SolOrwell.com

The recession (and possibly depression) we are barreling into has me both very optimistic and slightly concerned.

To get it out of the way – my concern is more broad than just ‘we are heading into a depression.’ The amount of corruption and cronyism everywhere is mind-boggling – as more and more details come out on how the bailout money is being used (a personal piggy bank) I can only imagine what price we will have to pay in the future.

At the saime time, I do think that a little belt-tightening is good for the soul (personal, business, country, etc). We’ve never gotten a dime of investment money, and as I’ve grown this from a hobby 11 years ago when I was just in high-school, I’ve learned to make sense of every dime spent. It isn’t about direct revenue to me. It isn’t about ‘measurables’ and wonderful P&L statements. It’s about “does spending a dime here instead of there” make sense in the context of where we want to be?

Seeing all these companies running around firing their workforce, tightening their benefits, and so forth boggles my mind. For example, recently Google has come out tightening the benefits it was lavishing on its employees. This is a company that makes billions of dollars in profits every year

. The recession will hurt them for sure – but they will still be making billions of dollars in profits.

I read this wonderful little article on why Toyota beats the pants off of GM, and the essence is the same – in the context of growing their company, in making better products, and retaining their skilled employees (I’ve only ever had one employee quit in almost 6 years), they are spending their dimes in a way that makes sense. Sure they lose a large chunk of money ($50-100 million according to this), but since they are still making a good solid profit, there was no reason to be reactionary.

Beyond the troubling broader issues, I am actually looking forward to the next few years. While others are running around screaming and trying to squeeze every single dollar they can out of their visitors, we continue to stay the course and iterate the hell out of our product (we had a 9 month standstill as we re-worked the entire system, but that is now done, and we are moving fast fast fast). Bad times causing companies to suddenly cut large chunks of staff smells like bad management.

I’m a sour puss that’s what

As things have melted around in general (ala economy), and some of that bubbling enthusiasm has started to pop (finally), we’ve been sitting here, thinking and doing.

The Thinking: what is local about? I really soured on user reviews a while ago, and as I explore restaurants in NYC, my sourness just gets more … sour? People who have no clue on what is going on throw their opinions as fact. I remember recently reading a review for a purist sushi restaurant where the reviewer gave it a 0/5 because they did not want to make her a California Roll. I don’t want to get into the complexities of if the customer is always right (I don’t believe they are), but why in the hell would you expect a purist place to serve up something like that? Ugh

And that’s just restaurants. I remember reading Jeremy’s (from Yelp) response to a post on Greg Sterling’s blog where he stated (the gist of) “a person knows if a mechanic fixed the car or not.” That statement not only takes a rather bleak view on the complexities of a car (a car that moves is not one that necessarily works well), it also underscores the fact that people don’t know how much some kind of service should cost, and exactly how much it costs.

I know computers. But that is the extent of my ‘deep’ knowledge. And relying on people who don’t really grasp a subject matter well – not my cup of tea.

So that’s the thinking part. Where does iBegin fit? We’ve done a good enough job making base data a commodity (and possibly even more so in the future), but that was never the end-game.

The Doing: So iBegin is morphing. We recently released a new version that is based on the Django platform. It wasn’t fun. When dealing with 80+ million records internally, edge cases prop up in places you didn’t even know existed.

99% of that is ironed out, so what lies in the future? We have two divergent lines. What is becoming more clear is that while the base data is absolutely critical in our future, it isn’t the

future.

I hope that was an excellent balance of both oddly cryptic combined with some tangible information

Also – if you are in NYC, I want to meet up with you. So hit me up and let’s grab some coffee (though I don’t drink coffee personally)