Meaningless E-mail from Vikram Pandit

I just got this because I'm a Citibank cardholder:

Dear Charles Odonnell,

I want you to be among the first to know about the bold steps we are taking at Citi to be the premier, global, fully integrated financial services firm.

Our objective is to create for our customers an experience in which services are seamless, payments and transfers effortless, and distances meaningless. My commitment - and the commitment of everyone at Citi- is to work tirelessly around the world and around the clock to deliver outstanding value and service as we continue to earn your trust and that of every customer we serve.

We are proud of our enduring strength as a global financial institution, striving to successfully meet the needs of clients like you in more than 100 countries. As always, we look forward to continuing to serve you - wherever you are and wherever you need to be.

Sincerely,

Vikram Pandit
CEO, Citi

So, um, yeah...  thanks Vik.  That was really...  um... bold of you. 

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How soon should you make yourself irrelevant?

One piece of advice that sticks with me is to try and hire so that you make yourself irrelevant--the goal being to build a well oiled machine that runs smoothly without you. This as opposed to one that comes to a grinding halt without you involved in every last decision.

One of the early mistakes I made so far was not to be aggressive enough about hiring early on. That put us behind where we wanted to be because it just takes a long time to find great hires--finding the right skills set, personality, timing. It's just a lot of variables.

So, recently, I met a completely amazing person who has the ability to take the business and operations of Path 101 to the next level once we launch in a month. Of course it's earlier than I ever thought I'd think about hiring a business person, but the more I think of it, the better I think it makes our product.

There are a lot of product challenges we will have moving forward: striking a balance between providing objective career information vs. possibly making candidates available for recruiting, incentivizing people to present honest portrayals of themselves in their content and data, not necessarily wht they think will just get themselves hired first... challenges that demand focus, creativity, lots of observation with respect to the product.. These are things that tend to get bumped when rasisng money, working out legal negotiations with partners, recruiting, working up financial and marketing plans... so it stands to reason that a product focused CEO would want to find a great businessperson as soon as possible, right?

I think that a lot of CEO founders have a hesitation around this and they possibly stay as CEO way too long--to the detriment of the business. I'm the opposite. I know exactly what I'm best at--getting out into the flow of conversation, being "outside guy", being creative and reaching out for business development, making connections, evangelizing. Our business prospect thinks it's too early to join... but I'm more concerned with waiting until it's too late.

links for 2008-05-14

• nextny Wiki / May Community Conversation - Hiring a Team
  (tags: hiring nyc nextNY)

links for 2008-05-13

• Your Resume - A $350,000 Advertisement | ORCMS Career Blog
  (tags: resume path101links path101 marketing careers)
• Path 101 | Career help for the "I don't know what I want to do" crowd
  (tags: careers jobs linkedin networking)

If you don't build for geeks, don't expect them to just show up

There's a nice piece in the Times about Yelp and how it has achieved nice growth and a small critical mass by focusing on the fanatics.

They quoted Jeremy Stoppelman:

“We put the community first, the consumer second and businesses third.”

That's paying off for them and it does make you wonder whether or not you can continue to be that way to attract the mainstream audience.

I was thinking about this the other day now that I have an Eee PC.  I'm liking it so far, but the keyboard is definitely maddeningly small.  Still, I'm getting better at it.  Anyway, one thing I'd really like on it is the ability to read feeds offline.  I currently use Newsgator products to read feeds--both Feeddemon and Newsgator Mobile.  I love the syncing capability.

But unfortunately, Newsgator doesn't have a Linux product.  It does, however have an API into their syncing infrastructure.  However, without a Linux product in the first place, most of the people I know that are using Newsgator are corporate types.  Newsgator Go!, their mobile product, is for Blackberry and Win Mobile.

With no Linux client and no iPhone app, what are the chances that the developer community is going to care enough about their product in the first place to develop on top of their syncing api.  Developers tend to build things to solve problems for themselves.  Not surprisingly, NO ONE has built a Linux RSS desktop client on top of their API.  Even a Thunderbird plugin would be nice, b/c Thunderbird can handle RSS feeds and it works in Linux.  So far, nada, zilch. 

Salesforce has the same problem.  Salesforce has no Thunderbird plugin because they say it's not a big enough chunk of their potential audience to make a business case for.  Perhaps, but think about the particular audience they're missing.  If you're not trying to reach out to the group of people who have rid themselves of Outlook in favor of an open source e-mail client, you're really missing out on a potentially passionate, creative, and innovative userbase.   If you're a platform company like Salesforce, you need those folks to stay on the cutting edge. 

So when you're building, the geeks might never get you to profitability or critical mass, but don't underestimate their importance in your community, especially if you're trying to get people to develop on top of and around you.

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Data Politics

When I was a freshman in college, I went to my school's club fair.  I like the idea of helping change this country for the better, so I checked out the school's political clubs--the young democrats and the young republicans.  I had visceral reactions to both because it seemed like they were more into politics than they were into progress.

That's how I feel about Hilary Clinton.  She ran a good fight, but she can't win--she doesn't lead in the popular vote, the delegate count, the superdelegate count, or in campaign funding--yet her interest in furthering her political career has gone beyond what's good for the party and what's good for the country.

"Politics for the sake of politics" is kind of what I feel like when I read Chris Messina's post about Data Portability.  Chris is a good guy and working really hard for what he believes in, but complaining about which technologies are featured on the Data Portability front page...   *shivers*...    Makes me totally not want to get involved at all.  It's like arguing whether Dave Winer invented RSS.  As far as I can tell, some combination of Nick Bradbury and Dick Costolo invented RSS, because Feedburner and Feed Demon are the most useful tools I had related to it. 

And I can imagine what those Data Portability meetings are like, too.  Arguing over which standard to adopt, figuring out a way for Google and Facebook not to "own" it all...    You know what, just lock up my data somewhere safe and try not to lose it.  We're talking about data portability, but meanwhile it seems like every other week someone loses my data in a cardboard box full of server tapes.  Monster, Visa...  Who's in charge of protecting my data over in these places?  Courtney Love?

Speaking of music...

Nothin' to do and no where to go-o-oh I wanna be se-DATA-ed.

Most of this open data stuff has been a helluva lot of political and PR posturing, like on who's joining or not joining Data Portability.  One thing I can guarantee is that everyone who joins that workgroup is self-interested and won't agree to anything that doesn't lose them money or positioning.  It feels no better than ClownCo...  oh... wait... Hulu, that's right.  Damn, I liked the original name better.

Face it.  No one cares about the user but the user.  And you know what?  The user doesn't even care about data portability either.   These are people that pay almost a hundred bucks for mobile plans and phones that are years behind the rest of the world.  They pay almost a hundred bucks for crappy television.  They pay another fifty bucks for broadband more fitting of a third world country.   You think they care about syncing up their Facebook friends with their LinkedIn contacts?  Most of 'em, believe it or not, don't even know what LinkedIn is.  You know what they think when they visit the "jail" that is Facebook?

"Oh, look, Mary's single again...   I gotta try to hit that."

"Oh, look how drunk Tommy was... what a funny picture."

"Oh, look, someone threw an electric hamburger at me."

So while you're out there trying to publish and share open standards, Facebook is building a tool that follows many of Scott Heif's 50 Reasons...    It's fun, because people will think they're a loser if they're not on it, because it gets them sex and/or love, etc.

When Microsoft builds something useful that solves a problem for me, I'll use it.  I don't care if it locks me in.   Plaxo used to be spammy and now they build a useful tool, so I'm using it.   Altruism and politics aside, if it's useful, they will come...  and they will come not because it's open or decentralized or because Google doesn't own it.

And while I'm at it, all the open financial publishing standards in the world aren't going to prevent the next big accounting scandal either.

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echovar » Blog Archive » A Venezuelan Moment: The Gillmor Gang considers nationalizing Twitter

The idea of building competitors to Twitter on the same platform, or redistributing Twitter to multiple players reminds me of the idea that New York City should be rebuilt in Ohio because it would be cheaper. Or perhaps we could distribute a little of New York City in every state of the Union. New York City is what it is because of the people who live and visit there. Building another New York City in Las Vegas doesn’t result in the phenomenon that is New York City. In a very important sense, Twitter is decentralized at its core, it is rhizomatic rather than arborescent.

echovar » Blog Archive » A Venezuelan Moment: The Gillmor Gang considers nationalizing Twitter

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links for 2008-05-12

• The New War for Talent - Articles - ERE
  (tags: careers path101 recruiting immigration)

Building the Team: A nextNY Community Conversation about Startup Hiring

Go in alone or with a partner?  How do you find and recruit a partner?

Need a business person?  A developer?  Where?  Who?

How do you know if they're the right person?  What do you ask on an interview?

And what do you pay all these people??

I've covered some of these issues in the posts below, but if you'd like to discuss startup hiring issues with a great group of up and coming entrepreneurs, you should definitely come to nextNY's Building the Team Community Conversation.

 

We'll be discussing, with the help of some great conversation leaders (entrepreneurs, a recruiter, a VC), the ins and outs of startup hiring. 

Please join us!

links for 2008-05-07

• This is going to be BIG! - 10 Things You're Not Allowed to Say in the Echo Chamber
  (tags: web2.0 rant myposts)

"We have no idea" and "Let's hope for the best": Two things you don't want to hear from Plaxo customer service when you are a paying, premium customer

I pay for Plaxo.  My premium service gets me Windows Mobile sync, which has been great, supposedly gets me LinkedIn sync, which currently doesn't work, and what I found out today is absolutely inadequate customer service by phone.

I was just trying to look up the e-mail of someone I recently connected to in LinkedIn.  It should be in my address book, because I sync LinkedIn to Thunderbird through Plaxo. 

Not so much.

Hmm... I went into Plaxo and there's not even a trace of that LinkedIn sync in my account.  It's not an available feature.  The only place the Plaxo site even has it is on their marketing pages for premium accounts.  So I call up customer service and the best thing they can tell me is "Our engineers are working on it."   I asked them how long I'd gone without this feature.  They had no idea.  That conerns me, because this is one of those things where I'm suspicious that it's more than broken--it may be that Plaxo is being blocked by LinkedIn for business reasons.  Either way, it would be nice to be told when a feature I'm paying to use and that I do actively use goes down. 

I told her I wanted a timetable of when this was expected to be fixed.  She had no idea... but she said that someone would get back to me.  I said, "Great, I expect someone to get back to me with a timetable within 24 hours, because this is a feature I'm paying my hard earned money for." 

She said, "Let's hope for the best."

Seriously?

"Hope for the best?"

Where's Stacy from Plaxo when you need her?  Do they have anyone else trolling the blogs?

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Nomination Fail

via
Marco.org Tumblelog

10 Things You're Not Allowed to Say in the Echo Chamber

1. I think Twitter is pretty reliable. It breaks less than a lot of the other things in our lives, like cellphones, cars, bikes, fax machines, copiers, etc. Jarvis agrees that all this burning Twitter at the stake stuff is over the top.
2. Facebook is not a LinkedIn killer. Facebook is where my actual friends live. I do not want to see pictures of your kids just because you read my blog.
3. I use Typepad. It works fine for me. I don't need plugins or installs or upgrades.
4. I still don't understand how OpenID makes my life that much easier and I don't have an OpenID that I actually use. I pretty much use the same password setup for everything, except my bank account, and "Remember this password" whenever I can.
   
5. Most startups, by number, don't make it. This does not mean there's a bubble. This is the way it has always and will always work.
6. VC's are not evil. They're not the cause of bubbles either. If a business model is stupid, don't blame the person who thought they could fund it and do something with it. Give some of the blame the person to wrote it and ran it into the ground.
   
7. I unsubscribed from TechCrunch because 99.9% of the companies profiled on their are not in my industry. Of course it doesn't hurt that Arrington's ego is the next bubble waiting to pop.
   
8. I do not have an iPhone, nor will I ever buy one. I need real keys and don't feel the need to carress my phone to navigate the web. Get a body pillow, people.
9. Kara Swisher is a journalist. The rest of us bloggers are pretty much hacks.
10. Ruby on Rails is not the answer to everything. A great developer is.
11. Bonus: 3/4 of founding CEO's should not be the CEO after the first 18 months of the life of the company. Unfortunately most of them have too much pride to step aside and focus on whatever it is they do best.
    

I missed this... Pots, Kettles, and Web 2.0 vs. the Economy

In her recent "Web 2.0 economy hangs in limbo" post, Caroline McCarthy gives her professional assessment of the frothy atmosphere of startup sponsored parties...

"...young women left and right were posing for photos with snappily-dressed Mashable overlord Pete Cashmore..."

That's Caroline on the right posing with Mr. Cashmore, for the record.  Should have been "Young women like me..."  Hell, why wouldn't you pose with the guy?  Dude's a handsome fellow.    

The article goes on to paint a picture of Web 2.0 companies being in trouble because of the economy, lack of business models, high burn rates.  Sure, every company has to watch their wallets because of the economy, but lightweight companies built on Web 2.0 technologies are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the economic downturn. 

For example, consider how much money the average company would save by switching to a free conference call provider--a provider using the latest technologies whose overhead is so low that they can afford to just make money off of giving the core product away for free and upselling for extra features. 

Plus, people think that ridiculous schwag and wasted sponsorship dollars is limited to startups.  I'm sorry, but has anyone been to a non-tech industry conference lately?  How many people have sponsored bags, pens, squeezey stress shapes from companies already making millions in revenues and far past their venture capital burning days. 

Perhaps my friend Caroline needs to spend more time at Ruby, PHP, MySQL, etc. users meetup, where developers are building great gamechanging applications instead of going to all the big flashy sponsored parties before making a generalization on the economic prospects of Web 2.0.  Not all of us are handing out light sabres.

When is New York City going to become bike friendly?

The other night, I went to the movies with a friend. The Kips Bay movie theater on 2nd Avenue has no bike racks, not that there are that many around the city, so I figured I'd keep the bike at his apartment. Unfortunately, his building has a rule that bikes are not allowed to be brought upstairs. The only place you're allowed to store a bike is in the building's storage area at an extra cost. Therefore, anyone trying to save money by biking to work pretty much loses that savings in bike storage costs--even if you can fit your bike in your apartment.

That's not the first time I've encountered this. Just yesterday, I went to go bring my bike up the elevator of our office and was turned away by the people at the front desk. Instead, I had to go around to the fright elevator. Unfortunately, the freight elevator is only open at certain times. I often work late. Good thing the night guard doesn't seem to mind when I exit the building with the bike through the front, because I don't have an alternative.

Even New York Sports Club fails in being bike-friendly. Once I asked the club manager on 35th and Madison if I could pull my bike into their lobby over by the side, because there wasn't even a parking pole outside the building to chain it to. He said "no", because this was one of their high end locations and they didn't want a bunch of bikes tarnishing the visual appeal of the gym. God forbid this should look like a place where people who participate in athletic, environmentally friendly activities work out.

While I'm complaining, I'll throw in Hudson River Park. Park police are more than willing to ticket you if you should bike anywhere but the little road, which means you can't bike along the path from the road to the Pier 96 boathouse. Since pedestrians and bikers share bike space on that main little road, this doesn't make much sense at all. In fact, I can't tell you the number of times I've nearly been hit walking out of the boathouse space on Pier 40 by the park police themselves driving around in their little golf carts. Want to protect pedestrians? Get those things off the road.

Some areas in parks don't even allow you to walk your bike in, let alone ride it. Try going to a sports game up at Riverbank State Park on 138th. I play softball up there and I'm not allowed to walk my bike to the softball field where I can chain it against a fence and watch it. Instead, I'm forced to chain it in a place where the park police person in the guard booth takes no responsibility for it whatsoever.

With all the time and effort we're trying to spend on congestion pricing, and the fair hikes, the green initiatives, etc... why isn't there some serious bike friendly legislation going on in this city?

Here are some suggestions:

1. It should be illegal to prevent someone from walking with their bike anywhere... in elevators, parks, etc. You don't make people with wheelchairs take freight elevators, and those things have just as many protruding metal parts that can do damage--because that would be a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And don't even get me started on the size of some of the strollers people are pushing around the city... they're bigger than some bikes!!
2. Every building with over a certain size should have to provide a safe and easily accessible space to store bikes AND be liable for their theft as if it took place in their own lobby. It would probably minimally impact their insurance bills and certainly provide an incentive to put the racks and storage space in a well lit area visible to lobby attendants. I had a bike stolen two years ago because the bike rack in front of 915 Broadway is about 10 feet past the slight lines of the guy at the front desk.
   
3. Give out special unlimited Metrocards for bikers during good weather months that delay experiation for every weekday that you don't use the card. I probably bike about 3 out of every five weekdays when the weather is nice, but I still buy the unlimited card because of how many times I use the subway to go to meetings, lunches, bad weather days, days I don't bike... I did the math and its nearly a push, so I'm not really able to save on transportation costs by biking part of the time. You have to be a fulltime road warrior to save any money. Certainly there's no incentive for anyone else to bike once or twice a week.

There should be some kind of a marketing campaign around being "bike friendly certified". Movie theaters, gyms, libraries, Starbucks, Jamba Juice... they should all ban together to do what it takes to become bike friendly. Racks would be a nice start.