Today a long time dream is coming true: I’m getting the chance to work together on a new venture with Benny Wong. And I couldn’t be more excited about it!

If this were a movie, I’d tell you about the day I first met Benny…how we randomly struck up a conversation about technology…how we immediately hit it off and became close friends…and how I remember the moment like it was yesterday. But to be honest I was sound asleep that morning when Benny and his family barged into our freshman dorm room at Columbia and started rearranging the furniture. I have a vague recollection of sitting up in bed and introducing myself, but mostly I recall the pounding headache after a night of partying.

Anyway, by some miracle I was blessed to have Benny assigned as a college roommate. The rest, as they say, is history.

So what’s so special about this guy?  In short, Benny is one of the most impressive people I know. They say that 10 good developers = 1 great developer. Benny is a great developer. When he writes code, he frickin’ flies. He’s also two skill sets in one. Perhaps you remember the hybrid “Hacker / Software Engineer” I described in the Three Types of ‘Computer’ People: “These talented folk will be able to rapidly hack together your prototype, then architect and build the real version, and then build and lead a technology team. They’ll write both quick-and-dirty code and well-written code — and they’ll perfectly balance progress and perfection.  If you find one of these, grab hold and don’t ever let go.”

I was describing Benny when I wrote that.

But Benny is much more than just a talented coder. He’s an amazing person too. He’s one of the kindest and most generous people I know.He cares an extraordinary amount about his family and close friends and he’s always there when needed. He’s incredibly level-headed and rational and diplomatic about handling disagreements. He has a great sense of humor and is a blast to hang out with. And he’s seriously easy to get along with.

In our seven years of friendship, we’ve only had a single fight. It centered around a prank involving a laptop, Butler library, VNC remote control software, gay porn, and Benny not speaking to me for three weeks. Buy me a beer sometime and I’ll tell you the story. (Buy me two beers and I’ll tell the story of how “Benny Wong” got mysteriously changed to “Benny’s Wrong” on his thesis)

Benny also has a great eye for visual design and an amazing sense of product design and user experience. He was the sole developer on the Gilt City founding team (part of Gilt Groupe) where he carried the product from zero to public launch.  Gilt City has since experienced explosive growth and moved into their own offices.

In the process, Benny learned how to lead and manage a technology team. That means he’s not just the perfect partner for building a product — he’s the perfect partner for building a company.  And he’s the perfect friend to share the crazy journey ahead.

Bdotdub, I couldn’t be more excited to work with you. We’re gonna rock this.

-Jdotdub

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Last week I launched FourGroupTwilVen, a fun mashup of Foursquare, GroupMe, Venmo and Twilio designed to entertain my bored friends on Christmas. When my Foursquare friends checked in at a Chinese food restaurant, they unlocked a little surprise:

1)  First, they would get a phone call wishing them a Happy Jewish Christmas and playing them Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You.”

2) They were also sent a small holiday gift ($1.80) via Venmo from “The Bank of JWeg” (Venmo is a mobile payment service)

3) They were also added to a GroupMe called “Awesome Jews Eating Chinese Food” (GroupMe is a free group texting service)

Below is a diagram explaining how the system worked.  Keep in mind that GroupMe and Venmo don’t have APIs to accomplish these things, but by registering new accounts for each service and associating them to a Twilio phone number, I was able to use outgoing text messages as a trigger to control Venmo and GroupMe.

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Christmas day can be depressing. It seems like the entire world is decorating trees, opening presents and feasting with family. Meanwhile, we Jews are lonely, bored and hungry. We’re left to scour the town looking for entertainment and food. And we always end up at a chinese restaurant and a movie theater.

Well, my fellow Jews, I’m making this year super special for you all! I’ve hacked together a fun mashup of the APIs from four of my favorite startups: Foursquare, GroupMe, Venmo and Twilio. For short let’s just call it FourGroupTwilVen – or something like that…

Here’s how to participate:

If you’re one of my lucky Foursquare friends, simply visit a Chinese restaurant on Christmas and your check-in will unlock a bit of magic!

I don’t want to give away too much but let’s just say that it will involve a small monetary gift, the company of other awesome Jews, and Mariah Carey. It’s gonna make you smile and cheer up your Christmas.

Let the fun begin!

.

P.S. My friends who do celebrate Christmas are of course invited to participate too And you don’t have to be in NYC — this will work anywhere.

P.P.S.  Make sure your Foursquare account has your phone number entered (most do!) — you can check under ‘Account Settings’ on http://foursquare.com/settings

P.P.P.S. If we’re not Foursquare friends, feel free to add me.  Be aware I’m pretty selective about who I share my location with so you might want to follow up with an email of why you’re worthy :-p

P.P.P.P.S.  I’ll write a post soon about what’s going on behind-the-scenes.

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(This post was also published on Business Insider)

There are three types of programmers.

Nope, this isn’t the beginning of a joke about binary numbers, I promise!  Instead it’s the conclusion I reached after a great discussion with my friend Ben Fisher about programmers and technical co-founders.

When hunting for a technical co-founder, don’t assume that anyone who writes code is a good fit to build your product. There are many variations in skills, attitudes, and risk appetites among programmers and getting the right person on board from the start is really important.

So with this in mind, let’s discuss the three types (but don’t forget these are simply broad generalizations):

Computer Scientists

Ever meet a programmer without a personal Website — or any online presence whatsoever?  Perplexing, right?

These types of programmers generally dislike gadgets and mainstream technologies. Instead, their interests run narrow and deep: they enjoy solving really tough technical problems. It’s possible they’ve never done Web development, instead focusing on engineering research or things like machine learning, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and vision detection. They’re probably heavily entrenched in academia or an R&D environment.

The Good: They’re really really smart people and they have excellent pedigrees that might impress investors. If they have experience with Web development, they’re probably focused on very specific back-end engineering challenges like search, scalability, storage, or latency.  In which case they’re probably working at Google, Microsoft, or another large technology company.

Computer scientists seem like natural fits for co-founders. After all, if they’re smart enough to build an image recognition algorithm then building a social networking site should be a cinch, right?

The Bad: Consumer startups rarely face interesting technical problems in the early days.  Instead, they take lots of grunt work and repetition.  And these types of programmers will be bored to death at the thought of doing mundane tasks like building a signup process, dealing with forgotten passwords, or dealing with session management.

These types also tend to be risk-averse folks who just want a stable paycheck.  And they may lack a strong sense of how to design a product that people will actually want to use.  This means they’ll need to be managed by a person with a strong design sense.

Software engineers

These are programmers who pride themselves on writing beautiful code. Sounds great, right? But remember that your end users will never see the code behind your product. A coders who prioritizes beautiful code is serving the wrong customer: s/he is making things for himself or herself (of which there is one) rather than for the end users (of which there are hopefully many many more). The goal of a startup is to build something people want, and writing beautiful code is of secondary importance.

The Good: They’ll write great code that lasts a long time.

The Bad: Several times I’ve seen developers so obsessed with writing beautiful code that it lead to the detriment of the product experience; they often have perfectionist tendencies that will slow down progress. Early stage startups need to rapidly iterate until they find product-market fit, which often means neglecting to finish that last 10% (which naturally takes 90% of time). Perfectionists have trouble cutting corners.

Remember, the most important product a startup can make isn’t pretty code.  It’s a product people use.

Hackers

These are programmers who have a strong product focus. They see programming as means to an end: ‘hacking’ stuff together to fill a need in the world and serve people.

The Good: These types typically have a solid online presence with lots of projects, hacks, and experiments that they proudly display.  As one friend put it, these are “people who do open-source stuff.” They’re usually dripping with product sense, and always sharing their thoughts on which products they love using and which they hate.

The Bad: Often they no have formal computer science training but are instead self-taught.  In many cases their work may be quick and dirty — prioritizing progress over polish.

Which Make the Best Co-founder?

As always, it depends.  If you’re a first time entrepreneur, you may not even have a choice – beggars can’t be choosers!

But in general a hacker is best because they’ll rapidly build prototypes and iterate. Quick and dirty is fine at the beginning.  Then when you raise money you can hire software engineers to focus on writing good code.

Computer scientists can also be a useful part of a founding team if your startup will rely on a strong technology advantage (such as a unique algorithm or processing engine). But even then, you’ll want to complement these folks with hacker-types who understand how to make a usable product.

In an ideal world, you’ll find a hybrid Hacker / Software Engineer. These talented folk will be able to rapidly hack together your prototype, then architect and build the real version, and then build and lead a technology team.  They’ll write both quick-and-dirty code and well-written code — and they’ll perfectly balance progress and perfection.

If you find one of these, grab hold and don’t ever let go.

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One of the most interesting early stage NYC startups on my radar right now is BNTER. The service lets easily capture and share conversations you’ve had. Here’s an example.

Is there a bigger vision for the product and company? I don’t know. But here’s my vision for them:

I think the company should focus primarily on making embeddable conversation widgets. Services now exist to embed nearly everything in the world:  Videos (Youtube, Vimeo an a host of others), MP3s (NiftyPlayer), PDFs (Scribd), Slideshows (Google Presentations), Spreadsheets (Google Documents), Video transcripts (Speakertext).  Even Twitter introduced Blackbird Pie to make tweets embeddable…you get the idea.  Embeddable is hot.

But the one media type that isn’t embeddable and collectible in any structured way are text conversations themselves. Yet. BNTER will hopefully change that.

At first, the idea seems too simple to work.  PDFs, Videos, MP3s etc have *technical* barriers to embedding them in a website.  These services are valuable because they solving those issues, right? But conversations don’t have those barriers, they’re just simple text!

Flash back to 2002.  I’m a web savvy high school student maintaining a section of my personal website dedicated exclusively to sharing the funny conversation tidbits: quotes.jwegener.com. Every few days, I would go edit the HTML of the site to add a few new quotes and then promote them in my AIM away message (with a link back to the site of course).  It was fun and became popular but the site was a lot of trouble to maintain. And I never felt that my bright blue and green design did the conversations justice. Over time, I’ve started to share conversations on twitter but tweets are ephemeral and those conversations deserve to be archived.

You’re probably now starting to see why BNTER resonates with me.  The site makes the task of capturing, archiving, and sharing conversations easier: BNTER is YouTube for conversations.

So BNTER’s embed strategy will hopefully lead them to widespread distribution and fame. There are several key elements they’ll need to concentrate on, the first of which I think is coming up with a distinctive visual style.

Imagine if BNTER successfully coins the de-facto style used to share conversations in the media.  You’d be watching MTV and you’d see them showing a conversation in the BNTER style — and you’d see it gracing the pages of People Magazine.  It’s already happened to twitter…

I also think BNTER should push the boundaries on what’s embeddable.  Go deeper than a static image.  Think creatively about what kinds of features can be built into a widget.  Ever watch an embedded YouTube video and then find yourself watching three more?  Those ‘related’ videos that cycle through afterwards = brilliant product design. Make the widget interactive and you’ll get more stickiness and user interaction.

Maybe even make the embeds animated — subtly of course.  Think about the “Jonathan is typing a message…” animation we’re all familiar with from IM.  Imagine incorporating that and slowly bouncing the visual focus between the conversation bubbles.

So far I’m really enjoying BNTER. I find myself visiting the website daily to see an entertaining stream of witty conversations.  And I’m excited to watch as their bigger vision unfolds with time.

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