Oxyfish

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.

Ah, the first customer. No other single event is as important and nerve-wracking to an enterprise software company as getting your first customer up and running. Fail, and the ensuing reputation damage could kill your business. Succeed, and the reference will set you up for a much easier sales effort to the next one. Not to mention the effect on employee morale, investors both current and potential, and (heaven forbid) your revenue line.

You know there are a few things not quite done about your product yet, but you think most of it is there, and you can manage around the rest. You know that you’ll learn some things from how the customer will use it, but exactly what is still unclear. You think you know how to deploy it, but some of the integration challenges are still opaque. As somebody said, you’re 90% of the way there, and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time.

Choosing the right first customer is essential. Someone with a champion willing to work with you through the inevitable obstacles that will crop up. Someone with a problem hard enough that your solution delivers significant value, but easy enough that your alpha-quality solution doesn’t choke. Someone name-brand enough to provide a strong reference.

In my experience, setting expectations is the hardest part. You don’t actually have any idea how long it’s going to take to deploy, but the customer wants an estimate. You don’t know exactly what the main value propositions are, because you don’t know exactly how they’ll use it, but you had to say something to sell it to them. And you want to leave yourself enough wiggle room that when you finally do deliver something of value, you can declare success and say that was your plan all along. This is a balance beam that’s hard to walk.

Final piece of advice: listen to your customer. Don’t just listen politely, but really dig in and listen hard. Spend a lot of time with them, both in the office and out. Learn why they think you can help them, and understand their own motivations. Watch them in their daily work, both with your product and without, to understand what they do and how they see the world. These things will help you work through the challenges, deliver a product that they love, and give you the foundation of a successful business.

Once in a while I feel the need to write some actual code. I’m really a programmer at heart, and I find it incredibly satisfying to think through a problem and create a useful solution. For me it’s more interesting than crossword puzzles, and the end product is (sometimes) more valuable.

For a variety of obvious reasons, it’s not a good idea for me to get my fingers into Yieldex production code, so I end up scratching this particular itch with small side projects. This one took me a couple of hours, and hopefully will be useful for enough people for it to have been worth it. In any case, I learned a lot, so it was worth it for me.

I’ve written about CellarTracker before. I’ve been a user for years; I love the site, and I love the business. But, I find some of the UI to be less than perfect. Here’s an example: when I get a wine offering in the mail, there are usually a number of different vineyard designations, and I get an allocation of a few bottles from each. I haven’t found a way in CellarTracker to enter 2 bottles each from 10 different designations without doing an incredible amount of clicking around and waiting for pages to refresh. So, I set out to solve this problem with a “bulk purchase” mechanism.

There are a number of different ways to tackle this problem, so the first thing was to decide on an approach. I’m still a bit 1999 when it comes to the coding for the web, so my first idea was to set up a server-side program. Then I started thinking about the complexity of screen-scraping and parsing, and robustness in the face of potential CellarTracker updates. Then there are the security issues of passing usernames and passwords so my server could log in to CellarTracker. Finally, I realized I didn’t really want to be responsible for keeping the service up and running, so I almost bailed on the entire idea.

Then I remembered GreaseMonkey for Firefox. Cool – an opportunity to enter the 2000’s in web programming, and polish up some JavaScript skills. And, it got around all of the above problems in a neat client-side way. The only real issue is that it works only with Firefox, and for most people would require an install of GreaseMonkey and the script itself.

I started by installing GreaseMonkey and a couple of web development tools, notably the DOM Inspector, the Javascript Shell bookmarklet, and then later the Web Developer Toolbar. I read quickly through the Dive Into GreaseMonkey book, and then just started coding. I was pretty excited that in only a few minutes I could build a script to automatically change a CellarTracker page upon load.

After a couple hours of experimentation, some heavy shell use, and a bit of DOM inspection, I had something up and running. I created a test account on CellarTracker, and entered a bunch of purchases. Success! I finished up by spending a few minutes on data validation, trying to make it obvious when something went wrong and how to fix it.

The best part about this project for me was learning one level deeper about how Javascript and the DOM work. Javascript is a much more powerful language than I remembered from 1999, and I have much better understanding of how Ajax and many modern web sites work. And it was fun.

The final step was posting it in the new/old OSS directory here on Oxyfish, and writing this entry. I also posted a note in the CellarTracker forum, in case anybody else wants to use it. I’m very happy with how it turned out, and am looking forward to the next wine offering in the mail, so I can start saving time.

Install the CellarTracker Bulk Purchase extension (requires Firefox and GreaseMonkey)

Analytics have long been an important part of content management, with companies like Omniture and Quantcast building nice businesses helping media sites understand how people are finding and using their sites. In contrast, the analytics focused on the revenue side of the business, particularly the display advertising, are surprisingly primitive.

One big reason for this is how much data is thrown away. Take DoubleClick DART for Publishers (DFP), for example. If you are a DFP user, you have access to some very basic information, like delivery count for each ad yesterday. But if you want to know which zones of your site a run-of-site ad was delivered on, you’re out of luck, they don’t keep that around. If you want that kind of data, you need to turn on “data transfer” and analyze the logs yourself, which despite their protestations of “it’s your data”, is an extra cost service (more on that below). And here’s a little-known fact about DoubleClick’s data transfer: it still doesn’t give you all the data. The DFP ad server strips out any publisher-specific tag attributes that aren’t used to target an ad. So, if you have your site divided into categories, with a key-value in the tag specifying the category, even with the detailed logs you still have no idea what categories a run-of-site ad was run on. They do have a workaround: duplicate your entire tag into a new parameter “u=”, with a new set of delimiters, and then you can re-parse it on the other side. In summary: re-tag your entire site, to get back “your data” that you are paying them to give you. The other ad servers are not much better.

If you ask your ad serving provider for the raw logs, they will claim that this is a lot of data, so they need to charge you for storage, bandwidth, etc. Let’s take a look at cost for a minute. If you are a pretty large site, you might generate 10GB of logs a day. For a reasonable comp, let’s look at what it would cost to use Amazon S3 for this service. 10GB of data transfer each day is $1/day to get it in, and $1.70/day to get it back out. To store it for 30 days would be $1.50. So, about $150/mo to move and keep 30 days of data, at the top end, with a healthy margin for Amazon. Remember that you pay extra to Amazon for the flexibility of scaling up and down easily, a dedicated hosting center would almost certainly be cheaper. So, if your ad serving provider is charging you much more than that (one DoubleClick customer I know was quoted $3500/mo for about 100MB of data per day, they negotiated it down but are still paying way too much), you should push back. Memo to ad server companies: storage is a lot cheaper than it was 10 years ago.

Ad sales and operations groups are starting to realize that they need detailed analytics to do their jobs. The first step of that is good underlying data, and getting that is way too hard. This needs to change.

We are riding the typical start-up roller coaster. Some days are absolutely great, others not so much. Here’s a good example.

I’m in a contract negotiation process with a major media company. Awesome – they want to use our product! And they’re willing to pay for it! Wow, okay, let’s do it. I send them a proposed contract. They get their lawyers involved. They decide they want to use their contract template instead. Hmm – then why did I spend the money to have my lawyer do the first draft? Their template is totally one-sided, but we work with it, mark it up and send it back. They send it back again. We finally put together a conference call with their business folks, their lawyer, my lawyer, and me. The call takes a while, but goes well: we hammer out all the substantive issues, and get close to signature.

Here comes the kicker. The next day, their lawyer goes on paternity leave. Hey, I know how that is, some things you can’t plan. Bummer is, the new lawyer they put on it looks at the contract, says “no, no, no” and shoves in a dozen more major redlines, completely changing the deal. Argh! Another round of back and forth markups, another major conference call, a late-night conference with my lawyer to get it turned around, and finally we’re done again. It cost an extra week and a few more thousand dollars, but we got it done. Now, the real work begins.

I use the Wordpress Database Backup plugin to send automated backups of my blog to a dedicated Gmail account on a daily basis. When the disk filled up on my server, the blog database was corrupted. Fortunately, it was the work of about 10 minutes to restore from the backup. Thank heaven for fire-and-forget backup strategies!

Frontier Airlines came through again for me last night. Here’s the story.

I was on United 595 from Denver to SFO, departing at 5:54. On the takeoff roll, the plane started to shudder violently, and even the seasoned passengers started to look a bit alarmed. We climbed out successfully, but it was obvious that as the pilots increased power, the vibration returned. Unsurprisingly, about 10 minutes later, the pilot announced that we were returning to Denver.

After deboarding, the craziness began. They had two more flights to SFO that night, but both were pretty full, and both were hours late. They apparently found another (smaller) plane for us, but couldn’t find a crew (it wasn’t a 767, so our crew couldn’t fly it). After several hours of dithering, they finally canceled the flight for the night, and started getting hundreds of people hotel rooms.

I hustled over to Terminal A to see if I could get on the last Frontier flight out, at 9:35pm. They had one seat left, and the gate agent was extremely nice, allowing me to purchase a ticket and managing to get me a great seat. It looked like my colleague Jeff was going to get left behind, but she offered to write down my credit card number, so if they could find him a seat at the last minute he wouldn’t have to be held up by getting the ticket bought first. Sure enough, one of the seats freed up, so they got him on the flight, then processed the purchase of his ticket. That’s going above and beyond.

I appreciate that the United folks had a nightmare on their hands, but they really didn’t handle it very well. So it just highlighted the contrast when the Frontier folks were nice and competent. I will be flying Frontier more often.

I randomly saw this question on LinkedIn, and it intrigued me enough to write an answer. I will say, I think it’s a pretty innovative way for a presidential candidate to use the net.

What ideas do you have to keep America competitive in the years ahead?

Here is my answer, which can be found on page 40:

I think there is a fundamental conflict between trying to “protect American jobs” and “increase American competitiveness.” For America to be competitive, Americans need to be competitive. That means they need to be willing to upgrade their skills and change with the times. We need to stop putting up regulations because we are afraid of competition with foreign firms or afraid immigrants will come take our jobs. We need to drop trade barriers and relax immigration rules. Will this be hard on our citizens? Of course! But as any small business owner knows, you can’t stay competitive these days without undergoing frequent and sometimes painful change.

We can mitigate the pain by investing more heavily in education, so our citizens are individually better equipped to compete. And we can invest nationally in energy, healthcare, and technology innovation, to make sure we have the infrastructure. But in my opinion, we will not remain competitive as a nation if we overprotect our citizens.