I just returned from a trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, and although it was mostly for vacation, I had enough interactions with the startup community there that I’d like to share some observations in the days ahead.

I wasn’t looking for a job out there, and don’t plan on joining Atlanta’s apparent westward migration, but I did have some interesting interactions with startups at all funding phases – seed funding, $1 million+ Series A rounds, and companies funded even better than that.  An interesting trend emerged – all of them had very similar hiring goals.

What was the common role that they were ALL hiring for?  Steve Ballmer knows:

Yes, developers, developers, developers.  One company was at 11 people, all developers, and still hiring for more.

This is VERY contrary to the pattern I’ve seen in my Atlanta startup experience.  The Atlanta norm seems to be starting with a developer or two, filling out the team at the seed or Series A stage, and then minimal developer hires after that.  I’ve seen several entire funding rounds dedicated to building out sales teams, marketing teams, biz dev, etc. with zero additional developer hires.  As a CTO/developer type myself, I’ve often felt like this is a stage where organizational vapor lock begins and progress toward the original, ambitious idea slows dramatically.  (Don’t get me wrong, I like revenue a LOT.)

So what’s the difference?  Of course I don’t KNOW, but I have some ideas.  First, I’d characterize Bay Area startups as somewhat more ambitious, risky ideas on average (more on this at a later date).  When your goal is bigger, you don’t have time to slow the organization down.  Any round of funding is an opportunity to get even further ahead of the competition, and you do that by building product.  Paul Graham has recently written about the importance of a hacker-centric culture – hiring more developers helps with that.  Mark Zuckerberg often hired developers for non-developer roles at Facebook – marketing and more.

I’m honestly a bit jealous, because I can imagine the sorts of awesome companies Atlanta could build if we could concentrate our entrepreneurial developer talent in some big ideas.

So you might ask how these startups set product direction?  I suspect they get great feedback from their users, board, advisors, and peers, and the founders remain heavily involved in setting the product direction.

What do you think?  Does Atlanta hire fewer developers at each stage of funding?  Why or why not?  Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Now to the issue at hand.  Flash, Unity 3D, Appcelerator Titanium, and the numerous other toolkits that Apple effectively banned today have one thing in common – they make it easier to write applications that run on both iPhones and other phones.  Apparently Apple can’t stand the idea of actual competition, and is willing to harm these companies that were following all of their prior rules verbatim. If Apple is truly committed to this course of action, they may well destroy companies that are betting on supporting multiple mobile platforms but don’t have the resources to build separate, native applications for iPhone, Android, Palm, Blackberry, etc.  Nobody saw this coming.  Apple made this compulsive, drastic move that affects hundreds if not thousands of companies that support them in the name of defending Apple’s profit margins.

Committing significant resources to developing for iPhone and iPad is now very much like adopting a pet tiger.  It’s cool and it’s fun, but it’s only a matter of time before Apple mauls you in your sleep.  If you had a girlfriend who you found really attractive, except she made you speak Latin, told you what you could and couldn’t think, changed the ground rules of the relationship on a daily basis, insisted you believe her definition of “sexy”, randomly attacked your friends, and freaked out the moment you thought about going out to dinner with your friends, I’d hope you would get out of that relationship. I hope iPhone developers will see that Apple is just using them for their apps and will turn on them compulsively and without notice.

In the 90’s, technophiles railed against Microsoft for having a semi-closed platform with apps that used undocumented APIs to gain a competitive advantage against their competition, which was any app a user chose to install.  Now, we have a more closed platform that chooses what apps a user can install, rejects apps that compete with its own or attempt to use undocumented APIs, actively opposes a plugin architecture that can spur innovation, prohibits users from installing apps that they want, and developers defend this system because it’s pretty and runs on nice hardware?  Wake up.  It’s time for a break up.

And now, the musical entertainment:

I’ve been using Twitter as @rkischuk for the past 16 months.  Twitter is growing.  Fast.

@jimmyfallon has taken the late night show slot on NBC formerly occupied by Conan O’Brien, with moderate viewer ratings thus far.  Interestingly, this evening, Jimmy and guests @kevinrose (Digg.com), @alexalbrecht (Digg.com), and @rustyrockets (Russell Brand, Forgetting Sarah Marshall funny guy) asked their Twitter followers and TV viewers to follow @bryanbrinkman, with the goal of unseating @BarackObama as the most followed person in Twitter.  Bryan’s a New York City based creative dude focused on video and animation.  He started today with 7 followers on Twitter.  For the uninitiated, Twitter is a “micro-blogging” service where users can post what they’re doing in 140 characters or less. Unlike Facebook or MySpace, you don’t have to be “friends” with someone.  I can follow your status updates even if you don’t care what I’m doing, and vice-versa.

I started following Bryan on Twitter earlier on Wednesday, after Jimmy twittered about it, but before the show aired – his follower count was still 4 digits at the time.  When he appeared on the show on the East coast, Bryan had over 11,000 followers due only to the “tweets” (twitter updates) of Jimmy and his guests.  As of the time I’m submitting this post, Bryan has over 18,600 followers, and this is even before Jimmy’s show airs on the Twitter-heavy West coast. In doing so, he passes the Wall Street Journal and Fast Company Magazine to become one of the 10 most popular Twitter users in New York City and in the Top 300 out of 1.3+ million twitter users.  Tuesday, Ellen DeGeneres created Twitter account @TheEllenShow, after guest @iamdiddy (P Diddy) demonstrated Twitter to her, and already has almost 50,000 followers in just 2 days, placing her among the 200 most popular twitterers.  Twitter has also been heavily talked about on the major news networks – it is everywhere.

As I was updating stats for this post, Twitter showed me a fail whale several times, as it does then they’re getting more traffic than they can handle.  Twitter Search‘s trending topics at the time were Jimmy Fallon, Google Voice, Bryan Brinkman, #SxSW, Late Night, South Park, Watchmen, Russell Brand, #melo, and GrandCentral – with 4 of these 9 topics related to Fallon’s gag, I have to believe that the fail whale was caused by Jimmy Fallon sending a ton of curious viewers to Twitter in a burst.

Twitter is everywhere on TV now, so much that I am inclined to call it mainstream.  I see not just technophiles on Twitter now – I see people I know from all disciplines – PhD chemists, real estate agents, entertainers, churches, you name it – joining Twitter.  Twitter’s been pretty stable lately, but with 33% growth in just the past month, and the ability of a single mainstream media hit to induce fail-whale’s, I think we’re in for a whole new era of growth as Twitter is embraced by a mainstream audience, and a whole new era of odd Twitter behavior as a flood of new users enters faster than the existing users can educate them about Twitter’s social norms.