On Single Founders

by on June 23, 2013, 10 comments

Hi. My name is Austin Hallock and I’m a single founder.

I’m writing this after learning Clay.io was rejected tonight by StartX, Stanford’s Accelerator. Their reasoning was the fact that I’m a single founder, and this isn’t the first time that has been a road block.

As many of you know, being a single founder is mostly looked down upon, especially by most accelerators and investors. For good reason too – it’s incredibly difficult to handle the burdens of a startup alone. That isn’t to say it’s impossible. Successful companies can be built with just one primary founder, see Dropbox, Amazon and countless others.

My problem is the metric for number of founders holds too much weight. In my experience others will favor a company that has a well-rounded team on paper: designer, developer, business guy, even if they have achieved less in the same amount of time as a company with a single founder. Of course, the lone founder of a company needs to be a rare breed capable of all three of those things, but that does exist.

Single founders have the advantage of always agreeing with themselves. At times this can be a disadvantage, but one easily countered by having a strong advisory board.

With that said, building this company as a single founder isn’t something I want – it makes life more difficult for me. Ideally I’d have one or two others who are just as passionate and committed as I am and I just haven’t found that yet. I need someone who I know will do a better job with either the design, business, or the technical stuff, AND have a major passion for gaming. Until I find that person, I will work my butt off to fill those roles myself.

To everyone judging a startup for having a single founder: don’t judge on the fact that there is just one face behind it, judge on its merit. How has the company evolved over time? What has been achieved for the amount of resources put into it? The history and traction of the company along with what the founder has built in the past should be more important than having the traditional team of a designer, developer, and business guy.

Of course, I am one of the more biased people out there for this argument, so I’d love to hear what anyone else has to say!

Analogizing Ethernet and HTML5

by on April 23, 2013, 1 comment

Given the recent news on LinkedIn moving away from HTML5, I thought this post would be worthwhile to write, to counter those who are once again knocking HTML5 for serious mobile development. First off I want to reiterate the fact that both LinkedIn and Facebook still think HTML5 in general, and HTML5 on the mobile web both have a bright future, and neither company has completely written it off.

As a student as the University of Texas, I am very fortunate to be able to work closely with Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet, and founder of 3Com. Ethernet celebrates its 40th anniversary this year with a history of obviously great success. Last week Metcalfe was speaking on why Ethernet ‘won’, and he attributes that to the fact that it was an open standard. As he was speaking, I started realizing there are a lot of similarities between the history of both Ethernet and HTML5.

First, a bit of a background on Ethernet.

Ethernet vs. Token Ring

The main competitor to Ethernet in 80′s was IBM’s Token ring. Like Ethernet, Token Ring was a local area network technology.

Standards

IBM’s Token Ring was also a standard, but a bad one because IBM was not committed to interoperability (where many different systems can work together). The fact that Token Ring was developed by a PC manufacturer, subsequent manufacturers were less likely to choose a standard controlled by a competitor who wasn’t focused on making it work in as many environments as possible.

Similar to IBM and Token Ring, Apple controls Objective-C thus Android and others will clearly never support it, and each operating system has their fairly controlling, closed-off App Store. These factors do not bode well for ‘native’ apps. The only current ubiquity can be found in HTML5.

Interoperability led to Ethernet’s overall success, and it makes sense that HTML5′s open standard equivalent will do the same.

Performance Improvements

The Ethernet-HTML5 analogy, though Metcalfe is probably a lot less likely to acknowledge, holds true on the performance end as well – at least at first. Without question native code performs much better than Javascript, just as Token Ring was technically more ideal than Ethernet in many areas. Ethernet however improved more rapidly by offering more and more bandwidth, while keeping it’s price much lower than Token Ring. In the mid-80s Ethernet adopted twisted pair ether wiring (like Token Ring) which made Ethernet cheaper, faster, and available in more places.

Javascript engines, especially on mobile, are improving at an incredible rate to the point that they will bring near-native performance. In fact, with LinkedIn’s move away from HTML5, speed wasn’t the reason, “It’s not performance issues, like speed or rendering”, but rather memory issues (Source).

With the performance aspect no longer as much of an issue, the other benefits (lower cost of not having to fully port apps) will contribute to HTML5′s success.

History Repeating Itself

Ethernet and HTML5 have a surprising amount of similarities, and if history repeats itself as it often does, HTML5 will succeed over native apps.

The fact of the matter is Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla, Intel, and just about any major tech company strongly supports the idea of HTML5, and that idea is rapidly becoming reality in today’s native-app driven mobile world.

The Difficulty in Getting Picked Up by TechCrunch

by on August 27, 2012, 6 comments

I thought it would be easy… well, easy considering the material I had going into it – especially considering the fact that 16-year-old me was able to do it, as well as several other questionable companies. I would woo the writers with the TechCrunch-themed HTML5 game I made. 6 weeks, multiple writers contacted, and 0 posts later, I realize I was very wrong, not just about how ‘easy’ it would be, but whether it was necessary to begin with.

Clay.io - HTML5 games

Clay.io is my baby, it’s a company I started back in January with Joe Vennix. Both of us have solid backgrounds considering our age (21) – our claims to fame: Joe developed Pizza Hut’s first iOS app, I was one of 4 at IntenseDebate when we were acquired by Automattic. What we’ve been building is a platform for HTML5 games (with Steam as our inspiration). It’s part cross-platform marketplace, part API for high scores, achievements, data storage, payments, etc.

Despite the fact that we don’t have funding, the main reason I thought we would be able to land a post is the TechCrunch-themed HTML5 game I developed. In my email to their tips line (as well as a few emails later to individual writers) I mentioned the game to get their attention, and also let them know they would be able to embed it directly into their article if they were to write one. Here it is embedded below – the game also works on mobile devices (link).

It wasn’t just the game… I thought we had a good story. There are three of us working on the company right now and we’re all University of Texas students. We’re in a startup accelerator class called 1 Semester Startup (yeah, we get credit to work on our company), have great office space provided by the University, and some fantastic mentors. Like I mentioned before, Joe and I also have fairly interesting backgrounds for our age – though, I suppose now, it’s not uncommon to see successful companies run by sub-21-year-olds.

If that wasn’t enough, we actually have a legitimate company in an exciting space with a proven revenue model (which should be the most important aspect, but for a TechCrunch article, I figured the fluff should be first). I know it’s clear to all of our current members and developers this isn’t just a hobby for us, and the site/API should reflect that as well. We started in January of this year, and have been able to keep things chugging along while the other student startups around us, and startups in general, have flickered on and off.

However, all of this wasn’t enough to get noticed, and that’s fine. I was completely wrong to think TechCrunch would be pivotal for Clay.io’s success. Sure, it’s a nice boost in traffic and new users for a day or two, and a bit of extra credibility, but by no means is it worth the effort I put into it. It’s a learning experience for me, and hopefully one for others reading this post.

If you’ve secured a decent round of funding for your hype-filled startup, then sure, it’s easy enough to get on TechCrunch… same goes if you have connections with the writers. Otherwise, tough luck! It’s not the end of the world. Continue to build your company and prove them wrong.