My strategy was simple:  I posted the article at 11 am EST.  I thought this window would optimize for getting people commuting into work on the West Coast, slide into the lunch time browsing of people on the East Coast, and get people at the end of their day in Europe.  I wanted to avoid the dead times in the middle of the work day when paranoid project managers with low blood sugar are constantly peeking over the shoulders of their employees.  Perhaps my strategy was confirmed, as most of the traffic was from the coastal US. Unexpectedly, there was lots of traffic from Texas, which could have been from attendees of the interactive SXSW conference who on that day only did not have their bosses watching over their shoulders telling them to get back to work.

Over 7,000 hits that day. Much to my dismay, an hour after posting the link into HN I saw Google Analytics was not installed (theme upgrade broke the GA plugin, doh!), so I imagine I missed at least several hundred hits in GA.

Peaking at 160 active visitors. Watching Google Analytics Real-Time is a fascinating way to watch the ebbs and flows of progress in once you send a post out into the wild.  Almost all the traffic was from HN, or derivative sites.

My 1.5 GB Slicehost server never got above 20% CPU. Surprisingly, apache load was heavy and I almost never saw varnish in top. Isn’t varnish supposed to remove that load on apache? Perhaps I misconfigured it (varnishd –f /etc/varnish/default.vcl –s malloc,1G –T 127.0.0.1:2000 –a 209.20.69.244:80)

My biggest question:  the next day there were several stories on the top three pages of HN but with fewer points and that had been posted around the same time.  My story had drifted out by noon the following day, which seemed strange. I suspect the aging algorithm on HN includes commenting frequency; I had only 17 comments in total, while other stories were generating more discussion.

*  (“Has Google Lost Its Mojo At I/O 2011″ or “Is Brazil finally ready to fulfill on its destiny as the country of the future?”)

I decided to go nameless for the conference. I covered up my name on my badge. The rules were that I could not tell anyone my name, and I could not pass out any business cards. It was a bit awkward during the unconference at Google when the security guards kept asking me to reveal my badge, but they never revealed my secret.

I actually experimented with going as “Wallaby Yogurt” for a few hours, and would argue with anyone who mispronounced it without an Australian accent

Here is what you get when you go nameless: I had no agenda when I talked to someone other than getting to know them authentically in that moment. I never had to worry that my title or company name did not impress them. It was liberating to stand there and really be present, starting the conversation with absolutely nothing, from which anything could arise. I think people remembered me more by not giving them my name. Hilariously, in one of the unconference sessions an old friend of mine mentioned my real name in a comment he was making, and someone I met earlier in the day spoke out to defend my namelessness. I wonder if he would have remembered who I was had I shook his hand and carefully said my name when we met?

This was a wonderfully intimate conference where the founders of some of the most world changing companies in recent history dropped into the crowd after their discussions on stage. Was it because I was nameless that I started noticing everyone running up after Evan Williams’ talk to pitch him on something? I was really present to how pained he looked as person after person tried to squeeze their pitch into their ten seconds with him. Evan told people he was very focused on the Obvious Corporation right now, and even at this conference the import of focus resonated very silently. Despite all his accomplishments, creating two of the top ten websites on the Internet (Blogger and Twitter), Evan still describes himself as a farm boy from Nebraska. My wife is from Nebraska, and I stood in the line to talk to him. Was the only smile he gave up when I asked which part of Nebraska he was from? Was that one of the few authentic connections for Evan that day? I have my namelessness to thank for stopping me from using my moment with Evan to get somewhere with him.

The most riveting discussion was with Eric Schiermeyer, one of the founders of Zynga, and a buddhist monk named Joan Halifax. Eric seemed to be really struggling with who he was right on stage. In the middle of the discussion, the monk prodded Eric about a statement he had made to her at some point in the recent past: “You told me you had addicted millions of people to seratonin.” It was shocking to have someone say that on stage with the person responsible right there, and more gripping because it was said completely without criticism. For the monk, I think, acknowledgement of this is part of Eric’s path to peace now that he has left Zynga. Eric is now building a new type of healthcare company which I say also places importance on mindfulness (as opposed to mindlessness). Is this the first time in the history of the world that someone could have such a powerful (and some would say negative) impact on millions of people and then be in a position to do something equally or more positively impactful about it in a few short years? How will Eric’s story of influence on the world be written in ten years and will it be vastly different than what would be written now?

I would have argued that many of the speakers there created companies that have arguably negative consequences, but I changed my mind after being at this conference. At the two day unconference there was a small discussion on mindfulness and neuroscience in the middle of the first day. Luke Nosek talked about how he had not invested in Twitter and Zynga, and I think he had some pride in having made a conscious decision to stay away from companies with which he did not align philosophically, or perhaps even felt were harmful to the world. And, he noted he has been attacked by participants at his fund for not investing in these now skyrocketing companies. I align with his principles, and you cannot help but think that the presence of these companies have made it infinitely more important to be mindful than all those of us yammering about meditation ever did. People cannot help but look for meditation and mindfulness to help regain control of their brains now being systematically attacked and mined by Facebook and Twitter. In the very end, it was so inspiring to see people like Luke Nosek at this conference, offering a meditation sit training in his hotel room after the conference day and spending his weekend talking about how to make the world a more accepting and mindful place instead of sitting on a beach sipping margaritas.

G+ gives me high value information. I think I now get the true power of circles. I am not sure how much algorithmically is happening behind the scenes, but the circles I have subscribed to (mostly tech information, with a dash of Japanese) provide much more valuable information. There are tools to filter this information on Twitter, but G+ as a platform has this built in; I don’t really want to find tools on top of other tools to do this filtering. I know far fewer people personally on G+ than I do on Facebook, and this is fine by me. The informational content is so much better. It would make sense that Google would understand best how to deal with the data tidal wave of social information; Facebook has the DNA to build better interfaces than Google, but Google is a company designed to handle massive amounts of data and process them into something digestible.

And, this is why I think G+ will win in the long run over Facebook. Facebook seems to be building tools to addict people to low calorie information. G+ actually is valuable to me, and I think will be valuable to businesses using Google Apps. I can see value in connecting G+ services to my employees using Google Apps; I can see a benefit to focused and useful information distribution inside tight circles. I would never say that about Facebook; Facebook wants you to waste as much time inside their platform, to the detriment of work you want to get done. As people get more sophisticated about their usage of social media, I think people with something important happening in their lives will drift away from Facebook and use tools like G+.

This is why I don’t give you a job (Hacker News discussion:  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3436244).

Fascinating.  There are some great comments.  The responses boil down into two perspectives.  One, that the government is a giant leech preventing entrepreneurs from succeeding, through regulation which makes it impossible to fire people and demand high taxes yet provide no return to those companies.  Or, the government creates a situation where “you pay to have access to a pool of highly educated potential employees who get free(ish) health care, childcare, pensions.”  Both of these perspectives seem reasonable.

I wonder if there are opportunities for American politicians to learn from a debate like this.  Could the US government find ways to assist in this kind of situations?  For example, stability is a critical issue for any new small businesses (actually a problem for large established businesses nowadays as well, but the topic of another post).  Could a stable organization like the government provide guarantees of stability that could assist instable businesses in ways that promote societal needs?  What if the government promised to cover expenses for hiring women that might get pregnant later?  There is a long term cost which a stable organism like the government could reasonably assess and manage which is extremely challenging for a small business to deal with.  I believe I speak for many entrepreneurs who have made the wrong hiring decision too many times and feel paralyzed by fear around hiring someone.  I’ve read the literature on “Top Grading” and I love it and it is another thing to add to my todo list which seems secondary to the other requirements around building a new business.

If the government created structures like this, guarantees to cover maternity leave for a small business that took the first step to hire someone that they perceived as a risk, a businesses could worry less and governmental goals (if you are not a cynic) of creating a more stable and prosperous society, through job creation and reduction of societal stress, are achieved.  Everyone wins.  Would this be something that social conservatives (who lament supporting a “welfare state”) would come to the table around, given that the business is putting something at stake first; nothing is given up front.  Liberal thinkers come around as well, given that this creates a stronger fabric of support created by the government.  This is something that a large governmental body is best suited to deal with.  My inner libertarian suggests that our politicians would wreck this kind of idea, but I’d like to believe it could work.

And, with that freedom comes new problems. In the Hacker News community, people are now thinking about how to answer the question about the “Gowalla situation.” This refers to what happened to all the people who built businesses on top of the Gowalla platform only to have the carpet yanked out from under them when Gowalla was acquired by Facebook. New startups now have a pressing new question to answer which is “how do I know you won’t leave me in the lurch?” This was always a remote possibility with any business due to acquisition, but it has become even more important because businesses have gone beyond being adaptable (quickly able to react to new business conditions) and are now transformable (quickly able to shift to entirely new business).

Whenever we see displacement through new technologies, we see new challenges created. This makes “soft skills” like communication, vision, commitment and integrity even more valuable.

GroupOn is the fastest growing business the world has ever seen. This is not as exciting as the possibility that GroupOn could be the fastest imploding business the world has ever seen. GroupOn did not raise the funds necessary to build the datacenter required to sustain their rapid growth, and their cash burn rate could kill them. They could eat themselves; their growth may destroy them (which is distinctly different than what happened to WebVan).

If businesses can adapt and transform with this rapidity, what is to prevent customers from adapting and migrating as well? I’m not sure people are locked into Facebook as much as Facebook and their investors would like to think. This is why I am bullish on Google over a company like Facebook: I still think Google’s engineering culture and products (which have taken focus and long term vision to build) will trump short term gains that can be achieved by a platform like Facebook which looks more reactionary.

I got you nothing this year! I mean it.

You and I think alike. We both hate the cluttered lives we have. No wonder people are stressed all the time. We live in an age of “affluenza,” too much stuff, stuff that is killing us. Our stuff is killing the planet. All this stuff is killing our relationships. If only it were just physical things! Now we have too much email, too many phone calls, too many text messages, too many status updates, too many followers and too many people to follow.

I don’t want to add to that. I don’t want to pollute your life any more, pollute our relationship with something you have to pretend you like, and then pretend you didn’t send it off to Goodwill. I don’t want to pollute the environment with more plastic wrapping, cause more wars in Africa over precious resources.

So, this year, I am giving you nothing.

I wanted to give you something. I wanted you to know how much I value our relationship.  It is rare to meet someone like you, who fills my life with joy, listens when I am sad, makes me happier when I’m around you, and keeps me going when I am apart from you.  I wanted something to commemorate that relationship between us.  But, truly, nothing would ever last that really represents what you mean to me.

So, here are nothings I want to give to you:

• Put nothing in your basement:  The next time I am visiting, I’ll come over and spend three hours putting things into bags with you, and then take them all to Goodwill.  You could have nothing in your basement, too!
• Put nothing in your calendar for an evening:  I’ll come over and babysit the kids for three hours.  You can just let me know when you want to do it, and you can choose what you want to place in that nothingness.  Spontaneity? Fine wine? A foreign film?
• Put nothing in your inbox:  I want to remove the stress that your email has become.  Let me spend some time getting your inbox to nothingness.  I’ll go through your email and filter emails out for you so that you have a permanently organized inbox.  I’m a computer professional, let me handle it!
• Put nothing in a car:  Let’s go for a drive, and just be together, with nothing to say.  We can plan where we want to go, and gather some music together, and just drive.  What would it be like to have quiet time for an hour or two in the comfort of just us, no complaining, no stress, no agenda, nothing to resolve?
• Add nothing to your life:  For a whole month this year, I’ll promise to stop leaving voicemails, stop leaving text messages, and stop clicking “like” on Facebook when I see things about you.  Instead I’ll do nothing other than stop by and say hello for a moment.  I say that spontaneous moment, if we can find it in our busy lives, will be the more memorable thing for both of us that month.

You can choose one or more of these gifts of nothing, whatever suits your fancy.  Nothing would make me happier.

Lastly, these are truly gifts of nothing.  I want you to think nothing of not using them if they don’t work for you.  If they feel like “something” to you, full of compromise, or laden with anxiety that I will come over and ask about the gift, then you can choose to let them return to nothing, nothing more than a thought in someone’s head.  That’s all they ever were anyway.

Happy Holidays!

I loved this. Give nothing this year to your friends and family.

http://www.bgr.com/2011/11/29/siris-first-real-competition-hits-android-phones-today-video/

This is interesting but it does not solve the really big problem. I don’t have a problem organizing my todo list. Or, putting more things on there. Or, reminding myself that there are things on my todo list.

What I have trouble with is knowing what to say yes to and what to say no to. I want an app that helps me determine the answer to that. It is far more stressful for me to know whether I should put something into my todo list or calendar than it is to get it done once I put it in there.

Update:  if you are facing these same issues and want to join a support community, consider joining the “Outside Entrepreneur” mailing list.

I moved to Hinesville, GA, about an hour from Savannah, about five months ago from Portland, OR. Leaving Portland was a big decision, but it was made easier because I left for the most amazing woman in the world. Portland is the perfect city in my opinion: full of artsy people, people dedicated to making the world a better place, a place where there is so much crossover in the communities. I loved going to Burning Man and hanging out with Portland people from the radical farming movements, CEOs at tech companies, and Libertarians. I think that community crossover is a strength of Portland unmatched by other cities, and only happens because of the smaller size of Portland and the culture of openness and community that you won’t find in any other American city.

One of the challenges for Portland and the startup scene is that there are few people who have left a Google or PayPal and can make investments in risky yet visionary startups. I’ve heard it from others, and it was my experience in pitching several startups (my ideas only had the risk but I think I could have purchased the vision with some cash). But, Portland at least has a great pool of technology people. Other cities outside of the tech hubs don’t; it is very difficult to hire local people when you are an entrepreneur outside of those three large tech hubs. And, it has been made worse by the hiring war going on with Google, Facebook and every other startup out there who are pulling people from smaller cities or even hiring them remotely.

Sure, you can find cheap people on RentACoder.com, but then you’ll be working with people 10 timezones away, people who often don’t speak the language and have poor communication skills, and typically suspect technology skills. You can sometimes find solo coders that live in the US, but there is generally a good reason why they are not working for a larger company: depression, substance abuse issues, working on three distracting projects at once, the list goes on and on, and the impact on you is: no reliability around the technology side of your business. A startup is challenging, and many of the people creating these new businesses are dealing with their own set of stresses, so managing flakey people on top of your own challenges is an awful experience. I’ve tried all of the above options and rarely had a good experience except for extremely short stints and with costly transition costs. Yes, I have hired people with drug issues and depression issues, and I can spot people in a heartbeat who are working on three projects at once.

I recently was introduced to a man from this region, a man I’ll call John here. John came with his right hand man to a Japanese restaurant in Richmond Hill two weeks ago and we sat down to lunch, and then I met them again at their space last week. We had been talking about working together, and I had been probing him about company culture and process. Yesterday John called me and said: “You’ve been sending me all this theory shit, and I’ve offered you a job. Are you ready to roll up your sleeves and get to work? I don’t need this bullshit from you, I need someone who can get shit done.”

What John was referring to as “theory” were the several documents I had written up for him as I analyzed what he had and how we would work together.  It is impossible to look at a massive project and say “yes, I can do it!” without first researching the code, and more importantly, understand expectations around process, which is what I had been doing.  I had proposed a hiring process as he said he wanted stability around his technology staff, and I had proposed a management process (using a tool called Pivotal Tracker) which I said would give him clarity around how his business goals were being translated into the technology and also whether the people working with him on the technology side were doing their jobs effectively, which I had seen he clearly did not have insight into.

It was an intense conversation. I told him I did not want to be spoken to like that, which he did not want to hear. We ended our call and our relationship right then and there. The big disappointment for me was that I believe I had ways to get what he wanted:  I think I saw what was hidden to him but was special about his company that could have led to him finding people locally, and keeping those people happy. He didn’t see value in that, so there was a failure on my part in how I communicated what I wanted to do for him. I had told him I was not available for long term work because I am moving back to Portland eventually and wanted to find another way to help him because I identify with his struggles as an entrepreneur, and I think his reaction was one borne out of a long fruitless struggle to find people. I wrote this article to extrapolate on the things that make tech startups outside of those big areas special and highlight the opportunities to hire people that cannot happen in the big tech hubs.

But, first, if you just said to yourself: “What a fucking idiot that guy John is!” then you’ll probably get no value from this article. If you just had those thoughts, then that tells me that you’ve never been in a situation where you put several hundred thousand dollars on the line to build your dream. You might call yourself an entrepreneur, but if you’ve never burned through multiple people trying to find the right one, had to deal with your wife constantly angry at you because of missed deadlines, broken promises around revenue from your venture, or upset investors giving you advice left and right as you deal with massive structural problems in your dream project, then you have no idea what John is going through. If you’ve never spent years building something while paying other people and not taking an income yourself, then you don’t know what you are talking about. This article is for those people that have “some skin in the game,” the words John wrote on his whiteboard as one of his hiring goals.  I’ve sold two companies as a majority owner in the last two years, one for a mid six figures exit and another for a low six figures exit, and I have gone through these same experiences as he is going through now.  I don’t judge John for reacting that way, but I do wish he would see that it is unworkable for hiring, especially technology workers who have so many opportunities right now.

At the very bottom of this article is the Craigslist job posting I wrote for John’s company (with a few bits redacted to respect his anonymity).  I wrote this with the belief that technology workers have many opportunities in the large tech hubs, so the ones that have not moved there are looking for something else in life.  And, with the belief that there actually are good people who have chosen not to live in Silicon Valley, NY or Boston (I consider myself one of those people).  John kept telling me his venture would make shitloads of money, but I’ve had people offer me shitloads of money at stable companies like Google or Amazon.  The good people outside of those tech hubs are motivated by family concerns, health and lifestyle concerns and finding a culture that aligns with their values and beliefs.  You can find those people only if you focus on providing them something within those goals.  That primarily means creating a culture that they want to step into.  People in this area refer to the lifestyle here as “island life” and they are talking about the opposite of the life you get on another island called “Manhattan,” a life of stress, commuting, late nights in bars and chaos and crime. Search for what people want and give it to them.  John does not care about that, apparently, and I was saddened initially to hear his reaction to my suggestions, but happy that we had that conversation early, because it was never going to fit for me.  If you are an entrepreneur trying to find people, you’ll need to look inward and see what you are offering to those people, and perhaps more importantly, think about what you are communicating about your values when you invite people to work with you.

Here are the three big things I think good technology workers require that are non-obvious to many new entrepreneurs, especially those without technology backgrounds, and each one has a specific big opportunity for entrepreneurs outside of large cities, entrepreneurs I call “outside entrepreneurs.”  You can definitely find people without offering these three things, but I think you’ll have the same experiences John has had:  journeymen interested only in money, people who jump the first time they are offered even the equivalent in compensation, people without loyalty or connection to your vision and the opportunity, and that makes building your business all the more difficult.

• A defined process which management and the technology workers have aligned around.  A startup is full of chaos and changes and this is inevitable.  But, you need a process that keeps you adaptive and not reactive.  Programming requires focus like no other job out there; it is almost like meditation and requires a process which keeps distractions at bay and minimizes random requests for reactions to changes to the product.  It is simply unworkable to have a boss who changes direction every day, or who is unaware of the impact of asking that developers react constantly to changing features.  Many programmers also probably have at least mild Aspergers syndrome or HFA which is what allows them to focus like they do, and having Aspergers makes reacting to changes and breaking focus very painful.  This is another reason I am marrying my fiance, she gets this like no one ever has, probably because she has studied meditation herself.  Using something like Pivotal Tracker with scheduled weekly “acceptance” meetings provides a good balance to getting things done and transparency for management.  Many new entrepreneurs see a process like this constraining their options to succeed, but that perspective is driven by stress more than reality; this process will keep technology workers happy and building things, which is a huge problem for startup companies no matter where they are.  Opportunity for the outside entrepreneur:  The opportunities for the startups outside the traditional large cities is that you can create this environment with fewer destructive pulls that you find in larger cities; people in smaller cities have fewer distractions.
• The opportunity for personal development.  Pair programming and constrained time around development mean that technology workers can improve their skills.  Most companies forget to do this, and treat their workers like wage slaves.  Companies that provide this to their employees retain people, and companies that offer this get people.  Google’s 20% time rule is a brilliant example of this.  When people are given the opportunity to learn at work, they use those skills at work, and the proof is in the pudding: Gmail was a product started in that 20% time.  Opportunity for the outside entrepreneur:  In the Savannah area wages are depressed, and there are many artist and design focused people because of the influence of the Savannah College of Art and Design.  You can train talented people into the positions you want (rather than hiring a jaded remote worker) if you are willing to invest in them, and you can pay them a lot less than a solo coder worker from NY with many other opportunities.
• The opportunity to work with genuine and authentic people.  What John could offer to me was the opportunity to work with real people rather than via Skype with a Project Manager in Boston.  There really is nothing more fun than building something with a group of creative people around a whiteboard.  I think Portland is a very friendly city, but I love that here in Hinesville I wave to everyone passing in their cars as I walk my dog around the golf course, and that did not happen in Portland often.  There is a real connection to real people that I am finding is one of the things I love about this place.  John offered what I can get at any crappy technology company:  anger, manipulation and ego.  Opportunity for the outside entrepreneur:  Genuine and authentic people are rare everywhere, but the stresses of city life are greater in my opinion, and face time builds connections.

The best Steve Jobs obituary so far.