Blog - Casey Schorr

Thursday

Jul222010

You're a lot less influential than you think

Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 4:02 PM

Bob Parsons is kinda sleazy. Doesn't matter. He's smart as hell.I'm a huge fan of Bob Parsons, the founder of GoDaddy. I have his 16 rules poster hanging in my office. I watch his cheesy video blogs religously. I like his unique style.

Recently I was on a family trip to Crested Butte. In the middle of a heated arguement, the sleazy motorcycle guy from Arizona popped into my head shouting "it's been two hours and you've gotten nowhere! Remember, don't spend time worrying about things you can't change!"

I'm a sucker for a heated political debates. And religious debates too. Nothing's off limits in my world. I love hearing other people's viewpoints and contrasting them with my own. But the more arguments and discussions I've gotten into, the more I realize a lot of these passionate arguments are a complete waste of time. Stressing over the latest changes the government has made, liberal vs conservative, and debating religion are all serious violations of this popular advice!

Why am I putting so much energy into things I cannot change? Wouldn't my limited time be better invested into something I have control over? Besides voting, I have very little control over the political process. I'll never settle the religious debate, even if I devote my entire life to it. It's almost impossible to change someone's fundamental beliefs. Why even try?

Next time you bitch about health care, AT&T, the iPhone, illegal immigration, taxes, liberals, mac vs. pc, abortion, traffic, or anything else you have little to no control over, try to remember to focus your energies on things you have control over. I know, it's so damn hard!

Casey Schorr |

Denver vs Boulder for Startups, Entrepreneurs, and Living

Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 12:27 AM

I've been in a year long battle trying to weigh the pros and cons of Denver vs Boulder for personal living and for my startup. My apartment lease is up in 45 days (and I don't want to renew it) so I've been thinking real hard about where I want to live next & where I want to work should we ever move our office from its current Denver location.

I hope my thought process sheds some light on my experiences running a startup for the last five years in Denver and the importance (or lack therof?) of physical location for both personal happiness and business success. I've seen a lot of "Boulder is Great for Your Startup" type posts, but nothing comparing Boulder to Denver from someone who has run a startup out of Denver.

Background

I first moved to Colorado in 2002 to attend the University of Denver. I lived near DU in South Denver from 2002-2006. I started Printfection in 2004 in my on-campus apartment. Printfection's first real office came a few months later in beautiful (ha!) Aurora, and a year after that (2005) we moved to our current location.

After graduation I moved to the ghetto side of Downtown Denver (on the same block as a large homeless shelter amidst a sea of parking lots) and lived there from 2006-2008. In 2008 I moved up to Louisville as I became more involved in the Boulder tech scene and was, at the time, planning to move our office from Denver to Boulder. The timing just wasn't quite right for the office move, so I still commute from Louisville to Denver and haven't really got to experience as much of Boulder as I'd hoped.

My Love-Hate relationship with Boulder

As I've become a bit more involved with the local Colorado tech scene, it's painfully obvious the entire local tech scene revolves around Boulder. Andrew Hyde, Boulder NewTech Meetup, David Cohen, TechStars, Ignite Boulder, Startup Weekend, Bar Camp Boulder, Brad Feld, Boulder.me, Startup Drinks, the list goes on and on and on. For better or worse, "The Republic of Boulder" is the center of the Colorado technology universe. With only 150,000 people compared to Denver's 1+ million, there are 10x more tech events and happenings in Boulder than Denver. I know, it doesn't make much sense. I still can't figure out why all the rich liberals run the worldwide tech scene (Boulder, San Francisco, etc) but it is what it is and there's no denying Boulder = Startups (in Colorado).

Boulder - Why I Love You

Absolutely beautiful environment
Everyone is really smart. Most people are at or above my own intellectual level
Amazing technology scene, very startup-friendly
Unmatched community feel. People really care about the community (both tech-wise and in general) and the level of support from your peers (and even your competitors) is unmatched
A more wealthy version of Madison, WI... my hometown... which is a great city
I know a lot more business/tech people in Boulder than I know in Denver
Awesome downtown. Big enough for a real downtown feel, but not so huge as to feel like a cement prision
I can walk more than one block without getting asked for change by a homeless person
Feels safer and more family-oriented than Denver (long-term family potential)
College town (Intellectual, University Resources, etc)

Boulder- Why I Hate You

Extremely expensive. Could I ever afford to buy a house here?
Could my employees afford to live here?
Nasty traffic into Boulder every morning on 36 as nobody can afford to live here so they commute from the 'burbs
College town (Overpriced, low quality housing rentals)
The "Boulder Bubble"/ "Republic of Boulder" - It feels like you're in your own little world. Boulderites are a self-contained little bunch who drink their own kool-aide
Extremely liberal
Extra 30 minutes to the I70 mountain resorts/skiing/Crested Butte
Limited radius for recruiting employees. Folks who live in the Tech Center will not drive to Boulder for work.

Denver Thumbs-Up

Most of my normal, non-tech friends live in and around Denver. They all think Boulder is a weird place where the hippies live and where you go on 4/20
Much closer to work - More central location, easier access to the mountains, airport, and much wider radius for recruiting employees.
More reasonably priced housing options close to downtown
Light rail transit around the city
The "real world", doesn't feel like you're in a bubble, I like not being involved in tech 24/7/365
I've met a few cool Denver startup/ tech folks like Luke Swanson, Devin Reams, Danny Newman, etc. I'm sure there are a lot more of you out there, but the community isn't as strong as Boulder.

Denver Thumbs-Down

Can't walk one block without getting asked for spare change or "do you want to buy some of this white stuff in this little plastic bag (drugs!)"
Cement everywhere.
Feels like a big city (because it is!)
Don't know nearly as many tech/startup folks compared to Boulder
Everyone is not as smart. Big city = diversity (in all aspects, including intellectual sophistication)
Very limited startup scene compared to Boulder, but it does seem to be getting better. Ignite Denver, Refresh Denver, WordCamp Denver, Big Conferences, the list is getting longer!
Doesn't feel as safe or "nice" as Boulder

With my list of pros and cons complete, I still can't decide. On paper Denver is cheaper, closer to everything, and should be the obvious choice. Denver's tech scene seems to be improving. Plus, is physcial location even important for an internet company? We've done just fine over the past five years, in a warehouse park by the airport! There's not another tech startup within 10 miles.

However, as I've become more involved with the Colorado tech scene I've started to spend more time in Boulder and have kind of fallen in love with the place. The community aspect of Boulder is amazing. I've met some truly great people up there, and it's beautiful... but on the flipside it's so darn expensive, tucked in a corner out of the way, doesn't have a lot of diversity, and to be perfectly honest I don't know if I could really live in a bubble filled with liberals who drive Subarus/ Priuses and are more concerned with spending $96 million installing government-subsidized solar panels on their roofs than worrying about the current economic crisis!

How much should I weigh business networking vs. cost of living vs. proximity to my current office vs. existing friends vs. the list goes on and on.... such a tough decision! That's why they pay me the big bucks... haha yeah right!

Please, let me know your thoughts!

...and P.S. - I voted for Obama, I used to own a Subaru, and I successfully co-existed with tons of crazy liberals in Madison, WI for 18 years. It's just too easy to poke fun at 'yall!

Casey Schorr |

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Friday

Feb062009

Next Door Neighbor's House Burns to Ground in Louisville, CO Fire

Friday, February 6, 2009 at 4:25 PM

Last night at 2 AM I wake up to a police man banging like hell on my front door. I have no idea the neighbor's house is engulfed in flames 30 feet high until I walk up the stairs from my basement bedroom. The living room is bright as day with a nasty cast of orange. Out the windows I can see flames rising 10-20 feet above my neighbor's roof and only mere feet from the side of our house. It reeks like smoke. I never actually thought I'd be in a situation where I'm quickly trying to decide what to grab before I run out of the house. I already had my cell phone and wallet in my pants pockets and I grabbed my laptop bag on the way out which had my camera, computer, and car keys. We make our way across the street and stand in the freezing cold for about an hour and a half watching the entire event unfold.

When we first walked outside the fire department hadn't even arrived, it was just a few police cars. Shortly thereafter the Louisville Fire Department arrived. It was strage to see them douse the house with water for 15-20 minutes before the first fire-fighter went inside. After watching so many movies I thought they would just run inside right away busting down the door with their Axe!

After talking with the neighbors I come to find out the old man who was our neighbor died two weeks ago (he was very old). His son was in town attending to his father's estate. The son was the only person in the house and sadly made it within a few feet of the front door but couldn't get out. He died in the fire. You can read more about the fire here or watch my videos below. What a crazy experience. Prayers go out to the Ryan family. Makes you realize you're only here for a short time and when your ticket is up, it's up.

On a more positive note, this is a great example of citizen journalism. I tweeted about the event 45 minutes after I left the house and was still hours ahead of the first news report. Furthermore, compare my videos to the video on the Boulder Daily Camera's website. I rest my case. In the coming years I expect regular old folks to break the news well before mainstream media more often and with continuing higher quality rich media as cameras and wireless/ cell phone internet becomes ubiquitous.

Casey Schorr |

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Saturday

Jan242009

Switched from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps & Couldn't be Happier!

Saturday, January 24, 2009 at 7:16 PM

It's been a week since we decided to switch our company, Printfection, from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. I'm ecstatic to report we couldn't be happier and wish we'd made this switch a long time ago.

The switch over happened last Saturday and took us about 10 hours of solid, hard work plus a few more hours of tweaking to get everything working right. We expect to save thousands of dollars per year so this should have a decent hard ROI. Most importantly, we expect everyone to have a much more enjoyable & productive experience with their e-mail (the Gmail search feature is absolutely amazing-- I can now search through 50,000+ e-mails in fractions of a second). This is important, as we live in our e-mail day-in, day-out.

Some surprises we came across during the migration (and how to fix them):

Don't use the downloadable Outlook > Google Apps migration tool! If you're on an exchange server none of the internal e-mail addresses within your domain transfer! This is a deal-breaker! The reason is Exchange keeps internal e-mail addresses (think co-workers) in the GAL and the migration tool does not have access to the GAL. Instead, follow the IMAP migration instructions. This is a really slick way to pull the mail directly off the Exchange server and put it into Google Apps. You can migrate every user at once, using nothing more than a web browser! Everything is handled server-side "in the cloud".
Setup all of your e-mail groups before flipping the switch (changing your MX records to point to Google). This will take longer than you think. There is no easy way to import groups from Hosted Exchange to Google Apps. We had to re-enter all of our groups (hundreds) manually. Furthermore, Google Apps has a limitation of one e-mail alias per group. In Exchange you can have one group with 10 e-mail aliases. In Google Apps there is a 1:1 relationship between a group and an e-mail alias. We had to re-work some of our groups due to this limitation.
Install Google Calendar Sync on each user's desktop to move their calendar to Google Apps. I couldn't find an easy way to accomplish this without visiting each user's PC and installing this little program. Once you do a sync you can uninstall the program.
Where's the tasks? Gmail Labs has a very rudimentary tasks feature, but for most users it won't have enough horsepower. We told everyone to try out Remember the Milk for now, until Gmail beefs up their tasks feature.
Make sure to arrive at the office on Monday before your employees! Give them a quick training session and explain how everything works. The great thing about Gmail is 75% of our employees use it for their personal e-mail so they already knew how to do everything!

My favorite Google Apps features, as compared to Exchange:

Gmail search: Hands-down, the single best feature of Google Apps. I migrated 50,000+ e-mails from Exchange to Google Apps, including all of my deleted items. I can search through them in less than a second and get relevant search results! This alone was worth the switch.
Gmail threaded conversations: Somehow Gmail knows what e-mails are replies and threads them into one conversation. This keeps your inbox very organized without any effort.
25GB of Email storage: I never have to worry about deleting another e-mail ever again! This will ensure I always have my old e-mails for reference, forever! I can't tell you how many times I've tried to find an e-mail from years ago, only to realize Outlook had archived it off the Exchange server and/or I couldn't find it because Outlook's search is awful.
Google Chrome support: I have my Mail, Calendar, Docs, and Contacts setup as "application shortcuts" in Chrome. They look and run just like desktop apps, and Gmail is much faster than Outlook ever was!
Google calendar quick-create new appointment: I can type in "Meet w/ Steve 9am Tuesday" and it figures it out, creating the appointment at 9am on Tuesday with the subject "Meet w/ Steve". This is a real time-saver for folks like me who put everything in their calendar!
Google Chat Gmail Integration: Conversations are stored within Gmail, automatically, forever. We are heavy users of IM within the company, previously using Skype. We've switched all 1:1 conversations to Google Chat and it's great to have an archive of your IMs in your Gmail. You'd be surprised how much mission-critical data is conveyed over IM!

If you have the opportunity to switch your organization to Google Apps I highly recommend it. We were skeptical it wouldn't be worth the effort. Thankfully it was. Hard cost savings in the thousands plus everyone is much happier with our new, simpler solution for messaging & collaboration. If our company is any indication, Microsoft should be very worried about Google.

Casey Schorr |

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Friday

Jan162009

Switching from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps: Pre-Switch

Friday, January 16, 2009 at 7:43 PM

Tomorrow we're switching our company from Microsoft Hosted Exchange to Google Apps. This should be an interesting transition and I hope to blog again in a week or two after we're Microsoft-free!

Background: A few years ago, frustrated with a standard Outlook/ IMAP/ Linux mail server configuration, we signed up with USA.net Hosted Exchange. At first we were thrilled. It was a much more elegant messaging/ collaboration solution. Outlook is a whole different (and more powerful) animal when you hook it up to an Exchange server. However, as our company has grown and cloud-computing has also grown, we've become more and more frustrated with our hosted Exchange setup. Here are some of our top frustrations we're hoping to alleviate migrating to Google Apps:

We're still on Exchange Server 2003 and USA.net doesn't seem in any hurry to upgrade us to Exchange Server 2007. Even if they would, what would it break? Would it be worth the hassle?
The Outlook Web Access interface for Exchange 2003 is horrible. Go figure, it was designed back in 2002, seven years ago! Employees trying to access their e-mail on the road or from home where they don't have the Outlook fat client installed can't search their messages, have a sub-par calendar, can't access their old e-mail (see #6 below) and generally have the pleasure of using a horrible, clunky interface. Oh, and it doesn't really work properly unless you're using IE.
Installing and configuring Outlook on each desktop is a pain. Some of our production employees & contractors need a corporate issued e-mail account but don't really have a dedicated computer we can install Outlook onto, so they are forced to use the horrible OWA website (see #2 above).
It's expensive. Something like $25/user/month which only includes 100MB of storage. 100MB is nothing. We pay a lot of extra money for extra storage, plus fees for each user that wants to sync their PDA or Smart Phone. Our administrators are constantly getting requests from users to "up" their mailbox size. Because it's so expensive we dole out space in 100MB chunks which doesn't seem to last long. We ask people to remove large attachments from their mailboxes, but then they forget to empty the deleted items, so this doesn't really work well. Furthermore, once they delete these messages they can't get to them later if they need them sometime down the road. Bottom line, users don't want to delete email and shouldn't have to just to keep our IT department from going broke.
People bitch about Outlook more than any other desktop application. It's slow and crashes frequently.
Outlook auto-archive is a terrible idea. This "feature" removes messages from the Exchange server and puts them into a .PST file on the user's local computer. I thought the point of the Exchange server was to keep all the e-mails in the cloud, on the server? Why would you want to permanently remove them from the server and place them into some arcane C:\documents and settings\application data\something\very\confusing\ folder on the user's local PC? Now the IT folks have to worry about auto-archive settings on every PC that has Outlook installed. What if the PC's hard drive crashes? Bye-bye old e-mail! The only reason I can think this "feature" was developed was to conserve HDD space on the Exchange server because server storage is so damn expensive? (See #4 above).
Outlook search is terrible. Even with the new Outlook 2007 search add-in, it pales in comparison to Gmail. Because of this, many users try to organize their Outlook using folders. At last count I had over 500 folders. Now when I Ctrl + Shift + V (shortcut to move) an e-mail from my Inbox I have to pick from 500 folders which is very time consuming.

I'm sure there are many more frustrations, but you get the idea. I'm also pretty sure there will be a lot of little things that drive us crazy about Google Apps. It will be interesting to see what everyone thinks on Monday.

Update on Saturday, January 24, 2009 at 8:09 PM by

Casey Schorr

It's been a week since we made the switch. I'm ecstatic to report we couldn't be happier and wish we'd made this switch a long time ago. See my post-implementation recap.

Casey Schorr |

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