Reflections on Working in a Multimedia World

I love crappy graphs. Here's one of mine reflecting on working at Lonely Planet, who are building a multi-media business out of the long-time successful travel guidebook publishing business.

It's a bit like having more than one heart and thus multiple pulse rates. There is such a temptation to just surgically bludgeon the rhythms together, to slow down the internet (like you could!) to match the cycles that it takes to make physical, high quality book product - at best you risk becoming irrelevant.

Perhaps worse, to try to speed up book production into some frantic rhythm that reflects the web today ("this is so last Thursday" is one of my favourite quotes from dot com times).

LP's success has been in bridging across these rhythms - pipes that funnel content between the media, or enable new ways of working in long-standing processes like book production. And then embrace the new media with products like iPhone City Guides and Phrase Books. It's a fun place to work as a result.

Working in America - reflection on safety

Working in the USA was a crazy thing. There was a nasty overlap between an employee's freedom to carry a gun, and the jitters that gave me when I monitored the speed with which pain-killers were consumed from the lunch-room in the Costco industrial packs of Panadol - let alone the valium, Ritalin and a million other pharmaceuticals that got the team through the day.

While in Minneapolis, the gun law was changed in some electoral skullduggery to allow concealed handguns to be carried. We foreigners never felt safe again.

As always - crappygraph.com comes to the rescue with a simple illustration of the problem!

Agile Development at ePredix by Shawn Lyndon

CIO says XP revolutionized more than the development process
Taken from Tech Republic, March 4, 2002
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5102-22-1045991.html

Shawn Lyndon is CIO of ePredix, an online human capital assessment company. He's also a proponent of XP. Shawn has more than 10 years' experience in the global IT industry, covering all aspects of enterprise systems development, management, and implementation. His primary area of expertise is in providing business continuance strategies for mission-critical applications. As CIO, Lyndon ensures that the current and future ePredix software and hardware infrastructure is highly available, scalable, and robust enough to deliver the ePredix solution. His previous role includes regional Sun/Oracle solutions architect, Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corporation Australia.

During a recent interview, he wanted to convince me that a stack of 4” x 6” index cards and freeing employees from traditional development roles has revolutionized not only the development process but also business values. This is what he had to say.

Takeaway:
Shawn Lyndon is CIO of ePredix, which produces online human capital assessment tools. In this article, he discusses why and how his organization began to use Extreme Programming (XP) and the ways that its impact has extended beyond the development team.

Builder.com: What model did you select for your development process?

Lyndon: Our development processes borrow heavily from XP and other Agile Development methodologies. In the spirit of XP, we have adapted these methodologies to address our individual business needs by adding our own modifications and adjustments. We continually challenge our processes in several ways. At any point, team members have the right to question why we do things a certain way. In fact, we expect such questions.

Also, if we have software-quality, performance, or general product issues, we ask ourselves what we can do better to prevent that problem from reoccurring. It is the constant questioning and refinement that has allowed us to develop our processes into a methodology that suits
the needs of both our customers and our team members.

More than just a theory

Builder.com: Do you emphasize certain aspects of the methodology?

Lyndon: I would say one of the overriding aspects of the methodology for us is the focus on the business need or problem and not the solution to that problem.

Builder.com: Sounds good in theory. Could you give an example from your organization?
Lyndon: Nearly two years ago—pre-XP and Agile Development—a member of our account management team came to me with a request for modifications to the primary Web report that our customers use to view scores of applicants using our solution. He wanted our developers to
paginate the report, with 20 records per page, and add navigation controls to allow users to jump to the desired page of the report.

Within four days, we implemented the changes, released them to production, and made them available for the client's use. It turns out, however, that our solution did not address the account manager’s concerns. Instead, he complained that loading a report still took the same time to load as before he submitted his request. I immediately realized that he was not interested in improving ease of navigation, a functionality issue, but rather he wanted to cut down the time it took to load the report, a performance issue. He thought by reducing the number of records displayed per page, he would get the performance improvement his client was looking for.

What he did not know was that we were preloading (caching) the entire report before displaying the first set of records. From a development standpoint, pagination was irrelevant to performance. Had the account manager stated what the problem was and why the client needed the improvement, we would have been able to provide a solution that addressed their needs the first time around. Instead, the account manager focused immediately on how he thought the problem should be solved.

In other words, the account manager told us how we should fix the problem, leaving the development team to merely implement the changes requested without any clear understanding of what the client actually needed and why. The better approach, and the approach we have since adopted, is for the account manager to express the what and why of the business need and leave it to the developers to come up with the technical solution—the how.

Builder.com: So if the account manager had a better understanding of how to ask the question, the problem could have been avoided?

Lyndon: Exactly. If the account manager had come to us and said, "Clients have a problem displaying over 200 records. They complain that it takes too long to view the applicants’ scores,” developers could have addressed the what—trouble displaying over 200 records—and the why—because it takes too long.

In our team, we believe that developers should be able to interpret business needs. By answering the what and why questions, our developers are focused on those needs. How many CEOs or CTOs can say that every developer on his or her team knows why they are building something and what it will deliver to the business?

Builder.com: How did XP methodologies enter the picture?

Lyndon: Fortunately, several members in the team began reading Kent Beck’s book Extreme Programming Explained. These team members adopted Beck’s mantra, "Embrace change," and pitched the idea to management. The decision to adopt XP was a natural one—it made sense for
both the development team and the company as a whole.

Builder.com: What was the first step you took in XP?

Lyndon: We started with “stories.” Each person, whether it be the CEO or a salesperson, makes a request of the development team, expressing it in terms of “what” and “why” on a simple 4” x 6” paper card. Each card represents a story. As a group, the team estimates how long it will take to deliver a solution to the story and records the estimate on the card. With this estimate and knowledge of the team’s capacity, the business (the “internal client”) has a clear picture of turnaround time for each story and can prioritize them according to ever-changing business needs.

As those needs change, the business has the opportunity to reprioritize the stories with full knowledge of available resources and consequences. For the first time, the business felt like it had some control over development timelines. From the development team’s perspective, the business was limited to requests that we could actually accommodate, and we felt as though we weren't saying “No” all the time. It was our first big breakthrough.

This concept of having the internal client create an index card ensured that we were addressing only immediate business needs in completing a story. We have effectively eliminated overengineering solutions to accommodate possible business needs.

We achieved two milestones in our early implementation of the XP methodology:
1. We gave back the power to the business to say what it wanted and what was important.
2. We delivered short releases that added real value to the business on an ongoing basis.
In the space of four weeks, we met more tangible business needs than we had in the previous six months.

Senior management buy-in

Builder.com: Was this the event that helped senior management see the light?

Lyndon: Yes. As soon as management could see these quantifiable results, they were all for it.
Agile development and the principles like those in XP are so much a part of our fabric as a company that it now extends through all parts of the business. We have many non-IT departments implementing Agile Development principles.

In fact, our COO, Nigel Dalton, has taken this into areas such as product development and account management. It is this belief and support from an executive level that allows us to continually improve our processes.

Builder.com: What do the business drivers and end users think of it? Are they deeply involved in the process?

Lyndon: The success of this type of development methodology relies on deep involvement of both external and internal clients at every stage of the process. The by-product of such involvement is constant feedback. Clients no longer feel like they are throwing the specification and pizza box over the wall to wait for the product. They are being listened to and can receive constant progress reports.

They see the product take shape before their eyes. It is an exciting and interactive process, and clients are genuinely enthusiastic about getting involved.

Inviting the bull into the china shop

Builder.com: Are internal and external clients deeply involved in the development process?

Lyndon: Absolutely. Internal clients, such as customer service, sales, and account managers, work side by side with the development team. We have taken this to the extreme by inviting one of our largest external clients to come into our offices and sit with the team as we go through the process of a release. This intimate involvement of external and internal clients is a fundamental driver behind our success.

Builder.com: In terms of skill set, what happens if, at a key moment during development, a person "less inclined" toward QA is responsible for testing?

Lyndon: Good question. In our team, we do not have any of the traditional roles such as business analyst, architect, QA engineer, or project manager that are generally associated with traditional development shops. We have a team in which everyone actively participates in every role. In some cases, a person remains in one role during an entire iteration. Other times, they rotate through all roles in one iteration.

For example, the most junior and senior developers will be involved in design, analysis, support, testing/QA, and resource management. Why have just one architect when you can have an entire team of architects at your disposal? How many times has a developer received a specification from an architect, only to find obvious omissions or weaknesses in the design?

We try to harness the full power of the team by allowing as much input for design as possible. We prevent one person from being labeled the "support person" or the "QA person" by making these roles a small component of each person’s responsibilities. By making each developer a QA person, we make everyone responsible for what they write. If they don't write a quality product, they will get to handle the resulting call for support and debug the problem later.

There are some cases where we have additional testing in place by the business to cover the issues around testing your own code. However, integrated unit testing and a focus toward functional testing make these processes less important.

Team building becomes a core value

Builder.com: Do natural leaders emerge in the open process?

Lyndon: This methodology requires a unique, flexible, and communicative personality. Everyone in the team is empowered to contribute to the highest level they feel comfortable. For example, during design process, anyone from a first-day employee to the CTO can take to the whiteboard and suggest architectures.

In this environment, people seem to gravitate toward being "thought leaders" in different areas of the system and development technologies, sometimes even surprising themselves!

Builder.com: Any warnings for organizations that are looking to adopt these methodologies?

Lyndon: XP and Agile have limitations, and they may not be for everyone. Before implementing these methodologies, understand why you are adopting them and know what you want them to do for you and your business. If you decide they are for you, be brave and be adaptable, and you will be rewarded.

At ePredix, we have had fun adopting XP and Agile methodologies. These processes have made the difference between success and failure in a very competitive and depressed market. We only hope spreading the word will allow others to enjoy similar success.

September 2001: Minneapolis

Living in the New America

The week of the 11th of September dragged like no other working week I have known. Arriving at work tardier than usual on Tuesday (having indulged in a little extra time with the ever blossoming Noah), I found phones ringing at empty desks and 30 people standing around the big screen television. A reality tv show to end all reality tv shows.

Each person was having their own individual experience of what was on screen - some only able to relate the scenes of planes crashing into skyscrapers to Schwarzeneger disaster movies; others, with a few extra years on their side remembering wars of the past and images of Vietnam and even London in the blitz; most contemplation being done in silence. But wait there's more - people plummeting like dolls from the upper levels. Eyes are covered - why would they possibly jump? Surely that's enough destruction for one movie - people grip the office partitions to make it all stop.

At 10 o'clock the phones ceased. A nation had just watched the impossible happen on their front doorstep. A nation that was delighting in reading about George Bush's revitalisation of the trillion dollar 'Star Wars' protective space umbrella project that would safeguard their infinite individual freedoms infinitely against terror and opponents of the American Way. Beaten by $3 Stanley knives.

By lunchtime Tuesday, most Americans had retreated to the security of their homes to watch the minute by minute unfolding of the nation's entry into a world where people die for the crime of being a citizen, believing in certain truths or voting the wrong way. As antipodeans running a business in a foreign country, we had to be sensitive to the tears and wide-eyed looks of uncertainty and send everyone home. Our tower block made business closure voluntary - with the Minnesota Government Center on one side, American Express HQ on another and the State Police HQ on the third it seemed prudent.

In my own naiive world I have to admit my first reaction to the footage was to wonder how someone had possibly stolen four empty airliners? It dawned on me by the fiftieth re-run that the planes were far from empty. It dawns on me now that I have flown on most of the flights and airlines that were hijacked that morning.

The fingers immediately began to be pointed at the Middle East. People rapidly forget that the last example of this kind of terror was perpetrated by a white American man, a US Army veteran who only a month earlier had been injected with a lethal dose of chemicals for killing hundreds of people in the bombing of a Government Building in Oklahoma.

Staff on their way home, waiting for the elevator to arrive at Level 35 mumble to each other, "what did America ever do to them to deserve this...?"

The CNN Nation is not generally alert to the other side of any story. With round the clock heart-stopping live action in 20 second sound and picture bites, how can you stop to analyze? Ask 50 people to describe the same scene or their feelings sure, but don't analyze. Coming from a country where radio announcers could take 40 minutes of prime breakfast radio to analyze the socio-economic impact of beer tax rising 2 cents a litre, it can be a little frustrating.

As the skyscraper implosions finally began to slow, hours of stories emerged to be told around individual tragedy, heroism and loss. The film is riveting, and as days go by the tourist video sold to the highest bidding media revealed even more shocking views of the events. You can all but see the plane emerge from the other side of that building.

Tuesday evening's viewing was a true-life drama scripted around saving the people who were trapped in the wreckage of the buildings. No-one knows how exactly how many were in the towers when they were hit, let alone when they fell 110 floors to self-destruction. The picture is painted of firefighters and construction workers tearing away at the 30 foot mountain of rubble in search of survivors. But not BUILDING survivors, as the nation was led to believe and hope for. These pictures were from 3 blocks back looking for survivors among the fire engines and ambulances that rushed to the scene that morning.

Three weeks later, the mountain of rubble at the true 'ground zero' is still 10 stories high, on fire and collapsing steadily.

It is hard to grasp the scale of skyscrapers like the Twin Towers. Each floor is an acre, stretching a city block each way. With much of that space taken up by dozens of elevators and the central skeletal structure, it still leaves room for over 250 people per level. Our US Bank building, the largest in Minneapolis houses around a 120 people per floor and rises less than half the height of the World Trade Center. When I worked in New Zealand, the black glass BNZ tower was a skyscraper, rising to less than a quarter the height and a fraction of the girth. Fifty thousand people work within 2 acres of flat land in Manhattan.

So what did America do to deserve this? On Wednesday September 12th my day was spent sitting with shocked staff members and starting to probe their anger at 'the moslems' for bringing a war that should rightly be fought on CNN in faraway fields, onto hallowed US territory. After Pearl Harbor, this is quoted as the first large scale incident of aggression on US soil in history. Damn the PLO-Taliban-islamites, we should kick their asses immediately by razing every shopping mall, skyscraper and financial center in Afghanistan.

My point, that there really aren't any skyscrapers in Afghanistan is beyond imagination. It isn't just your SUV and vacation-in-Florida lifestyle these people are bombing you for dammit. What did we ever do to them? Well, try $5b a year aid to Israel, much of which comes in the form of weaponry like the Black Hawk helicopters to keep the Palestinian problem under 'control'. Try the seven sisters of the oil industry in the 20th century, and their countless offspring in the decades since. An airliner shot from the sky over the middle east in a US training exercise error. Clandestine suport for wars and counter-wars to numerous to recall. All too much detail. I would get less blank looks concocting a story that because the Taliban live in the desert, they need to steal a really large number of Chevy Suburbans to get around, and since America has the most trucks...

More than once I am moved to wonder if this could actually be the most audacious Israeli plot yet? Or a Waco white supremacy act of madness? The Twin Towers are such an obvious symbol of money and power that even the psychotic teenagers who conducted the Columbine High School massacre last year figured them to be the ultimate target - their deranged diaries listed their ultimate plan as escaping the school grounds, hijacking a 747, flying across country and crashing into the North Tower.

One of the fundamental lessons in my life has been to understand and accept the existence of different 'world-views' (aka values, perspectives, ways of life, life-rules, philosophies, gestalts, methodologies, whatever word takes your fancy). Call it a benefit of a liberal arts education that pushed hard to make me understand that two people could see the same thing differently. That a fact was not a universal fact. Equally, that one world view might not be automatically superior to another. As a lesson it has served me well in working with different cultures and solving problems - more often working with people apparently from the same culture but with vastly different income levels.

America is a country with a world view so singular, dominant and indoctrinated that it is impossible for Americans to understand an act where a foreign soldier willingly suicides in an act of terrorism to better the state of the collective and become closer to god. Impossible to think through and explain why millions of people would refer to this nation as 'the great Satan'. The American dream of capitalism and individual freedom crosses cultural and economic boundaries like no other country I have visited - the US fundamentalist extremists don't even represent competing world views, they represent variations of the mainstream US world view. Think Ku Klux Klan and Timothy McVeigh. Think religious leaders claiming on TV that God allowed the September 11th disaster to occur because bible study was no longer compulsory in schools.

The closest they come to analysis is to identify the hijacking perpetrators as being psychologically disturbed madmen. The facts unfortunately fly in the face of this assumption - it is painfully apparent that these people passed themelves off as sane to universities, flight school instructors and landlords. A nation that cannot think through these complex issues is reduced to solving its problems in very simple ways. Perhaps nuking the bastards then administering Prozac to the world's less co-operative nations is the long term answer.

On a scale that stretches between complete freedom of the individual to complete devotion to the collective, the US certainly flies the flag for parties at the freedom end. A nation that values individual rights to the extent that drink-drive murderers escape punishment day after day as they have the right to an attorney being present before a blood sample is drawn (and said attorney has no time limit to get there), will never understand why a global collective based on politics and faith would organize to take on the world's superpower. Freedom includes the right to be free of having to think too hard about things.

There is little grasp of the rise of marginalised interest groups and religious fundamentalism as a major issue for the world to consider. First world and third world are apparently just finishing positions in the global human race, and the US already got the gold medal. The prize for being first was an island a long way from the rabble of the middle (and not so middle) east and minimal chance of invasion. I mean, the Japanese only got as close as Pearl Harbor and then we whipped their butts in the movie.

We are living in a country where the current president had been overseas once in his lifetime prior to election, and was quite proud of the fact. If you have 'travel' as an interest listed on your resume, it probably means you watch the Discovery Channel on tv. Terrorism is new here, but London has been without rubbish bins in the central city for years.

The terrorists were certainly well organized. Just when my Minnesotan colleagues began to comfort each other with "they'd never bother coming to Minneapolis", it was revealed that one of the pilots trained and lived in Saint Paul. Some of the terrorists have been in the USA for 10 years, and hardly fit the profile of fanatical suicide bomber with a truck load of TNT. At least 200 people have been identified as being involved in this current event - America has dubbed it 'The New War' but in reality its a very old war that has just moved to a new battlefield. That battlefield is slap bang in the middle of a nation that prefers the away games.

September the 11th has brought a new reality to the United States. First, this war is far from over, and it will not only be fought in the deserts of the middle east. There are acts of terrorism that can be perpetrated without the drama of hijacking planes and crashing them into capitalist icons. Poisoning, chemical warfare, a second hand nuclear device in the back of an SUV... Second, the timing of events has seriously exacerbated the existing fragility of the US economy, where consumers have been notoriously difficult to coax out of their shells into back to the Mall to spend their money (we are now down to 3% interest rates with no sign of behavioral change - how low does 'Greenspansan' have to go?).

The coincidence of the new Spielberg hit-tv series 'Band of Brothers' based on the D-Day invasion premiering 2 days before the Manhattan disaster is almost too much to bear. The US is going to be dragged back into arenas of war where loss of life is a fact of the job, not demerit points on the performance management report of a 4 Star General watching it unfold on the internet. Declaring war on global terror is a fairly tall order.

So as a resident alien it has become quite eerie to be in the USA at this time. The overwhelming urge is to flee the country. To where? To Europe, where a jet fighter can reach Rome from a base in Libya in 3 minutes? Where each country has an ongoing battle with their own fundamentalist faction using terrorist tactics to promote their aims - be it Spain, Macedonia, Belfast, London, Paris, Bosnia, Turkey, Italy, Sardinia, the Baltic states, or Germany with its neo-nazi revival. Not to mention coping with the refugees from everyone else's battles who bring among them peoples of many different beliefs and politics.

The bottom of the world, the places we refer to as home when asked by the inevitable American curiosity of someone who's 'not from around here', seem at face value fairly attractive and safe. They are hardly immune from the world's troubles however, as CNN and internet web sites in your face 24 x 7 would be there to remind you of what terror lay beyond the horizon. The problems of extremist behaviour in countries like South East Asia and the Pacific (let's not forget East Timor or Fiji) are not to be ignored either. Just how many soldiers are in the Indonesian Army?

Whilst our everyday lives are largely unnaffected by the crisis, getting around America will be a nightmare for the rest of the year. Coupled with my CEO's experience of seeing a pistol pulled by an angry passenger during a flight from SF to NY in December last year (resulting in an ear popping descent to Lincoln Nebraska, a major arrest drama but not a column centimetre of media anywhere as it apparently happens at least once a day!), I'm less keen than I was. Hijacking no longer means money, a getaway car and enough avgas to get the plane to Libya - it means you are buggered and have a date with a part of the US military-industrial complex. I take some heart from the fact El Al fly at all, and will happily pay more for a ticket to upgrade the $6 an hour labor currently staffing the security screening at 98% of US airports.

Having flown this week to Virginia, it reminded me of traveling 15 years ago when there were no e-tickets and gate-lounge check-ins. Two hours queuing to get a seat allocation and through bag and body search is just a fact of life. The sign at the metal detector gate at Norfolk airport (a major center for the US Navy) said it all - No knives, No Weapons, No Mace, No Jokes. For each of the first three it had been easy for the airport sign-maker to think of a symbol to contain in the obligatory circle with a slash through it, the international sign of 'not'. Clearly there is no international symbol for humor, as the last circle remained blank.

Attack and counter-attack will no doubt curtail a few other freedoms, and bring about some heavy debates about citizen's constitutional right to bear arms. A society obsessed with individual freedom may go to some extreme lengths to protect the freedom of some individuals over others - it is not beyond the realm that anyone of apparently middle eastern extraction will be rounded up and put in camps for the duration. Crazy? Ask the Japanese Americans who spent WW2 in confinement on US soil. Given the CIA's record of helping people disappear in South America in the last 30 years, so local practice is not out of the question.

For Lesley, Noah and I (who puff ourselves up with some kind of false pride at what 'global citizens' we are - for goodness sake we live in the international equivalent of Palmerston North!) it has all been a sobering reminder of how fragile that globe can be. I look at Noah and consider the emotions my parents must have felt at my birth in 1963 - a president assassinated, the threat of nuclear war, the Bay of Pigs, the Arab-Israeli crises and the emergence of Vietnam. I also consider my younger brother's generation who were born into the seemingly hopeless issues of environmental disaster, escalating nuclear tension, wars like the Afghanistan invasion by Russia and the IRA campaigns in London. No generation has been without these issues.

A lot of Minnesota people have hatched plans for escaping to Canada should gas attacks or biological warfare break out. In my opinion they are underestimating the difficulty of scaling up to 'top-dress' America (although crop-dusting, as they call it here, has been banned for 2 weeks now). Water supplies are diverse and closely monitored. CNN obsesses if there is an abnormal rate of ingrown toenails let alone Smallpox or Anthrax epidemics. Thus, for all its shortcomings, I am comforted by the astonishing resources that this nation can bring to bear on its problems, by the vast scale of both the geography and the economy, and by the way the people can collaborate and organize under siege. We'll stay put for now.

On a pragmatic front, our city location in Minneapolis does feel a little perilous - we are flanked by the Fed, the US Postal Service, the Minneapolis Police Station and the business district. With the humor that only an Anzac can bring to the tragedy of war, a couple of us are wondering if the nearby Target superstore might like to consider changing its logo in the near future.

March 2001: Minneapolis

Seize the Day Job

Plans can change very quickly it seems. One minute we were in Long Island attempting the triple whammy of opening a branch of the business, signing up a house lease, and buying a Volkswagen with no American credit history (a near impossibility here, the conversation steering quickly to “ah, so I see you have the first born on the way then…”) then suddenly we are setting ourselves up in the frozen state of Minnesota, home of the coldest capital city in the United States. Proudly beating Alaska for the title.

The ‘deal’ that was to take ePredix from California to Long Island, New York came to a sudden impasse forcing a retreat North to the company’s main office. When Nigel took this job one year ago this week, who would have foreseen that we would now be sitting in an apartment on the 16th floor overlooking the ice encrusted upper reaches of the Mississippi? As it turns out, with hindsight of two weeks it is not a bad place to be.

We didn’t so much as leave San Francisco, as just forget to go back. A perfectly scheduled trans-continental round trip devolved into the usual crisis du jour and here we all are. Not quite all either – Marmalade the cat is not due for another week or so. At work we have consolidated our acquisitions into a beautiful (ex Lloyds Bank subsidiary that didn’t survive a Nasdaq in the 1900’s) 35th floor tower block for $9/ square foot, around 1/8 of the price of something similar in SF even after the crash.



We have come to a very bad example of winter we are told. A spell of 120 days below 40F° (5C°) has just been broken in the last few days, whereas last year there was only 20 consecutive days that cold. When we arrived two weeks ago it was -20F° (-30C°), too cold to snow as the air is incredibly dry and there is no cloud cover to keep and heat in.

Now we are in March, a big month for snow as the temperatures gets up to around freezing point. Twelve inches of white powder yesterday and six inches of grit and salt flavoured slushie today in a balmy 34F° (2C°). It’s amazing how warm that suddenly feels.

The day we moved in to RiverWest apartments it was Zero degrees. Our Australian neighbour turned up in shorts to lift and carry, and the rest of us had t-shirts on. We were pleased to be re-acquainted with all of our possessions, and even more delighted when the truck driver gave us $100 at the end of the morning for helping. Never in 11 years of delivering furniture in the USA had the people who owned the furniture lifted a finger to help him. Another tiny insight into two cultures separated by a common language.

Weather Obsession

Everyone here is obsessed with weather as it is a survival issue. People die going outside for a walk. Going out in the car means being equipped with a survival pack of thermal blankets, food and water and shovels to dig yourself out in case of a breakdown. The TV has a dedicated 24-hour local weather station and our car radio has a dedicated weather broadcast button (so that’s what the ‘WB’ button is for!).

Fahrenheit, we’ve decided, must have been someone’s ploy to distract the proletariat of an eastern bloc country in the 1950’s from the monotonous tractor factory travails. It’s a whole conversation in itself just figuring out how damn cold it is. It makes the Celsius scale look like a work of staggering genius (well, make boiling point 100 and then freezing zero, and anything below that is damned cold…).

The roads, although well groomed, are lethal in the late afternoons as any snow that has melted in the middle of the day turns to ice. It took as about two minutes on the I-394 highway to decide that a 4 wheel drive was the only car for us, hence we have a leased Subaru Outback down in the (heated) garage. Motorized luge could be a new event in Salt Lake next year. The general conditions plus the grit and salt used on the roads to keep them negotiable don’t do much for the longevity of vehicles. Many look like Nanna’s doilies with the accumulated rust of only a few seasons.

A Minnesota car is especially built. Apart from the WB button on the radio, there are heated windscreen wiper blades (to stop them freezing to the glass); heated windscreen spray nozzles; no aerial (they break off under snow chunks that fly off the roof after a storm); heated seats (two settings including sizzle); heated mirrors; heated engine block; snow tyres; 1500 mile service intervals due to oil breakdown in the cold; larger petrol tanks to reduce stops at gas stations that resemble McMurdo Station in Antarctica; along with a myriad of places to store supplies for when you get snowed in.

The roads are interesting once the snow clears a bit – no dividing lines are left visible from the constant grit slushie they endure. Driving can be a bit un-nerving when the left lane is half covered with a blackened snow mountain and the remaining lanes are without lines or a centerline. Is this 3 lanes North and one South, or 2 lanes each way? Just exactly where is the line to stop at this intersection?

Still, all that aside, once you have got over the fact that it is really really cold outside for a good part of the year it so far seems a pretty good city. It is well built for the conditions. Driving around the place looks completely deserted. In the central city there are no shop frontages as all retail begins one floor up in the Skyway that runs through all the major downtown buildings including where Nigel works. It’s like a giant 4 ½ mile hamster tunnel criss-crossing the city. We live about a block away from the Skyway so it’s a matter of piling on coats enough for a short dash then we’re all cosy and having to carry all our gear for the rest of the outing.

Left My Debt in San Francisco

There’s plenty of challenging outdoor activities to be had. Nigel has been out cross-country skiing for the first time. Friends went out dog sledding this weekend and there is ice-skating, snowboarding, snowshoeing and all manner of frosty pastimes. All these things Lesley will be saving for next winter, as at 30 weeks pregnant crossing an icy street seems adventure enough.

Still, spring is on it’s way and by all accounts summers are splendid here - ignoring the fact that the 12,000 lakes that make the state beautiful are responsible for breeding mosquitos that have earned the crown of ‘official state bird’.

The cultural diversity of California is not apparent here. The population seems to be dominated by fair-haired pale people, Nordic stock I guess. For some reason there is the anomaly of a sizable Nigerian population. What attracts them here I have yet to ascertain. In general our experiences so far show people here to be very friendly and genuine, a reprieve after a year of self obsessed Californians.

People are just so nice. Even the intimidating ‘homies’ hanging out at the mall with their Tommy Hilfiger jeans worn with the in-pant anti-gravity generator, big puffa jackets and LL Cool J beanies open doors for Lesley and ask her when the baby is due, is it a boy or a girl, where are we from?

We wonder sometimes what to spend the surplus cash on – we have an apartment twice the size of our garret in SF, completely redecorated and newly furnished, a new car and still enough money left over to begin the offspring’s college fund before we even get up to what rent cost on the Left Coast.

The Columns of Porsches (CPI) Index

As I tracked (some might say caused) the rise and fall of the Silicon Empire in San Francisco, I devised a new state of the economy index. When we first arrived in SF, the Chronicle on Saturday had less than half a column of Porsches for sale in the classifieds. Old 1970s rust buckets, a few 1980s viagra-powered muscle cars with too many miles on the clock and no sign of the German holy grail – a 1996 Targa S. Times were too, too good.

As the new economic world fell apart, the classified columns grew. By mid-year, the slim pickings on the CPI had exploded to include a few 1990s models coming back from failed CEO leaseholders at www.justanothertotallyuselessdeliveryservice.com, accompanied by a sprinkling of ‘really must sell’ notices from the Valley.

By January 2001, the CPI had reached 4 full columns, with at least two inches of 1996 Targa S models to be had in black, white, silver, or blue, with low miles, a free service, a car cover and full references (both personal and mechanical).

Immediately upon arriving in Minneapolis I bought the local Saturday paper and scanned for the classifieds. O for Oldsmobile, P for Pontiac, and then straight to S for Saturn. Not a single heavenly glass roofed curvaceous boxer-engined body in between. With a ‘thank god the debate is over whether a child seat could be shoehorned into a 911’smile on her face, Lesley pointed out that with 4 columns of second-hand snowmobiles for sale it was unlikely they had room in that edition.

All kinds of Implements

As a farm boy from way back, there’s a lot of comfort in picking up the local paper on Sunday and having 3 or 4 inserts for bargains on tractor tyres and animal medicines crash among the lattes. A town with Monster Trucks every month, Supercross each season under the giant dome of the indoor stadium, RV shows and a big Agricultural expo has got to be a place I want to live.

We bought a map book of Minnesota last week (249 pages of blanks and 1 city) and ventured North to see the sights. I swear when they were thinking up state mottos that ‘She’s pretty flat, mostly’ would have been a finalist. The book reputes to have contour lines drawn on at 60 foot intervals – I challenge anyone to find even one! There are things you can do here that cannot be dreamed of where I grew up. Imagine driving your car onto Lake Taupo in winter and doing donuts to your heart’s content for example. Or driving right to the middle to drill a hole and go fishing through 4 feet of ice.

Preparations are well under way for the arrival of the American in our family. We bought the stroller (push-chair to our antipodean friends), borrowed the bed thingy and have started the clothing collection. It seems amazing that it is so hard to enter this country on a Visa yet the mere act of being born here entitles you to citizenship and a passport. Mind you, he will have to live down explaining to his friends why his birth certificate says ‘Minnesota’.

January 2001: San Francisco

Do You Have Trouble Starting or Holding Your Bowel Movements?

ANNUS CALIFORNICUS

The new millenium began, as I was recently reminded by one of my horde of grocer-in-laws, as a fart without pressure. An immense bottle of New Zealand's finest vintage bubbly, shaken by my sturdy hand, delivered not the cork as expected, but a quiet lisping ssssssththhhhhhhhh and the aged stopper in my hand. Dry as a dead dingo's donger.

Grocer-in-law #2, so proudly the recipient of the bottle in reward for selling shed-loads of some jam or other, had displayed it upright in the sun for 8 months in his office, letting every last ounce of joie de champenoise escape in time for for the great dawning of the 21st century. Without the anticipated fountain of champagne-like substances, aspersions were immediately cast upon my manhood and conclusions were drawn as to the 13 year childless state of my union with their sister.

Well, what say you now brothers-in-grocery? We have put our fertile fortune down to the San Franciscan karma generated from living next door to the Immaculate Conception Academy (illustrated below). Makes us wonder what could have happened had we chosen to live in Cow Hollow, Nob Hill or the Tenderloin.

Thus, with miraculous new male-child member of the clan due early May 2001, what other events could possibly have reached 'slightly interesting' in the history file for regurgitation?

Much of the year has of course revolved around being the last gold-miner to the Gabriel's Gulch of dot com California. A mere thirty days had passed before the 40-odd consecutive financial quarters of economic growth experienced in the USA started unravelling. By October the stock market curve resembled the new downhill ski run for the Utah Olympics. We New Zealanders can have that effect on things sometimes.

DOT COM DEATH RATTLE

With alarming speed the game changed from a scramble to build a business using OPM (other people's money) to just a scramble. Bigfast became 'Begfest', as doors closed in every institution in the nation to an ecommerce based startup proudly planning to lose money for at least a year. There were moments when we thought that changing our Powerpoint slides to read:

"Vision Statement: Enabling online paedophilia and becoming global standard for internet child pornography exchange"...

...might actually elicit more returned Venture Capitalist calls than our business to business human resources ecommerce proposition.

It was thus a very grim year in a business sense. Firstly, learning to cope with American markets, where the combined population of New Zealand and Australia live within 2 hours drive of our office - California is the 6th largest economy in the world, soon to overtake the United Kingdom. Secondly, learning that on bad days 2 hours in the car might only get you to the end of the block because the whole nation owns 2 cars - abandoning one on 24th Street outside Martha's coffee shop, and taking the other to work. Finally, living in a country where a layoff of 5,000 people makes the small print column on page 2 of the business section.

When we arrived in San Francisco, the NASDAQ index, which tracks most of the new economy stocks was just over 5000. As I trudged home 2 days ago, it had fallen to 2300. A mere halving would have been nice. I am composing the first draft of this on the first Saturday where I have not gone to work since April 14.

I reflect with irony that the star investment of 2000 was the Savings and Loan sector, the alternative to bank-lenders that in the 1980s flagrantly pumped up property valuations to allow them to have growth numbers in their lending books that would impress even a modern Venture Capitalist. The orchestrated litany of lies that inflated this sector was like a flame to greedy baby boomer moths, and the eventual realisation that lending 150% of a property's value could only lead to tears required the government to bail everyone out.

Ten years later 'dot com' joins the hall of infamy along with S&L and junk bond. I knew it was bad when people started quoting Michael ‘junk bond’ Milliken and bidding to get him on the board of their ecommerce startup. For those of you who have read Po Bronson's excellent 1999 book "The Nudist on the Late Shift", documenting the madness of the new economy in San Francisco, I can assure you that the reality of 2000 makes the more harrowing passages of his prose seem like a holiday at Surfers.

The dot com industry has regrettably descended to the realm of infamy as the human consequences of a 'dot com' burnout became evident in Boston this week. Workplace massacres with AK47 rifles used to be referred to as 'going postal' in reference to workplace shootings that involved disgruntled US Post Office employees. Its now going to be known as 'dotcommicide' I fear. The company concerned develops software for one of our competitors, just to bring it a little closer to home.

Once again the all-time number 1 victim of workplace shootings bought it (as 1 among 7) - the Human Resources Manager. Reminds me to talk to our R&D Manager about developing an online assessment for homicidal maniac proclivities. Whilst there are still HR Managers to sell it to.

NEW ECONOMY OR NEW MATHEMATICS?

The so-called 'New' economy has been so heavily over-promoted relative to its size and impact on the state of this nation. Through various nefarious mechanisms in calculating the Gross Domestic Product of the United States, the contribution of tech stocks and dot coms is vastly over-multiplied. In December everyone 'nouveau' is weeping because 10,000 people were laid off from all the dot coms that failed that month. Well, Maytag and Whirlpool (the washing machine people) laid off 10,000 people in the South before Christmas because white ware demand is down. Keeps it in perspective.

I read during the year that the employee head count of the top 1000 technology, biotech and generally 'new economy' companies (mostly but not exclusively listed on the NASDAQ exchange) is about 1,000,000 people. Wal-mart alone employs 1.1m people. Even with the hype, ecommerce based retail sales amounted to perhaps 4% of the retail sales in the USA this year. And the largest B2B (business to business) you-beauty chemical exchange ecommerce site in the world undertakes how many transactions per day do you think? A thousand? Ten thousand? Ahhhhh .... one on average actually.

Two main factors the economists among you should consider when thinking about the end of the US boom. First, there is still no real evidence of a productivity gain in the USA that can be attributed to computers or the internet. Yes, the USA has enjoyed 9 years of unprecedented quarter on quarter growth in GDP, and yes, at the same time the PCs have become ubiquitous across the economy (>60% of households for a start). But, when the wizards calculate GDP in the USA they use a magic spell called Hedonic pricing.

Hedonic pricing multiplies any actual spending on anything related to technology by a factor of 2-3 to account for the fact that the processor speed on 2000 year Pentiums is on average twice last years - there must be hidden productivity gains from that extra 300 MHz right? Surely? Likewise software with more functions for the same price on the box this year than it did last year. Surely it would be morally wrong to leave some of those gains unvalued?

Thus at the press of the F5 key (refresh), $92b national spending on computers in 2000 became $250b in GDP contribution this year alone. Test the theory - does your 600MHz laptop really double your productivity over your old 300MHz unit?

The other piece of muggle-wizardry is the way they validate working hours. This is not important for the gross GDP number, for if Americans choose to slave away for 2 extra hours a day to make 10% more digi-widgets good on them. It has its limits though, as that well-known Keynesian economist Monty Python so deftly explained (loooxury!). Anyway, each time the statistics are gathered some lucky young graduate in the Department of Commerce draws the straw to phone 1000 companies nationwide and ask them how many hours on average a person on various amounts of money works each week. Imagine it: "the US Department of Commerce, Washington DC here, we'd like to ask you about working hours at your company..." What human resources clerk wouldn't cack themselves on the spot and quote the party line that everyone strictly works 37.5 hours per their contracts? Any other news gets out and the lefty Cuban sympathising pinko democrats might just have a problem with it.

Germany recently used the US method of GDP calculation and discovered it was the strongest economy in the history of the world. Hope it doesn't give them any big ideas - we're probably safe given that the UK and USA have cunningly unloaded Rover and Chrysler onto their ordered world, the best piece of economic warfare since the Trojan Horse (which I add might well have been a more reliable vehicle than a Rover). That ought to slow them down! Hell, even New Zealand would probably be booming using these mathematics.

I am reminded of my favourite statistic for 2000 - that at the current rate of growth of Elvis impersonators, the entire population of the planet will be growing sideburns and wearing glitter suits by 2017. Coming from San Francisco I'm inclined to believe it.

Keeping a sense of humour, albeit gallows in nature, has been easy enough.

MOMENTS OF LIGHT

I recall laughing our arses off at 1am, amidst a sea of discarded Corona bottles and Thai Takeaway in the realisation that our "We Really Need Money Now or We're Going to the Poorhouse" presentation scheduled for Venture Capitalists the next morning now painted a business proposition so impressive and efficient that we didn't actually need to borrow any money.

Some weeks later, we had the second largest American business in history (more humour - it was the largest when I started this story but they seem to have just slightly overstated Q4 sales) on the other end of a web-cast to demonstrate our HR software, when a hungry psychologist put a bagel in the toaster and blew the whole floor's electricity supply. I note with some satisfaction that a few of Cisco's toasters must have also blown their fuses lately and their stock is looking a little underdone.

We even managed to top that episode when another psychologist plugged in his infra-red toad warmer and popped the circuits for a second time. Toad-warmer? Rest assured toads are not harmed in our product development process.

A Texas based assessment competitor provided some mirth mid-year when their clients were finally slapped with a class action suit for using such gems of psychometric questions in a job application as (answer true or false):

• I have had no difficulty in starting or holding my bowel movements
• I am an agent of God
• My mother was a good woman
• I like tall women
• The top of my head sometimes feels tender
• Everything tastes the same
• I very much like hunting
• I am fascinated by fire
• Sometimes in elections I vote for men about whom I know very little

The judge awarded damages of $2 million to unsuccessful job applicants with the Texas based 'Rent a Center' who used the test - they have 2100 stores nationwide and employ tens of thousands of people.

There's some kind of irony tied up in that last statement given the Texan that this nation just voted into office as the United States President. He's exactly the kind of good old boy that would pass the test and five minutes later would be renting you a tv or microwave for six bucks a month. To paraphrase Blackadder: "a man with a brain so small that if a hungry cannibal cracked his head open, there wouldn't be enough to cover a small water biscuit".

Equally, I can't recall an election that generated as much humour as this one - perhaps the internet is finding its true place in the American economy at last? Funniest moment? Probably Clinton advising Bush to "follow his conscience" in the leadership role - it had always worked for him. Add 'conscience' to the list of euphemisms for male organ.

Harpers summarized it perfectly, quoting Earl K. Long: “When I die - if I die - I want to be buried in Louisiana, so I can stay active in politics”.

If you answered 'True' to Rent-a-Center’s first question above, then there is even more mirth to be found on the domestic front - check through the California Yellow Pages for a moment in search of a plumber for example. You will find:

• Discount Rooter
• Economy Rooter
• Mister Rooter
• Rapid Rooter
• Ready Rooter
• Rescue Rooter
• Roto-Rooter
• Super Rooter
• Urgent Rooter

California is a very tree-ful state you see, and the tree roots upset plumbing no end. Of course you knew that. Not before one of the Australians in the office had copied down a lot of 1-800 numbers from passing vans in search of special companionship though.

WHITHER 2001?

Well, the first news is that the sun is setting on our California adventure. That rare combination of money, people, entrepreneurism, education, optimism, energy and success that made Silicon Valley the place to be, is just a lingering odour akin to the SOMA street corner drains above which we work. VC funds are giving unspent money back to investors. A long-standing company like Computer Associates can lose 80% of its market value in an hour on the stock exchange. Nobody knows what the next big thing is - biotech? NO! Comms? NO! Software? NO! Anything? NO! The Valley will return, but not until there has been an almighty Darwinistic shaking out of the remaining weak and aged members of the herds.

So we've concluded that with the ridiculous rents and nightmares attracting staff to work here, it is not the place to grow a company. Greener pastures please. Funnily enough many of the big Trust funds that support the Vulture Capitalists have drawn the same conclusion and are seeking investment in the Eastern USA and Europe. Growth in 2001 is suddenly very important - having somehow survived the nightmare that was 2000, the temptation is to curl up and hide from a year in hell. The right answer is to capitalize on our bank balance and finish off rolling up our acquisitions. Wondering where the rent money for your business is going to come from definitely toughens your survival skills.

Thus we are moving the main operation to Minneapolis, Minnesota in January. The slight climatic differences between the 2 locations have been pointed out a few times - on one day last week it was 50 degrees in San Francisco and minus 50 in Minneapolis. A full 100 degree spread. Get Fargo by the Cohen brothers out on video for a few ideas of the environment. An exploratory trip in December left us wondering what we would do with all the extra money each month - in 5 hours Lesley found 6 houses we could live in - 4 bedrooms beside picturesque lakes with nearby village-type shopping for a thousand dollars a month less than we pay here for a hovel. And all that shovelling of snow off the drive ought to rid me of this paunch.

We also have an opportunity in New York that we are investigating that might require a few people to base there. Here's hoping. I am reminded by the third person in the bed that they would like to know in the next month or so, to sort out their delivery schedule!

So, may we have seen the last of:

• A housing market where you are paying the equivalent of a $500,000 USD mortgage to rent a one bedroom apartment.
• People who advertise on their resume that the care and feeding of 12 zebra finches was a major achievement for them at College.
• IT developers who can't come in today because they had some bad vibes at their ceramics class last night.
• Vulture Capitalists
• Earthquake damaged buildings that cost $80 per square foot to rent; and
• Grande Egg-nog non-fat soy milk black forest frappucino's, Starbucks special seasonal beverage.

But then again, with the incessant Californication of the world I fully expect to retire to Tuscany in 20 years time and find a bouff-head Italian Elvis in the local Trattoria turning out the very same Christmas special coffee-flavoured beverage. Such is life.

May 2000: San Francisco

Five headlines and banners you would only find in San Francisco:

1. Cross Dress for Less
2. How am I driving? Dial 1-800-EAT-SHIT
3. Breast Implants through your Navel – new wonder procedure!
4. Now that your Mom has a portable CD player, get MP3
5. FBI investigate Twinkie hoarding.

Eight weeks in Wonderland and the white rabbits are everywhere. Having settled into a routine with our ePredix startup (work until Friday, then celebrate that there are only 2 working days until the next week), SF has become home. Home, crazy home.

We experienced our first earthquake a couple of weekend’s ago, walking along in the main shopping district searching for food for the Sunday work shift. Shop windows were visibly moving, the air felt thicker to breathe and a rumble like 1000 distant jet aircraft filled our ears.

The quake flowed up the street getting louder, and then, just when we started to dive under a doorway we clicked that an earthquake was unlikely to go to the tune of “yo funky nigger get yor ass around…” How anyone could fit that much sound in a Chevy Blazer astonishes me. How anyone can drive that Blazer and have intact internal organs is a medical mystery.

I’m very happy to announce that the cats arrived safely and settled in immediately. They sit on the fire escape watching the world go by and saving up especially large spitwads for the stream of dogs that walk underneath with their unsuspecting owners. “$2 says you can’t land a hoyk on that Lab’s head Lulu”.

Lesley meanwhile, has been painting like a dervish, developing her style in acrylics and managing to cover a fair few walls of our SOMA offices. Bad luck we move to larger space with more walls in 3 weeks time, she has become a gold card holder at the art supplies shop.

CHAPTER 1: The Food Chain has officially collapsed.

Graphic artist MC Escher, who allegedly died in 1972 (www.worldofescher.com) is actually alive and well in the San Francisco dart carm economy. Instead of sitting covertly in Starbucks sipping whatever brew a reasonable Dutchman might find among today’s special coffees (“ja, grande orange mocha chip frappucino to go…”), his spirit has infected everything to do with getting something done in this crazy city.

The biggest complainers are the dart carmers themselves, so we’ll start the story there. Within the neighbouring 10 blocks in SOMA, there are 700 internet based startup companies. I daren’t let my staff out at lunchtime for fear they will be tempted by a BMW wielding recruiter.

To get their 700 dart carm projects up and running they needed people – the smartest young people who could be cajoled into working for sixpence and some stock options. These sort of folk used to work at Kinko’s, the global 24 x 7 photocopy and binding company.

So, the dart carms stole the Kinko’s staff.

Kinko’s, in return, stole the Starbuck’s staff. Starbucks, tit for tat stole the Macdonalds counter staff. Mackers, already at the bottom of the employment food chain drafted the bewildered and homeless behind the counter. So, Bobby Dartcarm comes in for a Big Mac and fries to go, and wonders why he ends up with a Fish dinner and hepatitis to go.

We recruit a lot of people from out of the state. This leads to some hilarious moments with the applicant’s approach to getting from the airport to the CBD for their interview. Prize winner so far is the young Java Programmer from Texas who rented a car, drove up the 101 from the airport then spent 2 hours finding a car park.

It hadn’t occurred to him that you did anything else. We didn’t hire him in the end but I’m sure the trip wasn’t wasted – he probably got 3 other job offers just driving around SOMA.


CHAPTER 2: April 10, the Gloss comes off Tech Stocks

Being in the actual center of the Nasdaq earthquake on April 10 was amazing. A fair few internal organs got pulped that day. Not that everyone in this city works at a dart carm, its just that everyone in this city seems to have abandoned any traditional form of financial management (banks, mattresses, savings accounts, bonds, balanced portfolios…) for loading all their spare cash into E*Trade and getting high on the Tech Stock juice (‘drinking the kool aid’ as the jargon goes).

Another of the Escher-like qualities of SF is that we all get to watch the balloon deflate in real time on the net – no need to wait for the papers at the end of the day, everyone’s pager is going off as their portfolio crashes! By the end of the week’s trading, most companies in our sector (human resources, recruiting) were worth a third of their Jan 1 valuation. Not being listed yet made it a little more palatable.

The outcome is some very red-faced Tech Stock gamblers, including the Vulture Capitalists. This sophisticated species (Homo Usurer), watching the millions they loaned to the ninth pet food on line startup vapourise before their eyes have become very cranky as a result (www.sonofabitch.com). Having suddenly moved from 12 Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) a year to 2-3, there is some intense competition over anyone who actually has a solid business idea.

My prediction is that the phrase ‘dot com’ will come to mean something akin to the phrase ‘junk bond’ which emerged with such profile in the 1980s. Like all change, people have fallen for overestimating the speed and underestimating the impact. Its not helped by everyone claiming they are revolutionizing the market that they work within (“revolutionizing on-line sales of barbecues, implements and sauces”), and when one sub-model (B2C) loses its shine quickly shifting to another (B2B). Exhibit A the hordes of consumer sites that have suddenly found a ‘business to business’ angle and rolled out more kool aid.

It might help take some of the heat off the over-pumped housing market here. Right now to get a house you have to be prepared to write a 1000 word essay saying why you should be allowed to buy the property, and bid at least 20% over the asking price. I suppose it keeps the literacy levels up in certain neighbourhoods – maybe there’s a dart carm opportunity writing essays for people who desperately need new accommodation? And so, the net spawns another new business opportunity.


CHAPTER 3: Starting up a Startup is just like … starting up.

I saw a great advert for a programmer the other day that summarized the irrational and desperate nature of what we are undertaking as we surf the industrial revolution. It read “Web Programmer with at least 10 Years Java Experience Required Urgently”. Of course, neither the job, nor the software have existed even half that time.

It reminded me of that scary statistic that 80% of the jobs that today’s 14 year olds will occupy when they graduate DO NOT EXIST yet.

Nobody likes to admit it too much, but we don’t really know what we are doing here. Its not like we can delve into a bunch of history books. We all sneak a peak at Fast Company magazine in the hope that someone can offer comforting words that the emotions we feel are somehow normal. Recent headlines in Business 2.0 (another dart carm bible) suggested startups without a UK presence were not serious about their businesses. More on that later.

The speed with which we are working is quite phenomenal. Our CEO has not had a day off since November. I’ve had 2 in 8 weeks. Building a business in the new style is quite different - remember we have virtually no customers, no products being sold (yet) and setup costs that could fund much of the national debt of NZ (IT, recruiting…).

Funding this 20th century style (bigslow) out of each month’s tiny growth in profits would be impossible. It’s a bit like driving a Yank-Tank on the freeway, foot to the floor going so fast you can watch the petrol gauge dive every mile, and if you ponder for a moment whether there is a gas station in the next five miles you’ve lost your edge. There just has to be a gas station.

Our software is coming along nicely. With the net economy the primary focus is on having a whiz bang show for the investors - to hell with customers and details like whether it works. So, spend every penny you have on making the web-site dance and sing. Unfortunately, 20 seconds after listing or gaining funding in the market its all about meeting analyst’s revenue targets. So, spend all your money on the engine room and to hell with the pretty pictures. Focus swaps every 30 minutes. Balance that little game and remain fashionable.

I’ve been pondering an outdoor training program to get people to understand how this works. Lots of changing the rules without notice, understanding risk, overcoming obstacles, limited resources etc. Next life maybe.

We have a sensational team who have without protest worked the hours required when only 25% of the crew are on board so far. My time is spent balancing customers with finances and the software developers. Much of it has been dedicated to recruiting – if you do the maths and consider that we need 60 staff across the company at full complement, and for each we might review 20 resumes, that’s a lot of time spent recruiting.

Lesley and I are off to the UK in June to startup the European operation. Our greatest potential competitor is based in London and we think it appropriate to locate somewhere nearby and wave the flag. I’m sure if their stodgy old directors reviewed any proposal from a bright young thing on the team suggesting a dart carm startup they’d fair spew their brandy balloon across the room on the financials alone!!

Chapter 4: Recruiting Americans

I give up. Everyone out of the gene pool, you Yanks have gone too far this time. Getting an American, and more specifically a Californian to work for you is an ugly experience. The average conversation with a 22 year old graduate with no work experience can be summarised thus:

Employer: so*, what did you think of our presentation on the company and what we are offering?
Applicant: it’s kindof okay, but I just want to say that this is like not about you or ePredix, it’s like about me. When can we like, get in step with each other about the stock options?
Employer: well, we did that 5 times today already. What’s not clear in your mind?
Applicant: Well, I thought it was like normal for you to give me like at least 3% of the company…
Employer: ah, no, as I told you three times before your role qualifies you for the standard allocation, which is about 1/2000th of the outstanding shares…
Applicant: okay, but, like, I can sell them the day after we list right, buy my Ferrari and then like, you give me some more?
Employer: no, that’s on the FAQ sheet under “of course you can’t sell them the day after we list, what kind of a dill-brain are you?”
Applicant: so, like, do I get my own office?
Employer: no.
Applicant: secretary?
Employer: no
Applicant: interest free like, loan for car?
Employer: no
Applicant: okay, like the salary you’re offering is just for the first few weeks right, then everyone gets like $150,000?
Employer: ahh, no, where di…
Applicant: so, like, do I pay the phone bill and gas bill and get you to reimburse me or do you just pay them direct to the utility company?
Employer: tell me about how many of your friends have packages like this?
Applicant: well, none actually. But like, this is really not about them, it’s about me - I rock… I really think we need to get one to one about the stock options?

*there you go Tom!

These people would be the worst tennis players. They are the sort of bastards who sit at the other end of the court in a game of social tennis and have to hit every single shot as a winner, every serve an ace. Serve – whack. Serve – whack. They have no appreciation that the enjoyment of the game might be based on rallies, and there is a collaborative element in there somewhere.

Silicon Fever has only made it worse. One job – whack – millionaire – whack – retire – whack. Pete Sampras you have ruined a generation.

The real Silicon Valley (south of here) is a cess-pit of greed and frustration over the simple pretext your neighbour might be making more money than you. With e-businesses sitting cheek by jowl in concrete industrial parks its commonly noted that you can easily change your job without undergoing the trauma of having to change your car pool. In fact god help you if you have to find a new car pool.

Balance this seeming madness and greed against demand for employees. Every 7 days, in the (415) dialing district (SOMA and surrounds), on one job board (there are 6000 in America), over 3500 permanent Java Programmer roles are posted. Start to wonder why unemployment is at a record low? Start to wonder why America should see the medium term challenge of leading the new economy when China will have more citizens using the internet in 18 months than America will have?

My Russian contingent have a great sense of humour over the issue (www.glastnost.com?). According to them, in New York, you arrive on the boat and soon you get the only job that will take someone who has no qualifications and cannot speak English – taxi driver. In San Francisco, you arrive and one day later you are a software QA expert.

Chapter 5: The Days Off

When you get 2 in 60, they are precious and memorable.

In Tahoe we had a day’s snow-boarding out of the text book. Zig-zagging the pine trees, café half way down the mountain, dozens of chair lifts and no queues. The locals had abandoned the field as the conditions were totally ‘end of season’ and below standard. If I ever found a field in NZ or Australia with snow as good as their ‘rejects’, I’d be bottling it and buying a house nearby.

Lake Tahoe is a bit like Taupo in New Zealand, if you could imagine half the lake being in another country. Nevada butts right up to California in the middle of the lake, and of course Nevada has … Casinos! We drove up on Saturday evening, and admiring the billboards on the way for ‘World Sumo Championships’ found ourselves at Caesars Palace ringside for dinner.

If you remember the high profile Hawaiian sumo dude in the 1990s, then you can picture what a 640 pound athlete looks like. He was there, commentating for ESPN (those of you with cable should watch for us in the audience!) and apologized for being a bit lighter than his fighting weight now that he has retired. Truth is America should be apologizing for putting on ‘Fat Guys Who Couldn’t Get into WWF’ as a sumo event.

The draw card was a sad-arsed 710 lb man-mountain. He could barely stand. Three kiwis were on the cards, and we cheered loudly for them as they shuffled uncomfortably on stage with car towing straps jammed up their substantial cracks. It was cringeful but hey, only in Nevada. Much taunting has gone on since between Ivan (6’5”)and I (6’4”) over keeping our food intake up to ensure we can compete at the next world champs.

Might be nice if they invited some Japanese sumo next time too…

Our other trip highlight was coming across the Tahoe equivalent of the neighborhood possum going through your rubbish cans in New Zealand. Get the broom out and shoo them off! Not in Tahoe you don’t - the sight of a good sized brown bear treating a dumpster like a Macdonalds drive through was something to behold. We’d been teasing each other all weekend that bears would be coming out of hibernation (we made Ivan carry the Power Bars!), and so they were.

Chapter 6: Cheese Food

It’s the little things that tell you that the USA is a different place to Australia. For example – you can buy cheese (in fact there is a fabulous cheese shop in Noe Valley where we live), and you can buy ‘cheese food’. Think that through – it says on the label ‘cheese food’. Feel good about that? You know it ain’t even a second cousin to what you call cheese, but the Americans buy it 20:1 over cheese.

It shouldn’t surprise me so much I suppose – this is the nation that brought the world ‘cheese whip’, an aerosol can that shoots out a string of gloop that could not be likened to much else so the marketing department thought cheese was good enough. Equally cheesy poofs (pronounced as in proof for the sensitive souls among you) are a real live food item. Reading labels must be good for the literacy of the nation, no doubt enabling many San Francisco families to move to a better neighbourhood through the increased quality of the essays they write during the house buying process. Escher eat your heart out once more.

Starbucks have the same range of odd-sounding items – you can have coffee, or a coffee drink. No wonder NZ could never figure out exports – they need to quickly combine the works of the dairy industry with the Taranaki petro-chemical industry to ensure healthy trade balances with America.

Toilets are another thing – the water level is set at really really high tide. Where in the history of khazis did the basic design of the pan and the water level diverge so amazingly? That would have been an interesting moment in history no doubt. “Right Thomas, let’s give the Yanks a lot of water, the Germans a little shelf to admire the impact of their muesli diets, and the rest can just squeeze it down the bit at the bottom. Oh yes, well, luckily we don’t have to worry about the French and Italians at this point…”

The Twinkie strike was front page news here before the Elian issue (the latter having dominated newspapers for 3 weeks). Twinkies are a chemical concoction (twinkie food?) enjoyed by millions of Americans as a separate food group – vegetables, protein, twinkies.... They are yellow, crystalline sponges with white creamy stuff on the inside. The plastic wrapper is the most natural component of this tasty treat, and the only one documented in a chemistry textbook. They last for weeks on the shelf.

Somebody in the twinkie supply downed tools – a twinkie rush took place and hording became a major social issue to deal with (send in the FBI!). Eventually, newspapers nationwide published a recipe for making your own twinkies at home. Ohmygod. We looked at the ingredients list and tried to find anything remote resembling a natural food. None. The white stuff is certainly not cream. Don’t ever worry that the X-Files might run out of plots sometime!

I commend the social trend-watchers among you (and anyone who has to have contact with teenagers) to log onto www.budweiser.com and view the online versions of the phenomenal advertising craze that is sweeping the States right now (the Wassup campaign). If young males live in your household it is only a matter of time before they are uttering a new jungle cry on every occasion possible.

If you don’t have a 56k modem or better don’t try this at home by the way. Once you’ve viewed the official campaign view the unofficial and even more successful web campaign that has spawned:

http://members.xoom.com/jason_post/gomez/
(Editors note: this URL is long dead!)

There is no www in that last URL by the way. It’s a 4.6mb file so again, no slow modems. The other ‘must have’ trend to come out of California will be really intriguing to watch flow around the globe. Young men of the world, raid your mother’s sock drawer, cut the toe out of a knee-high stocking and tie the end in a knot. Now put it on your head like a skull cap. Feel cool. Feel at the cutting edge of fashion. Look like you have a stocking on your skull, but feel cool. You heard it first here okay?

CHAPTER 7: Home Life

A reader of this diary might be excused for thinking that we haven’t fallen in love with San Francisco – well, they’d be wrong. There are things we can do here that bring a smile to our faces just thinking about them.

1. Sitting outside Martha and Brothers coffee shop in Noe Valley in the sun, drinking lattes and reading the New York Times.
2. Sitting in the corner window at Starbucks eating a bagel and still reading the New York Times – it weighs about 3 kilos and is the source of most articles of more than 1000 words in newspapers across the country.
3. Buying Weetbix from the Indian Bazaar on Valencia as it’s the only place in Northern California that imports such oddities. Sanitarium should investigate the possibility of a few spices in the recipe, these taste great after a few weeks in the curry section!
4. Waking up to 3 cats who just love the mild temperatures and long sunshine hours (its raining for only the third time since we arrived) and who bully us into buying tinned cat food instead of healthy biscuits.
5. Having an apartment with a double garage when people often park miles from home to get a space.
6. Not having a car to park there.
7. Living in a town where VW Beetles look relevant, and everyone has one with a flower in the vase on the dashboard.
8. Living in a State where we estimate less than 20% of the citizens have shoes with a notable leather content. We figure this might be Escher’s final contribution to California – if we all dress like the homeless then they won’t know who to hassle for quarters. Brilliant.

Our little apartment is starting to look more like home with some bookcases from Ikea and a stereo. Our stuff has yet to be dispatched from Australia – we’ll get onto it when we get back from the UK later in the year. We don’t spend much time at home - Lesley looks after our friend’s boys some mornings, paints and hangs out. I dart carm most of the time.

We’ve attended a remarkable amount of theatre, thanks to one of the team who has tapped into the network of promotional tickets. Being the USA, there is usually someone famous on stage, which takes a bit of getting used to. Richard Chamberlain playing von Trapp in The Sound of Music for example.

Anyway, that’s enough diary. I have to get a Twinkie before I go to work, and Lesley’s not looking so I’ll just check her sock drawer for a new hat before we go out.

Nigel

March 2000: San Francisco

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