Due to the nature of the content, it doesn’t show up really high on search engine results and Dipiti is different in that way. We specialize in the community content and we’re making sure that our search works very well with the natural language that’s used in these discussion forums.

In addition, we provide an added value, almost a Consumer Reports type of service, in that we rate the level of activity on a site and their privacy policies to make sure that we can provide trusted sources of information to our users.

We’ll still provide the link to the site but it won’t show as prominently in our results. We will flag it that it has a weak privacy policy – if it is going to capture their email addresses, for instance.

There is a very large base line of traffic for health, financial, legal and pet care questions.

The best quantification I can give you is that, in a given year about 80% of American’s will search for health care information online.

The need for Dipiti is really illustrated by the fact that less than 16% of those who search for health care related information actually find what they’re looking for.

The, “boil the ocean” approach, the broad approach that Google provides is extremely valuable. And I know that I use it many times a day. But, also, there isn’t a week that goes by where I don’t have multiple questions of my own that Dipiti can be a good service for.

Establishing the trust with our user community and making sure that we have those urgent matters – not just a single specific market such as health care. But, expanding to those other matters that are important in people’s lives gives us a broad enough scope to be a frequent-return destination site.

It still maintains the focus that we need in order to provide category-specific search behavior that really delivers superior results to what a very broad search solution like Google can provide.

And that’s something that Dipiti is trying to do in a very focused way and that other companies are trying to do as well. I do think that it is going to be a very high growth segment within the Internet; adding the human filter to that – the human intelligence – so everything is not machine driven. But we can make some real assessments based on inspection of those sites is labor intensive but it also brings an additional dimension of value that our user community seems to appreciate very much.

Really, our objective is to, as you suggest, expose as many people as possible to what Dipiti offers and build a user community that way. Some of that will be on our site, some of that will be with partners who embed a search widget, for instance, in their own site.

Online advertising and professional referrals are our primary sources of revenue as we go forward. We actually look forward to sharing that revenue with our partners.

Beyond that, really it’s about respecting that user base and building a team that is enthusiastic about delivering something new and different that our users appreciate. And that enthusiasm is contagious, both inside the business as well as with the user community.

The investment partners that are required to support those businesses in the early stages and the Seattle venture capital community are really refreshing to work with. I’ve enjoyed all of my conversations with the different firms here.

And the variety of service providers that are needed in order to support early stage companies, because they’re not going to do everything internally. They need to reach outside the walls and develop the partnerships, both in terms of a vendor base with whom they can collaborate as well as the other companies they can partner with to fuel each other’s growth.

Certainly we need a great skill set, but also the flexibility and excitement of working broadly across the organization, particularly at the beginning when you have a pretty small team. In my daily life I go from being a CEO, to a direct sales person, to being the chief cook and bottle washer. And that’s something that everyone has to be able to enjoy and work with fluidly as demands on the organization change.

And then we look for everyone’s ability to scale with the organization; to bring some real distinctive capabilities over time. And when you can find employees that bring that mix of talents then you’ve got something really special. And we have that here at Dipiti.

Picnik is very easy. There is nothing to download. There is no installation process. All you have to do is open up any browser on any computer and you have a whole wealth of photo editing super powers.

Even as recently as eighteen months to two years ago, people were still thinking that software delivery was downloadable executables or bits that would actually come on a DVD that you have to buy off the shelf. This whole notion of delivering software applications, not just documents but applications, that are interactive and dynamic and rich over the Web was really a new concept. They had started thinking about that and laying the groundwork for that.

They then began coming up with ideas for Web application that would be really challenging. Essentially, they wanted to find an application that everyone else was saying would be impossible.

At the time there were some people that were already starting to do things like word processors or spreadsheets. Nobody was tackling the photo editing problem. The second insight was if we are going to do a Web application, then let’s do just an awesome and fun photo editor. That’s when Picnik was born.

People will notice the thing that is hard to do. If you pull it off, you are probably limiting, the set of competitors that you are going to have in your space. You are limiting it to either the companies with the most talent or the most resources to bring to bear, sometimes both. You are not going to necessarily have everybody in their garage working on the same thing, so that’s one of the reasons why photo editing was interesting to us.

Photo editing cuts across many different market segments. It doesn’t matter if you are a young kid who spends the majority of her time on MySpace or Facebook all the way on up to the, what I call the female CIO of the family, the chief information officer of the family whose job it is to organize the family’s photos, to print them out, to make greeting cards and send them to the grandparents, to make birthday cards, things like that.

Going further to older, knowledge workers or to people who traditionally don’t use technology very much but need to do so in the course of their work, such as real estate agents, who have to upload pictures to the MLS and make the pictures of those houses look great. To all of those segments, something like Picnik is highly relevant.

I think from the beginning we knew that both were opportunities and we have been pursuing both from the beginning.

As to the trade-offs between the two I would say that it definitely is easier to market directly to end consumers or to reach end consumers. I would say that it is a great testament to how incredibly efficient today’s Internet marketplace is that if you really have something that is valuable and it is out there. Granted, you have to reach a certain critical mass of utility and also a certain critical mass of buzz or general awareness on the part of users in the blogosphere and people talking about you and understanding how to find you.

Once you get there word spreads pretty darn quickly across broad consumers with or without strategic partners. As I look at both sides, both are incredibly valuable to us.

I would say more crucially on the development side, on the engineering side the team has done a fantastic job of again bouncing back and forth, especially earlier on when we were a smaller team, from, here’s a bunch of features that will go into the product that would reach the end user. Then we got to a point where then, OK that’s good. Let’s push those bits out there and see how they resonate.

Then, let’s take the next few weeks off from doing end user features and focus instead on working on an API.

Of course, when you have roads on the free side there is money on the table, if you will, if we don’t also take advantage of that traffic and serve up ads. Ads are an expected part of today’s Internet, for better or for worse, and there is revenue that can be gained from there.

Lastly, there is also revenue to be gained from Picnik being an end-to-end experience which is allowing people to go all the way from the beginning of their workflow to taking a photo and thinking about-what is it I want to do with it-to the end of the workflow where they may embody the photo in some way. They may want to print it out in some way. Put it on a mug or a t-shirt or make a calendar or cool greeting cards.

We have partnerships with print companies. The main one is where we do revenue sharing based on print products that are created using Picnik. That’s another means that we make revenue. There are others too that we are working on.

All of that is replicated, if you will, when we partner with a large distribution partner. When we partner with a Flickr or you see Picnik in Facebook or MySpace, what happens is that you will see all of these different ways of making revenue echoed or reflected again in that context.

That to me becomes a benchmark or a test of like could that some day be done. Can those things some day be done as Web applications instead of desktop applications? My answer is yes, I think you can do those things eventually. We can’t do that now, but eventually Moore’s law will come into place. The technologies that are going to be enabling whether they be Flash or Flex or Ruby on Rails and other things like that, they are going to get better and better and you are going to be able to do more and more.

I actually see no reason why the more Web application models will be curtailed or contained in any significant way.

So, with all due respect to folks that are working at Microsoft or any large corporation, I do believe that the advantages there are that you get used to having a lot of resources at your disposal. Things are just magically done for you, whether it’s how you actually file a trademark or patent an application, to pulling the trigger to hire more engineers or designers.

These are things that there’s all these wonderful processes in place to help you so that you don’t really have to worry about doing that much. But when you’re doing a startup, in a way when you unplug from the matrix all of the sudden you’re like, hey, the gritty real world, it’s tough out there. It’s a jungle out there and you’ve got to be really self-sufficient and do everything.

That definitely was an important realization. One is not better than the other. Like everything else in life, it’s just that you have to pick the trade-offs that you’re willing to make.

An addition difference is you don’t have to wait to be given permission, you don’t have to wait to have your analysis or the team’s conclusion be vetted in time by others. You have a quick meeting, you draw a conclusion, and you can move forward.

There were moments early on you stand around after the meeting and go, “Now what? Oh, we just go it. OK, go!” So, that was an important realization.

I would encourage others that, if there’s a way that they can self-fund or even angel-fund for the early stages. I think precisely because today’s Internet is so efficient, you should be able to get up and running pretty quickly and get a product or something out in front of real people, and get feedback from the marketplace telling you whether this sucks or it’s great.

You should be able to do that very quickly, inside of a year. That means that your costs don’t have to be very high.

We still feel that way. We still think in those terms that there’s directions and new places that we could take Picnik to that is uniquely suited to who we are as former game developers–so I hit the game analogy a little bit hard earlier precisely because we used to all make games for a living. We think our approach to product development, application development is a little bit different from most.

The second thing is that, again more generally, the marketplace values uniqueness. When you do something that by definition not a lot of people, people will pay attention to it and take notice and say, “Oh, that’s what I’ve been loving for. I’ve been looking for a lightweight, easy to access but very powerful and fun to use photo editor that I can use for all of my photo-editing needs, and here it is. Nobody else has done it, but these guys have done it.”

The goal for our company is to continue to transform Project Management with better tools that match the reality of today’s project teams. What we discovered, and what our team discovered, was that the tools on the market didn’t really work the way our team’s work and our goal was to fix that problem.

What we discovered is that the schedules are based on single point estimates which means that you’re giving one number to estimate something. And what that fails to do is capture the uncertainty inherent in pretty much everything we do.

LiquidPlanner allows you to capture and manage that uncertainty. We fundamentally change the way we approach scheduling. We call it probabilistic scheduling and we have a new scheduling engine that handle that.

The second thing that LiquidPlanner does is it looks at project management as the social application that it really is. We’ve redesigned everything from the ground up to keep people connected and engaged with the planning process.

Lastly, we learned that your planning tools really need to be a single source of truth and that requires a complete project environment, not just something used at the beginning of the project, but something that helps you execute throughout to the completion of the project.

The thing that we find really interesting from our research is that only half of our prospective customers actually use these tools, and instead are using things like spreadsheets, or white boards, or other alternatives. We think that a lot of planning, particularly casual projects, is not even captured in that. We’re focusing on expanding the market perspective. We look at the market in terms of the 36 million knowledge workers that are out there, just in the U.S.

We think that that’s the important segment that LiquidPlanner is really focused on, is today’s knowledge workers who are in an environment where everything is very highly collaborative, teams are living in project centric organizations, feedback is very rapid, you have short cycle times, and everything is highly transparent. That’s nothing like what the market was when project management tools of today were really created. Those really trace their roots back to the 1950′s when the Critical Path method was invented.

Our strategy is to drive awareness by getting this in the hands of as many people as we can on the front line. Because we actually thing the product is highly differentiated and really offers something new. So that’s how we’re initially going to market.

We’re finding in the people who have already signed up that that’s being validated. We’re seeing people in small and medium size businesses coming to us saying this is really what they’re looking for. And that’s really helping us guide what the definitive go to market strategy will be.

We’re also seeing a lot of independent teams in larger organizations reach out to us, as well. So we kind of have this strategy of bringing innovation to the sales model, as well as bringing innovation to the product. And that’s kind of all I really want to say about it right now.

I realized I was doing startups within larger organizations and changing jobs every 18 months that I was kind of an entrepreneur so it was time to jump out and do something serious and put my mind where my mouth is.

When you take on an area like project management it comes with a great deal of responsibility. You’re building a tool that is going to be part of a large group of peoples’ daily lives; it’s going to hold their data which is precious to them; and it really, really helps to look at this problem from many different angles.

Before I ever got into management I was a front line developer for a decade so I understand the front line. I understand managing at a lead level. I understand managing managers as managers and even operating an executive role trying to manage a portfolio.

One of the things I did was at Expedia start the company’s first project management office and that was an amazing learning experience. And that’s a perspective you can only get by taking a sort of long and varied journey through business.

I think you have to look for somebody who is a learner; somebody who has a hunger to keep learning and to keep problem solving and to keep doing something meaningful.

Often times in a corporate setting a lot of people have lost their fire for taking on new challenges or big challenges like this and that’s something you want to look for. Your hiring process has to be quite sound and that’s something I learned at Expedia. You have to find people who are willing to think big and join your long term strategic plan.

And when you talk to people you kind of have to dig a little bit and find out if that’s who they really are. And in terms of sort of getting diversity for the team, you look for people who maybe scare you a little bit. People who are smarter than you are and if you do that consistently you end up just rating the bar on the team every time you hire somebody.

Google is focused almost completely on unstructured data like the Web and we are focused on structured data. There are a number of similarities between the companies. We were spun out of Stanford like Google, working down the hall from them. And, whereas the Google gang was focused on unstructured data, we’re focused totally on structured data, and that’s why I use the word “database.” We think databases like Excel–which by the way, is a database contrary to popular belief–and Access and SQL Server and Oracle and Postres and MySQL, they’re just too hard to use and understand and that’s the problem we solve.

We have created a really simple user interface, it’s drag and drop and exploratory. It has unlimited undo so you can never break anything. Users can install the product in 90 seconds, connect to data of any size, shape, language, or subject in 30 seconds, and be asking their own questions of that data interactively within a couple of minutes. The best way to see whether or not what I’m saying is true is to go to our website and get a free downloadable trial in 90 seconds.

Regardless of whether it’s that Excel case or that giant billion-row case. It’s just too hard for your human brain to sit there and interrogate a database. It’s just too hard. It should be as easy, so to speak, as searching the Web. Right? Now, maybe that’s a goal we’ll never quite get to, but it should be simple and drag and drop and learnable in a few minutes. How easy is it for you, right now, to open some data and just start asking some rapid-fire questions of it. That’s what Tableau enables.

No matter what stage you are you need a simple, visual, high performance interface that you can point to that data and interrogate it, ask it questions, explore it, browse it, examine it, drill into it, zoom up, pivot it around, and give information. That’s true no matter, really, what state your data is in.

I like to think in terms of users. In terms of revenue, this is obviously in the billions of dollars. There are quite literally billions of databases on the planet. I would argue that 98% of them are too hard to use. I can tell you that from personal experience.

If you look at that market, there are certainly no fewer than five million users of a product like that. If you look at our customers and sales today, you will just see an intoxicating array of industries from, literally, three-letter secret agencies to corner grocers to restaurants to supply chain experts. Our biggest customer is Microsoft, our second biggest customer is Google. I mean, you can’t name an industry or a function or a country or a job profession that isn’t benefiting from Tableau’s discovery today. So although we’re in the tens of thousands of users today, we will not stop until we cross at least the low millions of users.

I think the good thing about that book and that thinking is that it correctly identifies the fact that hey you’re never going to get your 100,000th user without first getting your 50,000th user. You’re never going to get that user without getting your 1,000th user and so on and so forth and back. And so you have to try to find a way to carve that pyramid of opportunity up and advance. I think the analogy they use is kind of one bowling pin at a time.

The unfortunate thing that I have just discovered from people who have read that book is they tend to immediately think that means an industry. You know, so I’ve seen young growth companies just sit there and kind of say, “OK, we’re going to pick the financial industry!” or “We’re going to go pick the retail industry!” or “We’re going to go pick the defense in government!” and they kind of do these things on Power Point slides and offsites without any customers in the room.

And they’re not really thinking through whether or not an industry-based targeting is really the right way to attack the bowling pin. So for us, we have found that industry actually isn’t useful, at all, even though people recommend it to us quite a bit. But instead it’s more of a job function.

So, as I said earlier, you can’t name an industry that isn’t buying Tableau in significant volume anymore, and, in fact, the distribution is pretty uniform from defense, to retail, to government and finance, and, boy, just every industry you can name.

But I will say you’re still looking for early adopters right? And for us an early adopter is usually a business line manager or an analyst or an executive who’s very data-oriented of some kind. Many of our customers work in groups responsible for working with data, but not all of them. Sometimes, it’s just a…it’s a chief marketing officer or a VP of sales or supply chain director or, actually at Google, their HR department was the first group who discovered us.

And so it really–the biggest criteria for us is trying to put ourselves, put our message and put our brand in places where people who care about data and information are congregating. So I guess that’s our marketing strategy at 30,000 feet.

Also, each co-founder has to bring something substantial as a contribution not just in the company’s first year but in the company’s first ten years. In our particular case, the key inventor of our technology is Dr. Chris Stolte who is a Ph.D. student of Pat’s. Chris is really a worldwide expert and award decorated researcher into the fields of database querying and database optimization and data analytics and information visualization.

We also have Professor Pat Hanrahan who’s probably one of the most important computer scientists in our country. His resume you can research online. It speaks for itself. He co-founded, he was one of the founding employees of Pixar, the animation studio, which revolutionized the world of animated film.

My whole background was in data and analytics. So I was very much bringing the business users’ perspective of how to do good analysis: what the problems with databases were, what the challenges of businesses and organizations had, trying to better understand information.

I meet a lot of entrepreneurs who are kind of obsessed with culture and they just act very on and “we need to be very careful about the culture and we need to write it all down and we need to post it.” And that hasn’t really been our style and then, and I actually think that can be a little condescending.

The fact is your biggest goal as a founder is to hire more fantastic people, in fact, hopefully better people than you are. Better, smarter, more accomplished. That’s your goal. And so, the start-ups who kind of post all their values and what their culture is going to be like and write it all down really early before people’s personality quirks and before the whole talented birth-base has really kind of an emerged for itself. I think can kind of force the issue and, actually, make the culture, I think, a little bit fake.

So our biggest cultural point at Tableau is number one: make sure everyone understands and then starts actively contributing to the mission of the company. Number two, that people feel like they’re in a great work environment, and they’re having fun and they’re learning new things every day, and are in jobs where they feel like they can succeed. So, they’re kind of higher-level things than just kind of writing down cultural bullet points.

People will often ballyhoo their attachment to a successful product or brand of some kind, which is great. You’ll, immediately, ask a follow-up question, “OK, so what did you, specifically, do to make that project a success?” Then, as they start to list those things that they can (often they can’t), and when they want to start to list those things, you then say, “What went into that decision? It all probably seems obvious now that that was good. It all probably seems obvious right now that Google’s home page shouldn’t be a portal but, how did you make that decision?”

Again, ten minutes later, you can tell clear as day whether they actually were one of the formative people who came up with the creative solutions to those difficult problems, because you can tell by their depth of thinking on the issue. When you try responding in an interview, intelligently, to a deep question about which you never, actually, thought very deeply, I can tell you weren’t one of the key creative problem solvers on the team. So anyway, a little long winded answer but that’s the hardest thing to find, if you’re asking.

Then I went to Stanford Business School where I’m happy to say to have probably just one of the most amazing entrepreneurship programs from an educational perspective. Now, some people would say entrepreneurship can’t be taught, I think there’s a lot of truth to that, but it can be. Stanford does a really good job of it. After that, I actually founded my first software company with one of the other co-founders at Tableau who is Chris Stolte, the gentleman I have mentioned earlier. That was actually an information visualization set-up of a different variety. We invented a way to better render route maps and it had a successful outcome and was sold, and it’s now used by about a million people.

So when Tableau came along, I was looking at new entrepreneurial ideas, and I realized that software engineering plus entrepreneurship plus data analysis plus information visualization, this was really the culmination of everything I’ve ever done. I felt like I had the expertise to be a formative leader, at least, for the company’s first decade or so.

The biggest one I see is people spend too much. I don’t see all that many start-ups focusing on too many things. That’s a common criticism: that a start-up tried to do too many things. That does happen, but to me, it’s nowhere near the top of the list. Most start-ups figure out pretty fast that there’s no way they can do more than a couple of things well, so why bother. So that problem will tend to fix itself although, admittedly, not always.

So things like that are sort of seventh or eighth on the list of mistakes. But the big number one and number two, number one is you’re spending too much money too fast. You’re spending money ahead of customer attraction. Number two is you are not doing enough of the hard marketing and selling work early to get the feedback you need to inform your strategic choices and your product direction.

You’ll hear an entrepreneur or start-up group say, “Hey, there’s no way we can go show a customer this thing we’re trying to do or talk with them, because it doesn’t exist yet. You know, it’s like a chicken and the egg, right? We haven’t built it, and, therefore, how do we sell it? If we can’t sell it, therefore, we can’t get feedback on what to build. Boy, what do we do?”

Almost always when someone had said this, when I would then drill down on what they actually had, I found they had more than they thought they had. They’ve formed the business. They have a mission articulated. They have drawings for the things they’re going to build and the website they’re going to launch or the consulting service they’re going to promulgate. They have references from previous people they’ve worked with. They have intimate knowledge of some problem that somehow inspired them on what to do. Most people, I just say, “Literally, wrap that up as a package and go try selling it.” I think most entrepreneurs don’t do this because they’re afraid.

To be specific, even if your product isn’t built, take the drawings, take the PowerPoint. Unless it’s so confidential you can’t possibly tell it to anyone; take it to a customer, lay it out, and ask that person how much they’d pay. It’s an interesting conversation to have. You will find the minute you ask someone to pay or become a partner or to sign on to your service in some way, go sell a free beta–I guess, that’s an oxymoron–go invite people to sign up for a free beta. And then, as they say, “No.” or “I didn’t have enough time.” or “Boy, that’s not a priority now.” listen to what they’re saying, because if they’re saying they don’t have time and it’s not a priority and I just can’t get around to it, guess what? When the product is built, they’re going to be saying the same thing. So you might as well get that feedback, hard tough love feedback, early rather than later, so you can get the boat pointed in the right direction.

I think the fear is that even Shakespeare wrote hundreds of years ago, “Often your advantage becomes your disadvantage.” You know, Caesar’s unmistakable bullheadedness and strength and leadership and vision became hubris which caused his downfall. I mean, this is one of the great topics in leadership, generally, whether you’re talking about business leadership or political leadership, which is maybe a more timely subject. But often people’s greatest assets can, if they’re not very careful, it’s usually what the lesson is, if you’re not very careful, it can become your downfall.

In the case of entrepreneurs, just think about it. You got to be crazy to be an entrepreneur! You’ve got no customers, no product, no employees, no health care. You’ve got to leave a secure job, you have a hope and a vision and a dream. So the people who ultimately become entrepreneurs, whether they’re that corner shop owner or the founder of Cisco, they often share a real bullheadedness which is just a great strength. I mean, God bless Steve Job’s bullheadedness. Where would we be without it?

You have to be kind of obstinate and ignore what the data is telling you and go on instinct and don’t listen to criticism and just plow, plow, plow. We need entrepreneurs to have those traits. But I just happen to think when I’m, maybe in a coaching situation or being coached for that matter, is that often, you have to just be a little careful because that can become your weakness. So I think, to answer the fear question, often, people are where they are with their idea because they’re thinking differently.

So they don’t want to hear data or opinions that say it’s not going to work, and that’s partly what’s making them drive forward. But they can also become a real disadvantage because they stop listening or, in this case to your question, what I was on to there was they’re a little afraid actually. They are a little afraid after being in the basement working on this for a year and perfecting those schemas and PowerPoint slides and mission statements and sales points, they’re going to go out and be criticized whether they’re on the right track and so on.

But usually, they get over it. So my advice is that people don’t get over it; that everyone figures this out; they’re smart. It’s just that they often tend to wait; they withhold that stage of tough customer feedback just too late. In fact, I’ll put it this way, I’ve never seen a case where you did it too early. I’m sure there are cases of that but you can almost never be starting to get people’s opinions and tough feedback too early. If nothing else, it’ll just help spur your own thinking.

You’re asking the $64 million question of entrepreneurship. You know, that’s the hardest thing. You just can’t. It’s like saying, “But what does it take to win the World Series, anyway?” If I can list a thousand things, I would, but even I can barely remember them.

If I were to give two cents of advice, I would say number one is get co-founders or get advisers. Personally, at Tableau, I am always assured that we are going to make good decisions even when I may be veering towards the wrong decision, because I have co-founders, and, by the way, beyond co-founders, it’s a team, a whole management team and a whole company full of people with strong opinions and good insights and super high IQ who you can use to really find the right path. So I guess, in a word, stop trying to do it yourself is my best answer. You need a circle of teammates or co-founders or even advisors–some people do–who can help you not be too close to the decision that you can’t see, the forest for the trees anymore.

So certainly, ten years from now, without any question, we’ll be a public company. I think, in fact, we’ll be, hopefully, considering being a public company well within five years and selling products to people of all professions and industries all over the world in pursuit of that vision.