No news yet...  Arnold the car guy asked me to come down and reorder my company vehicle, which is due for an update.  I'm avoiding him for the moment.

Hillary Clinton's colossal blunder simply the last straw

We have seen an X-ray of a very dark soul. One consumed by raw ambition to where the possible assassination of an opponent is something to ponder in a strategic way.

• Career Advice '08
  (tags: career advice)

• Smithsonian Magazine | Travel | You got a problem with that?
  (tags: nyc culture)

Lawsuits: Sxip mauling investors in Vancouver's Silicon Forest

Sxip Identity, a Vancouver-based startup that's built a tool for porting your Web identity across sites, may have hustled investors out of $370,000 by misrepresenting acquisition efforts by tech titans Google and Yahoo. Founder, CEO and president Dick Hardt (no joke) now says the company is insolvent, and has no plans to honor the convertible bridge notes which were to revert to cash or equity upon sale or additional investment in the company. Where did the money go?

Well, Sxip Identity apparently owes Sxip Networks, also founded by Hardt, $4.7 million — and owes Hardt $275,000. The angel investors have filed suit, alleging that Hardt never disclosed the existence of the other company, and that the arrangement puts Hardt in a position to recoup money from the company before other investors do.

Well, I guess now we know.

Thought Industry: It's 3:00 am And I Can't Sleep

Look, between you, me and Google, I would love nothing more than to unlock the doors to allow you a chance to learn how I really feel.

About emerging media.

About my coworkers.

My family.

My friends.

Myself.

The fact of the matter is I can be a coward. It's the same cowardice people discover when tasked with answering a survey question with a response that satisfies what they think people want to hear verses what they truly believe.

On January 29, 2007, a Fordham junior decided to start a blog.  It wasn't a career blog, like the ones I teach my classes about.  It was about college life--the gossip and campus micro-celebrity, micro-infamay, controversy...   The whole campus was reading, and so were many of the recent alumni.

The administration was reading, too...  probably not happily either.  Oh, it was never really anything that bad--but it was up for all to see.  The internet provided a window into the world campus administrators always knew existed, but never really got to read about in public on a daily basis. 

The popularity of the blog was unprecendented.  There wasn't a student on campus who didn't know about it.  It became part of the weekend routine to e-mail the blog with the latest tales of collegiate debauchery.  It's popularity even spread to young alumni...  and I'll admit, at least one faculty member.

Sixteen months and 423 posts later, a captivated campus--a community, rather, read FUrez Hilton's final post.  He graduated and decided to say goodbye.

I'll repost some of that message below, because it was really touching, but what I really want to bring up is the question of what a blog like this means for communication between students and administration.

I talked to a school administrator the other day about Facebook.  She said she had never been on it because she was concerned about potentially viewing illegal activities .  What would she do if she saw photos of students drinking?

So, acknowledging that students probably do post photos of themselves drinking, rather than accept the reality of college life--which no doubt she participated in when she was in school--or engage in conversation with the students about it in an open way, she chose not to engage at all.  She chose not participate in a medium of communication used by 95% of the students on the campus, because she might see some photos of kids drinking. 

This is why students don't visit counseling centers, they don't meet with their class deans, and they don't show up at the career office--because at the end of the day, most administrators go home to a life outside of campus and would rather pretend that the student's life on campus--in all its gory reality, didn't exist. 

Well, thanks to FUrez Hilton, it couldn't be escaped.  I applaud the author for being authentic and true to themselves the entire time, no matter what anyone thought. 

What I hope is that future Fordham voices that are magnified by social media, no matter how controversal, are engaged.  If I were some of the administrators spoken about on this blog, I'd start my own blog.  I'd give the student body some insight into the difficulties of my position, because, frankly, it's not an easy task.  Students at every college are going to feel like it's a case of "us vs. them".  That's only going to get worse when you only hear the voice of "us" and never from "them".   

Let this whole FUrez era be a lesson in communication--that one student was singlehandedly able to captivate a campus of thousands, to help build a sense of community--all with a dinky little Blogspot blog.  I hope that school administrations all over think hard about how they talk with (not to, or at) their students, and what they can learn from what they're hearing.  Why do the students complain?  What are they upset about?  What makes them happy?   If I were an administrator, I'd look at this blog like the best thing that could ever happen to my relationship with my students--because it would have given me the chance to understand, to participate.  I doubt it will be looked at that way, and that a collective sigh of relief will be breathed, and an opportunity will be missed.

And now, FUrez's last post...  Best of luck!

"This is the hardest thing I will ever have to do in my life. Scratch that, adopting an asian baby with Eric Stafstrom will be the hardest thing, and that's because there are damaging pictures of him on Facebook. This website started as a joke and a way for me to vent my frustrations with the silliness of this Univeristy. (hint: I havent gone to bed since parent appreciation dinner and there may be mispellings. i will correct them later. get off my nuts.)

To my babies in the underclasses: please behave next year, but not too much. Make sure you carry my legacy on and question authority. Please don't be afraid to be yourselves. My biggest regret at Fordham is that I didn't come out earlier. I know this isn't the case for everyone, because not EVERYONE is a homo, but it's an example of waiting too long to enjoy yourslef. The past two years have been teh most liberating of my life, because I finally realized that A) everyone knew I was a homo, and B) I was finally comfortable in my own skin. Dont let the small mindedness of Fordham's silly administration or ignorant classmates stop you from doing whatever is in your hearts. If you want to go to a bar in the city, GO. If you want to tell the girl of your dreams that she is the most beautiful girl on the face of the earth, GO. If you want to make out with a guy with a bad reputation, FUCKING GO. You have four years before you are held accountable for your actions. All I ask is that you take advantage of it. Please. Make FUrez proud.

Also, when you see lost freshmen next year, take them under your wings and show them the way. When I was a wee freshman, i was walking aimlessly in the bronx with a group of fifty (as you all do as freshmen) and a group of upper classmen shouted to us from their apt to come upstairs and they told us where to go and where to have fun. This resonated with me all four years of college. Look out for each other. God knows the administration isn't. Casino night? Come on.

To my seniors graduating with me: It's been a fucking honor attending this university with you for the past four years. Every single one of you has taught me something. Even the ones who hate me and think I am the cockiest piece of shit in the world. It's true. I am a cocky piece of shit, but it's you who have kept me grounded through my rise to the top. I can't believe I just wrote "rise to the top". Like i said, I am a god damn mess right now. To the people I didn't get a chance to meet: I wish you the best. To the people who were there for me through all of my ridiculous bullshit: THANK YOU. I have faith that the class of 2008 will do great things. Actually, I don't need faith, because I know that you are all fucking superstars. Every single one of you. Even if it's figuring out how to steal bottles of alcohol from drinking establishments; that alone has demonstrated your commitment to a good life and your inginuity. You are all fucking fabulous. JEsus christ it's 7:24 at the moment and I'm writing this.

To most of the administration and faculty: Thank you. The jesuits have kept it real all four years and shown dedication to their ministry and calling in life. You are all superstars as well. To the members of the administration who feel the need to compensate for their own issues throughout their lives via their positions of power: take a good look at your job descriptions and rethink what you're doing in your offices. Know that you are here for US. You are only employed because students attend this university. Try and work with us. I know the sections of administration that are viewed unfavorably by the Fordham community (this includes faculty) are those that cater directly to students. You wer eall up Dean Grey's ass at the JASPA Convention and were all consequently promoted to offices of high power. Use your power for GOOD. The students are totally willing to compromise, but you need to be too. You have a great amount of egg on your faces from numerous debacles this year. Included: SPRING WEEKEND, the counseling and health services here, and your general attitudes towards the people who pay your salaries. This University is not the one from Animal House. You don't need to act like Dean Vernon Warner. These kids just want to graduate and get an education and have fun doing it. Don't rain on their parade.

 

Addressing the issue of succession of this blog: I honestly feel that it was a great moment in time, and that it shoudl end here. I know my cunty fans will try and replicate it. I encourage that. Send me your efforts. If I feel someone is following the same path I did, I will post the link here. However, I'm a bitch and my ego is huge, and the odds of me thinking your humorous writings are worthy of the entire Fordham community (alumni included) are slim. Understand that I'm not ruling it out.

I'm crying kind of because this is it. Please know that I love you all, and I will always be watching. Thank you for the words of encouragement and teh death threats. They all mean a lot ot me. The encouragement more than the death threats, yes, but I love you all. I approved a comment thanking me a few posts back saying they felt like they were included in a big inside joke, and that made my day, because all I've ever wanted is for everyone to feel like they are apart of the Fordham community. I have been listening to depressing friendship music all day and night and realized that Fordham University was the best decision I have ever made. Every memory I have from this place will be cherished, and I will never forget any of them. To any of you students who know how to party and go out on the nights when the Ram Van stops at 12: I have a swell apartment and you all have an open invitation to stay WHENEVER. I'm serious. My facebook sends all messages to my phone, so just let me know, and you can crash on my couch.

In the words of Eva Peron: My greatest fear in life is to be forgotten. Don't forget me. I will never forget you. I love and respect every single one of you.


xoxoxo,

FUREZ"

1) Our hours are really flexible. We can meet up anytime between 11PM and 8AM. Sleep can always be rescheduled.
2) We will never come home and complain about our boss.
3) We'll pay for all our dates the old fashioned way. (Old fashioned=Circa 1999...with worthless stock options)
4) You can tell all your friends that you're dating a CEO who runs their own company. You can leave out the fact that the CEO is also the secretary, the janitor, middle management, and a web design intern.
5) Some of us have millions of dollars in the bank. Of course, it belongs to our investors, but still...it's in the bank.
6) You get to be a beta tester of the next Google or Facebook.
7) We're good at teamwork. We have to be...not all of us can code.
8) We're not afraid of commitment. In fact, let's move in together... you know, economies of scale and all.
9) Your place is closer to my office and has more bandwidth. Do you mind if I just leave this server here? Really? Is it loud? I never really noticed.
10) Your parents will just love us... They're accredited investors, right?

Bonus: Passion: We haz it.

Dan Farber suggests that Twitter should just charge a subscription fee as a business model.

"Much of what gets sent via Twitter is a form of self-advertising. If you like Twitter so much, how about paying $5 a month for the privilege."

I think Dan's got it partially right.  Clearly there are people who use Twitter as self advertising.  The presidential campaigns, Gary Vee, Jason Calacanis...    with thousands of followers, many of whom are also influentials themselves with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of blog and social network eyeballs as a group, are clearly getting a lot more tangible value out of Twitter than someone who uses it to share with 6 friends.  I think it's important to have both sets of users.

The casual users with small networks of friends potentially contribute much more to Twitter, in aggregate, then they get back--so charging them the same fee that Jason Calacanis has to be doesn't make a lot of sense, and would put up an artificially high barrier to growth.  These users contribute a lot of good data--zietgiest data, brand information, or simply good local content that others might be able to leverage off of to create value themselves.  They're not pitching a candidate, product or book, so why charge them?

I think there should be tiered pricing.  What do you think Gary Vee would pay for Twitter if, like Dan suggests, it came with some SLA's and rebates for outages...or rather, what is Twitter worth to Gary?   Given his recent book sales, I'd say that he wouldn't blink at $50/month--or at least he shouldn't.  Neither should Jason, or Obama, CNN, or Zappos.  If you have 5000 followers, that's about a $10/CPM to your message across.  Given the number of Tweets to phones, the engagement level of the users, I'd say that's pretty cheap, actually.  Then we could scale it all the way down to like 300 followers or something at a few bucks a month. 

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. 

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.

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

• 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)

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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