
Three Stories - tzier
http://justinkan.com/three-stories
======
dcx
_" Gen George C. Marshall received a report from a general on his staff that
some of Marshall’s officers had morale problems. General Marshall said,
_'Officers don’t have morale problems. Officers cure morale problems in
others. No one is looking after my morale.' _"_

([http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a454364.pdf](http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a454364.pdf))

~~~
sanderjd
This is a clever way of putting things, but what it is really saying is that
leaders shouldn't let the people who are counting on them _see_ their morale
problems. But that doesn't mean that they can't _have_ morale problems, or
that they can't find support up or sideways on the chain of command.

~~~
hkmurakami
IIRC there is a section in Horowitz's book that covers this during the doom
days of Loudcloud.

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pkfrank
The pizza delivery messenger service is clever and hilarious.

~~~
livejamie
A startup waiting to happen! ;)

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cba9
The problem is you don't need fast physical deliveries of short messages
_that_ often. For example, a few days ago I was pondering how to reach a
particular person on very short notice; I had an address, but nothing else, so
I couldn't call them, and while I could spend like $50-100 on international
mail, it wouldn't get there faster than 3 days from sending. Ultimately, the
best solution I could find was... telegrams. Specifically, their modern
email+courier incarnation. It would cost like $70 and probably get to the
person in a day or two.

I thought this sounded outrageous, but then it occurred to me: when was the
last time anyone ever used telegrams? There can't be many uses of them - I've
never used one in my entire life - and all the regular costs of a business
still need to be paid and the couriers have to be paid and so on.

~~~
patio11
Japan spends far in excess of $500 million on telegrams a year, the
overwhelming majority of it because it is traditional to send one if you're
invited to a wedding and cannot attend.

There exist a variety of circumstances where a business has to put a piece of
paper in someone's hand within about 24 hours. It's doable between virtually
any two endpoints in the first world. It also costs whatever FedEx/DHL/etc
think they can get out of a business which needs to have a document hand
delivered on the other side of the world _immediately_ , which is "a lot."
(e.g. It's presently midnight on Wednesday in NYC. I can walk next door to a
store in Tokyo and hand FedEx a letter. It will arrive at the New York Stock
Exchange before the opening bell on Thursday. That will cost ~$125 but it will
almost certainly actually work.)

~~~
ovi256
The amazing observation in your example, for me, is that it's one of the few
things you can get cheaply, fast, _and_ reliably. The holy trifecta of
impossible requirements.

Some 60-70 years ago, you could not get it done for any sum of money. Maybe
the military could do it, on a good day. A few years later, it's not just
possible, but cheap.

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jacquesm
I can relate to all of these because _I 've lived through all of these_,
fortunately not as much in the public eye as Justin and his team (the web was
much smaller back then) but this brought back a whole bunch of memories.

Thanks Justin (assuming you read HN) for writing these up.

~~~
justin
Thanks for reading!

~~~
jacquesm
Hah :) Cool. I'm sure there are lots of people that can relate to your stories
in one way or another but what with us being active in the exact same market
(but you did _way_ better on the execution and on the business part) it really
hit the spot here.

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navitronic
A modern alternative to the pizza delivery message would be to use uber to
book a car near the location and upon the allocation of the driver, contact
them and ask them to deliver the message.

and then drive around the block a few times for their trouble.

~~~
bo1024
Taskrabbit or a similar service --- practically designed for such scenarios.

~~~
Axsuul
Uber is orders of magnitude better in this scenario.

\- TaskRabbit: Post job, wait for bids, accept a bid, wait for driver to leave
his/her house to deliver message, 2-3 hours later... profit?

\- Uber: Place pin near address, request ride, driver less than 5 min away
accepts, call driver with weird request. 10 min later... profit!

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cassieramen
It's always interesting to think about the key moments in a start-up's life.
Those ride or die moments that lead to great success or losing the Jonas
Brother. I wonder how many a startup gets? How many are created by action or
by luck? Do all startups have a couple of key moments they can look at as
lynch pins to their success?

~~~
timr
It would be incorrect to take away from these stories that they were "key
moments" in the life of JTV. These are fun stories, but there were lots of
other moments that Justin could describe that were equally dramatic (if not
worse).

If anything, these are examples of why most of the stuff that you worry about
in a startup turn out to be totally irrelevant in the final analysis. While we
were stressing about the Jonas brothers, the "gaming" category was off
languishing in its own little corner of the site....

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AznHisoka
Would there still be any objection to making money from a porn site if it gave
them 40% of their revenue?

~~~
hyperion2010
Not only that but everyone wins. The user looking for porn is directed to an
appropriate venue and everyone in the community that doesn't want to deal with
a horny male at the other end of internet never even notices he is gone!

Score -1 for continued prudishness.

~~~
AznHisoka
Yep and I lost some respect for these guys because they were bullied into
stopping by someone in techcrunch... Techcrunch. Makes me want to barf.

~~~
girvo
TechCrunch had (still does? I don't know) considerable influence over early
startups, so I'm not particularly surprised. The article itself is complete
bollocks, which is also not particularly surprising.

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pbreit
"we had an “unlimited vacation” policy, which translated into passively
discouraging people from taking vacation"

I've never heard this described so succinctly and perfectly!

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hamburglar
Such a great summary of "unlimited vacation":

> Because we were young and terrible managers, we had an “unlimited vacation”
> policy, which translated into passively discouraging people from taking
> vacation.

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noahlt
I've always wondered this about the pizza-delivery story: how did they know
the address where Kyle was staying?

~~~
cperciva
From [http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2012/10/what-goes-
wrong...](http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2012/10/what-goes-wrong.html) :

 _Let me give you one last example of improvising. The Justin.tv founders were
having a lot of scaling issues in the beginning. One weekend their whole video
system went down. Kyle was in charge of it, but no one knew where Kyle was.
And Kyle wasn 't picking up his cell phone. This was live video so it was
pretty critical that this get fixed immediately.

Michael Siebel called Kyle's friends and found out he was in Lake Tahoe and
got the address of the house. So here's a problem for you, you know the
address where someone is and he's not answering his phone. How do you get a
message to him right away? Michael went on Yelp and looked for a pizza place
near the house and called them up and said, "I want to have a pizza delivered.
But never mind the pizza. Just send a delivery guy over and say these four
words: The site is down." The pizza place was very confused by this, but they
send the pizza guy without a pizza, Kyle answers the door, and the pizza guy
says, "The site is down." Kyle was able to fix it, and the site was down for
less than an hour total from beginning to end._

So it sounds like they knew someone who knew where he was staying.

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sagargv
Where was twitch.tv hosted before the acquisition? Bandwidth on AWS would've
costed a bomb.

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bambax
Great stories and great writing; thanks for sharing.

