It’s Big Game week here at Meebo.  For those of you not from the Bay Area, Big Game is the annual football rivalry match between Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley (a.k.a. Cal).  With alums from both schools and locals who’ve followed the teams for years here at Meebo, we’ve got a friendly rivalry.

I’m sporting my alma mater Stanford’s red and white every day this week and will be cheering on the Cardinal at Stanford Stadium this weekend as we try to take back the Axe.  Greg, who wrote about Big Game last year, has decked out his corner of the office with Cal’s Blue and Gold, even going as far as decorating the trash can.

Vijay, who hails from Cal, renewed a bet from last season with me.  The loser will be forced to wear the winner’s schools colors to work the next day.

As an alum, this has been a very fun year to watch Stanford football.  Coming off decisive upset wins over Oregon and USC, Stanford is ranked 14th in the nation.  And we’re going to a bowl game for the first time since I was a freshman.  Meanwhile, Cal just beat Arizona at home and is looking for a strong finish to their season.

Big Game is a matchup that has brought us “The Play“, one of the most infamous moments in college football history, where the Cal team plows down the Stanford band for a last second touchdown.  This is the biggest game of the season and and both teams are driven to win.  And it’s sure to be a hard fought battle this year.

Of course, this is the time of year for lots of college rivalry games across the U.S.  It’s a chance to get together with friends and family and have fun cheering on your team.  What teams will you be watching?  Growing up, the important game was always the post-Thanksgiving match up between the hometown Colorado Buffaloes and Nebraska Corhnhuskers.  Good luck to your team (as long as it’s not Cal )!

Go Cardinal!
-Jim

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As someone who doesn’t follow fashion and had no clue that Donna Karan was a real person until like last year, paying close attention to what I wear usually isn’t top of mind. As many insecure kids do, I tried to dress like the cool kids in middle and high school in hopes that my social status would somehow magically skyrocket. Boy did it not! =p

As I grew up a bit and realized it really wasn’t that important, my style slowly settled into a nice place: t-shirts and jeans. Stressed out college students didn’t really have time to look trendy so I was pretty happy with the state of my wardrobe. My mom bought me a nice tailored suit for interviews, and that was probably the nicest thing I owned. I hung the suit carefully in my dorm closet, in hopes that someday I would look fabulous in it, and nab an awesome job. I thought to myself, “I will be SO fashionable in this suit.”

Unfortunately, I never wore it in college. A few of my interviews were at school, and for others I was told to just dress casually. Sad suit.

Fast forward a few years and I’m now prepping to talk to Sequoia about investing in our little company called Meebo. My suit is hella excited. Seth, Elaine, and I practice our pitch and the last action item I ask about is: what should I wear? I want to make a great impression, and what better way than to wear that awesome suit? As you can see, I had high hopes for that suit.

“Eh, dress like you normally do, like crap”

Huh?

It turns out Seth wanted me to really “look the part”. As in, look the part of the hard-working engineer who really only cares about getting the code working, and not about how people thought she looked in a suit.

He wanted me to be myself.

It’s funny how the smallest things can give you some the biggest realizations of your life. All the insecurities that I felt as a kid trying to be cool kind of just melted away. I could dress like me, look like me, and still be impressive. How awesome was that? (For the record, my suit is still pristine, and sitting in my closet).

So for those shy, nervous kids out there, don’t worry if you’re not the most fashionable, trendiest kid on the block. Enjoy your own style and be yourself. If this kid in jeans and a t-shirt got this far, so can you .

cheers,
sandy

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Everyone at Meebo.com is familiar with our flagship product, because, well, you’re using it! Here on Meebo.com you can get all your friends in one place to chat with them and quickly share links, videos, and photos. What some of you might not know is that late last year we began offering a mini version of Meebo for other websites as well.

This mini version of Meebo appears as a bar at the bottom of our partner websites. Some of our favorite sites — Flixster, Justin.tv, CafeMom, FanPop, Playlist, and others — use Meebo to power their own chat and let you bring your Meebo buddies right into their website. Well, this has been churning along for almost a year now, and the big news today is that the Meebo bar is now on over 100 websites!

One big blog using Meebo is Mashable.com. Mashable is a place to read about social media stuff, like how celebrities and news outlets are using Twitter lists or a list of the best apps on Facebook. To sign into Meebo on Mashable, look for the Meebo bar on the bottom of the page and click the button on the right. A window will pop up that lets you sign in. After that, all of your friends that normally show up on Meebo will be available to you inside of Mashable. Before you leave, try moving your mouse over any of the images inside the articles. You can then click down on the image and “drag” it to your friends on IM, or to Facebook, Twitter, or email. Whoever you shared the story with can now read the same article.

People at Meebo seem to have different favorites from the list of big sites running Meebo. Robb from our business team likes ClubPlanet, AllHipHop, 24HourHipHop, and SOHH.com. You’ll find Matt and Jian playing games on GameVance.com, just not at work, of course. When Stephanie reviews a legal contract, she’ll put on her headphones and visit PlayList.com, Batanga.com, and MixPod.com. I love Flixster.com, the very first site to use Meebo, because I’m a huge movie fan. I just saw Paranormal Activity – too scary!!

We are really proud of what we have accomplished so far, but just like with meebo.com, we know there are lots of things left to do. So try out the Meebo Bar on some of our partner sites and tell us what you think. Do you like the drag-and-drop feature? Would being able to IM from anywhere on a website you like to visit change the way you connect with your friends? Is there a service or feature you think we are missing? Would you want something like this on your site? As always, we appreciate your feedback.

Chris

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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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