blackrimglasses.com

Or “Startup Mojo”

Startup culture is not Razor scooters, pool tables, free snacks, a DJ table, a ping-pong tournament or dogs at work.

While I am all for “startup culture” infesting big companies (i.e., Zappos SF, the Wallmart Labs, NYTimes Labs, etc), these things are not what makes startups “startups.”

The freedom to engineer and implement rapid solutions to real problems with whatever means necessary. That is the “startup mojo” you seek.

All these other accouterments just let that happen in a more enjoyable way.

When I heard about Steve Jobs leaving yesterday, it was expected news but still sad.

In September of last year I was home sick for two days when I got an email stating that my former boss at Warners was leaving. I, like many were devastated by this news. It set in motion a series of other events which resulted in my decision to leave the company in January.

I have never worked for Apple, but I have worked with a lot of people at Apple. Jobs’ influence on the company was not something I ever saw directly, but you could feel if you talked to any of the 40,000+ people who work at the company. Good leadership is a positive virus, something which is a part of every individual who works underneath it. With everyone I worked with at Apple, there was always the undercurrent of Jobs: a focus on quality, perfection, disruption and the additive effects of technology on humanity.

On my former boss’ last day, I was not in the office. I was not there to give him a send off on the front stairs, and I left a few months later. But his vision remains with those who worked for him. A positive viral remnant.

The same will be applied to Apple. Steve Jobs is an outsized person, and someone who’s influence on society in the last 30 years will rank up there with Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, William Randolph Hearst and others. You can’t contain outsized influence in the frailty that is our human selves. Influence lives on and spreads so long as the virus remains intact.

I think the greatest thing that comes out of the legacy of Apple in the Jobs era is that he has put forth the notion in society that taste, design, aesthetics, simplicity and joy matter much more than technology.

Somewhere there is a kid thinking they can change the world. That “good enough” isn’t good enough. And that perfection is something to aspire to and exceed rather than relegate to an impossibility. Somewhere is a kid like I was at 5, realizing that I can make the turtle move, that these machines can respond to me.

And rather than thinking that building a life around this has to be relegated to the gray world of impersonal distance, thinks that technology is something that can be felt, touched, manipulated and make our lives better.

Thanks Steve. You’ve made this world a better place.

A few days ago, a great site called Code Academy launched. I saw it via HackerNews. It applies a very intuitive socractic approach to teaching programming (using Javascript) that reminded me of my old Logo books.

It also got me thinking about programming in general, and what it entails. What the ability to manipulate the logic of the machine does to the brain and why I think it is important.

First, let me state my opinion up front: if you are making a living using computers, and in your area consider yourself an “expert,” you should know how to program.

Simple. If you are a “social media” expert, a “product person,” and especially anything tied to the Internet, you should be able to program. It doesn’t mean that you will do it for a living, but you should know how, and do so regularly, if only to keep skills up.

I learned to program when I was about six years old using Apple Logo, like most kids of my age. The reason it appealed to me was primarily because it served as a method to let me wield control of the machine rather than the other way around. There was something profound in the ability to make the turtle move. Later when I went into BASIC on the Apple IIe, the power of even something as simple as a control structure or GOTO felt really nice.

I’m 32 now, and by no means would I identify myself as an engineer. I’ve taken exactly one computer science class in my life. However I do consider myself a programmer. I’m not a great one, I admit, but I try to keep my curiosity high and my abilities at a reasonable level. I haven’t made a living as a programmer in six years, but I still, given the challenge, sit and make something. Lately, because of my pseudo-unemployment, I’ve been doing this a lot.

If you work with Internet technology right now, you are working primarily on distilling the complexities of human thought, expression and society into systems and representations that can be manipulated algorithmically. Now, you might say “I connect brands with their consumers using social media tools,” but what you are really saying is “I manipulate consumer desire into text and use semantic filtering to re-represent that text to those for whom it is necessary and beneficial.” And if you are a programmer, you are really saying “I setup an API call to Twitter called by cron, store the results in a database and display it using a simple SELECT statement.”

No matter how abstract our usage of technology, in the end we are subservient to the methods that computers use to understand what we are needing them for: code. Having an understanding of this should cause a degree of influence on both sides: you will think more abstractly about the possibilities of technology, but always be influenced by knowledge of how to make those abstractions a reality.

The understanding and knowledge of how your tools work will make you a better product manager, social media expert, or what not. It’ll make you more tolerable to those who are 100% head down programming, and those like me who are 50-25% head down.

I remember when I was about 10 years old playing this video (from Tourfilm) on VHS over and over again. Everything about this clip was amazing: the Gang of Four a cappella at the beginning, the chair, the compiling of clips from other nights, Jim McKay’s direction. The weariness in Stipe’s eyes (this was recorded at the end of a year long tour) and the imitation/tribute to John King (from Gang of Four).

It was a mystery on every level. I remember summer nights, window open to the sounds of coyotes in the neighborhood and everyone but me sleeping as I watched this.

Every person I know in the music business has a story like this though. Mine is not unique. And I’d wager everyone in any business that involves some sort of passion (gaming, movies, startups, etc) has a story like this. In a year or two, it’ll be seeing the Social Network. Maybe people were inspired by Microserfs, or a video game, or something else.

What drives us is trying to achieve the promise of the mystery.

As much as I’ve done, I’ve not achieved that. Nor do I ever want to.

And that is my thought on another summer night.

There has been a trend in online products as of late that I have had a hard time articulating, but seems to be growing in a spectacular fashion. The focus on small, narrowly tailored and feature-sparse tools which fill defined needs rather than a spectrum of needs. Products which put the focus on getting a small set of things “perfect” rather than compete on a spread of features.

As I’ve been working on things for my next move, I’ve been even putting myself in this place as I do product planning: remove 50% of what I think is necessary and focus on making the other 50%, 100% perfect.

Then it occurred to me: this is building not the opposite of monolithic entities, but a subset which I call microlithic products.

Microliths, like monoliths are terms out of archeology used to describe both the form and function of artifacts. To me they define methods of product creation and how they reside in situ.

Monolithic products are focused on holistically defining all possibilities of affordances. If a user wants to do something, and the company wants that behavior to transpire within the application, features and affordances are added to enable it. Think of Facebook: in no way can you describe Facebook as a tightly focused, narrowly tailored product. It gives affordances for more possibilities of behavior than is ever going to be necessary for any individual. While their Platform has tried to enable fragmentation for the sake of focused utility by the core product, I argue the core product is still too convoluted.

Other monolithic products: Google, Flickr, Twitter and iTunes.

They subjugate focused perfection beneath macro-scale mediocrity.

And it shows: the Facebook iPhone app is a terrible mess. Google’s identity management systems are so horrible that its nearly comical. Twitter was a microlithic product which is no longer such. Try to explain how to configure the iPhone app to a lay-person. Also try to use their new photo service on the desktop or mobile client.

Even given these examples however, the trend seems to be steering toward Microlithic products, even within these companies.

This is no doubt helped along by the iPhone and mobile. The iPhone and devices like it have forced a focusing of attention toward simple and focused user experience, if only because the screen size, usage context and speed of the network and devices demanded it. No place is this better exemplified than by Square for instance. So radically focused that they curbed growth early on in favor of product perfection and simplicity.

The principles of Microlithic Products (especially when developed by monolithic entities)

• Focus on doing one thing really well with joyful results – what is shocking about the new Messenger app from Facebook is not that they did an app with a discrete set of functions (after all, it is basically Beluga), but how much better it “feels” than the native Facebook app. Why? It puts focus on doing one thing really well, and constrains its feature set based on that. It has the arrogance of simplicity and sets expectations for the user accordingly, down to the app name.
• When you find your product getting too monolithic, break it up – We all know the feeling when a product becomes too big. It’s a latent anxiety when you find a bug, a feeling of dread when it comes to add a new feature. And as a user, you know when the product you use is too monolithic: it doesn’t “feel” great. It crashes, it’s slow. Every release introduces more bugs rather than fixes them.

  For a product manager, if you find yourself with a stack of features in Pivotal, and you know you’ll never get them all to 100%, circle a batch of four that are contextually similar and make it a discrete product. Similarly, if you have a part of your product that is functionally discrete, but inadequate when part of a monolithic product, refactor it out into its own microlith.

• Disruption, not destruction – Zappos has an office in San Francisco to create “off roadmap” products. They are not destructive in any way to the core product of Zappos.com, but are rather disruptive enough to create a tension that improves both on and off-roadmap products. Microlithic products should be focused on disrupting their monolithic counterparts and competitors. However, when done as a compliment to a monolith, they should focus on disruption as a means to progress rather than destruction. The reasons why are self explanatory from the political standpoint (and boy do I have experience with this).
• Use microlithic products to hone and refactor your process – big products, codebases and entrenched methods of maintaining them lead toward an inertia problem when it comes to process. It’s hard to adopt new tools for SCRUM, continuous integration, version control, agile development, etc the larger the product becomes. Microlithic projects can be discrete enough to use as a method for implementing and honing new methods of development without upsetting the main trajectory. Rather than try to implement the new strategies upon the old, establish good baselines with the new product and migrate the old into it.
• Focus on utility rather than retention - back to Facebook’s new app, one of the telling things about it is that it embraces a “quick in and out” mentality rather than driving toward the vanity metric of “time on site” (or in app). Microlithic applications are not focused on monopolizing attention, rather they divert it for a as short a time as possible while adding the most amount of value to the transaction. Think about Square, Instagram, etc. They have a defined in/out point, and don’t rely on deep engagement for powerful experiences.