Twittering away
I have to admit that when I set up my Twitter account I thought I’d be turning it off after a few days for lack of interest. Instead I was calling up T-Mobile ordering a higher volume sms package. I have to say there’s something addicting about it – I like the short message format; I like hearing what my friends are up to; I like the record of my day that it creates for me and for people that are following me; in short – it’s just fun. My Twitter ID is Sether (www.twitter.com/sether) if you want to see what I’m doing. …
May 30, 2007· 2 min read
Is title inflation an acceptable recruiting/retention technique?
I’ve had a few people ask me about this recently and it felt “blog worthy”. At issue is the question of whether it’s ok to use title as an incentive to either keep someone at a company or attract them there in the first place . . . is playing to someone’s ego an acceptable employment practice? I know some people who get really bent out of shape about this stuff, but my view is that using title as part of a ‘comp package’ is ok –in certain circumstances and with a full understanding of the potential pitfalls. Most importantly, this can only be used in “bubble cases” where someone is truly on the line between senior manager/director or senior director and vp (the most common case in my experience where this becomes an issue – getting a vp title is seen as a big step). Promoting someone too early or hiring someone in at an inflated level where they are clearly not up to the standards of the rest of the team at that title grade is a mistake – people see through it and it causes an internal mess. Along those lines, titles like CFO, COO and President are not to be thrown around lightly – it sends a very specific message to an organization, investors, clients, etc – and a decision to hire at this level (vs. a VP of Finance or VP of Operations, etc.) is too important to play around with. That said, bringing someone in as your “VP” of Engineering when they are on the bubble of accepting an offer and where the issue is your desire to call them the “Senior Director” of Engineering shouldn’t cause you any heartburn. And while your first move should probably be to convince someone to take the tile you think is fair and review and promote them later (I’ve had great success with this in many of the companies I work with), when title becomes a real issue in a comp negotiation I think it’s ok to use it to your advantage. …
May 14, 2007· 2 min read
$1
Would you work for $1? Here’s a few people who do.
May 10, 2007· 1 min read
Wanted: Information
I don’t know what happened to Google alerts, but I’m not getting anything from my alerts these days. I have maybe 60 alerts set up and get maybe a one alert every other day – I know I’m missing just about everything that’s really being written out there, but can’t figure out why. While they say that ignorance is bliss, I’m feeling less utopic than just uninformed. I was going to switch everything over to Yahoo! alerts but I thought that before I did that I’d poll you to see if anyone had suggestions on alternatives. Any ideas?
May 8, 2007· 1 min read
Your social meter
Check out socialmeter. It gives you the link count for any site (any specific URL actually) from Bloglines, Del.icio.us, Digg, Google, Rojo, Shadows, Technorati and Yahoo. It’s a bit blunt and it would be useful as a widget (rather than taking you off the page you’re visiting and to the socialmeter page) – not to mention if it had a way to actually parse the link sources – but it’s both fun an interesting. …
April 5, 2007· 1 min read
Personal traits
I had lunch with someone last week who truly personified a quality that I admire – humbleness. I was surprised by this, not only because most people simply aren’t very humble, but also because despite being young (I’m not exactly sure his age, but it was likely 24 or 25) he had actually accomplished quite a bit – founding a finance firm, raising some capital and finagling his way into a handful of really interesting late stage deals (of course his perspective was that he really hadn’t done anything yet . . . but that was just him being humble). …
April 3, 2007· 1 min read
This is a unique approach
I was sent the following a few days ago: In order to give investors a sneak peak of what we’re up to, we’ve created a short video (4 mins): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9fiEu_TBdU I appreciate the effort behind stuff like this (as well as the novel thinking). While we’re on the topic, if there’s ever something you want me to take a look at, tag it to my del.icio.us account (for:slevine).
March 27, 2007· 1 min read
VC Pitch “Rules”
I often get emailed requests to include content in my posts. While I can’t always oblige I do look for interesting content to repurpose or link to or build a large post around. Today I received the following links from Laura Fitton on a topic near and dear to my heart – giving effective venture presentations. One of my very first posts for VC Adventure was on this topic, and much of Laura’s advice corresponds well to my thoughts on the subject. …
March 26, 2007· 2 min read
Perspective
Ben linked to a great post on how trained artists vs. trained psychologists look at the same picture. The lines on the pictures below denote eye movements of the study participants as they viewed each picture. Artists are specifically trained to discern perspective in composition. They do this by looking not only at the focal point, but also more broadly at the context around that focal point. In the study this came out clearly in the differences between the focus behavior of the psychologists (who tended to focus on the primary subject of the picture – represented in the left set of eye movements in the pictures above) vs. artists (whose concentration was across the picture – the right set of eye movements). …
March 22, 2007· 2 min read
Is this an ad?
Plenty has been made of Google’s recently announced pay-per-action beta (where advertisers pay not for a user clicking over to their site, but only if they take some defined action such as filling out a web form, downloading a whitepaper or purchasing product). Few people (notable exception TechCrunch, although for some reason the thread doesn’t seem to have been discussed widely) are talking about something that was buried in the release: …
March 22, 2007· 1 min read