Dealyard.com, an online mass merchandiser that also offers daily deals on its e-commerce site, says it has bought Bulx.com, a flash sale e-retailer of home improvement products.

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• Tenacious execution
• Intelligence without arrogance
• Take the initiative
• Team above me
• Be a good person
• Respect for customers, partners, co-workers and investors
• Honesty & transparency
• Results focused
• Arete – reach your highest human potential
• Quality matters
• Communicate & share
• Never stop learning
• Never, ever, give up

I think like all entrepreneurs I am half skeptic, half optimist. I recently made a mistake I have made before; hopefully this will be the last time. When you are ready to launch your product, put on your optimist hat.

In 2008 I was working on my first for-profit venture, Boundaryless Brands. I had just finished building our first website, which was built around the physical inventory of Hayward Distributing, my friend’s company, and loaded it with around 200 products that his company would drop ship when we got orders. (This model eventually grew to an enterprise level e-commerce play and was sold in 2011.)

So I was all set and had put in real work, but then something happened I didn’t launch the site. For some reason I simply didn’t take what should be the next logical step: to drive relevant traffic to the site. I reached out to fellow entrepreneur and friend Brad Howard to ask for advice. It took all of five seconds for him to say, “Well put some money into Google Adwords, idiot; you just spent a month building this site.”

He was right, and I already knew what to do. But one thing had stopped me: that moment when I realized, “Shit – what if I was wrong about this whole idea?” It’s a scary moment when you finally get to the point where you have to see if your crazy idea will work. Even if you are following the lean start-up methodology and are thinking of it as your MVP, and everything is an experiment, and let’s see what customers say, it’s still scary. Sometimes you need to be kicked over the edge. Thanks, Brad.

It happened to me again recently, and this time – even though I knew better – it happened again. PaeDae launched our MVP around two weeks ago. It took us around five weeks to build, around three weeks of highly reusable technology and two weeks of a frontend system that we intend to toss or revamp at some point in the future. Either way I had that same feeling: “Oh shit, what if this doesn’t work?”

Lean is ingrained in me after 10 years of entrepreneurship. PaeDae is the sixth company I have started. Of the first five, four were successful, and one failed. My first five companies were totally bootstrapped (as you can see by this silly article), but for PaeDae, mostly based on reputation, we have raised significant cash pre-product. This made the “Oh shit” moment even more potent. What if I just lost not just my own money and time, but other people’s money? That’s something I never want to do.

The good news is, once the product is built you really do only have one thing to do: Just let ‘er rip. It’s still very early for our first product, and the initial data we got back was minimal and all over the place, as it tends to be early on. We have already had some major early learnings about our product and customers, and have made some real changes to our strategy based on that data. But the important thing is that it’s based on the data.

So to take a lesson I learned early in my career from Tom Suddes, a friend and mentor at ForImpact: Just do it – launch!

PaeDae is a fast growing start-up based in Santa Monica, California founded by experienced serial entrepreneurs with multiple exits. We are building a game-changing platform in the online game space. We are funded.

We are seeking a highly intelligent & optimistic full stack engineer who executes diligently and works well in a team environment. Imagine a job working with cool people, in a fast paced start-up, solving hard problems.

Responsibilities:

• Design and develop software for ad server, analytics, and optimization technologies
• Assist business development team with troubleshooting and quality control
• The ability to write high quality code, and deploy to live systems safely and efficiently
• Love of learning
• Great attitude
• Comfortable with the change & uncertainty that is inherent to start-ups
• Attention to detail
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Strong time management skills

Requirements:

• Must be comfortable working with MySQL and/or PostgreSQL. Any NoSQL experience is also valued.
• Ability to architect a RESTful service architecture
• …using JSON protocol for communications
• Strong understanding of Linux technologies
• Knowledge of jQuery, Javascript, and CSS3
• Knowledge and some experience with Linux/BSD and web servers (Apache/Lighttpd/nginx)
• Experience with AmazonAWS, or other cloud host provider
• Experience with Ruby on Rails & MVC

Huge Pluses:

• Experience within the game sector
• Experience with big data & machine learning
• Experience with mobile apps
• Experience with the Facebook API
• Experience with personalization algorithms

We may consider you even if you are missing one or more of the requirements if you show a love of learning and the ability to learn quickly.

Local candidates strongly preferred. We are open to relocating the right candidate, or potentially remote workers via constant interaction with online video.

Please, no recruiters. Direct applicants only.

Apply here: http://paedae.theresumator.com/apply/8eivzV/Senior-Engineer-Full-Stack.html

Recently PaeDae hired one of the most qualified engineers I have had the good fortune to work with. The most interesting thing is that he is completely self taught. He taught himself Perl at age 14 in El Salvador. Previously I have hired non-computer science degree engineers, but never a person without a college degree.  I believe that a bachelors or advanced  degree, at least in the world of start-ups, is more of a signal of intelligence and skill rather than a predictor. Its harder to hire someone without a degree because its harder to independently verify her skill set.

If more fuel for the self taught movement was needed it seems as though more classes that are valuable to entrepreneurs are being taught online. A great example is Pros. Armondo Fox and David Patterson  are taking a UC Berkeley class and making it available for free online. Check it out here: http://www.saas-class.org/.

If you are considering getting into the start-up world or just want to brush up on your skills this seems like a great opportunity.

My newest venture PaeDae brought on a graphic designer to work on some elements of our new game this week. I’m a product obsessed CEO, so I need to work very closely with our designer to craft our user interface. We also use a highly iterative process that requires extremely fast feedback, similar to the classic “throwing a paper ball at your coworker to get her attention” action we all have seen in our favorite sitcoms.

Our designer is local and he spent his first Monday in the office. Because he lives in Hollywood, and our office is in Santa Monica, it was about a 60 minute commute each way during traffic time. On Tuesday, we used Skype to communicate instead and he was able to share his desktop with us on our big screen from the comforts of his own home. The result was amazing! It was honestly probably better than him actually being in our office. Our lead engineer could look over my shoulder and see what he was working on to give him feedback as he needed it, as well as cut off ideas we didn’t like immediately, eliminating any wasted time on his part. We are incredibly lucky that our office has fiber optic cables so our connections is incredibly clear.

Way to go Skype! We love your product and, for the first time, I think remote working is actually producing similar if not comparable results for PaeDae. I definitely plan on using Skype more in the future.

I have officially started work on my latest venture PaeDae. PaeDae is a patent pending platform, set to change everything you thought you knew about online games. Sign up here for an advanced preview.

Some photos from Uluwatu, Bali.

Some Photos from Gili Air and Lombok

Ubud was impossibly lush and beautiful. We had a wonderful time driving ourselves around the countryside and living in a tropical rainforest. Almost anything a family needed was in the forest behind their house. I think our favorite part was the cooking class.  Check out the photos below.