Philipp Moehring

Author: Philipp

  • Attention to detail

    Schiller meets John Gruber for a 1 on 1 about Mountain Lion, the new Apple operating system.

    Schiller has no notes. He is every bit as articulate, precise, and rehearsed as he is for major on-stage events. He knows the slide deck stone cold. It strikes me that I have spoken in front of a thousand people but I’ve never been as well-prepared for a presentation as Schiller is for this one-on-one meeting. Note to self: I should be that rehearsed.

    via Daring Fireball: Mountain Lion.

    This is what makes Schiller such a great executive. Also, this is what will make you a great C-whatever – being prepared and fully attentive in any meeting you take.

    I still have to improve, but I feel I am getting better at this.

    Edit: Hello Mr. Murphy. I fixed Mr Schiller’s title. Thanks Marcel. 

  • Why Android is stuck

    Funny how “legacy design” is an issue for a 5 year old platform. Things just move that quickly these days.

    Miner told me the grand vision for Android: it would be a solid foundation for mobile phones, based on Linux, that would work with many types of hardware, and it would be fully customizable. It would provide a “basic user interface,” he said, that “could be changed by the carriers and manufacturers to fit their goals.” The hardest part of building advanced mobile phones, he reasoned, was writing the lower-level software that the operating system uses to communicate with the hardware, including the radio baseband and audio/video controllers, so Android’s goal was to solve those tough engineering problems really well. The carriers and the manufacturers would then be freed up to focus on differentiating the experience at a higher level, at the user interface and experience level.

    via Nothing in Android makes sense except in the light of its original vision by Dustin Curtis.

    In my eyes, the clarity of the original vision is amazing, and makes a lot of sense. In hindsight you might say “of course these idiots people (the phone companies) don’t know what they are doing” – but back then, the phone companies were the ones who made all the phones and software.

    The resulting Android platform and the corresponding platform fragmentation are not really fixable by now. Actually, if you look at Amazon and their Kindle Fire branch of Android, it’s not very revolutionary at all – they are working along the original idea of Android. Curious to see if some phone companies will step up their game in terms of a UI layer (I doubt it) or faster adoption of core Android updates (1% on ICS by now?).

    The latter would be welcome, because i don’t think you can suggest any Android phone to anyone, if it’s not a Nexus device. Sorry, my Googler friends. You can’t.

  • Where to hire engineers in London?

    Lots of people approach me about finding “technical co-founders” “a few great engineers” for their companies. It’s not easy to hire at the moment, much less so in London where the banks and successful Seedcamp startups eat away all the talent (or so).

    Where to advertise for and find engineers?

    I usually say “good luck” with regards to the cofounder.

    When hiring a team (at market range salaries, with a great package, of course), I can recommend a couple of ressources (skewed towards London):

      1. workinstartups.com is ran by Diana, and a great ressource to advertise your (mostly UK-based) jobs.
      2. Silicon Milkroundabout not only has a great name, it is also a series of excellent recruiting events for tech startups. The nice folks at Songkick put it up, and the next one is coming in May. Be there.
      3. Stackoverflow has an excellent careers page. It is probably the most relevant ressource for developers. Profiles are not cheap, but according to founder friends, highly valuable.
      4. Forrst looks cute, is ran by Kyle (a great guy I only know through email), and a great place to find designers.
      5. Dribble is another great place to find designers – browse around to see what’s going on, quite the time waster if you like good design.

    If you are looking for hardcore developers, try scouring github (or let your engineers do it) for folks that work on cool, relevant stuff, and are based around you. They might be interested or able to recommend someone from their circles.

    In general, you need to be extremely resourceful when looking for talent, finding your ways to folks that work on the relevant platforms and technologies. Hiring is hard.

    If you have suggestions for more places to look – leave them in the comments, both for London and other places. If you share your own hiring hacks, you get extra Karma points.

    Oh, and if you are looking for a job in a startup – let me know. I might be able to help out.

    ADDITION

    Florian added a great comment that everyone should read, especially regarding investor /employee communication:

    I have been involved in hiring engineers for the last 2-3 years. The following builds on this experience.
    Okay, hiring hack share alert: I see numerous startups advertising engineering positions who pitch their company to engineers in the same way as they would to investors or founder peers.
    This leads to the following: Strong focus on the company’s market position, growth perspective etc etc. Strong emphasis on the current technology stack as a required skill set. Hype lingo (“stealth ninja CTO magician needed”).

    Far more interesting for high calibre engineers is the following: Describe your company starting with its engineering challenges. Focus on high level challenges that allow developers to think.
    Try and understand what specific skills your hire needs and where an agnostic developer with a broad range of experience will be able to onboard himself quickly (eg you probably don’t need a coffeescript expert, as someone with considerable javascript experience will be able to work productively with coffeescript in a matter of days).

    Describe your development process. If you don’t have one, get one installed. There are exceptional engineers who cowboy code. As long as you never plan to grow a team larger than that one engineer: No problem. Oh, you do? Get a process. Describe it.

    Cut the lingo. All the engineers I know hate it. If you want to stand out, use terms that engineers use to describe themselves. “Maker” is an example. “IT whizz” is not.

    Oh, and we’re hiring: http://mindmatters.co.uk

  • Can’t wait for the really cool photo apps on tablets

    I really love my cameras. I put a lot of hours into learning to use them, figuring out particularities, buying lenses and filters, etc. I am by no means a prosumer or even expert, but I know a little bit about taking pictures, composition, and aperture, exposure, blablabla. In high school, we had a very cool photography lab, and since my aunt was one of the arts teachers at my school, I could basically use it whenever I wanted. Thus, my love of pictures.

    Now, since I use Instagram on my phone, I use my camera much less. These photo sharing apps are especially nice because they almost force you to use filters, making every picture look artistic and sophisticated. BUT: I can still take much better pictures with my SLR.

    So, when will Instagram offer a simple desktop or even web version, to allow me to a) use these filters on bigger pics, and b) feed my stream from somewhere else, or c) allow me more immersive interaction with my photos?

     How about that bigger screen?

    Here’s a thought: All these camera apps on the market have very similar features (take photo, tweak it a little, publish to stream), and don’t go far beyond those. I will take out the ones like Path (private activities) and Eeve (group albums), as I think they have a great niche where they can grow and add more value.

    BUT: creation and tweaking, and also photo storage, management, and ordering across devices is still done in an app as annoying as iPhoto. How about these get thrown into the next generation?

    I would love to see an app that allows me to take pics on my iPhone, edit them on my iPad (easy to do with iCloud photo stream), and share them anywhere. Simply integrating the iPad into this experience will be a great opportunity to do more.

    Next step: instead of creating photos only, create collages, mosaics, GIFs, and other formats. Now, sharing these on your social networks will be much cooler and allows for much more of a story being told.

    Please, build this.

  • Effective intros

    My life consists of making intros to various people – for better or worse. I love connecting dots, so it’s a lot of fun and often rewarding, but it can also be lots of back and forth. In the series of “posts that originally were emails I wrote at least 5 times in the last week”, here is some advice as to how to make it work.

    Whenever you are looking for an introduction, the key is to make it clean, understandable and directed.

    How to ask for an intro in three simple steps:

    1. Clean: Use a fresh, empty, virgin email with a powerful subject line that conveys your message to the introducer and the next person
    2. Understandable: A short paragraph describing what you are working on (relative to you/ your company) and what you are looking for and information about the steps you have already taken, and why that did not work (if applicable)
    3. Directed: Put a specific ask in there so the person on the other end knows how he can help

    “Hi Philipp,
    we are looking for…. because we want to… I tried … but it did not work because… Do you know XYZ/someone at… would be great to be introduced.”

    BEFORE you ask for that intro:

    • Please check if you can find the solution on the interwebs or the documentation (FB, Google, Twitter, etc have great docs that you will most likely be referred to if your question is not specific)
    • Find out if you maybe already know that person. It usually works better if you know them yourself.

    When introduced, be polite and humble.

    This should be more than obvious. No one owes you a thing – you asked for the introduction in the first place. Afterwards, keep it easy for the introducer and move them to bcc as soon as the introduced person replies.

    [EDIT] In my case, I would probably forward the email to the next person, add a little flavor and some witty (bad) jokes, and get out of the way.

    Fred Wilson wrote about another technique when making introductions – the double opt in. Basically, it entails asking both people if they would like to be introduced to each other before you make the introduction – otherwise you can leave a sour taste.

  • One hell of a year. Thanks, all!

    Careful: boring blogpost about my year ahead.

    I’ve spent the past two weeks at home, in Germany. I finally had some time to wind down, relax a little, and read. I haven’t managed to come even close to my goal of 80% couch time, but it’s all good.

    As everyone, I’ve had a bunch of “oh, and what are you up to now” conversations – lovely. This year, I resorted to a “oh, mostly work – but it was quite busy”. and busy I was:

    iCal in Lion looks fugly, but it gives you a stress indicator. Fair enough.

    That tiny little bit of white in January was back when I was in Argentina for the break. The rest of the year – oh well:

      • – Seedcamp Events in Tel Aviv, London, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, New York. I skipped Prague, Ljubljana, and Stockholm, but it was fun nonetheless.
      • – Our huge US trip in March to the East and West Coast, with SXSW to top it all off was definitely the biggest strain on my sanity (and nanny-capabilities with 15 startups in tow).
      • – Seedcamp Week in September – wow, what fun. And not much sleep.
      • – A trip to San Francisco, Valley, and Mexico in October. Awesome fun with tons of new people in Kundavi, and of course the inevitable brain overload from the valley. Tomaz and Jakob at Vox.io were kind hosts in SF, I will have to make this a regular somehow.
      • – Some smaller excursions to Germany, including the Pirate Summit, which will hopefully become a fixture in the European startup events calendar. Go Team!
      • – Weekend getaways to the English coast, the Isle of Wight, and of course France for skiing with the ICE crew.

    I tend to judge a year on the basis of travel and change, and change there was as well:

      • – Isa moved to London in March and we moved to a beautiful new apartment in summer. I kid you not, it’s possible to live in London and have a quiet home.
      • – We (Seedcamp) moved office to East London, which is awesome because lunch is more fun (less bankers and lawyers).
      • – I tried all possible mobile phone operating systems and am back on an iPhone. Boring.
      • – I started running. Somewhat. Sometimes.
      • – We invested in 25 companies over the course of the year. This means crazy many new friends, work pals, calls, meetings, but most of all, it means an amazing set of people to work with beyond my team. It’s probably why I can bear it all.

    So, all is the same, all is new – and here’s to hoping that 2012 will rock as much or more. Q1 already looks like it will.

    Happy new years and stay who you are. Because there is one thing that did not change in 2011:

      • – My friends are awesome.

  • The peculiarities of education startups

    My colleague Carlos forwarded an article today:

    Most entrepreneurs in education build the wrong type of business, because entrepreneurs think of education as a quality problem. The average person thinks of it as a cost problem.

    Building in education does not follow an Internet company’s growth curve. Do it because you want to fix problems in education for the next 20 years.

    There are opportunities in education in servicing the poor in the US and building a company in Asia — not in selling to the middle class in the US.

    The underlying culture will change and expose interesting opportunities in the long term, but probably not for another 5 years.

    via Why Education Startups Do Not Succeed « Avichal’s Blog.

    Read the whole article, because it’s fascinating. I have thought about education for a long time (mostly because I received a good one, by chance and good choice), and find the situation quite troubling in many ways. However, I agree with Avichal – it’s a mess, and it‘s not easy to solve. Here’s a brain dump of my thoughts about the topic – I would love to speak to some people in the market to understand it better.

    The current status

    Education is either paid for by the state (=no opportunities to make much revenue, other than by disruption, and disruption and govt are not in the same bed), and/or it’s tightly controlled by large corporates that bank on the status quo (private colleges).

    Thus, it’s mostly a vitamins vs painkiller debate when talking about education things like learning apps, classroom organisation, etc. Due to the nature of top-down decisions in the classroom, the large corporates and their salesforce and lobbying are better positioned for quite a while.

    In 2nd and 3rd world countries, it might be a different thing, but this is also where the devices aren’t yet available. thus, it’s much cheaper and easier to facilitate change with people instead of technology there. The educational system in the poorer countries is still stuck in the 60s/70s when it comes to teaching methods. Talk to anyone who does voluntary or even vocational teaching in poor countries, and it’s all full frontal teaching with students writing and listening. They have neither money, education, nor infrastructure to allow for new methods of teaching.

    Seeing the education in the EU, it is very slowly breaking up to be more interactive and integrative, catering to individuals. This comes from both a very well funded education system (in reality, lots of money and leave no child behind type teaching) and our acceptance of new technology (and our own daily use). This will both take very long to come to the poorer markets, and necessitate solutions that are yet to be developed.

    What makes me hopeful

    is that most teachers (and builders, and professors, and politicians, and loads of other professions) are led and populated by baby boomer aged folks. Think about it – almost all of these professions are people in similar ages, and the following generation wasn’t one of the strongest in terms of development. The baby boomers got kids early, worked hard, studied a lot – their kids smoked pot, went to woodstock, studied until their 30s, and are now in safe positions where they want everything but change (nice over-generalization, right?).

    This leads to a new generation of very powerfully motivated people in our age group, wanting change. Look at us as an example – we’re leading the way in our field, simply overtaking a lot of people who are older than us, and stuck in old ways of thinking and working. In the educational sector, this is even stronger so, as teaching hasn‘t changed in a long time. There weren’t many teaching positions open in the 80s and 90s, but now a whole generation (the boomers) need to be replaced in about the next 10 years. I talked about this to one of my older teachers last week – almost all of the teaching body at my high school has actually changed in the last 8 years.

    Long story short

    that’s when new methods of teaching, bottom-up adoption of tools, and a much more cost effective, democratized version of education is possible. We have the tools, infrastructure, and knowledge to benefit from the possibilities. We also still have the large budgets, which is why the new education market can take off economically.

    The poorer countries don’t have any of the prerequisites, which is why they need radically different solutions, NOW. Without knowing these markets, it’s terribly difficult to build the necessary tools. Avichal makes a great point in his blog post, especially about the Asian markets – but you need to know these to play a part.

    Because of the long term nature of the problem and its solutions, I am similarly sceptical about the market and especially investment opportunities without a really long term horizon.

    TL;DR: There are a lot of structural problems to overcome or play along – it’s difficult, but exciting.