Tyler's Toolbox

From The HBR IdeaCast #43 with Bill George, author of True North. Bill says "...the hardest peson you'll ever have to lead is yourself. If you can lead yourself, leading others becomes a lot easier." LINK

I had the pleasure of a lunch meeting with an impressive guy today. However when discussing our mutual enjoyment of film, and my film school career he made an interesting reference. I was talking about achieving high quality results inexpensively and we migrated into other topics, he said (paraphrasing) "You want to make something interesting and something of substance, like Michael Moore." I am a fan of Moore's movies but the one thing they aren't is high quality. As Colbert would say, they lack a certain "truthiness" as well. Funny though that he's had such an effect on popular culture.

And I just noted that Chris recommended True North on his blog and introduced me to the person I had lunch with. That Chris is a smart cookie, but of course that's not really news to anyone!

Posted by Tyler Willis at 02:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I stopped writing poetry awhile ago, but I've felt the bug come back with a vengeance lately. Here's my first foray back into writing. Short. Sweet. A little sloppy perhaps, but for posterity...

"settling for God in the absence of love"

God answers my whine.
palm fronds turn to visions of women under full moon sky.
old standing building looks at me asking me why,
I don't tell it as I float by.
my soul asking if it's alone as mine.
I don't know, but in this light the palm fronds eyes shine.
and we're both alone; to be mine.

Posted by Tyler Willis at 07:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just under two months ago I received the news that I, along with 10 of my co-workers, would be laid off. Unlike most I was OK with this as I felt I'd learned an immense amount of knowledge and I had my compensation package to pay rent and bills while I looked for another job. Long story short is I got appendicitis, and later an offer to go back to work for one month. I took it and by the time I had recovered, I was just starting to look for another job. The company offered me a full-time position. No suspense, I took the job. But I'd like to delve into why, and the benefit of working in a challenging environment.

Over the 7 months I was at the company pre-layoff I learned an encyclopedias worth of knowledge about sales. I had never held a real sales career, and honestly I found the work dull. Then, relatively early on in my career my manager/mentor was out sick for a few days and I got to delve into the sandbox and close my own accounts. Luckily there was an easy win in there (it certainly wasn't skill) and I got a taste of what it feels like to sell somebody. It's an invigorating experience. That taught me the value of sticking through the mundane to get the win, and when I get mad, lazy, bored, or distracted I remember the sale and it refocuses me. I also developed a skill-set, which I refer to as "Bassilisms" in honor of the man who taught me 90% of the skills. I learned that I have a natural aptitude for sales and I refined the first layer of skills.

Now in June, when deciding whether or not to come back I had to weigh many factors: skills I could learn, new experiences I could get, the money I could make, how much I would enjoy my job, etc. I ended up taking the job because I felt as part of a smaller team I would be well positioned to continue refining my skills and that I would have an opportunity to take on new responsibilities if I wanted them. A larger company would have paid me more, but it would have possessed more bureaucracy and would allow me less opportunity to learn new skills. As a 20 year old starting a career and with my goals not lying in working for a larger company, but rather successively smaller ones until I can start my own; I knew learning would be more valuable in the long run then taking the money now.

So the cost benefit of salary versus development has been on my mind a lot as of late and I think the mix is different for everyone. As luck would have it, a former classmate of mine has been tracking his internship in Taiwan via Facebook and eloquently records some interesting thoughts. A lot of them are simple and seem to be common sense, but that's what most people need reiterated. Everyone knows how to dream, do you know how to systematically go about implementing those dreams? That's what makes an all-star. Since Facebook is a closed system I will copy some of my favorites here with my reactions below. Alex, you should really write a blog - you have been a compelling writer at least since 2004 (and my guess is longer) and you're only getting better. Share those thoughts!

"Sitting there with the other two new-guys, it really dawned on me how much you get from the first impression. Quite a cliché statement, that, but none the less true. After hearing about the solitariness, the stress, the long hours, the ‘corporate’ side of law, it was very informative to talk to my mentor, Edison about the nature of his work. I ended up asking him straight up if he liked his job. He sorta grinned at me and rambled off a response about what part of the job makes a difference ect … then he advised me that law isn’t a happy profession, but you can still enjoy it."

This is almost word for word my feeling for my sales job. Any job that requires full attention to detail to win a small percentage of battles is usually boring. In law, most commas are going to be in the right place but miss the one wrong placement in the 100 page document and it's a million dollar mistake. If you program NASA satellites, a missing comma could blow up a MGS satellite. In sales a 10% increase in method could double your sales, or more. Not the same stakes, but the same lesson -- being able to take pride in the big win and value your own consistent effort is an important skill to master.

"It’s not enough for an attorney to be satisfactory, anything less would be malpractice. Rather, a good attorney must spot future problems that could arise, as well."

Alex goes on to tell a story which I won't repeat, as he gives an example of a poor choice made by an attorney at a law firm, and I'm not sure about the implied confidentiality of Facebook (it is a closed system). Probably far enough removed, but better safe than sorry. The message is a simple one, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" (Ben Franklin), but it's one worth repeating. In sales you could waste months chasing a customer before realizing you never asked if they could afford it. Low and behold, they can't. When you "eat what you kill" that inefficiency hurts. If you prepare completely and actively look for problems, they become a lot more manageable. Paraphrasing Alex's summation of this experience, If you're lost in a snow storm it's nice to have your ass covered, but wouldn't it have been better to have gotten a map and not deal with frostbitten toes?

Continue reading "Reflection on Lessons Learned" »

Posted by Tyler Willis at 06:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My affinity for the Hyphy Movement is no secret. I'm reminded of my post.

Here, for those of you that go dumb, is our newest recruit!

Posted by Tyler Willis at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Brad Feld>Fred Wilson>Me

Fred Wilson posted about "The Facebook Problem" in response to Brad Feld's concern about Facebook's new Application layer not showing much immediate benefit for those developers building applications.

Brad Says: "In the absence of [ad-revenue sharing], Facebook is going to need to address the “value to the apps developer” quickly, before some of the larger apps vaporize due to the developer saying “I’m not willing to keep paying for servers and bandwidth.” "

Fred Says: "I see a different Facebook problem. Invite overload and application noise. I cannot keep track of all the invites I am getting, both the standard invites and the application invites. And what's worse, I can't keep track of all the applications that all of my friends are using.

We all know I am not the Facebook generation. So maybe I am just not capable of dealing with this level of social networking. But I bet that many of the members of the Facebook generation are secretly wishing for the old Facebook where it was more about them and their friends and less about being a social operating system."

In response to Brad I brought up the success of iLike: 6m total users in 8 mo. More than 4m have come in the last month, most from their facebook application. Their CEO is not worried about monetization. In an interview he said "There’s no way we’d try to fight an uphill battle against what’s best for the consumer. And fortunately, in contrast to the precariously-balanced “Myspace widget ecosystem,” making $ on the FB platform is no harder than making $ on our own site."

In Response to Fred I drafted a comment, which I shortened and posted to his blog. That comment turned into this post:

I suppose that unfortunately, I'm in the "Facebook Generation," I have 3 thoughts that may contribute some value to this discussion.

1) I resisted facebook for awhile, thinking it was silly. One of my friends tagged a photo of me and that was enough value to join. I just throw on a "noise" filter and it's very nice. I can keep up with people I met while traveling in Europe, or from high school, from my hometown, etc. I ignore everything else and after 5 hours I'd found all those I wanted to find. Now all things I want to see get emailed to me (I made plans for tonight and saw a friend was coming home while drafting and proofreading this comment), and management takes very little time. Applications increase the level of information I can see about my friends. Nothing regarding them gets pushed to me though, it's just there when I seek it out. I like this.

2) Quote Generator, Free Gift, Pets - I agree these are fluff applications with little value other than social interaction for social interactions sake. This helps college kids have sex, it will always exist! BUT, facebook exists as the primary online brand for most of my peers. 10% of my network have websites/blogs (most also have facebook or other social profiles), 75-80% of my network has a facebook or a myspace page. I have a desire to define myself online, so I'm redesigning my website to continue to house my blog and also use widgets to converge all my major online published material and control the presentation of it. Facebook Apps like last.fm, del.icio.us, twitter, etc. are essentially widgets and allow that 80% of my network to exercise similar control over there definition/brand online as those who code their own website/blog. If you doubt the value of widgets to some people, just look at the sidebar of Fred Wilson's Blog. Of course not all 80% of my network that uses facebook find widgets useful, but more than the 10% that also run personal sites/blogs will have use for widgets. This brings me to my third idea.

3) Facebook users are experiencing an exploratory phase. Most users are not entrenched in the Web 2.0 world, this applications program is arguably the first time many of these users have seen these ideas of widgets (and also the "web2.0" services that are easy to build but don't actually provide much value -- we all know that the vast majority of "web2.0" isn't useful). Facebook users are doing what all people do when placed in new circumstances, they are exploring. This I say with relative assurance because in just reviewing my notifications - my friends are removing applications just as fast as they are adding them. The quotes, the pets, the "hangouts i like" apps don't stick around much. The last.fm, twitter, and other "established services" apps don't get added much but they never get removed (I'm inferring from this that only current users of the services are adding these widgets). The iLike phenomenon is the most interesting, iLike faces a lot of entrenched competition and is still pretty young (8 mo. old). It now says it has between 6 and 7 million users, 3.9m of which have signed on to the facebook app in the last month. More than 4m have joined in the last 30 days. I've had many friends add this app and some remove it. It's my educated guess that most of those friends hadn't heard of iLike before the application, so everyone who still has the app is a brand new user for iLike. That's good news for the users that found a useful service and it's good news for iLike. It would be of interest to see the metrics across the FB network of adding and removing applications. I'm dealing with a limited sample group.

Broad Level Takeaways:

To those who are disappointed with the "noise level" - the info-noise level will continue to be higher than previous levels, but you are now experiencing an exploratory spike which will calm down as people begin to realize what apps are and what they do. The same reason I don't email my friends when I sign up for a new service just because it asks me to, your friends will learn that they need 3 days to test drive an app before saying they like it. Most will learn to stop notifying you, unless they think it will provide value to you, and in that case wouldn't you want to hear about it?

To those who think facebook needs to help developers monetize apps: You're both right and wrong. Facebook benefits in two ways from the applications...
1) Users like me get more information in many ways. Apps like Video and events help address competition with options available on Myspace, without having to alienate anyone who's not interested in changing their profile or interface. Apps like notes help users publish data for their friends to find if they want to (facebook blogging anyone? "flogging" if you will). Apps like Twitter, Last.fm, Dopplr, etc. mean I don't have to publish information twice to share it with a wider facet of my network. It also changes how I use these services, normally for the better. Synergistic! This doesn't require Facebook to help with monetization. Certain developers will take the risk that they can monetize the traffic. Any new app is only an added value to the userbase, and the critical features are built and maintained in-house.

2) The Marketing Playbook (great book; worth the read) details 5 strategies a software company can take. One strategy is the platform play, in which a company gain numerous allies by empowering other companies to survive in an eco-system they create. This could be a powerful move for Facebook. Empowering other developers is a great move, especially when it so perfectly fits into your core business. If they do help companies like iLike succeed and even allow companies to move to FB and turn a profit (like it sounds like iLike may do), then they have something unique, extremely valuable, and a huge win for them.

Thoughts? Responses? Comments!

Posted by Tyler Willis at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)