How Hard Could It Be?: The Unproven Path

I have some ironclad rules for starting a technology venture. I broke a bunch of them when I started my latest technology venture.

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If you're like me, you see business ideas everywhere. Here are three of my latest brainstorms, which you may have for free, and if you start them, I will gladly be your first customer:

• Open an indoor bicycle parking lot in lower Manhattan, where people can keep their bikes safe and dry. For bonus points, offer gold memberships with showers and fresh towels.
• Make a power strip with a built-in Ethernet hub that clips onto the back of a desk. That way when you bring a laptop into work or need to charge your cell phone, you can plug it in without crawling on the floor. Hotels catering to business travelers have something like this, but it's always custom-wired by electricians.
• Be the Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) of high-end office furniture. Reduce the lead times on nice cubicles and partitions from 12 weeks to two.

All three of these ideas came from needing something and failing to find it in the marketplace. I don't have time to do any of them, so, like I said, if you could, that'd be great. 'K. Thanks!

Another idea I had was a little bit closer to my heart. I wanted to launch a website to which programmers could go to ask highly technical questions about highly technical topics and get solutions from other programmers. "How do you multiply two 64-bit numbers in x86 assembler?" you could ask, and your peers, acting mainly out of the goodness of their hearts, would write up an answer. That sounds like an easy request, right? Doesn't that website already exist? There must be millions of them!

Well, yes. There is a lot of competition. But it all struck me as stunningly flawed. I had a couple of ideas about how to make a more useful website. For example, I thought that visitors to the site should be able to vote, giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to every proposed answer. The answer with the most votes would be listed first. Users wouldn't have to search through 100 answers, some of which were clearly wrong, because the best answers would rise to the top as other members of the community voted. (Kind of like Digg -- see this month's cover story, "Kevin Rose of Digg: The Most Famous Man on the Internet".)

My other idea was that people should be able to edit one another's answers. If someone saw an answer that was mostly right but contained some small bug somewhere, he or she could simply click on an Edit button and type in the correction. This would work just like Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia in which anyone can edit anything. Surprisingly, Wikipedia works well: Entries get better and better over time as everybody contributes his or her knowledge.

That was the basic idea: a programming community Q&A site with voting and editing. But like all my other ideas, nobody around here had any time to do it, so the idea went nowhere.

Then one day this guy named Jeff Atwood called me up. Like me, Jeff had a blog, on which he mulled various programming topics. He wrote well, so he was attracting quite a following. He had begun to put advertisements up here and there, and was making a little bit of pocket change, so he started thinking, Gosh, I can do this for a living. It sure beat the heck out of his day job working at a California company called Vertigo Software, which is where he was when he called me, asking for advice.

"Hey, I know exactly what you should do!" I said. And I told him the idea about the Q&A site with voting and editing. A site like this would need a lot of smart programmers to ask and answer questions. Between our two blogs, we felt we could generate the critical mass it would take to make the site work. Jeff liked the idea, so we decided to make it a joint venture.

We named it Stack Overflow, after a common type of bug that causes software to crash -- plus, the domain name stackoverflow.com happened to be available.

I had no idea if the site would work or exactly how it might make money, and I didn't have a ton of time to put into it. I have pretty deeply held ideas about how to develop software, but I mostly kept them to myself. That turned out to be a good thing, because as the organization took shape, nearly all these principles were abandoned.

First, I always insist on vetting programmers very carefully. Heck, I wrote a whole book about how to make sure you hire only the best programmers. But I entered into the joint venture agreement with Jeff after meeting him in person just once, for about three minutes, and I never bothered to check if he could write good code.

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