(via Shelby.tv gears up for SXSW with PROJECT G.O.A.T.S.)
this stuff is so much fun…
Shelby, and TechStars and SXSW, oh my!
ok kids… time to blindly RSVP to every SXSWi invite you get! especially this one!
SXSW Interactive. The infamous weekend where techies the world over collide in a BBQ-sauce-covered shouting match of startup ideas and marketing spend.
Am I mocking it? Yes.
Will I be there shouting just as loudly? Yup. ;)
But I won’t be alone! Instead, I’ll be hanging with 1000 of my closest friends as TechStars teams from NYC, BOS, SEA and even the original gangsters of Boulder throw down for a party that will make sure you start the weekend right. RSVP below to hang out with the likes of these geeks.
Remember @garyvee’s popup party last year? So fun the camera got drunk… See you in Texas! -Reece
Join the team building the future of video on iOS
I wrote this. I mean it.
I know you’re out there future-Shelby-iOS-developer. I know you’re listening. You’ve been looking for this opportunity and here it is, right in front of you… all it takes is one single email to get started…
We. Love. iOS.
iOS has changed the way we will compute for generations to come and enabled developers to build apps that made us fall in love with our iPhones, our iPads, and soon… our iTV’s.
Believe the hype. Apple will build an amazing TV experience, we have a good idea of what it looks like and we want Shelby to be the best social video experience out there. F that… we want Shelby to be the best app. Period.
So far, we built an iOS app that is insanely easy to use, elegantly designed and has some features that are first of their kind. Now we are looking for the iOS developer who will take Shelby iOS to new heights of function and form, while delighting users with serendipitous video discovery.
Why?
Because we love video. It is an amazing medium—that is so powerful and yet so nascent online—and we believe that 1) video deserves its own home and 2) that home should be built socially.
Who are you?
You are—first and foremost—a great person. You are also an iOS developer who believes in building simple, beautiful products. You can code with the best and have great taste for design. You are curious about the world. You are not one to just do what you are told. You are not one for being managed. You are one for video.
Who are we?
We are not a team full of “rockstars” or “ninjas” or “wizards.” We are not high on ourselves. We are just a team of passionate people who love building great products. We love to learn and we have a ton of fun while we do it. We may dabble in ping pong. We may play music from time to time. One of us may wear jorts. Most importantly, we love video. More on us here.
What will you do with us?
- Revolutionize the way people discover and enjoy video
- Work with great people on a lean, agile engineering team
- Be challenged to build the best stuff you have ever created
- Kick a dent in the universe
We are super excited about building Shelby—as a product, company and brand—and we are fortunate to have the support of some of the best investors in the game. We offer healthcare, we work on the best equipment, we hang our hats in our own office at 23rd and Park in NYC, and we believe in G.S.D., so our PTO policy is more of a policy than a practice…
If you are interested, we would love to meet you. Please get in touch. Email hiring+ios@shelby.tv and please include links to any apps you built.
Relativity of speed
This morning I decided our ugly office door had been an ugly office door for too long. I told Lauren I wanted to paint it black and get a Shelby sign made for it.
By the time I got out of our board meeting, Lauren had a sweet concept for how to lay-out our logos (ours and our officemates). By the time we finished eating and a quick game of ping pong, Vincent had the logos all done up… oh, and he had a friend with a laser cutter who could make us a stencil. Sweet.
Dan finished his day by hitting Home Depot for some supplies we needed and picked me up some paint. An hour later, my hands are covered in paint, but our door is painted black and ready for some sweet logo action tomorrow.
This story in and of itself, isn’t that interesting… but Lauren’s comment to me as I applied the second coat stood out…
“I’m still amazed at how fast we get shit done. At [my old job], there would’ve been a meeting to decide IF we should paint the doors, and THEN what color and so on…”
Lucky for me, I never worked for a big company. I don’t know anything about setting up planning committees. I’ve never had more than one person to ask permission to do something (and they usually just said, “yeah, don’t even ask next time.”)
So for me, this feels pretty normal. For Lauren, it is light-speed (and she loves it). Point is, speed is relative. And sure, I’m talking about painting a door - a trivial decision - but the speed with which we executed was awesome, that’s how it should be in a startup and that’s how we roll when it comes to decision making in general.
This morning, Dan and I took a trip up to Times Square (yes, above 23rd st… really.) to do a quick video shoot of our Shelby pitch on the set of NASDAQ’s Marketsite.
Obviously, we nailed our pitch ;) but not without a few laughs like the photos above.
Test! How many times can you find me in the panorama?
[Panorama taken with 360 Panorama by Occipital. Awesome app.]
we dominated.
I recently challenged one of my teammates to get something done on a short deadline. They responded by sending me this image.
I love Bruce Lee and the stories surrounding him are legendary, but this story in particular, hits home as I think back to a year ago this week, when we started TechStars and started doing more faster.
Sure - we’d been hustling for years at that point. Selling customers, building product, pitching investors, but we didn’t truly start doing more faster until we were dropped into TechStars with 10 other killer teams who were all sprinting like hell, 90 mentors who had an exponential number of data points around tech startups from which to draw and the pressure of the 579 other applicants who didn’t get in, watching our potential success or failure with a critical eye.
Looking back on that experience, I am extremely proud of the way in which we, as a team, came into TechStars ready for whatever was thrown at us, and came out with a beautiful product and the vision to match, in just a few short months.
We’ve been building and growing ever since, and while not all of our team members (9 now!) went through TechStars, “do more faster” is a mantra that we want to practice for the lifetime of the company.
So to TechStars - fellow founders from our class, from programs past and present, the mentors, the Davids… thank you for teaching us what it really means to do more faster.
Respect all. Fear none.
This bracelet is from my local gym in my hometown and was given to me by the owner’s nephew (who was hustling everyone in the place one $2 sale at a time. Love it).
The phrase itself isn’t that original, but it stuck with me as we (Shelby.tv) are generally in the midst of a competitive space AND this week in particular we are at the Consumer Electronics Showcase alongside thousands of other companies all vying for the world’s attention.
The message - “Respect all. Fear none.” is clear. Common sense even… but often forgotten. Let’s break it down…
Respect all.
This really is common sense, but it’s easy to forget. It usually happens one of a few ways.
- The competition is bigger than you and you say “they’re big and slow and can’t innovate and we’re going to f*ck them up.”
- The competition is smaller than you and you say “ha! yeah right… they’ll never catch us.”
- The competition is the same size as you and you say “so what if they have feature X… we’ve got a better team anyway…”
Justify it any way you want, all of these ways of thinking are stupid and lazy. When it comes to competition, the best way to approach it is as if you’re losing, regardless of whether you actually are. Treat every competitor with tons of respect and realize that it really is Any Given Sunday out there.
Fear none.
But! When competitor A launches X feature, hires Y engineer or gets Z press hit… all you need to do is see it, understand it, say “GAME ON” and then… GET. BACK. TO. THE GAME. To be clear, I’m not saying to blindly ignore it, and I’m certainly not saying to obsess about it. Just know what it is and then forget about it and build your vision.
Getting caught up in the tit-for-tat game of competition is a surefire way to build crap and it’s really just not worth your mental bandwidth to think about the bad guys.
So believe in yourself, while being realistic and get back to kicking ass.
Building in a bubble
[originally meant to post yesterday]
I’ve said before that it’s easy to get hopped up drinking your own startup Kool-Aid. You’re sitting around with great people, rapping about an idea and everyone feels the energy and says “yeah YEAH YEAH! Let’s do it!”
When it comes to building a product… that’s a death sentence.
Or is it?
On the one hand, when you build, write, or create in an insulated environment, you’re guaranteed purity of thought. Your thoughts are your own. Your ideas are yours. They are untested in the outside world, but the product is that which you want it to be and only you can screw up your own vision.
On the other, when you venture out into the world, when you speak with real people, when you (as a techie) observe behavior of “normals,” “n00bs,” and dare I say it - MOST of the people on this planet, you realize their pain points are not your own. Their desires are a far cry from yours. Their needs don’t include your product.
And that influences you. It makes you rethink what you’re doing. Makes you question your vision.
Yesterday, Chris and I spent hours on a whiteboard at Cyberdyne cranking out ideas for the evolution of Shelby.tv. We walked away very proud of our work. Excited to show the team and already imagining the first lines of code that would make our wireframes reality.
Today, however, we boarded a flight to ATL en route to Las Vegas for CES. As we look around - away from our office bubble, our tech startup bubble, hell… our NYC bubble - it’s a painful awakening that the average American may as well be from a different planet (or maybe it is we who are the aliens).
Most of the computer users on our flight now are on PC’s. Some are running Windows 2000. I think we even saw an Android tablet. (I kid… sort of). All (Apple) elitism aside, we mentioned picking up PC Mag to check the sentiment in that world…
We also spent some time drawing wireframes on our iPads. When Chris proudly opened an app that gives you all the basic iOS elements to work with, Dan was quick to suggest that working with pre-defined elements is a guaranteed way to stifle creativity and any hope for doing something original.
It was a telling moment. We, as a team, spend a lot of time thinking through our vision for Shelby.tv. We love user feedback, yet most of it doesn’t make it into the product… and that’s OK.
Like most things in life, balance is the key.
Creators must be well-versed in the way the world works. They should travel, speak and study with others in and out of their bubbles. It is constant observation of daily life. But when it comes to building a product, allowing for too much outside influence isn’t necessarily the best path to creating an amazing experience. Creators must not be afraid of throwing away what they know and starting with a blank canvas.
And those “aliens” I mentioned? Well if you’ve done anything original… anything that’s worth a damn… anything that creates some value… they’ll tell you.
But they’ll tell you if it sucks, too.
So, study the world, then shut it off and build your vision. Go.
