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PG

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index.html (A hacker friend of mine recently heard a talk by an executive at a giant corporation, and his reaction was so funny that I had to preserve it. The company's name has of course been changed.) Hey Paul, I just heard a presentation by a woman who is the "Chief Engineer" at Megacorp about how Megacorp does business, and I couldn't believe it! You often write about practices inside big corporations, but this is my first even indirect experience with that. Here are some of the quotations or near-quotations I wrote down: "value levers" "structured phase gate approach" "Lean Six Sigma" "mistake-proofing" "it's a stage-gate execution process with a focus on the value chain" "medium impact to in-process and results metrics and Business Case. Decision Team discretion for phase exit" "TTM, LSS and DfLSS work together . . ." "All problems are business problems - engineers need to think like business people." The best part, though, was the summary at the end, when she claimed that all of the appalling processes she had talked about for an hour and a half (using 52 PowerPoint slides) showed "respect for the intelligence of the individual." Is this for real? How could anyone possibly endure this at Megacorp?

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info, and .biz domain names. I hope this page adds to the search results about them. This group also appears to operate under the name Internet Support Network, or iSupportNet. (If this page helped you, you can help ensure it comes up near the top of Google search results by making a link to it on your own site.)

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index.html I was recently cold-called (on my cell phone) by a company called the Domain Support Group, which the woman on the phone said was a "transfer notification agent." I have been dealing with domain names for many years and I had never heard of "a transfer notification agent." I was suspicious, and it turns out I was right to be. If you look at the front page of the Domain Support Group, it looks as if they are some kind of semi official organization. The page has just the kind of ugly look it would have if it were administered by ICANN, and it is sprinkled with quotes about ICANN's mission. Strangely, however, the page also had ads on it. I poked around further in the site, and got still more suspicious. Meanwhile the woman on the phone transferred me to her supervisor. When I told him I had had domain names for many years and never had to deal with a "transfer notification agent," he just hung up. Apparently I am not the kind of prospect the Domain Support Group is looking for. So then I went to Google and searched for "domain support group scam" and what do you know, I got search results: http://www.niner.net/docs/dsg.shtml [http://www.niner.net/docs/dsg.shtml] http://www.bankersonline.com/technology/techalert_040902.html [http://www.bankersonline.com/technology/techalert_040902.html] Apparently the business of the Domain Support Group is to trick people into registering .us, .info, and .biz domain names. I hope this page adds to the search results about them. This group also appears to operate under the name Internet Support Network, or iSupportNet. (If this page helped you, you

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index.html Some people seem to have interpreted You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss [boss.html] as putting down programmers who work for big companies. Jeff Atwood reproduced one quote summarizing it as saying: Oh... you haven't founded a company? You suck. In fact the thesis of the essay is exactly the opposite: that although the press treats startup founders as gods, the differences between them and other programmers are due less to their nature than to their work environment. Here is the beginning of the last paragraph: Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear that the difference between the two is due mostly to environment... Why are people reading an essay that says this, and coming away with the idea that it says exactly the opposite? My guess is that this is an instance of a fairly common Internet phenomenon. People are reacting to what they imagine I'd say in an essay on this subject—that an essay comparing startup founders to corporate employees would say that founders are great and corporate employees suck. Actually that has not been our experience. Startup founders are not somehow set apart from "ordinary" programmers. Lots more people could start startups if they wanted to. In fact, our business model depends on it. If the pool of founders was limited to a few rare geniuses, Y Combinator wouldn't work.

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make rational calculations and decisions on their own every day? To enforce this norm, almost every all-hands meeting consisted of distributing a printed Excel spreadsheet to the assembled masses and Peter conducting a line by line review of our performance (this is only a modest exaggeration)." (by Keith Rabois, former Executive Vice President of Paypal) "Vigorous debate, often via email: Almost every important issue had champions and critics. These were normally resolved not by official edict but by a vigorous debate that could be very intense. Being able to articulate and defend a strategy or product in a succinct, compelling manner with empirical analysis and withstand a withering critique was a key attribute of almost every key contributor. I still recall the trepidation I confronted when I was informed that I needed to defend the feasibility of my favorite "baby" to Max for the first time." (by Keith Rabois, former Executive Vice President of Paypal) "Extreme Pressure PayPal was a very difficult business with many major issues to solve. We were able to see our colleagues work under extreme pressure and hence we learned who we could rely on and trust." (by Keith Rabois, former Executive Vice President of Paypal)

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index.html In California, I work most days at my house up in the Santa Cruz mountains. The round trip to the valley is an hour (assuming zero traffic). So meeting with someone is never just a matter of "grabbing coffee;" it consumes a big chunk of an afternoon. And an interruption on that scale means I will get significantly less programming or writing done that day. I solve the problem of meeting with YC founders who need to talk to me by designating blocks of time as office hours at YC several times a week. But this wouldn't work well for meeting other people. Among other things, there's not much privacy; YC is effectively one giant room. I'm still willing to meet in person with people who feel they need to talk to me about something very important. But if it's possible to talk via phone or email, that would be a lot easier for me.

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sufficiency. PayPal is and was, after all, a web service; and the company managed to ship prodigious amounts of relatively high-quality web software for a lot of years in a row early on. Yes, we had the usual politics between functional groups, but either individual heroes or small, high-trust teams more often than not found ways to deliver projects on-time." (by Yee Lee, former Product & BU GM of Paypal) "Willingness to try even in a data-driven culture, youll always run in to folks who either dont believe you have collected the right supporting data for a given decision or who just arent comfortable when data contradicts their gut feeling. In many companies, those individuals would be the death of decision-making. At PayPal, I felt like you could almost always get someone to give it a *try* and then let performance data tell us whether to maintain the decision or rollback." (by Yee Lee, former Product & BU GM of Paypal) "Data-driven decision making PayPal was filled with smart, opinionated people who were often at logger-heads. The way to win arguments was to bring data to bear. So you never started a sentence like this "I feel like its a problem that our users cant do X", instead youd do your homework first and then come to the table with "35% of our [insert some key metric here] are caused by the lack of X functionality" (by Yee Lee, former Product & BU GM of Paypal) "Radical transparency on metrics: All employees were expected to be facile with the metrics driving the business. Otherwise, how could one expect each employee to make rational calculations and decisions on their own every day? To enforce this norm, almost every all-hands meeting consisted of distributing a printed Excel spreadsheet to the assembled masses and Peter conducting a line by line review of our performance (this is only a modest

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Rabois, former Executive Vice President of Paypal) "Extreme Focus (driven by Peter): Peter required that everyone be tasked with exactly one priority. He would refuse to discuss virtually anything else with you except what was currently assigned as your #1 initiative. Even our annual review forms in 2001 required each employee to identify their single most valuable contribution to the company." (by Keith Rabois, former Executive Vice President of Paypal) "Dedication to individual accomplishment: Teams were almost considered socialist institutions. Most great innovations at PayPal were driven by one person who then conscripted others to support, adopt, implement the new idea. If you identified the 8-12 most critical innovations at PayPal (or perhaps even the most important 25), almost every one had a single person inspire it (and often it drive it to implementation). As a result, David enforced an anti-meeting culture where any meeting that included more than 3-4 people was deemed suspect and subject to immediate adjournment if he gauged it inefficient. Our annual review forms in 2002 included a direction to rate the employee on "avoids imposing on others time, e.g. scheduling unnecessary meetings." (by Keith Rabois, former Executive Vice President of Paypal) "Refusal to accept constraints, external or internal:We were expected to pursue our #1 priority with extreme dispatch (NOW) and vigor. To borrow an apt phrase, employees were expected to "come to work every day willing to be fired, to circumvent any order aimed at stopping your dream." Jeremy Stoppelman has relayed elsewhere the story about an email he sent around criticizing management that he expected to get him fired and instead got him promoted. Peter did not accept no for answer: If you couldnt solve the problem, someone else would be soon assigned to do it." (by Keith Rabois, former Executive Vice President of Paypal) "Driven problem solvers: PayPal had a strong bias

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index.html April 2006 A couple days ago I suggested to one of the organizers of the Web 2.0 Conference that that they should invite some little startups for free this year. Ironically there were few startups last year, because the conference cost so much that they couldn't afford it. He said they'd been thinking of doing that, and asked who I thought they should invite. As I tried to think of a list, I realized there was a more "Web 2.0" way to do this: let everyone vote on it. So I asked the guys at reddit to set up a special reddit for this purpose: web2.reddit.com [http://web2.reddit.com/top]. Please submit and vote for your favorite startups. (You vote using the little arrows next to each name. You have to register to vote, but to register you only have to choose a username and password; you don't have to give your email address.) Note that this is a list of startups, not applications. You'd nominate 37signals, not Basecamp specifically. This list has no official connection to the conference. It's just an experiment to determine what the most admired Web 2.0 startups are.