Deep Thoughts by Maggie Utgoff

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

— Teddy Roosevelt

Hey San Francisco! Be Excellent To Each Other!

I’ve always wanted to start a company that facilitated crowd funded public service announcements. I think the reason I love Twitter so much is my need to tell the public things that I think are important. I like to express myself. A LOT.

In September I started working with a company called LoudSauce. Together we have evolved and I am a co-founder of the new product “Louder.” It’s basically your internet soapbox. You can use Louder to crowd fund billboards, TV ads and anything that you consider advertising space.

Louder is a combination of two projects from my life: Twitter and The Estria Foundation. Instead of hearing from soda and car companies I’d like messages from normal people forced on me while I’m driving, watching TV, or playing interwebs.

Now… My secret wish this whole time has been to fund an awesome billboard. What could be better than Bill and Ted’s favorite mantra “be excellent to each other?” While our streets tell us to get a new car or drink more soda maybe slipping this nice and fun message in will make the lives of San Franciscan’s a little nicer for a month. Donate to get this f’ing awesome billboard up! 

XOXO: Do What You Love, But Don’t Get Sick

 

Andy Baio and Andy McMillan organized the Kickstarter funded xoxo conference/festival in Portland this past weekend. Why “xoxo?” According to Andy Baio It’s about using technology to make something you love. Speakers talked about the future of the internet as a place where people can follow their dream and connect with others who appreciate what they are doing. I’m not sure what the take away was supposed to be, but I left feeling like I can follow my dreams without conforming to the order of operations normally involved in monetizing a creative outlet.

People are making something they love without compromising their artistic integrity, and putting it online for sale directly to customers, cutting out the middle man. Emily Winfield Martin who created Black Apple on Etsy described this “as a time where any misfit can find a place for themselves and make their own job.” Unfortunately, those misfits have to be a good financial bet for health insurance providers, and have the money to pay an exorbitant amount for health care.

So I’m about 10% done with the book I’ve always wanted to write and I was hoping to fund it on Kickstarter. But… a few months after I left my last job I missed a $600 per month payment (don’t mail things from small towns in Nevada if you need them to arrive anywhere in a reasonable amount of time) and was dropped from COBRA. COBRA stands for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, which became law in 1986. COBRA gives you the right to choose to keep the group health insurance benefits that you would otherwise lose after you quit your job. It’s also the the name of a highly venomous snake, which is appropriate given my experience. As luck would have it, what “Obamacare” created for the uninsured in Californians excludes people who missed a COBRA payment. I have a pre-existing condition and I’m not willing to lie, so I was denied coverage from every insurance provider until I found a short-term plan that will cover my hospital bills in an emergency. Starting October 1st, my insurance will expire and if I don’t get a job I’ll probably turn into some Howard Hughes type character and stay indoors with my bike helmet on rambling about germs.

James Swirsky aand Lisanne Pajot who raised money on Kickstarter for “Indie Game: The Movie,” revealed their secret to healthcare: be Canadian.

I talked to quite a few independent artists who told me about how hard it has been to pay out-of-pocket for health insurance. One artist I love, who sell’s his stuff on Etsy, told me his wife’s Urinary Tract Infection (UTI) counted as a pre-existing condition and makes their payment outrageously expensive. Most women have had one. I guess this is just another part of what makes being a woman a pre-existing condition.

My experience at xoxo made me confident that someone will solve this problem. Bre Pettis of Makerbot applauded the open source community and considers owning a patent a waste of time. People are living on the edge of what’s possible and sharing. If people using this approach are taking on behemoths like banking and cable television (Simple and VHX), healthcare must be right around the corner, right?

Company Harmony: Finding the Job of Your Dreams

         


Silicon Valley has returned to the craziness of the orignial dot-com bubble. Everyone is raising money right now and “doing their own thing.” Most of them won’t make it, but I admire their optimism. To go big you need the best software developers. This has made for an insane supply and demand problem, and is forcing great developers to choose between a dream, stability and the sea of series x rounds in between. But how are they making that choice? 

Looking for a job is a lot like dating. You probably spend more time at work than you do with your significant other (when you have one), so test the waters and find out what’s best for you.  If you’re a good software developer, you probably get 5-10 Linkedin messages a day about “new opportunities.” But just because you are in demand, doesn’t mean finding the right person/job is easy. In some ways my analogy breaks down here because when you’re dating and you’re in demand, you can opt to have sex with as many people as possible*. But most companies demand monogamy immediately and they are so clingy it’s not like you’re going to be able to see anyone else anyway. They also give you that four year vesting period with a one year cliff, so walking away from them won’t be easy. Breaking up is hard to do. Take is slow. Don’t buckle under peer pressure. Other people are judgemental and take note of who you’re with, but you have to be with them for 8-10 hours a day. This isn’t a choice to take lightly. 

I’ve done some recruiting internally at companies that aren’t well known in the tech community and it’s a rough gig. Imagine asking a ton of people at a bar for their number and getting turned down 99% of the time; that’s exactly what it’s like. While recruiting firms can be great and deliver a steady flow of candidates; looking back, I’ve always found that the best candidates I’ve hired have been from the network of current employees or from people applying via the job posting on your homepage. 

Recruiting firms usually charge 20-25% of the first year’s salary of any candidate that gets hired as a finders fee (a good developer starts somewhere between $100,000 - 150,000/year). There are tons of developers but their skills range from incompetent to Rainman. With each new startup, demand for these developers rises and the supply is just not there. The motivations in place push recruiters to force placements that aren’t a good fit for either party.

One recruiting strategy for companies with more stability (money) is to look at the folks doing their own thing, wait until they are in the “Trough of Sorrow” and go after the vulnerable developer with kids and a mortgage. One recruiter actually said, “every time I hire someone, I kill a startup.” I’ve also heard recruiters lie to employees about benefits and lie to employers about the job history of candidates. It always amazes me how honest candidates are about being fired after a recruiting firm gave me a story about how they left on their own. Recently a friend told me about a developer who was recruited to work at a company that works in the music business and was promised tickets to any show he wanted. It was only after he had started working that he discovered how far from the truth that was. Recruiters throw around terms like “big data” and speculate about the number of users a product has. I guess sales is a business where people are known to stretch the truth, but when selling human beings I think we need to set our standards higher.

Great developers are the pretty girls at a dance with way too many dudes. We all hope pretty girls go for the right guy, the nice, smart, honest guy that cares about them but may be a little awkward (See Brian Krakow), but sometimes they go with the good looking selfish doofus who lies (See Jordan Catalano)**. And let’s not forget, some of the pretty girls aren’t so pretty on the inside. When startups get frantic, they forget to take it slow, and end up with the pretty girl who is mean and maybe not so pretty under the layers of makeup (See Reality Television).

The appeal of startups is that they can run things the way they want to. They are open to changing the way people do things and usually have less unnecessary processes. This creates a wide range of work environments. Fortune’s “100 Best Places to Work” comes out every year with the assumption that one size fits all, and that we all want the same things from our employers, but we don’t. We don’t all have the same taste when it comes to dating. Why would we all want the exact same job? 

We all have different needs and it’s important to figure out what they are. Most startups provide employees with an extremely wide variety of beverages, and a gym membership. But more importantly they all approach, hours, culture, management, communicatinion, and decision making in extremely different ways. Access to a ping-pong table and the ability to get food whenever you want is awesome, but it shouldn’t be a huge factor. We always give applicants an overview of the product and what type of sodas will be made available, but whether opportunities for learning and continuous improvement exist is something that is promised in interviews, and rarely delivered. 

Some advice for employees: Don’t get too excited about the free lunch and Mountain Dew. Don’t trust every recruiter you talk to. Take into account the motivations of the people giving you advice and take these decisions seriously. Make sure to go on as many coffee dates as possible, and do your research. Don’t let a recruiter promise you a ton of money and make these decisions for you. I know it’s easier, but you may regret it for a long time. Get advice from people you trust who have been in your field for a long time. Make your employer give you concrete details about the job and the culture of the company. This is your life. Take responsibility for it

Some advice for employers: Prioritize recruiting as something employees need to be doing. Make your employees happy so they tell their friends about how awesome it is to work there. Remember, when people go out with their friends, they will bitch about their job if they don’t like it. Set the bar high and keep it there. If you have a great product and a great team, things will work themselves out. Every single person you hire will affect the daily lives of your employees. Even when times are tough, take these decisions seriously. 

*If you want to explore this option, consider consulting/contract to hire. 
** My So-Called Life was canceled after one season, but I think we all know the whole Jordan and Angela thing wasn’t going to work. 

Someone asked me what I want from my job…

I don’t need to be famous or to make a ton of money, I just want the things below (from my job). I hate that this isn’t something everyone gets, since I don’t think it’s too much to ask.
Having these things would make me incredibly happy: 
  • To be learning about anything and everything.
  • A work life balance.
  • I like the people I’m working with so much that when the toilet is clogged I just plunge it without a thought.
  • A place where I can spill out my ideas and people get that I don’t care if they don’t like them, I just want people to listen and give me honest feedback.
  • To be surrounded by people smarter than me.
  • Help understanding what I’m good at and to do what I’m good at.
  • Honesty.
  • Laughter.
  • Appreciation.
  • And most importantly… to be inspired.

Humility is not part of the Steve Jobs leadership repertoire — and that’s worked out fine for him. But humility has become a crucial part of the job description for leaders who aren’t Steve Jobs. So marvel at his products, applaud his feel for design, wonder at his capacity to cast such a large shadow over so many industries…. But don’t think you’ll do better as a leader by acting more like Apple’s leader. Trust the art, not the artist.

—[Harvard Business Review 2009]

Heaven and Hell… Making Work More Like the Former

 Here is a Zen story I remember hearing about as a kid:

Once upon a time, in a temple nestled in the misty end of south hill, lived a pair of monks. One old and one young.

‘What are the differences between Heaven and Hell?’ the young monk asked the learned master one day.

‘There are no material differences,’ replied the old monk peacefully.

‘None at all?’ asked the confused young monk.

‘Yes. Both Heaven and Hell look the same. They all have a dining hall with a big hot pot in the center in which some delicious noodles are boiled, giving off an appetizing scent,’ said our old priest. ‘The size of the pan and the number of people sitting around the pot are the same in these two places.’

‘But oddly, each diner is given a pair of meter-long chopsticks and must use them to eat the noodles. And to eat the noodles, one must hold the chopsticks properly at their ends, no cheating is allowed,’ the zen master went on to describe to our young monk.

‘In the case of Hell, people are always starved because no matter how hard they try, they fail to get the noodles into their mouths,’ said the old priest.

‘But isn’t it the same happens to the people in Heaven?’ the junior questioned.

‘No. They can eat because they each feed the person sitting opposite them at the table. You see, that is the difference between Heaven and Hell,’ explained the old monk.

The moral of this story is simple: A turn in mind is all the difference between Heaven and Hell lies (一念天堂，一念地獄). Be nice to people and people will be nice to you. 

I thought of this story at work the other day. I’m working at a new start-up (Rally) and we are going through the process of defining our company culture. I do like a list with words like honesty and integrity (common for company values made public), but it would be nice to take the most important part of what makes a good work environment and just make one rule. Things like “Don’t be an Asshole” and “Don’t be Evil” have always appealed to me, but these mantras aren’t specific enough.

I think creating a workplace where people give each other recognition on a regular basis and no one EVER takes credit for another person’s work is a foundation for success. The best people I have ever worked with never toot their own horns and sometimes suffer because of it. If I can create a workplace where we are always recognizing each other for contributions and hard work and don’t feel the need to point out our own accomplishments, it would be awesome. 

So if the noodles are recognition and the chopsticks are appropriate forms of communication for the recognition at hand, lets make the chopsticks REALLY long. 

And then, there are these people:

Got Hope? Harvey Milk.

‎”I want you to connect with me through sharing and understanding the concept of dry mouthedness.”

The 'Radiolab' Effect

Melissa Stanley went to school for music—or rather, Music Industry. The 26-year-old recalls “taking maybe one physics class in college, and that was it” for her formal science education. After graduation, she became a director of A&R and booking at Jezebel Music, a concert-promotion outfit for unsigned acts in Williamsburg. Then, at the office sometime in 2007, things changed. “One day,” she said, “we just got tired of all of the music that we had on our computers, so I turned on WNYC.” The program on the air was Radiolab.

(via Instapaper)

Why Conservatives Should Read Marx

Every thriving political movement contains diverse and often warring elements bound together by little more than strength of feeling and the lure of power, so it would be stupid to look for unblemished ideological consistency in a political party. But it is hard to take such a view of ourselves.

(via Instapaper)