Summation

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York [read this book]

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro is a masterful book.    It is really long (1162 pages) and very dense and took me over three months to read.   but it is worth it.  

I now have had a chance to read all four Caro books (three are on Lyndon Johnson) and they are four of the best biographies I have ever read.   I hope and pray that Caro blesses us with another biography soon.  

Rapleaf looking for Incredible Systems/Network Ops Administrator

Incredible Systems/Network Administrator (Employee #16)

 

Rapleaf (www.rapleaf.com) is a well-funded

San Francisco

startup (we’re currently at 15 people). We gather publically available information from the social web on hundreds of millions of people to enable developers and companies to give their consumers a better user experience. Rapleaf has built the largest portable social graph in the world. We provide rich insight on costumers for clients such as retailers, airlines, hotel chains, social networks, lead gen firms, telcos, political campaigns, financial services, and more (these companies learn about their consumers in order to give them a better user experience).  The company has processed over 160 million unique searches for businesses and consumers.

 

You will maintain Rapleaf’s entire infrastructure and enhance the system to do great things as we’re on the trajectory to change the world.   Helping grow one of the largest and most complex databases for a small start-up.  

 

Role:

- Manage all Rapleaf servers (Linux – CentOS, Redhat), backups, web servers (Apache clusters)

- Manage relationship with hosting provider and hardware vendors

- Scalability and expansion (Hadoop)

- Systems administration (DNS,LDAP,NFS,TCP/IP,SELinux)

- Some scripting (Shell, Ruby, Python, or Perl)

- Administer MySQL databases (multi-master replication, snapshot backups)

- Learn how to scale with Ruby on Rails

- Manage complex Java systems

- Manage billions of data items of pages being served

- On-call duty

 

Note: this job is really hard. You’ll be working with some of the top search engineers in the world and they are going to expect that you kick ass. We’re doing things that no one has ever done before and solving problems that have been open for years.

 

Qualifications:

- Master of all things Internet and Linux.

- Incredibly smart, can learn fast, and takes no prisoners

- Learn new platforms fast. We use Ruby on Rails and Java … you can pick this up quickly.

- Intensely driven and proactive person.

- Extremely hard working. This is a start-up - team members work long hours.

- Quick learner and real doer. Err on execution over strategy.

- Thrive on working with A-players. Too good to spend long hours with B-players.

- Likeable person who garners respect on and off the job.

- Thrive on chaos, risk, and uncertainty.

- Should be easy to get along with, nice, fun, smart, ethical, and low-maintenance.

- Strong desire to build a more ethical society.

- Desire to be an early employee and want to be a real owner in Rapleaf’s future.

- Want to work with extremely large datasets and indirectly build portable APIs that thousands of other companies can build applications on top of.

- Ability to lift and install servers (50 lbs)

- Should want to live in or near

San Francisco

(relocation available if necessary)

 

Location:

- Downtown

San Francisco

,

CA

(

Mission

and 3rd)

 

Perks:

- Good salary/stock compensation.

- Personal MacBook Pro or Linux based machine

- Medical insurance, 401k.

- Kitchen stocked with food

- Work with some of the smartest engineers

- Contribute to the Rapleaf Dev blog (http://blog.rapleaf.com/dev/)

 

At Rapleaf, we’re only looking for people that really want to change the world.

If interested, please email [email protected] If you know someone who may be interested, we also offer a $10,007 referral bonus.

 

RateItAll gets funding

There was a nice article in TechCrunch last week on RateItAll.    This small company has quietly built a loyal following (and for most of the time they only had a one-person team).    I've been on their advisory board for the last two quarters and have been very impressed with Lawrence Coburn, Matt Spolin, and the rest of the team.    Congrats guys and looking forward to a lot of success!

The Art of the Job Offer: Encourage Candidates to Turn You Down

Build the best team by lowering your job offer acceptance rate

 

Most people go about giving a job offer in the wrong way.  They try to sell the candidate and win them over.  There’s a better strategy.

 

As a hiring manager, your objective is to get great employees who are always thinking about the challenges ahead, love their job, and are a good fit with the company culture.  It is possible, with the right interview, to determine if someone is a great engineer ... but too often hiring managers only go after people with great talent.  They forget about fit and that's because fit is so hard to interview for and assess.  

 

One great way to determine fit is not to explicitly assess it all.  Instead, let the candidate make the choice and opt-out.  We've been extraordinarily successful at hiring here at Rapleaf and that’s because we encourage candidates to turn us down.

 

First, don’t use the offer as an opportunity to sell the candidate.  Try to be honest and open with each candidate.  Tell them your goal for all employees is for them to love their jobs and that they should not take the job if they have doubts.  You've only been able evaluate the person for a dozen hours – but the candidate has known herself all her life.   She will be a much better judge if she fits the culture.

 

Next, be completely honest about the culture.   At Rapleaf, we take at least 15 minutes to spell out, in detail, the company culture.   Tell them your organization's quirks and what is expected of employees.  Some of the many things that are particular to Rapleaf that we tell all candidates:

 

• We’re frugal.  We’ll wait until we’re very profitable before we pay for fancy dinners.
• We give each other a good dose of constructive criticism.  We happily give and take criticism.  We want to better ourselves and the others around us. 
• We do not value our own ideas more than those ideas generated by our teammates.  
• We work long hours.  We believe great things are accomplished 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. 
• We believe the perfect is the enemy of the good.  This means we focus on getting things done, not on building the most perfect system.  We strongly believe in rapid iteration.

 

Really talk through the culture during the offer.   If you want your employees to work long hours, you better tell them that is expected before they accept the offer.  Conversely, if you believe strongly in a 40-hour workweek, tell the candidate because many people are looking to change the world and they want to work with people who really make the company mission a priority.  

 

The essential take-away is not to sugar-coat the experience.  Be completely honest.  

 

Then, tell the candidate your concerns about them.   Tell them what you like about them and what they will need to improve upon to be a productive employee.  And tell them not to take the job if they don’t think they can make those improvements.  This is the toughest thing for a hiring manager to do but it is important because it really sets the expectations.

 

Fourth, don't give candidates a long time to make a decision.   Two days is fair.   If they don’t know they want to work for you in two days, then they should probably turn down your job offer.

 

And give a salary that is a bit below market but give them a lot of stock.  You want to make sure candidates REALLY want to work at your company.   Then you should make sure you take care of your employees and give them frequent raises so they end up being paid above market.   This way you get the both worlds – employees who are really excited about the company and who are happy that they are appreciated by management (because of the frequent raises).  And  when your company increases its value, you want to make sure your employees benefit from the increased stock price.

 

Your goal as a hiring manager is get the best team member, not just the best athlete.   If you're managing a basketball team, you want someone that is a great player.   But you also need someone that will work well with the other team members and makes them all better.

 

United and Continental cooperate -- this seems good for flyers

message i just got from United:

As a valued Mileage Plus member, we wanted you to be among the first to hear that Continental and United today announced plans to cooperate globally, linking our networks and services worldwide to deliver new benefits to you. In addition, Continental plans to join United in the Star Alliance(R), the most comprehensive airline alliance in the world.

Once implemented, this new partnership, will easily enable you to take advantage of the resources of both airlines to enhance your overall travel experience, and receive more value from your Mileage Plus membership.

First and foremost, this partnership will include new frequent flier reciprocity that will enable you to earn miles when flying on either airline and redeem awards on both carriers. Travel on either carrier will count toward earning elite status. Similarly, members of either airline's airport lounge program will have access to both Continental's Presidents Club network and United's Red Carpet Club(R) lounges.

Second, together with Continental, we will be able to offer you a more comprehensive domestic route network and together with our Star Alliance partners, greater choice of service throughout the entire world.

Starting in the U.S., you are going to see United and Continental develop extensive code-sharing that will facilitate travel whenever your itinerary involves both carriers. We will be able to provide you with a coordinated process for reservations/ticketing, check-in, flight connections and baggage transfer.

Internationally, Continental and United will establish joint ventures that will allow us to cooperate with each other and with other Star Alliance airlines throughout the world.

These joint ventures will enable us to provide you with highly competitive flight schedules, fares and service to more destinations than we do today.

In short, once regulatory approval is obtained, this new partnership between United and Continental will expand your choice of flights and destinations, and improve your ability to earn both miles and elite status in Mileage Plus.

Together we will offer you more value whenever you fly. We expect to bring you the benefits of our cooperation starting some time in 2009, and until then, we will keep you informed about our progress.

We appreciate you and your business, and we look forward to seeing you on your next flight.

Email Deliverability is crucial to achieve consumer Internet virality

In the side conversations at the founders brunches, it seems that all people can talk about is invite deliverable.   The most important subset of invite deliverable is email deliverable.   Many B2C companies go viral by convincing current users to upload their address books and email their friends.   You can do all the viral tuning you want, but if your emails are going to someone's spam filter, they ain't gonna see your genius.   And that's a shame.

 

So what to do?

1. check if you are on any blacklists.   Three sites I like are:

- http://spamblock.outblaze.com/spamchk.html

- www.dnsstuff.com

- www.us.sorbs.net/lookup.shtml

 

2.  make sure you can be accepted by carriers by setting up SPF, Sender ID, and DomainKeys/DKIM.   To get more information on these, check out:

-          www.openspf.org

- Email Authentication

 

Then follow these steps:

- check your current configuration: http://senderid.espcoalition.org/

- set up SPF/Sender ID: http://old.openspf.org/wizard.html

- set up DomainKeys/DKIM: http://domainkeys.sourceforge.net/

 

 

3. Monitor your emails and make sure you unsubscribe anyone that hits the spam key.   Some good services to sign up for are:

- Abuse.net: www.abuse.net

- Spamcop: www.spamcop.net

 

 

4. Set up feedback loop (FBL)

- MSN/Hotmail: http://postmaster.msn.com/Services.aspx

http://postmaster.msn.com/snds/

- AOL: http://postmaster.info.aol.com/fbl/index.html

 

 

5. Get whitelisted/remove yourself from blacklists

- Yahoo: http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/mail/cgi_bulkmail

- Microsoft: set up FBL: http://postmaster.msn.com/Services.aspx and http://postmaster.msn.com/snds/

- AOL: http://postmaster.info.aol.com/whitelist/index.html

- Gmail: none  (dohhhh!)

- Earthlink: email [email protected] or [email protected]

- Bellsouth: email [email protected] or [email protected].

- Bell.ca: email [email protected]

- Netzero: http://www.unitedonline.net/postmaster/whitelisted.html

- Excite: http://newfb.excite.com/feedback.jsp?key=exbnc

- Verizon: http://www2.verizon.net/micro/whitelist/

- AT&T: email [email protected], [email protected], or http://worldnet.att.net/general-info/mail_info/block_inquiry.html

- Mail.com: check http://spamblock.outblaze.com/spamchk.html and email [email protected]

- Mac.com: email [email protected]

- USA.net: email [email protected]

- Road Runner: http://security.rr.com/RRUnblockRequest.htm

- SORBS: http://www.us.sorbs.net/cgi-bin/support

 

6. Monitor your email deliverability:

            - DeliveryMonitor: www.deliverymonitor.com

           

7. Pay for professional whitelisting (not recommended for startups on a tight budget unless email deliverability is truly your lifeblood):

            -Habeas: www.habeas.com

            -SenderScoreCertified: www.senderscorecertified.com

 

8. Ask your users to add your company’s email address to their address book and to whitelist you

 

9.) Other

- Zone File: make sure this is accurate and doesn’t have errors (check with your sys admin)

- Privacy policy: There should be a link from all sites to a privacy policy

- Unsubscribe links - web: Ensure that unsubscribe links are placed on all the homepages of sites the domains of which are used as senders for bulk email

- Unsubscribe links - email: Ensure unsubscribe links are placed in all emails to make them CANSPAM compliant

- Civic Address: Ensure your business civic address is placed at the bottom of all mailings to make them CANSPAM compliant.

- Unsubscribe Headers: see: http://lashback.typepad.com/main/2006/09/the_secrets_of_.html

- X-headers: Precedence list / Precedence bulk - consider implementing these.

 

10. And read one of the best blogs on this topic:

- http://blog.dogster.com/2006/11/29/sending-email-is-a-big-headache-for-popular-websites/

 

 

 

 

(Special thanks to my office mate, Vivek Sodera, for his help on putting this together)

 

 

The New Paradigm for Financial Markets by George Soros [pass on this book]

Just read it. decent book but I would not recommend it.

counterpoint to referral based hiring

People often believe that hiring people that were referred to you works out the best.

I started thinking ...

Could that be this is a result of the fact that most people who were NOT referred are low quality. I have found that the worst quality job applicants, on average, applied from a job advertisement they see somewhere (though I have seen plenty of exceptions).

Referrals often are not coming from an advertisement but instead are usually happily employed but open to a new position (passive job seekers).

Especially in today's job market, passive job seekers are generally going to be better than active job seekers.

So if the only passive candidates you are seeing are referrals, than referrals are going to be much better than the alternative.

However, you can actively recruit passive candidates. You can contact people directly who are not looking for jobs and try to convince them to apply. A good recruiter should do this. And it is not clear that these passive candidates would be much worse than the passive candidate that was referred to the organization.

And actively recruiting passive candidates is the recruiting function that most companies fail on.

read Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria [book]

This is an absolutely must-read to understand the new world. This should be required reading for next President's foreign policy team.

Read Hughes -- the brilliant eccentric [book]

Hughes

By Richard Hack

Howard Hughes was, for a while, the richest person in the world and possible the world's most complex person too. A movie director, world class pilot, brilliant idea person, and over-the-top eccentric, Hughes still remains a mystery. This is a good biography of Hughes and worth reading (or listening if you are an Audible fan). Recommend it.