There is a popular meme (see @sacca and @arrington) going around with people lining up to shout “hurrah!” to Paul Graham’s thoughtful post Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.  You can read it for yourself but the point seems to be that “makers” i.e. web developers or I guess in this case investors have a higher marginal cost to attending a meeting than managers.  This is an oversimplification and a cop out.

First let me state that many many meetings are bad, but that’s mainly because people don’t know how to run meetings.  Good managers learn to minimize the meetings in their organization, and make the meetings that do happen ultra efficient.  I’m not a fan of meetings.  But they happen.

I agree with the thesis of the post – which is that people benefit from having long stretches of uninterrupted work time.  In fact if you attend just about any seminar on time management this is basically what they teach you.  Make sure you have a clear understanding of your priorities and then block time out daily to accomplish the most important tasks.  If your number one priority is to accomplish a job that requires several 4 hour (or 8 hour or 10 hour) blocks of time in the coming week, then just open your calendar and block out the time.  This is called “managing”.  If I am managing someone who is falling behind schedule because they have too many meetings, I will make them open their calendar and go through the meetings one by one and decline the less important ones.   Everyone is happy – meetings just disappeared!

My main problem with the post is the assertion that most powerful people are on a manager’s schedule.  Really?  Who is that?  Most powerful people are work-a-holics who don’t sleep much.  They are on a “managers schedule” during the day, but they are finding blocks of time early in the morning or after the meetings have stopped to be makers.  My first boss ever told me before 6PM is for people, after is for working.  In today’s economy, especially in the tech space, there are no pure managers.  Everyone has making to do.

Seems like Paul’s main problem is that he doesn’t want to work the schedule of these so-called “powerful people”.  No problem there, but lets call it like it is. He needs to go grab coffee with Mark Suster (@msuster), investor by day, uber blogger and maker by night.

The origin of the post is that Paul Graham gets too many “lets grab coffee” requests and feels like he needs to explain his reason for turning down so many requests, but wants to frame it like he has found a better way and distinguish himself from run-of -the-mill managers.

Let’s frame the argument in more reasonable language.  Everyone has a different prioritization for networking – we all agree that even the most makerish coder can benefit by meeting new people once in a while, even if its just on the annual trip to comic con.  Other professionals (like esp. investors) need to assign networking a higher priority.  Some of us can’t possibly meet with everyone who wants to meet with us.  So use your new managing power to block out time for making, and time for meeting according to your own personal prioritization.  My friend Jill who runs a great non-profit in Portland gets a ton of non-directional “lets get coffee” requests and has come up with a rule – she does one such meeting a month.  If you want to grab coffee with Jill you might need to wait 3 or 4 months.  Another strategy that busy people use to good effect is to regularly attend a local meetup so that you can suggest to these people that if they want to grab coffee or a drink then attend the meetup.  Seems like Paul keeps office hours.  Everyone is happy – meetings just disappeared!

But lets drop the “makers vs. managers” characterization.  Just manage to make a little better.

Posted: July 29th, 2009 under work.
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This is my last week at Flux/MTVN. I have mixed emotions about leaving. When I left Yahoo! in July 2007 it was for a lot of reasons, but primarily I wanted to find a role that was closer to product and strategy side of the organization – the running of a business. Joining Flux gave me the opportunity to get back to what I love best and work on marketing, product, organizational leadership, and of course doing deals and managing a business development team. It was a wild ride, we cranked out a lot of groundbreaking products and worked with a ton of great partners. The acquisition of Flux by MTVN was a great outcome for our investors and for our employees, and it gave me the opportunity to help lead a team through the often difficult process of integrating with a large media organization. But its become apparent over the last few months that my career path will take me in another direction and that now is the time to go. Good luck and a big thank you to everyone at Flux and MTVN, keep making it happen.

When I was looking through my desk drawer a few weeks ago I noticed that the cowbell that we rang (loudly) when we closed a new partnership and got a new site live was tucked away there, and hadn’t been rung in a long while.  Somwhere between being a scrappy fast moving startup and becoming a division of a major media company you stop doing things like ringing cheap cowbells when you get up on the scoreboard.  I’m not sure whose bell it was originally, and I hope they don’t mind that I’m taking it with me to my next gig.

Posted: March 25th, 2009 under digital entertainment, flux, social networking, work.
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MTV just launched a cool site that has legal embeds for their entire music video catalog.  Its also integrated with Flux, which is excellent. Here is a Wilco vid grabbed at random. As of now there doesn’t appear to be any advertising, although I’m betting that will change.

Posted: October 27th, 2008 under digital entertainment, digital music, flux, mp3blog, social networking, work.
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I installed the new Disqus Wordpress plugin this week.  I had held off before because it didn’t support trackbacks but the new features made it seem worth a try.  I was really impressed because it did NOT go smoothly.

The process is: 1) Install and activatate the plugin. 2) Tell Discus to import your existing comments from the Wordpress database.  I can tell you from experience that #2  doesn’t scale well.  Database import/expoorts, no matter how simple, basically need to be overseen by a human because some percentage of the time the import/export is going to be misaligned.  Whomever the product people are at Discus had 2 options – they could make ME the lowly blogger manage and debug the process or they could have someone there do it.  Making me do it scales better (in theory they need fewer employees per new user).  It also guarantees that some of their customers are going to have bad user experiences.

Per my post on the new brand math, it’s crucial in the Internet age that you manage every single customer interaction.  Asking users to debug database import/exports would be a big mistake.

So there WAS a problem with my import/export.  I found out because AndrewB at Disqus sent me an email.  I emailed him back telling him I was pulling the plugin down, and to let me know when I should try it again.  He emailed me back this morning and told me “We fixed the glitch”.  I turned Discus back on, and found all my comments imported successfully.

If Disqus had relied on me to debug the import/export, I likely would have pulled the product down and grumbled a little.  Instead, they managed the interaction and got a customer and a glowing blog post.  That is how you scale a business.

Posted: August 14th, 2008 under social networking, work.
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or “How to Throw Away Billions in Brand Equity Away Picking Up Pennies” *

Something has changed. Or maybe it has changed back. The customer is king.  Super brands are developing in markets big and small – brands with fanatical followings, unheard of loyalty, dedicated employees.  And brands that were only a few years ago considered “great” have the lost a great part of their luster.  Customers are becoming so much better informed about their options, and know how to reward companies that treat them right, and punish those that screw them over (see note about Netflix below).

There are objective measurements that try to assign value to brands by comparing the market valuation that a company should have based on the free cash flow it is generating (and other valuation models like P/E etc.) to the market capitalization it actually has.  The difference in the two values are attributed to the value of the pure brand.  There are other survey-based qualitative methods.  And hybrids of the two.

It’s not important to  bother with trying to actually quantify a brand value in dollars and cents unless you are working on an M&A transaction (or trying to sell marketing consulting contracts!).  What’s more important as an executive or manager is to understand the velocity of your brand’s value.  Are your current business practices creating or destroying brand value?

What not to do – Dell Inc.

While surfing the internet recently I found this article from ‘04 in which Dell is actually cited as an example of a world-class brand.  Certainly from ‘95 through ‘02 Dell was a juggernaut from a brand perspective, consistently ranking at the top of quantitative and qualitative brand value surveys.  By 2004 though, the Dell brand velocity was clearly negative.  They abandoned any brand levers except low price, which cut into margins and forced their hand in operations.  They moved to outsource their customer support to India, which was a disaster.  They started relying on making money with gimmicky financing packages.  They didn’t respond when the competition began redefining the form factor.  For the 2 years their competition has been personifying them as oafish buffoons all over the place, and they haven’t been able to respond.  This year the NY State attorney general got a judge to say this about them.

“Dell has engaged in repeated misleading, deceptive and unlawful business conduct, including false and deceptive advertising of financing promotions and the terms of warranties, fraudulent, misleading and deceptive practices in credit financing and failure to provide warranty service and rebates.” OUCH.

Simply put, if you are earning margins by tricking your customers, you are destroying your brand value.  Misrepresenting your level of customer service and whacking people with unseen service and financing charges have been OK in the past, but it won’t work anymore.  Your customers are way too well informed, and they have means of retribution for a bad customer experience that didn’t exist 10 years ago.

Building a brand right – Zappos

By any rational evaluation, building a company selling shoes (they also sell clothing any other accessories) online should be impossible.  Amazon sells shoes.  Shoes have to be tried on, you’ll get killed on the return rates.  There are a million other reasons why selling shoes online is a terrible business.  Zappos is making it happen by being slavishly devoted to building their brand by closely managing every aspect of customer interaction, which is really, really hard.  Do yourself a favor and buy your next pair of shoes from Zappos, and take note of the experience at every touch point.  Its amazing.

The only way to pull it off is to develop an entire corporate culture devoted to improving your consumer facing brand.  State your core values and let them inform everything you do as a company.  Offer trainees a bonus to quit.  Zappos are so confident in their employees they even encourage them to tweet, and aggregate their employees posts. (I follow their CEO and am finding out that they are featured on Nightline tonight).

The good news for my dear readers is that so many companies have negative brand velocity, and even the best brands are miles away from being able to capitalize on the latest technologies to constantly test and improve their brands.  Get out there and help them turn it around!

Brand Death Watch (companies with valuable brands that routinely screw their customers and provide shoddy customer service)

• DirecTV and cable TV companies (can’t wait to cancel my subscription forever)
• Wal*Mart (just say no to cheap crap)
• Starbucks (at least they know it)
• Netflix (mainly because they are killing multiple user queues per account Update:  Todd informs me that Netflix listened to their customers and reversed this decision.  Strong! This is why you leave comments turned on for your corporate blog.  I’m leaving them on the list because of their reliance on pop-unders for customer acquisition.  Everyone knows they are effective, but we stopped using them cause they are so damn annoying.  This is a bigger problem for Huffington Post and Boston Globe who are monetizing with pop-unders via Specific Media.)

Brands making it happen

• Apple (taking brick-and-mortar retail high-end for everyone)
• Amazon (I buy everything here, except shoes)
• Netflix (they do some things right see above)

Who am I missing?

Posted: July 7th, 2008 under social networking, work.
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I blogged about the Facebook ads targeting the Yahoo employee network a few months back. It turns out that the VC behind the ads has put up round two to see if the continued uncertainty at Yahoo is helping his CTR. It is. He’s also targeting MSFT employees.

Yahoo’s employee base has a higher number of entrepreneurial types I’d guess, since a larger percentage of the employees came aboard via acquisition.

My own unscientific research gleaned from talking to my friends at Yahoo! – the ads were definitely noticed.

I always said during my tenure at Yahoo! that is MSFT did finally acquire them, during the resulting bureaucratic confusion I would simply stop coming to work and see how long I could keep getting a paycheck a la Office Space. My over/under would be 12 months.

Posted: February 8th, 2008 under social networking, work.
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While the twins were eating a turkey and corn bread stuffing scramble for breakfast, I was reading a very thoughtful editorial in the LA Times by Ezra Klein. The gist is that we are social beings, so people make us happy, but we’re also competitive beings, which explains why we work so hard for “stuff” to keep score. As I have reflect on a very satisfying year of my life over the holiday, Klein’s article provides a framework for explaining my strong feelings of happiness and well being. I’ve been able, somewhat unwittingly, to channel my competitive nature and value my social nature.

Work – output not politics: Last summer in the first of what would become a seemingly endless cycle of re-orgs at Yahoo!, I was given a lateral when I could have been promoted. They did give me a big raise and a title bump but it was one of those “we’re afraid you might leave” promotions. Had I been focused solely on the politics of the situation I might have done something rash like jump to another company or another division in Yahoo. What I did was put my head down and re-commit to doing what I was good at. Eight months later I had closed the biggest deal of my life and by force of will launched the Sansa Connect. It was a great product and arguably the best press Yahoo! got in 2007, even though the product was not a financial success. But when I reflect on the whole affair though, the best part of the process was working so closely with some of Yahoo’s best people: Dave Goldberg, Ian Rogers, Roberto Fisher, Suman Nichani, Dave Mowrey, Mike Cowan, and literally dozens more. Focusing on being effective at my job, not the politics of my job, led to great satisfaction because of the connections I made while being the leader of a team.

Work – remember what makes you happy: Towards the middle of the year when the re-org machine at Yahoo was in full swing, I found myself once again at the short end of the internal politics stick, spending more time trying to justify my existence than actually doing anything meaningful. I was being told to stay positive and that a VP title would be coming in the fall, but it was pretty obvious that nobody knew anything and the only thing certain was more uncertainty. Yuck. After my first meeting with Evan Rifkin, CEO of Flux, I knew my days at Yahoo! were coming to an end. I was a matrixed BD guy in a company that had no clear strategic direction – I wasn’t part of a team. When I talked to Evan I remembered my time at Musicmatch and Relegence and even Yahoo! Music – working closely with other great people as part of a team with a common goal. Even though working in a small cutting edge tech company can be extremely unsettling and nerve wracking, I take great satisfaction in working on a tight team, and I hate spinning wheels and playing big company politics. It was hard to leave the numerous good friends I made at Yahoo, especially my team, but now I have a new team and we’re making it happen.

Social tools help, despite being silly: I adopted two pieces of technology in the past year that have greatly enhanced my social nature: Twitter and Facebook. Facebook has very few real practical or professional applications, Twitter almost none. But both tools allow me to keep tabs on my friends and co-workers and provide updates about my day-to-day in a way that is consistently pleasant. My friend Mike Manning was so anti-twitter at first that he registered the domain ihatewitter.com. But now he’s traveling around the world and it seems like blogging is too much effort, but his twitterroll has been great fun to follow. Its interesting to note that neither of these tools are very competitive. Whereas not everyone feels comfortable blogging, anybody can twitter effectively. My friend Patrick Barry sends about 1 twitter a month, and its still worth it. And I stay away from the dumb f8 apps that have you rating people’s looks etc. I can only hope that my friends and family who are a bit older and less tech-savvy will adopt Facebook and Twitter in the coming year.

Embrace Urban life: One great decision Jen and I have made is to live and work in Santa Monica. I don’t understand why people decide to commute in from the Valley or Redondo so they can have a bigger house or a yard or other trappings of “success”. I ride my bike to work, dropping the boys off on the way. Jen often walks to her job. Sure, we rent a small house with a tiny yard, but we convert 10 or so hours a week from sit in the car alone time to family time. How much is that worth? Walking to the park and farmers market on the weekend sure beats driving to the local big box supermarket, too.

Working Out – teamwork without competition: My two main physical pursuits these days are mountain biking and yoga. Mountain biking is social – I go with the same small group every weekend. But the guys are all super laid back so we aren’t hung up on who is in better shape or who has the best bike. We just bullshit and sweat. Yoga is interesting because its a compelling competitive sport, but you don’t keep score. With the right instructor, every yoga workout is about pushing your body and mind to its limits in the context of a roomful of similarly challenged souls. The ethos of yoga is non-competitive while being very social.

So thanks to you Mr. Klein. I’ll try to remember to forget about titles and other meaningless competitive measuring sticks, and stay focused on friends, family, and keeping touch with my fellow man.

Posted: November 25th, 2007 under mountain biking, social networking, work.
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LA’s best pizza

Originally uploaded by steveray.

Is Joe’s – it opened last week, a transplant from Greenwich Village.  Far and away the best pizza I have had outside of NY or Chicago.  We are eating it like crazy here cause its on the next block.  We are seriously concerned about our long term health and weight  prospects.  This photo is the buttery cheesy garlicy white pizza.  I just hammered 2 pieces and I’m eyeing another.

Posted: November 20th, 2007 under food, work.
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A new VC has apparently targeted the Yahoo “network” on Facebook for some recruiting ads. This is the first freaky facebook ad I have seen. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they get an investment or two out of it either.

Posted: November 13th, 2007 under social networking, work.
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Collier at work

Originally uploaded by Steve R’s screen.

Explaining the strategy around a potential deal with a certain partner.

Posted: April 17th, 2007 under moblog, work.
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