Sachin Rekhi

In the wake of LinkedIn’s announcement of reaching 100 million members, I’ve been impressed with the resurgence they have had in the past year. I thought I would showcase some of the recent product innovation from LinkedIn as well as cultural shifts we’ve seen from within the company that have contributed to this growth.

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the latest Startup2Startup on engineering management with Yishan Wong, an early director of engineering at Facebook.

The area we spent the most time discussing, both during the presentation and during the discussion that followed, was how to hire great engineers for your startup. I thought it was a particularly appropriate topic given that I receive weekly requests from colleagues asking me for help on their quest for engineers. So I thought I'd take a moment to post on some of the most actionable take-aways from the discussion.

Last night I read Sarah Lacy's excellent post entitled Inside the DNA of the Facebook Mafia. If you haven't read it yet, you should. It not only catalogues many of the excellent startups that have come out of Facebook, but the emerging patterns amongst the bunch.

It got me thinking about my own experience at my previous startup, imeem. When I think back on imeem, I always felt that we had an incredible group of fascinating, talented, and ambitious people. While we never achieved our ultimate goals at imeem, I was sure many of these same folks would move on to something great afterwards. I told myself to keep a lookout as I was sure many would likely start their own ventures.

And sure enough, about a year since imeem's acquisition by MySpace, more than ten new exciting startups have been founded by the original imeem crew. I thought I'd take a moment to showcase some of them.

Today I’m excited to announce the launch of my latest venture, Connected. Connected is a personal relationship manager that brings your contacts and conversations together in one place. It integrates with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, and Google Voice to make it easier than ever before to stay on top of your most important relationships.

I had lunch with an old college buddy last week and he has been considering moving to San Francisco to start his next venture. We got into a discussion of the potential advantages and disadvantages of doing so. I thought I'd throw up my thoughts on the subject for those interested.

I've been in San Francisco now for the past three years. My immediate prior residence was up in Seattle, but I originally grew up in upstate New York. I have come to love San Francisco for many reasons, but mostly because it's an ideal place to start a technology venture.

While I am clearly biased, here is my attempt at a balanced discussion of the pros and cons of starting your venture in San Francisco or the Bay Area in general.

One of the most disruptive trends in the Internet era has been turning a culture of scarcity on its head and transforming it to one of ubiquitous access. No longer is the news, music, videos, and games we consume controlled by powerful oligopolies who artificially constrain supply in order to increase the value of their offerings. Instead, the new found democratization of media and information has been a win for all consumers, giving them the ability to consume their content wherever, whenever, and however they wish. While this transformation isn't complete, it is well on it's way across almost all major content verticals.

Yet with this new world has come new challenges. Specifically, finding the information most relevant to you right now has become a real struggle with the explosion of availability of content. When you look across the web today at the most successful properties, they can often be looked at as productivity tools helping us to increase the signal-to-noise ratio to make sense of our new information overload challenges. These services help us to filter and discover the content that is most relevant to us right now.

Given that this is still an emerging space, there are a variety of tactics that are being used across these services to increase the signal to noise ratio. I thought I'd take a moment to discuss ten trending tactics that these services are leveraging so that you can bring them to your own applications. I expect to see us refine our best practices across each of these tactics as well as see new ones emerge as we continue to understand how to handle this explosion of content that empowers the Internet today.

I remember as a kid being very excited about the future. One concept that was extremely enticing was the coming age of robots. I was assured that they were only around the corner by my favorite cartoon at the time, The Jetsons, and their robot Rosie. I knew in the future I would want my very own robot to take care of the laundry, vacuum the house, and cook all my meals.

Fast forward to today and unfortunately the closest thing we have to commercialized personal robots is the iRobot Roomba that can vacuum your carpets. That's sadly about it.

Yet the underlying beauty of having a personal robot, something that was always taking care of things for you while you were busy with the rest of your life, has found it's way into many interesting software solutions.

I'm always interested in improving my development stack in order to maximize productivity, facilitate rapid iterations, and maintain flexibility. Over the years I've periodically iterated my web stack, from a Microsoft-based self-hosted environment, to a PHP-centered world, to finally my present Python\Django stack on top of a cloud platform.

I thought I would detail my current stack and technology choices for those interested. I would also love to hear from you on what you use or if you have any suggested improvements.

As many of you know, I spent the last two weeks getting married. Yes, it did indeed take two weeks, including a wedding on April 24th in the Bay Area, as well as a reception in my home town in Rochester, NY on May 1st. Beyond the actual wedding festivities, there were months of planning and preparations prior to the events. Now that all of this has culminated, I thought I would take a moment to reflect on the lessons learned relevant to the startup community from my recent wedding experience.

Based on a suggestion from Andrew Chen, I spent Saturday afternoon reading The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar, which put me in a reflective mood on my own goals and vision for success here in Silicon Valley.

Randy Komisar put together a short narrative that challenges the traditional assumption of the deferred life plan, romanticizes the notion of business as a creative pursuit, and even finds room to go into a discourse on self-knowledge of one's own motivations. Beyond this, Randy litters throughout the book a great set of lessons from his own career as a successful entrepreneurial executive.

I thought I'd take a moment to share some of the highlights through a set of my favorite quotes from the book.