Tyler’s Toolbox

Just under two months ago I received the news that I, along with 10 of my co-workers, would be laid off. Unlike most I was OK with this as I felt I’d learned an immense amount of knowledge and I had my compensation package to pay rent and bills while I looked for another job. Long story short is I got appendicitis, and later an offer to go back to work for one month. I took it and by the time I had recovered, I was just starting to look for another job. The company offered me a full-time position. No suspense, I took the job. But I’d like to delve into why, and the benefit of working in a challenging environment.Over the 7 months I was at the company pre-layoff I learned an encyclopedias worth of knowledge about sales. I had never held a real sales career, and honestly I found the work dull. Then, relatively early on in my career my manager/mentor was out sick for a few days and I got to delve into the sandbox and close my own accounts. Luckily there was an easy win in there (it certainly wasn’t skill) and I got a taste of what it feels like to sell somebody. It’s an invigorating experience. That taught me the value of sticking through the mundane to get the win, and when I get mad, lazy, bored, or distracted I remember the sale and it refocuses me. I also developed a skill-set, which I refer to as “Bassilisms” in honor of the man who taught me 90% of the skills. I learned that I have a natural aptitude for sales and I refined the first layer of skills.

Now in June, when deciding whether or not to come back I had to weigh many factors: skills I could learn, new experiences I could get, the money I could make, how much I would enjoy my job, etc. I ended up taking the job because I felt as part of a smaller team I would be well positioned to continue refining my skills and that I would have an opportunity to take on new responsibilities if I wanted them. A larger company would have paid me more, but it would have possessed more bureaucracy and would allow me less opportunity to learn new skills. As a 20 year old starting a career and with my goals not lying in working for a larger company, but rather successively smaller ones until I can start my own; I knew learning would be more valuable in the long run then taking the money now.

So the cost benefit of salary versus development has been on my mind a lot as of late and I think the mix is different for everyone. As luck would have it, a former classmate of mine has been tracking his internship in Taiwan via Facebook and eloquently records some interesting thoughts. A lot of them are simple and seem to be common sense, but that’s what most people need reiterated. Everyone knows how to dream, do you know how to systematically go about implementing those dreams? That’s what makes an all-star. Since Facebook is a closed system I will copy some of my favorites here with my reactions below. Alex, you should really write a blog - you have been a compelling writer at least since 2004 (and my guess is longer) and you’re only getting better. Share those thoughts!

“Sitting there with the other two new-guys, it really dawned on me how much you get from the first impression. Quite a cliché statement, that, but none the less true. After hearing about the solitariness, the stress, the long hours, the ‘corporate’ side of law, it was very informative to talk to my mentor, Edison about the nature of his work. I ended up asking him straight up if he liked his job. He sorta grinned at me and rambled off a response about what part of the job makes a difference ect … then he advised me that law isn’t a happy profession, but you can still enjoy it.”

This is almost word for word my feeling for my sales job. Any job that requires full attention to detail to win a small percentage of battles is usually boring. In law, most commas are going to be in the right place but miss the one wrong placement in the 100 page document and it’s a million dollar mistake. If you program NASA satellites, a missing comma could blow up a MGS satellite. In sales a 10% increase in method could double your sales, or more. Not the same stakes, but the same lesson — being able to take pride in the big win and value your own consistent effort is an important skill to master.

“It’s not enough for an attorney to be satisfactory, anything less would be malpractice. Rather, a good attorney must spot future problems that could arise, as well.”

Alex goes on to tell a story which I won’t repeat, as he gives an example of a poor choice made by an attorney at a law firm, and I’m not sure about the implied confidentiality of Facebook (it is a closed system). Probably far enough removed, but better safe than sorry. The message is a simple one, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” (Ben Franklin), but it’s one worth repeating. In sales you could waste months chasing a customer before realizing you never asked if they could afford it. Low and behold, they can’t. When you “eat what you kill” that inefficiency hurts. If you prepare completely and actively look for problems, they become a lot more manageable. Paraphrasing Alex’s summation of this experience, If you’re lost in a snow storm it’s nice to have your ass covered, but wouldn’t it have been better to have gotten a map and not deal with frostbitten toes?

Note, posted updated quotes July 10, RP’ed to RSS. Original written July 6th.

Brad Feld>Fred Wilson>Me

Fred Wilson posted about “The Facebook Problem” in response to Brad Feld’s concern about Facebook’s new Application layer not showing much immediate benefit for those developers building applications.

Brad Says: “In the absence of [ad-revenue sharing], Facebook is going to need to address the “value to the apps developer” quickly, before some of the larger apps vaporize due to the developer saying “I’m not willing to keep paying for servers and bandwidth.” “

Fred Says: “I see a different Facebook problem. Invite overload and application noise. I cannot keep track of all the invites I am getting, both the standard invites and the application invites. And what’s worse, I can’t keep track of all the applications that all of my friends are using.

We all know I am not the Facebook generation. So maybe I am just not capable of dealing with this level of social networking. But I bet that many of the members of the Facebook generation are secretly wishing for the old Facebook where it was more about them and their friends and less about being a social operating system.”

In response to Brad I brought up the success of iLike: 6m total users in 8 mo. More than 4m have come in the last month, most from their facebook application. Their CEO is not worried about monetization. In an interview he said “There’s no way we’d try to fight an uphill battle against what’s best for the consumer. And fortunately, in contrast to the precariously-balanced “Myspace widget ecosystem,” making $ on the FB platform is no harder than making $ on our own site.”

In Response to Fred I drafted a comment, which I shortened and posted to his blog. That comment turned into this post:

I suppose that unfortunately, I’m in the “Facebook Generation,” I have 3 thoughts that may contribute some value to this discussion.

1) I resisted facebook for awhile, thinking it was silly. One of my friends tagged a photo of me and that was enough value to join. I just throw on a “noise” filter and it’s very nice. I can keep up with people I met while traveling in Europe, or from high school, from my hometown, etc. I ignore everything else and after 5 hours I’d found all those I wanted to find. Now all things I want to see get emailed to me (I made plans for tonight and saw a friend was coming home while drafting and proofreading this comment), and management takes very little time. Applications increase the level of information I can see about my friends. Nothing regarding them gets pushed to me though, it’s just there when I seek it out. I like this.

2) Quote Generator, Free Gift, Pets - I agree these are fluff applications with little value other than social interaction for social interactions sake. This helps college kids have sex, it will always exist! BUT, facebook exists as the primary online brand for most of my peers. 10% of my network have websites/blogs (most also have facebook or other social profiles), 75-80% of my network has a facebook or a myspace page. I have a desire to define myself online, so I’m redesigning my website to continue to house my blog and also use widgets to converge all my major online published material and control the presentation of it. Facebook Apps like last.fm, del.icio.us, twitter, etc. are essentially widgets and allow that 80% of my network to exercise similar control over there definition/brand online as those who code their own website/blog. If you doubt the value of widgets to some people, just look at the sidebar of Fred Wilson’s Blog. Of course not all 80% of my network that uses facebook find widgets useful, but more than the 10% that also run personal sites/blogs will have use for widgets. This brings me to my third idea.

3) Facebook users are experiencing an exploratory phase. Most users are not entrenched in the Web 2.0 world, this applications program is arguably the first time many of these users have seen these ideas of widgets (and also the “web2.0″ services that are easy to build but don’t actually provide much value — we all know that the vast majority of “web2.0″ isn’t useful). Facebook users are doing what all people do when placed in new circumstances, they are exploring. This I say with relative assurance because in just reviewing my notifications - my friends are removing applications just as fast as they are adding them. The quotes, the pets, the “hangouts i like” apps don’t stick around much. The last.fm, twitter, and other “established services” apps don’t get added much but they never get removed (I’m inferring from this that only current users of the services are adding these widgets). The iLike phenomenon is the most interesting, iLike faces a lot of entrenched competition and is still pretty young (8 mo. old). It now says it has between 6 and 7 million users, 3.9m of which have signed on to the facebook app in the last month. More than 4m have joined in the last 30 days. I’ve had many friends add this app and some remove it. It’s my educated guess that most of those friends hadn’t heard of iLike before the application, so everyone who still has the app is a brand new user for iLike. That’s good news for the users that found a useful service and it’s good news for iLike. It would be of interest to see the metrics across the FB network of adding and removing applications. I’m dealing with a limited sample group.

Broad Level Takeaways:

To those who are disappointed with the “noise level” - the info-noise level will continue to be higher than previous levels, but you are now experiencing an exploratory spike which will calm down as people begin to realize what apps are and what they do. The same reason I don’t email my friends when I sign up for a new service just because it asks me to, your friends will learn that they need 3 days to test drive an app before saying they like it. Most will learn to stop notifying you, unless they think it will provide value to you, and in that case wouldn’t you want to hear about it?

To those who think facebook needs to help developers monetize apps: You’re both right and wrong. Facebook benefits in two ways from the applications…
1) Users like me get more information in many ways. Apps like Video and events help address competition with options available on Myspace, without having to alienate anyone who’s not interested in changing their profile or interface. Apps like notes help users publish data for their friends to find if they want to (facebook blogging anyone? “flogging” if you will). Apps like Twitter, Last.fm, Dopplr, etc. mean I don’t have to publish information twice to share it with a wider facet of my network. It also changes how I use these services, normally for the better. Synergistic! This doesn’t require Facebook to help with monetization. Certain developers will take the risk that they can monetize the traffic. Any new app is only an added value to the userbase, and the critical features are built and maintained in-house.

2) The Marketing Playbook (great book; worth the read) details 5 strategies a software company can take. One strategy is the platform play, in which a company gain numerous allies by empowering other companies to survive in an eco-system they create. This could be a powerful move for Facebook. Empowering other developers is a great move, especially when it so perfectly fits into your core business. If they do help companies like iLike succeed and even allow companies to move to FB and turn a profit (like it sounds like iLike may do), then they have something unique, extremely valuable, and a huge win for them.

Thoughts? Responses? Comments!

I have been religiously watching the TEDTalks series, a group of videos produced by TED. Overall I’ve been mostly impressed with the speakers, very cool stuff.

Here’s an EXCELLENT spoken word piece by LA-based poet Rives. It’s one of the light hearted videos, more about the art then the content, but one line jumped out at me as being a one-liner definition of Web 2.0 - “We can interfere with the Interface.” Right up there with “The Machine is Us/ing Us.”

I love the new success of video in web 2.0, and will post more on that in the next post. It’s revolutionary stuff. I couldn’t find the transcribed lyrics so I transcribed and posted them after the jump. Click through if you want to follow along.

If I controlled the Internet
You could auction your broken heart on eBay
Take the money, go to Amazon
Buy a phonebook for a country you’ve never been too
Call folks at random till you find somebody that flirts really well in a foreign language.

If I were in charge of the Internet you could mapquest your lover’s mood swings
Hang left at cranky, right at preoccupied, u-turn on silent treatment
all the way back to Tongue Kissing and Good Loving.
You could navigate and understand every emotional intersection.

Some days I’m as shallow as a baking pan
but i still stretch miles in all directions
If I Owned The Internet
Napster
Monster and
Friendster dot com
would be one big website.

That way you could listen to cool music while you pretend to look for a job and you’re really just chatting with your pals! heck,
If I ran the web — you could email dead people.

They would not email you back.

but you’d get an automated reply.
their name in your inbox, that’s all you wanted anyway
and a message saying, hey it’s me…
I MISS YOU. Listen you’ll see being dead is, dandy
now you go back to raising kids and waging peace and craving, candy.

If I designed the internet, Childhood.com would be a loop. of a boy. in an orchard.
With a ski-pole for a sword, trashcan lid for a shield shouting
I AM THE EMPEROR OF ORANGES
I AM THE EMPEROR OF ORANGES
I AM THE EMPEROR OF ORANGES
now follow me ok?
Grandma dot com would be a recipe for biscuits and spit bath instructions (1, 2, 3)
that links with…
Hot Diggity Dog dot com that is my grandfather
they take you to
Gruff ex-cop on his forth marriage dot dad
he forms an attachment to
Kinda ditzy but still sends gingersnaps for christmas dot mom
who downloads
The Boy In The Orchard
The Emperor of Oranges
who grows up to be
me
the guy who usually goes too far
so if I were Emperor of the Internet, I guess I’d still be mortal huh?

But at that point, I would probably already have the lowest possible mortgage
and the most enlarged possible penis
so, I would Outlaw spam on my first day in office,
I wouldn’t need it!
I’d be like some kind of Internet Genius.
and me? I’d like to upgrade, to deity and maybe just like that.

I’d go wireless.
ehhh? Maybe GOOGLE would hire this
i could zip through your servers and firewalls like a virus
until the world wide web is as wise as wild and as organized
as I think a modern day miracle slash oracle can get, but
ohhhew weeeeee, you wanna bet
just how wack and un-PC your Mac or PC’s gonna be when I’m rocking hot shit hot shot GOD dot net

I guess it’s just like life. It is not a question of IF you can, it’s do ya…
We can interfere with the Interface
We can make you’ve got hallelujah the national anthem of cyberspace.
Every lucky time we log on.

You don’t say a prayer,
You don’t write a psalm,
You don’t chant an ommmmmmm
You send one blessed email

to
Whoever you’re thinking of
at
daddle a da da daa daa didaddle-la-daddle-la-daddle-la-da daddle da
dot com.

On 12.18.06 (Monday) I was visiting the local tavern near my work with a colleague. We saunter into the Napper Tandy (24th and S. Van Ness - quite a dive bar, but you can often find my colleagues and I enjoying a beverage or some corned beef and cabbage). We talked about many different topics. We touched on marriage (we both had experienced the almost leep into marriage only to not go for different reasons), philosophy (both Phil majors in college), travel, business, etc.

Wes and I finally got into a debate about the origin of the idea that virtue lies in the middle of two extremes. I was sure it was Aristotle, my buddy was confident it was either Socrates or Plato. We argued in good spirits for a few minutes before I tried to make the point that whoever it was, that it has a parallel in the idea that great things come from the intersection of two seperate areas. So the academic my friend Wes is, he suggests the best example of this I’ve heard in ages. Of course I’m speaking of Chunky Monkey - the delicious mixture of Fudge and Banana, brought to us by the lovable Ben and Jerry. Now we had clearly devolved from philosophy into the realm of silly, he suggested it was Aristotle who first came up with Chunky Monkey. I agreed, we both had quite a laugh and migrated to the pool table for random daubauchry with another co-worker. Later that evening, I was approached by another patron saying how impressed he was that he could still hear a debate about greek philosophers in a bar and that I had shown him hope for my generation. I was glad to be of service. The man went on to ask if Aristotle had really invented Chunky Monkey Ice Cream.

Oh old drunk man at the bar - how you disappoint my hopes for your generation. Wes on the other hand, you are an entertaining fellow and write a helluva blog.

I got some good advice in one of my lectures today from the co-founder of my film school (Stephen Kopels gets the nod on this clever colloquilism). The worst thing you can do is preface a presentation with an apology. That works with everything in life. The key is to do your best and then present it confidently as being your best. If your presenting something (be it powerpoint, painting, film, code, project, or absolutely anything) do you want the audience to walk in with a negative mood or a positive mood? The example Stephen used was cooking someone dinner. If you goto someone’s house for dinner and the cook starts the meal with apologizing for overcooking the chicken, you are going to look for flaws in the food instead of enjoy the dinner. So don’t apologize for your chicken, whatever your chicken may be.