A lot of startup events are pitching related. There’s a few reasons for this.

1. They are cheap to run.
2. They pad out the schedule of a larger conference
3. There are people who believe that an investor sitting in the audience will be immediately convinced and meet them off the stage with a massive check.
4. There are people who believe that one of the world’s great developers is sitting in the audience and will meet them off the stage with an offer to build the site for nothing.
5. The expert panel has no prep (just say the first thing that comes out of your head!) which is ideal for busy people so you can always fill it up. I’ve done this… it’s fun to pontificate.

I know this is endemic to the startup world but in particular South East Asia has a bad case of over-pitching.

You’re pitching to the wrong people, at the wrong time. If you are pitching, know why.

You need to stop talking to other potential entrepreneurs, start pitching to rooms full of your clients and future customers. At ImpulseFlyer, we pitch to hotels and to groups of our target audience of customers, not to other startups.

Sidenote: Pitching at incubator demo days is worth it, if they are rammed with real investors.

Pitching to a room is an easy thing to do psychologically because when someone disagrees with you, it’s because they dont understand. Plus you can pretend that all the preparation proves that you’re moving towards your goal. Right?

If you go out to the market and try and sell your idea and no customers come & pay, that probably proves that its not gonna work. But that’s good, because then you can work on the next thing. But then you can’t call yourself a founder anymore. Not good. Unless you want to actually do the tough leg work of trying to start a company.

Even with a functional business model this stuff is hard enough, so don’t waste your time pitching at every goddamn event: spend your time finding out whether your concept, with you at the helm, can ever make money. Else it is just a lot of talk and the simulcrum of action.

Thanks to Derrick Ko for reading a draft of this.

Safari

The most amazing place in the world is Mala Mala a private game reserve on the border of Kruger national park. Incredibly expensive, but worth every penny.

A river attracts lions, leopards, cheetah, buffalo, rhino, giraffes and incredible numbers of elephants. I would move there.

Cape Town

In Camps Bay, we stayed at Atlantic House a converted (very nice) modern house overlooking the bay.

The two restaurants we’d recommend:

Grand Cafe & Room get the seafood platter for two, you will not need a starter.

Codfather amazing fresh fish and sushi made in front of you. Great food, reservations probably needed.

Staying in the city we were at Urban Chic, nicely central in the heart of things and hence a bit noisy. Average breakfast but helpful staff.

However our favourite daytime eating was Manna Epicure. Awesome breakfast, juices, burgers, lunch, cakes and bread. Could have spent all day there.

We also walked up Table Mountain as the cable car was shut for wind, despite the spectacular day.

We were totally rained out on our hired minibus to the Cape of Good Hope but managed to stop off on the way home in Simon’s Town for (very damp) penguins.

The news broke late last week about the acquisition of Pivotal Labs by EMC. A chorus of wtf echoed around the internet.

The standard worries broke out:

“Everyone will leave”

“The founders will be out in 2 years”

“What about my beloved tracker?”

I’m gonna concentrate on what I think everyone is missing, and what I presume is the main reason for their sale. Net good for the world.

EMC is clearly making the IBM/HP move, hardware is becoming super-commodotised, so they are diversifying into an enterprise services model.

There is of course the chance that Pivotal will be absorbed, dissipate and cease to be Pivotal in the same way. However my hope is for an outcome much better than that. We, in the startup industry, have been benefiting from the lessons of agility in programming and excellent frameworks like Rails, letting us build quickly, test our software and act like engineering professionals even in tiny teams.

The Dirty Truth

I worked at Accenture for four years, although I wasn’t part of any engineering teams while I was exposed to the multi-million dollar engineering contracts.

The truth of the enterprise software development world is that they outsource to either low-cost locations and/or low-skilled/paid workers. Any investment is done by wrapping the engineering functions in a professional wrapper of project managers. This keeps the client somewhat happy, but results in mostly crappy software and a demotivated engineering team. They often don’t even use version control.

This is the opposite of Pivotal Labs. Their process is rock solid and focussed on deliverable, well-engineered software delivered in an iterative manner. All delivered by strong engineers with good communication skills.

Despite this a ‘big company’ would likely be wary of hiring a ‘small company’ like Pivotal Labs directly, however hiring software engineering from the people with whom you’ve been spending millions of dollars of physical storage and supporting software is much easier for a lay-person to do.

The Future

Imagine a world where talented engineers with a rock solid process get to work on enterprise level software: online banking, government systems, HR systems, accounting systems. That’s a good world right?

Pivotal’s mission is also to educate as they build software: their relatively high-cost is offset by the training they provide to the teams in which they embed. They also educate clients in the best way to effectively engage with software engineering. If you hire them as an outsourced system integrator you’re doing it wrong. Imagine EMC/Pivotal ‘infecting’ big business with the process used in the world best engineering teams.

It’s a better world for consumers of the ‘enterprise-y’ products. It’s a better world for clients who are deeply involved in product decisions on a regular iterative basis. Most importantly it’s a much better world for the engineers in these companies: potentially rediscovering a passion for engineering elegant systems.

This is what I hope for. We shall see.

My task was two-fold, find the best new tech talent for ImpulseFlyer but also to let the soon-to-be-grads know about ‘real careers’ in software engineering and in small companies. A bank did not have to be their destiny.

So I collected emails and eulogised in person and tonight I sent a note to that list. An edited version appears below.

Hello future engineers,

When I left university I didn’t realise it was possible to have a fulfilling career in and around smaller companies, it took me four long years to leave the golden cage I’d put myself in. Don’t feel bad for me, I met my wife made some friends and it wasn’t all bad.

This is to share my particular passion for a career both as a software craftsman and also doing that work in startups or small companies.

Right. Down to business.

About small companies / startups

Small companies are a very different proposition to larger corporates.

Small companies:

• Responsibility, quickly
• Strong personal relationships
• Relaxed work environment
• Nowhere to hide, you will work hard (but won’t be exploited)
• If you find the right people you’ll learn a lot
• You get to bring your whole personality to work, but you’ll bring a bit home too

Big companies:

• In theory, job security – but my experience is that your skills become your security. A good programmer/designer is rarely out of work for long.
• You might prefer the formality and structure of a big company
• You may be able to earn more money for less work
• A recognised career path
• You can generally leave your work at work

You’ll notice I haven’t put “fame and riches” as benefits of startups. Personally if that’s the reason you want to do web startups you’re going to be disappointed. Optimize for your own day-to-day happiness, get skilled, be lucky.

Your Personality

I’ll mainly be talking about the technical and design opportunities in this email, but most of the personality traits and behaviours are common in the non-technical roles as well.

Confident & outgoing: a quieter person may struggle with the banter amongst the individuals at this early stage of the company. It’s not that there is no room for quieter people in our company, it’s just that the makeup of the team is such that we’ve got quite a boisterous bunch right now.

Great communicator: design and development (and other startup work) is made much easier when you are able to express yourself well; both in person and in the written word.

Diligent: we do not have time to check every piece of work you do. You love to finish things, to ship code and to show people what you’ve done.

Self-motivated & Passionate: You see opportunities to improve things and you talk through the problem to come up with a potential solution. If you are only good at doing things you’re told to do, this job may not be for you.

A Good Learner: coming out of university education I do not expect you to have the exact skills I’m looking for, in fact I expect to invest time in training you.

We are looking for:

• Software engineers to work in a variety of technologies (primarily Ruby on Rails with the potential to move into mobile applications)
• Designers with visual flair
• ‘Business people’ with the raw materials for sales, marketing, content and support roles

Good signs for engineers/designers are:

• Working sites of your own
• A professionally presented portfolio (design or code examples)
• A blog
• A github page
• An interest in web technologies in addition to those you have studied

Things we look for in “business people” are:

• Strong analytical skills, ideally with relevant internships or other experience
• Exceptional presentation, communication and negotiation skills
• Passion for travel

General Advice

You should bear this in mind when you’re applying to us, as well as any other companies.

Work out which companies you want and then make an effort to apply to those specifically, do not just spam out your CV to everyone. You may get a job that way, but probably not one that suits your personality.

Your CV looks the same as everyone else’s: thus we probably won’t cast more that a cursory glance at it. Keep it short. Take the effort to write a specific cover letter, listen to what I’ve said in this email, find out what the company does and who the individuals involved are.

Make a strong impression, not just with your cover letter and CV, but especially during the interview. If we don’t remember you after the interview, that’s a problem. But… for goodness sake be yourself, it’s ok not to get offered every job, it’s about fit between you and the organisation.

About Our Company

ImpulseFlyer is a e-commerce startup based in Singapore. We are a private (invite only) booking site for luxury & boutique hotels for affluent travellers in the Asia Pacific region.

I’m Andy, the CTO, meaning I’m in charge of design and development at the company, I’m the one you met at the careers fair. British guy, t-shirt, enthusiastic.

We are a small startup, with some funding, that launched in October 2011. We’re very design-focussed and we want to provide a pleasurable experience for both customers and our hotel partners.

We do not have a list of ‘open positions’. We’re small and agile and our own jobs change daily, so getting a job with us will be an exercise in learning every day.

So. Apply. If this sounds like you.

If we sound like a good fit for you, drop us an email. If you look like a good fit, one of us will meet you for coffee and we’ll have a chat and take it from there.

Now as well as making ImpulseFlyer look awesome, I’m interested in giving a little advice and helping you find a decent job. If you’re skilled but we can’t hire you (for whatever reason) I can always pass your information on to some other startups I know. But I’m only gonna do that for the right people. I’m not a CV clearing house.

And now, some general advice for beginning software engineers

Never call yourself a Java developer or a C/C++ developer, because that is what they taught you at school. You are a developer or a software engineer, the languages you use will develop over time.

By all means have a specialization, or tool you like to use for certain kinds of work, but don’t close your mind to new techniques and paradigms. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I also personally advocate against ‘certifications’ for particular brands of software (Microsoft, SAP, Oracle), whilst you’ll be easy for recruiters to place into jobs it’s too easy to end up doing the same work over and over again.

Work hard on your communication skills. They are as important as your technical ability.

Some useful Rails/programming links

We use Ruby on Rails, a great framework for writing web applications.

rubyonrails.org

Online training:

• railsforzombies.com – online rails course
• codeschool.com – further courses
• peepcode.com – screencasts
• railscasts.com – free, short screencasts
• codecademy.com – learn JS in the browser

Get e-books from these places.

• pragprog.com – for developers
• abookapart.com – for designers, front-end engineers
• fivesimplesteps.co.uk – for designers
• htmlandcssbook.com – not read, but it looks good

Also… if you are serious about web development (of most sorts), you’ll want to be on a PC running Linux or a Mac. Windows is possible, but harder. Most engineers in small companies have a choice of their own development environment, more than 50% choose Macs.

Interesting SG places, meetups

• groups.google.com/group/singapore-rb Singapore Ruby Group, meets regularly
• websg.org – Web Standards Group (website in transit!)
• nushackers.org – NUS Hackers, a student-run organization spreading hacker culture
• groups.ixda.sg – Interaction Design Singapore
• hackerspace.sg – Programmers Hangout
• connections.sg – Good links for Singapore tech scene

And lastly a plug

RedDotRubyConf 2012, May 18th-19th

If you’re interested in working as a developer (particularly with Ruby) you could do worse than come to the conference on the 18th & 19th of May.

Note: I organise this event, Singapore’s biggest programmer conference, so I’d love to sell more tickets, thus I have an ulterior motive in raising it here.

We have awesome international speakers lined up and there will be developers from all over the region. You’ll have to spend your own money, but it’s a good couple of days.

Well done you made it to the end

I hope you found this worthwhile. If so you should follow me on twitter at @andycroll.

If not, never fear, you need never hear from me again. I wish you the best of luck in your search for work. Good luck.

A Book Apart and Five Simple Steps have transformed the way I continue to learn and think about our craft.

The books are beautiful physical objects and that care permeates every word, thoughful illustration and even their digital counteparts.

The three stand outs for me are Andy Clarke’s Hardboiled Web Design, Jon Hick’s Icon Handbook and Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte.

Hardboiled is a manifesto as much as a book, dispelling narrow thinking and chellenging the reader to do explore and do better in every piece of their work. It switched my brain onto the benefits of multiple techniques and for trying to push the envelope even in ‘standard’ websites.

The Icon Handbook is simply luscious & beautiful, a pleasure to hold. While I’m an ‘art challenged’ reader I appreciated the insights and the true artistry the medium of very tiny drawings.

Responsive Web Design will probably be looked back upon as a seminal work in the development of the web as it’s own medium; both similar but distinct from the printed page. The most important $9 a web designer can spend.

For the grand total of $54 you can buy the whole eBook back catalogue of a Book Apart and for £77 you can own all of Five Simple Steps. This should be less than a couple of hours of your hourly rate; you owe it to your career to spend some time with these words from the great thinkers in our industry.

Sidenote

When pulling together cover images for this article I noticed something… Zeldman has been planning a color takeover of the web design books industry and he’s been planning it for years.

In all seriousness, is there colour-collusion going on?