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For the sake of posterity, I thought it would be neat to keep track of the progress of del.icio.us as a growing company. Brad, Fred, and I, and everyone else associated with this deal are all very excited about it. Its great to be around such a fast growing phenomenon at this early stage. Joshua and Peter have been unpacking a lot of boxes in the last week or so and they now have their DSL up and running in the office. You might not recognize Peter their in the background. He used to look more Rasputin-like, but now he's a walking Gillete commercial.
100 Bloggers, 100 Boxes: The Charity Superbowl Wiki
As an experiment in non-profit collaboration on the web and to give us reason to keep watching in case Rex Grossman throws 4 INTs, I've created The Charity Superbowl Wiki for 100 bloggers to participate in a charity game.
For a donation of $10 (plus PayPal transaction fees), you get to stake claim over a box on a 10 x 10 table whose row and column numbers will represent the last digit of the scores of the Colts and Bears at various points in this Sunday's Superbowl.
The key is that you are playing for a charity... and all of the proceeds, net of PayPal fees, will be going to charity. When you win, your charity will get money.
Check it out here, and please help us run up the various meme lists by linking, digging, tagging, etc. It's for a good cause.
Are you going to be one of the 100 bloggers to participate?
Street Broker
When you're a Finance major, there are two things that are absolutely required consumption--Wall Street and Liar's Poker. If you haven't gone through both of them, well, no there's no point to even saying that because we all have. Its not just a rite of passage, its scripture.
But, what isn't required, particularly with Wall Street, is learning any kind of lesson. Guys grow up idolizing Gordon Gekko with his slick back hair and fancy 15 pound cell phone (it was 1987) on the beach, but the morality lesson gets a bit dwarfed in the whole thing.
When I was in college, I ran a retreat for business students in the spring of senior year. A lot of people complained about how empty and exhausted they felt about recruiting. Trying to figure out and play who you think these companies want you to be and sell yourself can get to you after a while. And for what? Do the people that "play the game" really actually wind up winning in the end?
I avoided the whole brokerage/investment banking side of Finance. I never liked who I was dealing with there because it always seemed like it was either about being better than the next guy or being the closest fit to a mold--never about being the best self you can be. I just wasn't willing to make that kind of sacrifice and I never felt I should have to.
I wasn't going to stay up nights like Bud Fox, charting companies to prove my worth to somebody. I was going to live my balanced life and I bet on the fact that I would get appreciated and discovered by others who wanted the same kind of balance in their lives.
Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) gets sucked in... the money, the women. A lot of people do. But you know what? That's not what really gets you to be that successful. Success in this country is built on equity... built on building things and owning the equity in things you built, not tearing things down. That's why most leaveraged buyout returns never get high multiples--there's only so many ways you can improve a company, only so much leverage you can get. Sure, it's also less risky, but in my life, if I'm going to be around an industry, I think its more fun to be in one that's shooting for the fences.
And when you're doing that, you've got to have your heart in it. When Bud Fox sold out Blue Star, he knew it wasn't right at the moment he did it. When we see entreprenuers, its easy to tell who is passionate about their business in a positive way. It flows out of them and drives them upward.
Ok, so I didn't talk so much about the movie and kind of went on a tangent. Its a great movie, even outside of all this moral commentary. Michael Douglass really is Gordon Gekko and Charlie Sheen is equally well cast. Its great to see him play on screen with his dad, making the whole betrayal seem that much more real. Go rerent it if you haven't seen it in a while... or rent it if you're boyfriend is a hungry, aspiring broker/banker and you want to know what all the fuss is about.
Oh, and I'm not trying to be sexist... plenty of women are obviously successful bankers, but I don't know too many of them who really like Wall Street. Disagree? Feel free to comment.
Partly Cloudy and 9
Right now, it's 6:37AM in New York. The skies are party cloudy and it's nine degrees.
That's right.
Nine.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine...
Welcome to snot freezing on the inside of my nose weather.
Sport Goggles
"There's someone out there for everyone - even if you need a pickax, a compass, and night goggles to find them."
I'm a romantic... hopefully, not hopeless, though. I also think life is a little bit weird and a little bit surreal.
I also think that, at certain times, my life could use a little Enya in the background for effect.
That's the essence of L.A. Story. Its all about how emotional and grandiose we can make our own little efforts to find someone, and then how often we realize how silly the whole thing is. Real. Silly. Both. Our lives are really silly, but they're great sometimes, too. Harris K. Telemacher's life is really silly, too. He drives to work through other people's backyards and through public parks. He makes amateur videos on roller skates in art museums. Electronic traffic condition billboards talk to him.
And, his life is great, too, because he finds someone that makes him show off--"the idiot's version of being interesting." He finds someone that makes him want to change the polarity of the earth to keep her from flying home.
"Life is a tale told by an idiot--full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
We are the idiots telling the story, searching hard everyday to find something of substance to lend meaning to the sound and substance to the fury. In the meantime, we watch Steve Martin to entertain ourselves.
Paninis, Pretty Girls and Metro North
I made myself a chicken parm sandwich to eat for dinner at work, but of course, I forgot it in the fridge on my way out. So, when I showed up at Track 103 to take the train up to Fordham with two minutes to spare, I got hungry. Panini stand right across from the track. Sah-weet. Dude, you got about a minute and a half to get me a panini. Go pay now, he says, and I'll get it to you. Pay...pay...shoot...four bucks on me. Credit card. Well, the woman behind the counter totally dropped the ball on the credit card machine. Fumbleruski. Fumblaya. Final seconds ticking down. Sorry, gotta bag it. Abort! Abort! Just get me the credit card back. Dropped the panini and bolted. Shoot...train leaving. I ran up to it anyway. By the back door, the ticket taker gave me the nothing I can do but shrug like a doofus look. Damn you..its still 5:37!!
Enter the pretty girl. Man, sometimes, I wish I was a hot girl. Ok, so we can pee standing up, so we've got that going for us, but being an attractive female is like having the Force.
*Waves hand*
You will check out my legs and open the door for us.
I think I'll check out your legs and then open the door for you, despite previously shrugging off the bald guy.
I wish I had that panini...or my sandwich.
Fight Like a Girl - Pillow Fight League in Brooklyn
Last Saturday, I saw a pillow fight.
It wasn't just any pillow fight. It was a kick-ass, no holds (as long as there's a pillow in between) barred action packed official Pillow Fight League pillow fight.
Here are more clips of the action. (PS.. Let me know if they're choppy for you... I was having a little problem with them at home...and what system/browser you're on.)
I took some photos as well. My friend Allison took part in an amatuer match and won, but she was a bit worse for wear afterwards.
The whole thing was quite a lot of fun. The girls were tough, but they were also creative, as they each had a persona invented for the fighting. I think Allison and I agreed that Boozy Suzey was our favorite, mostly because she would cover someone's head with a pillow and just punch away. I mean, seriously, if you can't be entertained by a bunch of girls fighting, go back to watching American Idol or that stupid Howie Mandel and his magic suitcases show. This was real entertainment.
I can't wait until these girls come back to New York!!
Poke My Career
There's been a minimeme going around about Facebook vs LinkedIn as the future of professional social networking.
Its obvious that Facebook clearly has a lock on college social networking and LinkedIn is quickly wrapping up the 28+ professional market but it's not entirely clear that its a generational gap. I'm inclined to think that, at some point, people just start getting more proactive and systematic about their career management and that's why they join LinkedIn.
Plus, Facebook hasn't quite mastered or had an interest in the idea of the professional profile. There's a section to fill out work information, but it's not exactly intuitive how you would show your drunken college pics to your friends, other people at your college, but not recruiters who may have went to your college. I think maybe they need a "Don't show to alumni" privacy feature, because many alumni recruit at their own schools. This is why, like danah, I don't believe in one network to rule them all. People are multifacted and they want to show different sides of themselves in different places. Facebook, as a community, may be best served just sticking to being a social service, even though I think that they could do a lot of good in helping young people reach out and help each other professionally.
Speaking of alumni, Facebook also hasn't been particularly aggressive in keeping alumni interested in the site. I've heard a lot of people say that they just don't use Facebook much after school, and maybe that's just natural. Plus, I'm not quite sure what alumni features would be. Perhaps they could enable people to publish alumni events and notices to everyone in the network via the newsfeed? Just an idea.
Keeping people interested in the site after graduation would be key to winning in the professional networking market, but I don't think that's where they want to go. They have setup work networks, but it seems like that's more about your friends from work than anything else. I fact, the other day, in trying to recruit for an entry level marking position, I tripped the spam alarm because I was sending a job post to a lot of young marketing majors. I was warned on the site, and when I contacted FB to tell them that I was a real person with a real job opening at a real company, and asked if that was spam, they very politely said it was and asked me not to use Facebook for recruiting. Recruiting and jobs seems to be a big business they're leaving on the table, and I'd be really surprised if they didn't make a move there. Prolific commenter Jeremy said that they should at least corner the internship market and I agree. They might just allow free internship postings and live off the ads around those pages. If they did that, I think they'd be well served to use Indeed to give themselves a huge head start in backfilling the database day one.
But, again, moving up the ladder to these types of professional tools doesn't seem to be on their roadmap.
On the other hand, LinkedIn trends older and hasn't made any headway at all into the college market. Career offices don't push its usage, and when you're just starting out and don't have much of network, the value of LinkedIn isn't immediately obvious. If I was LinkedIn, I would use the Facebook API to pull in your major, your school, your friends' names...not only to give younger members more value, but if nothing else than to signal the market that you never can start too early. I wonder if perhaps they really don't want the college crowd on LinkedIn, because their networks wouldn't add much and they'd likely take more than they would give.
So if I'm in college or just out, LinkedIn doesn't want me, because I'd be a mooch, and Facebook doesn't want to help get me a job, because that's not fun and social enough, so where does that leave me? Pretty underserved, I'd say. It's really amazing to me that one of the largest and most desperate group of job searchers, and the youngest and most technically savvy doesn't really have a place to go to start building professional networks.
I think there are two causes for this. First, there's a lot of self-fulfilling proficy going on with this age group. It is assumed, often in liberal arts schools, that career management is too early because they don't know what they want yet or they're still focusing on their education. So, what happens is that college seniors often find themselves illprepared to enter the workforce and they take the first decent job that comes their way.
Second, I wonder if today's MySpace Generation who grow up with recreational social networking has been trained to think of the internet as a place for friends and not really for careers.
Either way, I really think there's an opportunity for someone here.
links for 2007-01-20
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We anticipate that all dog hosts can get a dog-shit-free living environment from this product, and all people who feeding or not feeding dogs, and dogs, can live harmonically together in our society.
MySpace to Widgets: Let me see you dance (Flash embed code fix)
So our little talking people didn't work for new embeds starting last night. Before we sold our firstborn to Fox Interactive Media, we did a little work and blog reading and found this helpful user comment:
"MySpace began rolling out a change that would block embed tags, but allow object tags for embedded content. This caused some users to report stickers as “not working.”
...This is probably part of a larger, more-intelligent Flash filtering solution that would lend itself to a situation where MySpace acts as a gatekeeper to Flash stickers (as discussed)."
Well, we're all about more intelligent filtering solutions in MySpace, its just that a little notice would be nice. I still think MySpace should launch a developer or whitelist program. We're a legit company... whatever we need to do to our code to play nice in their, we're all about it for the sake of the users. In the meantime, we'll just keep playing cat and mouse.
So, for now, the code that works is as follows:
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400" height="300"> <param name="movie" value="movie.swf" /> </object>
After which, MySpace will forceably add a bunch of PARAMs into the code.
So, I'm happy to report, my little MySpace guy is still quoting Spaceballs.
Thanks Chris Bennett for the fix.
The Startup Song... or... Sunscreen 2.0
I graduated high school in '97, so the original version of this song means a lot to me. Here's my take on it for today's tech world:
Entrepreneurs of the class of '07... launch a startup.
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, startups would be IT.
The long term impact of startups has been proven by analysts, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering and thus far shortlived experience.
I will dispense this advice now.
Enjoy the power and beauty of simple HTML. Never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of simple HTML until the web has been completely eaten by Flash and AJAX. But trust me, in 20 years you'll look back at your site in the Internet Archive and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay in simplicity and how fabulous your site really looked.
Your app is not as lightweight as you imagine.
Don't worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to code PHP by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles with your servers are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4am on some idle Tuesday.
Add one feature every day that scares you.
Sing....on YouTube.
Don't be reckless with other people's data, don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.
Sleep.
Don't waste your time jealous of other people's traffic spikes; sometimes you're TechCrunched, sometimes you're not. The race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself.
Remember compliments you receive on your company blog, forget the insults; if you succeed in doing this, tell me how.
Keep your old wireframes, throw away your old Paypal confirmations.
Sleep.
Don't feel guilty if you don't know how you'll monetize. The most interesting startups I know didn't know at 22 million dollars of funding how they wanted to make money, some of the most interesting 40 million dollar startups still don't.
Get plenty of link love.
Be kind to your beta users, you'll miss them when they're gone.
Maybe you'll get bought by Yahoo!, maybe you won't, maybe Google, maybe not, maybe you'll implode in a bubble, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken at your initial public offering.
Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself, either.
Your clickthroughs are half fraud, so are everybody else's.
Enjoy tagging, use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it's the greatest categorization you'll ever use.
Dance... on YouTube. Even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room.
Create an FAQ, even if no one reads it.
Do NOT read Dvorak, he will only make you feel angry.
Get to know your users, you never know when they'll be gone for good.
Be nice to your angel investors; they are your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.
Understand that developers come and go, but for the precious few you should hold on to them. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle of your userbase, because the older you get, the more you need the young people who will paste your widget in MySpace.
Build a company in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard; Build in Silicon Valley once, but leave before it makes you soft.
Travel...after you get bought or blow up.
Accept certain inalienable truths, prices of AdWords will rise,
politicians will drop the ball on net neutrality, you too will get old, and when you do you'll fantasize that when you were young AdWord prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children entered their correct age during registration.
Respect your Privacy Policy.
Don't expect VCs to support you. Maybe you'll get funded, maybe you have a wealthy hedgefund partner; but you never know when the dry powder might run out.
Don't mess too much with your hair. In fact, just shave it, because bald is cool when you work at a startup.
Be careful whose blogs you read, and comment when someone blogs about you. Blogs are a form of feedback, and subscribing to the right ones is a way of cutting through the noise. Just gloss over and paint over the ugly parts, recycling reviews on your front page for more than they're worth.
But trust me on the startup.