When Safety Nets Become Hammocks: My Reaction to the Acquihire Debate

"You know what I wish for you?," Philip Rosedale said from across the table at a trendy Italian restaurant in the Marina. "I want you to wake up naked and penniless on a beach in Brazil because that's the way you're going to reach your full potential. You gotta eliminate the safety net." As the sentence ended, I half expected a bag to be put over my head while Philip leaned over and whispered softly "this is my gift to you" as I was dragged away to a South American cargo plane.

However it turned out he was just providing advice, not a one way ticket. I'd spent three years helping him build the virtual world Second Life and we parted during a downsizing round in late 2003. Afterwards I'd unexpectedly found my way to Google (unexpectedly because I was planning on staying in the startup space) and continued to have dinner with Philip every few months to catch up. He's an intense guy with a very unique way of looking at the world so his perspectives took some digesting, but this one in particular always stuck with me. It shot back into my frontal lobe when reading Sarah Lacy's acquihire article along with the the subsequent debate about whether "fear of failure" is a good and necessary requirement for healthy entrepreneurial cultures.

Philip's visual of severing the safety net would seem to suggest that you have to be afraid of the fall in order to soar, but what he really meant was to avoid getting too comfortable because you lose an edge. Eliminate the safety net less it turn into a hammock.

I don't believe acquihires are fundamentally good or bad things - it's just an outcome. However they do tend to leave people in jobs that they wouldn't have sought out through normal employment channels. If it turns out you love your project in the larger company, then stay. But if you don't feel as challenged, productive or passionate, then get out. Don't rest and vest. Don't give up years of learning for short-term earning, especially if you're learning skills that are company specific. Let's be real - much of being an executive at a large company is about understanding relationships, politics and "how to get things done." These aren't always the most valuable skills if you imagine getting back out into the startup scene. Stay through a product launch and a few planning cycles and you can understand "the Google way" or "the Facebook way." Then get out and resume building companies that do it a totally new way.

Oh, and yeah, Philip, as I approach nine (!) years at Google/YouTube, might need you to burlap sack me south of the equator :)

Why startups are like acting...

“You go into this business, you better not go in for the money. And you certainly better not go in it for the fame. You better love it because you love the art....It’s a long-winded way of saying, I’ve been around long enough that I know it ain’t fair.”

- Jonathan Banks (Mike on Breaking Bad)

No God Mode: Live With Same Limitations Your Users Experience

"Get rid of 10 minute video limit" was high on our 2007 YouTube task list, and although it took several years longer than I had expected, we were eventually able to grant 'long uploads' to all users in good standing. During the interim period plenty of folks at Google would ping me about getting their limit removed as we had for partners, politicians and advertisers. These requests ranged from random colleagues to Google executives, but regardless of my familiarity or their status, I delivered the same message, "no."

Yes, telling a VP that their kid's graduation video would need to be split into 10 minute segments likely qualifies as a Career Limiting Move, but it was an important decision. We needed to experience the product as our community did and not solve problems for ourselves that we weren't also solving for them.

So while God Mode might be essential for debugging or internal efficiency, be careful to not create a distorted reality. Your users are likely on worse hardware with slower connections. They bump against your system limits all the time. The best way to motivate and fix problems is to encounter these same frustrations, and make sure your executives do as well.

Ode to a Non-Technical Product Manager

Earlier this week an aspiring product manager sought counsel, wondering whether as a "non-technical product manager" he had any hope of succeeding. Of course in this case he's a college senior who *only* knows CSS, HTML and beginning level PHP, a set of skills which already put him in the global 1%. What he really meant was "can I be a product manager without being trained as an engineer or having otherwise acquired major hacking skills?" My answer? Yes. As a "non-technical product manager" I have my own personal bias, but let's examine the notion that only CS majors make good product managers.

First, what is product management? Three jobs in one:

• Project Manager: Make sure the trains run on time, team is functioning well
• Product Manager: Help a team produce worldclass products which delight your users and support a sustainable business model
• CEO: No matter how junior or senior a product manager you are, you must think like CEO. The buck stops with you. You tell me marketing failed to deliver? You share that responsibility. You tell me sales team had misaligned goals? Why didn't you raise that issue earlier?

The best product managers possess a broad set of skills which allow them to somehow manage wearing these multiple hats. The distribution of your time across these roles shifts based on the organization, the team, the nature of your project and one's seniority, but even a new grad needs to think like a CEO, and a salty veteran should roll up their sleeves to shovel shit when needed.

Within this construct, technical proficiency is certainly desirable but not required. What is required without a doubt? Technical curiousity. If you aren't intrigued by technology and getting your hands dirty via small projects, self-teaching on Codecademy/Treehouse, or asking smart questions, I'll wonder why. The ability to prototype your own ideas is even better, but again, I've seen many PM leaders succeed without this skill. Why? Because ultimately your job is happy team and happy users

But what's your superpower?

Ultimately it's not your boss who can make you successful, it's your team. You serve as the behest of the engineers and designers you work with on a daily basis. What can you do to help them? That's where your superpowers come into play. If you're a young product manager lacking an engineering background, it's really important you develop a few superpowers. Maybe it's being really well-versed in development methodologies so you can lead a team through an agile sprint, a waterfall or any other 'best fit' technique for getting the job done. Maybe you're a web analytics guru and can crunch logged data. Or a  growth hacker, with an eye towards the measurement and tuning of virality stats. 

Point being, you need to bring something(s) to the table and that sort of value creation is the more important question than being technical or not. 

The logic behind requiring technical PMs (as places like Google generally do), is mostly (a) to invent the future one must understand the underlying components and (b) to work closely with engineers in an engineering-driven company you need to share a common knowledge and language. These might be directionally correct but I'll put more emphasis in being clear about your superpowers - and whether they're a good fit for the project/team.

Furthermore, it's foolish to assume that being technically trained equates to being able to see the future. And if your PM is the only one who can 'see the future,' then your team and company have larger problems.

So closing, if you're a product manager who isn't technically trained:
1. Be technically curious - forget writing production code but knowing how things work and even being able to prototype is great.
2. Develop specific superpowers - don't just rely on being a smart generalist. 
3. Focus on making your team better - your success is tied to theirs, what do you need to do to help?

AT&T Charged Me Up: How Brand Sponsors Can Add Value

Lots of sponsor participation at the recent Fortune Brainstorm conference in Colorado, but AT&T should get additional kudos for really adding value and staying consistent with their brand (phones!). They supplied a phone charging lockbox (pictured at right). You could put your phone in, hook it up to Apple, Android or Blackberry chargers and lock it up. In some public places these sorts of stations would be maintenance and liability problems, but would love to see similar terminals in more locations.

Have you come across similar sponsor provided pop-ups that are useful and on-brand (ie not a credit card company sponsoring a massage station)?

Would you pay Twitter $10/yr to use 3rd party clients?

So let's say instead of trying to 'create a consistent experience,' Twitter charged users $10/yr to use 3rd party clients. The idea being when you try to auth against a client, Twitter checks to see whether you're activated for offsite tweeting. You can't compose messages, RT or receive/send DMs without authing in, and a 3rd party client that lacks the ability to send Tweets likely wouldn't gain much traction, so don't worry about their read access of the API.

Furthermore, the people who use 3rd party clients are likely powerusers who perhaps are less likely to click on Promoted Tweets (if you follow the general web rule that the more sophisticated users interact with ads the least).

What do you think - instead of eliminating 3rd party clients, what about asking users to pay?

(if it wasn't clear, I would pay this - i use 3rd party apps along w Twitter's own apps)
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via @geoffstearns: interesting, but the devil is in the definition of "client"
A: Anything that 'writes' (tweet, RT, DM). Allow for "free" read access & official implementations of Tweet buttons, oAuth ID