The post I wrote last week about hot chocolate was one of the most commented ever.  Comments on the blog, messages and comments on Facebook, and even some direct e-mail.  Here’s one of those e-mails that was sent to me by a friend who is a physician in Seattle:

Scott,

Your post about your deliberations with your hot chocolate reminded me of conversations that I have with my patients daily. I struggle with what is the most effective method to convey that the answer to the problem(s) is that he/she needs to change his/her behavior. Typically, one of three basics needs adjustment: nutrition, physical activity, and/or sleep. Unfortunately, after patients have paid their co-pay, many are disappointed to hear that I do not have or recommend a pill or procedure to fix “it.” Some even accuse me of being a “bad” doctor because I think that a pill is not the best medicine. This sets up an uncomfortable adversarial conversation.

My question to my husband last week was: “How do you tell your morbidly obese patients that the reason that they have knee pain is because they are fat?”

Behavior change – the simple, yet personally challenging answer.

I suppose that the answer to is that you have to just tell them. That’s the job. It must be horribly uncomfortable, but that’s the answer they need to hear.

For me, it was the answer I needed to hear.

After years of trying every medicine under the sun, my doctor finally just told me to change my diet.  When he did, I sat quietly for about 30 seconds, my mind racing to see if there was some way I could get around it.

Finally, I realized that there was no escaping—if I wanted to be healthy, I needed to change.  I looked up and asked, “So, about what percentage of your patients is the only solution to their problem changing their lifestyle and habits?”

His answer? 85%.

After my deification of Microsoft Excel, I was thinking that there is one feature I wish Excel had that it doesn’t.  Note: this is a serious power user feature.

Why can’t an Excel Workbook be queried with a SQL Query Tool?  A workbook is a database, each worksheet is a table, and each row is a record.  Isn’t this obvious?

I often find myself importing an Excel Worksheet into Microsoft Access, so that I can then run queries against the data.  In fact, I do this regularly.

Does this tool already exist?

It doesn’t seem like this should be very hard to build, and I’m certain there are all sorts of people out there in the business and academic worlds that benefit from it.

An informal survey of marketing and PR professionals who work with social media asked the following question:

What is the one tool you can’t live without?

Do you think the answer was TweetDeck or an iPhone or the latest and greatest sentiment-reputation analytics package?

Think again. The answer: Microsoft Excel.

If you think about it, that makes perfect sense.   Excel is like Playdoh—it can be used for anything.  It’s powerful and malleable at same time.

It’s the perfect tool for the long tail…for all the little niche parts of business that aren’t big enough to have their own specialized tool.  Likewise, it’s the perfect tool for emerging industries that have not stabilized to the point where suitable tools can be built.

Excel is the MacGuyver of software.

My view is that Excel is the single most valuable software application in the history of software.

Is it more valuable than e-mail?  Well, before e-mail we still had means of written communication.  Email simply made it faster.

Is it more valuable than a word processor?  Well, before word processors we still had typewriters.  Word processors simply made drafting documents easier.

On the other hand, Excel gives us the power to do things we couldn’t do before.  In an instant, Excel can do calculations that would have taken a team of mathematicians to do in the past.  In an instant, it can do calculations that would have been prohibitively expensive for even a team of math whizzes to do…calculations that would have taken them years.  And, in an instant, you can tweak one number and it will do all of them again.

Just think about that power!!

But, aren’t there other software applications that have empowered people to do things that couldn’t be done before?  Yes, I’m sure there are, but here’s what pushes Excel over the top: this power is given to the masses.  For a few hundred bucks, you can have this power and it takes barely any specialized skill to perform these calculations.

My goodness, Excel is a marvel!!

When a good portion of your revenue is running on Wordpress.com servers, this is not a tweet that causes my heart to go pitter-patter:

It’s more of a sinking feeling, to be perfectly honest.

Recently, Wordpress.com was down for almost two hours.  Dave Moyer, the host of WordCast, interviewed me about the outage, how it affected our business and my thoughts about Wordpress.com going forward.  You can listen to the interview, and I’ll outline my thoughts here:

• We continue to be very supportive of Wordpress.com and view them as an excellent partner.  I recommend Wordpress all the time without hesitation.
• I did not view this as a serious issue because Wordpress has a history of outstanding reliability.  (OMG!  Did I just jinx them?)  The last outage of this magnitude was 4 years ago.  In addition to Wordpress, we run our own infrastructure and we’ve had at least one outage in the last 2 years, so they’re doing better than us in that regard.  Obviously, if a pattern develops, we would have to review our point of view.
• Yes, we lost revenue that day.  But, if you think about it, that lost revenue is simply part of the cost of the service.  If we wanted an even more reliable service (and by no means is Wordpress.com unreliable), then it would cost us significantly more than the amount of revenue we lost that day.
• Why do we use Wordpress.com?  Simply put, it’s cheaper.  It might not be cheaper cash-wise, but when you look at the total cost of ownerhship it’s way cheaper.
  • First, we’d have to own and manage all that infrastructure which costs money and management overhead.
  • In addition, we’d have to develop the expertise required to host an extremely large Wordpress installation.  Wordpress.com already has this expertise.
  • And, there’s the stress of operating a 24/7/365 operation.
  • Most importantly, the opportunity cost of focus and cost distraction.  At the end of the day, Cheezburger benefits from having our full attention focused on building great sites and creating a great community.

For those of you reading this who might not give a hoot about technology or Wordpress.com, that final point really is relevant to so much of life.  The opportunity cost of focus and the cost distraction are such critical elements to success.  I wish I had words to express that concept more eloquently; somehow I just feel in my gut that it’s true.

Contrary to popular belief, I’m a nervous fellow. I like to be on time, I like to get there early, and when I make up my mind to do something, I definitely like to focus on getting it done now.

I’m sure this annoys my team at Cheezburger for a number of reasons which I shall enumerate via metaphor.

One must walk before they run. And, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

It goes without saying that I agree with these sentiments. As I said, I get nervous; time allows opportunity for something to come along and derail the project. A derailed project is wasreful, and if there is anything I dislike more than yellow mustard, it is waste.

There’s an approach to web and software development intended to act as a salve against my worries. I think it could applied to most types of projects, though.

First, just make it work. Even if it’s ugly or klunky or kludgey. I often refer to this as “The Happy Path”; get the basic use cases that satisfy 80% of the users working.

At this point, there will still be a lot of rough edges, but at least you’ll have something functional to show off. Going forward, work on smoothing out the edges.

Next, make it fast. In other words, take out all those rough edges that cause your product to be slow and perform poorly.

Finally, make it pretty. This is the phase where you smooth out all of the user interface and experience issues. This includes the rough edges related to edge cases and look and feel. (One reason to consider why this step is last: what’s the point in smoothing out the UI if the product doesn’t function?)

Often, we follow this process at Cheezburger, and it tends to work in terms of productivity.

And, I worry less, too.

I live in Seattle about 40 minutes from the ski slopes. Every week in the winter I take my boys up for ski school, and many weeks I ski while they’re in class. I am extremely fortunate in this regard.

This week I’m not skiing; I am sitting in the chalet staring down my arch rival and nemesis, the Newman to my Jerry, Joker to my Batman, Evil Emperor Zurg to my Buzz Lightyear.

I am being taunted by a cup of hot cocoa.

But I haven’t caved yet.

For about a month, I’ve been ill. Not seriously ill in any sort of life threatening way. Please, do not worry about me one iota.

But, my doctor says that I really need to lay off a few foods that don’t agree with me, including sugar, milk and chocolate for a few months. I’m having a hard time with it.

Most of the time I can stay strong and avoid it, but inevitably one or twice a day I’m tempted by, say, my regular weekly ski chalet mug of hot chocolate. All to often, I cave in. For example, Kiki brought in cupcakes into Cheezburger on Friday, and they looked sooooo good, just one little cupcake won’t hurt will it?

But the thing is, it does hurt. Not a lot, but enough that my recovery is stunted…it’s taking me a lot longer than it should.

This whole thing has me thinking a lot lately about the fact that if you’re gonna do something, you gotta go all the way. I say “you”, but I really mean “me”.

In many cases, 90% is the same as 0%, so what’s the point in putting forth so much effort for no result? Of course, the last 10% is often the hardest.

My friend Mike Concannon often says, “a job worth doing is worth doing well”…a saying I never really internalized until now.

And, of course, Yoda says there is “no try, only do or do not do”. Same thing, I suppose.

And the Taoists say, “do without doing”.

That’s a mind bender.  I think what that means is best explained by my friend Ron who would say, paraphrasing, that you will never stop wanting hot chocolate (no duh!), so the only way to not have it is to want your health more.

Anyhow, the mug is still there, I haven’t has even a sip yet. I’ll keep you posted.

This tweet caught my eye last night:

which led to a post by Antonio Rodriguez summarizing a keynote he gave at PyCon (i.e. a conference about the programming language called “Python”).

Rodriguez made three key points in his presentation, only one of which I’ll address here…he said:

I think every employee in a web startup— or in fact any company which depends on software in any meaningful way— should learn how to code. From the slickest sales guy to the most obstinate operations guy, from the laziest intern to the most professorial manager, if they don’t have their hands in the code, your startup is much more likely to fail.

I don’t disagree with this idea, although I terrifies me a bit. Rodriguez’ arguments for this are two fold.

First, it breaks down the false dichotomy between “business” and “technology”. I agree, in a web startup—the only type of place I’ve ever worked—the technology is the business.

Second, he argues that if everyone were able write code—even if it is just a marketing person updating the UI of an analytics report—”will tighten the loop and give you massive competitive advantage”.

I would add a third point, based an idea Joe Heitzberg mentioned to me the other day: in a web-based company, there are two types of workers: “work creators” and “work doers”.

A person who writes code is a “work doer”. A person who writes a spec is a “work creator”. (A person who designs web pages is a little bit of both.)

That’s not to say a person who writes a spec isn’t important…they play a crucial role in making the person who writes code efficient and effective. However, it takes another person (a work doer) for the value created by the spec writer to be fully realized.

The point isn’t that your company should be all “work doers” and no “work creators”. The point is balance…having an appropriate number of work doers versus work creators.

At a previous place I worked, I’d estimate we had 4 work creators for every 1 work doer. That was not the right balance.

On the other hand, toward the end of last year at Cheezburger we had the opposite problem; we had too many work doers and our ability to write code outpaced our ability to figure out what exactly to write.

Effectively, Rodriguez’ point is that everyone should have some work doing capability, even if it isn’t their primary job role. As a result, startups will have greater flexibility because they will be able to more fluidly maintain the proper work doer-work creator balance that is essential for success.

• My four steps to the epiphany: Lessons learned from creating a minimally viable research product
  Some excellent examples about how to incrementally work into a solution that actually solve customer problems, as opposed to designing a solution that nobody actually wants.
• Building a Lean Startup
  What I like about this presentation is how it illustrates the different aspects of startups that four key voices in the startup community–Blank, Ries, McClure and Ells–speak about. You will still need to learn about their arguments, but it places them each in a broader framerwork.
  (tags: Startup)

Pretty regularly, I have lunch/coffee/drinks with someone who is trying to find their way in the Seattle Tech Community.  Typically, it’s someone with an idea for a startup.  Although, these days, with the economy the way it is, often they’re looking for work at a tech company.

Here’s the thing: it’s easy to target companies like Microsoft and Amazon because everybody has heard of them.  But, these companies have two big problems:

• Since everybody has heard of them, a gajillion people are applying for jobs there, and
• They’re big, giant corporations and that’s not a good fit for many people.

The problem that these people are presented with is how to find the startups, and small to medium sized companies in the technology community.  That is, companies that are excellent places to work, that have great prospects, but who aren’t on the front page of the Wall Street Journal when they release their earnings.

I tend to direct people toward these resources…all of which are amazing gems.  I’m always surprised that so many people in the tech community are unfamiliar with them.

• TechFlash (http://techflash.com) — the most formally newspaper-ish of the group, TechFlash is led by John Cook, formerly a technology reporter at the Seattle-PI.  TechFlash primarily provides original reporting on technology companies of all sizes in the Seatlle area.
• Seattle 2.0 (http://seattle20.com) — focuses more on entrepreneurship and the startup community.  Seattle 2.0 has a small staff of writers, and often relies on members of the community for articles.
• Seattle Tech Calendar (http://seattletechcalendar.com) — a community calendar of technology oriented events happening in the Seattle area.  Includes all types of events, including, but not limited to, social, networking, organizational and educational. (If you read yesterday’s post about personal connections, Seattle Tech Calendar is a great resource for getting out into the community to meet other people.)  Seattle Tech Calendar also has a companion site, SeattleTechWiki (http://www.seattletechwiki.com).

I had coffee this morning with a friend who is looking for work.  (He’s a great guy…10 years at Amazon.com…if you’re looking for someone, let me know!)

As we talked, we came to the subject of “job listings” which are so impersonal.  For a professional, they feel like a pretty bogus way of getting a job.  Or, at least, uncertain and unreliable.

Of course, my thought was that it’s all about who you know…networking.  Essentially, my view is that personal relationships are what will lead to the next opportunity.

After coffee, I came into the office, was reading the paper, and came across David Brooks’ most recent column that addresses the impacts of the recession on people:

Recessions test social capital. If social bonds are strong, nations can be surprisingly resilient. If they are weak, things are terrible. The U.S. endured the Great Depression reasonably well because family bonds and social trust were high. Russia, on the other hand, was decimated by the post-Soviet economic turmoil because social trust was nonexistent.

Brooks illustrates my point in a macro-way, and both of us are simply expressing the point Lisa made when she said people and relationships keep you safe.

Finally, Brooks writes about the impact that social media has on the situation:

Facebook is great, but social networking sites do not by themselves create support networks when jobs disappear and poverty looms.

and notice the exact words he uses: “support networks”.  A “support network” is something different than a “social network”.  The support network is what we’re really talking about here.