Many people have heard the story of how the Mac user interface was born: Steve Jobs toured Xerox PARC and was shown some basic window-based computer. It was a short demo. When he went home, he tried to reproduce what he had seen. Except he hadn’t noticed the limitations, such as the fact that windows can’t overlap. And so Apple went on to create the GUI we all know today.

On a smaller scale, I had a similar experience. One day (this is the late 90s), my boss told me to drop whatever I was doing and start working on building some fancy debug system for hardware designers.

I was a pretty junior engineer and didn’t know any better. So I assumed I was really supposed to build such a system. I didn’t know it was impossible and didn’t make any sense at all.

It wasn’t easy, but I eventually figured a way. After a few weeks, I had a prototype. It worked! I showed it to my boss. And my first patent was born (the story of what happened to that patent after that is better left for another day).

What did I learn from that experience? In the startup world, there is a lot of love for young founders, because many believe only they can be disruptive and come up with innovative startups. As I get older, I should resent such a preconception, but I agree with it.

And now I understand why it is so: the more experience I gain, the better I am at knowing right away if something is going to work or not. But what I gain in efficiency, I lose in innovation.

How many ideas did I not pursue because I knew they didn’t make sense? I would pass on a 140-character messaging system, but it may be fun enough for kids to build. Who am I to judge.

Looking at the Google Analytics stats, I can see another lesson: twitter only brought less than a hundred visitors (0.49%). For all the buzz (:-), I’m not feeling the twitter love. Good old discussion groups seem to work better.

And so yesterday I bumped into a post on Hacker News about interview questions for Google product managers. Call it timely.

One interview question specially triggered my interest. I have been advocating doing the job rather than talking in empty generalities ever since I was educated by Nick Corcodilos in the late 90s, when I was interviewing tens of C++ developers. It sounded like a very reasonable question that a future Gmail product manager would want to answer:

If you are the product marketing manager for Google’s Gmail product, how do you plan to market it so as to achieve 100 million customers in 6 months?

Oh, and what would my answer be? I might as well walk the talk. Let me think.

First, I’d notice that reaching 100M customers means I have to think outside the US. The US market is just not large enough. What else could I target, hopefully cheap? What about India? That sounds big enough.

Ok, how much should I spend? Let’s shoot for $10M. I’d spend a million to get endorsements from Bollywood stars. Did you notice how Google never uses emotions and star power in their ads, and tends to focus on logic, reasoning and arguments? If you want to convert 100M customers quickly, you’d better appeal to their emotions, not their IQ.

I’d spend the other $9M on a TV ad campaign. In the US, you can get an ad at the Superbowl for $3M and reach 90M viewers. Hopefully, India is cheaper, and while of course not everyone will convert, you should get pretty decent results.

How would you do it (bonus points if you are a Gmail product manager)?

I was tired of people saying “how come the co-founders meetup is only in Silicon Valley”. “We need one where I live.”

Fine!

If you live in Austin, just sign up on the Meetup website. Locally, Ricardo is graciously helping me organize it.

How does the Meetup work?

It’s a great evening of fun, where 10 founders have 3 minutes each to pitch the audience of 100+ to find a co-founder. Before and after the pitches, we provide food and drinks so people can network freely and meet other entrepreneurs.

Mostly, it’s a lot of fun.

What are the rules to present?

You have 3 minutes to cover what you are looking for, what your project or skills are.

But more importantly, you should also cover one of your passions that is not directly related to the rest of your speech. Listening to 10 pitches back to back is tough on the audience: if you sound like any other business, soon your message will be lost. You need to communicate what your are passionate about. Better yet, reveal something personal, so people get a feel for who you really are.

Otherwise, you’ll sound like a business robot with yet another boring business plan. And no co-founder will call you back.

If you need inspiration for the passion part, think of these questions from the Y-Combinator application:

Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some system to your advantage

Please tell us in one or two sentences about something impressive that you have built or achieved

Surprise us!

Please, no more than 3 slides to help you support your presentation. Your contact info must be on the last slide, because that’s when people will pay attention, assuming you did a good job during your 3 minutes.

Make sure that one of your slides clearly indicates the skills you are looking for and whether full-time or part-time/moonlighting are acceptable. This is critical info for the audience.

How Can a Business Person Convince a Developer?

You can’t ask a “rockstar” iPhone developer to work for you for free, just because you have a “great idea.” Understand your audience. The best hint I can give is copied directly from a great post on Hacker News:

1. Become a domain expert – know the problem you are trying to solve inside and out. Know the market size, sales cycles, etc. Make connections in the industry.

2. Find Customers – Bring an idea, along with a 14,000 name mailing list that you generated via blogging on the subject.

3. Bring a design – Actually mock up a set of flows for an MVP. Show it to 20 people, and iterate on their feedback. Find out what is important so when you do start building you build traction right away.

Logistics

Please send me a draft of the slides, in Powerpoint format so I can merge everything into one presentation (and don’t call your file “co-founders meetup.ppt”: I have hundreds of these – use your name or your company’s name instead). Do not plan on bringing your laptop to present, we can’t switch laptops or give live demos.

Once all the materials have been received, I’ll send you an e-mail to tell you whether your pitch was selected and also give you feedback on the content to make it as compelling as possible.

One last thing. You should assume that the content of the slides is public, so do not put down confidential information – keep it for the pitch.

UPDATE (12/9/2011): you may want to read this advice on how to give the best pitch.

Why? Because some people will pay to read your tweets before everyone else. Sixty seconds is not long, but it’s the difference between free and millions of dollars of revenue.

Here’s how it works.

Imagine a new premium Twitter client. It costs 99 cents on the App Store. Every time you tweet, it gets posted on the regular Twitter network with a small delay. Everyone who is on Twitter will see your tweet with that delay. But the trick is that those who have the same premium Twitter client will see it live, before everyone else. That’s step one.

Step two is revenue sharing. Now that endusers have an incentive to buy the premium client because they really care about the influential people they follow, we can use the revenue from selling the app and redistribute it to those influencers. The premium twitter client actually would have a money counter in the top right that displays how much money you are receiving because of people who follow you.

Who could pull that off best? It turns out that Loic Le Meur of Seesmic already owns a Twitter client. And he has more than 50,000 followers. He could easily convince two of his buddies (Robert Scoble with 140,000 followers and Dave McClure with 40,000 followers) to take their tweets premium. Why? Because they love to be at ground zero of new technology and business models.

Out of those 200,000 followers, you’d easily get 10,000 to pay $1 to get the premium app to stay “in the first circle of friends” of their idols. Take that $10,000 of revenue, and send it back to the people with the most followers. Instantly, about 2,000 people just made $5 by buying a $1 app.

That’s all it will take to set off a chain reaction.

Could Twitter itself do this? Probably not right away: the notion of a two-tiered service would be a tough sell to their existing users. However, if it is made popular by a third-party, they could eventually do it too.

What do you think?

The twist is that all projects must build a hardware prototype (I guess because it’s linked to the Mechanical Engineering department). For me, it was a welcome change to hearing pitch after pitch of web and software startups. When you actually build hardware, your horizons expand.

There were good projects.

A dual-screen tablet to communicate with your grandma (there is a definite need here, I just think having two screens doubles the cost of the tablet beyond what people can afford, without adding enough value).

A very impressive demo of a telepresence table that goes beyond video to provide real document interactivity using gestures.

But my favorite one was TRUSTcard. It looks like a credit card (but a little bit thicker) with a tiny keyboard and LCD screen. It’s meant to make casual borrowing mainstream. Can I borrow your $100 textbook for the weekend? Although you don’t really know me, you hand me the textbook, because I hand you this card where I just punched the borrowing information. The card will serve as a reminder that the item is out there, and in the worst case, it can be used through insurance to get your money back.

Their vision is that will save the world because objects will now be reused much more, so we’ll have less junk being manufactured.

I like it.

Of course, it reminds me of crowdfunding and topics close to my startup (for instance, creating an instantaneous contract on the fly is quite similar to the vision behind FairSoftware, except one is for IP, the other for physical goods).

While there are iPhone apps that pretty much do the same thing today (minus the insurance bit, which I think is critical), the students were adamant that the physical trade, the fact of exchanging the card for the object, was hugely important.

How would I fund such a company? I would pitch it to an insurance company that wants to break into the student market. By selling those cards, they would instantly acquire a huge number of customers, that they could upsell eventually when they need car insurance of whatever else college students need nowdays. Kind of like freemium for insurance.

It’s a great idea. Unfortunately, it was designed by students for a class. So it remains to be seen whether someone will actually push this further.

UPDATED: I just had coffee with a member of the TRUSTcard team to discuss the concept further, and try to understand what features are core, and which ones are not necessary. By removing all the fluff, you can typically launch a product in weeks rather than in months, and find out quickly what works and what doesn’t. Stay tuned…

That’s what we just made really simple now on FairSoftware with our new feedback widget. Once you setup your idea and enter a description, the community can give you instant feedback on three key elements:

Here are some examples:

• Is there a market for bugcollect, a web site that collects logging and crash reporting information (early feedback from community seems to indicate so)?
• Can a Facebook game of power and political intrigue make money?
• Is an iPhone app that lets you create an emoticon from the built-in camera useful?

We figured that these three criteria are the most important to help improve your idea:

• You need to express your idea clearly, so people you’ll be pitching to (co-founders, business partners, potential customers), understand what you are trying to build
• Your product must be useful, otherwise no one will care. Are you solving a real need? Make sure you are not confusing a technology with a need.
• Even if you do great with the first two questions, you don’t have a business unless it can generate money. Some ideas are great and very useful, but you simply can’t build a business around them. They may be better suited for an open source approach, as a side project. Better to know before you invest too much energy.

Just visit any of the public projects to provide feedback. You’ll be doing a service to the startup community. New navigation buttons let you go from one idea to the next with one click.

And when you want to give more detailed feedback to the founders, there is a discussion thread attached to each project idea. Who knows, you may even join the project and become a co-founder if you think it’s a great idea.

So I got very interested when I saw Austin Brandt post a Fair Project around the concept of “Web Conversations.” It’s a space that I had been avidly watching for almost 10 years! So I challenged him right away to probe if he was any different than the few plug-ins I had seen come out in the last few years.

To my surprise, he had an idea that was new and innovative. When he explained it to me in details, it made a lot of sense. It’s one of those ideas that sounds quite simple and obvious once you hear it, but somehow, no one has done it yet.

Austin is a student in entrepreneurship in Illinois with a strong history of entrepreneurship. He brings vision and business sense to the project. He is looking for a software developer to further expand on the concept.

A lot can be done to improve the way we interact online and I believe that some amazing products will emerge in the coming years. I hope this project is one of them.