Vinny Lingham’s Blog

I’ve been here for nearly two weeks now - and it’s been really unbelievable how well things work around here!

I’ve bought a car, shoes, groceries, electronics and just about anything else you can imagine online. With my car, I selected the vehicle through Edmunds - received 4 quotes, selected one and the dealer delivered my car to my front door (literally!), without me even meeting him - within 48 hours - complete with insurance. And I bought it on a Sunday!

Shopping online also resulted in the most savings for products that I’ve been purchasing. I’ve been using FatWallet to take advantage of affiliate discounts and coupons, without having to go through the hassle of applying to each merchant program, etc.

I met with a recruiter on Friday to start getting resumes in for the positions that we have to fill in San Fran - and this morning I received 8 resumes for highly technical positions as well - it’s amazing how large the skills pool here is!

We’ve met with about 3 PR agencies here, and all 3 were impressive - some very tough choices ahead in this category. I’ve also had the time to mingle with a couple of valley CEO’s - and the network effect is already starting to happen as I get introductions to new people.

That’s probably the single biggest value that you get out of living and working in San Francisco - the tech circle is humongous and the ability to network with fellow tech startups is probably second to none. I’m also struggling to keep track of all the various activities around here, but it seems that Yelp is very popular!

My apartment is across the road from our offices, and down the road from AT&T park - in South Beach - it’s really a great place to be and I even get to walk to work for like 2 whole minutes :-).

We have a total of 8 people now working out of San Francisco and trying to hire aggressively, so check out the SynthaSite Careers page. We also recently made the following local San Francisco hires:

Chief Financial Officer: Trevor Harries-Jones (Joining us from OpenTV, previously PWC)
Vice President of Marketing: Randy Almond (Joining us from Walmart.com, previously Accenture)
Vice President of Product Development: Sean Crotty (Joining us from Mpire, previously eBay)

And here is a pic of our new offices (yup - looks like a startup office!)

Things are really beginning to move over here - we just got Internet access installed at the office - that was probably the most frustrating thing - AT&T have proved to be utterly useless - it’s taken 3 weeks and we don’t have a T1 line installed yet - and we are using a DSL. Comcast took me one phone call and 48 hours to have it installed - 16mb line - blistering!

One of the nicest services I discovered by OpenDNS - which doesn’t really work well outside the USA or Europe. OpenDNS basically gives the public a very quick DNS lookup server (the server that allows you to find a website on the Internet) - and anyone can use it - it’s very easy to setup. I HIGHLY recommend it for people living in EU & North America.

All in all, living here has been great so far and aside from missing family & friends, I’m loving it!

I’m fortunate enough to have qualified into Endeavor, through my previous company, incuBeta and as a result, I’ve tapped into an amazing network of people that have really allowed SynthaSite to flourish. Amongst other great resource opportunities, we also received interns from Georgetown University (Washington D.C.), Harvard & MIT - the latter currently working in our offices. Being part of Endeavor has really opened up the doors for very high calibre interns, which small companies functioning in parts of the world like Africa, would rarely get the option of obtaining. In fact, SynthaSite is one of just 2 companies in South Africa, selected by MIT this year for it’s GLAB internship program.

The MIT folks are really helping us optimize the usability aspects within SynthaSite, along with other great insights across our business. These are skills extremely difficult to find in our local market, and as we open up offices in the USA, it’s making it a lot easier to identify what our future recruiting needs will be (please keep an eye on our website if you’re in the job market!).

Here is a great video from Endeavor at the 10 Year Gala held in New York in November that I had the pleasure of attending (Michael Buble entertained us!):

I’ve been going on quite a bit recently about the changes in the economics of delivering software as a service, particularly relating to Cloud Computing - which leads me to a great article that came out this weekend from the New York Times, on the impending battle between Google & Microsoft.

SynthaSite launched our Alpha on Amazon’s EC2 cloud, and it held up perfectly - although it was not easy to scale the application architecture and we’re going to work on that - so in the interim we’re using some standard servers while we build out our virtualization infrastructure.

The future of the software is certainly in the cloud and delivered through the browser - Microsoft is not arguing about that - but they would prefer to ensure that it’s tied to the desktop in some way (and obviously IE). With the fragmentation that’s occurring as a desktop level (Linux, Mac, Ubuntu, etc), I doubt that this is a good long term strategy (in fact, they’re actually missing the plot totally) - especially given what a flop Vista is. That said, the article above is a great read!

The thing that really concerns me, is that if Microsoft really believes that applications should live in the browser - then why do they build IE only applications (such as Office Live). It’s really frustrating to not have cross browser compatibility - the browser is the new operating system, believe it or not…

I’m in New York at the moment attending the Endeavor Annual Gala event. I have the benefit of attending talks by Barry Diller (IAC CEO), Scott Meyers (About.com CEO) and a host of other great speakers. It’s a 3 day conference - hence my time for other things, like blogging, is very restricted!

The Endeavor network is really a great network for entrepreneurs from “Emerging Markets”, although arguably, some of these markets have already emerged! I can only highly recommend the support we’ve received from Endeavor, which is a non-profit organisation.

Synthasite was fortunate enough to be one of the companies selected by MIT (Massachusetts Institute for Technology) to host a team of MBA interns who will work closely with us for the next 3 months and fly down to Cape Town in January to assist us with post-Beta testing. I had dinner with the team on Monday night, and I can honestly say that I’m thoroughly impressed by the calibre - but would you expect any less from MIT? I might add that there were more companies applying than interns available - so getting selected was seriously something special!

I was also privileged to speak to a class of students at MIT in Boston as well - and it was great to be able to share my experiences as an entrepreneur with them.

Also, through Endeavor, we also received an eMBA from Harvard who spent 3 months with us earlier this year, and he did a great job! Now I get 4 MBA’s - it’s going to be great having some extra resources - we’re very excited!

The bottom line is:

I can really encourage any and all emerging market entrepreneurs to at least apply to join Endeavor - the benefits are fantastic and it’s great being part of a support network. You need to be operating primarily in an emerging market - but check their website for more details.

Courtesy of Chris Zaharias, I discovered a very nice slide show by Dave McClure

(Please view the full post to see the slideshow)