On Wednesday night, the Google NYC office opened its doors to nextNY to give us an insider's view of what its like to work there, what they're working on, and what the future holds... and, we hoped, maybe hire a few of us.  :)

It was a great showing on both sides.  nextNY had around 100 attendees and the Google side was well represented by Marcus Mitchell, David Eun, Tom Thai, Dominic Preuss and Dennis Crowley.  We spoke about a lot of great stuff and the environment their is very open and upfront... hence the reason why I can't go into too much detail about all of it!  :)   Still, it was great to have kicked off our Open House series with such an accomodating host.  Hopefully, after this, we'll start to see more tech firms like Google reach out to engage the local community through us in the future.

Zach reminded me of something I've said to a lot of creative people I know...  there's going to be big demand in short video ad spots for the web.  The explosion of video on the web is going to drive the need for video advertising, and repurposed 30 sec TV spots aren't going to cut it.   If I were going to start a non-tech business, it would be a video ad creation firm.

...other times you need to hit them over the head with a brick.

I run a mentoring program and attendence at some of our breakfasts was lagging because many of the students were afraid of their i-banking internship peers getting more hours in the office than them.  So I sent them this note:

STUDENTS, PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT TO READ AND CONSIDER THIS…

I’ve spoken to a number of students who are experiencing some issues attending breakfasts because of work conflicts or just the requirements of their job’s hours. 

I understand this.  When you joined SEMI back in January, you probably figured that one breakfast a week that ended at 8:30/9 would be easy to attend.  Then you got to your internships and not only did you feel the pressure of competition from other interns, but you feel like the offer is looming over you and you don’t want to risk anything. 

This is an interesting thought exercise in the psychology of market behavior.  Students think that the way to get an offer is to outwork their peers on the job…  to beat them out in terms of hours spent.  To not miss any gatherings, getogethers, or meetings.  So, every student does the same thing… works ridiculous hours an attends everything.  Because they’re all acting the same way, their ability to actually differentiate from their peers is minimal, and the cost of this minimal differentation is great…  lots of hours, lots of stress.

Is there a better approach?  What about if you said to your supervisor at your i-banking firm, “I have the opportunity to go to Blackstone’s offices and meet with some key people there.  I really feel like making some of these contacts might make me more valuable to the firm and I’d be happy to make up the hours another day.”   

First off, there’s no doubt that you would be more valuable to the firm in my mind.  Second, now you’ve seperated yourself from the pack.  You’ve presented yourself as a go-getter looking to add value to the firm in several different ways, not just through hours. 

But is there risk?  Will you be the only one not going to a meeting?  Showing up at 9:30 one day?  Will that look bad?  Will you lose your offer?

Maybe if you skipped out to go to Great Adventure or because you were hungover… but if you approached your manager and told them exactly what you were doing. absolutely not.  Plus, the worst that could happen is that they say no.

Actually, that’s not true.  That’s not the worst that could happen.  The worst that could happen is that they say no and they’re not happy in your taking interest in talking to other firms and making professional connections… and that you still actually go to work for these people who are so closed minded and unreasonable

You should really be aiming to work in an environment where you have supervisors that take an active interest in your professional development and see the benefit of the networking connections that a visit to Blackstone would bring in.  If they don’t, do you really want to work for them anyway?  Now is the time when you should be aiming high, being a little idealistic, and taking these types of “risks” (even though I don’t think this is very risky.)  Behaving just like everyone else and trying to be the last one out of the office is something you do when you’re at a place 20 years and you’re trying to protect your reputation or your pension.  Its not something you do now at this age.  It strikes me that so many of you want to work in investing, where people get paid for taking risk and only for taking risk, yet many students I speak with are so paralyzed by fear that they don’t want to step an inch out of like at their precious internships. 

You’re too young and have too much potential to start conceding these types of quality of life issues.  I’ve always strived to work for employers who understood that the more well rounded and balanced I was, the more valuable I was to the firm…. and they saw me as more valuable to the firm than the firm being valuable to me.  I was the capital… I was the product, and they took an active interest in my development and well being…and happiness, too.  That’s why I had a unique career path that was different than the strict paths many of you are hanging on for dear life to.

And then people ask me how to get into private equity.  You want to know how to get into private equity?  Take an hour off from your internship tomorrow.  Come to Blackstone (in business attire) tomorrow morning, and make great friends with [one of the hosts of our breakfast].  Stay in touch with her… try to angle your way into a lunch.  Impress the hell out of her so you can score some inroads to a fall internship or a chance to recruit at Blackstone, the #1 Buyout firm in the

US

But, no, I’ll still probably only see 10 of you there tomorrow and you’ll sacrifice the rest of the summer, killing yourself when you didn’t really need to, to get a position you probably had in the bag anyway without tomorrow morning’s extra hour or two.  Then, when you’re 25, you’ll be totally burnt out and you’ll meet me at a SEMI reunion and ask me about getting into private equity or venture capital again.  Trust me, its very frustrating to watch when students don’t realize that real success means blazing your own trail on your own terms.

That’s all I have to say.  I hope to see more than 8 of you tomorrow.

Charlie

The other day, I went into Duane Reade to buy some deodorant.

There were two on the shelf of the brand I normally buy, in two different scents:

STORM FORCE and cool mountain misty flower breeze somethingorother fluffy cotton bunnies

Now, of course I bought STORM FORCE, because that's the way I want to smell...  like the FORCE of a STORM.  STORM FORCE-- Two words that imply power, but mean absolutely nothing when put together in that order. 

I need this.  I must have this.  I want to walk down the street with a team of roofers behind me replacing shingles on rooftops.  I don't want admirers... I want debris.  FEMA should call me every morning after I put it on to see if everything is ok.

STORM FORCE

STORM FORCE

Because most of all, that's the way women want their men smelling, right?

Hmm... wait... I need to rethink this.

Maybe STORM FORCE wasn't the right move there.

Perhaps I should have gone with the misty cool fluffy mountain bunnies.

Steak at Palm, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Pretty good stuff!

The Dynamic Duo, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Dan and Heather... Softball powerhouse couple

Here are some short clips of the Ladies of the Club on Saturday...  I would have taken more, but it was raining and my camera isn't waterproof.  More here.   Flickr pics, too.

A couple of months ago, the folks from nextNY started clamoring for some weighter content than our bar outings were providing.  So, in addition to our "Community Conversations" we set out to make inroads into some big tech firms that had a local presence. 

Not surprisingly, Google was the first one to get on board, and so, on Wednesday, 100 nextNYers will invade the midtown office of Google for our first nextNY Open House.   I really have to thank the Google New York staff, particularly Soo Young Kim for pulling out all the stops for us and opening their doors to host our growing little local community.  It really shows a commitment on their part to maintain an active  engagement with NYC and I hope it encourages other large tech firms here, like AOL and IAC, to do the same.

My best friend Brian and I have birthdays a month apart, and so instead of buying each other equally priced gifts and exchanging them, which to me seemed silly, we've gotten into the habit of hitting up top tier NYC steakhouses.   We've done it for promotions as well, and so steak has become celebratory food for us.

Here's where we've been so far:

1. Del Frisco's  - Best seasoning...  friendly waitresses
2. Ben Benson's   - Redefined our notion of what a crabcake could be... best appetizers.
3. The Strip House - Very dark...  great food, though... if you date a steak girl, this is the place
4. Old Homestead  - Unbelieveable cut of meat... melted in our mouths like butter
5. Wolfgang's - Solid all around
6. Angelo and Maxie's  - I have a special place in my heart for their Teriyaki steak

Seperately, at least one of us has also been to the following places:

1. Peter Lugar's - Steak for steak people
2. Ruth's Chris - Excellent service
3. Morton's - Overrated (me)
4. Smith and Wollensky's - Overrated (according to Brian)
5. Sparks - Sorely disappointed when I went there...
6. Gallagher's - Good food but the place is sort of a dump

So we're going out tomorrow for Brian's birthday and we need to cross another off the list.  Anyone have any suggestions?

SANY0029, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Bonnie and a friend at yesterday's marathon swim at 6AM.

Just saw a note in an Etsy forum...

I think a problem with Etsy is that there are far too many sellers and not enough buyers to compensate. Ebay is very successful because of how much they advertise and before I ran across this website I had never heard of it and neither had anyone that I know. I found through my newspaper a place called Freedom which will send your ad through 11 states for advertising. It cost $275 for 25 words or less and an additional $5 per word after that. I figure if we pitch in we could advertise to the country about Etsy and get some acknowledgment about this wonderful site that so many people are missing out on. If you are interested in pitching in to get Etsy advertised please contact me and let me know how much you are willing to donate. If we get enough people to donate I will let everyone know and then we can work together to make the perfect ad and send it off.

Either Contact me with your willing donation (will not donate until enough people have committed)

Can you imagine chipping in to pay for advertising on behalf of your wireless carrier?  How about for the car you drive?  I don't even think I'd pay to advertise Jamba!

I'll be joining Bonnie as one of several blogging I'm sure who are doing swim support for the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim.

Take us once around!

I can't really guess where I'll be when, but the race starts at 6:30AM...  and ends around 2:30ish.  I'll try and snap a few photos to give updates.

My avatar has a good luck message for the swimmers...

I'm a big fan of Equity Private, a blog about the bottom rung of the investment banking ladder...  and yesterday, Yong the Analyst (my replacement at GM), suggested that perhaps the writer is female.

It reminds me of the time that I was looking at an unbelievably slick financial model one time--one that had some very powerful, but very simple..even elegant... VB code built into it.  We were so impressed, that we looked up the author.

P. Chung

Well, from that moment forward, anytime we were stuck on something in Excel, we thought to ourselves...  "P. Chung...  he'd be able to figure this one out."  "P.Chung" became a mythical figure between us.  Master of the Spreadsheet.  A man for all formulas.

Only later we found out that P. Chung was really Patricia Chung, Queen of the Spreadsheet.

Serves us cavemen right for assuming it was a guy. 

The Felds celebrated an anniversary (congrats) and Brad writes...

"We spent a lot of time talking about how satisfied we are with our respective existences on this planet"

How many people can honestly say they feel that way?

I've been thinking a lot lately about the purpose of a company blog, the style, etc.

Is it supposed to inform customers?  Is it a marketing document?  Is it PR with comments?  Who blogs?  Why?  How does it relate to the company's existing PR and marketing efforts?   

Every company does this differently, but I think that Feedburner has really set the bar for creating a dialogue with the technology community and a site that reflects who they are as a collection of people, not just a company.  They don't even post that much, but they still have 11,000+ subs. 

Why?

I think, most basically, they've created something that people actually want to read, with a style that makes outsiders think of Feedburner as the kind of people they'd like to work with... and probably even work for, too.  Props to Rachelle who has done a great job with their online image, and really for the whole team for giving us some insight into their corporate culture.

On their recent hackathon...

"The developers at FeedBurner have been acting like a bunch of kids in the back of a station wagon lately ... "When's our next Hackathon?! Tell Chris to stop touching me!"

On their new music fan feeds...

The office stereo is cranked up to eleven this morning to welcome our latest customer, Geffen Records. With a date like 06/06/06 upon us, the office flashpot could finally see some use should Rob Zombie drop in on us.

I don't know whether or not the folks at Feedburner decided ahead of time, "Let's just be ourselves..." or whether they just realized this was the accepted norm in the blogosphere, but they could have very easily went out and written the definitive RSS blog as leaders in the space.  However, they'd have to get past the first Google page of all of the other RSS blogs already out there.  So, instead, they went out and created the definitive blog about Feedburner... because, really, who else could do that any better?

And they didn't just stop at blogs.  They have a company Flickr account as well. 

Is there a business benefit to this?  Maybe...   maybe its just fun.  But, as a blogger using their product, it makes me feel like they're "one of us" more so than they're trying to sell me something or make money off me.

Feedburner... made out of people.

So, first I started with Feed Demon... but now I think I want to go web.  I want to be able to check my feeds from any computer, to not have to worry about syncing.  I want to tag feeds, too...  to create easily manageable catagories.

I tried Rojo, and there are things I liked about it and things I didn't.  It was great to be able to tag, and I liked the simplicity of the interface, and I even liked the recommendations...  but it was slow.  REALLY slow.  I'd often have to wait hours before feeds updated.  Maybe I'm an idiot and I don't know where the settings are for it.

So, if you have a web-based reader that you really love, let me know.  It needs to be fast... fast to read, fast to delete and mark as unread, fast to update, catagorize... etc.  I read a lot of feeds and need to be able to go through them quickly. 

I have a dream.  One day, the Mets will have a lights out closer that will make us all forget about Franco, Benitez, Looper...

Doesn't seem like Billy Wagner wants to be that guy in the early going.

Man, if only we hadn't traded Izzy.

In any case, if you're into locker room humor, you have to read the comments to this post about David Wright hanging out with some St. John's girls...  HILARIOUS.

My fav quote:  "Wright probably took his shot with two strikes."

Back in August, I wrote about what it takes to be successful in "Web 2.0"...  but now I'm not so sure that's an admirable goal.   Yes, there are lots of really great things about the "second coming", but I think there's a whole lot that makes the pedestal a little bit undeserving.  Obviously, this piece is meant to generate a lot of conversation and feedback through a challenge...    it doesn't mean that I'm no longer interested in slick, user friendly "web 2.0" apps that make my life easier and have gained great market traction. 

So here's my Top 10 Reasons Why Web 2.0 Sucks...    Feel free to blog, remix, mash, tag, aggregate, syndicate, disaggregate, digg, sploof, snorg, coagulate, microchunk, gloog, discombobulate, and comment...

1.   This is going to be small.  Small might be the new big, and that's great when it means lower barriers to adoption, tools which are more lightweight and easier to use... but it also seems like no one is interested in the next "big thing" anymore.  The overbuild of calendar and video clip apps is the equivilent of Seinfeld's take how our greatest scientific minds are working on creating seedless watermelons instead of curing cancer.  That's why, as flakey as it may be, I admire people like Second Life for trying to create fundamental change in how we interact online, or Meetup for trying to actually effect the way we connect and combine in the real world.

2.  The death of teamwork.   The fact that it only takes a handful of people, sometimes even just one, to build services, means that there's actually less community creation going on than there was before in the tech world.  You're not going to have "del.icio.us alumni" the way you have Microsoft alumni...  or you will, but they could all meet by pulling two tables together in a local pizzeria.  Plus, so many of these startups are working in virtual teams and never meeting...   you're really losing all the teamwork that goes on in larger organizations when people work together in person.  That's going to create less loyalty, more turnover, and make it hard for companies to really take on bigger projects that require more employee continuity.

3.  I spell poorly enuff.    Dots.  Dropped concone