“Create more value than you Capture”

I have a new personal maxim. For myself. And a new personal standard for the people I spend time with, both socially & professionally, in 2012.

Create more value than you capture. ~Tim O’Reilly

As we grow our business, I’m finding than the type of people that are worth my time follow this maxim, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Think about the traits of someone who creates more value than they capture..

• charisma (social value)
• intellect (informational value)
• humility (social value)
• generosity (societal value)
• leadership (societal value)
• abundance (monetary & otherwise)

as opposed to someone that doesn’t.

• neediness (social non-value)
• sloth (monetary non-value)
• cheapness (monetary non-value)
• envy (emotional non-value)
• greed (emotional non-value)

Reads like a list of universally attractive / unattractive traits of human nature.

Take a look at businesses that create more value than they capture..

• search engines
• social networks
• NGOs
• doctors
• retail stores

as opposed to ones that doesn’t.

• cable companies
• banks companies
• insurance companies

Reads like a list of industries that are ripe for disruption huh?

I think that attraction to value must be something that’s deeply evolved into the psychology of all social animals.

After reading Steve Job’s biography this past week, I was struck at how much time he spent adding value to his products. According to the book, his successor, John Sculley, was more interested in attempting to milk profits from Apple’s products than Steve. When Steve came back in the late 90s, the turnaround was tremendous. Great product = value to the user = success.

See you in 2012.

Techstars Bloomberg TV Show

TechStars (I’m an alumni) has a 6-episode series about startups and entrepreneurship on Bloomberg TV. Watch on cable or online, below.

These guys gave Ignighter it’s start, and Adam, Dan, and I are more than thankful to executive director David Cohen for the doors he’s opened for us. If you’re interested in entrepreneurship or starting your own web company, I strongly encourage you to apply to Techstars.

Startups @ Scale: Building an early warning system

I’ve been thinking how much things have changed lately at Ignighter.  We’re starting to get some press, a bunch of daily registrations, and a bunch more messages piping through our once-rinky dating website.  It’s beginning to feel like we’re not such a small startup anymore.

When milestones like those pass, it really changes the way your team builds software.  These days, I’m obsessed with building at scale.  Back when we founded Ignighter back in 2008, we built a system that was as efficient and scalable as an old rusty tricycle.  For the past 3 years, we’ve re-engineered (and re-engineered, and re-engineered) the system, and these days it feels like we’re building a jetliner right just as it’s taking off.

It’s a lot of fun.

Anyway, I wanted to share a new project I’m working on to help me keep an eye on everything as we fire up the afterburners.  This week, we launched the Ignighter Early Warning System.  It’s a private twitter account that keeps an eye on our logs and let’s me (and my team) know when there is significant movement, up or down, in them.  I’ve configured it to tweet out changes in our error, stats, info, or debug logs.  And since it’s entirely homebrew, it’s completely customizable.

These metrics are for illustration purpose only; They do not represent actual Ignighter.com usage.

Since our developers are all already on it, it makes sense to share this information on twitter.  While this system supplements, not replaces, traditional regression and Unit Testing, this project allows us to act on production issues before they snowball into a full-blown catastrophe.

Time from hallucination to first iteration: 3 hours.  If you’re interested in building one for your project: here are the tools I used:

• Syslog-NG to aggregate our logs
• Plain vanilla bash scripting, scheduled via a crontab
• TTYTwitter to tweet updates
• And, of course, twitter

Next up, I’m looking to extend the project to text us when a particularly egregious swing our statistics occurs.

If you build your own, I’d love to hear about it!  Leave me a tweet or a comment below.

Did you know? Ignighter is hiring.  We’re based in NYC, work hard, have a lot of fun, build cool shit, and we’re backed by some of the best investors in the business . Check out our open development positions.

 

Note: Any information of proprietary value to my employer has been removed or approved, and this post has been approved by my employer.