| "Usually
the way startups die is that they launch something, users ignore it,
investors are lukewarm, and they get demoralized and give up. Sometimes
there are other forces encouraging them to give up, like the pull of
school, or the push of founder conflicts. It's normal for users not to like what you first launch with, and for investors to be lukewarm. (Investors are basically permanently lukewarm.) So the groups who give up usually are looking at about the same information as other groups who keep going and succeed. Most of the time it comes down to whether they see the glass as half full or half empty." --.Paul Graham, writing at Hacker News, in the comments |
inspiration: April 2008 Archives
"Two months ago, I was doing what I had to do. Now I'm doing what I want
to do. And looking back, it was a change I'd always wanted to make, but
as long as I was drawing a steady paycheck, I didn't see it as a change
that I could afford to make-for me or for my family. Looking long term,
I'm not sure it was a decision I could afford not to make.
Getting laid off forced me to make the change that I'd always wanted
to make anyways. And it may work out or it may not. But the point is
that I've made that change now. I'm doing what I'm passionate about."
--Fellow ex-Yahoo! Ryan Kuder, who's started blogging, started a company and is seeing the brave new world, post Yahoo!.
Susan sez: It's hard to let go of complacency and choose risk, but well-thought out risk is one of the biggest adrenalin highs, and a place where both opportunity and productivity can flourish.
--Fellow ex-Yahoo! Ryan Kuder, who's started blogging, started a company and is seeing the brave new world, post Yahoo!.
Susan sez: It's hard to let go of complacency and choose risk, but well-thought out risk is one of the biggest adrenalin highs, and a place where both opportunity and productivity can flourish.
I learned recently that my old and dear friend Rochelle Ratner died at the end of March. I have a piece about her posted at BlogHer, but I want to share these two poems I wrote for her on this blog.I didn't send her this one--
Cancer Patient in New York
"There is no cure," you tell me and I think years, not days,
But I answer you calmly and say "It's just too soon to know."
Rose called it a black dog, Simic a plague, but it's cancer that's come
To live in your house, in your lungs and your brain, like a mildewed-streaked mold
That won't fade, no matter how hot the soapy water gets.
I listen to your voice on the phone, the tired edge and the dull complaints,
And I want to say this totally sucks, but instead I offer to visit next month
And I hear your voice brighten and you say "That's great," but we both know there is no assurance that when I get there you will even have the strength to walk down the block.
Old friend, friend of my youth, friend of my early middle age
I know you watch, perched high in your window above the city,
As the black hawk wheels above the park, the falcon poises its wings to dive.
Do you see the kestrel fly through Central Park on their way to nests in high towers?
See the lone eagle circle the meadow, his sharp eye looking for prey,
And the little starlings hop and scatter in the leaves as the school children parade?
On the phone to you in your room, I think of you, waiting,
Your ghostly reflection in the windows as you write of your own vanishing,
And how the city glimmers just beyond you in the looming darkness, the night
.
(All rights reserved, Susan Mernit, 2007)
I did send her this one--
The Young Poet (At Twenty-Two)
You always wrote poems
At your desk, glasses perched at the
End of your nose, squinting down at
The yellow pad you'd pulled out
From the surface where it lay. Every few minutes
You read to yourself, images, metaphors, similes
Blooming between the lines
Like automatic writing your hands poured out.
You wrote every day, you told me, reaching for those
Stories just out of your grasp, the reconstructed tales of the past,
your grandmother in Leeds, your grandfather pulling a cart in
Atlantic City, your youth at the Steelcase Pier listening to
Frankie Avalon croon. You wrote and wrote,
Poems every day, binders and binders of them: tough-minded,
Confessional, archaeologies of what you learned and lost, precise,
Poetic hymnals that showed clearly the life you had escaped,
The dancing language in your unschooled brain,
The determined writer you would damn well become
No matter what your parents said.
(All rights reserved, Susan Mernit, 2007)
Rochelle, I miss you. And thank you for everything you gave me.
Okay, my new favorite blog clearly has to be Signal vs. Noise, cause I keep quoting them on this blog:
"That's why I like working with the family man or woman. They come in as a cold bath of reality. When people have other obligations outside of work that they actually care more about than your probably-not-so-world-changing idea, the crutches are not available as an easy way out, and you'll have to walk by the power of your good ideas and execution or you'll fall fast and early."
---David, writing about why start-ups should hire family people as well as the 20-somethings with fewer responsibilities if they want to build better products.
"That's why I like working with the family man or woman. They come in as a cold bath of reality. When people have other obligations outside of work that they actually care more about than your probably-not-so-world-changing idea, the crutches are not available as an easy way out, and you'll have to walk by the power of your good ideas and execution or you'll fall fast and early."
---David, writing about why start-ups should hire family people as well as the 20-somethings with fewer responsibilities if they want to build better products.
On the bus in Israel, I had a chance to hang over a more sustained chunk of time with Scoble and Craig Newmark, two super well known bloggers (Scoble has1,600,000 links in Google; Craigslist has 28MM), and I learned something I didn't know before: these two A-listers are A-listers at least partly before they give some of the best customer service I've ever seen.
Yep, Scoble is online all the time with people who reach out to him: tweets, comments, trackbacks, posts. He pitches and catches with hundreds of people around the world, commenting and engaging in a way that means each person feel recognized.
And Craig, it's no different--Craig's passion is customer service, as he likes to say, and while a chunk of that is scrubbing the myriad forms of Craigslist, I'd bet he's just as committed to responding to the non-profits, the community folk, and the local folks who have something to say to him.
In other words, one of my take aways here is that these guys have intensified their stature through the one to one exchanges they have with people, and while these touches are not neccessarily visible, they make a huge difference in building and maintaining the connections.
Interestingly, I heard the same things about Mike Arrington from Israeli entrepreneurs when I was in Israel--Over and over again, Mike's name came up as someone people had spoken with, engaged with, learned from--so much so that I started to wonder how much Mike really sleeps.
In other words, in watching these folks in action, I realized while you build your reputation and your network through doing great blog posts, you can solidify and deepen it through true engagement with your audience, a lesson the best customer service reps--and the companies they support--have know for a while.
Yep, Scoble is online all the time with people who reach out to him: tweets, comments, trackbacks, posts. He pitches and catches with hundreds of people around the world, commenting and engaging in a way that means each person feel recognized.
And Craig, it's no different--Craig's passion is customer service, as he likes to say, and while a chunk of that is scrubbing the myriad forms of Craigslist, I'd bet he's just as committed to responding to the non-profits, the community folk, and the local folks who have something to say to him.
In other words, one of my take aways here is that these guys have intensified their stature through the one to one exchanges they have with people, and while these touches are not neccessarily visible, they make a huge difference in building and maintaining the connections.
Interestingly, I heard the same things about Mike Arrington from Israeli entrepreneurs when I was in Israel--Over and over again, Mike's name came up as someone people had spoken with, engaged with, learned from--so much so that I started to wonder how much Mike really sleeps.
In other words, in watching these folks in action, I realized while you build your reputation and your network through doing great blog posts, you can solidify and deepen it through true engagement with your audience, a lesson the best customer service reps--and the companies they support--have know for a while.
I had coffee a couple of days ago with a friend and former co-worker still at Yahoo!, no longer at Personals, but on to the next adventure. He was pretty psyched about his role, felt he was having a good impact, was at a project core to the company, etc. and as he talked I felt amazed at how, over the past two months, I'd moved so solidly from us to them. Or, in other words, to use a relationship metaphor, babe, I'd moved on.
Looking around at friends and co-workers who exited around the same time, it looks like most of us have moved on, even if some have not settled into new staff jobs (I know some great people still out there, DM me if you need product managers, SEO experts, and content types). Interestingly, more than 50% of the folks have gone to start-ups, often their own; another chunk went to other companies, and a not small number went to new roles at--surprise!--Yahoo.
As I said yesterday, I'm not really ready to share everything that's next right now, but life is starting to take shape and form. Thanks, Yahoo, for giving me a shove out the door that's been a catalyst for what should be a year of challenges, growth and continued change, as well as a whole boatload of stuff to figure out.
Looking around at friends and co-workers who exited around the same time, it looks like most of us have moved on, even if some have not settled into new staff jobs (I know some great people still out there, DM me if you need product managers, SEO experts, and content types). Interestingly, more than 50% of the folks have gone to start-ups, often their own; another chunk went to other companies, and a not small number went to new roles at--surprise!--Yahoo.
As I said yesterday, I'm not really ready to share everything that's next right now, but life is starting to take shape and form. Thanks, Yahoo, for giving me a shove out the door that's been a catalyst for what should be a year of challenges, growth and continued change, as well as a whole boatload of stuff to figure out.
There is so much going on in my life right now, most of which I can't talk about yet.
Sorry for the teasers, but it's the only way to explain both the lack of blogging and my non-show to date at Web 2.0; got the pass, but have been hunkeringh down down at home on some critical things.
Short version: Israel was a great (working) vacation, I feel refreshed and diving into the next set of adventures feels so energizing--and stressful--I always find changes really hard, even good ones.
Sorry for the teasers, but it's the only way to explain both the lack of blogging and my non-show to date at Web 2.0; got the pass, but have been hunkeringh down down at home on some critical things.
Short version: Israel was a great (working) vacation, I feel refreshed and diving into the next set of adventures feels so energizing--and stressful--I always find changes really hard, even good ones.
Even in a big world, human impulse is to make it smaller.
Valleywag may make derisive snorts about the "250," meaning the preening, self-congratulatory elitists they imagine as Silicon Valley's blogging core, but the truth is that the early adaptor crowd is really global, not local, and there's more like 3,500 of' em.
Having just spent a week in Israel with a gaggle of geeks, all using EVDO cards to stay connected on the travel bus, I observed a couple of things that I hadn't known before:
a) People from all over the world are talking to one another online, 24/7
b) Many of the people talking have formed strong ties and virtual communities.
c) Twitter is a key tool in supporting a & b, but blogs, friendfeed, IM, skype, email, and flickr all contribute as well.
During my week in Israel, I met folks, like the wonderful Orli Yakuel, who said she started techn blogging because of an influential blogger friend she'd met online, in the US; she and this person exchanged messages daily and had done so for a couple years.
At the same time, I saw Scoble, the most relentless and genial of bloggers, conduct conversations simultaneously with people all over the globe.
And I myself, of course, kept my my ties current and shared info daily with my friends and family in California, my business partner in Boston, and a whole gaggle of friends, family and colleagues in New York (and as I am now doing with a couple of people I met in Israel.)
The conclusion here, of course, is that it is human nature to make the world small.
Fueled by Twitter and skype, distances become smaller, discourses become more informal, and the global village gets larger, pulling us of us into the same virtual town.
Valleywag may make derisive snorts about the "250," meaning the preening, self-congratulatory elitists they imagine as Silicon Valley's blogging core, but the truth is that the early adaptor crowd is really global, not local, and there's more like 3,500 of' em.
Having just spent a week in Israel with a gaggle of geeks, all using EVDO cards to stay connected on the travel bus, I observed a couple of things that I hadn't known before:
a) People from all over the world are talking to one another online, 24/7
b) Many of the people talking have formed strong ties and virtual communities.
c) Twitter is a key tool in supporting a & b, but blogs, friendfeed, IM, skype, email, and flickr all contribute as well.
During my week in Israel, I met folks, like the wonderful Orli Yakuel, who said she started techn blogging because of an influential blogger friend she'd met online, in the US; she and this person exchanged messages daily and had done so for a couple years.
At the same time, I saw Scoble, the most relentless and genial of bloggers, conduct conversations simultaneously with people all over the globe.
And I myself, of course, kept my my ties current and shared info daily with my friends and family in California, my business partner in Boston, and a whole gaggle of friends, family and colleagues in New York (and as I am now doing with a couple of people I met in Israel.)
The conclusion here, of course, is that it is human nature to make the world small.
Fueled by Twitter and skype, distances become smaller, discourses become more informal, and the global village gets larger, pulling us of us into the same virtual town.
The boy is late teens, handsome and fair, and his eyes are earnest as he talks: "In One Voice we don't call it peace anymore; we want to bring about an a agreement that will bring bout comfort and a more stable situation than they have now. It's not peace, it's divorce...the metaphor says now we are pre divorce and we need to balance the situation...this is the difference between one voice and the normal peace movement that talks about peace and friendship."
It's a weekend morning, in Tel Aviv and Craig Newmark, JD Lasica and I are meeting with the director and a group of student leaders from One Voice , a powerful, grassroots peace movement that has engaged Israelis, especially college students, from all over Tel Aviv, Ramallah, and Gaza, as well as drawn in members from the US, the UK, Canada, and other parts of the world. The group is bright, committed, and right now, engaged in making sure this group of American bloggers and funders (Craig is on their board), understands how they work and what they have to offer.
Basically here's what I learn:
The universities are flash-points for OneVoice recruitment, as are the occupied terrorities. The movement tries to educate through lectures and events, then recruits at various levels of engagement, from signing up for a newsletter (over 100K people in a country of 7 million) to attending events, to joining as an organizer. For the students involved, One Voice clearly offers a change to discuss, a change to create change, but mostly importantly, a means to hope.
Here's some of what the students tell us:
Marina: This movement involves the public so they can have an opinion for themselves and think about what they support.
Tal: We try to enrich student understanding with lectures and knowledge; we also take the message of OneVoice and careful optimism and take it out on the streets, where we want to mobilize the students and the city residents.
Another student: We ask citizens what would you do to end the conflict? People can become policy makers, instead of just consumers of policy
.
Talking with this group, they make it clear to me that what engages them so deeply is the feeling of being empowered in a frustrating situation where it is so hard to effect policy changes. Because OneVoice is a participatory culture, with youth councils, leadership councils, and local action, it provides a means for these bright engaged students to avoid dispair, as well as to educate and inform.
Listening to the talk flow around me, and seeing the passion in these fresh eyes, it strikes me that like the African National Congress (ANC) for South African Doris Lessing and her fellow progressives in Johannesberg, so long ago, OneVoice provides a means to survive and hang on in an impossible situation by becoming a force for positive change. It strikes me that OneVoice is a great group, not only for what it offers in terms of the conflict, but the positive vision it offers Israel and Arab youth, and through them, their parents, families and neighbors
.
Learn more here:
Blog
Web site
YouTube videos
Facebook
Flickr
Imagine 2018 campaign
It's a weekend morning, in Tel Aviv and Craig Newmark, JD Lasica and I are meeting with the director and a group of student leaders from One Voice , a powerful, grassroots peace movement that has engaged Israelis, especially college students, from all over Tel Aviv, Ramallah, and Gaza, as well as drawn in members from the US, the UK, Canada, and other parts of the world. The group is bright, committed, and right now, engaged in making sure this group of American bloggers and funders (Craig is on their board), understands how they work and what they have to offer.
Basically here's what I learn:
The universities are flash-points for OneVoice recruitment, as are the occupied terrorities. The movement tries to educate through lectures and events, then recruits at various levels of engagement, from signing up for a newsletter (over 100K people in a country of 7 million) to attending events, to joining as an organizer. For the students involved, One Voice clearly offers a change to discuss, a change to create change, but mostly importantly, a means to hope.
Here's some of what the students tell us:
Marina: This movement involves the public so they can have an opinion for themselves and think about what they support.
Tal: We try to enrich student understanding with lectures and knowledge; we also take the message of OneVoice and careful optimism and take it out on the streets, where we want to mobilize the students and the city residents.
Another student: We ask citizens what would you do to end the conflict? People can become policy makers, instead of just consumers of policy
.
Talking with this group, they make it clear to me that what engages them so deeply is the feeling of being empowered in a frustrating situation where it is so hard to effect policy changes. Because OneVoice is a participatory culture, with youth councils, leadership councils, and local action, it provides a means for these bright engaged students to avoid dispair, as well as to educate and inform.
Listening to the talk flow around me, and seeing the passion in these fresh eyes, it strikes me that like the African National Congress (ANC) for South African Doris Lessing and her fellow progressives in Johannesberg, so long ago, OneVoice provides a means to survive and hang on in an impossible situation by becoming a force for positive change. It strikes me that OneVoice is a great group, not only for what it offers in terms of the conflict, but the positive vision it offers Israel and Arab youth, and through them, their parents, families and neighbors
.
Learn more here:
Blog
Web site
YouTube videos
Flickr
Imagine 2018 campaign
On April 23, the MacArthur Foundation and Common Sense Media are
hosting a free public forum at Stanford University on "how digital
technologies and new media are changing the way that young people
learn, play, socialize and participate in civic life." Julia Stasch,
the Vice President of the foundation, will talk about MacArthur's
$50 million digital media and learning initiative; danah boyd and Mimi Ito are among the funding recipients who will present research.
Teen Socialization Practices in Networked Publics
danah boyd, University of California Berkeley
Drawing from interviews of teens across the U.S., boyd will explain
how social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook have become an
integral part of how youth relate to one another and develop their
social identities.
Understanding New Media in the Home
Heather Horst, University of California Berkeley
Looking across a range of case studies, Horst will examine how
families of varying backgrounds negotiate the changes and challenges of
incorporating new media into everyday family life.
Hip Hop Music and Meaning in the Digital Age
Dilan Mahendran, University of California Berkeley
Based on his study of youth hip hop production in the Bay Area,
Mahendran will describe how young people learn, mobilize, and develop
meaning through collaborative digital media production.
New Media from a Youth Perspective
Mimi Ito, University of Southern California and Principle Investigator of the Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media project
Ito will conclude the research presentations with an overview of
project cases studies, ending with a discussion of what parents,
educators, and technology developers can learn from youth engagement
with new media.
Somehow, I managed to not actually see the She's Geeky videos from October 2007 until today--and they are powerful. If you care at all about women and tech, geeky women, dreaming in code, etc, play this video--it is great.
Bonus link: Interview with Miz Kaliya.
"I've noticed the biggest bottleneck stopping me from efficiently accomplishing the tasks I've set up for myself is just my mood. I'll have a clear definition of what needs to be done, full confidence in where I'm going with things, and I'll sit down and just think "aw, damn, I feel like shit." Then I'll generally waste time until it's 1am and I need to sleep. This happens 1-2 nights a week.
I'm looking for news.yc folks to try to get some rational insights on on the irrational problem of keeping your mood in check and focusing on what matters, when you're just one guy.
How do you guys deal with emotional problems?
How do you avoid ruminating on things in your day that have pissed you off? This is my biggest issue."
--Hacker News community member and start-up entrepreneur Dan Grover. writing about issues solo founders of companies need to manage in a post called "How do solo founders stay emotionally efficient?"
Susan sez: Seems to me this is a great question for everyone-how do you keep your brain and feelings in check long so you can get things done when you need to, and with optimal output and performance?
I'm back home; it's a nice day in the Bay area, and my body thinks it's evening tho my brain says midday. This of course will lead to the inevitable crashing out that jet lag often delivers.
Meanwhile, fellow Merry Travelling Geeks Crankster JD Lasica has published the very cool survey of the even cooler tools that the Bay area blogging crew on the israeli-based travelling geeks bus (and it was a very intimate bus) would confess to using.
People, that means you are about to hear what useful toys and shiny web implements Robert Scoble, Sarah Lacy, Craig Newmark and the rest of us fire up every day. Here are some highlights from the list.
Most obscure (and retro) tools? SSH (secure shell) & Pine (email client). Who? Uh, Craig.
Meanwhile, fellow Merry Travelling Geeks Crankster JD Lasica has published the very cool survey of the even cooler tools that the Bay area blogging crew on the israeli-based travelling geeks bus (and it was a very intimate bus) would confess to using.
People, that means you are about to hear what useful toys and shiny web implements Robert Scoble, Sarah Lacy, Craig Newmark and the rest of us fire up every day. Here are some highlights from the list.
- All 8 use Firefox, Facebook and Twitter.
- 5 use Friedfeed daily, 6 use flickr daily, and half said they used Gmail daily.
- Blogging software has the greatest fragmentation: some folks use multiple platforms, principally Typepad(5), Moveable Type (3), Word press (1, with one planning to switch.)
Most obscure (and retro) tools? SSH (secure shell) & Pine (email client). Who? Uh, Craig.
"In the last week we deployed new code to Flickr 50 times, including
546 changes by 16 people. We issued over 2,000 new API keys, and third
party developers made an average of 704 API calls per second, across 109 public API methods. We added 1 new API method, and updated 7 others. There are approximately 10,000 lines of open source code in our public subversion repository.
And our new developer site, code.flickr.com, is where you keep up with all that."
--flickr staffer kellan elliott-mccrea, writing on the flickr blog about the ongoing, useful development work the team keeps doing (oh, and there's a new developer blog here).
Susan sez: Isn't this what good web services do..keep empowering and working with their users?
Blogher's done a survey of US women and the blogosphere with some cool data points. The message, from Elisa:
" We are losing trust in the government, politicians, the media and many corporations. But as it turns out, we trust each other. The blogosphere is increasingly becoming the digital 'kitchen table' where individuals can sit down to have an authentic conversation about all the topics that affect their daily lives - from household products to presidential candidates."
The stats:
--
" We are losing trust in the government, politicians, the media and many corporations. But as it turns out, we trust each other. The blogosphere is increasingly becoming the digital 'kitchen table' where individuals can sit down to have an authentic conversation about all the topics that affect their daily lives - from household products to presidential candidates."
The stats:
- Approximately, 36.2 million women actively participate in the blogosphere every week with 15.1 publishing at least one post a week and 21.1 reading and commenting to blogs a week
- More than 40% of women surveyed consider blogs a reliable source of advice and information
- Half of women surveyed say blogs influence their purchase decisions
- Women are so passionate about blogging that large percentages of women said they would give something up to keep the blogs they read and/or write:
- 55% would give up alcohol
- 49% would give up their PDAs
- 42% would give up their i-Pod
- 43% would give up reading the newspaper
--
On Tuesday, had a chance to talk with a broader range of Israeli women bloggers and tech VCs and entrepreneurs. Some pictures in advance of real words.
From a story about a 13 year old boy who tried to run a game on his mom:
"My 13 year old managed to break the vacuum....thinking it would release him from that duty. He also has a list of other chores that were TYPED up for him to do Friday afternoon....one thing on the list was done...mind you these are simple things...empty the trash, clean your room, etc. Then I go thru the cookies on his computer and find out he has been checking out porn sites. Now there is a password so he can't even get on and his my-space page has a picture of snoopy on it now. Apparently I'm the meanest mom in the world, were his words."
As Gizmodo reports, this kid is hosed-, the Mom is selling his Xbox and games on eBay, and this lady is my absolute funniest new hero.
"My 13 year old managed to break the vacuum....thinking it would release him from that duty. He also has a list of other chores that were TYPED up for him to do Friday afternoon....one thing on the list was done...mind you these are simple things...empty the trash, clean your room, etc. Then I go thru the cookies on his computer and find out he has been checking out porn sites. Now there is a password so he can't even get on and his my-space page has a picture of snoopy on it now. Apparently I'm the meanest mom in the world, were his words."
As Gizmodo reports, this kid is hosed-, the Mom is selling his Xbox and games on eBay, and this lady is my absolute funniest new hero.
