Peter Thiel to Write Book on Building Companies

Training a general-purpose military force is highly risky and could throw the country deeper into strife.

I owe much of my understanding of suspense and fear on the page to one single terrifying experience.

You're the Boss Blog: Finding Alternatives to Building a Web Site

Generating revenue along with the buzz.

Over my last two columns, I’ve discussed how not to hire a Web developer and how to build a Website you love. But for some small businesses, there are other options — alternatives to building or refreshing a Web site.

One option is a one-page site. This is a specialty of Carbonsquare, a design shop that builds business sites of up to 10 pages using customized templates on the Weebly platform. One of Carbonsquare’s clients is a fashion-accessories retailer, Debra Wood, who has a mobile fashion boutique, DebiFashion. Ms. Wood decided a one-page site worked best for her side business. “It was so much work to constantly change my shopping-cart Web site, so for a $249 investment, I can make the changes I want and not break the bank,” she said.

For a basic 10-page site, Carbonsquare charges $549 plus a monthly hosting and maintenance fee that runs about $30. “We decided to use the Weebly system because it’s a simple drag-and-drop system,” said Christopher Rippie, founder of Carbonsquare. “We want to help our customers understand smart design. Too many people over-design their Web sites. We did not use the WordPress platform, because it takes more time to build a Web site, which drives the cost up. We are trying to eliminate the sticker shock in Web site design and give people something they can manage themselves after we build it.”

Carbonsquare does have some drawbacks. WordPress plug-ins won’t work with the Weebly platform, search-engine optimization functionality is not built in the way it is with WordPress, and if you are blogging heavily, the system has limitations. Mr. Rippie suggests building a blog in WordPress and integrating it with the Weebly Web site.

Another option is to use Tumblr, a very easy-to-use blogging platform, as your Web site. With more than 100 million bloggers, Tumblr has an active community of users who search for content based on keyword tags. This can make it easier to build an audience quickly. It allows users to post text, photos, quotes, links, music and videos from a desktop or phone and from a  browser or through e-mail. A Tumblr page works best for visual businesses, such as retail, design, food, or fashion. Some small businesses use Tumblr in addition to a WordPress blog. Tumblr allows owners to link back to e-commerce sites with coupon codes, QR codes and links to other social media accounts. Its templates are easy to use and there’s nothing to download to get started.

Diane Souter of Absolutely Fabulous Unique Gifts and Décor in Huntington Beach, Calif., uses a Tumblr page to highlight her latest products and attract a younger audience. “Tumblr is so easy to do that I could do it,” she said. “I’m able to take a photo with my iPhone and upload it to Tumblr with the hashtags and keywords, within seconds literally, and it links to my Web site.”

Ms. Souter said that while the traffic from Tumblr leads to some sales, it mainly drives buzz. “It would be great if people could click on the picture and the price comes up with the ability to make a purchase through Tumblr,” she said. That might be a way Yahoo will attempt to monetize the site, now that it has bought it for more than $1 billion.

Three months ago, Innate Family Chiropractic, based in Pasadena, Calif., started using RebelMouse to host its Web site. RebelMouse allows companies to display the latest updates on their social media accounts on the company home page; in fact, those updates can be the homepage or they can an embedded addition. Users can customize a RebelMouse site or choose from previously designed theme pages. They can also post a full-text blog post directly to RebelMouse and then add an image or a video. And they can add RSS feeds from their own blog or from other blogs they read frequently.

Paul Berry, former chief technology officer of Huffington Post, says he created RebelMouse to save small-business owners time and frustration. “We just so saw so many people struggle with their Web site almost to the point of giving up,” he said. “We knew there was a simple solution that didn’t involve developers or designers. We wanted to make people’s content shine and amplify their social media efforts.” The service costs $10 a month and integrates seamlessly with MailChimp, the e-mail service.

Innate Family Chiropractic picked RebelMouse to save time with its Web marketing and because it wanted a central place to share content on pediatric chiropractic care. The three-year-old family wellness and chiropractic center uses Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest to share and generate health-related tips and articles. “I used to spend so much time educating clients and putting our content on all our social media accounts,” said Christopher Vargas, a chiropractor and owner of Innate Family. “Plugging everything into RebelMouse just made things easier.” The company pays $19.99 a month to use the service on two Web sites.

Melinda Emerson is founder and chief executive of Quintessence Multimedia, a social media strategy and content development company. You can follow her on Twitter.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 7, 2013

A previous version of this post referred incorrectly to the Web platform Weebly.

The Boss: Arrowsight’s C.E.O., on Building Companies That Last

As a teenager, I worked in a fruit and vegetable store. My job was to make orange juice in the basement. Whenever the longtime employees walked down, I’d pepper them with questions about how everything worked. It was my introduction to business.

In sixth grade, I moved to Boston to live with my father, a physician, then returned to Vermont for college. I graduated from the University of Vermont in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and history.

During college, I developed a relationship with a financial adviser who worked at what was then Dean Witter Reynolds and was involved in technical trading analysis. He introduced me to a Japanese trading method called candlestick charting. I took the charts along with me on a summer vacation in Greece and continued to study with him for a few months after I graduated.

In 1991, I got a job on Wall Street at what was then CS First Boston as a currency trader, and in 1993 I moved to Paine Webber for a year. I had about 10 bosses in that time, so it didn’t seem like a stable industry. I hoped to start my own trading company. From 1994 to 1999, I was a co-founder of two money management firms that traded currency. When the euro was adopted in 1999, I thought that currency trading would become less profitable, so it was time for another career change.

Around 1997, my wife, Alison, and I watched a television program that included a day care center with a worker who possibly abused drugs. Putting cameras in these centers, enabling parents to see their children in real time by logging into a Web site, seemed like a good idea, and in 1999 I started ParentWatch, the precursor of Arrowsight. ParentWatch is now a division of Arrowsight.

I felt that the beef production industry, with its need for safety, offered greater potential for using video cameras. I thought of how sports teams use game films to improve, and I wondered why businesses weren’t doing something similar.

For three years while running ParentWatch, I studied the beef industry and raised capital for my idea, starting Arrowsight in 2002. My finance background helped me find start-up funding, and I met a senior executive in the meat industry who gave me a fast-track education in the field. I spent hours in meat processing plants.

Using cameras, sensors and remote video software, we started out checking food safety and animal welfare in meat processing plants. In 2004, a beef industry consultant introduced me to Temple Grandin, an expert in the humane treatment of animals. Temple endorsed our operations, which use auditing methods she developed, and she became one of our advisers.

Our customers include Cargill and the OSI Group, and, since we expanded our monitoring services into the health care industry, the North Shore-LIJ Health System and the medical center of the University of California, San Francisco.

When I started Arrowsight, I underestimated how difficult it is to convince potential customers to buy a system that doesn’t currently exist in their budget. I’d advise other entrepreneurs to look for investors who have a long-term view, and to forget their ego and choose colleagues who are smarter than they are.

Corner Office: Ryan Smith of Qualtrics, on Building a Transparent Culture

Q. What were some early leadership lessons for you?

A. I definitely had an interesting upbringing. There are five children, and everyone’s been pretty successful. My parents are both Ph.D.’s — they were in academia until the late stages of their careers, when they decided to go into entrepreneurial ventures.

They raised us with the mentality of “if you want it, you’ve got to go out and get it.” I remember when I was 13, my mother dropped us off in downtown Provo one summer, about two miles from where we lived, and said, “You guys are all paying for your clothes this year. Don’t come home till you have jobs.” They instilled in us the idea that “you can be anything you want to be, but you’re going to have to go do it.”

Q. How did you start Qualtrics?

A. I was a sophomore in college and working in L.A. for Hewlett-Packard on a summer program. My father was diagnosed with throat cancer, so I took a semester off school to be with him. He was always tinkering with technology to make the research world better. And when he would come home from his radiation treatments, he couldn’t speak. I bonded with him by helping him with his work. The cancer was very severe, and he needed something to look forward to. So we would work together, and by the time he recovered from the cancer, I had signed up 20 clients and we had formed a business. We’re 290 employees now, and we’ll probably double in size in the next 18 months.

Q. Tell me about the culture you’re trying to foster.

A. We’ve been extremely transparent, but not so that we can be cool. And it’s not about an open environment, because that’s not what makes a company transparent. It’s more around the fact that everyone needs to know where we are going and how we are going to get there.

So we want everyone to understand our objectives and make that available to everyone as we’re evolving, so people aren’t guessing and they’re not internally focused. That’s one obstacle a lot of companies fall into. I believe most companies fail because they’re not focused — they either get focused on other things in the market that aren’t important, so they’re thrashing around without a clear objective, or they’re focused internally on things like politics and bureaucracy. It’s not that these companies aren’t smart companies or lack good businesses. It’s just that there’s a lot of noise.

We want to be transparent because we want to encourage our people to have all the information to keep them focused on what really matters — our objectives and how they’re going to contribute.

Q. Can you give more details about how that works?

A. We took our best product guy and some of our best engineers and built a system internally to help scale our organization by knowing everyone’s objectives in the company. We have five objectives annually for our company, and everyone goes into the system each quarter to put in their objectives that play into those broader goals.

For one of the broader objectives, you might have 230 specific objectives. The reason we’re making all this available is, especially nowadays, you’re hiring individuals to think. We can’t control the way they think. All we can control or have an effect on is the environment around them.

We have another system that sends everyone an e-mail on Monday that says: “What are you going to get done this week? And what did you get done last week that you said you were going to do?” Then that rolls up into one e-mail that the entire organization gets. So if someone’s got a question, they can look at that for an explanation. We share other information, too — every time we have a meeting, we release meeting notes to the organization. When we have a board meeting, we write a letter about it afterward and send it to the organization.

When everyone’s rowing together toward the same objective, it’s extremely powerful. We’re trying to execute at a very high level, and we need to make sure everyone knows where we’re going.

The point is that it’s not like we just said, “Hey, we’re going to be transparent.”  We look at every decision and then say, “Why shouldn’t we share this with everyone?” And we do that instead of the default reaction of saying, “We’re not going to share anything.” It might make some people uncomfortable, but that’s not a good-enough argument. 

Q. Let’s shift to hiring. How does the conversation go? What are you looking for? What questions do you ask?

A. We definitely want someone with a high trajectory. The organization is going to change quickly — we’re not perfect, and we make mistakes. We want to find individuals who align with that, who will add value to the company in whatever role they’re in. Part of that is the disposition to be willing to do whatever it’s going to take, because we feel that if we win as a team, we’re going to win together.

Q. Tell me more about how you get at those qualities.

A. From my standpoint, I’m looking to see if someone’s a “gamer” — that’s what I call it. I want to know the hardest thing they’ve ever done. So if you were in Korea, traveling by yourself, did you go home when things got tough? That’s what I’m trying to figure out because when the ship’s going well, everyone’s good. But when obstacles come up, we’ve got to sit back and rethink, how are we going to navigate these? Will some people want to jump off the ship? Or are they going to be a gamer and want to come in, roll up their sleeves and say, “Hey, this is part of it.”

That’s what I’m looking for. I want someone who’s going to roll up their sleeves when a little bit of challenge comes their way.

I think you can pick that up by looking at someone’s career. When times get tough, do they stick in? Because most good things happen after you hit a rough patch. If things are too easy, we probably didn’t learn enough.

The interview has been edited and condensed.

Disruptions: With a 3-D Printer, Building a Gun With the Push of a Button

Lance Rosenfield for The New York Times Cody Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas, is working to design and create a gun using 3-D printing technology.

It has long been possible to make a gun at home. But what happens when it no longer takes knowledge and skill to build one?

It won’t be long before a felon, unable to buy a gun legally, can print one at home. Teenagers could make them in their bedroom while their parents think they are “playing on their computer.” I’m talking about a fully functional gun, where the schematic is downloaded free from the Internet and built on a 3-D printer, all with the click of a button.

Hit print, walk away, and a few hours later, you have a firearm. There are no background checks. No age limits. No serial numbers etched on the barrel or sales receipts to track the gun.

It might sound like science fiction, but 3-D printers are quickly becoming a consumer product. These printers, which now cost about $1,000, can print objects by spraying thin layers of plastic, metal or ceramics that are built up into shapes. Long used by industrial companies to make prototypes and parts, 3-D printers are becoming faster and less expensive almost weekly. One manufacturer, MakerBot, has set up a retail store in Manhattan. Chinese companies have started making them, and prices are falling to about $500.

Michael Guslick A fully functional semi-automatic gun, partly manufactured on a 3-D printer.

Hobbyists have printed fairly rudimentary objects: prosthetics, iPhone cases, cat statues and missing luggage clasps.

A number of people have already made gun parts using 3-D printers. And yes, the guns with these parts have successfully fired bullets. Cody Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas, is in the process of building a completely functional printed gun. “We hope to have this fully tested and put the files online in the next couple of months,” said Mr. Wilson, who runs a Web site called Defense Distributed.

He calls the gun the Wiki Weapon. In a video explaining the project’s goals, he describes the Wiki Weapon as the world’s first “3-D printable personal defense system.”

“What’s great about the Wiki Weapon is it only needs to be lethal once,” Mr. Wilson says in the video, in a monotone voice. “We will have the reality of a weapons system that can be printed out from your desk. Anywhere there is a computer, there is a weapon.”

Under most circumstances, it is not illegal to build your own gun, but it has been pretty difficult. Ginger Colbrun, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said people had made firearms out of pens, books and belt buckles. But those contraptions and conventional firearms require a certain amount of knowledge and skill.

Ms. Colbrun said the agency was keeping a close watch on 3-D printers. “A.T.F. always tries to stay ahead of the illegal activity and the novel firearms trafficking schemes, without impinging on individuals’ rights,” she said.

But monitoring whether people make their own guns on a 3-D printer is going to be impossible, barring sticking an A.T.F. agent in every home. It’s also hopeless to try to build a technology into these printers that prevents people from printing a gun. One project mentioned in Mr. Wilson’s video, called the RepRap printer, will be capable of replicating itself by printing other 3-D printers.

After committing a crime with a printed weapon, a person could simply melt down the plastic and reprint it as something as mundane as a statue of Buddha. And guns made of plastic might not be spotted by metal detectors in airports, courthouses or other government facilities.

“This becomes scary when you consider the fact that it could be yet another opportunity for people to evade background checks and get a gun,” said Daniel Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

The National Rifle Association did not respond to a request for comment.

Given the number of existing loopholes and the ease with which people can buy firearms on the Internet, people printing guns might seem like adding a drop of water to an Olympic-size swimming pool. According to an annual report released by the A.T.F., more than 5.5 million guns are made in the United States each year, and millions more are imported.

“Forty percent of guns are sold through a loophole at gun shows, where people are already able to buy a firearm without having to go through a background check,” Mr. Gross said. “There’s already a permanent ‘gun show’ on the Internet.”

Michael Guslick, an amateur gunsmith who has written extensively online about the considerable challenges of 3-D printed guns, said people had been experimenting with homemade guns for some time. He said the most notable example was the zip gun, which is made from off-the-shelf plumbing parts. (Not surprisingly, the schematics and instructions can be downloaded online.)

“This is just applying a different technology to something that is already being done,” he said. “But making one on a 3-D printer is a lot of work when your local plumbing department is so close by.”

For now, the task isn’t as easy as hitting print, say the few people who have successfully built guns using 3-D printers. The basic problem is not the printing technology, but the lack of plastics strong enough for a real gun.

But this year, Mr. Guslick managed to print some components for an AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle — the kind of gun used in the Aurora, Colo., shootings — on a 3-D printer. He used ABS plastic, “the same plastic used to make Legos.”

He was particularly interested in printing a part called the lower receiver, which connects the trigger, grip and magazine holder. “I used my home 3-D printer to make the lower receiver, which is the only regulated component of a gun,” he said. “Every other part you can legally pick up at your local gun shop.”

Ramallah Journal: Palestinians Building Tech Hub in West Bank

The idea, of course, is to give employees something resembling the comfortable, innovation-friendly working conditions that are a hallmark of Silicon Valleys around the world, said Murad Tahboub, 42, the managing director of ASAL Technologies. Because that is what Ramallah, the West Bank city where the Palestinian Authority has its administrative headquarters, has ambitions to become: a hub for the information and communications technology industry.

With 120 employees, ASAL is one of the largest companies in the small but burgeoning Palestinian tech sector, which many of those involved say is on the verge of big things. “We are in the right position to have exponential growth,” said Mr. Tahboub, looking every bit the part with his slicked-back hair and black-rimmed Lacoste eyeglasses.

Compared with other industries that the anemic West Bank economy might look to develop, the information and communications technology sector has an advantage: it is much less affected by impediments to movement, like the barriers, checkpoints and permit requirements that Israel imposes on the territory in the name of security.

“This is a sector that has no borders,” Mr. Tahboub observed. “You just need electricity and a telephone line.”

In the four years since Cisco Systems made an initial strategic investment of about $10 million here, financing the beginnings of business-service outsourcing to Palestinian companies, supporting training programs and drawing in other international partners, the sector is said to have grown from less than 1 percent of the Palestinian economy to more than 5 percent today — albeit of an economy whose total output is estimated at a modest $5 billion to $6 billion.

For all the enthusiasm and talk of an emerging “ecosystem” from Palestinians newly proficient in the industry’s international argot, the technologists of Ramallah must still grapple with some of the challenges that confront the wider Palestinian economy and society, most notably the continued absence of the long-envisaged Palestinian state.

A World Bank report issued last week said that while the Palestinian Authority had made steady progress toward building the institutions required by a future state, the economy was currently not strong enough to support such a state, and remained too dependent on foreign aid. The report said it was critical for the Palestinian Authority to increase trade, spur private-sector growth and integrate the territory into the world economy as much as possible.

Experts and business leaders say that the main resource the Palestinians have to work with is their young, well-educated, entrepreneurial-minded population. But there is a need, they say, to overcome the image the world has of the territory as a volatile conflict zone where people ride to work on camels.

Though outsourcing contracts are the mainstay of the industry here, the model that the Palestinian infotech sector looks to is not India’s, with its immense population, but more that of Israel. “Innovation, creativity, being ahead of the curve” is the goal, said Tareq Maayah, 45, the chief executive of Exalt Technologies, “rather than relying on a huge quantity of basic skills.”

Like Israel, the Palestinians want a resilient tech sector that can be a politics-free zone. “The occupation is frustrating,” Mr. Maayah observed, “but Israelis and Palestinians have been working with each other in the worst of times.”

He said that Exalt handles outsourcing contracts from multinational companies operating in Israel and from some local companies as well. “Now we are producers and we sell to Israel, as opposed to just being consumers,” Mr. Maayah said. “It’s the start of a better balance in the economic relationship.”

Others noted that Israel has built a thriving technology sector even as it fought several wars in recent years.

There is no shortage of prospective employees; rather the opposite. About 2,000 Palestinians graduate from local universities each year in technical subjects, one-third to one-half of them women, but only about 30 percent of them find work in the local industry.

The Palestinian I.T. Association of Companies lists 125 members, about three-quarters of them based in the West Bank and the rest in Gaza, which is run by the militant group Hamas, not the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. The entrepreneurs acknowledge that the industry is still in its infancy, with one estimating total outsourcing revenue at just $6 million a year. But they say it can be an attractive option for Israel-based firms because of its proximity, cultural familiarity, the talent of Palestinian engineers and their loyalty to their companies.

Sam Husseini runs LionHeart, a company that operates a training program with an Israeli partner to teach Palestinian entrepreneurs marketing skills. Two chief executives — Husni Abu Samrah of MobiStine, a start-up that designs health care applications in Arabic, and Saeed Zeidan of Ultimit, which develops software and does consulting work — each said they learned a lot from the training program, especially about what the industry still needs to thrive.

“The main thing is exposure,” Mr. Zeidan said. “We do not have exposure for the international market.”

Even so, Yahya al-Salqan, chief executive of Jaffa.Net, a software developer, said the regional market offered great promise. He observed that the Palestinian tech sector was uniquely placed in a “sandwich” between Israel’s so-called Silicon Wadi, less than an hour’s drive away on the Mediterranean coast, and what he called a huge emerging demand for technology services in Arab countries.

Mr. Salqan worked in Silicon Valley in California early in his career, and then returned home about 15 years ago to found Jaffa.Net, with one branch in Ramallah and another in Nablus in the northern West Bank. Jaffa.Net is working on mobile banking applications, and it will soon open an office in the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar.

Many people here viewed Cisco’s arrival in 2008 as a turning point for the industry. It started by offering a year’s research and development financing to companies in Ramallah, and then began hiring Palestinian engineers on regular outsourcing contracts. More recently, it invested $5 million in Sadara Ventures, said to be the first venture capital fund focusing on the Palestinian territories.

Holding face-to-face meetings with Israel-based customers and investors is not always easy, despite the short distances. Mr. Husseini of LionHeart said his company had held meetings at Biankini Beach on the Dead Sea, south of Jericho, not because of the resort setting but because it was accessible to people from either side of the Israeli security cordon.

Zika Abzuk, Cisco’s senior manager for corporate affairs in Israel, related one instance when she and a team of Israeli employees was stuck on one side of a closed military checkpoint near Jericho while 16 Palestinian entrepreneurs they had hoped to confer with were stuck on the other. In the end, they held their meeting on neutral ground: a Bedouin-style reception tent at a gas station near the checkpoint.