I’m just testing all the little pieces of Feld Thoughts to make sure that our upgrade to Movable Type 4.0 worked properly. So far I’m very pleased with the upgrade – the UI of MT is 31,415x better.
Wallstrip turned one yesterday. Howard Lindzon – the founder – celebrated by playing with guns. I’ve found Howard (and Lindsey) to be consistently hysterically funny and a good excuse to use words that end in the letter y. As part of the official press release, Howard suggested in his forecast for the next year:
“Over time, guns, booze, gambling, Internet and sex will continue their out performance. It may not be fair and may not seem right, but those that invest in these themes will be continually rewarded.”
Even though I don’t play the public markets, these dudes brighten up my day a little bit every time they end up in my FeedDemon newsreader.
Last Thursday, I shared the stage at the CSIA DEMOgala 2007 with Colorado Governor Bill Ritter. During his speech, Governor Ritter announced the formation of the Colorado Innovation Council. I’m one of three co-chairs, along with Juan Rodriguez (co-founder of StorageTek and Exabyte) and Phil Weiser (professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a national telecommunications policy expert.)
Phil and I have been working with Governor Ritter and his staff to form this since the beginning of the year. One of our goals was to create an organization that could have real impact, rather than just a collection of people who’s names would go on a web site and letterhead somewhere. We spent plenty of time talking to various folks both in and out of government who have been involved in things like this in the past and, as a result of our research, are hopeful that we’ve created an organization of “doers” vs. either “figureheads” or “pontificators.”
Now, before you say – “but wait, didn’t we go through this in 2000 when then Governor Owens declared that “Colorado is now an undisputed leader of the world technology revolution” – let’s hit pause (or reset) and try again. Ritter’s goal, of being “bold, ambitious and innovative when it comes to maximizing the use of technology” is much more interesting to me and one I’m behind. I have no desire to see Colorado become “the next Silicon Valley” (if I wanted to be in Silicon Valley, I’d move to Silicon Valley.) However, I’m a deep believer that a state like Colorado can continually improve and I’m proud to be part of an effort to work with the public sector to make an already great state even better.
The Colorado Innovation has three initiatives:
Each of the three co-chairs have taken a leadership role with one of these initiatives and is working with a subcommittee of about 10 high tech leaders. I’m leading State IT, Phil is handling Ubiquitous Broadband, and Juan is leading IT Entrepreneurship. There will be plenty of crossover between committees (e.g. many of the folks on State IT are also Colorado-based IT Entrepreneurs and vice versa.)
I’m working with the State CIO – Mike Locatis – on the State IT initiative. Our goal is a simple one – support Mike in his efforts to drive a multi-year IT consolidation throughout the state that ultimately results in appropriate centralizations of the state’s IT infrastructure. Currently, Colorado is operating under a massively decentralized IT model, which is horribly inefficient and very ineffective. As a first step of acknowledging the importance of the IT infrastructure to the functioning of state government, Governor Ritter elevated the CIO to a cabinet-level post.
I’ve been really impressed with all of my interactions with Mike around this. Governor Ritter’s commitment to getting some real stuff done here is exciting and the idea that the private sector can work with the public sector to move these three initiatives forward is attractive to me.
Overall, there are about 30 Colorado superstars involved in this initiative – look for me to write more about it as we start getting stuff done.
If you go deep into the Feld Thoughts archive bin – way back to December 5, 2005 – I wrote a post called It’s The Trust, Stupid. I still like that post, especially since it shows off my yoda like haiku writing non-ability.
It’s the trust, stupid
Pay attention people
Relevance it is
“Attention” has continued to be an abstract concept that is frequently talked about by a subset of the tech crowd. Due to the short attention span nature of our industry, it has largely been supplanted by talk about Facebook, which seems to have most of the current attention (pun intended.) However, for those of you that have forgotten, there is still this thing called the Web out there that has a lot of interesting data – much of which is a mess.
Nick Bradbury – the creator of FeedDemon (still the best client side RSS aggregator on Windows – by a million miles) – has been working on figuring out how to deal with “attention” for as long as I’ve known him. I remember a Gnomedex several years ago where Attention.XML was all the rage even though I couldn’t wrap my mind around how it would actually work. If you had recorded our conversation from then and played it back to us, it probably wouldn’t make any sense to you, unless you were a martian.
Nick and his buddies at NewsGator have continued to pound away at this. Yesterday they announced that three of NewsGator’s client side products – FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and NewsGator Inbox will support APML. In case you aren’t familiar with APML, its an acronym for “Attention Profiling Mark-up Language.” While it’s another in the long line of ML’s – I expect Nick’s involvement to move this from a generally abstract concept to something that lots of people can actually use.
Some day my computer will actually do all the work for me. And I won’t have to double-click this silly mouse thing so much.
The best thing I read in the paper (or on the Internet, or in my email, or on the side of a building) today was I Am an Op-Ed Columnist (And So Can You!). I rarely watch The Colbert Report (or The Daily Show) – I have enough friends that email me links to the funny bits.
There were so many “best lines” that it’s hard to pick one. Seth’s was (when Colbert was referring to a potentially new entrant in the 2008, or 2012, or 2016 election):
“Well, suddenly an option is looming on the horizon. And I don’t mean Al Gore (though he’s a world-class loomer). First of all, I don’t think Nobel Prizes should go to people I was seated next to at the Emmys. Second, winning the Nobel Prize does not automatically qualify you to be commander in chief. I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don’t need to care about science, literature or peace.”
Mine was:
“Our nation is at a Fork in the Road. Some say we should go Left; some say go Right. I say, “Doesn’t this thing have a reverse gear?” Let’s back this country up to a time before there were forks in the road — or even roads. Or forks, for that matter. I want to return to a simpler America where we ate our meat off the end of a sharpened stick.”
Or maybe:
“And Fred Thompson. In my opinion “Law & Order” never sufficiently explained why the Manhattan D.A. had an accent like an Appalachian catfish wrestler.”
Well – whatever. The whole damn thing is hysterical.
Before I call it quits on the damp Sunday night in Colorado, I thought I’d leave you with a thought that came up in a conversation last week: “Know What You Suck At.”
While my We Suck Less meme has had its day in the sun, I don’t hear people talk enough about what they aren’t good at. First meetings are peppered with “I’ve done this”, “I’ve done that”, “I’m good at this”, “I’m experienced at that.” However, rarely does someone volunteer that they suck at something. I’m often amused by the pregnant pause that comes after I ask “so – tell me something that you are lousy at.”
I have a long list. They include things like:
I’ve also applied this to my venture capital investing. There’s a wide swath of categories of companies that I’ve failed at, including ones that require significant capex investment or are fundamentally telecom oriented, pure services companies, retail oriented companies (e.g. dotcom spinoffs), and things that play only into vertical markets. This doesn’t mean that these aren’t good investments or don’t have the potential to be successful – they are just things that I should stay away from.
Oh – and restaurants. I’ve never been very good at investing in restaurants. After a couple of lousy experiences, I have no aspiration to be good at it. I’m excellent at eating at restaurants, but terrible at investing in them.
I use my “what do I suck at” filter to guide a lot of my behavior. Rather than try to get better at some of these things (like public market investing), I’ve just accepted that I’m not good at it and I should figure out a way to have other people do it for me (e.g. I do broad market allocations but then have individual managers handle specific public market investing for me – and I happily pay them to do what they love to do – and what I suck at.) This applies at a macro level and helps shape my investing themes, how I spend my time, and where I travel on vacation.
Like the adage that you only really learn when you fail, I think knowing what you suck at is more useful than knowing what you are great at. You have two choices when you identify what you aren’t any good at – you can either work on it and get better, or you can avoid it / structure around it. Either is valid, but unless you know what it is, it’ll limit your experience on the planet.
I went for a mountain run yesterday with a long time friend of mine. In between panting, we spent about a half an hour discussing the differences between a CTO and a VP Engineering. There are a lot of different definitions that vary by size of company, style of the CEO (technical CEO vs. sales-oriented CEO), geography, and the founders (are any of them either the CTO or VP Eng) – after we got into the conversation we decided to focus on what it meant in a startup.
As we went through a number of examples from companies I had been involved in, a few consistent themes emerged. The biggest was that one person could play the role of both CTO and VP Eng until a company got up to around 20 people. Once an organization has more than 20 people, there needed to be a separate CTO and VP Eng. In cases where there was only one person trying to do both roles, there were three cases:
When I thought about which was easier to hire at 20 people, it’s clear that the VP Eng is a much easier hire to find and integrate into the business. So – the natural default of the early CTO into the VP Eng role wasn’t very satisfying.
This led us to the definition of CTO and VP Eng that I was working with. I started with VP Eng and thought of some of the great ones I’ve worked with. They are process / management gods (and goddesses) – totally focused on building and shipping products. Most of them are “medium technical” – strong enough to stand up to the engineers they manage, but not necessarily the best coders on the team. A few were rock star developers; a few were non-programmers (although I think that’s more like me saying I can’t program – where the key word that is missing is “anymore” which implies I could if I didn’t have other things to do.)
In contrast, the great CTO’s usually can’t manage their way out of a paper bag, but have huge vision, the ability to pull an all-nighter and crank out a rough prototype of the thing they are thinking about, have the unique ability to translate complex / abstract thoughts into simple English that a non-technical end-user can understand, and a willingness (or even desire) to get up in front of 1,000 people and talk about the latest greatest thing they are working on / thinking about. They are also perfectly happy to work collaboratively with the VP Eng while leaving the engineering team completely alone.
Now – all of this is from the frame of reference of a startup or emerging company. My experience with the Feld Group (prior to the EDS acquisition) helped me understand this from a Fortune 1000 perspective, which is a radically different one that often includes multiple CTOs and VP Engs in an organization along with things called CDOs (Chief Development Officers), CPOs (Chief Product Officers), and CA’s (Chief Architects.) I never managed to find an R2D2 or a C3PO however.
If you follow the Boulder entrepreneurship scene, Jerry Lewis – the editor-in-chief of the Boulder County Business Report – has a video interview series up on the web titled Entrepreneur BizCast. This week he interviewed Lijit Networks and has interviews up with Collective Intellect, me.dium, and TechStars. They are quick – and good. You can also follow along in your RSS reader on the BoulderNews.Info blog.
Atlas Shrugged is one of my favorite books of all time (right up there with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values.) While I’m not a hard core mega-Objectivist, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead both spoke loudly to me at critical points in my life and have had a hand in shaping the way I think about the world.
Atlas Shrugged just turned 50 and I expect there will be plenty of chatter about it. There’s an update on the continued effort to make a movie about it and an excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Brian Doherty titled Rand and the Right. It’s short, pointed, and ends strong:
“Why does she matter to modern politics? It’s not like she is around for conservatives to seek her endorsement. But it is worthwhile for political activists to remember that Ayn Rand was utterly uncompromising on how government needed to respect the inalienable right of Americans to live their own lives, and of American business to grow, thrive, innovate and improve our lives without niggling interference.
Her message of political freedom was enthusiastic, and optimistic, and immensely popular. No major American political party has embraced her message in full. But millions of Americans have voted for her with their pocket books, and hundreds of thousands continue to do so every year.
On the 50th anniversary of her greatest novel, her advocacy of the still “unknown ideal” of truly free market capitalism is something that America, and the conservative movement, needs to reconsider.”
If you’ve either never read Atlas Shrugged or haven’t read it in a long time, you might give it a shot before the next election cycle gets into full swing.