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Nanowrimo? Nanowrimo!

Nanowrimo = National November Writing Month. Write 50k words in 30 days, preferably fiction. Obviously, quantity is valued over quality in Nanowrimo. I apologize if you keep reading from here.
 
~

It’s November and for the first time in a long time I have no homework. BWAHAHA. Side projects ban is going on until the end of the year but writing doesn’t realllllly count as a side project. Right? Right.

EGADS. I… I don’t know what happened. I really struggled to fill in the middle and end and … everything, that’s all I can say. I could write QFN-hating fairies all day, but trying to write a fairy tale with a moral? F* if I know what I’m doing.

I think the real moral of the robot fairytale is that we should all be fairies or something…

Tomorrow I will post the results of my survey about what my friends look forward to in the future, and today I will work on our kickstarter video, and really I blame Lauren Herring and thank her for giving Friday’s topic, “Robot Fairy Tales.” http://thefullereneincident.com/ her blog is great.

Yes, I’m two or three days behind. Well, long as procrastinating on nanowrimo convinces me to get other things done.

Hope in the Morrow

Sweet JST Connectors! Fae Andalie stood up and stretched, smoke curling from her fingers as the inorganic mess in front of her teetered, entropy written into its wiring and threatening to burst out of her delicate spellwork. The rabbit-foot in the corner stopped its mad screeching across the strings of the violin as it sensed a mood shift from VIOLINCECORE and settled into a gentle purr, though it had never been the foot to any rabbit. (you might ask — do rabbits purr? they certainly do when fairies pet them). You never knew what you were getting into when you tore into the guts of a Walmae robot, cheap suckers, mass-produced by drones in China before being ferried into the inner chambers of a Kraken for the journey over the Pacific, but oh-so-delicately engineered to be dirt cheap. She’d wanted only the greeting-card functionality of this particular robot, but found that for ease of assembly it had been coded as one micro with the dictionary functionality. And let’s not even get into the thousand-and-one springs assembled in a precise order so that the creation could move three parts of its body with only one motor, making accessing the chip a nightmare of deconstruction. Wouldn’t want it to turn into plain old destruction, after all. Delicious, and entertaining enough to keep her up until dawn!
She had really found the right magic-technology balance in her latest creations, she felt. Employed as a craftsman, she deftly rolled old technology and new magic into one-of-a-kind creations, custom-built for each customer. Her guild, forty-strong, did well plying its wares in the Rottermarkets, where old technology went to rot into new magic. She’d done so well in just the few years since coming to Atlanta that she no longer had to spend time talking to customers, instead receiving a backlog of requests spec’d out in the format she liked.
Ah! Like the latest request. This required some delicate spell-work, indeed. Didn’t get many rabbit robot requests nowadays. Seemed like all anyone cared for nowadays was the resistor-munching goat or the screw-sorting monkey. Rabbits, now, that was someone with some old-fashioned standards for companionship. Or lean meat.
“Huh! You got the QFNs to play along too!” Fae Leya wandered by, chewing on a bit of boggerfot, the smell phasing in and out like a badly tuned radio station. She winced. Never did get the point behind boggerfot. Messed up the brain, that it did. She tried it for a wren’s flight-time straight once (experiment) and twenty moons on still had to deal with the occasional flickers of auditory hallucinations. Cut through her existential crisis quickly, constantly hearing voices telling her to kill herself. Suppose she did stop caring about whatever originally caused her crisis really quickly.
No doubt Leya’s hallucinations were more pleasant. That, or she shuddered to think what he was running from.
“Yessir, was a right pain in the foot I can tell ya.” The rabbit-foot in the corner twitched uneasily, remembering the time it had been pressed into service as a charm-holder while she coaxed her spellwork to cover each of the frickin’ tiny pads UNDER the darned packages. Oh, and there were twenty-two of ‘em too. Lovely.
“Found an old rotary phone the other day. You’re welcome to it if you ever feel like something more gratifying.”
The two reminisced about the lovely pre-machine days when spellwork could be so crude as to only require a smattering of blood or a pint of moonwater, the packages easily readable and the circuits darn hardy and tolerant of changes like running on magic instead of electrons.
He paused on the way out of her workshop. “Hey. Uh. Thanks for the advice.” Leya smiled shyly. caught sight of the little butterfly popping into existing behind his shoulder, and blushed.
Andalie smiled, floating a bit of nectar over to the butterfly. “No problem.” Dealing with the daily harassment of customers trying to peek into their work processes or to inquire if it was done YET was an art-form used to be her specialty, but she was happy to pass on to the newcomers to the guild. The latest class was so polite about it too, especially Leya.
Whistling and entirely oblivious, she went back to work and a pigeon’s flight later a cute little gray-white rabbit was hopping around her workshop. Synthetic fur, naturally, she wasn’t a troll. They insisted on authenticity and were liable to use the deceased’s matter. She’d given up on the greeting-card chip and had devised a neat little spell instead. Rabbits didn’t tend to make a lot of noise, anyway, so the probably-too-ingenious-for-its-own-good spellwork wouldn’t be called on too often.
She stroked the rabbit’s back, then bid it on its way to Processing. She really enjoyed the sillier and cuter requests and bet the workers in Processing did too. Baen was the sweetest of the lot — everyone adored her — and no doubt would get the job to fly on out to the ‘burbs on her homemade broomstick. No doubt her mother had lovingly made it for her by hand, no magic involved. Just the thought of it all made some sweet molasses cookies appear around on her worktable, were they were promptly contaminated by the lead in the solder bits lying around. She sighed and fed them to her rabbit-foot, which commenced playing saccharine songs.
~
Sixteen year-old Marie Anders lived in the suburbs of Atlanta, and like most folks who lived for any period of time down south, owned a rabbit or two. Her whole family had been raised a believer in the old practices, ‘fore all the mad mixing of science and magic that passed for normal nowadays, and they’d kept pets for companionship without any thought to the modern-day uses proper magical training could give them.
She’d gotten her Maybelline about seven years ago now, raised it from a whee kit to prime old age. It’d been her first pet rabbit and she’d loved it ferociously. With the tricks she’d taught Maybelline and her sweet disposition, she’d been the envy of her schoolmates.
When her granny first got sick a year ago, the physician had told her mum it was because of Marie Anders’s rabbit. The rabbit was sopping up spells like nobody’s business due to the runoff from the spellwork cast on her neighbor’s lawn, and something about her granny having an serious allergic reaction, aggravated by that rabbit, to the increasing density of magic around the county. People were like the opposite of circuits — the further back they were made the more poorly they tolerated change.
Her mother hadn’t believed it in the slightest and kicked the physician out of the house (politely). Who’d ever heard of such a notion! They’d boiled orange peels and put vinegar about the house. Granny didn’t get better, but she’d gone right on believing her parents knew what they were doing until her granny ended up in the hospital. Her sister, who was always the scientist in the family, stopped talking to her. She finally started reading some of the publications lying around her sister’s room. Seems like the world had moved on and didn’t care a whit that her family couldn’t wrap its head around what was going on.
She killed her Maybelline that weekend, not knowing to look up local pet services that might operate on the weekend, not trusting she wouldn’t change her mind if she waited. Looked up a video on how to do it. Buried her in the dark well of shadow underneath the apple tree, and bought a cat the next day. Her granny spent a few more weeks getting better and was now back at home on her rocking chair on the porch when Marie Anders got back from school. Her mum apologized to the physician, who now came around for regular checkups, and her sister hugged her and was extra-nice to her for a while. Everything was right, except she —
She had killed her Maybelline. No furry head to pet, no little beating heart that would always love her because she provided such delicious food, no raisins to get it to indulge in weaving figure eights between her legs or to stand on two legs.
She’d moved on pretty fast to taking care of her new cat, but then she had heard of hypoallergenic robotic rabbits wired to be just like you remember them with a minimum of spellwork. After exploring the city some she’d fond the Rottermarkets, found a job and saved up, and now her order had arrived, dropped off by some crazy girl flying around on some dinky broomstick no less! At least the shipping had been fast.
Marie Anders tore open the packaging. High on caffeine, fingers twitching madly, head bopping along to the latest VIOLINCECORE song to hit the radio, she gazed upon her beautiful new robot friend. Well. Fuzzy new robot friend. Intricate, in her eyes her rabbit had finally come back and forgive her for killing it. She fed it some grains and grass, content to listen to her music and watch the rabbit live its life, before finally passing out somewhere between one screech of the violin strings and the next.
In the morning, nausea roiling her stomach, a headache throbbing with her heartbeat, she stared at the shreds of paper strewn about and found only a synthetic rabbit staring at her, eyes alert as it nibbled on some old newspaper. It seemed just like her old rabbit and yet utterly lifeless. Seeing it getting along just fine, as though she hadn’t killed it a few months ago, hadn’t tried to replace it with a cat, hadn’t scrimped for months to afford the faework commission, she knew that the rabbit was utterly incapable of loving her back. Maybelline was gone.
Sobbing, she stood curled around it, not noticing as her tears dripped onto the rabbit and it, agonized by its spellwork which bid it to create happiness in the world, grew hotter and hotter and finally all at once melted and streamed down her legs. Federal regulation N52-115 fortunately meant that as it dripped down her legs, it caused her no pain but only a mild stinging regret and a permanent watery tattoo, silver-grey as her rabbit had been. She finally wandered out into the street and, mind numb, rode the bus until the sun went down, and for the first time she noticed how many people had marks like hers, permanent, unwavering even as they too went to the grave. This chapter in her life had opened and shut, and she no longer liked the story, but she had no other story to live.
~
Real-life rabbits, dear friend, will never recover from the passage of time. You can sink all the love and magic into them that you want, just like everyone else. But they will rot away all the same, corrupted from inside by their own life-force.
Fae Andalie, on the other hand, hummed happily, warm and content in her silky cocoon draped high in the clouds. Her robot rabbits purred sleepily alongside her, providing her all the companionship she had ever known or needed, even as her spellwork bore her unceasingly forth into the night.

—–
NOTES
Oh, the rabbit foot violin… Arthur Ganson, mechanical automata on display at MIT museum.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXZN7JWCMag

ACTUALLY A FEATHER. Man, I really remembered it as a rabbit foot. But yea, try watching that video with a bunch of your college-aged friends standing around you. It’s a recipe for awkwardness.

Everything is fiction! Fiction, I swear! I most definitely did not ask my parents for a robot cat when I was younger, or be utterly disappointed by it and feel right sorry I wasted my parents’ money on it and didn’t even end up liking it, no sirree. ;__;

May you rest in peace, robot cat.
http://theoldrobots.com/tekno-cat.html
Tekno Kitty Robot

Startups: Legal, Pricing, and Marketing Issues

This post is a recap of what I have learned in the Global Founders’ Skills Accelerator I am participating in with my startup, NarwhalEDU (narwhaledu.com) over the last week. I am writing this up in the hopes that it will be useful to other new startup founders as a reference point. Some things are only relevant if you are open sourcing, if you have more than one founder, and other caveats of being the experience of a single person in a single company at this accelerator.

Lawyers
Founder’s Agreement and Equity Split:
Determined by factors such as replaceability of founder (e.g. technical knowhow), how much a founder is investing in the company monetarily, basically a really fluid of trying to determine how much a founder contributes to the company over time.
Vesting schedule — so that the equity / shares are earned over time, in case one founder decides to leave. Recommend 3 years, although investors will push for 4 years
1 year cliff — in case a founder leaves early on, their shares do not vest

C Corp vs LLC
C Corp in Delaware — recommended because that is what investors expect
vs. LLC — for tax purposes, can offset business losses against personal income for tax gains, but investors will not accept it if you ever take outside investment (so more suitable for lifestyle businesses, e.g. never plan on taking outside investment, not really aiming for exponential growth, longer-term are all used as criteria but I think the main one is not planning on taking outside investment.)
It is much easier to go from LLC to C Corp (about 5k costs) than the other way around

Fees
We’ve gotten quotes ranging from $2000 to $5000 for the standard incorporation and founder’s agreement and a set of template documents. There is an additional 250-500 in filing fees. e.g. if you do a Delaware C Corp every year there is $500 in fees to have a registered agent there.

Packages
Some firms offer this, some offer “flexibility” and haven’t started using the term package yet. But basically, firms will offer anywhere from full deferment of fees until you are “successful” (e.g. have raised a major round, are making over a million in sales, etc.) to 50/50 split (so pay 50% upfront, keeping you honest about controlling your spending) to a flat fee. So in a sense you are pitching to the law firms that offer packages.

How it works
What tends to happen is you will interview with the super expensive lawyer (ranging from $250 – $800+), then depending on your company you will get a team of 2 to 3 people: a junior associate (in the $500 range) and paralegals / secretaries (in the ~$100-300 range). These people charge less per hour and so the law firm tends to pitch this as being cost efficient.

Why a lawyer when there is legalzoom.com?
We asked one lawyer this question. She said that lawyers can provide business and legal advice, especially after working with startups for over a decade. When there is more than one founder, make sure that everything is agreed to properly. In general, it seems to be the thing to do at the accelerator so we are running with it, although I suspect there is a bias towards “startup” and not “lifestyle business” that a legalzoom LLC might be appropriate for.

Why incorporate so soon?
Put your IP into a company instead of into individual hands, and then can decide to open source it or license it however you want. Prevents one founder from forming their own competing company. (?? still a bit confused as to how this applies to open source hardware).

Open Sourcing and EdTech
http://stallman.org/articles/online-education.html The end conclusion is to NOT use a creative commons noncommercial use only license.

Capitalization
After incorporating, have to put some money into business to make it an actual business. Within 30 days, need to fill out 83B form.

Pricing
Often engineers go for cost-based pricing. Not the best idea. Consider instead the amount of value provided to the customer and getting an appropriate fraction of that. In particular, I have heard that in software the most money comes from subscription-based models. This is because the customer does not know the full value of the software initially and actually gains a lot of value over time, and the subscription model captures more of this value than an upfront pricing model.

Pricing! Okay, let’s go into how to do pricing surveys. In an ideal world, you do randomized questions with at least 30 responses each.
DO NOT ask the customer “how much would you pay for this product: $100, $150, $200?” because that is not how we make decisions in real-life — this feels like bartering, so the customer’s answers will be influenced by their bartering. Instead, randomly present them with one choice and ask them a simple yes/no.

To do this, I used qualtrics software, a trial version.

Then, to get survey responses, I used facebook.

The going rate seems to be about $1 per survey answer.
I put the max bid at 50c per click.
Click through rate: ~1%, e.g. if 1000 people see your ad, ten people will click through. Of that, maybe 2 people will actually answer the survey (that would be pretty ideal).

I had this 1 dollar/answer my first and second days but on the current day (day 3) it seems to have shot up to almost 3 dollars per answer ;__; hopefully the next few days will even this out, or perhaps weekends are just better for people clicking through and deciding to actually answer the survey.

This is called the “taxi meter” effect, something you have to beware of in pricing, that the customer is not constantly focused on whether they are getting the value they paid for out of your product (e.g. if you priced weekly or monthly instead of yearly).

Marketing
Pick up the phone and call!
Have the whole company focused on the same metric — something everyone can work towards. e.g. number of sales
Always be helpful, e.g. even if you are not immediately knowledgeable on a topic, you can answer forum posts / emails with a bit of google searching.
Should be more time than money initially, as you do labor-intensive one-on-one direct sales.
Personalization of emails is important (e.g. with their name) (for mailing lists, use mailchimp)
Other recommended software: HARO, grasshoper, Highrise CRM, google analytics, mailchimp
Testimonials are important! If they are above the fold, can lead to 10-15% increase in conversions.
Start a blog right away! Short posts just to get over the hurdle of getting started. Basically free marketing by establishing yourself as an expert right away.

Conclusion
There’s lots more, but I think that’s a good amount of information for one post. Please feel free to contact me or leave a comment if you have any questions.

Oh! One thing — if you’re affiliated with MIT, sign up for the MIT Venturing Mentoring Service. They will offer free legal advice sessions (make sure to sign up for the mailing list) and a whole host of other benefits (e.g. matching you up with mentors and you set the schedule as to when you meet).

trip to nyc / adafruit industries / founder of hackaday!

trip to nyc / visit adafruit industries / meet founder of hackaday and talk to ladyada herself!
with charles guan and cynthia lu and hanna lin

10 am: depart
2 pm: arrive

left to right: charles, cynthia, and hanna
arrive in CHINA wait sorry flushing district of New York City

look what we found in chinatown! an AVR manual IN CHINESE. @___@
and a MasterCAM X book. This was at the WJ bookstore
we ate at Taste of Shanghai on prince street. delicciousss
Cynthia sketches ladyada chibi! Ladyada was super happy about this when she got it.
Photo
this picture from Charles! Not mine!
We arrive!
The magical workings of adafruit heavy metal industries. Err. Adafruit industries.
$150k+ pick and place machine! IT IS SO SHINY. Apparently it is or is a relative of the ones Samsung uses to manufacture phones, and that this is something Foxconn / Apple would never do, sell you the machines that make machines at a conference
Assembly station! At adafruit industries they do it by product and not as a procedural task with multiple people per product. The guy is Philip Torrone, founder of hackaday and editor at large at MAKE magazine while he works with adafruit on everything awesome.
IT’S BINS OF AWESOME BADGES.
The ladyada shrine 🙂
Hydraulic wooden arm spotted! d’aww
And finally, on the air on ask-an-engineer! We are sitting in the background, as Charles is the main guest (we sort of surprise showed up). Left: Phil; Middle: Ladyada; Right: Charles
The episode is archived at
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/07/14/ask-an-engineer-references-equals-zero-by-charles-guan/ and
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/07/13/show-and-tell-7132013-e-ink-badges-flora-coats-laser-asteroids-twitter-api-neopixel-code-and-on-air-notifier/

Phil and Ladyada were amazingly open about everything we could ever possibly want to know. I learned that:

  • adafruit industries took on no outside investment and was entirely bootstrapped
  • it started in just one apartment, then two apartments, and finally they moved to a warehouse
  • their first pick ‘n place was picked because it was the only one that fit through their apartment door, and was $35k. they are now donating this to nycresistor with the condition that no questions come their way about how to use it or anything
  • after 8 years, they are at 50 employees, 1/3 in shipping, and at 10-15 million dollars in revenue and they are tripling every year. 
  • They wrote their barcode/shipping software in python and ship ~1000 packages a day. The software notifies the buyer and charges their credit card when items ship 
  • In fact, they are the largest shipper in lower Manhattan.
  • they grew specifically so that ladyada could do all the engineering, and it sounds like they have a few consultants from around the world that help with the engineering but ladyada essentially solo beasts all the products (it sounded like)
  • they chose to keep all manufacturing in house instead of outsourced
  • they used a black and decker IR oven, equipped with arduino, for reflow for a long time. In the new space, with the real reflow oven and new pick ‘n place, they are finally able to keep up with demand
  • Their latest video show has 3 year-olds making lemon batteries o____O Each 2-3 minute video takes over 80 hours to produce. Phil is the one manipulating the giant plushie LEDs / figures under the table
  • they are thinking about adding translations to learn.adafruit.com, hopefully crowdsourced, as there is a lot of demand from germany, japan, china, and italy
  • adafruit.com gets about 11 million visits (either daily or monthly) after 8 years of relentless quality documentation
  • the new move from docuwiki to their own system has cut down documentation time by about a third
  • but each tutorial still takes anywhere from 6 hours to 2 days
  • Their PCB stencils are done by hand. They found that people can do it better when trained and get over 99% yield, such that they almost think they don’t need an optical checker
  • Testing rigs for circuitboards! Ladyada actually designs products with testing in mind
  • They worked with companies like Eagle to make girl scout/boy scout-esque badges, and Eagle was very happy about it
  • They helped Jay Silver with MakeyMakey, who really just needed encouragement that a market exists
  • Ladyada did not market ressearch nor business plan. She believed in the product strongly enough that she created a market / demand for it. Execute.
  • ladyada reminisced about her time at MITERS and how it used to very much by Tim Anderson’s shop, and also about her Bridgeport mill which is still in active use at MITERS

ALSO. I GOT A 555 PLUSHIE. d’awwwww it is an octopod ^__^ heart cousin of hexapods

And a final note on fail.

I wanted to draw ladyada’s face with our robot arm but sadly we were not at a stage to make a recognizable drawing and I think ladyada was just like, WTF. ;__; SORRY LADYADA one day we will draw better faces with our el cheapo 9g miniservos and then give you a portrait. we probably should have stuck to the adafruit logo or something.

edge detected from the WIRED magazine cover
draw out… yea… it does not resemble ladyada at all x___x

http://youtu.be/q73vKiPvaPA?t=59s

Ah well. So it goes, so it goes.

That’s all for tonight folks! Getting ready to teach Intro to Robot Arms, class #2, in a few hours (for MIT HSSP. Let me know if you all have any questions.

Oh, an easy one — I don’t know how this came about. I think Charles emailed Ladyada saying he would be in NYC and wanted to visit, and he was then invited as a guest onto the show. He was going to by in NYC for a mikuvan trip including us, so we tagged along to visit adafruit industries. All quite strange and befuddling.