Nate Sullivan

You can divide all the people who might care, or might find it interesting that a company like Facebook spent nineteen billion dollars on a company like Whatsapp, into what are essentially three groups. 

1) People who get the purchase, and the reasons behind it

2) People who don't get the purchase, but never claimed to understand why Facebook does what it does

3) People who don't get the purchase, and are horrified and annoyed that they don't get it

First of all, LOTS of people who claim to be in Group 1 are really in Group 3. Let's just get that out of the way, because this isn't a post about false expertise or imagined credentials or anything like that. Analysts and pundits feigning understanding is standard operating procedure, not something interesting.

What IS interesting is how big Group 3 really is — how many confused tech industry people there are struggling to process the implications of this kind of deal. "Nineteen billion dollars for an SMS app? Doesn't Facebook have a perfectly good messaging application, and doesn't practically everyone have Facebook? Even if this is something worth purchasing, how could it possibly be worth SO much money?"

i don't get it either, but that's okay

I'm not going to try to answer those questions, because there are smarter people out there  with a better understanding of things like international social networking business models who can do that for you, and because that's not really the kind of thing this site is about. What I am going to do is write about the feeling of suddenly not understanding something you thought you understood, and how to deal with it.

Everybody has blind spots, and in my experience, they're not necessarily intrinsic; they're usually formed — somewhat ironically — from experience and expertise. Anytime you learn how to do something in the real world, you find efficiencies to exploit and irrelevancies to ignore as you learn how to do the job. That's why you get better at your job, of course. Before you know it, you're confident, effective, and comfortable blasting through the questions and obstacles that might paralyze a less experienced professional than yourself.

That's when you get your blind spot. Marketers and media people assume everyone is on Twitter, designers assume that everyone has good taste (and cares about it), VCs assume that all good ideas get funded, developers assume everyone smart can code well, companies with sales lock-in assume their products are competitive, and the Knicks assume great players will demand to play in New York. 

(Okay, I can't explain that last one — some people are just delusional.)

This process happens to everybody. You can bring in consultants, and sometimes that helps (hi!), but what's more important than a voice coming from outside your organization is a voice coming from outside your discipline or culture. Facebook doesn't need a consultant from some Bay Area design firm; they already have a very good version of that perspective in-house. What they need is to figure how to deal with people outside that universe who post ugly memes and political rants, and also happen to comprise a majority of their user base. 

One of my old co-workers joined a company that made some kind of automation software for the government, and wanted to expand sales to the private sector. Great — except they used their government product/sales/marketing approach to do it, and refused to deviate because it had worked so well in the past, even when it didn't work. They couldn't see past the similarities of the two markets ("the purchasing guy at this telecom company used to work for the FCC!"), and as a result missed the differences. Success had made their world so small and focused that they lost the ability to live outside of it, or even to recognize that this had happened in the first place. 

MY blind spot

I brought up the Facebook/Whatsapp deal because it's a great example of this happening to lots of people who consider themselves more resistant to blind spots — people like me. But in my case, I've already been disabused of the notion that I understand international social networking — when I started working for EEx, I was introduced to WeChat, China's enormously popular (and profitable) messaging/social app. Internally, I dismissed it immediately. It was ugly, weird, and full of gimmicks like voice messages and the ability to send a message in a virtual bottle. Everything I knew about software, applications, and human beings said this app was a joke. 

As it turns out, WeChat is the opposite of a joke. It has 600 million users, including 70 million outside of China, and more importantly, is an active, immediately-understood method of communication in a huge market, and a vibrant ecosystem for things like Paypal-style payments and additional apps. My blind spot — a combination of my inability to see the potential of a platform based on messaging, along with my own personal preferences for design and usability — kept me from seeing WeChat for what it is. Fortunately, EEx has a great team of people from different disciplines and cultures, and we listen to each other. WeChat seemed insane to me, but the people telling me how important it was did not, so I got over it. 

I wouldn't say that's the IDEAL way to handle blind spots; if you're doing strategy or planning, you probably want to focus on not developing them in the first place. But you're only human, and ten or twenty years in an industry is likely to cause them no matter how open-minded you are. In that case, your best defense really is your ability to find and hear those outside voices — the ones that can tell you your technology is weak, your product is lame, or your sales channel is closing.

Hey, nobody said being in charge would be easy. 

For someone who is an admittedly terrible artist, I’ve always liked working with animation, even as a little kid. When I was 11 or 12, I started taking animation courses at the summer camp I went to every year, even though I never really fit in with obviously talented “art kids” who usually participated in that sort of thing. There, I learned how to do stop-motion animation, how to think about details at 24 frames a second, and how to convey meaning through different kinds of motion. We didn’t use a computer for any of this – my favorite creation starred a paper cutout basketball player I made with little shoulder, leg, and knee joints. I’d slide him around my background, and shoot one frame at a time on our little camera as he performed one ridiculous dunk after another – and no matter how silly he or my hand-drawn stadium looked, there was something about the energy of his motions that allowed to to express power, or a sudden burst of speed, or a particularly perilous descent. 

Anybody watch 30 Rock? Remember in the first episode, when Jack Donaghy describes his famous oven?

“The GE Trivection Oven cooks perfect food five times faster than a conventional oven because it uses three kinds of heat. Thermal technology for consistent temperature, GE precise air convection technology for optimal air circulation, and microwave technology for incredible speed. With three kinds of heat, you can cook a turkey in 22 minutes.”

You probably don’t need me to explain any more of this if you’ve seen the show – but if you haven’t, the whole idea is that Jack is there to fix the ratings of a struggling television show, and decides that what the show is missing is “the third heat”, which comes in the form of Tracy Morgan’s character. Hilarity ensues. 

For a long time, unless you were working with broadcast media, there were only two kinds of “heat” in most forms of media and software – the visual, and the written. Take something useful, make it highly usable and nice looking, and label everything really well, and in many cases, you were probably doing about as good a job as could be expected. 

This is no longer the case, and hasn’t been for some time. Not only is motion – the third heat, if you will – an essential part of communicating meaning, but the bar for the quality and “rightness” of that animation is much higher than it was less than a decade ago. Animation used in poor taste stands out more than ever (ahem, most PowerPoint users…), but at the same time, static media is increasingly ineffective at getting the right point across. You have to not only understand what you’re saying, but why you’re saying it in the grand scheme of your overall argument, so you can present it a way that ultimately makes sense. The way it moves and feels is nearly as important as what it says, or how good it looks.

Visual interactions are really, really important – the iPhone’s properly scrolling lists (of all things) were one of its killer, industry-smashing features, and the future of design is heavily tied to proper use of animation. Pretty soon, not “getting” motion is going to be like not “getting” the internet. We all need to step up our games to succeed in that kind of world – so dust off your summer camp portfolio (hope you have a VCR), and think about how you can use it to tell your boss, your team, or your customers a better story. 

(note from the future : this is from back when I was freelancing)

"It hurts when I do this." Well, don't do that.

When I started to put this site together, it forced me to look back on the different people and organizations I've tried to help out over the last few years — places I've worked, friends with businesses, freelance clients, and companies we've partnered with. A lot of times, the cry for help is the same.

“Our website sucks. Help.”

While some people are just completely hopeless and tone-deaf about this kind of thing, most people know a bad website when they see it, even if they don’t know how to fix it. It just feels “off”, in a discomforting way. Sometimes, companies trying to deal with this unsettling feeling hire a web design firm, blow everything up, and unveil a new site. Many times, it has the same problems as the old one, which usually become apparent in a few weeks, once the novelty has worn off.

MG Siegler recently wrote about the lack of radical change to television over the last few years, and made this argument:

"The reason why none of these things end up working out is simply because they don’t play ball with either Big Cable or the content producers — or, ideally, both. They keep trying to solve a technology problem that anyone could solve. The issue is with getting the right content."

In his case, he was suggesting that all the radical UI improvements from set top boxes (Apple TVs, Rokus, Tivos, etc.), which are great in some ways, still aren't relevant to the real problem, which is that large, entrenched companies control television content, and improving the TV watching experience isn't currently in the financial interest of those companies. So every time a company comes out with a "better way to watch TV", they're unable to REALLY change the way we watch, and nothing truly changes at all.

At the risk of spewing inanities (hey, it’s my blog), watching TV sucks because watching TV sucks. You can add as many intermediaries to the equation as you want, but no matter how interested they are in making TV not suck, it’s not going to change the underlying problem, which has nothing to do with them. Garbage in, garbage out, no matter how nice the bluetooth-enabled garbage can is.

This is the number one problem with bad company websites. Your website is lame because the way you think about — and often operate — your business is lame. The best thing someone like me can possibly do to help your organization is think about your business in a better, more honest way. Once you do that, you’ll immediately start seeing what’s REALLY wrong with your site (among other things), and even better, you’ll probably realize how to fix it.

So instead of telling you what’s technically or structurally wrong with your website (which is a useful, although completely separate discussion), I’m going to tell you what’s probably wrong with your business that is adversely affecting your website. Remember, this isn’t just what’s wrong with your “brand”, or your boilerplate — this stuff is in your head, affecting how you operate each day. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

1. You are scared.

It's really hard to make a simple, clear argument when you're hedging your bets. You can't say "our product is better", or "the way our company works is better for you", while simultaneously insulating yourself from the possibility that some people might not agree with that, or worse, may be actively offended by the very notion of it.

One way I’ve seen this impact websites is through what I think of as “checkbox” or “defensive” marketing – the idea that the failure to include certain “key” things leads to a loss of potential business from customers who don’t see their pet topic covered/acknowledged by your site. So you end up with a room full of management people saying things like “we have to make sure we talk about {thing X}”, because that’s something that makes, or could make, the company money. This is exactly how you end up with entire pages basically about nothing (“WE ARE COMPATIBLE WITH SUPER DATABASE PLUS 2009!!!”), and huge site navigation systems that highlight groups of subgroups of these pointless pages that take focus away from what the average customer may actually care about.

By definition, having a business means implying – and arguing – that certain people should come to you instead of NOT going to you, or going to someone else. There’s no way around it; accept that this is the case, own it, and stop assuming that people are going to randomly do business with you just because you happen to exist and don’t step on anyone’s toes.

2. You don't believe in your product/service.

Maybe you really do believe in the purpose of your business -- but you may not believe in your ability to execute it, due to a substandard product or service. The ugly truth is that there are a lot of businesses trying to make the best of a bad situation. Maybe the product is new, and simply isn't as good as the competition. Maybe you need to get a few customers before you can invest enough money in your service to make it what it needs to be. Maybe you don't even know why your product is inferior -- like your website, it just is.

There is usually SOMETHING better about your product or service; you should probably focus on that (this is where I usually come in). But in many cases, that differentiation either doesn’t matter enough (“it has a real keyboard!”), or sometimes doesn’t even exist at all. I know for a fact that I’ve sat there, banging my head against my desk, trying to come up with a compelling reason for someone – anyone – to buy a certain product or service that simply isn’t worth it. Far too many people think just being in a space entitles them to a small chunk of the market, but the world simply doesn’t work that way, and that’s not a messaging problem. Go ahead, ask Blackberry, or HP. Somebody like me may be able to help you survive your problem, but it’s only triage at that point – you need to get locked in to why your core value proposition is so weak, and fix it.

3. You are lazy.

Defining a strong identity for your organization involves difficult decisions, and saying "no" to a lot of things. It often involves resolving disagreements with people internally, shutting down pet projects and concepts, and identifying mistakes that have been made in the past. Feelings get hurt. Important people who drive really nice cars may end up being wrong, and they might look stupid. Relationships you can normally take for granted will probably have to be managed and repaired.

Sounds like a lot of work, huh? Well, that’s life. If you don’t feel like working, your website is the least of your problems.

4. You don't like your customers.

There really are two kinds of businesses. The first is the kind where you find the solution to a problem, and realize that certain people will happily pay you money to solve it effectively. In this case, you spend most of your time (a) getting better at solving it, (b) finding people who need it solved, and (c) helping those people understand the truth, which is that the problem exists, that you can solve it, and that it makes sense for them to pay you to do it.

The OTHER kind of business is where you find a group of people who are spending a lot of money on something, and try to figure out how to get them to give that money to you. I always refer to this as a “value extraction” business, because in this case, solving a problem isn’t the primary reason you exist. The money is. In fact, there may be no problem at all, just money to be extracted. In these kinds of businesses, the effectiveness of a product or solution is irrelevant, compared to the ability to sell it. Maybe you sell it by becoming friends with people who can cause it to be purchased (“Another 9 holes? SOUNDS GOOD, BRO.”) Maybe you sell it by getting it associated with something else that people actually have a reason to buy (make checks payable to “Gartner, Inc”). Maybe you sell it by convincing people it’s something that it’s not.

Either way, that kind of business often has a very hard time expressing a strong, clear argument for their business, because there isn’t one. And once again, that is a much bigger problem than anything on your website.

Cheer up!

This sounds like a really negative list, and I'll admit, these problems do exist for a lot of businesses, and there's a ton of resistance to addressing them. But in a lot of cases, there's an equally large opportunity buried in there. It could be that you're scared, but really shouldn't be. Or perhaps you don't like your customers because you've been looking for the wrong kind. If you are open and honest with yourself, and ready to do what it takes to fix it, these problems are extremely solvable. And I should know, because that's what I do!

Does the wedding-industrial complex deserve some of the blame for decline of marriage? Serious Q [t.co/bvIWNKvlC...](http://t.co/bvIWNKvlCa) via @mattyglesias

— davidfrum (@davidfrum) January 7, 2014

Damn skippy it does. I am going to puff out my chest for a minute (so brace yourselves, or move on), but eight years ago (!!!) I was out on the wedding FRONTIER when it came to my generation of friends, family, & acquaintances. We boldly went with a very nice, relatively cheap wedding in a public park. Maybe 30 people, max. Lots of unhappy non-invitees. Very classy, but also very free heirloom ring courtesy of my Mom. $40 wedding bands from the mall (I wore mine for a few months but just couldn’t get used to it). Nobody cares now, but we took a pretty decent amount of crap for all of this, which slowly eroded over time as people finally began dismissing us as harmless crazy people. 

Today, by all appearances, the wedding world is even worse — and God forbid you get married when you’re older, and expected to have money. So, here are my tips for taking back the concept of weddings and getting married from the bandits and highwaymen currently running things from Bravo or HGTV or whatever (I haven’t had cable in five years, cut me some slack).

1. Never get offended if you don’t get invited to a wedding. Somewhere, someone feels really bad about it, but it’s a necessary component to your friend’s attempt to take control of his/her life and marriage. Be cool. Consider it a wedding present. Hang out with the two of them soon, and remember why you actually wanted to be invited.

2. Never assume anything about someone from the way they handle wedding/marriage customs. For a couple years, lots of people (not my wife, though) tried to bully me into wearing a wedding ring, when I’ve never worn any jewelry my entire life. The most awful way was by insinuating that I had some kind of psychological hang-up about my marriage, which is obviously a horrible insecurity to try to install into somebody who just got married. It’s like, dude, I type and play bass all day, my hand is not to be adorned. Accept it and move on. Similarly, we had to deal with lots of “WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN” moments from people who didn’t get invited, or weren’t in a wedding party, or couldn’t bring a guest, or whatever. You know what it means? It means we’re not borrowing money from my parents/new inlaws. That’s what it means. Of course, these people probably didn’t know or understand that at the time (given the obscene state of wedding standards), so no hard feelings, but that’s why I’m a freaking PIONEER.

3. Stop assuming everyone always does all the stuff you just to happen to want to do. Do you want invitations? “Save the dates”? Twenty five toasters? Fine. That’s what you want, and that’s great. Aspire. Cajole. Do whatever it takes. But don’t for one minute think that you’re the one with your back against the wall — you are putting everyone through this, including yourself, because it’s what you are choosing to do. “You’re supposed to get all your kitchen stuff at the wedding though!” Oh please — cry me an upper-middle class liberal arts river. What are you eating off of now, the floor? Pull this card when you need a kidney, not a (PROFANITY) serving tray.

4. At the same time, if people want to spend tons of money, let them. Although I really and truly believe most people these days who have giant weddings do so against their true desires, your friends having a huge wedding is not some kind of bizarre smoke signal meant to pressure you into matching it someday. Not everything is about you, fella! Just be happy you got invited to a $40,000 party — how many of those do you get to go to? “NICE ICE SCULPTURE, BRO!!!” It’s not hard. We don’t all have to have the same wedding, or any wedding, or a boring wedding at city hall. To paraphrase every parent ever, if your friends are actually bullying you into adhering to their idea of a proper wedding, they aren’t your real friends. And your real friends? They’ll understand whatever you do, unless you suck and they’ve just been staying in touch with you to go to your giant, expected wedding shindig, in which case you have bigger problems. 

As I tell every 20-something who asks me (and yes, ONLY THE ONES WHO ASK, no one actually wants unprompted advice from grizzled old men), the person you marry isn’t any different the day after you marry them, nor is the quality of your actual marriage driven by what goes on at the wedding itself (unless you push her down or something during the ceremony, that’s probably a little scarring). Everything that takes your focus away from, you know, your actual day-to-day life with this person you ostensibly are building your world around is very likely either in your head, or a distraction caused by our stupid obsession with stuff and commercializing & branding everyone’s “moments”. 

Anyways, scoff all you want, but… eight years and going strong, folks. Or you can trust some wedding expert who finally “got it right” the third time. Your call.

Last year, me and the other guys in Six Foot Machine put out our first release, (get it here for free!) a ten and a half song album entitled “Monday Night Miracle”.

SFM records are fundamentally different creatures than literally all of the other albums I’ve worked on in the past. While I’ve started to explain some of the logistical differences here in the past, I found a much better analogy the other day, related to work.

“Waterfall” and “Agile” development is in the news a lot these days because of the healthcare.gov rollout, and of course, its problems. This is going to be an oversimplification – and I’m not an expert, just a frequent witness to this kind of stuff – but the gist of it is that in “waterfall” style development, everything is done in one big piece, while “agile” development is rolled out as soon as possible in its most basic form, and pieces are improved & added as you go.

</sound of any developer/project manager reading this freaking out and demanding details and exceptions be stated, and referring to books from 1997>

Now, when I say I’m not an expert, I mean in the purest sense of this. There are certifications and books and generally accepted schools of thought on these concepts, but honestly, they bore me and I’ve never needed to speak in those terms, so I don’t. There are plenty of people who do, so if you’re interested, you should ask them and not me. But the general principles behind these methods are really important, because they’re more about approach and priorities than technical or process specifics. Waterfall style work – even non-development work, like writing something on your dumb blog – tends to put a very strong emphasis on the importance of the whole being bigger than the sum of it’s parts. Your vision is this big, functional system, and if it doesn’t do everything, it doesn’t really do anything at all. On the other hand, Agile style work lets you get something very basic out there and in something close to the real world; you very quickly understand the costs and benefits of your general approach, instead of doing all this work and then realizing it’s fundamentally impractical or ineffective after putting in months or years of work.

No matter what you’re building or trying to accomplish, you’re probably working somewhere along the spectrum covered by agile and waterfall. When I used to build product videos, I initially started off – as a web generation guy – doing things with an agile approach. I would storyboard out scenes, put together an extremely rough cut, and then show my bosses and co-workers and get feedback.

In my case, this was almost always a disaster for a couple of reasons. The biggest one was that I had a complete vision for the final product that people couldn’t grasp from a storyboard and rough cut. There were too many little touches and details that I simply couldn’t convey the value of without actually having them in place. In that particular situation, basically my work didn’t accomplish ANYTHING, or have ANY VALUE at all until it was completely done. It was a waterfall style project, whether I wanted it to be or not. 

Increasingly, I started doing more work that way, but only because of the nature of what I found myself doing. When I was doing something new (investor decks, for instance), and wasn’t sure if it was worth doing, I’d almost always work from a more agile perspective – and when I didn’t, and tried to keep the whole thing to myself until unveiling the finished product, it usually blew up in my face.

So there you go. If you can solve a big chunk of the problem without perfecting the solution, or you’re trying something new, agile is a great approach. If the outside community can’t add value, or if your solution is truly useless until it’s completely finished, you’re probably stuck working on a waterfall. Naturally, you can see why big, giant waterfall projects are really scary, and extremely risky, and conversely, why risk-averse people LOVE agile development, even when it’s impractical.

Now, what the hell does any of this have to do with making records? I’ll tell you.

My shock, and initial resistance, to the way SFM produces our finished recordings is a lot like some middle-aged software developer who’s used to building big, detailed, waterfall projects, and is thrown into an agile environment. All of my old records were waterfall projects, in fact. Here’s how Glenn’s Army would make a record.

1. decide it’s time to make a record
2. figure out how much money we could spend
3. figure out how many hours we could book in a studio for that amount
4. figure out how many songs we could do per hour (.28 or whatever)
5. decide the length of the album
6. decide what songs to include, and start writing whatever was missing
7. book studio time
8. get really, really good at playing all of those songs, over several months, in the exact way we’d need to play them at the studio
9. go to the studio for several days and do everything perfectly (or as close to it as possible)
10. have a record

Everything about this screams waterfall; maybe it’s not a big surprise that two thirds of our band works for the federal government today. Our projects worked because we got really good at setting requirements, meeting deadlines, and accurately assessing our capabilities and the capabilities of the people we worked with or were dependent on. When things DID change, it drove me (and probably the other guys) bonkers. On Fight Songs, Andrew wrote – I think – two songs pretty close (for us) to our recording time, and I really didn’t want to add them. It’s not that they weren’t good. It’s that they weren’t part of the original requirements, and that terrified me. They ended up being two really good songs, but adding them was not without risk.

This process, with or without a studio, was how I did every album for every band prior to SFM. Plan, plan, plan, practice, until the big day. BOOM. Record. Success was driven entirely by our ability to plan ahead and accurately project future situations. When Elementary recorded our studio full length in 2011, I went right back to my old playbook and ran the same process verbatim. 

Today, as with software, improved, cheap tools and the internet have completely blown up the necessity – not the value, but the lack of choice – that’s always come with musical waterfall development. While famous artists or rich guys could screw around in different studios and do things piecemeal, that was rarely the case for small bands with few resources. Today, SFM is a perfect example of the previously nonexistent choice facing musicians. As a post-2010 band, we basically prepare for nothing when it comes to recording. Jesse will usually put together a very simple, structural demo of a new song literally the day we record it, and send it all to us to mess with and think about. From that point forward, unless we actually change the structure (which is rare, but not that hard to do when we choose to), the final song you hear a few months later is based on that very skeleton, even though every single part – guitars, drums, bass, vocals – has been completely re-done. The bones of the final track exist from day one.

Is this better? Boy, I really, really don’t know. It’s certainly better for us; we’re adults, and we only get to practice once a week. In high school and college, Andrew and Steve and I would practice three or four times as often when writing or working on a record; if I recall correctly, we recorded almost nothing until it was time to go to the studio. If SFM did that, we’d never have any songs. We’d simply have forgotten them by the time we played again. The side projects Steve and I are working on today, in fact, are somewhere in the middle of these two approaches, and we don’t make progress anywhere near as quickly as SFM, largely due to the constraints of waterfall style song development. We forget things all the time, retrace our steps, decide things are bad after working on them for weeks, and constantly deal with other forms of adversity, because we lack the agile development skills the other guys in SFM (i.e., not me) have.

Is agile development of music less “artistic”? I don’t put it in quotes to be a douche; in fact, to me, a lot of times it feels like it is. But some of that – maybe all of it – is based in nostalgia, and it’s important to be aware of that.

Anyways, the point of all this is that SFM has a new album just around the corner built exactly this way, and like just about everything else I’ve ever done, I’m really excited about it. Sure, I love the music, but I also love that I’ve been able successfully adapt in order to make sure that music actually got made. Old dog, new tricks, and all that.

You know what’s worse than the government wasting money? That money not getting spent at all.

Private equity firms are sitting on some $1 trillion in “dry powder,” or uninvested capital from previous fundraising rounds. Like cash-heavy companies in the corporate world, the firms are hoarding more cash, partly because they’re having trouble finding worthy investments amid economic uncertainty and a dearth of cheap debt that helped juice returns in the pre-crisis days. It’s also taking longer for PE firms to exit their investments, as M&A and IPO activity remains choppy. Thus, many PE investors are locked into funds that sit on a large share of their cash and charge them a hefty management fee—usually 2% of assets per year—for the privilege.

It’s not like these funds should be somehow “required” by society to spend this money. That’s obviously ridiculous. They are supposed to be finding investments that will generate a positive return, and they don’t feel confident they can do that, so they are sitting on the money, and sucking out 2% management fees until they have to give it back. From a financial self-preservation perspective, that makes sense (from an efficient distribution of growth capital, not so much). 

Here’s the real takeaway, though. We must stop telling ourselves that capital, in private hands, and regulated solely by profit incentives, inevitably leads to growth. In the right environment, maybe it does. Combined with sufficient broad, non-profit motivated public investment (grants, university research, public works), I’m almost certain it does. You’d never want to strangle out private investment given it’s track record in society. 

And yet… that’s exactly what we’re doing with public investment. Constantly reducing public spending — especially outside of defense — to the bone, and cutting high end tax rates, puts a staggering amount of potential growth capital in the hands of a relatively small number of groups that are looking for pure financial returns. In general — and this is now from significant personal experience, so I’m not just pulling this out of a bong with a Che Guevara sticker on it or anything — these people aren’t creative. They aren’t imaginative. They don’t can’t about solving problems. They are frightened by and largely hostile to change, new pricing models, new markets, and new ideas. In other words, they are bad entrepreneurs. 

You know the story about the determined, self-made billionaire, who mortgaged his house and maxed out all his credit cards because he believed in his business, and that’s what it took to make his enterprise successful? I know it, because that’s what every investor seems to want. And you know what? That’s exactly the opposite of how a giant private equity firm thinks. They would never take those risks, because they’re too big, and have too much to lose. 

This is why trickle-down economics, at the scale we’ve applied it, doesn’t work. It requires us to pretend that the very, very rich — both individuals, and companies/funds/etc. — are similar economic actors to regular people, and that they’ll behave in a similar way. For instance, a thriving middle class is full of people who spend most of their money, and save a little bit, creating enormous opportunity for poorer people to create businesses based on that spent money. 

But that’s what someone making $75k does. That’s not what someone sitting on $100 million, or $1 billion, or $100 billion, does. They can do basically anything they want with a small percentage of what they have; they’re simply less dynamic than a large group of diverse minds working with that same block of capital. 

We’ve all been conditioned over the last thirty years — myself included — to believe in the dynamism of unregulated, private capital, as if it was a monolithic concept of the universe that simply “worked” on it’s own, once it was uncorked, like nuclear fusion or something. It’s not. Again, at scale, It’s a small number of extremely comfortable people looking to make safe returns without overturning the apple cart. You’re not going to the moon in the 1960s on the backs of private equity, not because it’s impossible, but because private equity never would have done it. 

People talk about the government as “the lender of last resort”. in fact, the government’s willingness — even tendency — to lose money on things is increasingly making it the venture capitalist of last resort. And we’ve undercut it’s ability to do that. 

As a society, we really, really have to stop fighting the fights from the 60’s and 70’s. Our inability to think outside of that box is why I can sit here and propose vital, life-saving reforms to private, capitalist innovation and be immediately dismissed as peddling “socialism”. 

You’re doing it right now, aren’t you?

I first heard The Weakerthans in 2002, when we were in school in DC for the semester, working on this record — I mean studying. One of Steve’s roommates convinced us to go with him to a show at the Black Cat, and I figured it would be cool to get out and do something with other people, since I had been in college for two years at that point and never tried that.

It’s always weird to see a band you don’t know anything about but like immediately, particularly if that band is The Weakerthans, and a decent chunk of their appeal comes from their lyrics (which you don’t know, and can’t really understand live unless you do know them). So I thought — hey, this band is actually really good — and then went home and promptly forgot about them.

Very soon after that, the band released “Reconstruction Site”, which I found on the rack at the radio station doing our weekly show back in Richmond. It was really good; immediately accessible, simple but well-thought out arrangements, and of course, really deep, interesting narratives. I had no idea just HOW deep and intricately constructed all of that was at first (read the wikipedia page), but figuring it out just made me like the record even more over the years.

Reconstruction Site is also one of those very rare albums where it feels really long, but never boring. Obviously that’s no small feat, and they completely avoid the eighth/ninth-song-doldrums that I always have trouble getting past when I make albums. Anyways, the point is that I really, really like this thing, and as the time goes by, I only like it more. Four years later, they released a follow-up, called “Reunion Tour”, which — being lazy and cheap — I never bought until about two weeks ago when I needed something new to do work to. After a week of listening, I’m actually a little disappointed. I definitely like the album, but it’s a shorter, more experimental record and probably by necessity, it’s just a different, less epic experience than its predecessor.

… except for one thing. On Reconstruction Site, there is a GREAT song from the perspective of a depressed person’s cat, called “Plea From a Cat Named Virtute”. Musically, it’s super catchy and upbeat, easy to follow, and one of my favorites on the record, with a giant climax of a bridge, and basically everything you could really want from a non-pretentious, energetic indie rock song. I knew all this when I first heard it, and of course back then, I had never had a pet, let alone a cat.

But man, if you DO get a cat, and you actually like him, this song takes on a whole new significance. As I’ve written many, many times, I spent most of 2006–2007 jobless and lying on the floor in my smelly, cold basement being depressed and talking to young Coby the Cat, an experience that is probably a way more influential part of my life than anything like that really should be. Keeping that in mind, here are some lyrics, verbatim, from the aforementioned song:

“Why don’t you ever wanna play? I’m tired of this piece of string. You sleep as much as I do now, and you don’t eat much of anything.”

If Coby could speak English, this is exactly what he would have said in 2006.

”And listen… about those bitter songs you sing, they’re not helping anything. They won’t make you strong.“

WHAT THE… DID MY CAT WRITE THIS SONG???? He then goes on to describe this awesome party they should have, and all these people and animals they should invite, how he would cater it by killing birds and mice, and how much fun they could be having if they’d stop just moping around and feeling bad for themselves. But despite the silent pleading, I — I mean, the guy — doesn’t seem interested, leading to this harsh accusation:

”All you ever wanna do, is drink and watch TV… frankly that thing doesn’t really interest me. I swear I’m gonna bite you hard and taste your tinny blood, if you don’t stop the self-defeating lies you’ve been repeating since the day you brought me home… I know you’re strong."

First of all, I have this song cued up on iTunes, but I just pulled that entirely from memory, which should give you some indication how welded into my brain this song is. Secondly… wow. No, I wasn’t drinking in Cleveland, but I specifically remember sitting there, watching Judge Judy at two in the afternoon while my wife was in some God-forsaken pre-industrial country for three weeks at a time, and Coby would literally sit there on the table and stare at me, meowing what I assume was the cat-equivalent of “can we do something else?” The little dude was my own personal combination of Lassie, Jiminy Cricket, and Wilson the Volleyball from “Castaway”. It’s very hard to properly express just how much the combination of complete social isolation and pet ownership can affect a person. My wife and I decided together that it was eventually time to get out of Ohio and do something more satisfying with our lives. We didn’t consult Coby the Cat on that decision, but the scary thing is, I spent SO much time alone talking to myself through him (yes, out loud, like a crazy person), that functionally, his seemingly irrelevant cat actions actually had serious influence through me. And I never forgot that this song, at roughly the same time that I figured out what it was about, was LITERALLY HAPPENING TO ME IN REAL-TIME.

That brings us to the next record, which contains a follow-up song about this same cat, entitled “Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure”. Loving the original, I eagerly listened and paid attention to everything, wondering if (though not necessarily expecting that) this song would reflect my current situation as well as the original had.

It does not, although it’s a really good song. In fact, taking all this into consideration, it is currently the saddest song I’ve ever heard in my life. I honestly have trouble listening to it, because instead of reflecting my successful escape from (unofficial) depression and apathy, it’s a story about the worst-case alternative. In the sequel, the pleading cat eventually gives up trying to reach her owner, leaves home, and thinks about how much she loved him, and all the good times they had, until she FORGETS THE NAME HE GAVE HER. Oh yeah, she is also very cold, because she lives outside now. And all of this is done with typical Weakerthans imagery, and cat-ownership experience (my wife eventually met the Weakerthans, we can confirm that at least some of them own, and really like, cats), making it all the more horribly authentic.

Now, I could handle a sad song about a cat. Lots of people have cats. Many cats are unpleasant, and irrelevant to other people’s lives. No problem there. But it’s not really about the cat, per se; it’s the whole story — the idea that there’s another, unbelievably more depressing way someone like me could have reacted to the situation I was in. That there’s a colder, less caring alternative to the response I had to Coby the Cat (“oh my God, my cat is more motivated than I am, I have to get out of here”). It’s not just sad, it’s jarring, and scary, AND sad.

“after scrapping with the ferals and the tabby, let you brush my matted fur. How I’d kneed into your chest while you were sleeping, the shallow breathing made me purr. But I can’t remember the sound… that you found for me… but I can’t remember the sound… that you found for me…”

OH MY GOD, ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? The thought of that poor little dude out there, cold and scrapping with ferals, because I couldn’t get my @#$% together and he just had to give up on me after spending his entire life trying to get me to do something, is utterly devastating. I am immune to standard issue artistic emotional plays (ask my wife; there’s nothing funnier than watching some dramatic “Parenthood” scene or something with her, and she looks at me crying and is like “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU? DO YOU EVEN HAVE FEELINGS??”), but this is different. This is like a customized series of songs, over multiple albums, designed specifically to make me feel terrible.

And it’s just really, really well-done. Congratulations, Weakerthans. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to race home and hug my cat for forty minutes.

(Postscript from the future… my God, it’s a trilogy now, and I’m a wreck. Good context here. I don’t know what to say, except that I really, really miss Coby the Cat. He passed in 2018 and I think about him a lot.)

Betanews tries to figure out if anyone’s going to be able to compete with the iPad, and comes up with this piece of analysis.

But Google, like Microsoft, doesn’t have a reputation for quality that’s required to compete in this space.

This unintentionally hilarious quote tells you pretty much everything you need to know about how lazy and entitled most of the electronics & software industry has gotten thanks to the go-go 90’s and 00’s. I mean think about it – Google and Microsoft have advantages and disadvantages when it comes to competing with Apple, but one major problem they share is, you know… product quality.

Don’t you love how “quality” is just one of any number of checkboxes on a long competitive analysis list? “Well, we have more USB ports, and a discrete GPU, but your stuff isn’t detestable crap, so we win, two to one.”

The fact is, with the exception of the Xbox (which isn’t the driving revenue leader at the company, and has been loss leader for most of its existence), Microsoft’s (genius) business model simply doesn’t hold them accountable for its design decisions and product quality. Don’t get me wrong, that’s absolutely brilliant from a business perspective, and it’s given them the ability to experiment with all kinds of nutty cross-product integration ideas (Microsoft GrooveLiveMesh Professional 2009 Edition!) over the years without any real sales consequences. But the fact is, when required to deliver something that appeals to the people who have to use it every day, and especially when attempting to unseat an incumbent who’s already doing it, the non-Xbox part of Microsoft isn’t prepared to go much further than  a big press event, concept video, or acquisition. Their biggest, most impressive achievement is building an enormous, amazing partner and channel system tasked with the sole purpose getting other companies to build products for them, get them in stores, and deal with angry, confused end-users. It’s amazing, it’s innovative, it’s complicated, and it’s made Microsoft a staggering amount of well-deserved cash. People focus on products (which makes sense), but Microsoft’s incredible “get other people to make us money” program is the defining secret sauce of the company, the way supply-chain management is rapidly becoming a key, understood-but-still-underrated difference-maker at Apple.

And while that “don’t call us, call Packard-Bell/Compaq/Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc.” system served as the backbone for the PC explosion that changed everything and made the modern internet – such as it is – commercially viable, it doesn’t result in a consistently positive (or consistently anything) end-user experience, and never has. Consumer environments where five different vendors can blame each other don’t often foster accountability. And now, all of a sudden, that user experience, and that accountability matters A LOT, partially because of unprecedented competition (both in innovation and price) from Apple, and partly because years and years of free corporate IT money has allowed the world of third party hardware manufacturers to lose any kind of competitive edge or empathy with end-users.

Google, on the other hand, appears to be going through serious growing pains, and seems unable to execute on much of anything these days. They may or may not figure themselves out sometime in the near future, but I don’t expect them to put out a high-quality, end-to-end (software + hardware + ecosystem) consumer product before they do. 

Either way, the push is good for Apple. But so much of the push is talk, and concepts, and vaporware. Even if they get caught up to in specs, or features (as has happened with phones in some ways), their huge advantage in distribution, support, ecosystem, and brand is something that takes years to build, if you’re even able to pull it off. Apple is doing this stuff right now.

I think, if fully committed, Microsoft could do it. But I don’t think they’ll ever be fully committed to anything, and they’ll ultimately fail. The easy-enterprise money is just too tempting, and it’s too deeply infused into the company’s DNA at this point.

I have a pretty obvious love-hate relationship with social media. For simplicity’s sake, and to start a post with some concrete statements instead of directionless blather (which I will save for the middle and end), here are some things from each of those categories.

HATE

1. I hate how important people make social media out to be.
2. I hate how much attention it gets in the media as a result of being disproportionately useful/engaging to people in the media.
3. I hate how obviously many social media tools are designed for the perfect user, instead of the kind of mouth-breathers (like me) who will actually use it (Facebook and Google, especially).
4. I hate that my most annoying friends are the ones who participate the most, and that the vast majority of my interesting friends barely participate at all.

LOVE

1. I love the user focus of social media sites (at least the good ones, which are often the popular ones) – off the top of my head, I can’t think of another industry that cares more about your experience using their product.
2. I love how services are held accountable for no longer caring about their audience. MySpace stopped caring about what it was like to use MySpace, and they died almost instantly. Facebook annoys people, but that’s only when it’s necessary to meet their increasingly weird business model. They still care about – and put a lot of work into – the experience. 
3. I love the way it fosters creativity among people.
4. I love the way it cuts out the media from the places where it has the least value (I’m thinking largely of sports, here).

Looking at this list, I think what I really like isn’t social media, but internet publishing tools, which is probably why I get such an irrationally big kick out of maintaining a fairly comprehensive, largely unread web presence. If I were someone else, I’d be a social media juggernaut; I think of things that I think are neat and worth telling anyone who cares ALL THE TIME. But I’m me, and the idea of bothering people so I can tell them what I think about something they very likely aren’t interested in is inherently repellent to me. 

As somewhat of an aside, I also have this dorky love of data services that talk to each other. When I was a kid, my Dad taught me to program in various forms of BASIC, and one of the most satisfying things I ever did with it was write a little program that could open a text document and import various elements of it. I just thought it was so cool that I could access data from a whole other world, and connect it to something built for a completely different purpose, where it could have totally different uses. I think that’s the same thing I love about the API-driven web era, where these hundreds of services all talk to each other and allow you to push and pull data. I love when different technologies can talk to each other; that just seems like the root of so many good potential ideas. 

But like I said, I’m starting to realize that has a lot less to do with social media specifically, and a lot more to do with web technology, which simply facilitates social media (among other things). I’ve gotten really, really curmudgeonly about Facebook ever since they rolled out the idea for the Timeline thing, going so far as to basically hide/delete (whatever Facebook actually allows) pretty much all of my contributions. I haven’t put anything up in a few months, and I honestly think I’m really done with it. 

Here’s the problem for me in a nutshell. Ultimately, I’d rather talk to myself than to someone who doesn’t care about what I’m saying. If you know me really well, this is obvious – I will absolutely talk your EAR off, and then you’ll introduce me to someone at a party and I’ll find the first excuse to go stand in the coat closet and think about sports or the internet or some band I was in a decade ago, unless that person seems legitimately interested in what I’m saying, in which case I have a new friend (this happened twice in four years of college). People assume that means I’m shy, but I’m not shy at all. I just sang a horrible lounge version of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer to 120 co-workers and assorted strangers in Vietnam, completely sober, while walking around like I was backing up Run-DMC. Why? Because they asked me to sing. You wanna hear me sing? You got it. Am I going to ASK you to listen to me sing? Probably not.

I think the reason Facebook makes me increasingly uncomfortable is that they’re so interested in promoting my thoughts/pictures/activities on my behalf, instead of simply letting me choose when to do it. And that’s no better than me bothering people myself – now I’ve simply got Facebook running around asking people if they’ve watched me sing karaoke yet, which is only one degree away from me annoying people myself. I don’t like that. 

Elementary’s own Feathers recently shuttered his blog/website (it’s significantly older than mine), and made the now standard remark that he’ll still be writing on Twitter and Facebook. That really seems to be the direction everyone is headed in, which seems to indicate people have had – all this time – very different goals than I when it comes to their little respective web presences. I tried it, but Twitter doesn’t do it for me; it’s too restrictive, and utterly pointless without the social component (which I’m unwilling to foster by brute force, as seems to be the normal way to do it). And Facebook seems to be more about dumping a bunch of information into Facebook’s digital brain and hoping they use it in a way that people find interesting, which seems way too lazy and conformist for me to find worth doing. 

But at the same time, would many of the pointless conversations I have via email be more interesting if they were on Twitter, where other interested people could add to them? Probably. Maybe Jeff and I just need to make a new rule – something like “we can only ask each other Celtics questions on Twitter”.

Who knows. Maybe I’m just too old for this stuff; the tail end of the millenial generation still has one foot in the 80’s, after all.  

A couple of months ago, a got a new phone for the first time in five years. Given that I work with nerds, and live in a pretty affluent part of the richest country in the world, most people reacted to seeing my new phone with the following statement.

“Why didn’t you get an iPhone?”

Most people expect a better, probably more ideological reason than “I’m on a weird, manually negotiated plan with Verizon, and as a result, getting an iPhone would cost me a lot more money”, but that’s the only one I have. The iPhone looks cool, and I bet I would enjoy owning one, but I don’t, and that’s pretty much the end of that. Given that I’m not exactly lacking in the “Apple branded consumer electronics” department, I think I’m going to be okay. They aren’t making you move out of Fairfax County for not owning an iPhone… yet.

One thing that’s interesting, though, is that absolutely NO ONE I know is impressed by my new phone, other than me. Sometimes, this surprises me, but then I realize that I’ve been using a Samsung 400bxq or whatever it was called since they invented YouTube, and that I’m probably pretty easy to impress. Having a functioning web browser on your phone might still be recognized by many as the luxury that it is, but it’s not something that blows people’s minds anymore. The same goes for Facebook and MP3s and decent looking video capabilities.

I’m beyond okay with this. I’m thrilled. I’m a dork, and I love cutting edge technology and what-have-you, but it’s not a social outlet for me in any way whatsoever. Not only do I not need to have the coolest phone in the room, I actually find it undesirable to. I mean, who really wants to be known for the consumer products they own? What kind of an identity IS that? I’m the same way with musical equipment, another dorky universe that people take way, way too seriously. Most of the time, people see my bass — which I love — and want to know if it’s Mexican, or Japanese, or what kind of wood it’s made out of, or some dumb thing like that, so that they can tell me how much better the one from Norway that’s made out of titanium is. Every once in a while, someone tells me that I have the greatest bass in the world, and how much better it is than theirs, and I have pretty much the same disinterested reaction. I like it. It is what it is. 

But back to my phone. I’ve only lost one phone in my life; a $35 Cricket (a crappy regional carrier, if you haven’t heard of them) model from back when we were putting the screws to Verizon for a month or so. It wasn’t worth much, and we were getting rid of the service, so I was admittedly careless with the thing, and eventually I left it in someone’s car or something. Lesson learned. But other than that, I’m pretty careful with phones — which is why I was really surprised when I couldn’t find my new-ish phone the other day. 

Some background; the last time I remembered having it, I had just come inside with my bike (I was listening to music on it), and put it on our front counter. After that, I don’t know what happened, but I still had the charger and the little headphones that came with it. After about two weeks of not having a phone, and seeing if it would turn up, we started really tearing up our house (and cars) trying to find it, but to no avail. Usually, when I lose something, there’s a scenario in my mind that, however unlikely it seems, would explain the loss of whatever is missing. Here, though, I had nothing. Where the hell could I have put it? Where do I even go these days, anywhere? And who would want to steal a Palm Pre 2?

This is where things get interesting. We remembered that we had called the phone a day or so after I lost it, and that for some reason, it had rang. It’s a Palm, though, so it basically dies without a charger after about 16 hours of standby; how was it ringing? My wife, who is somehow both incredibly naive and frighteningly savvy, decided to do some digging, and started checking our phone bill. The bill itself wasn’t any different than normal (which is why we hadn’t noticed it before), but the call log was different than what we had expected. A few days after my last call on the phone… it started calling people. And texting people. A lot. Even weirder… they were LOCAL people.

No calls to France, or Mexico. No app purchases or anything like that. Just tons, and tons, and tons of texts and a few phone calls to people within a few miles of our neighborhood.

Being equally naive myself, it took a minute to dawn on me. Someone from our neighborhood HAD my phone? And was using it casually? What could they possibly be thinking? Surely, it wasn’t of any long term use; we’d obviously be suspending the account before we ended up paying for another month of service, and then what good would it do them? Why wasn’t it already sold on Ebay, if it was worth anything? And WAS it even worth anything? It was a freaking Palm, for crying out loud. It was, in phone terms, about as sexy and desirable as our Hondas.

As I stood there, pondering the infinite possibilities of all this, my wife decided to be more direct.

She started calling the numbers. 

Yep, no dallying around for her. She was direct, but friendly. Hello? Can I ask who this is? Have you happened to get any calls from a 401 number lately? All in her just slightly/maybe a little flirty voice I don’t think I’ve heard since college, or since she was trying to get our cable bill lowered before we cut the cord a few years ago. 

She took copious notes of her conversations, and very quickly, the picture started to get clearer. Everyone we called was an uncomfortable sounding high school boy; one of the nicer ones practically told her his life story. Name, hobbies, where he went to school, where he had been accepted to college, the whole bit. 

We Googled, and Googled, and Googled some more. In minutes, we had graduation lists, basketball team pictures, and a lot of names. But ultimately, my wife didn’t need much of it for anything other than satisfying our curiosity. Within an hour, she had convinced the thief — through one of his friends — to give up the phone, no questions asked. We got an address to pick it up (under a for sale sign, I kid you not) just a block or so from our house, and sure enough, there it was, no worse for wear. 

He blanked the phone (wise), but also forgot to tell his friends to stop calling and texting it (less wise), so within another 20 minutes, we had his name, age, and position on the local high school football team (6’2, 140lb sophomore tight end — hit the weight room, dawg). My wife even got him and another one of his friends to accept a Facebook friend request, which absolutely blew my mind. 

We laughed, and Palm is actually pretty good about restoring everything (IT’S IN THE CLOUD, MAN!!!!), so my phone is pretty much completely back to normal, minus a bazillion MP3s, which I’ll put back some day. But the really amazing thing here is just how disconnected I am from whatever teenage society is these days. I mean, seriously, what was this kid thinking? If you’re willing to take (possibly while I was playing basketball, that’s our current theory) my cell phone, and then use it indefinitely, even telling all your friends that this is your new number, how are you able to be convinced to RETURN it when we have absolutely no leverage? And if it’s because you’re just a nice, considerate, kid, then WHY DID YOU STEAL MY PHONE IN THE FIRST PLACE?

So many questions. Did you think we’d actually pay your imaginary cell phone bill for you? Did this phone (somehow) make you look cool to the other 16 year olds for a few minutes? Don’t all kids have cell phones now, especially in Fairfax County? Did you actually buy a proprietary charger for this cell phone, knowing it was going to be shut off in a few days? Or did you steal one of those from someone else?

I dunno. But thanks for not throwing it in a lake, I guess. That’s what my generation probably would have done.