Headworx

Last week has been the most important in the history of our wiho.me startup. Not that we signed another distribution deal. Several are in place and more will come. But because the missing pieces of the puzzle finally "clicked" in my head. It all happened in Ireland, where we went (courtesy of Enterprise Ireland - thank you Bartek !) for two busy days to meet potential partner companies who may help us with the industrial design, and with development and organization of the entire supply chain of our hardware product. I've mentioned it here a couple of times: I have no hardware experience and the entire process from idea to the first million boxes distributed worldwide has been a big unknown. But now there is no fog anymore. For the first time I really believe we can build a billion dollar company. So here is how it feels. Fifteen months ago I told my 15-strong team we were on a path to the top (Quartz has a story on this). The goal was to be the number 1 worldwid...

For the third year in a row we are investing in bringing the ultimate home automation solution to the market. There are a number of threads this project executes in parallel, but there is one feature I consider the most important. The software and hardware responsible for ruling and running all the control tasks in a smart home have to be unbreakable and unstoppable. I have to admit I am very happy with the current results. Generation 2 of our product / solution will hit the shelves in Poland in September. Up till now it has been evaluated and implemented by more than 800 professional installers, we've trained over the last 12 months. And myself, I do eat my own dog food. My house fully depends on my product. Yesterday I upgraded my home server to the new beta release, we are now stabilizing. The previous version of the software was installed 289 days ago. And it was running non stop till last Friday, when I stopped it for what is called a "scheduled maintenance". ...

The idea. The passion. The hard work. The sleepless nights. The product. The goal. They all define the startup. Every one aiming to conquer and change the world. We are 50% complete in 10% of time. Then 80% in 50% of time. Then 90%. And 95%. Problems start mounting. A year ago we thought we were ready. So we did 6 months ago. And today? A month away? I've met several stories like this one. Full of optimism. Underestimating the task. They all have one thing in common. Their development plan was built to be offensive. While the seasoned grown ups plan defensive. A good IT company should spend about 70% of development costs on Quality Assurance - QA. I have never seen such budget allocations in startups. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, when they compete for funding, they want to look attractive. Somehow a lot of greedy investors never learn a good product has to be expensive to build. Secondly, the inventors and entrepreneurs are often inexperienced and only the exp...

Let's face it: passwords are the nightmare of the Internet era. They are out of owners' control and out of the industry control. They are the weakest link of the accelerated evolution of the information age. Everything requires passwords. Credit cards, phones, Bluetooth headsets, computers, bank accounts, social networks, cars, travel tickets, music services, smarthome appliances... The system is collapsing. On one hand there are sites and services requiring "strong" passwords (including lowercase, uppercase, digits, special characters and more than 12 in total) and at the same time there are sites who still do not allow for special characters and their passwords have to be 6 or 8 characters long. Users give up. They give up the security, storing the passwords in their GMail messages or Evernote notes. The Web services fall one by one prey to malicious hackers armed with continuously growing power of the hacking tools. By the way, thanks to GPU arrays, brute force...

I've started reading the George Gilder's latest Knowledge and Power . George starts with his favorite metaphor of entropy and moves on to explore the concept of a learning curve and how it impacts the economy and competitive landscape in particular. I dawned on me George had just named what I was feeling and believing all the time. Where the advantage of an organization comes from. For a number of times I was naming the team, the culture, even the management as far more important than ideas and money. But Gilder has nailed it: the learning curve. The angle, trajectory and sustainability of the learning curve is the most important factor deciding who will win the race. If an organization learns faster, it will be the first to deliver better product with better quality and products that cost less or bring higher margins than the competition. What else do you need? The thinking follows the Steve Jobs' sentence I quote most often: " there's a tremendous amount of...

A short retrospect on what worked on my vacation trip to Vietnam and Cambodia. I planned to travel light, taking only a carefully prepared set of gadgets. I took two Sigma DP Merrill cameras, the DP1M and the DP3M . I'm still in the process of working on the photos (the Sigma software is a pain), but I really, really love the results. I took three times as many photos with the DP3M and I think I will let the DP1M go. If somebody likes wide angle lens coupled with Hasselblad IQ (image quality) in a minimalistic and pocket friendly design, please drop me a note. Sigma Merrills require two support items: spare batteries (many of them, plan at least two per day) and a tripod. I took two tripods: the Gitzo GT1550T 6x Carbon (probably the lightest full size tripod on Earth) and the Manfrotto Pixi . Both served me extremely well. Both Sigmas I had in AST Ever Ready cases that proved to be very handy, stylish and protecting the cameras very well. So did the National Geographic NG ...

We're hiring and we've been doing many interviews with potential job applicants recently. Whenever possible I try to attend the interviews. The value for me is to have a grip on the state of the engineering talent we could potentially reach out for. After all in my opinion it is the team that defines what you can or cannot do. The strategy, the ideas, the money are relatively easy compared to assembling the team. At the interview I try to learn how a candidate thinks, how she or he approaches a problem. Not how the problem is solved. Among many skills I value creativity and problem solving the most. So I present some real design or implementation problems we have and see how they are approached. Personally I have one general rule I use when working on a solution. I assume we are never the first to face the particular problem. Meaning somebody must have already done something with it. And if so, I want to learn about the approach and the solution. So I start with Google sear...