#trying so hard to do all the onboarding employee stuff too.

[darkacademiamlm]

Sorry for the lack of content recently!! I'm queuing up some posts rn. too lazy to figure out how to do a read more on mobile so context in tags lol

[dreamescapeswriting]

No One But You ~ KTH

>>>Word Count: 1,801

>>>Genre: Fluff, Mafia AU, based on a scene from Howl’s moving castle cause you know ya girl love that film

>>> Pairing: Hacker!Taehyung x Reader

>>> A/N: This is based off the scene in Howl’s moving castle where Howl comes to Sophie when the two men are talking to her, I really love the film so I just had to write something based off it. This is just a random drabble I wrote while I was laid up in bed sick. 

You were starting your slow walk home from work, you knew the way like the back of your hand but it didn't make it any easier to be walking that way at night. The part of Seoul was known for being dangerous, especially for younger women who would be alone after a night shift.

"Are you sure you don't want me to drive you?" Your co-worker asked as she locked the door to the bar you shook your head.

"It's not in your direction, I'll be fine. I have my pocket knife." She hugged you goodbye and watched you leaving down the dark alleyway in the direction of your apartment. She hated that you insisted on walking home but she couldn't exactly force you to get into her car with her.

"I'll see tomorrow night." You called out before disappearing around a corner and keeping your head down, you pulled the hood of your hoodie over your head and kept your head down while you walked not wanting to drawer any unwanted attention to yourself. It had been a long night at the bar and all you wanted to do was go home and crawl into bed but the walk was twenty minutes long.

Taehyung was taking his walk home after a long day too, he'd been sat behind a desk all day trying to hack into something for Namjoon and his head was a mess. He wanted to walk home instead of taking the usual care to take a break and get some fresh air into his system. Not only had he been hacking all day he'd had to listen to Jimin talk about the last girl he was with for the last four hours until he finally had enough and walked out. He didn't care about who Jimin was fooling around with now as long as it didn't come back around to him again. The last one he was with he had to hack into their social media accounts, phones and all the unnecessary stuff to delete information Jimin shouldn't have been giving out in the first place,

"Hey hot stuff, you alone?" Taehyung looked up in front of him to see you standing in front of two men who were eyeing you up hungrily, normally Taehyung would walk right on by but there was something about this that was making him uneasy.

"I think you should let me escort you home, it's not easy for someone like you to be alone out here." The taller one of the men said to you, putting his arm on the wall to stop you from passing through.

"I'm fine, but thank you." Taehyung stayed in the shadows waiting to see what would happen next, plenty of bad things happened in Seoul, he should know since he worked for one of the biggest Mafia Families in Seoul. They practically ran the place so he knew what happened on the daily,

"But you're so sweet and innocent, let me walk you home baby." You tried to move again but the second man put his hand on your waist, that was it. Taehyung came out and stood beside you wrapping his arm around your shoulder he felt your whole body tense at the fact that three men were now surrounding you,

"I'm sorry it took me so long, who are your friends darling?" You looked up at Taehyung and you knew who he was, you'd seen his photo in the papers in the Bangtan Sonyeondan side of it he was the main hacker for them.

"We were just talking about walking your girlfriend home, isn't that right baby? You've been teasing us all night." They lied, they obviously didn't know who Taehyung was or they simply didn't care that he could ruin them within a matter of seconds. The first man's hand left the wall and took your hand in his,

"I suggest you leave her hand alone before you lose it," Taehyung warned in a deep growly voice making the man back off instantly and then hold his hands up defeat and let you both pass by without any trouble. Taehyung took your hand in his and continued your slow walk home,

"I'll take you home, but they're following so stay close to me." You hummed in agreement and kept as close to him as you could get, you lead the way and he followed still holding your hand. The silence was killing you,

"I'm assuming you know who I am?" He whispered as you came out of the dark alley and onto the main road,

"Yes, Are they still following us?" You questioned trying not to look behind you, Taehyung looked for you.

"They are, I'll text someone." He took out his phone with his spare hand and began texting Yoongi to come and take care of them for him so he didn't have to get his hands dirty.

"You're going to kill them?" You questioned as you crossed the road in the direction of your apartment,

"I am." He mumbled coldly walking alongside you and looking around at the streets, he hadn't been this far in Seoul in a while and he remembered why they'd moved to the richer side. A lot less trouble there then there was here,

"Do you live much further?" You pointed up at the main apartment building and he shook his head,

"No. No way in hell," He grumbled turning you back around and heading in another direction,

"Excuse me, where are you taking me?" You questioned as he continued to walk you in the opposite direction of your apartment and the opposite way of where you had come from. Taehyung wasn't about to leave you in a crummy apartment building when you'd been followed all the way home and Yoongi still hadn't responded.

"I'll take you to one of my hiding spots, you can stay there until the creeps are taking care of and maybe I'll let you keep it. That old place is falling apart." You scoffed at him as he continued to walk with you hand in hand in the direction of his place,

"Excuse me but I don't really have much of a choose Mr Rich kid," He chuckled at you, you were a lot braver than most people they'd come across. Usually, they'd avoid getting into confrontations if they knew who the boys were but you were daring and there was something about him that drew him into you,

"Working in that dead-end bar doesn't pay well?" He'd been researching you the moment you started walking to his place, he'd seen your name on the back of your bag.

"You shouldn't keep your name out in plain sight for just anyone to see." He smirked looking at your confused face, you looked down at your bag and shifted it to the other side of your body.

"Too late, I already know everything there is to know about you. You were the smartest in your class, why didn't you go to university?" You laughed sarcastically at him not wanting to discuss your life with some stranger and he stopped outside a giant white building which had windows covering one side of it,

"You live here?" He shook his head walking you into the building and collecting some keys,

"I store my car here, I'm not going to walk all the way out to my spare place. We'd be walking for days." You nodded, you didn't know why you were following a known psychopath into a parking garage and getting into a car with him but you somehow felt safe with him. As if nothing could go wrong as long as he was by your side and he felt the same with you,

"Seatbelt." He warned as he started up the engine.

"You alright?" He asked as you sat in front of the fireplace, you were in a cabin in the middle of nowhere and that feeling of being safe was still there but your mind was still running over everything else,

"Are you going to kill me?" He started laughing at you and then shook his head,

"No, but I'm going to offer you a job,"

"I won't kill anyone." You said quickly but he began laughing softly at you and shook his head yet again.

"Nothing like that, it's a secretary position. Better money than that stupid bar, and you'll get an apartment as an incentive to coming to work for us.

"I would just be a secretary?" He nodded and you looked over at the fireplace, you didn't have any other options really it was that or back to the dead-end job at the bar being hit on by creeps or going to work for a group of people who were just as dangerous as the part of Seoul you lived in.

"We understand that it's a lot to process but working for us would insure your safety for life, even if you decide to leave the company in the future." You looked at Taehyung who was trying to push hard for you to say yes, he wanted to protect you. He had a protective instinct over you after barely knowing you and maybe it was how Jimin felt about all the women he shared his time with or maybe it was how his grandparents felt around each other but all he knew was he never wanted that feeling to go away. He wanted to look after you for as long as he possibly could,

"I'll take it." He smiled and you don't know why the smile made you feel like you were signing a deal with the devil but at the same time, it felt comforting. It was all a mixture of emotions to you but the most overwhelming one was the way you felt when you looked into his eyes and you caught him smiling at you or just staring at you.

"Good." He whispered moving closer to you in front of the fire, you felt your heart begin to beat a little faster now he was so close to you, and his arm wrapped around your shoulder as though it was something you'd been doing for years.

"It's nice to have you onboard." He whispered bending down to your height and kissing your lips you began having a heated make-out session on the sofa until you pulled away putting your hands on his chest to keep him at a small distance.

"Do you do this with all new employees?" You questioned not wanting to get involved in this type of relationship with your new employer,

"No one but you." He whispered kissing you once again, this time your hands went into his hair and you tugged a little at the ends making him groan against your lips.

Tagline: 

@yoongisdumplingcheeks @snowy-meowl @lynnthevirgo @jooniesdarlingdimples @kpopfanfictionhoes @lyoongx @callingmyangel @fan-ati--c @mitzwinchester @rjsmochii @btsiguess-kpop 

[imamotherfuckingstar-lord]

What We Did, pt.22

Summary:  After finding out you were pregnant, Bucky agrees to help you leave the hero life. The two of you go to Seattle, and hamper down for six months until you start dreaming of a certain someone. Convinced the dreams are a sign, you and Bucky go back to New York. Will everyone be happy to see the pair of you? What questions will they have? And will the lie Bucky and you made up finally resurface?  

A/N: This chapter is dedicated to my main bitch @childishhoebinoo again. THIS IS A BIT SHORT, SORRY!

Warnings: //cheating//pregnancy//ADULT STUFF//

masterlist

Chapter Twenty-Two : 50/50

Nothing was going to be perfect, you realized that as you sat on the living couch trying to fold onesies damn near a break down. Your belly was swollen, back was aching and a headache had made a permanent residence of your temples. Frustration built as the onesie you folded flopped open and you grunted, throwing it across the room. Leaning back into the cushion, you rubbed a hand up and down your stomach, questioning everything you had every done thus so far in your life; the baby was due in mere weeks now, but there was so much on your mind. No one, except Tony and Pepper, had come around; the pair had visited a month ago to bring over some last-minute baby supplies because you had opted out for a baby shower. Besides, it would have be awkward with a bunch of dudes and Pep.

And then there was Clint.

You had promised yourself that the baby came first, but lately, as the due date neared, he was constantly on your mind. Bucky and you had gone through the birthing process, and he was the one you wanted beside you – holding your hand and encouraging you, he was the one you wanted to hear the baby’s first cries with, but Clint had his place it all of it too. Except, you had to think of Laura. That was why you had reached out, three days ago.

Bucky was upstairs assembling a bookshelf for the baby’s room, because he had come across an article that talked about the importance of reading to children, even infants. He was sweet like that.

Moving into the kitchen, you stood by the sink, looking out the window to the backyard. The phone rang against your ear and apart of you hoped Laura wouldn’t pick up – and she hadn’t. Taking a deep breath, you waited until the call went to voicemail and then you talked.

“Laura, it’s Y/N. I know I have no right calling you like this and I know you asked me to stay away,” you stated quietly, a lump in your throat causing you to pause. Somehow this felt harder than coming face to face with her. “It’s just…the baby is arriving soon, and you know your husband more than anyone in the world, he’s going to want to be there. I need to know what you want, do I let him come to the birth? I know it’s a lot to put on you.��

Again, you paused, this time feeling tears streaming down.

“Just say the word and I’ll make sure he doesn’t come, and I’ll tell him it’s all me. I just want you to have the final say. Call me back when you’re ready.”

The house was quiet as you got up from the couch, headed to the kitchen for a snack. Bucky would be home soon, he started picking up early morning shifts because the store was slower than. He figured if the baby decided to come in the morning, he could easily leave without putting the manager in a bad spot since there was always another employee working with him. It was sweet, Bucky was a sweet man; constantly at your side making sure you had everything a person could possible need – it made you feel love.

You grabbed a string cheese, leaned against the counter and took a bite right off the top; you had no time to string the damn cheese, you were too hungry for that. Nibbling away, the frustration left with each bite and your body relaxed as the baby moved around; seemed like his leg was hitting up against your back. Finishing up the cheese, you threw the plastic in the rubbish and started back toward the living room just as your cell began to ring.

It was on the coffee table and when you picked it up, you saw that it was Laura’s number – suddenly, the cheese tasted spoiled in your throat as you aid hello, voice trying to remain steady waiting for an answer.

“It’s Clint.”

“Jesus,” you muttered in relief, falling onto the couch.

“You thought it was Laura, huh?” He chuckled lightly and explained that she was not ready to talk to you directly. “She still has some reservations.”

“Understandable, how are you guys?” It was a question you had no business asking, but a selfish part of you wanted to know if only for your own relief. Here you were in a wonderful home with a wonderful man and the Barton’s homestead was in shambles because of something you had done.

“I’m back at home, the kids think I was working. Laura and I have been trying to work past things, she wants to make it work. She told me about the message you left her…”

“I’m sorry – “

“-no, no. Don’t be sorry, we sat down and had a long talk, and we decided it would be best if I was there for the birth. I was there for all my kids; this doesn’t make a difference. Also, we talked about it and I think 50/50 shared custody once he’s old enough would be fair, we have an extra room…”

He continued to explain all the plans Laura and he had come up with as you sat quietly, feeling the cheese curding in the pit of your stomach.

You were speechless – 50/50 shared custody?

Laura was onboard?

Everything was hitting you hard, the fact that Laura was willingly to accept your son in Clint’s life changed everything but only one person came to your mind and that was Bucky. Laura and Clint were married and by that technicality, she sort of had a say in things – in a way. The Barton’s were a unit, you knew how they worked and that just left Bucky – he wasn’t the baby’s biological father and he wasn’t your husband – in a law of court, he would be just a third party that got no say and that freaked you out.

“Clint,” you snapped, interrupting him as he rambled on about different paint colors. He stopped talking and asked if something was wrong and you said yes. “This is a lot to process, the baby is due a few weeks, can we talk about all this after he comes?”

He let out a low ‘oh’ and you quickly perked up your voice, telling him it was just that you were really tired and all you could think about was getting ready for the baby. “I promise we’ll talk about everything eventually, okay?”

Clint was quiet for a moment until he agreed. “I’m happy we’re going to figure this all out, thank you.”

“Of course,” you whispered, hand on the top of your belly. “I need to go now; I have to pee.”

He laughed and promised to get in touch soon; the two of you said goodbye and when you hung up, you leaned further back into the couch cushion, hoping it would suck you in. You tossed the phone to the other end of the couch and placed both feet up on the coffee table; reaching for the remote hoping to find a movie to keep your mind off things. Twenty minutes into some Lifetime movie, you couldn’t stop thinking about Bucky and his role in this whole circus – you wanted him to be a part of the decisions or have an equal position like Laura, and there was only one way to do that.

And as if on cue, Bucky called out as he walked through the front door. You sat up just as he sauntered into the living room, green apron from the hardware store still on – his hair was pulled back behind his ear and when he saw you, he smiled wide and asked how you were doing, holding up the take out he had brought along with him.

Getting up, you turned to him and smiled. “Let’s get married.”

…

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[seekingthestars]

this is gonna sound really complain-ey and i don’t want it to, but honestly work’s sucked a lot out of me over the last few weeks and i just...

i’ve been working on this project, this horrible project that was never managed properly, thrust into doing things i wasn’t formally trained in and wasn’t overwhelmingly comfortable with, but i sucked it up and did the best i could with my team and really picky clients. this project made me cry/almost cry multiple times, but i put in the time and effort to try to help figure things out for them and offer solutions to problems. that project has run me dry, but i just keep going.

and then..... okay, so recently i volunteered to and did create design team onboarding documentation and a training document for a program only i’ve been trained on. i step in to help whenever i can (minus weekends bc no you don’t deserve that part of my time), even if i don’t want to. i’ve asked multiple times what i need to do to get promoted and all i ever get told is “you’re doing great, everyone loves working with you, it’s just a ~~~feeling~~~” and then i had to watch yesterday as a designer who’s been there less time than i have get promoted to senior before me.

this isn’t taking away anything from him. he’s great and he deserves it. but it’s exhausting when i put in time and effort and i try to do the best that i can and i’m told i’m doing great and there’s nothing wrong but i still don’t get promoted. and it’s not even just... we have this recognition program where people can write nice messages about other employees and it gets sent to the whole company and guess who hasn’t gotten one in over a year? i mean, sure, people don’t use them that much, but even when they do, i never get one. i get to watch people i directly work with send them to other creatives but not to me

where’s my motivation. where is it. where’s the motivation to put in effort when i don’t feel respected or valued because two thirds of the time my opinions are just overruled by people who know less than i do. why should i care.

i’m so tired. i feel drained all the time. i have all of this cosplay stuff to work on for my con in less than a month and i’m having a hard time mustering up the energy to work on it. i need to look for an apartment, and a new job, but everything feels like too much

and i’m scared of a new job. i’m scared bc what if it’s not any different, what if it’s worse, what if it’s horrible in a different way, what if no one ever wants to hire me, what if what if and the what ifs scare me. and then i can’t bring myself to do anything. and do i still like my industry? do i just not like the job, or do i not like what i do in general? but what would i even do if i didn’t do this. i don’t know anymore. and the thought...when i remember i still have like 40 years of this...how

my eyelid’s been swollen and stinging really bad all week, so i’ve been more exhausted than usual, and i dunno, just felt a little...down

[snappedsky]

Borderlands: Skies the Bodyguard 1

Skies regales the story of how she first met Handsome Jack.

Previous! 

Next!

--

Chapter 1

           My entire life I had been a mercenary, travelling through space in my crappy, little cruiser, taking whatever job I could get my hands on.

           I had made a name for myself by killing whoever people wanted me to kill. I offed anyone from cheating boyfriends to high-level politicians. I had no code. It didn’t matter if it was some vigilante justice or a personal grudge. I would do the job with only one question asked: how much?

           It had been a couple weeks since my last job. I was drifting in space, scrolling through the ECHOnet, trying to find my next meal ticket when my comm started chiming with a call.

           “Skies the Merc,” I answered.

           “Heya, kiddo. It’s Handsome Jack.”

           Any moron this side of the galaxy knows about Handsome Jack: the low-level Hyperion employee who became CEO and sole owner seemingly overnight. He was one of the most powerful people in the universe. So I think my reaction of choking on my own spit was justified.

         The amusement in his voice as I hacked was annoyingly blatant. “You…okay there, cupcake?”

           “Y-yeah, fine,” I coughed and cleared my throat. “Uh how can I help you?”  

           “I wanna hire you for a very important, very special job.”

           “You…want me to kill someone…?” I asked with disbelief.

           “Not…exactly,” Jack replied, “I’m not gonna discuss it over the ECHO communicator. If you’re interested, then come to the Hyperion space station, Helios outside of Pandora.”

           I wish I could say I hesitated. I mean if I went there and refused, then he would just kill me. That’s why he wanted to discuss it in person. But all that was going through my brain was ‘Handsome Jack. Handsome freekin Jack.’

           “Uh, yeah, no problem. I’ll head there right now,” I replied without a second thought.

           “Excellent,” he purred, “I’ll have someone wait for you. See you soon, kitten.”

           After we hung up, I just leaned back in my seat, staring dumbly out the window, trying to process what just happened. I had never gotten a job from anyone nearly as huge as Handsome Jack. I had done plenty of jobs for big-name-company stooges, sure, but nobody higher than like middle management.

           This…this could be my big break! I do this job for Handsome Jack, and my name and rates will skyrocket! No more struggling between jobs, no more settling for whatever I can get; I’ll be set!

           Oh, how naïve I was.

           So I headed for Pandora as fast as my little ship could putter. It took a few hours.

           As I neared Helios I remembered feeling stunned. I had seen pictures of the Hyperion station before but in person it was incredible.

           I directed my ship into the landing bay and docked it amidst the much bigger, much nicer ships. As I hopped out, a pair of armored guards approached, guns at the ready.

           I kept my cool but left my hands at my side. I didn’t wanna to ruin my meeting with Handsome Jack by getting shot but I also didn’t want these corporate morons thinking I was scared of them.

           “Identify yourself,” one of them barked.        

           I hooked a thumb at myself. “Skies the Merc.”

           “Who?” the other scoffed. I just rolled my eyes.

           “Why didn’t you answer when you were being called?” the first asks.

           “Oh uh yeah, it doesn’t have an onboard communicator,” I replied, pointing at my ship.

           They both laughed at that and so did all the surrounding bystanders. I could see them, eyeing my ship and me, dressed in my raggedy cloak. Little did they know, I had about a dozen knives and a couple guns stashed under that cloak.

           “What’s your business?” the first guard asked.

           “I have a meeting with Handsome Jack,” I replied.

           Everyone started laughing even harder. It was really starting to get on my nerves. Wasn’t someone supposed to be waiting for me?

           “You? As if,” the second guard scoffed.

           “Yeah, why don’t you take your trash heap,” the first guard said, “and get back to whatever junkyard you crawled out of.”

           I narrowed my eyes as everybody laughed and quietly weighed the pros and cons of killing them all. But then the bystanders suddenly scurried away like rats as a man approached the two guards.

           “That’s enough,” he snapped and they instantly shut up. “Get back to work.”

           They skulked away quietly as the man faced me. He was the whitest guy I had ever seen, and I had done jobs for citizens of the snow planet, Kryo. Light hair, pale skin. And just looking at him made my douchebag alarm go off.

           “I am Mr. Blake,” he said like it was a big deal. “I’ll be escorting you to Handsome Jack’s office.”

           “Cool,” I said. He gestured for me to follow and led me out of the hangar bay.                    

           As I followed him through the halls, I got eyed by every stuck up, arrogant asshole we passed. Many of them scoffed, snorted, or commented loudly to their friends on my ‘unsightly appearance’. But I kept my eyes forward, not giving them the satisfaction of a reaction.

           Blake eventually led me to the Hub of Heroism: a monument to egotism, assholery, and Handsome Jack. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t impressed.    

           We passed through the atrium to a large elevator and Blake stopped to face me.

           “This elevator will take you straight to Handsome Jack’s office,” he said.

           “Thanks,” I replied as I stepped past him.

           “Good luck,” he added slyly as he walked away.

           I glanced after him before entering the elevator and going up.

           I was brought to the lobby first. It was big and comfortable, except for all propaganda posters all over the place. There pictures of Jack fighting some sort of great beast and taking down a whole army with just two guns.

           Somebody- or something- was standing by the door on the other side of the room. It looked like a man fused with a Loader Bot. He was standing so still I almost thought he was statue, but I could feel his eyes on me.

           I crossed the room quickly but before I could reach the door, the cyborg cut me off.

           “Uh what’s up, big guy?” I asked.        

           “Leave all your weapons,” he demanded in his robotic voice.

           “Oh, sure, that-that’s understandable,” I shrugged and removed my whole cloak. “Here, just take this whole thing.”

           The cyborg took my cloak and stepped aside.

           “Don’t mess with any of my stuff,” I snapped as I went through the door. It led into a hallway that went straight to another closed door.            

           As I walked I glanced at my t-shirt and grimaced. It was Dahl shirt I had stolen off some dude I killed once. “Wish I had worn a different shirt.”

           It was too late to worry though, as the door opened and I walked into Handsome Jack’s office.

           If I could only use one word to describe his office I would use…ostentatious. It was needlessly big with fountains, two giant busts of Jack, a couple of large couches, a trophy case. The far wall was just glass, looking out on Pandora’s moon, Elpis.

           If I was impressed by the Hub of Heroism, you can imagine how blown away I was by his office.

           Leading straight from the door, up a couple of stairs, was a large desk with a big, yellow chair behind it. And sitting in that yellow chair was Handsome Jack himself.

          “Hey, there she is,” he boomed as he stood up. “Just the lady I’ve been waiting for. Come on, have a seat.”

           I approached his desk and sat in the round chair across from him. I was…tense. I wasn’t scared of those Hyperion guards or that big cyborg, but Handsome Jack…Handsome Jack was different. He radiated power and confidence. I had never been around someone like that. It wasn’t that I was scared, really, I just…I felt like I really wanted to impress him.

           And I had to wear the brand Hyperion hated most.

           “You want anything? A drink, something to eat?” he asked, flashing a charming smile.

           “Uh no, no I’m good,” I replied. I was actually starving but I could not show any kind of weakness. I was just begging my stomach not to growl. “S-so uh what’s this job?”

           “We’ll get to that,” he said, waving away my question as he sat down. “But first, I’d like to ask you something.”

           He tapped on his keyboard, bringing up a holographic computer screened. He typed something then turned the screen to me, showing the picture of a man. “Recognize this guy?”

           I did. A few weeks back I did a job on Demophon for some Jakobs employee that involved killing a Hyperion employee. I had done countless jobs like that before. Corporate scum liked murdering the opposition but rarely liked getting their hands dirty. But why did Jack care?

           I considered lying to him but if he was asking me then he already knew.

           “Yes,” I replied bluntly, “he was a mark.”

           “Tell me how you did it,” he ordered, leaning forward.

           I watched him carefully.  Both of his hands were folded on the top of the desk and he didn’t look angry, more intrigued.

           I took a deep breath. “I disguised myself as a janitor and stole one of their IDs. I figured office workers didn’t pay much attention to people below them. I was right. I was able to get into the facility and find the mark’s office easily. Then I just hid out until he was alone, slit his throat, and got out before anyone noticed. It was just a standard job.”

           “And it wasn’t the first involving Hyperion,” Jack added.

           I continued watching him, my eyes darting between his mismatched ones. “No. I had killed quite a few Hyperion employees. And I had killed for Hyperion plenty of times too.”            “Oh, I know. You have quite a rap sheet, don’t you?” he grinned as he leaned back.

           I narrowed my eyes cautiously and brushed my hand against the knife I kept hidden in my beanie. I didn’t plan on using it but it did ease my nerves a bit.

           Jack laughed. “Ease up, kiddo. This isn’t an interrogation. It’s an interview.”

           I blinked with surprise.

           “I’m not gonna kill you, I like you. I like the way you work, the way you think. See, I’ve done some research on you and I’ve been keeping an eye on you since this job.” He pointed at the computer screen.

           “How’d you know it was me?” I asked.

           “I didn’t, not at first,” he replied, “I had to find the Jakobs employee who hired you first. That wasn’t hard. Neither was torturing him.” He laughed. “Th-the moron was crying the whole time my boys were bringing him to me. He crumbled like paper. And don’t get me wrong, that makes my job a lot easier. But it’s just-it’s kind of boring, you know?”

           “Anyway,” he says as he turns his computer screen back around. “You passed the interview. Congrats. Now let’s discuss the job.”

           “Now, this job is top secret and super important,” he explains as he types. “So, because I’m such a nice guy, I’ll give you this one out because if you choose not to do it after I tell you about, I will kill you.”            I should’ve backed out right then and there. Obviously whatever this job was, it was dangerous and different and so was Jack, to put it lightly. But I was intrigued and excited. And I had never turned down a job before.

           “Whatever it is, I’m in,” I said.

           Jack grinned. “I knew you’d say that.”            “You said over the comm that you didn’t want me to kill anyone,” I stated.

           “Right. I need you to track someone.”

           I leaned forward as he turned the screen back to me. It showed multiple different pictures of a woman, beautiful with fire-y red hair. One of the images showed her glowing purple with some kind of blast firing from her hand into a group of armed people.

           I shot up. “A Siren!”

           “You said you wouldn’t back out,” Jack warned.

           I glared at him. “I’m not, I just…Sirens are legendary. I’ve never even seen one in person.”

           “Then consider this your lucky day,” he grinned, “this is Lilith. A while ago my guys and I destroyed a bandit town on Pandora called New Haven. Killed tons of people. It was great. And I thought Lilith died with them but lately I’ve been thinking she actually survived.”            “So you want me to find her,” I stated.

           “Find her, find evidence of her, or find evidence she actually died,” Jack added.

           “So you’re just going off a hunch?”

           “Hey, I have great instincts with this type of thing.”            “Alright, do you at least have some idea of where I can start?”

           “On Pandora there’s a bandit town called Sanctuary,” Jack replied, “start there. I can give you a shuttle with the coordinates.”            “Just message them to me. I can take my cruiser.”

           “Ha, you mean that rusted little tin can you flew in on?” he snorted, “no, no, no. I’m not going to let anyone working for me be seen in that thing or in a Dahl t-shirt.”

           He typed on his keyboard. “What’s your size? Medium?”

           “Small,” I grunted.

           He finished typing and a yellow shirt digistructed on his desk. “There, for you. Consider it a gift of my admiration.”

           I unfolded it, trying to hide my grimace. “Yellow’s not really my colour.”

           “I think it’ll look great.”            I tucked it under my arm. I’ll be wearing my cloak anyway so it didn’t matter.

           “There’ll be a shuttle waiting for you in the docking bay,” Jack said.

           “One more thing,” I said, “how much?”

           Jack grinned with amusement. He typed on his keyboard and showed me the screen. “How’s that?”            I had never seen so many zeroes. It almost made me dizzy trying to count them. I quickly shook some sense back into my head and looked back at Jack.

           “Half now, half when I finish the job,” I demanded.

           “Sure,” he shrugged, “just remember, if you try to run, I will find you.”            “I don’t run away,” I said.

           He grinned as he typed on his keyboard. “There, I’ve wired it to you. We done here?”

           “Yup,” I nodded and stood up. “I’ll call you if I find anything…or don’t find anything.”

           “I’ll be waiting.” He waved as I walked away.

           As soon as I was outside in the hall, I checked my ECHO comm. The amount of numbers nearly took up the whole screen. I had to keep from jumping and cheering, but I couldn’t stop the big, goofy smile on my face.

           I sauntered back into the waiting room, my head held high. The cyborg was still standing by the door with my cloak. He held it out to me.

           “Thanks, bro,” I chimed and saluted him. “Catch you later.”

           As I rode the elevator down, I put my cloak back on. After I exited into the Hub of Heroism, I held out my new Hyperion shirt in front of me. Suddenly yellow was looking pretty damn good.

[sheminecrafts]

Anyone is building a marketplace for advice, one 5-minute call at a time

Anyone, an audio app that’s building a ‘marketplace for advice’ one five-minute phone call at a time, is launching new versions of its iOS and Android apps today* and beginning to large-scale onboarding after operating in a limited closed beta for the past six months.

The app — which was founded around 18 months ago (so pre-pandemic) — has a simple premise: Advice is best delivered verbally, concisely and one-to-one, in a time-limited format.

Video is distracting and a hassle to fit into busy people’s schedules. Text is time-consuming and prone to misunderstandings. But a simple phone call can — quickly and usefully — cut through, is the thinking here.

Hence the decision to hard-stop at a five-minute phone call. The app automatically terminates each call at the five minute mark — no ifs, no buts (and, well, hopefully fewer time-nibbling ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ too).

To fund development of the marketplace, the team has raised around $4 million in total to date — mainly comprised of a $3.6M seed round led by Berlin-based Cavalry Ventures with participation from Supernode Global, Antler and a number of high-profile angel investors (contributing angels include Atomico’s Sarah Drinkwater and Sameer Singh; and ustwo’s Matt ‘Mills’ Miller, among others).

Broadly speaking, online audio has shown its staying power through a sustained podcast boom and, more recently, a buzzy moment for social audio, via developments like Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces — which speak to a general sense of pandemic-struck ‘Zoom fatigue’ as remote workers max out on video calls at work yet still crave meaningful connections with other people at a time when opportunities to mingle in person are still limited vs pre-COVID-19.

A lot of social audio can still be very noisy, though, and Anyone wants to be anything but. This is short-form, topic-specific audio.

Clubhouse closes an undisclosed $4B valuation Series C round, as tech giants’ clones circle

Why five minutes? It’s short enough for a busy person to almost not have to think twice about taking a cold call from someone they’ve probably never spoken to before — while being just about long enough that some useful advice can be distilled and imparted across those 300 seconds of one-to-one connection.

Naturally the short format does not allow for group/conference calls. It’s one-to-one only.

Anyone’s CEO also reckons this “intimate”, short-form audio format could help drive diversity of advice by encouraging people whose voices may be underrepresented in traditional mentorship fora to feel more comfortable offering their time and knowledge to others. (He touts a current 50:50 user-split between men and women offering expertise through the app — and 25% people of color.)

“It’s not about taking long form meetings and compressing them — it’s about taking those conversations that would never have happened… and making them happen,” says CEO and co-founder David Orlic, pointing out that mainstream calendar apps have a default meeting slot that’s set to half an hour or an hour. So the wider thesis is that our current tools/infrastructure just aren’t set up to help people give and grab bitesized advice. (And, well, on the Internet anyone can claim to be an expert — but of course you can’t rely on the quality of the ‘advice’ you find freely floating around online.)

“Our belief is that there are a lot of five minute problems that we could be solving — whereas there are a lot of 30 or 60 minute problems that have solutions designed for them already. So we’re kind of building this for those conversations that aren’t happening,” he adds.

Orlic hints that the intention is also to leave Anyone’s callers a little hungry for more — to feed demand for more five-minute conversations and so fuel transactions across the marketplace.

“If you look at the demand side — the callers — there’s always multiple calls involved. So people will call a lot of people and ask them basically the same question or bounce ideas. And then they will aggregate those insights into something that’s much more valuable than one conversation,” he continues. “So it’s like building an advisory board for yourself.”

The idea for the platform came after Orlic and his co-founders realized they could trace key career decisions to a handful of short conversations — brief moments of advice that ended up profoundly influencing the trajectory of their working lives, to the point where they were still looking back on them years later.

“None of us in the founding team had any networks to speak of when we were growing up. And we had fairly little exposure to opportunity. Alfred is from a small village in the middle of nowhere in Sweden, I grew up in an immigrant family, and Sam is a working class bloke from Leeds. And looking back at our careers we could track them back to this handful of conversations — these haphazard moments when someone gave us a piece of critical advice,” he tells TechCrunch. “For them it was just another five minute chat but for us it turned out to be life-changing.”

“For Alfred it was some quick advice on how he could land a job at Google which he managed to do and spent almost a decade there working as a growth guy on Google Chrome and other stuff; for Sam it was how to start a company; for me it was the suggestion that I as a creative should pursue an MBA — which I ended up doing. So we started thinking long and hard about the concept of advice, and we became obsessed with opening up these closed networks.”

The aim for Anyone’s marketplace is to make similarly pivotal moments accessible to all sorts of people — by giving the app’s users the chance to call any expertise provider on the network (provided they can afford the fee) and ask their question.

A slogan on its website poses the question “imagine if you could call anyone in the world” — which is certainly a poetic-sounding moonshot to be shooting for, although the size of the user-base remains far off that global vision at this early stage.

“What we’re building is really the phone book of the future,” says Orlic, slotting his elevator pitch into our ~30-minute phone conversation. “We’re building a place for unique, one-to-one, five minute experiences — which is something really different from most social audio plays.”

He points to a trend of other apps intentionally applying limits to change/define the user experience in behavior-shaping ways (like Poparazzi, a self-styled ‘anti-Instagram’ photo sharing app that doesn’t let you take selfies to make you take more pics of your friends and vice versa; or the dating app Thursday which limits users to one active day of use per week to prevent endless swiping and nudge matches toward going on an actual in-person date).

The marketplace component of Anyone’s app is another intentional limit too, of course. Calls are not free by default.

Putting a price on Anyone’s one-to-one advice is one way to try to weed out unserious (or indeed abusive) users from those genuinely seeking others’ expertise on specific topics.

But primarily it’s there to provide an incentivize for people who have expertise worth sharing to make themselves available to take cold-calls (even very short ones) from strangers/those outside their existing contact networks.

Pricing for a five-minute call is set by Anyone users. So the call fee can vary from nothing at all (if the user distributes a free voucher code) to as little as $5 or all the way up to $500 (!) which does sound pretty crazy expensive. But Orlic notes users can choose to donate their fee to a charity if they do not wish to financially benefit from the advice they’re dishing out (so there may be instances where a high fee includes a philanthropic component).

With such highly variable fees, the app will need to have a good safety mechanism to re-confirm a user really does want to be charged the specific fee. (And, god forbid, to avoid the risk of butt-dialling…

)

“If you want to connect with someone I think it’s reasonable to put a cost on the scarcest resource on the planet which is someone’s undivided attention,” Orlic argues, suggesting that plenty of mainstream tech confuses transient ‘access’ with attention. “We can ‘access’ people everywhere — we can listen to them, read them, follow them. But that’s not the same as attention… Someone’s undivided attention is a remarkable, remarkable thing. And the five-minute cap forces you to be very clear and to the point about what you want to chat about.”

With its intentionally attention-slicing infrastructure — which manages ephemeral contacts into precisely measured and billed units — “all of a sudden you have all of these conversations that wouldn’t have happened happening thanks to this manageable way of connecting with people”, is the claim. 

Anyone users wanting to list themselves on the marketplace to sell one-to-one advice will need to create a profile that specifies their availability to take calls and some basic details (name, career details, location etc), as well as setting their five minute fee.

They also need to provide details of the “conversation topics” they’re comfortable giving advice on.

Co-founder Alfred Malmros’ profile includes examples such as: “Make the leap. Quitting a dream job to make it on your own”; “Rising quickly in a large organisation — politics vs. talent”; and “It takes a fool to remain sane. Thriving as an employee” — so topic steerage looks intended to be not only specific but maybe also give a flavor of the individual’s personality to further help advice-seekers decide if they want to shell out for five minutes of that particular person’s time.

The risk of imposters or low quality advice is being managed by “vetting and verification” processing all advisors have to go through prior to being able to sell, per Orlic. “Beyond verification, we put a lot of work into making sure that everyone on Anyone understands what constitutes good advice, how to avoid projection and biases in conversations, etc,” he adds.

The platform also incorporates a rating system — again, in an attempt to keep quality up across the marketplace.

Anyone’s early users are a blend of creators, founders and investors, per Orlic — including a lot of first and second time founders, as you might expect, with the pandemic having limited in-person startup networking opportunities.

He also says they’ve attracted a lot of people mid career, looking for advice on how to quit their jobs and pivot into something totally new — again, likely fuelled by the pandemic reconfiguring many things around how we work (and, more broadly, how we may be thinking about work-life balance).

“When you’re doing that kind of big life decision you really want to connect with a lot of people and ask around,” he suggests on the interest from established professionals looking for advice on a career switch. “Also there’s a high willingness to pay, I’d argue, when you’re in that position.”

“Business is a huge thing as a marketplace for advice,” Orlic adds, noting that a record number of businesses started in the last year too. “Investors — by the way — love this for deal flow because they can speed date a lot of founders and then pick who they continue with.”

Parents are another community of early users he highlights — saying they’ve been both offering and soliciting advice during the early test phase. He says one of the best pieces of advice he’s personally gained through the network was a conversation about parenting, adding: “I’ve had some really profound conversations with other dads. People that know a lot more about parenting than I do — where I’ve gotten really actionable advice and support. So that has been a big thing for me personally.”

Orlic also says he’s excited about potential in the area of mental health — suggesting the short-form format could be helpful to get people to have conversations about therapy which, since they’re so bitesized and bounded, may be a non-intimidating introduction toward taking up more sustained support.

He also mentions that he’s excited about the potential for civic society to make use of the platform as a tool for driving public engagement and awareness around issues and campaigns.

Appropriately enough, Anyone’s team has been dogfooding by using the app to get advice to help build the startup. (Orlic admits he asked someone on the network how to get TechCrunch’s attention and was advised, by the unnamed investor, to pitch this reporter — so it sounds like he got some solid advice there ;)

The app has had around 1,000 test users during the closed beta period — with some 12,000 on the wait-list that Orlic says they’ll be onboarding over the coming weeks.

Network building — so growing the size of the user-base on both the expertise and demand sides — is clearly going to be a key challenge here. (And notably Orlic emphases the network effects expertise of its angel backer, Singh.)

Anyone’s five-minute format may be bitesize enough to encourage users to spread the word of any good experiences they have on the platform to their (wider) social graphs on mainstream social networks. Although the calls themselves must surely remain private between the two interlocutors — so there are some hard limits on the app content being able to go viral.

(At the time of writing, a link to Anyone’s privacy policy wasn’t working so we asked for a confirm on the privacy of calls — and Orlic told us: “All calls on the new app are completely e2e encrypted, and there’s no way to listen in on an ongoing conversation. For user safety, calls are recorded, anonymised and stored in a secure environment for maximum 30 days. So in case a user reports a specific call in the app and wants a refund, or if an advisor flags up harassment or other serious issues, we can deal with that in a sustainable way.”)

At the same time it’s not hard to imagine a platform like Twitter (or, indeed, LinkedIn) seeing value in offering a similar one-to-one user call capability — and bolting it on as a feature on an established network where users have already built up extensive social graphs. So If Anyone’s idea really takes off the risk of cloning could get very real — which means it will have to balance network building/growth with attention to the quality of the community it’s building and innovating to keep its users happily stuck to its own (inevitably smaller) network.

Commenting on backing the app in a statement, Claude Ritter, managing partner at Cavalry Ventures, said: “What sets Anyone apart from other audio apps is the quality and connection of 1:1 advice. The team saw the potential of audio and the emergence of the creator economy long before the hype. We’re impressed by what they’ve accomplished to date and by their mission to build the phone book of the future.”

Around 9,000 five-minute calls have been made via Anyone’s platform so far, per Orlic — who says the goal they’re shooting for as they open up access now is to get to 100,000 calls within a year.

The business model for now is to take a straightforward 20% cut of the advice fee.

On the fee side there’s also potential for things to get bumpy if momentum builds around the concept — given that platform giants have been known to take a predatory approach to pricing when trying to close down creator-supporting upstart competition via their own fast-following clones. (See, for example, Facebook’s recent dive into offering a newsletter platform — for which it’s both paying writers upfront for contributions and, at least initially, not taking any cut of their subscriptions.)

It’s clear that Anyone will need to pay particular attention to the quality of the advice and community it’s building. It may even end up needing to hone in on serving particular niches and specialisms in order to leverage differentiation vs larger more generalist networks which have the advantage of larger user-bases should they decide to move in on the same ‘quick call’ turf.

At the same time, there are signs that some of the buzz around social audio may be fading away to more of a hmm as the hype dies down and app users tire of all the noise. But again, that’s why Anyone keeping the audio side intentionally short looks smart.

“We feel that we are part of a movement that is rebuilding the Internet as we know it and building something that is more sustainable and healthy — and really creating value,” says Orlic, discussing the changing landscape around social apps. “Closed social is a topic that I’m really excited by. We’ve seen this for years, with Slack channels and WhatsApp groups. We’ve seen social closing off because of a tonne of different reasons — and with Geneva and a lot of new really cool startups and platforms we’re seeing everything focus around communities. People building communities around specific verticals and then monetizing them in different ways. So we’re definitely a part of that wave.

“A lot of our most active users are people who have built audiences around specific topic and want more meaningful connections with those audiences — the Substack writers that use us as a way to both connect with their existing readers but also gaining new superfans, if you will, because when you’ve had a five minute chat with someone and then sign up to read their Substack, you will read everything they write after that kind of intro. So we’re definitely a part of that closed social. But as a business we are a marketplace — because again we’re obsessed with that idea of someone’s undivided attention being a very scarce resource and the fact that we’re seeing the ‘cameo-ification’ of everything and everyone. And that is also here to stay.”

“Monetization — in one way — sounds like a really crass and cynical concept but at the end of the day we want people to build income streams around things they’re passionate and know a lot about. At the end of the day that is a wonderful, wonderful thing,” he adds. “A creator middle class is a very exciting concept because looking at all the big platforms, old social media, we know where the money is going ��� it’s going to the top 0.1% of influencers and creators. Whereas small and mid tier creators are not making money to sustain themselves off their passion. For that you have all of these cohort-based courses through Maven. And platforms like us — that enable people to connect directly with each other in a one-to-one setting.

“We think it’s very cool that we’re doing an opinionated, one-to-one, five-minutes, audio-only platform because that gives us a unique positioning. And this is what excites the team. Seeing these stories come out of it — and those stories would not come out of it if it was just another broadcasting or Clubhouse thing.”

There is of course no small irony that it’s exactly because of the proliferation of mobile connectivity and apps — which have driven increased utility by providing people with on-demand access to so much data (and people) — that the traditional ‘quick call’ of old has been derailed, creating conditions where a startup feels there’s an opportunity to build a dedicated marketplace for scheduled quick phone calls. (Albeit, one that’s aiming to scale to a far wider network that the average person would have had in their phone book back in the 1980s, say.)

But as software and connectivity keeps eating the world, enforcing tech upgrades and reconfiguring learned behaviors, it’s clear that the resulting disruption can recreate the right conditions for new tools to come in and repackage some of the old convenience — which maybe got a bit lost in the noise.

*App Store review gods willing

Social networking app for women, Peanut, adds live audio rooms

LinkedIn confirms it’s working on a Clubhouse rival, too

  from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/3i6H0y2 via IFTTT

[lukecmurray]

2016 Review

Last year I spent several days (and well over a dozen hours) reviewing 2015. This is a drastic improvement from 2006, when I spent several months reviewing the previous year. But still, the process could be improved. So, I spent about a half-dozen hours going over my process (see my previous post for lessons learned from that) and am going to hopefully finish reviewing 2016 in just a couple of hours. This will be a beast of a post, but should only be a single post. Here’s the structure I’ll use.

Why am I doing this?

Already did this last  year, will just revisit and revise it for this year.

What did i do?

The highlights of what happened in each month, plus how many total checkins I had that month and lessons learned.

Best and worst things that happened.

Will likely be pulled from the above list.

Habits analysis

How much progress did I make with each habit?

Is it still a good habit? (keep/toss/change?)

What are the biggest barriers to crushing it and ideas to overcome those barriers?

Themes analysis

Love

Unplug

Core values

How well did I live them?

Expected vs. Actual

What things did I want to get done, vs. what did I actually get done?

WHY AM I DOING THIS

Last year, I clarified the reasons I spend several hours (and even days) at the beginning of each year going over the previous year in nauseating detail:

Make new/different mistakes

Get more accurate w/goals vs. reality. Get my expectations closer to reality, without lowering my standards or ambitions.

Increase my ability to accomplish goals

To record things, so that I have a sense of having lived, of having “done things”, of having moved forward in my life.

I would still consider these to be accurate, but I would summarize the first three by saying this:

"I do these yearly reviews to tighten my 'wisdom feedback loop'."

I wrote about what the 'unlived life within us' means to me: Decreased clutter and increased clarity. This, I think, is the essence of what wisdom in action looks like. So if I'm a) always making new and mistakes instead of old ones b) shrinking the gap between my expectations/plans and my reality, while c) increasing the difficulty of tasks to which I aspire, then I'm increasing my velocity towards becoming my definition of 'wisdom in action'. Or, tightening the wisdom feedback loop.

I also want to add another reason for doing this: To help others accomplish the same things.

I don't mean that they will have the same goals, but if they have the same reasons, I can help them. I've done this process in increasingly less wrong ways every year since I was 18.  And each 'less wrong' process makes me that much more valuable to people that are trying to do the same.  

Also, I mean this in both a virtual and physical capacity. Nobody reads this blog, so I don't expect that I'll be able to help lots of folks virtually in January 2017, but perhaps months or years from now people may discover it and use it to improve their own process for self improvement.  I'm sitting next to my good friend Mike (pictured above) and he interrupts me every few minutes to ask about how I do x, y, or z and my advice to him is always based in personal experience...based on a lot of wrong ways that I've done these reviews over the years.  Hopefully I can help facilitate more of these in-person sessions and be valuable because of the work I've put in for the past 15 years.

WHAT DID I DO IN 2016?

tried to get into car flipping

got ATLS certified

almost got a job in Owenton ER

broke up a fight in the middle of the street

BL summit

failed to get an in-person personal assistant onboarded

lived in Vegas: iora, boosted board adventures, time w/cousin’s fam

INSIGHTS - this was one of my best months ever and i didn’t bring my cell phone to vegas at all and I stopped at 7pm sharp every day.

clinic, then chief on service

INSIGHTS 

I wrote about being worried to hit a burnout wall after my great January month, and this is what I wrote in the second week of feb "I did hit that wall (screwed around for 2 hrs on thursday PM)...but then recovered and have done okay since, and in the grand scheme of things, that's AMAZING for me (only screwing around for 2 hrs)."  That's how in the zone I was - I complained about 2 hrs.

i turned down a lot of things to stay in the zone - ski weekends, a wedding in Oregon

After one of my best weeks ever in the history of recording checkins: "Why?It wasn't trying harder. It was saying no, keeping my head clear, and getting up really early to knock out all the stuff that I'd usually put off until the end of the day. It feels like a miracle, like I'm a new person. It gives me an insane amount of confidence...So remarkable that the true answer to how to make such dramatic change is basically: do less, say no, cut out the BS...if you do that, all you should be left with is your own voice, and it's plenty wise enough."

chief on service, then clinic

called friends in the evening for awhile

Michelle got sick

Annabelle was born

AMSA speech: Med Students & Adversity

Fancy Nick engagement party #1

INSIGHTS - was getting up at 5am in feb, this got thrown off by a couple days worth of surprises and never recovered. 

Derm rotation, became great friends with Dr. Tobin

last night with Nick as roomate

Nick bachelor party

Nick getting married

took FM boards

delivered baby

South Africa...which included

time in the hospital

going to mosque, buying Quran, time with Uncle

cape point sunset

getting lost on table mountain

run through newlands forrest

robben island/nelson mandela jail cell

rondebosch garden

hiked lionshead

bungee jumped world’s highest

ostrich farm

snowboarded (indoors)

met some cool girls & camped at storms river

INSIGHTS

last year i spent a month abroad and totally fell off the wagon...did incredible by comparison this time. learned from last time.

recording what i did each day really added significantly to the richness of that experience it, because i get to re-experience those memories

Geriatrics, then clinic

Meacham

double date with Dr. Tobin

passed boards

did graduation roast speech, and tried to get drunk

started working out consistently b/c elevated BF % s/p Africa

got UK job

Florida trip to negotiate with landlord

Dale Hollow houseboat trip with Amy’s family

moved into RV, LOTS of time working on it & hosting friends in it

Samuel helped work on the RV, became my friend

family trip down in GA

marriages: Emily Wehrley. Stu Brenner.

INSIGHTS

friends went on a surfing trip to charleston and i turned it down, hard to do, glad i did

“#1 HAVING A MORNING ROUTINE THAT KNOCKS OUT A BIG CHUNK OF THESE <habits> GUARANTEED....I'M JUST TOO ANXIOUS TO INVEST THIS TIME IN THE AM...BUT THAT'S WHAT I SAID IN MEDICAL SCHOOL THAT KEPT ME OUT OF THE GYM FOR YEARS. Wow, i really need to work on controlling anxiety/pressure in the moment.”

went low carb

worked on RV, RV expo

trip to Charleston b/c friend got sick, surfed

started my autobiography

scanned all family photo albums

visited all my old friends

GA visit b/c Melissa back from deployment

Pa visit x 1 wk

INSIGHTS

While in Charleston “it's REALLY hard to steer when you feel pulled all over the place by circumstances. but the consequences of ignoring those circumstances and plowing through are mostly illusory...i could only stop by <the hospital> for one hour 3 times per day and that would be PLENTY of visiting time. i could then spend the rest of the day working by myself”

While scanning photos “why do i feel behind? b/c I am compared to the schedule i made for myself at the beginning of the year. pretty silly to be operating off of a plan you made 6 months ago.”

time with family/grandparents in OR + coast...SUPER quality time

surfing in OR

writing autobio

Spout Springs visit

credentialing for job

pendelton roundup, deck with dad, Bethany visit

garrett NYC proposal trip + Adeel + Chris Salotta visit

INSIGHT

time with gparents was some of the best & most important things I did all year

best month of checkins in ever (4 yrs!!)...not sure why

freaked out about every friend i have getting married/engaged. changed my priority to emotionally fulfilling hangouts instead of caring about ‘romantic relationships’

installed solar panels

autoB progress

started talking/helping Aalap with SignalHealth - DC conference

Such family camping trip

started Curt book

first shift at UK as employee

surf trip to SC with Raney’s

job apps

moved into jenna’s

comedy club with dr tobin

long weekend with DP & friends

ehof - board meeting, event

accomplished my NY resolution!

G life transition meetings

job apps

started Murray Medical, LLC

hurt myself w/flag football

confirmed BIAB project/EHOF book

global entrep week

alejandra x 1 wk, visited everywhere + beaufort

such appreciation dinner

started work at KDMC

INSIGHT

after an 80 checkin week “best week i've ever had in my life. a LOT of it was about saying no to the camping trip this weekend. that was hard, but i'm proud of myself for doing it. also got to practice not feeling sorry for myself by wishing i was somewhere else.”

worked every day at KDMC

Freeda adventures/challenges

brought back 2 people from codes

ski trip with friends at PNS

INSIGHT

Working 34 days in a row was awesome because it created a routine that allowed me to consistently do lots of things (besides work) and improve at a much faster pace in my medical skills & knowledge.

BEST AND WORST OF 2016

BEST

finishing residency & passing boards

not getting a job - was scary, but this provided me the freedom to do lots of other 'life list' important things

having one metric that mattered and tracking that only - doubled down on using coach.me and accomplished my NY resolution for the first time in my life

also...

gave med student adversity speech

Annabelle was born

nick marriage/end of a great roomate run

south africa month

RV - doing what i said

quality time - vegas, grandparents, parents, friends, surfing

WORST

I didn't grow in my romantic relationships as much as i did in 2015 - In 2015 i grew a lot by having the goal to be "terrifyingly honest" in relationships. I didn't push myself to that standard this year and stagnated as a result.

also...

things took longer than I thought - but that was good lesson to learn because it forced me to accept and live by realistic timelines, and because i didn't have a job I could follow all the way through on my plans

RV was more work than expected (example of above) - i first was glad that i spent time getting to know the RV and how to fix things, but i got to the point where i don't care to 'learn' more, i'd rather spend that time being a doctor and use the money made to pay a professional.

i got broke - i coasted on credit cards in the interim between residency and starting a job and got pretty close to 100% broke - but this was also a lesson that was important. things cost more money than you expect and if they are really priorities, then you've got to pay the price, in both time and money.

HABITS ANALYSIS

In my recent post “My Goals for 2017″ I said:

“Last year my goal was to check in to more daily habits on coach.me. And I crushed it. And it had the ripple effect of me crushing a bunch of other areas of my life...when using the 'total number of checkins metric’ I improved 107% since last year and 60% over my best year ever (2013).”

This was the only metric that I tracked week over week. And because of that, for the first time ever, I consistently did week reviews where I knew how far ahead or behind I was from my overall goal (eg on July 1, I should have 1,000 checkins for the year, if I had 1,100 at that point, I would note that I was 10% ahead of schedule). Making this the only metric that I tracked had a positive affect on lots of the parts of my life - most obviously, on each of the areas the specific habit addressed.

So, now I’m going to take each goal and ask:

How much progress did I make?

Is it still a good habit? (keep/toss/change?)

What are the biggest barriers to crushing it and ideas to overcome those barriers?

progress vs 2015: 272 checkins vs 117 checkins. 132% improvement.

I didn't feel like i was growing in this in 2015. I was doing it but didn't feel more calm/mindful throughout the day, which is the whole point. Late this year I downloaded several meditation apps and HeadSpace stood out as far and away the best one.  I've spent at least $100 total at this point and I really am growing in this super important area.  I catch myself (the most important part) getting anxious, frustrated, distracted, etc. and then use the techniques I've learned from this app to get back to calm. Probably the best money I spent all year in terms of its return on my health.

keep/toss/change: definitely keep, continue progress with headspace app

barriers: just making the time, but i'm at a point where i like this enough that it doesn't take discipline. sometimes i do it when i'm tired and don't get much out of it. On those days I should consider doing it twice - the second time when I'm not exhausted.

progress vs 2015: 233 checkins vs 111 checkins. 110% improvement

In 2015 wrote about wanting to feel clear-headed after walking away from a session of reviewing goals & 'visioncasting' and i didn't have a good process for it at the time. Surprising to see that this was still an issue as of the end of 2016. i came up with a system just a couple days ago that will hopefully help with this and i think the reason this will work is because of my improved mental condition/focusing of the mind that came from meditating. Glad to see how long this problem has existed. Should motivate me to solve it this year.

keep/toss/change: keep it as a goal, but changed it as noted above to have some structure

barriers: lack of clarity - which I have now

progress vs 2015: 138 checkins vs 77 checkins. 78% improvement

Posted 60+ things this year, (< 30 last year), did much better, big realization is that this was streaky. Another great example of being able to keep consistent tabs on something because you kept all your data collection in one place (I kept track of all my writing progress on coach.me, including using the notes section to keep track of  when I posted stuff). 

keep/toss/change: I would like to actually start sharing my content somehow. This probably means fiddling with marketing, setting some goals about viewership, but I feel like this might do two negative things: 1. scare me off from writing and 2. change what/how I write.  So will probably at least track viewership or something. 

barriers: none for posting on this blog. Barriers to working on larger projects (book, etc.) are the same that used to (and sometimes still do) keep me from publishing on this blog. Namely: fear. I think the answer for that is writing with friends. Going to try to schedule writing hangouts, even if only brief ones. 

progress vs 2015: 210 checkins vs 80 checkins. 163 % improvement

Goal last year was 200, actual was 80. this year i didn't have a goal but hit 210. Hell. Yes!  Big realization here was starting with one small thing at a time. I went on a streak from august where I added one new thing to my physical health regimen each month, and kept it going consistently until late november, when I got injured playing football, then had a friend visit from out of town for a week, then went on a 34-day straight work assignment away from home. I took January off (though I still had 4 checkins that month + 8 days of skiing, vs my monthly average of 6.7 in 2015) and have been on track 100% thus far this month.

keep/toss/change: change to one small thing I'm doing that month to improve my health. Keep track of it in the notes of exercise. 

barriers: injury (don't play football!).  Simplicity/low bar - adding one small thing per month put me on course to have the best 4 months of physical health progress in years...maybe ever.

progress vs 2015: 153 checkins vs 56 checkins. 173% improvement.

This is a keystone habit. If I do this then everything else goes better. I realized this last year and wrote about how important it was. This year I had the second highest amount of improvement of all my habits (except for eat the frog, which was 193% improvement). I’m super proud of myself for making such amazing progress on this...but it still is the 9th most checked into habit out of 12. As one of the most important habits it should be one of the most checked into. 

keep/toss/change: keep - and double down on it! again!

barriers:  Make sure to identify it when planning the day and checking it off when you do it, even if it’s not a specific action (e.g. if you stayed calm all day).

progress vs 2015: 51 checkins vs 82 checkins. -38 % decrease

I don't have this anymore....but the bigger lesson here is 'what's the thing that causes the background static/stress in your life and what's your process for getting rid of it or ignoring it?'

keep/toss/change: already tossed it, but getting out of my email inbox is my #1 goal for Q1 of 2017 and I'm well on my way. Also, to get rid of the static - my visioncasting format really is helpful in clearing my head to do this.

barriers: I'm addicted to my email inbox. Need to CREATE barriers (and an alternative outlet) to keep me out of it.

progress vs 2015:  113 checkins vs 83 checkins. 36% improvement

i crushed the boards, studying 37 days before taking it (about 83 times the year before total). Totally didn’t deserve that. So no clue what happened there. Then i got a bit lost on what 'studying' made sense. i started with reading a book summary every day, which felt like i was accomplishing something, but none of the content really stuck, even when i reviewed my highlights on the weekends. then changed to tax books, which was awesome bc i wanted to learn that stuff. i still need to nail down what this means and then pick a bite-sized way to chip at it.  I also expect this to change often. I kept track of actual studying vs expected for awhile, which was motivational, as was just hearing that another resident friend of mine was working her ass off. Just hearing her say that she studied 2 hrs per day in addition to her residency duties lit a fire under me.

keep/toss/change: change continually, should be part of planning my day

barriers: lack of clarity on what this means, get rid of it by deciding what it means when i plan my day

progress vs 2015: 348 checkins vs 183 checkins. 90% improvement

Went OFF on this. not sure why other than that it's something you can get away with skipping a day here and there and still check in later. also stopped rating the days - not sure why i did this, other than i couldn't put a number when i tried to think of it. hopefully this is a reflection of an improved attitude and a better acceptance of my life, along with less judgement, which I wrote about on my birthday. 

keep/toss/change: keep, might revitalize the 'today' project, because when I read through my summaries of each day they spark certain memories...but a photo does that so much better.

barriers: none...but might be if I start expecting myself to take a picture.

progress vs 2015: 252 checkins vs 145 checkins. 74% improvement

i've ended up doing this during my 'think about goals' time, which is not when it's supposed to happen. but everything i wrote about this goal last year, applies to this year 

“I’m afraid to do this sometimes, especially if i’m not in bed on time & am tired….because i have to come to terms with all the things i will not get to do tomorrow. But then i end up just feeling sad and like “damn, tomorrow’s going to really suck because i won’t be able to get everything done that i want, and i’m bummed that i didn’t get what i wanted to get done today, too.” Wow, writing that. What a crummy/unintelligent strategy for ending your day.  I HAVE to stop with energy/motivation in the tank so I’ll have the willpower left to accept what has happened that day & decide what i’m going to do the next day…because when I do do this, it really does feel mentally freeing & motivating for getting up in the morning…i literally don’t want to wake up in the morning when I haven’t done this because I just have this ball of vague stress to great me that I feel: “Well, not sure what all this stuff is that i need to do but i know that i’m not going to be able to get as much of it done as i want to and even what i decide to work on i probably won’t get finished which is going to give me a feeling of being even more 'behind’…so yeah - not pumped about this day”. What a terrible cycle of not-awesome!  Glad I articulated the concept of paying the opportunity cost of planning up front.”

 This even happened during my 6 months off, or on days i was truly supposed to be 'on vacation'. the idea of 'i don't want to wake up tomorrow'.  That was a big surprise because i thought it was because of my job. It turns out it was totally because of my attitude - which was affected by my expectations (pay opportunity cost up front) and my energy. I need to manage both of those.

keep/toss/change: keep, but try not to do it until AFTER you've meditated and taken a high level view of your life (visioncasting/reviewing goals) so that you have the right mindset when planning the day.

barriers: my attitude at the end of the day. not wanting to wake up, addressed above.

progress vs 2015: 126 checkins vs 43 checkins. 193% improvement

This was one of the top two most important things on my list to improve from last year...and I did it! This was the most improvement of any of my goals. However, I still have lots of room to get better at this, as it was only the 9th most checked into goal I had. 

keep/toss/change:  keep. duh.

barriers: just having the courage to identify it when planning the day, and then checking it off at the end of the day.

progress vs 2015: 45 checkins vs 18 checkins. 150% improvement 

These were too long and I didn’t have a central place to put them. I changed it and put EVERYTHING in my notes instead of on a spreadsheet or somewhere else and that 100% solved the problem. It kept me keeping track of my progress throughout the year. This little checkin session helped recalibrate me and actually fed my feedback loop. 

keep/toss/change: change to track my 4 goals for the year.

barriers: none. just keep the time expectation down at 10min.

progress vs 2015: 130 checkins vs 68 checkins. 91% improvement

This is a goal that sneaks up on you because the problem is pretty much never solved (my back hurts every day and every night). In retrospect I had an amazing year with it. I was able to sleep on my back for a couple nights in South Africa, was able to stand for significant amounts of time without significant pain, and even let myself be active (i.e. sprinting) to push the boundaries of what’s possible for my back.

keep/toss/change: change by continuing to try new methods and seeing what works

barriers: this is all about minimal time commitment (5-10 min) and building from there, because some of the stretches feel SO GOOD that once I do a few of them I get more into it.

THEMES ANALYSIS

Love

I didn't set the standard of being “terrifyingling honest” so I didn’t get out of (or into situations) fast enough, or at all. 

I also had a breakdown when a bunch of friends got married on the same weekend (felt like I was ‘alone’ or doing something wrong) & redefined what this meant. Ultimately, I’m not worried or ‘empty’ because I’m missing out on physical intimacy, what I’m missing is emotional connection, or interactions that fill my emotional tank. So now that’s what I’m doing - focusing on those kinds of interactions, and turning down ones that are anything less than 8/10 in this respect.

Also, part of this is giving/being selfless and it motivated my goal for this year.

Unplug

I spent time at the cabin and other time just alone, and it was good. Read Deep Work twice. Probably could have said 'no' a little bit more often, especially near the end of the year. Am realizing more and more that this is the ‘answer’ in so many ways. 

CORE VALUES

This is the third year I’ve tried to systematically focus on one core value per week. I didn't do this consistently. I want to give up on it...but so did Ben Franklin. I now have it in my daily visioncasting so I think I'm okay with that. 

EXPECTED VS ACTUAL

At the beginning of the year I listed out what I wanted to happen week to week all year long. It stressed me out once I fell behind this, and I wanted to somehow keep an updated sense of how many iterations happened and what changes were made. I quickly found that keeping track of the iterations was a huge hassle. So this year I’m just trying to book out my calendar really far in advance and chunk it at a high level (i.e. this week I had off and just blocked off “finances/admin” for the week). 

I’ll publish my ‘takeaways’ from this review, as well as things to do differently in 2017 in a later post. 

First Draft: 1/21/17

Published: 3/21/17

Time: 20+ hrs

Image Credit: me, and my buddy Mike Leek

[shirlleycoyle]

How Facebook Trains Content Moderators

Monday morning, the Verge’s Casey Newton published a blockbuster investigation about Facebook’s reliance on American contract workers to moderate its platform. Contract content moderators at Cognizant, a “professional services” company with an office in Arizona, can make as little as $28,800 per year to moderate posts that can include hate, graphic violence and sexual content, and suicide and self injury.

Newton’s piece is a rare window into what it’s actually like to be a Facebook contractor; some of his sources say they’ve been radicalized by the content they click through on a daily basis, others have anxiety and panic attacks, and one moderator says that they’ve started sleeping with a gun. At Cognizant, contract content moderators for Facebook get nine minutes of “wellness time” per day to take mental health breaks. Some of them say they can be fired for having too low of an “accuracy rate.”

Last year, Motherboard senior staff writer Joseph Cox and I spent several months reporting an investigation about how Facebook makes its content moderation policies, and about how its larger apparatus works. As part of that investigation, I went to Facebook’s Menlo Park, California headquarters for on-the-record interviews with the people in charge of the company’s sprawling content moderation operation. One of those leaders was Brian Doegan, who at the time was Facebook’s “Global Learning Leader.” Doegan was in charge of Facebook’s content moderator training practices—essentially, he helped set up the guidelines by which all moderators would be trained, and the best practices for actually training them.

This interview took place at the end of June 2018. Doegan has since left the company. According to active job listings, Facebook has not yet replaced him. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Besides Doegan, Facebook spokespeople Carolyn Glanville and Ruchika Budhraja participated in the interview and added clarifications when necessary. Though Doegan has since left the company, this is still the most extensive interview Facebook has ever given about the specific protocols it has for training moderators and contract employees, as far as I know.

MOTHERBOARD: What is the onboarding process like for a content moderator? BRIAN DOEGEN: After the talent is placed for this role, and obviously we look at language ability, local marketability and things like that, but once the talent is placed, that’s when their learning journey begins. We start off by just acclimating folks to the Facebook culture, what we’re all about, what is our mission. From there, we engage in basically a three-phase approach. I bucket our training onboarding experience into three distinct categories. There’s pre-training which is your onboarding and shadowing, and I’ll say more about that, there’s your formal curriculum, so the comprehensive curriculum, and the materials that we leverage to have that conversation. And then there’s post-training and ongoing reinforcement.

The pre-training is we ensure that all of our reps have an opportunity to actually shadow and observe more experienced people that are actually doing this role. They get a real good sense early on for a day in the life. And there’s a lot of learning there, just by nature of the fact that they have the opportunity to really interact with people that are already doing that job well. So, when they segue into their formal curriculum, it’s several weeks, and it’s very comprehensive. We cover all of our comprehensive community standards, and that exchange, there’s an opportunity for practice, for discussion, for examples. There’s actually a conversation that happens around all of the material.

Does this apply to both contractors as well as… Yeah, it does.

So, everyone. And that’s one thing we’re really proud of is the consistency we have in that space. But on that, it’s really three things working together, right, training is never one and done. So, yes, there’s a healthy element of lecture, which most of us are familiar with just from having been exposed through academia, etcetera, but there’s also an on the job component, but very practical. So, trial and error.

We look at metrics, we actually give you an opportunity to assess your knowledge, in a very safe environment, so that we can provide individual coaching. So, really, lecture, formal training, on the job coaching and mentoring, and just really practical support. And it’s basically, we weave all of that together into a multi-week experience. And every abuse type is different, actioning hate is very different from actioning bullying, which is very different from sexual content. So, from a design perspective, we truly tried to get the right blend of modalities targeted at the right policy. And we’re always evolving that and revisiting that.

Do people specialize in different content types? On the whole, we upskill our moderators, our content reviewers so that they can action all of our abuse types.

“Hypothetically, if you’re struggling with hate, then we can look at the data based on your simulation results, and we can work with you on that topic.”

Even, the trainers, is it like, this is our expert on hate speech, this is the team that’s an expert on hate speech, this is the team that’s the expert on sexual stuff… We definitely have subject matter experts that do specialize in abuse types, and really, the goal of the training function right, is we partner very closely with our subject matter experts so that we can take that information and convert that into the best possible training experience, and then we deliver that to our sites across the world.

CAROLYN GLANVILLE: I’d also elaborate slightly on that…

BRIAN DOEGEN: Sorry if I misspoke.

CAROLYN GLANVILLE: You didn’t at all, you didn’t at all, I just wanted to get a little bit more. So, for our reviewers as he said, they’re trained on all of our community standards, when, what you talked to James about, you have that escalation channel, where they’re slightly more knowledgeable about certain policies, you have the policy team that can dig in on some of those things, all of the nuances are better served there. But, then you also have the markets team, and some of these things kinda go to there, but naturally through the process of our reviewers being onboarded for all our policies, there are certain areas where it takes a little bit more either training, or speciality, like, child exploitative images, that’s not going to be shared widely, there’s a specific subset who are going to be able to deal with those things and deal with them right, through the correct channels. But, training for him globally, is the masses, how do we make sure that the masses are moving together.

BRIAN DOEGEN: Right, and thank you for that, that’s a good point. Just on that for example, training and monitoring against hate in Turkey is very different from monitoring hate in Texas, just culturally, so, to Carolyn’s point, we do leverage what we call our market teams which is a body of professionals that specialize in certain markets and languages, and we often partner with them to make sure that our training has the most relevant examples.

“We don’t teach with an iron fist for lack of a better term”

This is a hard job, content moderator, super hard job, how is that portrayed to the employees when they’re getting started? Is there a period of time where it’s like, this is the type of stuff that you’re going to have to look at every day? This is how you’re going to be judged, is this right for you, is this not right for you, that sort of thing? BRIAN DOEGEN: And we recognize that it’s a hard job. I spend a lot of time monitoring the folks actually actioning this content too, so that I can stay somewhat relevant with everything that’s going on, and monitoring the learning experience. This job is not for everyone, candidly and we recognize that. In my mind, that starts at talent selection. Engaging just through the interview process and selection process, making sure that folks have a high level of understanding what it is that they would be getting into. We also do that through various assessments and other creative approaches to make sure that we’re getting the right people into the roles to begin with. From that point on, one of the reasons we engage in shadowing early on, is we want to give folks the opportunity to live the life of [a moderator], so that they get a realistic flavor of that. And of course, we’re supportive and one of the things I’m quite proud of is that we have such a broad resiliency program, so that everybody does feel supported, and they always have access to resources and services and things like that at any point during this process.

I’m certainly not an expert in HR strategies or training strategies, but I’m curious if the training that you give is modeled on anything like, modeled on an academic theory or modeled on some sort of best practices that have been seen in other industries, or other parts of Facebook, or was it built from the ground up specifically for content moderation? In some regards we’re very unique. We’re the only organization that is providing— this is what gets me excited about my job, right—this kind of training at this scale, based on a relatively emerging area, and of course training and corporate training has a lot of legacy models.

The one that we seem to have identified with the most is called the 70-20-10 model. And again, take the numbers aside for just a minute, but the elevator pitch of that model suggests that roughly 70 percent of what you know as a professional, as an editor, as a reporter, you probably learned through on the job, practice. 20 percent through coaching, and having had the pleasure of working with people who can show you the ropes. And 10 percent through formal learning. So, we try to balance the formal learning, on the job practice, and then coaching as well, so that model does fit very well in terms of what we’re trying to do, and we keep that in the heart of everything we do. Because, as we talked about, training is never a one size fits all, and it’s never one modality, it’s a mix of different kinds of formats.

Is there a period of time where people are making content moderation decisions on a dummy site or test site or something like that? Yes, we offer opportunity for practice, and a very valuable tool that we have at our disposal that we’re now introducing is a simulation mode that allows you to action true to life content. It’s a replica of the same system that these folks are using every day, purely for the purposes of learning and practice. So, the decisions made there don’t impact the community of 2 billion people, so, for us that’s been a really valuable tool because we get data and a practice opportunity, but we go beyond that, and that gives us a really great avenue to provide personalized coaching. So, hypothetically, if you’re struggling with hate, then we can look at the data based on your simulation results, and we can work with you on that topic.

We also launched assessments and tests, and again, they replicate, they look more or less just like the same application that folks are using [on the live site], so, alongside what we call the simulation mode, we have and we will continue to use assessments as well. You will get a sampling of let’s say, 20 jobs, 30 jobs, however many it takes in a certain abuse type, and that is our version of what we would call a classic assessment. That plus practice typically work together really well, I just wanted to get that plug in there, because I feel like that is a truly active ingredient that we use as well.

What is success for a content moderator, in terms of obviously you want 100 percent accuracy, but what are they shooting for realistically? What makes a good content moderator, is it 99 percent accuracy, according to someone who audits it later, or… I feel like we don’t publicize the actual metrics, like 100 percent is always the goal, and maybe Carolyn you can say a little bit more about that, but, that is always the goal. Because at the end of the day, behind every abuse type, around every report is a person and that’s what makes this such a challenging position.

“Whereas some it’s fine to just go walk across the hall to a counselor, and they don’t care, in other cultures, they don’t do that, they would do it off hours, and other people might not know about it.”

CAROLYN GLANVILLE: I think you would be surprised at how high the accuracy rate is, but the reasons that we haven’t really talked about it to date is because, like he said, those errors, that do exist, is a person, and those are the ones that get publicized, and those are the ones where people are upset, and so, no matter what our number is, it’s never going to be enough, and we’re always trying to work towards reaching that state of not having mistakes.

When you’re training people, or when you’re onboarding them, you obviously stress that you want 100 percent accuracy, but of course mistakes are going to get made, and I assume that working under the assumption that if I make any mistake, it could be catastrophic, is probably not realistic. So, how is that messaged to people? BRIAN DOEGEN: Learning is a safe environment, it’s just for the purposes of learning, right? So, we don’t teach with an iron fist for lack of a better term, and I can tell you, from design through execution through monitoring, my team is also consistently evaluating the quality of these programs, the focus is really on the community.

RUCHIKA BUDHRAJA: I wonder if some of that is on us to be setting expectations externally. Like, we aren’t going to be perfect, I think we say that a lot, but what’s the alternative of not being perfect? Everything being swept up by automation, you know, people don’t want that, and so when you need to have people, you’re going to have mistakes. I think we’re also trying to talk more about automation and our algorithms, so, maybe the two go hand in hand. If reviewers see us talking about this externally, then they’re not as overwhelmed internally.

CAROLYN GLANVILLE: I would say there’s probably very few cases, I can’t speak to specific examples, where someone is let go for making a mistake, from Brian’s world. If we start to see that mistakes are being made, that either means retraining needs to happen, or it’ll end up in kind of the other flow where we’re starting to see people making mistakes on this kind of content, maybe there’s something in our policy we need to look at, maybe there’s a gap in our tooling, maybe there’s some other thing that’s not quite identified yet. So, it’s not so much, I think the mistakes also help to surface some of those things, which is a good thing that we need to address.

“There’s actual physical environments where you can go into, if you want to just kind of chillax, or if you want to go play a game, or if you just want to walk away, you know, be by yourself, that support system is pretty robust”

Are most of the trainers content moderators who have just been through the ranks? BRIAN DOEGEN: Some are, yes, absolutely, because, that has been great for us because it also provides career pathing. Folks that are truly exceptional have a drive to do a little bit more, and have a drive for coaching and mentoring, often do come into the role of the trainer, or training lead, even.

As far as resiliency goes, I know a lot has already been written about that, this job is difficult, you’re looking at graphic images often, hate speech, things like that. But what do you offer? From a training perspective, we touch upon [resiliency] in each of our abuse types. It’s something we talk about, we revisit it early on, in that training module, so we don’t just radically expose you, but rather we do have a conversation about what it is, and what we’re going to be seeing etcetera, to make sure that we’re level set. I think the broader resiliency efforts for me, and what I admire is that at any point in this role, you have access to counsellors, you have access to having conversations with other people. There’s actual physical environments where you can go into, if you want to just kind of chillax, or if you want to go play a game, or if you just want to walk away, you know, be by yourself, that support system is pretty robust, and that is consistent across the board.

CAROLYN GLANVILLE: From the training perspective, I think one thing that’s interesting, not even so much from the training, but resiliency in general, I guess, you look at the global nature of what we do, we offer resiliency counseling to anyone that reviews content, but look at the cultural acceptance in certain places in the world, and it’s not necessarily culturally acceptable to take that sort of help, or to talk to someone publicly, so we have to work very closely with either our vendor partners or our sites or whatever it might be, whatever kind of setup it is, to make sure that their employees know what is available in a way that is also culturally acceptable for them. Whereas some it’s fine to just go walk across the hall to a counselor, and they don’t care, in other cultures, they don’t do that, they would do it off hours, and other people might not know about it. It’s just interesting that we have to take those cultural nuances into account, when ensuring that people even know about the resources that are available.

Do you have to do that in terms of the actual training as well, just like, people in this part of the world learn in this way, this is best practices in India, this is best practices in like… BRIAN DOEGEN: Learning is as much of an art as it is of a science. As an insanely data-driven company, right, it’s not down, to, like, there’s no research that says this is the way to teach in India, that doesn’t exist. But what we do though, is that people can see here, and interact with what they’re learning. Our goal is really to accommodate a wide variety of different cultural learning styles. And that’s why we place so much emphasis on different modalities. If that answers your question. But, you’re asking a question that no learning professional has been able to answer with military precision, I can tell you that. But it’s a great question, don’t get me wrong.

You mentioned that teaching is art, not science. Content moderation is art not science, as well… Or art and science. Yeah, there is a science, there’s a methodology for how we triage need and so on that we use, the ISD methodology.

Do you think that Facebook values the role of the human in this process? Absolutely, in my mind that’s evidenced based on the pure nature of, like, our scaling and growing, and we’re placing so many resources behind this to get it right. In my 17 year career, for what that’s worth, I’ve not quite seen an attempt to invest this highly in that function.

How Facebook Trains Content Moderators syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[icodogio]

The Story of ICODOG, November Progress Report

Crashing through the support lines like a Boss

If you are reading this, then your awesome! ICO DOG started off as a simple twitter channel in January 2018. People started to follow the dog, because we provided useful insights into ICO investing and whitelist links. Back then people still had to race everyone else to get into these things, before they would dump hard. 

In February we then had the first guys asking us to make a telegram chat room for the community and use primablock to pool funds together to send to such projects. It was a very exciting time to see ICO DOG brand grow so organic. After that, the market crashed 20% every single day. That was a rough period. To be honest, the whole year was a stony road. 

Several people came together, that were very active in the telegram channel and formed a team. It was like a mini DAO. We had review & marketing guys, tech guys, lawyer team and all that happened by itself on Telegram. We build the first Presale Platform, created a cool UI for users introduced a level system to build the community and later even added master nodes. However, things just became more and bleaker. As Bitcoin fell closer to $3000 more people left and the group became silent. 

Sounds like a sad story right? Well, every good storyline has a downturn, followed by a boost of motivation to get through all the shit. 

A few months ago, we decided that the ICO space became a bit too scammy in 2018. We started to become more selective with the investment choices and eventually stopped pooling altogether. Pooling was about winning together, and it’s not fun if everybody loses. 

We started to look into other forms of revenue that we can build up to keep us over water until the bear market is over. What we love to do the most is community building, and community is the MOST important aspect of a decentralized network. 

The idea of blockchain was it to move from a centralized system to a decentralized one. This word decentralized is being thrown around on a daily basis although most people still do not understand what it means to change the architecture from centralized to decentralized. Most if not all big projects still have a very centralized structure going on with a few exceptions like Bitcoin, Ethereum & Steem. 

Understanding decentralized Architecture 

A decentralized architecture is fundamentally different to anything we know as of know. That’s also why it’s so hard to understand. Think of bitcoin as the first decentralized company. Let’s call it Bitcoin Crop.

To help understand the Bitcoin Company metaphor, let’s say bitcoins properties are the products that this new decentralized company is producing. Common things said about Bitcoin is its decentralized, censorship resistance peer to peer money. These are often the terms used when people tell you why you should buy bitcoin. Bitcoin is the fastest growing asset of all time. Therefore Bitcoin as the first decentralized company is the fastest growing Company in the world, reaching an evaluation of over 300 Billion USD in less than 10 years.

Although the Bitcoin Company is producing high-quality stuff, the products themselves are only as good as the sales, distribution, marketing and that where decentralized architecture kicks centralized companies ass. 

To make things even more complicated we now have to rethink what it means to be paid and to receive a salary. In a centralized company, build on the centralized architecture model, you work for your boss, who has a boss and that boss gets told what to do by some CEO who then has to take his others from shareholders. The money “trickles down” the food chain and by the time it reaches the bottom almost all of it is gone. 

Let’s compare this with the first decentralized company Bitcoin. In the Bitcoin company its a bit more complicated than that. In the early days of the company, if you want to work there, you actually have to pay the company first! Crazy I know! Think of it as some tribute to show your loyalty to the Network. The earlier you join, the less you have to pay, and the more of the company network you own. 

In the early days of Bitcoin Corp. most of the employees there were just engineers and a few crazy marketing guys. Things became a lot more interesting in 2013, when some important people started to work at Bitcoin Corp. People like the Winklevoss twins, Roger ver, Chamath Palihapitiya and many others bought a big share in Bitcoin Corp. and thereby earned the right to work for the Bitcoin. After that, Bitcoin Corp started to grow exponentially, because those new high-class employees had a lot of leverage and even more incentive to grow Bitcoin. The harder they would work the bigger the company would become and the more valuable there coins would be. 

This was the birth of the first decentralized payroll. Most of the mentioned people earned millions working for Bitcoin and are still working hard getting ETFs approved and spreading the word about it. Every person that owns Bitcoin becomes an employee at Bitcoin Corp. Everybody is rewarded for the work that anybody does, and everybody is incentivized to help grow the Bitcoin company. 

  Introducing a New Way of Doing Everything

A few months ago, we decided to build software to help ICOs build their own decentralized Networks. We called the system Proof of Engagement and called the Software the DAO Maker. Pun intended.

Proof of Engagement is a concept that helps onboard new users and uses token bondage curves and community incentive to create an organic community of long-term token holders. We took our functions that we build to detect contributors in an ICO pool and combined it with our Point system to great a smart community program. The idea is that users can join the ICO before it starts and do community work, quizzes, and other services before the public sale ends. Once the tokens are unlocked, those users that joined the ICO will get their investment tokens + engagement reward tokens. Users can then continue to earn community bonus tokens monthly, but ONLY if they keep their ICO token in the wallet which they used for investing into the ICO.

The monthly rewards increase with:

Time user holds the initially invested coins. 

Time users hold their earned engagement tokens.

The total amount of tokens held by registered users.

The total amount of tokens user is currently holding.

Current users community level.

Monthly earned points. 

All of these factors are added together, to give the exact value that a user will receive monthly. Put simply its a micro staking system, that rewards engaged users in tokens. The result is a dynamic token bonded community. People have incentives to build and help the network, the more experience that have the more tokens they will own, the more tokens they will earn. The system incentives loyalty and hodlers, while also makes it possible for new users to join the system and help the network to grow.

For a deeper understanding on Dynamic Token Bonding Curves you can check out some publications on Token Economy here 

The best KYC & AML & CTF in Crypto

For the past months, we were talking to A LOT of KYC providers. We quickly came to the conclusion that most of them are scams. The state of Anti Money laundry in crypto is pretty scary. I lots of people will end up in court for violating the AML directives. Currently, most ICOs do not comply with KYC & AML laws. The EU currently requires to be compliant until the 4th EU AML directive, which will change in 2019. We are already compliant with EU AMLD5, which is not in force yet but already includes cryptocurrencies, we are a step ahead of the curve in the EU.

Starting this week, we will introduce the new KYC & AML features on our Platform. We are using the newest system of machine learning to scan a users face and password as well as detecting an applicants voice, to generate a complete biometric signature of his application. We will be able to onboard KYC & AML application in real time and will be one of the first fully compliant with the new regulations of 2019.

    Updates to ICODOG Reviews

We changed the homepage for ICO DOG to show more crypto stories, reviews and post analysis. We are working on a more in-depth redesign for ICODOG.IO in 2019. We added a few new Blog sections namely,  ICO Analysis and Post ICO Reviews and Crypto Stories.

We want to take more time in 2019 to evaluate ICOs that concluded their Sale in 2017 & 2018. We are planning to make this a decentralized work effort with the help of Token Curated Lists (TCL). We will make a few posts about TCL in the next few weeks. ICODOG.IO is focusing on providing value-adding content, not the same stuff that the mainstream crypto outlets write about. This will be a really cool project that we are very excited to start next year and finish by end of Q1 2019.

We welcomed 3 new writers to the ICODOG team and are trying to produce useful content every day. 

New Partnerships & Business Development

Last month we Partnered up with several high-quality service providers as well as high potential ICOs. We will add all of the new partners on the Partners on the Partners tap of the updated website. Looking forward to building the new world with likeminded people.

ICO DOG Platform Upgrade 2.0 

We been very busy and added a lot new feature on ICO DOG Investment platform. We are still in bug hunting so if you use the bug bounty tap on the platform to help us. We added some cool features that will make the life of many a lot easier.

Automated twitter confirmation

Users once a user connects their Twitter account in the profile section and starts generating tweets and retweets, these actions will be detected at midnight automatically. That means users do not need to click claim every day, but instead can earn points directly on Twitter.

Reddit Automated Integration 

Users can now also join the Reddit campaign and generate threads and comments to spread the word about ICO DOG. We increased the team to help with the distribution of content among all the social media accounts. This should help you guys earn points quicker and easier as well as build a community on Reddit. 

For launching this new system we are increasing the points for reddit registrations by 3x. 

Ambassador Program 

We added an Ambassador Program for the ICO DOG community. We added Ambassador status to several people already that have been part of the community for almost a year and been working together through this bear Market. Ambassadors have special rights and access to social media accounts, discord reddit and will be informed about the latest updates.

ICO DOG COIN

We plan to introduce the ICO DOG Coin next year. This coin will be the fuel that powers all of the ICO DOG utility. Ambassadors will get monthly airdrops in the ICODOG coin depending on their contribution. Part of the revenue that ICO DOG will make goes into the coin via buybacks and token burns. As we are not raising any funds from nobody, the coin is cannot be considered a security.

All new Features Summarized

Following a few of the new features: + Upgraded pool system: – new wallet management – my pools is now a list (click the red sync button to update your pools) – record and track all the transaction you have sent, even from different address – improved overall working flow + Add reddit integration with auto check (it runs every day) + Weekly competition + Global real-time notifications + Two factor authentication support (Google authenticator) + Twitter with auto claim (it runs every day, no need to click Claim anymore) + Many other new features and bug fixes

  Summary

This year was rough, but we did not give up. The harder Bitcoin Dumps, the harder we work! Things could be better in terms of the market, but fundamentally ICO DOG is doing pretty good. We want to thank all those that have been with us on this amazing journey since the beginning. 

Crypto will change the world and we will help make that happen. 

If you like what we do please register on the icodogpool platform and shill this and other-other content! As always like, share and join discord & telegram.

  The post The Story of ICODOG, November Progress Report appeared first on ICODOG.

source https://icodog.io/crypto-stories/the-story-of-icodog-november-progress-report/

[topicprinter]

Join for a chat with the master of SaaS and startup growth, Sujan Patel. Sujan is the co-founder of Mailshake, Pick, ContentMarketer, Narrow, Linktexting, Quuu, Ramp Ventures, Web Profits, … a never-ending list of companies 😲He is a serial, but even more so a parallel entrepreneur, who likes to keep pushing his own limits to the extreme.Sujan knows all about building startups and is an awesome guy to have a coffee with.As always, I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and was glad we got this one on tape.You can read the transcript below or head to the podcast in the original post (the link is at the bottom) 👇---Jeroen: Hi Sujan, great to have you on Founder Coffee.Sujan: Hey, thanks for having me. Very, very excited to talk to you.Jeroen: Me too. You’re founder of a whole bunch of companies, can you give us the list?Sujan: Yeah, there’s a bunch. So to keep it simple, I’m a managing partner at Ramp Ventures.We own six SaaS companies and operate five. So I’m the founder of Mailshake or rather, the cofounder of Mailshake, Narrow.io, Pick.co, Voila Norbert. There’s probably a few I’m forgetting here! Yes, Linktexting.com.I run a couple of SaaS companies essentially, and I also run a digital marketing agency, called web profits.Ramp Ventures and the agency are two very different businesses. But yeah, I love helping people and working on their growth. I guess I’ve doubled down over and over to the point where I have six different things going on at the same time!Jeroen: How do you manage all of these things at once?Sujan: Yeah, so it’s quite difficult to be honest. But it’s also not as bad.The one thing I do to help myself manage multiple things is, focus on every single company in the same way. You’ll notice that all our SaaS companies have a common trend between them — not the products, but sometimes, the industry. But most importantly, you’ll see us using similar tactics, strategies and channels to grow.We basically try it once, master it, figure out a process and then identify a way to do it over and over again for the other companies.Sujan: I’ll give you an example. We’re working on onboarding improvements for our products and are also testing a referral program.We’re testing the referral program in the company that’s the least risky one, Narrow.io, to see how it works. Getting people to be active is a big challenge. I know the pitfalls because I’ve set up a lot of different referral programs. They usually don’t work as well as you want. So we’re going to test it out and if it works, we’ll know how to apply the same strategy to the other companies.Sujan: Mailshake has 12,000 customers right now. I definitely don’t want to do any tests on that one because there could be a lot of blowback.So when we do things like this, it improves our efficiency and it also our effectiveness because we’re not scaling things that are half-baked ideas. We’re scaling things that are proven and have metrics behind it. It helps us do our jobs better.The other thing is, I think working on multiple projects, businesses and switching gears all the time is something that I enjoy doing. I’ve worked on the agency side before this and I’ve worked with various companies as well where I was in charge of marketing multiple products. So I kind of got used to it.Sujan: I go into one business for a day, implement a bunch of things that may take a week or two to get data or even get developed, and then come back to it a week later to check on what’s happening, how it went.Jeroen: Is Mailshake the bigger one in the portfolio?Sujan: Yeah, Mailshake’s one of the bigger ones. At least the most successful one.Jeroen: Is there any bigger idea behind the portfolio?Sujan: Well, I think the bigger idea is to buy and grow SaaS companies.You’ll notice one thing about the portfolio. They’re kind of an evolution, especially over the last three years.We started Mailshake and Narrow in 2015. Our goal was to see if we can even do this. Can we even grow a business every year?Next year, we proved ourselves we could. It all worked and both the companies grew.But we also realised that it takes a while to build stuff, so we decided to buy what’s already out there. Our next goal was to see if we can grow a company that we didn’t build.Sujan: In 2017, we bought Norbert and we’re growing that. It’s grown over 2x in the seven months we’ve owned it. So the answer to our question was definitely a yes.We are not focused on working with a specific industry. Although I know sales and marketing the best, so obviously we get a lot more stuff in that space. But the thing is, we’re looking at even HR for that matter. We’re really looking at anything in the market that we can grow.Jeroen: So how did you get into building, growing and buying SaaS companies? How did that start?Sujan: You know I’ve always been infatuated with SaaS and software. When I was running my first agency called Single Grain, I worked with lots of different SaaS and software companies. We were helping them grow and it was then that I realised that I really wanted to do this.So while I was working on my first agency, I was also trying to build some stuff on the side. It always failed.I went to a startup weekend, found a developer, tried to build an idea but they were kind of crappy. Reality is, I was just kind of not that good at being a software guy.I was really good as a marketer, I was good as a top of the funnel guy. I knew how to grow businesses and so, I would always get hired to work on that aspect. For example, I’ve worked with Salesforce, helped Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics too. Seeing these companies grow the way they are, I’m like wow!Sujan: Meanwhile, I realised that agency margins are not the greatest.Jeroen: I agree, they’re not.Sujan: Running an agency is a grind, right?I mean, I love it. But selling hours and time is often difficult to keep up with. My point being that I was always envious of the software side.But since I tried and failed a couple of times, I decided to first educate myself in software. That’s when I sold my first agency, end of 2013 and got some pretty good runway. I told myself that I’m going to get my master’s and I’m going to do nothing else.Sujan: That’s when I got to see the mobile space, built some mobile apps and tried to grow those. Was even successful at it!Didn’t really make much money off it, got into a lawsuit due to a copyright as well. I had actually bought an app from somebody and they had a copyright issue on their main image, that they failed to mention during acquisition. I ended up paying a fat fee because of that.I killed all my profits.Anyhow, I ended up working and going to work for a company called WhenIwork.com as the Head of Marketing or say the VP of marketing. It was previously a client of mine. But my goal after SingleGrain, was to go and learn the software space.Sujan: And by learn, I didn’t just want to read it. I wanted to live it, breathe it. I gave myself 5 years there. I told myself that I’m going to go through an exit as an employee and I’m going to take a break from entrepreneurship.That lasted for just six to seven months.It is then that I ran into my Co-Founder from Narrow, Jared and hunted down my Co-Founder from Mailshake, Colin. I found two dovers that loved to work with me. And honestly, we worked well together.So I decided to go ahead with it again. One of these would definitely work, right? It was like I had two chances to succeed.I started moonlighting the software space. After a while, I felt like I got really comfortable on the marketing side, but what I didn’t know was customer support.Sujan: Like, I knew all the theories behind it from all the reading. But when you get in there yourself, it’s very different. The sales side, customer success, the operations, the development and everything else are very difficult to do. And they all hold equal parts in running a company, when compared to marketing.Jeroen: How did you actually get into marketing in the first place? Like, you worked for big companies and helped to grow them. How did this come about?Like, I knew all the theories behind it from all the reading. But when you get in there yourself, it’s very different. The sales side, customer success, the operations, the development and everything else are very difficult to do. And they all hold equal parts in running a company, when compared to marketing.Jeroen: How did you actually get into marketing in the first place? Like, you worked for big companies and helped to grow them. How did this come about?Sujan: So I got into marketing because of my cousin, Neil Patel. He was in high school and I think that was like my first year of college. He was like, “Sujan, you got to check out this this SEO thing.”And I was like, “What’s SEO?”So first of all he was like, “You got to check out the Internet, you can make a lot of money online.”I’m like, “That sounds like a scam.” Then he’s like, “No, no, seriously, check it out once.” That’s exactly what I did.I got into search engine optimization at that moment. He was like I’ll show you how to do it and then we could make something out of it. Back then, I didn’t know. We were young kids. It turns out that he told me about a lot of stuff around SEO, pointed me in the right direction, but didn’t really teach me much. Unfortunately, Neil’s style of training is putting you in the deep end.Sujan: Which is great, because I learned the hard way. So in college, I was just doing SEO consulting on part-time, instead of getting a part-time job or whatever. As SEO evolved, I kind of became more of a T-shaped marketer, learned other marketing channels like PPC, and social media.I got into SEO before social media even existed. That was the time when platforms like Digg had started. It was very early on and my role expanded to be more of a T-shaped all rounder in marketing.Jeroen: So you went straight from college to having your own agency?Sujan: Well, yes. I was in college when I started Single Grain. It worked well as a part-time college gig but not so well as a full-time job or making a living out of. So I ended up getting a job at an agency, putting mine on hold and just kind of working my way up from an entry-level SEO person to the Head of SEO in two years.I realized that this workforce thing is not for me. I need to go do my own stuff and so I restarted the Single Grain business and kept going.Jeroen: Why was the workforce thing not for you?Sujan: I went from an entry-level employee to the director-level in just two years. I kind of hacked my way up there. Every move I made, I took a leap and I was lucky at the time because a lot of people were investing into it.But ultimately, I felt like there was a cap on how much money I could make. I was 23 and making six figures already. With bonuses and revenue share, I was clearing almost 200k a month. In fact, a bit more.Sujan: I took a look at what the wages for the next two-three level would be and honestly, they weren’t much better than what I already had.I was like, okay, I have no college degree because I dropped out. So I could grind this out and kind of work my way up.I was 23 and knew that I could always go back to doing what I was doing if I failed. I wanted to make millions and at the time, I just knew it was marketing. I couldn’t be sitting in meetings, looking endlessly at PowerPoint presentations — which I believed was the life of an executive marketing person at any large company.Sujan: That’s what brought me into doing my own business. The company I was working with was downsizing and I was like, this seems like a good time to leave but also had an opportunity for me.So I convinced them to be my first client at the agency and I locked in an year’s contract with them. I also got them to pay me more than what my salary was.I was like, “Look, you guys are laying off people. You’ve just laid off like four or five people in the SEO team that I was running. There’s three people left on the team and I could do all the work myself. Not necessarily the people on the team, but the people you just let go of. So de-risk the position and move me to being a contractor. I want to start an agency anyways.”So yeah, that worked really well and I gave us an year to either fail or succeed. It ended up working out.Jeroen: So that was how you started off on your own. Was it with the intention to only grow your agency or were you already thinking about other products?Sujan: At that time I was not really thinking about products. I was thinking more about what businesses can I get into.What are the businesses that I can even start? What do I have the skill sets for?We even did some affiliates. So I was doing affiliate marketing and working on lead generation sites. I was also doing a lot of SEO and marketing for the travel space.That’s when I thought that we could work on lead generation for insurance in travel. So I built out some sites and it worked pretty well for some time. That was the extent of my product experience then. It was like working on and promoting someone else’s product.Jeroen: That’s really cool. Are any of your startups VC funded or are they all bootstrapped?Sujan: I’m a partner in Quuu.co and that is a funded startup. That’s the only one. For the others, we haven’t raised a Series A or anything like a seed funding yet. There’s also one that we don’t run through Ramp Ventures just because we’re a partner and there’s an awesome team behind it based in the UK.Jeroen: Is it a conscious choice not to raise money?Sujan: Yeah, absolutely.I’ve worked with lots of different VCs. They actually refer us quite a bit of business and I’ve seen the insides of a SaaS company, working with VCs. And realistically, I didn’t want to have a job that I was forced to do for 10 years.That’s how I look at getting an investment.The reason I say 10 years or failure really, is that if you’re taking $500, $1,000, $1 million, $20 million, $100 million, whatever it is, the bigger it is the longer the commitment.The VCs don’t want to see things do well, they want to see things explode or implode.So that means you have to hire fast, grow as a team and do so many other things that you otherwise, would consider irresponsible.Sujan: I wanted to build something sustainable. We could have easily raised money for Mailshake or any other venture. I could have also joined some firms as a ER, jumped on as a Co-Founder of a business. But I wanted to have my cake and eat it too.I wanted to make money ‘now’, but I also wanted to make a lot of money later on when something grew or at a potential exit. So, I figured I’ve got enough capital to kind of get things off the ground. For the last few years, I am running an agency because that’s how I make a living and I don’t need to take any money off the SaaS products I am working on.It kind of allows us to grow without anything else.One of the things I realized is that I don’t want to take a shot at making $1 billion or creating this crazy, big company. I don’t want to be restricted to taking one shot in 10 years and then look at my life like I did none of what I wanted to.I didn’t just want to give up and go do something like getting a job. I wanted to take more than just that and I wanted it quick. Doing things quicker meant not letting anyone tell me what to do.Obviously we’ve got some advisors. My partner in Ramp Ventures is an ex-VC and he’s very experienced in capital raising.Let’s just say, we’re meeting only 30% of our company goals. Now if someone offers us a ridiculous amount of money for it or even a reasonable amount, I want to be able to make my own decision. I never wanted to have a board tell me what I can or cannot do.Jeroen: Yeah, that’s definitely what happens when you have VCs onboard. When you buy a business, what is exactly the goal you have in mind? Like where do you see the business going?Sujan: My goal is to try to grow the business. Obviously, I won’t buy a business that I don’t think I can grow. I want to be able to understand who the customers are and see if we can make a better product for them, and identify where its strengths are.If I think I can grow the business by 10X, then I usually dig deeper. Like, taking a look at the competition, what’s out their, what their weaknesses are and talking to customers. Really, it’s awesome to get into the details to understand a business more. It’s even making me better at running my own business!Jeroen: For those with a small SaaS business out there that might be interested in selling, what kind of businesses are you looking for?Sujan: We’re looking for really businesses that are somewhere between 100K ARR to a million. They could be in any industry really, but are wanting to be or are already into SaaS. I just want to make sure that we’re able to grow them. So if anyone out there knows someone who is interested, let me know!Jeroen: What business do you spend most of your time on now?Sujan: Right now, in the last few months, I’ve been kind of serving as a customer success person for Mailshake. I’m kind of known for like going into different businesses to try something new.So for example, we want to test out if customer success is the right hire for us or should we just hire a salesperson.I want to see if we get hundreds of new customers signing up, will engaging them get us anything? I mean I know it will. Talking to customers is definitely very valuable, but do customers want to talk to us? What are the KPIs of this role? What are the goals that we’re meeting here?I want to serve as that role to be able to understand the nitty gritty of it.Sujan: You know, last year I was doing a lot of the marketing for Mailshake. But now for content marketing, we’ve hired a resource. So we’re pretty much serving as the roles that are potentially coming and then working on looking for somebody who could kind of manage it well.But I’m also doing onboarding and things with other businesses.For like example, Norbert. We’re expanding the product to add a few more things to what it already does. It has fallen way behind over the years and the competition has gotten way ahead.So we’re kind of expanding to try and catch-up with the market. I don’t really need to be in the day to day of those things, but that was something me and my partner, Bob, worked on three months ago.He’s kind of carrying that and once it is live, it will be my turn to do more of the marketing for it.I can go in and out of businesses fairly easily. I do that almost on a daily basis. For instance, I worked on Pick yesterday. We worked on all of the onboarding and some technical stuff to kind get the email marketing automation set up.That’s going to take two days for my developer team to execute. So now I’m going back to Mailshake to continue doing what I was doing.Jeroen: So if I understand it well, you focus very much on experimenting, improving and then delegating. Is that right?Sujan: Yeah. Delegating and in some cases, choosing not to do things.For example, we’re working on using the ICE framework — Impact, Confidence, Ease of Implementation, in rating all of our ideas.A lot of times we decide not to do things. Like I already have the product roadmap for the next year and a half for Mailshake. I know exactly what we’re going to do and build for Norbert.Some of these things we decided not to do immediately. We try to prioritize and that comes from extreme discipline. But it also comes from having limited resources and budget constraints.Those two things have leveled me up as a human being, as well as a marketer. Because having those constraints really forces you to think about what you want to do and what you should be doing.Sujan: I think, most marketers and also most Founders, get really carried away with the fact that they can do a lot of things. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you should do those things or those are the right things to do.I always go through the exercise of answering, is this the absolute right thing to do? We usually move at a slower pace than most and don’t do a lot of the things we’ve listed down. But that also means, we end up doing things better.Sujan: You know, one of the things I really believe in and am not an expert in but a part of, is great UX. I think like the end consumer when we’re working on Mailshake, Pick and some of our other companies. I like to think if the product is really easy to use and how we can get it right in the first go.Because a competitor may have more features and a better pricing, but if ours is the easiest to use, people will fall in love with it.Jeroen: Right. So when we look at the different tools you have in your portfolio, the common thread is probably their ease of use?Sujan: Yeah, exactly! They’re really simple and easy to use.I think that’s kind of our motto — especially for Mailshake. At Ramp Ventures too, we want to make things as easy to use as possible for our target demographic.And that often means saying no to building out features, saying no to doing things that make things complicated.We get feature requests all the time. I don’t want to say no immediately, so I take a note of it and make a list of things that our customers want. For example, a lot of our customers really want us to build a CRM. They want to be able to do everything inside of Mailshake. But if we did that, the dashboard’s going to become very confusing.So I know our customers want a certain functionality, but building it out right away isn’t really the best move. I’d rather go and integrate with you guys because that’s what your core functionality is and you’re already great at it. Honestly, I don’t know any tool that can do it all without compromising on the UX.If you look at HubSpot or Salesforce, you don’t hear people saying that they love the fact that they can do everything on one tool. They just say they use the tools because they are using them for something else as well. But they don’t love them because they do everything!Jeroen: I agree. It tends to make the solution very complicated, difficult to navigate. It obviously has some advantages but it doesn’t make it fun or like a joy to use it.Sujan: Yeah, exactly.I found that fun and enjoyable to use is actually the thing that is the marketing engine. So in the early days of Mailshake, I spoke to a few customers who were willing to have a conversation with me. We have three different use cases or personas for Mailshake and this customer fit none.We have marketers use the tool for link building content for instance, then it also sees some use cases in the recruiting side of things, HR and PR. Basically, for cold emailing.Now the person I am speaking to, is a salesperson. He runs an eight person sales team and they have just signed up. So I wanted to know who this guy was really and what potential did he see in Mailshake?I spoke to him and he said that he uses Mailshake for a few things and that even though it didn’t serve a lot of the functionality that he needs, it is a tool that his team can get started on immediately. He said that’s why he loved the tool. He told me that he didn’t care if the tool costed him 20 bucks or $5000 a month, because it made his team more productive and the net gain on efficiency is in the tens of thousands.Jeroen: Yeah, most people are not really tech savvy. You need to make it super easy for them to become productive. So what is it exactly that keeps you going?Sujan: You know, I get really excited about doing something, winning or seeing the results of hard work. I’ll give you an example and this is not even a monetary change or win.Past Monday, we implemented this form. We knew people were signing up on Mailshake and there were some active users too — for us, these are people who have sent out at least one campaign using the tool. So they went through the at least 5 or 6 steps of setting up their email, writing the email, figuring out who to contact and more.We wanted to survey the 12,000 customers that we have to know what do people really use Mailshake for.I’ve talked to hundreds of users, actually probably 1000 by now. But there are still 11,000 of them that I haven’t gotten a chance to interact with.There are literally dozens of use cases, but I wanted to hear it from our users. So we implemented this forced feedback form that pops up right after you send a campaign. It asks a simple question, “What are you using Mailshake for?” and says, “Tell us more so we can make the software better for you.”We literally forced every single customer to answer this for us — even those who haven’t sent out a campaign before. There’s no way to close or avoid the feedback form.In the first one hour of implementation, we got 500 people who answered it. Within the first day, we ended up getting 1,300 responses and now, we’re pacing at like 2,500. This was done just three days ago. It’s exciting to see all the quantitative as well as qualitative information from people who are using Mailshake. Some of them are sending us feature requests, while others are telling us how they integrate it with another tool to serve a workflow.Sujan: One of the metrics that we don’t really track, is the DAU (daily active users), because I really don’t care about that. I just like to look at the campaigns that have been sent. We also look at the number of emails that we’re sending out per day.But what got me the most excited, was the feedback we received. We found out that there are almost 2,000 people or at least over 1,000 that login to our product every single day. If I were to have a look at the data and tracked this, it doesn’t nearly show as that high.Sujan: Another thing that excites me, is what we’re doing for Norbert. We increased the conversion by 3x already. So it was exciting to see the movement, that needle go up from one percent to two percent to three percent; accounts moving from free trials to paid users. Those are not actual numbers, I’m just giving you an idea of what we’re seeing now.Sujan: But it was exciting to see all those things. Seeing those kind of numbers is exactly why I love working on multiple companies. Because while one is kind of struggling, the other one’s success keeps you going. I can keep poking around and getting my hands dirty with new tactics like. Like the referral program. It’s been seven months since I last executed one..For one company I’m working on creating in-app personalized workflows and for another, I’m working on customer success. And there’s one, where I’m gathering customer feedback. I get gratification in three different ways. I’m kind of addicted to this and it’s fun!Jeroen: Yeah, you are a really lucky Founder I think.Sujan: Yeah.Jeroen: In terms of balancing this with your personal life, how does that work?Sujan: That’s a good question. I think for the longest time, I was trying to find my work-life balance. So for the two and a half years that we had been working on Ramp Ventures, there was no work-life balance.Sujan: There was just work. It was my life and I was trying to survive. And I think a lot of this was also to do with me having fun doing this. I found it to be my true passion. But I think now that we’ve been able to stabilise in the last six months, hire and build out a team, outsource a few tasks including customer support, we’ve now finally been able to get some room on our plates.Sujan: So now I have a work-life balance and what I try to do with it, is exercise in the morning. I wake up early and by the time my true workday starts, I’m usually caught up on emails. In the evenings, I usually clock off around four o’clock. It’s something really different for me. Signing off or leaving work at 3 or 4 in the evening, feels a bit weird too.Maybe also because I see that in the last few hours or a typical workday, I’m being completely useless. I’m browsing Facebook or Amazon, texting my wife to ask what’s for dinner or where she’d like to go. I’m really not focused on anything. That’s why I just sign off early to come home or do something fun. Sometimes, I watch a movie and come home to spend time with my wife, and family.Later towards the evening, I still get one or two hours to get in my zone and I usually use it to do something that would have taken me longer during the workday. Simply because there’s absolutely no distraction at this time. Realistically, my best and my most productive days are Sunday mornings.Sujan: I wake up early on Sunday mornings. I usually knock out one of the biggest and the hardest thing I have on my plate. This helps me get organized better. During the weekends, my goal is to help my team remove hurdles and bottlenecks, and make sure that they have everything they need to be successful. So I’m not actually doing a whole lot as an individual contributor during the work hours.Jeroen: Yep. I saw it on Facebook that you really started working out. Is that working for you? Do you feel a difference in your energy levels?Sujan: Absolutely. I wake up earlier, I work harder and it’s all because I actually exercise.And this is not my first time doing this, this is actually my second time. For the last two years, I just got distracted and fell off the wagon of eating healthy and exercising regularly. I was doing it for five years before, but moving cities across different time zones, speaking at events and working on multiple companies, made it hard to keep up with. So I kind of decided to let go of it.But exercise has helped me a lot. Even just 20 minutes of running or like going to the gym, getting your heart rate up, has helped me be kind of happier. It might sounds like a little infomercial here, but it’s such a simple thing to do. You just have to get off the couch or your office hair and do it.Jeroen: Yeah, I totally agree. I also just started running again two weeks ago, makes me feel so much better.Sujan: Yeah.Jeroen: You just mentioned that you moved cities, where are you based now?Sujan: Austin, Texas. I’m from LA, lived in San Francisco for five years and then kind of made my way to Austin.Jeroen: Why did you move to Austin?Sujan: It’s like mini San Francisco — a mini tech area. Lots of good food, nightlife and I like it because it’s not always all tech focused.There’s probably a lot of non-tech things like music. I like the work-life balance of my surroundings and again, that kind of forces me to maintain the same.I think in San Francisco, it’s hard to achieve that. I love that place and have always said that I grew up there, learned my chots. But everyone’s a Founder there, they’re working on something cool and that nudges you to do more than what you’re doing too. Getting out of that environment to see what the rest of the world looks like, was very important for me.Sujan: And the funny thing is, I connected with more people in the six to nine months after I left San Francisco than I did the whole time I was there.Jeroen: With people in San Francisco or?Sujan: Yeah, with people in San Francisco. I met, I even went and hung out with people more. I had more meetings with people in San Francisco than I did the five years that I was there. And it was because I made a concentrated effort. When I am there for five or six days for a conference or something, I make sure that I connect with everybody that I wanted to.Whereas, when I was there I’d always be too busy to network and would stall it by another week or month, that turned into ‘never’. But now, I try to connect with someone new at least three to four times a week and have a meaningful conversation with them.Sujan: I remember a few weeks, a month ago now, we had a great conversation with absolutely no agenda. It was just to meet each other and get to know what we were each doing. I have those kind of conversations more often now because it opens my eyes to what’s happening around me. I can share what I have learnt so far, learn new things and it’s a whole lot of fun.Jeroen: Yep. I’m also learning a lot now doing these calls, it’s really amazing. You think Austin is a good place to have your startup? What other cool startups are based in Austin?Sujan: Yeah, I think Austin’s a pretty good place. There’s Book in a Box that is a good startup. Sumo.com and Noah Kagan and that group is here. There’s HomeAway, you know one of the older startups.Dell, which is not necessarily a startup anymore and some larger companies too. But yeah, there’s a decent amount of startups here. Not as much as you would think though and not always like a software business. There’s companies like Able or LawnStarter subscription lawn care business. Lots of different kinds of businesses.I think because it’s a smaller community, everyone likes to know each other. I have a monthly CMO breakfast where there are five to seven people that attend with the VPs or executive marketers in the area. So I think my network is much tighter here. While I don’t have too many relationships going, I certainly have more meaningful and stronger associations happening.Sujan: You know, it’s about really going after who you want to connect with and figuring out how to connect with them. You’ll find that it’s actually not the location that is the hindering factor, it’s either you or your lack of initiative to connect with that person.Jeroen: Totally agree. Wrapping up, what’s the latest good book you’ve read and why did you choose to read it?Sujan: I am reading the book, Sapiens. I don’t know why I’m reading it. I would say it’s an interesting book. I chose to read it because every one of my friends kept telling to check it out.Sometimes I blindly take recommendations for books from people I respect. But the book is like an interesting learning about humanity and human being in general.I would say the book I most recently read and absolutely loved, is, Principles by Ray Dalio. He’s the guy who kind of you can learn from. The book is about investing and talks about money management, and work-life. It’s one on my favourites now and I would totally recommend it.Jeroen: Yeah, I’ll definitely going to put it on my list. Is there anything you wish you had known when you started out?Sujan: No. You know why? It is because even if I knew it, I would still make another mistake and not know where exactly I went wrong. I would fast forward to this interview and wished I knew that mistake. So I learned all these lessons the hard way and it has gotten me where I am today. I’m fine with going on that route over and over again.Jeroen: Cool. Thanks for being on Founder Coffee, it was really interesting. I’ll send you a package of some actual Founder Coffee in the next few weeks. Thanks again!Sujan: My pleasure, thanks for having me.---Original post with links to the podcast here.

[lalast0ne]

The elephant in the room

Layla

I’ve been avoiding my parents, Ruby, The Gentleman’s Club and any situation that could land me face to face with Naz, like the plague since the encounter in my Dad’s office. I know I can’t carry on like this forever but at the moment, I’m of the mindset that if I didn’t see any of them then I didn’t have to speak about anything I was feeling. And right now I was feeling betrayed; Betrayed that my own family had welcomed Naz back into our lives with open arms. Wilder hadn’t pressed me for any other details since our chat and for that I was thankful. My ostrich approach of burying my head in the sand in the hopes everything would return to normal ASAP, was suiting me just fine. The timer of the oven pulls me from my thoughts and I bend to retrieve my third attempt of chocolate muffins. Wilder didn’t have to know these were my third attempt. I’d gotten rid of the evidence of the other 2 batches; The first was raw in the center and the second had been …… slightly ….. overdone. These though, these looked perfect! Step aside Delores, there’s a new cook in town. I smile across at the pups as they both sit watching me, wagging their tails in the hopes of getting a treat.* Not a chance, kids. These are for my main man … when he comes out of that office! *He’d been spending more and more time in there lately. I didn’t ask why or what he was doing. Not because I didn’t care but because I figured if he wanted to tell me about it he would. I throw the oven gloves on the side and flick the coffee machine on as I exit the kitchen. Padding down the hallway toward the closed office door, I wait a few seconds until the low rumble of his voice stops, then tap my knuckle before pushing the door open.* Baby? Are you coming out?

Wilder

*I hang the phone up in frustration after cutting the call with that idiot who runs the grocery store. I gave him three simple rules and he had broken each and every one of them. This was his one and only warning. Next time, I was paying him a visit in person and it would not be good day. I close up the paperwork on my desk, the smell of something chocolate invading my office and then I hear your voice on the other side of the door. Standing quickly, I open the door and have to put my hands up to keep you from falling into me. A smirk plays at the corner of my lips.* Were you listening to my call Little Ball of Fire?

Layla

*I right myself as quickly as possible and feel my cheeks heat.* Not at all. *A minor lie and I know you know it.* I just didn’t want to interrupt you while you were hard at work *I try to look over your shoulder, already knowing I won’t see anything out of place or unordinary in the office behind you* and I wanted to let you know that the homemade snacks were ready. Delores would be so impressed with me. *I raise an eyebrow questioningly at you.* Are you done in here now?

Wilder

*Smirks, leaning down and bites your neck, my hands sliding around to cup your ass.* I’m all done in here for the day. *I take a step as you step backwards, leading us into the kitchen.* Whatever you made smells really good. *I go to bite your neck again, growling and then laugh when I see both Killer and Luna with a muffin.* I don’t think dogs are supposed to eat chocolate.

Layla

Finally. *My body presses into yours and I laugh softly as your teeth bite down.* I was beginning to miss you and I made you … *I pull back slightly when you start laughing, my eyebrows raised questioningly. I spin around quickly to see both dogs demolishing off the last of evidence.* No! You pair of little… *Pulling away from you, I chase both dogs, with their tails wagging, down the hall and back to the kitchen where I discover my perfect third batch has vanished. I hear your footsteps coming up behind me and pout as I turn to look at you.* They looked even better than they smelled!

Wilder

*Following the trail of evidence to the kitchen, one lone muffin still remaining on the counter.* It’s the thought that counts baby. *Takes a step forward and pulls you into my arms, kissing your pouty lip.* Want me to kill them for eating all your hard work?

Layla

*I can’t help but laugh. Your ability to turn any situation into a laughing matter amazes me given how serious you are in the outside world. If people only knew just how soft you could really be. Shaking my head, I nip your lower lip.* You leave those little thieving pups alone, Mr. Steele, otherwise it’ll be your ass that’ll be in trouble. *I twist my head to look at the sad looking lone muffin.* Help yourself to the cake. I spent hours slaving over that. *I turn back to you, my lips tugging upward at the corners in amusement.* One of us should get to enjoy the fruits of my labor. *I snap my teeth at you and pull away.* Coffee?

Wilder

I prefer when your ass is in trouble. *Spanking your ass when I walk past and grab the muffin, cutting it in half.* Coffee sounds good. *I eat my half in one bite, turning to look at you.* I think it’s time we had a talk Layla. I notice you have been avoiding your family. I know this because they have suddenly become my best friend.

Layla

*I place 2 mugs on the counter and make each of our coffees just how we like. The mention of my family stops me in my tracks and I slowly spin to look at you, a frown on my face. I guess we’re going there after all.* You’re not funny. *I turn my back on you when your lips curl up.* You know I love that my family have accepted you so quickly. Just like you know exactly why I’m avoiding them. *I gather both mugs and pass one to you when you move beside me.* I know I can’t stay out of their way forever, but for the moment, it’s just best for everyone.

Wilder

Thank you. *I take my mug from you, debating whether I should push this issue or not. Sipping my coffee, I set my mug back down and move to cage you in.* Interviews have been set up for this week. I’m really excited for the background checks. New victims to unearth and dig up dirt on. It’s going to be so much fun.

Layla

*My hands trail along your forearms, over your biceps to your shoulders and down your chest. I can see it in your eyes as you internally deliberate whether to push the matter, or move away from it and I actually feel my shoulders relax when you change the subject.* I’ll sort it soon with them. I promise. *Tapping my finger against your nose, I laugh hard as your face goes from serious to full of excitement.* I actually have my first interview lined up tomorrow; Salem Lincoln. Apparently she Delores’s great niece. She’s in town for a while and needs money so I told Delores to send her to the club. She wasn’t sure what experience she has work wise but I’m sure we can find a role for her. Besides, any relative of Delores has to be credible and trouble free, surely.

Wilder

Salem Lincoln? *Growls and bites your finger harder than expected.* That girl had the audacity to pull a gun on me the other day. I’m not so sure she does not have trouble following her. I warned her what would happen if it found her. *Reaching around and grabs the last half of the muffin and stuffs it in my mouth.* She’s a spitfire that someone needs to knock down a peg.

Layla

*I wince and pull my finger free from your teeth, watching you with interest as you speak.* A gun? Wow, so she can definitely hold her own. Just the type of girl I like to employ. *I raise an eyebrow at you, watching as you stuff the cake into your mouth giving me the perfect opportunity to speak.* When exactly did she have the opportunity to pull a gun on you? I’ve not even seen the girl.

Wilder

I paid a visit across the street on Friday. This girl showed up in my town and she needed to explain herself. *Narrows my eyes at your expression.* I let myself in. It wasn’t breaking and entering.

Layla

I see. *I nod my head slowly, one perfectly manicured eyebrow arched.* So, you let yourself in to Delores’s house, introduced yourself politely *Tipping my head to the side* and she pulled a gun on you?

Wilder

*Throws my head back, howling with laughter.* We both know I did not introduce myself properly. *Lifts you up onto the counter, biting at your shoulder.* Are you not suppose to be on my side Little Ball of Fire? I’m protecting you and my town when a stranger shows up unannounced. Much like you did all those weeks ago. The difference there is *smirks* had you have pulled on a gun on me, I would have fucked you right there in the diner.

Layla

I will always be on your side baby. But if I’d had a gun when you came in to the club garage unannounced, it’s highly likely I would have pulled it on you too. *My legs wrap around you as you step close to me.* You’re pretty intimidating, Wilder Steele. I can’t blame Salem for feeling the need to defend herself at your unexpected intrusion. *My head dips and I attack your neck, my tongue licking a path to your ear.* Maybe we should reenact that meeting in the diner. I have a gun now. *I laugh softly and nip your ear.* But in all seriousness, we need staff. Don’t scare them all away before they’ve even begun. Have your fun with your background checks but we discuss any issues together, don’t just tell people they’ve not got jobs because you see something you don’t like.

Wilder

*Growls low, my hands squeezing your hips as I feel your tongue tease up my neck.* We discuss all matters and I can kill the people that step out of line. Sounds like the perfect plan to me.

Layla

Easy there, handsome. How about we go with a simple disciplinary first and if a problem persists, depending on what it is, then you and your security team can step in? That seems more reasonable, don’t you think? *I nip your earlobe and sit up straight, smiling at you.* The vetting process is going to be so tight that only the best employees will be taken onboard anyway. I’m not anticipating a need for, you know…. killing the staff.

Wilder

*Huffs and frowns.* Way to kill a mans dreams Layla. I was fully expecting to kill some of the staff off. Now you expect me to…..work with them? What kind of upstanding club are we running?

Layla

You’re so cute. *My amusement can’t be contained. Resting my forehead against yours, I laugh softly.* It’s a crazy concept, isn’t it? Managing. *Coiling my fingers around the ends of your beard and tugging.* But I think, after a little adjustment period and resisting the temptation to slit anyone’s throat, you’ll be damn good at it. The Steele Cage is going to be as upstanding as possible. Just like the leaning tower of Pisa.

Wilder

We are not becoming that much of a tourist attraction. *Leans in and bites across your jaw.* We are going to be an amazing team together. Our club is already a success and it’s not even opened yet. *I slide my hands down to grip your thighs, a soft moan escaping your lips.* I think it’s time for us to discuss your sister and this guy who is consuming your mind.

Layla

We’re already an amazing team. The buzz around town about the club is exciting. The locals want to get in. *My laugh turns to a groan and I shift closer to the edge of the counter.* Don’t say it like that. There’s only one man that consumes my mind and he’s currently between my legs. *I scrunch my nose as I continue speaking.* And I definitely don’t want to discuss my sister. *Smirking down at you, I press soft kisses to your lips.* We’ll talk about it all later. Right now, we have a date with a huge bowl of popcorn, a movie, the sofa and a blanket.

Wilder

*Tugs your bottom lip between my teeth, kissing you hard.* Let’s enjoy this movie, popcorn and you naked. Then we can talk about the elephant you are avoiding.

[sheminecrafts]

Why Flexport built a slick Slack SaaS for shipping

“Make their metrics your metrics” is one of Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen’s mantras. Sometimes that means building free software for your clients. It can be frustrating aligning your fates with a fellow business if they operate on email, phone and fax like much of the freight-forwarding industry that gets pallets of goods across the world from factories to retailer’s floors. So today, the new Flexport Platform launches, allowing brand clients, their factories and their Flexport logistics reps to all team up to get stuff where it belongs on time.

The software could further stoke Flexport‘s growth by locking in customers to work with the shipping startup that was valued at $3.2 billion after raising $1 billion from SoftBank in February (to bring it to $1.3 billion in funding). Flexport’s revenue was up 95%, to $441 million in 2018, Forbes’s Alex Konrad reported. Yet there’s plenty of green field to conquer given even Flexport’s largest competitor Kuehne & Nagel only holds 2.5% market share while the whole freight-forwarding industry grows 4% per year.

The Flexport Platform lets 10,000 clients, like Bombas socks, invite their suppliers to collaborate on managing shipments together. An integrated calendar makes shipping timelines clear. A map gives clients a god-view of their freight criss-crossing the globe. Pre-filled forms expedite compliance. Tagging lets users group shipments and filter or search their dashboards, and flag something for extra care — like a pallet of goods critical for a marketing launch event. Collaborators also can sync up via a Facebook Wall-style feature, or direct message the team with threaded conversations, much like Slack.

Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen

“There’s infinite demand for a job well done,” Petersen says about his industry. “The hard part has always been doing a good job.” Taking the confusion out communication scattered across email chains means clients get shipping documentation filled out 50% faster with 4X more accurate data. Flexport is on the tip of the tongue as software eats the world, with antiquated sectors suddenly leveling up.

Petersen saw the inefficiency first-hand growing up running his own import/export and customs business. He is part of a wave of entrepreneurs attacking unsexy businesses that the typical Silicon Valley enterprise exec might never stumble across. But three years after we profiled his scrappy company, when it had raised just $26 million in funding and had 700 clients, Petersen tells me “We’re trying to retire the word ‘startup.’ ”

It turns out top global brands like Sonos and Klean Kanteen don’t like the second half of “move fast and break things” when those things are boats and planes full of their products. “They want a company that will help them grow, not the fly-by-night startup,” Petersen explains. But with competitors trying to chase it and incumbents trying to adopt similar technologies, Flexport must maintain its agility to avoid being subsumed by the pack.

As his company has grown to 1,700 employees, he’s dedicated a ton of his time to keeping its culture in check — especially after a certain other logistics giant startup had some uber-painful troubles with workplace toxicity. “You either have too much bureaucracy or not enough process, and no one knows what to do. The English language lacks a positive word for bureaucracy — just the right amount of process so people can move quickly.”

That’s what Flexport wanted to give clients with the new platform. From a dedicated tasks queue to a notifications pane, it’s built to take the guesswork out of what to do next while being as approachable as consumer software for new users. That also why it’s free. It’s not supposed to be some chore you’re forced to complete, product lead Frank te Pas tells me. “As you move your first shipment you get onboarded onto this system” says te Pas. “It’s our way of helping.”

That’s meant a ton of personal growth, too. Petersen is still enthusiastic, curious and charmingly rough around the edges, but he carries it all with more dignity and gravity than a few years back. “The only way I get to stay in this role is if I learn faster than anybody else. Being the CEO of a 1,700-person company is not something I knew how to do four to five years ago, or even last year,” he tells me. “I’ve changed and become more self-aware. It’s been really important to take care of myself — sleeping a lot, I quit drinking alcohol, I lost 30 pounds. I feel great.”

With plenty of cash in the bank, industry talent taking it seriously and new businesses like Flexport Capital freight financing and its cargo insurance offered in partnership with Marsh, the company might not be a startup for long. It looks like a hot candidate for a coming season of IPOs. And while this company has its own plane (the leading entry for the naming contest is “Weird Flex But OK”), it’s actually part of its shipping fleet.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2neqZgG via IFTTT

[teritcrawfordca]

How to Run a Successful Business

Melinda Emerson, @SmallBizLady offers advice and encouragement to more than three million entrepreneurs every week online. She is the publisher of succeedasyourowboss.com. Forbes magazine named her the #1 woman for entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter. She has a 20-year track record as a successful businesswoman as CEO of Quintessence Group, an award winning marketing consulting firm based in Philadelphia, PA. She is a social media expert, journalist, and dynamic keynote speaker and she’s a professional single mom. I sat down with her for an exclusive interview on the eve of the release of her new book, Fix Your Business that was released March 6,2018. For details log on to www.FixYourBusiness.com

Q: You’re an amazing role model for all entrepreneurs. Can you tell us your story?

SmallBizLady: I was 26 when I started my company Quintessence Group. I knew I didn’t know much about running a small business. I am journalist, so I approached starting a business like a research project. I read and took business courses to learn how to run my business and be a leader. After about seven years in business, I was doing very well. I had numerous professional accolades and awards, and I had the largest female-owned production company in my city. Then my husband and I got pregnant, and I was immediately put on bed rest with a high risk pregnancy. I went from being the worst workaholic in the world, to not being about to leave my home and Wi-Fi was not available yet. My business really suffered. In fact, I almost went out of business that year. Unfortunately, I built a business that couldn’t run without me. However, when I had six months to sit and think, I came up with a million-dollar idea. I realized all the expensive mistakes I had made in business and it also occurred to me that unless I started educating people about the right way to run a business, they must struggle that way I did. The first thing I did after my son was born, and I adjusted to motherhood, was write my bestselling book, Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months, which is now in its second edition. It was completed in 2008, but when the global recession hit, my publisher postponed the release of the book until 2010. This was heartbreaking to me at the time, but it positioned me perfectly to become a national small business expert.

Q: How did you become SmallBizLady?

SmallBizLady:��After my publisher postponed the release of Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months, a good friend suggested that I hire a publicist to help me start promoting the book even though it wasn’t coming out for 18 months. I hired a woman who specialized in book launches and knew social media which was in its infancy back then. She suggested that I build my brand on Twitter. When I first went to Twitter to sign up for an account, my name Melinda Emerson was taken. After I got over the initial shock, my publicist suggested that we come up with a nickname that would tell people who I am and what I am about. We came up with SmallBizLady, which we now know was the best branding move ever. Later we launched www.succeedasyourownboss.com and I have used the SmallBizLady brand to build a social media machine to help small business owners, that now reaches 3 million small business owners a week online.

Q: The title of this book is Fix Your Business, A 90-Day Plan to Get Your Life Back and Reduce Chaos in Your Business, this is quite a promise. Can this book really help a business owner do this?

SmallBizLady: Yes, this book is designed to help readers create a 90-Day Turnaround Plan for their businesses and get back control. If a business owner actually implements the ideas, the money rules, develops processes, and a new strategic plan for their business, things will run a lot more smoothly. There are 12 chapters in the book based on the “12 Ps of Running a Successful Business.” Readers have two options for using the book, they can look at all 12 areas of their business and tweak things as needed or they can do a Deep Dive and focus on the three biggest trouble areas in their business. This book is designed to help you see results in 12 weeks. If the reader keeps to the schedule and follows the action steps at the end of each chapter, change will happen. The cutting-edge concepts in Fix Your Business are already producing results for businesses across multiple industries.

Q: What are the 12 Ps Running a Successful Business?

SmallBizLady: The 12 Ps of Running a Small Business are fresh strategies to help business owners develop a business that works for them. Each chapter is based on the one of the 12 Ps Preparation, Purpose, People, Profit, Process, Productivity, Performance, Product, Presence, Prospects, Planning, and Perseverance. I want readers to prepare themselves for their businesses to be different, then I want them to reconnect and recommit to their “Why” story and mission which is the purpose for their business. Then, I help readers examine their leadership and create hiring and onboarding processes in the people chapter. The profit chapter is all about learning better money management skills and create new profit strategies, and the process chapter is about how to document your signature processes and business systems. The productivity chapter is about getting the right technology tools to save time and money. The performance is all about what you should be measuring in your business, the product chapter helps you take a hard look at your current products and services. The presence chapter is about building your brand offline and online. The Prospects chapter will help you develop a formal sales process. The planning chapter will help you develop a new strategic plan and the perseverance chapter is about finding the strength to stay with your business for the long haul.

Q: Why did you write Fix Your Business? 

SmallBizLady: There’s so much in the world around right now that feels out of our control. And many businesses are on that list too. My new book Fix Your Business will encourage people to take back control and change how their business run. It’s not okay to skip paychecks on a regular basis. It’s not okay to feel like you could never take a vacation. It’s not okay not to know how much profit you made in your business until your taxes are done. I want business owners to stop letting their businesses be a runaway train. I’ve written this book to teach processes and systems to help business owners run their business intentionally. My goal is to help existing entrepreneurs create a business that allows them to have the freedom to live their dream life.

Q: How is Fix Your Business different from your Bestselling book Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months?

SmallBizLady: My first book Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months was about how to make the transition from employee to entrepreneur to start a business, but staying in business requires a different skillset. For years, I’ve been getting letters and emails for business owners who needed more help. My new book Fix Your Business is the answer for those entrepreneurs. They are in business full-time, and they’ve had some success, but things are overwhelming and stressful. They need specific advice and systems to handle the tough stuff going on in their businesses so they can reduce the chaos and start loving going to the office and serving their customers again.

Q: How to did you create you mission to end small business failure?

SmallBizLady: It just made sense to me based on this work that I do helping small business owners. Being my own boss is the ultimate form of freedom, but success will not just happen to you. You must plan for success.  I wake up each day without an alarm clock; I have a purpose clock. My mission is the focus of every speech I give, every video I create and every blog post I write. Most people have great business ideas, they just don’t know how to run a business. I try to stand in the gap for those people and give helpful business advice before they realize they even need it.

Q: What personal qualities do you have that you think have made you a successful entrepreneur?

SmallBizLady: I am a successful entrepreneur because I have never believed I couldn’t be successful. I use being nice and good to work with as my secret weapon. I am constantly reading and learning to be a better leader. I don’t take a no from anyone who can’t say yes. I leverage technology to be more effective in my business. I am relentlessly consistent in my business habits. I do not believe in daily to-do lists. I make business decisions based on my budget and my current financial statements and I believe in paying vendors quickly. I delegate things I don’t do well or enjoy, and I have a team of mentors who I call for advice regularly. I also pray over my business regularly.

Q: What are the biggest lessons you have learned in business?

SmallBizLady: You must have a niche target market. If everyone can use your product or service, no one will. You must hire people who are trustworthy and polite. You can teach someone how to do anything, but you can’t teach them to be nice. You also cannot teach them to have integrity. Your employees must have these traits coming in the door.

Q: What are you most proud of?

SmallBizLady: I am most proud of the fact that I have survived nearly 20 years in business, and that I have had the opportunity to see the world as the SmallBizLady, helping people live their dreams as entrepreneurs. I have been fortunate enough to accomplish nearly all of my professional business goals. I am currently developing a new bucket list for myself.

Q: How do you define success?

SmallBizLady: Success is just success; it really doesn’t mean a whole lot. When I was younger in business it was all about revenues, but that is not a good measure of success. There are plenty of wealthy people who are miserable. A better question is how do I define happiness? I define happiness as having complete control over my time and having the resources to invest in the things and people I care about.  I cherish my son and family and my deepest friendships and I love to travel. I also believe ultimate happiness is having someone in your life to build with and share your life.

Q: When is Fix Your Business being released, and aren’t you going on a National Book Tour this April?

SmallBizLady: The book will officially be released March 6th, 2018. It will be available on Amazon, and you should go to your local bookstore and request it as well. We are kicking off the National Fix Your Business Book Tour on April 2, 2018, in partnership with SCORE chapters across the country. I’m excited to be going to 12 cities. We are starting in NYC, Philadelphia, PA, Washington, DC, Nashville, TN, Memphis, TN, Atlanta, GA, Miami, FL, Chicago, IL, Houston, TX, Los Angeles, CA, San Francisco, CA, and Detroit, MI.  Click here for tour details.

If you found this interview helpful, join us on Wednesdays 8-9 pm ET; follow @SmallBizChat on Twitter.

Here’s how to participate in #SmallBizChat: http://bit.ly/1hZeIlz

The post How to Run a Successful Business appeared first on Succeed As Your Own Boss.

from Teri Crawford Business Tips https://succeedasyourownboss.com/how-to-run-a-successful-business/

[gta-5-cheats]

Inside ‘Fin,’ the elite human/AI assistant

New Post has been published on http://secondcovers.com/inside-fin-the-elite-human-ai-assistant-2/

Inside ‘Fin,’ the elite human/AI assistant

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“I have FOMO for the future”, says Sam Lessin. That’s why his startup, Fin, is working backwards from a far-off tech utopia. One day, computers with some human help will answer our every beck and call. Today, Lessin is teaming them up. Every day, Fin gets smarter.

For $1 a minute, 24/7, Fin gets your digital chores done. Message, email or speak a request and a real person will snap into action, augmented by a machine intelligence toolkit built from all the tasks Fin’s tackled to date. Sure, it handles research, scheduling, commerce and customer support calls. But it also learns your habits, negotiates for you, and conquers complex jobs like creating a website.

Now after two years and funding from top investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Fin is opening up to more customers and press. “We’ve really intentionally talked to no one,” says Lessin, a former Facebook VP who sold it his file sharing startup Drop.io.

That’s a vastly different approach than most boisterous AI startups have taken. “There’s been this crazy hype cycle,” Lessin tells me. “‘Everything’s a bot. Bots are awesome. Everything’s an assistant.’ All these things fucking suck.”

Converting money into time

Fin was determined not to suck, even if that meant staying quiet. Lessin and co-founder Andrew Kortina have tinkered and tested Fin since mid-2015. “I had done Venmo,” Kortina says, downplaying his co-founder role and its sale to PayPal, “and was then doing nothing. I heard Sam was also doing nothing and that piqued my interest, as he’s an old friend.”

Brainstorming led them to the thesis that “the internet is broken as an information machine,” Kortina tells me. They saw a greater destiny than entertainment, distraction and big enterprise. So in Fin’s first incarnation, the duo swapped neglected memos and to-do lists, and tried to find what they could get done for each other. Plenty had been falling through the cracks.

“I’m okay about doing menial things for colleagues but I’ll just let all that stuff in my own life slip,” Kortina admits. “I wouldn’t go to the dentist for years. I didn’t have health insurance after college for 10 years. My credit score was terrible because I had some bill I wouldn’t figure out how to pay.”

Most people have similarly boring tasks they loathe spending time dealing with. You could call the cable company to fight a price hike or research restaurants and hunt for a reservation. So could Fin. And thanks to Uber we’ve grown accustomed to being able to trade money for that time back, sidestepping slow public transportation or looking for parking when we’re in a rush.

Fin co-founders Sam Lessin (left) and Andrew Kortina (right) in front of the flag of Finland

While it’s easy to imagine Fin as merely a first-world luxury for the lazy, and it’s great at that, it’s also a productivity tool that can let people achieve more of what only they can do. Kortina talks about Fin as a way to “instantly offload” chores.

Even if you could power through a task faster than Fin could second-hand and keep the dollars, “It’s not just the cost of doing that thing yourself. It’s the context switching,” Kortina explains. “It’s so hard for me to get into a really good state of concentration and flow and creativity, and when I get into that state I don’t want to be interrupted.”

Reverse-engineering science fiction

Fin’s far from the only personal assistant startup trying to save you time, but many of the others fail due to hubris, relying too heavily on their own code as the answer to every question. “The mistake is looking at machine learning and thinking we’re so close to this general intelligence,” Lessin insists. Replacing humans outright isn’t the answer. “The future is people helping people.”

Competitors that can go AI-only are restricted to narrow sets of tasks, like x.ai for meeting scheduling. Traditional and virtual assistant services can be inefficient. Facebook’s M assistant also uses a combo of humans and AI but is free and hasn’t been opened up to the public.

One service similar to Fin called GoButler was forced to pivot to solely automated assistance, and eventually sold as scrap to Amazon. Fin’s most remaining direct competitor is Magic. It’s cheaper at $0.59 per minute but only takes requests via text message. Lessin moonlights as a partner for Slow Ventures, which participated in Magic’s $12 million 2015 Series A, which raises some concerns about conflicts of interest he wouldn’t comment on. [Update: More examples of competitors were added to this paragraph.]

But wait, isn’t AI supposed to take everyone’s jobs? Lessin envisions a new industrial revolution instead. He cites cobblers making a few shoes while waiting around the shop for customers, struggling to match fluctuating demand. But with steam and electricity “you had a new source of power. It’s not like power stopped work. You had humans doing what they were good at, tech doing what tech was good at, and you had way more shoes.”

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With Fin, though, Lessin’s vision involves a team of round-the-clock operators equipped with AI and processes for similar tasks can snap into action even after-hours, rather than a full-time dedicated assistant being “paid for showing up being on YouTube” and then going off the job, Lessin says. Even if it’s expensive at $1 per effective minute of work, Fin is exceedingly convenient, and you don’t pay for down time.

To use Fin, you just pop open its minimalist black-and-white desktop site or iOS app, then type, speak or upload a photo of your request. If you’re unsure what you could ask for, there’s an anonymized feed of real examples from other users to spark your imagination.

“We can execute any task that doesn’t require hands in your city,” says Lessin, noting how hard it is for some startups to get local scale and capacity nailed down. “I have incredible respect for Instacart.” He also points out that “there are types of specialized knowledge we can’t currently do for you. Ask us some PhD physics problem and it will either take a long time or we won’t do it.”

Usually, though, you get messaged back almost immediately by a Fin human who collects any necessary details and gets started. I felt an instantaneous sense of relief upon outsourcing my responsibilities. Along the way, your task gets updated with progress and requests for secondary decisions. When possible, it just pulls things like addresses and airplane seat preferences from your onboarding survey, and payment information or online passwords from the app’s Vault. You get a detailed statement of exactly how Fin used your time and how much you owe.

“Our job is to mix the best tool or person for the job in a way to deliver an experience that’s better than you can get from working with a single isolated individual, or a piece of pure software,” Kortina declares.

That’s where the name “Fin” comes in. “Like ‘the end’ in French films,” Lessin reveals. “This is the interface and the ways things will work in 50 or 100 years.” While technology will get more and more adept at a wider range of tasks, he imagines that in the end, it will still be humans sending requests to computer-human teams.

The unevenly distributed future

The hardest part of using Fin is getting over the mental hurdle of relinquishing control while paying for what you could do yourself.

“I think that’s the real competitor,” says Lessin. Even factoring in what your time’s worth and the context switching overhead, Fin can produce some serious sticker shock. That’s accentuated by our idealized predictions that underestimate the time required to do things. “How long does it take to book movie tickets?” Lessin jokes. “30 seconds? No!”

Fin’s team

I was charged $80 to deal with having a mis-shipped iPhone X refunded and a new one bought and sent. While I was thankful not to have to deal with customer support, it was some pricey peace of mind. Getting a holiday restaurant reservation originally cost me $150, which is completely absurd even if it took several loops to find the right time and get me to sign a credit card payment form for the prix fixe dinner.

Luckily, I was refunded that $150 after submitting a complaint through the app, which is easy to do through Fin’s thumbs up/down buttons on each request. “Most really heavy users escalate / ask about something every month or two,” Lessin admits. Fin uses internal benchmarking tools to track if certain assistants take too long on a task or routinely do too much research in a category. Still, Fin sometimes goes overboard so users shouldn’t be shy about contesting any charges that seem ridiculous. You can sign-up through this link for TechCrunch readers to get a discount on your first tasks.

Fin initially launched in beta with a $120 per month subscription fee. But Kortina gripes that “all we were learning is how people could arbitrage Fin to do way more than $120 worth of service.” He seems to be having bad acid flashbacks to before Venmo started charging a 3 percent credit card fee in 2012, when people would just send money back and forth to hit minimum spending limit or earn points while Venmo ate the fees.

With the switch to per-minute pricing, “We’ve set ourselves up for the long haul by really focusing on unit economics,” says Lessin, in contrast to many on-demand startups. That surely delights Fin’s investors John Doerr at KPCB, Sameer Gandhi at Accel, and Saar Gur at CRV. While Lessin won’t reveal exactly how much Fin has raised, he calls them “good capital partners,” noting the startup has enough cash to “be able to do this for a long time.” Fin now has 20 employees on the technical side, while it’s climbing toward 100 when you include its full-time operators.

Not subsidizing the service is a healthy choice for Fin, but that means “Unfortunately it’s not at a price point that everyone on Earth can afford.” Whether through economies of scale, AI advancement, or human training, Fin may need to bring the price down if it wants widespread adoption. “The future is already here” sci-fi author William Gibson once said, “it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

The premium price tag begets premium service that makes Siri and her cohorts feel like mere calculators in comparison. “The message is you should demand a lot more out of assistant services than cooking timers and Google search lookups,” Lessin concludes. In an era when technology is designed to soak up the maximum amount of your time, Fin lets you buy it back. We’ll each have to decide how much it’s worth.

[ronaldmrashid]

Sexual Harassment At Uber Reminds Us That HR Is Not Your Friend

One of the key takeaways from my book, How To Engineer Your Layoff, is understanding that the Human Resources department is not on your side. First and foremost, the HR department is there to protect the company from liability. After such protection is made, maybe then HR will help a troubled employee with a problem.

My experience comes from being a manager at a major financial organization, having to work with HR to hire and lay off staff, negotiating my own severance, and consulting with dozens of people about negotiating their own severance since publishing my severance negotiation book in 2012. Your best strategy is to befriend HR but hold sensitive information close to heart right before making a move.

Because Uber is the most successful startup of all time at its current stage, it’s always going to be a target. The latest damning news about the company comes from Susan Flowers, a former engineer at Uber who penned a post called, Reflecting On One Very Strange Year At Uber. You should read the post if you are an employee, manager, woman, startup entrepreneur, or work in HR. You should also read the post if you’re a bored entrepreneur crazy enough to think that going back to work will make you happier!

Susan writes that she was sexually harassed at Uber and denied upward mobility due to being a woman. This is not a surprise for those of us who have experience working in Silicon Valley, an area dominated by socially awkward men who’ve suddenly become hot stuff due to their computer engineering skills. Here’s an excerpt from her post:

On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn’t. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn’t help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.

Clearly, this type of behavior from a manager is NOT OK. The manager should be fired for trying to take advantage of a subordinate. No employee should ever have to feel uncomfortable going to work.

However, if your goal is to survive an organization’s politics, immediately reporting your manager to HR for any grievances could be a suboptimal career move. Instead, it’s important to consider CONFRONTING your oppressor first, spelling out exactly what it is s/he is doing that makes you feel uncomfortable.

Yes, confrontation is sometimes scary, but it is a must to help save your skin. Most oppressors don’t get confronted because the majority of people they maltreat are terrified to stand up for themselves. It’s so much easier to report someone than work out difficult and unsuitable situations yourself. Heck, trying to solve difficult situations is why most people quit instead of engineer their layoff.

But what you’ll find is that once you stand up to your oppressor, he should get the message and back off. The bully now knows you won’t stand for his bullshit, and if the bully continues, he knows he’s putting his career and reputation at risk.

One confrontation hack I used when it was time for me to face someone at work was envisioning what type of power this person or senior employee had over me OUTSIDE of work. The answer was always nothing. He was just another regular chump.

Here are more excerpts from her post highlighting how Susan continuously reported everything she felt was wrong to HR:

Things were beginning to get even more comically absurd with each passing day. Every time something ridiculous happened, every time a sexist email was sent, I’d sent a short report to HR just to keep a record going.

Less than a week after this absurd meeting, my manager scheduled a 1:1 with me, and told me we needed to have a difficult conversation. He told me I was on very thin ice for reporting his manager to HR.

California is an at-will employment state, he said, which means we can fire you if you ever do this again. I told him that was illegal, and he replied that he had been a manager for a long time, he knew what was illegal, and threatening to fire me for reporting things to HR was not illegal. I reported his threat immediately after the meeting to both HR and to the CTO: they both admitted that this was illegal, but none of them did anything.

With each HR reporting, Susan trapped herself in an increasingly difficult position because HR was building a case for the company, and not for her. The only thing Susan could do was leave Uber after one year, which is EXACTLY what HR wanted. Any HR department would prefer a disgruntled employee leaving quietly on his/her own versus having to deal with the complexities and negative ramifications of settling a legal case.

Unfortunately for Uber, Susan took to the internet to air her grievances and caused a massive backlash by reviving the #DeleteUber hashtag on social media. If HR and management had properly addressed the issues earlier, Susan would never have publicly blown up the company.

If Uber is valued at ~$66 billion based on the last round of funding, this negative PR could EASILY wipe away at least $1 billion in market value as consumers switch over to Lyft or other means of ridesharing transportation. Perhaps the damage is actually much greater given a reputation takes a tremendous amount of time to rebuild.

Hiring former attorney general, Eric Holder to lead an investigation into claims of sexual harassment and discrimination is totally a PR move, and the wrong one. First, if they want to hire anybody to investigate, it should be a woman. Second, how much investigating do you really need when you can easily find out who Susan Fowler’s HR manager was who repeatedly ignored her reports?

See: Massive Reputation Destruction Is Why Negotiating A Severance Is Possible

Understand The Role Of Human Resources

Most employees think of HR as a department that handles the onboarding of new employees, ensures everybody plays nice with each other and helps struggling employees do better. The reality is the HR department’s primary purpose is to protect the company and senior management from liability. The second goal of HR is to ensure the company is as successful as possible given their own careers are at stake.

Employers need workers to grow a business. But employers also realize that with each worker they hire, there’s a risk the employee might cause problems within the organization. HR is there to try and smooth things out before things reach extreme levels, e.g. settlements over lawsuits.

It is true states such as California have “at-will” employment laws, which mean a company can choose to lay off an employee whenever they want. But seldom are companies so ruthless as to lay employees off without proper documentation. Documentation is why it often takes at least one review and six months before a company will lay off any employee because if the employee ever sues for wrongful termination, the company can show they highlighted the performance issues and gave the employee a chance to improve.

The reason why Susan’s first manager wasn’t fired immediately after being reported was because he was deemed a “high performer.” Uber HR determined the manager was more valuable to the company than his transgressions. Clearly, this shows that HR is on the corporation’s side, and not on Susan’s side.

With each HR reporting, HR builds a case that Susan is a weak, easily offended employee, who isn’t willing to talk things out and play nice with others. HR can basically manipulate their interpretation of Susan’s reporting as they see fit to protect the company and its highest performers.

The HR rep began the meeting by asking me if I had noticed that *I* was the common theme in all of the reports I had been making, and that if I had ever considered that I might be the problem.

Do not think for one second that everything you reveal to HR will be kept confidential and won’t be reported to your manager or someone in a position to determine your future.

I won’t discuss details about my experience with HR when subordinates were unhappy. All I can say is that I knew what unhappy subordinates were saying to HR because HR told me. And I’m sure there are things I don’t know from HR that were told to my managers because they deemed me a liability if I knew too much.

Instead of hiring the former U.S. Attorney General, Uber should reprimand or fire the HR manager for not properly managing Susan’s situation after repeated reports. But that would be too logical!

Your Goal As An Employee

Do these simple things if you want to survive workplace politics and get ahead.

1) Read your employee handbook. I’m constantly surprised that most people have never read their employee handbook. It is loaded with great information to your benefit. If the information is in your employee handbook, that means it is gospel. HR/management cannot go back and argue against whatever thing you did if it is OK per the handbook.

2) Keep meticulous records of perceived transgressions. Document everything you think is wrong. This includes inappropriate e-mails, texts, conversations, events. But keep everything private until you really need to talk. Your highly organized documentation will serve as your ammunition during any bargaining process.

3) Build a relationship with your office HR manager. If you can get your HR manager to be on your side, you’ve got a powerful ally because she will help you navigate the land mines. It’s human nature to help people you like. HR people are no different. Take her out for coffee. Ask about her vacation. If she has a family, inquire about their health. Hopefully, you really do build a great relationship. If not, at least make it clear you are a hard working, thoughtful, and caring employee. HR does have the power to speak on your behalf and make recommendations about your future with the company.

4) Confront your oppressor and talk things out. People who oppress in the workplace are sometimes CLUELESS about their actions. Because nobody tells them they are being weird, sexist, rude, or whatever, they continue to act inappropriately because they believe whatever they are doing must be OK. One strategy is to just take them out for lunch or coffee on you. You can disarm them with your generosity, making it much easier to share what’s on your mind. Bottling things up and exploding is not healthy. And reporting your manager to HR when everything you say could get back to your manager can be a risky, career limiting move. Stand up for yourself and talk things through.

5) Know your leverage. If you’ve come to wits’ end, then leaving is probably your best option. Leaving quietly is one way to go about things. Leaving through a lawsuit is another way. But the best way is to engineer your layoff so that both parties get something, i.e. go through mediation. The reason why I was able to earn a severance and keep five years worth of deferred compensation is by knowing my leverage and having a dialogue. After 11 years at my firm, I knew that if I left, the revenue I helped generate for the firm would decline by multiples more than the cost of my employment. Therefore, I came up with a plan to transition my clients to my subordinate over a two month period to help them minimize any losses. I also made it clear to my employer that I wasn’t going to a competitor, which made negotiations much easier.

2015 German study

Things Can Usually Be Worked Out

Please think twice before firing off every transgression, perceived or otherwise, to HR. That could set you up for failure. Instead, confront your terrible co-worker and clearly delineate that which is bothering you. If that doesn’t work, speak to a manager you think you can trust to help you. Speaking to HR is sadly the last resort.

As good fortune would have it, Susan landed on her feet at Stripe, another richly valued startup. It was wise of Susan to light Uber’s barn on fire after she solidified her position. Who’s going to dare bother her now?

Related:

Career Advice For Women: Blaze Your Own Path Instead!

Is Your Nose Brown Enough To Get Ahead?

How To Get Revenge From An Employer Who Fired You 

Readers, what are your thoughts about Susan’s case? Is there anything she could have done better to improve her situation? Why aren’t the HR people at Uber who let this slide not being accused? Could it be because HR works for senior management and not the employees? Why don’t more people confront their workplace oppressor if they are at wits’ end? Have you ever been sexually harassed or felt extremely uncomfortable at work? If so, how did you deal with the situation?

from http://www.financialsamurai.com/sexual-harassment-at-uber-reminds-us-hr-is-not-your-friend/