Derek Dukes’ Blog

I’ve been working on a company I started with some old friends and co-workers called Dipity. Over the past 2 years we’ve done a lot. We’ve raised money. We’ve built up the team, shipped a product (which is where a lot of startups drop the ball) and we’ve iterated quickly, learned from our mistakes and made adjustments to the product, company and business as quickly as possible.

When we started we had a ‘Big Idea’: Own When. What we meant by that, is owning the organization of information using time, in the same way that Google Maps now owns ‘Where’ or Wikipedia owns ‘What’. Ideally, we’d create a platform for organizing and displaying information where time was the central, but not sole, organizing principle. In addition, we’d take this platform and let users create what ever they wanted with it. The net result was a robust platform for timelines, with a dash of social media so people could collaborate among common interests.

In the past year or so, the ‘Big Idea’, has been pushed to the background. We’ve taken on the realities of running a pre-revenue company in the face of the worst economic downturn since the 30s and in the sizable shadow of companies like Twitter and Facebook. We’ve focused on the basics, keeping the lights on, making something users love and people will pay to use on their site. We’ve prioritized making sure people get paid and that health care insurance checks don’t bounce. The tactics of running a business.

We’ve got the blocking and tackling down, now is the time to take things to the next level. Re-focus on the ‘Big Idea’, see if it still fits or needs to be changed. Basically, start thinking bigger then where we are today.

I found this cool site that has all these great timelines about actors, bands etc. you can even make your own timeline. Here’s the one for the Counting Crows:

Spent most of this past sunday with Noah and Sig at the annual Bernal Heights Soapbox Derby. I’d heard about this event for years and always wanted to go but for some reason or another had never made it.

Basically there’s a short course down Bernal Hill in Bernal Park and you build a soapbox derby car, find some pushers and try and race your fellow drivers for fame and glory.

It was a great time and the first time in awhile that I brought out my camera and shot. It was great to get back to something I really enjoy doing that’s not work related. You can see my full set all 110 photos in my flickr account.

Stay tuned for next year as Sig, Noah and I plan to build and enter the race!

It seems that in many things in life you start with two elements, put them together and sometimes you get a reaction and some times you don’t. Often you need a catalyst, sometimes the reaction starts and ends in a flash or explosion, if you’re lucky you were wearing your lab coat and safety goggles.

When reactions happen too quickly it can be difficult to really capture what happened. What went right and what went wrong. When reactions are slower it’s harder to really see what IS happening and you have to be more precise with your measurement and attentiveness. While these two extremes exist, I find that that reactions between two people that sustain for awhile start out with a ton of energy, rapid creation of something new and then they reach an inflection point where they either keep building or suffer from a heat entropy. The entropy is characterized by a gradual cooling of things, less time spent together, more ‘me’ vs. ‘you’ and less ‘us’ thinking, less communication and ultimately the reaction ceases all together.

While I have a good idea how the entropy comes to be, it’s less clear to me if you can successfully add in a new catalyst or new element to reverse the entropy and get things going again. Can you get past all of the by product (good and bad) of the initial reaction and resulting entropy.

Are sustainable reactions nurtured? Tended to? Naturally occurring? or are they more scientific, do you have to put a bunch of instrumentation in place, constantly measuring the ‘health’ of the reaction. The romantic in me likes to think that the underlying reaction needs to be self-sustaining, needs to be fueled off the compatibility of the two elements and not the constant tinkering of someone in a white coat, but I can’t seem to find any real hard evidence to support this theory so I guess I’ll don my coat and goggles and see if the reaction is ‘tinker-able’ or if I need to find a new element to explore.