Oxyfish

I’ll start with this: I’m a confirmed Blackberry addict. Have had one since they were two-way pagers. But since they seem to be falling behind on the software side, and I’m fed up with AT&T’s crappy service, it seemed like a good time to look for a new phone.

My one non-negotiable point was the physical keyboard. I have had an iPhone and an iTouch, and I simply can’t stand typing on the virtual keyboard. I need to be able to make a quick, sometimes one-handed reply to an email, and I found the iPhone actually prevented me from replying to email out of sheer frustration. I also hate the unpredictability of the auto-correct, and the fact that I can’t type without looking closely at the screen. I type fast enough on my Blackberry to take notes at conferences, and write relatively long emails, and I just can’t give that up.

Given that, I was pretty excited by the Droid 2, which seemed to meet my specs perfectly. Improved keyboard, cool new Android OS, and Verizon service. So I really wanted to love it. I tried to love it. Really.

Since the keyboard was the main thing, let’s talk about that first. The raised bumps are nice, I can feel the keys, but I still find them hard to detect without looking. A huge problem is the top row, which are hard up against the raised bezel of the screen, so it takes extra effort to squeeze my fingers against the bezel to hit them reliably. Often used keys like the backspace key and the numbers are up there, making it doubly annoying. A few design decisions are strange – the Alt Lock key is right next to the A, so I hit it by accident all the time. The arrow keys are great for quick editing, and the search key is nice, but I couldn’t figure out when to use the OK button and when I could just use Enter. Bottom line: I could not get comfortable or fast typing on the keyboard, even after carrying it for two weeks, and using it exclusively for 3-4 days. I even tried Swype for a while, and I think it’s very cool, but I never got that fast with it either. This was ultimately the deal-breaker.

With the punchline out of the way, there were a few other deal-breakers as well. First, the battery life is abysmal. When I was using it as my main phone, with 1-2 hours of talk, lots of email, and some browsing, it lasted only 8 hours. Who works only 8 hours? I can’t charge my phone twice a day, that’s ridiculous.

Another deal-breaker was the fact that I couldn’t search my Exchange email. Not just the email on the server, you can’t even search the email on the *phone*! Completely unacceptable. I also found annoying that I had to tap several times to edit an appointment. Other than that, I thought the Exchange support was decent.

Finally – and this one surprised me – the speed wasn’t actually that fast. Sure, the graphics were nice and all, but actually working on the phone often required annoying waits between task switches. And twice I did that most important of speed comparisons: how long from the time the airplane’s wheels hit the tarmac to the time when emails start hitting your phone? The Blackberry crushed the Droid 2 each time.

Have to say, there were several things I absolutely loved about the Droid 2 as well, and will miss. The voice commands and voice search are terrific. Just being able to say “Navigate to 123 Maple Street” and get turn-by-turn voice nav is an awesome thing. Also, all the apps are great fun to play around with, and I happily wasted several hours trying out lots of apps. The running one in particular was great – listening to Pandora while mapping your run is very cool.

The Verizon data speed is definitely better, and my main regret is that I’m still stuck with crappy AT&T service. So, I’ll keep my Verizon MiFi and use it when necessary, but it’s a hack I don’t like. Wish Verizon had the Torch.

I’m still fairly new to the Torch, but it seems to work pretty well. The keyboard is not quite as awesome as the Bold, but still much better than anything else out there. Love the trackpad and the touch-screen combo, I found all the things I expected to work just *worked*. Not quite as fun or new as the Droid 2, but for getting work done, seems like the right choice for me.

Let me be the first to introduce you to the hot new TLA (three-letter acronym) for 2010: RTS. 2009 brought you RTB done by DSPs. On the other side, we’ve just been introduced to SSPs, so that means they should do – you guessed it – Real-Time Selling!

I am only partly joking here. As I’ve written before, RTB continues to skew the power in favor of the buyers. A healthy ecosystem requires a balance of power between buyers and sellers. To help restore the balance, publishers need a complementary system – an SSP – and part of what an SSP should provide is real-time selling.

So, what is real-time selling? We define it as the ability for sellers to set floor prices in real time to make sure they’re getting full value for their inventory, in the same way buyers can set bids in real time based on available information at the time of the impression request.

One of the major selling points of DSPs is they can incorporate information from many sources – agency and advertiser data, third party providers, and the publishers themselves – and use it to decide how much an impression is worth. Somewhat less obvious is that the worth of the impression is actually just a ceiling on what the buyer is willing to pay, and sophisticated bid management programs often bid much lower in an attempt to get the impressions for the lowest value. This means the publisher may get much less than the buyer would have been willing to pay.

This is why publishers need to use all available information to set their floor price for an impression. Some of the information they might want is unavailable – agency or advertiser information, or certain re-targeting cookies – but any third party and publisher data can be incorporated. Then, sophisticated analysis is required to detect segments of inventory where floors should be raised or lowered – the closer to real-time the better. These algorithms will no doubt continue to be refined over the next several years.

Premium publishers have a much more complex problem: they also sell guaranteed impressions over a period of time. As long as those up-front CPM-based buys were much more valuable than the secondary channel, this was easy to solve: serve the guaranteed ads first, them look at the exchange or network. But as the secondary channel begins valuing some impressions more highly, the publisher needs to manage global yield optimization across multiple channels, and the floor-setting algorithms need to incorporate that data as well. This may seem like it’s years off, but several of our customers have asked us about this capability, and we’ve applied for patents in this area.

Lots of three-letter acronyms have been proposed in the last couple of years, and it’s way too early to tell what the final landscape will look like. That said, forward-thinking publishers who are looking at technology platforms to serve them for the next decade or so should be asking about their plans for Real-Time Selling.

This post also appears at AdExchanger.com in “The Sell-Sider,” a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.

This is our third year at the Crunchies, and I think this could be our best effort yet. Kudos to Matt Hempey and Mark Casey and the team that put this together – I basically showed up and sang. And danced. A little.

Google’s release of the DoubleClick Ad Exchange 2.0 has introduced Real-Time Bidding (RTB) to a much wider audience. While they were not the first, they are probably the biggest, and their entry is starting to legitimize RTB as more than just a niche.

Neal Mohan’s introductory blog post emphasizes the three main principles behind the development of their exchange: simplify the system for buying and selling, deliver better performance, and open up the ecosystem. It’s this last point – openness – that I’d like to explore.

Real-time bidding offers some openness for the buyers: they are delivered each impression, with the floor price, URL, and cookie, and have a fixed amount of time to bid. They are then notified if they win and a request is made to deliver the advertisement. What’s surprising is that unlike a standard auction, at eBay for example, if they lose, the potential buyer has no idea what the winning bid was. Google gets to keep all that information.

Even more incredible is the fact the publishers also aren’t told the winning bid amount. They get an aggregate value for their earnings, but can’t see the value of each impression. This is as if you auctioned 10 things on eBay, and at the end, eBay sent you $100, but refused to tell you what item 1 sold for vs item 2 or item 3.

This information asymmetry is largely to the benefit of Google, but also skews to the buyers. Savvy buying systems can tweak bids up and down in real-time to do crude discovery of the “true” value of different kinds of inventory and how it varies over time. Publishers have no such ability to discover their inventory value at an impression level. Worse yet, while buyers can bid different prices for each impression, publishers have no ability to re-set floor values on each impression to push the bids up. Of course, they would need new tools to do this (SSP, anyone?), but it is much harder without data.

One final point on how the system is stacked against the publishers: any buyer can participate in any of the exchanges, and indeed many of them do. But since Google does not give publishers their impression values, it is very hard for publishers to find out if some of their inventory would perform better on a different exchange. And to add insult to injury, Google makes it almost impossible for non-DFP publishers to participate at all.

Publishers should be wary of using any ad exchange until they get real openness, and the tools – like an SSP – they need to ensure the deck isn’t stacked against them.

This post also appears at AdExchanger.com in “The Sell-Sider,” a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.

I’m getting to the age where if I go play a sport I haven’t played in a while, I ache for days afterwards. I recently played 5-5 full-court basketball for the first time in decades, and could barely walk the next day. Some of those hurts are “good hurts” – sore muscles that are getting stronger from the workout. Some are “bad hurts” – like a partially torn rotator cuff. They all hurt, but it can be important to distinguish between them, because the remedies are different. And no matter what you call them, they still hurt like hell.

Similarly, in startups, we talk about “good problems” and “bad problems”. Bad problems are the ones nobody wants: unhappy customers, products that don’t work, or markets that don’t materialize. Good problems are ones that sure seem like they’d be nice to have: too many customers sign up at once, investors want to put in too much money, etc. Just like bad hurts and good hurts, bad problems generally require outside intervention to fix, while good problems work themselves out through positive progress. Everybody says they want the good problems, but they are still problems – and they still require a hell of a lot of work to get through.

The new real-time bidding (RTB) exchanges seem to skew the buying power further in favor of buyers. They can see each impression in real-time, data-enhance it with their own data, and then bid on it. The problem is that most publishers don’t know where the pockets of value exist in their remnant inventory, so they can’t intelligently allocate that inventory in a way that makes them the most revenue.

Publishers need 3 things to maximize the value of their inventory on an exchange:

1. Inventory value. Publishers need to get back from their exchanges the value of their inventory, on an impression-by-impression basis. Just getting high-level average CPMs by section or zone isn’t good enough, this masks the high-value impressions that may exist within those sections.
2. Third-party data. Your buyers are using data to understand the value of your inventory, you need to have the data to fight back. You should be setting floors on your inventory based these data segments, so buyers can’t just cherry-pick your inventory at an overall low value, and you can’t do this without the data.
3. An analytic system to maximize yield. You will need a system that can capture an analyze all this data – terabytes of it – and spit out a set of floor prices by inventory segment. In an ideal world, this system operates in real-time, re-setting floors based on the most recent data. I call this real-time selling – the antidote to real-time bidding.

Not all of these items are easily attainable. The first item is not generally available from exchanges, so publishers need to demand it. The second is becoming more available, from vendors such as Audience Science, BlueKai, and eXelate. The third will be provided by Yieldex, among others. Forward thinking publishers, who put this stack together, should be able to dramatically increase revenue from their unsold inventory.

This article was also published on AdExchanger.com.

Ever run across a Windows app you really wish you could run on your iPhone? I did, just the other day, planning a 1-day kamikaze trip to Disneyland with my 3 kids. There’s an excellent program called RideMax, that helps optimize your day to minimize wait times and hit all the best rides. The idea is to make a plan, print it, and more or less stick to it. Clearly the developers don’t have kids – no plan survives 3 kids for long. What I really wanted was the ability to run it again a couple times during the day with the remaining rides we want, and get a new plan each time. But that would mean running it on my iPhone.

You can’t really run Windows applications on your iPhone without cheating somehow, so I cheated. I loaded the free LogMeIn client to my desktop PC at home, and bought the $30 LogMeIn Ignition iPhone app. This worked amazingly well – I was able to log in to my desktop and control RideMax just as if I was sitting there. And it was especially great when I ran it while waiting in line at the Alice in Wonderland ride (which was a last-minute addition by my 4-year-old) to figure out if we should do Splash Mountain or Space Mountain next. I’m confident the program saved us at least an hour of line time, and re-running it during the day was a key factor.

One complicating factor for me is my iPhone is a 2G and I’ve canceled the AT&T service so it’s essentially a first gen iPod Touch. To get online, I used the nifty Verizon Mifi that I have for my laptop. The technique is described in more detail in this Verizon iPhone article. So I was running LogMeIn on the iPhone to control RideMax on my home desktop, connected via wifi to the Mifi, which connected via the Verizon 3G network and the internet to my home DSL, and through my internal network to my desktop. There were lots of moving pieces, but in this case they all actually worked together nicely, and the result was a great day at Disneyland with the kids.

Cloud computing means lots of different things, and much of it is hype. At Yieldex, we’ve been using cloud computing, specifically Amazon Web Services, as a key part of our infrastructure for the better part of a year, and we thought we’d pass on a few of our lessons learned. As you might expect, the services we use have trade-offs. If your challenge fits within the parameters, cloud computing can be a huge win, but it’s not the answer for everything.

All of these lessons are the result of the hard work of our entire engineering team, most notably Craig and Calvin. These guys are among the best in the world at scaling to solve enormous data and computation problems with a cloud infrastructure. We could not have built this company and these solutions without them.

For a startup, there are a number of compelling reasons to use a cloud infrastructure for virtually every new project. You don’t get locked into a long-term investment in hardware and data centers, it’s easy to experiment, and easy to change your mind and try a different approach. You don’t have to spend precious capital on servers and storage, wait days or weeks for them to arrive, and then spend a day or two setting them up. If your application scales horizontally, then you can scale additional customers, storage, and processing with minimal cost and time delay. All these things are touted by cloud providers, and basically boil down to: focus on your business, not your infrastructure.

Sometimes, however, you do need to focus on the infrastructure. We provide our customers with analytics and optimization based on our unique and proprietary DynamicIQ engine. Our first customer was a decent sized web property, and we were able to complete our DynamicIQ daily processing on several gigabytes of data using just one instance in less than an hour. Our next customer, however, was 10x the size. And the one after that, 10x more – hundreds of gigabytes per day. Fortunately, we had designed our DynamicIQ engine to easily parallelize across multiple instances. We spent some time learning how to start up instances, distribute jobs to them, and shut them back down again, but because we had designed the engine for this eventuality, we were able to use the cloud to cost-effectively scale to even the largest sites on the web.

We also have BusinessIQ, which is basically an application server that provides query processing and a user interface into our analytics. Initially we started with this server in the cloud too, but as we bumped up against other scalability issues, we found that the cloud doesn’t solve every problem. For example, we provide a sophisticated scenario analysis capability. To calculate a “what-if” scenario requires processing a huge amount of data in a very short time. For our larger customers, a single cloud instance did not have enough memory to perform this operation. Trying to stay true to the cloud paradigm, we implemented a distributed cache across multiple instances, but this didn’t work well because of limitations on I/O. We ended up having to go to a hybrid model, where we bought and hosted our own servers with large memory footprints, so we could provide this functionality.

We have been very happy users of the Amazon Web Services cloud, and not just because we won the award. We would not have been able to get our business of the ground with out the cost effective scalability of the Amazon infrastructure. While it’s not for every application, for the right application, it truly changes the game.

We are delighted to announce our Series B financing. The $8.5m round was led by Madrona Venture Group, a really smart group of investors. We met them through the Amazon AWS Start-up Challenge, and as it turns out they had been looking for a company like ours, so they had done a lot of research on the space. We were impressed by their industry knowledge and their experience, and are excited to be working with them.

We also are excited to have Amazon participate. They are the clear leader in their space, and their vision has proven out time and time again. We certainly hope they are right about this investment, too! Their AWS platform is what enables us to scale so cost-effectively.

Finally, a big thank-you to our Series A investors Sequel Venture Partners and First Round Capital, for their advice, counsel, introductions, and yes, their support in the Series B. We could not have build this complex and innovative technology without their support.

This is just the beginning for us. We are now well positioned to succeed, and our success is largely within our own control – just the way we like it. Great athletes always want the ball when the game is tight – we now have the ball, and we will win this game.

This is an exciting week for us at Yieldex, we are finally launching our first product, BusinessIQ! We’ve been working hard for quite a while on this, so it’s very liberating to be able to tell the world about it. Read our press release, or see the MediaPost article, for the details.

Having built enterprise software before, we know how important it is to have real customers banging on the product to make it solid. We are delighted to have Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia as our debut customer, and look forward to announcing more in due course.

MSLO has been a great beta partner for us, give us tons of constructive feedback and being patient through our inevitable growing pains. We have been able to iterate the product very rapidly to address their needs, and we are continuing to improve by leaps and bounds. We are excited by the value we are providing to them; we love seeing our hard work start to bear fruit.

Congrats to the team for this milestone – let’s enjoy it! Okay, that’s enough, get back to work.

The doom-and-gloom set have been getting a lot of press lately, and the conventional wisdom seems to be that display advertising will die off in favor of performance-based marketing. But don’t write the obituary yet. There’s an interesting new study from MarketingSherpa and ad:tech that surveys 1200 marketers and concludes that most actually plan to increase display ad spending in 2009. From the report summary:

The greatest shift in budgets is for behaviorally targeted ads. About one out of five marketers (21%) are cutting their budget while more than half (52%) are investing more money. Slightly more than 30% of the respondents said that behaviorally targeted ads were providing a great ROI, as noted in the first chart.

Surprisingly, 46% of marketers reported that they are increasing spending on rich media ads, despite the fact that more marketers reported that they deliver a poor ROI (27%) than a great ROI (23%), as noted in the second chart.

Traditional online ads will get more spending from 29% of marketers. That tops the 24% who said they’re cutting budgets in this area. This is surprising as well since about 1 out of 3 respondents (34%) said banner ads deliver a poor ROI and only 13% said they were great.

Perhaps the branding effect of the ads, while not directly attributable to revenue, is seen as vital. Almost half of marketers (47%) are holding steady in this category.

Surprisingly, this seems to suggest that marketers are not exactly running away from traditional online ads, but instead could actually be increasing their spend, particularly for rich media. And behaviorally targeted ads are typically display ads too, just targeted at audiences instead of content. So while performance-based advertising is very important to every marketer’s mix, let’s not lose sight of the fact display advertising, in various forms, is critical too.

The Richter Scales got a great response from the audience at the Crunchies, after making fun of just about every aspect of running a Web 2.0 company in these trying times. My contribution consisted mostly of showing up and not flubbing the couple lines they gave me – it’s great to be in a group with such talented people!

I was recently asked what advice I would give to aspiring company founders. While there are many mistakes I’ve made that I would try to warn others about, the best advice I can give is to work with great people.

Great people are easy to communicate with, and will give (and take) honest feedback. Great people make it enjoyable to come to work, and help turn a job into a passion. Great people argue passionately, then come to agreement, then work closely together to get the job done. Great people can be trusted.

Startups are hard places to work. The hours can be long, and the disagreements are often heated. Everybody has their ups and downs, nobody is perfect. There are big wins and crushing losses. But great people with great relationships get through these patches much more smoothly.

At Yieldex, I’m privileged to work with great people. Every member of the team works well with the others, and we can feel the momentum building. The result is we are executing very efficiently, and getting more done in less time than any other team I’ve worked with. Best of all, I love the feeling that I like everyone I work with, that I would be happy hanging out with them and their families. At our company holiday dinner, I was delighted that everyone, including the spouses, seemed to have a very enjoyable time. These are the times we will look back on years from now and remember fondly.

I used to row crew competitively in high school and college. Crew is a sport that epitomizes team “flow”. A boat full of great individual contributors will get beaten by a boat that is rowing smoothly together every time. We are rowing smoothly together here at Yieldex. One of my biggest jobs is to not screw it up as we grow.

Life is too short to work with jerks. Work with great people.

I wonder if even a couple years ago anyone predicted the use of web video to send holiday “cards” to friends and family. This year we’ve been inundated by them, and I’m even in a couple. No, Yieldex didn’t do a video holiday card, although we did do a nifty video for the Amazon AWS Start-up Challenge.

The First Round Capital holiday card video is a fun take-off of a popular viral video. You can see me at 1:48 doing the silly dance in the middle of Howard St in downtown San Francisco. Mike Arrington was worried we’d get hit by a car.

Now my singing group, the Richter Scales, decided to get into the act with our own holiday parody. We shot it in half a rehearsal one night, and our own inimitable Matt Hempey put it together in just a couple sleepless nights. The song is a parody of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, with lyrics updated for 2009.

Enjoy!

We won! Out of nearly 1000 startups who applied, we won!

This is a great validation of our fantastic technical team. We have been chosen as one of the most innovative users of Amazon’s cloud computing technology. We could not have done this without your hard work. Thank you!

This was a great experience for us. The Amazon team was very professional throughout, the event was well-managed, and they even made a cool video featuring our development team. The press release went out tonight, and there was even a blog post that beat mine.

Here’s the blow-by-blow, for those who want all the details:

We pitched the panel of judges, all senior execs of Amazon, at 1pm. They had 50min presentations from each of the seven finalists, and had been going since 7am. We did our standard pitch, and did a great job talking about how important AWS is to us. They seemed to appreciate the presentation, but were somewhat poker faced, so while we felt we did a good job, it was hard to tell their reaction.

Later in the afternoon, we had a “VC speed-dating” event, where we had 10 minutes with each of 5 VCs. The firms were all first-rate (BlueRun, Hummer Winblad, Madrona, Greylock, and CMEA). Our product is pretty complex, so it’s hard to get across in 10 minutes, but we did our best, and each of the VCs seemed to get it quickly enough. All were interested in following up, but again, hard to tell how we ranked.

Then there was a reception while the judges and the VCs deliberated. They had invited 200 other startup people to come hear how the seven finalists were using AWS. My guess is closer to a hundred people were in the room, and we had to do another 10 minute presentation on AWS, with slides, to this group. We managed to do it in only 5-6 minutes and get our message across. Finally, around 9pm, it was time to announce the winner. We were jubilant when they picked us – I let out a shout of joy and a fist pump, to the delight of the audience.

Andy Jassy, the SVP of AWS said some nice words and gave us the traditional golden hammer. We were then invited to take a whack at an old rackmount server they had, to symbolize the destruction of our own servers. John and I both hammered it pretty hard, but we barely dented it – those steel frames are tough.

Then everyone came up to congratulate us, and we shook hands with big grins on our faces. We took a couple of pictures, approved the quote in the press release, and talked with the Amazon folks some more. All great stuff.

Finally, we headed out for a celebratory dinner. Once again, thanks to everyone in the company for your hard work – we did the talking, but we could not have done this without all of you.

Hooray!

These days, I don’t usually re-post links to things I read online, although I used to. This one, however, is worth the exception. This is the single finest exposition of copyright I have ever read (Lessig included, which is saying something, since I’m a huge Lessig fan). And it’s a speech delivered in 1841!

The easiest form of parochialism to fall into is to assume that we are smarter than the past generations, that our thinking is necessarily more sophisticated. This may be true in science and technology, but not necessarily so in wisdom.
…
Be forewarned: this speech is long, and far more intellectually challenging than most modern political speech. But the mind behind it is lively and incisive, and you may be surprised by how little the fundamental issues have changed, and how some of the disingenuous arguments put forth today echo those of the far past. Judge for yourself whether the politicians to day are wiser than those of a hundred and sixty years ago.

Macaulay on Copyright

We were delighted to learn yesterday that Yieldex was selected as a finalist in the Amazon AWS Startup Challenge. Seven companies were selected out of probably 100’s that applied (apparently 900 applied last year, don’t know how many applied this year). We even got a TechCrunch mention – can’t wait to see what that does to our web site traffic. For the record, our web site is intentionally vague – we didn’t want to really launch the company until we had a few customers up and running – and we’re getting close.

We view this as a great validation of our sophisticated technology for solving the complex and difficult problem of maximizing the value of premium inventory for large web sites. By using cutting-edge software that takes advantage of the unique capabilities of the cloud, coupled with our patented engine, we are able to tackle these challenges that have resisted commercial solutions for a decade or more. Congratulations to our development team – they deserve this!

My apologies to the trick-or-treaters on our road between 6 and 7pm tonight, who were disappointed to get no candy from our house. Let me explain.

We live on a relatively short cul-de-sac, with 22 houses and dozens of small kids. For the past few years, most of the parents and kids would trick-or-treat on the street together, with the parents at the upcoming house running ahead to be there to answer the door. While we were all out, we’d leave our trays of candy outside the front door with a sign, in case anyone came by and we missed them. At least 12 of the houses had trays loaded with candy in front of them at some point.

This year, a couple of high-school kids caught on, and almost every single tray on the street was emptied while we were out. As we were all returning from the far end of the street, I overheard another family complain “another house with nobody home and no candy!” I felt terrible as I ran in the back and headed to answer the door, where our tray was completely empty. My 3-year-old was not to happy with me grabbing a handful of her candy to hand out – I had to make a couple hasty promises that I’m sure I’ll regret. Later I raided the kitchen for raisin snack packs to fill the tray, and while most kids were good-natured about it, I’m sure a few won’t be back next year because they didn’t get candy.

Mostly, I’m ticked off. I brag that I live in a neighborhood where the neighbors all know each other and look out for each other, and we can more-or-less leave the door unlocked. When something like this happens, as small as it is, it reminds me that the real world isn’t like that. Bummer.

I have a simple tip for executive hires: you don’t learn anything meaningful about them in the first hour of the interview.

I was explaining this from a panel I was on at an Endeavor event in San Francisco. Endeavor is a fantastic organization promoting entrepreneurship around the world, and there was a roomful of successful entrepreneurs from Argentina, Chile, Turkey, and others. My friend Jason Green is involved, and had invited me to be on the panel.

One of the main topics we discussed was hiring and building a great team. We talked about much of the conventional wisdom – hire slow, fire fast, for example – but also added our own twists. Mine was that you really don’t learn anything meaningful in the first hour unless they’re completely incompetent.

Any executive with competence can tell the story of their career in the first hour in way that makes them look great. Why they left this job, what great opportunity they saw in this other company despite the fact that it failed miserably, etc. These are all interesting, but rarely tell the whole story. This is why it takes the second – and subsequent – hours to get the real story. Even for the most frank and straightforward people, the very act of interviewing often cements the story in its most flattering light. So, time is one factor – you can’t short-circuit the time it takes to make a good hire, there are no shortcuts.

The other is relationship building, and any advice around this would need to take into account your personal style. I do use one other technique here that may work for others, and that is to disarm the question of “what are your weaknesses” with an indirect question. Take someone they have worked for recently, and ask the question like this: “what would your former boss say were your weaknesses?” And if they still balk, ask if they had a performance review, and what personal challenges they were working on. If that doesn’t work, you may want to gut-check to see if you think they are really being frank with you. Nobody likes to talk about their weaknesses, but this sometimes makes it easier.

Some of these ideas I learned at Woodside Fund, where they perform the Org Chart Process for CEO hires, although I have added my own twists. I still make hiring mistakes, but I think these techniques have helped me make fewer.

Sometimes as an entrepreneur you just gotta roll with the punches. Last week I had a week-long trip to NYC, Philly, and DC to visit customers and prospects. The morning I was to get on the plane, I woke up with the whole left side of my face throbbing. I managed to get in to my dentist first thing, who discovered an abscessed (infected) wisdom tooth. I spent the whole week on amoxycillin and vicodin, napping between meetings in Bryant Park. Frequent caffeine injections ensured I had energy for presentations, and I managed to power through with reasonable success.

Friday night, on my cross-country flight home in the very back row (the one that doesn’t recline), my legs started itching. I thought it was just travel pains, but it turns out I’m newly allergic to penicillin. Fortunately, the infection was mostly gone at this point, so I survived the weekend on vicodin. Monday morning at 7:30am I had the tooth pulled, and switched to a regime of cipro and ibuprofen. Fortunately the swelling went down quickly, and I started to attack the mountain of work that piled up over the last 10 days.

Then my Macbook froze. Hmm – that never happens. Oh well, reboot. Hmm. Nothing happening. Then a folder appears with a blinking question mark. Uh oh. Looks like another day’s productivity shot. Good thing I bought a $350 desktop machine for web surfing – I can still get a lot of things done. And I use FolderShare to make sure all my key documents are synchronized across my laptop and home machine. But I still had to make an appointment with the Genius Bar to get the hard disk replaced (it was shot). Then I had to go back and pick it up. Now I have to re-install all my apps. There was a time when I would have really looked forward to this task, but right now? Ugh.

And don’t even get me started on all the people forwarding the Sequoia presentation and asking me if I have 2 years of cash in the bank.

It’s been a tough couple weeks, but I’m rolling. Keeping a positive attitude. The important things, family and overall business, are doing well. Things are looking up.