Sachin Rekhi

Throughout our careers, we are often lucky enough to work with a few individuals that far exceed our expectations, have the ability to move mountains, and inspire us to do our best work. These individuals are often directly responsible for our own success as well as the success of our projects and direct contributors to our proudest professional accomplishments.

I call these rock stars members of my draft pick. And after every job, I update my draft pick with individuals who fit the bill. I then ensure that I touch base with each of them at least once a year.

That way when it comes time for me to build an all star team, I can call upon the very best.

Those who know me know that outside of software, music is a great passion of mine. But not just any music. More specifically, music from up and coming unsigned artists on YouTube. What excites me about artists at this stage is you see them acoustic and raw, often just a guitar or piano and their own vocals. By following them over time, you also watch them grow in confidence and mature over surprisingly short periods of time. Many of them go on to sign deals with record labels, put on national and international tours, and much more. One of the greatest disruptions YouTube enabled was making it possible for individuals with talent to showcase it online, gain an audience, and become successful without the traditional talent scout approach.

But there is an even more interesting trend that has emerged on YouTube in the last couple of years - that of the collaboration. It’s become popular for up and coming artists on YouTube to collaborate with other such artists on a single recording. The recordings always ends up being richer with the combination of two different artist interpretations. But equally important is the cross-pollination of audiences across both artists. Existing fans of one artist are exposed to the other artist and vice versa, significantly growing the fan base for both. It’s a win-win-win user acquisition strategy for each artist as well as their fans. I know I’ve discovered many new artists in this exact way.

I often get asked what motivates me as an entrepreneur to do what I do. For some it’s fortune, for others it’s fame. But for me, it’s this:



Seeing the positive impact the software I’ve built has on real people every day. That’s what motivates me. That’s why I do what I do!

I recently went through the thought exercise of trying to define my professional identity on the web. When thinking about the various components that make up my professional identity, I thought about it in terms of what I’d like people to know about me and what best represents myself and my work.

Given the recent acquisition of Connected by LinkedIn, I thought it would be a great time to reflect on what worked well with our technology stack as well as what I would like to improve going forward.

If you haven’t had a chance to check them out, feel free to review my previous posts where I detail our technology stack and the open source libraries we leverage. In this post I’ll jump right into our learnings.

The cost of building software products has dramatically fallen compared to a decade ago. Products that used to take millions of dollars are now being built for hundreds of thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. Two of the most important drivers of falling costs have been open source software and cloud computing.

Yesterday I had the delightful task of rebuilding one of our production cloud images for Connected. What I realized during that process was the full extent to which we rely on open source software to build Connected. Connected wouldn't be what it is today and couldn't have been built nearly as quickly or cheaply without the incredible amount of open source used throughout the stack. I thought I'd take a moment to catalog all the open source software we use to give you a sense of just how much it has truly changed the cost of software development.

Social is clearly one of the biggest trends on the web right now, with the majority of new apps and services taking advantage of your friends to provide a more participatory experience. This extends across desktop and mobile applications as well as across most verticals, including media, e-commerce, travel, and more.

But what’s most exciting to me is what is happening a layer below these applications - the rise of the social data layer. The social data layer provides a set of compelling APIs that any application can take advantage of to quickly immerse it’s experience in social. Just as cloud computing significantly reduced the cost of building web applications, these social data platforms are significantly reducing the friction in creating compelling social experiences.

Today I had the pleasure of attending the Evernote Trunk Conference, Evernote’s first ever developer-focused event. I was excited to attend not only because Connected is an app in the Evernote Trunk, but also because Evernote has been a break-out success story in the productivity space. I thought I’d share some of my thoughts from the day.

Startup2Startup has been on a roll lately with great events and this week was no exception. BJ Fogg, a professor and researcher from Stanford University, stopped by and shared with us his secrets on behavior change. For those of you who are not familiar with BJ Fogg, he has been studying behavior change for over a decade, is the founder of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford, and author of the book Persuasive Technology. He also led the first Facebook Apps class at Stanford, which was massively successful in generating explosive growth for student apps. BJ Fogg has leveraged his insights into how technology can be used to bring about behavior change both in his academic work as well as in industry work, especially in the mobile and health sectors.

His focus for the evening was around how we can leverage his research in our own startups to help bring about the behavior change that we seek in our users. Practically every startup is trying to elicit some behavior from their users, whether it’s getting them to log into your site daily, signup for a new service, or share their content with their friends. And the lessons from BJ Fogg help us to understand the psychology behind eliciting these behavior changes and how we can ensure they happen. I thought I’d take a moment to summarize his 5 key secrets from the evening.

Last night I attended another fantastic Startup2Startup event focused on Interaction Design. The lineup was terrific with Jason Putorti, lead designer of Mint.com and now co-founder of Votizen, Kate Aronowitz, Director of Design and User Experience at Facebook, and Garry Tan, co-founder of Posterous and Designer in Residence for YCombinator. They brought together a breadth of experience in design across all stages of the startup lifecycle.

I thought I’d briefly summarize by sharing five key quotes from the night and some of the discussion around them.