The Musing Mill

As many of you know I’ve been working on a startup for about a year now, and it’s been a struggle with financing.

Most of the angst is self-inflicted, since we are trying to raise all the funds privately and not through VCs. So to those of you thinking about starting a business I give this advice;

Never underestimate how hard it will be to get people to part with their money.

Really. Leonid and Irwin were able to do it fairly easily with Revit because of the climate at the time and their incredible track record of success. I think it clouded my expectations.

For the length of this summer it’s been hard to tell whether the Solo business will survive. People have asked, why don’t you take it to a VC, but the controlling interests in the business don’t want to. So, it’s not my choice.

I was very close to pronouncing it dead this weekend when I had not heard from architect of the deal in almost a week. We would normally talk several times a week so this was really unusual. So to those of you thinking about starting a business I give this advice;

Don’t ever panic

I finally got him on the phone yesterday only to find out that things are all set and he was just busy trying to get stuff out of the way so he can focus on this once funded. It figures. Anyway, it’s a good idea to keep more than one option open, thus the interviewing you see sprinkled here.

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In the middle of last week, I got a callback for a Product Management position at Google, so I have another phone interview on Friday. They basically ask you questions about products and design, leading to a question about how to improve a Google product. This seems like an interesting way to get feedback as long as it makes it into the official loop.

Anyway, since I had the opportunity, I went right after the core product and told the interviewer how I thought they could improve AdWords. Maybe next interview I can focus on Adsense. It’s a pet peeve…

Why? Well, for one thing, Adsense is COMPLETELY insecure. Since the publisher codes are available within the source of the page, anybody with a site extractor that supports PHP can fake being you and get ALL your sites banned in one go. Actually it’s easier - if someone wants to get you banned, all they have to do is join a free surfing site and put your URL in the rotation. You will then get invalid clicks and VIOLA, all your sites will be banned by Adsense. As a bonus, you will have no recourse with Google.

There are discussion and articles on various forums about this and it is some of Google’s dirt they try and keep under the rug. There is an easy way to fix this and I’m surprised they haven’t done it yet…method to be revealed in an another interview someday

For instance, this site is EXACTLY the type of site Google wants in it’s publisher network. Yet, somehow everytime I submit, they come up with some vague reason to say it’s not what they’re looking for. It indicates their system is broken. I think they know that. Or maybe it’s because I’m starting to bash AdSense. I think I’ll submit MusingMill again today. Let’s see what happens. (revised - 10/17) Yes, Google turned this site down again. Hmmmm.

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Today was the day Leonid told me he was leaving. Well actually it was yesterday afternoon, but I couldn’t post it since Rick and I had been busy splitting a bottle of scotch last night.

Who knows what the real story is, but no matter how you look at it, the design meetings just aren’t going to be the same. Besides, I have 5 years invested in a working relationship that is now soon going to be history.

There’s going to be a lot of organizational churn to deal with - motivation is not my greatest quality right now.

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