Apr 27

100 Mistakes

As a startup founder, I wore a lot of hats and I made a ton of mistakes. I was a typical first-time, 20-something entrepreneur with tremendous pressure to scale with the team and business.

At night, I found myself awake agonizing over the mistakes I could see myself making — not letting go of ideas that I liked but that weren’t good for the business, not presenting my ideas effectively in group meetings, or not saying no to projects when I was already overwhelmed. However, I found that if I wrote down my mistakes in a bedside journal, I could return to sleep and revisit my mistakes in the daytime.

The journal grew and grew. And when I started hiring a team, I saw my team members make the exact same missteps. At first, I was relieved. I no longer felt like I was the worst contributor, manager, director, or VP! But I also wanted to compile my mistakes and share my perspective with them.

At first, I tried giving new managers and directors my bulleted list. However, that was horribly ineffective. No one wants to be handed a list from their manager of all the ways they’ll inevitably fail!

So instead, I started focusing on telling stories and setting the scenes for these mistakes. I sketched the scenes of all of the mistakes and started weaving them into a story that showed the professional journey that everyone makes from their first day on the job as a fresh grad to leading the company as a C-level executive.

It’s an illustrated story that I’ve been narrating and sharing with other startups and organizations. I presented the story at South by Southwest a few months ago. Since then, it’s been mentioned in the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, and this morning, I presented a few of the mistakes on the CBS Morning Show.

Originally, this was a fun side project that I enjoyed sharing with other startups and the feedback that I’ve heard is that it should be a book. I’ve just started considering that in earnest. If you want to know where you can get a copy of 100 Mistakes, please bear with me — you’ll need to wait a little bit longer!

And at the end of the journey, I’m just grateful to have been a part of a team that allowed each other to grow and to learn from our mistakes. With a little bit more perspective, I am overwhelmed by how much everyone genuinely wants to do well by others and to create something meaningful together. However, old habits, misplaced exuberance, and role ambiguity sometimes get in the way.

Looking forward to sharing more soon!

April 27th, 2013 · elaine · entrepreneurship, life 4 comments

Dec 09

Five UX Research Pitfalls

I wrote this for UX Mag a while ago and it remains one of my all-time favorite writing projects. However, I never posted it in its entirety on my blog so here it is now. Enjoy!

More and more organizations view UX as a key contributor to successful products, connecting teams with end-users and guiding product innovation within the organization. Though it’s fantastic to see this transition happen, there are growing pains associated with becoming a user-driven organization. These are the pitfalls that I see organizations grappling with most often.

Pitfall 1: It’s easier to evaluate a completed, pixel-perfect product so new products don’t get vetted or tested until they’re nearly out the door.

Months into a development cycle and just days before the release date, you realize that the UI has serious flaws or missing logic. If you’re lucky, there is enough flexibility in the schedule to allow grumbling engineers to re-architect the product. More likely, though, the PM will push to meet the original deadline with the intent to fix the UI issues later. However, “later” rarely happens. Regardless, everyone wonders: how could these issues have been caught earlier?

The UI is typically built after the essential architectural elements are in place and it can be hard to test unreleased products with users until the very last moment. However, you can gather feedback early in the process:

Don’t describe the product and ask users if they would use it. In this case, you are more likely testing your sales pitch rather than the idea itself. If you ask users if they want a new feature, 90% of the time they’ll say yes.
Test with the users you want, not the users you already have. If you want to grow your audience with a new product, you should recruit users outside your current community.
Validate that the problem you are solving actually exists. Early in the design cycle, find your future users and research whether your product will solve their real-world problems. Look for places where users are overcoming a problem via work-around solutions (e.g., emailing links to themselves to keep an archive of favorite sites) or other ineffective practices (e.g., storing credentials in a text file because they can’t remember their online usernames and passwords).
Verify your mental models. Make sure that the way you think about the product is the same as your user. For instance, if you’ve been pitching your product idea to your coworkers as “conversational email” but your actual users are teenagers who primarily use text messaging, then your email metaphor probably won’t translate to your younger users. Even if you don’t intend to say “conversational email” in your product, you will unconsciously make subtle design choices that will limit your product’s success until you find a mental model that fits that of your users, not of your coworkers.
Prototype early. Create a Flash or patched-together prototype internally as soon as possible. Even if your prototype doesn’t resemble a finished product, you’ll uncover and develop confidence in the major issues to wrestle down in the design process. You’ll also have an easier time seeing the areas of the product that need animations or on-the-fly suggestions which often go unscoped when the product is only explored in wireframes and design specs but can require significant engineering time.
Plan through v2. If you intend to launch a product with minimal vetting or testing, make sure you’ve written down and talked about what you intend for the subsequent version. One of the downsides of the “release early, release often” philosophy is that it’s easy to get distracted or discouraged if your beta product doesn’t immediately succeed. Or upon launch you might find your users pulling you in a direction you hadn’t intended because the product wasn’t fully fleshed out or dealing with weeks of bug-fixing and losing sight of the big picture. Once the first version is out the door, keep your team focused on the big picture and dedicated to that second version.

Pitfall 2: Users click on things that are different, not always things they like. Curious trial users skew the usage statistics for a new feature.

Upon adding a “Join now!” button to your site, you cheer when you see an unprecedented 35% click-through rate. Weeks later, registration rates are abysmal and you have to reset expectations with crestfallen teams. So you experiment with the appearance of your “Join now!” button by changing its color from orange to green, and your click rates shoot up again. But a few days later, your green button is again performing at an all-time low.

It’s easy for an initial number spike to obscure a serious issue. Launching a new feature into an existing product is especially nerve-wracking because you only have one chance to make a good first impression. If your users don’t like it the first time, they likely won’t try it again and you’ve squandered your best opportunity. Continuously making changes to artificially boost numbers leads to feature-blindness and distrustful users. Given all of this, how and when can you determine if a product is successful?

Instrument the entire product flow. Don’t log just one number. If you’re adding a new feature, you most likely want to know at least three stats: 1) what percentage of your users click on the feature, 2) what percentage complete the action, and 3) what percentage repeat the action again on a different day. By logging the smaller steps in your product flow, you can trace the usage statistics within all of these points to look for significant drop-offs.
Test in sub-communities. If you are launching a significant new feature, launch the feature in another country or in a small bucket and monitor your stats before launching more widely.
Dark-launch features. If you are worried that your feature could impact site performance, launch the feature silently without any visible UI and look for changes in uniques, visit times, or reports of users complaining about a slow site. You’ll minimize the number of issues you might have to potentially debug upon the actual launch.
Anticipate a rest period. Don’t promise statistics the day after a release. You’ll most likely want to see a week of usage before your numbers begin leveling.
Test the discoverability of your real estate. Most pieces of your UI will have certain natural discoverability rates. For instance, consider adding a new temporarily link to your menu header for a very small percentage of your users just to understand the discoverability rates for different parts of your UI. You can use these numbers as a baseline for evaluating future features.

Pitfall 3: Users give conflicting feedback.

You are running a usability study and evaluating whether users prefer to delete album pictures using a delete keystroke, a remove button, a drag-to-trash gesture, or a right-click context menu. After testing a dozen participants, your results are split among all four potential solutions. Maybe you should just recommend implementing all of them?

It’s unrealistic to expect users to understand the full context of our design decisions. A user might suggest adding “Apply” and “Save” buttons to a font preference dialog. However, you might know that an instant-effect dialog where the settings are applied immediately without clicking a button or dismissing the dialog allows the user to preview their font changes immediately and saves the user from opening up the dialog repeatedly to make small font style tweaks. With user research, it’s temptingly easy to create surveys or design our experiments so study participants simply vote on what they perceive as the right solution. However, the user is giving you data, not an expert opinion. If you interpret user feedback at face value, you typically end up with a split vote and little data to make an informed decision.

Ask why. Asking users for their preference is not nearly as informative as asking users why they have a preference. Perhaps they are basing their opinion upon a real-world situation that you don’t think is applicable to the majority of your users (e.g., “I like this new mouse preference option because I live next to a train track and my mouse shakes and wakes up my screen saver”).
Develop your organization’s sense of UI values. Know what UI paradigms (e.g. Mac vs. Windows, Web vs. Desktop, etc) and UI values (e.g. strong defaults or lots of customization, transparency or progressive disclosure) your team values. When you need to decipher conflicting data, you’ll have this list for guidance.
Make a judgment call. It’s not often helpful to users to have multiple forms of the same UI. In most cases it adds ambiguity or compensates for a poorly designed UI. When the user feedback is conflicting, you have to make a judgment call based upon what you know about the product and what you think makes sense for the user. Only in rare cases will all users have the same feedback or opinion in a research study. Making intelligent recommendations based upon conflicting data is what you are paid to do.
Don’t aim for the middle ground. If you have a legitimate case for building multiple implementations of the same UI (e.g., language differences, accessibility, corporate vs. consumer backgrounds, etc.), don’t fabricate a hodgepodge persona (”Everyone speaks a little bit of English!”). Instead, do your best to dynamically detect the type of user situation upfront, automate your UI for that user, and offer your user an easy way to switch.

Pitfall 4: Any data is better than no data, right?

You are debating whether to put a search box at the top or the bottom of a content section. While talking about the issue over lunch, your BD buddy suggests that you try making the top search box “Search across the Web” and the bottom search box “Search this article” to compare the results between the two. You can’t seem to place your finger on why this idea seems fishy though you can see why this would be more efficient than getting your rusty A/B testing system up and running again. Sensing your skepticism, your teammate adds, “I know it’s not perfect, but we’ll learn something about search boxes, right? I don’t see a reason not to put it in the next release if it’s easy?”

The human mind’s ability to fabricate stories to fill in the gaps in one’s knowledge is absolutely astounding. Given two or three data points, our minds can construct an alternate reality in which all of those data points make flawless sense. Whether it’s an A/B test, a usability study, or a survey, if your exploration provides limited or skewed results, you’ll most likely end up in a meeting room discussing everyone’s different interpretations of the data. This meeting won’t be productive and you’ll either agree with the most persuasive viewpoint or you’ll realize that you need a follow-up study to reconcile the potential interpretations of your study.

Push for requirements. When talking with your colleagues, try to figure out what you are trying to learn. What is the success metric you’re looking for? What will the numbers actually tell you? What are the different scenarios? This will help you determine the study you should run while also anticipating future interpretations of the data before running the study (e.g., if the top search bar performs better, did you learn that the top placement is better or just that users look for site search in the upper left area of a page?).
Recognize when a proposed solution is actually a problem statement. Sometimes someone will propose an idea that doesn’t seem to make sense. While your initial reaction may be to be defensive or to point out the flaws in the proposed A/B study, you should consider that your buddy is responding to something outside your view and that you don’t have all of the data. In this scenario, perhaps your teammate is proposing running the search box study because he has a meeting early next week and needs to work on a quicker timeline. From his perspective, he’s being polite by leading with a suggestion without realizing that you don’t have the context for his suggestion. However, after pushing him for what problem the above study will resolve, you can also help him think through alternative ways of getting the data he needs faster.
Avoid using UX to resolve debates. UX might seem like a fantastic way to avoid personal confrontation (especially with managers and execs!). After all, it’s far easier to debate UX results rather than personal viewpoints. However, data is rarely as definitive as we’d like. Conducting needless studies runs the risk of slowing down your execution speed and perhaps leaving deeper philosophical issues unresolved that will probably resurface again. Sometimes we agree to a study because we aren’t thinking fast enough to weigh the pros and cons of the approach, and it seems easier to simply agree. However, you do have the option of occasionally saying, “You’ve raised some really good points. I’d like to spend a few hours researching this issue more before we commit to this study. Can we talk in a few hours?” And when you do ask for this time, be absolutely certain to proactively follow-up with some alternative proposals or questions, not just reasons why you think it won’t work. You should approach your next conversation with, “I think we can apply previous research to this problem,” or “Thinking about this more, I realized I didn’t understand why it was strategically important to focus on this branding element. Can you walk me through your thinking?” or “After today’s conversation, I realized that we were both trying to decrease churn but in different ways. If we do this study, I think we’re going to be overlooking the more serious issue, which is…”

Pitfall 5: By human nature, you trust the numbers going in the right direction and distrust the numbers going in the wrong direction.

Hours after a release, you hear the PM shout, “Look! Our error rates just decreased from .5% to .0001%. Way to go engineering team! Huh, but our registration numbers are down. Are we sure we’re logging that right?”

Even with well-maintained scripts, the most talented stats team, and the best intentions, your usage statistics will never be 100% accurate. Because double-checking every number is unrealistic, you naturally tend to optimize along two paths: 1) distrust the numbers that are going in the wrong direction and, more dangerously, 2) trust the numbers that are heading in the right direction. To make matters worse, data logging is amazingly error-prone. If you spot a significant change in a newly introduced user activity metric, 9 times out of 10 it’s due to a bug rather than a meaningful behavior. As a result, five minutes of logging can result in five days of data analyzing, fixing, and verifying.

Hold off on the champagne. Everyone wants to be the first to relay good news so it’s hard to resist saying, “We’re still verifying things and it’s really early, but I think registration numbers went up ten-fold in the last release!” Train yourself to be skeptical and to sanity-check the good news and the bad news.
QA your logging numbers. Data logging typically gets inserted when the code is about to be frozen. Since data logging shouldn’t interfere with the user experience, it tends not to be tested. Write test cases for your important data logging numbers and include testing them in the QA process.
Establish a crisp data vocabulary. Engagement, activity, and session can mean entirely different things between teams. Make sure that your data gatekeeper has made it clear how numbers are calculated on your dashboards to help avoid false alarms or overlooked issues.

One of the main tenets of user research is to constantly test the assumptions that we develop from working on a product on a daily basis. It takes time to develop the skills to know how to apply our UX techniques, when our professional expertise should trump the user’s voice, or when to distrust user data. As a researcher, you are trained to keep an open mind and to keep asking questions until you understand the user’s entire mental picture. However, it’s that same open-mindedness and willingness to understand the user’s perspective that makes it easy to assume that because their perspective can make sense, that it should also justify changes within our product design. Or, because we are so comfortable with a particular type of UX research, we tend to over-apply it to our team’s questions.

While by no means a complete list, I hope these five pitfalls from my personal experience will be relevant to your professional lives and perhaps, provide some food for thought as we all strive to become better researchers and designers.

December 9th, 2012 · elaine · design, entrepreneurship 4 comments

Oct 27

geeky guide to halloween

Via annedela at istockphoto.com

It’s likely that Halloween can be explained by two tiny almond-sized regions deep in your brain. By researching neuropsychology and history, a primal code appears that describes 5-6 specific stories that terrify our brain senseless. Once you know them, you can design a truly scary Halloween costume or outline many horror books and screenplays.

the floating eyeball that wouldn’t go away

Evil eyeball via moddb.com

When I was eight, I awoke to a bloodshot eyeball the size of a softball glaring down on me. I closed and opened my eyes — expecting it to be gone — but it wouldn’t go away and terrorized the space above my bed for half an hour.

The experience was petrifying. When my politely concerned parents suggested that the eyeball was a dream or a bird, I was aghast, “Dang it – now I have to risk my life catching that blasted, deathly eyeball before you’ll believe me?!”

The mystery unraveled in college when I learned about the brain’s amygdala. I went on a research deep-dive and realized, “Wait a second — this is the secret to a great Halloween costume or horror film!”

the culprit amygdala

Courtesy of Creative Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amygdala.png

The amygdala, a small low-level region of the brain a few inches behind each eye, seems perfectly wired for Halloween. It is responsible for the fight or flight response, keeping a library of what is scary in the world, detecting fearful facial expressions, and waking its dreamer when something goes bump in the night.

Hyperactive amygdalas (generally from stress, sickness, food reactions, poor sleep habits, or genetics) can trigger hallucinations and paralysis while we pass in and out of sleep. The experience isn’t always negative but when it is, it becomes a “night terror.” This is very different from a nightmare. Only 6% of the general population is believed to ever experience the prerequisite sleep paralysis [1] and a full-blown hallucinatory “night terror” (also referred to as pavor nocturnus, hypnagogia, or hypnopompia) is far rarer.

But what’s astounding is that most night terror hallucinations, spanning nearly all cultures and over thousands of years, are remarkably similar!

This suggests that some experiences are universally scary. Interviewing your amygdala is impossible and designing a psychological experiment to scare subjects is unethical. However, night terror accounts provide a convenient glimpse into that hidden psyche.

how a night terror happens

The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli (1741–1825)

A few things must misfire for a night terror to occur. First, the amygdala must be in deep REM sleep where it has the most vivid, fanciful dream activity. But before the amygdala runs and flies into wild REM sleep stories, it warns the brainstem to immobilize the body so that the dreamer remains safe and still instead of thrashing about in their sleep.

However, occasionally the amygdala and motor shut-off signals fall out of sync before or after REM sleep. If our mind becomes conscious before the body, we can wake up paralyzed or numb. Sudden-onset paralysis is already frightening but being frozen while a fear-obsessed amygdala is in overdrive can turn terrifying!

Once frozen but conscious, the amygdala hallucinates within the bedroom scene. Suddenly ghostly apparitions appear to crawl out of closets and emerge from shadows while the dreamer remains helpless. The dreamer can even feel their intruder’s cold touch or painful pinches. Night terrors are frequently accompanied by shortness of breath and chest compressions so strong that one account describes them as “a ton of rocks upon my chest.” However, dreamers are unaware of these mechanics and attribute the sensation to the intruder crawling upon their body and riding them to near suffocation. The experience is so real that it is often hard to convince the victim that the terror didn’t actually happen.

Though night terrors vary, all night terrors exploit one fear — an intense and overpowering anxiety that something is “out to get you.” Our amygdala’s worst fear is not public speaking or the dentist but being chased or pursued with the intent to kill.

“Ichabod Crane, Respectfully Dedicated to Washington Irving.” William J. Wilgus (1819 – 1853)
The headless horseman chasing Ichabod Crane

the 6 night terrors

Here are sure-fire ways to scare the beejezus out of your Halloween buddies. Academic research and historical accounts typically identify the old hag, incubus/succubus, and vestibular motor sensations (dizziness, vibrations). Outside of research, contemporary accounts also include alien abductions and vermin.

1. The Old Hag

Snow White, Frankenstein, Wizard of Oz, Tales from the Crypt, and Night of the Living Dead

Example: Your ghoulish deceased grandmother appears in your bedroom, slowly approaches, crawls upon your chest, and proceeds to suffocate you with her weight.

The old hag night terror refers to an old or deceased woman who appears at night and crawls upon the dreamer’s chest to choke, assault, or suffocate them. Though it’s called an “old hag,” a ghoulish male equivalent exists too. Witches, mummies, and zombies are an embodiment of this terror. With skeletons, the dreamer sometimes awakens to find the skeleton sleeping beside them. And more recently, online forums are filled with accounts of creepy children who crawl into the room to attack the dreamer.

Interestingly, Mary Shelley supposedly developed the vision for Frankenstein based upon a “dream vision” and it’s worth nothing that Dorothy’s interactions with the Wicked Witch of the West occur while she is sleeping. On Halloween, the old hag is represented by the classic pointy hat witch costume.

2. Evil Species

Engraving from Charles Nodier’s “Tales” (probably inspired by Henry Fuseli) (1846), King Kong, Gremlins, Terminator, Aliens,
and Forbidden Planet (1956)

Example: A giant expressionist monster with glowing eyes enters your room through a crack in the window, immobilizes you telepathically, and proceeds to suck the life out of you with its super powers.

Sometimes the menacing presence is not entirely human but a demon, gremlin, monster, or animal. In research, these are typically classified as types of old hag hallucinations and the overall intent is the same — to physically assault the dreamer. However, there’s a subtle distinction that I think makes it worthy of it’s own category. Unlike deceased human corpses, the amygdala appears to invent a threatening superior species. In history, this has been a stronger demon, a monster laden with teeth, or a creature with supernatural powers like a werewolf at full moon. Today, there are fewer accounts of these demons. However, alien abduction stories are rampant and many researchers believe that these are modern night terrors exposing a deep fear of a technologically superior species.

3. Femme Fatale & Ladykiller

Medieval woodcut of lustful Pan from Darrah Anderson with 3:AM Magazine, Snow White (1937), La Chiesa, Dracula (1931),
Phantom of the Opera, Lilith by John Collier (1892), and Basic Instinct
Example: The devil appears in your bedroom and wants to impregnate you with his spawn.

Though it’s controversial to mention, history is riddled with accounts of the incubus (male) and succubus (female) — evil lustful spirits that use their sexual wiles to seduce and assault their dreamers. This is the classic tale behind Rosemary’s Baby.

In the Medieval period, these reports were so pervasive that if a woman unexpectedly became pregnant while her husband was away, the demonic incubus was suspected before infidelity or rape. The male form is controversial and many suspect that historical accounts of incubi have been scape-goats for history’s sexual offenders. However, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Rosemary’s Baby, and the Phantom of the Opera are almost certainly of incubus folklore.

The female equivalent, a femme fatale, generally takes the shape of a demonic angel (she-devil) with pronounced sexual features like large breasts, long hair, and sometimes wings. In some cases, the female form attacks the children of the dreamer. Most cultures have a Lilith/Eve temptress within their folklore – some dating back thousands of years. It’s not at all far-fetched to suggest that religion may have taken a cue from a hyperactive amygdala!

4. Vibrations & Noise

Alice in Wonderland (1951), Vertigo (1958), Exorcist (1973), haunted house via clker.com

Example: You wake up to paralysis. You strain to open your eyes or sit up in bed but even the smallest movement is impossible. You’re trapped in your head’s darkness growing dizzier by the second. A buzzing noise joins your darkness and gets louder and louder, closer and closer. You try screaming for help but you are still paralyzed. The buzzing noise is overwhelming and all-consuming. The darkness has become a whirlpool and the buzzing is so loud your head is shaking. At any moment, you’re afraid that your head might explode.

Night terrors do not always include a living intruder. Sometimes dreamers find themselves shaking uncontrollably, falling, dizzy, or just experience the world off-kilter — like a whirlpool appearing within the room, Alice falling down the rabbit hole, the heartbeat beneath the floorboards in Edgar Allen Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart, or violent shaking that cracks bedroom walls.

Some night terror victims have an experience more akin to a noise. The “exploding head syndrome” refers to a noise trapped in the dreamer’s head that spins around getting louder and louder until the dreamer fears their head will explode.

Other noises include explosive door slams, gunshots, or explosions that immediately wake the dreamer. Or, the dreamer is paralyzed but hears far-away noises like screams, laughter, ringing, or wind getting louder and louder foreshadowing something ominous. This explains haunted house noises and perhaps why shaky hand-held camera effects elicit scary spine tingles.

As an aside, it might not be a Halloween costume, but if you’re going to write a horror film, the vibration category is my bet. Pop culture has desensitized us to vampires and zombies but the “exploding head syndrome” is rife with opportunities.

5. Vermin

Silence of the Lambs (1991), The Invasion of the Vampires (1963), rats in ceiling via darksidedisplays.com,
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), The Birds (1963)

Example: The wallpaper shifts, squirms, and starts crawling with hundreds of rats. The rats crawl from the walls to the ceiling above your bed and then fall into your bedsheets. They keep coming. Soon you are swimming in rats that want to overtake you.

Creepy crawly apparitions vary by culture — one culture’s cockroach is another culture’s chameleon. However, spiders, bats, lizards, cockroaches, snakes, and rats appear frequently on English-speaking forums. If the beady-eyed intruder is alone, it is typically over-sized, flying, and potentially baring teeth. Swarms of critters tend to crawl up ceilings and drop on the bedsheets of their dreamer.

After reading many vermin night terror accounts, I suspect that patterned wallpaper, curtains, and carpets provide the perfect canvas for the amygdala to go nuts. A significant number of vermin stories start with the wallpaper shifting into squirming snakes and spiders. Personally, I love fantastic wallpaper in horror films (like The Shining’s hotel) but I’d be in favor of banning wall and floor patterns in hospitals. Sickness and fever is a predictor for night terrors and the hospital is a place where I definitely want my amygdala shielded!

6. Fear of the Unknown

Repulsion (1965), Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland (2010), The Son of Man by René Magritte (1964), evil eyeball via moddb.com, monster under bed via monster.wikia.com/

Example: You wake up with a sense of overwhelming dread. You know something is in the room. It is very cold and you feel more alone than you ever have before. Whatever it is has already taken everyone else in the house and is now coming after you. You are petrified with fear. Each second the presence doesn’t reveal itself just leaves you in greater suspense.

Many visual hallucinations are incomplete or semi-transparent versions of themes 1-5: teethy jaws, ghosts, shadowy figures, faceless spirits, floating heads, arms emerging from walls or closets, and countless variations of evil eye hallucinations — floating eyeballs, red glowing eyes, or white eyes with no iris. In some cases, there is no intruder at all but just an unbearable presence that is perhaps worse than if the hallucination took full shape. This could be the monster that lives under the bed or the still shadow who keeps the dreamer in terror-filled suspense.

Within Halloween, the jack-o-lantern approximates a dismembered floating head and it’s easy to see why the ghost costume is so popular. However, if you’re looking for a great Halloween costume, the faceless shadowy figure wearing a brimmed hat and business suit (or trenchcoat) is one of today’s most common night terror hallucinations.

Conclusion

If you’re thinking, “Now I have to fall asleep after reading about the old hag. Thanks a lot Elaine.” I have good news. The more you know about night terrors the less likely you are to have them. And in fact, this may be the reason that Halloween exists at all – the more we reconcile our worst fears the less likely our amygdala goes ballistic when we’re deep asleep.

However, if you freeze with sleep paralysis tonight, many reoccurring night terror victims say that thinking positive thoughts and willing yourself to spin out of bed from your side instead of sitting straight up will break the paralyzing spell.

Happy Halloween!

Via annedela at istockphoto.com

October 27th, 2012 · elaine · life 5 comments

Oct 02

preserving awesomeness: why metrics aren’t enough

I love, love, love numbers. If I am ever trapped on a deserted island, please just give me data and a scripting language and I’ll live out my remaining days content. After graduating, I spent four years in quant heaven conducting hundreds upon hundreds of Human Factors studies and reducing the world to performance indices and error rates. When we started Meebo, it took me no time to instrument every conceivable performance metric including whose blog posts were most read, emoticon preferences, and average time to open the first IM conversation. If it moved or clicked, *bam* — I logged it.

But with time, touchy-feely neurons sprouted within my data brain. Minimum viable products, “release early, release often” philosophies, feedback loops, and A/B testing help optimization and decision-making but they can’t guarantee that a product is awesome. Quantitative rigor is a requirement but what kills startups is not lack of data. What kills startups is when the 2-3 year strategy gets murky, when a product loses its pizzazz, or when management is no longer confidently aligned. It’s the fuzzy, intangible stuff.

I met with a CEO & friend last week who, after over a decade in business and millions of users, was considering layoffs. He’d spent the previous days sifting through years of decks with the question, “What went wrong?” haunting him. We were contemplating a front page redesign and I kicked off our creative session with, “Okay, let’s define awesome — why did you start this company?” but his response was surprisingly mournful, “I think that’s the problem. I think there have been times when I’ve forgotten that too.”

That spark that ignites founders is unfathomably huge. “Awesome” seems obvious initially and losing that passion seems absurd. However, business partnerships with big checks will tempt you from your strategy, late products will demand you shave features, a pivot will fling you into new industries and revenue models, a “go big vs. stay nimble” debate will divide meeting rooms, flashy headlines will make you question whether you’re a fad or a trend, and your significant other will ask, “Wait, why is this worth it again?” as you curtail your vacation for yet another supposed emergency. Very rarely will the answer be waiting on the internal dashboard.

The mission statement is supposed to be the company compass that cuts through the data clutter but it’s insufficient. The mission statement is merely a 12-24 month hypothesis of how the current business will be most successful. It does not define the unbeatable x-factor that perseveres the inevitable ups and downs. And when you lose grasp of that essence, the entrepreneurial experience starts to feel inauthentic, the passion dies, and years later you try to remember why you set down this path initially.

So the surprising advice from a data-head gone slightly soft is simple but I promise it will save you hundreds, if not thousands, of stressful hours. Before you hire your first employee or launch your first prototype, take a two-hour lunch to do a three-word exercise to define your founder awesomeness: who you are, what you do, and how you do it. At Meebo, our three words were, “simple, elegant, friendly.” Public companies’ three words can be approximated from their s-1s — Facebook’s might be “fast, bold, open” whereas Google might be “data, big, visionary.”

Logic-loving counterparts, I can see you skeptically furrowing, “Words? Wha? Elaine, I have 109 bugs to fix, I just ran out of coffee, and your blogs aren’t exactly short.” But wait, let me prove this is more than a touchy-feeling bonding exercise:

THE RATIONALE

Nip it in the bud. Whatever debates surface over this informal exercise are likely to be repeated countless times in the future: when to launch, how large an office to lease, whether to throw a party, what types of revenue models are palatable, whether your email tone is formal or informal… these debates are really about values and identity. Plus, these issues are likely to surface when you’re under stress and under-rested.
Everyone does their part. By making this a team exercise, you spread the responsibility for upholding awesomeness across all founders — it’s not one founder representing fantastic user experience while the alter-ego founder battles for margins. These words become your shared playbook instead of divided territories.
It’s inevitable. As you grow and build out teams like Product, Engineering, UX, HR, Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support, those team members will need to understand “awesomeness” so they can do their job: how to interact with customers, how to reward employees, how to pitch the vision, how to pace development, how to design the product, etc. What they are really trying to do is articulate the founders’ DNA. If it’s not readily apparent, those teams will define their own version of “awesome” and then that function will feel inauthentic and be ineffective.

STEP #1 – BRAINSTORMING

Digging into fuzzy stuff isn’t easy so before the two-hour lunch, here are four homework questions to prep:

Who are your competitors? From a perspective, how are you different?
Who are your enemies? A common enemy is galvanizing — what are you against? Loneliness, boredom, waste, mean people?
Who are you akin to? If your company were < music, an animal, a car, or even a Disney character, etc>, what would you be and why?
What’s your magic wish? If you could wave a magic wand and change absolutely anything (the crazier the better), what would be different in the world because of you?

When you share, pay attention to the words and themes that reappear. The why is more important than whether you 100% agree on specific Pokemon characters.

STEP #2 – SELECTION

Cull and clump common themes and words together. Get it down to three. Here are 575 words to start and some tips:

Stick with three. You might think more words = more awesome. However, the more words you have, the more watered-down your essence is and the harder it is to prioritize later. Designing a front page with three words is a thousand times easier than with four words which is likely to feel incoherent. 99.999% of the teams I’ve worked with want to stop with four. However, your future teams will be enormously grateful that you took an ice cream break and whittled it down to three.
Aim for tension. Your awesome words have more personality and power when they conflict with each other. For instance, “honest, open, transparent” is less effective than “honest, irreverent, idealistic.”
~~Avoid negative words.~~ Be positive. This is your awesomeness! Think pep-talk motivator instead of “thou shall not” downer.
Think big. Make at least one word aspirational — “simple” was Meebo’s aspirational word. We wanted to design products whose technical complexity was hidden within a streamlined user interface. Our aspirational was centered around the product but your aspirational word might refer to your identity, “largest, unbiased, champion, leader” or execution: “fearless, fast, risky.” That aspirational word keeps you reaching towards something instead of just defining your current status quo.
Anticipate double meanings. “Bright” could mean smart or vibrant. “Together” could mean solidarity or buttoned-up. Those particulars matter.
Choose words that will endure. You might be an “underdog” now but what about at 10,000 employees?
Be suspicious of hollow pick-me-ups. “Excellence, nice, original, trustworthy, different, innovative” — are these words specific enough to help with decision-making? Why are you excellent? Why are you trustworthy?
Focus on you — not the market. Every bank wants to be “honest, secure.” Every startup wants to be “social, open.” But what is it about your particular startup that is different?

Remembering what you didn’t choose and why will be important later so find a shoebox (or camera) and archive this somewhere safe. A Marketing person in your not-so-distant future is weeping for joy right now.

STEP #3 – VALIDATE

There might be one word that doesn’t sit quite right with you — that’s normal. The words will grow with you. But to gain a little bit of confidence before immortalizing these words forever, here are a few questions to think through as a team:

Hiring: What skills and experiences do you look for based upon your three words? How is the recruiting process conducted so that your three words are self-evident to candidates?
Team-building: What team behaviors are encouraged and discouraged based upon your three words? Decorated desks, heated debates, meetings that run long, swearing — are these acceptable or unacceptable behaviors?
Leadership: What should leadership pay attention to the most? Consumers? Market? Team? Investors?
Innovation: Where do ideas come from most often? How do you develop and validate insights? How does this scale?
Decision-making: What is the appropriate response when two employees reach an impasse: hierarchy, escalate, gather more data, test and see, pick one arbitrarily and run?
Tone: What language do you use to address your users? How frequently? What information do you share and hide? Which users do you prioritize and how?
Sales & Marketing: How do you sell your story and product? Testimonials, demos, field expert influence, data, price, product speaks for itself?
Development: What’s more important: development quality or development pace? How do you reconcile the two?
Design: What expertise (i.e. typography, color, interaction, editorial) do you value most because of your three words? What other products embody one of your three words and why?
Recovery: When you make a mistake with your (release a buggy feature, miss a promised deadline), how do you recover?
Accountability: Who is ultimately accountable for goals? The manager, the employee, the founders? What are the repercussions for not meeting those goals? How are disappointed employees, investors, managers, etc reassured?
Celebrations: How do you celebrate individual, team, and company achievements? Is reward solely salary, titles, equity, and bonuses?

Your words might not address all of these questions. That’s okay. At Meebo, we didn’t have an execution word and looking back, I can see how that generated a strong product brand but a more organic development philosophy. Had we tried answering these questions, we might have ferreted out those issues earlier and better realized our potential weaknesses.

SUMMARY

But here’s the surprise — now that you’ve articulated your awesomeness, your metrics will make a lot more sense. You might realize that to be a “leader,” you need to prioritize market metrics. If your goal is to be “fast,” you might track release cycles and product stability. For “friendly,” your outreach, interaction, and reputation with users is key.

I once believed that data was pure and incontestable. However, in a business context, data is interpreted by people with unconscious agendas, is most frequently a trailing indicator that can only be gathered once a prototype has been built, and can never quite quantify “awesomeness.” No one sets out to build a lackluster product, hire an unexceptional team, or present substandard returns to their investors. While awesomeness cannot be quantified, it can be articulated and the earlier that’s done in a company’s history, the better.

October 2nd, 2012 · elaine · entrepreneurship 9 comments

Sep 11

dear elaine

Dear Elaine circa 2005,

If you’re reading this, it’s because time travel becomes possible and someone has been kind enough to relay this message to you. Please thank them for me too.

First, it’s Elaine from 2012. In 2005, you are enjoying team walks to Peet’s each morning, realizing that your London and Italian cohorts are right – MSN is huge internationally, and maybe you’re even backing down from your stubborn use of camel case thanks to your friends knocking some sense into you. You’re a motley, passionate start-up crew and that crazy clash of perspectives has made Meebo’s product and team stronger. There are very few occasions where I’d confidently stop time to experience a moment indefinitely. However, that oh-so-short walk to Peet’s is one of them.

I’m not going to spoil your Meebo journey. I wouldn’t want to ruin the exhilarating surprises and nothing I could say, unfortunately, could prevent the occasional soul-crushing despair. Fortunately, the good days will definitely outnumber the bad. However, time travel is an extraordinarily rare opportunity and I know you’d be disappointed if I didn’t offer you any advice.

But please be patient, I want to recount a story from our autobiography…

In an airport between flights, your future Elaine meets a retired psychologist and after some social banter, you casually ask, “So at what age do most people become self-aware — demonstrate an understanding of their strengths & weaknesses and some idea of how they fit into their social context?”

This is a set-up. You’re already thinking about follow-up questions. Does self-awareness gradually increase with age? Is there a time when it peaks? What happens when someone becomes self-aware at the age of 80 – is that even heard of?” You’ve been dying to ask these questions forever.

But what he says stops you, “Elaine, I can’t answer that question because less than 5% of people get there… ever.”

To my 2005 existence, I’m so sorry – I know this is a shock. When you were in middle school, your mother reassured you that your classmates might grow up and surprise you some day — she was right. You half-expect a similar right-of-passage transformation to happen with your peer group — it’s unlikely.

Second, it’s not clear what this means for societies coexisting at a larger scale — I can’t speculate on that either.

And lastly, everyone probably harbors some secret, selfish hope that those who’ve wronged us might one day develop some future self-awareness and regret their clumsy missteps — oy, this rarely, rarely happens either. You have to keep doing the right thing just because it’s the right thing.

You already know that you aren’t self-aware. It makes you a little uncomfortable but boy, how you’d really like to join that 5%!

So the advice. I know you’re hoping for a top ten list with easily digestible bullets and actionable tidbits. But, actually, my single piece of advice to you is philosophical and just three words…

“Don’t be self-aware.”

I know this runs contrary to everything within you — your desire for truth, to do well by others, and for self-efficacy. However, when you are self-aware, you can’t dance without feeling ridiculous, talk without freezing mid-sentence, learn at any reasonable speed, or help but blame yourself for not getting along with everyone. The start-up pace is so relentless that if you commit yourself to self-awareness now, you will spend too many hours replaying events in your mind and crushing yourself under the weight of self-criticism. It’s hard to balance the humility of self-awareness with the confidence it takes to run a start-up. Self-awareness is a destination you need to know how to get to but it’s no place to linger.

It’s also refreshing to have people who are woefully un-self-aware in an organization — those are usually the folks who have a lot of perspective to offer, who don’t bow to an organization’s normalizing pressure, and who keep that spark alive. Your team will be a happier, stronger place if you postpone your quest for self-awareness, focus on just being comfortable with your own skin no matter what you learn about yourself, and keep Meebo a kind environment for everyone.

I know what you’re thinking, “Elaine, you came back all the way in time just to tell me this?!!!” Sigh… yes. And from one perfectionist to another, you know I wouldn’t do it without a ton of reflection and consideration. Perhaps your favorite quote will help:

“There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.” — Oscar Wilde

Love,
-Elaine

P.S. And spend more time with your future husband too!

September 11th, 2012 · elaine · entrepreneurship, life 7 comments

Aug 07

the best recruiters – followup

Of the 530 emails directed to Pete London, there were a few standouts. Thirty-seven emails contained personalization, role, and company information but within that group, just 5 recruiters went beyond an occasional detail and spent a minimum of three paragraphs explaining the team’s priorities, charting the company’s trajectory, and describing why Pete’s background set the perfect stage for a new opportunity.

The best recruiters

According to these metrics, the extraordinary recruiting folks who represent that top 1% are:

Bill
Umoff

what’s their secret?

I’ve re-read Pete’s emails multiple times and analyzed the best recruiters’ tips and tricks. Here’s my attempt to articulate the unspoken rules of a fantastic recruiter email:

Tip #1. You, your, and yours

The most common mistake a recruiter makes is framing the opportunity from their perspective instead of the candidate’s: “Hi, I’m a recruiter, I’ve got a great position for you. We’re doing amazing things. Call me!”.

Ronda and Brad’s brilliant emails stood out for one simple thing — the predominant use of the second person. Instead of selling the company and listing its virtues in “I, me, we” language, they paint the position from Pete’s perspective with “you, your, yours” language:

“This opportunity would take you more in the direction of new media… it would give you the opportunity to really stretch your skills… you’ll have the chance to learn SproutCore directly from the guy who developed it…” – Ronda Woodcox

“Specifically I have you in mind as Software Engineer for our Application Development team which is responsible for building and scaling innovative features for <company>. You’d be responsible for seeing projects through from inception to development, production, and rapid post-production iteration. You’d be working on UI to the meaty challenges in back-end scalability, optimization, and performance primarily in Javascript and PHP…” – Brad Fuellenbach

By adopting the second person, the potential benefits to Pete are more apparent and the recruiters become a storyteller instead of a salesman.

Tip #2. First impressions…

Though everyone wants their emails to stand out, most email openers fall into one of three categories: 1) 35% “Hi, I am a recruiter” 2) 22% “I came across your profile and was impressed, and 3) 7% “Sorry to bother you but…”

None of these greetings is ideal. The most common introduction, “Hi, I’m a recruiter, ” or “Hi, my name is and I work with…,” seems like a harmless and polite opener, but it’s not necessary (your name is already in the to header) and it immediately puts the focus on your status as a recruiter instead of the candidate’s potential opportunity.

The second category, “I came across your profile and was impressed,” isn’t specific and once you’ve received 100 recruiter emails that are similarly impressed, the flattery falls flat.

And finally, the apology. There’s no reason to apologize for being a recruiter or for a cold email. An organization is nothing without its people and your role is to leave no stone unturned on your quest to match an opportunity with an ideal candidate. If your email is strong and well-written, there’s no need to start your outreach from a weak and tentative position.

For contrast, consider these approaches:

1) “I’m reaching out to you given your strong front-end development experience, particularly with Javascript.”
2) “Your unique mix of front-end and back-end knowledge and experience really caught the attention of our current Web Developer manager.”
3) “I see that you have experience with large scale software development involving distributed systems that lines up nicely with the work being done in our Cloud Technology Team”

In all three cases, the author’s recruiter role is implied, the flattery is specific, and the critical opening sentence is not wasted on frivolous social niceties.

Of the five top emails, only one began with a “I saw your profile and was impressed.” The other four began with a specific compliment or a non-standard opener.

Tip #3. Follow up; don’t spam

Within the 172 organizations who reached out to Pete, 44% of those emails could have referenced a previous email or colleague, “Pete, I wanted to reach out again…” However, the actual number was much lower – just 12%.

When recruiters reference previous emails, they maintain the conversation and history. When a subsequent email is sent without referencing the previous outreach, it’s worse than starting over. The ignored history implies that regardless of what the recruiter says, the candidate is unmemorable and the recruiter’s words read insincere.

And beyond mentioning a personal follow-up, just 1 recruiter picked up the torch for their team member by name, “It’s been a few month since my colleague, Thomas, reached out to you.” Teamwork brownie points go to: Ryan Eriksson (Expanxion).

Tip #4: The limelight belongs to the candidate

External recruiting firms and VC’s are especially likely to justify their outreach by talking about their firm, their firm’s specialty, years of experience, previous LinkedIn testimonials, etc. A laundry list of credentials doesn’t prove you are a great recruiter — the proof is in the email where the focus should be on the candidate’s qualifications, not your own.

The top five recruiters take a different tact and show a friendly, insatiable curiosity to learn more about Pete while never mentioning anything about their role or title:

“From what I gather, you’re a JavaScript and front-end expert, having worked on web applications that scale to millions. I also noted, however, that your skills go beyond front-end work, demonstrated by your experience at Plaxo in C/C++ (and even violin!). What I take from this is that you are really an engineering generalist, although maybe having some obvious strengths and likes, with a clear understanding of the web. I thought I would get in touch with you in hopes of learning about your situation and sharing some info from my end.” – Bill Umoff

“…I am extremely impressed with the experience you’ve gained from Meebo, Plaxo and Disney … but primarily your passion of “scaling applications to millions, and pushing the bounds of what’s possible on the Web” … Well, I’d love to learn some more about you and your interests and am curious if you’d be open to having a chat with us here at <company? either tomorrow or Wednesday…” – Brad Fuellenbach

summary

One last tidbit, recruiters don’t read blogs. Surprisingly, Pete’s inbox has continued flowing since the initial honeypot email post — roughly one ping every 31 hours — with no signs of dwindling. While the field attracts a wide range of talent, this shouldn’t detract from the amazing recruiters who are getting recruiting right.

A special thanks to Bill Umoff, Brad Fuellenbach, and Ronda Woodcox for allowing their non-anonymized emails to be reprinted.

Happy team-building,
-Elaine

August 7th, 2012 · elaine · tech 22 comments

Jun 26

the recruiter honeypot

In late 2009, I created an online persona named Pete London – a self-described JavaScript ninja – to help attract and hire the best JavaScript recruiters. While I never hired a recruiter from the experiment, I learned a ton about how to compete in today’s Silicon Valley talent war. Based upon two years of non-scientific research, here’s what you should know…

The Recruiting Crisis

In late 2009, my desk was piled with JavaScript resumes. Our homegrown JavaScript framework edged us over competitors but maintaining our technical advantage meant carefully crafting a lean, delta-force Web team. Though I averaged two interviews a day, we had only grown the team by three-four engineers each year.

However, in 2010, that had to change. It was our first year with a real revenue target and also the first time we planned to pivot from our original IM product. We charted our end-of-year goals, quarterly milestones, and eventually backtracked to our team and hiring priorities. To meet our 2010 goals, I needed to double the JavaScript team in just one quarter. If I didn’t, innovation would stall and without revenue, our business would be in serious jeopardy.

I had very little more to give. Over the previous four years, I had already spent my personal networks, seeded every nook of the Web with job descriptions, and experimented with guerilla recruiting tactics like hosting JavaScript meetups across the country, planting hand-written congratulatory notes on the seats of CS Stanford students who’d just finished their finals, coding a spidering engine to find online JavaScript resumes, and even buying Google AdWords for relevant terms like xmlhttp, opendatabase, and localstorage.

But then my recruiting problem went from serious to heart-stopping dire. In the final months of 2009, every female on Meebo’s recruiting team became pregnant within a month of each other. Our expectant mothers were searching for contract replacements but as winter crept closer, finding someone who could temporarily step up to our extraordinary JavaScript challenges during our most critical hiring quarter looked unlikely. I was truly on my own.

PETE LONDON IS BORN

I needed amazing recruiters desperately. After the third expectant mother relayed her good news, I sunk into to my chair overwhelmed with urgency and stared blankly at my monitor thinking over and over, “Oh my god, what do I do now?” My first impulse was to look at the recruiters in my Inbox – specifically those who had pinged me for a Javascript role and presumably had prior Javascript recruiting experience. However, I also needed a recruiter who was smart enough not to poach a founder.

The honeypot idea emerged slowly, “If only I weren’t a founder! Which recruiters would have contacted me as an engineer?” I stewed on the idea of posting my resume online with a fictitious name for days and then one sleepless night, without telling anyone, I woke up and posted a small three-page website with an about page, resume, and blog for a supposed Pete London whose interests and engineering persona mirrored my own except he wasn’t a founder. I swapped out my post-graduate experience with my husband so it wouldn’t be too easy to trace back to me. I returned to bed with a small glimmer of hope – I had been hunting for recruiters for months but now the recruiters would come to me!

LAST RESORT – LINKEDIN

My hopes sank pretty quickly. PeteLondon.com sat alone in Internet ether for weeks with absolutely nada activity. I was about to pull down the entire site when I thought – I’ll just post the resume on LinkedIn as a last resort.

Bam. It was as if I’d finally stumbled upon the door to the party.

On December 10th, 2009, the first LinkedIn message arrived from Google. Mozilla followed on December 15th. Ning and Facebook followed in January. Since then, Pete averaged a recruiter ping every 40 hours and saw 530 emails from 382 recruiters across 172 organizations.

* Q1 2009 and Q2 2012 data are not complete. Data collection began December 10th, 2009 and ended June 1, 2012

WHAT I LEARNED

After two and a half years, I learned less about recruiting recruiters and more about recruiting engineers. Here are my eight biggest take-aways to finding the best talent online…

Lesson 1: Recruiters rely exclusively upon LinkedIn

You might be thinking, “Really? This is obvious!” But understand the context. I was interviewing tech recruiters who said they had “moved beyond LinkedIn.” LinkedIn was a “crutch for everyone else” but them. When I asked what techniques they used to fulfill JavaScript roles, they’d describe complex Boolean queries, highway 101 billboards, and obscure search engines. I ate it up! But at the same time, I wondered, “Wait, if this is all true, why hasn’t anyone found Pete London yet?”

To further my confusion, LinkedIn wasn’t how Meebo found its initial superstar JavaScript team. From 2005-20011, only one JavaScript team member was hired via LinkedIn – the rest came from personal networking, meetups, blog scouting, and other guerilla recruiting approaches.

Recruiting Method for Meebo's First JavaScript Engineers

I also assumed that a professional who made their living from recruiting, would want to optimize their response rate and would seek out ways to contact Pete London beyond LinkedIn. Though Pete London’s website and personal email address were just one click from his LinkedIn profile page, the majority of emails still arrived via LinkedIn – especially from larger companies.

Surprisingly, very few recruiters tried more than one communication channel.

TIP #1: If you’re a start-up who always feels like you’re scraping the bottom of the LinkedIn barrel, you’re probably right – LinkedIn is incredibly competitive. Recruit latent talent off the grid.

TIP #2: Recruiters flock to LinkedIn first, if not always. To increase your personal opportunities, join LinkedIn.

Lesson 2: Fear the Silicon Valley long tail

When I wrote to potential engineers, I always imagined my email landing next to recruiting giants like Google or Facebook. As a result, I was careful to emphasize Meebo’s unique start-up learning opportunities, amazing culture, and the opportunity to make impact.

However, my strategy was misguided. The Silicon Valley companies that drew TechCrunch headlines from 2010-2012 (i.e. Adobe, Amazon, AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Netflix, Microsoft, Mozilla, Skype, Twitter, Yahoo, Zynga) only represented 15% of the landscape.

But I should have been more scared than I was – the emails from start-ups and mid-sized companies sounded nearly identical (my own included), “We’re a fast-growing start-up disrupting a lucrative space where your talents will shine and your efforts will be amply rewarded.” By emphasizing the classic start-up experience, everyone sounded exactly the same:

Start-up in Mountain View: “We’ve assembled a world class team. Our monthly uniques have already exceeded [###] million and continue to trend higher at a rapid pace. We’ve reached an inflection point where we’re looking to scale, and with your background I wanted to speak with you about our engineering hiring.”

Start-up in San Francisco: “There are a variety of interesting technical challenges in front of us including scaling for millions of users, developing applications, building a sophisticated data platform, securing user data and, most importantly, ensuring an incredible experience for our users. Aside from our plethora of awesome technical projects, this is also a great place to work. Everyone on the team benefits from free meals and tremendous organizational transparency (weekly all hands, daily stand ups, etc.)”

Larger companies employed an entirely different strategy and anecdotally, I saw more terse, canned emails from larger companies than start-ups. To quantitatively compare strategies, I went through all emails and noted whether the recruiter included role details, company information, or if the email was personalized specifically to Pete. I was incredibly lenient and gave points whenever I could. By almost every metric, the larger companies performed weakest: smallest word count (114 vs. 148 words per email), least likely to describe the company mission or personalize email, and least likely to use a personal email address. However, large companies hired triple the number of recruiters and made up for their shortcomings in volume. Pete heard from an average of 1.4 recruiters at each start-up and 4.6 recruiters at each large company.

You might assume that with more internal recruiters, big companies would do better than start-ups who depend more upon external recruiters. After all, big companies have had more time, resources, infrastructure to make this a key strategic asset. But it turns out you don’t want to emulate the big guys and you also don’t want to assume they are your stiffest competition.

TIP #3: Your real recruiting nemesis is the start-up down the street. Pitch your job opportunities with more specificity than “fast-paced, innovative startup.”

Lesson 3: The recruiting landscape isn’t just filled with recruiters

Only 97% of the recruiting emails can be attributed to traditional recruiting. So who represents the remaining 3%?

Surprise! VCs – specifically early-stage angel investors.

* Q1 2009 and Q2 2012 data are not complete. Data collection began December 10th, 2009 and ended June 1, 2012

Though they are a small lot, they are a super lethal bunch with an eye on your jugular artery – your revered first engineers who built your system from scratch. The charming VCs know that your prized engineers could fulfill a similar role at their future portfolio companies and set their hooks early. In most cases they don’t have a specific company or role in mind but are just proactively networking and hoping to be top-of-mind in the future. Given how interconnected and fast-moving the start-up world is, this might be inevitable but woah! good to know.

“I’m with [a VC firm] and my charter is to build out their talent services capabilities. What that means is we are looking for high caliber individuals that would be interested in potentially exploring opportunities with our portfolio companies.

Your experience is exceptional and you have the type of background that should be apart of the network. If you are interested in learning more I would love the opportunity to speak with you in more detail. What we are looking to establish is a “go to” network of top notch individuals that would be a value add to our portfolio of companies. I hope to hear from you soon.”

TIP #4: Keep your engineers happy (i.e. free food, great people, & amazing challenges). When the VCs come knocking, make sure your MVP’s are glued in.

Lesson 4: Can a start-up rely upon external recruiting?

As a start-up, you are inevitably resource-starved. When you have the good fortune to gain traction, you have the setback of suffering infrastructure growing pains while realizing the only way to get ahead is to find time to recruit, interview, and close candidates. In the early days, external recruiters appeared on Meebo’s doorstep and promised to screen and pass along qualified candidates so I could turn my attention back to Friday’s release – it seemed like a dream come true!

However, the first people you hire set your engineering and cultural DNA for the lifetime of the organization and while you desperately need to hire well, can you depend upon external recruiters to step up to the task? Once the scaling challenges strike, does it make more sense to proactively hire a superstar in-house recruiter or to rely upon external recruiters to scale the engineering team?

The answer is surprising – external and internal recruiters perform similarly in start-up environments. Internal recruiters are 14% more likely to describe the position but 14% less likely to personalize the email.

However, larger companies don’t have a viable external recruiting option. External recruiters at the top companies were much weaker overall – 340% less likely to include a description of the role, 140% less likely to personalize their email, and 88% less likely to include detailed company information. Though larger company recruiters were relatively weak overall, in-house recruiters are their only viable option.

Given this significant performance difference, it’s no surprise that larger companies also employ far more internal recruiters than start-ups.

TIP #5: As a start-up, you can sleep easier knowing that external recruiters are a fantastic resource. Find your superstar engineers first and your superstar in-house recruiters second.

TIP #6: Contingency recruiting farms are financially incentivized to hire for less selective companies. For difficult roles, a dedicated contract recruiter may be your only realistic option.

However, before you get too excited about external recruiters, read further…

Lesson 5: Be careful whom you invite into your house

Unfortunately, it’s not all about the numbers. Though external recruiters perform well for start-ups, there’s another side to this story. It pains me to write this but I think it’s important to share…

Meebo employed lots of external recruiters when we were getting off the ground. We had standard 18-month no-poach restrictions with all of our contractors that specified that those recruiters were not allowed to contact Meebo employees within 18 months of our contract expiring. Most of those contracts expired in 2008-2009.

However, every recruiter and firm we’d worked with who was still in the recruiting business tried to poach Pete London.

Every single one!

It’s impossible to know whether our former recruiters were pinging employees during the no-poach period prior to 2009 but I wouldn’t be surprised. However, I doubt they were being malicious – it’s more likely they were just disorganized and didn’t communicate an off-limits list to their staff.

In addition to pings from too-familiar recruiters, there were two cases that left me especially uneasy. In the first case, a former recruiting agency tried to poach Pete London and then 15 minutes later, wrote to me offering recruiting services! I was being pulled on both ends! When I didn’t respond, they repeated the stunt again six weeks later. I got wind that they’d sent recruiting emails to everyone on our Engineering teams and I called them on it (without referencing Pete London). I never heard from them again.

May 13th, 2:20pm

“Hi Peter,

I am a recruiter who works with high-growth, top-tier start ups and industry leaders. I came across your information and was impressed with your background. I’m guessing you may not be actively looking for a new job right now, but I’m sure you plan on continuing to advance your career in the long term, and would be open to hear about opportunities that may accelerate that advancement.

I’d like to get a better idea of your interests and goals, so that I can identify and present to you a few of the most attractive opportunities in the market both now and in the future. You may be pleasantly surprised at what is out there for you. Let me know a good time and number to call you…”

May 13th, 2:35pm (15 minutes later)

“Hi Elaine,

I’m a recruiter… We specialize in the placement of technology professionals. I’ve been working with many excellent candidates from the space and researching companies for them. meebo came up in my search as a good company to consider, so I’d like to present some of these candidates to you for interviews.

Please call me or email me a good time and # to reach you…

Thanks and I look forward to working with you!”

The second case that made me uneasy involved a contractor recruiter who worked from Meebo’s office for nearly a year. During this time, the recruiter went to lunch with the team, participated in hackdays, and became close with many folks. Two years later, that recruiter poached Pete London and a few hours later, showed up at Meebo’s informal Friday happy hour! I was definitely in a queasy gray zone where there wasn’t a strong divide between our personal and professional relationship. Technically, it was hard to nail down any real grievances, but I was certainly aware that our teams were constantly under former recruiter attack.

External recruiters are an inevitable necessity for start-ups. But after seeing all of the emails that those external recruiters generated in subsequent years, I wish Meebo had switched to in-house recruiting sooner.

The external recruiters you work with today are good but they will learn your strengths, your team, and you’ll probably be uncomfortably top of mind later on.

TIP #7: External recruiters are a mixed blessing – be selective and switch to internal recruiters as soon as you can.

TIP #8: Push for at least 18-month no-poach policies with external recruiters.

Lesson #6: The most common little white lie is…

With very few exceptions, recruiter emails were well-written, smarmy-free, and didn’t smell of phishing. I expected far worse. However, if a little white lie is going to sneak into an email, it’s going to look like this…

“I was referred to you as a possible source for a position I am working on here” – Large company

“I previously worked with [Bob] & [Andrew] and have heard great things about you and feel you’d be a great fit…” – Startup

“I understand that you may not be actively looking at this point, but we have heard that you are very good and wanted to see if you might consider looking into a position with [us]” – Startup

“I’m reaching out to you because I’ve been an admirer of your work at Meebo and believe you could be the perfect founding engineer to lead front-end engineering for our product.” – Startup

Little white lies appeared across all recruiting groups and generally took the form, “I was referred to you” or “I’ve heard very good things.” While even unfounded flattery feels good, I learned to be suspicious of vague recruiter compliments.

TIP #9: Flattery will get you everywhere! Take recruiter praises with a healthy pinch of salt.

Lesson #7: It’s time to buy more hoodies

If you are a JavaScript engineer, you know that the talent market is increasingly competitive and you are inevitably feeling the pull of San Francisco. The demand for engineers has intensified over the last two years and recruiting activity has exploded in the foggy north.

* Q1 2009 and Q2 2012 data are not complete. Data collection began December 10th, 2009 and stopped on June 1, 2012

It’s impossible to ignore the momentum that is growing in San Francisco. If I were a start-up getting off the ground today, I would start in San Francisco. In 2011, Meebo saw more of its JavaScript engineers hailing from SF than from Mountain View for the first time. While it’s exciting that there are more geographic options to start a tech company, it’s also time to recognize that companies need strategies for geographically dispersed teams and for recruiting from different areas of the Peninsula.

TIP #10: As the city of Palo Alto or Mountain View, I would make sure that resident tech companies are happy and that public transportation is a top priority.

TIP #11: When writing to candidates, specify where your office is located – it’s no longer assumed that an opportunity is south of San Mateo unless otherwise specified.

TIP #12: The entrepreneurial epicenter is no longer Palo Alto. If you’re south of San Mateo, figure out your SF strategy now.

Lesson #8: Who’s the best in the valley?

You are.

There were 19 emails from managers, execs, founders, and board members who presumably had no professional background in recruiting. However, those non-recruiters collectively outperformed every other professional recruiting segment – scoring just as high or higher by every metric: email quality, outreach technique, and word count. No matter how many recruiters you hire, there is no substitute for a heart-felt note from a future manager.

However, managers have responsibilities beyond recruiting and it’s not realistic to spend eight hours a day reading resumes and penning candidate emails – professional recruiters are a necessity. However, most managers probably hope to hire a recruiter who does the job better than themselves. Of all of the emails Pete received, only 40% of the recruiter emails scored better than the average manager who actively sought out Pete London. And within this top 40%, there were proportionately more start-up recruiters than any other segment.

TIP #13: Look for recruiters with start-up backgrounds rather than large companies.

TIP #14: Hire the best recruiters and treat them like gold. If a product is only as good as its team, then the product is only as good as its recruiting team.

SUMMARY

Of the 382 recruiters, there was only one recruiter who actually figured it out. To do so, he did one thing that no other recruiter did – picked up the phone and called someone who should have been connected to Pete to ask for an introduction. And that’s where the ruse unraveled. If there were one recruiter I would have partnered with during my toughest hiring crunch ever, it would have been him.

However, that recruiter had also recruited for Meebo the prior year and he shouldn’t have been poaching Pete London from our team. He apologized. In the end, the honeypot ended up identifying the one amazing recruiter I already knew about but couldn’t justify working with again.

Ultimately, our recruiting challenge was solved by hiring more JavaScript managers who could help recruit too.

In the next blog post, I’ll examine the “best recruiters of silicon valley” more. With their permission, I’ll list the top five recruiters and a few email snippets.

Stay tuned!

June 26th, 2012 · elaine · life, tech 171 comments

Mar 08

why the symphony needs a progress bar

(photo courtesy of Santa Barbara Choral Society)

About three years ago, my work-life balance started to improve – start-up sleep deprivation was no longer a constant norm. I didn’t have enough time to restart violin lessons but season tickets to the San Francisco Symphony? Yup, I could swing that.

I bought tickets for myself and my husband, Todd, a relatively new concert-goer. But after a few shaky experiences, I was worried that Todd would back out of a subsequent season subscription. I started doing anything I could to avoid the, “Oh my god – is this only the first movement?” mid-concert terror. Seeing the experience from a newbie’s perspective, my UX instincts kicked in and I started jotting down the, “If only the symphony had…” moments. Three years later, here’s my list:

If Only the Symphony Had…

1. A Progress Bar

Even the most devout classical music listener has, “OMG is this over yet?” moments. When you’re not responding to a performance, the experience becomes torturous if you don’t know whether you’ve endured 5% or 95% of the piece. A progress bar would make a world of difference. Nearly every other performance genre has accompanying scoreboards, screens, tickers, or subtitles to track the event’s progress. A JumboTron might be inappropriate but a few progress lights on the conductor’s podium would really help.

2. People Who Talk

Half of the fun of following a sports team is getting to know the players. At the symphony, you regularly have a two-hour experience with over a hundred performers with absolutely no words exchanged. I love encores because the artist announces the piece they are about to play and I can suddenly match a voice to a performer. Then they become real. I’d love for the conductor or soloist to provide a 3-4 sentence introduction, “Thank you for joining us this evening. Tonight we will be performing…” It’s only natural that the audience feels more engaged when they hear a performer’s voice. In the three years I’ve attended the San Francisco Symphony, I’ve never heard Michael Tilson Thomas talk!

3. Quiet Candy

The symphony season is almost perfectly aligned with head cold season – fall through spring. No one wants to cough during a performance but when that annoying tickle happens, you can only hold your breath and writhe in agony. I’m sure Ms. Stewart would endorse a hospitable offering of wax paper-wrapped candy in the entryway as both a welcoming gesture and a potential quick-fix to hold you over until you can make a mad dash to the water fountain.

4. A tl;dr opener

My typical symphony experience started with leaving Meebo a little early without dinner and finding myself starving in a 101-N traffic jam with a spouse who is thinking, “Wait a second, if we miss the symphony, we can skip the concert and get pizza instead!” We have never missed a performance but we sprinted from the parking lot on a few occasions. With seconds to spare, I’d see Todd crack open his program to find a dense Ph.D. thesis on the first piece. Two-three sentences in, the lights would dim and suddenly Todd was grasping his dark, useless program notes with no idea of what he was listening to.

Here’s a San Francisco Symphony program written for Messiaen’s Oiseaux Exotiques (click to read the 11-page version):

In all of the 2,000 words, the title, “Exotic Birds”, is never translated! Assuming Todd made it through the first paragraph before the music began, he’d know the commissioner, dedication, and all of the locations and conductors who have played this piece of work since 1956. This is not helpful information for someone who is going to listen to Messiaen for the first time!

The first paragraph needs to be oriented to a 30-second, the-lights-are-dimming panic scan. Here’s what I wish preceded the lengthy write-up:

Oiseaux Exotiques (“Exotic birds”), 1956
Duration: 16 minutes (no movements)
Composer: Oliver Messiaen (1908-1992), France
Period: 20th century
Influences: Roman Catholicism, birds, colors, Japanese music, landscapes
Instruments: Piano and small orchestra
Listening notes: Forty-eight birdsongs are played throughout this piece. Messiaen was not familiar with American birds so many of the birdsongs such as the Cardinal, Wood Thrush, Prairie Chicken, Oriole, and Finch were exotic to his ear.

5. Program notes on the fold

While I’m harping about program notes, I’ll also mention a personal pet peeve. I dread the moment when I accidentally close my program and realize that I’ve lost the position to the concert notes. I’ll need to carefully open and flip through pages to locate the notes again without squeaking a chair or elbowing my neighbor. I know that it might make economical sense to bury the program notes amidst diamond cocktail ring advertisements but I’d really appreciate a program that naturally falls open to the concert details. If the advertising dollars can’t be missed, then offer a lightweight $.99 iPhone app that has white-on-black text (to avoid glowing screens) that can be flicked in the dark.

6. Programming for beginners

When you launch a new product, you inevitably have a few crazy, very vocal early adopters (why don’t you support Opera’s browser yet?) that you have to selectively ignore if you want a product that appeals to a wider audience. The symphony is the same. About half of the audience attends for a pleasant symphony-going experience. A small minority will be hard-core educated symphony folks who needle, “Why haven’t we heard more atonal music by post-JanÃ¡Äek Slavic composers this season?” The remainder are the musically tepid spouses and children who have been dragged to the hall and are just trying to stay awake and to clap at the right times.

To sustain the symphony, there needs to be beginner programming at every concert – even if it’s just a 3-minute warm-up to perk up newbie ears with a, “Oooh – I’ve heard of this!” moment. Pre-concert talks are fantastic but I’m battling hectic schedules and a seatmate who (though he’d graciously never admit it) probably wants to spend less, not more, time at the symphony. However, it’s these seat-mates who determine whether I repurchase symphony season tickets and who will probably determine whether the symphony thrives longterm.

I can imagine that in two hundred years people will attend rock concerts performed by historical cover bands and wonder, “Why do they require that we stand for the entire concert?” Or, “If the concert really begins at 11pm, why do they print 10pm on the tickets?” The symphony was intended for entertainment and our rigid adherence to its nineteenth century form has made it increasingly difficult to appreciate. A progress bar is long overdue!

March 8th, 2012 · elaine · design, life, music 11 comments

Feb 23

happy and fun in silicon valley

Last week, I posted Armed and Dangerous in Silicon Valley – a list of design, programming, and biotech classes in Silicon Valley to keep you armed and dangerous regardless of your background.

However, when you’re burnt out of pixels, bugs, and pantone colors, it’s helpful to balance it all out with some computer-free classes to get your hands dirty, see some sun, and expand your palette beyond what’s available for take-out. Plus, there are some absolute gems available in the Bay Area that you can’t find elsewhere:

Forage SF – Learn how to forage and identify edibles like fungi, nettles, herbs, and other wild ingredients depending upon the season. The Wild Kitchen dinners are amazing too.
Bay Area Glass Institute – glass blowing is the antithesis of coding – it’s organic, unpredictable, and dangerous (and I love it). We’re lucky to have BAGI in San Jose (they’re the folks behind the Great Glass Pumpkin Patch). Treg Silkwood is one of the best instructors I’ve ever seen.
San Francisco Baking Institute – If you’ve read Tartine and wondered why your lump of dough doesn’t look as smooth and springy as their pictures, you’re in luck. I showed up to SFBI’s breadmaking workshop with zero experience while all of my professional peers wore weathered, monogrammed chef aprons and traded bread war. However, it is a ground-up class and on your first day, you will come home with a dozen baguettes. No experience is necessary though their weekend courses are specifically geared to home bakers. It’s an impressive resource that most Bay Area natives don’t know about – the instructors even compete in the equivalent of the Bread Olympics every four years and SFBI has a hotline for sending starter to bakeries across the country when an unfortunate yeast emergency strikes.
4505 Meats – these sausage making and butchery classes sell out instantly so it’s better to sign up for their e-mail list and pounce when a new class is announced. However, it’s worth the hassle – you’ll have a freezer filled with amazing sausage and meats for months.
SF Center for the Book – has revived the art of handmade books. If you’ve oohed and awed over those fashionable letterpress cards, now you can make them yourself on vintage Heidelberg presses. In November, they also offer Christmas card and gift tag making workshops.
The Bike Kitchen – is run by a community of cycling enthusiasts who teach in-depth bicycle maintenance courses. They even offer a unique program where you can build a bike from the spare parts they have lying around.
18 Reasons – spend an hour or two with a local Bay Area foodie who wants to share their love of peanut butter, home brewing, or urban gardening with the community. 18 reasons offers casual evening classes nearly daily and even has some availability on short notice. It’s a great community-oriented alternative to dinner and a movie.
San Francisco School of Massage and Bodywork – aside from their professional programs, they also offer occasional beginner weekend workshops for couple massage classes. If you spend 40-60 hours in front of a computer each week, you may need some extra help getting those knots out of your uber-tight upper back muscles.
College of the Redwoods – Fine Furniture Program – this requires at least two weeks of free time and is 4 hours away but it is worth knowing about. The program was originally started by the legendary furniture maker and design philosopher James Krenov who resurrected the appreciation for fine furniture making in the 1970′s. I took the summer workshop when Krenov was still at the center and the class was taught by Jim Budlong. It was transformative – you’ll want to rethink the way all of your furniture has been built and designed. When I attended, our class had seasoned carpenters, students from RISD, and other craftsman hoping to try a new direction. Jim Budlong is still teaching the curriculum that Krenov started years ago. The two-week programs are subsidized by in-state tuition and are absurdly popular. Some prospective students drive to Fort Bragg and camp out at the school’s doorstep to be first to submit their application on March 1st. I faxed my application a few minutes after submissions opened and was wait-listed (though eventually admitted). It’s a crazy and worthwhile adventure.

Tuck your phone away, disconnect from that bug or release, and refresh yourself with something totally new. We’re lucky to be surrounded by so many extraordinary communities who are excited to share their passions.

Enjoy!
-Elaine

February 23rd, 2012 · elaine · food, life No comments

Feb 16

armed and dangerous in silicon valley

Last weekend I took an Adobe InDesign course at BAVC and was surrounded by Sales & Marketing start-up folks taking classes so they didn’t have to bother their busy design and engineering teams with small requests. I had to restrain myself from recruiting every single one of them (especially the one who brought donuts in the morning).

Becoming armed and dangerous in Silicon Valley is easier than most people realize. There are amazing tech classes in the Bay Area that don’t require technical degrees or taking a sabbatical – they are just a little hard to find:

BAVC – offers an exhaustive selection of video production courses as well as Adobe, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, color, and typography workshops. If you’re a start-up, you might even qualify to take classes for free.
TechShop – offers electronics, machining, and other workshop classes. Right now, Autodesk provides Autodesk Inventor workshops for free (for members). Or prototype that electric gizmo you’ve been dreaming about with the Arduino series. The TechShop’s laser cutting and etching course is far and away their most popular course. The TechShop also has three locations in San Francisco, Menlo Park, and Mountain View.
Stanford Continuing Studies – offers nearly everything from language development, liberal arts courses, writing workshops, lecture series, to professional development. The Personal & Professional Development Series offers financing, leadership, PHP, entrepreneurial, public speaking, and Web design courses. I took a public speaking course with Matt Abrahams. The writing workshops are also highly regarded. It’s also worth mentioning that many of the Art and Archaeology instructors offer international trips to excavate or study art in-person.
UC Berkeley Extension – offers back-end computer science courses such as System Administration and Networking as well as front-end classes like Web development and graphic design. Some classes are available online.
California College of the Arts – offers Web and graphic design classes such as Adobe Creative Suite bootcamps plus other hard-to-find courses such as creating interactive ePubs for your iPad, Cocoa Touch programming, or a how to use a Wacom tablet.
BioCurious – this up-and-coming Biotech workspace in Sunnyvale offers a complete working laboratory. Learn how to do genome sequencing and cloning with their weekend workshops and then start your own genomic experiment – no prerequisite experience necessary!
SFSU Extension – SFSU’s quarterly programming and design classes include jQuery, HTML5, Mobile UI design, ActionScript, and WordPress. Many of the classes are available in weekend workshops.
Digital Media Playground – teaches digital photography and video production so you’ll no longer feel guilty about carrying around a camera you don’t know how to use. It’s also one of the few places that regularly teaches food photography.
The Crucible – prep for Burning Man in no time. These friendly folks offer every Industrial Arts class you can dream of including welding, hula hooping with fire, neon sign making, blacksmithing, and electronics.

If someone’s snickered at your purple comic sans e-mail signature, consider a typography classes. If you are a Project or Product Manager who isn’t totally fluent in geekspeak, look at the Berkeley, SFSU, and Stanford computer science courses. If you are a Sales or Marketing professional who wants to tweak brochures for conferences or start a company blog, take a WordPress, HTML, Photoshop, or InDesign classes. And if you’re a hardcore computer geek, maybe you crave working with something tangible – you’ll love the TechShop and Crucible.

Enjoy!
-Elaine

February 16th, 2012 · elaine · design, tech 4 comments

Feb 08

the first idea

When I ask folks why there aren’t more funded females entrepreneurs, I typically hear one of two responses: 1) the ideas from female teams aren’t good – they are all beauty review sites or 2) females lack the technical expertise to get things going.

I don’t have an answer for #2. I certainly wish there were more females in tech – especially when engineering talent is so scarce.

However, I think that reason #1 – female ideas aren’t good – is misleading. It’s true – if you attend a women’s entrepreneurial event, there’s a 99% likelihood that someone is launching a beauty review site within the week. It’s only natural that people are excited by their personal interests and until the male beauty sector catches up (Men Pen or Man Glaze anyone?), females are likely to dominate this category.

However, I also remember my days as an engineering student and hopeful entrepreneur coding for project classes. Though we were given freedom to build nearly anything we wanted, I was always surprised when nearly all group projects fell into one of a few categories (woah – someone else thought of building a dating app too?). Years later, I judged a few HCI events, and even then, the same ideas were circulating.

Now I believe that there are a few ideas that every engineer needs to get out of their system before they can move on to more promising ideas. Those include:

Organizer & list-maker: develop a better to-do list, create group calendars, or make it easier to find available meeting times with busy calendars.
Fitness tracking: track your diet or fitness plan and get encouragement from a health-oriented community.
Recipe creator & grocery planner: create a consolidated shopping list based upon your planned meals or find recipes using the existing ingredients in your fridge.
Review sites: a social network dedicated to providing expert reviews for business, car, food, beauty supply, pharmaceutical, bike, etc. categories.
Dating: online matchmaking with a twist like requiring videos, community exclusivity (religion, location, occupation, education, etc), or maybe even allowing your friends to choose whom you date.
Finding places to eat: review daily lunch options, find new dining pals, get daily deals, or locate the shortest lines.
Real-time location: track your running route, find your lost parked car, find someone at the coffee shop whom you should network with, or look at tweets that are happening in your vicinity.
Drink mixer: get the 101 on how to make any drink like a pro. This category is my favorite because it usually has the best student project names.
Campus party finder: Stanford CS147 wouldn’t be complete without a campus report-a-party app. Bonus points if it’s combined with #1 so you can stay on top of your busy party calendar.

Having an idea on this list doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad idea. However, if you want your beauty product review site to grow into something beyond a fun side project, you need a competitive edge and wide appeal. Instead of a beauty article on warm and cool skin tones, perhaps you can consistently deliver expert insights such as how hemoglobin and melanin govern skin tones or you have novel image recognition technology that accurately assesses skin color regardless of the lighting condition.

It takes skill to generate and evaluate ideas. In school, design classes made us practice generating 100 solutions to a problem in 15 minutes which helped avoid the habit of falling in love with your first idea. It might seem like females are always gravitating towards the same beauty review site concept but I think it’s more likely that we all gravitate towards certain problems.

And, full confessional, I’ve been guilty of #1, #3, #4, #5, and #6

February 8th, 2012 · elaine · Uncategorized No comments

Jan 04

New Year & New Beginnings

Meebo in 2005

Playing foosball

Our 6th birthday

It’s a New Year and I’m looking ahead to new beginnings. In 2011, I found myself with a set of Meebo responsibilities that no longer comprised a 40-hour work-week and a nagging feeling that this was the right point to start gracefully unwinding from my formal tasks. In October, I started transitioning into an advisory role. It was a difficult decision but nothing makes you prouder than seeing the next generation of leaders take the company to new heights and witnessing the company grow from three people to seven offices, tens of millions in revenue, and billions of monthly page views. While it’s exciting to think about what lies ahead, it’s also hard to leave the best group of people I will ever work with. I take my advisory role seriously and as the team needs me, I’ll be back at 215 Castro Street in a heartbeat.

Looking back, I am overwhelmed with gratitude. I am grateful to our angel investors and to Sequoia for taking a risk on us when we were just a few kids toying around with two servers in an apartment. I am grateful to have been a part of a team that genuinely cares and respects each other. And, I am grateful for the opportunity to realize a product that has touched so many people and for the kind support of our users. These have been the best six years of my life and I wouldn’t trade a single Meebo day for anything.

But most of all, I am grateful to Seth & Sandy. I challenge anyone to find a better set of co-founders. If you don’t know them, Seth is the most savvy business strategist you’ll ever encounter and Sandy will out-execute anyone with her gosh-darned-cute charm. When you work with someone for so long, you learn a lot about a person’s true character. After working with Seth & Sandy for eight years, I know that they are two of the most selfless, fiercely loyal, and talented people you’ll ever meet – much less have the extraordinary good fortune to work beside. I can’t thank them enough for their support and understanding.

As for what’s next, I have an idea or two but before diving into something new, I am finishing projects with Meebo and taking a few months to recharge and reconnect with people I’ve long neglected. The Bay Area consists of an extraordinary entrepreneurial community with tremendous goodwill. After benefitting from the ideas and advice from others for so many years, I’m more than willing to return the favor. Please feel free to connect if you’re looking for an outside opinion.

Looking ahead to 2012, it’s exciting to have a blank slate and the opportunity to start anew. Thanks again for everyone’s support and for believing that passionate people really can make a difference.

January 4th, 2012 · elaine · life One comment

« Older Entries

Pitfall 1: It’s easier to evaluate a completed, pixel-perfect product so new products don’t get vetted or tested until they’re nearly out the door.

Pitfall 2: Users click on things that are different, not always things they like. Curious trial users skew the usage statistics for a new feature.

Pitfall 3: Users give conflicting feedback.

Pitfall 4: Any data is better than no data, right?

Pitfall 5: By human nature, you trust the numbers going in the right direction and distrust the numbers going in the wrong direction.

the floating eyeball that wouldn’t go away

the culprit amygdala

how a night terror happens

the 6 night terrors

1. The Old Hag

2. Evil Species

3. Femme Fatale & Ladykiller

4. Vibrations & Noise

5. Vermin

6. Fear of the Unknown

Conclusion

THE RATIONALE

STEP #1 – BRAINSTORMING

STEP #2 – SELECTION

STEP #3 – VALIDATE

SUMMARY

The best recruiters

what’s their secret?

Tip #1. You, your, and yours

Tip #2. First impressions…

Tip #3. Follow up; don’t spam

Tip #4: The limelight belongs to the candidate

summary

The Recruiting Crisis

PETE LONDON IS BORN

LAST RESORT – LINKEDIN

WHAT I LEARNED

Lesson 1: Recruiters rely exclusively upon LinkedIn

Lesson 2: Fear the Silicon Valley long tail

Lesson 3: The recruiting landscape isn’t just filled with recruiters

Lesson 4: Can a start-up rely upon external recruiting?

Lesson 5: Be careful whom you invite into your house

Lesson #6: The most common little white lie is…

Lesson #7: It’s time to buy more hoodies

Lesson #8: Who’s the best in the valley?

SUMMARY

If Only the Symphony Had…

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