Curebit stealing the design (and assets!) from 37Signals is prompting this post. But its been in the making for a while.

Terms like “starup junkie” or “startup dude” or “serial entrepreneur” are just so sexy right now (or maybe always have been in SV for a while) that young entrepreneurs get this feeling that they are invincible, above everyone/everything else and that anything/everything is fair game. Ripping off a contractor, screwing over an employee, plain reneging a signed legal contract, buying services that they have no money in the bank to pay for etc. etc.

Hustling is one thing. Ripping people/ideas/IP off is another.

People make mistakes, but as is obvious in this latest (Curebit) case the entrepreneur in question has no qualms, tries to justify the means and is least bit perturbed. See this twitter thread: https://twitter.com/#!/davemcclure/status/163310899376041985 (with Dave McClure playing referee…. he happens to have recently funded Curebit).

Everyone will make mistakes, but own up to it, say an unconditional sorry and move on. I think every entrepreneur needs to go through ethics training. Thoughts?

Priyanka and I spent 3 nights in Hyderabad, while there for a friends wedding. We made a vacation out of it and had a great time.

The highlight of the trip was our stay at The Park there. Even though the tripadvisor ratings for the hotel are wanting, its a great new hotel with a lot of potential. Overlooking the Hussain Sagar lake, the Hotel has a infinity pool, outdoor seating, a 24 hour cafe, 3 bars and excellent staff to round it off. The morning breakfast was the best morning food spread I’ve seen in a while. Highly recommend staying there if you find yourself in Hyderabad.

We also made our way to the Chowmahalla Palace which is worth a visit with 3-4 small palaces and exhibits. The Charminar was a bit of a disappointment. Its not been maintained, is in a super crowded market/neighborhood and just made us run to the nearest auto-rickshaw.

The Golconda Fort is a well worth a visit too. Go around 2-3pm, so that you can hire a guide and go all the way to the top. That will take 2-3 hours and that’ll be a great segway into the 6:30pm light and sound show in English inside the fort. The acoustics and science applied 700 years ago is impressive.

Apart from these places we made our way to a local mall (GVK-1), to the Shilparamam (think Delhi Haat) and of course to Paradise for their famous Mutton Biryani (not the best in Hyderabad, but pretty decent. Sit in their nicer airconditioned top floor, if you’d like a more relaxed experience!). The old city is a bit chaotic and dirty, but if the airport and the 11 km freeway to the city are any signs, things are improving for sure.

Overall we were pretty impressed with the city of Nizams and highly recommend it to anyone if you have 3-4 days.

Having lived in California for 4+ years now there is a lot to be thankful about. The beaches, sun (not in SF sadly), bounty of natural resources, fresh organic food etc. etc. There is a lot that sucks too (high taxes etc.) but thats for another day…..

But there are three things in the CA law that keep coming to my attention now and then. These are things that most other US states don’t have and make CA a much better state to be in.

No non-compete bullshit

Non-competes are evil. Plain and simple. California doesn’t respect, allow or recognize them. From Wikipedia: “Noncompete agreements are automatically void as a matter of law….”.

Even if you move to California from another state, and you had signed non-competes there, they are no longer valid or binding.

No service fees or expiration of Gift Cards

Retailers use a lot of tricks to make money. Even gift card loopholes are not beyond them. CA / Connecticut / MA are the only states that protect consumers against these things. Gift cards can never expire… period.

The recent online coupon craze from Groupon, LivingSocial, Freshguide etc. is another example. All these offers come with an expiration date, which is all fine. But the catch is when you don’t use these offers and they expire. In CA the base value you paid ($10 for a $20 coupon say) is always to be recognized by the small business. Meaning you never ever lose money you paid!

Limited private beaches

Most of the 1000 miles of CA coast is accessible by anyone. Yep, no private beaches. There are a few exceptions though, private beaches in Avalon, on Vandenberg Base and along the Central coast are but a few of the locations where you won’t be welcome.

Coastal access at the fancy Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay is a great example. The local/CA government made sure there is even a parking structure built on this property for people to park their cars (for FREE) and get coastal access.

There seems to be a big disconnect between project management, bug/issue tracking and source control solutions out there. Simply put in most companies these systems don’t talk to each other as much as they should.

How have I solved the problem. I’m using bitbucket.org for source control that talks nicely with LighthouseApp which I use mainly for bug-tracking (Milestones feature is nice… but only for bigger teams).

We don’t really use anything for project management per se, although we do use Highrise as our CRM system and it has a cool, “Cases” feature. So lets say we’re doing a site redesign I  create a new case and upload all relevant assets  / discussions to that case. Highrise comes with awesome email integration, so each case gets a unique email address and I can fwd emails to it, and they get attached to the case automagically. I think BaseCamp is for dedicated project management, but for now I can live with leveraging Highrise features.

So I started a new gig this week, and I have become addicted to using Mercurial in my previous job for revision control of code. Mercurial rocks !

I didn’t really want to host the repository myself and have the additional headache of backing it up etc. (we’re a small early stage startup). I used Assembla before, and its very mediocre, tries to offer everything and is using .htaccess based authentication, making me type my username and password multiple times, doesn’t support the native mercurial web view, offers trac for ticketing which sucks… etc. etc.

Then I came across BitBucket. These guys rock! Firstly its an inexpensive service to host your mercurial repositories; I will end up paying $5/month for hosting my dev/prod (upto 5) repositories with them. They offer issue tracking too (for which I am using LightHouse app). The mercurial integration is pretty deep, offers hooks which can send you emails, twitter, link to your bug tracking system etc. And its hosted so I don’t have to worry about backing it up, uptime, security/auth etc.

A shout out to BitBucket’s customer service. I am not even a paying customer yet (using the free version for now, till I need a “prod” repository) and they have been trying to resolve my complaints. For example I filed this enhancement request with them, asking them to writer me a broker to close/update my issues in Lighthouse app when I merge bugs etc. Turnaround time? < 1 day ! Their developer Jesper Noehr went out of his way, fixed a few bugs he inadvertently put into the broker code, launched the fixes and the feature overnight, and voila I have this feature out of the box.

Wish every company (hoping mine will be in this category too, when we launch!) had such good customer satisfaction! Thanks BitBucket and thanks Jesper!