Note to the MSJHS.net Team

This note was written to the MSJHS.net team during December 2009, after we had started rebuilding our site from scratch using a new software platform.

As members of the MSJHS.net team, we’re well acquainted with Etherpad, the collaborative writing tool that we use for chat and project management. Most of us have also heard that Etherpad was acquired by Google last week. On Dec. 4, the five people on the Etherpad team received a total of 10 million dollars for their hard work, and joined the Google Wave team to work on what one could call Google’s own version of Etherpad. And just a couple of days ago, they released their code as open-source.

We, as high school students, are now working on MSJHS.net to create a useful student resource. But a more important goal is to learn and prepare for the real world, to gain experience for the future. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that we might be the ones founding startups in a few years, given that we’re young, proficient with technology, and working on MSJHS.net.

Given that context, we’re in an enviable position. MSJHS.net isn’t all that big a project, success is within reach, and we don’t face the legal and business hassles that real startups have to concern themselves with. We have no budget to exhaust and no living arrangements to manage, and our work is a lot less stressful given that most of our code has been already written for us. In many ways, it’s almost as if we’re getting bootstrapped, but instead of having consultants deal with the business details there are none to deal with at all, as if we were in Startup School.  As high school students we somehow are a lot busier than grad students and even undergraduates, but that’s the main difference. Coincidentally, that’s how Etherpad started.

Given the similarities, we should definitely be thinking about what made them successful.

Work

You’ve all heard that invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, but you don’t know it until you’ve experienced it. And throughout most of life, people don’t have to work very hard. The work ethic and intensity of a startup are so far removed from those of everyday tasks and schoolwork that it’s a real surprise. In addition to design and coding, business planning, product testing, and sales and marketing are all essential to creating a product; there’s a lot more work than one might expect, and much of it is tedious and time-consuming. And the whole time, you have to adjust to changing market conditions (e.g. new Facebook features, or changes in the school policies) and handle unforeseen challenges.

The Etherpad team went through all that and more. In the words of the guy who founded their startup school, they “worked their asses off…they did three complete startups worth of work.” First, they built a platform for creating web applications, but that turned out to be too ambitious a project. So, they completely rewrote it in a different language to make it simpler. But that didn’t work either, so they went back to their original idea, and upon it built Etherpad. Now, they’re millionaires with jobs at Google.

While MSJHS.net won’t be selling for millions anytime soon, we have our own reasons to work on this project – experience innovating in a nascent organization, the chance to work with a diverse yet dedicated ensemble of fellow students, and the chance to build the school’s first long-lasting independent student website. Most importantly, it’s the experience of working on a project together while making it all up from scratch that makes MSJHS.net special, and prepares us for the future. Get in the habit of doing your best, and it will serve you well. While staying up late polishing the site and working through the school day editing content are not new to us, neither are they our routine. But facing and conqurering such challenges is rewarding, and it’s worth the lost sleep.

Reinvent

Another lesson, again demonstrated by Etherpad, is that startups often have to reinvent themselves. Flickr demonstrated it too, as they started out as an online multiplayer game. After several metamorphoses, it became the most popular photo-sharing website on the Internet, and was acquired by Yahoo for $35 million. We are yet another example: after our site’s first iteration, which was good enough to win at the Digital Open but not good enough to garner widespread acceptance, we’re transitioning to a different platform.

Taking a new direction instead of giving in to failure is, in fact, how we’re setting ourselves apart from previous attempts to establish websites for clubs and for the school. But more than that, it’s what sets real-world enterprises apart from student projects. It’s the reason teacher-advised organizations like the Smoke Signal have survived and thrived; it’s also the reason clubs and student organizations face high turnover at our school, and why so many clubs can never become more than “officer clubs.” Teachers hold students together; since they’re around for more than a few years, they persist through difficulty and force students to reinvent themselves instead of giving up. The result is inevitably (although not necessarily immediately) success.

Vision

Persistence and adaptability, indeed, will get you a long way. But there’s still one thing missing: a vision. The first two qualities will get you places, but without a vision, there is no place to go.

Etherpad’s vision is pretty simple: build a online collaborative text editor that is ridiculously easy to use. Before, it was creating a JavaScript framework to make coding simpler. Both were pretty easy to understand; they were both tools that the creators, as programmers, would find useful. It’s easy to refine a vision for a product when you use it.

Etherpad also exemplifies the relentless pursuit of a vision because it’s the simplest web application I’ve ever used. There’s no required registration, no superfluous features, and no lag to complicate things; instead, all it takes to get started collaborating with friends is a simple copy and paste of the URL. But while the application is barebones, it’s easy to build upon it. By specifying a few social conventions, Etherpad can become a chat room, a polling tool, or a project management system. That was the reason the three-person Etherpad team built a product more critically acclaimed than Google’s “new medium of communication,” Google Wave. The Etherpad team so focused on their goal of creating a simple web application for text editing that they didn’t get distracted. They added the features that were absolutely necessary, and by avoiding the bloat created something that many regarded as superior.

You can’t always be your own audience, but you can strive to understand who will be using your products. Most often, they will be less-technical people who just want a product that’s easy to use. Sometimes, it could be people you don’t know very well, or even a different society or culture you don’t know at all.

Then you have to think and research, to find out what your users want. Through analysis, you have to arrive at a conclusion at what will best benefit them. That’s the reason I’m writing this letter: writing helps me work out my thoughts and better understand what I’m doing. (Did you think it was for motivating the team or something like that? If I wanted to do that, I’d organize a hangout.)

Concluding

Take a look at the Etherpad team. Of the five, two are MIT graduates and the other two are ex-Googlers. But they succeeded not because of their credentials, but because of their experience. Working on MSJHS.net, we’re getting that experience earlier than ever.

Wherever I go to college, I expect to have the chance to come back to the Bay Area often. When I come back next year, I’ll be expecting great things from you guys.