Posts by John Tornow

Seth Godin:

Most of all, software as a whole just isn’t good enough. There have been a few magical leaps in the evolution of software, products and operating systems that dramatically improved productivity and yes, joy among users. But given how cheap (compared to cars, building materials or appliances) it is to revamp and reinvent software, and how urgent it is to create tools that increase the quality of what we make, we’re way too complacement [sic].

Fix all bugs. Yes, definitely. But more important, restate the minimum standards for good enough to be a lot higher than they are.

We need better design, more rigor and most of all, higher aspirations for what our tools can do.

Time to get to work.

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David Ulevitch, CEO of OpenDNS:

I’ve recently started talking to investors again and one of them asked me this highly poignant question: “Is what you do hard?” I don’t know. Is anything hard? If anything, things are easier now. You have frameworks for frameworks for frameworks. SMTP was hard. TCP/IP was hard. SSL was hard. Today there are truly amazing development tools like Meteor and Parse. You have AWS! Most applications and services I use on the Internet are mediocre, at best. The bar to be simply interesting is low. The bar to succeed isn’t much higher. It’s not depressing, it’s an opportunity.

This one is a bit old but it popped up again a few places today. Well said then, and now.

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Nolan Caudill on the Slack blog:

At Slack, we want to work with people that have the skills to do their job and the gumption to do it well. They possess great empathy, as designing and building a great product is made up of countless acts of empathy, not only for the users but for those you do the work alongside. Diligence, persistence, an unrelenting bull-headed pursuit of Quality - this drive is what compels the kind of person we look for.

These traits are not intrinsic to any category of sex, creed, origin, race, or any of the other petty reasons others have used to determine who is able to do this kind of work. We believe that the above qualities are a deeper, better, and truer measure of what makes someone successful at Slack.

Specifically, our industry has for decades been directed and built by a mostly homogenous group, and has downplayed the accomplishments of others not in this group. We recognized our own shortcomings in this area and thus wanted to be explicit about what Slack stands for, what we are trying to build, and who we want here to help us build it. By focusing on how we build Slack first, we can hopefully improve the greater industry, in whatever measure.

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Jason Fried:

Last year we topped 40 people at Basecamp. And that’s when I began to notice that we didn’t know as much about each other as we used to when we were smaller.

When any group gets to a certain size, it naturally begins to splinter into smaller groups. Cliques form and conversations often stay inside those cliques. That’s natural and OK, but I thought it would be nice to force some cross-clique personal conversations so everyone could get to know everyone else a little bit better again.

So I had this idea to bring together five random people (plus me and David) once a month for a one-hour free-flowing anything goes conversation, and then share the conversation with the rest of the company after it was over.

I admire the folks at Basecamp, specifically Jason, for constantly striving to know each person in  their growing company. Once you are past a few dozen employees it becomes a big challenge, but it doesn’t mean you have to give up. Focusing on knowing people just needs to be an intentional part of your daily work.

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Brian Cardarella, CEO of Dockyard on the company’s 2014 year-in-review:

This year’s story is one of how we nearly went out of business twice yet still managed to pull off our most successful year yet.

His entire story is very transparent and clearly presents some seldom-discussed aspects of small software companies. I’ve dealt with most of his same issues personally as I grow my own software consultancy. Hiring is hard. Maintaining a quality rate is hard. Building a business development team is hard. Maintaining sufficient margins is hard. Culture is hard. But when it all pays off that hard work is rewarding. Here’s to another great year, Brian.

I wish more people would share the real stories of small companies like this.

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Ev Williams:

The problem with time, though, is it’s not actually measuring value. It’s measuring cost as a proxy for value.

Advertisers don’t really want your time – they want to make an impression on your mind, consciously or subconsciously (and, ultimately, your money).

As the writer of this piece, I don’t really want your time – I want to make an impression on how you think. If my rhetorical skills let me do that in less time (for me and you), all the better.

Great piece. This part sounds a lot like actionable vs. vanity metrics too.

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Cabel Sasser on the Panic company blog:

Panic is a multi-million dollar business that has turned a profit for 17 years straight.

It just hit me, typing those words, that that’s a pretty insane thing to be able to say. (And, sure, we barely qualify). Believe me, I know it won’t last forever - but wow, what a kind of crazy deal.

If you’re curious about some business stuff, our setup couldn’t be more cut-and-dry. We still have no investors or debt. The overwhelming majority of our revenue goes to employee salaries and benefits, which is just the way we want it. Then there’s our rent, our internet, some donuts and chips, etc. Anything left over goes into the magical Panic Savings Account for future projects or emergencies - we’ve always felt it was important to have some wiggle room for who-knows-what. (In the past we’ve actually reduced that warchest by simply distributing it to employees as a bonus.) We also continue to operate on standard office hours, avoiding weekends and crunchtimes with ferocious overprotectiveness, for better or worse. Maybe the most controversial thing we have is an open office, but since we have no sales or marketing teams things are usually library-quiet.

Panic is the gold standard for software development shops doing it right.

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Steven Sinofsky also responds to the recent discussion on remote working and hiring:

Overall the big challenge in geography is communication. There just can’t be enough of it at the right bandwidth at the right time. I love all the tools we have. Those work miracles. As many comments from personal experience have talked about on the HN thread, they don’t quite replace what is needed. This post isn’t about that debate-I’m optimistic that these tools will continue to improve dramatically. One shouldn’t under estimate the impact of time zones as well. Even just coast to coast in the US can dramatically alter things.

The core challenge with remote work is not how it is defined right here and now. In fact that is often very easy. It usually only takes a single in person meeting to define how things should be split up. Then the collaboration tools can help to nurture the work and project. It is often the case that this work is very successful for the initial run of the project. The challenge is not the short term, but what happens next.

Sinofsky knows a thing or two about this. As a long-time Microsoft employee and former head of Windows and Office, he’s overseen two of the largest sustainable engineering projects of the past 30 years. He touches on an important point here that I agree with: at first, remote working can seem to work very well.

Anyone can work remotely for a few weeks, or on one small project. Sustaining a high-quality work ethic remotely over time is very difficult. I previously mentioned that my company has had good success with remote working, especially in engineering talent. The reason I think we’ve been successful: we’re a services agency and work on many new projects each year with small, focused teams. We are in the exact sweet spot Sinofsky alludes to where the workload is new, the team is typically always in the ‘initial run’ and we’re all working towards a concise common goal. Our formula and business model fit well with remote working but, as Sinofsky clearly notes, this doesn’t mean it works for every business and every model.

Collectively, I believe that we, the engineering leadership community on the Planet Earth, have done a poor job supporting each other. I think for every manager who has taken the time to find and regularly meet with a mentor, there are 20 managers who like the sound of mentorship, but haven’t done anything about it because they have no time. And even if they did, they wouldn’t know where to start.

I think that there are well-intentioned HR teams who are building leadership training without partnering with their engineers. Similarly, I think there are legions of engineering managers who have been asked very politely by their HR teams to partner on building said programs and those managers have politely and repeatedly said, “I’m too busy.”

I blame everyone. We can do better.

Rands nails it again. And, he proposes a simple survey to research and mine for solutions. I’ve filled in my response.

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Paul Graham’s latest thought-provoking essay has touched a nerve in some circles. His basic premise is spot on:

The US has less than 5% of the world’s population. Which means if the qualities that make someone a great programmer are evenly distributed, 95% of great programmers are born outside the US.

The solution to this dilemma according to Graham: Let’s reform immigration to “let” these programmers in so that they can be in San Francisco. I’m paraphrasing the last part a bit, and Graham doesn’t come out and say as much, but this is what is being implied.

Almost everyone agrees that immigration policies need some work in the United States. I also believe that we’re only hurting ourselves by refusing to allow talented people to legally enter our country.

Graham’s point is valid, but he misses on one mark that Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress and famously remote-only Automattic, writes this week:

If 95% of great programmers aren’t in the US, and an even higher percentage not in the Bay Area, set up your company to take advantage of that fact as a strength, not a weakness. Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline. Let people live someplace remarkable instead of paying $2,800 a month for a mediocre one bedroom rental in San Francisco. Or don’t, and let companies like Automattic and Github hire the best and brightest and let them live and work wherever they like.

Graham’s basic premise is solid, and I completely agree with it. However, I’m with Mullenweg and most of the related Hacker News thread that people should be able to live where they are happiest, and work remotely.

Over the past year, I’ve worked with many people in our Dallas home office. In that same time period I’ve worked with people in Argentina, Germany, London, Canada and a half-dozen other states outside of Texas. We’ve sponsored visas for some and have just worked with others on a contract-basis. We use many of the technologies that Mullenweg mentions: Slack, Google Hangouts, Skype, Screenhero and good old-fashioned phone calls. It works great. We ship software, we produce great work for our clients and we don’t rely heavily on finding  perfect people just in one town of one country.

We’re lucky to have a strong base of great people in one location, but we wouldn’t be the company that we are today without great people outside of our base. One of the reasons a small shop with a quirky name in Texas can compete with much larger companies is because we’re not biased by where we find great people. We’re not limited by what’s in our backyard and we hire the best people we can find.

Immigration policy needs reform in the United States, yes. But let’s not wait for that to happen to start hiring great people from around the world. Great people are out there today and they’re ready to make companies awesome.

Speaking of Amazon, The Verge’s piece on its hardware design lab is a good look into one of the least seen aspects of the company. It also has a nice history lesson of the Kindle:

It’s been a decade since “Fiona” was first imagined, the codename Amazon gave to the first iteration of the Kindle. As recounted in The Everything Store, Brad Stone’s rollicking 2013 history of Amazon, Jeff Bezos commanded his deputies in 2004 to build the world’s best e-reader lest Apple or Google beat them to it. To Steve Kessel, who was put in charge of running the company’s digital business, Bezos reportedly said: “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.”

It took three years for Kindle to come to market. The first model wasn’t particularly beautiful: a $400, off-white chunk of plastic with a full QWERTY keyboard. But before the world had ever heard of an app store, Amazon had integrated its bookstore directly into the device. For the first time, you could summon almost any book you could think of within seconds, no matter where you were.

The accompanying photography is also great. They, of course, do not reveal anything secretive or particularly groundbreaking here but a glimpse into the secret labs of large technology companies is always of interest.

I have no major complaints on the Kindle hardware, but its software still leaves much to be desired. It’s encouraging to see so much research being performed on the tiniest details of the hardware, but it would be great to know why the typography and formatting controls are still primitive at best. John Gruber put it best, back in 2012:

Amazon’s goal should be for Kindle typography to equal print typography. They’re not even close. They get a pass on this only because all their competitors are just as bad or worse. Amazon should hire a world-class book designer to serve as product manager for the Kindle.

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This entire interview with Jeff Bezos conducted by Henry Blodget at Business Insider is excellent. Some of my favorite parts are where Bezos discusses the public challenges to his company. For example, his viewpoint on the recently launched and less-than-stellar Amazon Fire Phone:

Again, one of my jobs is to encourage people to be bold. It’s incredibly hard.  Experiments are, by their very nature, prone to failure. A few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn’t work. Bold bets — Amazon Web Services, Kindle, Amazon Prime, our third-party seller business — all of those things are examples of bold bets that did work, and they pay for a lot of experiments.

What really matters is, companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence. Whereas companies that are making bets all along, even big bets, but not bet-the-company bets, prevail. I don’t believe in bet-the-company bets. That’s when you’re desperate. That’s the last thing you can do.

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According to Cards Against Humanity’s letter to participants, the company bought the island for the following reasons: “1) Because it was funny, and 2) so we could give you a small piece of it. Also, 3) we’re preserving a pristine bit of American wilderness.”

The company also contributed $250,000 raised through the campaign to the Washington, D.C.-based Sunlight Foundation, which promotes transparency in government.

Cool story. Also, check out the wonderful photos and writing over at Everything Will Be Noble about exploring the same island.

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Kevin Plank, CEO and Founder of Under Armour, on how the company was named:

My next idea was Body Armor, and I thought that was the perfect name. Back then, it took a couple weeks for the trademark process, and by the time those two weeks had gone by, I had told everybody I was going to name my company Body Armor.

One morning, I got a call from my friend saying we would never get Body Armor, because there were some body shops up in New Jersey and some ballistic vest manufacturers all named Body Armor. I was a bit dejected, but I had lunch plans that afternoon with my oldest brother, Bill. So, I show up to pick him up, knock on the door, and he looks down at me the way only an older brother can look at a younger brother, and he asks, “How’s that company you’re working on, uhh…Under Armor?”

Whether he was just messing with his younger brother or whether he was intentional with it, it doesn’t matter at this point. I cancelled lunch, went back to grandma’s house in Georgetown, filled out the paperwork, sent it to the patent and trademark office, and three weeks later, we were clean and clear.

Oh, and the reason we added the U in Armour is that I was skeptical at the time about whether this whole Internet thing would stick. So I thought the phone number 888-4ARMOUR was much more compelling than 888-44ARMOR. I wish there was a little more science or an entire marketing study behind it, but it was that simple.

Fun story. The entire article is a great glimpse into one of my favorite companies. Looking at today’s sports apparel market, it is hard to imagine a world with just basic cotton t-shirts and gear. What Plank and Under Armour did completely disrupted the entire industry and sent athletic giants like Nike and Adidas back to the drawing board.

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Todd Olson, writing on Medium:

The idea of disruptive technology has been with us since Clayton Christensen released The Innovator’s Dilemma in 1997. Since then, we have seen not only major companies disrupted, but entire industries. We have observed incredible disruption in a very short time, but can we learn from this history how to reliably cause disruption? In this regard, I want to examine the premise that:

It is design innovation – not technological innovation – that causes disruption.

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