I think because we avoided the Super Bowl. You see, I’ve really lost my interest in watching sports since being out here. If you get me in front of a TV, then I still love it, but I can’t plan around it anymore. There’s just too much to do in life.

What did we do instead?

Brunch with a dear friend. One of my best friends from Raleigh, John Gottshall, is in town through Tuesday. We took him to the top of Twin Peaks, which I’d never done before, and it was quite awesome. One thing that wasn’t was the $4.50 hot dog, but that’s San Francisco for you.

And all of that was just Saturday!

Today we trekked into Sonoma and Napa hitting three wineries, two tours and a great two hour lunch along the way. Micky and I are members of the Hess winery, and I love it. The art is cool. The wine is easy to drink. Really great place to take folks.

When we got home Miss Amelia went straight to bed. She’s now rolling onto her stomach to sleep that way using Boomer as a pillow. Her little butt is sticking straight up in the air like a teepee. It’s quite cute really.

John and I watched the last two drives of the game, and then we all had burgers, fries, and fantastic conversation.

What more could a weekend be?

• Wendy & Raif visited

  We had a whole slew of visitors come through the first half of the month. Our far, far away family descended to meet baby Amelia. Unfortunately for Wendy (and Geoff) she had to be re-admitted to the hospital due to an infection. She had a bright red inflammation underneath her oemphalocele, and it took a 10-day course to knock it out. Once she was home though, it was all magic! 

  My dad being in town was nice except he smokes too much. It caused a lot of problems in that Micky kept getting upset, and I think he realized it and got upset as well. We also put him up in a bed & breakfast in the Castro district of San Francisco which I think he enjoyed (even though he got relocated to the “garden suite”). I’d highly recommend the Parker Guest House to anyone who has folks in town.

• Soccer/Fitness

  Still too fat and slow. I have however started to really lose weight. A trio of us at work are making it to the gym 3 times a week, and I’m loving it. Hop out for 1 hour as if we were going to coffee, and get in some exercise. Rotating muscle groups, but now I need to put some more time into aerobic. I’ve started that this week 

  My goal is to reach 180 pounds by my one year wedding anniversary. I’m at 195 lbs right now. I’m feeling pretty good about my chances.

• Work

  I think all in all, this may be where things are best right now. 

  I got to present at this month’s board meeting, and that went really well. I’m sure for most folks that’s a non-event, but I wonder if folks who have entrepreneurial  aspirations if your first board meeting is like your first time with a girl? It was about as exciting :-p

  Product team is buzzing with too much to do, and not enough time to do it. Everyone keeps saying that’s a good thing, but I’m pretty convinced that that’s just a convenient story to tell oneself to make it all make sense. I think we’ve got an awesome few months ahead of us at the ‘Box.

• Vacation

  Which leaves me with what I’m doing right now. We’re on vacation at an amazing house in Tamales Bay. We’re on the water, and we’ve spent the last few days grilling out, hanging out with Amelia and just re-establishing our family. It’s been awesome! Photos to come soon.

The questions are:

1. What is the company culture like?
2. Who will my mentor(s) be?
3. How will this company make me better in 3 years? in 5 years?
4. What motivates you to stay at the company?
5. How much time is dedicated to experimentation, execution and process?

The questions serve the following roles:

1. What is the company culture like?
   As far as I can tell, culture is the single biggest prohibiting factor at a company. Having a great culture can’t make a company, but having a poor culture will sink a company. I don’t know if anyone will openly admit that things are wonderful or horrible in an interview, but deep dive into their answer. Are people motivated to work? Do people go above and beyond the call of duty? I think what the college student wants to find out is if they are around a group of people who are motivated by the same things that they are. The company should also be trying to figure this out about the student, but not all companies put in the effort to have culture be part of the interview process.
2. Who will my mentor(s) be?
   I think that this question is the biggest one that I missed. In the formative years of one’s career, don’t go through and try to figure it all out on your own. It only leads to failure and frustration.Having a strong mentor figure early in one’s career can really help establish how successful years 5 – 10 will be, and those years can only be successful if the foundations for success have been set in years 1 – 4.The thing to  really learn here is how cross-functional a group of individuals there are for one to learn from. Don’t just expect that your boss will be your mentor. Ask someone from marketing, product or sales to be your mentor when your job function is in fact an engineer. Understand where you want to be, and find someone in that role to help you understand the path between you and them. In fact, it’s probably better if your boss isn’t your mentor because it’s scary to be honest with your boss about your relationship with them. I got really lucky in that I felt that, after a hurdle or two of the opposite, Yang and I could really be honest with each other about everything, and it led to a really great relationship. That said, I would say that I look to Yang as a mentor more now than I did when he was my boss, as an example.
3. How will this company make me better in 3 years? in 5 years?
   I actually think that this one is more important for the applicant than for the answer. The applicant should sit down and think about where they want to be in 3-5 years, and understand what it takes to get there. If they don’t know, then ask. I think introspection is a big part of having a successful interview. If you don’t know what you want, then you can’t gauge if you’re succeeding in getting it or not.
4. What motivates you to stay at the company?
   I’m curious to understand why the person that I’m interviewing is still at the company. In the Valley especially, anyone who has a modicum of skill can jump ship, and find a new job pretty immediately. Especially at the junior engineer level, where folks are probably underpaying you, and just throwing some stock at you to make you feel better about yourself.

   So find out why this person hasn’t jumped ship, and found the next big thing. What about the current company inspires them to stick it out, and make this the basket in which they put their proverbial eggs? If the answer is that it’s a job, then you’re probably in trouble.

5. How much time is dedicated to experimentation, execution and process?
   This is a big one for me, because I really feel as if I burned myself badly here. If you’re a hacker, or you just like building things, and there’s no room for experimentation, then it’s the wrong company for you. If you’re unorganized, and you can’t find your elbow from your shoulder, and there’s no process, then this is the wrong company for you.

   Again, introspection comes into play, as you have to really understand what makes you tick, but if you’re confident that what makes you tick is someone giving you a spec, and you drilling the hell out of it, then find a company where execution and process are more highly valued than experimentation. It just makes everything easier from getting motivated to being the person who is excited about what they do, selling the company and being a good advocate.

Those are my five questions that I wish I had known to ask before starting a job out of school. They may not be immediately relevant to everyone, but I do think that some piece of each one is relevant to understanding whether a job that you’re interviewing for is really one that you want. It’s the rest of your life, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week… do something you love.

I got to play some soccer this weekend, worked out today and hacked on some stuff that I’m really starting to get excited about (hopefully more on that coming soon).

The big win this weekend though was getting to do dinner with Saket. We’re at very similar places in our careers, and in a lot of ways our lives (Saket isn’t married with a kid on the way, but in general). I noticed on Saturday night that Saket and I meet in social situations a lot. We have to “share” each other per se. Saturday we just guy bonded, and it was really excellent.

It was a really awesome chance to reflect on myself while reflecting in Saket’s experiences. We talked about the naivety of college kids (which will be my next post), management styles under which we’ve worked, the frustration of the current political system and the situation in the Middle East.

I miss having conversations like that, and I feel as if I’ve lost them in some sense since leaving school. The problem is that it’s all we did in school, so relatively it’s a complete loss. The late night IHOP, going to Waqaar’s house and smoking hookah, being in Watauga Hall and up til 2am talking. I realized Saturday night that those moments and conversations are really important to me.

Now, I feel as if people do things in bigger contexts. Dinner parties with lots of people. Going to the games. It just feels big. The intimacy of one-on-one time with a friend is lost. I don’t know why that is. Are we too busy? Are we just trying to multi-task friendships as well? I hate to sit down and actually answer those questions because I don’t think I’ll like the answers.

But this weekend, I got it back, and all was well again. Even if the wall is aqua and not orange.

From dictionary.com:

val·i·date

–verb (used with object), -dat·ed, -dat·ing.

1. to make valid; substantiate; confirm: Time validated oursuspicions.
2. to give legal force to; legalize.
3. to give official sanction, confirmation, or approval to, as elected officials, election procedures, documents, etc.: to validate a passport.

It’s as simple as a good job from someone who notices what you’ve done, or a feeling before you go to bed that you’re the man. There isn’t a single formula across which validation works for everyone, but it is something that everyone needs.

The really interesting bit is that for some it’s an internal validation that they’ve accomplished something. I think there’s a real luck to this kind of person because they can find something that they love, and be happy doing it, and that’s the extent of the validation loop. The effort, blood, sweat and tears are all summed up in that feeling at the end of the day that they’re proud of themselves. End of story.

I think though that the more relevant case for me is an external validation. Not necessarily in words, but in body language. I want to see in your eyes that you get it. I want to hear your heart beat a little bit louder because you’re excited. I want to see the chill across your skin when you realize what a game changer I’m sharing with you. It’s that instant moment of, yup, we just did that, that makes the journey so sweet at the end.

You want to motivate me… give me the chance to blow your mind.

Really, the win there more than anything else is that there’s something to being surrounded by the kind of people who appreciate and  live on the margin between #1 and #10. Being surrounded by people like that is a very strong form of motivation. It was this section that I found the most appealing from Newcomb’s blog post.

Super A = a(a), a=a, super B=c(c), b=c and c=0 – Various sources but probably mostly Peter Thiel and a little bit of Luke Nosek.

There really is something to being surrounded by the all-stars of your trade. The question I have though is how to do so outside of the crowding that happens at large companies that seem to swallow talent. My friend Jordan O’Mara told me the other day that he’s the worst on his team, which he considers one of the best inside of Red Hat corporate. Fantastic! He’s going to learn like crazy, and he’s going to be a LOT better for it. That said, there has to be a way to get that talent out of the door, and into the proverbial garage.

Having thought about this all day, I think the answer is quite simple actually.

Create, or be part of creating, something that is in and of itself such a cutting edge idea that you become the attraction to the top-level talent.

I think that’s the key indicator that there is a lack of truly great ideas coming out of the Valley of late. The fact that everyone wants to go to Facebook instead of building their own says something. The great ideas are missing.

And so I’ve come down to the idea that there needs to be a great idea, a sense of control to the journey and a community of the best with which to make it all happen. There’s a lot of motivation in all of that, but I still think it’s missing something big. That I’ll speak to tomorrow.

And so comes forth the challenge of understanding what motivates.

Since a large-scale operation to discover isn’t an option, I found it most pertinent to find the answer in myself. Instead of comically interviewing myself on the subject however, I’ve been looking for others ideas of motivation to see if it is something to which I can subscribe.

It lead me to an article on Steve Newcomb’s blog about building a cult culture at a startup. Steve Newcomb was the founder of Powerset which is now a part of Bing.com. This paragraph here really got me:

The best way to prove to yourself, potential investors and to any potential future employees that you have a killer idea, is to get a number of A-level engineers to join full-time with equity-only deals.

Would I ever do an equity-only deal? That’s a pretty awesome question. Does that mean that the idea motivates you so much you know it’s going to succeed? Or is it that the money you make is irrelevant in the short term versus the ability to cash out in the long term? Does it mean committing to a project for 2-3 years to vest enough of the equity such that if there is a liquidation event then it’s all worth it?

One million and one questions flew through my mind in an instant. And I came back to the original which was, “Would I ever take an equity-only deal?”

I quickly realized that the answer was no. Not because I’d want money instead of the equity, that’s not the problem. I think the problem is that the motivation doesn’t come from the expected result, but by the journey that gets me there. Having the equity doesn’t give me the power to control, in some shape or form, the journey. I know that no end result is guaranteed, but I do know that I have to get from point A today to some point unknown in the future, and that I want to enjoy it while I go down that path.

Nonetheless, there was much more in this article to glean from, and so I’ll return to it tomorrow. Maybe the answer lies here, but really what the answer isn’t lies here, and the answer lies somewhere else.

Funny because I thought that I did everything else quite well today.

I got to class late because I got into a really good discussion with Jason and Andrew about how to work through some new questions that we’re posing at work. It’s a really fascinating time for me on that front. I thought that I really enjoyed creating much more than innovating. This is a problem when it comes to joining a project, and helping to be part of the solution. However, it turns out that I really have no problem with innovating, but that I just hate doing things when I think I’m perpetuating a bad state of being.

And so I’m trying to do a better job of understanding what it means for a project to be in a bad state. Is it that you read the code, and think to yourself, “Why the fuck was it done this way?” That’s one piece, but the god honest truth is that after one month when you look at any code you ask yourself why the fuck anyone thought it was a good idea, especially when you’re that anyone. We all outgrow our code.

Fine, it isn’t the code itself. Then is it that the API is too fragile to really scale? The tough thing there is, the product requirements ask that an engineer deliver functionality*. Good engineering practices ask that an engineer deliver functionality. All fine and dandy right? No. Not at all. If a product works, and if an architecture works are two completely different sets of functionality. It’s just unbelievably frustrating when you want to build a product, and have to build an engineering toolkit instead, and vis-a-versa. However, that doesn’t put things in a bad state. It creates friction. Friction produces heat. Heat produces fire, and fire leads to the Internet (just run with it, we don’t have that much server space to draw out the connection).

So fine, we have friction, but we’re not in a bad state yet. So what’s the problem then?

I think I figured it out tonight at SCUBA. You see, I didn’t realize that I had a bad O-Ring because it looked normal to me. The teacher said you have to smell that it’s off. That made no sense to me at all. You’re supposed to put the weights into these quick to remove weight pockets, and I put them in a side, zippered pocket instead. So when we went to do the ascent technique which requires throwing away your weights…. I just sat on the bottom of the pool. I was just in the wrong mind set the whole night. And that’s the problem.

A bad state is one of a discordant mind set. I felt as if this post needed some big words, so I threw those in there. But this experience in the pool tonight really opened my eyes to a wider problem. If you’re constantly solving a different problem than the one being presented to you, there’s a problem. It gets even worse when you can’t conceive of why you’re constantly unable to achieve success. In your mind set, you’re solving the problem presented to you and solving it well (in theory). However, the truth is that you’re just solving a problem, but not THE problem, and unless they are one in the same, then you’re just plain out of luck.

So, after my SCUBA fail, I think the proper resolution is to work on understanding the macro problem, and then understanding how to decompose that into micro-level actions. The challenge awaits!

This game owes you nothing. There’s going to a come a day where the game passes all of us by. It chews us up and spits us out. Which means every time we get to play, every time we step on the field, we have to play as if it’s our last match.

When you come out here, first come with your heart. Bring passion. Bring joy. Bring beauty. Bring an appreciation for the beauty of the game.

Then mentally show up. Get here on time to warm up. During warm ups get in your touches, and work on one thing for each game. Work on your first touch. Work on your headers. Work on shooting to corners or work on wall passes. But mentally commit to being better at one thing after the game compared to before the game.

Finally physically show up. Make the runs you’re supposed to make, and surprise yourself and make some you didn’t think you were strong enough to make. Play defense with intensity. Support your teammates with passion. Ignore the ref. Play the game beautifully, and after these 90 minutes which we have, these 90 minutes where the game is still ours, let’s walk off the field and say to ourselves if today was the last time we ever played the game we did so with heads held high, with pride in our performance and with everything we have left on the field.

We did not do that today, and for that I am ashamed to be associated with this team. This game will never give you anything. We have to go out there and earn every inch. Today we just quit. I promise each and every one of you that this team won’t quit again. If you think that quitting is an option, then don’t come back next week.