It’s been an amazing year. We did our best to document it in our annual Christmas letter. This is the third year we’ve done this letter on the web, instead of mailing it out on dead trees.
» Read our 2011 Christmas Letter
To all of our family and friends out in Twitter, Facebook and blog land, we hope you have a wonderful holiday season and a Merry Christmas!
This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for a family that loves me.
I’m thankful for a job that I love to do.
I’m thankful to work with a team of people I admire and appreciate so much.
I’m thankful to advocate for a cause I care so much about.
I’m thankful to be a part of making our community, our region, our state and our country more prosperous through education.
I’m thankful for each of you who I get to talk with every day through this blog, Twitter and Facebook. (Yes, even the trolls. It’s Thanksgiving.)
I have so much to be thankful for. And despite all of our problems and our challenges, we have so much to be thankful for as a country. Let’s not forget that.
So like the pilgrims of old who sought out freedom and found it here, let’s raise our glasses in thanks for all that we’ve been given.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Last Saturday, I edited and posted an “author unknown” piece about the cause of the Great Recession. It was funny and a good reminder of how the Big Business + Big Government cartel got us into this mess.
On a whim, I submitted the link to Hacker News. I’ve done that before. The HN community is a pretty awesome group. They vote up the posts they like, and you get some nice readership there.
But apparently this one struck a chord. And then it hit #1 on Hacker News.
I don’t write this blog for the stats, but I do check them once in a while to see what’s been popular with readers. This is what my Google Analytics graph normally looks like:
This is what it looks like after a post goes to #1 on Hacker News:
So thanks to all you HN people who subscribed, or followed me on Twitter, or became a new Riskalyze user! Hopefully, this blog will live up to your standards with interesting posts, though I can’t guarantee they will all discuss beer.
I am having a blast with my new approach to blogging. It’s actually fun again. And from the emails, tweets and comments I’ve seen, you’ve been enjoying it too, which is an honor.
I’ve only had two people unsubscribe from the daily email so far…but this is just a reminder that I pay a few bucks every month to a company called Feedblitz to make a weekly email option possible.
So if you don’t want to get an email from me six days a week, just click here to subscribe weekly.
I wouldn’t want to get an email from me six days a week either.
I’ve decided I want to try to blog more, even though I have less free time than ever. So I stopped to think the other day about what was stopping me, and I realized that I’ve had three really silly mental blocks in my way.
#1: I wanted to fully convey every part of my thoughts on a subject. Rather than writing a few paragraphs about something, I felt like I needed to write a masterful 1000-1200 word post talking about all the nuances of an issue. Which naturally takes more time. And as it turns out, those who bother to read my blog actually like the concise posts better (like this one, and this one).
#2: I worry about whether one of my circles will get bored. I have three distinct audiences for this blog: the tech startup and investor community who I love interacting with at Riskalyze; the supporters, colleagues and staff I work with at Sierra College; and the adoption and orphan care community who I advocate alongside of as an adoptive dad. Will I lose my adoption friends by blogging about technology too much?
#3: It took too long to find a great photo for each post. I love great photography and illustrating a post with a great photograph or visual seemed really important to me. And I still think posts will be more effective that way. But some concepts are hard to find illustrations for, and requiring myself to find a visual for each post ate up a lot of time I didn’t have.
The silly part of each of those mental blocks is that the alternative was not to blog at all. If I couldn’t convey every nuance of a subject, I’d convey none. If I might bore one of my circles with a post, I wouldn’t engage any of them at all. And since I didn’t have time to find a visual, I wouldn’t write the words at all.
So those excuses are gone.
I’m going to try to blog once every day, except when on vacation. They will often be short, concise posts. I’ll often post without any photo or visual, largely because I wrote the post on my Android while mobile. And if the topic is boring to you, use my multiple feeds to subscribe only to what interests you.
These posts will be on topics I’m thinking about or working on that day. I’m going to focus a little less on sharing my point of view and more on raising questions and talking ideas. I hope to learn from all of you in the comments.
I’m excited about this because writing on a more regular basis about technology, education policy and the global orphan crisis can really help me to “beta test” ideas, and increase the velocity of progress on all of these things that I work on.
So that starts tomorrow. And if I mess up, you have an open door to call me on it via the comments, Twitter or Facebook.
Update: I meant to write “weekday” when I wrote “every day” above. I’m not going to blog regularly on Sundays, but I will go ahead and do Saturday posts…because I really am having a blast with this new, easier approach. It’s made blogging fun again.
You can go to Wordle.net and create a “word cloud” from your blog, so I thought I’d check it out. A word cloud will show the most common words in your posts as larger text.
I may have been writing a lot about Riskalyze recently, but it will take some time for that to get bigger, since I’ve written a lot more about our schools, apparently.
I did think it was too cool that the words “exceptional teachers” were smack in the middle. We do have a number of them at Sierra College.
I’ve had two “bad habits” with social media. I accept every Facebook friend request. I follow back everyone on Twitter.
This led to 3,200 friends on Facebook and 6,000 followers on Twitter.
The result is an overwhelming amount of spam from event invites, app requests, group additions, messages and Twitter DMs.
It’s made the signal-to-noise ratio on Facebook and Twitter really bad for me. Too much noise, not enough signal.
So I’ve come to a tough conclusion: I have to change how I use social media.
The interesting thing is that most of those 3,200 Facebook friends and 6,000 Twitter followers are real, awesome people who I enjoy interacting with. They follow my work in technology, or at Sierra College, or perhaps we know each other from advocating for adoption and orphan care.
But a bunch of them aren’t, and I’m making it worse because I’m doing it wrong.
I’m not going to give up all the wonderful things I get from social media. I’ve learned incredible things from people sending me @ replies on Twitter. I’ve gotten great input in my elected role at Sierra College from folks on Facebook. I’ve developed really important business relationships and deepened real-life friendships.
And I’ve even made a few amazing friends that I haven’t even met in real life. (One of those friends in particular is one of my favorite people in New Hampshire…you know who you are!)
So here’s what I’ve changed.
I’m hoping these changes will make social media an even more powerful tool than it was before for talking, interacting and getting to know you.
Don’t be a stranger!
Update: Just to be clear, to “know me” isn’t necessarily to have met in real life! There are a number of people I’ve met in real life who I don’t know. There are a number of people I’ve only met online who I really know. If you feel like we know each other, please go ahead and friend my personal Facebook page (just be patient as I catch up). The goal here isn’t exclusivity, just the elimination of spam.
I got to thinking a few weeks ago as it became clear that I was headed back into the startup world to lead a new company…this blog now has three key audiences.
Some of you are involved in education reform, are employees at Sierra College, or are supporters of the work I’ve done there since 2004.
Others of you are involved in the adoption and orphan care community, either as adoptive parents yourselves, as advocates for ending the global orphan crisis that touches 163 million children, or as supporters of the Adami Tulu project to build a school for orphans in Africa.
And while I’ve always written about business and technology here and there, I’m sure there will be a growing group of readers primarily interested in my new startup, Riskalyze. I’d love nothing more than to share some great ideas here and have some really smart people like you help make them better.
Despite the three distinct audiences, there’s no way I’ll ever be posting to this blog more than once a day on a regular basis. I just don’t have time.
But there are plenty of you who belong to just one of these groups, and you just don’t want to be bothered with my posts for the other two audiences.
So with the help of a cool tool called Yahoo Pipes, I created three new feeds so that you can have only the posts that you want delivered to your inbox by e-mail, or to whatever web site or software you use for reading blogs.
So you can subscribe to all of my posts, or just the posts about one of those three areas of interest. You’ll find these feeds in my sidebar to the right of this post, and it looks like the example at left.
All three of the new feeds will still include “general” posts and the odd post here or there about my family or things happening with me personally. In fact, if you want a sampling of what’s included with each one, just click the orange “RSS” button beside each of them to check out the prior posts included in that feed.
Some people have suggested you can’t have a blog about three distinct topics. But I really couldn’t stop blogging about any of this – they are all things I’m passionate about.
I hope you find this useful!
I hope you’ll indulge me for a minute so I can share some exciting personal news.
I’m joining a brand new startup company as CEO.
Here’s a little bit of the story about how it happened.
I’ve always had the good fortune to work with entrepreneurial companies – from my dad’s distribution business where I started packing boxes in the back room at age twelve, to a web consulting firm I sold, to a business ops software company that built a great team and a great product, but ultimately didn’t get funded.
All in all, the good has always outweighed the bad. There’s just nothing like being a part of limitless opportunity – and that’s what the American system of entrepreneurial capitalism is all about.
During the last four years, I’ve spent most of my time leading global product development for a financial services firm with operations in the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago. That gave me the chance to broaden my experience with consumer marketing and international. It’s been a great privilege to work with an incredible team of people there.
And now, that chapter is coming to a close and a new chapter is opening.
For the last fifteen years, I’ve had a front row seat to watch technology – and the web – change the world and remake how we go about our daily lives.
When I started messing around with this stuff in the late 1980s, “twitter” was something that only birds did and “facebook” was what happened when you fell asleep while reading. We didn’t have Kindles or iPhones. (Heck, we didn’t even have cell phones – I remember when my dad had a pager so we could make him stop at a pay phone and call us!)
As I’ve spent the last four years building technology products and interacting with some of the world’s most brilliant market traders, it’s been fascinating to watch how they all deal with risk. Every economic decision we make is motivated by one of two things: seeking opportunity, or avoiding pain.
If you think about it, how we see the world through that lens of risk is very personal to each of us – you might even say it’s like a fingerprint. And yet it also changes over time. Our own job, our finances, national security, world events and the financial markets cause us to constantly shift a little bit closer to seeking opportunity, or a little bit closer to avoiding pain.
Earlier this year, I was presented with a fascinating opportunity. There’s some incredible technology that can actually capture that “risk fingerprint” from each of us, and let us use it to make better risk/reward decisions. It’s groundbreaking stuff, and nobody has ever tried to do this quite the same way before.
The new company is called Riskalyze. I’m joining the company as CEO on March 1.
We’re going to take that raw technology and transform it into a set of products that will fundamentally change how the world makes risk/reward decisions.
I’m incredibly excited about the challenge that lies ahead. For one thing, you’ll be hearing more from me on business and technology topics I haven’t been able to write about before. (Financial Services is a highly regulated industry, so corporate policies prevented me from writing much about it.) I’ll be sharing a lot about what we’re doing as our story unfolds.
In fact, I’m hoping the “regulars” who follow this blog – everyone from friends and colleagues in business, to folks at Sierra College, to people in the orphan care and adoption community – will be intrigued enough to try this out when it’s ready. (If that’s you, go ahead and comment on this post, and I’ll make sure you get a “Backstage Pass” to check it out before it launches!)
I had to hold this post until I could meet with my incredible staff and share this news with them personally. It’s been a privilege to lead them for four years. It’s also tough to leave an incredible boss, who taught me a lot and gave me all the support that I needed to be successful. I trusted her with my career for those four years and she never let me down. I owe her a debt of gratitude.
So there you have it – one chapter closes, and another one begins.
I can’t wait to get started.
My VAIO is back. The pop, crackle, snap has been repaired. All of my draft blog posts have returned. So I should be back to posting on a regular basis, starting tomorrow morning.
First up: the next installment in the “It’s Time to Change the World” series.
I hope your enthusiasm for this series of posts hasn’t waned in the last few weeks! The need is even greater than it was before.
