A Quantum Immortal

As most of you know, I left Google a few months ago to join a hot new eCommerce startup (I can finally reveal it’s Commerce Sciences).

So far it’s been just Eyal, Aviv and myself working here at our Herzliya office.

Well …

We are pleased to announce that we secured an investment of more than 1.5 million dollars, and are now ready to spend that money on you!

That is … if you’re a really top notch developer looking for adventure, learning, teaching, cutting edge tools and challenges, a terrific product (still stealth mode, but we already have some clients) that will change the way we do eCommerce, together with a superior team.

You will be our second or third employee … plenty of room to grow, influence the team, the code/architecture and the product.
I was actually just planning to write a post about “why I love startups so much” when the news of the investment round was made public .. look forward to it.

I can’t elaborate publicly about the product, but technology wise I can say we’re working with Java 7 (thinking about Scala), Groovy, Play! Framework, Javascript/HTML/LessCss (will integrate Coffee Script first chance we get) Amazon EC2, git, and Trello.

Learning from failures is important, so I invite you to take a look at Google Baraza. It is “a Q&A site designed for Africans“, whatever that means.

From the looks of it, it seems to be a clone of the Stack Overflow / OSQA / Quora models. What’s unique about it? Nothing, as far as I can tell. My question about this got little informative responses (the most pathetic response was “Because it’s Google, it’s cool.”).

The site seems plagued with questions such as where can we find girls to sex, and How can i handle a nagging wife.

Every startup or project should be treated as an experiment. At the start, you think you have “The Spark”, that undefinable quality that will make your project a success. Most startups are copies or combinations of existing ideas, there’s nothing wrong with that. Before Google, there was Alta Vista, and before Facebook, MySpace. But as we know, 90% of all startups are destined to fail. Better to fail early than lumber around stuck in a limbo forever. If I were leading the Google Baraza team now, I would decide now is the correct time to fail.