Thank You Mom

May 8, 2011 Leave a comment

I’m almost never with my Mom on Mother’s Day, we live so far apart.  But particularly on this day I want her to know how much she is loved and appreciated for all that she has done and continues to do and the role she has played in my life.   She has always been the most supportive person throughout my life, always selfless in her guidance.  Never wavering in her support for my decisions, regardless of how strange or misguided they must have seemed at the time.  And always there in a non-intrusive way to help through the difficult times, and there’s been a few.

And its not just about me.  Mom has been a giver to others her entire life.  She never comes first.  Kindness, generosity and selflessness would be the words to describe my Mom, among others.  Well Mom, I hope for at least today YOU can come first and let this day be about you.

I love you.

Filed under Personal Tagged with , ,

Lifelong Learning With MIT – For Free!

May 6, 2011 Leave a comment

Ten years ago the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) began OpenCourseWare, a program to publish educational materials from all of its courses freely and openly on the Internet.  At this ten-year milestone, the program has 90% participation among faculty, sharing 2,000 courses with over 100 million individuals worldwide.  The program’s objective over the next ten years is to serve 1 billion people.  Wow.

While these courses do not bestow degrees or certificates, there are some incredible stories about how these world-class instructional materials are changing lives, particularly for the under-privileged and those in remote locations throughout the world.

It’s been 14 years since I completed graduate school at Kellogg and while I actively read to keep stimulated, there are areas, particularly in technology, that I could really stand to dig a little deeper to make me a more effective leader.  So I have just started an undergraduate, self-paced course through MIT’s program called Introduction to Computer Science and Programming that educates on the role computation and programming can play in solving problems, including application using Python programming language.  Lots has changed since my undergraduate FORTRAN programming class in 1987.  It should be fun!

43% of OpenCourseWare users are self-learners and 40% of them use the service to “explore areas outside my professional field”.  There are lots of areas of curiosity and interest for me in these 2,000 courses.  Particularly areas I know nothing about but have a curiosity to learn.  Anthropology and Urban Design are two areas I know squat about, but with a small amount of time and access to such great educational resources, I can get a cursory introduction.  Heck, why not Genomics and Computational Biology while I’m at it?

The world truly is at our fingertips.

Filed under Personal, Technology Tagged with , , ,

The Founder Conference

May 5, 2011 Leave a comment

I attended The Founder Conference this week in Mountain View, CA.  I don’t really attend many conferences, but every once in a while I’ll go to an event if there are a few speakers I’d like to see.  This one had two and it was a decent event, with about 500 entrepreneurs in attendance to hear some startup luminaries like Guy Kawasaki and Naval Ravikant speak about startup funding and delighting your initial customers.  Additionally, Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, gave a killer talk about the success and growth of his company and how he did it.

I intended on summarizing some of the key points, but there’s someone else who did a stellar job, even shooting video of the event.  See Dan Odio’s Founder Conference Blog Page for a re-cap and great video.

For the highlights, I suggest the following:

  • If you are interested in raising money for your startup or understanding what is happening in the VC/Angel marketplace right now, definitely watch Guy & Naval’s talks.  Guy Kawasaki is a serial entrepreneur, former Chief Evangelist for Apple and author of Enchantment.  And he’s a great, engaging speaker.  Naval Ravikant is also a serial entrepreneur and recent founder of AngelList that brings together founders with Angel investors – about 1900 of them!  He knows a thing or two about what’s happening in the marketplace for startup funding.
  • If you want to hear a great startup success story and be awed by how to really track performance and understand your customer’s needs and behavior, then watch Phil’s talk on Evernote.

These 3 presentations I thought were the best, most useful of the day.  Enjoy!

Filed under Technology Tagged with , , , ,

Engineer = Rock Star

May 4, 2011 2 Comments

It’s good to be a developer in this job market.  Really good.  And not just in Silicon Valley, although SV really is the center of the universe for mobile and web technology.

At TrueCar, we’ve been really aggressive with hiring for both our LA and SF offices, including offering relocation packages from anywhere in the U.S., even for junior engineers.  We’re selling our story hard.  Here’s what we’ve been up against over the past year:

  • Google recently gave every employee across-the-board 10% raises – up from already strong compensation.
  • Large Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook are actually acquiring small startups, in some cases only a few months old, to gain access to the development team.
  • Poaching talent from competitors has become a fine art, escalating signing bonuses to extreme amounts for top talent.  As incredulous as a $500K retention bonus sounds, the economics of that decision for a company like Google makes perfect sense based on the shareholder value that lead engineer will create.  Oh, and 15% of Facebook’s employees have previously worked for Google.
  • In Boulder, a consortium of companies are pooling money to fly in engineers from around the country to attend Boulder Startup Week beginning in a few weeks on May 18.

Compounding the challenge is the fact that its probably the best time in tech history to be an entrepreneur and start your own company.  There’s efficient access to capital and mentoring through firms like AngelList, YCombinator and TechStars and valuations are soaring, encouraging top technical talent to do their own thing, which is exactly what is happening, effectively removing top engineering talent from the labor pool.  How crazy is it that top engineers leave Google, start their own company, get acquired within a year and end up back at Google as an employee?

It’s a downright war for talent right now.

Filed under Current Events, Technology Tagged with , , , ,

Bin Laden Dead. Now What?

May 2, 2011 Leave a comment

Wow, what a historic day yesterday.  It will be one of those moments for me, like the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster or Princess Diana’s death, where I will remember forever where I was and what I was doing the moment I heard the news.  I was gathered with friends, including Sudhir “Suds” Kandula, to watch the finale of “America’s Next Great Restaurant” in which Suds was a top 3 finalist when the NBC News Special Report interrupted the broadcast.  Unfortunately, Suds came in 2nd place, but the Bin Laden news was an epic prize for all of us.  A particular sweet justice for all of service men and women who have sacrificed so much over the past decade.

I’ve been amazed at the pace of information flow, particularly on Twitter, regarding the Bin Laden situation.  Twitter stated that at the beginning and end of President Obama’s speech, there were over 5,100 tweets per second on their network.

I’m certainly not qualified to talk intelligently on the subject of what Bin Laden’s death means to global terrorism, so I’ll instead share a few of the most interesting articles I’ve come across in the last 24 hours.

However, I will say this – I for one don’t believe that Bin Laden’s death spells the end of Al Qaeda or that Al Qaeda becomes so fractured and disorganized that it becomes completely ineffective.   If there is any organization in the world that should have a detailed succession plan in place for leadership, it would be Al Qaeda.   Setting emotion aside for a second, Bin Laden created an evil but effective worldwide organization that operated efficiently in a decentralized way – and did so at the same time that all superpower countries built their own organizations with the sole purpose of destroying Al Qaeda and killing its leadership.  Can you imagine operating an organization under those terms?  He was a ruthless mass-murderer, but he was not stupid.  I fear that in some respects Bin Laden may be more powerful dead than alive, at least in the near term.

Here are links to several interesting, and differing points of views on what Bin Laden’s death means for the world and the U.S.:

  • The Special Ops Team that executed the mission against Bin Laden.
  • Maps of the Bin Laden compound, in unbelievable detail.
  • An alternative and somewhat brutal point of view on Bin Laden’s impact on U.S. Government and U.S. citizen behavior entitled “He Won“.
  • Debate among New York Times columnists on the impact of this historic event.

What do you think Bin Laden’s death means for Al Qaeda, global terrorism and the U.S.?

Filed under Current Events Tagged with , , ,

Newer posts →