Trevor Burnham

Yes­ter­day, I received a delight­fully under­stated e-​​mail from Y Com­bi­na­tor: “Your appli­ca­tion looks promis­ing and we’d like to meet you in person.”

Until a few months ago, I wouldn’t have believed such a thing to be possible. I’d tinkered with software as a hobby, but I hadn’t thought of it as a career. I was 24 and on track to become an academic, studying algo­rith­mic game theory. On Sep­tem­ber 19th, 2008, in the third week of my first semester as a doctoral student at the Uni­ver­sity of Michigan School of Infor­ma­tion, I wasn’t thinking about startups; I was thinking about science. Specif­i­cally, I was thinking about how sci­en­tists share their work; or rather, how they don’t. If you want to repli­cate an analysis that you read in a sci­en­tific paper, you’re in for a tough slog: First, you need to track down the data. Even if the data is osten­si­bly public, it may be impos­si­ble to find and convert to a usable format. Second, you’ll need a computer program for the analysis. If you contact the original authors, they might share their code, but you’ll probably need some expen­sive software (not to mention hardware) to run it. If you don’t hear back from them, you’re in for some har­row­ing reverse-​​engineering. And after all of that, you may find that the paper omitted several critical details.

That’s the sort of problem we talk about a lot at SI. So I proposed a solution: A YouTube-​​like hub where people can upload theories, for­mu­late hypothe­ses, and test them. On the off chance that I might want to turn this vague notion into a reality one day, I reg­is­tered the lengthy but friendly domain The​o​ryville​.com. And I sat on it. It got lost in a slew of other ideas (I would wind up turning one, a social book­mark­ing site called Quocial, into a rough but func­tional app over the summer) and my focus was on being a student, at any rate. Cer­tainly, the startup life appealed to me, and I loved Founders at Work, but I didn’t see myself dropping out.

That started to change last semester. My research was going nowhere. I had lots of ideas, but they felt unsat­is­fy­ingly abstract and remote from real appli­ca­tions. I began to suspect that my com­par­a­tive advan­tage wasn’t in the academic realm. When a local summer seed funding com­pe­ti­tion (RPM10) was announced, I thought I’d see if I could recruit some co-​​founders. On November 17, 2009, I sent an e-​​mail out to an SI e-​​mail list, asking if anyone was inter­ested in joining me to form a startup based on this concept: “X is to STATA as Google Docs is to Microsoft Office.” Obvi­ously this isn’t the best way to meet co-​​founders, but I was extremely lucky: Among the replies, two of them stood out as serious, and both prospec­tive co-​​founders—Noah Liebman and Tom Haynes, both SI Master’s students—asked great ques­tions that showed that they under­stood exactly what I wanted to achieve, how this small piece of software could have grand, world-​​changing impli­ca­tions. They were also talented, design-​​oriented coders with previous expe­ri­ence working for small software com­pa­nies. I proposed that we step up our ambi­tions a notch: Let’s not just apply to RPM10. Let’s start acting like a real company—having regular meetings, exchang­ing ideas and code—and let’s apply to every seed accel­er­a­tor we can to make sure that we’ve got a roof over our heads this summer and some con­nec­tions to VCs after.

With each appli­ca­tion we sent in, our ideas got better. The first inter­view we did, back in February, was for the Frankel Fund, a UMich invest­ment com­pe­ti­tion run by MBA students. The one who inter­viewed us had a lot of great ques­tions that we had no answers for. We waxed exu­ber­ant about the easy-​​to-​​use inter­face we planned, and he asked us: “Well, is that some­thing researchers actually want?” Of course! we answered, it’s easy-​​to-​​use! “But isn’t there a lot of inertia in the academic software market?” Well, yes… but that’s why we’ll use a freemium model! “Have you actually talked to any poten­tial users?” [Pause] Um… well, at SI, we’re trained to… we’re really good at… we will do that! We didn’t get a second interview.

When we met with Dug Song later that month, he raised the same concerns. We’d been talking with each other about the idea, but we hadn’t been talking to the people we were going to sell it to. We’d figured that customer feedback was some­thing you waited to collect until after you had a working demo to show them. But investors are wary of aspiring entre­pre­neurs who spend all their time tin­ker­ing with untested ideas—and rightly so! When that clicked with us, every­thing changed. We started asking for input from every poten­tial user we knew and sending cold e-​​mails by the dozen to UMich profs to ask them to talk with us about their software needs. Based on the feedback we were getting, our under­stand­ing of the market com­pletely changed.

Mean­while, we’d applied early to YC—just a couple of days after the appli­ca­tion became available—and Harj asked us to Skype just a few days later. We had a great informal inter­view, much longer and chattier than the official one that’s been compared to Guan­tanamo Bay. We men­tioned that we knew Ben Con­gle­ton, founder of Olark, whose foot­steps I’m inad­ver­tently fol­low­ing in. (He withdrew from the PhD program last year, his second year. He was even on the same fel­low­ship.) I’d barely known Ben while he was at SI—I was focused on course­work, while he was already doing Olark—but it was still some­thing. A little while later, Harj sent us an e-​​mail sug­gest­ing that we chat with Ben, with the clear subtext that he wanted to get Ben’s opinion on us. We had a fruitful con­ver­sa­tion, and Ben con­nected us to the founders of Lingt, the only YC-​​funded company (to my knowl­edge) that has expe­ri­ence selling to class­rooms. I don’t know what Ben told Harj, but I’m sure it worked in our favor.

We built a crude demo in the two weeks before the YC appli­ca­tion deadline, in hopes of showing that we can execute. However, this was our first time coding together, we had a lot of other things going on at the time (courses, midterms, an Ultimate Frisbee tour­na­ment…), and the result was far from stunning. Still, it was worth it for two reasons: It gave us some momentum, which we’re using to build a much-​​improved demo now (essen­tial to the YC inter­view, by all accounts); and it led us to grapple with some design deci­sions that weren’t apparent when we were just using white­boards and static mockups. That, in turn, gave us a more specific notion of what our product’s advan­tages are.

Noah and I went to TS4AD where, despite our intro­ver­sion, we got to make some great con­nec­tions and collect novel feedback. (Two separate people sug­gested that we tailor our product to the needs of MBA students, who currently—and appar­ently unhappily—use Excel for every­thing.) While TS4AD is a non-​​essential event (we were repeat­edly assured that there’s no sta­tis­ti­cal dif­fer­ence in Tech­Stars accep­tance rates between TS4AD atten­dees and those who stay home), it led to some unex­pected benefits. For one, a Boulder entre­pre­neur who saw my tweets from the event con­nected us to some high school stats teachers, allowing us to explore another poten­tial market.

Other factors: I had karma of about 500 as Trevor­Burn­ham on Hacker News, most of it from being the first to submit the fan­tas­tic Wired story on the slow, ago­niz­ing death of Duke Nukem Forever. I’d like to think that I avoided “karma-​​whoring,” resist­ing the temp­ta­tion to link to sala­cious fluff. I doubt that was a sig­nif­i­cant factor in YC’s decision, but it couldn’t have hurt. I also read HN vora­ciously, via the RSS feed. I watched a lot of the Mixergy inter­views, and the recent Jessica Liv­ingston inter­views. I’m an outsider to the startup world, so I felt that it was impor­tant to absorb as many founder stories as I could. That appetite for knowl­edge has def­i­nitely paid off during the various inter­views we’ve had so far, and I’m sure it’ll continue to pay off as we build our product and our business.

And that’s the story of The­o­ryville so far. No matter what happens after this, it is, as they say, an honor just to be nominated.

Tags:   autobiography   startup

Just got back from Tech­Stars for a Day, a meetup of several Tech­Stars appli­cants, alums and mentors. The latter two groups gave talks to us aspiring tech entre­pre­neurs, of which the key recur­ring theme was: Your idea sucks. Or: No one actually does the idea they applied with. Or: Your team is what matters.

Now, this asser­tion is absurd on its face, so it took me a while to grok what these veteran founders and investors were talking about. If the idea doesn’t matter, why does the appli­ca­tion even ask for it? And even among the alums present, some (such as SendGrid) had suc­ceeded with essen­tially the same concept they’d applied with. Sure, obvi­ously the ability to execute—to write good (or, prefer­ably, amazing) software in a limited timeframe—is more impor­tant than the idea. As one speaker put it, “An A team with a B idea is way more likely to succeed than a B team with an A idea.” But what’s this about ideas sucking?

That glib pro­nounce­ment finally made sense as the founder alums spoke about their expe­ri­ences. As it turns out, most (like SocialTh­ing) applied with an idea in a certain space (they’d wanted to create a com­peti­tor to MySpace), realized during the summer that there was a better oppor­tu­nity in the same space (a utility that lets you sync infor­ma­tion across multiple social networks), and built that instead. Aha! Now I got it: “Your idea sucks” is just a pithy way of express­ing the following:

1. No matter how good your idea may be, do not regard it as sacred.
2. You need to spend time lis­ten­ing to (poten­tial) cus­tomers and mod­i­fy­ing your idea accordingly.
3. Having a good idea does matter, but only insofar as it a) shows that you are capable of gen­er­at­ing good ideas, and b) shows that you’re inter­ested in a market with potential.

As it happens, I read Steve Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany on the flight over, on Dug Song’s rec­om­men­da­tion. Blank’s theme is similar to the above, saying that startups should center their efforts on “customer devel­op­ment” rather than “product devel­op­ment,” lest they develop a first-​​rate solution to a problem no one has. To cite one of his examples: The Segway had a great engi­neer­ing team, but they fell in love with their idea rather than getting feedback from the folks they were planning to sell the thing to.

So, how does this relate to The­o­ryville, the idea I’ve been fleshing out with my team­mates since November? Based on early feedback from poten­tial cus­tomers, I believe that our strategy should be to reseg­ment the sta­tis­ti­cal software market into “col­lab­o­ra­tive” and “non-​​collaborative” software by intro­duc­ing the first collaboration-​​oriented stats app for pro­fes­sional researchers and students. That’s the space we want to go into. But beyond that, our ears are open. We’ve designed a non-​​linear graph­i­cal workflow inter­face that we all think is quite clever, but we won’t really know if it solves a problem until we start showing it to people. We think our initial target market will be social sci­en­tists, but we’re also con­sid­er­ing class­rooms, and some of the folks we talked to at TS4AD sug­gested that finan­cial analysts and MBA students would love our easy-​​to-​​use inter­face. We need to test those assump­tions, and we can’t wait until the end of the summer to do so. We have to do so con­stantly.

I have to admit that Paul Graham com­pressed all of the above down to just seven words in What Startups Are Really Like, #10: Fast iter­a­tion is the key to success.

Tags:   autobiography   startup

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