Jeff's lists are probably the best summary 5 highlights of the past year
Built a vision that was exciting, credible and actionable
Assembled a team of the best and brightest people around
Promoted a culture of rapid execution
Went with an open working environment
Delivered and improved upon an excellent customer experience
Who can argue with that? All of those are vitally important to the success of any business and it was particularly great to have an opportunity to exercise these, particularly 2, 3 and 5.
We failed to build a business vision to match the experience and technology visions
Bad job scoping and bad hires happened
I didn't heed early problem signs, and we weren't quick enough to react to lessons learned
These are all true as well. Working across geographic boundaries is tough and expensive. Throwing a cultural difference in there makes it much much harder.
The tricky thing with startups is recognizing when your original idea isn't quite right (and it pretty much never is) and adapting quickly. That is the advantage of starting small and hiring great people is that you need to be able to adapt or you will die. DeepRockDrive did adapt a few times, first switching from our own Social Networking site to using Facebook and again, near the end, we were trying to get out of our expensive production facility and into more venues. Each of those adaptations, though, took a long time. Months after we even admitted to ourselves we needed to do them and that, in the end, was critical.
Anyway, that is my read on Jeff's post though I think he does a better job explaining it himself. Check it out.
While we've known it for a little while, today the web site made it public. DeepRockDrive did it's last show on August 1st and is being put in mothballs for now. I still think it is a great idea and we did some amazing shows but it turns out the money can't last forever. You can still catch a number of our shows up on YouTube though.
At least we didn't have any drummers die. One got sick, but I hear he is feeling much better now.
Motley Crüe is playing at DeepRockDrive on August 1st. This promises to be our biggest show yet, and our first from a venue outside of DeepRockDrive's own blue box. We will be deepcasting the sold-out show from Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Sold out for people in Las Vegas, that is, but not for you!
The interactive live concerts at DeepRockDrive are an amazing experience, but most of the internet, it turns out, didn't get to see all of the shows, so we've created a new feature on the website to answer our most common email request.
"Can I see a replay of the show?"
Starting yesterday, we are uploading full songs from our catalog of shows and you can watch them in our vault player, where you can pick the songs you want to hear and discuss the shows with other fans right in the player.
O.A.R. is playing at DeepRockDrive next week. If you're into the Dave Matthews Band you should check it out. There are definite similarities, in fact, they tour with DMB and will be playing together at the Gorge this September.
Also, check out this Sprout I made - what an amazing site for creating live web widgets. Amazingly simple and hugely powerful.
Thanks, Jeff, for making me build my first one. I'm hooked!
Wow, we had an amazing show at DeepRockDrive tonight. Disturbed played to a HUGE crowd of 10,000 people and the show went great! It wasn't that long ago that relatively tiny shows had our web servers overheating but DeepRockDrive 2.0 really showed its stuff yesterday handling 10,000 people from 71 countries and over 1.34 MILLION interactive events(*) without breaking a sweat.
Disturbed was really great too. I hadn't heard them much before but I'm a fan now.
It took a ton of great work from the dev team in Seattle and and the production team Las Vegas to pull this off but it was an amazing feeling to watch so many people really enjoying the show and to see everything working just like we thought it would.
Woo hoo!!!!!
(*) What's an interactive event? That is either a vote for a song, a shoutout to the band, or a click on an emotapplause icon to clap or send a fist in the air to the band
We put together a cool demo of how the DeepRockDrive interactive experience actually works. Not just how the video looks, but how to use all of the interactive features. Check it out!
Well, we shipped a big release of DeepRockDrive last Friday. We are now available on Facebook! The site has been streamlined to let us really focus on delivering great interactive shows and leaving the social networking features to the social networking sites!
The Spokane Spokesman Review did a couple of vidblog articles on us, including this one where they take a quick tour of our office in Bellevue.
Heck, you can watch it right now!
Check out some of the great upcoming shows on the site, grab a ticket and I'll see you at the show!
Ari Hest played at DeepRockDrive today. It was a really great show! He has a project called 52 where he is releasing a new song every week for a year. His show at DeepRockDrive was an acoustic set and was just fantastic.
At DeepRockDrive, we are working on creating a very cool interactive experience between the artists and the fans who are watching on the web. Among other things, we have a feature called "Shout outs" which lets fan type a message to the artist and it shows up in the studio on a big screen with their username, picture, location and the message they typed. It is an amazing opportunity to say something to the artists you love and we've known for some time that between songs they read them and respond, but one thing I've wondered is whether the shout outs register with them during the song.
The answer, apparently, is yes! Last night, the Wylde Bunch played a show at DRD. They were awesome - think Earth, Wind and Fire for the 21st century. Tight and funky! They also did a great job of interacting with the fans through the shout outs.
After the show, I was talking with a couple of the guys in the band and I asked them what they thought and they really loved it. They wanted to keep on playing! When I asked if the shout outs registered while they were in the middle of the song he said "Definitely! I saw them coming up and it was great. It felt like the audience was right there! (points at screen)"
I always figured that these would register for many artists during the song, perhaps not with the same focus as between songs, but it was great to get that data point.
After many years at Microsoft, I've gotten used to a certain rhythm of shipping. It takes place over a period of months (and sadly, sometimes years) but the process is generally pretty similar. When shipping large client releases of software, where the cost of getting a fix out to all of your customers is high if you make a mistake somewhere along the way, you need to spend a lot of time in the planning stage and even more time in the stabilization, integration and testing phases of the product. Sometimes that last phase can last a year all by itself. Then it takes a few months for all of the CDs/DVDs to be made and shipped out to the store. By the time it hits the streets, you are often months into the next project.
Even when I was writing my shareware utilities like DragStrip, there was a lot of work involved in releasing an update, even to the internet. Installers, upgrade testing from all of the previous releases, documentation updates, email to users about the changes, etc.
The wonderful world of web services is very different. The distance from a development build to a shipped release is often as little as synchronizing some code to some servers and updating a database. Boom, you've gone from working for a few people to having your entire user base up and running on the latest version. You still need to go through the integration and validation periods but they are much shorter because the cost of getting a fix out is much MUCH smaller and, in all of the cases I'm working on, the code base is miniscule compared to things like, well, Windows.
This is not news to anyone who has worked on websites and web services before. The really cool thing for me at DeepRockDrive now, though, is the fact that the software we're building is not just live on the net, but it is LIVE, as in Live on Stage. I'm working on updates for our interactive show experience which users can tune in tomorrow at 5:00 to see. Take all of the excitement of shipping new code, and add in the excitement of a live show where, honestly, anything can happen. This week, it is updates to our in show set list voting mechanism where the fans get to vote on what the next song they want to hear next and then the band actually plays the top vote getter. At last week's show, we had some "challenges" with this so this week, its a big update to help it perform better. We can do all the stress testing we want on it, but we won't know for sure until the crowds come in and start voting. It's LIVE!
I have to say it is incredibly cool to have a challenge like this. We have some work we need to get done before the show, and we can't slip because, as they say, the show must go on. It creates a whole new kind of urgency in development and it is really nice to be able to get stuff out to our customers like this.
So if you haven't already, head over to DeepRockDrive and create an account. Then tomorrow, join us for The Objex at 5:00 PM PST. And while you're there, vote on my latest petition for National Geographic Live to come to DeepRockDrive.
After my Exit: Microsoft post, a number of people asked me what was coming next. There was a subtle hint within that post (not to mention a cool logo in my sidebar), but I wanted to wait a little bit for the full description.
Well, now is that time! I have joined DeepRockDrive, an amazing startup focusing on building a community of artists and fans and an interactive performance experience that will create a cool new way for artists and fans to interact and share their music. Drawing on my background as a musician, audio engineer, networking guy and of course software engineer, DeepRockDrive is the perfect storm of my interests and I am really excited about what we will be building.
Even more exciting is the fact that our service has officially launched tonight. So right now, you should head over, create an account (it's free!) and start petitioning bands to come play for you at DeepRockDrive.
I have this theory that all sports can be broken down into two categories:
1) Games involving balls, holes and/or sticks
2) Games that involve doing things that people do in their real lives, but some people just do them better or faster.
