Neumann Family blog

Making good decisions is critical

2009-05-17T10:25:00.000-07:00

Jeff Hawkins spoke at Stanford recently as part of my favorite podcast, the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders class. I’ve heard him talk about his theory of working smarter, not harder before, and I agreed with the concept, but he added a new twist, which unified some thoughts I’ve had about how to work.
I’ve given a lot of thought to the notion that the biggest problem in any startup is working on the wrong thing/waste. I’ve seen surveys, blog posts, videos, etc about it. If you’re in a startup, think back about how company resources have been allocated, and think about what percentage of those were wasted. It’s huge.
So, how do you avoid waste? This is where Jeff’s talk comes in – you make good decisions. It seems stupid and simple, but in my experience, it’s really hard to make good decisions. In my opinion, the best decisions are made when people with different opinions and data are able to add to the shared pool of knowledge. However, this rarely works – people anchor themselves on their opinions, data gets ignored, there are other political forces present, people get emotional, etc. So, companies move forward with less-than-optimal decisions and hope that things work out despite them. That’s OK in a big company, to a point (General Motors). In a startup, a few bad decisions mean you’re out of business.
Back when I was running First Person Software with Brett Levine, I remember we had long talks about critical decisions trying to collaboratively come up with the best choice. We’d game out various scenarios like a chess game, and come to the best decision. This was a huge advantage for us, as whenever it was time to actually make the decision, we were better prepared, and our collaborative approach led to a much better decision than a solo one. Jeff talks about Nokia being a rubber boot company for a really long time, and then someone started making decisions which led them to become what they are today.
Could you be making better decisions in your life? Not that I’m making bad decisions, but I’m sure that if I improved this ability across everything I do, things would be better.

Sadie is here!

2009-03-29T21:43:00.000-07:00

I made a special site just for her!

I'm not trying to get ahead

2008-07-28T14:40:00.001-07:00

In general, it seems like people are always trying to "get ahead". What or who are we trying to get ahead of? Probably most people would say that they want more money, so that they will be ahead of their peers or someone else. I don't really want to get ahead, I want to have "enough". Of course, the big question is "what is enough?". Probably the best answer is to have enough to be able to do what you want to do. Right now, I don't have "enough" because Mary Ann and I want to be able to live in Marin and raise kids there, with Mary Ann staying home with them when they're young. By my estimates, in order to have reasonable access to jobs and pay to raise kids in decent schools, one needs an annualized income of around $250K. That could go up after Obama takes office since he'll raise taxes on those "rich" people.

Back on point, I feel like my peers who are "ahead" of me financially, on the average, aren't necessarily ahead of me in terms of happiness or generally enjoying their lives. Working hard can definitely let you earn more money, but at some point, there are seriously diminishing returns - you end up working all the time and not enjoying your life, sort of like the redhead in the Sex and the City TV show. I love working at home, making cool stuff, learning things and working with smart people all around the world. I hope that I never have to retire from doing that. Now, if I can just get it to pay at least $250K/yr, then personally, I'll feel like I'm WAY ahead!

How to be successful

2008-03-09T13:12:00.000-07:00

I listen to a fair number of talks on entrepreneurism and effectiveness and the like, and I've noticed that there a few themes that keep repeating themselves as the keys to success from all these disparate people.

Be truthful. I think Stan Christensen gave the best advice on this one: Wherever you are on the truthful scale, try to move just a little bit more toward the truthful side. I think this makes it easier to implement. I have been doing this, and it's harder than it sounds, mostly because you usually are not truthful when you screwed up, and so you have to put your ego aside and have some humility.

Apologize. Randy Pausch summarized this well: an apology has 3 parts:

Say you're sorry
Take responsibility for screwing up
Ask what you can do to fix it.

This one is closely tied to the truth one. Pay attention, most people will try to hide their screwups and won't try to fix them. Steve Young talked about following this framework in his marriage. That's a great place to practice it since it's all upside, no risk in getting it wrong. It really works, and it works in the workplace too. If you apologize and ask to fix it, people will really let you off the hook. Bill Clinton and Martha Stewart could have benefited a lot from listening to this one!

Work hard and do the right thing. This one comes in many different forms, but I hear it consistently. If you just work hard and try to do the right thing - you know what that is - then you will have success. I think that Google's "do not evil" company culture is a good manifestation of this. Facebook seems to be trying to make their app platform's rules actually enforce this, which has the double benefit of helping their company, which I find very cool. This one is why I don't like contracts all that much - if I have to pull out a contract after I've done business with someone, then probably they're not someone I should be doing business with anymore. I'd rather do business with someone who is honest and dependable, will do the right thing, and not later screw me on a deal.

OK, go out and be successful!

Post-Mortem on Dovetail

2008-03-01T05:37:00.000-08:00

OK, so Dovetail is technically still in business, so this is more of a personal post-mortem on what I did right and wrong at this startup than one on the company.

If there was one mistake I made in this one, it was hanging on too long. During the summer of 2006, we had already been working on the site for 1.5 years, and we had very little end-user traction relative to the amount of effort we'd put into it. We'd nearly burned through our friends and family money, and there wasn't a lot of hope. However, the market was hot: Grouper was sold, YouTube was about to be sold and traffic to competitive sites was growing. So, we buckled down, raised more money, and kept going. By the time I left, very little had changed from our situation a year earlier, except that I'd spent another year of time and money on it. I should have admitted it was done when it was.

Mistake #2 was going after such a big thing in my second company. I knew this was a classic second time entrepreneur mistake, and I did it anyway. Doh.

Mistake #3 was our selection of technology. We tried to make a Rich Internet Application using very advanced technologies. There is a place for this stuff, but I think we would have been better off just using AJAX or some already known technology. We were able to implement our Facebook app in a matter of weeks, but the GUI for the web site took significantly longer. Not good.

Mistake #4 was not attacking the risk factors soon enough. One of the biggest areas of risk was content. We knew we wanted to be 100% legal (unlike YouTube). We didn't even bother with the studios since we knew their licensing terms would be unacceptable. We all really enjoyed indie films and knew that the films needed better distribution. We spoke to a few indie filmmakers and they seemed interested, so that was enough for us and we set out working on the tech: really nice user interface, and back-end technology which supported reduced bandwidth costs through peer to peer. We knew that these high res films would require a lot of bandwith, and at scale we'd go out of business delivering that bandwidth. Unfortunately, we never really got to scale, and so the back end tech didn't matter: it turned out that the indie filmmakers didn't really want to promote/distribute their films, and people didn't want to watch them, so all the really cool tech that we made ended up being useless. Of course, it's possible that Brett is cooking up something really cool with the tech and this thing could rise like a Phoenix from the ashes, but my point is that we didn't attack the biggest risk factors first.

Things I feel like I did right:
1. Went after an interesting market that I was passionate about. While YouTube is really the only winner in the "online video" market right now, I still believe that a lot of entertainment will be delivered over the internet in the future, and that someone will successfully execute an innovator's dilemma attack on the traditional distribution companies.

2. Outsourced almost everything. Brett, Jason and I tried to outsource as much as we could so that we could focus on the things we thought we of the highest value. While we sometimes had to "take out the trash", I felt we did a good job of spending a big % of our time delivering value to the company.

3. Offshore engineering. During the time we were working on Dovetail, it became possible for small companies to offshore engineering. Brett did an amazing job of identifying great talent in Ukraine, and we worked together to develop processes for working with and managing the team there. Without that team, I don't think we could have gotten done what we did. If you know how to manage an offshore team, it can be a big competitive advantage. If you don't, it can be a big disaster.

4. Efficient capital structure. Because the company was controlled by the founders and owned by the founders and friends, family and a few angel investors, we had tremendous flexibility in our options for what to do with the company. A lot of founders equate fund raising success with business success, and that is a big mistake. If you raise $5M on a $15M valuation, the VC who put that money in is unlikely to let you sell the company for less than $100M. Those types of exits don't really exist, so you're looking at more like $300M+. That's a big deal! There are also exits in the $10-20M area, so if you can raise just a few hundred thousand dollars, then everyone can make money in an exit without having to grow into a relatively big company. I think this is the most efficient capital structure for internet-based software companies these days. If the small company ends up getting huge and you want to "go for it" and raise more money, then that's fine. Slide and Zynga are good examples of this, but they were also founded by people who were previously successful and for whom $20M would be a "failure". If you don't have $10M+ in the bank, then I think your best risk-adjusted return is to maintain maximum control and equity.

Learning about people from their signals

2008-01-27T22:08:00.000-08:00

You can learn a lot by watching the signals coming from what people do. My friend Rich Menendez has this analogy that he told me that I like to use as the basis for this:

Let's say it's your first day on the job. You ask a subordinate to come by your desk at 2:15 the next day and put a post-it note on the bottom of your monitor. Basically, the simplest task ever. Then you wait for the next day and see what happens. Does the guy show up at 2:17? Does he put the note in the wrong spot? Does he forget and apologize? Any one of those things is no big deal, but each of them is a signal of things to come. The guy who shows up at 2:!5 sharp and puts the note on the bottom of your monitor is probably a guy you can rely on. The guy who forgets and tells you there was no point is probably not going to be so reliable.

I think these signals are really valuable in all parts of life. If you can pay attention to the little signals that people give, you can reasonably accurately predict what they're going to do. You can give them the benefit of the doubt, but probably they'll prove you wrong and you'll be facing the same situation you predicted would happen based on your earlier observation.

If you're able to read these signals, then you can make an early decision on how to deal with any issues. It's great to be able to make that decision earlier rather than later - you're going to have to deal with it either way.

Perhaps the best book ever written?

2008-01-27T21:08:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I was up skiing with my friend Tim, and he introduced me to the book Squallywood. This may in fact be one of the best books ever written. I read it cover to cover the night he showed it to me.

The book is about all the big cliffs and hardest lines at Squaw, along with how to ski them, and the ski videos they've been in. They have a system rated 1 to 10 for difficulty. People say I'm a good skier, although I think I'm not really that good. I think that maybe I'd be willing to try one of the lines in the book that's a 1 on a powder day.

In addition to the descriptions, there is a list of places to stand and watch people huck these lines, as well as the GNAR point system for basically local skier tough-guy points. I think that most people will not understand this at all, which is why I think it's genius.

When I got home after the trip, I ordered the 2nd edition of the book. What could they have improved, I wondered? Well, several things:
1. Some people have since skied some previously unskied lines. Nice.
2. They added a chapter about epic crash stories. Awesome.

The only drawback about the book is that it's about Squaw. I'm really not a big fan of Squaw because I had a bad experience there a few years ago where it was late in the season and a few friends had asked me to go up and sell some day passes they had left over. I did so, and one of their undercover security people pulled me into a room and started being all gestapo on me threatening to arrest me and stuff. I didn't feel like I was doing anything wrong, and they way overreacted, which was lame. So, I generally take my business elsewhere unless I'm with someone who really wants to ski there.

Anyway, I highly recommend this book to anyone who is a good skier, or claims to be a good skier. The GNAR point system even gives bonus points for the ego claim: you get extra points for riding up in the tram and exclaiming loudly "I'm the best skier on the mountain!"

I got an Apple TV

2008-01-26T08:07:00.000-08:00

I've been interested in the notion of downloading all of my entertainment content from the internet for a while now. It makes sense. Cable TV sucks - I don't need most of the channels that they give me, and even the channels themselves really don't provide value: why do I care what channel "Heroes" is on? I want to watch the show.

I've tried a lot of these media players over the past few years. The Apple TV is the latest, and I decided to get it because it sounds like it got a lot better with the new software update. Here are my thoughts:

Out of the box: where are the wires? They don't even supply the basic wires necessary to use it. I have a box full of spare wires, and there are multiple ways to connect the Apple TV to your TV, so I'm not sure where I shake out on this. Probably good to not include the wires since I don't have to pay for wires I don't need. That's just for me though.

Once hooked up, it asked me to sync with my iTunes, so I got out my laptop and entered the code, and it started cranking away. The preferences seemed reasonable out of the box, except for trying to copy all of my music. Too much.

Video that played was nice, and generally looked good. Videos I already had on my laptop played nicely. The Apple TV only supports H.264 video, which is kind of annoying because almost all of the stuff I already have is in the DivX or XviD format, so I'm going to have to figure out how to convert it.

I was able to buy a TV show from the iTunes store, and it downloaded and sync'd to Apple TV automagically, so that was cool.

I thought you could buy/rent movies right from the device? If you can, I don't know how to. I RTFM, and I still don't know how to. I see there are movie rentals in iTunes when I browse it on my laptop, but even that is not very clear. Renting movies is one of the things I really wanted to do. Bummed that it's not clear, and the selection is pretty poor too. Movie trailers were pretty cool - I liked being able to browse them right from the remote. Music playing is pretty sweet too. My Airport express was never reliable enough, I think the Apple TV will work.

It's too early to tell whether the Apple TV is going to supplant my 3 year old networked DVD player from Japan, but it's possible. We'll see.

Update: It turns out that they shipped the new Apple TV with the old software. There is no indication of this anywhere. So, now I'm sitting around waiting for the new release.

How to Steal Coffee

2008-01-24T15:51:00.000-08:00

I'm writing this in the Foster City Noah's Bagels, and I'm pretty sure I just saw someone steal coffee. Here are the steps to repeat:
1. Enter store, go to coffee station (which is not behind the counter)
2. Fill own travel cup that you brought in.
3. Go to the bathroom. This ensures that any employees that noticed you have now forgot about you.
4. Leave store when done in the bathroom.

The Slingbox is really cool

2008-01-11T14:42:00.000-08:00

I just got a Slingbox. It's totally sweet. Here's what they did really well:

1. It just works. Like TiVo, there are a lot of wires, but once you connect them, it pretty much just works. You run the install disks on your computer, they connect to the Slingbox, you click next, next finish, and it working. You can watch TV on your computer. Some caveats - the install CD's software only works on XP and below, so if you have Mac OS or Vista, you have to go to the website and download some software, but that was pretty easy and just took a few minutes.

2. It just works. It was pretty cool that it worked on my home network right out of the box, but it was even cooler that it worked on an external network right out of the box. After I was done installing, I brought my laptop down to a local cafe to grab some lunch, and give the Sling Player a spin. All I did was open the player software and it almost instantaneously started working. Amazing.

3. It just works. Because of where I live, I have pretty slow DSL at home, and I was on a wifi connection at the cafe. I expected the picture to be pretty crappy. Wrong. Somehow they're able to auto-adjust everything so that the picture and the sound all work well, even with that remote connection. Cool.

4. It works on my Treo! I downloaded the Treo app and installed it pretty easily, and I entered a very long string of numbers to identify my slingbox, and it also connected and just worked. The picture even looks pretty good. I don't really take trains or wait for buses, but I do have the unlimited data plan from Verizon, so maybe when I'm mad at them I'll leave this on all night so that I can use a lot of data.

Overall, I'm really impressed with this. I know it works with TiVo too, so I think I'm going to hook up my TiVo to this whole setup. I was wondering what I was going to do about watching the Olympics - now I have my solution!

Your call is very important to us (not!)

2008-01-06T17:36:00.000-08:00

I am trying to return something I got for Christmas to Amazon. Here's the procedure:

1. Go online, click returns area
2. Don't have order number, need to speak to someone. Click the kinda cool interface that calls you and connects the call with a rep.
3. Clearly rep is in India, and it's a VOIP connection, so the connection is not clear and they are not good at understanding my american accent. As a result, I need to speak slowly and clearly for them to understand me at all.
4. The rep tries to help me, but is very slow at comprehending what is going on. I do not have the order number, and because of that, they have to look up the information of the sender to find the order. I'm faced with a really slow process of communicating all this information to them.
5. They put me on hold, during which time I hear an endless 15 second loop telling me over and over that my call is very important to them and they'll be with me shortly.
6. Finally they find the order, and say they are going to email me a shipping label and instructions. I hang up.
7. Email doesn't come. Wait a day, call back, repeat steps 1-6.
8. Email comes, but I'm returning 2 things, and only get one return label.
9. Wait a day, call back AGAIN. Repeat steps 1 thru 5. This is the dumbest guy yet. He has no idea how to even process a return, so I lose my shit, start swearing, ask for a manager.
10. Sit on hold for 20 min. Write an angry email to Amazon during that time, get a response that says that they don't accept email at that address. Guy comes back, manager is in a meeting or something, he'll call me back. Everything they have told me so far has been a lie, so I don't believe him. We'll see...

The upshot of all of this? I thought that having a wish list on Amazon would be a good idea. Unfortunately, the downside is that it's almost impossible to return something, so I'm probably not going to put stuff on that list anymore, or only things that I really, really want. Amazon could make a lot more money from me if they would just have even halfway reasonable customer service. The experience is similar with Dell these days, and I won't use their products and strongly recommend against them to others as well.

By the way, are you from India?

2008-01-03T19:22:00.000-08:00

I just got off the phone with a customer service agent who I'm 99% sure was in India. He must have said "by the way" about 25 times during our call. I've heard this many times before when talking to Indian customer service people, and people that I know who are from India also say that pretty frequently. What's up with that? Is there something in the Indian language which is getting translated?

It's a small world (or, all negotiations are serial)

2007-12-31T14:20:00.000-08:00

How many times do you come across people you never expected to see again, having one of those "small world" experiences? All the time, right? I've been listening to a bunch of the negotiation podcasts from the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series. One of their biggest tips is that when you are negotiating, you should expect to see the person that you are negotiating with again.

This one really resonates with me. I've seen a lot of negotiations be carried out as one-time events, where at least one party tries to "win" by getting more than their share of the pie. The problem with that is that the party who "lost" will try to get their rightful share of the pie back in some form. Here are a couple of examples I can think of right off the top of my head:

1. My landlord is making way too much construction noise. We've spoken about it, and he's agreed to things like not working on Sundays. He has not fulfilled his side of the deal. There's nothing I can do about it now, but at some point, he'll want something from me, and I'll be less likely to give it to him.

2. When I left Dovetail, Brett negotiated the departure in bad faith. It was so bad, that I will never do business with him again. This is an extreme case, but the point is that it's a small world, and probably we'll cross paths again. If he'd negotiated in good faith, I would have considered doing something with him again, but since he didn't, I won't even though we have a long history of working together.

3. I am writing this post from my friend Tim's ski house in Tahoe. I'm not a part of the share, but he got the others in the house to let me use it, which was really nice of him. In this case, he's gone out of his way to do something nice for me which costs him almost nothing. He didn't have to do that, and he's taking a risk that I mess the place up. Instead, I'm going to leave it in better shape than I found it so that he looks good in front of his housemates and I have a higher chance of being invited back.

I am going to listen to this advice, and always think of any negotiation I enter into as one of many future negotiations. Generally, it's much better and easier for both parties to come up with a "win-win" solution instead of trying to split the pie and having one side "lose".

Please don't mess with my home

2007-12-27T13:27:00.000-08:00

I've noticed that people have very strong reactions to messing with their homes. Something that might otherwise be no big deal turns into a very big deal when it comes to your home. My landlord, Howard Cooper, is currently renovating the apartment below us. They took it down to the studs and are doing structural work, so there is massive pounding noise into our apartment. That's really annoying. REALLY annoying. On top of that, Howard lies about the work schedule. He has repeatedly told me that he will not have them working on weekends, but then they work both Saturday and Sunday. I had a bad experience with my last landlord selling her home, and I have friends who have problems with their landlords as well (stay away from Citi apartments!).

So, while the pounding is really annoying when I'm trying to work or enjoy the weekend, it's not the end of the world in the grand scheme of things. Despite this, I find myself getting much more angry and annoyed about it than I think is warranted. I thought it was just me being psycho, but my friend Jim is behaving the same way - he's getting way more angry than he would otherwise get.

This leads me to think that the home is sacred and deserves special treatment when you deal with it since people will act irrationally about it.

Please don't mess with my home.

The woman's version of "No friends on a powder day"

2007-12-26T18:29:00.000-08:00

I went to the day-after-Christmas shopping excursion with my wife today. In skiing, there is a saying: "No friends on a powder day." The saying alludes to the notion that on the best skiing days, the skiing is so good that you don't wait around for your friends to catch up - if they're too slow, sorry, see ya in the lodge tonight and learn to ski better for the next powder day.

The day started off on the wrong foot- Saks opened at 7 instead of the traditional 8, which meant that others had already gotten a lot of the good stuff in the shoe department, where the best deals (~70% off!) were to be had. Nevertheless, a few bargains were still picked from the wreckage. A quick pass through the clothing area at Saks revealed there wasn't much to buy there, so it was on to Neiman Marcus, which opened at 9.

Unlike Saks, there is a men's department at Neiman Marcus. The women scattered through the store, and the first call came from Katie, Mary Ann's Mom: "Come down to the men's department, great stuff down here." I abandoned my post as sherpa/helper and went down to the basement, where Katie introduced me to a guy who could help me. I should preface this whole thing with the fact that Mary Ann had told everyone that I needed clothes for Christmas, and I even agreed that after 2.5 years with no salary and a low burn rate mentality, that my wardrobe could use some help. The guy that Katie pointed me to pointed me to the other end of the store and told me to look around and he'd "be right with me." I got to the other end of the store and nervously looked around - the racks were filled with $400 army pants and things which looked like they were torn and spray painted on. To me, this stuff looked like it came from the salvation army. I wandered around for a bit, and when the guy didn't show, I went back upstairs to get Mary Ann's help.

A short time later, Mary Ann's friend Charlotte showed up. She hadn't planned on going shopping that day, but wanted to see the spectacle, so stopped by. Mary Ann sent Charlotte back downstairs with me. Her idea was to find the best looking salesperson down there and see if he could help me. She did that, and I described what I needed. He brought a bunch of pants which were too tight on my fat butt, so round 2 fit better. Charlotte went to work finding some cool shirts. Mary Ann eventually came down with about 15 bags for me to bring to the car, and started yelling at me for trying stuff on too slowly.

After trying a few things in a frenzy, so as not to waste one moment (the sales end at noon!!), we chose a few things and the tailor came over to mark where to let out the butt in the pants. I was left behind to pay. The damage was $1500 - ouch!

This evening, we looked through the stuff I'd gotten. It turns out the pants were NOT on sale and cost $595 plus $24 in tailoring. Clearly I had sucker written on my face for the salesperson. I knew when I was there that I was getting jacked by the way he was only somewhat attentive, acting like I was poor and out of place. It's true. I do not want to spend my money on $600+ pants. Ever. If I had $100M, I probably still would not. I bitched about this to Mary Ann, as I put her partly at fault for not helping me through the process. I want her to stop whatever tailoring is happening and return the $600 pants, as I am already proven to be bad at dealing with these sorts of things. Her response: "You need to learn how to deal with this stuff." In other words: "No friends on a powder day!"

My plan for dealing in the future: do not deal. I don't want any more clothes for Christmas or birthdays or whatever. I will get my own clothes my own way. Maybe I won't look quite as good, but at least I'll won't have to learn a $600 lesson, and the day after Christmas will be much more relaxing next year.

Thoughts about Apple as a company

2007-12-19T21:39:00.000-08:00

The only company that can truly do both hardware and software. This is the main source of their competitive advantage

Probably Steve Jobs is key to this advantage. I hear he’s pretty crazy. Without him, they will probably be in trouble.

They are not very good about servicing their products. They make it easy to buy them, which is a good idea, but they don’t provide a similar level of service/support for their products. I think that damages their brand since they’re not fulfilling their brand promise of “easy to use”. If it breaks and it’s hard to fix, that’s not good. I think that in the long term, they’d be better off doing a better job of support.

People knock them for making their old products obsolete. I can understand that it’s frustrating if you buy something that the “wrong” time, but in general I think it’s a good strategy. Technology moves too fast, you can’t support all the legacy stuff all the time. This is a big problem for Microsoft, but it’s also the source of MSFT’s competitive advantage (keep collecting fees from entrenched users)

I like that when you buy a Mac, it comes with all the stuff you need to use it. You don’t have to go buy all of these ancillary programs and install them, each one of which probably tries to install another toolbar and reset your home page, etc. It’s also nice that the Mac doesn’t come with tons of third party trial apps that will break the computer if you try to uninstall them.

Their products are so much better than the competitive products that they are able to attract really top talent. Same with Google. A very nice virtuous cycle. A lot of industries are like that - people want to go work where they are working on cool stuff.

Is a homeless person's pet also homeless?

2007-12-17T13:46:00.000-08:00

I just read in the paper that some vets did some volunteer work to help people who brought their pets to Dolores park. The headline read "Vets who fret for homeless pets". To me, it sounds like the pets are homeless. I would say they are not. My (limited) experience is that dogs and cats think of "home" as wherever they get their food. If a homeless person is giving a dog food, then that pet is not homeless, its home is with the homeless person.

While I'm on the homeless subject, I've always thought that there is no scenario under which giving money to someone on the street will help them get off the street. This does not apply to street performers (Bush Man makes $60K/year), just people that beg. Does anyone know about this subject? Is it possible for them to get off the street from direct giving?

The ultimate FB app (or, what I learned at Stanford)

2007-12-14T11:13:00.000-08:00

I went to Stanford the other night for the presentation of the Facebook class's apps. In case you don't know about it, they did a 10 week course about making Facebook apps at Stanford this fall. It was taught by a psych professor who specializes in persuasion, so it wasn't all about hacking and making cool stuff.

Based on those learnings and my own learnings, here is the ultimate viral growth app: Free Money. Here's how it works:

Add app, with the instructions that if you invite 20 friends a day for 10 days, you will get $20 sent to you in the mail. The app is one page - instructions and an invite box.
Turn it on, let everyone invite everyone else.
If anyone actually invites 200 friends (it's OK to invite more than once) then put up a text area requesting their mailing address and telling them that it's 6 weeks to process their check.

Within a few weeks, you will have millions of people using your app. You might have to tweak the wording to get people to believe that they will actually get their money. Maybe you can even make money doing this if you can get people to sign up for various mail-in offers, etc, ie lead gen. You'll probably get in magazines and on CNN.

This thought exercise is meant to evidence the big problem with FB apps right now: in order to go viral, you have to make your app not very functional, and instead spend all your energy on making some sort of viral invitation machine. From there, you can make something more engaging.

Facebook has to change this - people are getting sick of the invitation machine apps, and developers who want to work on more interesting apps, but can't get a user base, are getting sick of having to compete with the invitation machine apps.

The City Tax

2007-12-10T09:48:00.000-08:00

I've lived in San Francisco for 7.5 years now, and I'm starting to get a little sick of it. What my friend Dylan calls the "city tax" is the reason. This weekend, our car was broken into near Crissy Field. Mary Ann actually saw the guy do it. $600 for a new window, plus the hassle of an insurance claim on the stolen cell phone. We've also had 2 flat tires on our car in 6 months because the streets are full of glass and nails and other debris. $1000 for 5 tires since we had to replace the spare too. As I type this from my house, I am listening to heavy construction noises from the renovations taking place on the apartment below us. In the apartment before that, the landlord was selling the place, and harassed us to the point that we had to get a lawyer involved. The cops don't do anything about crime (20% murder solve rate in SF), but they are more than willing to give out pointless no left turn tickets and tickets for not having a front license plate. The list continues from there, but you get the point.

Maybe I'm old, but the city is really starting to wear me down. The time to move out to the suburbs draws nigh.

Do power tools and pot smoking mix well?

2007-12-06T11:24:00.000-08:00

The apartment below me is being completely renovated, including removing and changing some of the walls. That means real power tools like circular saws and stuff. The guys who are doing the work are pot smokers. Really. When MA leaves for work in the morning, it's wake and bake time for them - the building's hallways are filled with pot smoke. Today, amidst the sawing noises, I walked into the other room and smelled pot smoke in my unit. Seems like these guys are smoking pot while using a circular saw. I have nothing against smoking pot, but that just seems like a bad idea, kind of like drinking and driving a boat around at night - just bound to end in disaster. I will not be surprised when the ambulance comes to pick up the guy who sawed his arm off accidentally.

Update on Jack Sprat

2007-11-18T21:11:00.001-08:00

A little update on Jack Sprat. I realized that I haven’t had any posts on my blog in a while, and that the current post has to do with Jack having SM. Things are going OK with him. We thought that we were going to have to put him down shortly after he was diagnosed, but the drugs the doctors put him on took effect after a few days, and he’s been able to lead a somewhat normal life. We are lucky that we live near UC Davis, which has one of the best vet programs in the world, and Jack has a doctor there who is watching his case. Unfortunately, the long term prognosis is not good – the disease is degenerative, and eventually he will get to the point where his quality of life is not worth keeping him around for. For now, he has a good life: he loves going hiking, and a Westy named Sydney moved in down the hall, so he plays with her whenever she’s around, and also his BFF Oliver when comes over from time to time.

Jack has Syringomyelia (SM)

2007-09-19T21:05:00.000-07:00

This is bad news. Really bad news. So bad, it almost couldn’t be worse. Basically, this is a disease where the skull is too small for the brain, and so the brain starts squeezing out the hole in the skull near the brain stem. That’s where the cerebellum is located. The cerebellum is responsible for basic motor skills. As you can imagine, it affects the central nervous system and causes a lot of pain. You can read about it here: http://www.cavalierhealth.org/syringomyelia.htm

He’s exhibited symptoms of the disease ever since we got him. He’s always randomly started yelping, but that was rare and occasional. Now it’s frequent when he walks around. When he’s on a lead, he’ll start “air scratching” at himself. He obsessively licks and nips at himself, which we thought was an allergy. He yawns a lot. Turns out that’s because it relieves some of the pressure. He likes to sleep with his head elevated. Same thing.

He became markedly worse on Sunday when were up at Mary Ann’s parents’ house in Marin. Instead of running around the yard like normally loves to do, he would run a few feet and then start yelping like you stepped on him. Weird. Then he was fine for a while. Then he did it again. MA brought him to the vet on Monday, who thought it was a sprained back. It’s a pretty rare disease, and it turns out that this is the normal diagnosis. He’s only 5 months old, so that didn’t add up to MA, so she started doing research. That’s when she found out about SM. Jack exhibits every sign in the book. We went to the neurologist on Tue morning, and he sent us to the pet MRI today (Wed). The MRI confirmed what we knew. He has this, and it’s a really bad case. Normally, signs show up in dogs (60-70% of all cases are Cavaliers) 2+ years old. Jack is 5 months today. Ouch.

What’s the next step? Well, we’re starting with meds. He’s got about 4 different drugs that he’s supposed to take, but the bottom line is that it’s not good. Adult dogs can have surgery that gives them ~2 years more. Jack’s a puppy and still growing. Surgery isn’t really an option at this point. Hopefully we can control his pain, that remains to be seen. We’re going to spend the next few days assessing what he needs really are, but I think the likely case is that he goes back to the breeder in Vacaville since she has other dogs and is around all day and can give him the care and attention that he needs. With both of us having full time jobs, and Jack needing a lot of special attention, I am concerned about our ability to care for him.

This has been really hard on us. Even as I write this, it’s hard not to cry. Mary Ann is really a mess, as she’s been the driver of this since the start. When we started getting serious about our relationship, I made it clear that she had to be willing to get in the plane and fly around with me driving it. She made it clear to me that I’d better be willing to get a dog. Ever since, she’s been looking at different breeds, thinking of names, etc. We finally settled on the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel when we went to the dog show with MA’s father in January. She researched who the top breeders were, and started calling them and getting to know them. She eliminated a lot of the “crazy” dog people, and settled on two breeders, one in Camarillo and one in Vacaville. When we moved to a place that allows dogs in July, and it turned out that the Vacaville breeder had a puppy available, she jumped on it and we picked up Jack Sprat literally the day after we moved in. She has given him nothing but love and attention, frequently at my expense, ever since. So, this is particularly hard on her. Anyone who is Facebook friends with me knows that I have become equally enamored with Jack, constantly posting photos of him and talking about all the fun and funny things he does. Jack has even brought us closer to many of our friends as they come over to see him and play with “the cutest puppy ever!”.

I’m not sure how to end this other than to say thanks to everyone who has expressed concern for him. We’re taking the best care of him that we possibly can.

Notes on Peruvian Culture

2007-09-07T18:48:00.000-07:00

Peruvians like loud muzac. Everywhere we go, the background music is really loud. It started with LAN Peru, the national airline. Apparently, they think that foreign tourists also like this, since if we go to a restaurant and it is empty, within a few minutes of sitting down, the loud muzac will come on. Usually it’s local music, which is like Mexican music with more recorders and flutes in it, and some synthesizers, like 80s sounding. If it’s not Peruvian music, then it’s 80s American rock. Basically the same stuff you’d hear in a ski lodge, but more poppy, like George Michael. Anyway, I don’t get it.

Food: Empenadas seem to be really popular, and are good and in a lot of varieties. That’s the street food here, like Hot Dogs in the US. The national soft drink is Inca Kola. I noticed that all the Peruvians on the plane were drinking it, and now I see it everywhere, it’s definitely more popular than Coke. It’s yellow in color, I’d say almost exactly the color of urine. Needless to say, I was excited to try this stuff? What would urine-colored soda taste like? Turns out that it tastes like bubble gum. The most popular drink in Peru is bubble gum flavored yellow soda. It actually tastes pretty good though. Mary Ann tried some hot chocolate made from pure cacao (main ingredient in chocolate). Not so good. Gross in fact, but that was not because of the chocolate as much as the liquid it was mixed with. In general, the food leaves a lot to be desired. I’ve eaten several of my “emergency” power bars. The traditional holiday meal here (like turkey on Thanksgiving for us) is Guinea Pig. They kill them, boil them to strip the fur, then stuff them with mint and roast them on a skewer, and then you eat it with your hands. It’s actually pretty decent-tasting.

Choose your Guinea pig - sort of like the lobster tank at a seafood restaurant.

The dish, ready to eat!

We’ve stayed in 4 different hotels on this trip ranging from jungle cabin to “4 star” city hotels, and every one of them has had a rock hard bed. The weird thing is that despite being really hard, the beds are not uncomfortable. We asked one of our tour guides if all beds were like that, and they said no. I guess it’s just a hotel thing.

As with any trip which involves a lot of logistics, there have been a few times where things have become mini-crises. When this happens, the people are generally really helpful, but they also say “don’t worry” and then get on with things. We’re sitting there thinking “Hey man, we need to take action on this right now if it’s going to work out!” The thing we’ve come to realize is that what appears to be the people going to get on with their lives is not really what is going on – they walk casually away and then actually start trying to help you!

Almost every merchant requires nearly exact change. If something costs 3 soles and you only have a 20, it’s unlikely the merchant will have change available for you, so they’ll actually leave the store to go find change. There’s a constant mini-struggle to keep smaller coins and bills so that you can buy stuff. We haven’t figured this one out.

We’re staying in a “4 star” hotel in Cusco, which doesn’t have heat in the rooms, and the temp gets down into the 40s outside at night. There is a sign in the lobby indicating that checkout is at 9am! At least check-in is at 10am. I guess there are a lot of early morning flights into Cusco. Our flight landed at 7:05, so that makes sense.

Rules of the road: There are a few traffic lights, and those get obeyed, as there are tons of traffic cops around. Other than that, cars rule the road. If you’re a pedestrian, you’d better get out of the way, because the cars aren’t stopping. They will give you a small beep of the horn to let you know you’re about to be run over at least. The system seems to work well – even dogs have learned to get out of the way, which is pretty funny to see.

Catholicism, but without guilt! In 1532, the Spanish landed with a few hundred people and managed to wipe out all of the Incas and install Catholicism. Apparently, this is a different flavor of Catholicism though, since everyone seems to be guilt-free and happy. My favorite thing is that there’s a custom where you mount a small (6” tall?) cross on your roof, with two bull figurines on either side of the cross to ward off evil spirits. One of the evil spirits this stuff can ward off is your neighbors saying bad things about you or your house. We’ve even seen a few houses with beers next to the bulls. I guess they think God likes burgers and beers. Sweet.

The flag of the Cusco region has got 7 rainbow stripes and looks remarkably similar to the gay flag. That must have led to a few uncomfortable situations over the years.

Peru Trip, first 2 days

2007-09-04T15:46:00.000-07:00

Wow, it’s a LOT of travel to get to Peru’s jungle. Here is what it took to get here, all times are SF to make it easy. Peru is in Midwest time zone, 2 hrs ahead of SF.

7:30 am – Super Shuttle pickup
9:44 am – SF – LA
2:05 pm – LA – Lima
11pm – land Lima. Lima’s airport is 40 min from Lima, so you have to wait in the airport, or pay $200 for a room at the hotel attached to the airport.
3:50 am - Lima – Cusco
5:05 am – land Cusco. Meet expedition people at the airport. Cusco is at 10,800’ elevation, so MA almost immediately started throwing up from altitude sickness. This continued until we were on the airplane to the jungle and descended.
10am – take off for jungle airstrip in a Cessna Grand Caravan, single engine turboprop.
10:45 am – land jungle airstrip @ Boca Manu, elevation 1500’. The Andes really drop off very steeply from Cusco to Boca Manu!
11:15 am – Load into boat to drive down river to Manu wildlife preserve
1pm – Arrive Manu wildlife preserve. Whew, we made it!

This place is located in virgin rainforest in one of the most biodiverse areas of the world. The river that we are located next to eventually feeds into the Amazon. It’s really flat here though – think about this – it’s probably 2000km of river, but only 1500 ft of elevation change for this water to make its way to the Atlantic Ocean

We’re here at a pretty good time – the end of the dry season. The reason it’s good is that a lot of the normal food sources from the rainy season are depleted, which makes the animals roam around looking for food.

We got up at 5am this morning and took a 20 min boat ride to an area where the former path of the river (it changed suddenly during the rainy season 4 years ago) had worn away the land to expose the layers of clay. Parrots and Macaws eat this clay because it helps to somehow counter the toxins that are present in the berries that they eat for food. So, each day at dawn they show up to this clay lick to eat. By they, I mean hundreds of birds. It’s REALLY cool. They have a little blind set up where you can come with your binoculars to watch them up close. First the smaller parrots come. These parrots look very much like the parrots that live in the Telegraph Hill area of San Francisco, and even make a very similar sound. Maybe this is where the pets that originated the flock came from? There are about 6 different species that show up though, and their markings are slightly different. Sometimes, something must spook the birds, and they will all fly off the lick at the same time. The noise of 100-200 parrots all flapping their wings to take off at the same time is pretty neat. Once the parrots are done, the macaws come. These are the big colorful red and green birds that most people think they will see a picture of if they look up “parrot” in the dictionary. Sometimes they are kept as pets, or are with street performers to take photos with in touristy areas. Really beautiful birds. When they fly, they are extremely graceful. They go around in pairs and are “married”. They fly together, sit together, clean one another, etc. They act like they’re in love. If you see 3 together, it’s parents with their baby. Makes me wonder if it’s a mean thing for these birds that are captivity to have to live alone, since there were no solitary macaws in the wild.

On the way back, we got to see some pretty neat things along the river:
- A capybara, the world’s largest rodent. About the size of a golden retriever. It had just crossed the river and was resting on the bank. I guess it eats grass.
- A Giant Anteater. Our guide hasn’t seen one all year, so we were lucky. This thing was really neat, probably 2 ft tall and 4 ft long, all shaggy. That thing must eat a ton of ants every day! Good for it, as there are ants everywhere here. The biggest ones I’ve seen are probably ½ inch long. Yuck!
- A turtle up on a log with a butterfly on its head. I guess the butterflies lick the salt from the turtle’s eye tears in some sort of symbiotic relationship. Cool to see that in person.

After lunch and an afternoon nap, we took a 1 ½ hour hike into the jungle to another clay lick and another observation platform to wait for the tapir. The tapir is the largest mammal in the jungle, weighing in at 250 Kg, about 3 times the weight of a human. The tapir usually comes late in the day, so we got there at 4:30 (it’s dark by 6). We waited silently under mosquito netting for about 1.5 hrs (another group had to wait 5 hours) for the tapir to arrive, but it was worth the wait – it was cool to see such a big animal up close in the wild. At the closest, we were only about 10 ft from it up in the platform.

The Manu area that we are is virgin jungle because it’s impenetrable. They aren’t kidding when they say this – when we’re on the trail, I think the furthest you can see is about 30 ft, and that’s what you can SEE. If you wanted to walk those 30 ft off the trail, you’d have to fight your way through a mass of vegetation.

There are no lions, tigers or bears here, so who is the king of this jungle? Turns out it depends on where you are. On land, it’s the jaguar, the world’s 3rd largest cat (behind lions and tigers). The tapir we saw had a scar from a jaguar attack on it’s hind quarters. When the tapir is young, it is vulnerable since it is small enough that the jaguar can get it’s jaws around the tapir’s neck. When it’s older, the neck is too thick. When the jaguar attacks the tapir, the tapir runs really fast, and tries to run next to the trees with spines on them, which a lot of the palms do. The spines are 4-6 inches in length, so the jaguar doesn’t hold on too long when that happens, and the tapir can escape.

If you’re on the water, it’s the Anaconda. The Anaconda is the world’s most powerful constrictor, and humans are easy prey. Crocs, no problem. The predator of the anaconda is the Giant Otter (6 ft!), but it takes a group of them to take one down. Apparently, the tapir also has a defense the anaconda. It can make it’s body very small when the anaconda is constricting (think of holding your breath to make your body smaller), and then it can very powerfully blow itself back up, causing the anaconda to let go, or risk being literally ripped apart from the force of the tapir’s expansion.

So, it seems to me that the tapir is the king of the jungle, even though it’s a plant eater. Our guide disagreed though since the tapir is not a meat eater.

Check out our photos at: http://www.neumannfamily.org/peru

2007-08-14T09:17:00.000-07:00

What works on Facebook and what doesn't.

I've been spending a lot of time working with customers to help them shape how they might extend their brand to develop a Facebook application. I've been seeing some recurring themes, so I thought I'd spend a few minutes writing them down so that I can crystallize them.

1. If you're going to do it, do it right. Companies that have thought of their Facebook app as a way to drive traffic back to their site are not doing well. We like to give the case study of Veoh vs Flixster. Both companies were given access to the FB platform prior to its launch. Veoh is a video sharing site competitive with Dovetail, but they have allowed tons of content to be illegally loaded onto their site, so there are lots of movies on there that you can download and watch in high resolution. Pretty sweet. Flixster is also about movies, but you can only discuss them and do other fun things. Veoh is stuck at around 4,000 installs, while Flixster has millions. The difference? With the Veoh app, you have to go back to the Veoh site to use it, while the Flixster experience exists completely within Facebook. You can also go to the Flixster site, but you don't have to.

2. You have to provide value to the user. Facebook is not a promotional platform. The "fluffy" apps like Top Friends are doing well in terms of viral spread, but for companies looking to move their experience inside of Facebook, the important thing is to provide value. A very simple way to do that would be to simply provide a view of relevant data inside of Facebook. Here's a good example. I like to use pbwiki for lots of things - personal organization, specs, etc. It would be really cool if pbwiki made a facebook app which allowed me to click on something in my profile which then allowed me to view and even edit my wiki right in a Facebook canvas page.

3. It doesn't have to be viral! There's no inherent viral nature to my wiki example, except that my friends sometimes ask me about what wiki I use, and they would be able to easily see if I had a pbwiki module installed. Same with blogger, which I am using to write this. It would be easier for me to just compose this post right in Facebook rather than having to go to blogger.com and login. Blogger wouldn't have to move all the functionality into FB, just the compose component. I think I would be more likely to write posts. I know it would be way easier for someone like my Dad to write posts - it's a pain to have to remember how to deal with Blogger. Who wants to even remember the URL? No value there, and no value to Blogger.

4. You can leverage the built-in authentication of Facebook to make your app really easy to use. Because you're authenticated when you login to Facebook, you can carry those login credentials through to your app, and assume that any users who come from Facebook are valid. This is a big deal. With Dovetail, a user has to register in order to be able to comment, subscribe, etc. Registration is a pain, and people are scared about giving out their email address for fear of spam. With Facebook, you an integrate the registration process with your existing database. Since it's so easy to add an app in Facebook, you can get people over that registration hurdle really quickly. There are some apps that make you separately register for their service within the canvas page, or worse, on their web site. That creates huge downward pressure on adoption. Better to get them signed up through Facebook, then ask for their email address at a later, more appropriate time.