And again we have a world-renowned computer scientist on the program! On Friday (April 6), I’ve sat down and talked with Robert Sedgewick:
- founder and former chairman of the department of Computer Science at Princeton
- William O. Baker Professor of Computer Science at Princeton
- member of the Board of Directors at Adobe Systems
- Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for the seminal work in the mathematical analysis of algorithms and pioneering research in algorithm animation
- author of numerous research papers and several books, including a series of textbooks on algorithms widely used all around the world (published by Addison-Wesley)
The questions I asked to Prof. Sedgewick:
- When did you decide to pursue CS as a career?
- You completed your PhD under the supervision of legendary Donald Knuth. What was it like to have him as an advisor?
- Do you agree with Donald Knuth’s advice to young people, ‘If the topic is popular, the results will be unimportant’?
- On Nobel-prize effect when scientists after being recognized can’t afford to work on small problems and end up not producing anything great afterwards?
- What are your thoughts on the Nobel-prize effect when applied to innovation - big successful companies overlook small low margin markets which are attacked by disruptive startups?
- While working on your PhD, how did you allocate your time on reading, writing and research?
- What was the collaboration environment like at Stanford back then?
- How was the intro to programming taught at Princeton before 1992 - the year when you started COS 126?
- ‘COS 126: General Computer Science’ is the highest-enrolled course at Princeton (50% of all students at Princeton take it), 25% of all students take ‘COS 226: Data structures and Algorithms’. What are the reasons behind the popularity of the courses you developed?
- On the future of publishing: if the scientific paper won’t be read on paper why write it as if it will?
- Could you elaborate on some ideas for the future of publishing you hinted during your ‘Algorithms for the masses’ talk at ANALCO’2011 (San Francisco)?
- Can you describe your hybrid model of publishing: traditional textbook + forward looking booksite (‘Intro to Programming in Java’ booksite; ‘Algorithms’ booksite) with all the code, videos, pictures and simulations?
- Your ‘Algorithms’ textbook aims to cover 50+ algorithms every programmer should know. It’s widely considered one of the best books on algorithms (example of this is a question on Quora: ‘what are some great general algorithms books other than Knuth, CLRS and Sedgewick?’). What are the reasons behind its success?
- Galactic algorithms are ones that will never be used in practice. Why? Any effect would never be noticed in this galaxy. You once said, ‘O-notation is useful for many reasons, but common error is to think that it is useful to predict performance’. Can you talk more about this?
- You worked as a software engineer in Silicon Valley, and currently at the board of directors of Adobe. Which companies are, in your mind, the most innovative?
- What do you think of the future of consumer web and social networking startups?
- What are your reading habits nowadays? Any technical blogs do you recommend?
- It’s understandably highly contextual, but what is the one piece of advice you would give to students who haven’t figured what to do with their lives?
Guest: Brian Kernighan
Producer/host: Arman Suleimenov
Princeton, NJ
March 20, 2012
princetonstartuptv.com
Brian Kernighan! The computer scientist who doesn’t need any introduction:
- co-author of the programming classic - ‘The C Programming Language’ (with Dennis Ritchie)
- coauthor of AWK and AMPL programming languages
- Professor of Computer Science at Princeton
- author of many Unix programs including ditroff, cron for Unix 7
- early contributor to Unix alongside its creators Ken Thomson and Dennis Ritchie
- the person who coined the term Unix which stands for Uniplexed Information and Computing Service
- co-author of well-known heuristics for graph partitioning and TSP
- author of 9 books: Software Tools (with PJ Plauger), Software Tools in Pascal (with PJ Plauger), The C Programming Language (‘K&R’) (with Dennis M. Ritchie), The Elements of Programming Style (with PJ Plauger), The Unix Programming Environment (with Rob Pike), The AWK Programming Language (with Al Aho and Peter J. Weinberger), The Practice of Programming (with Rob Pike), AMPL: A Modeling Language for Mathematical Programming, 2nd Ed. (with Robert Fourer and David Gay), and the most recent ‘D is for Digital: What a well-informed person should know about computers and communications’ which is available for purchase here.
Questions discussed on the program:
- Where did Prof. Kernighan grow up?
- How was the decision to teach at Princeton come about?
- What interesting projects came out of ‘COS 333 - Advanced Programming Techniques’?
- What are Brian Kernighan’s current research interests?
- D is for Digital - teaching technical material to non-technical audience
- What were the goals of AWK and AMPL programming languages?
- Thoughts on Perl, Ruby and Python?
- Which books and blogs does Brian Kernighan read?
- What does he do for fun?
- How does his day look like?
- Would Prof. Kernighan ever use Twitter?
- How do you write?
- What are the challenges of a writing a book nowadays?
- What tools do you use to write books?
- How do you publish books?
- Join a company or start one? - advice from Brian Kernighan
It’s time to to dispel the gospel that programming is a skill which can be acquired by only a small cohort of people. Programming is just like playing a piano, juggling, or swimming: if you put enough effort, you can learn to code too. Codecademy is a website which provides an interactive and fun way to learn how to code. Codecademy was the runner-up for the ‘Crunchies - Best New Startup of 2011’ (the first place went to Pinterest). Code Year, Codecademy’s New Year resolution project that encourages people to code, attracted 127,000 users in just 3 days after launch and now has more than 400,000 people who are learning to code by receiving lessons via email. Among notable people who joined Code Year are New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg and one of the best VCs in the US - Fred Wilson.
Codecademy is venture backed by Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Social+Capital Partnership, Thrive Capital, CrunchFund, Collaborative Fund, Founder Collective, Joshua Schacter, Vivi Nevo, Naval Ravikant, and several others.
In this episode we discuss the following questions:
- Codecademy - company from YCombinator Summer 2011 batch
- Interactive lessons in programming
- Game mechanics: achievements, badges
- How Codecademy started off with matching skills with jobs in the market project
- Launch at Hacker News - ‘Show HN’
- Ethos at YC: build something people want
- How to deal with the fear of rejection
- When and how do you launch?
- Email is a forgotten, but still powerful connection tool
- Code reuse and version control
- Technology stack at Codecademy: underscore.js, backbone.js, rails, python modules, node..js, mongodb
- Lessons: optimize for code reusability
- How do you prioritize features?
- What were the things you made right?
- Demographics of Codecademy users
- How is New York tech scene?
- Project management at Codecademy
Joe Perla was a co-founder or CTO at Zandigo - social network around the college admissions process, Labmeeting - social network for scientists, and Turntable.fm - popular social site to DJ and collectively listen to music. He coded ProHDR 2.0, the leading HDR photography app for iPhone, and created Weby Templates - minimalist Python web framework.
In this episode we’ll hear the exciting journey of Joe Perla: how he started brainstorming startup ideas during his freshman year with friends Mick Hagen and Jeremy Johnson, how he eventually left Princeton for 2 years to start companies, why he is pursuing graduate school to do original research in artificial intelligence.
Some of the questions discussed
- The story of LabMeeting - the social network for scientists
- Stickybits - iPhone/Android app which lets you scan barcodes of products to get discounts and join the conversation about the stuff you love
- The pivot from Stickybits to Turntable.fm
- Amazing story of Turntable.fm (Billy Chasen and Seth Goldstein)
- Sentiment analysis - how to determine the mood of a piece of writing
- Favorite courses at Princeton: Artificial Intelligence, Behavioral Economics
- The importance of research and universities for innovation
- Public transportation and Aaron Patzer
- Are the ads on Facebook are very effective and why Facebook is a Ponzi scheme
- Is Facebook too good to click on ads?
- Vanity metrics at Facebook
- Is Facebook sustainable business?
- ‘The Innovator’s dilemma’ by Clayton Christensen
- The most difficult and the happiest moment in Joe’s life
- On web frameworks
- SQL vs noSQL databases: mongodb, MySQL, memcache
- When is MySQL a bad idea?
- On doing everything in RAM
- How does Joe see himself in the future?
Guest: Joe Perla
Host: Arman Suleimenov
Date: December 11, 2011
Location: Princeton, NJ
Princeton Entrepreneurship Club
Guest: David Lieb, CEO and co-founder of Bump
Producer/host: Arman Suleimenov (twitter.com/suleimenov)
Mountain View, CA
December 8, 2011
princetonstartuptv.com
- What is Bump?
- The origins of the idea for Bump
- How to start a startup: 2 ways startups are formed
- YCombinator experience: launching before applying
- Make something people want
- How did Bump look like on the YC demo day?
- Challenges of the network effects product: from the risk to the asset
- Thoughts on NFC (Near Field Communication)
- Closest pair problem from Computational Geometry
- Retention rate and usage across different features
- Countries where Bump is big: US, UK, Japan
- Reasons why Bump is the 3rd most downloaded mobile app of all time in Japan
- Stats: the total number of downloads, the number of active users in the last 3 days
- The key lesson learned as the first time entrepreneur
- Technology stack: Objective-C, Java; C and Python on cloud servers
- Hiring at Bump
- Applications built on top of Bump API
- 5 whys: underneath any technical problem lies the human problem
- Viral engine growth at Bump
- Blogs and books: Paul Graham’s essays, TechCrunch, Ben Horowitz’s blog; ‘The Facebook Effect’, ‘Emotional Intelligence’, ‘Steve Jobs’
- The vision for Bump
Guest: Adam Goldstein, CEO and co-founder of Hipmunk
Host: Arman Suleimenov
Date: December 8, 2011
Location: San Francisco, CA
Princeton Entrepreneurship Club
Hipmunk is the flight and hotel search engine which presents flight results as the visual timeline, sorts flights by agony, searches for hotels in the areas with many points of interests, and provides Amtrak train routes among other things. Time magazine named Hipmunk as one of the 50 best websites of 2011. The founders are Adam Goldstein and Steve Huffman (co-founder of reddit.com). Investors include SV Angel, Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail), Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) and Ashton Kutcher.
Questions discussed:
- How / when did you come up with an idea for Hipmunk?
- What was the process when coming up with the name?
- YCombinator experience
- ITA as the source content for search
- Is the main power of Hipmunk an outstanding user interface?
- Gantt charts for flights
- Hipmunk’s technology stack
- Why companies like Southwest don’t provide their fares to the flight search sites?
- Hipmunk as the multitransport search engine
- Hotel search around points of interest
- What Hipmunk was like when launched?
- What are the plans for improving the service?
- How does feature prioritization work at the Hipmunk team?
- Key lessons learned
- Favorite blogs and books
- Patents as the defensive mechanism from big companies which crush startups
- Any plans to own the booking part of the equation?
- What’s your vision for travel planning space and Hipmunk specifically?
Guest of the show: Vinicius Vacanti, CEO and co-founder of Yipit (twitter.com/vacanti)
Host: Arman Suleimenov (twitter.com/suleimenov)
Date: December 2, 2011
Location: New York City, NY
TigerTreks / Princeton Entrepreneurship Club (princetoneclub.com)
The topics discussed:
- Yipit - daily deals aggregator
- 8 projects before stumbling upon the idea for Yipit: unhub.com, 140it.com
- The Lean Startup methodology by Steve Blank, Eric Ries
- 3 blogs to read: ‘Both sides of the table’ (Mark Suster), ‘AVC.com’ (Fred Wilson), ‘Techmeme.com’
- Actionable metrics
- The difference of yipit.com with 8coupons.com
- On the danger of new ideas: uninformed optimism, informed pessimism, crisis of meaning followed by crash & burn vs informed optimism
- Threewords.me by Mark Bao
- From the project to the company: what happened before an idea and now?
- How does Yipit make money?
- The vision for Yipit and the local commerce in general
- The constant iteration
- Web frameworks. What’s better: Python + Django or Ruby on Rails?
- The challenges associated with aggregating deals from 800 different sites
P/S: Vin has a great blog titled ‘How to Make It as a First-Time Entrepreneur’ (viniciusvacanti.com/). I have been reading it for about a year, highly recommended!
Guest of the show: Mick Hagen
Host: Arman Suleimenov
San Francisco, CA. Nov 4, 2011
From Princeton Entrepreneurship Club
‘Princeton Startups’ is the podcast where we talk about startups and entrepreneurship. Questions discussed in this episode:
- Zinch - LinkedIn for high school students
- What were the initial challenges?
- Early years of the company
- The art of launch
- Joining a startup vs creating one
- Undrip - filtering Twitter / Facebook stream
- Long-term stealth mode approach vs ‘launch as soon as possible’ approach: art.sy, spotify
- The Lean Startup: actionable metrics, Minimum Viable Product, Build-Measure-Learn loop, pivot
