Alex Payne

On Business Madness

2012-02-12T00:00:00-08:00

On Business Madness

I am not intentionally a business person.

Over the course of my career to date I’ve worked at companies of various sizes, and have been situated at commensurately varying distances from the concerns of running a business: funding, sales, forecasting and planning, marketing, payroll, legal matters, and so forth. In that time, I’ve developed an interest in the mechanics of business. It seemed prudent to know where my paycheck was coming from. Still, I got to keep my distance from the “business stuff”.

Being now a co-founder of a startup has made it difficult to stay impartial when considering how businesses work, how they succeed, and how they fail. I’ve made a couple of angel investments, and I advise a couple of other startups. It’s hard to spend one’s time and money this way and not develop an opinion about what is a “good business” or a “bad business” and the practices and decisions that support such outcomes.

But, as I observe discussions of business matters in the startup community, I can’t help but think that none of us – for all the blustering blog posts, crowing keynotes, self-published manifestos, and chest-beating sound bites fed to hungry reporters – have little more than the slightest idea what we’re doing.

We mistake dumb luck for a machine that produces success. We rely on induction when we should rely on deduction, and then, having realized our mistake, we lean on “data-driven decisions” in lieu of common sense. We chase patterns that aren’t there and miss eager markets right in front of us. All this while projecting the confidence, real or manufactured, that’s necessary to play the game.

This madness takes many forms.

Pattern Matching

There is a term that venture capitalists use: pattern matching. My ears perked up the first time I heard this from a VC, because in the world of computer science, pattern matching is a well-defined concept and a feature of more interesting programming languages.

To a programmer, pattern matching is a slick way of looking for a needle in a haystack of data. The haystack must be a known quantity: a thing, or maybe a collection of things. The needle, too, we must be able to describe: a particular value, a type of thing, a collection of things grouped in a particular way. Once we have our haystack and describe our needle, the computer does the rest. But pattern matching is not fuzzy logic. It is clean-shaven logic. Logical logic, of the sort programmers tend to like.

For venture capitalists, pattern matching is a way of saying: “I’ve seen this result in people making money, but I haven’t seen that result in people making money, so you should probably do this and not that if you want to make money.” I have to admit, I was somewhat disappointed when I realized how the term was being employed at the negotiating table. I thought maybe VCs had access to some brilliant new software that evaluated prospective investments in startups. But no. What we’re talking about is good old fashioned experience, which is what you get to call induction when you’re making money and what you say you earned instead of cash when you were losing money.

Many firms make their venture capital investments with a “shotgun” approach: fire chunks of money at a bunch of companies and hope that a couple of them make it big. That is to say, the VCs who operate this way make their money from anomalies. Talking to some such investors, though, you wouldn’t know it. If they haven’t seen it before, they’re not interested. They want something new from something known. They rely on exceptional outcomes from circumstances that align with their experience.

Apparently, experience hasn’t worked particularly well for the last decade.

Location, Location, Location

Startup founders love to obsess about location. Worrying about where in the world to start your company is a wonderful way to defer the terrifying prospect of working really hard on it and potentially failing.

To wit: as I type, one of the top articles on Hacker News is a guide to where you should locate your startup in the Bay Area, down to the neighborhood level. Read now, lest you lease an office on a block that hasn’t been visited by the talent acquisition faerie!

People outside of the Great Silicon Valley-San Francisco Startup Sprawl also love to talk about location, but defensively. “Hey, we matter too!” they shout from Boston, London, Seattle, Iowa, Berlin, and most anywhere else that a person with a laptop and the eagerness to fill out incorporation paperwork can live. Certainly, a fair amount of agonizing about local startup viability goes on in my adopted home of Portland, Oregon.

A cursory look at the data shows that location pretty much doesn’t relate to the long-term success of a startup. Which, if you think about it for even a second, makes perfect sense. How many of our corporate behemoths have their home offices in unlikely towns and cities? How many of those towns and cities have grown up around companies, and not the other way around?

There are good reasons to start a company in a particular place, or to move your company from one place to another. “Because everyone else has” is not one of them.

Process Cults

Running a business means making many, many decisions. Decisions can be hard to make. Having a framework in which to make decisions greases the wheels, but coming up with said framework is even harder than making decisions. Thus, the wide world of business books.

No, I’m not going after business books as a whole. What interests me is a particular form of Business Madness that often ends up in book form: the Process Cult.

Process Cults form around a set of business practices that, when judiciously applied, are supposed to yield a profitable, successful business run by shiny, happy people. The startup segment of the business book market has its favorites:

Eric Reis’s lean startup and associated book.
Steve Blank’s customer development and associated book.
37signals’ methodology, as expressed in the books Getting Real and REWORK.

I have read all of the above. I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with their contents. What I disagree with is the notion that anyone should start or operate a business in the explicit mold of someone else’s experience, as reduced to a couple hundred pages padded with illustrations and diagrams. It’s a bit like starting a fad diet without considering the particulars of your health and lifestyle. It may be hard to subsist on kumquat juice when your neighborhood grocer doesn’t sell kumquats.

The ultimate use of such books is not so much for the advice they contain, but for the social signaling that comes from adopting one as scripture. Lean Startup people go to Lean Startup meetups to find co-founders. The term “customer development” is dropped in pitches to knowing nods from investors who believe in the approach. Those who have Gotten Real leave supportive comments on blog posts by their brethren, railing against the inanity of whatever venture-funded company is this afternoon’s big story. Bonds are formed and reinforced. Process Cults emerge, putting more faith in ritual than in ideas.

When I look around the world, the businesses that dominate don’t seem to be the ones that formed around process as a rallying cry. Rather, they adapted processes to bolster world-changing, market-creating ideas. The world doesn’t need a lean startup, or a developed customer, or a REWORK’d business; it needs solutions to problems, magic where previously there was darkness. How that magic happens is interesting and maybe even useful as a basis for other people running businesses to compare to, but it’s not a recipe for success.

Conclusion

Given some preparation and calibration, you can bake the same cake from the same recipe the same way every time. But a business is not a cake – not even a cake-making business. You can retrofit “success factors” to businesses that made it big, but you can’t then reapply those factors to another business and expect the same results. Every new business is an experiment with too many variables to possibly control for: the concept, the execution, the stability of the people working on it, market forces, political turmoil, the weather, and on and on.

The factors that appear to make a business successful change from week to week, article to article, tweet to tweet, blog post to blog post. This week, everyone is trying to figure out how to replicate Facebook’s “hacker way” because that’s where the money is going. But eventually, the money moves on, and with it goes our idea of how to manufacture success. It was Taylorism in the 1880s. It was Japanese management theory in the 1980s. A few weeks ago, before our collective attention shifted to the Facebook IPO, it was whatever Steve Jobs had done, from hallucinogens to yelling at your employees. Next week, it will be the philosophy of whoever seems likely to make the most money right then.

How can we be like the successful ones and not like we are: tired, confused, scared, not-rich? Just tell us the secret. There is a secret, right? There must be. They make it look so easy.

I am not a business person. I don’t know what makes a good business. It seems like it helps to have a good idea, great people, the willingness to work hard, and an absolute shit-ton of luck. Being certain about much beyond that seems, well, a bit crazy to me.

On the Welcome End of a Black Year

2012-01-09T00:00:00-08:00

On the Welcome End of a Black Year

At the beginning of 2011, all I wanted was a year of single-minded focus on our work at Simple. 2010 was a frenetic year for me, full of change and excitement, risk and commitment. I had made a number of life-altering choices in 2010 that I was eager to see through in 2011, and work was foremost amongst them.

Around this time last year, I remarked to my wife one day that things were going almost too well. We were loving our new home in Portland. I was loving the excitement of getting Simple off the ground alongside the brilliant people I get to work with every day. The other shoe had yet to drop.

Then, just as I was about to leave the office one night in March, I got a call from my mother.

“[Your step-father] is dying”, she sobbed.

And there went 2011.

Memorium

My step-father, Rodney, was a remarkable human being. Born in South Africa, he got his start in the forestry service, engaging in early conservation efforts and planting forests in Mexico as well as his home country. Diplomatic work later took him to New Zealand. Eventually, disgusted by apartheid back in South Africa, he moved his young family to the United States and found work in the decidedly niche field of nuclear transportation. There, he excelled, ultimately co-founding Transport Logistics International, which he ran until its effective sale in early 2010.

Think about this for a moment: like it or not, the world has many nuclear weapons, plus a number of nuclear reactors used for power, medicine, scientific experimentation, and so forth. In the last several decades, most of the world has decided that nuclear weapons are bad, but that nuclear reactors can be quite good and useful when operated correctly. To that end, there are international cooperative efforts, like Megatons to Megawatts, that turn nuclear weapons into fuel for power plants. So, who moves the actual nuclear material from those weapon sites to places where it can be used for good? Who moves nuclear material to and from reactors? Who keeps it safe in the process?

Well, Rod did. Which, whatever your opinions on the safety and efficacy of nuclear power, you have to agree is a phenomenal thing: moving potentially planet-destroying nuclear material around the globe safely and predictably while billions of people simply go about their days.

In many ways, Rod was my model for entrepreneurship. Throughout my teenage years, I watched him start a company, grow that company, cope with its with ups and downs, handle politics both interpersonal and international, and ultimately exit TLI successfully after more than a decade of hard work. His surprisingly small team performed their critical task from a modest office in suburban Maryland. He demonstrated every day that it’s possible to run a company ethically, do good and important and meaningful things, treat employees fairly, and still make a profit. Before knowing Rod, I never would have considered the world of business. Having known him, it’s hard to imagine doing anything else with my life.

Fighting and Dying

With most of my extended family living across the country, death was always a remote event, something that happened “over there”. Our relatively small family hasn’t been free from loss, but we’ve also had fewer funerals in our past than many other clans I’ve known. Upon receiving my mother’s call, then, my immediate reaction was to outright dismiss the distant – in all senses, distant – possibility that what she was saying was true.

My step-father had been diagnosed by his general practitioner with pancreatic cancer, a type of cancer that’s recently seen a lot of press in relation to Steve Jobs’s death. There are several main varieties of pancreatic cancer; some are operable and some are not, but the overall survival rate on a not-particularly-long time scale is not high. If you have your choice of cancers (and you don’t), this is not the one to choose.

Rod had been told by his doctor, bluntly and unkindly but ultimately truthfully, that he wouldn’t live to see Christmas (2011). We, of course, refused to accept that. We searched every available resource, contacted everyone we could who might have some insight or direction, considered every experimental option. Rod was quickly enrolled at the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, which we deemed to be both the best and the most practical option for his treatment, as my mother and step-father then lived less than an hour’s drive away.

That was early Spring. Over the next several months of in-person visits and frequent phone calls, things went up and down repeatedly. One week, Rod would be feeling better and numbers on tests would be interpreted as saying good things; you wouldn’t guess from looking at him that he was dying from cancer. The next week, he’d be a wreck, and the numbers were now telling grim stories. Then it would all shift around again. Surgery wasn’t an option in his particular case, so our hopes of spending more time with him rested on drugs and chemotherapy.

It’s hard to say how much time the treatment bought us, and if it was worth the pain and time and expense. As summer drew to a close, I got on a plane yet again. I knew from the grim tone of the doctor I had spoken to that I wouldn’t be coming home until my step-father was dead.

The man I saw when I arrived at the hospital was a faint shadow of the man I had known throughout my adolescence and early adulthood; a pale gray crescent of a person who had always shone brightly with determination and conviction. We talked for as long as he could manage, and after he fell asleep, I wept at his bedside until I could physically produce no more tears.

That seemingly endless week in August was the conclusion of our family’s personal tragedy. Rod had sold his company a little more than a year before his diagnosis. So here, dying in barely-contained agony, was a man who had worked tirelessly his entire life, only to be felled mere months after his retirement. His regret was palpable, never at having worked hard, but for having worked too hard, sometimes putting the wrong things first. It was a final lesson.

After

Reading an article on how doctors choose to die some months later, I found myself nodding sadly along. For as far as we’ve come with medical treatment, diseases like pancreatic cancer still have the best of us. For the future, we need to aggressively fund and remove barriers to research. For today, we need to acknowledge that simply managing pain for as long as you’ve got may well be the best option. I wish Rod had spent less of his final weeks in a hospital being filled with hopeful poisons and more with us, doing whatever he damn well pleased.

I was happy to see 2011 go. The remainder of the year was filled with unpleasant reminders of death as Steve Jobs, John McCarthy, Dennis Ritchie, and Christopher Hitchens – all men I revered – passed away one after the other.

With the support of my wife, my friends, and my unbelievably kind and understanding coworkers and board at Simple, I feel ready to make 2012 the focused year that I hoped this past one would be. Life, after all, is for the living. Rod taught me how to live better and work better. That’s what we’re here to do.

Obligation

2011-06-27T00:00:00-07:00

Obligation

Back in March, I wrote (and subsequently removed most of) a ham-fisted post about the obligation that smart, privileged people should feel to work on things that might make a difference to other people. This was discussed in the context of questioning whether so-called lifestyle businesses are a good idea for entrepreneurs and society at large.

I’ve mulled over the idea of obligation and how it relates to entrepreneurship off and on in the intervening months. That thinking has changed my tune pretty significantly.

There are several obvious problems with obligation as it relates to work:

Some people don’t feel obligated to do much of anything.
Most people don’t like to feel obligated to do something, even if it’s the optimal thing for them to do. We like choice, or at least the illusion of choice.
If what you’re doing isn’t making you happy, you probably won’t do a good job at it. You might even subconsciously sabotage yourself.

That final point, on happiness, is by far the most important of the three. Even if we had a magical machine that told us the optimal, most societally beneficial job for every individual – that is, the job we should be obligated to do – it wouldn’t matter if we were all assigned jobs that we hated. Fulfilling a sense of obligation isn’t a substitute for actual unqualified happiness, and it’s certainly not a recipe for good work.

At the end of the day, the best thing you can do is to figure out what makes you happy and then do the hell out of that thing. You’ll probably do a great job at whatever it is you’ve decided to do. Hopefully, your passion for your work will result in positive outcomes that benefit you and your community. Maybe we’ll all luck out and the job that makes you happy ends up benefitting a large number of people. If not: hey, at least you’re not miserable.

Problem is, it’s really really hard to figure out what makes you happy. It’s way easier to guilt yourself into a sense of obligation which you then use to rationalize the decision to do something you don’t actually enjoy. (Other popular happiness-avoidance tactics include doing nothing, trying to make a lot of money, bad relationships, and over-education.)

The type or scale of work you do doesn’t really matter as long as you’re happy. Some people are made happy by running a lifestyle business. Some people are made happy by running a Fortune 100 multinational. Doesn’t matter. Do what you love. If you don’t, you’re not going to make things better for anyone, very least yourself.

This advice is so completely and utterly not new, but it’s repeated over and over again because so few of us actually seem to remember it. Or maybe people do remember it, but they never create or are afforded the opportunity to do what they love. I’m not sure. All I know is that trying to do what you love as a guiding principle makes a helluva lot more sense then acting out of a sense of obligation. That, and I was pretty damn wrong.

One Year In Portland

2011-05-26T00:00:00-07:00

One Year In Portland

I realized the other day that I moved to Portland, Oregon just over a year ago.

Part of me feels obligated to write a big long post talking about the city, my favorite and least favorite things about it, its suitability for startups, the absurdity of thinking that any place can or should be the “next Silicon Valley”, if it’s really like that Portlandia show, how to deal with the rain, and so on.

I just don’t have that post in me right now. Quite honestly, I haven’t felt like writing or tweeting or really sharing much at all, lately. I just want to focus, to do good work, to recognize others’ good work, and maybe, eventually, should my endeavors deserve it, be recognized in kind for what I’ve produced, not for what I’ve said.

When I look back on so much of what I’ve written over the years, I see … well, I see the person I’ve been: young, pissed-off, inexperienced. There are things I’ve written that I still very much enjoy and am proud of, but then there are things that make me wince. That’s the way it goes, though, particularly if you’re an experiential learner fumbling your way through life. Every day is a good day to fuck up and learn something. It has to be.

About Portland, though, I will say this, if only because it was a perfect moment given to me by chance, and such moments deserve to be shared.

Two Saturdays Ago in the Japanese Garden

Portland is not much of a tourist town, unless you’re a food tourist. There’s Powell’s, the mammoth bookstore that occupies a solid city block. There’s a zoo, a couple nice museums, farmer’s markets, some pretty hikes. And then, inexplicably, there is an almost obscenely beautiful and peaceful Japanese garden perched high up in the west hills.

Two Saturdays ago, I took my visiting father and his wife to the Japanese garden. She opted to wander the paths at her own pace, and so my father and I went our own way. We strolled down by the waterfall, up by the stone sea of the Zen karesansui, by ponds and by shrubs. Finally, we stopped at the edge of the garden at a spot with an expansive view of the city.

My father is friendly and kind, understated despite formidable intelligence. He’s the sort of person that constantly gets asked for directions. Strangers look at him and think, “here’s a guy who knows what’s up and won’t give me any trouble”. When I was younger, I didn’t understand some of the decisions my father made. With every passing year, that confusion fades.

We stood there, in the garden, looking out over downtown. The sky was typical Portland gray, hinting at the possibility of rain, but the buildings were clear in the distance. My father spoke.

“It’s not exactly the most architecturally interesting city, is it?”

He thought for a moment, his eyes turning towards the trees, the mountains.

“But then, as pretty as it is here, you’d never really notice the buildings, would you?”

In that simple statement, my first year in Portland.

All We Will Ever Have

2011-03-23T00:00:00-07:00

All We Will Ever Have

At the end of last week, I tried to convey my perspective on a particular and narrow category of entrepreneurship that I do not believe is optimal. I stand by what I had to say, but the way in which I said it at the time was not effective. Such is the nature of debating challenging ideas: the burden is on the challenger.

At the very least, the exchange was food for thought. It helped me realize what’s worth arguing about through words and what’s worth arguing about through action.

Just as I was wrapping up a day of minor sound and fury over my post and comment, I found out that someone very close to me was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. This person may not live to see the end of the year.

In light of that news, I’ll leave the “words” portion of this discussion with a quote from the poet Philip Appleman:

“Whatever we are, whatever we make of ourselves, is all we will ever have – and that, in its profound simplicity, is the meaning of life.”

Not A Waste

2011-03-18T00:00:00-07:00

Not A Waste

Last night, after several long days, I was clicking through news and found a recent blog post by self-styled “solopreneur” Justin Vincent. Its title, Entreporn, The Fallacy That Wastes Your Life, sort of says it all, but it’s worth a read to understand the perspective of a vocal minority in the tech industry.

Frustrated by what I read, and by the post that inspired it from longtime acquaintance Amy Hoy, I left a ragey, unnecessarily personal, and vitriolic comment. I’d like to clarify that comment and my broader position on the discussion.

Regarding Freckle

I said two things that, were I still able to edit my comment, I would now remove:

The phrase “duping credulous customers”. This is a stupid, loaded phrase. No reasonable person is being duped by Amy Hoy’s Freckle time tracking product. Her customers have ample information with which to make a decision to subscribe to the service.
The word “overpaying”. This is too subjective. For a certain type of freelancer, Freckle may be well worth the monthly outlay. Value is relative.

To be clear: I did mean to call out Freckle and its creator, in no small part because she dishes it out when it comes to business and startups. I intentionally didn’t mention her by name because I wanted to imply that online time-tracking tools aimed at freelancers are not exactly in short supply. My jerky comments could have been describing Freckle, but they also could have described a dozen other web applications.

At any rate, I should have omitted the above two items and engaged in more civil discourse.

Wasn’t There More Here Before?

Earlier today, there was the more of a blog post here. The original content is still available if you look for it, but I’d prefer if you didn’t.

I tried to argue a very difficult-to-communicate point, and I largely failed. What I wrote baffled and infuriated friends and strangers alike. Some people got the gist of what I was trying to say, but most didn’t. It’s an idea that is probably better expressed through action than through words.

I have been in the habit of writing here to explore ideas that I’m struggling with. Perhaps it’s time to break that habit and find another avenue for those ideas. I’ve come to that conclusion before, and the fact that I’m coming to it again is telling.

Apologies to Amy, and to you, reader, for wasting your time.

Following Up On What Technology Values

2011-03-04T00:00:00-08:00

Following Up On What Technology Values

If you enjoyed my post on what technology values and you have about half an hour to listen to two people talk, you’ll probably enjoy this interview I did for a new whip-smart blog and podcast called The Machine Starts.

The interview starts with a brief discussion of how social networks fit into society and our identities, but then gets into issues of disconnecting from social technology, who businesses should be building technology for, technology’s role in the current revolutions in the Middle East, and the philosophy and morality of our industry. All in all, a broad discussion that I’m near-totally unqualified to be mouthing off about but had a ton of fun with.

Thanks to Chris at The Machine Starts for the opportunity.

Advising Simperium

2011-03-02T00:00:00-08:00

Advising Simperium

I’ve been impressed with Simplenote since I first installed it. It has everything you want out of a good iOS app: simplicity, reliability, frequent updates, plentiful options for desktop integration, and just enough going on under the hood to keep power users happy. I recommend Simplenote at every opportunity, and I even wrote a backup utility that inspired their official backup solution.

This past summer, I got to meet Fred and Mike, the guys behind Simplenote. Their company is called Simperium, and their ambitions run far beyond selling subscriptions to premium features for Simplenote. Indeed, Simplenote is just a demo – albeit an incredibly useful demo – for the sync platform that Simperium is working on.

Dropbox is the clear leader in syncing raw bits today. They do a great job at it. The latest version of Simplenote supports syncing to Dropbox because it’s so darn useful. That said, Dropbox isn’t a solution for the problem of syncing structured documents. You can build that extra sync layer, but isn’t easy, particularly if you’re a developer who’s never built a sync solution before. The beleaguered developers at Cultured Code know all too well that this is a hard problem. Right now, sync is a problem that’s getting solved by developers over and over again in slightly different ways; some better, some worse.

What Simperium will eventually offer is an easy-to-use platform for building apps that sync. I’m happy to announce that I’m now an advisor to and a (very minor) investor in Simperium. I haven’t worked on sync systems, but I am hoping that I can provide some insight to the Simperium team on building a developer platform and scaling out their backend systems.

If you’re a Simplenote user, expect the app to get better and better. If you’re developing an app that needs to sync, Simperium is building a platform you’ll want to use. If you rely on apps that sync, you’ll be using Simperium-powered tools before you know it. Fred, Mike, and their team are up to great things, and I feel privileged to be able to support them as best I can as they take their company to the next level.

Be sure to check out the latest release of Simplenote, which features the aforementioned Dropbox sync capability along with the ability to treat notes as lists, slick sharing and tagging, and more.

Solving The Hacker News Problem

2011-02-22T00:00:00-08:00

Solving The Hacker News Problem

Hacker News has long since become the preeminent watering hole for startup-minded programmers and tech entrepreneurs. Like any open and growing online community, it’s had its ups and downs.

Lately, Hacker News – HN for short – seems more on the decline than not. I see (and make) frequent complaints on Twitter about the quality of both submitted links and the associated discussions. Often times those complaints come from individuals who’ve racked up significant karma in the community. The typical complaint is that the top items on the site are dull, dim, pandering, and inane. The most interesting items, sadly, often have the least votes.

Beyond the increasingly poor submissions, HN now has a reputation for Usenet-grade pedantry. It’s become the sort of place where provocative ideas go to die at the hands of raging nerds. This is a shame, because there’s no place else quite like HN on the Internet right now. You can find similarly engaging microcosms on Twitter, IRC, Convore, and elsewhere, but HN at its best brings it all together. Unfortunately, the site is rarely at its best these days.

What’s Wrong with HN

I believe that HN serves too many masters. When it started, the audience was clearly “hackers” by Paul Graham’s definition: the sort of motivated and curious youngish techie people that his Y Combinator fund would like to hand checks to. Since HN launched, its audience has broadened, and the world of startups has changed, thanks in no small part to Y Combinator and the rise of other incubators, super angels, etc.

The HN community now reflects a dense spectrum of startups, from one-person “lifestyle businesses” on up to mature companies like Facebook and LinkedIn that might mistakenly be called “startups” by someone outside the tech industry simply due to the fact that they haven’t gone public yet. HN boasts representatives from all of these types of firms, plus tech industry veterans, academics, students, tinkerers, wannabes, and a supporting cast of thousands.

Diversity can be asset in a community. It can also cause friction. In HN’s case, you need only look at a weekly recap of the top submissions to see all the different directions the site is being pulled in. Listed in (totally subjective) order of frequency, you’ll find:

General tech industry news of the sort that’s much better surfaced by Techmeme.
VC and funding news of the sort that’s much better surfaced by sites like peHUB.
Startup launch announcements.
Promotions for products and services, usually to the chagrin of HN community members.
Pop science.
Pop sociology.
Pop economics.
Pop psychology and relationship advice.
Windbag pundit-type blog posts like this one.
Business advice and war stories.
Technical HOWTOs, comparative evaluations, etc.

Clearly, a substantial number of people like this mix of content, because HN continues to grow in popularity. For the vocal minority that isn’t happy with what the site has become, the powers that be offer the facepalm-worthy hidden concession of classic mode, which only pulls in submissions from longtime members. “Classic” is probably the single biggest sign that something isn’t healthy in the HN community.

HN today is a jack of all trades and master of none. Some might say that’s necessary to represent the interdisciplinary nature of the startup world, but I’m skeptical of that. I think a little competition would go a long way towards improving HN and focusing the site on what it’s best at: content relevant to tech industry entrepreneurs.

What To Do About It

Over this past Thanksgiving, I took some time to think about how I might build a competitor/alternative to HN. I asked friends inside and outside the HN community about what they like about their online hangouts. A number of common perspectives emerged:

Focus the community. Ensure that people share a common interest, goal, or set of values. Right now, HN lacks that shared focus.
Invitations should be controlled in some way. Anyone should be able to read, but not everyone should be able to write. Demand quality.
Effective and vigilant moderation is key.
Copy MetaFilter. It’s probably the healthiest long-lived online community out there that’s based around sharing links.

I had lunch with MetaFilter’s creator, Matt Haughey, and got further insight from him on what’s helped keep MetaFilter so good after all these years. In a nutshell: dedication on the part of the people who run it. A great community isn’t something that you just set up and periodically patch. Running a great community is a full-time job, not a weekend hack project.

In BankSimple, I have much more than a full-time job. I’m not the right person to attempt to build an HN competitor/alternative, at least not at this point in time. I would, however, be up for steering an interested party in what I think is the right direction.

As you’ve probably figured out, I think HN does a crappy job with general tech news and a so-so job with content that’s specifically relevant to startup founders and employees. These days, HN does a downright terrible job with deeply technical topics; that’s the area I hear the most complaining about on Twitter and in private. Since deep tech is HN’s weakest point, let’s go after it.

I’d like to see someone borrow the best of MetaFilter’s community dynamics, find a strong set of moderators and seed users, and build a competitor to HN with a focus on deeply technical news and discussion. That would leave room for HN to focus on non-technical startup issues like hiring, marketing, customer service, fundraising, tools and services, etc. Yes, in a perfect world, HN would have both the technical and business topics under one roof, because they’re two sides of the same coin. That time has passed. It’s just too wide and deep a set of topics for one community.

If you’re interested taking on this challenge, contact me. I’m happy to spend some of my free time transferring my thinking and domain names to the right people. With Matt’s permission, I registered the MetaFilter-aping bloomfilter.org with this project in mind (also bloomfilter.net and blf.lt for shortened links). I’m ready to donate my time and these domain names, if wanted, to the right person or group.

TL;DR

Hacker News is slipping, which is a shame, because it can be a great community. I’m ready to support an alternative community focused on deeply technical news and discussion. HN could then focus solely on business-oriented startup-centric topics. Ideally, the two sites would be healthily competitive, eventually even complementary.

Preemptive FAQ

But I love HN just the way it is! That’s nice. Other people don’t. Different strokes.

What gives you the right to judge and generalize about the entire HN community? Nothing. I’m just some dude who’s a little bit obsessed with how people communicate about technology. If you don’t like what I have to say, flag it and go about your day.

Isn’t it kind of bullshit to criticize HN and then ask for someone else to do the work of building an alternative? Yes, it kind of is, but there’s only so many hours in my day and BankSimple takes up most of them. If it’s any consolation, I don’t want any credit or compensation from this hypothetical HN alternative/competitor. I just want it to exist, and I can spare a few hours and some domain names to help get it off the ground.

What do you mean by “deeply technical”? Substantive content by and for the people who implement technical solutions. Busy smart people want to read findings that other busy smart people decided were important enough to take the time to share. “Deep” to me connotes intellectual rigor, not fashionable obscurity or the unnecessarily academic.

Are you aware of Community X? I think that’s what you want. Yes, I probably am. No, it probably isn’t, but send that email anyway.

If people wanted the kind of community site you’re describing, don’t you think it would exist by now? I think it has existed in various places: HN, Reddit, Slashdot, Usenet, etc. Nobody has figured out how to capture this particular herd and get it to settle down. Maybe that’s impossible. It’s certainly not going to be easy.

Don’t you want to build your own little fiefdom so people can read more of your excruciatingly preachy and self-important blog posts? No. I would moderate away my own blog posts on the community I’m proposing. Frankly, they’re not technical enough. I also don’t submit my own posts to HN, for what it’s worth. I write for myself first and foremost.

What do you have against Paul Graham and Y Combinator? Nothing. This is about Hacker News as a community site, not Y Combinator and the people behind it.

What Technology Values

2011-02-21T00:00:00-08:00

What Technology Values

As part of their reporting on recent events in the Middle East last week, NPR ran a story called Internet Freedom and the US State Department. The story is an interview with Alec Ross, co-founder of nonprofit technology provider One Economy and now Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

While dodging hard questions about US companies selling restrictive or invasive technologies to repressive regimes, Mr. Ross made a statement that jumped out at me from my car stereo:

“[T]echnology itself is value-neutral. It depends on how a government chooses to use these technologies.”

I believe this is an unproductive, misguided, and all too common way of thinking about technology.

What Technology Is

The word “technology” can refer to many things:

The process of human beings inventing tools that improve our quality of life.
A particular tool from the above category.
An industry or amalgamation of industries producing said tools.
The future.
Change.
Dehumanization.
Progress.

And so on.

Because technology is such a malleable concept, it’s frequently repurposed for political rhetoric. Want to celebrate human achievement? Technology. Want to bemoan how we’re frittering our lives away on silly gadgets? Technology. Guns? Technology. Advances in treating gunshot wounds? That’s technology too. Like alcohol, technology seems to be the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.

Having found it to be a near-empty rhetorical vessel, it would seem that we’re able to side with Mr. Ross in declaring technology “value-neutral”. We could stop here, save one important factor that changes it all.

Technology is Made of People

Technology is not an abstract entity. Technology, like art or literature or music or mathematics, is a human endeavor. It is made by people and, as such, is imbued with their values, hopes, foibles, and passions.

All too often our mental concept of technology is that of a creeping and cold alien force, forever replicating and destroying everything in its path. When we think of the evils of technology, we think of The Borg or Agent Smith: something hostile and increasingly pervasive whose origin is unclear but whose intent is clearly malice towards all things human.

It’s important to remind ourselves that technology is not such a villainous force. It’s not a force at all. No technology – good or evil, exceptional or mundane – is built in a vacuum. No technology is built without human intervention.

Even the most bureaucratic of technologies can’t be claimed to be un-opinionated or free from our values. The lowly SQL database, workhorse of dismal trades like accounting and business analytics, is theoretically “value-neutral” to the data it stores. Yet, in structuring data into rows and columns of particular standard types, a set of values emerges that dictates what information is and how it should be stored and queried. Dig in to the history behind SQL and you’ll find values and opinions aplenty.

If technology was indeed “value-neutral”, why would the drama of competing technologies and the personas behind them have dominated headlines for decades? Whether Mac versus PC or MySpace versus Facebook, it’s clear that the values inherent in particular technologies aid in forming social clusters around those technologies. This doesn’t even begin to touch on biomedical technologies, some of which threaten our values so deeply that we regulate and ban them.

Technology Values What People Value

Saying that “technology itself is value-neutral” shows a misunderstanding of the basic nature of an essential component of human society. To further wave off a political and moral responsibility to regulate technology and ensure that it’s deployed in the interest of human rights is, to say the least, puzzling coming from someone with a track record of using technology in positive ways.

Our idea of technology appears to have supplanted the reality of technology, at least in the minds of our officials. Technology is not an invisible force; it is not still air waiting to be blown hither or thither. No, technology is the work of people, and insofar as technology “values” anything, it reflects the values of its creators and users. Technology is born with intent. We ignore that intent at our peril.