I roller-skate. I’ve been skating and competing for 23 years and most days I think I actually skate better than I walk (I trip all the time!). When I tell people that I roller-skate, the most common reaction I get is “like, roller derby?” “No! I’m not tough enough for that,” I tell them. It’s like ice-skating, but on wheels.

I’m not sure what drives me to skate, but there’s just something about putting my skates on and getting lost in my figures that I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of. It’s so meditative at times. Unfortunately I’ve never been able to pursue the “Olympic dream” since roller-skating has never been an Olympic sport. But I have been able to do a lot of cool things in the sport. I got to train at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, CO. I have traveled all over the continental US to compete. And I managed to get three national medals and one national title.

Looking back on the last 23 years, I never thought that my Saturday morning ritual of going to the STAR classes at my local roller rink with my mom would have turned into the journey it has become. This very well may be my last competitive year in the sport, so I’m more determined than ever to make it my best. Fingers crossed for one more National title!

If you have never roller-skated before, or if it’s just been a while, you should go to your local rink this weekend. You’ll have a blast, I promise!

Brittony

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The results from last week’s jack-o’-lantern poll are in, and the voting was oh-so-close.

“Ghost” won the vote from our blog readers by a super-slim margin, but when you add the votes from our front door display, the overall winner is ….

“Braces”!

Honorable mentions also go to “Sad Panda” and “Death Star.”

So congratulations to Renaud for carving the winning jack-o’-lantern! You win a year’s supply of cooked pumpkin! Why cooked pumpkin, you ask?

A note to any of you planning to do this on your own some time. Don’t leave the lights in the pumpkins for too long. Otherwise they wind up looking like this!

For those who celebrated, we hope you all had a safe and happy Halloween.

-Greg

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After lunch yesterday, Elaine organized a pumpkin carving contest here at Meebo, and though we didn’t go as far as some people, we definitely had fun. We set up the pumpkins by our front door for anyone passing by the office to see, and asked Chris to set up some online voting so they could vote for their favorite.

But we figured, why not let anyone on Meebo vote?
So vote for your favorite Meebo jack-o’-lantern. We’ll post the winner next week.

Pictures are below, and also in the survey.

Happy Halloween!

By the way, you can still try out our Halloween skin by clicking here! (This link only works if you are viewing the blog from inside your Meebo session.) To change your settings again, go to Preferences > Appearance and choose a new Meebo wallpaper and chrome (the colored squares).

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Try out our Halloween skin by clicking here! (This link only works if you are viewing the blog from inside your Meebo session.) To change your settings again, go to Preferences > Appearance and choose a new Meebo wallpaper and chrome (the colored squares).

Halloween is just around the corner, so we thought we’d bring back last year’s Halloween skin to celebrate.

Not only will this give you some fun new buttons for your buddy list and IM windows, you’ll also enable David’s hidden Halloween emoticons (NOTE: you need to activate the skin with the link above to get the emoticons to work!):

	(bat)
	(bloodyhand)
	(bones)
	(eyeball)
	(frank)
	(pumpkin)
	(witchhat)

So click here to try out our Halloween skin, if you dare! (Cue spooky evil laugh.)

We are also bringing back our Halloween avatars for you to use:

Download one you like to your desktop, click on your Meebo buddy icon at the top left of your Meebo window, and select “Custom Icon…” to set it as your buddy icon. (You’ll need a Meebo account to set a custom buddy icon.)

And last, keep on the lookout for some more Halloween fun here on Meebo over the next couple of days. Stay tuned!

Greg

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Meebo’s team has been growing. In order to house our growing numbers, a few weeks ago we took over part of the 2nd floor of our building (Hi Neoedge! . In addition to a few more code-review lounges, meeting rooms, a *lot* more room for desks, and a “zen meditation area”, we also were able to resurrect our four-square court. 4^2 at meebo has long been a part of our company culture, but when space became a premium we reluctantly had to put desks in our beloved 4^2 court.

So it was with an immense amount of pleasure that Renaud and I headed downstairs to an isolated corner of the office, duct and measuring tapes in hand, to mark off our 4^2 court. Immediately, we were filled with an equal amount of displeasure when we realized that the ceiling was quite low … and covered with fire sprinklers. For those of you not acquainted with office fire sprinklers, they usually have a bulb or metal link that, when it breaks, causes a monsoon of somewhat stale water to cover the office. This seal is designed to melt when exposed to heat, but it’s equally vulnerable to a hit from a bouncy rubber ball.

We weren’t about to give up on the idea of 4^2. Engineers, left to their own devices, will do what engineers do best. Innovate . We pondered PVC pipes, chicken wire, even fiberglass enclosures. None of these seemed like elegant solutions (frankly, none of them seemed like intelligent solutions, or even legal). So we scoured the web and came across the fire sprinkler guard. Not wanting to wait for shipping, we looked for a local source.

We were lucky enough to stumble across a company called Statcomm, located about 10 minutes away from the Meebo office in Mountain View, that provides fire protection services. Greg called them up, explained what we needed and they told us to come on by. Stopping by their office and warehouse, it was clear that their main business wasn’t selling fire sprinkler guards to companies eager to play childhood recess games. However, they were nice and friendly enough to take time out of their day to help us out and get us the parts we needed. Thirty minutes later, we were back at meebo eagerly affixing the guards to the sprinklers. We had a little assembly line going; I’d grab fresh guard, open it up, and hand it to Kevin. Kevin, who is 6′5″, was uniquely built to perform the delicate task of actually affixing the guard to the sprinkler. Lastly, Greg walked around actually tightening each screw.

The finished product:

All in all it was a lot of work just to play 4^2, but the first time we got out that rubber ball … it was all worth it.

Vijay

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Where were you on October 17, 1989 at 5:04 PM?

Ask anyone from the San Francisco Bay Area that question, and you will likely get some extremely detailed answers. Twenty years ago this Saturday, the Loma Prieta earthquake shook San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Oakland, and the rest of the Bay Area with the largest temblor since The Great 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

Game 3 of the Bay Bridge World Series was the big event that day, and the eyes of the country were trained on San Francisco’s Candlestick Park to watch the SF Giants take on their cross-bridge rivals, the Oakland Athletics, for the MLB championship.

For my part, I was hauling equipment out to our high school football field for marching band practice. I had come directly from soccer practice, so I was a bit late, and the entire band was already on the field.

My first realization that something was happening was when I noticed the sound, a low rumbling that could have just as easily been a large truck passing by, except it was coming from across the football field, and there was no street over there.

And then I saw it. It was as if a huge log was rolling underground toward me, followed by at least one more that I could see. As the undulating earth approached the unsuspecting band on the field, plumes of water shot into the air as the earthquake passed each of the houses that bordered the school, sending the water from their pools to a height of 30 feet, easily above the rooflines of those two-story homes. I distinctly remember thinking, “Wow, every single one of those house has a pool!” as it struck each one in succession.

Then it reached the band. And they all fell down. I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. I was with the drum major, and we both busted out laughing, managing to keep our feet as the quake shook the ground beneath us. For fifteen seconds, we jumped up and down, hooting and hollering as if we were on a stand-up roller coaster. Being in the middle of an open field is about the safest place you can be in an earthquake, so we were just enjoying the ride.

When the shaking was over, I was impressed. That was a pretty big earthquake, and I was glad no one at the school was hurt. Some of my friends from the water polo team had been thrown from the pool by the force of the quake, but we all generally described it as “a lot of fun.”

Not until we got home that night and turned on the news did we know the extent of the damage to San Francisco, the freeways and Bay Bridge, and Santa Cruz, all within a 45 minute drive of my town.

Having lived in the Bay Area for most of my life, I had already been through a decent-sized earthquake, the 1984 Morgan Hill earthquake that measured 6.2 on the Richter Scale. So a 7.1 shaker doesn’t sound like that much more, right? Well, because the scale is logarithmic, it grows exponentially as it goes up the scale. So a 7.0 would be ten times greater than a 6.0. That’s some confusing math, I guess.

Twenty years later, many local news sources are sharing their memories of Loma Prieta. Here at Meebo headquarters, Christian remembers stacking oil filters at the auto shop where he was working when he saw all of the telephone poles swaying and the cars jumping up and down like they were at a lowrider rally. And Danny, well, he probably just remembers that the Giants ended up losing the series 4-0. (Type “( letsgogiants )” without the spaces to display a cool SF Giants emoticon in Meebo.)

Some people think we Californians are crazy to live in a state where earthquakes happen every day. But honestly, I have only felt 4-5 of them, and I think I will take once-in-a-lifetime major earthquakes to seasonal hurricanes or tornadoes any day. There’s no “earthquake season,” after all. People who live in hurricane country probably feel the same way about earthquake country.

There are tons of earthquake preparedness resources available, and most of them seem to focus on a few simple rules: make sure nothing will fall on you by bolting tall furniture to walls and storing heavy items close to the ground, reinforce your building if necessary to make it more resilient, and remember to drop, cover, and hold on.

So do you remember where you were 20 years ago on October 17? I sure do. Oh yeah, and it was my brother’s birthday, too. Happy birthday, Erik.

Be safe.
Greg

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This is the third in a series of posts on how to form your own startup from scratch. Like the last one, this post can be found here and also over on TechCrunch.

The number one question you all asked after reading my last blog post about starting a business from scratch was “how do I find my co-founders?”

Great question – let’s start with a bit of self reflection:

Close your eyes and visualize your group of closest friends.

Now, think specifically about how tall (or short) they all are.

Great, now ask yourself “are all of them roughly the same height?” I’ll bet most of them are – you included.

And therein lies the problem in finding co-founders for that startup you’re dying to launch. It’s most comfortable to hang out with people like ourselves, but those are exactly the folks you probably don’t want to co-found a startup with. Seems a bit unintuitive, right? I’ll explain.

The best founding team for a startup is a group of two or three people who have synergistic – not overlapping – skills. Note that it’s also important your goals and passions be similar. If one of you wants to sell fast and the other wants to build a billion dollar business, that’ll make for pretty serious friction down the road. So too would a team where one person’s more interested in enterprise startups while the other person’s passion lies in consumer experiences. With that out of the way, however, it’s critical that you look for people with complementary skills to your own. In consumer internet, that usually means one front-end user-facing developer, one back-end server-side developer, and ultimately a business person (details will come in a later post).

The reality though, is that we tend to hang out with people who are just like us. Remember that story I told about the three business school students telling me about their tech startup, leaving me to wonder who’d actually build the product? I see that all too frequently – from business folks and techies alike. It’s just easier to hang out with people in your same classes at school, or your same group at work.

If you happen to be in school now, you’re in the most fertile place possible to meet your co-founders. Take advantage of it! How’d I meet Elaine and Sandy? Mutual friends from school. How about some other teams? Larry and Sergey from Google met at Stanford. So did Jerry and David from Yahoo!. The Plaxo founders also met in school, which is also where Mark from Facebook met his co-founders. Having trouble meeting folks you think would be good co-founders? Here are a couple ideas:

1. Join student groups relevant to your interests. If you’re a business major – go check out the Engineering Society’s monthly meeting. If you’re in the CS department, I’ll bet the business school students would kill to meet you at the next Entrepreneurship Club meeting.

2. If your school doesn’t already have a student group designed to foster collaboration between groups of students with the skills necessary to get a startup rolling, start one! BASES at Stanford is a great model to follow. It brings together students from both the undergraduate and graduate levels, across disciplines such as design, computer science and business.

Ok, so most folks reading this are probably out of school. Fortunately, there are a number of examples of successful founding teams that met outside of school. Chad and Steve from YouTube met while working at PayPal. Sean and Shawn from Napster met in an IRC channel. Cisco was a husband and wife team. It helps to be in school, but it’s not an absolute requirement. A few practical ideas applicable to everyone, in school or not:

1. Get out there and find activities that attract diverse groups of people. In Silicon Valley, rock climbing’s a current hot spot for startup folks. So is ultimate frisbee. There’s at least one weekly ultimate frisbee game I’m aware of that’s chock-full of people from the startup industry, on both the business and tech sides.

2. Ask your friends for intros to people in an area you’re trying to learn about. Chances are someone in your group of techies knows someone business oriented. The first folks you meet may not be a fit, but keep asking for referrals and you’ll get there.

3. Join / attend local organizations designed to foster introductions between folks interested in startups. SVASE or Founder Dating in Silicon Valley, First Tuesday in London and Hackers and Founders in New York all come to mind.

4. Team with co-workers at your current job or that internship you did last summer. Just make sure to not violate any non-competes, etc, in the process! Generally speaking, as long as you’re not working on a project your employer would reasonably want to own, you’re probably ok. Of course, do not use any of your employer’s resources. A great friend of mine is scheming, right now, with a co-worker on their next great startup. One’s a PM and the other’s an engineer.

I’m sure some of you are thinking “that’s all great – but I live in the middle of nowhere and none of those resources are available to me.” To be blunt, find a way to move to Silicon Valley. Other cities like New York, Boston, Seattle, LA and Austin TX also have pretty strong startup communities. However, nowhere has as many real estate agents, lawyers, accountants, landlords, employees, co-founders, mentors, and VCs all steeped in startup culture as does Silicon Valley. The ecosystem is just hard to beat. The result is that you’ll be exposed to many more people who can help you get started. In my case, I grew up in Connecticut and spent a fair amount of time in New York – all the while trying to start companies, relatively unsuccessfully. Friends in Silicon Valley kept telling me to move out there for all the reasons I mentioned above. I finally found my ticket in the form of admission to business school in the valley. Find your ticket.

The hardest part of starting from scratch is finding the right co-founders. Ideas, comparatively, are easy. You may spend three years finding your co-founders while you’ll come up with a solid idea every 3 months or so. Luckily, once you settle into a great founding team you’ll be able to execute much faster on that killer idea you all come up with – beating those ten other folks who came up with the same idea at the same time.

Remember, the ultimate goal is to create a founding team that can, within its own skill set, get a working prototype out the door. This means you need to find folks with skills that compensate for your weaknesses. Co-founding a startup is like getting into a marriage – picking the right people is critical. In later posts I’ll get more specific on how to figure out if the folks you’re meeting are the right people to work with, and also how to deal with issues like splitting equity and paying yourselves before raising funding. Feel free to follow me on Twitter to get notifications of later posts on this topic.

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UPDATE – There’s a great post in TechCrunch today about Meebo’s recent growth.

On September 17th, everyone on our team stopped what they were doing, pushed schedules aside, postponed code reviews for another day, and convened at Rengstorff Park at 11 am under the late summer sky with our frisbees, softballs, and guitars to celebrate Meebo’s birthday. Four years ago, we were a team of three. Today, we are a team of approximately sixty and still gradually growing.

Seeing Meebo evolve from the beginning, I am more aware of how the dynamics of the team change with the number of people. When we were a team of three, I could tell you what Seth and Sandy were doing almost on an hourly basis. One of us was always on high alert monitoring the servers and making sure they could get in touch with the others in case something seemed amiss. When we were twelve people, we could still fit everyone into Godavari Indian Restaurant across the street. Around thirty people, we were able to work on multiple projects simultaneously which meant that if you wanted to take a break from coding, you could switch to stats, or talk with David about his latest set of mockups.

What I really appreciate about Meebo’s current size is the resulting excitement and energy that makes it easier to gain critical mass and get projects rolling. For instance, Renaud, Mikey, and I planned a three-city usability tour asking folks how they communicate online. A year ago, this would have been nearly impossible. And in 2009, there were enough of us interested in leading a liquid nitrogen ice cream experiment that we stocked our kitchen freezer with enough experimental flavors of ice cream to keep our sweet tooths sated for years. And if you get an itch to go rock climbing or skiing, you’re in luck – you’re going to be able to fill a car with like-minded folks pretty quickly.

For this year’s birthday celebration, we were estimating how much food we needed for this year’s picnic and after a few phone calls, I was delighted to realize that we had enough team members to justify a visit from the cupcake truck. If you haven’t heard of a cupcake truck before, picture a cleaner and pinker version of a hotdog truck that just specializes in icing-topped goods. So around noon on September 17th, the Cupkate Bakery truck rolled up to Rengstorff Park, opened its windows, and handed out Meebo birthday cupcakes. The minimum order is 100, roughly two cupcakes per Meebo person, and this quantity also ensures that you don’t have to decide between the Double, Double Chocolate or Smores cupcake.

A birthday celebration is already a happy occasion. And the idea of a cupcake truck just makes me giddy. Combine the two – and it’s just a deeply satisfying moment in time. Happy birthday Meebo team.

Take care,
- Elaine

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Quick update – The Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, just launched the Meebo Bar on his official website. Check out the VentureBeat story here.

As a relative newcomer to the US, I was pleased to discover there’s a lot more to American culture than the simplistic clichés that are sometimes tossed around internationally. Similarly, there are a few representations of my homeland, Australia, that seem to have become fused with the global consciousness, and I attempt to dispel these absurd misapprehensions whenever they arise.

To clarify:

1. We do not all have kangaroos hopping about in our yards.
2. We are not all devoted beer guzzlers.
3. We are not all descended from convicts.

Having said that, my house borders on bushland so it’s actually not uncommon for roos to stray onto the property. Also, I really do enjoy a cold ale or two on a summer afternoon. And as it happens, the shadowy corners of my family tree are speckled with the thieving scoundrels who colonised the nation some two centuries ago. But far from feeling a sense of shame at my convict ancestors’ misdeeds, I’ve grown to appreciate these stories in the context of history.

In the early 1800s, poverty was widespread in Ireland. My great-great-great-great-grandfather was sentenced to 14 years for a petty theft and was transported to Australia on a ship called the Three Bees. The Napoleonic Wars were raging on the high seas at the time so the vessel was armed to the teeth with 16 cannons and 30 kegs of gunpowder. Probably just as well, since the fleet encountered a warship off the west coast of Africa along the way, and after a prolonged and treacherous battle, sailed on victorious. Conditions were extremely cold and wet. Disease spread and many lives were lost. After a harsh six months at sea, the ship arrived in Sydney, where thousands of convicts would serve their time, build a new settlement and eventually begin new lives, full of promise. As for The Three Bees, a couple of weeks after arrival, a careless crew member accidently started a fire in the hold. With enough gunpowder on board to start a revolution, the decision was made to abandon the flaming ship and cut it loose. The vessel drifted out into the cove, cannons blasting ball and grapeshot in every direction. (I like to think of this as Sydney Harbour’s first fireworks extravaganza, now a yearly tradition.) After a six hour pyrotechnic display, the blaze reached the lower ammunition stores, sparking an epic explosion and sinking the faithful ship just off the rocks of Bennelong Point, the current location of the Sydney Opera House.

So there you have it: I’m a walking stereotype. This is hardly typical of the prevailing, diverse Australian experience, I hasten to add. But having only recently learned many of these details about my pioneering forebears, I find this connection adds to my appreciation for the richness of history and how significantly modern generations will shape the world’s future. I would encourage anyone to do a little digging around the family tree. You never know what treasures you might unearth.

Cheers,

Jayce

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I get a lot of flack for being a fan of the New York Yankees.

Whether people are fans of the Boston Red Sox, critical of the amount of money the Yankees spend on marquee players, or generally root against “bandwagon teams,” there are a lot of folks who seriously dislike my favorite baseball team and their fans.

I suppose it’s understandable. With a long and storied history that stretches from the home-run derby days of Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle to the more-recent dominance anchored by stars like Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter — Yankee fans can be arrogant and annoying in their support and praise of the home squad.

As the 2009 playoff season draws near and the Yankees wrap up another trip to the post-season, I recall my first baseball game — the memorable nine innings in 1993 that added 11-year-old Mikey to the long list of those who bleed blue:

I was born in New York City, and though my family had moved to Southern California, I still visited the Big Apple once or twice a year.

It was August 15, 1993, and this was one of those summer trips. My aunt knew how much I loved watching Yankees all-star first baseman Don Mattingly, and she bought me tickets to my first professional sporting event: great seats near the front row in right field for a day game against the Baltimore Orioles.

I’ll never forget that first glimpse I had of the field at the old Yankee Stadium. Bright, piercing green. I walked, in awe, through the maze of ramps and stairs all the way to our seats where we could see the staggering scene of 50,000 screaming fans, the famous facade of the stadium, and the ballplayers I usually only saw on television.

Soaking it all in, I became enamored with the game — every pitch, every defensive shift, every foul ball. I got so involved that after a few hours, I didn’t realize that the game was almost over, and neither team had yet scored!

In the bottom of the 8th inning, Don Mattingly came to bat. Standing on my seat — at four feet, seven inches — I knew I was cheering harder than anyone in the crowd.

“Donnie Baseball,” as he was affectionately known, took two straight strikes to go down in the count 0-2. I was nervous, tightly gripping the baseball mitt on my left hand. All of a sudden, CRACK… Mattingly drove the ball in a hard line-drive that was headed my way. Pushing and shoving my way to see over the outstretched hands above me, I saw the ball sail right over my head for a home run!

Today, I can still close my eyes and see the seams of the baseball. For a kid who had just turned eleven, it was a very big deal. The Yankees won that day, 1-0, thanks to that solo shot by my favorite player.

I followed the Yankees closely every year after that, and it’s been quite a ride. We made it through the baseball strike in the mid-90s, Joe Torre’s arrival and departure, and a brutal loss to our rival Red Sox in the 2004 ALCS. This year, we’re back, and the playoffs look to be exciting.

Even if you’re not rooting for the Yankees like I am, I hope you’ll be watching some baseball this October. I know some 11-year-old kid will be watching his first baseball game from right field at the new Yankee Stadium, and I’ll be rooting for him to catch a home run ball.

Mikey

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