Quick hits returns. Thoughts on new jobs, the ER and my awesome wife.

Quick hits are back! So I only did it once, its my blog, I do what I want.

First full week of work at Oberon Media
So far so good.  Lots to learn, lots to digest, head spinning but less and less so everyday.  I'm very impressed with my new co-workers.  They are smart, with it and know the space.  There appears to be some of the old AOL feeling of being a little beaten down, but not too much.  Looking forward to making great products!

First visit to the emergency room
Yesterday morning I woke up with a pain that morphed very quickly into a severe pain.  My wife jumped to action.  Got us to a cab, to the right emergency room (not Elmhurst Hospital or Jamaica) in Mt. Sinai of Queens in Astoria and my pain settled pretty quickly with a dose of morphine.  Turns out I have a kidney stone.  I was hoping to avoid my family ailment, but alas I could not.  My father, sister and brother have all had stones. (My dad, more than one, poor bastard).
I could not have had a better experience at Mt. Sinai Queens. They were attentive, understanding and capable.  Fairly impressed with the results. Plus, I worked with one of clerks years earlier, who helped extridite things.

Sweet ass Queens
We're a week into our new home and all the boxes have been emptied!  Now comes the tough part of finding where the hell we put everything!  There are still minor things to fix (anyone good with a single stem faucet replacement? I had a helluva time). The only issue so far is my commute is a bit longer than expected.  From Forest Hills to Battery Park City is 55 minutes on the train with an added 15 minutes of walking to and from the subway.  Hopefully Oberon will be moving soon and I can get 20 minutes back. 

An ode to my wife. 
I am so thankful she was there to save the day for me in my most urgent moment with my stone. She stayed level headed, focused and in charge.  Even though I was wimpering and writhing in pain, she stayed strong and never made it about her or her anxiety. (Which I might do). In that two hour window of my pain, there was a lot of fear in the room and she showed tremendous courage.  I could not be prouder or more in love with my wife.

If you have anything you want to know my thoughts on feel free to shout them out.  I've got a lot to say!

Companies that sell downloadable things are doomed.

The idea of the hardcopy software and download products are doomed.  The web, networked storage and processing is coming for you and will destroy you. For companies still in download business, change NOW! (You may already be too late) Don't wait, don't say "you don't understand, our business is different", call your people together get a road map set up for being completely web/cloud based and fast. 

Look around? Everything that is content in a physical form is either destroyed or in the process of being destroyed. (Books, music, movies, TV) Oh sure, they will stick around for some, but fundamentally its over. If you think people will wait for a download game when on an iPad games play in 30 seconds? Or pay monthly for cable channels they never watched, needed or asked for? Your customers will find alternatives if you don't give them a reason to stay.

Working in the (I'll say it, sleepy) casual game business I've seen countless opportunities go by the wayside for fear and the ever present "That's not our demographic". The casual game business audience is perceived to made up of technology laggards. If some one uses the AOL client, they are a casual game player.   This has hurt the industry and slowed it down. Download games didn't have to get swamped in the Facebook/Zynga wake, they chose to. By holding themselves back on "not our demo" they mostly got squashed.  Software needs to be a service. Constantly evolving and growing as folks interact with it. A standalone download product with release candidate, gold disks and patches simply isn't going to fly.

Destroy your business before it gets destroyed.

So what is my new job? (And my first day at work)

After five years at AOL, I've moved on to Oberon Media as a product manager.  I'm still working in digital games, but more focused on the download game space.   It’s going to be a challenge but I'm up for it!

Why Oberon?  Since October of 2010 I've had my ear to the ground on leaving AOL.  There had just been too much turmoil, too much change and as they say "there was a new sheriff in town". The new sheriff wasn't interested, nor did he believe in the team he inherited and made it known by his actions. 

Oberon impressed me with passionate people who had a plan for what they wanted to do.  I cannot tell you how valuable it is to work at a place with direction.  Everyone I interviewed with was honest, discussed the problems Oberon has face and to a person, relayed the same message.  That consistency in voice and clarity in focus made accepting the job at Oberon easy.  Give me a place that knows what it wants to be and do any day of the week.

I interviewed at agencies for social media specific jobs and while I didn't get any of those jobs, I learned a ton from the process.  I learned that I was being too narrow in my search and that I had more value than just being a social media flavor of the month hire. I knew product and specifically games product. 

Interviewing has so much value for what you can learn. You learn about expectations of knowledge, what you know and forces you to examine what your own expertise is.  While in the interview process I got a real handle on what I was professionally. Go on interviews!  It's actually fun and a great learning experience. 

The first day of work is always a shock.  Everything is different.  All your comforts are gone and your brain is in hyper-activity mode.  You're just trying to process everything all at once.  From setting up your desk, to finding the coffee machine and locating the bathroom, the first day at work is exhausting....

 

I know no one wants to read this much... ask me questions about my new job in the comments.

Reflections on five years at AOL

I'm on the subway heading to my final day at AOL.  Wow!  I have worked at AOL during one of the most interesting times the web has seen.  Within a few months of starting at AOL, Facebook opened up to everyone and launched its developers platform. That single event started the social web explosion (before social we called it Web 2.0)

I have been at AOL during that upheaval.  Hired to do one thing but never actually having the platform built, I threw myself into the social web era and became the change agent within my small corner of AOL as part of Games.com.  My boss (Greg, love you man) thought I was insane and actually wanted to let me go (your life would have been a helluva lot easier if you did!) But somehow (I still don't know what I did) I was held onto and able to learn so much from each one of my co-workers.

At AOL I became a professional. (Yes folks, I was worse) Sure I had been working for ten years before but fundamentally I didn't take work as seriously as I should have,  At AOL I had a career, a focus and my ideas mattered (even if there were way, way, way too many of them). Even though we missed some major opportunities I feel very proud of the work we did and could not have asked for a better bunch of co-workers. 

Fundamentally, what I will miss is my collegues.  As a group they are the most respectful, competant and hardworking group of people I may ever work with.  To a person, they always put the the group first. There was never a personal agenda, ever! We had the "secret". We worked as a team, understood our roles and acted as a unit.  When given opportunity to work, we were effiecient, quick and without parallel.  Sure, there were struggles here and there, disagreements about direction, but over all we worked with mutual respect and caring.

AOL itself? Well that's a different story.  All you have to is go through Silicon Alley Insider posts on AOL to see all the absurdity and ridiculousness that went on.  Most of the leaks and internal documents were and are correct.  It was a made worse with schizophrenic direction and directives.  From month to month and quarter to quarter, goals and strategy changed.  From everything being labeled AOL to basically detroying the brand with mini-brands (we got up to 57) and now rolling everything back under Huffington Post, we did everything. Just in the games group we had five different VP's in 18 months. We went from being for sale (just games) to status quo to doubling down. 

I would say that all things considered? Tim Armstrong has done a good job.  Tasked with turning around a ocean liner with a steam engine, he's gotten us to be a second hand pleasure boat that at least runs on gasoline. (Don't know what that means but go with it). What I can say is that he's trying.  People want a turn-around and he's trying to find the right mix.  Sure, one could be critical of the individual decisions taken one at a time, but when looking at the whole picture you can see what he's trying to do.  Create sellable content at scale that has some brand-trustworthyness.  Not easy to do, but he's trying.

So, to quote my favorite cartoons,  "Thats all folks!"
Deep, deep thanks go out to:
Greg Mills
Ben Zackheim
Libe Goad
John Logsdon
Sharon White
Jim Watson
Sarah Watkins
John Worrell
John Benyamine
Dan Sormaz
Robin Yang
Hing Yen
Ken H. Lai
Joanna De La Cruz
Leanne Cabrera 
Nicole Opas
Ralph Rivera
Raj Nijar
Avinash Ramani
Won Mu Hur
James Brightman
Miguel Ferrer
Mario Torrez
Ivis Mas
Patty Green
Laura Palau
Charisse Beamon
Michael Mullen
James Fleenor
Bill Mitchell
Mark Ludlow 
Rob Mitchell 
Alina Zafirescu
Kevin Jackson
Anthony Anderson
Steve Setlik 
Lindsay Duffy
Alex Ressi
Britney Buchan
Joe Osborne
Chris Buffa
and everyone one else I crossed paths with and didn't add 

 

 

Meetings suck, don't work (And it's your fault)

Just read Fred Wilson's post on meetings as a VC, Bored of Directors.  He details the issues with being on a board of a start up and how often the meetings are unproductive.  The views outlined are similar to all meetings.  I am at my core, a meeting hater.  Sure we need them and they can be productive but mostly they suck.  They suck because they are impersonal, usually held on a phone and a simply rehashing of stuff we already know. 
Fred detailed a few things that make his meetings productive:

1) get everyone in the room

2) less reporting

3) more discussing

Yes,  yes and more yes. When every thing is equal and the efficiency of the web becomes common place what will be the competitive advantage for a meeting?  That's right!  Physical presence and charisma!  

Meetings suck mostly because they are run by humans.  It's our fault because the x factor in every meeting is the people in the room.  You can try and set agendas,  outline everything in advance and do as much work as possible before hand to try and un-suck the meeting but ultimately,  the people in the room will muck it up.  People want to be active in a meeting.  Running through reports is boring and un-productive.  We humans want to have fun and talk.  Going through slides and statistics blows.  Just get in there and talk about real issues and do discuss things that people want to talk about

Your status and why it matters.

For the digirati, the status update is the building block of a persons relationship with friends.  It is how they know what each other are doing online or on the go via mobile phone. 
The status update is the building block of conversation.  All the bits, bobs, digibits and nuggets make up the fabric of the new relationship.  Without all those little pieces of information, the digital people would have a hard time having points of reference to talk about. 

Today I saw a friend (Jon, I need ya) for the first time in five years.  We're close so we had enough to talk about but what was interesting was that he knew what had been going on in my life much more than I knew about his.  He had the advantage of my updates.  He's on the networks but doesn't share much.  He admitted to me that he felt like he just didn't have much to say.  I disagreed!  I wanted his mundane updates, I wanted to hear about the traffic to the Dodger game or that he wasn't so into fixing cars any more. Without him sharing there was a one way flow of information.

If you are like my friend and don't think your updates are imporant think again.  Updates

• - provide day to day stories about your life
• - let folks know you are ok.  And strangely that you are thinking of them (weird but seeing folks post brings closeness)
• - allows for a conversation to start anytime you feel the need.  There isn't that barrier of entry of picking up the phone.
• - weaves a fabric of your life that your friends want to know about.

Am I crazy? Am I off?  Let me know.

Views on online communities from a ten-year online community manager

I spoke with a co-worker yesterday whose goal at work is to create new community here at AOL.  We had a great conversation about the whole process and we came to a couple of great conclusions.

- Having lots of social technology on your site does not make it have a community.

Placing buttons that float and social engineering software does not create a community. Yes, it may bring referrals but is that a community?

- Most organizations treat community as an afterthought.

Historically,  communities online have been ignored by business people.  Starting with message boards on to chat rooms and through the social network phenomenon, C-level management has made community an afterthought.  Very rarely has time,  resources and investment been directed towards community progress.

- The content creators for your site need to take a stance and have personality.

Starting conversations about content written specifically to be impartial is hard.  Having an opinion or at least infusing the authors personality into your pieces helps with building community.  If a community member reads an authors posts regularly, that reader should "know" the author over time.

- Authors are usually bad at engaging with community.

Strangely enough,  writer write and critics, critique and the two shall not meet.  Having content creators be the primary source of community engagement and moderation simply does not work.  The dynamics of creating content and then leading the conversation on the created content don't jive.  I liken it to cooking a meal and then judging the merits of that meal, objectively.  A cook simply can't critique their own meal.

- Creating community is hard work.

There is no magic, there is no secret and there is no secret formula. You need good content,  a good product and people who are willing to talk about things.   Creating a strong and dynamic community takes nuanced, a heavy hand and unwavering consistency.  From dealing with message trolls,  to spam and back around to community revolts a community managers job is hard and thankless.  When there aren't comments we're asked to manufacture them and when there are too many we're asked to stop them.  The community manager is the front lines of the Internet.

What are your thoughts?  Do you have anything at all you want to add? I'd love to hear it.

Impartiality in journalism is completely modern bogus

I was reading The Foxification of news on The Economist and came across the quote below:

"The idea that journalists should be impartial in reporting news is a relatively recent one. “A lot of newspaper people treat it as one true religion, when it’s an artefact of a certain set of economic and historical circumstances,” says Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab. America’s Founding Fathers nurtured a vibrant, fiercely partisan press with no licensing of newspapers or policing of content. During the 19th century newspapers gradually adopted a more objective stance, for several reasons. By appealing to a wider audience, they were able to increase their circulation and hence their advertising revenue. Consolidation, and the emergence of local newspaper monopolies, also promoted impartiality. “When you are the only paper in town, you can’t risk pissing off liberals by being too conservative, or vice versa,” says Mr Benton."

I have been harping on this point for ages.  The idea in journalism that you have to be impartial is modern and current.  It was a business decision.  The faster your own site, blog or articles have you and your personality in them in them the quicker you'll be able to build a community, kinship and comments on posts.

You have to have an opinion.  Everything boils down to sports for me.  You are doomed if you are mediocre. Either be the best,  or be the worst,  the middle is death.

Why Facebook succeeded (And why Google+ can succeed too)

Why did Facebook explode?
One word with a second word follow up: Apps and Games. 

Working in the game space I've long thought that a significant reason Facebook succeeded is the games (mostly Zynga games)  that people built on top of the platform (the platform itself is a major technical achievement)

Jason Calacanis (Internet blowhard and entrepreneur of mild success) basically said what I have always thought:

"Without Mark’s (Pincus of Zynga)  innovations driving 20% to 35% of the traffic on Facebook (in my estimation), Facebook would be half the company it is today. In fact, don’t be surprised if Zynga is responsible -- even at this late date -- for 25% of the time spent on Facebook and a third of its earnings.  We will find out when Facebook files its IPO."

Read Jason's whole post here

If you want to look for the sure signs of success of Google+,  look for the games to arrive. If they do? Then you know Google has a winner on their hands

Sunk costs in sunk processes

Eighty percent of my understanding about economics comes from following baseball and the statistical revolution that changed the game over the last twenty years. One of the key principles about was the idea of sunk costs.

When applied to players it basically says, once the money is spent, it’s gone and trying to extract value from it is futile. If you pay a player fifteen million dollars over three years and they get hurt in the first year the cost of that player is a sunk cost. It can't be recovered, you can't derive value from and you might as well move on.

Unfortunately, the irrational human mind doesn't work that way. By spending that money on a person, object or system we act differently towards it. We hold on to it, try and make it work without regards for whether there is any value to be exacted from it. Our minds have pegged the value at what was paid for it.

This principle applies to processes at work. We hold onto sunken processes even though their value has long since dissipated. Think of old platforms that you work on that no longer function or the office adage "that's the way we've always done it". Those sunken processes are held onto despite the fact that there is no value being derived from it anymore.

Here are a couple of sunken processes that I am sure you run into:

•  A weekly meeting that we all have to attend but no one knows why.
•  a progress report that is the same every week that everyone has access to but you have to send an email for.
•  Companywide employee evaluations that have no bearing on career advancement or change in responsibilities.
•  using publishing or work platforms that no longer function, or are being supported.
•  keeping departments whose sole purpose is to perpetuate their own existence.
•  keeping partnerships that no longer function.

What other sunk processes can you think of?

The Real Reason Google+ Will Succeed (And it has nothing to do with Technology)

You mom (Her mom jeans and her mom jean wearing friends), your grandparents, your creepy uncle and three job's worth of co-workers aren't on it.

Sunk costs in sunk processes

Eighty percent of my understanding about economics comes from following baseball and the statistical revolution that changed the game over the last twenty years. One of the key principles about was the idea of sunk costs.

When applied to players it basically says, once the money is spent, it’s gone and trying to extract value from it is futile. If you pay a player fifteen million dollars over three years and they get hurt in the first year the cost of that player is a sunk cost. It can't be recovered, you can't derive value from and you might as well move on.

Unfortunately, the irrational human mind doesn't work that way. By spending that money on a person, object or system we act differently towards it. We hold on to it, try and make it work without regards for whether there is any value to be exacted from it. Our minds have pegged the value at what was paid for it.

This principle applies to processes at work. We hold onto sunken processes even though their value has long since dissipated. Think of old platforms that you work on that no longer function or the office adage "that's the way we've always done it". Those sunken processes are held onto despite the fact that there is no value being derived from it anymore.

Here are a couple of sunken processes that I am sure you run into:

•  A weekly meeting that we all have to attend but no one knows why.
•  a progress report that is the same every week that everyone has access to but you have to send an email for.
•  Companywide employee evaluations that have no bearing on career advancement or change in responsibilities.
•  using publishing or work platforms that no longer function, or are being supported.
•  keeping departments whose sole purpose is to perpetuate their own existence.
•  keeping partnerships that no longer function.

What other sunk processes can you think of?