Socrata

I spent a couple of days in Menlo Park and Palo Alto. Here are ten random thoughts:

1) The area around Stanford University is among the most beautiful in the world. What a wonderful place physically, geologically, geographically, meteorologically.

2) I grew up in the bay area, lived in Orange County from 1996 to 2005 and now live in Seattle. The traffic between San Jose and Menlo Park seems at least as bad as the worst I’ve seen in southern CA or Seattle.

3) Does anyone else think there are some unusual parallels between Sand Hill Road and the Silverado Trail in Napa’s wine country? The terroir is similar. The ratio of development to open land is similar. Even the signage has the same emotional appeal. Along Sand Hill Road you see the names of legendary valley VC firms that have backed the pioneers of the software industry and the Internet. Along Silverado Trail you see the names of wineries producing some of the world’s finest wines.

4) The valley has the smartest work attire. The east coast is suit and tie. Southern CA is monotone black, white and gray or jeans and dress shirt. Seattle is socks and sandals. But the valley is just sharply dressed, plain-front slacks, collared shirt with sleeves rolled up, ready to get work done. I think I saw only a few guys in ties my entire time. They looked out of place. Oddly enough, I saw almost as few people wearing jeans.

5) Downtown Palo Alto is phenemonal. It reminds me of a larger, but just as quaint and historic downtown as in San Luis Obispo. Most restaurants offer free wifi. There’s abundant street parking. It’s clean. Lots of upscale restaurants and shops. The University art shop is awesome. I bought gifts for three of my kids here.

6) I saw Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in one of the coffee shops in downtown Palo Alto. In case he frequents it often, I won’t tell you which one. He had no entourage. Just Mark and one other guy getting a cup of joe. Nice to know he gets his caffeine one cup at a time, just like the rest of us.

7) The 2:10 flight between Seattle and San Jose is the perfect length. Just long enough to get some work done, but not too long to numb your rear.
Before flying down to the valley I ran into good friend and Internet marketer extraordinaire Todd Sawicki in the Seattle airport. It was about 5:30 a.m. That’s about 3 hours before Todd normally gets up. Regardless we had a good chat about how savvy CIOs are managing the grassroots consumption of peripheral software-as-a-service and consumer-to-enterprise software in their organizations. I’ll write a full post on this topic soon.

9) If you’re ever looking for an address on El Camino Real – don’t. I drove up and down looking for my hotel. Finally I called the hotel and received guidance. The desk attendant told me the numbers on El Camino Real repeat and don’t stay in sequence. Apparently it has something to do with it being the oldest highway at something like 150 years old.

10) Forget about Google earning street cred for blanketing Mountain View with free, ubiquitous high-speed wifi access. They’d get more goodwill by offering to wifi up San Jose airport. It’s ubsurd for airports to charge for wifi. Savvy travelers will start choosing airports the way they do hotels – by only choosing ones that offer free, unhindered wifi access.

And one bonus thought…

11) I’m a passionate 49er fan (remember, I grew up in the bay area in the Walsh/Montana/Rice era). I was looking forward to picking up a new 49er baseball cap while in the bay area as one can’t be found in Seattle. Surprisingly none could be found in Palo Alto either. Are the 49ers so bad you can’t buy any garb in the bay area either? I’ll be back in the valley next week. If you know where the 49er fan shop is, let me know.

Oh wait, one more…

12) I was sitting in my seat on the plane at about 8:00 p.m. tonight, waiting to depart San Jose for Seattle. For about 45 to 50 seconds the plane shook violently. It was as though one of those little buddy trucks couldn’t decouple from the plane and was herking and jerking to free itself. The flight attendant next to me said she’s felt those little trucks crash full speed into a plane and it hardly budges the plane. It turns out it the shaking was due to a 5.6 magnitude quake right under San Jose. Yeah, I miss California.

In the 1980′s Microsoft showed what it meant to hire people who are “smart and get things done.” Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software has blogged often about the topic over the last 6 or 7 years and has even written a good book about it. Google also has demonstrated a penchant for hiring people who are really smart and get things done and that model seems to be working out well for them.

Much has been written about the brain teasers and logic questions Microsoft, Google, et al. will ask during interviews. During interviews at blist we certainly ask our fair share of tough questions, too. The point of these complex problem solving questions is to separate someone who might know a lot of trivia from someone with the raw intellectual horsepower to solve unforeseen problems. When I’ve taught others our hiring philosophy, I often am asked “How do you really measure if someone is smart or not?”

In my opinion, the questions a person asks are a much stronger indicator of smart-ness than how they answer the questions I ask of them. Even in the questions I ask, the qualifying questions they ask to narrow the scope and/or understand the problem paints a much better picture of how the candidate thinks. If you agree that asking good questions is a sign of intelligence, then you have to have to provide candidates with ample opportunities to ask a lot of questions. If you want to ask bright questions, drop us a line.

While Facebook is all the rage right now, Linked In is still an extremely important and valuable networking tool. Being relatively new to the Seattle area, I’ve leaned on Linked In heavily over the last two years. Without a tool like Linked In it would have been much harder to create a startup in a new locale.

I’m not promiscuous in the way I use Linked In. By that I mean that I only send and accept connnection invitations from people I’ve met and with whom I want to “bridge” networks. You could say that my network in Linked In is fairly representative of my network in the real world.

One thing that surprises me is that about 5% to 10% of my contacts conceal their “Connections” tab, meaning I can’t browse their network. I can still find people in their network via a search, but I can’t open up their “Connections” tab and just meander through them. That’s unfortunate. One of the benefits of Linked In is it creates an asynchronous opportunity to discover people whom you should get to know.

Bryan Starbuck is CEO of TalentSpring here in Seattle. He’s a direct connection of mine. Last year I was browsing his connections and discovered Bill Bryant. I read Bill’s profile and was impressed with all he’d accomplished as an entrepreneur in the Seattle area. I asked Bryan for a personal introduction to Bill, which led to a meeting over coffee before an event I was attending. Bill and I hit it off so well he joined me at the event. Over the ensuing six months Bill and I got to know each other better and recently Bill became blist’s first Board Advisor. He’s making great contributions to blist already.

This was only possible because Bryan is open about sharing his connections with people he knows and trusts. Isn’t the point of a network to help make introductions between like minded people? The irony is that I think the the “Connections” tab is concealed for some people and they don’t even know it. That tab was introduced after many Linked In early adopters joined and if you joined before the tab was introduced, the default is for it to be concealed. That’s a shame. If you’re using Linked In and your “Connections” tab is concealed, go to My Profile –> Account & Settings –> Privacy Settings –> Connections Browse and turn it on. You’ll make more connections, which in turn will create more opportunities to expand your own network.

I worked at Microsoft from August 2005 to September 2006 and thought it might be helpful to share a few behind the scenes insights about Microsoft. As a brief recap, I founded email archiving software-as-a-service company MessageRite in late 2002 and merged it into FrontBridge Technologies in August 2004. Microsoft acquired FrontBridge in 2005 and moved about 90 of us, including me, up to Redmond from California. After fulfilling my obligation to stay one year, I took a few months off and then started blist earlier this year.

From time to time I’ll post on what it’s like inside Microsoft. The intent isn’t to bash Microsoft, but rather to give startups some competitive insight. Whether you’re competing with Microsoft for customers or for key employees, hopefully you’ll find the information in these posts useful.

Insight #1 – Musical Chairs

During my 13 months at Microsoft I had three titles and five bosses. When I joined, they gave me the title of program manager. I lasted about five weeks as a program manager and then my boss suggested that I accept a title change to software architect. Architects have no direct reports and generally spend their time thinking about solutions to fairly complex technical problems. About 6 months later my boss asked me to become director of operations to see if I could provide some stability.

The reality is, that like a lot of big organizations, at Microsoft there’s a lot of reorganization going on. I was surprised by how many reorgs take place in Microsoft. When recruiting Paul (one of our great software engineers) from Microsoft I sensed some frustration on his behalf. The source of his frustration was in part the frequent reorganizations he had endured. I asked him:

“How many reorgs have you been through?”

He shared that he’d been through five reorgs in three years. Reorgs hurt your career growth and can be detrimental to your bonus.

If you are trying to recruit someone from any big company like Microsoft, keep musical chairs in mind. My own observation is that it is the biggest source of frustration for most people of the people I met at Microsoft.