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Former Odeo architect sells Uruguay dev shop to “Lean Startup” firm

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 01:01:36 +0000

Evan Henshaw-Plath is one of those entrepreneurs who’s surprisingly under the radar in comparison to the integral role he’s played in the development of some key web tools — he was the first employee and lead architect of Odeo, which later became Twitter, and was the architect of Yahoo Brickhouse’s Fire Eagle location platform. But perhaps he won’t be undercover for much longer: Henshaw-Plath has sold his 20-person Uruguay-based Ruby on Rails development shop, called Cubox, to New Context, the lean software consultancy that includes Eric Ries as a partner.

The companies didn’t announce terms of the deal, but Henshaw-Plath will become CTO of New Context. New Context is a subsidiary of Digital Garage, the Japanese internet and media company that was an early investor in Twitter and Path. Digital Garage launched New Context just a few months ago.

Henshaw-Plath tells me in an interview that New Context was interested in Cubox because it was looking for an agile development shop focused on working with lean startup clients. It wanted a shop with an ability to do test-driven development, focus on short release cycles, and contribute to open source. The idea is to be able to offer “customer development as a service” — an emerging trend in the development world.

Development as a service could actually have a large effect on startups and Silicon Valley — picture what cloud computing has done for startup web architecture, but apply it to a startup’s business, design and development. Henshaw-Plath says “we realized that building a startup isn’t just about creating it’s code, you need to have a better process around building the business. The concept of a lean startup is that way of doing it.”

Henshaw-Plath actually isn’t so under-the-radar if you hang in the right circles. He’s got a bit of a cult following. He’s an uber nice guy — always trying to help people out, one friend told me — and a geek’s geek. He met up with Digital Garage in Japan during one of Dave McClure’s Geeks on a Plane trips, and I met Henshaw-Plath on the Geeks on a Plane trip to Latin America (and was super bummed that I missed his Uruguay tour). Now within the Lean Startup environment, he’ll also be using his growing influence to help create conferences and give talks.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “Wait, there’s a hot development market in Uruguay?”. Yep. And although it might seem like an unusual place to run a dev shop, it’s actually got a lot of strong resources for a budding development community. The country has provided free laptops for every school child, offers free broadband for everyone, and provides tax breaks to encourage the development of the software industry. It’s also on a similar time zone as the United States, so a U.S. firm working with Uruguay-based developers faces less early-morning or late-night Skype calls, compared to working with a shop in India or Eastern Europe. The country also has a high quality of life, a low crime rate, and transparent business climate — you know, all that good stuff for encouraging business climates.

Henshaw-Plath moved to Uruguay a few years ago with his wife (who’s from Uruguay) as a change of pace from the Valley. After freelancing and opening up a co-working space in the country, he says he “fell into running a consulting company,” and founded Cubox in 2008. He’s been splitting his time between Uruguay and Portland ever since, but will probably spend more time on the west coast as CTO of New Context.

Image courtesy of Robert Michael Murray.

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It’s Obvious: Ev Williams and Biz Stone, together again

Mathew Ingram — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 22:13:34 +0000

Twitter founder Evan Williams

When Evan Williams announced several months ago that he was stepping back from day-to-day involvement at Twitter — the company he co-founded, financed and was the CEO of until last year — it wasn’t clear what he was going to do. That still isn’t clear, but now at least we know who he’s going to be doing it with: his Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced Tuesday that he’s also stepping back from his involvement with the company, and joining Williams at a relaunched Obvious Corp., along with former Twitter product lead Jason Goldman. One thing is for sure: whatever kind of third act this group comes up with, expectations are going to be pretty high.

Eagle-eyed readers might have noticed a tiny clue about the new venture in Evan Williams’ blog post in March, which was entitled “An Obvious Next Step.” But for many, the obvious part seemed to be the fact that the former Twitter CEO was leaving the company — by that point, his involvement had declined so far that insiders said he was barely spending any time at all at Twitter headquarters, even though he was supposed to be directing product strategy. Williams had (apparently) voluntarily stepped into that position when Dick Costolo took over as CEO in October of last year.

After he left Twitter (although he remains on the board, and said in March that he would still be advising the company), Williams was replaced as director of product development by another former co-founder: Jack Dorsey, the man who came up with the original idea for Twitter and sold Williams on the concept while at Odeo, a podcasting startup. Odeo was later shut down and Williams took over Twitter, something Dorsey — who also happens to be the CEO of mobile-payment startup Square — said was like a “punch in the stomach” in an interview earlier this year with Vanity Fair.

As for Obvious Corp., that name has a long history, not all of which is positive: after Odeo failed to get much traction, Obvious was the vehicle Evan Williams and his partner Biz Stone used to buy back shares of the company from the venture capital investors who originally financed it. And it was also the vehicle that Williams used to effectively take control of Twitter, after it became clear that this idea of a short-form information network had some potential, and eventually oust Dorsey in 2008 (there’s a Quora thread with some more detail on these early years from an Odeo staffer).

As for Jason Goldman, the former vice-president of product for Twitter, he and Evan Williams go back even farther: Goldman was the product lead at Google for Blogger — the early blogging platform that Evan Williams and partner Meg Hourihan created and later sold to the search giant in 2003 (Biz Stone later worked on Blogger at Google as well). Much like Twitter’s early years (which have been the subject of some controversy over the ousting of Dorsey and some other events at the time) the rise of Blogger also led to some criticism of Williams and his abilities as co-founder and CEO.

For his part, Williams has admitted in interviews that he is not really cut out to be a CEO, and that he has learned a number of important lessons from the creation and failure of Odeo. Presumably he plans to apply those to his new venture — and his partners likely know him as well or better than anyone at this point. As for what Obvious Corp. plans to do now, that much is still a mystery. All the Obvious website says is that the company “makes systems that help people work together to improve the world” and that it is devoted to “developing products that matter.”

For all their flaws and tortuous growth histories, there is no question that Blogger and Twitter have been part of a communications and information revolution unlike anything seen since the web was first invented. Will the Obvious team be able to match that kind of track record with their new project? One thing seems pretty obvious: they shouldn’t have any difficulty raising venture financing, if they want it.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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Ev Williams: Do as He Says, and as He Does

Carleen Hawn — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:21:21 +0000

We launched Found|READ a year a go with a post about serial founder Ev Williams, and how the things he’d learned as CEO of Odeo were informing his then-nascent startup, and now-raging phenomenon, Twitter. (See, Do as I say, not as I did.)

This month Inc. magazine has wonderful profile of Williams, called Anything Could Happen, which explores his uncanny ability to cultivate ideas into companies, to build something of value out of nothing — even that which is “useless, in a sense”, as Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey put it to Inc.

Ev’s gift isn’t so much genius, as it is genius-execution. This means you can not only learn from him, but probably replicate Ev’s methods to your own benefit (if not to Ev’s level of success). Writes reporter Max Chafkin:

…unlike many of the most successful, he’s no genius when it comes to programming. [Ev's] specialty is taking a tiny, almost nonsensical idea and turning it into a cultural phenomenon. “He’s like a master craftsman,” says Naval Ravikant, a serial entrepreneur who is an angel investor in Twitter. “There are entrepreneurs who are financial geniuses, and there are raw coders. Evan is the master of creating a product where there wasn’t one before.” If Williams’s art is the conception of inconceivable products, then Twitter is his chef-d’oeuvre.

It’s a long story, but one filled with important insights. We offer some highlights.

1) Ev believes that small ideas are almost always better than grand visions…

“I think features can make great companies,” he says… “Applying constraints can help your company and your customers in unexpected ways. [The] default thing we do is ask how we can add something to make it better. Instead we should say, What can we take away to create something new?”

2) Paul Graham believes in small ideas, too:

there are smart people, like start-up financier Paul Graham, who argue that technology start-ups are undergoing a fundamental change, becoming smaller, cheaper to start, and more numerous–in short, commoditized. We may be entering an era of the little idea, a time tailor-made for Evan Williams.

3) Practice makes perfect and Ev has failed plenty. Let this hearten you:

Williams grew up on a corn farm in Clarks, Nebraska (population 379). He’s a self-taught coder, having dropped out of college after only a year to start a company…the companies–there were three failures in five years–were unambitious, money losing, and admittedly dopey. Williams’s most successful product was a CD-ROM for fans of the Cornhuskers football team. Finally, convinced he still knew little about how to run a business, he cut his losses, took a Web development job in California, and started writing about it. [This led to Pyra Labs, which led to Blogger]

4) Ev really struggled to get Blogger off the ground. It forged a core principle: Patience.

The experience of shepherding Blogger through growth, then hardship, until he finally turned it into a real company cemented Williams’s philosophy of business. He would be an entrepreneur who looked for value in things that seemed worthless. Faith–in one’s ability, in one’s chosen path, and, above all else, in the fact that there are always opportunities ahead–was a company’s greatest need. Stick to your product, forget about scrambling for deals, and good things will happen…“[Ev] has a tendency to wait just a bit longer than everyone else would, to give an idea more time,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, says. “It is patience and perseverance and hope–all those things rolled up into one.”

5) Ev sold Blogger to Google, and wrote “my best blog post ever”, a founder’s opus: Ten Rules for Web Startups

6) Then at his next gig, podcasting startup Odeo, Ev broke them all (Hey, nobody is perfect!):

…He wasn’t even podcasting. As Odeo sputtered, struggling to gain new users, Williams began to see his problem as one of corporate structure. He had accepted millions of dollars in investment capital, built a team, and worked the media before he knew what his company was.

7) When in doubt, hold a “Hack Day”:

[Ev] broke the company into small groups and told them to spend a day experimenting–not just with podcasting, but with anything that struck their fancy. It was [cofounder Jack] Dorsey’s project that struck Williams’s. Dorsey had long been fascinated by the status function on instant message programs: the short, pithy postings that allow you to tell your online friends what you are doing. He built a prototype of Twitter in two weeks.

8) From this experience Ev built Obvious, a kind of incubator where ideas can get hacked and where he can offer them the patience they need to germinate:

The goal is to separate the creative environment of the start-up process from the regular work-a-day of running a business. “It’s all theory for now,” Williams says. “But we’re hoping that by setting up an environment with multiple projects at once, these happy accidents [like Twitter] can occur.”

If you have the time, read Max’s whole story, it is far more thorough than even these many highlights suggest. And for more of Ev Williams’s wisdom,. see: *
Do as I say, not as I did
* ‘Will It Fly?’ – Ev Williams, on Idea Evaluation
* And again, his classic: Ten Rules for Web Startups

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