Name: Jecca Cervero

Section: O0C

Case study Chapter 25

Joel Spolsky

Cofounder, Fog Creek Software

Joel Spolsky founded Fog Creek Software with his friend Michael Pryor in 2000.  He founded Fog Creek Software with its popular software, including FogBugz and Fog Creek Copilot, Fog Creek Software which has doubled its sales every year, even during the post-Bubble meltdown. The company never took any outside investment, and continues to operate as a profitable, privately held company.

               Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor started the company in 2000. At first, they didn’t have 
any a specific product in mind, but they were motivated to develop software the right 
way, hire the best software people, and treat them like stars. 

               Philip Greenspun , the cofounder of Arsdigita became also one of Joel Spolsky’s 
inspiration. They look at ArsDigita and they were amazed by the great stuff that 
Philip Greenspun made.
Their goal is to build a company where they can take much more significant idea. 
They want to have the organization that they don't have yet where, 
when they get those ideas, they can produce the products."   There are an 
endless supply of bad pieces of software out there.  There is an endless supply of 
people banging their heads, not understanding why the software isn't designed right.  
These are all opportunities..

               The biggest mistake that they consistently made is that they kept getting all 
kinds of interesting marketing ideas".  They tried numerous marketing strategies that people 
will say are REQUIRED.  They know that a lot of people say that you're product will go nowhere
 if you don't market it correctly.  That's probably true in some cases, but it might not be as many 
as you think.  It might not be as powerful as you think. 

            According to Joel, Don't start a company unless you can convince one other person to go along with you. If you don't have two people (or I would even say three) that you've convinced to devote their lives to doing this, it's just going to be a different thing."  This is new to me.  It makes perfect sense.

      

Name: Jecca Cervero

Section: O0C

Case study Chapter 26

Stephen Kaufer

Cofounder, TripAdvisor

            Stephen Kaufer is the cofounder of TripAdvisor, He together with Langely Steinert, Nik Shanny, and Thomas Palka started TripAdvisor, an online trave site in 2000. The idea of having a start-up came when Kaufer and his wife , Caroline tried to find vacations for themselves an there was a travel agent who recommended an island and some resort for them. So Kaufer search lot of websites that would help them book a reservation at the hotel, but he found nothing…. Eventually, Kaufer enter some chat rooms, andd he found out that the island was not safe, and that time Kaufer realized the essence of the Internet. So, Kaufer look for different travel agent who recommended a different island, different place. That time, when he did the research again on the Web, he found out that the hotel was really not up to his wife’s standards. That time, he spent a couple of days in sort of mindless searches until his wife suggested that since Stephen know something about technology, and he could build a better search engine to find what someone is looking in travel, not the published opinion, but the unpublished, unbiased opinion about  a place or a location.

            It’s been a year when Kaufer decided to resign for him to start his own company. He decided to build the best travel search engine in the internet, where they would define “best” as not searching for prices but really finding the unbiased information.

            Kaufer was introduced to Langey Steinert. Langely and Kaufer then assembled four initial founders of the company and get their first round of funding on February 2000.

            They focus on destinations, hotels, and attractions. They ended up looking at all of the published sources of information like news papers and magazines. Then, they hired people to read every single travel article they could find on the net.

            It took a couple of years to populate the site. And as the site grew, all of a sudden those thousands of articles are dwarfed by the user reviews that their visitors have generated. It has updated information, very detail and it became more reliable for many people.

Three Things I have Learned

Name: Jecca Cervero

Section: O0C

Case study Chapter 27

James Hong

Cofounder, Hot or Not

James Hong is the cofounder of  Hot or Not. He launched the site with his friend Jim Young just for fun. Hot or Not let users submit photos of themselves and have others vote on their hotness on a scale of 1 to 10. After they launched Hot or Not they found way to generate revenue from the site. They added dating for a monthly fee. in spite of many acquisition offers, Hot or Not continues to thrive as a stand-alone company. As of July 2006, Hot or Not had counted about 13 billion votes.

Hot or Not started when Jim Young mentioned that he thought a girl he met at a party was hot, and that she was a perfect 10. And when Jim said that he thought he found a 10, an idea popped James’ head. He thought of having a service where people could post their pictures into the system, and then other people could rate them from 1 to 10.

At fist, it wasn’t that hard for James Hong and Jim Young to build the site. They hit forty thousand on their first day when only a handful of people knew it existed. But, it became hard for them to build later because they had to scale it.

They first address the biggest problem. And that was getting rid of the huge bandwidth driven by pictures. They had solved the previous problems to keep the site running. But the site was still slow. The site spread virally, and within hours their server was swamped. Hong and Young sensed there was a business in it, and worked frantically to scale the site to handle the load.

For me, the Hot or Not startup is something that is entirely new. Aside from it is a fun site, it involves also the “Meet” System where they would allow people to meet each other which required a little more work than most dating sites, because it requires both people to be active.

I think what the consumers want about Hot or Not is that many people think that looking at hot chicks is fun. The concept was new and edgy at the time. No one had ever seen it before or thought about it. It was just so funny-and painful too. Like voting for people who were so ugly that you wondered why they were voluntarily doing it.

3 Things I Have Learned

Ø      James Hong is the cofounder of Hot or Not network and after he had found out the network he realized that looks don’t make up for a good personality.

Ø      HOT or NOT is a Social Entertainment Network where anyone can meet and rate hot single women and men from around the world or in any local area

Ø      Experience will come when you face certain problems and live through them. And the best way to do that is to put yourself squarely in the path of those problems