Krillionology: where local and commerce connect

By Design 1: Interior Design on a Budget

One of Krillion's founding principles is the belief that design is a great differentiator. Everything we do, create and touch should be infused with that core value, but living up to the goal can be challenging for a startup with limited resources. Case in point; our office space in downtown Mountain View comfortably situated on the residential/commercial boundary had great natural light from a bank of front windows and skylights, but little else going for it. The one-time grocery store turned mosque turned ISP looked tired and run down. Here's what we did to make it an inviting workspace that would improve our chances to hire great people.

1. Clean. The windows had accumulated a patina of grime that Dickens might have written about and our overhead lighting was an entomologist's dream. Whoever said the Amazon had the world's greatest diversity of insect life never saw our fluorescent fixtures before we cleaned them.

2. Paint. This gave us the most bang for the buck. It would have been easy to skip this step and just bring in furniture. We resisted and painted the place ourselves using a paint sprayer and over 900 yards of 3M blue tape. Cool, clean colors.

3. IKEA. We could quite easily hang a sign in the window announcing ourselves as a local IKEA showroom. They're all family. GALANT (desks), MIKAEL (rolling files), JOAKIM (task chairs), JULES (reception chairs), LACK (coffee tables), KLIPPAN (loveseats), FLYTTA (kitchen cart/printer stand), MAGIKER (shelf units), GRÖNÖ (lamps), KLUDD (notice boards), KLYKA (uplights), KOLJA (mirrors). Assemble these in any combination and you'd have a nice setup.

4. A little Imagination. After the fresh coat of paint the walls still needed a some visual interest, so we decided to mount our own architectural panel design. Spaced two feet apart these 4' x 8' panels of veneered pre-finished plywood were a good match for the birch IKEA furniture. To make them functional we added two KLUDD tempered-glass notice boards to each and gave the piece some dramatic punch with a KLYKA uplight. Not including our considerable sweat equity the ten panels cost $100 each. If we'd hired an architect or consultant the cost would easily have been ten times that much. We'll update this post with some more detailed notes and pictures soon.

5. Weird Stuff. This Sunnyvale CA outfit is an amazing source for the technological detritus of companies big and small. Not only does it warehouse a fabulous collection of cables (network, power) at great prices but it also has a fascinating assortment of items useful and useless that reminds us not to get too hooked on the latest gadgets. Sooner or later they all end up in a bin at Weird Stuff.

We're not done yet and continue to add new details to the space to make it comfortable, useable and fun. Next up is a coffee bar for informal meetings and lunch. It's part of the overall vision of an open, multi-purpose space that encourages collaboration; and that's by design.

Routers, Redbacks and Switches Oh My!

There was a momentary pause as if the AT&T technician was pondering the enormity of what he was about to say... we may have to do a "redback". Hell I thought, not that... and then it dawned on me I had no idea what he was talking about.

"What's a redback?" Somewhere in midst of his answer I zoned out, and began channeling a Brian Regan bit. "The manifold flap-coil was overheating, and the hydro-pin... "

 

(roll flashback)

Three weeks earlier, the office was taking shape, the computers had arrived and Roger had us wired and ready to go. Our Mikaels assembled, we put up the site and enjoyed our first productive days as a connected company. And then the network started to go down; at first sporadically we'd lose connectivity for 20 seconds and Outlook would complain it couldn't connect to the Exchange server. We noted the problem and carried on but within a couple of days this was happening every ten minutes and the outages lasted for minutes at a time. We called AT&T support and arranged for a technician to come out.

 

Thus began a parade of "inside" and "outside" repairman each one more clueless than his predecessor (as if we were part of some remedial training exercise for delinquent techs). "I'm here about your "deisel" (DSL) he said, his farm overalls festooned with pens, screwdrivers and notepads  - a giant toolbelt containing what appeared to be the world's largest Ti calculator strung around his waste. In awe we took him to the server room and let him do his thing. Ten minutes later he re-emerged and told us "your deisel is workin' fine... I checked the wires" and then he left. Not surprisingly the service cut out moments after his overalls left the building and Roger was immediately back on the phone with AT&T.

As our support tickets grew so did our respect for Roger's patience. Call after call he would walk another representative through the problem history and arrange another service call. Before it was over we'd have no less than a dozen visits and waste several hours on the phone with American Time and Trouble. Among ourselves we began to suspect someone had inadvertently wired our service to a dimmer switch in the central office (which ironically, is located 100 feet from our building). We might have confirmed that theory too if the building had a single window in its brick facade.

So we waited while they rebooted, changed our wiring and replaced our router twice before we finally convinced them the problem had nothing to do with our setup... "Houston YOU have a problem"

 

That started a round of changes at their end. There was a port switch (nope) and the bright fellow who decided to cut our speed in half to stabilize things (nope) before we reached the point where this post began, the redback! Swapping redbacks is apparently the ISP equivalent of a constitutional amendment. Well, even that didn't work, so we were left with no alternative but to call for replacements. I don't suppose Comcast installers usually get a standing ovation just for showing up. Ours did.

A month later, our Comcast network is stable and fast and though the ATT DSL is still coming in, we've yet to hook it up to our dual WAN router. What's truly sad about the whole episode is the missed opportunity to blog about the disaster as it occurred. We couldn't have scripted it.

Krillion recruiting, some assembly required

When a friend mistook our office for a furniture showroom our IKEA pedigree was assured and a Krillion tradition was born. You see, the Swedish giant's desks, chairs, tables, and accessories feature heavily in the mix and every stitch was hand assembled by the team. Generally we made quick work of it. The universal instructions weren't always clear but we had the Birch on the run until we met our match in Mikael. Whoever said good things come in small packages has never assembled a Mikael.

Staring at those 843 parts, allen key in hand is when it hit us. Google is reputed to have a tough, quirky hiring process but they don't ask new hires to assemble furniture, do they? Well we do. No employee is truly part of the team until they pass this critical test and build a MIkael on their first day. It's there waiting for them that first morning and nothing else happens until a finished, fully functioning unit rolls off the assembly line. To date, no one has failed the Mikael test or refused to take it, but that day may come. You might want to think about that as you look over our job postings.

In the beginning...

Krillion founders Joel Toledano and Roger Spreen put nearly two years of thought into their new search venture before a partnership with Hummer Winblad set the wheels in motion in early May. Now the duo has been joined by a small staff of heavy lifters stoked at the prospect of building a thriving business and making Krillion a hub for consumers and advertisers alike. Krillionology hopes to chronicle that journey and perhaps share a little of the excitement that propels us.

It wouldn't be a stretch to say that we're seldom at a loss for words when formulating ideas and discussing what needs to be done, and that should translate into some interesting posts. Whether this finds an audience outside the team is anyone's guess, but we're going to have fun telling the story. That's how all rumors and legends get started.