We simply ran out of time as a company!  As a bootstrapping startup, you’re always in a race against the clock.  The modest revenue streams we’ve created over the past year and a half just aren’t enough to sustain us, so it’s time to try something new.  Snowcap Labs will not be taking on new work, and each of us is exploring our own options for what to do next.

That said, I don’t exactly want to go fly a cubicle for 60 hours a week, now.  So I’m evaluating my options (and there are a lot of really great projects to get involved with in Atlanta right now), but ideally I will find something that I’m excited to work on and that can offset my personal cash flow needs.

If you’d like to discuss your cool project with me, or you just want to shoot the breeze, get ahold of me (via Twitter or just leave a comment) soon and we’ll schedule a lunch or coffee (or even drinks!)

Emotional as all of this is, I see this as a good thing.  There are no hard feelings, we’ll each get residual checks going forward, and I’ve still got our (wicked!) web video recording software at my disposal.  I’m very excited about being Atlanta’s newest entrepreneurial “free agent”, and you can bet I’m already thinking about how to get into a new coworking situation!

So we banded together to create START Atlanta, a non-profit to fill exactly this void.  The goal of START Atlanta is to get the funding and support that Atlanta’s young startups need to cultivate their ideas, build great teams, and “graduate” them to the next level (whatever they define as the “next level”.)  We will achieve this by bringing the community together and creating a site that acts as a hub for investors and high-net-worth individuals to match up with early-stage companies and entrepreneurs.  We hope that low friction and high visibility will foster the kind of growth Atlanta’s startup sector desperately needs.

We’ve already arranged some great sponsors and excellent buzz around the idea, now we just need to build the site!  So we’re holding a weekend event to do just that.  So if you’re an investor, an entrepreneur, a developer, a designer, a blogger, or a potential sponsor, we’d like you to participate!

We created a Facebook event where you can go to RSVP for the weekend.  Here are the details and schedule breakdown for the weekend:

Open Discussion: Friday, September 19th, 6:30pm

The first night is dedicated to listening to the community.  We want the ultimate customers (entrepreneurs and investors) to participate in helping us gather requirements for the site.  What functionality do you need?  What features do you wish other investment sites offered?

Everyone is welcome on this night.  We want a spirited discussion that sets the stage for the whole endeavor.  As investors and entrepreneurs talk out their mutual needs, legal and insurance will be offering advice, developers and designers will be gathering requirements, and you lovely bloggers will be covering the birth of this magical new entity in loving detail.

Development Jam: Saturday-Sunday, September 20th-21st, All Day

The rest of the weekend is devoted to construction of the actual site.  The development team is made up entirely of local designers and developers, many of whom are also (of course) full-time entrepreneurs, volunteering their time, talent, and effort to seeing this vision realized.  We have all manner of product management roles filled, and with many Startup Weekend Alumni in attendance the weekend promises to produce the amazing results we’ve come to expect from this community.

Location: The Appcelerator Offices in Buckhead

Here is the map to the address, but i understand that directions from there are still pretty difficult.  The best i can tell you is cross-reference the map with this image, and be nice to security:

If you have any questions or concerns, just drop me a comment!

A major strain on their system is power users. For example, people who are followed by tens of thousands of people, and avidly post (Robert Scoble.) The math doesn’t scale well at all, so when you overlap these “power-user” qualities, you clearly get an exponential explosion of activity. I can see how this is nasty to scale. Now imagine what’ll happen when the mainstream finally figures it out! (Hint: it’s happening. Have you seen @comcastcares?)

“Twitter could be down for months.” They’re discussing the fact that they have a plan for fixing their scaling issues, but that the plan won’t be in place tomorrow. They’re complaining that the users won’t accept “months” as an answer, but they really didn’t give any details. I’d really like to hear about their proposed architecture! Will they ::gasp:: shed Rails? Adopt the cloud?

“The ratio of downtime this week is better than last week.” Apparently Twitter has been undergoing immense growth. March was South by Southwest, which is where Twitter was born 2 years ago, meaning an enormous uptake of usage and users. In fact, according to Evan, users doubled in the March-April time frame. They made it through all of it without a crash, supposedly due to some recent optimizations. Of course, the growth has continued (i guarantee it is exponential and the rate is exponential) and further changes are required.

“‘Why don’t you drop Ruby already?’ That’s not exactly a solution…”

“We have a lot of money in the bank, money in the bank doesn’t make the servers run better.”

“We haven’t had serious talks about open-sourcing our software. We have a small group of smart people who haven’t solved this kind of problem before… We have some great advisers… Senior Engineers at Google… too many cooks in the kitchen [if we add more] at this point.”

“…we turn off the really expensive parts of the site so the site will stay up.”  Found that out the hard way recently, haven’t we?  I call them “brownouts”.

“API requests are 10 or 20 times as much traffic as web requests.”

Talking about a stream: “Lots of copies on cache, only one copy on disk.”  Sounds like a nightmare, but i’m sure he doesn’t mean “no backups” or anything so sinister.

“When we built Twitter, we didn’t know what it was.” This quote totally nails the power of Rails! I have to consider Twitter a Rails success.

Talking about what Twitter developers are capable of: “I can break this whole thing [Twitter], it’s fragile. It shouldn’t be, but it is.”  Way to be candid there, guys.

Why don’t you just stop taking new users? “That’s a possibility…”, but new users aren’t nearly as expensive as maturing users, basically, so it isn’t terribly effective.

“Twitter was a side project at Odeo.” 4 guys worked on it on the side “as a lark.” This is why they didn’t build a huge infrastructure up front. Frankly, it wouldn’t have gotten built at all if they had stopped to think about scalability.  (Rails definitely helped here.)

“Sometimes you have to build a prototype to get the point across.”  (Rails again.)

About spammers: “We look a lot at the ratios of users’ activity.” Apparently people are doing “traditional email spam” with Twitter by unfollowing and re-following to keep triggering the “You are being followed by SpammaJamma” emails, over and over again, i suppose in hopes you follow them back.

Any of my Tweetin’ audience have thoughts?

UPDATE ABOUT THE VIDEO STREAM: Well, I was broadcasting this event live before lunch, but I was asked to stop by the organizer. (Something about some people still have day jobs, potential SEC trouble, etc. I’m sure i wouldn’t understand…)

UPDATE 2:  Here’s the videos i took until my battery died, neatly archived by Justin.tv.  I’m linking them here for posterity, but they really aren’t that interesting when they’re not live…