusiastic about the possibilities than any time since 2000. Here's why:
- We have the benefit of the lessons of recent history. The pain of the bubble is still fresh in many of our minds and I think we will be (slightly) more cautious because of it. Furthermore, most companies (with the exception of Vonage) don't have the same land-grab mentality that so characterized the late nineties, and consequently seem to be spending at a more measured pace.
- The cost of entry for web startups is rapidly approaching zero as Joe Kraus, CEO of JotSpot, wrote recently. The limiting factor is changing from how much money you can raise to how quickly you can execute on your idea.
- We have learnt important lessons from the open source movement in the last few years. And we are applying those lessons to areas far beyond the development of code. I can now talk realistically about Open Companies which are changing the way they relate to their customers over the broad spectrum of their business. Open Companies are serious about engaging in a conversation with their customers and about fostering a mutually beneficial ecosystem around their products.
- We are beginning to recognize the power of small teams. 37 Signals is doing a great job of marketing the "less is more" school of software development. This is a value that has long been fundamental to great technology startups, from Steve and Woz in their garage to Larry and Sergey in their dorm-rooms, and I am coming to better appreciate its power.
- There is massively more information available about all aspects of technology and business. If the internet has fulfilled its early promise in one area, it is the democratization of information. Imagine that you're a college kid who has a great idea and thinks he can turn it into a startup. You have ready access to advice about software development from top-notch developers like Joel Spolsky; you can learn about the venture capital process from practicing VCs like Fred Wilson or Brad Feld; you can learn about the business side of startups from people like Paul Graham or Joe Kraus; You can learn about goings-on inside your larger competitors from people like Robert Scoble or Jeremy Zawodny. These are just a few of the folks that I have benefited enormously from reading. The resources are available for people to educate themselves.
- Location is less important. Silicon Valley is still the undisputed center of the industry, but we are now able to forge connections and build relationships more easily over wider distances. People with good ideas can find an audience despite living outside of the Valley, or even outside of the country.
The stage is set. Opportunities abound, and I feel that it's time to make a move. Over the last several months circumstances have been slowly aligning. Exciting things have been happening for me: unfortunately, I haven't been able to talk about them. But the time has finally come when I can speak, and I couldn't be more excited. Come back tomorrow and I'll fill you in on the first part of my story.
Jonathan Nolen 