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
When you know it’s not right . . . it isn’t
_“When you know it’s not right, it isn’t.” _ A fellow board member said this to me a few months back and I wrote it down as something I wanted to remind myself of every once in a while. She was referring to the human tendency to act slowly in the face of clear evidence and in particular to venture capitalists’ reluctance to be decisive. While I don’t fully subscribe to the “Blink” theory on decision making, I find it excruciating when decisions are drug out unnecessarily. Don’t do that.
December 4, 2007· 1 min read
How much is that meeting costing you?
So now that you are arguing for consensus at your meetings rather than arguing to win, how much is that tete-a-tete costing you anyway? Here’s an amusing answer to that question. I just ran a hypothetical meeting with a VP Sales, COO and Director of Biz Dev. They couldn’t agree on anything and our meeting ballooned into an hour long discussion. The grand total? $169.56. A waste of time and money . . . hypothetically speaking . . .
November 25, 2007· 1 min read
Arguing to win
Someone recently told me about being stuck in a group where people were arguing to win, rather than arguing for consensus. Whatever it was they were talking about didn’t get solved and a bunch of people left the meeting annoyed. I’ve not heard anyone describe the difference in debating style to me in this way before and think it perfectly captures a huge distinction in the polar approaches some people bring to a group decision making process. …
November 25, 2007· 1 min read
1980’s all over again
I’ve written a few posts about my general concerns over our economy (we save too little, have too much debt, etc.). I’ve received my fair share of feedback that outlined all the reasons why the world had changed, that certain leading indicators no longer mattered, etc. That’s all wishful thinking in my mind – we live in a world of real and repeatable cycles. And while overall the global standard of living has gone up over time and the duration of our periods of growth have lengthened, our economy and the world economy is cyclical and generally speaking follows repeating (if not predictable) patterns. …
October 26, 2007· 2 min read
StubHub Rocks
Brad put up a post last night about how tight StubHub is (see “StubHub Seriously Has Its Act Together“). I promised a post on my rockin’ StubHub experience buying tickets to Game 4 of the NLCS in “Jumping on the bandwagon” so here goes: The thing about specializing in a specific vertical is that if you get it right, the experience is worlds better than your generalist competitors. When StubHub was started conventional wisdom suggested that eBay had a lock on all things auction. But it turns out that there are plenty of very specific niches for which the eBay one-auction-fits-all model falls short. Ticket sales is clearly one of them. If you’ve ever tried to buy or sell tickets on an eBay auction you know exactly what I mean. Tickets to an event are a highly specialized good – every ticket is not the same (each seat is different and each venue is unique in its seat layout), events are time specific (i.e., they occur at a very specific date and time before which the ticket is valuable and after which the ticket has zero value), there are major logistical challenges with shipping around tickets and ensuring they get where the are supposed to get when they are supposed to get there, and there are significant challenges in dealing with last-minute purchases (transferring the ticket from a buyer to a seller hours or minutes before an event). …
October 23, 2007· 3 min read
“Everything just works”
On a recent trip to Chicago I had the chance to visit Dick Costolo, former CEO of FeedBurner and now proud employee of Google. Brad and I took Dick out to a congratulatory dinner. Before we went out Dick gave us a tour of Googleplex Chicago. As we walked around the impressively decked out office (200 inch screen in the presentation room? Wow!) he told us how smoothly the operations ran at Google. “Everything just works” he said, demonstrating the video conferencing system. On top of that, the systems in the Chicago office are exactly the same as the systems in every other office. Learn how to do something in Chicago and you know how to do it in Palo Alto, Boston or Munich. Most of the offices even have the same look and feel. While it may be a bit formulaic, it’s productive. And clearly Google is all about maximizing the productivity of its staff. That . . . as well as the fact that they actually had a working video conferencing system that required no IT staff to actually set up a video feed . . . is pretty impressive. …
October 18, 2007· 1 min read
Peripheral vision
One of the great challenges of business in general and smaller, fast growing businesses in particular is figuring out the balance between near term focus and long term vision. While all companies become slaves to the calendar (striving for quarterly sales targets, specific product release dates, etc.) too many never look up to see where they are really headed. I’m not talking about making sure you have the latest IDC report on your industry on your bedstand, I’m talking about having a meaningful understanding of your business, you competitors and spending real time focusing on how and where you are going to take your company. …
June 19, 2007· 2 min read