smallchou

Amazon's Blind Spot: Taste

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:03:51 -0400

Let me get this out of the way first: I really like Amazon.com:

I’m (very) long on Amazon stock.
I buy everything that I reasonably can using the service, shipped to me quickly (and free) through my Amazon Prime membership that I happily pay for.
Hiplist uses at least five different AWS services, all of which I’ve specifically chosen over competitors.

If you put a gun to my head (please don’t do that) and asked me to guess one technology company that my future grandchildren will be using 50 years from now, I’d pick Amazon.

And I definitely agree with the recent post by the founder of Bonobos, Andy Dunn, that Amazon is *the* bear in building an E-Commerce company. It’s a great read from someone smart who’s in the midst of building a durable business in one of Amazon’s markets from scratch. [Side note: an honest first-person piece like that is an example of why the Internet is awesome]

That said, I was surprised that he didn’t directly touch on what I think is Amazon’s most significant blind spot: taste. More concretely: taste, style, personality, opinion, and emotion.

Clothes. Shoes. Art. Interior design. Furniture. Vehicles. Destinations. Sure, some people make these purchases with function as the only barometer. For most though, these purchase decisions (and the research that goes into them) are driven by personal taste and subjective emotion. There is no right answer to the question, “Which of these should I buy?”

These are the purchases where human beings go to experts for taste and guidance. Where they see something a friend has and they, in turn, desire it. Where they feel a need to brush against the material or view it in the flesh to really experience it. It’s their emotional reaction that drives these decisions. These are the purchases that are in Amazon’s blind spot.

In Dunn’s post, he writes that Proprietary Pricing, Selection, Experience, and Merchandise are the, “four strategies in the marketplace to deal with Amazon’s incumbency.”

I think there’s another strategy (an indirect one) that a few companies are taking: amassing a digital representation of personal taste and, in turn, creating native taste-driven demand.

It’s Pinterest. It’s Wanelo (Want! Need! Love!). It’s Houzz. Environments where self-expression of personal taste is not encouraged, but expected.

The additional beauty of these platforms are that monetization shouldn’t just be a bolt-on part of the service, they must be part of the experience or the experience actually suffers. Because if you’re the platform where I finds things I love and keep track of them, at some point it’s actually a pain in the ass if I can’t buy them with one click.

Think about that for a second: a service where monetization isn’t just a feature, but is actually *the* experience.

Rest In Peace.

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 13:02:14 -0400

I’ve been to two funerals in my life. I’m very lucky to be at the age of 31 having only experienced that twice.

The first was my grandfather’s. In many ways he raised us. He was a brilliant man, small in stature and a giant to me in so many ways. When it was his time, we had a week to prepare ourselves. I cried for months. Silently in public and loudly behind the door of my dorm room. This past September I cried again at his grave. All indications are that I will do that the rest of my life. He lived a full life.

The second was my uncle, who passed suddenly and left behind two beautiful daughters who moved to my parents’ home. It was affecting to me because of his passing, but also because of the pain I witnessed in Angela and Emily, who would have to endure so much.

This weekend I’ll be attending a third. Suddenly. Shockingly. Tragically. And with no reason.

It’ll be the third, but it will be uniquely painful, like all of them are.

It will be the first funeral I attend of a generational peer, of someone who I imagined, or rather (stupidly) ‘expected’, to see in old age.

I never thought twice about it. We would visit with each other until we were 90, trading stories about children and grandchildren. Or stories about how she had accomplished all of the ambitious dreams of her life, that she shared with us so readily. Or the story about the time she designed and made her own bridesmaid dress to walk down the aisle at our wedding. These are stories that will never be shared from her mouth, a strange feeling at our young age.

If it will be hard for me, I shudder when I think about the loss for her family. To bury the youngest person in your family… I can’t imagine…

And, selfishly, I sob when I think about the loss for Ivy, who has lost one of her very best friends. She loses a spirit that she looked to as a model of confidence and passion. A partner-in-crime, to share both Mount Fuji and Comic-Con with. A godmother of a future child of ours. And, maybe most of all, a trusted confidante.

I often listened to them talk, lingering just within earshot at our dining table. They chattered about men, jobs, plans, families, fears, and dreams. It was amazing to hear the plain honesty with which they spoke to each other. No pretense and, like so many things Betty, no holding back. Ivy would emerge from these chats energized about life and full of optimism… for both of their lives. It was so unique. It’s tragic that these end so young.

I feel pain for myself, but so much more for the family and my wife. I cry for the void that I won’t be able to fill in her life, and then I cry because that makes me feel so cowardly.

I know these feelings will pass, but right now… this is hard and this is real.

Rest in peace, Betty Ho. You will be so missed.

Being a contemporary sports fan

Sat, 02 Feb 2013 00:34:17 -0500

The most famous sportswriter of our generation is so popular that, for most males in the U.S., he just goes by his last name: “Did you read Simmons yesterday?”

He doesn’t write stylistically like Grantland Rice (by the way, if you didn’t know where the website name “grantland.com” came from before that, you’re welcome) or his contemporaries wrote, but he’s been equally appropriate for his own generation.

I enjoyed reading Simmons for a long time until the Boston sports surge a few years back (when he turned into an insufferable homer blowhard), but I had forgotten exactly what I liked. His column today reminded me in a hurry:

I believe that Ray Lewis cheated. I believe that to be true based on circumstantial evidence, his age, his overcompetitiveness, the history of that specific injury, and the fact that his “recovery” made my shit detector start vibrating like a chainsaw.

I believe in my right to write the previous paragraph because athletes pushed us to this point. We need better drug testing. We need blood testing. We need biological passports. We need that stuff now. Not in three years. Not in two years. Now. I don’t even know what I am watching anymore.

I believe we need to fix this disconnect between our private conversations and our public ones. Cheating in professional sports is an epidemic. Wondering about the reasons behind a dramatically improved performance, or a dramatically fast recovery time, shouldn’t be considered off-limits for media members. We shouldn’t feel like scumbags bringing this stuff up. It’s part of sports. [espn]

It’s a great, great column on sports in our modern age. Read it here: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8904906/daring-ask-ped-question . I don’t quote that here (just) because I can’t stand Ray Lewis and I’m a huge 49ers fan. I quote that passage because it’s illustrative of his column and it fully represents my own experience in watching sports over the years.

When I was a kid, I woke up every morning (on my own) at 6:30am. I hopped awake, grabbed the SJ Mercury News on our front lawn, and read Section D (Sports) cover-to-cover. Every. Single. Day. No exception.

There’s no way I’m that consumed by sports today - not even close. Part of that is being 31. But part of it is not being able to trust what I’m seeing on the television and in-person. Am I watching the entirety of the career of the single greatest NBA talent in history? Or am I watching a cheat who had the body of a 25-year old at 16, but everyone blindly chose to ignore it (“Wow, he’s 18 and hammer-dunking on high school kids with acne like Vince Carter at the NBA Slam Dunk Contest! That makes sense”)? To be honest, I’m sad that I feel like there’s a 1% chance I would be justified in feeling that way about Lebron.

I’m glad that Simmons wrote a piece this honest and forward. It’s why real sports fans started enjoying his work in the first place.

And I know, in today’s environment, if my future child started getting as consumed by sports as I was as a child, I would cancel my newspaper subscription and explain to her that, “These are not heroes. They are probably cheaters.”

Heroku and Root (aka "apex" or "naked") Domains

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:19:00 -0500

As I’ve spent a lot more time writing code and building web applications, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many PITA technical problems are solved by searching Google and finding a blog post that explains a pithy solution. It’s pretty amazing, so here’s a contribution:

Let’s say you have your site awesomesite.com . It’s an awesome site, so when someone hears about it, you want them to be able to type “awesomesite.com” into their browser and have something happen. You generally want one of two things to happen:

Root domain redirection: Your user should be redirected to http://www.awesomesite.com
Root domain serving: Your user sees your site at the address http://awesomesite.com

It’s a subtle difference. If you try the major web properties out there, you’ll see a mix. Google (“google.com”) and others 301 redirect to the ‘www’ subdomain. Pinterest, Twitter, and a few others serve their site directly from the root domain (and actually, if you type in your browser “http://www.pinterest.com”, it will 301 redirect to http://pinterest.com .

Consistency in picking one way or the other is both good for users and good for SEO purposes.

It’s not a huge deal if you have a lot of control over your stack, but let’s say you’re using a platform like Heroku. Heroku is a fantastic product that abstracts away much of the complexity of configuring, deploying, and maintaining a web stack. When I wanted to deploy a Flask application for the first time and started using Heroku, it took literally 10-15 minutes to get the app up on the web, doing nothing but following this tutorial. And I didn’t know anything.

But using Heroku caused a challenge for scenario (2), serving from the root domain. That’s because Heroku serves your app at a URL like http://falling-frost-2989.herokuapp.com (the old one for Wisepatch) instead of at an IP address. Heroku does this for really good reasons, but it still makes http://awesomesite.com difficult.

If you want to serve http://www.awesomesite.com from that URL, you just go in your trusty DNS settings and set a CNAME record to point your subdomain ‘www’ to ‘falling-frost-2989.herokuapp.com’.

But at the root domain level, you really can’t be using CNAME records. It’s out of spec and it can apparently cause lots of issues with email delivery, etc. Instead, you’re supposed to use an A record which (wait for it…) means pointing at an IP address, which we just said Heroku doesn’t recommend. In other words:

CNAME record: http://example.com —> falling-frost-2989.herokuapp.com

A record: http://example.com —> 123.456.789.012

And it’s even challenging for scenario (1), just redirecting the naked domain to the right place. So what are the options? Here are the simplest possibilities I found:

(1) Root Domain Redirection

There are several simple options for just pointing the DNS for the root domain to an actual IP address, which then 301 redirects the user to www.awesomesite.com , while continuing to use a product like Heroku to serve your app. The fact that people explicitly went and built something like this probably indicates how prevalent the issue is.

Keep in mind, when you do this, you are actually saying, “Hey, when some dude types in ‘awesomesite.com’ into his browser, I am ceding control of where he goes to whoever runs the server at this IP address. I have to be pretty confident this ‘whoever’ is trustworthy.”

Here are some:

http://wwwizer.com/naked-domain-redirect . I was surprised by how many people suggested this on forums. I did not go this route.
Google Apps. Perhaps recognizing how useful this small feature is, Google Apps provides a feature that redirects naked domain requests to another of your choosing (like ‘www.awesomesite.com’). So if you already use Gmail for jack@awesome.com email address, go to Domain Management and look under ‘Domains’. Note, as of recently Google Apps for a domain is no longer free.
Your DNS service may have an option for this. For example, Amazon Route 53 and S3 has a way to handle this using the ALIAS record in Route 53.

(2) Root Domain Serving

This is more challenging since, as noted before, your DNS service is supposed to take in the request to the root domain and essentially give back an IP address or some kind of redirection.

Setting your root domain to a hard IP address sort of ruins many benefits of using something like Heroku or EC2. Heroku puts it well:

Specifying IP addresses at the DNS level prevents your platform provider from responding to network events and re-routing traffic to your app.

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/avoiding-naked-domains-dns-arecords

So what are you to do? The simple two options that I ended up settling between (and I’m sure there are others) both do something similar. These DNS services have their own kind of record (an ALIAS) that effectively takes in a root domain request and converts it to an IP address behind closed doors, basically looking like an A record to outside parties:

DNSimple.com . They describe it well here, but the company regularly checks the host name you provide (could be Heroku, could be any other domain), stores the IP address it resolves to, and returns that when your root domain is requested. $3/month.
Route 53 from AWS. They do it similarly, but the only hosts you can specify are an AWS Elastic Load Balancer (tied to EC2 boxes) or an S3 bucket (static web pages/content). Basically, they won’t do that “behind the curtain” resolving for external servers (makes sense). The challenge is this requires leaping off the Heroku stack and moving to EC2 directly.

Conclusions

If you’re using a stack like Heroku and are pretty ambivalent between serving your site on http://awesomesite.com and http://www.awesomesite.com , it’s pretty much a no-brainer to serve your site on the www subdomain and use one of several simple options for redirect root domain traffic to www.awesomesite.com. Just make sure you set up the 301 redirect properly.

If you’re really set on serving your site straight from the root domain (because you’re going to be the next Twitter or Pinterest) and you’re not averse to stepping off the Heroku stack, the most straightforward solution is using the AWS Route 53 + AWS ELB + EC2 combination, since you’ll probably be using AWS anyway.

Guns. Admittedly From A Liberal Californian.

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 01:09:52 -0500

I’ve been trying to better understand the contentious discussion around guns in the US in the wake of last week’s horrible tragedy. As someone who considers himself fairly free-thinking, I wanted to make sure I was at least attempting to take as balanced a view as possible.

Some links:

The Atlantic had an interesting, balanced profile on Japan, which is more or less a country without guns. The conclusion I came to is that while having no guns would be much safer for all involved, the price would be (in theory) a police state and (in reality) impossible.
Gun proponents often cite the use of guns for the greater safety of people against evil. Slate has found that it is true (and, no surprise, also false) that armed citizens have stopped mass shootings.
I’ve found many of the gun advocate arguments to be so bizarre that I can’t really comprehend them actually taking them seriously. Here’s a pretty reasonable facsimile to my own thoughts on most of them by The American Prospect, especially 2, 5, 6, and 8. Is that because I’ve never been interested in guns or because I’m thinking lucidly? I don’t know.
Australia’s gun buyback program had positive results in reducing suicides and mixed results in reducing homicides. It would also be politically and financially challenging (impossible?) to replicate in the US.

Thoughts:

Checks on Government: It’s hard for me to empathize with folks who believe that arms you can purchase at Big 5 will enable you to defend yourself from the full tyrannical might of a wayward United States military (if that ever happened), but I can conceptually understand the argument and do not agree with it.
Personal Protection: As a husband (and hopefully someday a father), I can empathize with a desire to be able to protect my own family from harm. I just can’t imagine that purchasing a highly-dangerous weapon that I do not want to become an expert of is the best way to protect anyone.
The Divide: I wish commentators better framed the dichotomy between your everyday gun owner and your everyday gun control advocate. To me, no comment illustrates the divide better than, “Well, are you going to ban cars and knives too?” It succinctly explains how one group considers the value of a gun to be on par with an automobile and a kitchen instrument. That’s not a knock, it’s something that is just not understood by gun control advocates. Gun advocates seem to *really* consider gun control to be similar to a TV falling on a child at a Best Buy and the government asking them to get rid of their TV’s.
That Lens: When you look at guns in that lens (as a possession and a personally-useful object), you can quickly grok the intensity of responses by gun owners and advocates. It turns total bewilderment into (at least) normal disagreement.
300M Guns: There are estimates of almost as many guns as people in the United States. It’s disheartening to see legislators saying they’re committed to gun control, but then grandstanding on legislation that does not touch any of those already-purchased guns.

Poker and Risk Mentality

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 14:26:34 -0400

I’ve had a number of people come across my answer to “What did you learn from player poker?” on Quora and ask me about it. The most interested questions were about ‘Risk Tolerance’ and my assertion that the concept of expected value can make a risky-looking decision logical.

This is not an uncommon view among poker players. For example, I just came across a new answer to a question on Quora from a (self-titled) Professional Poker Player. I’ve never met him and I don’t know anything about him, but his response to a clear situation (note that I wrote the same advice to the question) is telling:

You have so many fucking outs it isn’t even funny. I would liquidate my net worth and toss in the keys to my car, the deed to my house, and the birth certificates or [sic] all my children.

Of course he’s joking I think (one can never be sure with poker players) but the sentiment is normal for an experienced no-limit player in this scenario: the odds are strongly in your favor here, so you put all of your chips in the middle of the pot and hope it works out as it should. Nevermind that it may very well turn out very poorly.

It’s simple: the math and numbers lead to logic, which leads to comfort with risk. It’s a type of logic that is rarely demonstrated in such stark terms in the real world.

Stanford and Penn State

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 09:56:00 -0400

Every morning as a kid, like clockwork, I woke up at 6:30am to grab the San Jose Mercury News from our front door and read Section D (Sports) cover-to-cover. It was a daily routine. A ritual, really. And it was a reflection of what I spent the rest of my day doing as well. I think because school always came easily to me, I quickly found myself filling my day with sports: playing, trying out, watching, reading, following, talking, coaching.

If Americans are a people obsessed with sports, I guess I would qualify as evidence of that. The son of two immigrants, I somehow found myself at age 10 reading high school sports scores before eating toast in the morning.

When I was at Stanford, some of my friends and I would discuss what the school would be like if it housed a prominent football program. Maybe it was the maturity of older age or the stunning realization that I wouldn’t be a professional athlete, but even at the time, I remember thinking that it would be horrible if Stanford bent its admissions standards, coaching pay grades, or academic reputation to make room in the school’s public image for a team that scored more touchdowns than its opponents. It didn’t even cross my mind that a school would ever cross its own morality to protect a football program.

Enter Penn State, Joe Paterno, and the Freeh Report:

In order to avoid the consequences of bad publicity, the most powerful leaders at the university — Spanier, Schultz, Paterno and Curley — repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse.

On the list of concerns that a human being has about the horrible Sandusky saga, the reputation of the non-human organization surrounding the crimes is pretty low. Legal and moral crimes were committed by many men against the victims and families - that’s very obviously the worst part about it. And those men should be blamed and held accountable.

When you dig further, this whole saga also starts to look like a commentary on the dangers of handing over the reins of a school’s identity to something as meaningless as a sports team. Would these men have been enabled and motivated in the same way if Penn State’s football program wasn’t the dominant identity of the school? After all, even after the report’s release, some terribly-misguided folks were still supporting Paterno’s legacy.

Luckily there are some Penn State folks asking those types of questions. Michael Weinreb, at Grantland, has a pained piece on this:

It is clear now that the most powerful leaders at my university perverted that cause, and if it takes a temporary shutdown or de-emphasis of the program to right that wrong, those of us whose primary concern is the integrity of this university we held dear will accept that…. The Grand Experiment is a failure, and the entire laboratory is contaminated, and there is no choice but to go back and start all over again.

It is enough to make a proud alumnus of Stanford and football fan wonder if the recent (amazing! unreal! Harbaugh! Andrew Luck!) prominence of the Stanford Football program is a good or bad thing for the school’s identity. Certainly the crimes at Penn State were first and foremost caused by morally-ugly individuals, but it would be foolhardy to believe that they all started that way and behaved that way independent of the football program’s reputation.

The success of the football program enabled it to dominate the identity of the school. And when that identity was threatened with embarrassment, the caretakers of that identity chose horribly. Could that happen in lesser or equal degrees at other schools? Absolutely.

I hope Stanford Football keeps playing and succeeding at its latest levels, but much more than that I hope the identity of the school never becomes dominated by a something as meaningless as football or sports.

3 Observations For Other First-Time Founders

Mon, 07 May 2012 11:52:55 -0400

So you’re going to leave your safe, cushy job and start a company. Nice!

Well, considering we’ve spent a few months starting Wisepatch, I’m clearly highly qualified to give you amazing advice about starting your specific company. Here goes…

I’m kidding, of course. And by the way, you should probably be weary of anyone who gives you definitive, “you must follow this” advice about your particular startup, especially in the first days. When I played a ton of poker, people would often ask me things like, “should I play a hand like J9 suited?” For anyone who has played much poker, there is only one right answer to that question: ‘It depends.’ For the most important areas of your company (product, technology, monetization), it’s probably the same way. Probably.

That being said, what might be helpful are a few observations that I’ve combed from several months of being a first-time founder. A quick look at three things you will probably experience:

You Will Talk About Your Idea All The Time: Have you ever met a random person at a party and been asked what you do? If you work at a big company like LinkedIn, you just say, “I work at LinkedIn.” Maybe there’ll be some chit-chat about someone you know in common, but in four+ years I never once had someone follow up with, “Tell me in excruciating detail exactly what your startup is… Oh yeah? How is that different than Quora or Yahoo Answers?” Now I have that conversation every day. Know that you will be asked about your company or product every single day, by everyone. And when I say everyone, I mean last week the postal worker I bought stamps from asked, “How’re you going to get distribution?” A homeless guy outside suggested I integrate with Facebook (Though that advice we really did follow. Hey, he seemed pretty smart?). If you don’t have a pithy, short way to describe your company now, you will soon.
Everyone Will Be A Doubter: When Chris Dixon says that being a founder means starting with, “no one who believes in you (except perhaps your closest friends and family),” he is absolutely right. Not too many people will be openly dismissive about your idea or product, but you will feel the skepticism seeping out of their pores. And look, they’re probably right. The odds certainly say so. But hey, the only alternative to continuing to think and work hard is to agree with them and demonstrate that you have no conviction for your own idea. And that’s pretty lame. Don’t do that.
Everything Will Look Like Competition: If you’re working on a product in a large market, the first few months will feel like a press barrage of companies that sound exactly like your product. This will be exacerbated by the fact that everyone who you’ve talked to about your idea will forward you every TechCrunch article remotely similar to your idea. Oh, and of course Andreessen Horowitz / Greylock / SV Angel / Benchmark / YC / Sequoia / Your Mom invested in their Series Seed / A. The first few times, you may panic about that TechCrunch / Venturebeat / PandoDaily post. After a while, you’ll realize that the world is large, markets are huge, hunger is on your side, and you should just get back to working on product.

"We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details."

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 19:14:35 -0400

“We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.”

- From Jeff Bezos. My favorite quote about building products/businesses.

Thoughts on Jeremy Lin

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Like a lot of people in my generation, Michael Jordan drew me in to basketball. Watching MJ marked the first time in my life that I was truly inspired by the obvious brilliance of an individual at his chosen craft. That experience triggered my love for basketball. It drove me to practice hard at the game and try out for my junior high school team. It compelled me to get better and make my high school squad. And it motivated me to spend years coaching basketball, trying to teach kids to play the game correctly.

But ultimately for me, as a Taiwanese-American kid living a few miles from Stanford, the lesson from Michael Jordan was always that (1) a human being could select a craft based on sufficient talent and (2) become the best in the world at it given unreal dedication. It was never, ultimately, about basketball.

That’s at some level because Mike just wasn’t like me (physically, culturally, etc.), but also because I never saw anyone like me playing with him. Sure Rex Walters was a Japanese-American NBA player from that era who grew up in San Jose, but I didn’t even know that until years later. And, as Walters said himself, “I consider myself Japanese-American. I just don’t look it.” At some level, it wasn’t really until Yao Ming was playing in the NBA that I actually believed people of Asian descent were even allowed in The League. And while Yao may have broken some kind of barrier, that was always explained by his absurd height, paired with freakish coordination for his size. In other words, he wasn’t *really* like me.

I think that’s why so many Asian-Americans are so taken by Jeremy Lin’s sudden emergence on the NBA scene. I mean, he’s like me! We grew up a few miles away from each other, living in supportive and strict Asian households. We’re both close to six-feet tall and look physically like, well… Asians. We both did well in local public schools and dreamed of attending Stanford down the street. We both loved and immersed ourselves in basketball. We even played in the same high school league, just a few years apart. Many Asian-Americans share at least some portion of those same similarities. At some level, I think they’re then thinking, “Dude is just like me and he’s breaking down Steve Blake, drilling corner threes against the fucking Lakers? What world are we living in where a guy ‘like me’ is actually doing that? See, that could be me!”

Of course that embarrassingly undersells Mr. Lin’s talent and dedication. We really aren’t very alike at all. He’s a 6’2” man who can dunk easily, read a ball-screen effectively, play 45 of 48 minutes in a game against the best athletes in the world, and drill corner NBA-distance threes against the fucking Lakers. All of that is incredibly special. It’s all the result of talents that I wasn’t born with or hard work that I didn’t commit. It would be a shame to demean all of that by saying that he’s “just like us”.

That being said, I hope my future Asian-American children will not just observe from watching the NBA that they can work hard at a craft and become the best in the world at it, but also that that craft could be basketball, no matter how unlikely. And if the best way for that to happen is a 6’2” Asian Jeremy Lin being on TV slinging the ball to Carmelo Anthony at an electric MSG, then so be it.

Ordering my #17 Knicks jersey right now.

p.s. If anyone wants to go halfsies on starting a new series of basketball camps in Cupertino capitalizing on the impending rush of Tiger Moms thinking their children are the next Jeremy Lins, let me know.

Three Things I Learned At LinkedIn

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Last Friday was my last day at LinkedIn. After almost four and a half years at the company, I decided to embark on a different type of experience, fraught with risk, uncertainty, and instability. Smart choice? We’ll see.

Working at LinkedIn was a truly important experience for me. As I wrote to coworkers on my last day:

I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity that I have been given here - it is the best job I’ve ever had. I ate free food, moved desks many times, and was gifted the chance to help build a fresh product and business that truly matters. Along the way I made great friends, experienced some of the best moments of my life (even got married!), worked in a fantastic team, and learned every day. It has truly been a privilege to work with all of you at this great company.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that LinkedIn was the first time in my relatively short professional career that I led something that mattered in a meaningful way. For that, I am grateful.

There are tangible, tactical things that one learns in every role. My time at LinkedIn was no exception. I learned important and actionable skills at each role that are not diminished just because they can be found in a book.

But as a product person and product leader, most of the learning is intangible and tacit. I’ve heard friends called it an “apprenticeship.” The most important things that I learned while at LinkedIn? Three simple ones:

Influence Wins: You can tell people what to do against their will or you can productively influence people to arrive at the same truth. The former is called ‘being a dick’ and doesn’t help over time. The latter is called David Hahn‘ing someone.
Sense of Urgency: Jeff once asked me in a meeting whether I felt I had demonstrated the proper sense of urgency in a particular effort. I had never been asked that before and it definitely made an impression on me, because I realized later that I had not. I now ask myself that question just about every day.
Relationships Matter: One of the most productive Product people I know (link) also happens to be the most well-liked professional I’ve ever met. It took a few months for me to recognize those were not only related, but one caused the other.

Thank you to LinkedIn, for a great 4+ years.

What happens when the Kindle Fire costs $0?

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

My coworkers often laugh at me because of the number of Amazon.com boxes I receive. I buy everything from books to toilet paper to golfballs from the site. It’s possible that I’m the company’s single best customer.

So it might surprise you to hear that I haven’t purchased a Kindle Fire yet. Why? The answer’s pretty simple: I know it’s going to get better. And cheaper. And it will head in both of those directions quickly. So why not wait for the next one?

If you’ve purchased one of the other non-iPad tablet devices on the market, you may be the only one who has. They are each (in some order) thicker, heavier, slower, duller, or just generally crappier than their iPad competitor. Having a down-market product is fine in and of itself, but the companies then seem to exacerbate the problem by having prices that seem to imply a lack of simple logic (case in point). Remember, the iPad starts at $499.

But clearly the Kindle Fire will be different, because Jeff Bezos and company have no interest in charging a premium price for a product that they essentially expect to be a virtual USPS mailbox for their growing inventory of digital goods. Amazon worries about the long-term only and, as the NY Times noted, they actually mean it.

So while the question, “What happens when the Kindle Fire costs $0?” may include a bit of hyperbole, it’s not hard to imagine a day when the Kindle Fire: (1) has progressed to being a truly capable tablet that covers 90% of the iPad’s functions capably, and (2) costs a trivial sum, maybe $49 or $79. What happens then?

If we’re to believe Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma and expect this market to follow other technology markets in history, Apple and the iPad will not be able to simply innovate with ‘sustaining’ features that incrementally drive the state of the art forward. Apple will need to continue to introduce disruptive innovation into the tablet market just to compete with their lower-price, down-market competitors.

In other words, a slightly better browser, camera, or email application won’t be enough to fend off the Kindle tidal wave. It will need to be marrying the iPad with a hovercraft skateboard, a frisbee, or maybe a hot plate stovetop (don’t laugh, think about how handy that would be!). Jokes of course, but you get the idea. It is a lot to ask, but Apple has been developing magical products for quite a while now, so perhaps the disruptive innovation will continue.

In either case, I’m bullish on Amazon’s prospects in moving to win the non-iPad segment of the tablet market. If I see another $499 tablet from any number of poor Apple competitors, I’ll lose my mind.

The French Laundry

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

A friend came by for dinner last night and we eventually started talking about his experience visiting The French Laundry, the iconic Yountville Thomas Keller restaurant. This morning, I opened up my browser and was greeted by a page from the The French Laundry website, left over from the evening:

“Every day we create two unique nine-course tasting menus – chef’s tasting and a tasting of vegetables – each a series of smaller, focused dishes. No single ingredient is ever repeated throughout the meal. What we want you to experience is that sense of surprise when you taste something so new, so exciting, so comforting, so delicious, you think, “Wow” – and then it’s gone. We want the peak of sensation on the palate to be all that you feel. So we serve a series of small courses meant to excite your mind, satisfy your appetite and pique your curiosity. We want you to say, “I wish I had just one more bite of that.” And then the next plate arrives and the same thing happens, but in a different way, a whole new flavor and feel and emotion.”

I found that description and mission to be incredibly compelling, not just as a (hopefully!) future customer, but for the business itself. The experience that French Laundry seeks to build for its customers is beyond excellence – it seeks to provide emotional stimulation in its work. Surprise. Curiosity. Longing.

If Thomas Keller’s more accessible restaurants (Bouchon, Ad Hoc) are any indication, I’m positive the dishes at French Laundry are unreal. But the craftspeople at French Laundry are really pursuing a mission more substantial and lasting than their employment and the quality of food that they prepare. The creations are just vessels for a deeper experience. And in that way, the institution becomes more meaningful than just the food that is plated.

I think we all want the work we pursue in life to be that meaningful. We want the pursuit to be more profound.