-
FOR SALE: 2004 BMW 330xi — $10,500
I am selling my fully-loaded 2004 BMW 330xi. It has been meticulously maintained by one the top-rated BMW mechanic in the Bay Area (German Auto Sport). I’m sad to let it go, but since moving to the city, I’ve been riding my bike everywhere. For the rare cases when I don’t, I’m happy to use Zipcar.
Photos are below, and here are the details:
- dark blue exterior, beige interior
- less than 120k miles
- all-wheel drive
- automatic transmission (tiptronic)
- power windows and locks
- power seats, including 3-driver “memory”
- winter package (heated front seats, ski passthrough from trunk)
- premium Harmon Kardon sound package
- aftermarket iPod adapter (charges, plays through, and displays title)
If interested, please contact me.
-
My Latest Obsession: The Singularity
A year or two ago was when I first heard about Ray Kurzweil and his notion of “The Singularity”. When I first heard about it, someone was trying to explain it to me, and it sounded too much like a cult created by a crazy person, so I dismissed it. Somewhat recently, I started hearing more and more about it, so decided to look into it a little bit. I discovered a few things:
- Although Ray Kurzweil may indeed be crazy, he’s also brilliant. The Singularity is not a cult or religion, but rather more a theory, and one with some pretty compelling arguments to boot.
- The people who are interested in The Singularity are some of the brightest, most well-educated people on the planet.
- I am a believer, and mildly obsessed with the phenomenon.
So what is The Singularity? Frankly, it’s too much for me to try to explain fully in this simple blog entry, but I’ll take a stab at a quick summary:
Technology advances occur at an exponential rate. Likewise technology costs fall at the same rate. For the less geeky-types out there who may not understand “exponential”, think of it this way … How many “doublings” does it take before you get to a thousand? In other words, 2 x 2 = 4, 2 x 2 x 2 = 8 … how many 2s are needed to reach 1,000? The answer is 10. 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 1,024.
Put another way, if next generation computer processors follows the previous generation every 6 months, and the next generation processor is twice as powerful as the previous generation, how long do we have to wait before a computer processor is 1,000 times as powerful? The answer is 5 years (or 10 times 6 months).
The most exciting bit is that it’s not just computer technology, but all technology that advances at exponential rates, though perhaps slightly slower. For example, solar technology falls in cost and doubles in efficiency every two years. In other words, in twenty years, solar technology will be one thousand times as powerful as it is today. (That’s good news for humans, as it means that we’ll be able to meet all of our grid power needs inside of that time window.) But again, it’s not just computer technology and solar, it’s all technology.
The implications of this are mind-blowing. It basically guarantees that, at some point in the next 50 years, it’s likely that there will be a computer intelligence that is more powerful than the highest human intelligence. Does that frighten you? It should. No one can really predict the implications of such “artificial intelligence”, except for to say that, “shit is gonna go down”. Things are going to change, and in drastic ways. If you think it’s cool that a computer can beat a chess champion or that a computer can beat humans in game shows, just wait until you see what’s happening in another 20 or 30 years.
Do you want to know more? I recommend watching Transcendent Man. It does a great job of explaining The Singularity, while painting an interesting portrait of the man behind the ideas. If you don’t have time for that, I at least recommend watching this TED talk:
If it gets you excited (as it does for me), think about how medical technology is going to change. I recommend watching these next two TED talks (in the order presented here). The first one is by Aubrey de Grey, who believes that (sometime in the near future) we will “cure” human aging.
The second one (with Anthony Atala) is not set in the future at all, but instead focuses on technology that is in research and development today. Mind-blowing stuff. If you (like some of my friends) are considering a career in “alternative” medicine, you really ought to watch these before taking out your loans:
What do you think?
-
Simplified GTD: My exit from email hell.
A few of my colleagues / friends lately have told me that they are suffering from email overload. Are you one of these people? Do you have (literally) thousands of unread emails? I used to. Then I read a bunch of other blog posts about GTD, or “Getting Things Done”. I even bought the book, but then never read it. I didn’t need to. Here’s why:
I use Google’s Gmail for both my personal and my work email systems. My explanation will assume you know what Gmail “labels” are. It also assumes you know what “set up a filter” means. If you don’t, well, go figure it out and then come back to this. Okay, now go create a set of filters that will take any “bulk” email and deal with it. If you’re cluttering your inbox with list mail, you’ll never survive. Go do that, then come back to this. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Okay … Create three new labels in Gmail. Call them “00-action”, “01-pending”, “02-someday”. Now you have to decide how many of the remaining Inbox items you’re going to pay attention to. I recommend no more than 100. Chances are, if you haven’t dealt with it anything older than that, you’re never going to. Accept it and move on. Select all but the first 100 emails in your Inbox and archive them. Now, for the important part.
Go through each of your remaining 100 emails, one at a time, and ask yourself these questions, in this order:
- “Do I need to deal with this, or now that I’ve read it, am I done?” If you are done with it, you can archive the email now. If not, then ask …
- “Can I deal with this in under 2 minutes?” If so, do it. Deal with it. Reply to the email. Make your phone call. Whatever it takes to do it in under 2 minutes. Now archive it. If it cannot be dealt with in 2 minutes, then ask …
- “Do I need to deal with this in the next week?” If so, label it “00-actions”, then archive it. Otherwise, label it “02-someday”, then archive it.
At this point, your inbox is empty, you’ll have one label (“00-actions”) of things you need to deal with soon, and another set of things (“03-someday”) that you can deal with later. Next, go through your “00-actions” emails, and ask this next question:
- “Can I resolve this on my own?” If so, ignore the email for now and move on to the next one. If you cannot resolve it on your own, send an email to whomever can help you resolve it requesting the help you need, then change the label on the email from “00-actions” to “01-pending”.
At this point, your inbox is still empty, and you’ve got three buckets of work:
- 00-actions: Things you need to deal with soon that you can deal with yourself.
- 01-pending: Things that you will deal with once someone gets back to you.
- 02-someday: Things that you will deal with when you have nothing left to do in 00-actions.
I look through my “00-actions” mail several times per day and deal with things in priority order. There are usually less than 10 things with this label.
I look through my “01-pending” mail at least once per week, pruning items that have been resolved via my day-to-day activities, and emailing reminders to people who haven’t yet done their part of the joint-resolution task. There are usually less than 25 things with this label.
I look through my “02-someday” mail only when I have nothing else to do (seriously). This “02-someday” label has some real gems in it; it’s filled with great ideas from other folks. It’s full of process improvements, requests for a “small favor”, etc. In other words: stuff that may never get done. This folder grows slowly over time. I prune it no more than once per quarter. Seriously.
That’s it. 14 short paragraphs to freedom from email hell. I’m not kidding. You don’t need to read any further than this if you trust me. If you don’t, read on …
I spend about 10% of the time on email that I used to. Seriously. By clearing my inbox continuously and sorting things into the buckets I mentioned above, I am able to focus my mental energy only on the highest priority stuff. By moving things that are waiting on others into a less-frequently-observed bucket, I’m not often distracted by things that are in a wait state. And by moving the rest of the things that are interesting into a “someday” bucket, I can feel like I’m capturing things that are interesting, but are not a priority.
This method takes discipline. If you let your inbox fill up, you’ll always be digging yourself out. But if you keep it clear, your work is always sorted for you.
Do you have an assistant? Even better. You can have your assistant sort your email in this fashion for you. S/he can also deal with the “01-pending” reminders. Then all you have to do is the work in your “00-actions” label.
Try it, and let me know how it goes. I promise, it will change your life.
-
Giving Our Gifts
The past three weeks have been grueling. A typical weekday for me has meant being into my office at 08:30 and leaving sometime after 23:30. All of my meals have been at the office. And at the end of each day, while I’m incredibly exhausted, I’m usually pretty wired and have trouble falling asleep. Why?
These past three weeks have been leading up to the beta launch of the improved Change.org petition platform. Tonight, Saturday, at a bit before 23:00, we went live. I’m both incredibly excited at what my team was able to accomplish, but even more so I am humbled to be a part of such a team. I asked a lot of these guys, and they came through … in spades.
It’s true … at 37, these hours are tougher on me than they once were. However, it’s really incredible to know that, without my team doing the work we do, things like this couldn’t happen. There is no higher calling in life than to use the gifts we’ve been given to make things better. We do. Every day.
By the way, we are hiring.
-
Stop Buying Bottled Water!
In case you haven’t heard, today is Blog Action Day. The theme this year is: WATER. Water is such an integral part of our daily life, that most of us don’t think about it much. For much of the world, though, clean water is a constant struggle; access to clean, drinkable water is incredibly difficult in the developing world.
I took this photo during my travels in 2009 while I was on the island of Koh Lipeh in Thailand:
I was completely in awe when I arrived on Koh Lipeh. I had never seen such beautiful water before. What’s sad, though, is that just around the corner from where I took this photo, the beach was quite literally covered in trash. Ironically, much of the trash was in the form of plastic water bottles.
Seeing those piles of plastic water bottles against this turquoise backdrop was definitely an eye-opening moment for me. Hell, I’m old enough to remember a time when the joke went something like this: “Did you know that ‘Evian’ is ‘naive’ spelled backwards? You just paid for water, stupid!”
Today, though, people don’t think twice about plunking down $2 for a plastic bottle filled with what is, in many cases, water that comes from the municipal supply. On top of that, many of those plastic bottles end up getting tossed away, either to be burned (as they do on Koh Lipeh), sent to landfill, or worse.
I have to admit, I’m guilty of sometimes buying bottled water … most of us are. Sometimes we’re forced to buy a bottle of water (for example, you cannot carry containers of water through airport security). Most of the time, I’ve got my trusty “Kleen Kanteen” with me. If you don’t have one yet, get one — they’re great. It’s a pretty easy idea, really. Let’s do what we can to minimize waste and to reverse the trend of bottling companies owning our water supply. As much as is possible, let’s stop buying bottled water.
Also, on a related, but perhaps slightly off-topic note, please sign the petition below so that others in the developing world can know what it’s like to enjoy good, clean water. Thanks.
-
jeffreywescott asked: Can we really ask you anything at all? Do you promise you'll answer it?
First of all, that’s 2 questions. One question at a time, please.
Secondly, umm, no. Of course not. I’ll only answer the questions that I feel like answering.
-
Switched to tumblr.
Today I thought I’d give tumblr a try. Things were getting confusing with me hosting my personal(-ish) blog over on my LLC web site, so I moved the relevant entries here (which was easy, BTW — tumblr is pretty awesome). From now on I’ll be posting via tumblr, and it’s automatically hooked into Facebook and Twitter. Easy breezy.
A few of my friends are on posterous, but, I heard it described as, “posterous is engineered, tumblr is designed”. That feels about right to me.
-
Understaffed Beats Wrongstaffed
I started running Product and Engineering at Change.org late this past April. One of the things that attracted me to the company was how successful they had been with such a small, focused staff. For example, my colleague Mark Dimas had single-handedly built the entire web site. As an engineer, Mark’s expertise is both broad and deep, yet amazingly, he seems to have almost no ego.
After assessing things within the organization in my first few weeks there, I realized that not only was there some technical debt (as can be expected when only one person works on a codebase), but in addition, there was quite a bit of organizational debt. Not only had Mark built the whole web site, but he was also doing network and system operations, technical support, and a whole array of other things to keep the web site running smoothly. I feared what might happen if he ever got “hit by a bus”.
I am an entrepreneur. My favorite part of entrepreneurialism is team-building. And my favorite part of team-building is the beginning stages. People who have built early-stage teams before will most likely either smile or cringe at that statement … they’ll smile because they know that the early-stage team are the foundation for the whole future. They’ll cringe because they know how detrimental it can be to hire the wrong people. The early-stage team members are the metaphorical Atlas upon whose shoulders the world rests. Hiring the right people at the beginning will go a long way toward making a team successful. Hiring the wrong people … well, I’ve done it, and let me tell you: it isn’t pretty.
I can best illustrate my point with data I’ve collected about hiring engineers here at Change.org. I’ve looked at 127 resumes. From those 127 resumes, I’ve set up 72 phone screen interviews. Of those 72 phone screens, I’ve invited 9 engineers on-site for in-person interviews. Of those 9 engineers, just 3 made it past all of the rounds of in-person interviews and received offers. And of those 3 offers, just 1 engineer accepted. For those of you not good at math, that’s about a 0.8% success rate on resumes received. 127 –> 72 –> 9 –> 3 –> 1 == 0.8%!
Some of you may be saying to yourselves, “That’s impossible — certainly there must have been more than just 3 viable candidates from a pool of 127!” To which my response is, “No, there weren’t.” When we are evaluating candidates, we consider mission-alignment (we are Change.org, after all), team fit, and skills and experience (in that order). We have met with a few candidates who had deep skills and expertise, but were not a team fit. Other folks seemed like they’d be great to work with, but didn’t quite have the depth of experience we need from them at this stage. With such a small team, we need folks who can hit the ground running, folks who aren’t intimidated by a large codebase, a large data set, or intense uptime requirements. We’re rapidly approaching 2 million users and get about 100 thousand new signups every month. We are profitable and need to stay that way. We need hardcore hackers, not hobbyists.
We are, right now, feeling the burdens of being understaffed. Still, .
Are you a Ruby / Rails hacker? Do you want to use your skills to make the world a better place? Would you like to work for someone who has (in the past) made hiring mistakes and understands that understaffed beats wrongstaffed? Drop me a line. We’d love to meet you.
-
The Problem With Libertarianism
Most of my adult life I’ve called myself a “social anarchist”. Make no mistake: I am (and always have been) fully aware that I am a white, privileged, male American. Nonetheless, my early studies of politics led me to believe that:
- Bureaucracies don’t work. The larger, they are, the less effective they are.
- Individual freedom is more important than collective welfare.
- Any system created by humans will be corrupted by humans.
My conclusion was: don’t bother.
The United States was founded by a bunch of anarchists. Actually, it was founded by a bunch of privileged, wealthy, white, land-owning anarchists. Often, they were the cast-off nonconformists of European privileged society that placed pedigree above merit. Every system has its flaws …
Now I’m 36 years old. I spent most of 2009 traveling this beautiful wide world. And, unfortunately, I have seen the status quo that is hidden from view for most first-world privileged folk. It’s washing up on the shores of Koh Lipeh in Thailand in the form of Coca Cola bottles. Today, it’s washing up on the shores of the Gulf Coast in the form of crude oil.
I’m an engineer by training. Engineers like to think about problems of optimization. Human systems are just that: our attempt to optimize for certain variables. Unfettered capitalism is one such system. It tries to simplify everything by creating a system around the notion of “currency” — a universal unit of measurement from which and into which any resource can be “converted”. We’re optimizing to maximize the amount of currency in the world. Guess what: it’s working. However, that’s not the right variable against which to optimize! We should be optimizing for happiness, not wealth. My wealthiest friends are the least happy people I know. Past the point of “freedom to spend your time as you wish”, wealth inevitably makes people unhappy.
Like all such systems, pure capitalism is too simple. It looks great on paper. However, it doesn’t look great on the shores of small Pacific Islands — it doesn’t look great on the shores of Louisiana right now, either. The system itself is imperfect.
Does this mean I’m casting off my “social anarchistic” tendencies and becoming a Democrat? Hardly. Actually, I could never align myself with either Democrats or Republicans, since they are both too moderate for me. Politics is not linear. There is more than one axis. I am neither “left” nor “right”. In terms of social / moral politics, I believe the government should “butt out” (yes, gays should be able to marry, all psychoactive substances should be legalized, etc.). In terms of fiscal policy, however, my recent observations have made it very clear to me that regulation of huge corporate beasts is not only necessary, but imperative.
I find it quite depressing that so many of the world’s brightest people, many of whom are my friends (and / or family), fail to see that governments are no longer the enemy of “the people”. Well, maybe they are. But they’re no longer the most powerful enemy. Huge, multinational corporations now rule the world. And until we reign them in, everyone will suffer, including libertarians, startup entrepreneurs, and day laborers.
Unfortunately, I am not a political scholar. I am a businessman, an inventor, a technologist, and an entrepreneur. I don’t offer any solutions in this blog post. I’m just ranting, as usual. For this (and all of my other shortcomings), I apologize.
If you’re in California, though, I will offer this: don’t forget to vote today!
-
My New Gig: change.org
Today, I officially started as the full-time VP of Product and Engineering for change.org. You may want to ask me, “What?! You took a job?” I’ll admit, it wasn’t what I was expecting. As these things go, though, often a series of connections leads to a synergy that simply feels too good to disregard. In this particular case, I was introduced to Ben (the CEO) through my friend Tamara, and was immediately taken by his vision, his passion, and (to be frank) what he had already accomplished.
Ben is a true leader — the type of guy that when you meet with him you just can’t help catching a bout of his contagious passion. His vision, to be the platform where people use the organizational power of the internet to create positive change in the world, is nothing short of daunting. Yet he faces it not only with confidence, but with relentless enthusiasm. He’s surrounded himself with nothing but “A-players”, each of whom has played a crucial role in creating one of the most impressive businesses I’ve ever seen. Ben’s vision, it would seem, is truly within reach.
So what was it that finally hooked me? After all, there are many places where I might have found a job (although, to be honest, I wasn’t looking). After Founding and leading Zivity, I was almost certain I’d start something else once my travels completed. One thing stuck with me, though, from my first meeting with Ben. He said something to me along the lines of, “I look around San Francisco and the Valley and I see some of the most brilliant people in the world. And what are they doing? They’re selling icons. I believe our generation has something better to offer the world than FarmVille.”
I couldn’t agree more. The torch has been passed. It is our generation’s turn to take responsibility for the planet and its people and do our best to make it better. I, for one, believe that entrepreneurialism is the most effective form of creating the change we want in the world, and change.org sits exactly in the place where I want to be. It’s a Bay Area tech company with a simple mission: make the world better.
Oh, and remember … with great power comes great responsibility. Use your powers for something good. Come join us. We’re hiring. Bad-ass Ruby / Rails engineers wanted. Contact me: jeffrey [-at-] change [-dot-] org.
-
