tutorblog:

YCNYC Talk from Aaron Harris on Vimeo.

We don’t have Tutorspree tshirts yet. Shocking, no? We’re incorporated, launched, have users, growth…but no shirts! And there’s a simple reason for that: it hasn’t made it to the top of our priorities yet. We simply haven’t gotten around to it, and that really isn’t a big deal.

I’ve met a number of other folks in the startup space recently who, I think, would disagree.  My guess is that these folks have mistakenly begun to equate various milestones with success. “YC? You made it!” I was recently told. Another person asked me, incredulously/accusingly “You don’t have t-shirts?”. Each time that happens, I get a little sad because, while I’d love to have shirts, and I loved YC, they are not the things that define whether or not Tutorspree is what we want it to be.

There is, in reality, only one goal for Tutorspree: viable, scalable company that creates a paradigm shift in the tutoring market. Getting there is going to be a hell of a lot harder than anything we’ve done thus far. The amount of work it will take to do it makes what we’ve done so far look miniscule.

We’re ready and excited about that challenge. We’re better prepared for it because we have it squarely in perspective. Would I love to accomplish it with some great Tutorspree shwag? Sure. And we’re going to order some t-shirts pretty soon. But keeping those t-shirts in the right perspective, as just another milestone, a piece of company cohesion, a marketing tactic, is critical.

If the t-shirt or funding or YC is your entire goal, then stop now. If they are, you’ll constantly optimize towards them, and not towards your longterm viability as a company. And then, if you do achieve them, you’ll be left seriously wondering what comes next - not just from a product or marketing perspective (always a hard question), but from an existential perspective. You’ll start wondering why you’re doing what you’re doing. You’ll lose sight of the conviction you need to get to where you actually need to be. And that’s one more way your company could die. There’s enough challenges to winning (and I certainly don’t have all the answers, these are just my assumptions based on my experience thus far), so don’t create artificial ones.

In the meantime, if you do have a cool shirt, I’ll happily wear it. No such thing as too many good t-shirts.

A little over four months ago, we found out that we had gotten into Y Combinator. After we were done jumping up and down and shouting, we realized that meant we were going to have to pick up and move from NY to the Bay Area. Between running around and looking for subletters, buying tickets, packing, and saying goodbye to friends, we had glimpses of what the move might mean. We talked about whether or not we’d stay in California after YC - after all, it is the land of the startups. We were told that engineers were plentiful, investors eager, and the weather spectacular.

When we got here, we found that that was exactly right (well, aside from the fact that all the engineers had jobs and multiple offers). Josh and I were grilled on our business plan by the checkout guy at Trader Joe’s during our first week. Folks in coffee shops and bars not only thought that Tutorspree was a cool idea, they realized that we were not, in fact, unemployed. Strangers were able to give valuable advice on design, scaling, and marketing. In many ways, it was the perfect place to launch a startup.

And yet, here we are, in our last few days in Palo Alto, about to go back to the Big Apple. I keep telling people why, and I think it’s worth sharing. There are as many opinions about where to start and grow your company as there are people to ask. A lot of folks give unequivocal answers: New York, because you’re doing fashion! The Bay Area because you need super technical Stanford PhDs! Chicago because you’re Groupon! Blarg.

The truth is that every startup and every set of circumstances is entirely unique to that startup. We look at what we need in order to develop the next stage of Tutorspree - high density of students, focus on education, willingness to experiment with new technology and methods, design talent, engineering talent, etc. and we put that on the scale. For us, those factors all point to NYC as our optimal first market to conquer. But it’s not perfect. It’s 100% true that in NY we have to fight Wall Street salaries and a different view on new technology than we do in the Bay. It’s also true that our cost of working and living will be higher.

But there is never a perfect answer to a problem, and attempts to optimize for perfection generally result in iterative death. The only way forward is to weigh each of our options and decide on the best path for the company while considering every factor we could see - and hypothesizing on those we could not. And after a lot of long discussions internally and with our advisors, we decided what was best for the company.

And with that decision done, we also considered what was best for us personally. Part of the reason I became an entrepreneur was to gain freedom over my choices. Freedom to make my life what I want it to be. That runs from building an incredible company with great people to change the path of education to knowing that can make time for the things that are important to me which are often denied by the rigors of, say, strict market hours.

So we’re coming back. We’re returning to a burgeoning tech scene that is rapidly adding incredibly talented, interesting, and innovative people. We’re excited to add our voice to a rising chorus proclaiming NY as more than it’s most recent definition as the capital of Finance. We’re going to do everything we can to share the incredible lessons we’ve learned on the West Coast - lessons built on decades of success and failure in building technology companies. We’ve been exposed to different ways of thinking (and I now know how to wrap a burrito), challenges we’d never considered, and people who pushed us to the very edge of our abilities.

It’ll be hard. It’ll be invigorating, fulfilling, mind-bending, heart wrenching, and glory making. It’ll be the best thing I’ve ever done. In short, it’ll be a very New York kind of story.

(oh, yeah, and we’re hiring - engineers and designers. jobs [at] tutorspree dot com)

I was a huge fan of Ducktales growing up. I can still sing the majority of the intro song, recall most of the characters, and was always willing to allow for the physical impossibility of both Scrooge’s ability to swim through money and the existence of Duckburg as a city where dogs and various billed fowl lived in cross-species harmony.

The really interesting thing about the show, looking back, is the perfect embodiment of the Horatio Alger ideal in Scrooge McDuck. In fact, He seems to have been a thinly veiled stand in for Andrew Carnegie - a poor Scottish lad who made good through his wits and work.

As a kid, of course, there was always the repeated message told in Scrooge’s origin story: Work Smarter, not Harder (he discovers this while earning money as a shoeshine…there’s a great scene with a bicycle powered shoeshine device, but more on that another time), and success and riches will follow. But now I’m actually running my own company, and the lie of Scrooge’s words becomes obvious.

Much as I try, working smarter as opposed to harder is never a clear trade off. More than that, smarter isn’t necessarily what I made it out to be. Oftentimes, clever is a much better categorization of what we have to do - from prioritization decisions on features to design choices, to customer interaction methods. And even if you’re as clever as can be, you still have to work harder.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that even if you’re working smarter, you still have to work harder. And harder isn’t the only other piece of the equation. Harder is, I guess, a measure of time spent times the difficulty of that task (T*D). But the real issue is how fast you can do it. Throughput ((T*D)^RPM), in this kind of an environment is critical because, odds are, there’s someone else just as smart, clever, and hard working as you out there, so you need to keep one step ahead all the time. You can’t do that by working hard on lateral problems, you can only do it by solving the problems that are absolutely necessary to getting that next customer, and to keeping the majority of the ones you already have.

If anything, Scrooge was selling it easy. That’s fine, because he could swim through solid matter. I’m not so lucky, so I am constantly working with Josh and Ryan to figure out how to figure out what we need to do next, and how to execute on it without killing the 20 other things we have to do. That challenge has only gotten bigger as we’ve started to grow, and it’s only going to get bigger as we grow some more.

I’m ready for it.

I had drinks with my friend Alex last night. As it often does, we started talking about the Fed, Wall Street, economic turmoil…and physics. Or, more precisely, we started discussing how insane it is that the best and brightest in the country go work on Wall Street instead of at JPL, or CalTech, or even Skunkworks.

I brought up an incident I remember from the heart of the financial crisis. At issue were government restrictions on bank bonuses. There was a loud outcry from the banks that required government help (yes, even Goldman, which likely should have been put into receivership), that any limit on bonuses would make it impossible for them to compete for the top talent on the Street. Somehow, that swayed lawmakers. And, as a result, Wall Street remained a nearly impossible to avoid honey pot.

And I don’t fault those who go to it - I did the same. The intellectual challenges are fascinating, and are precisely the kind of things that scientists and puzzle solvers love. There are massive puzzles, and huge payouts. It’s a beautiful system with perfectly aligned incentives. But Alex and I kept coming back to “what if.”

So, what if restrictions had been imposed on banks such that they went back to being the loan companies they were meant to be. Well, you wouldn’t be able to make billions off of that. But what if, instead of creating an $850B per year tax cut, much of it for the extremely wealthy, the government put a $10B prize, tax free, to the first person to successfully engineer a working fusion reactor?

What do you think would happen as thousands of unbelievably bright scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, etc. refocused their energy on creating the ultimate power source? The SpaceX prize - only $10mm - led to civilian produced, space capable vehicles. Richard Branson decided that there’s enough money in space to develop a commercial spaceliner. A spaceliner!

So amplify that challenge 1000x. I can assure you, it won’t have much of an impact on our national deficit. And if we succeed? If we get to the point where oil isn’t necessary, where solar and wind power are memories of a not terribly efficient past? Just think of the dividends.

And for those who would argue that fusion is science fiction, I’d point to the discovery of bacteria that can use arsenic in place of phosphorous. I’d point to an internet rapidly evolving into something far more than William Gibson could have imagined. I’d point at mail-in gene mapping kits and telescopes that have let us see into the beginning of the universe. I’d point squarely at CERN, where they recently isolated anti-matter for long enough to study it. And we’ve only just scratched the surface.

So, dear Washington, if you actually care about our future, align incentives for the people who want to build the world anew. Stop arguing the relative merits of political agendas and open your eyes to a world in which you can surely bet China is trying to invent the next game-changing technology. See beyond your noses and the intense lobbying to which you are subjected. Create earmarks for something useful, something that could change everything. Please, dream a little.

I’ve always had my fair share of nightmares (literal, here…you know, wake up in a cold sweat kind of thing). They ranged from the truly terrifying upon waking (big big dangerous spiders), to the nearly farcical - trapped in a cage of excel? Yep, that happened several times and probably reflects some of the pain I experienced as an entry level investment banker.

Every time one of these things happen, I can fairly easily trace it to something in my life causing me anxiety. Obviously, sometimes there is an element of obscurity there (hi Freud!), but the relationships between fear and dream have always been pretty traceable. Which is why a dream I had last night is so eye opening.

The heart of the dream: traveling in South East Asia, and my wallet is stolen without my noticing. It is returned, also without my noticing, but, when I pull it out, I notice the money is fake. It dawns on me that my credit cards have been stolen, and, with it, my identity. Cue the cold sweat wake up.

And sitting and thinking about that dream now, it’s incredible to me that I haven’t already had that dream. I live, sleep, eat, dream the internet these days. Everything I do is contained in a series of linked techno-social constructs that are me because…I have the passwords to them? I have several bits of unique information that let me access them and use them? But those elements are disjointed enough, and there are enough people out there who have no meaningful experience with flesh and blood Aaron Harris, that those identities could just as easily not be me. With the regular compromise of various security systems all over the world - from blogging platforms to major retail outlets - the digital bits that we point to as “us” are increasingly at risk of becoming…not us? Or, perhaps, some small piece of that identity could be hijacked without our even realizing it.

Which is to take a long winded run-up to a fairly old existential crisis. This time, though, that crisis is effectively projected outwards. It’s no longer simply a question of losing/finding oneself within one’s own mind. There’s an increasingly large element of not knowing where the basic anchors of one’s identity are, or if they are even secure. And I think that points to one of those startup ideas/themes that always plays around in my head (especially as I spend hours looking over the tutors signing up for tutorspree and running screens and talking to them): we need a better solution to personal identity, and it has to be secure. Does that mean everyone gets their own RSA key? Biometric scanning at every computer? Star Trek style voice/code word combinations to set off the self destruct?

I’m really not sure. But until that does happen, I’ll still probably wake up in a cold sweat every now and then, wondering if I’m still me.

There seems to be a strange virus propagating through networking events. Main manifestation: being a jerk and throwing the word “network” around. Not really sure why or where that came from, though I have some theories.

I think that there is a perception among certain people that the best way to get respect, connections, and deals is to drop names and list accomplishments. By doing that, the thinking goes, you are telling people about the great company you keep, and hope to force the conclusion that you/your company are great by association.

The thing is, that’s not how it really works. One of the most important lessons I’ve ever had hammered into my head is: show, don’t tell (which, to be honest, was hard to learn due to some very heavy indoctrination in kindergarten). When you start a conversation with explicit references to how great you are, the first thing smart people realize is that you can’t back it up on your own. You’re relying on implied connections when you should be engaging people with your idea, and with you. Genuine enthusiasm + killer idea = a way better method of impressing people.

The best part about doing things that way? You end up having conversations, not monologues. Speaking from my own, admittedly limited, experience - the best conversations I’ve had are the ones where I’ve talked the least. It may sound strange, but I genuinely enjoy meeting new people who do interesting things and have interesting things to say. And at the end of the day, maybe I didn’t press as many palms as some of the other guys. I certainly didn’t drop as many names (though there are plenty of situations where using a real reference to a relevant conversation or name is actually a very good idea), but I probably formed the beginning of a solid connection. And that’s what’s important to me.

My trip to California last week brought an ugly truth to light: the way that I interact with the world has changed because of the mobile web.

It’s not often that I can so easily trace behavioral modification to a specific event, or series of experiences. Sure, I know that I love Led Zeppelin because my brother forced me to listen to it when I was 7 (he was scared I would be sucked into a world of crappy music). But as an adult, the daily barrage of experiences, and the slow rate at which we generally change tends to mask shifting behaviors - at least to ourselves. This is the sort of thing that social scientists study and unravel, and I am neither. Mostly, we are not nearly self-aware and objective enough to realize what happened.

But last week, I had something of an epiphany. It came between the time I booked a hotel room by using a kayak mobile app (the same one that led to victory over rental car agencies) and taking the train to San Francisco without any real idea of where I would be meeting people. Now, for some people, I realize that’s something of a norm. Land in a new place, and figure things out. That’s not me. I tend to travel with a small notebook filled with confirmation numbers, train schedules, addresses, key phone numbers, and times, and alternate routes. Type A traveler? Absolutely 100%.

And I started thinking hard about what the hell had happened. Why was I running around without a clear idea of where I would be. Walking down the Embarcardero with my friend Jini, we started talking about it. It was clear to me that my iPhone was at the heart of the problem, closely followed by the increasing ubiquity of wifi. In my head, I know that anywhere I go, so long as I have a signal, I can find my way to wherever I need to go.

That’s an incredible safety net, and a testament to the way in which our world is changing. But it’s also dangerous. There are still many places where the signal won’t cut it, where planning is critical, where it leads to faster, better decisions. There are places where the perception of convenience can create a false sense of security.

But then again, on the whole: holy crap! Just thinking about the world we live in makes me giddy sometimes. I can land in a city I don’t know, blindfolded, and, 10 minutes later know where to get a sandwich, a local microbrew, and a hotel room. Zounds!

So what that really means is that I now have choices I never had before. Those options are seductive and they have to be consciously considered. Not planning = exciting, fast paced, and sometimes more convenient. Planning = more sure, safer, generally more efficient. There’s some mix of the two towards which I am moving, testing the balances along the way. Now I’m doing it far more consciously than I was.

Living in the future is awesome.

Josh, Ryan, and I landed at SFO yesterday knowing we needed a car, but without having reserved one yet. Normally, I’d never do something like that (I generally have all hotel reservations and confirm numbers written down in a notebook…), but we were in a rush, and, having checked Kayak the night before, I figured we could just walk up to the counter and get the $40 rate I had seen at three of the major car rental companies.

Instead, when we walked up to the counter, we were told that a car would $100/day, twice the online price. I told the guy that we had seen it online for half the price, which he tried to wave away by claiming that I had seen a price without taxes. He then urged us to talk to any of the other counters, and come back to him. He was quite secure that we would fail, and that would be that.

And then I did what millions of other people can do these days: opened the App store, downloaded the Kayak app, searched car reservations, booked a car for $37 a day, walked back to the counter and asked for the keys (at which point the saleswoman asked if I had just booked online, as the reservation hadn’t even hit their system yet - clearly, I’m not the only clever fox in these parts). I was standing at the back of the line while doing this. For me, mobile internet had just had an incredibly satisfying impact on my day. It also made the rental agency look very silly.

Now, I realize that they can still operate on the current model because smartphone penetration is not pervasive, but that can’t last much longer. The tools at my disposal are incredible, and are incredibly disruptive in a way that you can only really feel when you are standing next to someone telling you things are a certain way, and then prove him utterly wrong through access to information.

That’s real power for the consumer. That’s the exact thing that smart companies are playing to, rather than against right now. That’s what we’re trying to do with tutorspree: disseminate information, increase transparency, make difficult transactions easier rather than harder. It’s not an altruistic move, it’s a move that aligns incentives with your customers and makes them love you. It makes them want to come back, rather than forcing them to come back because they have no other options. That’s what I want to be known for, that’s how I want to do business.

Oh, and Dollar? Thank you for the Kia, it handles nicely.

Eight months ago I left finance to do…something involving startups. Seven months ago, Josh and I had our first conversation. Four months ago, our customer development process told us we were onto something. Two and a half months ago, we convinced Ryan to join our crazy scheme. A few hours ago, we put our first prototype out in the wild.

Woah.

I’ve never had a feeling quite like this. Putting this much time and effort into something that didn’t exist in any way, shape, or form a few short months ago, based on nothing but conviction, seems totally nuts. Leaving a lucrative career for the chance to build something you can’t even yet put into words makes no rational sense.

But it makes so much emotional sense. For the first time in my working career, I have built something over which I have real, foundational, continuing influence. Every vision, every product decision, every pitch, marketing scheme, and conversational goal came out of mine, josh, and ryan’s brains. We got a lot of help and advice, but at the end of the day, if we had decided that tutorspree should sell can-openers, we’d be selling can-openers right now. And that’s what makes all the difference. It’s not the need for control in the service of megalomania. It’s not the fact that we think what we’re doing will be very profitable. It’s the fact that we made something that didn’t exist before. Something that we think is good, that we’re proud of, that we’re pretty sure people will use, that we believed in and saw before anyone else did.

And that, for me, is the heart of being an entrepreneur. It’s not that you take on the world all by yourself (because I’m not alone). It’s that you face off against…nothing, and you have to see the possibility in it, and then do something with it. You have your idea first, and that’s worth a little. Then, you grind towards something better and better every day. And then, one day, you turn around and you have your first product.

For tutorspree, this is our “softest launch.” Really, it’s just a prototype. Not everything works yet (though it all will soon and we’d love to hear any feedback you have on it). But it’s there. And for me that’s worth so much. It’s a validation of so much of what I’ve been doing, but more than that, it’s a validation of our team. It’s evidence of what we can do. It’s fuel for what we have to do next. In short, it’s why we fight.

Now we start the real work.