Agmon Dot Com

I would have directed movies.

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Finally, ten years after joining the email world, and after thousands of ‘microsoft donates $1 for each forward…’ emails, my mom sent me something funny:

How Italians Drive?

Fabrizio

Rossi

Biaggi

Schettino

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It has been many years since I wrote code for a living, yet in my heart I always remained a bit of a coder.

It paid an important part in the two challenges I took upon myself with my new startup, Dynamic Yield: 1. Bootstrap it 2. Code the product all the way through its initial stream of revenues.

Why would I do that?

1. In the fast-paced technology world, it’s enough to stay out of touch for a couple of years to lose your edge. Coding reconnected me back to the sources of innovation, to developer blogs, open-source code stacks, gems like stackoverflow, and many other inspiring projects.

2. Coding is fun. It’s like puzzle-solving all day long. And you get paid for that! (or in my case, you justify it to yourself through value creation)

3. One of the things I didn’t like in my previous startups was the long months I had to wait for the engineering teams to complete the first version of the product. Now I am responsible for product shipment, and I’m so upset with my bugs I have no time being upset with product delays.

4. I was really scared of coding again: Will I be able to get up to speed again? where do I start? What programming language should I learn? So many things have changed in the past 8 years. I needed to overcome my fears.

So how does it go so far?

It’s going well. The beginning was very difficult. After two years of a very flexible lifestyle, I had to train myself to sit in front of a code editor for a full day. It’s also the reason why I was so active on Facebook in the past few months. An easy escape just a click away.

I chose to write our admin console in Ruby on Rails. Why? It seemed like a beautiful language and a great framework. It also has a large dedicated community, which should be a key factor in choosing your coding framework. The community’s value in invaluable. I spend at least 20% of my coding time googling solutions to problems I encounter. When I hit a wall, I post a question in stackoverflow and get immediate support.

It took me much more time than I thoughd to get up to speed again. Rails is a very flexible and open framework with a steep learning curve. It took me a good two months to reach a point where I felt comfortable using it.

And finally, I have a great co-founder, Omri Mendellevich, who provides moral support during frustrating coding days, configures source control the way it should be, and in general is in charge of the more sophisticated technical aspects of our product.

And I dare our future employees to rewrite any of my code. My code stays all the way to the end!

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Added straight to the top of my next home’s wishlist: Samsung’s transparent smart window, introduced at CES 2012.

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I never made new-year resolutions before, so I’m pretty excited to write this post.

Here are my new-year resolutions for 2012:

1. Do more sports. On an average week I run ~8K, swim ~2K and play tennis once. I plan to double these figues and add at least one bike ride and one yoga class per week.

2. Spend more time with the people I love.

3. Have a healthier diet. Eat more vegetables, eat out less frequently. Lose 5kg and reach 75Kg. That’s the toughest one. I love good food too much.

4. Learn to sing at a basic level. I am the most terrible singer in the world, to the point where I am embarrassed to even sing Hanukah songs. In 2012 I’ll work with a voice teacher and practice to a level where I could proudly master all necessary holiday songs.

5. Travel: Spend a couple of weeks in Iceland or in Mustang in Nepal (or both). Spend a week doing Via Ferrata climbs in the Italian Dolomites. Find time to go for a kiting trip. Go for more weekend trips in Israel.

Mustang, Nepal

6. Work: Reach $1M+ revenues with my new startup.

7. Read more books. I read less than 15 books in 2011. That’s not enough.

8. Spend less time online.

9. Improve my time management.

10. (A private resolution.)

 Have a Happy New Year and a Great 2012!

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A bit over a year ago I had a revelation: I am almost 34-years old and I can buy a motorbike even if my mom doesn’t want me to.

Being a startup guy, I strongly believe in beta-testing. So I bought an old 50cc scooter from a poker friend for 3,000 NIS (~ $800). The logic was:

1) I’ll use it only inside the city and not risk my life on highways,
2) If I don’t like it I can get rid of it pretty fast (actually a mistake, there is barely a market for 50cc bikes in Israel) and
3) I can tell a good story of how I won this scooter in a poker game (of course, realizing later there is no market for 50cc bikes, I figured I was bluffed, which is pretty much in par with my poker performance in the past year).

Soon I realized I hate even the notion of stepping into my car so I upgraded to a new 125cc San-Yang scooter. Cost (after trade-in): ~$3,700.

My Scooter

So, here are the stats for 1-year of motorbike riding in Tel-Aviv and its vicinity:

• Monthly fuel costs: $37.  85% savings compared to my car fuel costs  (~ $320 / month)
• Minutes saved in traffic: Approx. 20 minutes per day. I value my leisure time at $60/hour. Monthly savings: ~$450. Quality of life impact: much higher. I hate being stuck in traffic.
• Minutes saved looking for parking: at least 10 minutes a day. Parking in central Tel-Aviv is hell. Luckily I live next to the river, otherwise I’d be at 30-minute a day. Taking into account an average of 6 parking tickets a year and parking fees, monthly savings: $225 in quality time + $30 fees.
• Insurance costs: Using some strange Middle-Eastern logic, you pay higher government insurance costs for motorbikes than cars. The logic: Motorbike riders are 5X more likely to get killed or injured in accidents. By whom are they getting killed? In most cases by car drivers. The authorities choice? let’s tax the ones who are getting killed, not the ones killing them. Makes lots of sense. Additional insurance cost: $50/month.
• Depreciation: ~$500 / year. New car depreciation in Israel: ~$4,500 / year. Savings: $4,000 / year.
• Other fees (taxes, maintenance, etg.) – saving of ~$250/year.

Total yearly value vs. using a car: ~$15,500 Net. That’s a lot of money!

Non-quantitative advantages:

• It’s fun to ride.
• I park exactly in front of where I am destined: my office / bar / restaurant / home. No long walks due to lack of parking.
• I can meet people any time of the day, anywhere they want. Traffic and rush hours are no longer a consideration.
• My girlfriend hugs me more, especially when riding in the winter.

The only downside really is that it is so freaking dangerous to ride a motorbike with all the crazy Israeli drivers on the road.

What are my chances of surviving the next 10 years? The stats are 20 deaths per 1 billion kilometer (plus about 200 serious injuries). I ride approx. 1,000km / month. In 10 years I’ll ride 120,000km. My chances of making it alive and healthy are: 1-(120k/1B)*220 = 99.76%. (merely 0.1% lower than the chances of car drivers of surviving 10 years on the road).

So, an additional 0.1% survival risk for accumulated 10-years value of over $150,000 puts my life’s value at $150,000/0.1% = $150M. Wow, that’s exciting! I never though of myself as a multi-millionaire!

Recommendation: Get a bike

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Yesterday was the last class in this year’s New Media Entrepreneurship course at the Zell Program of Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya.

The Zell program (funded by Sam Zell of Chicago) is designed for outstanding undergraduates in their last year of university who are seeking to create new ventures. Twenty two students were selected this year to participate in the program, plus six guest students from Singapore.

Over the last couple of years I’ve seen hundreds of startups in various stages. What was imminent with many early stage startups was that their founders lacked the foundations for asking the right questions about their own projects, unknowingly setting themselves to fail.

Hence, my goal when teaching the class was to teach the students to think like entrepreneurs; to understand what are the critical questions they must ask before starting their businesses.

In the eight 2.5-hour classes we spent a lot of time discussing distribution-at-scale (which is were most startups fails), building minimum-viable-products, customer discovery and the excellent 9 building blocks model. We also covered ideation (how to find ideas for your startup?), tools, variety of shortcuts (heard of Mechanical Turk?), money raising and other subjects that are critical for venture creation (hiring, founder agreements, the importance of good lawyers, etc.).

I believe in hands-on experience (read: lots of homework). The students had to go out of the building and conduct real-world work during the course. Each team interviewed 2 CEOs of startups on topics such as ideation, pivots and customer discovery. They interviewed dozens of customers as part of the customer discovery process, presented their up-to-date venture insights on an almost-weekly basis and spent real money with Google and Facebook campaigns to attract users to their startups’ landing pages.

We also had three excellent guests lectures:

• Omer Shai (VP Marketing of Wix), one of the best online marketing executives in Israel, gave a detailed presentation of Wix online marketing strategy and tactics.
• My friend Revital Hendler, founder and CEO of AllJobs, gave a talk about how AllJobs grew from a garage company to becoming the biggest job site in Israel, employing over 200 employees (side note: I single-handedly wrote the code for the site in 2004, using C# and a single SQL Server. That was the last time I wrote code until I started my new startup, a month ago).
• My friend Adam Fisher from Bessemer Venture Partners, one of Israel’s top investors (take a look at his portfolio and read his blog) gave an excellent talk about the VC industry and how he evaluates deals and startups.

I had lots of fun teaching this course. The students were great. I was pleasantly surprised by how smart, focused, enthusiastic and mature they were. Definitely the kind of people that will achieve great things in life. The Zell program is the best program of its kind in Israel, and kudos to IDC for creating and nurturing it.

Zell 2011 Class

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