Curiously enough, what got Segway into this problem was that the company was itself a kind of Segway. It was too easy for them; they were too successful raising money. If they’d had to grow the company gradually, by iterating through several versions they sold to real users, they’d have learned pretty quickly that people looked stupid riding them. Instead they had enough to work in secret. They had focus groups aplenty, I’m sure, but they didn’t have the people yelling insults out of cars. So they never realized they were zooming confidently down a blind alley.

– Paul Graham, YCombinator

My take:

- I agree, raising “too much” capital for an idea is poison. Having to do a lot with a little instills discipline, and forces one to be uber-resourceful, razor focused, and quite frankly a little paranoid :) I’m extremely lucky to have mentors like David who have drilled this mantra into my head. We achieved a lot with little at both Lookery and Compete.com, and now Shareaholic.

- Iterative design is the way to go. All of us that create applications for which we can push updates and upgrades at-will at not much cost are blessed. Criminal not to take advantage of this gift.

- Focus groups? Community Managers (= everyone in the company) should be curating the feedback loop from in the field – talking to real users, asking them how we can improve our products, create the most value for them, and knock down the most roadblocks in the process — in short, make their lives easier.

Users first, always.

A big thank you to our pals at Viximo for sharing their space with us :)

Update: David just posted some more pictures here.

There are some strange parallels between this video and Lookery, but I wont get into that now :)

Can’t get enough of it.

At Compete, I had the privilege to work with the most incredible, talented, and fun group of people I have ever met — together we worked hard, played hard, believed in and executed on our vision for compete.com, achieved what some thought impossible, delighted clients, pulled all-nighters, and during all that developed special friendships. I learned A LOT, and had a lot of fun. Most of all, I am very proud of the teams accomplishment and what we were able to achieve in a very short duration of time. You can expect a lot of great stuff from Compete in the very near future.

As you can tell, it was a very hard decision for me personally to leave my fellow Competers, but they are all excited for me and understand that my next opportunity is a big one. Thank you Team Compete for an incredible experience — I love you guys.

what’s next?

I will soon be joining David Cancel (founder and former CTO of Compete), Scott Rafer, and the rest of the crew at Lookery, leading Product Development & Strategy.

About Lookery (blog):

Lookery provides demographic marketing services in and around social networks. Lookery is in the process of assembling anonymous profiles on 100+ million people. Using this data and Lookery’s 1.5 billion+ page-per-month Facebook ad network, we will raise the price paid for billions of remnant Internet ad impressions each day. Part of that course is becoming the anonymous user data king and expose that via APIs, widgets for site owners, etc. Lookery collects profiles from and with the permission of social networks, dating sites, ISPs, and e-commerce sites.

A whole new adventure is just about to start, and I am very excited by all the possibilities that lie ahead! …and in case you’re wondering… for now, I am going to be based out of Cambridge, MA.