Open Mind, Insert Thought

Let’s see – June seems like a pretty quiet month for me.  Selling my house, renting a place up in the city, moving up to the city, quitting Yahoo!, securing life insurance (apparently Yahoo! cuts you off the day you leave – heads up woulda been great) – oh yeah, and starting a new job as VP of Product Management at Zynga.  Yeah, I can definitely squeeze in an album release party.  So I will!!

I play bass and sing in an insanely tight band known as Soul Patch.  Seriously, we’re good.  Following a brief hiatus after our first album (what’s seven years among friends?), we finally released our sophomore effort at the beginning of 2008.  Feels like a great reason to party, so we’re going to put in a rare live appearance.  Here are the details in case you happen to be in Colorado (or are such a devoted fan that you’d make the trip):

Soul Patch Summer Soulstice Concert
June 21 at 9:30
Redfish Brewhouse
2027 13th Street
Boulder, CO 80302

I’ve been practicing playing and singing at the same time (two things that I was thankfully able to do separately in the studio), and now I’m remembering just exactly how hard some of our music is to play.  That’s also probably why we’re so damned funky and fun.  In my (clearly) humble opinion, it’s absolutely worth checking us out.

And, if you simply can’t make the trip out to Colorado, we’ll forgive you if you buy our stuff on iTunes or Amazon.   Go ahead, give us a listen.

Just a few weeks shy of my five-year anniversary, I did it.  I left Yahoo!  And it wasn’t with an entirely happy heart that I did so.  A bit of background:

For the past five years, I led product teams at Yahoo!  In my time there, I enjoyed an amazing job and worked with some of the most dedicated and talented people I have ever met.  I was given opportunities to make tremendous changes that impacted the lives of millions on a daily basis.  Some of those changes were homeruns, some of them were massive failures.  But the changes of which I was most proud were the ones almost no one noticed — policing and cleaning up one of the largest online communities in the world, putting pedophiles and other seriously bad people in jail when they abused our service, and protecting kids while keeping Yahoo! out of court and out of the press.  And, of course, I’m happy that I helped some righteously outspoken people be heard, worked on products so advanced they won’t be available to the public for a couple years, and just generally made the Internet a more interesting, safe and fun place.  I worked on small teams and I also cultivated a team that topped out at more than 100 people worldwide, and together we built some great products.

And, then, I left.  It was clearly time to go.  I leave incredibly disappointed in both the corporate management and the board of directors, who let the opportunity with Microsoft slip away.  A deal like the one Microsoft proposed was a necessary step for Yahoo!, and its loss was the result of sheer hubris.  The arrogance I witnessed at Yahoo!, which is present in all big companies, reached a peak a couple of years ago – ironically just about the time our loss to Google was beyond question.  That fall from power as the #1 online service resulted in cross-company retrenchment as execs thought more about securing silos of power than about the good of Yahoo!.  That play-it-safe attitude led to Yahoo!’s current state, revealing what the entire investment community has now come to see — that Yahoo!’s uppermost leadership needs a swift kick in the ass and the company needs to be bought.  With the exception of Connected Life (the last BU for which I worked), I believe that Yahoo! corporate has lost anything resembing a competitive edge.  To be fair, I applaud the work being done by several individuals across the organization, including those on the Y!OS team; however, I fear that it’s too little too late.  Stepping back from the tactical, one can see that, when an upstart company like Facebook can rise up to be a worthy competitor for a storied giant like Yahoo!, it’s time to start thinking about plan B.

So, I was (to my surprise) open to being poached.  And poached I was, by a tremendous opportunity.  I leave Yahoo! to head up product for a well-funded social gaming company.  As I watched the online community sector develop over the past 11 years, I came to believe that the traditionally difficult-to-monetize world of user interaction would ultimately be won in social gaming.  And Zynga is the right company at the right time to capitalize on that promise.  I’m pleased to join them as VP of Product Management, and I know that our products will evolve dramatically over the next year.

So, after five years of fighting every day to save the world (and one of the biggest global Internet brands) from itself, I ride off into the sunset.  Beyond the horizon, there are interactions and experiences that promise to be fun for everyone – just wait and see.

…and, even though I missed it by a few weeks, I was still given my five-year gumball machine.  Thanks and peace to all of the hard-working people I stood beside in those purple trenches.  It was a great experience every single day.

As a musician with a pretty good set of ears (I’ve been recording and mastering music for about 20 years), it was with a heavy heart that I packed up my prized Martin Logan electrostatic speakers for a few months (years?).  You see, these free-standing speakers are tall enough to come up to my chest and have a magnificent sound.  They also have a bunch of cords at ground level, and those are simply too enticing for our little crawler.  Dani is incredibly mobile now, and she loves to grab and pull cords.  So, they had to go.

In their place, I mounted my Linn Tukans.  These are "bookshelf" speakers, only 12" tall.  I bought them the first time we lived out here in the Bay Area, and I have been carting them around ever since.  I’m pleased to say that I forgot how good these sound.  Even without a subwoofer (also out of the question given our little crawling cord-puller), they sound deep and rich.  They are mounted on either side of the new 52" Sharp LCD, and aside from the fact that they represent the only visible cables in the entire setup (a small bit of wire between the TV and each speaker), I’m pretty happy.

I’ll miss my Martin Logans, but am having fun rediscovering these speakers that I bought almost a decade ago.

There, that’s your audio geekiness for the weekend. 

I think that 149 New Montgomery St. in San Francisco must be a cursed address.  I worked there for a period of time, preparing for the IPO that was going to be the big blow-out at the end of 1999.  eGreetings had become a greetings and gifting site (thanks to a lot of torturous work from my team), and on the strength of a promising monetization story, we did the roadshow and filed to go public.

If you remember your bubble history, December of 1999 was not really a great time for an IPO.  We went out, rolled over, and died, and the rest of the industry followed.

One of our gifting partners at the time survived, however – they were Red Envelope.  I had a friendly relationship with the company going all the way back to my days at Excite.  I remember when Pete Baltaxe came in to the Excite offices to discuss his new venture, which was to become 911Gifts.  We had just launched the Excite Shopping channel, and Pete was looking for distribution.  It was during my tenure at eGreetings that his company’s name changed to Red Envelope.  They wanted to continue to deliver on the last-minute gift promise, but didn’t want the recipient to KNOW that the sender was sending something last minute.

Now I hear that Red Envelope has laid off most of its workforce and will likely shut down soon.  Oddly, they seem to have failed to embrace the lessons that the bubble taught us about growing a customer base inexpensively.  They moved into expensive but unproductive catalogs (which I remember receiving) and failed to aggressively acquire search-engine traffic to sustain flow to the site.

Looking at the stories of their failure, I was surprised to see that they’d moved into the old eGreetings offices on New Montgomery.  Word to the wise – it’s a lovely location, but just don’t move in there.  When times get tough, as they inevitably will, your designers will spend too much time envying the cool kids across the street at Academy of Art College and your business folks will skip out of work early for drinks at the Thirsty Bear.

This is an actual ad for Aston Martin. ‘Nuff said.

I’m realizing that I’ve fallen down on the job when it comes to blogging about my industry and my family (the two things I thought I’d spend much of my time relaying). Well, when I do finally get a chance to write, I have a tendency to write about the things that are unusual and have caught my attention…and this week, that’s the fact that I finally got everything in my living room converted to HD.

And OH MY GOD what a difference

I have a Sharp 52″ LCD, with incredible contrast. I have a Tivo series 3 now, with its sexy dual tuners and digital picture and audio out (goodbye cable box as well). I was even watching Blu-Ray movies. It’s one thing to see HD in the store, quite another to see it where your SD used to be. My wife and I just sat in awe and watched golf…golf of all things!…and stared at the beauty of it all.

From now on, I’m apparently spending all of my time up in the digital channels that start at the 700s. My friends who went HD long ago are probably laughing a bit. Yes, I’m late to the HD game by early adopter standards, but oh so happy to have finally joined.

Peeps are nothing but sugary, sickening goodness. I have loved them for years, so was a huge fan of this:

see more crazy cat pics

A truly brilliant offering from a budding animation master:

Quite a bit more on YouTube. Cheers to you 15-year-old Kevin:

Check it out

Spotted on a T-shirt at the mall:

Nike swoosh beneath the words "I’m so good, even your mom cheers for me."

Nike branding and a good old "your mom" made my day. 

I just finished reading a fascinating book that was (ironically?) given to me for Christmas.  The title is Misquoting Jesus, and it takes a critical look at the Bible we English speakers read.  The upshot is that the New Testament has changed dramatically from the original texts (all of which are actually lost).  The source material available in any language was changed by the scribes who copied the texts in the early centuries of Christianity, and those changes stuck, ultimately giving us divergent "families" of texts that tell sometimes significantly different stories.

A few good examples: the King James Bible is based on a Latin translation of a single Greek version of the New Testament (and a heavily altered Greek version at that).  Earlier Greek versions, among the "closest" we have to the originals, leave out some fairly well-known stories: the famous "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" story and Christ’s sweating blood before he is captured to be crucified, to name a couple.  Also, scribes often tried to reconcile the gospels, which means we don’t have to grapple with the question of whether Jesus was an imperturbable figure (Luke’s story) or a bit of a moody badass with a message (Mark’s original story!).

I have always been fascinated with history and love to study religions, so I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  Take a read through it, then go consult your Bible and see if it has a few of the incredibly well-researched footnotes that perhaps it should.  No version is perfect, but as for me, next time I want to read the Bible I’m likely to consult the NRSV.