Better Advice

Nobody is going to disagree that "hiring awesome people" is key to the success of any business, which is exactly why we need to stop obsessing over this.  It's boring.  It's not exactly a bold or surprising philosophy, and yet various founders, managers, and founder/manager-wannabes harp on the point of finding good talent like it's some kind of hidden truth.

No, you don't want to hire idiots, but I'm tired of hearing the same thing over and over again.  It plays into how overpaid young engineers are these days--and the fact that engineers plateau (in career and compensation) pretty quickly.  It's a little like banking culture.  Young associates (CS grads and dropouts) are well paid, but only a few rise up to be directors (the true rockstar engineers).  Everyone else gets replaced by cheaper talent or changes industries.

Hiring right matters.  That's all there is to say on that topic.  So many other things matter, too.  To be great, you have to be great at everything.

I think we need to change the cultural obsession that we have around individuals, from CEOs down.

Online Shopping and Nausea

I moved to Seattle recently.  To outfit my new apartment, I went to the internet and started ordering like mad.  After a month of digging through boxes of goods (with some deliveries still to come) I can say with total confidence that I am sick and fucking tired of buying stuff online.

Maybe I should clarify.  I signed up for Amazon Prime.  Amazon Prime is an absurdly good deal.  I could actually care less about two day shipping, free shipping period is an enormous remover of friction when it comes to e-retail.  Shipping costs and latency were the reason why I would research something online and then buy it in person.  Amazon turned that whole thing on its head.

But.  I can't take the waste anymore.  The volume of packaging that I have had to deal with over the past month has left me feeling sick to my stomach.  It was too easy to order something, and so I ordered way too much.

What's got me so worked up?  Amazon's program results in less efficient packaging, less efficient delivery runs, and more stress at Amazon's notably (although not uniquely) worker-unfriendly distribution centers.  This is to say nothing of the environmental or labor practices of the manufacturers of the underlying goods, which are difficult to inspect from Amazon's website.

For now, I'm going to take a break from online shopping.  I wish I could take a break from shopping, period, but I still don't have anywhere to sit in my new home.

Better Writers Than I pt 2

Unsurprisingly, people with more brains and experience are sometimes capable of discussing this business better than I can.  Max Schireson from 10gen does a good job of explaining pricing in his recent blog post here: http://maxschireson.com/2012/05/14/the-value-based-pricing-trap/.

The vendor viewpoint is slightly more comprehensible, it seems.

Full disclosure: I met Max once, when I was interviewing at 10gen.  Impressive guy.

The Mission Matters

(TK: Zappos vs. Amazon.com, two absurdly customer-centric companies that take divergent approaches to service)

I've actually been struggling with this post for over a month.  I've decided to narrow my focus just to customer support in order to get it out.

Also, I want to use my own voice more from now on.  It's really hard to write about this kind of stuff with a straight face, and I'm not actually so dry in person.

A company must have phenomenal customer support as part of their mission from an early stage.  It's nearly impossible to establish a good support organization down the line because the value of support is difficult to measure, and big companies necessarily become driven by metrics.

And what constitutes phenomenal support?  There's a fairly middlebrow observation that the primary impact of support is not solving problems, but giving the customer a good experience.  I've worked with some folks on my teams who couldn't solve problems, but were excellent at dealing with customers.  I'd prefer to work with a guy like that over a highly effective but less empathetic individual.

And what is a good experience?  An interaction that results with the customer having a good opinion of your products and your people, and feeling confident that the issue is being addressed.

In my opinion, you need to hit a few key points:

• Good interactions
• Self-explanatory, but this has to emphasized at the most core level.  It needs to be part of your identity.  If not, folks on the team will slip occasionally.
• That it's easy to say "treat customers well" is the point.  Everyone talks about it; you have to live it.
• Accessibility
• Some folks prefer phone, some prefer email, some prefer a web portal
• Don't corral your customers into a single way of interacting with support.  It's potentially a lot easier for your team to be flexible than to force your methodology onto all of your customers.
• Match your hours to your customers'
• Visibility
• Provide some kind of evidence that their issue matters, such as a case number, or description of the escalation path that you are taking
• Not every problem is solved during the first touch point.  Just as you need an internal system to collaborate on customer issues, your customers need visibility into your overall process and into the status of their particular interactions with you.

Guess what?  All easier said than done.  That's why the mission matters.  If treating your customers well is not part of who you are, it's way too easy to cut back on service, reject issues, and under-invest in support systems and staff.

So, before your company gets too large, put tools, processes, and people in place to provide phenomenal support.  Make it part of your mission, make it part of your identity.  Take whatever mission statement you have now, and append "provide ridiculously good customer service" to it.  If you don't get it right from the start, you are gonna have a big struggle getting it right later.

Better writers than I

Alexis Madrigal has said it better than I ever could:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-jig-is-up-time-to-get-past-facebook-and-invent-a-new-future/256046/

Maybe another point to take away is that we're much less creative than we're all given credit for.  With enough people, you always get some amount of innovation, but most folks--even the intelligent ones we depend on to be leaders--will follow an established path.  The last half-generation of great minds all went into finance, to iterate endlessly on the same flimsy premise (eliminate risk through math! get rich and live forever!), much like the way everyone  is beating on social/local/mobile today.

Young people aren't piling into startups because they're all thrill seekers.  It's actually much less risky than the prevailing, pre-Internet perception would have you believe.  Ad-supported products aren't in a zero-sum competition for users.  This makes it easier for a company to post good stats and raise money, and consequently less risky to work there.  Because these firms and their employees can do reasonably well without taking big risks, they don't innovate.

Unconventional Transparency

I think everyone inside of an organization should be able to read everyone else's expense reports.  Give that idea a minute to sink in.  Is there really any downside?  Imagine how useful it would be to look at where your coworkers have stayed in Chicago, or the average cost of a one-week trip to Toronto, or countless other patterns that are too specific to be outlined in your policies.

Assume management and accounting still take responsibility for what actually gets paid out, so it's not like the judgment of others will prevent you from getting your expenses handled.  Do you think your colleagues would try to shame each other into spending less?  Or goad each other into spending more?  Does it matter?  The whole conceit is that your management should have a handle on this.

And as such, the only people with anything to lose in making expenses public are your management.  It would expose the degree to which there is iniquity in the system.

There seems to be a convention by which anything to do with money is not public knowledge within an organization.  Compensation is an obvious example.  My current employer actually guards sales figures  (in their defense, they are protecting mainly unaudited, nonpublic information) and contracts from folks who don't have a vested interest in the accounts in question.  What about the costs of office space and equipment?  Or HR data like vacation planning?  Or timesheets for a services team?

99% of the time, none of this information is needed for me to do my job.  However, I think great things can be accomplished when you open up your data--internally, at least.  Some companies even share all their compensation data.  Rather than foster jealousy and rancor, transparency can be used to validate that a company is being fair or at least consistent with regard to its treatment of employees.  It sounds trivial to say this, but even if they don't own stock, employees are stakeholders in a business and deserve to understand important HR and financial figures.

I like information.  A lot.  And I get the question "why do you need to know that?" way more often than I should.  Rather than keep employees in the dark, I think the right question is, "why shouldn't we share this?"

Endless Optimization, Consumer Apps, and Complexity

I had an interesting conversation with my flatmate over brunch yesterday.  He currently works at a well-funded B2C startup.  While his company is working on many interesting problems, they also have to dedicate a lot of resources to optimizing ad displays in order to keep up revenue.  It's kind of ironic that some of the best minds of our generation are at least partly dedicated to ads.  The brainpower that is focused on display ads (including, occasionally, my flatmate), is just staggering.

Well, not ads in the Mad Men sense, but really more in the sense of modeling and optimizing for human behavior.  Where do we look on a screen?  What makes us click on an ad?  How many people will tolerate a modal ad/front door, how many people will be driven away? Entire businesses exist just to drive marginal improvement in advertising ROI.  These improvements are driven by better data on users and better execution on ad networks.

This is starting to sound familiar to me.  Ad sales is being treated like an inefficient market, where actors and prices can be exploited for profit.  It doesn't stop there. Consumer apps, like Groupon and its clones, or Mint, or Foursquare (vis-a-vis their partnership with American Express), are providing a service in exchange for data on you. Target is modeling you and your lifestyle via your purchasing decisions.  Everything you do feeds disparate systems that, in effect, predict your behavior.  Specifically, they try to predict your purchasing decisions.  In turn, this increases the value of ads or promotions that are shown to you, because those ads are thought to be more relevant.

Why does this make me think of the rise of quantitative finance?  Because it looks like an increasingly complex system involving more and more algorithms, autonomous actors, and dependencies.  The array of systems keeping tabs on your wallet and personal life might reside in different applications, but that doesn't mean they are not interrelated.  The algorithms designed around your prior behavior might be able to learn, but that doesn't mean that they can't be gamed.  To me, this sounds increasingly like the advent of the various financial bogeymen of the past two decades. Millisecond execution on ad networks could be like HFT. Behavioral modeling, data leaks, anonymous players in what is supposed to be a transparent system--it's all there.

Problem is, we know what happens when finance goes bad.  Fraud, market crashes, firms destroyed, savings wiped out.  We've seen it.  But what happens when optimization and consumer apps run amok?  What happens when the advertising ecosystem, the revenue model upon which many apps and services depend, begins to creak under its own complexity?

Maybe we'll see a collapse in the ads market, as fraud and data leaks destroy the value of personalization.  Maybe consumers will become disenchanted with ad-supported services because ads will become increasingly intrusive and creepily specific.  Maybe incidence of identity theft will skyrocket.  Maybe bank accounts will get hacked.

I'm not saying these things are guaranteed.  Finance, and stock markets in particular, lends itself to certain types of abuse and risk-taking.  Web and mobile apps that sell ads to survive are a little less foolhardy, at least when it comes to their main source of revenue.  But I do see risks to the kind of endless optimization and gaming that is endemic to the modern web, and I think consumers and developers need to take into account that a disjoint system of behavior-tracking applications could have unintended consequences.