Laurels

“A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.”
— Andrew Grove, Chairman and former CEO, Intel Corporation

I met Jess on Friendster. Which, for those of you too young to remember the web ten years ago, was at that time a successful predecessor to Facebook. Famously, Friendster turned down a sizable Google acquisition offer, as the social network market seemed wide open in those early days, and Friendster’s CEO didn’t see any serious competition.

By now, Friendster has long since been relegated to the dustbin of history, Facebook having eaten their lunch. But the object lesson remains. Being the first, or being the biggest, is often a substantial competitive advantage for a startup. But as markets mature, it’s rarely a sufficient one. Competition for customers (and for employees) means a company needs to continue to innovate, to adapt to the realities of a changing world, to find a way to continue capitalizing on that early lead. And at the same time, pressure on management (who perhaps confuse brains with a bull market in explaining their growth to date) often makes it tempting to simply double down on the exact same strategies that previously worked, this time with an increased eye towards cost-cutting to hang on to earlier margins.

I’ve been watching that happen of late to a business near and dear to my heart, though one where I’m now ill-poised to prevent what’s clearly the early stage of a slow-rolling disaster. I can already play out what’s likely to happen – stalling growth, the gradual departure of key personnel, the eventual decay of customer-base eventually leading to the company’s fixed costs collapsing the entity under its own weight. I’d love to jump in to help. And, indeed, I still might be able to find a way to do so. But there’s also the reasonable point that, in many cases, it’s just about as easy to build a Facebook from scratch as it is to keep a Friendster in its early lead, especially when a market is still young enough to have huge room for growth.

Don’t Sweater the Small Stuff

Each morning, I get out of bed, and look at the morning’s temperature. And, each morning, I have no idea what to wear as a result. Thirty-five years in, and I still have no sense at all of what different temperatures feel like, of when I should switch to long sleeves, of what ‘sweater weather’ is precisely, or of if I need to throw on a light coat. This morning, it’s 61 degrees. What do I put on?

Of course, I realize the temperature/clothing relationship is relative. In the fall, coming down from summer highs, perhaps 61 is cool enough to warrant a fleece; in the Spring, after months of snow, frost and freeze, I’d gladly head out in shorts and a t-shirt. Or consider regional differences: when my parents come in to visit from California, in weather in which I’m still wearing just a sweater, my mother has broken out scarf, gloves and hat.

Still, as with other basic skills I somehow missed early in life (cf., locating all 50 states on a map), I always feel like I should be doing something about the situation. So, in total loser style, I’m taking a ‘quantified self’ approach here, and have begun spreadsheeting the weather, what I wear and how it feels each morning after I walk Gemelli. With enough data, I might finally crack the code of what 61 degrees means, to me. And, in the process of noticing and tracking it every day, I suspect I’m far more likely to actually internalize the result.

Granted, knowing when to put on a sweater doesn’t really justify this much data-keeping; but nerdy, obsessive record-keeping comes naturally for me. You might even say it’s dyed in the wool.

On Fundraising

“I advise you to apply to all those whom you know will give something; next, to those whom you are uncertain whether they will give any thing or not, and show them the list of those who have given; and, lastly, do not neglect those who you are sure will give nothing, for in some of them you may be mistaken.” – Ben Franklin

Nuts

gemtree

Every morning, Gemelli and I head to Riverside Park for a walk. Before 9am, dogs are allowed off leash there, and Gem is wild with freedom. As much as he’s thrilled to explore, and to look for ladies (in human years, he’d be in his late teens, making chasing tail his primary hobby), what he really wants to do is poop in privacy.

Normally, he stays fairly close to me, rarely wandering more than a dozen feet from my side. But once we hit the Riverside Park Promenade, he takes off sprinting. A hundred feet or so ahead, he ducks behind a tree, and drops a morning deuce.

Frankly, I understand. After the embarrassment of pooping at leash’s end the rest of the day, the luxury of going solo seems well worth the effort.

Recently, however, a handful of squirrels have taken up residence in the trees above Gem’s favorite poop spot. I assume they must be harvesting the acorns, though they’ve been at it for at least a week, and I can’t imagine there are enough acorns still in the trees to sustain the effort. Nonetheless, if you’re under those trees, a regular barrage of acorns comes dropping down around you. I’m not certain that the squirrels are trying to hit you, but the proximity of the drops seems pretty suspect.

Gem seems more interested in observing the tree squirrels – occasionally barking at them, considering ways of reaching them ten feet up – than in pooping. After five minutes of chasing bouncing acorns, we move on. But it isn’t until I put his leash back on some twenty minutes later that Gem seems to realize he still needs to go.

On that final stretch of the walk, Gemelli looks at me repeatedly with a mournful expression. And then, somewhere close to home, he crouches and squeezes out an unhappy poop. He won’t make eye contact while he’s doing it, or for the rest of the walk home. Clearly, he’s been robbed the high point of his day.