Molson Hart

100+ presentations and speaking gigs later, I am comfortable enough to ad lib an hour long presentation. I keep getting asked to present at things, so it seems to be working.

PROGRAMMING Unlike many founders, I didn’t grow up coding. I was a physics major in undergrad, which translates to being an absolute shit programmer. Didn’t take a single CS class in school. Object oriented programming? No fucking idea what that was.

I never worked at a programming job either. Went directly to rounding out first company, Kiko, a web calendar which was a giant mess of spaghetti code made from copy and pasting JS tutorials I found online.

That year we pivoted Kiko half a dozen times, which basically served as a bootcamp to build half a dozen new web apps. By the end of that year I was ok at architecting and spinning up a REST app.

After starting http://Justin.tv , I continued working on product and contributing to writing code. Some of my proudest moments were building cross-browser JS libraries for complex rendering of ads. 4 years after starting professionally, I was a serviceable programmer!

MANAGEMENT When we started Kiko, I’d never worked at a job for more than 3 mnths in my life. I didn’t know jack shit about how to manage. You think you work w green managers? Our first employees didn’t even show up to work half the days and we didn’t know how to talk to them

At http://Justin.tv , we didn’t even have 1:1s because I thought they were a waste of time. Finally our VP Eng took me aside and told me I had to start doing the basics. (He also has to tell me what the basics were)