Apropos of last time, on xpastor.org there's a really great framework for thinking about organizational mechanics and purpose. I know nothing about xpastor but I thought that the neat entity diagram was great and the quote from Sun Tzu solid.
Last night I posted photos of guests from April's wedding. Here's one of my favorites:
I wrote the below a while back as part of building a framework of common purpose in my group at work. At my new job I've found the same thing useful to contextualize the business and the decisions we're making. It helps to have a logically consistent line of thought all the way from the big picture to the quotidian.
A Mission is what an organization is all about; what we do every day, and what we excel at. Think of it as answering the questions "what do we do, for whom, and why?". It defines our role at the highest level and describes the areas which are pre-ordained for us.
A Vision, on the other hand, describes what the future will look like when we achieve our Mission. It's what will happen because we execute so superbly on our Mission. "A PC on every desk", Microsoft's early mission statement, is archetypal.
Traditionally, one's Mission would be derived from one's Vision. Once you've decided what you want the future to look like (the Vision), you pick the Mission which will get you there.
Putting this all in perspective,
- Vision dictates Mission
- ...which determines Strategy
- ...which surfaces Goals
- ...that frame Objectives
- ...which in turn drive the Tactics
- ...to deliver Key Results
Here's a picture from my commute the other day:
A couple of weekends ago Wendy and I flew to Austin to see April and Brad get married. I've posted a set of the wedding on Flickr as well as one of some of Austin we saw.
I'd never been to Austin before but liked the feel of the place. I used to live in Colorado, and Austin had the air of a cross between downtown Boulder and Denver's LoDo. College town, hip crowd, sprawling frontier settlement, ancient creek, huge skies, wide concrete roads, prairie homes, converted brick warehouses, blue city in a red state.
Look at that big sky, clear as can be:
Wendy enjoying a chopped beef sandwich, authentic Texas BBQ style:
A rural suburban front yard, 2 miles from the Texas Capitol Building:
From the wedding, a few favorites are this one of the bride and groom:
and this one of the gorgeous occasion:
For Christmas, one of the books I got was Reinventing Collapse by Dmitry Orlov. The premise is that the author was "born in Leningrad and immigrated to the United States in the mid seventies". He was "an eyewitness to the Soviet collapse over several extended visits to his Russian homeland between the late eighties and mid-nineties". From the platform of this experience he compares the former Soviet Union and today's United States. Noting similarities and differences between the two—in culture, infrastructure, religion, economy, industry, government, education, housing, and so on—he extrapolates a narrative of the impending collapse of the US via some thoughtful analogies with the fall of the SU.
Dmitry is brilliantly perceptive and wonderfully witty, and Reinventing Collapse is a wickedly cynical book. I had many favorite passages but here's one in particular which I enjoyed:
The Soviet Union had a single, entrenched, systemically corrupt political party, which held a monopoly on power. The US has two entrenched, systemically corrupt political parties, whose positions are often indistinguishable and which together hold a monopoly on power. In either case, there is, or was, a single governing elite, but in the United States it organizes itself into opposing teams to make its stranglehold on power seem more sportsmanlike. It is certainly more sporting to have two capitalist parties go at each other than just having the one communist party to vote for. The things they fight over in public are generally symbolic little tokens of social policy, chosen for ease of public posturing. The Communist party offered just one bitter pill. The two capitalist parties offer a choice of two placebos. The latest innovation is the photo finish election, where each party pre-purchases exactly 50 percent of the vote through largely symmetrical allocation of campaign resources and the result is pulled out of statistical noise, like a rabbit out of a hat. It is a tribute to the intelligence of the American people that so few of them bother to vote.
On a very few occasions the hyperbole was just too much and the propositions arising became farcical or facile. The vast majority of Dmitry's "intentionally provocative thought experiments", though, were fascinating, wise, cogent, intelligent, and delivered with a delightfully dark sense of humor.
Reinventing Collapse is an enjoyable and worthwhile read; I couldn't put it down once I'd started. As one reviewer comments inside the front cover: "be prepared to have your window shoved open and feel the fresh air shake you up".
To recap from last time, two truths and a lie about me:
Illustrative of the need for the Salmon protocol, I've had friends guessing the lie on Facebook, FriendFeed, Google Buzz, Twitter, and in the comments here on my blog. I was surprised to find the votes easily consolidated:
Congratulations, then, to my friend Craig for being the only one to pick out my lie about the piccolo. In actual fact I played the flute in the school orchestra. I've been told that's a bit sneaky, but hey—this is the internet. It's the wild west here, folks.
I'm not sure what to make of nobody picking the ballet classes.
Here's the other photo of me which nearly made the cut to be my "Hi, I'm Isaac" photo to accompany my fun facts. Taken by Wendy in Golden Gate Park last summer:
I'd never come across the concept of "fun facts" before working in Silicon Valley. Here, though, they seem to be the standard way of introducing people. Mainly they come in triples, for example "Everybody, meet Bob. Bob climbed Mount Tahoma last year. Before that he lived for ten years in a shack in North Dakota. He knits his own swimwear".
My last two employers have asked me for fun facts about myself so that they could introduce me, and here comes my new employer asking for the same (I start there on Monday).
So while I think about it here are three fun facts about me:
Twitter also asked me to supply a photo of myself. I sent this one which Wendy took on Spring Break last year in Lone Pine, CA:
Talking to Wendy this evening about fun facts, she introduced me to a variant "two truths and a lie" which I like much better. For completeness, here are two truths and a lie about me:
Spot the lie.
Following on from my last post, this is what the aftermath of a night of wholesale vegetable trading in Borough Market used to look like. I took this from the window of my flat in 1998.
Years ago I lived in Borough Market. When I moved there in 1998 it was pretty much an abandoned area of London frozen in time: a little Dickensian enclave. Filthy vegetables were sold wholesale 2am–6am, the corner pub opened 6am–9am to serve the market vendors, but for the other 17 hours each day it was more or less empty apart from shady characters up to no good amongst the deserted stalls and sooty arches.
I took the photo below exactly ten years ago today, 23 February 2000. See those three windows on the first row, the second set in from the left? Those looked out from the front of my flat, 11 Stoney Street:
Here are the same three windows a year or so later, in June 2001. I can't remember what was going on at the time with the flat upstairs but boarded-up windows were pretty common in the area.
And talking of shady characters, you can see the three windows again top-center about a minute into the first scene of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Here's Bacon on the run after the cozzers turn up:
(The B.J.D. SUPPLIES LTD sign was put up for the filming in 1998 and taken down afterwards)
The whole neighborhood has changed quite a bit now; I visited a couple of weeks ago as I passed through London. These days it's glistening sun-dried tomatoes rather than muddy sprouts, and instead of piles of trash on the corner it's carts offering slivers of imported jamón or nuggets of organic falafel. It's upscale and lavish and epicurean and gastronomic. How incredible that an institution 150 years old (or 700 at a stretch) can transform so dramatically and so suddenly.
The three windows are still there. The windowless ground floor, however, which used to house my downstairs neighbor (a reclusive artist) in the late 90s, is now a glass-fronted oyster place.
For the nostalgic, I've got on Flickr a set of shots of Borough Market in its pre-tapas days.
My moment of fame: isaach.com being linked from TechCrunch. You can't but sympathize with the fourth commenter George:
Are you seriously planning on reporting about every little nobody that leaves Google and joins Twitter?
Indeed.
Here's what a Crunching looks like, showing visitors to this site over time:
When I left Google I didn't have any plans in particular apart from taking a "funemployment" break and finding the right next move. At first I wondered how I was going to go about it.
Ever the good corporate citizen, I figured I'd start off with meetings. I met a lot of people in a lot of coffee shops. There were some who got in contact with me when they heard I'd left Google. There were other people from previous lives and previous companies with whom I was long overdue in catching up. Still other interesting people I managed to hunt down through ruthless LinkedIn-ing.
I had a great time hanging out with people and talking about the business of technology. I signed some NDAs and learned some amazing things. It's actually incredibly exciting how much is going on out there.
After doing a lot of talking and a lot of thinking I made the breakthrough realization that in fact I wasn't looking for a specific role so much as I was looking for a specific environment:
From the beginning, Twitter stood out as seriously impressive. Everyone I met there was smart, super-interesting, switched on, and welcoming. I'm a keen user and fan of the product. What's more one of the co-founders mentioned while interviewing me that he wants Twitter to be not just in San Francisco but a part of San Francisco. I love this city and thought that that sentiment was especially cool.
Most of all, though, and as I said on Twitter itself, how could I resist such charming stationery?
I'll start next month as a Product Manager and I'm pretty excited. Between now and then I've got a few weeks of funemployment left and lots of thinking to do so I can hit the ground running in my new job. If you've got thoughts or ideas about Twitter, send 'em over.
Like I said, I'm a bit obsessed with this iPhone app. Here are a few more shots since last time.
I staged and took this one to make Wendy's birthday card:
This one taken at an open house down the road which Wendy and I went to view:
This one round the corner from us in the evening sun:
This one of the Contemporary Jewish Museum downtown:
This one just up 24th Street from us:
I just can't help myself!
The other day I bought an iPhone app which takes photos in the style of a Polaroid® camera. It's wickedly addictive. I may be a little obsessed with it.
Some recent shots include this plant in Facebook's lobby:
this of the outside of Wendy's school:
this of city skies:
this outside Blue Bottle Café downtown:
another outside Wendy's school:
and this of Wendy herself:
An ever-growing set including these and more is on Flickr. I know it's corny but boy this thing is so much fun.
I've been reading notalwaysright.com recently. It's a compendium of transcriptions of often hilarious exchanges between serving staff and customers.
Recently there was Famous Ignoramus:
BOOKSTORE | HOBART, AUSTRALIA
Me: “Hello, sir, how may I help you?”
Customer: “Do you have those books in that series?”
Me: “Which series is that?”
Customer: “You know, the one by that famous author.”
Me: “There are lots of famous authors, sir. Do you know what one of the books was called?
Customer: “I want the third book in the series by that famous author!”
Me: “I’m sorry, sir, but without more information, I don’t know which book you’re after.”
Customer: “This is ridiculous! How could you not know the ones I’m talking about? They’re FAMOUS!”
It reminded me of my own stint working in a bookshop in 1992 when I had a number of almost identical experiences. Going beyond the above basic encounter, my two favorite stories from that time:
In other news, I took a bunch of photos with my new lens the other night. Here's one, the rest here
My boss was fantastically gracious. She said "I'm proud of you. I'll miss you. Thanks for helping me build the team". You could barely ask for more when you hand in your resignation.
A week or so later I sent out this email:
and received in return a wealth of warm wishes from people with whom I've worked. Man alive, I've worked with some really super people at Google.
This evening I had my team over for dinner. What a great team! They gave me this lovely card:
Fitting and inspirational. I'll miss them.
Tomorrow's my last full day at Google and next week I begin my "funemployment" with a quick trip to the UK. Exciting times! As a present to myself I bought a new lens for my camera. I took this picture of Wendy with it:
It's true that I don't yet have any "next thing" lined up. If you have any ideas, let me know. My résumé is at isaach.com/cv.
I went to the Crunchies last Friday night. The Crunchies as far as I can tell aspire to be the tech equivalent of the Academy (film), Emmy (TV), Grammy (music) or Tony (stage) Awards.
Tech celebrities appear at the Crunchies annually—including plenty flying in from around the world—and just as with the more famous ceremonies you might be forgiven for thinking that the real talent is probably elsewhere. On the other hand, unlike the more prestigious SoCal-baed awards, they let the fawning masses like me in too... if you're quick enough when they put the tickets on sale, that is.
I was in the cheapseats for the awards ceremony, but surprisingly enough two down from a guy who won a free Nexus One (winning tickets were taped to the undersides of selected seats). It was a good time, with geeky entertainment from the Richter Scales.
My friend April joined me for the afterparty and we rubbed shoulders with the tech elite... sort of. And then we had our photo taken:
When you're having a baby you can barely help doing internet research on what's going on during pregnancy. Turns out, to my surprise, that it's all about fruit and vegetables. Week 7: it's as big as a blueberry. Week 9: as big as a grape. Week 13: as big as a peach. A friend of mine recalls the "Spanish onion" stage, which is remarkably specific.
It's always foodstuffs but apparently never "as big as a packet of chips" or "as big as a cheeseburger". Fruit and vegetables only.
Or so I thought.
And then I found this delightful "Dad's pregnancy guide". Week 7: as big as the power button on a TV remote. Week 10: the size of the head of a hammer. Week 13: a gas cap, of all things.
Love it!
Here's a picture of Wendy the day we got our exciting news:
For many years I've been spending Easters, Thanksgivings and Christmases with Wendy's family in Terry Lake, Fort Collins, CO. The lake's north shore is hugely photogenic, so nice photos are easy pickings each year.
This Christmas was no exception. I zipped out at sunset one evening and shot this set:
While in Denver over the holidays Wendy and I went to the Broncos/Raiders game at Mile High Stadium (or "Invesco Field at Mile High"). We'd managed to get fantastic tickets for seats on the 4th row at the 40-yard line, Broncos side, and the weather turned out to be absolutely beautiful.
Tragically, and heart-breakingly, the Broncos lost to their arch-rivals in the last minute of the game—chances of reaching the playoffs diminishing accordingly. Still, I got some good photos.
This year I was lucky enough to receive the most kick-ass selection of books. I can't wait to get started working my way through the pile:
I also received one of the most fantastic Christmas gifts ever: a Korg Kaossilator. Holy moly this thing is some kind of super-addictive-awesome.
Also: a Brookes saddle for the fixie and a two-tone chopping board. Got to love it.
Bernal Hill is a few blocks south of where we live in the Mission. I find the area incredibly photogenic.
Yesterday Wendy and I went on a walk up and around the hill, as we often do. In the fall afternoon sun I got a set I'm fond of, some of which are below:
[an atypical business-related post with due credit to the Telco 2.0 Blog, an excellent resource on the modern economics of telco]
I've witnessed this point argued again and again: at my current employer, my previous employer, and the one before that. Telcos are greedy; telcos sell "unlimited data" but deliver otherwise; telcos will lose the broadband market to a player who can offer better value; and so on. Definitely I'm not defending misleading marketing of broadband services, but claiming that telcos are on a mission to exploit consumers falls short of the mark.
It's really not as simple as that.
The problem the telcos have is this: their costs building and running a packet-switched network are fundamentally a function of data volume on that network, (# of bits transported) * (cost per bit). As a first-order approximation, this linear function works pretty well; in this simplified model the cost per bit is an aggregation of OpEx and CapEx (amortized). CapEx includes licensing wireless spectrum, building out towers and backhaul and so on.
Telco costs are a function of data transport volume, more or less.
So you might be tempted to think that a "cost-plus" pricing model is the answer: charge the consumer per transported bit (ie. a metered data plan) at a rate of X * (cost per bit), where X>1. In general these pricing plans don't work well because on the consumption end what users end up paying doesn't correlate with the value they're getting. Is watching that YouTube video on my iPhone 100x more valuable to me than downloading that email from my boss? No, but it might cost me 100x more. Consumers can't make sense of that, and metered data plans haven't worked for the industry.
Consumer value is not a function of data transport volume.
So the telcos move to a subscription-based pricing model, otherwise known as flat-rate. Here they charge you a monthly fee for access to the network but typically give you "unlimited data" along with that. This is easy for consumers to understand, avoids the problem of data value being independent of data volume, and everything works just fine... EXCEPT that now the telco's revenue is a function of (# of subscribers) while their costs are a function of (# of bits transported).
In a subscription-based world, telco data costs and revenues are decoupled.
Having your revenues decoupled from your costs is a dangerous situation to be in, because you could easily find yourself paying out more money than you're taking in. So you try a few things:
After the launch of iPlayer in the UK (iPlayer is the BBC's streaming media product), one major ISP revealed that their costs of carrying streaming traffic trebled within weeks. Unless they can pass those costs to consumers, or fund them some other way, or prevent them entirely, they'd be in trouble. Bad news when your costs treble and your revenues don't.
Of course there are other talented folks doing this stuff. If you're interested you should check out 25 Spectacular Light Painting Images. Of the angel (#10), Matt says "Looks like it was done with a sparkler" and I think he's right. Clever.
Thanksgiving is an interesting time if you're an expat in the States. Intellectually of course I "get" the protocol—the family gatherings, the turkey meal, all-day Bond marathons on TV, mega-retail, putting up the Christmas tree, and so on—but viscerally my experience seems inevitably different from that of those around me. They've grown up with the holiday and I haven't.
The difference isn't about knowing the rituals: these can easily be learned and acted out. The difference is that after decades of experiencing the tradition it internalizes and becomes a "feeling". Thanksgiving has a particular "feel" to US natives, the substance of which is an aggregation of memories going all the way back to childhood. Thanksgiving doesn't have a "feel" for me in a way that Christmas Eve does, for example.
This isn't to say, of course, that it's not a good time. This year Wendy and I stayed in San Francisco for Thanksgiving, something we've not done before. We were thankful for each other, the amazing city we live in, the Californian climate, the house we love to live in, and the beauty of the fall.
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