Startup Metrics

At this weekend’s BarCamp I managed to miss my own discussion  (it was part of the last flight of presentations that got cancelled due to time management issues that I will not go into, and both of Jared Goralnick’s presentations.  The reason I missed one of his presentations was because it was a talk about a talk that I had already found online and I really wanted to learn something new.  But, the talk was a good one and in the spirit of SOCIAL MEDIA I’m sharing it with you here.  The talk is about something very important for startups:

Playing It Safe While Job Hunting

People often take for granted how interconnected people are these days.  We share our daily routines with each other on Twitter, Facebook and through a myriad of other social media outlets.  We also pick up the phone now and then too. 

I’m constantly amazed at how many people bad mouth the people they work with, for and service as clients.  Let’s face it, we’ve all done this and probably will again.  Human nature being what it is we need to conciously think about how to keep our thoughts in check.

When looking for a job this is even more true.  This week I spoke with someone who interviewed with an employer that competes with their existing employer and got the boot when the current employer found out.  Perhaps this happened because the employers knew each other or becasue the employee told someone they confided in or someone overhead it or said something that ultimately resulted in their getting the boot.  I’ll never know, but one thing is certain: they will not be the last person that gets fired for something that potentially could have been avoided.

In the past I’ve written about how smart employers will take the time to cultivate people who they like.  In one example I pointed out who the employees of two companies collaborated on a side project that helped them to get to know each other.  The employee of one company helped their employer to recruit the other guy to join the other team full time about six months later.  This is different.  It isn’t just different, it is a recipe for success in job passive job hunting.  If you work in a tight market where people know each other well you should be creative in getting to know people.  Turn that up a knotch and get them to like you and then when they, or you, have a career option or opportunity to be resolved the short list will include you or them or both.  Don’t do this and you may find that people are suspicious of your motives to change employers.  You know the drill, more money, passed over for a promotion, bad interpersonals, etc.  If someone likes you then you are more likely to be their first choice and potentially their only choice. 

The bottom line is that if you want your career to take off in a direction then take the time to get to know the people who you want to work for, with, etc.  Be the best option in their mind and you’re as good as golden.

Reasonable Disclosure on Resumes

Is this you or someone you know?

The number of resumes finding their way into my inbox has been climbing over the last few weeks.  I haven’t decided whether this is a result of new found hope on the part of job seekers, the long tail of discussions about networking as part of the job search, or confidence in people who have been holding off on looking for a new job becasue they weren’t sure they wanted to be stuck without an option if an offer fell through and the boss said see ya!  As a greater percentage of my time each is spent reviewing and making suggestions related to resumes an old issue rears its ugly head: the partial or fuzzy disclosure on a resume.

What usually happens is someone will include the name of the college they attended, minus dates.  Somtimes they will include the name of the college, minus the campus.  With the number of online schools increasing and the number of people not quite finishing their programs this is becoming more and more common.  Take for example, President Obama’s recent Federal CIO appointment who states in his official bio that he attended the “University of Maryland” as opposed to the University of Maryland University College.  The difference being that he attended the online program for his masters degree, not the highly ranked on campus program at the University of Maryland College Park.  To someone not familiar with the distinction this probably isn’t going to raise an eyebrow unless they call to verify that he completed his program, but for someone who knows the difference it can be a very big deal.  In this case, the on campus Masters in Information Systems program at the University of Maryland College Park is ranked #6 in the nation according to US News & World Reports while the online program is not ranked at all.

The argument for dropping the education dates may seem like worthwhile one for a candidate who has been in the workforce for many years if they feel they need to compete with people who are earlier in their careers with respect to landing the interview.  But if you drop the dates you have to drop the experience too.  At some point grey becomes black and white and a line is crossed.  I’ve seen candidates who make five years of job hopping into five years of “consulting” or ”freelance” expeience under their “consulting company” that consists of themsleves and no ohter person.  I guess they assume that nobody keeps track of old resumes or that employers won’t take the time to search the web for their work history.  If you think about this from the hiring team’s perspective, there is no way this ins’t shady.  DON’T BE SHADY. 

If your experience or education isn’t amazing then you need to work on making up for it in ways that are not shady.  In the case of a web designer or developer this might mean that you take the time to put together a really impressive portfolio.  Maybe it means that you spend some time volunteering on people’s web projects so that you can have some extra portfolio material.  For a developer the same is essentially true.  I’ve seen many developer blogs and websites that add major value to their overall candidate profile.  The ones that don’t are almost always the same - they show off how big someone’s ego is or they fail to demonstrate why someone is worth the time of a hiring team.  For someone who is not a designer or a developer, a blog or website or online profile is a great place to stitch together details that round out who you are.  For example, discussing key elements of books or blogs that relate to your experience in a constructive. 

Not everyone does this stuff intentionally.  Some people just get in the habit of doing things a certain way because that is how they learned to do it.  For example, listing dates of employment as 2006-2007.  They might have even worked from Jaunary 2006-December 2007.  Unfortunately, this is usually not the case.  What is more likely is that they worked from December 2006-February 2007.  Common sense would seem to dictate that by hiding key details you make people trust you less.  In the case of recruiters this is especially true.  When a recruiter sees ambigous dates like this they are twice as likely to apply stricter scrutiny to every detail on your resume.  In fairness, there recruiters out there who might recommend or event change your resume to read 2006-2007 because they want to make a placement and collect their placement fee.  Hiring teams aren’t dummies either and they’ll apply additional scrutiny to resumes submitted by those recruiters, including the one with ambiguous dates.

Something else that seems to be fairly common is the use of ambiguous employer names.  One thing that I see frequently on consulting resumes is the use of the staffing agency’s name instead of the employer’s name.  I’m not always sure if this is to hide the fact that they didn’t last on a job or what, but in any case it is a bad idea.  If you worked for a genuine consulting firm that did work for a client or various clients then put that, but in the case of straight up staffing companies you don’t need to include them in the mix at all.  If you do you’re just advertising for them.

One thing that you can definitely do to improve the perception of you as a candidate, even if you have some less than ideal patches on your resume, is to get people to write you recommendations.  LinkedIn has a pretty good system for this and people tend to trust recommendations that are well written as evidence that you were a good contributor.  At the end of the day this is the goal.  People understand that you might not have had solid chemistry with a team or two or with a boss or two – that’s life.  Just don’t be shady and have people who can’t really speak to your qualities when it comes to getting the core part of your job done.  In other words, the people from the water cooler should remain by the water cooler and not enter your LinkedIn mix.

Is News Corp The Anti-Social Media Company?

Check out this story from BBC:

‘Murdoch may block Google searches‘

“Mr Murdoch’s News Corp had previously said it would start charging online customers across all its websites.

He believes that search engines cannot legally use headlines and paragraphs of news stories as search results.”

This sounds remniscint to when Craigslist went out of their way to stop job aggregator services like Indeed and SimplyHired who were aggregating their listings.  I wonder what this would mean for the Way Back Machine website.  This seems to be counter to the major aspect of the web these days: sharing.  If Murdoch has his way then this could theoretically make News Corp the Anti-Social Media Company by preventing people from sharing news headlines freely.  But maybe that is the point, maybe they want people to use MySpace for sharing and discussing what happens on Fox and in the Wall Street Journal.  Get enough news sources under one roof and you’ve got a really compelling reason for people to sign up for MySpace.  Is it just me or does this feel like the good old days of dialing into services like Prodigy and Compuserve all over again.  You get your online news through a proprietary, members only, service.  Have a friend who isn’t on MySpace, too bad…they should be.  This could be an interesting play for News Corp.

Now that I think about it, back when I was using one of those dial-up services and their early BBS predecessors people seemed to have more focused conversations than happens today.  Today things seem to be more self-promotional and prolific vs. ask a question and get an answer.  This is very evident on LinkedIn when I ask a question and half of the answers are promoting a website or company’s products and services.  During the early days this thing just did not happen in my neck of the woods.

Update 11/17/09:
Tim O’Reilly concurs in his article today on Information Week.

Featured DC Area Web Developer & Web Designer Jobs

[If your team is hiring or you know one who is please make sure they share their jobs on Jobmatchbox.com too and I'll re-post them here too.]

Astrum Solar, Columbia, MD, Lead Developer / Senior LAMP Engineer
http://digg.com/u1FiWV

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, PHP Web Developer, Washington, DC. 
http://digg.com/u1FeIZ

staffmagnet, Lead Web Developer (platform agnostic), Montgomery County, MD.
http://digg.com/u1Fm5K

Stealth Mode Startup, Sr. Web Developer – Ruby on Rails (other experience welcome as long as it includes MVC/OOP), Washington, DC. 
http://digg.com/u1FeKP

Alliance for Climate Protection, Web Developer, Washington, DC.
http://digg.com/u1Fm4o

RollStream, Sr. Web Developer – Ruby on Rails (other experience welcome), DC Metro. 
http://digg.com/u1FiWL

Related Jobs:
Corporate Executive Board, Sr. Visual Designer, Arlington, VA
http://digg.com/u1Fm5r

staffmagnet, Sr. Linux Administrator, Washington, DC
http://digg.com/u1Fm5e

The Functional Startup Founder’s Dilemma

If you have ever attended one of our Social Matchbox events you know that the playing field in the DC Startup Commmunity is anything but equal.  You’ve got people who are riding on seed and angel investments courtesy of friends and family who contributed during the FFF (the “Friends, Family and Fools” stage of fundraising).  At this stage a lot of people fund themselves too.  Some people are better prepared than others.  A couple of days ago I heard from someone who is helping an early stage startup that is in the same exact space as antoher DC Startup Company.  The story was sad to hear.  The founder outsourced software development for the early stage company’s prototype to a third party develolpment shop or interactive agency based in the DC area.  If the story that I heard is true, the third party development shop was asked not to “offshore” development.  As the story goes, development was offshored anyway.  In reality, it doesn’t matter whether the work was done onshore or offshore becasue  the founder was not happy and the product prototype was in bad shape.  Local developers were recruited to help.  A call for help was issued, more sharks circled, and help was offered.  You have really got to appreaciate what I mean by shark tank.  To begin with, this includes people who are both engineers and technologists, and in addition to that it means people who are social media strategists who offer both engineering and technologist expertise.  Based on my interactions with founders, who are by the way ALL OVER THE MAP in terms of inights, many of them get the distinction but many others do not.  For the people who do not get the distinction then they should talk to experts in the subject of evaluating all three for startups, or make sure they’ve got sufficent expertise on their board of advisors to shore up their lack of it.  Both options are worth it.  At the very least, the founder of an early stage startup company should apply the same exact level of due dilligence to an outsourced development team they are about to outsource their project to that they would apply to a person they were interviewing for a job.  Again, if the founder doesn’t have experience hiring (I see this a lot) then they should talk to and/or hire experts in hiring people for startups.  Some of the basic elements of due dilligence should include checking references on the team and getting a written confirmation of who is going to be doing the work.  The written confirmation of who should be doing the work should be written into the contract.  If you or they have a boilerplate legal contract and you don’t have the budget or network to get an attorney to make this happen or the experience with contracts needed to make this happen then you should not be outsourcing your work without adult supervision.  This goes back to get a board with people who shore up your individual weaknesses.  I would recommend reading what others have written on the subject of lawyers on boards.  In many cases, if you can find something that you can do to help people out with their business they are very likely to help you out in your business.  As an early stage company your first mission in life is to get product to market without any major screwups.  Don’t make life harder on yourself than it needs to be because you are in a hurry, doing it because you lost your job and just happen to have a lot of time on your hands, because a friend told you that an outsourcing shop was good.  Do your homework. 

So far this post has mostly concerned outsourcing of work.  In house development is another animal.  A few sleepless nights ago I re-read Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of The Start (it is like reading the MLA guide because he has a lot of things in it like what size your pitch deck font should be, etc.) and happen to agree with what he says for the most part.  He talks about how you should not outsource mission critical tasks to others.  He talks about this in terms of PR, development, and so on.  Now he isn’t suggesting that you shouldn’t outsource PR ever, just that you should not outsource critical elements of PR.  I get the impression that he would not advise you to hire  PR coach.  The solution to this dilemma is to get someone on your advisory board who knows PR and marketing way better than you do.  For example, the head of marketing from a successful startup company.  If you can’t convince the one you know then you may want to consider spending some time neworking.  Check out DCTECHEVENTS.com for local events.  The same goes for developing your product.  Ok, if you just have tons of money to throw around because you’ve got a trust fund or a rich uncle then you may have money to burn, but most founders that I have met don’t.  That margin that is going to the outsourced team could be the difference between sink and swim a few months down the road.  And, if you are anything like me you don’t like having to go back and ask for more of something because it wasn’t enough to get the job done.  Take the time to find someone who can help you – network, ask your FFF people, attend a Social Matchbox, etc.  At the very least you should be able to find an advisor who is a Sr. to Management to officer level software engineer who can help you evaluate the shop you are about to start wrting checks to.  Don’t wait until you’ve blown $50-100k to do this.  Trust me, you WILL regret it and so will whoever you hire to pick up where they left off.

The bottom line here is that there are a lot of good people who you can trust to get the job done who will not be your direct employee, some of them will get it done way better than your employees, but you need to make sure you have the ability to perform sufficient due dilligence on them just like you would an employee.  If utilized optimally, they may even save you a lot of money and get your product to market faster.

Business Relationships That Matter

Earlier today I called up my personal insurance provider and the person who initially took my call thanked me for being a customer for 15 years.  This phrase stuck with me after the call.  I’ve been doing business with them for 15 years in that time I’ve never had to change insurance providers.  Sure, they’ve been doing something right for a tough customer like me to choose to stick around for so long.  They don’t do everything right – for example, the insurance company also offers banking services and their loan rate is consistently 1-1.5% higher than my preferred banker’s rate on the two occasions when I’ve bought a car that required financing.  By contrast, I can’t imagine my company being stuck with the same health insurance provider for more than 1-2 years.  Health insurance is a hot button issue right now, but the way that my business health insurance provider operates leaves much to be desired.  To start off with, the employee benefits experience is cumbersome and the customer service and paperwork that they interact with my benefits team through is horribly unpleasant.  User experience aside, they tried to double my health insurance premium as soon as year two rolled around.  As a startup company owner and executive this is incredibly frustrating.  I can just see some fat cat party in a conference room with piles of money being counted when I think about this.  To get a rate that isn’t double the first year a switch to a new provider was required.  The disturbing irony is that the switch was to a different, virtually identical, plan from a different division of the same provider.  Disgusting!  As I watch the months on the calendar and start preparing for my end of year accounting work I can’t help but think about how much I can’t stand my business health insurance provider.  It feels a little like being on a blind date except I’m stuck with them for a year.  Even more disgusting.  Somehow I doubt that I would have a different experience if I switched providers.  I guess this is part of being your own boss, you trade that guy from Office Space (I had that guy as a boss and I actually did TPS reports, seriously…) for a series of extremely ambiguous and unpleasant hydra like organizations that are required parts of doing business.  There has got to be a better way.  And insurance is just the tip of the iceberg.

Business to Business and Business to Government interactions are not the only ones that leave room for desire in my book.  How companies recruit and how recruiters recruit is another such subject.  A very good friend of mine recently spent two days in a row telling me how much he hates how he was treated by a recruiter in a salary negotiation.  While this is refreshing in the sense that the most common vent from job seekers I hear is that they don’t hear back from the employer, i.e. you suck we’re not hiring you  so go crawl into a hole someplace out anywhere but here, would be a step up from a one way ticket for the resume black hole express.  My own personal favorite was the recruiter who called me 5 times in two weeks about a sharepoint developer job.  I’ve never developed in sharepoint and I explained this the first four times that the recruiter called.  The fifth time I simply told him to never call me again.  Uh, that was when I was a recruiter and my resume wasn’t even technical.  Ok, I’m a recruiter on some days and a CEO on other days now so I can see both sides, but this guy should have been given a literacy test before he was hired.  There is no excuse for that and I fault the big huge company that also somehow missed the fact that the guy was totally out to lunch in general. 

So back to the point: “Dating vs. Doing Business”.  Why is it that people don’t seem to get the importance of business relationships these days?  You go to a restaurant or store and the people working there are of the most temporary quality.  Fast food is even worse.  When I was in high school I had friends who worked in the local fast food places.  I remember being rejected for a job at Burger King and thinking that I was never going to get over it until I found another part time job.  These days, especially in the big cities, local kids wouldn’t be caught dead working at a fast food place.  I remember being shocked when I went to a diner in Bethesda and a student home from the summer from Duke was working there.  I guess today’s kids, at least here, are obsessed with nailing the SAT or running charities they founded out of their parent’s basements or trying out for the Olympic Speed Walking team so that they can get into their favorite school Ivy League School. Why bother working your way up the food chain when you can skip to the top, right? 

This all has the feeling of a house of cards.  If we keep stacking the deck with people who don’t care about their jobs, about the business’s relationships with people and vendors, sooner or later the whole house of cards is going to come tumbling down.  Or is that not important for wealthy business owners who have diversified portfolios?

In writing this I hope that it will inspire a few people to think about the importance of being a part of a good healthy business relationship.  Let’s be the change that we wish to see in the world.

WSJ Calls DC Top Youth-Magnet City

While I can’t quite grasp why the Wall Street Journal consulted demographers, economists, geographers and authors on urban issues about where the hip young crowd wants to be these days, I’m still happy that DC bested Austin, Boston, New York and wait for it: San Francisco according to Sue Shellenbarger in her Work & Family article titled ‘The Next Youth-Magnet Cities’.  Their (hopefully) well founded research seemed to miss some of the key draws for hip young people: DC’s startup and creative communities.  Let’s face it, we’re not the the place that people think of when people think of creative culture.  Instead, peole tend to think of DC as the town of the Beltway bandits and government contractors.  In a recent conversation with a dean at a top 5 Computer Science program a member of our team listened to a community outsider describe Baltimore as more of a startup friendly town than DC.  So maybe we’ve got an image problem and should look to our pals in “Charm City” for some guidance.  Perhaps the problem is that we are spending far too much time networking and Tweeting up and not enough time enriching our minds with art, culture and having fun.  On that level we could and probably should follow in the footsteps of Austin, Portland and B’More. 

Event of Interest to Small Businesses Around DC

Much of what we talk about here  concerns high tech startups and not small business in general.  The difference is almost always the percentage off the business that involves web development, software development.  Fortunately, our friends at Network Solutions are out there blogging and organizing events for small business owners.  If you are in town next week, or need a reason to come to Washington, DC, then their day long conference GROWsmartBiz is happening Tuesday, September 29th at the Renaissance Hotel here in Washington, DC.  We will be there and are looking forward to hearing Wired’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, and Senator Mark Warner  speak.  Others including local marketing strategy guru, Bob London, will be speaking about small business strategy.  For more information visit the official registration website.  If you use the code MATCHBOX they’ll take half of your registration.

How One Googler Recruits

When you read this Googler’s post titled ‘Looking for good Yahoo search engineers’ you might ask yourself, can’t Google afford recruiters?  To that I want to point out that some of the best recruiting programs don’t involve traditional recruiting or recruiters.  In this case there are a ton of people courting Yahoo Search Engineers right now, including DC area companies who are looking to hire a few for themselves.  Note: If you happen to be a Yahoo Search Engineer and want to get hired – local or virtual – by a DC Startup then drop me a note and I’ll connect you with several (email@jobmatchbox.com).  The point here is that employees should be doing more of this for their employers and employers should be thinking about how to get their employees to be spreading the word about their openings.  I’m not sure that being so specific is a good idea, but hey it worked and it got coverage on one well read blog or two.