Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Customer Support is the New Marketing (or Not)
Rob Kalin from Etsy has referred to customer support as marketing and Etsy has significantly enhanced its customers support team to cut down response time dramatically. Danny Meyer in his book Setting the Table and the actual operations of his restaurants also makes helping the customer central to the experience. I believe this to be especially important in an age where a customer whose problem is not addressed can tweet and blog about it as I am about to do with regard to my recent experience with Netgear.
In 2006 I purchased a ReadyNAS NV+ that has served as my home media storage and TimeMachine backup since. Recently it started behaving strangely by suddenly losing power without the log files showing anything. I started a thread in the ReadyNAS forums and someone provided a terrific diagnosis of the problem. As it turns out, I need a new power supply unit (PSU) — my ReadyNAS model belong to a group with known PSU problems.
So yesterday I call Netgear customer support to order a replacement PSU. At first things were going just fine. I get a human quickly after navigating the phone tree and she understand the basic issue. But then she said that in order to process my request she needs to register my ReadyNAS. I provided her with the serial number off the back of the device and was told that it is “not a recognized serial number” and so she could not register it.
Instead, I had to take a photograph of the Serial Number and email that to a customer service address which would have a 2 week turnaround time!
It was clear that she could do nothing else for me at this point and so I went home, took a picture and emailed it in. Amazingly, there was not even an automatic reply saying they had received it (and yes, I checked my spam folder).
So now I am in customer service limbo. This is all the more amazing since I told the rep that I was completely prepared to pay for the PSU. After all, the device is over 4 years old and I really don’t expect the PSU to be covered by warranty. I will provide an update on how this goes, but so far Netgear is losing a terrific opportunity …
[Update: Just checked the forums again and the newest reply points out the part number for the PSU, so hopefully I will be able to buy directly]
Tags: customer_service marketing netgear
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Inception
Saw Inception on Sunday evening and loved it despite (because?) some its glaring flaws. It is a spectacular mashup of some of my favorite movie elements: philosophy, action, heist, stunning imagery and more action- all on a huge IMAX screen (the way movies are meant to be seen).
The philosophy element is about some of the deep unresolved questions around consciousness, free will and our potentially tenuous grasp on reality. The action element is well action including fist fights, car chases, skiing, you name it. The heist element is wonderfully satisfying because it involves planting something rather than stealing it and (spoiler alert) is pulled off successfully against great odds (lots of echoes of traditional and newer capers here). And finally there is Nolan’s signature element of amazing imagery. My personal favorites were Paris folding in on itself and dreamers floating in a zero-gravity hotel room.
Now as I mentioned there were also some glaring flaws mostly relating to internal consistency and character development (or more precisely lack thereof). But I am happily willing to overlook these or even consider them to come with the territory. I would definitely go see a sequel - this could be the Oceans 11-13 of mind benders.
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Monday, July 26, 2010
Privacy, Secrecy and Reputation, Oh My!
I love the duality of the Jeffrey Rosen piece about the End of Forgetting in the NY Times Sunday magazine with the release of the Afghanistan files via Wikileaks. Citizens and governments are faced with a fundamental challenge to privacy and secrecy. This is not a change in degree, like the advent of photo copiers compared to hand-cranked ink paper (yup, old enough to have used that!). It is a completely different world and many individuals and almost all institutions are in denial about how radical a transformation is ahead of us.
I believe that embracing transparency is a far better approach than any system (legal or technical) for trying to control the information once it it out. The overhead and unintended consequences of those systems would be tremendous. Imagine a world in which you could send a take-down notice to anyone for content that you may deem no longer appropriate. Everything would grind to a halt. Or imagine a world in which information on one of your machines can be deleted automatically by a third party without your consent. The potential for abuse would be horrendous.
I believe that over time the net result of a transparent world will be a real premium on authenticity and direct communication. If you are a person, company or institution that is actually doing more good than bad and you are communicating that directly to the world, then it will be difficult for others to try to “override” your image. This comes with one crucial proviso: it assumes we continue to have net neutrality! Without it, others might manipulate the flow of information in a way that could in fact drown out your own communication.
P.S. If you don’t have have domain yet, at which you control entirely what you communicate, now would be a good time to get one!
Tags: wikileak privacy secrecy transparency net_neutrality
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Portland, Oregon
I am on the road in Portland, Oregon for OSCON. It is interesting that OSCON is here again after being in Silicon Valley in 2009. In 2009, I happened to sit down at lunch next to a development officer for the city of Portland who said he was attending because he wanted to make sure they could bring the conference back to Portland! There already are some interesting startups based here, such as JanRain and Jive, which just announced a $30 million funding round, and the city is clearly attracting more folks interested in startups (e.g. Alex Payne moved here after leaving Twitter). The city also seems much hipper than I had remembered it from spending some time here over a decade ago. For instance, last night I stayed at the very cool (almost too cool for me) Jupiter Hotel and caught a show by Admiral Radley at the Doug Fir Lounge. Now off to OSCON!
Tags: portland oregon oscon janrain jive
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Applying Engineering to Business: Binding Constraints
Fred has been posting a wonderful series of MBA Mondays posts that I recommend to everyone who wants to know more about the business side of startups. If you come from the engineering side, it may also help to think about business using engineering principles. My favorite one is the idea of a “single binding constraint.”
When the execution of a program runs into a hardware constraint, it tends to be a single binding constraint: the program is either CPU-bound, memory-bound or IO-bound but generally not two or three at the same time. The same tends to be true for organizations. At any particular point in the life of a startup, there is most likely a single binding constraint on growth. For most startups this is the lack of product-market fit. If you haven’t solved that, investing heavily in a sales force is the equivalent of adding RAM when your program is CPU-bound.
Once you have cracked one binding constraint a new one is likely to emerge. For instance, with product-market fit in place, your single binding constraint might shift to sales, or to engineering or to customer support. A key job of the founder/CEO/board is to identify the single binding constraint for the startup at any given time and focus on overcoming it. I have found this way of thinking to be incredibly powerful. There tends to be so much going on in a startup that it is all too easy to want to attack many different constraints all at once. At that point it is critical to remind oneself that only one of those constraints is likely to be binding, in the sense that it is truly impeding growth.
Tags: business engineering
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
The Case of the Missing Google Notes
So I am finally midstream in migrating off Exchange and onto Google. Email - check (gmail). Contacts - check (google contacts). Calendar - check (gcal). Notes - what no Google notes? Huh? I may be overlooking something obvious here, but it doesn’t seem as if Google has a direct equivalent of notes.
Now as it happens, I use notes a lot. For instance, I keep a running list of ideas for blog posts as a note. I have notes for each portfolio company. There are notes for travel destinations. In general I put anything there for which a traditional document would be total overkill. I love that my notes are fully local (eg edit in subway) but also synched to the cloud, so it doesn’t matter if I drop my device — all those little thoughts are well protected.
I am looking for suggestions for alternatives that meet the same criteria: notes that are super easy and fast to use, stored locally on device, and synched to the cloud. Must run on Android and Blackberry support would be really sweet. One of my goals with switching to all Google is to be able to try out many devices easily and simultaneously! Would be quite ironic if notes (the easiest to build) were the hardest to get. Will try out Evernote for sure but would appreciate other recommendations.
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Monday, July 19, 2010
Admitting Mistakes
A quality that I find hugely important but increasingly rare in people is the willingness to admit mistakes. Growing up I wasn’t really part of a culture in which mistakes are openly discussed and used as an opportunity to learn. For a long time, my own approach was therefore one of just moving on or trying to fix things without admitting to any mistakes (often compounding the initial mistake in the process).
But as I started to manage people I came to realize that if you want them to try things and take risks you can’t have a culture that hides mistakes. Every mistake is an opportunity to learn and you don’t want to throw those away. So if you want that kind of culture you have to start with yourself and admit your mistakes. In a business setting a simple “I got this wrong” or a more emphatic “I screwed this up” is so direct and helpful that often it doesn’t even require an apology (unless someone got harmed).
I certainly wish we had more of that in our public/political world as well which seems full of attacking others for their (alleged) mistakes without ever mentioning one’s own. I occasionally struggle getting this right at home (where more emotions tend to be involved) and writing this post will hopefully serve as a good reminder to myself.
Tags: management ethics
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Android versus Apple (Flash, App Inventor)
Yesterday evening I wanted to bone up on the racing rules in sailing after having had a close encounter while rounding the leward mark last Thursday (which elicited quite a blue streak from the skipper of the other boat). I really wanted to see some animations of different situations that one might encounter to test my understanding of the rules. After a quick search I wound up on the UK Halsey site, only to remember that I was on an iPad and none of the animations would work because they are in Flash. Apple is definitely on the wrong side of this! Globally there must be millions of hours invested in educational content that is in Flash, much like these sailing simulations. Yes - at some point it could (and maybe even should) be rewritten in something else, but until then, I can’t wait for an Android tablet.
Speaking of Android, I love Google’s move to make Android programming accessible to everyone. I will get my kids onto the App Inventor ASAP and will likely get them Android phones (now that they are going away to sports events by themselves having phones actually makes sense). This will be a stark contrast to their iPod touches on which they are consumers only. With App Inventor, they can create mini apps in a way that they are familiar with from programming Lego Mindstorm Robots. There are some good questions over at Read Write Web about where App Inventor will go, but it is the principle that matters. Google is trying to make it easy to program Android, betting that there will be a huge number of devices and very large number of people who want to develop for them, whereas Apple is taking a very restrictive approach, even removing Scratch from the app store!
Apple is still in an excellent position but at least for our household I currently see more Android than Apple in the (mobile) future.
Tags: google apple android mobile
Monday, July 12, 2010
Time for (Web) Reminders of the Wars?
As in the past 8 years, we went to see the Scarsdale Memorial Day parade earlier this year. Attendance was incredibly low. I remarked to Susan then that this is a direct function of virtually no one in Scarsdale having a family member in the military. As far as I can tell, we have essentially “outsourced” fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the poorer parts of the States. I was reminded of this on 4th of July, where around here everything was idyllic and not a single conversation I had that day as much as referenced the two ongoing wars. Then I quickly forget again myself because there are no visible signs around here. Sure, the New York Times has been running a bunch of cover stories about Afghanistan but first, I don’t look at the cover of the NYT much anymore and second, even when I do the tech stories of the day quickly draw my attention instead. I am wondering how people would react if (tech and other) web sites were to start running a small permanent strip at the top with a duration and casualty update for the wars - maybe combined with a link to let folks donate to support veterans. This kind of reminder strikes me as important for all of us, whether or not we support(ed) the wars. As it stands now - it just seems way too easy to ignore.
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Thursday, July 8, 2010
Some Career Advice
Following our recent recruiting effort to find Christina and Gary I have been spending a fair bit of time meeting with people we encountered in the process who wanted career advice. Here are some of the points I have found myself talking about repeatedly.
First: many people think they want to be an entrepreneur but few actually are. The best way to tell is to look at the things you have already done. If you have never taken the initiative to create something from scratch (and even if that something is just a new club at school) you are probably not well suited to being an entrpreneur.
Second: finding a job at a great startup requires a lot of initiative. The best startup jobs are never advertised so you need to be highly proactive.
Third: if you join a startup but not as a co-founder then it is best to join one that already either has clear traction and/or is venture backed. The risk-reward ratio is worst for non-founders in pre-traction/pre-funding situations.
Fourth: Consulting and Investment Banking are generally not good preparations for being either an entrepreneur or joining a startup. Most large companies are only marginally better. If you want to be an entrepreneur or work at a startup, get out of that consulting, banking or big company job as fast as you can!
Fifth: You can’t expect the first startup you join to be a huge success and have you be set for life! Expect to work at a string of startups instead. Therefore you have to value the benefits of being at a startup, such as being able to get things done without a bureaucracy.
Sixth: Being a generalist is tough because even startups look for some degree of specialization as soon as they get to be more than a handful of people.
Seventh: Networking and general purpose informational meetings are great, but you should always have an agenda and concrete questions. Otherwise the meeting winds up not being a good use of anybody’s time.
Nothing terribly new here at all but find myself surprised how many people appear confused on what I consider basic pointers.
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