Danielle Morrill

I’m onboard my return flight from D.C. with Kevin and so happy to be coming home to San Francisco. I’ve basically been on the road for two weeks, last week I was in Seattle for the Seattle 2.0 awards and then I made a quick flight back to SF Friday to do a 12 hour turnaround where I repack and jump onboard the redeye to New York with Adam for the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon. Flying the redeye can be painful since usually i don’t fall asleep, but it does save money on a hotel — which is worth it for New York. Fortunately I flew Virgin America, and the sleep deprivation caught up to me and i was asleep before we even took off.

We got to New York, and due to last minute planning we didn’t actually have a place to stay yet. Fortunately, our friend David Lifson from Postling connected with us on Twitter and he and his girlfriend met us over at Dogpatch Labs to drop our backs and grab dim sum. $4 per person dim sum in Manhattan – amazing!

We parted ways with them after lunch (they were headed up to the Apple store to get their iPad!) and headed over to the conference location to get ready for the hackathon. New York is so awesome, jump in a cab and we’re there. So the hacakthon begins, we have a little table for Twilio and try to chat with as many people as we can. Its so amazing having people walk up saying they already use Twilio, and even more incredible when they gush about how much they love the API. By late in the night, a handful of the hacks being created were using the Twilio API (including the Mr.Stabby robot from NYC Resistor!) and everything was going well, but the one problem was we still didn’t have a place to sleep.

Fortunately, the AirBNB folks were at the event too and offered to help us with our search. I had been working the website all day for an affordable place (hotels were coming up on Priceline for a minimum of $600) and around 10pm we got a message back letting us know we could get a 1 bedroom apartment in Soho for just $190 per night ($95 per person!!). I razzed the landlord bait about he bad reviews he got for cleanliness to make sure he would take care of it before we arrived, and we headed out. All in all, when we got there it was clean enough to fall asleep and thats all that really mattered.

The rest of the New York trip went smoothly, including many highlights:

• new friends from SimpleGeo
• Catching up with Jeremiah and the MediaTemple crew
• Awesome app demos from 6 hackathon projewvts using Twilio
• camping out at Fedex off for 5 hours to make sure we got collateral to our friends at TechCrunch by 3am
• A walking tour of parts of New York with Tim from Foursquare, followed by several games of shuffleboard
• delicious steak dinner at Quality Meats, courtesy of Bradley from 2tor
• meeting Cyan, founder of Zivity.com
• extending my streak of awesome iphone photos of the Empire State building to 3 trips in a row (link)

On Tuesday afternoon, with Disrupt still in full swing and the rest of the evangelism team headed to Colorado for Cloudcamp and Gluecon, I hopped my short flight to DC to meet up with my husband and get us all set up to represent at O’Reillys Gov 2.0 Expo at the a washington Convention center. Major discovery: the JetBlue terminal in JFK has these little counters where you can sit and order food to be delivered to you. I didn’t use it this time, but what an awesome idea!

Connected with Kevin at the airport after a three hour wait and we headed to a place i had booked us, a 2 bedroom townhouse within walking distane of the convention center. We arrived in a neighborhood that was pretty rundown (the house next door had all the windows busted out) and were greeted by our host and a friend of hers (a woman) carrying a gun – turns out she is a police officer but i am just not used to that i guess. We were only getting a room, turns out there was a long term tenant in the place and airBNB had listed it wrong. $149 per night for a room in. A house in a crappy neighborhood we couldn’t walk around in at night seemed lame, so we spent one night and switched to a hotel for just $10 per night more and lucked out and got a huge suite because things were slow! Two days of tradeshow goodness, which pretty much amounts to education people about Twilio and cloud technologies in general, collecting businesss cards, and dreaming up new uses cases. I spent Friday in the hotel room catching up on work and that brings me to today, where we worked and went to the National Gallery to check out the sculptures (my favorite medium) before heading back.

And there you have it, links and typo fixes coming later when I’m not on the iPad. Happy to be bak and hope to see many of you soon

I’m here in New York for the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon, which is wrapping up the demos and announcing the winners of a 28 hour hack session that began yesterday and spanned into the early morning hours today.

Hacks Using the Twilio API

Adam and I arrived early yesterday to set up a little table and then find out what people wanted to build.  We hung out with a lot of different teams, and tried to offer our help and brainstorming skills. Originally, we had been thinking of doing our own hack project but wound up never starting it because we were in so many awesome conversations.

I’ve been liveblogging the demos that involve the Twilio API on the Twilio blog, including snapping quick videos of them with my HD Flip Mino.  Congratulations to Groop.ly, NewsCred, FBcall, Phonzy, and Mr.Stabby for successfully creating your projects and demoing on the big stage here.

Mr.Stabby Video!

Check out the videos here, and my blog post on Twilio.

The Winners

The winners will each get to demo on Wednesday to a packed house

• Future Mario
• Twitter Demographics
• WorstPhoneEver

Honorable Mentions:

• iPad Safety Strap
• Mr.Stabby

Now onwards to see which of the 100 startups presenting wins the TechCrunch Disrupt cup during the conference this week!

Today I went to Ikea to get new furniture for our loft, and I brought my iPhone and iPad.  The iPhone battery was at 20% when we walked in, despite sitting on the charger the entire car ride from SOMA to Emeryville. Fortunately, my iPad was a little more up for the game.

We wandered the store, discussing colors and motifs that would work with our post dot com crash modern pad.  A lot of birch was in order, and in fact we were getting a little burned out on the uber-Malm look.  After looking at the piece I really liked, we realize their might be more furniture in the unique grey-brown color that we hadn’t considered, so I resorted to a quick scan of the Ikea store on my iPad.

I never realized how useful the Ikea website is for in-store experience before! Before I knew it, I was constructing a shopping list and checking the availability of items in the colors I wanted in the store’s stock.  I even found things I didn’t realize the store had at all, which we then went and tracked down in the store.

Overall, we ended up spending 3x more than we had planned because we found a lot more of what we were looking for than we had bargained for. I remember over a year ago I helped pull together a “Future of Retail” meetup group in Seattle, as a market research for my previous startup, and we discussed how technology could be used to create special in-store experiences.  I think that was early then, but is becoming more and more relevant now with a device like the iPad that I can reasonably carry in my purse and pull out at a moment’s notice.

Bottomline: iPad was very helpful

Someone asked about how I got into all of this marketing and PR stuff, and it began with this unauthorized interview with Mashable about the launch of the Whrrl iPhone app in the summer of 2007. So funny… how LBS was the hot topic then, and it is again now with the looming Foursquare acquisition. I’m happy I’m not working this anymore, but it was a lot of fun and still think offering these kinds of features and localized lead gen for business, footstreaming, location awareness, etc. are cool. Long interview, enjoy…

Time for some navel gazing, because just a couple hours ago marked 25 years since I entered the world at the first daughter of Daniel and Kathryn Clark. People always remark that life is so short, or life is so long, but lately I’ve been feeling like its just right.  I know I travel a ton, work like a maniac, am great at planning for the hyper short term (spontaneous) and super long term (procrastinator) but not as great in the middle, etc.  I really love being alive, I love the people I’ve chosen to spend my time on Earth with (Kevin, my family, my friends, my professional colleagues, etc.)

At 20, I wasn’t nearly as self-assured or confident in what I was doing, but I did know that I would be an entrepreneur.  In fact, I new I would be an entrepreneur when I was 17 working at McDonalds to pay for garage band gear, and when I was 15 working for the family business, and when I was 12 and visited my Dad’s startup in the Maritime building (heated with steam pipes) or when I was 9 and figured out how to get all the Moms on the block to contribute lemonade to our lemonade stand.  At each age, that idea of what I might do in the future took on different forms and when people asked, “what do you want to do when you grow up?” I would grasp around for the words to describe it.

Growing up I wasn’t taught that work was something to dread about adulthood, from my viewpoint it was an exciting adventure that I couldn’t wait to be a part of.   A place where applying your mind to problems earned you more than just a good grade, and more than just money, it earned satisfaction and personal fulfillment.  I always knew I would do work that I loved, because I never did anything I didn’t love.  The second the smell of McDonald’s Egg McMuffins became too disgusting our the dread mounted in my chest about spending another day helping people ship freight, I made the choice to move on.  Often I moved on without knowing what I would do next, fully confident that I could figure out how to make money paying the bills (building random websites, training old people how to use their computers, pulling espresso shots at the neighborhood coffee shop, etc).

I have extraordinary parents, who have stayed married in the face of plenty of challenges from rebellious kids (especially me) to financial hardship (multiple failed companies and near bankruptcy).  They’ve taught me so much about love and commitment.  I criticized them for staying married when I was younger, because I couldn’t see or understand their romance, but now that I’ve been married to Kevin for almost 3 years it makes a lot more sense.  Relationships with human beings are fragile, beautiful things to be treasured and appreciated – and my parents loved me even when I was behaving terribly, when I was their heart walking around in the big bad world they couldn’t protect me from, and they watched in fear as I danced with danger from time to time.  Fortunately (miraculously?) I kept on being right about decisions they thought were insane, from attending my senior year of high school part time to pursue my band (I was so ahead on credits) to dropping out of college to join the workforce at a Fortune 500 company, to quitting that kick ass job 2 weeks short of my wedding to join a tech startup.

Beyond my parents, I have the kind of marriage I never could have imagined.  Kevin proposed to me when I was 21, and we were married when I was 22.  The divorce rates for people married our ages aren’t great (37% chance for me, 22% for him) and a lot of people were skeptical when our on-again off-again relationship turned serious after 2 years of dating.  Getting married young is probably the riskiest thing I’ve ever done, and the one agreement we came to was that I needed to have the space and freedom to fully discover who I am – outside the marriage.  We weren’t going to be a hyper co-dependent couple, and I wasn’t going to have any kids for a long time (right now the plan is to revisit the topic when I’m 30).  Instead, we would travel, live abroad, take turns doing startups, and development independent circles of friends.  All the things we saw married couples NOT doing, and then complaining about as they filled out the paperwork for divorce.  Not a guarantee of happiness, but certainly helpful.  Since our marriage, I’ve worked on 3 startups and Kevin left his long-time role at Microsoft after living in China for 6 months.  We’ve lived in separate states and/or countries for 50% of the time we’ve been married, made countless friends, founded a company together and travelled a ton.  In short, my marriage is my grandest ongoing adventure.

Looking into the future…

I’m more open about my past, and guarded about my future.  The future for my company is probably the most clear, and everything else follows from there.  I know that when I leave this startup there are 2 things I will do: 1) take a trip to the remaining continents I haven’t been to with my best friend D’Laina 2) catch up on sleep.  Then I’ll probably found a company of my own, I’m ready.  Will we continue to live in the Bay Area – probably, since the heart of the tech industry is here.  Will we ever move back into our blue house in Kingsgate – probaby, when we’re older?  I’d love to have kids there, if I have kids at all.  Will my life continue to be full of passionate, adventure and people I love – definitely.  And being certain of that is enough for me.

After a couple weeks at home, except for that quick trip up to Seattle for Valentine’s Day and my going away party, I’ve been free of business travel.  I love to travel, but it was good to take some time to be in the office with the team and we got SMS launched.  Sometimes its like we run so hard, our feet don’t even touch down.  Well, I had my time to touch down briefly.  I mean, I did laundry so that means I came home a few nights.  My little room is bursting with stuff… clothes and gadgets, but mostly with papers and books and ideas and my anxiousness to become more connected in this new town.

Tomorrow I’m on the road again, headed to Las Vegas for LeadsCon for a couple days, then back home in San Francisco Thursday and then out again to Sunday for a trip to New York where I’ll be doing some speaking and meeting with cool geeks to spread the word about Twilio, host a hackathon, and maybe even find some people we’d like to hire.  So I’m back late Thursday night from that trip and home for about a week, then off to South by Southwest.  And so it goes.

This song made me think about what its like being on the road.  I’m happy, although I do wish I had heeded my Dad’s advice to travel light and hadn’t bough the house back in ’07. Oh well, live and learn I guess.  Hopefully I’ll see you in my travels.

While I love my DanielleMorrill.com blog, it is pretty much a smattering of random things I am thinking about and pieces of my personal life.  And don’t worry, I won’t stop writing here, but I am looking forward to creating a more structured home for all my ideas about how marketing can be done effectively at startups.

Lately, I’ve been following along more closely with Eric Ries, Steve Blank and others who are talking about Lean Startup.  I think it is really cool that “lean” has finally made it down from the ivory tower of Six Sigma to the nerf gun wielding floppy haired startup kids.  And with the state of the economy, it couldn’t come at a better time.

How I Came To Love Lean

When I was 15, I started  working for my Dad’s newly formed financial consulting company (he’s blogging now, woo!).  After two failed startups that had attempted to marry technology and the finance/healthcare benefits industry he was ready to strike out on his own, and I served as his tech-support/office-manager/generalist.  It was my sophomore year of high school, and the first year I really got to know my road-warrior of a father.  As consult, the business was basically a one-man-show so I began to set up processes that would help things like reporting to scale as we took on more customers.  The first business book I ever took down from his shelf was The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox, and it was the seminal work that brought the concept of lean manufacturing to the average businessman when it was published in 1984.

I was fascinated by the “Theory of Constraints” – the idea that you have to run your business in a way that is appropriate to your constraints.  You have a broken machine, materials shortage, broken supply chain, damaged orders?  Figure out how to restructure your processes to serve your end goals and take the reality of your situation into consideration.

Why “Constraint Marketing” for Startups?

Marketing in the technology world is more than just brand awareness, it’s a core distribution channel for consumer and enterprise products that are sold on the internet.  The new product supply chain isn’t interested in planes, trains, trucks, and boats.  Instead it is interested in channels like display advertising, social media, webinars, and ultimately a call-to-action that leads to conversion.

So what if we applied the rules of lean manufacturing and supply chain to startup marketing?  What would happen, what can we learn, and would be more effective marketers?  I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve heard marketers derided for not being cost conscious enough, or efficient enough – and in that way I think I have a lot in common with a plant manager at a factory.

I think my experiences working in logistics (Expeditors International) as well as on-site for highly productive lean manufacturing factory concerns such as a Genie Industries and distributors like Zumiez were some of the most fascinating and formative experiences of my life.  In the same way I am marrying the old and the new in telecommunications with Twilio, let me marry the old and new wisdom of product distribution for online products.  We’ll see where this goes… I’m looking forward to feedback.

Stay tuned, http://www.constraintmarketing.com will be live soon