Month: March 2011

I “met” Joel Spolsky before he met me.

My developer friends were active followers of his popular blog, Joel On Software. And often would send me links to great posts like Craftsmanship (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Craftsmanship.html).

After reading gems like that I had to follow along as well.

For a long time I have been active in various message boards. That’s how my personal relationship with the internet started. I got so much out of being active in various online communities based on my passions about photography, audio/video equipment, media software etc.

But along the way I wanted more from message boards. They simply weren’t keeping up which I wrote about here: http://bijansabet.com/post/39556615/thinking-about-message-boards

When I first saw Stack Overflow I was blown away with three things. The extraordinary thinking behind creating a network that provided the best answers. the ability for users to get recognition for the value they provide. and of course the quality of content, specifically great answers. Basically, they fixed my beef with message boards.

When i met Joel (@spolsky) and his cofounder Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) the service made even more sense. Joel and Jeff are so thoughtful and purposeful about how they make decisions, how they think about their role on the web and how they make software.

Stack Exchange is the new name of the company because the company is more than Stack Overflow. Stack Exchange is a network of other great sites that use the same platform to provide the best answers for other communities like cooking, photography and others.

This morning Joel wrote about the new name and the new round of funding http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/03/a-new-name-for-stack-overflow-with-surprise-ending/.

I am over the moon to be an investor in this company.

(sorry for the lack of links and likely typos. wrote this on my phone).

I’m delighted to announce that we have just invested in Kik along with Union Square Ventures and RRE. My colleague Andrew Parker led this investment for us and wrote down some thoughts behind this investment. Fred also has a post up as well. 

I wrote a few things about “SMS 2.0” and mobile messaging of late. I’ve become fascinated about what comes after SMS for private 1:1 use and for private groups as well. 

I don’t think SMS is the answer. It’s not reliable and it’s missing things that I want to see like status of a message (with Kik you can easily see if when your message is sent, delivered and read. I love that). 

There are apps that bring more sophisticated messaging to iPhone and Android, like Skype for example.

But Skype was created in the days of desktops and Skype was born as a P2P client. You can see desktop behavior even when you use their mobile app. Here’s a recent screen shot i took of my Skype buddy list from my iphone. 

As you can see most of my Skype friends are “offline”. The most notable thing is from my friend Nabeel where he writes “out of office, send me an email” as his skype status update. Yikes.

Mobile experiences don’t resemble the desktop at all. The first day I met Kik’s founder, Ted Livingston, he emphasized how different mobile is and how there is no such thing as offline vs online. With mobile you are connected. Period. 

With that instinct, Ted and his team have created a fast and beautiful messaging app. You can use Kik for private 1:1 messages. And a new version was updated today in the app store is now even faster and brings new capabilities like photo sharing and groups. All in a very simple and clean user experience. 

I started out as a user and I’m now happy to also be an investor!