Things about management and business on a smaller scale, and economics on a larger one.
The Troubling Case of Chris Hedges: Pulitzer winner. Lefty hero. Plagiarist.
Actually reading it, the conclusion is obvious.1
One concidence: Chris Hedges was a reporter for the New York Times from 1990-2005 which overlaps this incident.
In 2008, I had a friend who was the co-founder and CTO of a startup. He was getting a lot of pressure from the other co-founder to get into TechCrunch. I said, “Why the fuck does anyone want to be in Techcrunch?1 The only people who read it are your competitors.”2
…
This morning just before I woke up, I dreamt that I found out that TechCrunch had made it into the top ten most popular websites.
In my dream, Michael Arrington still owned them and through a systematic analytically-driven approach of A-B testing subject lines, content, and marketing, they had applied it to an entire network of blogs to make it very popular. Michael had picked up ballroom dancing as a hobby and even his ballroom dance blog, through this approach, had become far more popular than it deserved to be.
I started thinking, “Wow, that’s crazy. I remember back in 2005 when TechCrunch was so unknown Michael had to comment on Scoble’s blog to get traffic.3 Who would have thought it could become so popular?”
…
Then I woke up and remembered that nobody reads TechCrunch.4
When I first heard someone use the term “the sharing economy” last year:
Me: What the fuck is “the sharing economy”?
Someone: It’s a catchall for businesses like AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit and the like.
Me: Sounds more like they should call it “the slavery economy.”1 Give it a few years for that bubble to go the way of GroupOn.
…
What did I mean?
Well to take one example, this was sent to me recently by a friend because it appeared on her feed and she was curious how they got the numbers:
Let’s do the math, shall we?2
LinkedIn brags about their use of A-B testing.1
Here is a fucking clue, guys. When you vary where a mail header (from:2, to:, subject: line, etc.), you bypass peoples’ mail filters and of course e-mail open rates will test higher.
So many companies don’t know the limits of analytics. To those idiot business analysts that are data-driven instead of data-informed: please DIAF. ktnxbai!
(Disclaimer: None of the views here are those of the Wikimedia Foundation.)
Brendan Eich, creator of Javascript, resigned as CEO of Mozilla mostly over his unrepenting anti-gay views.
I must admit a brief bit of schadenfreude because I predicted that this change would happen on Prop 8 specifically. The only thing that surprises me from those six-year-old articles is the quickness of the sea change around this issue.Continue reading about Eich and other thoughts after the jump
At my first startup, I had a CTO, who was a year younger than me, used to tell me stories of his time at UUNET and what whiney little cheap turds most of the first generation dotCom billionaires were before their tiny little ISP’s sold for hundreds of millions.
This story isn’t about that.
As a Korean, he was asked to set up the asian version of UUnet. Back then Korea’s networking should have been trivial as its a peninsula and most of the population lives in or around a single city, Seoul. Instead it was terrible because none of the Korean networking companies would set up peering points with each other. “See,” he told me, “When you need to connect two networks to each other, you have to set these up, and while they’re free to run, they’re costly to build. How do you decide who pays for the point?”
You might think 50-50 is fair and propose that. If you’re a new player in this space, since you’re the one asking to set up these points, you probably benefit more than network you are trying to pair up with so they expect you to pay all or most of it. You get nowhere with this offer. This is what happened to him.
Korea wasn’t the powerhouse Internet trendsetter they are today. I remember, back then it was often faster to connect to a US site then to another Korean one because your packets to the latter would have to go through peering in the US since there wasn’t any in Korea. In other words, to talk to your neighbor, your message would be sent from Korea, across the Pacific to the US, and then back across the Pacific to Korea. This was the Korean Internet in the early-mid 90’s, all because of a lack of peering there.
On a lark, a friend of his wanted to set up a BBS or something and he dropped a server on his network for his friend to use for free.
Then one day, months later, companies that had previously refused to peer up were contacting him to peer up. As I’ve outlined just now, being the asker is a huge concession in the negotiation. He wondered what changed and looked at his traffic. It turned out that his friend’s BBS or something had become hugely popular in Korea and a lot of that network’s customers were demanding better service to it.
…
The lesson here is if you have what the other party wants, you hold the cards and the other side has to make the concession.
I bring this story up when I have to explain a basic business principle to others to understand what is going on.
Want to understand why Office is finally out on iOS? Look no further than the peering story.
M—: So, my wife is working on Transformers 4. (sigh)
Me: Oh? I haven’t seen 2 or 3 yet.
M—: Me, neither. And she worked on those two also. What’s the point?
One of my engineers was leaving the building for a late lunch and held the door open for me and another director. Before we parted, we had a short chat in the doorway about approvals on a purchase order.
“Hey, I need to see your ID!” Building security yelled at us.
“Huh? What?” H— replied?
“That’s the new policy. I need to ask to see everyone’s keycard.”
“It must be related to that mailing list thread.” I told H—, matter-of-factly. (For over a week now, an internal mailing list thread has been going on about building security. I stopped reading when someone suggested that the only way to solve this was to install lasers to detect when two people enter with one card, and another one argued that we should just make an HR policy to fire anyone who lets anyone in without proper ID. The reason I stopped was because neither post was trolling us in jest.)
The building security guy continued indignantly, “Even if I know you, even if you’re a manager—and I know you two are managers. L—, the head of the company, said I must to ask for your ID or call her down to greet you in the lobby.” (Sidenote: L— is not the head of the company. On the other hand, poor L— suggested on the mailing list that any solution hopeless because building security is seriously underpaid by the owners, perhaps to the point of illegality.)
I joked, “Even if I thought the discussion that touched off this policy was a waste of everyone’s time?”
Building security apparently has about as much humor as our company mailing list. So I reluctantly dug through my wallet and and pulled out a blank white piece of plastic, that may or may not have been my car parking card—they’re identical and I do not have an RFID reader on my person.
He let me through anyway.
That’s good, because to this day I do not know the average airspeed of an unladen swallow.
On the way to work this morning, M— mentioned two contrasted successful people in public relations. She said, “When I think of X and compare him to Y, I’d rather take Y as a role model. Do you have any role models?”
*Do I? Feynman? Wozniak? Jobs? Mayer?* I paused for a long time.
“No,” I said.
M— laughed.Continue reading
She complains, “There’s just no appreciation on their end. I got them ___, and they’re still trying to tell me how to do my job. It’s so frustrating. I have clients that I feel I’m under-servicing and this one takes up all my time. They have a low retainer, but they act like they own me. That’s the last time I let them talk me down on my retainer.”
“You shouldn’t have let that happen so you shouldn’t be surprised.”
“How so?”
“I once visited Venice when I was a kid. Many stores didn’t have prices, but some of the stores did. No matter which, you didn’t have to pay the listed prices — there was an expectation that you could haggle over the price.”
“And?”
“Well with this client: they don’t know your field so they don’t know what the expectation is. **You** set that. Letting yourself get talked down on that amount is like buying something in Venice. Imagine if we were in the United States, and someone walked into your store and said, ‘Hey, I know it says it cost $15, but how about I give $10?’”
She laughs.
“Exactly! The only place you can do that here is at a car dealership. If you treated their counteroffer like you just treated this hypothetical, they would have learned to go somewhere else and be someone else’s problem, or deal with you on the terms you set. When you created your own business, it was because you didn’t want companies to feel they owned you, and you wanted to be free to be honest with them. You need to set those terms down in this way.”
“Yeah, they said that they wanted _____ in the long term but didn’t have enough money right now, so they wanted a two month contract at a lower rate to try it out. I should have known they never really valued the work I do.”
“That’s another thing right there! Imagine, I was single right now and asking you out. What if I told you, ‘Hey, I really want have a committed relationship and get married someday. Why don’t we fuck so I can try you out?’ Would you?”
“When you put it that way, definitely not.”
“Exactly.”