Brian Alvey

Back in 2001 when Niki and I were having tons of fertility trouble — before we had our three kids — we did what fertility-challenged couples are not supposed to do. We got a puppy.

Barkley was the first of our three Cavaliers, but she wasn’t the first Cavalier we tried to get. Our breeder chatted with me while we were looking at his dogs and I didn’t realize I was being tested and I failed. Niki was shocked that I could be so clueless about the “adoption” process. I didn’t fail my second test and we got Barkley.

In college, Niki had a high-jumping cat that she named Jordan after Michael Jordan. She had been an MJ fan since his UNC days. Now we had a dog to name and we both enjoyed watching Charles Barkley on TNT, so Barkley it was.

Barkley was the first dog I ever had from a puppy and she was the best.

She was the first dog I ever took to be trained. After a few lessons I figured out how dogs learn, so I decided to skip ahead and I taught Barkley how to shake. The next lesson after I did that, the instructor went on a rant about how laying down and heeling are useful skills but shaking hands is just a circus trick with no practical value. Hah!

Cavaliers commonly have a heart valve defect. Recently that meant Barkley would get fluid in her lungs and in spite of medication she often had trouble breathing. This weekend when we boarded our other two dogs for a July 4th trip to see my family, we took Barkley upstate with us. We knew the outdoor exercise would be less harmful for her than the stress of a lonely weekend at the kennel. Yesterday she had another crisis requiring a doctor visit. Today when she wouldn’t even lift her head to eat a treat we knew it was time for her to go.

I miss my circus dog so much.

Last fall at TechCrunch 50 (video here) professional Internet celebrity judge Robert Scoble asked me why I didn’t spend time talking about all of the big successful content management systems I’d built in the past. I answered that I only had 6 minutes on stage, so I focused on the product. But at NY Tech Meetup in March I decided to address his question again and tell one of the stories of Crowd Fusion — how I had built all these other great CMSes that no one in the audience had ever used. There was never going to be an O’Reilly book on the Capgemini CMS or a Blogsmith for Dummies, but maybe we’ll see books like that for Crowd Fusion and people everywhere will have the chance to try our platform out.

I talked about some of my experiences partnering up with Jeffrey Zeldman and Jason Calacanis and showed off two book covers I made for the presentation.

About a month ago, I heard a beer commercial in my car and decided Crowd Fusion should have a more beer slogany slogan. Our current tagline is “It serves you right.” So I tweeted a few new slogan ideas:

I’m thinking about rewriting @crowdfusion‘s site to sound more like a beer commercial. People like beer commercials.
9:07 AM Apr 7th

Crowd Fusion is brewed with only the finest PHPs and cold-filtered using a node query language that has been in our family for generations.
9:12 AM Apr 7th

@MikeTRose added his own as well as the #cmsbeerads hash tag I forgot:

@frankensite “Straight from the code foothills of the Rockies, delivered ice cold to your browser.” #cmsbeerads
9:18 AM Apr 7th

I never think of adding a hashtag when I’m doing a series of tweets. @Baratunde does this. He expects his stuff to go viral. Oh well. Live and learn.

Next, I made fun of Drupal.

More for our site: “Please code responsibly. Friends don’t let friends use Drupal.” #cmsbeerads
10:06 AM Apr 7th

Then I ended it with my favorite slogan. It still seems like a great fit when you consider that Crowd Fusion does so much more than a blogging platform.

“I don’t always blog, but when I do I use Crowd Fusion. Stay snarky, my friends.” — The Most Interesting Blogger In The World #cmsbeerads
10:50 AM Apr 7th

Crowd Fusion needs to add three more solid developers ASAP just to work with our existing customers, but we hire really slowly because these aren’t traditional developer jobs.

I mentioned that Craig posted to Authentic Jobs looking for developer talent. That got me thinking about the people we’ve worked with at Weblogs, Inc., Blogsmith, Netscape and Crowd Fusion who were a successful fit. Many of them had run their own personal consulting businesses or startups before they worked with us. That makes sense. If someone understands how to get enough done to pay their rent each month, how to land new customers while not disappointing existing customers, how to deliver projects on time AND how to do all of that from home, then they’ve probably got what we need.

Being a developer at Crowd Fusion is not like being a developer at a bank. Crowd Fusion is a totally virtual company. Everyone works from home. There are some downsides to this, like we don’t go to lunch together every day and you can’t have an assistant come and work out of your house while you’re away on a business trip, but the good far outweighs the bad.

37signals talks about the dangers of interruptions in the workplace and even call it the interruption tax. I’m sitting at my desk, trying to get into a problem solving zone, and you come and stand in my doorway because you’ve got something you need to talk to me about right now. Those interruptions are a killer. Most of the things you want to discuss can wait. Send me an email or a text message. Open a ticket in Assembla and assign it to me. Type your question into our Campfire group chatroom. Just don’t stand in my doorway and stare at me.

I’ve been working out of my basement office since 2002 and I don’t miss the workplace interruptions, but working from home doesn’t mean you don’t get interrupted. I’ve got three kids and three dogs so there is plenty going on!

To be successful at working from home you need two important things: 1) personal discipline and 2) cooperation from your family. If you aren’t a self-starter, you can’t work from home. If the people (or animals) you’re living with equate you being home with you being off the clock, then you’re just trading one set of interruptions for another.

There’s an old saying in basketball that I heard a lot when the Jeff Van Gundy took the New York Knicks to the NBA Finals and their center Patrick Ewing was injured along the way. I was at MSG when the much shorter Knicks team lost to the San Antonio Spurs and their two seven-footers, Tim Duncan and David Robinson. That saying is “you can’t coach height.” Van Gundy could teach the Knicks a lot of things, but all the coaching skills in the world couldn’t make his team taller.

Someone with solid development skills in another language like Java can be trained to make great Crowd Fusion PHP code, but I don’t believe you can easily train someone to be an effective virtual employee. I’d rather find a responsible, passionate person who can learn to code better, than find a smart developer who needs to be in an office with co-workers to get things done.

On Thursday night I was a co-host of the first New York Open Angel Forum dinner with Charlie O’Donnell, Jason Calacanis and Tyler Crowley. More than a dozen great local angel investors networked and watched investment pitches over burgers and beer at Dogpatch Labs.

I was at the first OAF dinner in Los Angeles three months ago. Since then they’ve had events in San Francisco and Boulder and a bunch of the presenting companies have been funded. The NYC event went smoothly and the presentations from HD Cloud, MyNines, Aristotle Circle, Kodingen, Food52 and Up Next were fantastic.

Food52 would make a great Crowd Fusion app. HD Cloud would make a great Crowd Fusion plug-in. Kodingen would be a great way to edit Crowd Fusion sites from a web kiosk.

I’m looking forward to the next NYC OAF event. Our sponsors were actively involved and we got great feedback from everyone who attended. There are half a dozen little things we’ll be changing for the next event to make it more efficient.

Thanks everyone!

UPDATE: There’s an official recap on the Open Angel Forum site with links to posts by presenters (Kodingen and UpNext) and investors (Howard Morgan, Jeff Stewart, Jon Steinberg and Fabrice Grinda). My co-host Charlie O’Donnell also gives in-depth praise to our sponsors Joyent, Cooley, and Winter Wyman.

Thursday night while I was waiting for a meeting at the bar at the Four Seasons hotel in L.A. to begin, I had a beer and did some star watching. I wasn’t planning on star watching and maybe it doesn’t always happen like this there, but it was three nights before the Oscars so I got a mini-preview.

First, Jeremy Piven was at the bar. He walked by me at one point and I said hi and told him I was still upset that they cancelled his show Cupid which ran for only 15 episodes more than a decade ago. He laughed and thanked me, but I’m sure he’s happy he was freed up to work on Serendipity, Old School and Entourage.

Then Queen Latifah walked by. Wow. She looked like she had no makeup on and was easily the prettiest woman in the hotel.

There was one table full of women that looked like they might have been the cast of the Fake Housewives of Santa Monica. They were all older than me, except for the parts of them which were newly-added. They didn’t make a big deal out of anyone, but when Sean Penn walked by they all noticed and whipped out their phones to text all of their friends.

I saw a few more people that were turning heads and being fawned over, but I didn’t know their names so I didn’t tweet about them. One of them I am now sure was Paula Deen, the southern chef who is famous for making the world’s deadliest bacon and egg burger using two Krispy Kreme donuts as a bun.

The last celebrity I didn’t know yet stood right in front of me for several minutes. People told her what an amazing actress she is and what a great singer her mother is. They were paying her more attention to her than to any of the other stars.

I had no idea who she was until I was in LAX headed home the next day and saw her on the cover of Ebony. Then I watched the Oscars last night and there was no way to avoid learning who Gabourey Sidibe is, the star of Precious.

In case you are wondering, my meeting there went well. Sadly, Ryan stayed behind to continue training a customer we’re launching soon in the ways of Crowd Fusion. He would have loved to meet Jeremy Piven.

In the future I will tell our L.A. customers we can only do day training so we can stalk celebs by night!

Friday night I flew home from L.A. to make it back in time for the birthday my wife and I share. I landed just after midnight and was wondering if since I was in the air between time zones when March 6 arrived that maybe I hadn’t turned 40. No such luck.

I don’t remember freaking out when I turned 30, but I definitely had a couple of troubled moments when 40 was approaching. Niki made sure all of that was far from my mind.

We had breakfast and lunch with our three kids and debated what movie we were going to see after our dinner without the kids. Niki was adamant that it wasn’t going to be Avatar since we spent our birthday last year at the opening night of Watchmen. Oh, and we also had to drop off some ski helmets to a friend’s house after our dinner. She told me about that when I was at LAX on Friday.

While I was with the kids after lunch, Niki got me a “Big Four-Oh” balloon and a flashing pin to wear on my shirt so everyone would know I was now 40. Even not flashing, that pin got me a dozen double takes at Starbucks. After lunch, Niki ran some errands and said the balloon had escaped out the back of our minivan. Seriously? If you had to pick one, I’d have hoped the blinking pin would have been the thing to let float off into the sky.

My first surprise that night was a fantastic massage appointment before our dinner reservations while Niki read a book in the waiting room. Driving to dinner, Niki calculated that we had an extra half hour and could drop off those helmets in advance. She called her friend Vanessa and said we’d be stopping by and then we debated whether all of these people should be called her friends or our friends.

For a split second, I wondered if something was up. A few weeks ago we went to a surprise party for our friend Carolyn. It was the only surprise party I can ever remember going to and I’ve never had one of my own. But nothing else was setting off any alarms in my brain. There were only two cars in their driveway. Even the part where she said to just open the door and not ring the doorbell to wake their baby didn’t register as odd.

I walked in and was surprised by more than a dozen of our friends. Wow. We had great food and way too many great drinks. That “Big Four-Oh” balloon was at the party too. It hadn’t been lost. Cool!

To let you know how disoriented I was by all of this, for several minutes I was still thinking we were just eating dinner there and then heading off to our late movie. After a while I realized that all the debating we did about movies was a setup. In the car at one point I was coughing and Niki gave me a strange look. I guessed that she was thinking “this is going to suck if he does this at the movies tonight” and she agreed, like I was reading her mind. We both laughed. Of course, she was laughing because we weren’t going to a movie. Incredible.

This morning after 3 hours of sleep, I pieced together all of the events from the party Hangover-style. I wasn’t missing any of my teeth, but my wallet was left behind, my iPhone had a bunch of birthday text conversations I didn’t remember and Safari was open to a Google image search of “fergie pissed herself” — so it must have been a great party, right?

Thank you Niki and all of your my friends!

In December I was lucky to be in town when Jason’s daughter was born. That evening I was in their hospital room holding her and got to see her again later that week. I didn’t make it to his wedding in Hawaii, but that was bigger by far.

Last week I was again lucky to be in town for another Jason Calacanis event, his Open Angel Forum. The five presenting companies were interesting and one was compelling enough that I’d want to invest in it and advise the team. One thing I liked about all of them is that they weren’t all from the SoCal region. Investors follow people and markets, not geography.

The best part for me was having dinner with a smart group of investors. Some of them I already knew like Matt Coffin, Gordon Gould, Shawn Gold and Ron Conway. Some I followed on Twitter but hadn’t met in person like Chris Sacca and Mark Suster. Some weren’t on my radar at all, but are now like TechStars founder David Cohen, Shervin Pishevar and NY angel Jay Levy. Although Jarl Mohn was there and many people have told me I should meet him, there was so much going on I didn’t get the chance. Next time!

Mark Suster did a much better recap of the OAF event, who attended it and what differentiates it from events where entrepreneurs pay to present to angels.

I definitely won’t miss the NYC versions of these events.

We had a great night last night. Niki said she wanted to get tickets for Rob Thomas at the Beacon Theatre in New York City months ago. We didn’t get them when they went on sale and figured we’d either skip the show or buy some on the ticket reselling service StubHub. We’ve had a great experience with StubHub in the past, so a few weeks back we bought 5th row seats. We were excited.

The show started at 7PM and there were two opening acts we wanted to see but we hadn’t eaten, so we had a quick dinner at the diner on the corner. At 8:10PM we walked to the show. As we passed an independent ticket salesperson (i.e., scalper) who was offering us a seat “upgrade” to the 13th row, I happily thought to myself “well for us that would be a downgrade.” How cool.

Niki and I have seen Rob with Matchbox 20 at Jones Beach and at Madison Square Garden. I saw a solo Rob Thomas show at Live8 in Philly. Niki and I also saw a solo Rob Thomas show with Jewel at Jones Beach and we saw Santana at Jones Beach when Rob came out to sing his monster hit “Smooth.” It’s safe to say we were both looking forward to this show.

The Beacon scanned our tickets and told us our tickets had already been used once and we couldn’t go in. We immediately realized that the person who printed these tickets at home made two copies: one for his friends and one to sell on StubHub. Or maybe he sold the other pair on Ebay.

We remained calm.

I talked to the people in the ticket office at the Beacon and they were incredibly supportive. They couldn’t do anything about the StubHub tickets besides confirm that they were, in fact, used 45 minutes before we tried to enter. They told us to call StubHub and the Beacon ticket rep gave us a free pair of second balcony, second-row-from-the-back seats — just in case we didn’t have any luck with StubHub. Wow. At this point we were Beacon fans for life.

I patiently explained our situation to StubHub. The first thing they did was take down my number in case we got disconnected. Very reassuring. They saw that I’ve used their service a bunch in the past and they connected me with a customer service manager. He apologized and quickly called the local ticket center. He said they had some replacement tickets for us, but we had to go get them ourselves.

I asked the Beacon team what the exact start time was for Rob’s set. They said 8:50PM. It was now 8:20PM. We jumped into a cab to begin our 70 block roundtrip. The ride downtown was slow, but the ticket handoff was fast. Their agent Matt handed us two sets of tickets: one was a pair in the first row and one was a pair in the second row. Amazing. At this point we were StubHub fans for life.

Our cab made its way back to the Beacon. We jumped out at exactly 8:50PM and still had time to get some drinks. Our first row tickets worked first try, no drama, and we spent the rest of the night just a few feet away from the super-talented Rob Thomas. It was incredible.

In September at TechCrunch50 Craig and I got up on stage and told a couple thousand of our closest friends — and tens of thousands of our closest friends who couldn’t make it to SF so they watched on ustream — that our Crowd Fusion platform is being released as an open source project. Unlike the hour-and-a-half episode of This Week in Startups that I was on, this was a six minute presentation (video here) with two minutes of questions from the panel of expert judges. It was a blast being on stage and having people come up to us afterwards with feedback and questions. I definitely need to go to more events and do more speaking!

After a whirlwind tour of Crowd Fusion’s features, we gave out the URL for registering for our beta program. We had 500 signups in the first week and we’ve got about 700 total now. We are managing the beta applicants using our own CMS as a CRM system.

The first round of developers has had access for a few weeks now. The second round is getting access later today, now that most of our documentation has been written. We are going slowly, taking our time with each new user, answering questions about the platform and helping get sites built. “Concierge” is a pretty accurate description of this process. We’ll do a few more rounds of access and then release Crowd Fusion publicly some time in early 2010.