"Pentland predicts a future when he'll be able to use frequency of calls, physical proximity and interruptions in conversations to determine for example who among your Facebook friends is a real life friend, who you've never met in person and who is your superior in a workplace hierarchy."This is exactly the kind of data and analysis I was referring to, but with the important distinction that customers of any kind of commercial service should have access their own usage data at the same level of granularity available to this researcher, so they can remix it for their own purposes (not just as passive recipients of whatever commercial service Nokia envisions for the output of this analysis).
Friday, December 21, 2007
Who's Mining Your Data?
Here's an excellent, timely addendum to my recent post on mining and remixing your personal data silos: Marshall Kirpatrick at Read/Write Web just did a piece on an MIT researcher named Sandy Pentland who - with funding from cellphone giant Nokia - is mining hundreds of thousands of hours of cellphone call data - including proximity and location details - to identify relationship patterns among callers.
More Q&A with Clark Kogan
Q: Chris, It seems that you have a pretty good understanding of the business world. I, myself, have stayed mostly in the educational culture. I've played around a bit with the idea of starting a business after I get my bachelors in Math & Physics this coming year. What things, would you say one needs to learn before he/she is likely to succeed at business? Clark Kogan
A: Hey Clark, I'm flattered that you're interested in my answer to this question, but more ink has been spilled on this topic than probably any other in the field and I doubt I can add anything that's fresh or useful to the existing body of thought on the subject. But because you asked (and because I enjoy answering), here are a couple of thoughts for you to consider:
It's not as much what you need to learn as what you may need to unlearn. 90% of business decision-making is plain common sense. The other 10% may require some kind of specialized insight or expertise, but in my experience that 10% takes years to develop and simply can't be acquired without going through repeated (and often painful) cycles of trial and error. What tends to prevent people from being "successful" is not a lack of education, but rather an unwillingness to be wrong, to look stupid, or to try something that others think is sure to fail. If you can unlearn some of the lessons that our culture works so hard to teach us - "don't make mistakes", "don't break the rules", "just try to be like everyone else" - you will open yourself up to possibilities that most other people won't consider, and that's a great first step toward achieving something that most other folks won't.
It helps to be really, really angry about something. I'm not recommending that you go look for opportunities to be mad at anyone. In fact, this is less a piece of advice than an observation: everyone I know who's achieved extraordinary success (and I don't count myself in this group by a long shot) has done so in large part to prove someone else wrong. Maybe it was a parent who said they'd never amount to anything, or a peer group that looked down on them in high school for being different, or an admissions department that failed to recognize their brilliance, but somewhere along the way the world told them they were no good and they've spent the rest of their lives proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that they're just as good as - better, in fact - than anyone who ever put them down. If this happened to you, I'm sorry about the very real hurt that you suffered, but I'm also happy to say that you now possess the most important thing you need to succeed in business: the absolute, burning certainty that you deserve to succeed.
A: Hey Clark, I'm flattered that you're interested in my answer to this question, but more ink has been spilled on this topic than probably any other in the field and I doubt I can add anything that's fresh or useful to the existing body of thought on the subject. But because you asked (and because I enjoy answering), here are a couple of thoughts for you to consider:
It's not as much what you need to learn as what you may need to unlearn. 90% of business decision-making is plain common sense. The other 10% may require some kind of specialized insight or expertise, but in my experience that 10% takes years to develop and simply can't be acquired without going through repeated (and often painful) cycles of trial and error. What tends to prevent people from being "successful" is not a lack of education, but rather an unwillingness to be wrong, to look stupid, or to try something that others think is sure to fail. If you can unlearn some of the lessons that our culture works so hard to teach us - "don't make mistakes", "don't break the rules", "just try to be like everyone else" - you will open yourself up to possibilities that most other people won't consider, and that's a great first step toward achieving something that most other folks won't.
It helps to be really, really angry about something. I'm not recommending that you go look for opportunities to be mad at anyone. In fact, this is less a piece of advice than an observation: everyone I know who's achieved extraordinary success (and I don't count myself in this group by a long shot) has done so in large part to prove someone else wrong. Maybe it was a parent who said they'd never amount to anything, or a peer group that looked down on them in high school for being different, or an admissions department that failed to recognize their brilliance, but somewhere along the way the world told them they were no good and they've spent the rest of their lives proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that they're just as good as - better, in fact - than anyone who ever put them down. If this happened to you, I'm sorry about the very real hurt that you suffered, but I'm also happy to say that you now possess the most important thing you need to succeed in business: the absolute, burning certainty that you deserve to succeed.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
The Portfolio Theory of Marriage
My wife and I met in business school (a statistically unlikely prospect if you stop to think about it). One of the many relationship advantages this confers is a large shared vocabulary of concepts we can use not only to communicate about our work lives, but that we often apply (sometimes in jest, sometimes not) to our lives outside of work. One of the most enduring of these half-jokes is that our decision to get married sprang from a rational application of Modern Portfolio Theory. As our relationship has matured (we're closing in on 10 years together), the kernel of truth behind this idea has developed to the point that it's a useful (partial) explanation for what makes our relationship work.
The joke sprang from a facile observation about our appetite for professional risk. My wife grew up in a family that valued stability, respected established institutions and viewed an executive role within a name-brand enterprise as the logical aspiration of a career in business. As an adult, she can see this cultural conditioning with a clear eye, but its influence is clearly visible in the arc of her career choices.
To outward appearances my own upbringing was not so different, but somehow I came away with a more idealistic and free-spirited bent, including a strong inclination to question established authority figures and the institutions they represent. Not surprisingly, my work life reflects that temperament: I've sought out smaller and less well-known companies (including a few I've started myself), changed jobs more often, and seen much greater earnings volatility than Emily has.
In the language of Portfolio Theory, our career choices have complementary risk-return profiles. I'm the speculative, high-beta security, with strong upside potential but significant downside risk and high expected volatility. She's the blue chip, likely to exhibit solid and steady earnings growth with little risk to the downside but an equally low probability of market-beating performance. In theory (and in real life), we're better together.
What's interesting (at least to us), is how much this model reflects our partnership in areas beyond our expected earnings. As just one example, a few years back Emily shifted her career focus from for-profit to not-for-profit work (a notable and emotionally weighty decision given her cultural conditioning). She now works as a program officer for a large family foundation; her specific portfolio is to catalyze access to broadband connectivity for the largest possible number of low-income and otherwise disenfranchised groups throughout the U.S. In a very real way, her work and mine are now mirror images of each other, both in content and in emotional valence.
I spend my days thinking about how technology can change the lives of a relatively thin and rarefied slice of the global population, those for whom Internet access is as integral to their daily lives as water and electricity. She spends hers looking for creative ways to push that same benefit down to the least advantaged tiers of our community. My daily interactions are mostly limited to people who (at least in the macroeconomic sense) know no want: investors, entrepreneurs, software developers and other types of knowledge workers who sit at the very top of the economic pyramid. Emily's work keeps her attuned to the realities and needs of those at the very bottom.
Just as we each benefit from the other's earnings profile, we also benefit at least as much from our ability to share knowledge and experiences across these parallel universes. Having left the for-profit world behind, Emily stays connected through me to the strange passions and preoccupations of startup culture. But even more importantly, her daily awareness of the desperate condition in which far too many of our fellow humans live helps me put my work in appropriate perspective. In effect, I am the agent of our shared capitalist impulses, while she enacts our mutual desire to give back to the community. Here, as in so many other ways, we are much better as team than we could ever be as individuals. And in a marriage, just like an investment portfolio, that's what it's all about.
The joke sprang from a facile observation about our appetite for professional risk. My wife grew up in a family that valued stability, respected established institutions and viewed an executive role within a name-brand enterprise as the logical aspiration of a career in business. As an adult, she can see this cultural conditioning with a clear eye, but its influence is clearly visible in the arc of her career choices.
To outward appearances my own upbringing was not so different, but somehow I came away with a more idealistic and free-spirited bent, including a strong inclination to question established authority figures and the institutions they represent. Not surprisingly, my work life reflects that temperament: I've sought out smaller and less well-known companies (including a few I've started myself), changed jobs more often, and seen much greater earnings volatility than Emily has.
In the language of Portfolio Theory, our career choices have complementary risk-return profiles. I'm the speculative, high-beta security, with strong upside potential but significant downside risk and high expected volatility. She's the blue chip, likely to exhibit solid and steady earnings growth with little risk to the downside but an equally low probability of market-beating performance. In theory (and in real life), we're better together.
What's interesting (at least to us), is how much this model reflects our partnership in areas beyond our expected earnings. As just one example, a few years back Emily shifted her career focus from for-profit to not-for-profit work (a notable and emotionally weighty decision given her cultural conditioning). She now works as a program officer for a large family foundation; her specific portfolio is to catalyze access to broadband connectivity for the largest possible number of low-income and otherwise disenfranchised groups throughout the U.S. In a very real way, her work and mine are now mirror images of each other, both in content and in emotional valence.
I spend my days thinking about how technology can change the lives of a relatively thin and rarefied slice of the global population, those for whom Internet access is as integral to their daily lives as water and electricity. She spends hers looking for creative ways to push that same benefit down to the least advantaged tiers of our community. My daily interactions are mostly limited to people who (at least in the macroeconomic sense) know no want: investors, entrepreneurs, software developers and other types of knowledge workers who sit at the very top of the economic pyramid. Emily's work keeps her attuned to the realities and needs of those at the very bottom.
Just as we each benefit from the other's earnings profile, we also benefit at least as much from our ability to share knowledge and experiences across these parallel universes. Having left the for-profit world behind, Emily stays connected through me to the strange passions and preoccupations of startup culture. But even more importantly, her daily awareness of the desperate condition in which far too many of our fellow humans live helps me put my work in appropriate perspective. In effect, I am the agent of our shared capitalist impulses, while she enacts our mutual desire to give back to the community. Here, as in so many other ways, we are much better as team than we could ever be as individuals. And in a marriage, just like an investment portfolio, that's what it's all about.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Christopher Alexander
In 1999 my partners and I sold our 50-person Web consulting shop Adjacency to Sapient, a public IT consultancy. The next two years of my life were a complete blur of post-merger integration, recruiting and discipline development to flesh out Sapient's nascent e-business consulting capability, plus an ongoing role selling and delivering client engagements to Fortune 500 companies (all this at the height of the first Web boom).
Frankly, I don't remember all that much about that time, but a few seeds were planted during the period that have since grown into stout limbs that I find myself leaning on again and again. One of these sprang from a sidebar conversation I had with Shep Narkier during one of our many management offsites. At the time of our meeting, Shep was the global head of the Technology discipline (with Creative and Strategy, one of three disciplines that made up the company's service offering at the time), and I was running the Strategy discipline. We were both logging heavy air miles in these roles, and so we took a minute to swap book recommendations to help make better use of our long seat-hours.
Shep gave me a list of his favorites, all but one of which I've forgotten. The one that stuck with me seemed like an odd one for a software engineer to recommend: it was a passionate architectural and urban design treatise from 1977 called A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, authored by a UC Berkeley architect named Christopher Alexander.
As Shep described it, Chris Alexander's methodical parsing of architectural design principles into discrete units, and his systematic hierarchical nesting of patterns from the most general (e.g., "The Growth of Towns and Cities") to the most specific (e.g., "Light on Two Sides of Every Room") helped to lay the intellectual foundation for the modern discipline of pattern-based software engineering. I'm not a software engineer by any stretch of the imagination, but I've always had a passion for architecture and design, and I was eager to get my hands on a work that bridged this personal interest with my daily life as a technology professional.
As a work of literature or a practical manual of architecture and design, A Pattern Language has not aged particularly well. The more granular patterns stand up better (and have been richly exploited by Sarah Susanka in her wildly popular Not So Big House series), but the larger-scale urban design patterns read more like a utopian fantasy than anything resembling our modern reality of highly specialized service- and knowledge-work. But setting aside the specifics of the subject matter, the intellectual method on which the work is based is as fresh and relevant as any current work of strategic analysis. In effect, Chris Alexander reverse-engineered his discipline and exposed its inner workings as a kit of parts that anyone, architect-trained or not, could use to conceptualize a built environment, from its smallest detail to its most integrated workings. With Shep's setup, it wasn't hard for me to see this approach at work in everything from Linux to more recent rapid development frameworks like Ruby on Rails. I still can't write a lick of code, but Chris Alexander helped me learn a habit of pattern-based thinking that has become second nature. I'm not sure I ever properly thanked Shep for this, so hopefully this post will find its way to him. Thanks, Shep, for the great recommendation.
Frankly, I don't remember all that much about that time, but a few seeds were planted during the period that have since grown into stout limbs that I find myself leaning on again and again. One of these sprang from a sidebar conversation I had with Shep Narkier during one of our many management offsites. At the time of our meeting, Shep was the global head of the Technology discipline (with Creative and Strategy, one of three disciplines that made up the company's service offering at the time), and I was running the Strategy discipline. We were both logging heavy air miles in these roles, and so we took a minute to swap book recommendations to help make better use of our long seat-hours.
Shep gave me a list of his favorites, all but one of which I've forgotten. The one that stuck with me seemed like an odd one for a software engineer to recommend: it was a passionate architectural and urban design treatise from 1977 called A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, authored by a UC Berkeley architect named Christopher Alexander.
As Shep described it, Chris Alexander's methodical parsing of architectural design principles into discrete units, and his systematic hierarchical nesting of patterns from the most general (e.g., "The Growth of Towns and Cities") to the most specific (e.g., "Light on Two Sides of Every Room") helped to lay the intellectual foundation for the modern discipline of pattern-based software engineering. I'm not a software engineer by any stretch of the imagination, but I've always had a passion for architecture and design, and I was eager to get my hands on a work that bridged this personal interest with my daily life as a technology professional.
As a work of literature or a practical manual of architecture and design, A Pattern Language has not aged particularly well. The more granular patterns stand up better (and have been richly exploited by Sarah Susanka in her wildly popular Not So Big House series), but the larger-scale urban design patterns read more like a utopian fantasy than anything resembling our modern reality of highly specialized service- and knowledge-work. But setting aside the specifics of the subject matter, the intellectual method on which the work is based is as fresh and relevant as any current work of strategic analysis. In effect, Chris Alexander reverse-engineered his discipline and exposed its inner workings as a kit of parts that anyone, architect-trained or not, could use to conceptualize a built environment, from its smallest detail to its most integrated workings. With Shep's setup, it wasn't hard for me to see this approach at work in everything from Linux to more recent rapid development frameworks like Ruby on Rails. I still can't write a lick of code, but Chris Alexander helped me learn a habit of pattern-based thinking that has become second nature. I'm not sure I ever properly thanked Shep for this, so hopefully this post will find its way to him. Thanks, Shep, for the great recommendation.
Mining and Remixing Your Personal Data Silos
One of the big ideas we were exploring at Judy's Book was the topic of tacit or latent knowledge. Everyone's head is filled with a richly personal blend of facts and opinions: where to get the best burrito in San Francisco, my current favorite band, the name and contact information of my childhood friend who now runs a hedge fund. The hard problem is finding a way to get this information out of people's heads that feels effortless, or at least that creates so much "me value" that the effort feels worth it.
At Judy's Book, our attempts to reduce the friction in this process included: licensing a local listings DB to reduce the data entry burden; offering creative ways for users to ask questions (both of their friends and of the community as a whole) to elicit recommendations; building emotional identification with friends and the larger member community to confer "social status" on active contributors; and adding gaming elements (e.g., scoring, leaderboards, promotions) to channel users' innate competitiveness toward content creation.
Some of these methods were more effective than others, but our ultimate conclusion was this: building a service exclusively or primarily around tacit knowledge is a bad business proposition. Our internal shorthand for this was the (not very original) "icing and cake" metaphor. Fresh, user-generated content (UGC) is "icing": it makes a service feel engaging and alive and keeps users coming back. But if you want to create value for a large number of users right away, and across a broad spectrum of informational needs (i.e., the "cake"), you need to find a way to deliver that value with the absolute minimum required contribution from your users.
This pattern was burned into my brain so deeply at Judy's Book that I now apply it instinctively to every new business I learn about. It doesn't always fit, but when it does it triggers an immediate emotional reaction - positive or negative - depending on how cleverly business is going about solving the problem. Here's the 30,ooo-foot view of the framework:
Inferred solutions are typically the most powerful and user-delighting, fulfilling Arthur C. Clarke's famous maxim that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (which has to be the intellectual root of the excellent and useful coinage: 'automagic'). Until recently, the data and engineering overhead required to build an Inferred solution has meant that only large enterprises with a significant vested interest (i.e., credit card fraud departments that need to limit losses, or Amazon.com whose thin margins demand efficient methods of driving incremental purchases) have been able to afford the investment.
However, in the past few years, I've watched with interest (and envy) as people much smarter than I am have begun to implement Inferred solutions that tackle specific silos of personal information outside the enterprise. A few of my current favorites include:
In doing so, they point the way toward a future in which all of our personal data is available to us for remixing, not just in individual silos, but as an integrated (or integratable) data store. This won't happen quickly, as many institutions (particularly those who view your data as a proprietary corporate asset) will resist the demand to free their customers' data on competitive grounds. (Amazon is an easy example here: they won't love the idea of offering each customer an easily-downloaded XML file of their lifetime purchase history so it can be shared with competing online retailers). And even if they concede the right of their customers to own their own data, others - think the highly-regulated and security-phobic financial services industry - will struggle to implement a workable technology solution in the face of cultural opposition from their IT and compliance teams.
Despite the inevitable competitive and cultural hurdles, customers will ultimately win the right to their entire universe of personal data. This integrated personal data store will become the foundation of a personalized analytics, recommendation and content creation engine that can only be gestured at using current examples. And I don't think this is a decades-away idea; some companies (think Google) have the engineering and financial wherewithal to begin moving in this direction today.
If anyone wants to join the fight on this, here's my personal wish list of the remixable data elements I want to pull into my personal analytics suite:
At Judy's Book, our attempts to reduce the friction in this process included: licensing a local listings DB to reduce the data entry burden; offering creative ways for users to ask questions (both of their friends and of the community as a whole) to elicit recommendations; building emotional identification with friends and the larger member community to confer "social status" on active contributors; and adding gaming elements (e.g., scoring, leaderboards, promotions) to channel users' innate competitiveness toward content creation.
Some of these methods were more effective than others, but our ultimate conclusion was this: building a service exclusively or primarily around tacit knowledge is a bad business proposition. Our internal shorthand for this was the (not very original) "icing and cake" metaphor. Fresh, user-generated content (UGC) is "icing": it makes a service feel engaging and alive and keeps users coming back. But if you want to create value for a large number of users right away, and across a broad spectrum of informational needs (i.e., the "cake"), you need to find a way to deliver that value with the absolute minimum required contribution from your users.
This pattern was burned into my brain so deeply at Judy's Book that I now apply it instinctively to every new business I learn about. It doesn't always fit, but when it does it triggers an immediate emotional reaction - positive or negative - depending on how cleverly business is going about solving the problem. Here's the 30,ooo-foot view of the framework:
- There are three classes of solution to the tacit knowledge problem:
- Declared - e.g., user-initiated reviews, recommendations, blog posts
- Elicited - information extracted from users via surveys, Q&A, friend requests, etc.
- Inferred - data and patterns extracted from existing private and public data stores
- The utility of the solution (a.k.a. the "me value delta") is inversely proportional to the level of effort required of the user.
- The engineering effort required to implement the solution is roughly proportional to the utility delivered (i.e., correctly inferring patterns from large and 'dirty' datasets is orders of magnitude harder than capturing and publishing user-entered text).
Inferred solutions are typically the most powerful and user-delighting, fulfilling Arthur C. Clarke's famous maxim that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (which has to be the intellectual root of the excellent and useful coinage: 'automagic'). Until recently, the data and engineering overhead required to build an Inferred solution has meant that only large enterprises with a significant vested interest (i.e., credit card fraud departments that need to limit losses, or Amazon.com whose thin margins demand efficient methods of driving incremental purchases) have been able to afford the investment.
However, in the past few years, I've watched with interest (and envy) as people much smarter than I am have begun to implement Inferred solutions that tackle specific silos of personal information outside the enterprise. A few of my current favorites include:
- Last.fm - A website and desktop widget that extracts my music listening history and habits from iTunes to create a listener profile for me, suggest related music I might like, match me with other listeners with similar profiles, and help me track upcoming shows in my area. All I have to do is create a profile and download the widget; everything else happens automagically.
- Lijit - A blog widget and profile aggregator that indexes of all my past blog posts (and other social media platforms), maintaining a tagcloud and search box for my entire (public) online media output. Again, I don't have to do anything once I've installed the widget - they do all the heavy lifting in the background.
- Wesabe - I've only dabbled with this one as the user input overhead is significantly greater than the other two, but their goal is to automate tracking and pattern recognition of personal spending habits, using bank account and credit card statements as the base input, but then (like Last.fm) searching for patterns and money-saving recommendations across their entire user base.
- Xobni - I've abandoned Outlook, but those who use it report that Xobni's plugin transforms the experience, parsing your email history to expose and analyze the real world social network represented by your contacts and your pattern of communication with them.
- (He still has considerable work cut out for him, but my friend Christopher Parks deserves mention here for his MedBillManager, a project to automate and surface helpful and money-saving patterns in the blizzard of communications patients receive from their medical insurers and providers).
In doing so, they point the way toward a future in which all of our personal data is available to us for remixing, not just in individual silos, but as an integrated (or integratable) data store. This won't happen quickly, as many institutions (particularly those who view your data as a proprietary corporate asset) will resist the demand to free their customers' data on competitive grounds. (Amazon is an easy example here: they won't love the idea of offering each customer an easily-downloaded XML file of their lifetime purchase history so it can be shared with competing online retailers). And even if they concede the right of their customers to own their own data, others - think the highly-regulated and security-phobic financial services industry - will struggle to implement a workable technology solution in the face of cultural opposition from their IT and compliance teams.
Despite the inevitable competitive and cultural hurdles, customers will ultimately win the right to their entire universe of personal data. This integrated personal data store will become the foundation of a personalized analytics, recommendation and content creation engine that can only be gestured at using current examples. And I don't think this is a decades-away idea; some companies (think Google) have the engineering and financial wherewithal to begin moving in this direction today.
If anyone wants to join the fight on this, here's my personal wish list of the remixable data elements I want to pull into my personal analytics suite:
- Credit card transaction history, including accurate timestamps on each transaction
- Completed and planned itineraries for any airline, hotel or rental car company
- Current and historical lat/long time series (maybe at 5-minute increments to make it more manageable) from my cellphone network pings
- SKU-level product purchase history from all major retailers (starting with Amazon)
- Email communications history, including full text and a browsable archive of attached files
- Email and telephone contact history, including timestamp, duration (for calls) and word count (for emails)
- Complete personal photo and video archive, with timestamps
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
More (and Less) on The Hippocratic Oath of Business
Brevity has never been my strong suit. Witness this morning's PE Week Wire (an excellent daily newsletter for those with an interest in Private Equity and Venture Capital): Alexander Haislip offers a single sentence that delivers the same message as my recent post on the same topic, but in just 25 words:
Good companies, they said, make good products that don't hurt people, have financial success, treat their employees fairly and give back to the communityThis is the considered view of the fifth-grade class at the Carden El Encanto Day School in Santa Clara, California where Alex was a BizWorld volunteer for a day. Smart kids. I (obviously) couldn't have said it better myself.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Q&A on "That Founder Feeling"
Q: Hi Chris, I've randomly become an occasional reader of your blog, and I'm starting to get addicted. I remember that you were interested in questions...I read your last post about the founder feeling, where you said...
Thanks for the great writing!
Cheers, Clark Kogan
A: Hi Clark, thanks for the great question (and sorry for the delay in responding - my forwarding rule looks for the prefix "Crash Dev:" on new questions and for some reason it wasn't present on yours). As I mentioned in that post, my experience with startups is finite, so my pattern for it is based on that limited data set (i.e., your actual mileage may vary). Disclaimer aside, my observation is that the act of starting a company creates such an obsessive mindset in the founder that they literally have a hard time thinking about anything else. This heightened state of awareness is what I was relating to the "fight or flight" response: the acute sense that there are a million things you need to be doing RIGHT NOW to ensure the survival and ultimate success of the fragile little idea you're trying to grow into a big and successful business.
It may be that this obsessive anxiety and action bias can cloud your thinking or lead to inefficient or unproductive effort (as your question suggests). But I'm a big believer in "background processing" - the idea that your brain is constantly recycling your stored experiences and looking for useful patterns without you even being aware of it. Particularly at the beginning, the founder experience seems to focus this processing effort into a narrower band, concentrated on the issues and opportunities surrounding your idea. Most founders I know talk about their difficulty falling asleep, or getting back to sleep after a wakeful period, because they can't "turn off" this background processing, with new thoughts and ideas forcing themselves to the surface just as they're trying to fall asleep (here's a fresh example from Evan Williams' blog).
Inefficient as this may be, I do think this period tends to heighten creative output, due to the sheer application of raw processing power focused on the needs of the new business. It can't be sustained forever, but the anxiety and emotional turmoil of the founding period are a positive and memorable part of the founder experience.
"It also unlocks previously unknown reserves of energy, a "fight or flight" response that fuels the creative effort of shaping and implementing a new business."Do you think that the "fight or flight" response fuels creativity? You've got it worded to where I can't be sure whether it is fueling creativity or just effort. I think I've read somewhere that creativity is drastically hindered by the "fight or flight" response, but I'd like your opinion.
Thanks for the great writing!
Cheers, Clark Kogan
A: Hi Clark, thanks for the great question (and sorry for the delay in responding - my forwarding rule looks for the prefix "Crash Dev:" on new questions and for some reason it wasn't present on yours). As I mentioned in that post, my experience with startups is finite, so my pattern for it is based on that limited data set (i.e., your actual mileage may vary). Disclaimer aside, my observation is that the act of starting a company creates such an obsessive mindset in the founder that they literally have a hard time thinking about anything else. This heightened state of awareness is what I was relating to the "fight or flight" response: the acute sense that there are a million things you need to be doing RIGHT NOW to ensure the survival and ultimate success of the fragile little idea you're trying to grow into a big and successful business.
It may be that this obsessive anxiety and action bias can cloud your thinking or lead to inefficient or unproductive effort (as your question suggests). But I'm a big believer in "background processing" - the idea that your brain is constantly recycling your stored experiences and looking for useful patterns without you even being aware of it. Particularly at the beginning, the founder experience seems to focus this processing effort into a narrower band, concentrated on the issues and opportunities surrounding your idea. Most founders I know talk about their difficulty falling asleep, or getting back to sleep after a wakeful period, because they can't "turn off" this background processing, with new thoughts and ideas forcing themselves to the surface just as they're trying to fall asleep (here's a fresh example from Evan Williams' blog).
Inefficient as this may be, I do think this period tends to heighten creative output, due to the sheer application of raw processing power focused on the needs of the new business. It can't be sustained forever, but the anxiety and emotional turmoil of the founding period are a positive and memorable part of the founder experience.
Finding the Herbie in Your Web Startup
Thanks to my friend Robin (via Google Reader's new Share with Friends feature) for pointing me to this post from Evan Williams on the Theory of Constraints. Reading it, I had a simultaneous flashback to my b-school Intro to Operations class, and to a great meeting I had with a very exciting pre-release Web startup this past Friday.
First, the Operations topic. Anyone who's been to business school in the past 20 years will remember with a groan a book called The Goal
by Eliyahu Goldratt. This is a basic manufacturing operations case masquerading as a novel about a struggling production manager named Alex Rogo. Despite (or maybe because of) the incredibly hackneyed writing, the book makes it impossible to forget the core principle of the Theory of Constraints: that finding and removing bottlenecks is the secret to improving operations performance. In the book, the bottleneck is personified by an overweight Boy Scout named Herbie who singlehandedly slows down his entire troop during a single-file hike. Thanks to Goldratt, MBAs the world over now use "who's the Herbie?" to mean "what's the holdup?"
Flash forward to last Friday. A couple of local entrepreneurs were walking me through a deck and demo of their app. Their team had been working without pay for eight months on a hugely ambitious idea, creating an entirely new way for friends to interact with each other and with the media they share. They have a terrific team and have made significant progress toward their vision, but still have a few months of work ahead of them before the product is likely to be ready for an initial release. In addition, their core use case requires a user to make a significant change in behavior, adopting their application as a replacement for not one but two other, more familiar methods of addressing the same need.
I was thinking about this significant adoption hurdle as they walked me through their deck. Then they brought up a slide that crystallized (at least for me) everything that was exciting and different about their idea. The slide described a feature that wasn't on their launch roadmap. The feature would create an entirely new and significantly more engaging user experience out of an application that every Web user interacts with daily. And - with some fancy engineering in the background - a first version of that experience could be manufactured for the user automagically with just two or three fields of user input. With all the usual caveats (they knew their product and user much better than I ever could; I was sure they had prioritized the features they had for good reason), I told them that my emotional experience of the pitch was that their user adoption challenge would be significantly lessened if they could deliver that feature earlier, even before they made the big ask of their users to switch to their application.
So what does Herbie have to do with this? For a startup, the biggest bottleneck to success is creating the initial wave of user adoption: finding that core group of passionate users who will put up with your inevitable failings and give you the candid feedback you need to start moving your product toward Product/Market Fit. Removing the Herbie in this process means finding a way to deliver the biggest possible satisfaction payoff to your customer (what Brad Feld calls "me value") for the least possible effort on their part. And you should do this even if it (temporarily) distracts users from your ambitious vision for the product. As we learned the hard way at Judy's Book, big visions often get in the way of delighting users, requiring too much effort on too many fronts to deliver that critical Me Value payoff. Focus on creating the biggest Me Value delta you can and your odds of success go way up.
First, the Operations topic. Anyone who's been to business school in the past 20 years will remember with a groan a book called The Goal
by Eliyahu Goldratt. This is a basic manufacturing operations case masquerading as a novel about a struggling production manager named Alex Rogo. Despite (or maybe because of) the incredibly hackneyed writing, the book makes it impossible to forget the core principle of the Theory of Constraints: that finding and removing bottlenecks is the secret to improving operations performance. In the book, the bottleneck is personified by an overweight Boy Scout named Herbie who singlehandedly slows down his entire troop during a single-file hike. Thanks to Goldratt, MBAs the world over now use "who's the Herbie?" to mean "what's the holdup?"Flash forward to last Friday. A couple of local entrepreneurs were walking me through a deck and demo of their app. Their team had been working without pay for eight months on a hugely ambitious idea, creating an entirely new way for friends to interact with each other and with the media they share. They have a terrific team and have made significant progress toward their vision, but still have a few months of work ahead of them before the product is likely to be ready for an initial release. In addition, their core use case requires a user to make a significant change in behavior, adopting their application as a replacement for not one but two other, more familiar methods of addressing the same need.
I was thinking about this significant adoption hurdle as they walked me through their deck. Then they brought up a slide that crystallized (at least for me) everything that was exciting and different about their idea. The slide described a feature that wasn't on their launch roadmap. The feature would create an entirely new and significantly more engaging user experience out of an application that every Web user interacts with daily. And - with some fancy engineering in the background - a first version of that experience could be manufactured for the user automagically with just two or three fields of user input. With all the usual caveats (they knew their product and user much better than I ever could; I was sure they had prioritized the features they had for good reason), I told them that my emotional experience of the pitch was that their user adoption challenge would be significantly lessened if they could deliver that feature earlier, even before they made the big ask of their users to switch to their application.
So what does Herbie have to do with this? For a startup, the biggest bottleneck to success is creating the initial wave of user adoption: finding that core group of passionate users who will put up with your inevitable failings and give you the candid feedback you need to start moving your product toward Product/Market Fit. Removing the Herbie in this process means finding a way to deliver the biggest possible satisfaction payoff to your customer (what Brad Feld calls "me value") for the least possible effort on their part. And you should do this even if it (temporarily) distracts users from your ambitious vision for the product. As we learned the hard way at Judy's Book, big visions often get in the way of delighting users, requiring too much effort on too many fronts to deliver that critical Me Value payoff. Focus on creating the biggest Me Value delta you can and your odds of success go way up.
Friday, December 14, 2007
The Siren Song of Local Reviews
I just got off the phone with another young entrepreneur who's in the process of starting a new "social reviews" site for local restaurants. I tried hard not to be a complete wet blanket, but I have so many knives in my back from my Judy's Book experience it was hard not to pull a few out and do a little show and tell.
I completely understand the emotional appeal of local. Starting a local reviews site is the online entrepreneur's equivalent to the fiction writer's maxim of "write what you know." The internal monologue goes something like this: "I love to eat at great new restaurants with my foodie friends. Existing review sites are mass market mediocrities that sing the praises of T.G.I. Fridays. If only there were a site that spoke to my personal tastes and values. If I build it others will come."
The list of reasons why a new local site (especially one focused on the super-saturated restaurant category) is extremely unlikely to ever make money is too long to enumerate here, but if you want me to bore you with the details (like I did the poor guy I spoke with a minute ago) I'm happy to share. But if you just want the short version, here it is:
If you're looking for a labor of love that will take years to mature and, with good luck and patience, might become a breakeven business someday, by all means start a local reviews site. If you want to make money in local, forget reviews, forget content, forget innovation. Just pick one, narrowly-defined, high-ticket services vertical where local merchants understand the value of a new customer (and where there aren't already a dozen other competitors). Figure out how to connect online searchers with qualified local providers for less than the provider is willing to pay you for the referral. Listen to your customers, focus on the numbers and look for small ways to improve your service every day. Scale to profitability. Select another vertical. Repeat.
I'm the kind of person who has to learn things the hard way, so it took me three years to learn this lesson. I hope this post saves somebody out there from making the same mistake twice. (P.S., if you'd like to see this playbook in action, take a look at Cooler Planet, they're nailing it).
I completely understand the emotional appeal of local. Starting a local reviews site is the online entrepreneur's equivalent to the fiction writer's maxim of "write what you know." The internal monologue goes something like this: "I love to eat at great new restaurants with my foodie friends. Existing review sites are mass market mediocrities that sing the praises of T.G.I. Fridays. If only there were a site that spoke to my personal tastes and values. If I build it others will come."
The list of reasons why a new local site (especially one focused on the super-saturated restaurant category) is extremely unlikely to ever make money is too long to enumerate here, but if you want me to bore you with the details (like I did the poor guy I spoke with a minute ago) I'm happy to share. But if you just want the short version, here it is:
If you're looking for a labor of love that will take years to mature and, with good luck and patience, might become a breakeven business someday, by all means start a local reviews site. If you want to make money in local, forget reviews, forget content, forget innovation. Just pick one, narrowly-defined, high-ticket services vertical where local merchants understand the value of a new customer (and where there aren't already a dozen other competitors). Figure out how to connect online searchers with qualified local providers for less than the provider is willing to pay you for the referral. Listen to your customers, focus on the numbers and look for small ways to improve your service every day. Scale to profitability. Select another vertical. Repeat.
I'm the kind of person who has to learn things the hard way, so it took me three years to learn this lesson. I hope this post saves somebody out there from making the same mistake twice. (P.S., if you'd like to see this playbook in action, take a look at Cooler Planet, they're nailing it).
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Charlie Munger, Don't Be Evil and the Hippocratic Oath of Business
I have my friend Sree to thank for introducing me to the writings of Warren Buffet's longtime investment partner, Charlie Munger. In his excellent book of investment (and other) advice, Poor Charlie's Almanack, Munger offers 10 rules for investment success, one of which has been on my mind lately. Rule number 1: Measure Risk, includes a specific caution about the reputational risk of working with people of "questionable character."
For-profit business offers an unusually hospitable environment for people who play fast and loose with the truth. In its more innocuous varieties this manifests as "spin", "selling" or "putting a positive light on the facts." Under pressure, it slides into lies of omission, and from there into outright fabrication and on into actively deceptive or even deliberately harmful business practices. Given the powerful cocktail of greed and raw competitive energy that fuels much business activity, a cynic (or anyone who follows the business press) might even consider deception to be the natural mode of the business world, notable only when it fails to make an appearance. In this context, following Charlie Munger's advice probably requires a little more explicit boundary-setting.
They've taken considerable heat for how well they're living up to it, but Google's "Don't Be Evil" pledge is a nice articulation of the same basic idea. My friends at Ignition have a related rule of thumb, if a little more crassly worded: "Don't do business with a**holes." Whenever I come across a business whose model is based on deceiving people (e.g., adware, typosquatting, etc.), or taking advantage of their baser instincts (e.g., Nigerian bank spam, offering "free" stuff to harvest emails and spam the hell out of people, etc.), I find myself thinking the same thought: it might be legal and it will probably make someone a bunch of money, but I don't want any part of it.
I feel like the business world could learn something from the medical profession on this topic. Instead of subjecting MBA candidates and corporate executives to hours of meaningless "ethical training", I propose a public oath to forswear all shady business practices no matter how much money they might make you. I don't expect a tidal wave of followers on this, but here goes anyway. With you as my witness I hereby take the Hippocratic Oath of Business: "Go ahead, make a buck any way you want to. But first, do no harm."
For-profit business offers an unusually hospitable environment for people who play fast and loose with the truth. In its more innocuous varieties this manifests as "spin", "selling" or "putting a positive light on the facts." Under pressure, it slides into lies of omission, and from there into outright fabrication and on into actively deceptive or even deliberately harmful business practices. Given the powerful cocktail of greed and raw competitive energy that fuels much business activity, a cynic (or anyone who follows the business press) might even consider deception to be the natural mode of the business world, notable only when it fails to make an appearance. In this context, following Charlie Munger's advice probably requires a little more explicit boundary-setting.
They've taken considerable heat for how well they're living up to it, but Google's "Don't Be Evil" pledge is a nice articulation of the same basic idea. My friends at Ignition have a related rule of thumb, if a little more crassly worded: "Don't do business with a**holes." Whenever I come across a business whose model is based on deceiving people (e.g., adware, typosquatting, etc.), or taking advantage of their baser instincts (e.g., Nigerian bank spam, offering "free" stuff to harvest emails and spam the hell out of people, etc.), I find myself thinking the same thought: it might be legal and it will probably make someone a bunch of money, but I don't want any part of it.
I feel like the business world could learn something from the medical profession on this topic. Instead of subjecting MBA candidates and corporate executives to hours of meaningless "ethical training", I propose a public oath to forswear all shady business practices no matter how much money they might make you. I don't expect a tidal wave of followers on this, but here goes anyway. With you as my witness I hereby take the Hippocratic Oath of Business: "Go ahead, make a buck any way you want to. But first, do no harm."
Google + BlackBerry Integration - Two Down, One to Go
I love my BlackBerry and I love Google's suite of productivity and communications apps, but until recently I've had to rely on apps I don't love at all (like Microsoft Outlook and BlackBerry's own desktop sync) to make the two play nicely together. It was a great day when Google released Gmail for the BlackBerry, but I still had to reply on junky apps and/or physical connections to handle Calendar and Contacts sync. Yesterday Rahul tipped me off to the release of Google Calendar for the Blackberry, which I promptly downloaded and found to work flawlessly. Now all Google needs to do is ship an app to sync my Google contacts to my BlackBerry and I can cut my desktop (and Microsoft) out of the equation altogether. C'mon guys, you can do it!
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
That Founder Feeling
Lots of ink gets spilled on the mechanics of starting a business (I guess readers and search engines both love "how to" content), but I haven't come across many accounts of the emotional experience of starting up that feel true or accurate to me. (Marc Andreesen has one of the better posts on the subject, but he only deals it a glancing blow on his way to a different point altogether). From my experience, the emotional side of creating a new company is at least as challenging and complex as the tactics of building a business, and worth a closer look.
My experience of starting companies is pretty limited: I was an "honorary" co-founder of my first startup, Adjacency, because I gave them their first e-commerce job (building Patagonia's inaugural online store) before joining them as a partner. After selling Adjacency to Sapient, I co-founded Judy's Book with my business partner, Andy Sack. I've been working closely with my friend Sree on his company, IndieMarketer, from concept through its many phases of development (and now, hopefully, to Product/Market Fit). And I recently co-founded (again, with Andy and a great operating team) Cooler Planet, a company that connects residential solar customers with local installers.
All of these businesses were built in the same basic domain: Web-based software and services. But the example that really helped me see the underlying emotional patterns in the founder experience came from a completely different sphere. Earlier this year my brother relinquished his partnership in a big New York law firm to start a boutique firm specializing in online commerce and digital intellectual property. Despite operating in a completely different business universe, his emotional experience as a co-founder of his firm, DeVore & DeMarco, would be immediately familiar to any of the technology founders I've worked with.
This was surprising to me, mostly because I think of lawyering as one of the less entrepreneurial vocations out there. (For clarity, I don't consider ambulance-chasing and other forms of low-grade litigious opportunism as lawyering, entrepreneurial though they may be). In my experience, law firms resemble universities more than businesses, hoary with tradition, bound by the rituals of the court and steeped in a culture of seniority. And lawyers, by temperament, are cautious and methodical people, much more inclined to avoid or mitigate risk than they are to seek it.
But after following the white shoe legal trajectory for over a dozen years (law review, clerkship, federal prosecutor, senior associate, partner) my brother arrived at the emotional certainty that ultimately animates any founder: "no matter how hard it proves to be, I would rather write my own story than follow someone else's script for my life." When it arrives, this certainty goes off like an emotional bomb, triggering a nausea-inducing cocktail of elation, fear and anxiety. It also unlocks previously unknown reserves of energy, a "fight or flight" response that fuels the creative effort of shaping and implementing a new business.
There's much more to be said about the many emotional phases (high and low) that follow this initial explosion, but to me it represents the point of no return that any entrepreneur has to reach before setting out, a "burn the ships" moment that makes it impossible to imagine doing anything else. The fact that my brother and I now share this experience has added a layer of understanding and mutual support to our relationship; this fellow-feeling among founders is another theme that I want to explore in a future post.
My experience of starting companies is pretty limited: I was an "honorary" co-founder of my first startup, Adjacency, because I gave them their first e-commerce job (building Patagonia's inaugural online store) before joining them as a partner. After selling Adjacency to Sapient, I co-founded Judy's Book with my business partner, Andy Sack. I've been working closely with my friend Sree on his company, IndieMarketer, from concept through its many phases of development (and now, hopefully, to Product/Market Fit). And I recently co-founded (again, with Andy and a great operating team) Cooler Planet, a company that connects residential solar customers with local installers.
All of these businesses were built in the same basic domain: Web-based software and services. But the example that really helped me see the underlying emotional patterns in the founder experience came from a completely different sphere. Earlier this year my brother relinquished his partnership in a big New York law firm to start a boutique firm specializing in online commerce and digital intellectual property. Despite operating in a completely different business universe, his emotional experience as a co-founder of his firm, DeVore & DeMarco, would be immediately familiar to any of the technology founders I've worked with.
This was surprising to me, mostly because I think of lawyering as one of the less entrepreneurial vocations out there. (For clarity, I don't consider ambulance-chasing and other forms of low-grade litigious opportunism as lawyering, entrepreneurial though they may be). In my experience, law firms resemble universities more than businesses, hoary with tradition, bound by the rituals of the court and steeped in a culture of seniority. And lawyers, by temperament, are cautious and methodical people, much more inclined to avoid or mitigate risk than they are to seek it.
But after following the white shoe legal trajectory for over a dozen years (law review, clerkship, federal prosecutor, senior associate, partner) my brother arrived at the emotional certainty that ultimately animates any founder: "no matter how hard it proves to be, I would rather write my own story than follow someone else's script for my life." When it arrives, this certainty goes off like an emotional bomb, triggering a nausea-inducing cocktail of elation, fear and anxiety. It also unlocks previously unknown reserves of energy, a "fight or flight" response that fuels the creative effort of shaping and implementing a new business.
There's much more to be said about the many emotional phases (high and low) that follow this initial explosion, but to me it represents the point of no return that any entrepreneur has to reach before setting out, a "burn the ships" moment that makes it impossible to imagine doing anything else. The fact that my brother and I now share this experience has added a layer of understanding and mutual support to our relationship; this fellow-feeling among founders is another theme that I want to explore in a future post.
Friday, December 7, 2007
IndieMarketer and "Product / Market Fit"
In his excellent series of blog posts on building and managing technology startups, Marc Andreesen advances (with an oblique credit to Benchmark's Andy Rachleff) the idea of "product/market fit" as the foundation of startup success. In his view, achieving product/market fit is the only thing that matters to a startup, trumping all other factors like quality of the idea, management team, technical execution, etc. Having seen this play out in the negative with Judy's Book, I know viscerally that this is completely true. Which makes it all the more exciting when I see what looks like product/market fit coming together in another venture.
In the fall of 2004 I was approached after a speaking gig by a soft-spoken Indian entrepreneur named Sree Nagarajan. He said his attention had been caught by one of my slides titled "Commitment Creates Opportunity" and he asked if we could meet for coffee. I agreed and, over coffee he shared with me his idea to tap his network of offshore development and data analysis relationships to build a services company that could efficiently deliver sophisticated analytics capabilities to U.S. customers at a very competitive price. He didn't yet have a specific target in mind, but was exploring different markets and looking for a sounding board to help him zero in and make the leap from employee to founder. I was impressed not only with his obvious intelligence and methodical approach to building a business, but also by his personal warmth and humility, and agreed to work with him to flesh out his idea and support him in whatever way I could.
Fast forward to today. Sree called me this morning to tell me he had just closed a major new client for his business, had several more equally big deals quickly coming together, and had just struck a deal with a long-time contractor to sign on full-time as VP of sales. His business, IndieMarketer, has evolved significantly since our first conversations, from its first incarnation as a self-service direct marketing platform for small artists and labels through several interim phases, finally emerging as a data and analytics provider to major labels and management companies (plus a back-office tools provider to music marketing agencies). In that time, Sree has worked through the full spectrum of startup challenges, from massive technology rewrites and personnel crises to the ever-present challenge of convincing your in-laws that your early promise as a marriage prospect has not been entirely scotched by your entrepreneurial efforts.
Whether Sree has truly reached this inflection point with his business remains to be seen, but having been with him through all the twists and turns to date, and seeing the momentum beginning to build in nearly every aspect of his business, it sure feels like it. My fingers are crossed for Sree, not just because I'm an investor in his business but because he's earned it. Unless you're extraordinarily good or extraordinarily lucky, achieving product/market fit requires massive effort and incredible personal resilience in the face of uncomfortable odds. Sree's making it happen and I'm proud of him.
In the fall of 2004 I was approached after a speaking gig by a soft-spoken Indian entrepreneur named Sree Nagarajan. He said his attention had been caught by one of my slides titled "Commitment Creates Opportunity" and he asked if we could meet for coffee. I agreed and, over coffee he shared with me his idea to tap his network of offshore development and data analysis relationships to build a services company that could efficiently deliver sophisticated analytics capabilities to U.S. customers at a very competitive price. He didn't yet have a specific target in mind, but was exploring different markets and looking for a sounding board to help him zero in and make the leap from employee to founder. I was impressed not only with his obvious intelligence and methodical approach to building a business, but also by his personal warmth and humility, and agreed to work with him to flesh out his idea and support him in whatever way I could.
Fast forward to today. Sree called me this morning to tell me he had just closed a major new client for his business, had several more equally big deals quickly coming together, and had just struck a deal with a long-time contractor to sign on full-time as VP of sales. His business, IndieMarketer, has evolved significantly since our first conversations, from its first incarnation as a self-service direct marketing platform for small artists and labels through several interim phases, finally emerging as a data and analytics provider to major labels and management companies (plus a back-office tools provider to music marketing agencies). In that time, Sree has worked through the full spectrum of startup challenges, from massive technology rewrites and personnel crises to the ever-present challenge of convincing your in-laws that your early promise as a marriage prospect has not been entirely scotched by your entrepreneurial efforts.
Whether Sree has truly reached this inflection point with his business remains to be seen, but having been with him through all the twists and turns to date, and seeing the momentum beginning to build in nearly every aspect of his business, it sure feels like it. My fingers are crossed for Sree, not just because I'm an investor in his business but because he's earned it. Unless you're extraordinarily good or extraordinarily lucky, achieving product/market fit requires massive effort and incredible personal resilience in the face of uncomfortable odds. Sree's making it happen and I'm proud of him.
New albums this week: Arctic Monkeys, Old Crow Medicine Show
I still buy CDs. Not that I actually play them - they get ripped to my hard drive and put on a shelf never to be touched again - but because I never got comfortable with stealing music and I don't like paying for DRM-restricted tracks. (I'm excited about Amazon's new DRM-free MP3 store but have a lingering desire to own my own hardcopy backup even if it costs a little more. Maybe I'll get over it).
Anyway, I was getting bored of my workout music and wanted some fresh tracks so I dug through the DJ recommendations at the world's best radio station (KEXP, for the uninitiated) and picked a couple of albums that I'd heard often on the station and liked. They're pretty different, but after a couple of listens each they're holding up well:
Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
I resisted these guys for a while due to the massive hype cloud that surrounded them (especially in the UK), but now that it's died down some I figured I could pick it up without being labeled a hopeless fad follower. Not sure if "lad rock" is a category, but this is super-catchy, ska-inflected English rock. Great workout music.
Old Crow Medicine Show, O.C.M.S.
On a completely different theme, I love old school old-time music and had been suspicious of these guys as revivalist imitators vs. the "real thing". I shouldn't have held off so long. Their musical chops are very real, and they tackle both traditional styles and more contemporary themes with obvious pleasure. Not such a good workout album, but terrific listening.
Anyway, I was getting bored of my workout music and wanted some fresh tracks so I dug through the DJ recommendations at the world's best radio station (KEXP, for the uninitiated) and picked a couple of albums that I'd heard often on the station and liked. They're pretty different, but after a couple of listens each they're holding up well:
Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm NotI resisted these guys for a while due to the massive hype cloud that surrounded them (especially in the UK), but now that it's died down some I figured I could pick it up without being labeled a hopeless fad follower. Not sure if "lad rock" is a category, but this is super-catchy, ska-inflected English rock. Great workout music.
Old Crow Medicine Show, O.C.M.S.On a completely different theme, I love old school old-time music and had been suspicious of these guys as revivalist imitators vs. the "real thing". I shouldn't have held off so long. Their musical chops are very real, and they tackle both traditional styles and more contemporary themes with obvious pleasure. Not such a good workout album, but terrific listening.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
UX Design is hard
I spent a bunch of time today (between coughing fits) building screenshots for an application prototype I'm working on. Whenever I try this, I'm reminded how hard it is to build a usable application, no matter how simple it seems at the outset. I don't claim any great gifts at the discipline, but whenever I take a fresh swing at the task I'm reminded how much I respect the skills of the great UX designers I've worked with in the past, and how much their efforts contribute to the overall quality (and ultimate success) of the final product. Back-end developers get all the glory while the front-end folks are dismissed as "coders-lite" with fancy sneakers, but over the years I have come to value a gifted front-ender as much as the deepest of full-stack devs.
P.S. - He's now a fancy-pants art photographer, but the all-time best I ever worked with was Bernie de Chant from way back in my Adjacency days. All of the gifts, none of the attitude, and the most massive work ethic ever. Big ups, Bernie.
P.S. - He's now a fancy-pants art photographer, but the all-time best I ever worked with was Bernie de Chant from way back in my Adjacency days. All of the gifts, none of the attitude, and the most massive work ethic ever. Big ups, Bernie.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
(Im)patient
For all dozen of you loyal readers out there, I do intend to keep posting to this blog more-or-less daily but have been laid low since last Wednesday with a particularly tiresome bout of pneumonia. I can't blame my kids for this one as they've been healthy (or as healthy as kids who attend the petri dish known as school can be) throughout. I started one antibiotic on Friday, just switched today to a another "broader spectrum" one because the first had accomplished exactly nothing, and hope to be officially on the mend by late this week.
As my wife will no doubt attest, I am a most impatient patient: I equate prolonged sickness with some kind of moral weakness on my part and this episode seems all out of proportion with my relatively minor current slate of vices. Meanwhile, thank you for your patience: I expect to resume pace (and on topics of greater general interest) very soon.
As my wife will no doubt attest, I am a most impatient patient: I equate prolonged sickness with some kind of moral weakness on my part and this episode seems all out of proportion with my relatively minor current slate of vices. Meanwhile, thank you for your patience: I expect to resume pace (and on topics of greater general interest) very soon.
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