This post is by Jishnu Menon, data and product counsel for Mozilla. Prior to Mozilla, Jishnu has practiced law at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and as in-house counsel for Adobe Systems and Ning and blogs intermittently.

Choosing a good legal team for your business or project is not a trivial matter. Ideally, whomever you end up with will be with you for years, not just one or two transactions. Since I’ve been on both sides of this decision, I wanted to lay out some things I’ve learned that may help you with your choice.

Referrals matter.

Here’s the most important tip: get a good, informed referral. A great lawyer can be an amazing value-add…and a bad one can make your life very difficult.

If you know someone who is a lawyer that you like as a person (rare as that may be), ask them for a reference. If one of your colleagues who is in a similar business has a contact, that’s a great way to go too. If you receive a reference from a non-lawyer, try to get a corroborating one from a lawyer and vice versa.

The next two tips are longer, but can help you narrow in on a choice based on referrals you get.

Different lawyers have different roles.

It’s not always clear, but practicing law encompasses many specialties. If you’re looking for a lawyer, you’ll need to find a good lawyer in a specific area of expertise. While most outside counsel will list a litany of specialties on their professional resume, in my experience only some lawyers have deep specialty in several areas of expertise.

For the Internet/software/hardware related practices alone, here is a sampling of categories of law I’ve run across:

Corporate formation/structure/counseling, Technology Licensing, Content Deals, Copyright/Trademark Litigation, Patent Litigation, Copyright/Trademark Counseling, Patent Counseling, Commercial contracts, Privacy (involving some combination of deals, litigation and counseling), Mergers and Acquisitions, Employment, Compensation and Benefits (usually distinct from employment), Immigration.

As a start up, you want someone who can either do as many of the above well as possible or a group of people that can help you.

Big law firms are not necessarily better than solos and small shops.

Large firms offer some great advantages: they can provide your investors with “name cred” that can help move things along in a lot of ways with deals and convincing people around legal risk, they can have a wide skill set under one roof, they can attract some pretty stellar talent (with big salaries).

They also have their disadvantages: they are (sometimes very very) expensive, they can be out of touch with what an early stage company needs, they can be inattentive at times (especially if they’re busy or overly successful), they can attract some pretty mediocre talent (with big salaries).

Solo practitioners have their own set of advantages: they can be reasonably priced and know about running a small company (because they do), they usually have a vested interest in seeing you succeed (so they get paid and can eat), they can have a wide skill set under one hat and can provide more through referrals, they can actually be stellar talent that got fed up with big law.

They also have their disadvantages: if they are inattentive you could be out of luck as there’s no one else at the firm you can bug, the level of expertise can vary widely from one person to the next, if their network is not good, you may not have an internal referral for certain specific types of work, and they can have mediocre talent with whom big law got fed up.

I know the numbers of positives/negatives don’t match up in this comparison, but that’s not a reflection on which type of lawyer I think you should get. If it’s important enough to your business, even one of the positives could outweigh all the negatives I’ve listed. It’s also important for you to understand that I’ve worked with great lawyers from many types of firms.

Have a great day and feel free to hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn if you’ve got questions.

As we prepare to launch our newly-structured WebFWD program, we are thrilled to add one more team to the portfolio. Here’s buddycloud, in their own words:

buddycloud believes that group communication can be so much better. People currently resort to a mishmash of forums, email lists, email with multiple CC addresses and sometimes IRC. But people love to communicate on social networks. We take the best of the social web and help teams work better!

buddycloud is making group communication “just work” with channels. A channel is built around you and around your interests. Channels let you share content in realtime with video and pictures. You choose who can view the channel. buddycloud is open source, and even better than that, built around an open protocol. Now anyone can run their own buddycloud server and each server will communicate with the others. Securely and easily.

It’s exciting to be working with WebFWD: Mozilla exists today because Netscape was able to create an open web instead of the many incompatible proprietary dial-up servers like Compuserve and Genie. A huge web ecosystem was spawned. We see new services one could never have imagined when the first browser was released.

The buddycloud team believes that an open systems enable developers to invent new products that nobody can even conceive of. So you can build your own social communication tool, without lock-in, we are working with standards bodies to standardize the buddycloud protocol so that everyone can build on it.

We’re really excited to work with the WebFWD team to build a product that you just fall in love with.”

Photo credit: buddycloud hackathon by Dirk Duckhorn

After 4 solid days of learning, coding, designing, writing and generally moving the dial on their startups, WebFWD teams are back home, digesting and applying what they learned - and ate - during our Summit.

We wanted to let the teams speak for themselves:

“Our time with Jim Cook helped us realize the need to identify what we’re better at than our competitors (features, price etc.). A serendipitous meeting with Melissa and Chrissie helped us with our marketing and brand positioning. And as always, getting refueled is uber awesome when trying to do a startup. The positive energy from all of the teams is amazingly helpful. I genuinely feel like everyone there was a friend and partner in crime.” - Jaisen Maithai of OpenPhoto

“The biggest benefit to me was learning what challenges the other teams in the program were facing, and their approaches to solving them. It’s invaluable to be able to talk through and brainstorm with others that have a different perspective, but ultimately the same goal of creating a product or company with long-lasting impact.” - J Herskowitz of Tomahawk

“I had an amazing time at the summit. All the generous Mozillians that offered their expertise were so helpful, even to me, easily the least tech savvy in the group. I feel fairly confident talking about and understanding a world that just a year ago seemed completely alien. I also learned a ton from my fellow WebFWD members - being able to talk about our projects together was really helpful for me. I had a million new ideas for CASH while hashing out other people’s problems. We face so many of the same issues and other folks’ take on them is always a good way to see a problem in a new light. All in all I can safely say that Jesse and I left the summit feeling inspired and totally focused on getting CASH to the next level.” - Maggie Vail of CASH Music

“We got to meet some really incredible people with fascinating stories to tell. We learned a lot about startups and had a fun time exploring the possibilities in the open innovation space.” - Diwank Tomer of iHeartCode

“It was incredibly inspiring to be a part of this summit. Diane and Pascal have brought together people from literally all over the world who are working on some incredible projects. This really shows the power of open source development to bring people together, the backbone of what so many of us are working to do, building community and collaboration for a more open web. Entropy Wave has already benefitted from the constructively critical feedback and advice we’ve received from being a part of WebFWD, and I’m looking forward to seeing where the program goes moving forward.” - Tristan Crane of Entropy Wave

“The WebFWD summit was great accelerator for the BigBlueButton project. From the first day alone we got valuable feedback on improving our user experience, integration with WebRTC, and viable business models to support an open source project. Also, the four days of close collaboration with the WebFWD teams really built for us strong sense of fellowship between our groups as we helped each other to succeed.” - Fred Dixon of BigBlueButton

“Synbiota learned many things!

1. We learned about the culture inside of Mozilla. We were especially intrigued by the organization, efficiency, and inclusiveness of the AirMozilla Monday meet up. Very cool. These insights are already shaping our thoughts on how we will operate.
2. We learned that Mozilla is much much more than just Firefox.
3. We learned how to better analyze and break down milestones and to really understand what each milestone means and what to do if that milestone hasn’t been achieved. We are entering more and more into the data-driven mindset.
4. We learned that our project is difficult to explain and so it works best (so far) to begin a pitch with context, followed by problem, opportunity and then solution.
5. We had our first encounter with participating in an open-source, distributed hackfest. This will help us to stage future events.
6. We learned the importance of testing everyone’s products and eating one another’s dog food.
7. The WebFWD group is a global force!”

Many others participated - for giggles, you can see their responses through Diane’s Storify story….enjoy!

Berlin-based WebFWD Scout Joseph Somogyi is keeping busy. He will present WebFWD next week on May 25 at LinuxTag, the biggest Linux and Open Source exhibition in Europe, full of workshops, camps and many conference tracks running in parallel. Linux Tag, a 4-day government-sponsored event for every kind of Open Source, is expecting a host of exhibitors and attendees.

Joseph also found time recently to share a pointer to The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Vol I-II (2012), edited by Amy Brown and Greg Wilson, and available online in its entirety. Chapters are written by a collection of open source heroes, including one called Firefox Release Engineering, by Mozillians Chris AtLee, Lukas Blakk, John O’Duinn, and Armen Zambrano Gasparnian.

Joseph quotes:

“Architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study critiques of those buildings written by masters. In contrast, most software developers only ever get to know a handful of large programs well—usually programs they wrote themselves—and never study the great programs of history. As a result, they repeat one another’s mistakes rather than building on one another’s successes.

Our goal is to change that. In these two books, the authors of four dozen open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program’s major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to these books provide unique insights into how they think.”

Other sightings: These closing links come from startup country, Silicon Valley, where a couple high profile acquisition plays triggered plenty of noise and some thoughtful postings earlier this spring:

• High Scalability - The Instagram Architecture Facebook Bought for a Cool Billion Dollars
• Learning from Slideshare’s Founders - NextWala

Our Summit is going strong: after a day of hands-on learning, our teams have spent Saturday huddled in clusters, engaging new and current contributors, and metabolizing the bagels, pizza and candy to keep the fires burning.

Kicking off with workshops was the right move as this allowed the teams to digest new learnings for the hack day on Saturday.

Learnings? There were lots. On Friday we opened with marketing & communications: learning how to hone in on core messages and empower users to tell your story with WebFWD’s own Diane Bisgeier , and exploring the best ways to acquire users with Jane Finette who heads up user engagement at Mozilla.

Our teams went on to have some serious user experience (UX) analysis and evaluation of their websites by Mozilla UX experts Jennifer Morrow aka Boriss and Brian Dils ( a Mozillian with past stints at Adobe, Logitech and PayPal). The focus was on simplifying, which can be done with some simple tools not requiring fancy focus groups or labs. Prime example: the “Think Aloud Test” where you simply have an outsider look at your page and share every reaction aloud they have as they navigate the site. Effective and, significantly, scrappy—the currency of startups.

Next up were tech deep dives guided by Mozilla developers Myk Melez, Anant Narayanan and Fred Wenzel, who helped our teams with issues around web runtimes, scaling and sage wisdom around using tools your community wants to use (sounds obvious, isn’t always).

Rounding out the day were sessions with WebFWD’s own Pascal Finette and Mozilla’s Chief Financial Officer Jim Cook, who described his pattern of working for successful underdogs: Intuit (which challenged Microsoft), Netflix (which beat out Blockbuster), and now Mozilla (taking on walled gardens of the web). Pascal and Jim challenged the teams’ assumptions about who their customers are, and how much value they may place on what offerings.

Thus after a full Friday, our teams came to Saturday’s work day energized by new ideas for positioning their projects, with a full day to hackfully apply what they’d absorbed. Sunday was a chance to refine their pitching - which you can hear at 11am PST Monday at the Project Meeting on Air Mozilla. Onward!

Can you guess what our teams are listening to here?

Hard to believe that nearly half a year has past since the first WebFWD Summit came to town last December. Hard to recall how much we’ve learned and grown. In recent months, three new teams have joined the WebFWD program. This weekend, at the Summit, we’ll host David and Tristan from Entropy Wave, J and Christian from Tomahawk, and Diwank from iHeartCode. We’ll spend time with team members we haven’t met yet in real life, like Maggie “@magicbeans” Vail of CASH Music and Justin Pahara from Synbiota. And we’ll catch up and swap stories with veterans from Big Blue Button, CASH Music and the OpenPhoto Project.

But for the participants themselves, the Summit is about the work, and storytelling is just a small piece of it. As the WebFWD program comes of age, we’re honing in on structure and execution, on deliverables, on releasing code and shipping product.

The four days in Mountain View are chance to dig in and get focused on product and business challenges. Friday is a day of workshops: deep dives with mentors and experts on user experience issues; brand, positioning, communications and marketing strategies; hands-on sessions for finance and accounting; and one-on-one meetings with technical advisors.

Saturday is an Open Work Day, and you’re invited to participate! There’s no better way to get a feel for the people and projects of WebFWD. This is a day-long opportunity to see what it means to build a minimum viable open source product or service with a small team of passionate stakeholders. This event is a cross between a Hack Day and a sprint, and you’re welcome to stop by Mozilla’s Mountain View office to collaborate and code, or dial in remotely to work alongside your favorite team. Mozilla is geo-distributed workplace, and this work day is no exception.

Each of the participating WebFWD teams has posted a list of tasks where they could use help from contributors and fans: from UX and fast prototyping to JavaScript to Python to server-side chops - there are so many ways - large and small - to lend a hand and push the Web forward. Register to attend in real life or virtually via Air Mozilla. We’re even hoping a few hackers from the London MDNHackDay will join us.

One of the best parts of being at Mozilla is how much people want to help. And we’re talking really great people.

Case in point: Neil Patel, CEO of Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics. When we saw what fantastic work he was doing to help companies not only understand who their users were, but to take actions on making this knowledge useful, we knew we had to have him share with our teams.

So we reached out to him. Cold. And he responded. Like, within minutes. A few conversations more and he was live, sharing some incredibly foundational and important practices with our teams.

A few nuggets:

The underpinning rationale of employing web analytics effectively is that understanding your users (and their usage) alone does not equate to generating revenue. It also won’t help you prioritize which features are most valuable to increase your users and their engagement.

Rather, the smartest companies set up the following practices at the start - regardless of how young they are. And importantly, they do more than track this stuff: they act on it.

Sound daunting? Then start by picking one and focus on moving the needle there to start. Then move on to the next one:

• Track people vs. unique visitors
• Get targeted Feedback (Keep Asking Questions)
• Remember that people need time before they buy.
• Discover who’s engaging (and how)
• Track user events e.g. play, pause, stop, click, download, etc.
• Get your Real conversion rate e.g. track where they came from, what they did before they became a converted customer, and how long it took them to pay
• Look at cancellations; this will help you reduce churn as well as initiate conversations with your users
• Measure the Lifetime Value (LTV) of your customers
• Conduct Cohort analysis to better understand the health of your business.
• Segment your users to create a personalized experience.

Watch Neil to see how this all can work for your business.

If you are anything like the majority of startups in today’s distributed world, you are working on projects and tasks with team members strewn across the globe in offices and (more likely) cafes, coworking spaces and living rooms. Your time coding likely trumps the time you spend chatting or in meetings.

Small wonder agile development tools have surged in popularity. One tool, PivotalTracker, evolved organically out of the work that Pivotal Labs, a leading software development firm, was doing with its clients. Pivotal developed the tool for internal use with its clients…and once it wound down its engagements, learned that the clients wanted to continue to use the tool.

While it began selling the tool to cover core development and support costs, Pivotal remains committed to openness, offering an open version of the tool for free. We particularly appreciate that Pivotal also offers free accounts for qualified non-profit and educational organizations - a spirit of giving back very near and dear to the Mozilla ethos.

Our teams had a drive-through of the tool, including how it integrates with other industry tools (such as Bugzilla ;) from Pivotal’s head of quality and service, Joanne Webb. We hope it’s helpful to you!

“If we could get our users to visit our page once a day….click on this button when they want to do this…tell their friends about that service…”

These common goals of the web entrepreneur are the very stuff that Behavior Design seeks to address. Some even point to this discipline as a driver behind the recent success of Instagram. So it was a treat to have three Stanford students affiliated with the Persuasive Technology Lab share more of these principles, and how to apply them.

The Lab designs solutions to get people to adopt new habits, and adhere to them longer. The students sharing with us are:

• David Ngo, Stanford’s First Behavior Design Major
• Karissa Paddie, a self-described “rising senior” and philosophy major.
• Nishant Jacob

…and they debunked commonly-held beliefs around behavior change and shared practical ways to frame the issue and implement desired changes in consumer - and personal - behaviors. Want to lose weight? Be healthy? Stress less? Be a more effective team member? Tune in to the video for some practical exercises you can take for your startup - or your life - to effect real change.

When you develop an open source project, you get used to the idea of sharing and allowing others to contribute for the greater good of innovation. In this context, are there things you can you do to protect your brand and ensure that you continue to meet the expectations of your users, who have grown accustomed to your brand and what it represents? Is “protecting” your brand antithetical to open source development?

Not at all, according to Curtis Smolar, a Partner with Fox Rothschild LLP, a law firm focused on litigation and intellectual property.

Curtis walked our teams briefly through the history of commercialization and open source, pausing at Red Hat, whose value creation around supporting services vs. code is a watershed example for how OS projects can deliver on their brand promise.

In the rest of the presentation and lively Q&A, Curtis elaborates on steps OS companies can take to ensure their brand promise is protected globally. Curtis is also a devoted contributor to Mozilla as a WebFWD mentor, with a guest appearance in a Firefox Flix trailer.

Below is our latest update from our most recent WebFWD addition, iHeartCode - based in India & the U.S.!:

“We’re extremely glad to introduce IHeartCode, an open platform for creating interactive lessons. It is based on the idea that we learn by doing.

Who are we?

We are a bunch of crazy nuts who believe in fostering open innovation and good design. In decreasing order of the most exciting people on board:

What are we up to?

We are building a platform that makes it incredibly easy to create interactive coding tutorials for the masses. We want to spur a learning revolution by enabling anyone to create great looking Codecademy-style lessons.

At its core, we’re using Natural Language Processing techniques to enhance the potential for assisted learning. We’re also working on a client side interpreter that supports most of the popular High Level Languages. The platform is built from the bottom up to be small and portable. This is incredibly promising to potential SaaS vendors who can embed language-agnostic interactive tutorials for their APIs.

Why are we doing this?

Partly because it’s fun helping people learn how to code and partly because we think that this industry has immense potential for expansion. Companies like Coursera, Codecademy and Treehouse demonstrate this potential. Also, initiatives like MITx and Stanford are driving many more people to learn online.

There is something interesting to IHeartCode’s background. It initially started as an REPL for Python so our friends could try out basic commands while learning to use the language. What surprised us was the fact that people seemed to love the interactive approach. It let them get their hands dirty without the fear of breaking their PC!

How do we fit in here?

We’re very excited to be a part of WebFWD. There’s a lot that we hope to learn and understand about open software from Mozilla. The most exciting aspect of the program are the amazing people that it has brought together.

IHeartCode also hopes to benefit from existing Mozilla initiatives like Persona and Open Badges.

Where do we go from here?

We can go on and on about how exciting this is but we would hate to bore noble readers to slumber. Instead, we want you to take a peak at our prototype and share your insights. You can also take a look at the innards [but the code is (slightly) messy for now and viewer discretion is advised].

If you have anything else to say or just want us to sponsor your coffee, feel free to write us at zego@iheartpy.com”

We welcomed the OpenPhoto project to WebFWD after their successful Kickstarter campaign last year. As an open source photo platform to help Dropbox and other cloud storage users share, organize and enjoy their photos, they have made significant progress.

Today marks a major milestone for them team: launching their iPhone app!

Read more here, download the app here, and start snapping!

Three key resources a start-up has are time, (sometimes) money, and energy. Of these, mental energy is both free and easy to optimize. At this LearnFWD, our teams learned some interesting insights into personality types and how to manage them to increase effectiveness from WebFWD mentor Jennifer Selby Long.

A certified interpreter of psychological instruments, Jennifer has worked with numerous teams and leaders to help them better understand themselves and how their personalities impact those around them (community members, coworkers, bosses, team members, etc.). She began by defining introversion and extraversion…and debunking some big myths pertaining to these two temperaments. She then went on to elaborate how these temperaments can be managed through tactics such as taking breaks, setting up phone meetings, and asking teammates for input on how to best work together.

An extravert herself, Jennifer’s energy and delivery of this very personal, relevant and valuable subject matter are not to be missed. Tune in, follow the exercises instructions for your own teams, and learn how to energize!

We asked Fred Dixon of our WebFWD team BigBlueButton to share what he was passionate about. Fred also operates Blindside Networks, the commercial entity that offers support to BigBlueButton customers. After co-founding three companies, perhaps it’s no surprise we got this: “Generating revenue so your co-founders can eat.” If you’ve ever started something, you know how vital generating revenue is. Even if you haven’t started something (yet?), you know how vital food is!

Fred shared specific ways that open source start-ups can generate revenue. But he also went way beyond that, providing insights into qualifying prospective clients, developing solutions, and negotiating best practices that apply across the spectrum of start-ups, open source or not. All of this translates into cash flow that will keep your company alive and ultimately in a position to grow and thrive.

A software engineer by trade, Fred said he decided to go into sales because he felt it was one of the hardest things to do. When asked what to do if a teammate questions the value of sales, he suggests allowing them the opportunity to close some deals to gain an appreciation of the task.

The key points Fred wanted us to take away:

• Sales is a process.
• Your revenue comes down to a few key moments.
• People buy from people.
• Make this your motto: “We will not permit you to fail.”

We suggest you watch this extraordinarily useful video to glean what this all means for you and your startup.

As reported last week, three new teams join WebFWD this month! Tristan Crane of Entropy Wave shared the news last Friday. This introduction by Tristan Crane describes the San Francisco-based company and what they do:

Hello everyone! We’re David Schleef and Tristan Crane, the founders of Entropy Wave – a company based around open video codecs.

A bit about us….

David founded Entropy Wave in 2009 to create products around open video. A long-time open source developer, David saw a need for products that incorporate open codec formats and give content producers an easy way to use open codec formats on the web. Tristan joined the company in 2010 to provide product marketing, project management, and general cat-herding.

Our products are a fairly diverse: we have a live multi-format video encoding platform that is featured in a line of hardware appliances. We’re working on moving this platform to a cloud-based solution for companies to utilize as a service.

Mozilla has experimented with some of our equipment for streaming Air Mozilla in WebM. This system, the E1000, encodes and streams in MPEG-TS, HTTP Live Streaming, Flash, Ogg, Matroska, and WebM. We have several open-source products related to this platform: streaming server software which can be integrated with the E1000 into a scalable streaming system as well as used independently. We’re really excited to bring our newest development project to the Mozilla community – a multi-camera live streaming capture application.

We’re extremely honored to be included in the portfolio of companies that are part of the WebFwd program. We are very much looking forward to working more with you, building community around our open source projects, and participating in the Mozilla and open web community.

Find us online and find our code at open source site.