Today, for the first time I went to a social event here in Berlin for entrepreneurs. After the lamentations that I’d been exposed to by the locals, I can say that I was pleasantly impressed. The group seemed decent — a mix of coders and business folk and some in between.

One thing was painfully obvious. I’m a whole lot worse at explaining what we’re doing than I thought I would be. Most folks could layout the basics of what they were doing in a few seconds. I stumbled over it even when rambling at length. I’m too used to giving presentations, where I’ve got an audience and an hour.

The first time that we presented our ideas we over simplified. We’re working on some fairly hard problems and we didn’t manage to convince them that we both had something compelling and the skills to pull it off.

This time I went too far in the other direction. I blabbed too much about my background (more than probably anyone cared, and likely to the point of seeming arrogant) and in spoken form, still struggled with outlining what it is exactly that we’re doing.

A good “elevator pitch” is harder than it seems. For us we’ve got to:

• Show how what we’re doing is interesting.
• For the non-computer scientists, point out that it’s non-trivial (i.e. hard to duplicate).
• For computer scientists, convince them that we’re skilled enough to pull it off.
• Briefly explain how we plan to monetize it.
• Boil that down to about a minute.

 
The crux of the difficulty, perhaps, lies between points two and three.  For non-technical folk, what we’re doing seems easy.  For technical folk, it seems very hard.

I’ve got another shot at this at the Open Coffee meeting on Friday. Hopefully by then I’ll have managed to get a little closer to something compelling. I’d like to have a clear message that we’re able to present by the time that we go for a public beta in the near future.

As I’ve worked through some of the ideas that we’ll be using at Directed Edge over the last few years I’ve stumbled across several subfields of computer science: information retrieval, semantic webs, graph algorithms, recommender systems.

As we cross boundaries there is one question that always strikes me: Why don’t computer scientists track related sub-fields?

This problem seems to afflict academia in general, but computer scientists seem to have even worse tunnel vision than par. When I stumble across papers that are potentially useful to the work that we’re doing I tend to track down the papers they’ve cited in search of other useful pieces of the puzzle and invariably there is almost no overlap in co-citation across sub-fields.

Why is this?

On the one hand, this provides a measure of excitement to me; there are these pools of knowledge that I manage to stumble across every few months that help bring our technology closer to realization. On the other hand, there’s this nagging wonder that so many brilliant minds aren’t talking to their colleagues to put together cool solutions to interesting problems.  Theories?

Shameless plug: We’ve started a blog aggregator for startup related blogs. Got one? Drop me a mail and we’ll add you to the syndication.

After posting this on Hacker News I’ve gotten pretty serious about setting up some things to get the Hacker News startup community to pull together to our collective advantage.  Here are the main points:

• Link to me at LinkedIn and join the Hacker News group (assuming you’re a news.YC regular)
• Join our mailing list for entrepreneurs.  Let’s hone each others projects into something great.
• Join the Planet.  Mail me.  If you’ve got a startup, we’ll syndicate you.  What’s a Planet?  It’s something like this.  They’re real community hubs in the Open Source world.
• Food.  We’re working on this.  If you happen to be in or near Berlin, we’ll do dinner regularly starting Saturday the 19th.  If you’re not in Berlin and want to host, let’s get a calendar set up.