McKay Thomas | Blog

Startups Are Like Friends

Mon, 06 May 2013 01:27:00 -0400

Sometimes you love them. You can’t get enough of them. You wake up Monday morning and can’t believe how lucky you are to have them.

Sometimes you hate them. They take and they take and they take until you feel like you have nothing more to give.

Sometimes they make you laugh. Sometimes there’re tears. Sometimes they give you facial ticks and sometimes they give you money.

Sometimes you make new ones. And sometimes they die.

There are many ways for startups to die. Acquisitions, no matter the price (aQuantive for $6.2B), acqui-hires, too much money (ahem, color), too little money. But most of the time it’s because, to quote Chris Dixon:

The default state of the world is to stay the way it is, which means the default state of a startup is failure.

My mind is whirling this evening around this subject as Mick, a friend of mine and fellow entrepreneur (although a more successful one), is turning off a product he and his world-class team have been building for the last year and a half.

Now the team is nowhere near wrapped up, but their product, Undrip, is. Undrip has been for me a place I go when my Twitter and Facebook feeds are boring and overly noisy. They developed an algorithm that sifted through my feeds and helped me discover, truly, the best of my web. Not just the web at large, but the web that I wanted to know. My little corner of the web. And Undrip made my little corner that much more cozy and familiar.

I opened up my cozy little corner today, the Undrip app, and I was shown a message that I knew was coming, but was not ready for, the message saying that the team was shutting the app down to work on a new and exciting project.

But, again, I say that startups are like friends and when they die it hurts. My cozy corner is once again the noisy circus is was before. And maybe I’m partially to blame. Maybe I could have used the app more. Maybe I could have told more of my friends about it. Maybe I… well, I guess none of that matters now.

What matters most is that my dear friends at the Undrip office, and all would be world-changers, can hear me say thanks! Thanks for making my life that much easier, if only for a while. Thanks for caring. Thanks for the long hours and the weekends. Thanks for the sweat and the blood, yes, the blood, for who would doubt the wounds these startups inflict.

There are, probably, too many startups out there. Heck, I’m one of them. But tonight there’s one too few in my heart.

So, guys, girls, entrepreneurs, would-be world-changers, I think I speak for everyone when I say I can’t wait to see what is coming next! Knowing you, it’ll blow us all away.

The more I think about it and the more I see it and experience...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:20:22 -0400

The more I think about it and the more I see it and experience it, the mote I’m convinced that mobile devices are converging around one device. Laptops are becoming more like tablets, and at the same time tablets are becoming more like phones. Phones are getting larger, but I’m feeling more and more that the phone will be the device that will see the most activity long term. (at Caltrain)

Google is shutting Google Reader down. I’m going to miss...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 11:02:34 -0400

Google is shutting Google Reader down. I’m going to miss it so much. I’ve starred nearly 1000 articles as favorites that I’ll never be able to really have now. Hurts. In fact I just saved another one this morning. Old habit I guess. (at Startup Graveyard)

Where To Draw The Line: What Is A PC?

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 18:50:57 -0500

Over the last couple years we have seen lots of people weigh in on whether tablets should be counted as PCs. However, we’ve seen a slow shift towards research firms adding tablets together to demonstrate PC marketshare.

What was one 10” tablet, the iPad, became lots of tablets of many sizes from many manufacturers. Flash forward to the last few weeks and we’ve been hearing rumors of a larger iPhone. Although Samsung has had lots of larger phones, Apple introducing a product in the category would be very legitimizing for the form factor, which leaves me asking: what is a tablet? And what should we count for marketshare?

Is a tablet defined by a diagonal screen measurement? That is about the only think I can find different between the iPad and the iPhone. A larger iPhone may only not count towards PC marketshare only because Apple will call it an iPhone Something rather than an iPad Something.

A New Baby

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 22:55:22 -0500

A New Baby:

There are many satisfactions to being involved with product and software development. There are also many dissatisfactions. The universe is determined to ship as little code as possible. As many engineers and developers and designers will attest to, shipping comes far too rarely.

However, when you’ve experienced a few shutdown projects, a few shuttered startups, and a few failed features, then the sweetness is all the more sweet when all the elements combine for a big launch. A day like today.

My faux-founder, Otavio and I set out to create the greatest product and technology team in Brazil. It was April last year when we started getting our first few yeses from team members. It grew from two to five, to 15, to now over 25. The goal was always quite simple: change the way people shop online. Make it faster. Make it trustworthy. Make it so easy that they stop shopping anywhere else. And that’s when industries start shifting. A brilliant product can get a rival CEO fired. Can get an entire board of direction reshuffled. That was the goal and today we took the first step towards that with the launch of our new web store. The new Baby.com.br.

I say we, but in reality the team did many of the final preparations without me. I left my day-to-day responsibilities at the company I co-founded in December. I ache in a certain way as I see this product launch as I am just beginning development on a new product at a new startup. I’ve written many times on how heartbreaking it is to leave something that demanded so much of your soul, even if it is what you know is the right thing to do.

I miss the team now and hope they can hear me across continents as I shout from the rooftops,”I’m so proud of you guys! You’ve done it! You shipped! And the tides in the industries we will disrupt have begun changing. I can feel it all the way from up here. You inspire me with your dedication and your product accumen. I miss you and am full, full, full with satisfaction in this, your victory.”

Parabéns meus amigos! Parabéns.

The Stacy Doctrine

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 22:50:56 -0500

The Stacy Doctrine:

I’m naked now. In a very metaphorical sense, but it’s true. Through the crazy emotional journey of fundraising, I’d slowly started putting on someone else’s clothes. Someone from the establishment, someone with old ideas and blinders, someone who wears parachute shirts and shoes I can quite describe other than uncomfortable.

I was listening to the questions of all those around me and was being consumed by them. I was letting others doubts about my business and my very future wear me. An outfit I’m not used to.

Then I had a call with the usability expert on my team. She’s met face to face with dozens and dozens of our users over the past month and as a result has deep understanding of the business. She had slowly watched me changed my clothes. Looking back, I could feel it too, but it wasn’t as obvious to me.

“That’s the wrong question, McKay.” Stacy said. “We’re not selling information. You can get that anywhere.” She went on to describe a doctrine that will no doubt guide this business over the next phase of its life. And maybe forever. The Stacy Doctrine.

As I heard it I felt the strange outfit begin to fall off and I began to feel exposed. Naked. I was once again fighting an industry worth billions with a vision I had relayed to Stacy but had somehow forgotten. I am not here to ask other people’s questions. I’m here to build something for my users. I’m here to make something and make it so well that my users will feel compelled to say, “Boy! This makes things so much easier.”

Not 3 hours later I came across this article in Fortune about the chairman of Samsung.

“In the late 1960s Samsung officially entered the electronics business. In the early years the company was known for cheap televisions and air conditioners. That all changed in 1995, when its chairman, Kun-Hee Lee, paid a momentous visit to the company’s plant in Gumi, a factory town in south-central Korea. Legend has it that Lee had sent out the company’s newest mobile phones as New Year’s presents and was horrified when word came back that they didn’t work. Later, at Gumi, he made a giant heap of the factory’s entire inventory and had it set on fire.”

May we take the precedent of whatever it is our lives have been about until now and make a big heap of it. May we douse it with the fuel of shock and discouragement and pain and skepticism and light it up. Watch it burn. It doesn’t matter what you’ve made up till now if isn’t what you want it to be. If it doesn’t work or doesn’t inspire.

Screw other people’s questions. Go build something. That’s the Stacy Doctrine. And may we ever live by it.

High Highs, Low Lows

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 12:38:00 -0500

On December 6th 2012 I left Brazil for San Francisco to answer a call. The universe had been reaching out to me and inviting me to do something more, or at the very least different, for weeks, and it was that day that things finally aligned for me to answer.

I was scared, but at the same time the blood in my veins had been replaced by electricity and my eyes by telescopes. On the plane from São Paulo I would frequently go to the lavatory and just stare in to the mirror. My facial expressions changed every second or so between elation and blindness. Conquering and fear.

“Fear. Deep rotting fear. They were infected by it. Did you see? Fear is a sickness. It will crawl into the soul of anyone who engages it. It has tainted your peace already. I did not raise you to see you live with fear. Strike it from your heart. Do not bring it into our village.”

These wise words from a father in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto came back to me as I splashed water on my face from that little washbasin. Was I truly afraid? Had this cancer taken root in me? I reflected then, as I reflect now, on my family. My wife. My two-year-old daughter. My six-month-old son. Why would I leave them even for a day if I could help it? Why for a week? Or weeks and weeks? And who knows how long this will be before we find an apartment. Or feel ready to find an apartment in the same city, or even the same state.

Am I afraid?

The months leading up to my departure from Baby.com.br were filled with imbalance, a lack of equilibrium, and a scratching knowledge that there was a road, a path before me that would lead me forward on my life’s mission. And I followed it. There are many things that I didn’t know about this road before I began walking it. There are also many things on this road I knew would lie ahead when I took that step out in to the darkness. Was I ready to face those things I knew and those things I knew I didn’t know? Was I ready to be alone? Was I ready to be rejected? By peers. By legends.

The universe guided me here. Picked me up and shot me across the sky. My head exploded with pyrotechnics and a sound we’ve all heard before. Boom.

Am I afraid?

Am I completely nuts? Is it even moral to do what I’m doing and leave my darling wife in Utah while I enter a fray that has claimed more than I care to dwell on?

So, am I afraid? No. I don’t wake up every morning and shudder. When I look at myself in the mirror I don’t question. When I pitch my business, I do so with the knowledge that I have a whole universe behind me pushing me in to an industry that is aching for disruption. When I look back at my life I see a slew of innumerable moments that have prepared me to wake up this morning, to put on my pants and my t-shirt and stand at my desk and write a note to any would-be entrepreneur, founder, investor, and my family and say to all as a kind of invocation: let’s start this thing up.

Look At That Idiot With That Thing On His Face

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 10:38:47 -0500

Look At That Idiot With That Thing On His Face:

HTC has introduced what many are laughing at, which is a companion device to a very large phone. A phone that solidly would be considered a “phablet”, a phone and tablet in one. Although I agree that having a little cordless phone device in addition to your “phone” sounds funny, there is something about this general concept that feels correct to me.

A few weeks ago I bought an iPad Mini and it has changed the way I work and browse and read. It’s ULTRA-portable. It makes the full-size iPad look clunky and feel so heavy. The iPad Mini is perfectly sized and is feather light. I have stopped using my phone as much as a result. When I got my first iPad I would constantly think to myself, “I’d rather just be doing this on my iPhone.” The roles have now switched with the iPad Mini.

It works so well at everything, it makes me wish it could take calls. Calls?! If you think people who talk on their Galaxy Notes are ridiculous, wait till you see people holding their iPads to their ears. It’ll never happen. But I do want an option to take calls on the iPad. So what is the solution?

There are certain things that are so natively human that we never question them. I believe that speaking in to an object that you are holding up to your face isn’t one of them. It’s weird, right? We seem cool with the idea of holding our phones, which are getting larger and larger, to our faces for now, but I believe this will change. It has to. It has simply been grandfathered in from another time where the future didn’t exist. But today it does. We don’t have to hold these things on our faces anymore, we just do it because there isn’t a better option yet.

Yet.

HTC has introduced a plausible solution. One that may come across as ridiculous right now, but that is only because it challenges the status quo and is coming from a company very few people respect as an innovator. They have released a companion phone device for their phablet. Their solution looks like a cordless phone. Buttons for dialing, a small screen, and a speaker and receiver.

I don’t think this will be the final solution, but I will say that this idea greatly interests me and solves a problem with device size. Talking on the phone isn’t just another app. It needs to be dealt with in a unique way, different from the other native and app functionalities of our smartphones.

In fact they are even called smartPHONES, even though we email, Facebook, text, and do other things far more frequently that talk on them. The phone is different. And as our devices begin homogenizing, companion devices will become the norm.

Help Local Entrepreneurs Hurt By Sandy

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 12:56:03 -0500

Help Local Entrepreneurs Hurt By Sandy:

My news app of choice, Undrip, is using their hip hop skills to help get a few local businesses affected by Superstorm Sandy get back on their feet. Their video embedded below is awesome! It’s a kind of hommage to those who give their life to the dream. I can’t stop listening to it.

After listening you can also donate to help the cause. I already donated this morning. You should too.

Blackberry Says They're Future-proof

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 04:17:45 -0500

Blackberry Says They're Future-proof:

I stumbled in to a “news” story aboutBlackberry this evening that proved that they have learned just about nothing since there very public downfall.

In an interview with a German newspaper just yesterday, said Thorsten Heins, Blackberry’s CEO:

“We have taken the time to build a platform that is future-proof for the next ten years.”

That assumes so much. They are basically over engineering an OS that competes with the existing mobile OSes. The status quo, basically. Also called playing catch up. I think it’s safe to say that their new OS, BB 10, is just as “future-proof”as the company itself. Which is to say, not much.

Lonely

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 11:23:46 -0500

A week ago I landed here in San Francisco. I’ve left my darling and supportive wife and two kids in the care of my parents and her parents in Utah, while I flex my creative muscles in pursuit of a call. The call to build something. The call to create something. The call that comes to each of us, which demands you ask yourself what more the earth could have, your life could have, if you were to jump in head first.

I have about as many answers as I came here with, which isn’t many, but I have come to learn something about loneliness. Before I came here, I thought that being alone was as lonely as it could get. But that’s wrong. Being alone is not as lonely as being around the wrong people.

I came here in search of business and commerce and technology, but all I’ve found so far was a little voice inside that keeps telling me that I’m no longer alone. I’m on the side of the universe, now. And although that means very little in terms of having answers, it means I know I can find the answers.

I will start this business. I will grow this team. I will get my wife and my kids in to an apartment here. I will build a technology that will make being a parent easier and more peaceful. The universe, which was reaching out to me and shaking me and my life until I could hardly hear anything else, has aligned with me. As if to say, “Hardship behind, hardship ahead, but this time it’s what you were sent to do.”

This is art.(via riffsandfragments and Matt Wiley)

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 19:08:00 -0500

This is art.

(via riffsandfragments and Matt Wiley)

You May Be The Product, But That's OK

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 09:51:16 -0500

You May Be The Product, But That's OK:

Smart write up on All Things D this morning about making the most of an advertising-centric online world. Although it hasn’t really changed my views, I’m a big fan of making the most of my situation, and that’s largely what I took away from the article.

“What you can do is actually get value from being tracked — while holding companies to a high standard of responsibility, of course.”

Read the full thing linked in the title.

iPad Mini Is The New Default iOS Device

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 13:08:00 -0500

iPad Mini Is The New Default iOS Device:

Every now and again a device gets released, that I buy, that everyone I sit next to on planes or at church or just around want to talk to me about. The iPad Mini has been such a device. As someone who has used an iPad from the first version, up until now I haven’t been a huge fan of them. I like the idea of them, but found that I’d rather just be using my iPhone to do basically everything the iPad could do.

The iPad Mini changed that.

Dan Frommer outlines in the article linked above how he feels the iPad Mini is the real size iPad. The size the iPad should have been the entire time. I’m completely compelled to agree. Where with my iPad I kept wanting to simply do every task on my iPhone, I actually am forgetting to take my phone with me now.

In truth, there has been days that have passed without me even knowing where my phone is, and those that know me can attest to just how crazy that is, but its the truth. The iPad Mini is my main iOS device now. More than my phone. I enjoy it more. It’s more functional. It’s INSANELY light. And I highly, highly recommend it.

CES Update

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 12:48:57 -0500

So far CES has been a series of what I am allowed and not allowed to do. Don’t walk here. Don’t go in there. Out this one. Stand over here. Don’t sit there. I feel like I’m back in 2nd grade, only there’s no Mrs. Rochester promising snacks afterward.

The other thing has struck me is the sheer scale of this event. For instance, they have maps you can use to see where everything is as part of CES. But these aren’t the normal pieces of paper maps, these are full blown fold out maps. And there isn’t one of them. There are FOUR!

I feel lost and I’m not even allowed “inside” yet.

My First CES: The Awfulness And Excitment

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 13:56:00 -0500

I will be attending this years CES, which will mark my first time at the event. I’ve read the coverage in the past and fully expect it to be filled with out of touch former big leaguers trying to dazzle the press with products that clearly won’t compete. Yet, I’m not going so I can be a part of that.

Although I’ve wanted to experience the awfulness/excitement first hand for several years, what actually allowed me to justify it this year is the Digital Health Summit, which will be a part of the conference this year. I’m hugely excited and bullish about the space and look forward to meeting with people to talk about the future of the human body as it relates to technology.

I’m not a live blogger, and actually I’m not much of a gadget blogger, so I’ll leave the pros to do what they do best. But what I plan on writing about over the next few days is how my experience goes with CES in general and how my experience goes with the Digital Health Summit. I hope to come away feeling inspired by the big projects that will undoubtedly shape the way we look at and treat our bodies.

Life Is Not Surprises

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 05:18:24 -0500

What started with a simple, one room hotel in the sketchy part of town, is ending with dear friends, damp eyes, and a road that feels solid enough to walk back to the US on.

I don’t know why, but life never surprises me. When I was younger, I was quite the embellisher. I felt deep inside that my life should have been more than what it was. As I’ve grown older and experienced more, I feel that slowly my life has caught up to my expectations and, if anything, I’m not even telling full stories when people ask, because I doubt they’d believe it anyway. But as my life unfolds and big changes get made, it all ends up feeling like the next natural step. Like it was always and obviously going to happen. And this last big change, leaving Baby.com.br and starting something new and on my own, seems like what was obviously going to happen the whole time.

But life couldn’t be that simple, could it?

It may just be. I have no idea what will come of my next venture. Of my next chapter in San Francisco. I have hope that it will be all I want it to be, and plan to make something along those lines happen. But I’m not alone in feeling that way. I feel I have a rendezvous with destiny, and I must do everything possible to make that appointment.

Here’s to life. Here’s to living it. Here’s to risk and doing what you’ve always dreamed of. Here’s to the high country and riding it. Here’s to destiny.

The New Business

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 08:00:50 -0500

Although I’m not ready to discuss everything, I do want to say that my new business is very much picking up where I left off at Baby.com.br and is actually inspired by all that I learned while building its expansive audience of over two million moms. Moms are a special group. A noble group. And a pain for them, in my eyes, is worthy cause of my time.

Stay tuned.

The Beginning

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 07:57:45 -0500

There is something completing about a year’s end. Everyone writes something about it, either in the coffers of the mind, the pages of journal, or the walls of a social network. We find ways of resolving things, if at no other time, at the end of the year.

The last year, 2012, was very complete for me. What had barely just begun in 2011, Baby.com.br, entered 2012 with a few employees, big hopes, big promises to big hires and big investors. 2012 was to be defined by what we could do with the expectations we set for the business. But business, I’ve come to learn, is a fickle friend. The friend you think you know and can second guess. The friend you long to be near to and make sacrifices for. The friend that you think you can trust. However, every morning when you meet this friend for coffee they’re different. Their ambitions are smaller, then bigger, then entirely new. Like any loyal companion, you adjust and adapt to the new horizons, but business has an appetite that can never be quenched. An appetite for capital. An appetite for strategy. An appetite for technology. 2012 would be the year I would have my last coffee with this business. The year I would give all I would ever give to Baby.com.br. The team of a couple dozen that greeted 2012, became over 250 that greeted 2013. 2012 would be the year a promising startup would become a very promising medium-sized business. And the year I would let the team I helped grow and the technology I helped shape, continue on their course without my day-to-day guidance.

My last few years have been stacked with really unique, very challenging, and sometimes almost braking experiences. It can be difficult to place them on a scale and say with certainty which ones were easier or harder than the other ones. Almost like choosing a favorite child, I would hate to offend or diminish any one of the moments from the last few years by comparing them to their peers. Each one was met with newness and curiosity, a little bit of fear, and the belief that the human spirit could overcome. Could create. Could build. But this last experience, that began on December 6th, just a few weeks ago, feels unique amongst the unique.

I first started working on startups when I was 18 in 2003 when my brother Kimball and my cousin Davis first wanted to start something on their own. Between selling roses in parking lots and pool tables online, over the next 7 years we would end up working together to see some modest successes, if by no other gauge than by teaching us all what not to do. We created Baby.com.br to be what our previous ideas weren’t, huge. And the last few years have been spent in the pursuit of size and market and success and, in many respects, achieving it.

Flash forward almost 10 years, and for the first time I’m on my own. Leaving Baby.com.br was equal parts heartbreaking and inspiring. Anytime you put your soul into something, it hurts when it ends. And yet, from my co-founders to my friends to the universe itself, I’ve received much strength and optimism in my next project. I feel the time is right to start something new, again. And this time around my brother and my cousin will not be together with me. My trail is my own to blaze. But I couldn’t think of a better way to be brought up. A better course to have taken to prepare myself to strike out and begin walking alone.

2012 was complete for me. Taking a business from its earliest days and passing it off to the most capable team imaginable is very completing. Leaving to start something new, although technically a beginning, it is where I’ve been heading my whole life, and although I have no delusions about how long or hard my road ahead will be, the fact I’ve arrived at the road at all means I’ve completed the most crucial step, the beginning.

With Google’s new maps app, my Apple Junk folder is now...

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 13:56:56 -0500

With Google’s new maps app, my Apple Junk folder is now full. Why can’t we hide these apps?! Their replacements are so much better and are updated so much more frequently, I just don’t understand.