Covering the technology industry must be really fascinating for reporters in our industry. Most of the companies are privately held. There’s intense competition for markets, users and traction. Companies and their PR reps only want to talk about partnerships and growth metrics that put them in a positive light.

Meanwhile, without the drama of screwed up financings, founders having fights with other founders, or acquisition rumors, tech reporters can’t generate the controversy that drive the day’s buzz and discussion.

That makes for an interesting dance.

I’ve dealt with this before, and it can be a challenge. So well in advance of these tough questions coming our way, I thought I’d share my philosophy about what we will and won’t talk about, and more importantly, how that changes over time as our company grows up.

Unreleased products. We’re inclined towards the Apple model for this. We like to ship early, ship often to a small group of beta users, but we don’t talk publicly about products until we’re in the process of rolling them out. Just good competitive common sense.

Financing rounds. We won’t talk about financing that isn’t closed yet, but once it’s done, I suppose we’ll talk about it. We don’t consider a round of financing a huge achievement. It’s not even close to being on par with shipping an amazing product. (We didn’t bother to issue a press release for our last financing.)

Revenue, profits and overall financial results. We wouldn’t talk about financial results until we go public or are required to. At times, if you’re really a mature company, you might try and give the press a sense of your scale with a range, but that can be a sign you’re much more focused on competitors than you should be. We’re going to be very cautious about giving any public guidance or detail about our financial results while we’re a private company.

Number of employees. Again, this can become a vanity metric. Is a 100-employee company 10x more successful than a 10-employee company? We don’t see number of employees as a sign of success. This isn’t something we’re uptight about talking about, but it’s definitely not a number we’ll put a lot of focus on.

Users, page views, customers, partners. Once you exit beta and really start scaling, it can definitely be interesting to try and tell your growth story using whatever growth metric makes sense for your business. Some of this data can be estimated from public data sources anyway. The challenge is that until you start scaling, you may not know what metrics really matter yet and are worth talking about. That can frustrate reporters, but it’s life.

Competitors. I admire and have adopted the Amazon approach to this. We don’t talk about companies that we perceive as competitors. We might talk in concept about how our approach to solving problems compares with other approaches, but we simply won’t trash talk our competitors, even if they trash talk us first. It’s rude, unnecessary and we won’t stoop to that level.

Now that I’ve written this, I think I’ll just send this post on to any reporters who get annoyed when I won’t tell them something. At least they’ll know it isn’t personal!

Apollo 13 is one of the greatest entrepreneurial movies ever.

• The classic pivot: “What do we have on the spacecraft that’s good?”
• The believer in data: “Let’s work the problem, people. Let’s not make this worse by guessing.”
• The inspirational leader: “With all due respect sir, I think this is gonna be our finest hour.”
• And the unwavering unwillingness to lose: “Failure is NOT an option!”

When I grow up, I want to be Gene Kranz. Still hard to believe they gave the Oscar to Mel Gibson’s movie that year.

What movies inspire you?

In Steve Jobs’ biography, there’s a moment when the new Apple retail stores are about to be rolled out to the public, and stores chief Ron Johnson has a realization: they’re all wrong. The stores are designed around the products, rather than designed around what people want to do with the products.

So he goes to Steve Jobs and tells him that they need to delay the launch and redesign the stores to get them right. Jobs comes around to the belief that he’s right, and that’s exactly what they did.

In retrospect, we had a moment a little bit like this about two weeks ago.

A few minutes after our Monday morning team meeting, I had a scheduled product meeting with Levi, our Director of Engineering, to talk about how to implement “discovery” (helping to surface investing ideas for users to try out in their Riskalyze portfolio) and “execution” (helping users figure out how to take action after they finish building a portfolio).

And then he lowered the boom on me – showing me how our user experience had gotten off track, how we were emphasizing the wrong things, how our design was trapping us into making bad design decisions.

I hated to admit it, but he was right.

I had seen the red flags for a few weeks, but I kept thinking to myself “we’ll fix that later.” Given the amazing algorithm improvements that Matt, our Director of Core Technology, had just shipped, along with the kudos and thumbs up from several visionaries in the investing and tech fields, I felt like we could get along with the product we had.

But in that moment, it became abundantly clear that Levi was right. We needed to fix these things so core to our user experience if we were going to really engage users with the product.

So we hit the reset button.

That added another week to our schedule, but it’s probably one of the most important weeks we’ll spend.

And this Thursday, you’ll get to see the fruits of this work – a brand new Riskalyze, unlike anything you’ve seen before.

Way easier to use. Incredible discovery of new investing ideas. An awesomely simple way to put your Riskalyze portfolio into action. And an elegant way to get started and make Riskalyze fit into the flow of how you invest now.

We can’t wait for you to give it a whirl.

I’m on a 6:50AM flight to New York this morning. That entails a very early drive to the airport after kissing my three favorite people goodbye, and this morning I was thinking about the difficulty of balancing being a great husband, a great dad, and a great startup CEO.

Doing a startup is incredibly hard work. It takes a lot of hours. And when you’re not at your desk, your brain is usually still working. Pondering problems. Figuring out how to get around or over them. If you’re not careful, you can miss out on some wonderful moments of life.

I’m quite sure I don’t have this all figured out, but a big part of the solution for me has been redesigning my day around my family.

Most startup people that I know sleep in, start work around 9AM, and work until midnight or later. They also waste a lot of time being disorganized and working on the wrong things.

How do I know this? It used to be me.

So now, I start most days at 5:30AM, and try to step away at 6 or 6:30PM to spend a few hours with my wife and kids. Later that night, I might catch up on email, or prepare for the next day.

And I’ve also gotten very disciplined about being organized and making sure I’m working on the right things. I always know what my top priorities are, and what I need to do to push those forward.

I still find myself in “crunch time” once in a while, and have to stay up until 1AM to get something done. And I spend a good chunk of my Saturdays working, too. But if that’s the tradeoff I have to make in order to not work the 9AM to 2AM schedule and miss out on the lives of my three favorite people, I’ll take it.

If you’re balancing a family you love with a startup or an intense job, what are your secrets?

Verizon Wireless doesn’t seem to think that the industry that has created all of the net new jobs over the last few years merits a checkbox.

We’re still in the early innings of a new wave of innovation and growth in our world. And I’m incredibly privileged to get to be a part of it working in technology.

One of the world’s most amazing entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos, has built an incredible company, and it’s hard to believe he only got started in 1994.

Check out this awesome infographic from FrugalDad.com.

One of the great changes happening in the world is that bottom-up efforts are gaining ground in ways that top-down, centralized, command-and-control initiatives never could.

A great example is the “Create Jobs for USA” initiative that Starbucks got started in partnership with Opportunity Finance Network. If we can all raise $50 million – and Starbucks kicked things off with $5 million – the equity can be leveraged 7X to lend $350 million to small businesses to create new jobs.

That’s real money.

So consider making a $5 donation at a Starbucks donation near you. Because we’re one nation. Indivisible. And nothing can stop us if we work together, from the bottom-up, to bring change to our country.

For the entire day today, you won’t be able to see our logo on the Riskalyze.com web site. It’s obscured by a black bar that looks like this.

We’re joining a group of Internet companies and organizations to oppose two bills winding their way through Congress, known as SOPA and Protect-IP. Bankrolled by lobbyists for big media companies, these pieces of legislation want to make it possible for the federal government to block access to web sites at the DNS level of the Internet.

These are the same tactics that China, Iran and Syria use to suppress the freedom of their citizens. I don’t care how good the reason might be – this is a line the United States should never cross.

Right now, the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act offers startups like Riskalyze “safe harbor” protections. Let’s say that one of our users upload a copyrighted image as their profile photo (silly, but certainly possible). A big media company could send us a letter, and we wouldn’t have liability as long as we removed the copyrighted material.

Under this new law, big media companies can go after any site hosting images, video, sound or even links that appear to violate copyright – and get them blocked at the DNS level. Any sites designed to allow for self-expression, like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or YouTube, are at risk.

Putting huge liabilities on the technology startups driving all of the net job creation in this country over the last few years is the last thing we need to do. I hope you’ll get involved and make sure Congress knows that the big media lobbyists can’t have their way.

You can learn more about these bills from this AmericanCensorship.org info graphic, and send a free letter to your Congressional representative here.

Picture this kind of road. Now pretend you’re driving it at night, with no headlights, at 100mph.

That’s sort of what building a technology startup can be like.

(H/T to @bryce)

I’d like to build a new feature into my calendar. Every time I add a meeting or event, I wish it would ask me, “do you need to schedule some time to prepare?”

I’m half joking because I probably don’t need to prepare to go to the gym in the morning.

But while I’ve had others tell me they can’t tell the difference, I feel like I’m 100x more effective when I spend focused time preparing.

If it’s a meeting, I’m asking myself “what do we need to discuss and what do we need to decide?”

If I’m speaking, I’m jotting down the points I want to cover, or writing the speech in long form (rare but if the format demands it, I will).

And for board meetings, there is no way to do them without great preparation.

I can be spontaneous. I can speak without notes. I can do unstructured meetings. And I’m working on getting better at it.

But I think I’ll always feel like I get more out of things when I’m prepared. When I’ve thought through the best way to articulate my ideas. And when I’ve got a checklist of the questions I’m hoping someone else has an answer for.

Do you find that preparation helps you in meetings? Or are you 98% as effective if you wing it?