Mark Fletcher, on his experience starting up companies
Garage philosophy. Started working on Bloglines on his own while he was still working at other companies. You need:
Garage philosophy. Started working on Bloglines on his own while he was still working at other companies. You need:
- Passion - because it will consume your life
- Cheap technologies - great time to start an Internet service. Hardware/software is getting cheaper
- Keep it simple - keep it simple both for users and technology
- Release early and often - it's really important to get things out there and incrementally improve. Your users will have better ideas about your service than you will
- Moonlighting limits risks - Worked nights and weekends; friends/family are the first people you should look for funds because they want to see you succeed; free services == less pressure (it's not the end of the world if your service is down for a few hours)
- Hire a lawyer
- Web services APIs are a good thing
- Find good help (especially sys admin)
- Outsource to eLance.com (you can outsource all kinds of stuff. Have contractors bid for your work)
- DBJ (http://cr.yp.to) qmail djbdns daemontools
- ClearSilver (web templating package)
- Berkeley DBs
- Linux/Apache
- C/C++/bash/python
- Skiplist data structure (a data structure algorithm)
- Avoid NFS (has a tendency to look up systems without explanation)
- Avoid table-level locking in MySQL (doesn't scale)
- Two choices: dedicated servers vs. buying/hosting. They went the dedicated server route. Cost less to get going
- Design for cheap hardware - Google is the shining example of this
- eBay - you can get hardware on the cheap
- APC PDUs for remote power cycleing (power strips you can log into and cycle if a machine has crashed on you)
- HP ProCurve (machines work great)
- Avoid Seagate Ultra-SCSI drives
- Good phone for SSH - likes a Treo so you can log into your machines from anywhere
- Copying files vs. client/server (they end up copy files around like bloglines RSS feeds)
- Calculate on the fly vs. cache (subscriber counts at bloglines are delivered by a once a day process) Memory vs. Disk
- Relational DBs vs. Flat Files (all blog articles are stored as flat files--all 3M articles)
- RAID vs. Redundant (they ensure blog articles are replicated across all machines--why? if a box goes down, you don't lose available of an article)
- Linux software RAID 1 - rock solid
- DNS round robin for web servers - don't have to worry about setting up a load balancer
- Hot back-ups for off-line processing - backup every hour
- Worry about cooling in the co-lo (if you start to have hard drive failures, that's a good indicator that you might be having cooling problems)
