I also mentioned a couple of slideshows or videos to watch, here are direct links to them.

• How Did X Get Traction – a Q&A threads on Quora. Lots of nuggets of wisdom about acquiring your initial audience.
• ‘Bootstrapping Soundcloud’ – an entertaining talk by Eric Wahlforss. Eric tells a great story about SoundCloud party that they organized in Berlin and how it acted as a right kind of grassroot PR to make them better known among musicians, their target audience.
• Startup Lessons Learned – a presentation by Dropbox. They explain how advertising and traditional PR didn’t work for them. Offline virality (people suggesting Dropbox to their friends) was the most effective and they did things that helped user to evangelize Dropbox online.

I’m going to talk about a few topics related to tech startups that I know something about. It’s a bit random selection of topics, but I thought it would offer a better background for a free-form discussion after the talk than a very focused one topic talk.

Topics are, in the order of raising importance for an early stage startup:

• Getting acquired. Why is a startup acquired?
• Trial and error of attracting early users
• Working smarter, being persistent. Hackers & Hustlers. Difficulties that tech founders encounter.

Summer of Startups is a first attempt to organize something akin to a very early stage investor Y-Combinator in Finland. It’s organized by student-run associations AaltoES, HankenES and Hues, but nevertheless they have been able to involve a lot of experienced entrepreneurs and investors. I think it’s amazing what is currently happening with Summer of Startups at Aalto Venture Garage and around these associations.

Ramine Darahiba is coaching founders during the summer.
Checkout a list of startups participating from his Arctic Startup post.

What they teach in management schools? That question has intrigued me for a long time. Either they teach wrong things or getting thousands of employees to stay motivated and work efficiently is a really tough if not an unsolvable problem.

Today I accidentally encountered a succinct description of management that resonated with me. Ben Horowitz, a VC and an ex-serial entrepreneur, describes management in an answer to a question in Quora:

If you think of management as a systems problem where your task is to design and maintain a system where it’s 1) easy to get meaningful work done and 2) is fun to work in and 3) you will be recognized for your good work, then the relevant experiences for management are to a) work in a company and find out why it’s hard to get things done or b) run a company and carefully observe how you are screwing it up.

I’ve worked in two big companies, Nokia and Google, and in various smaller entities.

Nokia, at that time, was dysfunctional. Working there felt like driving several months with a gas pedal fully pressed down, but a gear stucked on 2. You could smell the smoke. Capable people worked a lot, but a little useful came out. And then there was an equal amount of less capable people. I don’t know if they worked a lot or not, but it probably didn’t matter.

Although there was several problems, I put the main blame on a deeply hierarchical organization that Nokia had at that time. I had three levels of management sitting next to me and I never talked with anybody from the high management. Neither did my team mates, thus the lack of communication was not just a sampling issue. How could the high management ever understand problems that us in the execution level had, if they only heard them from company-wide intranet surveys and from the middle management 10-steps-deep. In my opinion, all the other problems followed from that.

Google is a poster-child for a company with a great work culture. During my short 1-year-stint there, I had an interesting 20 minute discussion with Larry and bumped into Eric in a party despite the fact that I was mainly located in London instead of Mountain View. And of course they had a TGIF events on every Friday, with high management talking to employees and taking questions. Thus they definitely didn’t have a problem that Nokia had.

But Google wasn’t without its own growing pains: Supersmart PhDs doing Javascript hacks and feeling empty inside, a lot of killed projects that clearly had left emotional scars with long-time employees, certain less-inspiring personality types climbing up the command chain. You know, the usual big company stuff.

I sometimes felt that a some kind of reality distortion field of “this amazing work place with free gourmet food” was the main motivator for many.

Google has been very innovative in how to be a company with 3000 employees, but I felt that they had deliberately decided that they are not going to innovate how to be a company with 20000 employees. It’s risky after all and they are already taking risks in their innovative products.

Though, I honestly think that Google might have the best possibility to innovate in big company management, if they choose to try out radical new approaches.

When it comes to Ben’s description of management, I think I’ve personally done enough of the a) and I’m now having a start on the b). Maybe someday I know what they should teach in management schools.

We decided that we don’t go for Amazon EC2. As we are focusing on mobile, we will likely not get web-scale load-spikes even in a case of surprising success. Using Amazon S3 – or any other truly scalable data storage – for a data backend sets certain hurdles for programming. It’s good to keep those restrictions in mind, but we decided to go for flexibility at this point.

However, we wanted to something that can be scaled both horizontally and vertically based on our needs. Simple, cheap, programmer-friendly VPS host seems like a perfect fit.

Following three hosts seemed to have a right attitude and pricing.

• slicehost – “Built for Developers.”
  Praised for their support and the community. Excellent articles on set up. Was acquired by Rackspace and servers run in data centers owned by Rackspace.
• Linode – “Develop. Deploy. Scale.”
  Prices are between slicehost and prgrm.com. Seems that they don’t have on-site personel in all of their data centers.
• prgmr.com – “We don’t assume you are stupid.”
  Cheap prices. Targeting a lower end hobby market although apparently they have very skilled personel.

Pricing

Our choice – for now
We ended up choosing Slicehost, because of the positive opinion of their support and great articles. We will evaluate again when pricing starts to matter. If you know about other good VPS hosts in this category, please leave a comment and I’ll extend this article.

P.S. In case you decide to use Slicehost based on this post, here is a referral link that you can use to sign up and give us extra credit.

In short, App Store and it’s rivals are solving a distribution problem so that it’s very cost-efficient for a small startup to test an idea, reach users and try to get traction in mobile. This wasn’t possible just 3 years ago, when we started Jaiku. Only reasonable way to get a mobile application to users was through operator or device manufacture deals.

Another interesting opportunity is that new App Store in iPhone OS 3.0 is providing a small payment solution in a user-friendly way. You can build and test business models that have been very difficult in web services as there hasn’t been widely adopted solution to pay few bucks in user-friendly way.

Now, very interesting future possibility is that Apple and others are not actually building application stores, but more general small payment systems. What if iPhone OS 4.0 would provide JavaScript APIs to App Store in-app payment system?

This is a must-see. The Netscape founder Marc Andreessen talks about services and making business in internet.

Among other juicy bits the interview includes stories about testing ideas and concepts via Google Ads and early days of Twitter investments. Did you know that Twitter founder Evan Williams returned money invested in his company Odeo back to investors and said that it’s not going to work, but that they have another idea?