On the walk to school today, I found a worm on the sidewalk. I figured it was a goner anyway, and so I picked it up, and handed it to Luka.
The poor guy survived a full day of school, and we released him into the wild when we got home. I don’t think he’s going to do very well though…
Update (4/5/14): This post was written in the future anyway, but today we discovered what happened… he got eaten by a colony of ants. They were finishing him off just as we got there. It wasn’t pretty 🙁
Getting out of email, and being able to solve real problems is hard.
Fighting technology as basic as wireless router vs. cooling system is frustrating.
Feeling like no matter what you’re 2 days behind is just depressing.
So tonight I just hit the reset button. Micky and I let the kids stay up late. We had spaghetti together. They fell asleep. We fell asleep. And I pushed a magic reset button. The roller coaster has been really extreme lately. I get ahead; then I fall behind. I know what’s next, and then the horizon fogs up again.
So this weekend, I’m going to go one step further, and make the list of all lists. I want to understand what the entire quarter needs to look like, put names against each item, and then figure out how we’re going to get there. Because at some point it all scales or it falls apart.
Oh shit, this is going to be a fun ride over the next 90 days :-/
This week we lost both Betsy and Byrne to true start ups (venture backed companies as opposed to our corporate backing). The lovely Nicki Dexter is in town, and we’ve been jamming about what it is that makes TokBox tick.
The combination has led me to think quite a bit about how we can fight the Silicon Valley game.
The obvious things don’t make for an interesting blog post. They are what they are, and we’ll do our best to make them work. The selling points for joining the product team at TokBox are actually quite simple:
#1 really speaks to the kinds of problems you want to solve as a product manager or designer. Do you really want to customer insight your way to the next widget on the machine that makes it 10% better? The answer should be yes for 99% of people. And that’s okay. I want that 1%
#2 speaks to your personality. The non-obvious, and the vaguely defined have to be friendly or somewhat well known playgrounds. Coming from a well established place that has millions of customers doing trillions of events against your stack isn’t going to translate. We’ll be there in two years. But today you’re playing with different numbers, and so the game has less of a playbook.
And I think #3 is the one that should speak to your career the most. Platforms are the next (or current) major contribution that Silicon Valley is throwing into the world. Platforms take really hard problems, and they make them accessible to folks who don’t want to solve those hard problems. Learning how to be great at developing product is transferable to the fullest order, and we know how to build platform.
So I can’t give you equity or visibility to the latest VCs in the business. But I can help you change the world, and be excellent at it in the process.
So come join us 🙂
There was an election in Turkey over the weekend.
My Facebook news feed is full of folks who are predicting the beginning of the end for AKP. The change in the vote results is quite noticeable. Unfortunately, it’s mainly the right switching from the religious freaks to the nationalist freaks. This past summer folks updated their photos and their names. They virtually joined protests. The folks who did it had a huge sense of pride and community.
But it’s all fake.
You can’t change the world on Facebook. You can’t leave a country when you’re 18, never vote, and enact change.
And yet we all do it.
We sign online petitions as if anything will change as a result. We ask politicians to pay attention. Governments to change their ways. All because we hit the “Connect with Facebook” button, and share our email address.
I genuinely have no idea what has happened with any of the online petitions that I’ve signed. And I’m no longer going to sign a petition unless I’m willing to put money or action behind the signature.
Because it needs to feel sincere.