water
Last year, I met up with Josh Stylman. We took advantage of the small window of gorgeous Spring weather and grabbed a couple afternoon Negra Modelos at Pacifico. Josh is a former-entrepreneur turned investor / advisor and I asked him about that transition. He mentioned that part of what makes investing in startups difficult is that “will is non-transferrable.” You can advise and encourage a startup all you want, but at the end of the day, it’s up to them to exert the will and effort required to get things done.
That phrase hit me hard. I called Josh a “former-entrepreneur” but that really just means that he’s an “entrepreneur between obsessions.” Entrepreneurial character traits are hard to shake even if there is no immediate project on the docket. Of all the entrepreneurial traits I can think of, self-reliance and strong personal will are the most foundational. People like Josh, myself, and the rest of the Fictive team have been conditioned to rely on our will to get things done and so it is frustrating to see its absence in a project you are involved in.
I don’t do a lot of angel investing, but in my personal life I often feel like a kind of early-stage investor. Instead of investing money in startups, I invest my time and energy in the dreams of my friends & family. These folks hope to build something great or change careers or advance in their existing careers and have asked me for advice on how to do so. I didn’t realize it until recently, but these personal energy investments bear a great deal of resemblance to financial investments.
Once someone has involved me in the plot for their dreams, they keep a little piece of me with them, whether they know it or not. They can take that energy and turn it into something great or let it fade. Either way, I have a very real emotional stake in their outcome.
I used to think that I had near-infinite energy reserves, but it’s become increasingly clear that, like a financial investor, I need a return on my energy investment. If people involve me and then go on to accomplish what they set out to do (or even just work hard toward it) I gain a great deal back in the satisfaction of knowing I helped someone. It’s then easier to pay that energy forward to other folks who want my help. If they go on to do nothing, I lose the energy I invested and it won’t be coming back.
This year, I’m making it a goal to fully internalize Josh’s comment. Will is non-transferrable. In order to have the biggest impact possible, I’m going to need to be increasingly discerning with my energy investments. I need to throw myself behind the most eager folks so my reserves stay full and I can keep being generous with my time and energy for a long time to come.
Posted with tender loving care on the 2nd of January in the year of our Lord 2012
As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
-Ernest Hemingway
Understatement of the year in whatever year he said that. I’m not old, but I’m getting older and I’m hurting for heroes. Once you leave school, learning is no longer structured. You have to figure things out for yourself. You still want to learn because learning means growing and growing is the most enjoyable way to live, but it’s gotten a lot more difficult. I’ve discovered that I learn much more from other people than I do from textbooks. I also realized that these people - my heroes - come in three flavors, one of which is in short supply.
The first group of heroes I think of as “role models.” The role model group is composed of my peers who are smarter and more talented than me in one way or another. I try to spend as much time as possible with people like this and, on that account, I’ve been very lucky. I’m surrounded by tremendous role models in my family, among my friends, at Fictive Kin & at Studiomates. Their proximity makes them incredible sources of learning. I can see their behaviors and ideas in action on a daily basis or I can go deeper with them on a walk home or a fireside scotch conversation. As such, no other group has done more to shape me into the person I am today.
The second group of heroes leaves the idea of proximity behind altogether and enters the realm of imagination. It may seem weird, but I look up to a lot of the fictional characters (Holmes, Protagonist, d’Anconia, Dantes) and historical figures (Franklin, Edison, Lincoln, Hemingway) that I find in books and movies. These heroes tend to excel at some aspect of human ability or spirit that I would like to see more of in myself or in others. Because they are essentially imaginary (even the historical figures) these heroes are aspirational in a sort of unrealistic way. Sure I’d love the observational powers of Sherlock Holmes, but that’s not very likely. That doesn’t mean I can’t learn from his character to be more observant in my day to day life. It does mean there are limits to the impact these heroes can have on my life. You never fully feel like it’s possible to accomplish what they accomplish.
The final group of heroes is a marriage of the first two. I like to think of them as the big “H” heroes. Mostly because I don’t have a better name. These Heroes are people have done astounding, almost unbelievable, things and yet they aren’t imaginary. They’re real. You can see them. You share the air with them. They’re existence makes the world seem full of possibilities because they stand as an example of just how far one person can go. My first love is products, so for a while now my only version of this Hero has been Steve Jobs. This article, which I wrote when I first heard about the SJ biography being released today, was meant to be a thank you to him for setting that kind of example. I’ve had to edit things because he is dead. Overnight, he was transformed into a historical figure. There is no next chapter. As of today, I have no living Heroes. I’m pretty bummed about that.
Posted with tender loving care on the 24th of October in the year of our Lord 2011
Wednesday
- 9:15 - morning hang
- 10:00 - in session
- 10:30 - small group love
- 12:00 - lunch
- 13:00 - in session
- 13:15 - small group love
- 14:45 - break
- 15:45 - in session
- 16:15 - big group love
- 16:45 - dinner & drinks
Thursday
- 9:15 - morning hang
- 10:00 - in session
- 11:05 - break
- 11:55 - in session
- 12:30 - lunch
- 14:00 - in session
- 15:00 - break
- 15:50 - in session
- 16:55 - dinner & drinks
Friday
- 10:30 - morning hang
- 11:00 - in session
- 12:10 - lunch
- 13:10 - in session
- 14:10 - break
- 15:00 - in session
- 15:50 - break
- 16:40 - in session
- 17:30 - dinner & drinks
Posted with tender loving care on the 10th of October in the year of our Lord 2011
So HP is probably going to bail on making PCs. That’s pretty crazy, but what’s even crazier is what they’re giving them up for.
- Move HP into higher value, higher margin growth categories
- Sharpen HP’s focus on its strategic priorities of cloud, solutions and software with an emphasis on enterprise, commercial and government markets
- Increase investment in innovation to drive differentiation
Increased investment in innovation to drive differentiation. I can see it now.
Posted with tender loving care on the 20th of August in the year of our Lord 2011
On Saturday night I was skimming through my Google Reader and landed on a Techcrunch post about the effect of commercial fryers on the environment. They highlighted the following impact:
“If every large vat fryer in the [country] met the new Energy Star requirements, energy cost savings would increase approximately $81 million per year and reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the emissions from nearly 95,000 cars.”
We really need a better way to communicate the environmental impact of our actions. Who decided that we should use cars as the primary unit of measurement? If you stop using plastic bags for your groceries, that’s like one car. Recycle all your cans, that’s like two cars, but one of them is a Hummer. Stop driving you car to work, that’s like five cars (trust us). Presenting gains in terms of theoretical cars off the road only confuses the matter and does little to connect with us on a personal level.
There’s a story in Made to Stick about when CSPI wanted to get people to stop eating buttered popcorn because of the tremendous amount of saturated fat that was in it at the time. They used the following language:
“A medium-sized ‘butter’ popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theater contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings — combined!”
That story is tangible, relevant, and personal. They compare food with food and require no mental abstraction on the part of the listener. The facts are startling and make you think, “Do I really want this popcorn when I could have all this other good stuff instead?” Probably not.
We can also see this kind of clarity in the message charity:water uses to help raise donations. First, they lay out the enormity of the problem to show that it is worth your time.
One billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water.
If they stopped there, the enormity of the problem would be clear, but would also be daunting. Few potential donors would feel that anything they could do would make a dent in the situation. But, thankfully, they do not stop there. They make it simple, personal, and easy with the following two figures:
- $20 = clean, safe drinking water for one person.
- $5,000 = a well for a community.
And all of a sudden, my personal role in this huge problem is clear. All I need to do is come up with an Andy Jackson and I can help a single person get clean drinking water through the creation of a sustainable well.
I don’t know what the equivalent language is for understanding our environmental impact, but I’ll be thinking about it a lot. The best language might be tied to relative measurements. What is my impact relative to my neighbors? What’s the per capita impact of my community relative to neighboring communities? You could also make it about money. How much more does the greenest person on the block save than the most wasteful? Clearly I don’t have an answer yet, I just know it isn’t cars. If you know of folks doing compelling work in this area, please let me know.
Posted with tender loving care on the 18th of August in the year of our Lord 2011
For part one, go here.
There is an implicit contract that the intern and employer enter into when an internship begins. I think that because it is implicit, it is rarely heeded. I’d like to take a moment to make it explicit for both parties. This post has the same disclaimer as Part One which is that I am talking about internships with individuals or small teams, not larger agencies that have whole processes in place for chewing through interns.
Interns
Interns. It is your job to lighten the load or increase the capacity of your employer. You do this in exchange for valuable experience knowledge and industry connections. In most cases you should be paid, but not a lot. You are making a sacrifice early in your career for much greater gains as you develop. While you should expect to work on some interesting projects, not all of your work will be knowledge work. Gopher work should be a part of it too and you shouldn’t shy away from it.
Because many employers are too polite to request help with menial tasks, you can distinguish yourself by spotting and doing them proactively. Offer to go on coffee runs. Clean up the office space without asking. If you see your employer, for example, taking out the trash every Wednesday, offer to save them the time & effort. If you find yourself without anything to do, feel free to suggest a project or a couple projects to your employer. It will be easier for them to pick something from a list than to generate something on the fly.
During your time as an intern, your goal should be to ship as many quality projects that you can show off in your portfolio as possible. Before you start your internship you should set this expectation and hold your employer to it. You should measure the success of your internship by how much work you ship and how much fun you had. The next step is either a full-time position at the place of your internship or some other interesting company.
Employers
Employers. When you take on an intern, you are agreeing to mentor them and help develop their skills. You should be consistently imparting industry knowledge and meaningful feedback to them. If you are doing that right, the intern will leave the internship more talented and more employable than when they started.
It’s ok and give interns some amount of gopher work as long as you are balancing that with meaningful project work that gets completed and published. Don’t take on an intern if you don’t have specific projects lined up for them. It’s not fair to either of you. An intern does not simply want to bask in your glow. An intern wants to ship. They may bask for a little while, but soon they will realize that you, like everyone else, are just a person.
Set your internship for a finite period of time. This is a jumping off point for the intern and you need to ensure they do not get stuck. As the internship is coming to a close, you should be attempting to help your intern find a job. You should consider your internship a success if you either decide to hire your intern on a full-time basis or you are able to help them find a full-time gig somewhere else that is cool. If your intern struggles to find a job following your internship, odds are you didn’t do right by them.
This contract is sealed
If each side lives up to their end of the bargain, you have a smarter, more employable intern, a lightened load for the employer and a long-term industry friendship. This contract is sealed.
Posted with tender loving care on the 29th of June in the year of our Lord 2011
This is a public service announcement for all you young designers & developers out there looking to get started in the web industry. There is a conversation happening again and again at Studiomates that I think you should be aware of.
Studiomates is pretty high-traffic in terms of interesting guests covering a broad swath of awesome. Lately, at our guest lunches, we can’t seem to avoid the subject of interns. What I’ve found interesting is that the conversations all follow the same arc. They start out as a longing and turn into a sort of dejection punctuated with lines like “I’d love an intern, but they’re too much work”.
I was raised in a “waste not, want not” household and I hate to see great potential internships go to waste because of some perceived quantity of effort. The reality is that internships only seem like a lot of work. When done well, they are a huge boon for both the intern and the employer, they improve the knowledge base of the industry as a whole, and they lead to life-long industry friendships. It wouldn’t hurt to have a few more around.
Quick disclaimer: In this article, I am talking about internships with individuals or small teams, not larger agencies that have whole processes in place for chewing through interns.
Effort
Thinking of interns as “too much work” seems to put the blame on the intern, but the reality is that the employer holds much of the responsibility. The problem is that most employers are tremendous practitioners of design & development, but not as practiced in the art of management. After doing the work to find an intern, they don’t always know how to get the most out of them. There are two things that I think can improve the quality of the internship and reduce the sense of effort.
Ask for help with administrative tasks. Creative work is challenging when interruptions are high. Offloading your distracting, administrative tasks to your intern will improve your productivity. Sure, it can be uncomfortable to tell other people what to do, particularly if the work is not glamorous, but as long as you aren’t giving your intern only menial tasks, you shouldn’t hesitate to lighten your daily load by asking them to mail a package or make copies.
Be willing to delegate. Too many folks in our industry micromanage their interns instead of trusting them. Of course interns will seem like a lot of work if you have to constantly scrutinize their work as well as your own. There’s no leverage in that. Let your interns solve problems iteratively. Check in at the end of each iteration, give thoughtful feedback, and point them in the right direction. It may take them a bit longer (in terms of days) than if you had done it on your own, but the effort required of you to get the project done will be minimal and the whole time you can be getting work done on your other projects.
The moral of the story here is that employers have just as much a responsibility to keep an internship effortless as does the intern. Let’s have a look at the intern’s responsibilities, shall we?
Initiative
Hi interns. This is may just be Old Man Cameron talk and I’ll probably catch a lot of flack for saying it, but it seems to me that kids these days have talent up to their eyeballs and initiative up to the soles of their feet (standing position, not jump kicking). If you are under 25 right now, I am almost certainly talking about you.
I don’t think I am alone in thinking this way and it’s useful for younger web folk to understand that this is a prevailing attitude. The interesting implication of that attitude is that when you are trying to land an internship or even a great job, you aren’t really competing on talent. Talent is a prerequisite, but it doesn’t get you the job.
Instead, you should focus on your new favorite word: “initiative.” You need to be able to be given a problem and just go to town on it with little supervision. You need to be able to internalize feedback and make adjustments to your work accordingly. You need to be able to take notice of when you are idle and generate some possible suggestions for how you can be made productive. You need to be looking out for ways to help that your employer hasn’t even noticed yet. If you can do that you are invaluable.
The good news is that if you are one of the under-25 crowd and you are genuinely a hard-worker with some solid initiative, you are extremely well-poised to get great work and dominate the web industry. Your peers are weak sauce and you are Sriracha.
Part II
This post was getting a bit long and, in deference to our modern ADD world, I broke it in two. The second post is all about the implicit contract between employers and interns and what each should expect of themselves and each other. Bon appetite.
Posted with tender loving care on the 29th of June in the year of our Lord 2011
Despite our playful splash page inspired by one of our favorite Brooklyn beers, Brooklyn Beta does exist and it is taking place this year from October 12-14. Over the past six months, it has become increasingly clear that demand for BB tickets will far outpace supply. Lots of folks, including many friends I would greet with a hug, will be disappointed. This post is an attempt to offer some insight into the situation so everyone will know what to expect and maybe even take it easy on us when the tickets are gone.
At the end of last October, when folks were saying nice things about Brooklyn Beta, it felt good. Chris and I knew we wanted to create a conference, but it was by no means clear that we’d be able to create one that people liked. It’s not widely known that just two weeks before the event start date we had only 4 speakers (doesn’t count as a conference) and stood to lose about $15K each (money that we absolutely did not have). Needless to say, we weren’t sleeping great. In the end we got lucky. @k and @marcoarment took a chance on us and rounded out our fantastic speaker list. H&FJ, Mailchimp, Fontdeck, Ning, Siteleaf, and WonderProxy took a chance on us and saved us from the poor house. It wasn’t just sponsors and speakers who took a chance on us, it was friends and even strangers travelling from around the globe to attend a “friendly web conference” (whatever the hell that is). These people showed up not knowing what to expect and then made Brooklyn Beta awesome.
This awesomeness did not go unnoticed and demand for tickets this year is nothing short of frightening. Chris has the details on how we’re doing the tickets this year. We’ve tried to be as fair as possible with the process, but we are also trying to keep a lot of the magic of last year alive. To us, that means a couple things. First, we’re keeping the event small. We’ve made it about 30% bigger, which is not so much that it will lose last year’s intimacy. Second, we are inviting back quite a few of the folks who took an early chance on Brooklyn Beta and helped make it great. This includes our respective teams and studios, last year’s speakers and workshop leaders, our sponsors, last year’s crew, and a small batch of positive people like @lachlanhardy & @scenariogirl who signed on to BB from day 1, travelled from Australia, and had two of the best attitudes before, during, and after the conference. That still leaves quite a few tickets, but again, demand is high.
If you don’t get a ticket, please look at it as an opportunity. Build sold out in under 24 hours, 600 folks descended on Nottingham for Collycon, folks travel across the globe for Webstock, and people are currently kicking themselves for missing JSConf tickets. People want more friendly web conferences. Ones that are run by small groups of passionate folks. This is a great time to put on an event that shows off your neighborhood and your community. Put on a friendly web conference and they will come. (Me, too.)
Posted with tender loving care on the 20th of April in the year of our Lord 2011
Today an article that I wrote was published on A List Apart. I can’t explain just how much that means to me, but to say the least, it makes me very proud.
When I started out making things for the web, the ALA articles were an invaluable source of both education and inspiration for me. The site itself was even more important. I spent numerous hours looking it over and trying to understand all the decisions that made it what it was. I believe that even today, it remains one of the best site designs on the web. If there was such a thing as a gold standard for web design, ALA would be it.
And then there’s the illustrations. Oh, the glorious illustrations of Kevin Cornell. How does he do that every issue? It is entirely possible that my favorite part of being published on ALA is the fact that I got a badass illustration created for my article. Thanks Kevin.
As far as the subject matter of the article is concerned, I got really lucky. The idea of orbital content is one that is very important to me and is at the heart of the work we’ve been doing on Gimme Bar. Some of the concepts are pretty out there and may be a bit controversial, but I think they are very much worth reading. I hope the article will shed light on some of the ideas behind our app and generate some discussion that will push us to be better.
A final note is all about the thank yous. Thank you to Carolyn Wood who encouraged me to submit this article to ALA and gave me an early round of much needed feedback. Thank you to Mandy Brown for her spectacular editing. She once tweeted: “If I do my job as editor, you shouldn’t be able to see I was there. It should just be the best thing you’ve ever done.” This was my experience working with Mandy. Lastly, thank you to Chris Shiflett, Sean Coates, Evan Haas, Bedrich Rios, Frank Battaglia, Ed Finkler, and Tyler Mincey for reading the early versions of the article and telling me how bad they were.
Posted with tender loving care on the 9th of April in the year of our Lord 2011
If you’re running a startup or doing any kind of fundraising, I’m gonna put something in your head that you won’t be able to shake. At every meeting with an investor watch for them to say that the investment market is “frothy.” When it happens (oh, it will happen), take a mental shot.
The herd mentality among investors is always surprising to me. This month it’s frothy, next month it is something else. I don’t know where they’re all going to get the word du jour, but I want in. Can’t handle the suspense of waiting for what comes next. “This market is a classic ultra-skim soy market.”
Anyhow, been hearing frothy a lot and wanted to pay it forward. You’re welcome.
Posted with tender loving care on the 6th of April in the year of our Lord 2011
