February 25, 2008
LA Times on Founders Brunch and the PowerStache
My friend Jessica Guynn just wrote an article that appeared online in the LA times today entitled: Brainstorming over bagels: Silicon Valley entrepreneurs seek camaraderie and capital at brunch.
The article will appear in the LA Times print edition tomorrow morning.
The articles covers the Founders Brunch, a networking event for founders of companies that I attend regularly.
Many of my friends are quoted in the article, and there are photos of Auren Hoffman and Keith Rabois (our host this time). Peter Thiel expressed the networking aspect of this kind of event well:
Founders Brunch is important for the same reason Silicon Valley is important: There are all of these subtle network effects,” said Peter Thiel, a 40-year-old former PayPal executive now bankrolling some of the hottest Internet companies. “Otherwise why wouldn’t you start a tech company in Fresno where everything is cheaper? The advantage to being in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco area is that so many other people are doing the same thing.”
Jessica noted that I had a new beard, and I explained my recent decision on growing it:
Barney Pell, the 39-year-old co-founder of Powerset, a natural-language search engine trying to challenge Google, sported a new beard he vowed not to shave until his San Francisco start-up launched its new product.
To be more accurate, I vowed not to shave off my beard until the launch, but I didn’t vow that I wouldn’t shave at all. I made that mistake during graduate school. I thought I was ready to submit my PhD thesis in about 3 months, and vowed not to shave or cut my hair until it was done. This was partly a way to motivate myself to finish, and partly a way to let my friends stop asking about my progress as they would clearly know when was done. As it turned out, my thesis advisor thought I had more work to do, and I wound up taking a full year before finishing. So by the time I was actually ready to submit my thesis, I had really long hair and a very full beard indeed. I’m not going to do risk that again…
Anyway, you might think I’m a maverick, but it turns out that most of Powerset is in on the gig. Almost all our employees are growing moustaches and/or beards in preparation for our upcoming launch. Even women who can’t grow nearly as nice moustaches as the men have painted them on from time to time. And our folks even registered a domain name and created a website, PowerStache.com, featuring photos taken over time as people grow their beards and moustaches.
It’s pretty silly and really wasn’t initially a coordinated effort, but it’s fun and reflects the excitement inside the company as we are nearing the time when the early version of our product will be available to the general public.
Posted by barney on February 25, 2008 at 7:52 pm | No Comments
December 2, 2007
Unfriender: Social etiquette and rapid Facebook application development
This post is about a new application I helped create today, called Unfriender, that addresses a functional issue in social networking services. It is perhaps more interesting for the demonstration of how rapidly it is now possible to create new applications on top of the Facebook Platform.
continue reading the Unfriender: Social etiquette and rapid Facebook application development
Posted by barney on December 2, 2007 at 1:21 am | 2 Comments
August 9, 2007
Powerlabs internal launch
Today was an exciting milestone for Powerset. We released the first version of the Powerlabs platform for our employees to try out. The Powerlabs platform is a framework for innovation in which a community of users can generate and refine ideas as they interact with products and concepts. It combines elements of social networking, crowd-sourcing, and social search (among other buzzwords that, in our case, really make a difference).
It turns out that the product team have been using Powerlabs to improve Powerlabs itself, so there were already a large set of ideas and evaluations by the time the rest of the employees got to try the system out. And we are already finding the system to be addictive: within a couple hours of internal release (the time it took Product Manager Mark Johnson and me to play a few matches of Dance Dance Revolution), already over 50 ideas had been generated and evaluated!
With this much interest from our own small number of employees, it is amazing to think about the kind of ideas, creativity, and feedback we are going to get from the 16,000 people already signed up for Powerlabs launch in September! (You can sign up at the Powerlabs Website).
Powerlabs is so cool, in fact, that we have already started talking about potentially offering this as a service to other companies who want community innovation around their products (both internal employees and outside users). So the race is now on to see which takes off faster: a radical new way to search using natural language, or a radical new way to create products!
Posted by barney on August 9, 2007 at 8:49 pm | No Comments