Offshoring Yourself: Ground Rules

Traveling to work in such a far-off destination as Krabi, Thailand comes with its own risks. Among the most disasterous is the potential for your offshoring exercise to become an excuse for a paid holiday.

Now, Swoosh has some pretty phenomenal employees. . .check their profiles here. . but before making the decision to come out here, I made sure to get buy-in from all Swoosh employees on a couple of fundamental ground rules:



Ground Rule #1 - Be more productive

- More hours and smarter hours - each team member tracks his hours, we have daily 10AM meetings to discuss what we accomplished yesterday and what we plan on accomplishing today

- No more daily grind - no commute, no lunch meetings, no hanging with friends at the bar, or going out and picking up on the fairer sex. .all of our time is hanging with each other, talking shop and getting work done.

- Limit distractions - My hours have been smarter as I don't have nearly the distractions around me (phone, meetings, IMs, etc.). . . I've limited myself to calls with existing customers, and advanced sales prospects ONLY with 5 calls a night at 11PM here, 9AM Pacific time, and 5 more calls at 7AM here, 5PM Pacific time.

- Laser focus - I'm laser-focused on accomplishing the goals we've set out for the trip. . . getting our new site up, making sure the guys are on their game writing a next gen version of our P2P delivery platform and putting RS in the best position to turn the corner on its relaunch.



Ground Rule #2 - Spend less

- We're between office leases, moving up to SF from San Mateo, and so we have no office rent until we get back. You'll find us in the city (SF, South Park) starting in June.

- Everybody bought their own tickets ($740 round-trip), for a couple guys totally funded by sub-leasing their apartments while they're here.

- Hotels and lodging are ranging between $2-$6/night/person (it's ultra-cheap out here)

- RS contributes large portion of office rent savings to various expenses, lodging, team dinners, tech equipment, etc.

This has been one hell of a change from business as usual and has provided some hi-octane fuel and motivation as we go through a major software overhaul and a complete revamp of product marketing. At the least, we'll make sure we've worked at least the same amount as we do in SF. On the upside, we'll have a successful re-launch, a sparkling new generation of our grid software platform, and additionally a powerful self-service portal that generates real activity and converts real business.

- chief swoosher

Six-Million-Dollar Re-write

So us techies are doing our part for Swoosh by throwing down a major code rewrite here in Thailand.

It's a tough call to do a re-write. Customers always want new features yesterday, and that means Travis is on our butts to get things out. But what happens when features on top of features on top of features make for crazy-serious complexity? Eventually it takes longer to keep adding features on-demand than to re-write a next-gen platform. But then the rewrite means feature-freeze until we get the new client out.

The wager: Our existing client and server software does what it needs to do now, and does it well (can you name a better P2P content delivery system out there?). But the bet is that it will be a lot faster, easier, and cleaner to introduce the sophisticated and powerful new features needed over the next few years on the new architecture than on the current architecture. How about live-event streaming, ultra-high performance delivery speed that blows away our current 50% advantage over web-servers, and hitting high peer-efficiencies on super-rare content for starters.

The Bottom-line: Dive deep into coding and prepare an environment that will produce high quality code with even higher quality testing in a short period of time. Can't get into the secret sauce here, but so far so good.

I've been part of Swoosh since February this year, but I only just physically joined the team yesterday, flying in to be part of this zany Thailand adventure. It's been fun so far, and I know it's going to get a whole heap more intense, and thus a whole heap more fun. And I know I just won't be able to get that Six Million Dollar Man quote out of my head the whole time:

"Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. [...] Better than he was before. Better... stronger... faster."

Tom - code dude

Work and Play in Pattaya

There must have been a great deal of miscommunication between Team Swoosh and the citizens of Bangkok who directed us to Pattaya. We were looking for a house with fast internet access on or close to the beach. But the locals must have understood this as, "We are looking for a throng of Thai ladies, boys, and lady-boys on or close to the beach". This is the only explanation I can think of for the highly recommended Pattaya.

After arrival, it did not take long before Travis declared Pattaya 'the Tijuana of Asia', and Team Swoosh concentrated their efforts on work rather than establishing headquarters for the longer term. Shielded from the outside world the Swooshers thoroughly enjoyed an office in the lobby of a Marriot Hotel while staying in a $10/night guest house across the street. We had the cheapest internet access in town, yet a plan was quickly set in motion to share our one wireless connection. scissors + patch cable = crossover cable. Clearly, we were not thinking because the amount we saved on internet access was negligible. The real cost of our Marriot office was in the drinks we ordered. The drink prices were reasonable as well, but only by western standards. Life was good, but only in the lobby.

Pattaya seems to offer little more than cheap thrills and a run-down rotating restaurant. I have spent two years in various parts of the developing world and nowhere have I seen a sex tourism destination as thriving as Pattaya. The city certainly does not have the saddest and most desperate looking sex workers, but it seems to have the most. That said, there was no play in Pattaya unless you consider Travis's late night excursions to 'make phone calls'.

With morale dropping quickly, we left Pattaya to the old white men and their escorts in search of the paradise on the postcard in the first post.

Customers Know no Time Zones

Of the 3 million clients we've deployed as part of the Red Swoosh grid, several hundred had an issue last night. After the 911 emergency-hotline batphone call came in from a customer of ours, we hit battle stations and had a war room going down across from the Wild Orchid.

It was morning for our customer, but not for us. It was almost midnight. We spent 4 hours in a Siam fire drill - 11PM to 3:30AM finding out that a group of our customers' URLs were 404'ing from their datacenter. We alerted them of the issue, and it was resolved quickly thereafter.

Swoosh Aphorism #103: When your customer makes a mistake, it's time to look in the mirror.

Customers only make mistakes when you believe your tech's issues stop at your front door. If your interface is too complicated, your monitoring not sufficient, or you've built a product that solves a technical problem but hasn't adequately solved the customers' problems. . . you will lose sleep. Don't fix a problem, build a solution.


Travis - chief swoosher

Pain and Pleasure

Of all the factors by which to differentiate between tourists and travelers, I find masochism to be the most compelling. Tourists try to reduce pain and discomfort while travelers seek it out. Given this seeming paradox, how could they ever interbreed? For this reason our world is gifted with Khao San Road.

Along its endless row of brazen lights and pumping bass, there's both the best and worst of everything in the city. Dingey bars compete for your attention alongside opulent nightclubs and questionable dining establishments. The only constant to be found is your currency conversion rate -- which favors you very heavily, no matter where you're from.

In a typically schizophrenic fashion, we have a love hate relationship with the place. We first arrived at Khao San from the airport simply because it's impossible not to -- step into any taxi with a confused look on your face and you'll turn up here sooner or later. Our plan was to use it as a stepping stone to Pattaya, where we hoped to find a remote beach compound surrounded by nothing but jungle and high-speed internet lines.

Not surprisingly, we returned days later, hopes and dreams crushed by the depravity of Pattaya beach. Joined by new members and with a couple nights rejuvenation under our belt, we aim to head out again tomorrow morning to Krabi Peninsula -- as much an antithesis to Pattaya as can be found. Let's hope the results are more to our satisfaction.

Offshore Yourself

Every small start-up has thought about it. For us, it was around a lunch table at an Indian buffet lunch spot in San Mateo. One of the engineers said, "we should move our office to a totally decked out compound in some exotic locale." It would have enough bedrooms for everybody, wireless access in the rooms AND at the infinity pool :) . . .okay, that's a bit much but a location that's secure enough that we don't have to worry about being kidnapped or robbed. Ideally somewhere close to the beach with ubiquitous/constant access. Ultra-cheap because it's in the developing world. Inspiring because we're somewhere incredibly different and new. Team-building because we'll be with each other 24x7 going through this adventure together. Productive because we'll be spending 15 hours a day developing new products and services. We would call it Swoosh Phuket, or Swoosh Cabo, or Swoosh Samoa. . . We basically would Offshore ourselves!

Why should any company ever do this? No doubt that for the right developers, this would be by far the most exciting way to build technology. . . ever. But us entrepreneurs all know that's not enough. We're here to build a business, to change the world, to scale and grow and be profitable. So when do you take a trip like this? At the core of any adventure or journey from Homer's Odyssey to our Swoosh Offshore experiment is the concept of regeneration. Over time we all get into our routines, we get used to how we did things yesterday, and so we do them the same today. After too much time every business gets rigid in its thinking and its execution. For a start-up, rigidity is a death-knell. Especially for Swoosh. . . . we started our company 4 years too early. . . only now is the market catching up to our ideas and technology. That's potentially 4 years of rigidity built into my company. We need renewal as bad as any large tech company that's gotten used to business as usual.

Re-launch your company. Rewrite your core client software; rewrite your backend systems, re-think and redesign your website and customer touch-points. Renew your thinking. Renew your inspiration. Renew your creativity. Breathe life into your company. Innovate your routine. Rebrand. Refocus. Regenerate. This is what you do when you offshore yourself. This is the Red Swoosh experiment for the next 6 weeks. We'll be blogging from Thailand.

Keep up with our adventures, our product & technology development. . . and let us know what you think. . .

Travis - chief swoosher