As most people who subscribe to this blog know, blist raised $6.5M from Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures earlier this year. While raising money does tend to be picked up and reported on by journalists, it really is a non-event. What matters is what you do with the capital you’ve raised. After all, the existing shareholders wouldn’t accept ownership dilution unless they felt enterprise value would increase over the long term by exchanging some ownership for some working capital.

The most important activity a startup can do with more capital is hire great people who can help accelerate the pace. We’ve maintained a really high hiring bar. I’m thrilled that we’ve kept the bar high but have been able to hire some really key contributors. I mentioned that our first director of user experience joined us a couple of weeks ago. Today marks the start of three back-to-back-to-back weeks of new hires joining us from Amazon. Two of them are mid-career software engineers and the third is a technical program manager who’s also been a software engineer at Amazon. In a couple of weeks we’ll also add our summer first intern - a graduate computer science student from the University of Washington.

As a team, all of us at blist work hard to continue to hire exceptional people. I’m thrilled with the team we’ve assembled and look forward to an incredibly productive summer and remainder of 2008.

We had our first board meeting last week. One of the topics we covered was the status of the team. We have a great, small, core team at blist, but there’s no doubt we need to grow judiciously in a number of areas - engineering, marketing and product management for starters.

One of our new board members has a great deal of experience growing great teams and shared his thoughts. He prefers getting everyone already in the organization involved in growing the team. This includes sourcing new candidates, not just participating in interviews. Of course he suggested that folks think about people they know who might be a good fit. He suggested a small bonus for a referral that results in a hire. When employees go to events, they should allocate a small part of their time to casual, long term recruiting. Bring engineers and marketers, not (just) HR folks to university recruiting events.

Great tactical suggestions for sure, but the big one that really resonated with me was his opinion that the more and earlier you get everyone involved in building the team, the more pride of ownership they take in the culture of the company itself. At blist we all want to work with only the best, smartest people. How better to keep the bar high by making it everyone’s job to go find these great folks?

blist will be at the University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering recruiting Fair this Tuesday, February 12. The event is from 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. in the atrium of the Paul G. Allen center. If you’re a standout UW CSE student looking for a summer internship or a full-time software engineering role, be sure to stop by our table. Bring your resume and the solution to the coding challenge on the careers page of our website. You’d really impress us if you can talk through BigTable and/or its open source clone - Hadoop HBase. We’re excited about Internet scale challenges and hope you are too.

Looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday.

Lots of folks have been sending us notes saying they want to get involved with blist in a big way. Maybe none of our open roles exactly describes you. Don’t let that deter you. Define your own role. The reality is, at a startup there’s no such thing as a perfectly defined role. We all wear a lot of hats. You need to be smart, resourceful, creative, passionate and hard working.

Want to join us? Tell me how. kevin dot merritt at blist dot com.

blist will launch in beta at DEMO next week. We’ve been working hard on fixing bugs, stabilizing the application, getting our production system up and running, etc. What’s sometimes overwhelming is how many features we already have on the product backlog. The main inhibitor to adding these features is simply engineering bandwidth. We’ve been interviewing engineers lately, but none are stellar. It might seem like a reasonable idea to slightly lower our standards for now, just to crank through the backlog, but that would be a huge mistake. We have to keep the bar high.

As we come out of our stealth shell, launch at DEMO next week and host Lunch 2.0 next month, I think recruiting will become slightly easier. Even in the last month the quantity and quality of unsolicited, inbound inquiries has noticeably improved. I sent an outbound feeler to an engineer today and his response was “Yeah, I know who you are. I’d love to come talk with you.”

Little by little we’ll get there. It just may take us a little longer by keeping our standards high. If you’re an exceptional engineer, product manager or marketer, I encourage you to introduce yourself. I can be reached at kevin.merritt at blist.com.

blist is hiring across all disciplines. I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you what you can expect when interviewing at blist.

Assuming we’ve been introduced via email, I’ll usually first ask a software engineering candidate to complete a programming challenge that you can find on our website . If you’re not a programmer, anticipate some kind of project in your area of expertise. For example, I once asked an online marketing prospect to write a paper on how he’d build a database of the 500 most influential bloggers after the Technorati 100. The coding or marketing project is designed to show me a little about how you solve problems without time constraints and with all resources in the world at your disposal. This should be some of your best work. You won’t have the luxury of time or abundant resources during the interview. Take advantage of this opportunity by trying to really impress.

Assuming the candidate does a decent job with the take-home assignment, I’ll arrange for an in person one hour informational discussion. This can be in our office, at a coffee shop near your work, over lunch, etc. I try to spend 75% of the time trying to make sure the candidate understands what we’re trying to do technically and/or as a business. The other 25% I’ll use to get to know the candidate a little better. I might point out a bug or two in the code they wrote and ask them to fix it. Or I might ask why they made certain assumptions or why they chose certain algorithms. I’ll usually ask questions about their most recent role in order to understand what kind of work they’ve been doing.

If the informational discussion goes well and there’s mutual interest in going forward, I’ll schedule a full interview loop. At blist an interview loop is usually comprised of four hour-long interviews. In the case of a software engineer, it would be three back-to-back interviews with existing blist engineers, followed by an interview with me. If the candidate does well during the earlier interviews, I’ll usually continue with a deep technology interview. If the candidate doesn’t do well, I’ll usually probe in other areas to see if maybe there’s another fit.

If you are interviewing for any technical role, expect to write lots of code and to be asked to design solutions to hard problems. I know this isn’t anyone’s idea of fun, but it’s really the best way for us to discern whether you can write code here at blist. The kinds of questions you’ll get are ones that you should be able to design and/or code in less than 15 minutes. Some will take only a minute or two. Usually you can code in any language you want, although one of the things we look for is that you know how to pick the right language for the job. Here are some examples of questions you might be asked:

*) We’ll probably ask you to write one of the functions in the standard C library (strcpy, strstr or memcpy, for example).

*) We’ll ask you to write some code that works with data structures - stacks, queues, trees, lists, etc.

*) If you have SQL on your resume, we’ll ask you to write a fairly complicated query, probably needing outer joins or subqueries.

*) We’ll ask you to design a data model from scratch. For example, what would the data model look like if you wanted to be able to query for which pitchers in major league baseball throw more strikes in day games than night games.

*) We’ll ask you to demonstrate that you can think abstractly and re-use code. For example, how could you build a CRUDdy database API re-using SMTP as the transport protocol?

*) Based on some technology you’re already using, we’ll ask you to describe how it works - Rails’ ActiveRecord, a load balancer, garbage collection, Ajax, MapReduce, Berkeley DB, etc.

*) We’ll probably ask you to design the API for something you’re unfamiliar with.

*) We’ll probably ask you to extend the API of something you are familiar with.

*) We’ll ask lots of "How would you design or code the following: blah blah blah" questions. Some will be fairly concrete, like writing a function to return the day of the week without using any built-in date routines. Some will be fairly abstract, like how would you design an IM client that transmitted sounds instead of text.

*) While less likely coming from the other software engineers, I’ll usually ask some pie-in-the-sky technology design and industry questions. For example, how does high performance computing materially benefit from widespread consumer adoption of the iPod.

Hopefully you can see a pattern: A) do you have the fundamentals? B) Do you currently have good problem solving abilities? C) do you have the smarts to solve unforseen problems and grow beyond the role for which you’re currently interviewing? A yes-yes-yes is what we’re looking for.

A four-hour interview process is a big commitment. It’s an investment we make in candidates and it’s one we think top candidates should make before joining any company. After all, if the fit is good and the company and the employee are both upwardly mobile, the relationship should be a lengthy one of many happy, successful years together.

If I haven’t totally discouraged you from considering coming to work with us at blist, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at kevin dot merritt at blist dot com.

We’re looking to hire our first engineer focused on ops automation. This is primarily a software engineering role, although to be successful you’ll need to have roots in and a passion for systems administration. At blist systems engineers develop software that automates as much of operations as possible. The goals are fully lights out operation via automated systems deployment, imaging, monitoring, error detection and healing. To qualify you’ll need to meet most of the following prerequisites:

* Ability to design and develop production quality automation code, preferably in python but at minimum in perl
* Solid understanding and experience xith PXE boot based automated image deployment
* Good familiarity with Xen or other virtualization software
* Good familiarity with systems monitoring software (Nagios, etc.)
* Broad Unix/Linux systems administration experience
* Some experience in database administration is helpful, but not mandatory
* Passion for distributed computing

blist is a well capitalized startup developing database as a service, operated at Internet scale. We’re solving some really interesting challenges and have a terrific team of passionate engineers. If you are interested in joining us, send your resume along with the solution to the following challenge:

Assume you have a network comprised of 1,000 servers in 10 different data centers - 100 servers in each data center. The data centers are in multiple time zones. Write a centralized script that runs on the Linux PC in your office, which identifies the server in the network which was most recently rebooted. The output should identify the server, the data center it’s in, the date & time when it was last rebooted and how long the script ran in order to find the results. Your script must finish in less than 5 minutes (300 seconds). At any time 2% or 3% of the servers will be offline.

Your solution should include:

* A description of your assumptions about network topology - how your Linux PC connects to each server.
* Any other base assumptions you make about the servers in the network.
* A description and, if appropriate, the layout of any configuration file(s) you’ll need to solve the problem.
* Commercial quality perl or python code that solves the problem and prints the results.

If ops automation at Internet scale is your passion, drop us a note. We’d love to hear from you.

As many of you know, we recently moved from Kirkland to the Pioneer Square neighborhood of Seattle. I wanted to share some of the motivations behind the move. The simple answer is recruiting. This is where the top talent wants to work. We want to hire top talent, so it boosts our chances of hiring these kinds of folks. If you’re an investment banker in the New York area, you want to work in Manhattan, not in New Jersey. Many software engineers in the Seattle area want to work in Pioneer Square, not in the suburbs.

If you weren’t already aware, studies show that companies most often locate themselves where it’s a convenient commute for the founders. We wanted to be a little more thoughtful and deliberate and locate the company where it best positions us to succeed. We subleased in Kirkland for 8-months, paying attention to the recruiting challenges of our eastside location. I’ve already received a few emails from candidates we interviewed previously who wanted to work in Pioneer Square and weren’t attracted to our old location in Kirkland.

So how’s it been working in Pioneer Square? We like it. Two-thirds of our employees now have a commute from the suburbs into the city. That includes me (I think I now have the second longest commute). We’ve all decided to ride the bus to work. The bus is peaceful and relaxing, a nice 20-minute ride to visit with other bus riders, read the newspaper or think about the day. It feels good taking public transportation, doing a little to help the environment. Near the office there are lots of great restaurants and places to quench your thirst after work. I even walked to the Seahawks-49ers game on Monday night.

The biggest downside is that people who visit from the eastside may not be aware that parking is tight in Pioneer Square and they drive in for a meeting and call you circling the block asking where your parking garage is. No such luck. We need to learn to manage people’s expectations better. Take the bus if you can. If not, there’s a moderate amount of 2-hour on street parking for $1.50/hour. If you plan to stay longer than 2 hours, Qwest field has parking for $10/day and Qwest event center has parking for $5/day.

So wherever you are, when your lease runs out, be thoughtful and deliberate about where you move. My vote is to locate where you can recruit, not for the CEO’s commute.

As I blogged previously, Justin, Matt & I from blist attended the University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering department’s annual intern career day today. It was a terrific event that far exceeded my expectations. These are some of my random thoughts:

1) I was blown away by the turnout both in terms of the number of great Seattle companies (and a few from Silicon Valley) with booths and the number of phenomenal students we met. My guess is that there were 35 companies. We accumulated no fewer than 50 resumes from great CSE students. Maybe the event drew more people than they anticipated. Box lunches quickly ran out. Kudos to Kay and team for quickly ordering a bunch of pizzas.

2) I figured out why Zillow recently raised another $30M VC round. It went into paying for that gigantic tradeshow prop. It was huge. And the 8 or 10 person Zillow entourage was impressive.

3) Industry giants Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, IBM, Real Networks, Expedia, Amazon and Adobe were all there. Some of the other companies with booths were: TalentSpring, Pluggd, Pelago, Redfin, WhitePages.com, Ford, Chief Architect, Intelius, Cozi, Adapx, LiveMocha, Ludic Labs, Cray, Pure Networks and TeraNode

4) My vote for best schwag goes to Amazon for their Amazon logo emblazened decks of cards they were doling out. If you were a student coveting the deck of cards it seemed you had to answer the question of what a link list is. With this crowd it seemed akin to asking a gardener to describe a shovel, but maybe the point was to make people feel like they earned the schwag.

5) UW students come prepared! Most came with resumes and were ready to make a solid 5-minute pitch about their interests and backgrounds. Every student who emailed me in advance and said they’d introduce themselves at the event actually did.

6) The Paul G. Allen Hall is a beautiful building. State of the art.

7) It was great to see UW CSE profs making the rounds and talking with companies and students. We chatted briefly with Ed Lazowska, Blake Hannaford, Dan Weld and Hank Levy.
We gave sneak peeks of blist to most people who stopped by. They don’t know it, but that was the first time a public audience has seen blist. Feedback was very positive and the blist UI impressed most of the folks.

Congratulations to Kay Beck-Benton, Ed Lazowksa and the entire CSE department for hosting a great event. blist will definitely be back next year. If you’re a prospective summer 2008 intern or a June 2008 graduate and you want to tell me a little about yourself, my email address is kevin.merritt _at_ blist.com