Perezium

My Reminder for the New Year

I’m not much for new year’s resolutions, I motivate/obsess about things just about year round, to begin with. But, a fresh year does warrant a bit of reflection and remembrance/dedication to ones self.

Its so easy to get caught up in our surroundings, our jobs, our families, what we think is important, what we want to do, what we want to be. This year, I want to be more mindful of the unstoppable flow of life. Its human to think we control our destinies. Maybe we do ultimately have some granular control on some minute aspect of our destiny, but relatively speaking, how much do we actually control?

Some people spend their entire lives fighting their ever flowing rivers of destiny, in 2012, I want to remind myself every day to go where my life takes me, for better or worse. If life is one giant collection of events and memories, I want to remind myself to be present in them.

Wei Wu Wei, Act Without Action.

Year one: Orchestra in retrospect.

One year ago, today, Gentry Underwood and Scott Cannon reached out to me, and together we started working on building a product, team, and culture that we call Orchestra. Its amazing how many moments you can fit in 365 days of your life, this post is an attempt to recall those moments, for posterity.

The Nest

Like so many before us, Orchestra kept its headquarters in the home of one of our founders. I’ll always look back on this as a special time, for me. I spent lots (and lots) of time here, getting to know Gentry, his family, and Scott. They opened up their home to me, and made me feel welcome. I loved coming to “work” everyday and being greeted by Ronan and Austin (Gentry’s kids), having lunch with Scott & Gentry in the backyard, whiteboarding on an extremely large makeshift whiteboard.

Together, we worked on prototypes. Lots of prototyping, learning and brainstorming about what it is that we intended to build here. We were all still getting a feel for what we were doing. In these days, I was doing most everything related to the product engineering. Backend (which was in Rails + MySQL at this point in time), frontend iPhone prototypes (written in Sencha Touch), and frontend web prototypes. The prototypes were humble and rough, but absolutely symbolic to our present day offering. We were able to use those prototypes to understand where to go next.

It was clear to all three of us very early that mobile development was going to be crucial to our product goals and vision, so a couple of months into our prototyping we were lucky enough to convince Sean Beausoleil and Steve Flory to leave there jobs at Linkedin and join our team. Shortly after that, David Barshow also joined us as hacker/engineer in residence, who continues to be the glue across all of our engineering projects.

This places us around March 2011, if memory serves. We had all of the raw talent and material to start making our product a reality, so thats what we began to do. In the space we authored many more prototypes and got to know one another.

Leaving the Nest

We continued to grow a bit more by adding Liz Armistead to our team. If you’ve ever sent in a message to support, you’ve spoken with Liz! About this time, we started to out grow our space, somewhat, so we had to say goodbye to Gentry’s home and moved on to our current office on Hamilton Ave, in Palo Alto.

I remember our first day in the new office, before the space had our culture embedded within it. It felt like fish being acclimated to their new tank. As time went on, Liz and Gentry designed an absolutely gorgeous environment for our team, a place I’m always happy to work within.

We have so much natural light in our new office, 18 windows total. We never have the ceiling lights on, they aren’t needed. Its amazing how much of a difference natural light makes on productivity (at least for me).

Founding Team

Here we’re all together in our newly furnished office. This photo was commemorating our lovely new coffee table that was hand made by a relative of Gentry, the table is beautiful, you should come see it in person.

Around this time, Stanford was letting out for the summer, so we had Jack Dubie and Adam Cue (who actually is from Duke University) join our team as interns for that summer. We regularly got together as a team for picnics at the park, enjoying as much of that summer weather as we could, between sprints. David also would bring his RC helicopters out to the picnics and wow the team with his expert flying skills. Passersby would literally stop whatever they were doing in awe of his RC flight prowess!

This photo always makes me wonder if that dog ended up being okay. (you had to be there)

The Beta

We worked hard on our beta throughout the summer. The beta era was comprised of many late nights, and hot, AC-less weekends. We had to get creative about the heat, sometimes.

This was a period of serious productivity and learning. I look back fondly on our weekends together, and our late nights pushing software to our beta users. This was also the period I look back on with the highest frequency of highs and lows. “Is this going to even work?”, “Wow, this is fucking awesome!”, “Why can’t more than 5 people use it at once?”, etc.

Our beta offering was an iOS and web client. At the same time, we we’re building our backend system to service the communication between all of our clients and users. We went through a few beta periods, working hard to get the right balance and blend of our features, technology, and aesthetic. Still having the freedoms that young startups have without customers.

The Launch

We were all very excited to finally be able to share what we had been doing with everyone. We had an incredible launch, and a ton of organic growth which we were continuously floored by. Within a month of launch, Apple had chosen us to be App of the week, we we’re named LifeHacker’s best to do list app for the iPhone, and notable praise from Mr. Jack Dorsey.

With a product in the open, customers, and support requests, we’ve been learning as a team how to spread ourselves out efficiently, focusing our product efforts on our short, medium, and long term company initiatives, while continuing to make users happy, add features that matter and fix problems they run into.

Today

We have users. They are using the things we’ve built, and its making an impact on their lives. Wow. I remember seeing this photo randomly on Instagram. I don’t know these people, they don’t know who I am, but they’re getting value out of a product that my team and I have been pouring our souls into.

I’m really proud of us. We’ve grown together as a team. We have funding, and we’re continuing to grow our team. Expanding to more platforms, making more robust backends, designing new features, and cultivating our company culture.

This has been an incredible adventure so far, and as Gentry says “its been a race to the starting line”. Thank you to everyone in my life who made this year possible, I could have never anticipated all of the growth I’ve experienced, all of the friendships I’ve made, and all of the incredible opportunities that are in front of all of us. Thank you.

We are all still human, on the inside.

Its always important to remind ourselves, regardless of the human imperfection, the mortal flaws, the snide remarks, the vested interests, the words you don’t say and don’t hear, we are all scared, and insecure human beings. Together, in one place.

It never hurts to smile, it never hurts to take your shoes off. There is plenty of evil in this world, but the philosophy that all people have a general goodness to themselves is a powerful one. Humans are great at misunderstanding each other, maybe because we don’t want to be understood, but we are all moving forward down the same path, ultimately.

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“Therefore the Master never attempts great things, and so, accomplishes them…Thus for the Master everything is difficult, and so in the end, nothing is difficult.”

• Tao Te Ching | #63

Changing The World, In “Trivial” Ways.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, thinking about how technology and the internet have been applied in such fascinating and unbelievable ways, ways that have absolutely re-written the fabric of how we as citizens of earth interact with information, but also each other. When I think about all of this, the truly astounding thing is the passage of time that has elapsed. Companies like Apple, Google, and Wikipedia are doing their best to make sure that the way we interact today, is nothing like the way we will interact tomorrow.

These are visionary companies, ran by some of the best and brightest of our time, can you imagine a world without Google? (your children won’t be able to). The internet itself has been the biggest catalyst of our 21st century evolution, providing a platform and foundation for limitless connectivity, where our ideas and capabilities are the only limitation.

Its not often that I feel so inclined to be nostalgic about an industry that hasn’t even been around for 50 years, but lately, I’ve been evaluating my place in the scheme of things. I’ve been watching the innovations and “innovations” that have hit the market in 2008, and frankly, I think we can do better.

But this isn’t new, people have been inventing solutions to problems nobody has had forever. I guess you could say, this is my letter to myself to make sure I am actually doing things and working with people who want to make a difference in the world, rather than “minnovate”. People say that times like this (referring to our economy) are when people sit down and do the most amazing things, not because its the hip thing to do, but moreso out of necessity.

So here is to a world changing 2009.