1) Great hiring is partly function of how many people you put into the top of the funnel.  You won't put extra pressure on yourself to hire anyone you don't feel great about, because you know you'll see more, and it will help you get a good sense of what you're looking for.

2) Take feature suggestions out of the hands of executives.  Instead, make problem/opportunity identification their job and let the process figure out the solutions through testing and data.

3) Slankets are awesome.  Path 101 got Gary Clegg at The Slanket to hook up every single SocialFoo attendee with a Slanket.  We thought it would be appropriate because it gets cold at night in Sebastopol, plus, as you can see, Slankets are an important part of the social graph:

4) At the end of the day, the most successful people are those that are dedicated to building really great stuff, not the people who worry too much about beating the competition--collaboration FTW!

5) Building a few deep connections with people is better than trying to network at scale.  This is the same reason I love SXSW.  When you can hangout with people in your industry in a relaxed social setting, you get to know them a lot better.  They become people versus just business cards or Twitter icons.  I greatly enjoyed getting to know the folks I met at SocialFoo and look forward to hopefully running into them again soon.

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

In and Out, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

First time ever.

(via tvparty) (via tvparty)

Jen Robinson's Tumblog: (via tvparty)

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

Can anyone tell me, coherently, what those kids at the New School are even protesting?

If these kids were smart, they'd have a website up.  They'd optimize it for search and maybe even buy some keywords to advertise against "New School" searches.  The ads should say "Why we protested" or something like that... and the site would have a well-written, neatly laid out list of demands.

Instead, after searching around a fair bit, I can't find anything substantive about their plea.  I don't know how I'm suppose to sympathize with their cause if I don't even know what their cause is.

They don't like the way the school is run...or something that?

Huh?

Apparently, the faculty isn't a fan of the way the school is run either--particularly Bob Kerrey's attempts to run the school like an economically viable business. 

God forbid.

Let's get one thing straight.  The costs of education are spiraling out of control--and do you know why?  It's in big part because you've got PhD faculty getting paid 100k a year to teach one class a semester--using the same syllabus they've been using for 20 years--and to publish research in academic journals that maybe 10 other academics ever read. 

Do you think the average tenured college professor works half as hard as the average NYC public high school or elementary school teacher--who is by the way making less than half the pay?  When 95% of university faculty vote against something--I have to question what could all universally make them so upset.  Yup... do more work for the same amount of pay ought to get everyone up in arms.  As an adjunct making $4,000 for the one class I teach each semester, I can't say I have a lot of sympathy for them.

Let's pretend this school was a company.  Could you imagine shareholders or employees trying to affect change the way these students were acting?  Do me a favor.  If you support these kids, the next time you have a problem with your boss, break into his office and "occupy" it.  When security comes to usher you out, scream like a lunatic.

See how far that gets you.

And as for police brutality, I watched the videos. I saw a metal barrier being hurled at police, lots of screaming, and one kid get knocked down by a cop.  That kid proceeded to scream and resist arrest while cops yelled "Stop resisting!"

When are people going to realize that when you throw metal things at cops and resist arrest, you might get a bit jostled during the arrest process?   Thus far, in my 29 years of living in NYC, I've been able to avoid getting beat up by NYC police.  There's a trick to it:  Don't throw metal things at cops and resist arrest.  I know, I know, it seems difficult, but you have to try.

You know who was even angrier than those protesting kids?  The kids who are paying tuition who actually wanted to come in on those days and use those buildings to study.

Here's the way to affect change: If you don't like the way your school is run, you could...

1) Transfer. 

2) Run for student leadership positions and try to get rules enacted or changed by working together with the administration.

3) Expose the issues you have with the school to local media, donors, trustees, etc...with a good old fashioned PR campaign. 

Or, if you'd rather look like a bunch of spoiled rich kids who think they know better than everyone else:

1) Unlawfully commit breaking and entering, carrying mace and crowbars into school buildings. 

2) Create a public disturbance that puts the general public in harm's way (you know, b/c most people's noggins don't mix well with hurled metal barricades). 

3) Completely fail to get any kind of coherent message across. 

At the end of the day, I don't know if Bob Kerrey is good for that school or not--and that's kind of the problem.  By completely failing to make any kind of articulate case against him, these protesters utterly fail to draw any sympathy to their cause.  I put them in the same bucket as the people who spit on US soldiers returning home from Vietnam--so crazed over the idea of protest that they fail to identify any kind of logical and reasonable means to promote their ideas.

Holiday hangover, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Too much agitation for Joy to handle...

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

So here's the first thing that jumps out at you about the new Taurus--It doesn't look like a Taurus. That's probably a good thing in this case, especially in the back. I never liked the back of the Taurus either in the mid 90's or the more recent, less boxy back. This back is like a better version of one of the recent takes on the Mercury Cougar. Still, with my Mustang, it's clear that it's a Mustang. With a Taurus, if it's constantly changing, will that hurt the brand recognition? What's a Taurus supposed to look like?

So the nice folks at Ford are paying for my meal, but actually, I realized after being invited that I have a history with this car. Not only am I a current Ford driver ('06 GT Conv), but the Ford Taurus was the first car I ever drove. It was back in 1995. I was almost but not quite 16. I had a family member in the hospital and my mom was pretty stressed out so I think I caught her at a weak moment. We were going down a quiet straightaway by Staten Island Hospital and I asked if she'd let me drive. I think she let me go two blocks before she freaked and told me to pull over.

Path 101, the company I started with our CTO and Co-Founder, Alex Lines, is looking to hire a developer.

Over and above anything else, here's the kind of person we want:

• Someone with a sense of ownership and pride in their work.  We get that nothing can ever be perfect, but you need to constantly strive to make things better.  This means not only making stuff works, but that it's easy to use and makes sense--and that you try to make it easier to use and more interesting everyday.
• You see the bigger picture--you realize that there are really exciting things to work on and then there's bug fixing--but at the end of the day you're happy we're moving forward as a team, as a company, and as a product. 
• You really hate when stuff breaks or it sucks and it keeps you up at night.
• You're friendly and/or interesting and are just cool to hangout with--not too uptight to break for a snowball fight in the park or to randomly pass funny images to the rest of the team on chat.

As for the tech stuff, an intelligent, curious, ambitious person can learn anything, that's true, but ideally you'd be an intelligent, curious, ambitious person AND be as much of the following as possible:

• experienced web developer
• very strong understanding of python
• extensive experience with django - you know its strengths and
  weaknesses, its ecosystem of libraries and components, participate in
  django community <-- This is ideal, but if you're strong in python, let's chat.
• obsessed with performance
• you can talk for hours about caching <--Alex's criteria, not mine.  Don't talk to me about caching... ever.
• experience with mysql
• know how to properly normalize a data model as well as the costs and
  benefits of denormalization
• strong unix/linux background
• conversant in html/css/javascript
• familiarity with column-oriented / key-value stores is a plus

We'll accept a resume but prefer a link to your blog and linkedin profile.

Here are some things you might what to know about us:

• We're helping people figure out their careers.  While this might not be feeding the poor, helping someone figure out what they want to do that makes them happy can really make a significant impact in someone's life. 
• We're doing it in an innovative way--by crawling the web for resumes and laying on interesting user data, like personality, blogs, tags, anything you want to tell us about yourself--in order to figure out what everyone's really doing with their careers.  This way, we can help you put your career in a context and figure out what "people like me" do for a living.  There are around 10 million resumes out there and we're going to crawl every last one of them.
• We're funded by some seriously smart and successful angels like Roger Ehrenberg, Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, Scott Heiferman, Jeff Jarvis, Hunter Walk, Jeff Stewart, Peter Hershberg, Joshua Stylman, Brian Harniman, Shripriya Mahesh, and others...
• We were the first company to ever get an investment by the recently launched NYC Seed fund. 
• We're really passionate and dedicated to what we're doing.
• Team:  Charlie (@ceonyc), Alex (@alexlines), and Hilary (@hmason), as well as some super awesome contract folks.

So, tweet @ us, e-mail us, or leave a comment.   But please, no recruiters.  We can't afford a recruiter, so there's really just no point to reaching out.  We're really serious.  Really.  Serious.

New York City based EnergyHub just received it's first round of venture financing, from Physic Ventures and .406 Ventures.   News on the financing from NYC journalists: conspicuously absent.  Wake up, folks!  It was on VentureBeat last night! 

That's exciting to me for a number of reasons.  First of all, what they do is very cool.  The company makes information systems that help you monitor your energy usage.   This way, instead of a bill with just the bottom line of how many Kilowatt hours you used last month, you can get an in-depth view of how you're using energy.  This is key to reducing peak consumption and lowering your costs.  It would certainly be nice to know how much money and power my computer is costing me each day.

What's very cool is that I got the opportunity to work with the founders, Seth and Tom, at ITAC's FastTrac class, where I am the Entrepreneur-in-Residence.  (In this case, EIR is a fancy way of saying that I'm the class instructor and good utility guy to have close by to help startups working with ITAC).  If you're interested in future FastTrac programs given by ITAC, you should contact Veronica Price at vprice@itac.org.  There are a lot of programs, consultants and advisors for startups in NYC--

They come out of Honeybee Robotics, a New York-based company that builds hardware for NASA’s Mars missions and the Department of Defense.  Who said everything in NYC was about finance, advertising and media?  They're really awesome guys and I'm glad to see them get their funding.  I can't wait to be able to buy an EnergyHub system for my apartment.

What's also great is that they got money from .406 Ventures--making this .406's 2nd investment in Brooklyn (they're also in Kaltura).  I had the opportunity to talk to Larry Begley in the fall and he was super smart and extremely approachable.  Hopefully, there will be more NYC-area based investing from .406 in the future. 

BTW...  Good thing Ted Williams choose to play that final day of the season.  .39955 Ventures just doesn't have the same ring to it.

2009-04-08_0943, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

This is the network of people I interact with over Twitter... Interesting. I like how you can see the mini-networks within my network.

"It is, I think, that we are all so alone in what lies deepest in our souls, so unable to find the words, and perhaps the courage to speak with unlocked hearts, that we dont know at all that it is the same with others." Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy"

a lifetime burning in every moment

"Your Google snits dont even address your far more profound problem: the vast majority of your potential audience who never come to your sites, the young people who will never read your newspapers. You all remember the quote from a college student in The New York Times a year ago, the one that has kept you up at night. Lets say it together: If the news is that important, it will find me. What are you doing to take your news to her? You still expect her to come to you - to your website or to the newsstand - just because of the magnetic pull of your old brand. But she wont, and you know it. You lost an entire generation. You lost the future of news. You blew it."

The speech the NAA should hear « BuzzMachine