History of a Start Up: Part 1 of an Ongoing Interview with Chuck Groom of Bill Monk. by risa
After a summer full of afternoons at the Copa, my friend Emilie and I are always left feeling we owe the other a beer. We make half-hearted attempts to balance out, but the math of our friendship is on that longish list of things we’ve decided to let go of. Now, take my financial situation with Miss Emilie, multiply by all the members of the loose and friendly beer-buying network of folks who make up this here Mile End-of-Montreal scene, and you’ll start to get an idea of the dizzying nature of our particular subset of the economy. Bill Monk proposes an interesting solution. Keeping track of what we paid and what we owed with a web-based-and-cell-phone-accessible system like Bill Monk would be like turning one of life’s slippery blurs into a solid state. A clean and interconnected list. A history. And with wide-spread adoption, the implications of their social accounting could get exponentially more interesting.
By laying down certain equations and tracks of thought about Social Currency, Bill Monk aims to make trust visible over time. This potential visibility is a freaky thing, especially if you’re already haunted by debt (it reminds me of that Paul Simon line about how “you can’t outrun the history train”.) But software systems developed for banks and governments have given other people privileged access to knowledge of our spending patterns (and our credit ratings) for decades. It makes sense that software systems developed by the open source community would now be used to attempt to give us access to our own financial patterns.
Interestingly, BillMonk might be quietly encouraging us to make our ideas about money more liquid, or more open, if you like. If we add our layers of social currency, all that uncharted value, to the math on Bill Monk then we also add dollar worth to the pot. The amount of money in the system will increase, and so will our ability to control and communicate with systems that value money. This is where the potential for a viable business model kicks in: when the Amazons of the world want Bill Monk users to be able to buy products with their social money. They’ll need Bill Monk to coordinate that exchange, and Bill Monk can charge the company for that service and/or take a percentage from the company’s profit.
Elran and I putter away on the enormous question of making useful systems/a living out of stacks of open source software, and we have lots to learn, so I asked the Bill Monk boys for an interview, and they obliged! Chuck threw himself whole hog into these questions and has created a lot of room for more debate, so thanks for that!
Here goes part 1:
RD: how many people are working directly on the development of BillMonk, who are they, where are those people located? How did you hook up? (a little humanizing back-story please!)
There are two of us; Chuck Groom (me) and Gaurav Oberoi. Gaurav is 26, I’m 28. We both live in the same apartment building (different apartments) in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle (the Hip but Not-So-Yuppie neighborhood right above downtown). The company is an LLC that we funded from our savings, with an even ownership. Both of us have a background in programming, so we’ve been learning a lot about business, law, marketing, and so on as we go.
We both used to work at Amazon.com, though in different teams. I was working in the Catalog Metadata Services team, and was tasked with the vision of Amazon’s next generation of managing data about data about things. (e.g. finding ways to automate learning that bicycles tend to have two wheels and frame materials like aluminum, steel, or advanced carbon-stuffs.) Gaurav worked for the search and browse team, and focused on the categorization of items on the Amazon site. This turns out to be a really, really hard (and therefore interesting) problem when you take into account the sheer volume of data and requirements, e.g. “show all men’s shirts of brand X which are not Y and which are scheduled to be shown on the site on date Z”. Anyways, the point is, we were both working on pretty interesting stuff.
I have some other friends in the browse team, so we met during lunch shortly after Gaurav moved to Seattle. (This was a bit more than a year ago; Gaurav moved to Seattle following the girl who he’s still with). He was looking for apartments, so I hooked him up with my building (which is totally sweet). Since then, we’ve hung out a lot, especially as drinking buddies. It helps that his girlfriend lives across the street, and mine is only a few blocks away.
Amazon, Amazon… such a strange company. They hire very smart people. They have great problems to solve. I was paid pretty well. But I realized that it wasn’t a good place for me to be as a programmer in the long run. I started idly thinking about how great it would be to do the startup thing, but without any particular problem in mind.
Whenever Gaurav and I hung out, conversation always drifted to startups – the business thinking, the market, the freedom to geek out, zany ideas. Nothing solid, but I think it got us both thinking.
I took a leave of absence from Amazon for the month of July (2005) in order to travel around Europe and to get space for perspective. It was great! The idea of doing Something Else became a no-brainer. I had savings; I had no kids or mortgage; I had skills and contacts; and I could grow more by doing my own thing than by working for someone else. So I quit Amazon in August 2005.
Gaurav and I kept on tossing around various company ideas. We agreed that we wanted to do something that was socially helpful, cheap to implement, and had something to do with an on-the-go lifestyle. One night, Gaurav dropped the idea of a centralized service for splitting bills + cell phones. We played with the idea, to see if it would be worth doing without the cell phone piece at first — and decided that, no, it was such an important killer feature.
Once we had an idea, we decided to start a company. We were very lucky to know lots of people who could offer great advice. Ron Karpf, my brother’s father-in-law, had a ton of experience getting ideas off the ground, and told us (a) to do it! and (b) to file a patent for our protection. Alex Edelman, who worked at Findory.com, offered great advice about the personal side of a business relationship; in particular, to treat it like any other relationship, taking care to establish boundaries and communicate.
Gaurav was still working at Amazon at the time; he loved the idea, but was unwilling to make the leap. He worked on weekends and nights, and agonized about what to do. Meanwhile, I was happy as a pig in… uh, a bug in a rug. I had a purpose! I had complete freedom! I could geek out in ways that hadn’t been possible during all my years at Amazon. I was a happy Chuck.
He needed about a month to really make that mental switch from “oh, I can do this on the side” to “I’m 100% committed.” Which was totally fine. I think that’s the way with many big decisions; you live with both options for a little while until one day, one of the options just becomes painfully right.
So, Gaurav quit Amazon in mid-October, and we started coding full-time. (We also picked our company name during this time; that story is on our blog).
So, a brief tangent about practical details… while we both have savings, we’re not awash in gobs of cash. We’ve had to be extremely frugal about how we’ve gone about this idea. Being frugal is a great exercise for any company, I think. Since we’re a tech company, all reduced all our costs to just three things: filing company paperwork, computers, and internet bandwidth.
Our first few computers were purchased from the Amazon company store while still worked at Amazon (the company store is a basement room where old equipment and rejected merchandise is sold to employees for steep discounts); we got servers for $10. Our apartment building was our headquarters, and my closet was our machine room.
…
RD: That’s it for part 1. I smiled when I read Chuck’s answer, and even laughed out loud a bit, though you probably couldn’t hear it over the buzz of computers. Ours have taken over the house, sprawling far beyond the back closet where they were once relegated. Coming up next- What does Chuck find exciting about Bill Monk? Why did the idea of tracking social money make these guys commit to the giddy and freewheeling brainspace of the start up? What is the crazy, cascading potential in it, and what does it have to do with open source? Chuck goes down some interesting roads and you can count on me to get verbose and hyperbolic, so stay tuned.
February 1st, 2012 at 6:11 pm
hi!!!