what’s a company to do?
Now that I’ve received a link to the Sequoia “Holy Shit” presentation about 30 times along with about a dozen emails asking “what do you think?” it’s probably time for a post. My partner Jason has a great post up on the subject (with a more general discussion of how the current markets effect our business – definitely worth reading) and Brad has some practical advice up this morning on his blog as well. …
October 13, 2008· 3 min read
MSFT still has it…
I spent last Thursday at Microsoft for their annual VC Summit. While there are plenty of ways that the company can improve, I walked away with the very distinct feeling that the “market” underestimates the innovation coming out of Redmond and the ways in which the company is clearly changing and adapting to the new technology world. Specifically, the products and people I encountered were forward thinking – clearly moving well beyond the OS and embedded software mentality that is the history of the business – and significantly more platform agnostic than they are given credit for (both product demos I saw included at least one Mac and other non-Microsoft based products). …
October 1, 2008· 1 min read
Move to Boulder!
A handful of Boulder companies are pooling resources to bring 100 software developers to Boulder (see Boulder.me). If you’re interested in a chance to come out and see what we have to offer, take a look at what they’ve pulled together (my partner Chris Wand is heavily involved and has a post up about the event on the Foundry blog). Not only is Boulder a beautiful place to live, it’s a fantastic place to work and build successful companies (see Ryan and Jason’s view of moving from the Bay Area to Boulder here and here). To quote from the “Boulder Wants You” post: …
October 1, 2008· 1 min read
Life without email?
For most technology professionals (really most professionals of any kind) email is so integrated into our work that we can hardly imagine life without it. Sure, it can be a distraction at times and – especially if you carry a wireless device – hard to escape from. But it also greatly enhances productivity, allows us to communicate quickly and effectively and to have asynchronous interactions with a great number of people. I know in my own work life I send and receive between 200 and 300 emails a day. And since I’m already tied up on the phone or in meetings for at least 5 or 6 hours in any given day, email allows me to be significantly more productive (and to process more information and communication with a far greater number of people) than without it. …
June 10, 2008· 2 min read
Your chance to play designer
If you’re like me, you spend most of your days pining away for the life that would have been had you followed your true passion into product management and design. Ok – I’m being flip, but we all have opinions on the way the sites we visit look, feel and work. So here’s your chance to weigh in on an important design decision and help out a Foundry investment in the process. …
May 10, 2008· 1 min read
Know your audience
I don’t know what it is about the last few weeks – maybe the change of season; maybe something in the water – but I’ve been absolutely amazed at how often people have showed a complete lack of comprehension for who was in the room with them. This may sound more calculating than I intend it to, but I think its a good practice to always consider who you’re talking to before you start in on a conversation. This is especially true when you’re negotiating for something, making a request or otherwise trying to drive to a specific outcome. I’ve witnessed several pretty amazing examples of a complete lack of thoughtfulness around this notion of late. From making idle (and counter-productive) threats, to inappropriate requests, to outright lying (which was sure to be uncovered). …
April 15, 2008· 1 min read
How I don’t travel
We have a great partner dynamic at Foundry. We’ve all worked together for at least 7 years (in some cases over 10 years) and are close friends as well as colleagues. We also have pretty varied styles and opinions. Case in point – Brad’s recent post on his travel habits. I couldn’t be more different in how I approach travel. Heading to the west coast, Brad likes to get up insanely early and take the 6am flight to SFO so he can start his meetings at 8:30. I’ve done that about a dozen times and finally realized that I just can’t deal with the 22 hour day that results from it. I was doing it a lot on Mondays and it pretty much assured that I was a few steps off for the rest of the week. Instead, I prefer to either fly in the night before (there’s a late Frontier flight that still lets me have dinner at home with my family before heading out) or on the 8:30am flight in the morning (from that flight I can make a 10:30 meeting pretty much anywhere on the peninsula or in the city). …
April 9, 2008· 3 min read
Sharing practical experience
My partner Ryan related amusing story about leaving his brand new MacBook Air on a recent flight. I had a similar experience myself last week, which unfortunately didn’t end up quite as happily (although fortunately didn’t involve a $3,000 piece of technology). I left the office for a meeting on Friday afternoon with my hands full: I had my computer bag in one hand and was carrying my jacket and a garment bag in the other. In addition I was on my phone as I dragged all of this down to the parking garage. I managed to get everything in the car without disrupting (or dropping) my call and drove off. After a few blocks, I noticed that my phone wasn’t in the spot I usually keep it in the car. I was still on the phone (on a bluetooth headset) and figured it had fallen down between the seats. After about 10 minutes I finished my call and at the subsequent two stop lights frantically looked for my phone under the passenger seat, in my bag, etc. About 5 minutes later I heard a thump from the top of my car (and thought relatively little of it). About 3 minutes after that, I realized that the thump was actually my phone falling off the top of my car where I had inadvertently left it while trying to load everything into the trunk. Oops… …
March 24, 2008· 2 min read
“Seth can’t take your call right now . . .”
I have a few pet peeves about personal business habits that I’ve joked about in the past (see How do you sign your emails and Where was that you went to school, for example). Here’s another one that’s been bugging me lately: outgoing voicemail messages With apologies to my many, many friends who do this, it really bugs me when people have their assistant leave their outgoing voicemail message. I get it – you’re busy; you’re very important; you have an assistant; you don’t really have time in your schedule to deal with things like setting up your voicemail. But really? Do you honestly not have the 30 seconds it takes to set up your own personalized outgoing message? Or is it that you just can’t figure out how to do it . . . ? …
January 2, 2008· 2 min read
Explicit Behavior
Atul Gawande has an outstanding article in this week’s New Yorker entitled “The Checklist” (full article available) that describes how explicitly defining the steps in complex processes (and then following those steps religiously) significantly reduces errors in certain intensive care procedures. Creating explicit checklists of steps for common ICU procedures resulted in far fewer infections and other complications and an unbelievable amount of money and time saved (not to mention the number of deaths averted). It’s truly mind boggling and a great example of Occam’s Paradox, which I wrote about a few years ago on this blog (for those of you who don’t want to link through, Occam’s Paradox is the idea that while the “challenges we face in life and business [may often be] complex – the solution to those challenges generally are not”). It’s a reminder that in many cases making behavior explicit rather than relying on memory, intuition or guess work ultimately saves time and results in greater accuracy. As the article point out, airplane pilots figured this out a long time ago. Doctors are apparently just waking up to the idea. Perhaps it’s time for the rest of us to start thinking about it.
December 10, 2007· 1 min read