Trevor Burnham

It’s been an exciting/​intense/​terrifying/​gratifying week for me. It started with a valuable lesson: If you want your blog to get more hits, announce that you’re leaving a PhD program. Responses at SI have been largely warm: “We hate to see you go, but you’ve gotta do what you feel is right”; “You’ve been a terrific person to have in our com­mu­nity”; “You’re launch­ing a startup? That’s so exciting!” That’s been a great relief. Some schools would see a second-​​year dropout as a failed invest­ment. That I haven’t gotten that reaction is a tes­ta­ment to the friendly, positive atmos­phere at SI.

Mean­while, fol­low­ing the The­o­ryville team’s surprise chat with Harj of Y Com­bi­na­tor, we’ve received more and more positive signals. First, we were invited to Tech­Stars for a Day; so, one week from today, Noah and I will be net­work­ing up a storm in Boulder! (Tom had a con­flict­ing oblig­a­tion.) We were named as Momentum MI final­ists, and awarded free summer office space by TechArb, putting us into con­tention for the TechArb Accel­er­a­tor (this year’s suc­ces­sor to the RPM10). We’ve received encour­ag­ing queries from the folks at DreamIt Ventures and BetaSpring. And all the while, we’ve been building our first func­tional demo, set to go online before TS4AD.

On Tuesday, Noah and I had lunch with Dug Song, the central hub of Ann Arbor’s entre­pre­neur­ial ecosys­tem. The guy is a walking gold mine of startup business knowl­edge. The thing he empha­sized most was Paul Graham’s highest prin­ci­ple of startup success: Know your cus­tomers. It’s an obvious rule, but we realized that we haven’t been giving it the priority it deserves. Sure, a working demo is nice, but input from prospec­tive cus­tomers is price­less. We need to fill in the blank in “I’d pay for The­o­ryville if it let me _​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​_​,” and convince investors that there are tens of thou­sands of researchers with that same blank.

We also realized during our con­ver­sa­tion with Dug that a sec­ondary market we’d only been glancing at might actually be our primary market: edu­ca­tion. These days, intro­duc­tory courses on sta­tis­tics are typ­i­cally taught using Stata, SPSS, or R. Many of those students have never written computer code before in their lives, so they’re encoun­ter­ing both pro­gram­ming and sta­tis­tics for the first time—a har­row­ing expe­ri­ence! Wouldn’t it be nice to have a code-​​free envi­ron­ment that could be used for rigorous hands-​​on data analysis in the classroom?

So, our strategy right now: Finish our rough, built-​​in-​​two-​​weeks proof-​​of-​​concept demo (what we’re calling Version 0.01a). Then contact as many poten­tial users as we can (not just the handful of profs and grad students we know per­son­ally) to find out how we can make their research/​teaching simpler, faster, and more fun.

And what about you, dear reader? How might The­o­ryville make your life better?

Tags:   autobiography   startup

I’m leaving the Uni­ver­sity of Michigan School of Infor­ma­tion PhD program after this semester. It’s been a great two years, and I’m very grateful for the STIET fel­low­ship that’s sup­ported me. At SI, I’ve been sur­rounded by people who think deeply about tech­nol­ogy not for its own sake, but for how it affects our lives and our culture. I’ve gotten the chance to take courses on every­thing from rec­om­mender systems to methods in exper­i­men­tal eco­nom­ics, not to mention the won­der­ful first-​​year micro and game theory sequence at the UMich Econ depart­ment. I got to present a short paper at the HCOMP con­fer­ence in Paris last summer. And I’ve had the honor of serving on the Faculty Search Com­mit­tee, helping to decide who the school will hire from an extremely talented pool of appli­cants. So this is not a decision I’ve made lightly. It is, however, one I’m sure of.

When I first came here, I liked to tell people that in five years I’d be an absent-​​minded pro­fes­sor, most likely of Eco­nom­ics. My advisor helped me to find novel areas of research, and I started perusing the lit­er­a­ture and creating the­o­ret­i­cal models. But I soon found that I was much more excited about building stuff that people could actually use than I was about writing academic papers. Last summer, when I built a social book­mark­ing app called Quocial (now defunct), I thought the two inter­ests could co-​​exist. Since then, though, I’ve grad­u­ally reached the con­clu­sion that the optimal allo­ca­tion of my time is 100% software devel­op­ment, 0% academic stuff. Which means leaving grad school and seeking funding for my dream: To create an amazing, web-​​based alter­na­tive to STATA.

Now, of course I don’t expect to attract investors on the basis of my idea alone. (What do you think this is, the 1990s?) To quote a trope that’s rightly per­me­ated the star­tu­pos­phere: “Ideas are worth nothing unless executed. Exe­cu­tion is worth millions.” And I know I’m not the only one who’s had this idea. Someone posted a rough pro­to­type to Hacker News just two weeks ago that was very similar in concept, in fact.

For­tu­nately, I have more than just the idea. I have two amazing SI Master’s students as team­mates, Noah Liebman and Tom Haynes. We call our­selves The­o­ryville. We’ve been meeting since November to flesh out the concept and do some basic market research, and we’ve recently started pitching our idea around.

Today we got a nice call from Harj Taggar, founder of Auc­tomatic and cur­rently a part of Y Com­bi­na­tor, asking us some informal ques­tions about our appli­ca­tion. One of the things he encour­aged us to do was to build a demo before it comes time for him and the rest of the Y Com­bi­na­tor folks to pick final­ists. Coin­ci­den­tally, I’d told my team the same thing earlier this week: We need a demo. We need to show that we can execute.

And that’s the story so far: Leaving grad school. Two weeks to show that my team has the poten­tial to turn our idea into a useful, slick-​​looking app this summer. No pressure.

Tags:   autobiography   startup