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Continue reading →: Book Review: Getting Real by 37 Signals
Back in 2006 when I was diving full-time into MetaGeek and hired Brian Tuttle to join me, 37 Signals was the “it” startup in my world. They were a small company making BaseCamp for project management and publishing a blog with strong opinions about how to build a successful business.…
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Continue reading →: Book Review: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte
I have no formal education in data visualization. When I developed the first version of Chanalyzer, the display mimicked Agilent and Tektronix spectrum analyzers. Chanalyzer 2.0 innovated slightly in that it showed multiple views of the data simultaneously, but each view was still mimicking Agilent and Tektronix. It wasn’t until…
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Continue reading →: Retrospective 2008 – Is MetaGeek a Hardware or a Software Company?In early 2008 MetaGeek had grown to a handful of people. We were selling Wi-Spy 2.4x, which was the first Wi-Spy that we had custom designed for us. This was still 2.4 GHz only, but with much better resolution than the original Wi-Spy, which was a wireless mouse dongle with…
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Continue reading →: From the Archives – It’s Time to End the 40-Hour Work Week Requirement for Salaried JobsOriginally published April 21, 2021 The United States has a false perception that all white collar jobs must be “full time” jobs. You’re either all in, or you’re out. And let’s be honest, “full time” really means more than 40 hours per week. The overwhelming majority of jobs that are…
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Continue reading →: From the Archives – Scrum, It’s Not Just for Software AnymoreOriginally published April 22, 2015 “I will never not do Scrum again” ~Jay Bowen, MetaGeek’s Fearless Marketing Leader MetaGeek believes in Scrum. Completely. Our software teams have been “agile” since 2010, and after reading Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time we decided…
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Continue reading →: From the Archives – How We Unsucked Our Hiring ProcessOriginally published April 4, 2015 Firing people sucks. If you’ve ever had to do it, you know how awful it is. As the CEO of a growing startup, I feel responsible for every person we’ve fired. After the first few firings of people that were obviously not good fits for…
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Continue reading →: From the Archives – The Ultimate Pairing DeskOriginally published March 27, 2015 We believe that two heads are better than one. Pairing together to work on a project is better than having a meeting with half a dozen people to discuss how a project could be implemented. At MetaGeek, we’ve taken the concept of “pair programming” to…
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Continue reading →: From the Archives – 20% Time at MetaGeekOriginally published March 20, 2011 Last August we started a 20% Time program similar to Google, 3M and Westinghouse*. Everyone at MetaGeek can take up to one day a week to work on projects of their own creation… and I mean everyone, not just engineering. Marketing, finance, shipping… full-time, part-time,…
I’m Ryan
And this is a retrospective of the sixteen years from founding to selling MetaGeek. Beginning as a “side hustle” that quickly became a bootstrapped tech startup. We survived the 2008 recession, new product successes and new product failures. We learned through growing pains and shrinking pains. Lots of things went well, and lots of things didn’t go so well. This blog will explore it all…
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A Founder's Retrospective 