Category: Commentary

1. Leaders in Silicon Valley are on the edge of the growing, emerging markets in tech. Yet they constantly fall all over themselves to win approval from the leaders of the stagnant, dying markets of academia and journalism. It’s like the rebel nerds won, but they still want approval from the conformist cool kids who lost.
2. Twitter and social media in general seem to have a growing gap. The world I see there looks less and less like anything I experience in the actual world of flesh and blood people. This has me wondering just how much social media is completely fake. Manufactured controversy. Fake likes and comments and retweets. Fake accounts. Fake stories. There seems to be just too much divergence from the reality I see off Twitter for the one presented on Twitter to not be manufactured in significant part.

From Tweet thread.

Framework I’m thinking about:

Marketing Debt

Startups talk about tech debt and management debt (building stuff now for expedience that can’t last long term and will cost you down the road to rebuild on solid footing)

These are not bad. Or good. They are tools with costs and benefits.

Too little tech debt means you’re overbuilding and sacrificing speed for early core users.

Too much and you create an unpayable backlog and might go tech broke.

What’s Marketing Debt?

When your public reputation gets out ahead of your customer experience.

Every early good story or case study is a bit of marketing debt.

Why? Because 100% of customers not likely to get same result. That means those customers may get upset by this.

That’s a lurking reputational liability.

It’s ok for not every customer to be thrilled or get best results.

It’s needed to tell stories of great customer success.

But be aware of lurking marketing debt.

The bigger the gap between your marketing customer story and your average customer experience, the greater the marketing debt.

If you avoid any marketing debt at all, you’d tell no stories or only those of you’re least happy customers. That way no one would experience anything below your marketing.

But that’s not accurate or fair and great potential customers may not try.

If you go nuts and way overhype a few customers you brute forced to success in a non-repeatable way and hide the less dramatic stories, you’re racking up a backlog of new customers bound to crap on your reputation later for under-delivering.

So be mindful in your marketing how big a gap it creates (thus how big a liability) between expected and average customer experience.

Be mindful which stories to tell.

Be mindful what kind of customers to pick.

And be mindful of the little things like phrasing. “One customer even achieved X!” Accrues less marketing debt than “Use the product and achieve X”

Check out this article on Medium and let me know what you think.

I’m excited to push the future of career launch.

View at Medium.com

Nothing on my mind today but the awesome batch of talent on Crash.co seeking their first professional jobs.

Go help them out!

That’s my mantra for this year.

On New Year’s Day I took a long, quiet walk around my neighborhood. Mindlessly looking at the buds on the leafless trees, a phrase kept running through my head. ‘Stay above the fray.’ I wasn’t thinking about any particular fray or experiencing any particular stress at the time. Still, the thought was simple and settling.

I decided to make it my phrase for 2019. Something personal (well, at least until I blogged about it today) I come back to from time to time to keep me from getting tangled in energy-sucking lose-lose situations.

It’s been freeing and effective. I’m not prone to drama as is, but the preponderance of potential frays I’ve encountered this year is disproportionately profuse. (Perhaps that last word was a preposterous alliterative indulgence).

Humans want to be on the side of right. We want to stand for justice. But most of the time, we actually don’t. I mean, we want to want to, and want to not be passive in the face of bad stuff, but in most cases we aren’t willing to bear real costs for a cause. That’s nothing to feel guilty about. If I were Robin Williams’ character in Good Will Hunting, this is the part where I’d give you a big hug and say, “Scarcity is not your fault.”

The worst thing to do in the midst of constrained ability to care is pretend. Even worse is to play at caring when you lack clarity on whether any of the sides are right, let alone the energy to pay a price for one or the other.

It’s not so much the particular battle at hand, but the fray itself that’s a danger. The belief in the need to enter every fray is a vortex that reduces you to only what your willpower can sustain. That’s pretty small compared to what you can be at your best, when incentive structures are aligned with interests to maximize your potential even though you’re not a saint.

When my Spidey-sense tingles and I smell a fray, I repeat my New Year’s Day phrase. Stay above the fray. Stay above the fray. It kills the boil in my blood and brings me back to my better self.

I don’t want to descend into frays. I want to ascend to my own definition of progress. In the process, I have to overcome challenges, some of which resemble battles and incur costs. But those are my battles on my chosen path. They’re not frays at large that pull me in. Staying above the fray isn’t about running away from the good fight. It’s recognizing that most fights aren’t good, even if some of the people in them are.

My wife asked me at dinner what I thought the difference is between a visionary and a crazy person.

The best I could think of on the spot was how useful the stuff they do is to other people.

Whenever I’m thinking of doing something that exposes me to more risk, I think back to previous risky decisions I’ve made.

What I’ve found so far is that I have never once regretted any of the decisions I made that involved taking on more risk. I have regretted some decisions that involved taking on less risk.

It’s instructive for me. I haven’t reached my risk tolerance maximum. I’m more likely to err in the other direction, which is enough to push me over the edge towards the riskier move most of the time.

I get why VCs always say they care less about the bets they made that flopped than the bets they didn’t make that succeeded.

I’ve been daily blogging for a long time, with a few reprieves here and there. What amazes me is no matter how long I’ve been doing it, I still enter phases where it’s hard but for totally different reasons than the previous struggle phase.

You get through one struggle and it’s easy. Then a new one comes and you smash through that one keyboard-pounding day at a time and it’s easy again. Rinse, repeat.

The current phase is challenging for a few reasons:

1. I’m on Pacific Time this summer, and no matter how early I get up, I start the day behind a slew of emails and messages from ET people. I tend to the urgent ones and before long the day is in full swing, I have meetings, and I’ve got to find a slice of time and mental space to blog smack in the middle of it.
2. I’m doing a lot of writing and idea working for Crash right now. Mental energy going into decks, articles, emails, and other writing-like work means I have little left over for writing a daily blog post.
3. I’m Tweeting a lot more. This means ideas get an immediate outlet in a Tweet or Tweetstorm, and the blog is left with less to work with.

Still, every day I make myself sit down and hammer out a post, I walk away feeling like I added to my personal value by 0.001%. Whatever else happened that day, I’m not stagnating, I’m compounding my worth. Whatever else I experiment with, I’m not quitting or bailing on my commitment to daily blogging. It’s a damn good feeling.

A big difference between being an implementer or solo driver and being a leader pitching and rallying others around a vision is how many steps need to be skipped in the story.

When you’re selling an idea, you need to cover the top level stuff really quickly. Your narrative needs as few points as possible. This means you’ve got to describe your history and process in a way that’s really hard for the implementer inside you.

Say I’m working on a pitch deck. I want to show what our company has done so far. I get one slide to show traction, so I display numbers from our beta period and our live period. The story is a simple A to B journey. We got a little something with a beta, and moved to a launch and got a little more. It makes sense.

But the implementer’s left eye twitches on this slide. They want 10 slides. Because really, we started with plan A, got it halfway there, than altered to plan A2, making our previous success measures irrelevant. A2 moved to B, then we switched to C but it was a gradual morph from BC with no clear change point. After all this shifting and changing and measuring different stuff, we got to D, our current product and way of measuring it.

But A-A2-B-BC-C-D isn’t a vision. It’s a treatise with footnotes and bibliographies. No one but you understands or cares, even though the process was necessary from an implementation standpoint and what you learned going through it is valuable.

To sell your vision, you’ve got to simplify the past and fit it into the present paradigm. You collapse everything before point D into one and call it A, apply your current measures to it, and make point D your point B. Everyone gets it. You started at A and did such and such numbers, moved into B and are doing such and such numbers.

You have to make a bigger leap in your story than you made in your experience. And you can’t take time to explain that leap. “You see, what A really means is that we did this and this and this” is too much. Let it go. A contains a whole universe of lived experience, but it’s just a small point in your narrative and vision. Let the details die. You can always revive them in your 700 page biography later.

The people following your pitch don’t care about everything that went into A or they take it as a given that A is shorthand for A-A2-B-BC-C.

There are so many things you can do when trying to build a product and company.

It’s easy to really focus on some key metrics and go all in trying to get those up. This isn’t bad, but early on you never really know for sure the metrics that matter are the metrics that matter. There’s a lot of fuzzy in-between.

What to fill it with?

Fun.

If in doubt, do the thing that customers find more fun. Do the thing that team members find more fun. Do the thing that you find more fun.

Having fun adds energy and exploration and determination. Not having fun, you can only get so far on sheer willpower.

Life naturally falls into segments. Personal and professional, hobbies and vocations, intellectual and practical, etc.

These are useful mental categories. Maybe not so useful to divide them when it comes to action. Early on in my life, they were all bolstered by being mostly separate. The further I go, the more fruit I get from breaking the barriers and letting them talk and bleed into one another.

I don’t think melding to the point of undifferentiation makes sense. Action becomes too hard. But refusing to dice up actions and units of time expenditure into wholly one or wholly the other seems to be an aid to energy and ideas for me.

I’ll have to think more about why de-segmenting seems like a bad idea early, but staying fragmented seems like a bad idea later in life.

Read the full thread.

Massive challenge for young people trying to find/win their first career job.

-jobs are badly described so they don't know what's a fit
-they have no way of signaling the right stuff to the right people

we're trying to solve that with Crash

— Isaac M. Morehouse (@isaacmorehouse) July 7, 2019

Years ago TK Coleman told me something like, “The universe will expand to accommodate your dreams.”

It’s a great quote. It’s easy to not give yourself permission to have big dreams because you don’t see any room for them in the universe. The quote reminds that it doesn’t work that way. The universe is literally the sum of people’s dreams. Dream first, expand the universe by bringing it to life.

But something else happens. Dreams are a way of adding substance to a feeling or desire. Your gut has a longing, and your mind adds flesh to the bones by creating a tangible plan, product, or goal around that longing. That’s a dream. But it’s always limited by the information you have access to. A kid dreams of being a firefighter. They have very little info about ways to enact desires in the world as an adult. They desire adventure, risk, heroism, proximity to powerful machines, or cool costumes. Given their limited info, those desires are best expressed through the dream of firefighting. As their info expands through life, they realize that was a limited version of living out those same desires. Maybe they realize founding a company or making movies does it even better.

As your universe expands based on pursuit of your dreams, your information expands. When you information expands, the ways to enact your desires into dreams also expands. In other words, the targets change.

This can be difficult. Changing dreams may cause those around you to think you’ve given up, sold out, or failed. But you can’t let your past control your future. Your 8 or 18 year old self with limited info had different ways to pursue the same desires. Why should that self dictate your present and future self with expanded info?

Every plot twist seems out of character at first, but that’s just because you’re in the middle of the story. Step back and view the entire arc and you can identify the driving force consistent throughout. Michael Jordan quit basketball and ruined his story. Then he came back and revealed that it was all part of a unifying thread and his story is better because of it.

Don’t be afraid of dreams too big for the current universe. It will expand. And don’t be afraid to adjust your dreams based on your new universe. You should expand too.

Statements mean nothing

Compared to revelations

From actions taken