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DriverSide’s aim is to not only help consumers find a new (or used) car and sell their old car online more efficiently, but to help during the ownership process as well. Car owners get nervous about how much to pay for routine or unplanned service or repairs to their car. People need to know what their used car is really worth on the open market and how quickly it is depreciating so they know better about when to sell. People need a place to turn when it comes time to make modifications or upgrades to their car. We’ve built DriverSide to solve those issues and many others that everyday car owners experience. We like to say, love it or hate it, everyone has a relationship with their car. We’re here to make that relationship go more smoothly.

So, our public beta starts today. We’ll be working out a few bugs and vigorously improving/adding new features throughout the summer.

I also want to thank my family and friends being so supportive through this busy time … and our wonderfully talented employees for bringing it all to fruition.

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Social investing sites such as Covestor.com, Cake Financial and several others have done a great job of bringing all types of (typically) non-professional investors together. Their sophisticated platforms allow members to enter their brokerage account login credentials (a little scary, but most of us swallow hard and do it anyway out of curiosity) in order for the site to “verify” your trades. Your trading activity is downloaded into the database and the site assigns a percentage of your portfolio each equity occupies. The number of shares (amount of cash you’re playing with) is not published in order to protect your privacy. The idea here is that, because the equities are verified by the site to exist in the member’s brokerage account, full-disclosure is satisfied and anything that member writes can be judged fairly by the readers. Many of the more active members on these sites keep blogs and write publicly-viewable messages about their rationale behind trades. In fact, when Covestor detects that you’ve made a trade in your brokerage account, they will email you asking for your rationale in the form of a mini blog post on covestor.com.

So, the first thing I did was pick the top 3 or 5 members on Covestor as ranked by their portfolios’ performance. The site has very nice graphs that show members’ performance against other indices like the S&P 500. After following a few of these members I noticed that a lot of their trades were solid (and common) like BUY APPL @ 110 or other fairly safe bets. This made their track records look decent and they typically edged out the market. Other equities they had would typically take up < 10-15% of their portfolio and would be very small-cap companies. These stocks would have a lot of blog posts associated with them and you could see the record of the member buying the stock all the way down a hill, often with comments to the effect of “time to load up, this one is on sale”, etc. Any time there was a pop in the price, you might see something to the affect of “you like that 200% gain today? More where that came from!”. But, the overall performance of the stock since the member initially bought in would typically be abysmal. Often you’ll see other members posing (publicly viewable) questions to the trader to the effect of, “I see you’re taking a bath on XYZ but you keep buying it up … you must have some inside info”, etc. That is often enough to get the degenerate-gambler-day-trader to jump in on the action and wait for that next 200% pop.

The first few of these I encountered made me think, “Well, the guy obviously believes in this stock because Covestor verified his ownership of it”. But, Covestor and others don’t publish how many shares the member owns! This trader could own literally 1 share to begin with and then keep buying 5 or 10 more as the price drops just to back up his public enthusiasm about the “sale”. Then, in another brokerage account not connected to Covestor (and therefore not publicly viewable), he may be making very different trades.

Call it pump-and-dump 2.0. It’s analogous to how the spam kings of yesteryear would pump penny stocks for a week then dump them after enough suckers bought in. I think Covestor and others are great sites with impressive platforms and very innovative features. The first one who figures out how to solve this problem, though, will certainly have the advantage. The only way I can think of off the top of my head would be if the site were to award different “badges” to positions in a trader’s portfolio. One badge could signify that the position is in excess of a certain dollar amount (proportionate to the share price). This would give users that track the trader a little more comfort in knowing that this is less likely to be a pump-and-dump trader.

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• Email: I use my own domain(s) for email and Google Apps for Domains has been the best solution yet. I’ve been running it for about 16 months now after using MS Outlook for almost a decade. The free version has 6.5+GB of space and the Premier Edition gives you 25GB for $50/yr. It also allows you to POP3 or IMAP mail in/out of the system. I imported all of my old email so I can use the search feature (it’s Google, the search rocks) to go back over a decade of mail. A lot of people like to keep all their old email (like Mark Cuban, who should definitely check this out). Cost: $0.
• Calendar: Google again. It comes with the Apps for Domains package. I like keeping multiple calendars (work, personal, financial/investment, birthdays) so you can turn them on and off as you need them. I also like the database of calendars Google keeps that you can search through and add to your own. That is the only way I know which sports games on are and when. Also, it finally 2-way auto-syncs with my BlackBerry with the new Google Sync for BlackBerry. Cost: $0.
• Tasks: I still can’t figure out why Google hasn’t made even a primitive task manager part of their online suite that is slowly eroding Outlook’s market share. Until they do, I’ll be a faithful user of RememberTheMilk.com. It lets you create multiple task lists, set due dates, add notes and associate links all very quickly. They are also one of the earliest adopters and best users of Google Gears so the task system works when you’re offline and will sync later when it detects a connection. I use this on multiple machines throughout the day and it does a great job of staying in sync. The only thing they really still need is BlackBerry sync (they have a Pro Version ($25/yr) that syncs with iPhones or Windows mobile devices). Cost: $0.
• Chat: Because I really only chat with people in my organization (which runs Google Apps), I really only need GChat (Google Talk). They have a great BlackBerry client, though, which can tell when you’re not at your PC anymore and will send chat conversations to your BB (which blinks red when there are new IM’s). All your chats are logged and searchable later (unless you tell it to go “off the record”) Works flawlessly. Cost: $0.
  • www.blackberry.com/GoogleTalk from your BB browser.
• Phones: I still have 2 phones because I haven’t found one yet that is durable enough for all of life’s activities (and I like redundancy).
  • Motorola K1M KRZR (Verizon) - horrible UI but very small, durable and cheap/easy to replace if lost.
  • BlackBerry 8830 (Verizon) - A great device, though I’d use a Curve if Verizon carried it. And it obviously has a lot of support from the Google Apps.
• Backups: Both desktop and web server backups are very important in my (and most peoples’) business.
  • Desktop files: I’ve been an avid user of FolderShare.com for quite a while now and it has always been there for me (it even survived being acquired by Microsoft!) It is a small desktop client that runs in Windows or OSX and monitors directories you tell it to watch for changes to files. When files are created/changed/deleted, they are sent to the other machines in your FolderShare network that are currently online. It does so in a peer-to-peer fashion so your files never touch a Microsoft server. You can also access all of your files via foldershare.com (as long as the client machines are on and connected). This has saved me countless times when I’ve been on the road and needed a file I forgot on my desktop. There is a lot of buzz these days around backing up to “The Cloud”, but I see no reason to move away from FolderShare anytime soon. Running it across my home and work machines has allowed me to stop paying for and bothering with expensive RAID arrays as well. Oh yeah, and it’s free.
  • Server files: I also have a leased Linux web server that I host a few non-mission-critical web sites on (like this blog, for instance). Even though it is not mission critical, I’d rather not lose everything when it inevitably dies. I also would rather not pay for expensive RAID gear or managed backup services. For this reason I use a nightly RSYNC via SSH to backup to another Linux web server. This isn’t an extremely process to set up, but if you do the following 2 how-to’s in order, you’ll be set. You’ll need some Linux CLI knowledge but nothing hard-core.
    • Setup an account between the 2 servers that can SSH from client to server w/o a password.
    • Setup the automated RSYNC over SSH of your web and database files.

This technology changes and typically improves almost every month - especially the Google offering. I’ll probably end up jumping on the iPhone bandwagon, too, once the next version is released and they start using a real network.

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Having recently been inconvenienced by this waste of paper and time spent at the post office, I decided to give their general customer service line a call (800-528-4800) to see if there was anything I could do to stop the flow. Their always-friendly agent responded immediately to my request to be removed from the direct mail list as if she’d been training for it for months. She then went into script mode and quickly read me the list of things I was being opted out of. Within seconds I zoned out and tried to politely let her finish (for some reason I feel guilty hanging up prematurely on overly-polite customer service people). A few key words in her monotone caught my attention, though, so I grabbed a pen and asked her to repeat the list, more slowly this time. Here is how it read:

“You are now being opted out of the following programs with American Express:

1. Telemarketing
2. Banking offers
3. Offers from 3rd parties (little scary)
4. Amex news (huh?)
5. Affiliate sharing of credit history & report (WOW)
6. American Express sweepstakes”

The entire call took about 3 minutes and after letting my mind wander on #5 for another 3 minutes, I decided to post this entry.

Incidentally, this got me search for other opt-out stories and I came across this nice and compact opt-out script.

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MySQL Database Administrator

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Some recruiters will want to come out to your office and soak up hours of time chatting about your “culture” and what you are looking for in a developer (as if “LAMP” skills needed more explanation).   Although the face-to-face does add some value to the process, I think this is mostly a networking play on their part to forge a relationship and make sure their future unsolicited email to you will at least be opened. Many of the recruiters we’ve had come by the office wrote vigorously on their notepads as we described the very basic skills we were looking for (I got the distinct feeling they hadn’t heard of PHP or MySQL before). Others (mainly the ones from Craigslist) will just start showering you with resumes once you’ve given them permission.

Both groups send plenty of unqualified candidates - obviously more from the ones that don’t stop by in person. I have some great and rather embarrassing stories about many of these recruiters already just after a few weeks of working with them. I have yet to see any “hireable” candidates through this channel.

I wish there were some sort of a directory I could reference each time a recruiter contacted me to see what the community thinks of his or her performance. I’d like to know:

• What kind of luck other employers have had with the recruiter.
  • What is the ratio of good resumes to bad ones?
  • Do they do ridiculous things like send candidates who aren’t willing to commute to your office after you’d been clear about the fact that you need someone in-office?
  • How many actual hires have come from the recruiter?
• What the candidates think of the recruiter.
  • Does the recruiter thoroughly test and get to know the candidate to ensure more efficient placement?
  • Is the recruiter responsive to calls and emails?
  • Does the recruiter provide feedback when an opportunity is not right so the candidate may learn and improve their skill set?

It’d be nice to have all of this information in a publicly viewable, yelp-style site. If the site got enough audience it could probably get into the job listings business itself! But remember (see previous post about job boards) - keep the listings free!

RecruiterWatch.com (taken w/ no site)
RecruiterWatch.net (available)

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Fulltime Web Developer & Fulltime Senior PHP Web Developer

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I paid the fee and commissioned them a couple of months ago to acquire a domain name for me.  It took them 2 weeks to even start the process after I’d paid the fee with my credit card.  After that the communications between myself and my Sedo representative had a minimum several-day (often up to several week) delay.   The particular squatter that owned the domain I wanted lived in France.  Before I paid the $69 I asked a Sedo representative if they’d be able to negotiate in French for me in the event the squatter did not speak English.  I was assured this wouldn’t be a problem.  Finally, a few weeks later, I got a response from my “broker”.  They, naturally, couldn’t get a hold of the squatter.

Trying to get my money’s worth from Sedo, I inquired about another domain I wanted.  Without even contacting the owner, my “broker” replied with “The company that owns that domain doesn’t entertain offers under $500,000 USD.”  To this I replied, “Would you mind going ahead and sending over my offer for $50,000.00 jus to see what they say?”  That was about two weeks ago - still no response from Sedo.

I get the feeling they are sending an email to whoever is on the WHOIS record of the domain and forgetting about it - not something one needs to pay $69 for.  I won’t be dealing with Sedo in the future.

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Finding good and experienced talent is currently as challenging as ever. Here are the different ways I’ve found one can go about finding talented employees:

1. Post your job listing on a high-traffic board.
2. Pay a site like Dice.com to search their repository of technical resumes.
3. Troll the free resume repository on Craigslist
4. Cruise social networks like LinkedIn or Facebook and attempt to connect with and poach already employed people at other companies
5. Pay a head-hunter to bring you candidates. If you hire one you will pay them between 25-30% of the employee’s annual base salary and usually an additional fee on top of that. This really adds up for developers who make in excess of $100k.
6. Spam all of your friends and let them know you’re hiring. Cheap yet typically ineffective and typically detrimental to friendships.

Craigslist:
I’ve had a lot of luck with Craigslist so I posted there first. They charge $75 per listing - mainly in order to keep spammers from destroying the board. Unfortunately, because it is free to respond, the spammers just destroy it that way instead. One listing for a full-time, in-office technical position with our SF-based startup will typically get 50-75 responses. 80% or so of those are from people or firms outside of the United States (even though the listing clearly says ‘no contractors’ and ‘no telecommuting). Another 15% or so percent are from local contractors not looking for full-time work or local headhunters wanting to charge you astronomical fees to deliver typically less than perfect candidates (just my experience). To date, I’ve posted each of my listings on CL twice and have received between 0 and 3 qualified candidates for each position.

Trolling the CL resume repository is a different story. I’ve found that talented and often employed people will post their resumes here just to keep a net in the water in case anything interesting happens to swim by. I’ve snared several very qualified (and typically employed) candidates from here that have turned out to be excellent prospects. It has also been my experience that if a candidate looks especially appealing but says they prefer contract work, email them anyway - your startup might just be compelling enough to pull them back into the full-time world. Expect to have the old “we’re subsidizing your salary with equity” conversation because consultants are used to making big dollars (sometimes I wonder why I left that world).

Trolling is of course free but takes time. The nice thing is that you can create a search that will find what you’re looking for and then turn it into an RSS feed very easily so you can keep an eye on new resumes.

Free Job Boards:

I don’t know of any other job boards where it is free to list and someone will actually see your posting. I’ve posted to StartUpers.com which has a very cool look and is easy to use but has only yielded several responses - all spam. I also managed to get an invite to Doostang.com, an “invite-only career community started at Harvard, Stanford and MIT.” The rather pompous site has yielded zero leads, legitimate or otherwise - but the listing was free.

It’s really too bad that SimplyHired.com won’t let you post a job to their system. They’ve got one of the best search engines for open positions but they seem to only take feeds from other boards. There are probably competitive issues in play - IE their data sources don’t want them competing with them while monetizing their data.

Not-Free Job Boards:

There is no shortage of these. I’ll give a quick and non-comprehensive list of the ones I considered and ultimately did not post to - mainly because we’re a startup and we can’t afford it (although I’d probably pay if I thought it was worth the fee).

Keep in mind - these are technical positions so I did not consider generic boards like Monster or CareerBuilder. I need to go where my candidates go.

1. TechCrunch’s CrunchBoard : I know this network gets a lot of traffic from the Silicon Valley community. I’m not convinced developers spend a lot of time reading it (seems like more of a business / product crowd). They charge $200/listing.
2. LinkedIn is an excellent site that I’m a big fan of. I’m not sure how many developers use it to look for jobs outside of their network (or at all). Their listing fee is $145/listing but gets cheaper if you buy in bulk. I’ve actually had much more success trolling my network for developers here. Most of my connections were happy to pass along messages to developers to the effect of, “Hi, I know you have a job but you look like a stud and I’d like to talk to you about my new startup.” If you happen to find people that you’d rather contact directly (a good idea if you think you’re linked to this person via their existing boss who won’t be inclined to pass along your solicitation) you can upgrade your LinkedIn account to send InMail - IE contact people you don’t know directly. $20/month gets you 4 InMails. The prices climb quickly from there. We’ve had some success with finding people this way.
   11/15/07 UPDATE: I bit the bullet and spent the money to post the listing on LinkedIn. I’ve only had 3 hits - two from people in Eastern Europe (even though I specified no telecommuting) but one was local and is a very strong candidate which made the listing worth-while.
3. Dice.com. When I was hiring for my last startup between 2004 and 2006 Dice was a great resource. They are certainly capitalizing on the tech labor market these days. They have a large (possibly the largest) resume database and almost 100,000 tech job listings, making it an excellent resource for both job seekers and employers. That is, employers who have the cash. They charge $459/listing to get your jobs on their board for 30 days. Accessing the resume database is so expensive for an employer that they won’t even publish their rates. I had an aggressive sales person from there call me after I filled out the “more info” form. He quoted me about $1,000/month for access to the resume database (I’d be doing my own searches) or I could buy their “special” and get 1 year of access plus 10 slots to post my openings in for something like $10,000/year. This might work for Google and Yahoo! but not for the startup.
4. 11/15/07 UPDATE: GoBigNetwork.com: I listed the job here after reading about these guys in TechCrunch. The job posting process makes no mention of a listing fee until you are finished creating the listing - pretty sneaky. After spending the time creating an account and the listing, they expect a fee to make the listing go live. I can’t remember what the fee was (well over $100) and there is no way to find out what that fee is from their site without going down the road of creating another listing. I abandoned the listing and was contacted the next day by a GoBig employee. He said he’d give me the listing for free for 30 days. So far I’ve received 3 spam messages via the posting - no candidates. Even at $0 I don’t think it is worth posting there.

I know there are many more sites that will take my money to post the job but after Dice I discontinued my research.

Disruption:

Clearly there is an opportunity here for a superior offering to disrupt the current pricing model. The spam issue is a very real one but I’m sure there are some creative ways to usurp this, even if it involves charging a nominal (even less the CL’s $75) fee.

I don’t see an open community platform for job seekers right now. One that allows employed people, unemployed people and companies come together and keep an eye on each other for opportunities. Plenty of employed people would leave their current position for better pay, a better position, better equity, better work environment, etc. That doesn’t mean they’re going to spend any time looking at openings or applying for them. And plenty of great positions aren’t getting in front of the qualified candidates. I’m a little biased here, but I feel like job seekers using Dice are probably not being exposed to young and innovative startups that need their services but aren’t interested in paying exorbitant fees.

A site that combined listings from sites around the net, LinkedIn-style employee profiles, a vibrant community and company reputation/feedback system that did not charge all the fees we see today would certainly be effective at stealing market share on both the seeker and employer side.

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