Big Data is the new buzzword in the startup world. As with “social” and “real time” a lot of investors and entrepreneurs are betting big on this trend. These new companies are not only about Big Data, but about data in general. We can separate these startups in two categories:

Data marketplaces: Companies that sell datasets and enable people and institutions to trade their own datasets.

Data analysis tools: Companies that make brand new data analysis tools to handle big data problems or to make data analysis and visualization more easy.

What we are not seeing a lot are products for the end user.

Data products deliver insights not data

There a lot of products that contain a lot of data but aren’t data products.Twitter produces huge amounts of data, but their core is communication not data, the same can be said about Facebook. Not everybody wants to analyze data. People want insights not data. The next step we need to take in ”data science” is create more end user applications. How can we use data to make these products ? I can list four main themes:

Help people discover new things

Amazon product recommendations and Netflix movie suggestions are the most common references of data products to end users. However, we live in a world of information overload and saturation. Recommending movies is just a small step.

Help people learn about themselves

People love to know more about themselves and their friends. Mint can help users learn more about their finances and find patterns in their expenses. We can improve health, work and education by letting people find patterns and learn what works and doesn’t work.

Help People make decisions

Our decisions shapes our lives. We can’t make good decisions without the right data. FlightCaster alert people about flight delay hours before the airlines do, with this information people can take action and make more informed decisions.

Help people save time and money

Price comparison engines are everywhere. Instead of visiting a bunch of websites and collecting pricing and specs you can find what you want in seconds. What other kinds of information can we curate and deliver to our users to help them save time ?

I am excited to see what kind of products will emerge from the new breed of data startups. What kind of products do you want to see ?

As hackers we love making stuff. The idea of creating something from barely nothing attracts a lot of people to programming. But it turns out that a lot of programming work is fixing bugs and making modifications in stuff that already exists.

Your work doesn’t stop after your product launch, it just getting started. You need to keep your application running and also make lots of modifications and additions. There are two main attributes of your code base that needs constant attention:

Code Health

Code health is how “well” your code works.To keep your application healthy you need to fight bugs. This is the most common problem in developers mind. Your users will complain if your application has a lot of bugs. You will constantly be fighting to fix all bugs.

Code Fitness

Not all developers pay attention to this one. Code fitness is the capacity of your code to change. One person can be relatively healthy and not be fit. Your application can have very few bugs and still not be “fit”. You can make your application more fit by refactoring your code. If your application code base is constantly being refactored it will be more flexible over time.

Code Fitness Day

Balancing these needs is more difficult than it seems. In your day to day activities you are fighting infrastructure problems, bugs and developing more features to your product. You keep saying that “when I have the time U will change that crappy login class” or “that class has too much responsibility”. You never find the time and your code base will keep getting out of shape.

One solution for this problem is to keep a reserved time to make your code more fit. I like to take one full day every 2 weeks only to do refactoring. This is 10% of my total development time but it is enough to make a huge difference in the long run. You can do one day per month or even one day every 2 months, but you need to start now.

All companies have a culture. Some companies intentionally try to build one but even if they don’t, some kind of culture will emerge as a result relationships of employees and customers.

You can clearly see the distinct cultures of companies like Apple,Google and Amazon. This has a impact on the kind of people that want to work in these companies. When you have people with shared culture working in the same company the decisions made will reflect and empower this culture.

The right culture for your startup can be your most valuable asset because it will help you build the right team and help your team use their strengths to build better products. Your traits and the traits of your co-founders will inevitably have an impact on the way things are done in your startup.

While founders are often seen as the source of a company’s culture because, it is actually the first employees who have the greatest impact on it.

It seems obvious that the founders will choose early hires that fit with their own values, but this might not be aways the case. In the beginning founders have a huge challenge in hiring talented people, hiring talented people with culture fit can be an even more difficult problem.

The first employees of a company will define the future company culture because your culture is shaped by your environment. When we have only the founders, their culture are the company culture. The team will grow and the company workers will have more contact with each other than with the founders.

Companies with strong founders like Google owe parts of their culture to their early employees. The “don’t do evil” motto was created not by the founders or PR team, but by an early employee. The founders set the basic limits of the culture, but the early employees gives the final shape .

The early employees in your startup are much like founders themselves.You need to let them contribute in some way to your culture, embrace their ideas. Cultures are a collective creation.