Send this story Print this story

Adjust text size

Start me up
Debugging Backboard with dashes of humor, Stanford students take first step to launch 'indispensible' business tool

by Arden Pennell

In a Stanford University conference room, four entrepreneurs opened matching Macintosh computers and got ready to steer the launch of their new software program.

On a white board were handwritten to-do lists labeled "fix," "build," "plan" and "do." "Fix" was noticeably longer than the rest.

The four students — Rebecca Illowsky, Kimber Lockhart, Jeff Seibert and Ray Thang — had been awake until the wee hours debugging the new program, called Backboard. But the long list, and the unpredictable troubles of launch day that lay ahead, didn't seem to weigh heavily on them.

Absent were dark under-eye circles, caffeine jitters or nervous tempers.

Instead, Illowsky shared an e-mailed joke from her fiancé — a picture of a fluffy chinchilla throwing a basketball at a backboard, a play on the program's name.

Lockhart found her inbox had only a couple of problem alerts from Backboard's test users — probably because 11 a.m. is early for college kids, she reasoned.

"I think most of our testers are still asleep," she said with a laugh.

Yet one had answered, and Lockhart read out loud to the group: "Good stuff. Congratulations. Where's the party?"

Launching Backboard to Stanford students is the first step in turning the students' larger start-up company, Increo Solutions, into an indispensable business tool, according to Lockhart, the firm's CEO.

The four founders, all seniors majoring in computer science except for Thang, who's getting a master's in the field, started Increo last year.

It incorporated in late March and will announce its seed venture funding sometime in May, Lockhart said. Illowsky is the chief technical officer, Seibert is the chief operating officer and Thang is the lead engineer.

This article is the first in a series to track the company as it grows, providing a glimpse of what a Silicon Valley start-up looks like in its earliest days.

Increo's goal is to help companies navigate — and capitalize on — the unpredictable weather of brainstorm sessions, Lockhart said.

It will offer services ranging from a collaborative editing program for ideas to a semantic search engine that links similar ideas, she said. Ideally, those Web tools would encourage creativity, fueling — then capturing — priceless "Aha!" moments.

But first the four founders had to slog through some "uh-oh" moments this month, as they prepared their first publicly launched program.

The free program, available at www.getbackboard.com, allows users to create "backboards," or pages where they upload photos, presentations or documents. Friends and colleagues are then invited via e-mail to visit the site and give feedback.

The week leading up to Backboard's launch was crammed with last-minute challenges, some small — and some downright disastrous.

Only a few days previous, the group discovered Increo's server was too slow at converting documents for uploading to Backboard's site, Seibert said.

They decided to switch to a server from Amazon.com in a last-minute dash.

"We've spent 22 hours of the past 48 coding," he said.

Meanwhile, even seemingly mundane tasks became maddeningly tricky in 24-hour, non-stop launch mode — such as finding tape after business hours.

"Nobody sells tape at 11 o'clock at night. I had to drive to Mountain View," Lockhart said.

When she returned to campus, the group stayed up until 2 a.m. plastering the Graduate School of Business and sandstone arcades of the Main Quad with fliers.

But they don't look worse for the wear. A combination of youth and experience

— they have all worked at start-ups previously, Illowsky said — propels the team.

Seibert pored over computer-programming manuals at a tender age and had started his own Web-design company, Arios Software, by high school, he said.

Lockhart has always been "an idea person," she said — from collecting hats for cancer patients pre-Stanford to the latest venture, Increo.

Quick to smile and immensely approachable, she doesn't fit the stereotype of a data-obsessed, terminally shy computer-science major — but it's the ideal field to learn how to turn her ideas into real companies, she said.

Seibert and Lockhart also run the "Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders" lecture series, inviting valley luminaries, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to speak.

"We sat next to each other on the first day freshman year and decided we wanted to run it when we were seniors. So we did," Lockhart said.

Seibert hasn't missed a single lecture of the last 86, he said.

Increo's founders netted venture funding through connections made at the lectures, Seibert said.

Now, Backboard is the first step in what the young entrepreneurs hope will be their own staircase to success. It should offer a tantalizing taste of the value of Increo's software to businesses, which may go on to purchase premium services such as the semantic search engine, Lockhart said.

But first the group launched Backboard on campus to Stanford students. In coming weeks, student feedback will help them debug, clean up and improve the site. Then the group will be primed for a "hard launch" to businesses, Lockhart said.

Clearing her screen of the chinchilla picture on launch morning, Illowsky began work on the firm's patent application, munching on macaroni and cheese for fuel.

Seibert and Thang talked back and forth, rapidly debugging the site's temperamental "Contact Us" page and searching the net for royalty-free fonts to use.

And Lockhart turned to the company's blog.

Young companies can experience sudden, instantaneous fame if they get noticed and mentioned by writers in the so-called blogosphere who obsessively track Internet developments.

But bloggers, often self-appointed citizen-journalists, are more likely to recoil from sites or products that seem corporate, Seibert said.

So Increo needs a blog of its own, written by employees, which will strike bloggers-at-large as more authentic, he said.

Lockhart had written the first entry earlier that day.

"I'm a computer scientist by training, but an entrepreneur at heart," she read aloud to the group. She paused. The tone was a bit cheesy, almost cringe-worthy, she decided.

"Guys, please don't let me post these without editing them first," she joked.

Yet there wasn't time to dwell on it — she had to move on to the group's on-campus marketing blitz on the "Do" list labeled "FB Event: invite seriously everyone at Stanford."

Giggling, she ruminated on how to label the launch event, given Facebook's tongue-in-cheek options.

"I guess the launch can't really be a 'night of mayhem,'" she said. Regardless, a good chunk of campus would soon hear about it — Lockhart has 508 Facebook "friends" at Stanford (and 783 in total).

In coming weeks, the group will track site performance and traffic to help plan the business launch — scheduled for after the company's very first board meeting, she said.

But encouraging Backboard's popularity will be a game of guesswork, Seibert said.

The program is designed to spread virally, or with one user passing it to another, yet there's no established method to how Web sites attract users.

For example, the social-networking site LinkedIn discovered traffic rose 10 percent if invitation e-mails contained a smiley face emoticon, he said.

"And so there's no real science behind it. Psychologically it just works. You try a bunch of things and see what works," he said.

Instant feedback from online monitoring means that by the time this article is printed, the group will already have an idea of what's not working well.

It's likely they won't waste time worrying, but rather — perhaps with a joke or two — get down to sorting things out.

Staff Writer Arden Pennell can be e-mailed at apennell@paweekly.com.