Ever tried to hail a cab in Seattle? Uber wants to help, but they need a great local GM

A common question among out-of-town visitors at Founders Co-op is "how do you get a cab around here?" Seattle is a car-centric city with far-flung neighborhoods and few concentrated population centers that can support a New York-style cab culture. As a result, actually getting a cab to show up when you need it is pretty hit-and-miss.

So when Ryan Graves pinged me a few weeks ago to say he was bringing Uber to town and would we help spread the word, I told him I was happy to pitch in, if only to have a better answer to the question of "who should I call for a ride to the airport?"

If you don't know about Uber, they're a mobile-centric car hire network that has been racking up rave (even astonished) reviews from jaded technophiles in their current launch cities: San Francisco + New York. They raised a seed round from a stellar group of early-stage folks to prove the model, then loaded up with $11 million from VC heavyweight Benchmark Capital to roll out nationally.

John Cook has already announced the impending arrival of the service, but there's still one thing standing between Seattle and Uber: one killer hire. Whenever they enter a new city the first thing the Uber team does is recruit a local GM to own every aspect of the local offering, from pricing, marketing and PR to hiring and managing the rest of the local team (usually including an operations and a customer support lead). According to Ryan, the city GM role is an ideal platform for anyone who's on a path to building and running his or her own business and wants to add key skills as part of a high-performing team.

So what's the downside to the job? Local cab companies and the bigger limo outfits will probably do what they can to make your life hard (including lobbying local politicians and transportation regulators to slow you down). And skeptics (John Cook included) will question whether Seattle's down-home business culture is ready to embrace the "black car" attitude of bigger and flashier cities. But it wouldn't be fun if it wasn't kind of hard, right?

Sound like your kind of gig? Email ryan [at] uber [dot ] com

The Mobile Ecosystem - Legal Frontiers in Digital Media Conference - May 19, 2011

I had a great time last week at the Legal Frontiers in Digital Media conference - an event put on jointly by the Media Law Resource Center and Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society.

As one of the few non-lawyers in the room (most attendees were either in-house counsel at large media and software companies or media attorneys in private practice) I was asked to deliver some opening remarks on the state of the "mobile ecosystem". I took this as a license to ramble on passionately on a range of topics I care about, mostly pivoting around the growing power of software entrepreneurs to make magic for consumers (and businesses) and the ways in which mobile platforms like iOS and Android are enabling this innovation.

If this sounds like your kind of thing (or you're just curious what a roomful of lawyers were forced to listen to last Thursday), my slides are embedded below.

A new weapon in the war for talent

A few weeks ago Fred Wilson reflected on the tight market for engineering talent:

"[T]here is a war for talent, particularly developer talent, going on. Not just in Silicon Valley but also in NYC and many other places around the country."

In chemistry terms, developers are now the limiting reagent for high-growth software firms. The scarcity of talent is especially acute in Silicon Valley, leading many big players like Zynga, Facebook and Google to set up shop in relatively less competitive markets like Seattle.

Some of this market pressure is cyclical: plummeting costs and a flood of new capital sources for early stage software innovation have created a bloom of new startups (and startup investors), many of which won't survive the inevitable down cycle. But the fundamentals of this market are here to stay: at least in the earliest phases of software innovation, capital will continue to chase talent and not the other way around.

In this context, we've been on the lookout for a new company that can inject real liquidity into the market for engineering talent. AngelList has done an incredible job of adding transparency and liquidity to the capital side of new venture formation, but that's only intensified the crunch on the talent side.

So where's the AngelList for badass engineering teams?...  Meet GroupTalent.

Co-founders Gordon Hempton and Wes Hather are Y Combinator '08 alums (TeamApart) who experienced first-hand the intense tug-of-war for Bay Area engineering talent. Based on that experience, they've created a new kind of marketplace for skilled hackers that reflects many of their core beliefs about how the current system is failing:

1. Teams vs. Individuals
   
   While most traditional job sites focus on the individual, high-performing software developers tend to self-organize in teams. Some of this is functional - different people tend to settle at different layers in the software stack - and some is generational. "Millenials"- the demographic cohort that describes the current 20-something generation - grew up in school and social environments geared toward collaboration. In the words of one demographer, "these are the kids who even went to school dances in groups rather than one-on-one dates." GroupTalent helps high-performing teams market themselves as production-ready units, not individual contributors.
   
   
2. Hacker cred vs. Business cred 
   
   LinkedIn is a brilliant discovery platform for business talent, showcasing a professional's education and career history. But the best hackers aren't necessarily sorted by school and title; it's what they've built that matters. GroupTalent treats each team member's GitHub profile as a core source of profile data, and also makes it easy to showcase the side projects and open-source contributions that are the real benchmarks for performance among their engineering peers.
   
   
3. Geography + false scarcity
   
   Many Bay Area folks are convinced that there's only one place to build a software startup. Mark Suster's recent post - "Can You Really Build a Great Tech Firm Outside Silicon Valley?" - tackled this boneheaded assumption head-on. Great software teams are forming across the country and around the world. Some of those folks are willing to relocate and some aren't, but thousands of them have the capacity to build amazing products and successful companies given the right combination of mentorship, capital and support. GroupTalent aims to shine a light on those amazing teams wherever they are, bringing cross-geography liquidity to a market that leans way too heavily on a few schools and cities to meet demand.

GroupTalent is a new idea. Like many new ideas, some of it is dead-on, some isn't quite right, and lots is still missing. What the GroupTalent team needs now is feedback - lots of feedback. If you're a member of a high-performing engineering team, create a team profile and let them know how it feels. And if you run a company that's on the hunt for killer devs (and what company isn't), build a profile for your company and see what kinds of teams are out there looking to make a connection.

We're putting our money where our mouth is on this one: Founders Co-op is a proud supporter of  GroupTalent. Congrats to Gordon and Wes on shipping and excited to see where the community takes us.

The importance of showing up

I was on a great panel at TiECon on Friday, flew home just in time for my son's 6th birthday party, and flew out the next morning for Whitefish, Montana. I usually hate being away from my kids on the weekend but this was a trip I couldn't miss: a close college friend had just lost his mom to cancer, after losing his dad (also to cancer) a few years previously. The memorial service was scheduled for Saturday afternoon and my wife and I arrived just in time to be a part of one of the most moving and emotionally true remembrances I've ever attended.

I wanted to be there for a lot of reasons: he's an old and dear friend, his parents were amazing people, I know and like his entire family and our kids love their kids. But I also remembered how - two years ago when my dad died suddenly and unexpectedly - he piled his entire family in to the car and drove 600 miles to attend the service here in Seattle.

So here's a reminder - as much for me as for anyone else reading this post:

• Life is short. 
• Relationships matter. 
• Make a point of showing up.