Innovators Patent Agreement

From Twitter's Blog (emphasis mine): 

The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended.

This is a significant departure from the current state of affairs in the industry. Typically, engineers and designers sign an agreement with their company that irrevocably gives that company any patents filed related to the employee’s work. The company then has control over the patents and can use them however they want, which may include selling them to others who can also use them however they want. With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon.

Aaron Dignan on The worst game ever.

Aaron Dignan, quoted by smartplanet earlier this year: 

Imagine playing a game where you only get feedback once a year in an annual review? It would be the worst game ever. And yet, that’s the game we play at work.

My last job prioritized production over team feedback.  It was, of course, not by design, and nobody would have actually articulated anything to that point, but looking back I regret not speaking up. But the nature of the company was that projects were sold before the infrastructure to deliver them was in place, and the result was that we were - at least during my time there - always behind schedule. Efforts were made to emphasize team building and open communication, but when projects are late by as much time as they were originally projected to be completed in, it's difficult to put much energy into anything but hurrying the hell up. 

In the end, I was complicit in these tendencies as well. I can distinctly recall the spacey way in which I would listen to my reports talk about their families; I absorbed as much as I needed in order to ask a question from time to time, but I wouldn't say I put a ton of effort into *really* hearing them. I was careful to provide positive feedback when warranted (and negative feedback when necessary), but our product's long term prospects were too hazy - and my own feelings about the company were too conflicted - for me to really engage in the discussions that I'm sure mattered most.

Notes on a Square-shaped career

A jack, and his trades, on a quest for some type of mastery.

In the interest of self-congratulation, and because (who knows?) maybe it’s better to mix some parody into one’s résumé:

Things I have done in the past, and will do again if you pay me.

Worked in subzero conditions for days on end.

You know how they say some things build character? Well, being cold is miserable, but I always remember it fondly.

Demolished a load bearing wall.

This shit is tricky. You gotta build a temporary wall to keep the load supported, and then you get out your sledgehammer and knock the old wall out. Extra points if you actually *lift* the load up beforehand, using a bottle jack or similar.

Organized my music collection with a shell script.

Most practical use of my years on Linux. I had all these old Napster-era files on my hard drive and had (obsessively) named them all in a particular naming sequence (“Artist Name — Album Name — Track Number — Track Name”, if you must know). But a lot of them were just in the root of my “Music” directory, and I wanted them to be sorted into a directory structure that only halfway existed. So I wrote this script that identified all of the relevant fields in the filename and searched to see if the necessary file path existed, and then created it if it didn’t and moved the files into the right path. I was an amateur and spent like a weekend on the script. It executed (and probably sorted through a couple dozen gigabytes of music) in like five seconds.

(Shamelessly) done my own photography.

Hey, I’ve got nothing but love for your selfies. I spent *years* with a tripod and a remote trigger. About the best investment I ever made was a muslin backdrop, and I’ll curate & color correct the *hell* out of some soft-focus product shots.

Been to China.

Incredibly (and to no particular credit to myself), this is maybe my most marketable achievement in the past three years. I visited like ten factories while I was there, and was wooed by some number of dozens of potential suppliers of machined/extruded/moulded parts. I was apparently also charming enough to get a local girl to show me around working-class Pudong (in a non-romantic way). I was out of my element, and accidentally brilliant.

Spliced both three-strand twist *and* double braid rope.

Three strand is easy once you get the hang of it. Double braid rope comes in all varieties, and you really need to know what you’re working with to get it right.

Vetted SMT assembly shops.

Not that I knew the first thing about how SMT is done. But supplier vetting is more about understanding the people you’re talking to than it is about understanding the processes they’re performing.

Finished The Power Broker.

You want commitment? You got it.

Attended Edward Tufte’s one-day course.

Edward Tufte has a vanity gallery in Chelsea, and he seems pretty good at getting a couple dozen suckers to plunk down $380 to listen to him rap about information design for a few hours. Which, if you count my ability to gush about John Snow and claim expertise on the ways in which PowerPoint distorts intellectual discourse… Well, let’s just say it was money well spent.

Attended The Landmark Forum.

You have no idea how many things occur to me that.

Unlocked basically all the privacy settings on my Facebook page.

If you’re scared of hiring me because — gasp — there are pictures on the internet of me drinking beer with friends, well, move right along.

Had a letter to the editor published.

And let me tell you, there are some key phrases I wish I had reworded beforehand.

Been the president of a nonprofit.

You gotta watch out — speak up at the first meeting, and they just might call on you.

Derived the syntactical structure of sentences like “The man that the girl that is nice met is cool.”

If you don’t think that’s grammatical, well, check this out.

Made coq au vin.

Though I must say, chicken bones in my stew is a little weird.

Been at the helm, at the start of a race, in a 38' sailboat, when we crashed into the committee boat.

They were parked; we were probably doing 7-8 knots. Not my brightest moment. Everyone was okay, and after that was clear I accepted my lapse in judgment and got back at the helm.

Told a supplier that we were working on developing in-house capabilities in his field.

I had no idea how to splice rubber extrusion, but I pitched the idea to my bosses and eventually we figured it out. The supplier was really cool about it, too — we paid him a retainer and he taught us what he knew (which wasn’t very much) about the process. Rubber transfer moulding is really simple, but — even with our supplier’s support and advice — we struggled with the details for months. I still don’t understand precisely what is happening chemically as rubber cures, but in the end I guess that wasn’t really relevant.

Fired a subcontractor.

Guy was an asshole. I made a key mistake, though, and didn’t limit my list of reasons to “you’re an asshole.” If you’ve got that card, play it — and leave the rest to yourself.

Let my boss convince me to let an employee go.

This was a huge mistake. Ultimately he was right, but his lack of trust in my judgment was a harbinger of bad things to come.

Spent way too long sharpening a chisel.

But man, sharpening stuff on a Japanese style waterstone is so cool.

Stayed at home and written silly things for the internet.

:)

---

With apologies to Mike Arauz and his excellent post, Square-shaped is the new T-shaped.

Man From Mars

When I got out of college, I spent two years in construction management in Northern California. It was a stressful period for me - I was out of my element, alone, and over my head - and I struggled to fit in with the employees and subcontractors that I dealt with on a day-to-day basis.

It was towards the end of this time that I heard Tom Wolfe's 1987 interview with Terry Gross, in which he described the benefits of standing out. It's something that's stuck with me since. Emphasis below is mine.

Wolfe: I have discovered that for me - now, maybe it doesn't work for everybody - for me, it is much more effective to arrive at any situation as a man from Mars than to try to fit in.

When I first started out in journalism - in magazine work, particularly - I used to try to fit in. I remember doing a thing on stock car racing. I went down to North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, to do a story on a stock car racer named Junior Johnson. And I tried to fit in to the stock car scene.

I wore a green tweed suit and a blue button-down shirt and a black knit tie and some brown suede shoes and a round Borcelino hat. I figured that was really casual, it was the stock car races.

And after about five days, Junior Johnson, whom I was writing about, came up to me. He says, I don't mean to be rude or anything, he says, but people I've known all my life down here in Ingle Hollow - that was where he came from - he said, they keep asking me: Junior, who is that little green man following you around?

And it was then that it dawned on me that A, nobody for 50 miles in any direction was wearing a suit of any color; or a tie, for that matter; or a hat. And the less said about brown suede shoes, the better, I can assure you. So I wasn't - you know, I wasn't fitting in to start with.

I was also depriving myself of the ability to ask some very obvious questions if I thought I fit in. I was dying to know what an overhead cam was. People were always talking about overhead cams, but if you were pretending to fit in, you can't ask these obvious questions.

After that, I gave it up. I turned up - always in a suit and, you know, many times a white suit, and just be the village information-gatherer. And you'll be amazed, if you're willing to strike that role.

GROSS: When you were doing the research for your book "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," which is about Ken Kesey and the psychedelic acid trips, were you dressed like that, too?

WOLFE: Oh, yes. And actually, to have tried to fit into that scene would have been fatal - perhaps literally, fatal.

Kesey had this abiding distaste for pseudo-hippies or hipster -there was really no such term at that time, but we'll just call them pseudo-hipsters - you know, the journalist or the lawyer or teacher who on the weekends, puts on his jeans and smokes a little dope and plays some Coltrane records, and tries to be part of the scene.

And so he had a device called testing people's cool. And I remember once witnessing this. It was on one of these weekends. And he said: All right, let's everybody get nekkid(ph) - that was his word for naked - and get on our bikes and go up Route 1. This was in California.

And they did. They took off all their clothes, they got on their motorcycles, and they started riding up Route 1. Now, this separated the hippies from the weekend hipsters, if you will, very rapidly. But now, I didn't have to worry because I was in my three-piece suit with a big, blue corduroy necktie. And the idea that I was going to take any of this off for anybody was crazy.

Name Three

From Less Wrong, emphasis mine. 

Even with people who've had moderate amounts of exposure to Less Wrong, a fair amount of my helping them think effectively often consists of my saying, "Can you give me a specific example of that?" or "Can you be more concrete?"

A couple of formative childhood readings that taught me to be specific:

"What is meant by the word red?"

"It's a color."

"What's a color?"

"Why, it's a quality things have."

"What's a quality?"

"Say, what are you trying to do, anyway?"

You have pushed him into the clouds.  If, on the other hand, we habitually go down the abstraction ladder to lower levels of abstraction when we are asked the meaning of a word, we are less likely to get lost in verbal mazes; we will tend to "have our feet on the ground" and know what we are talking about.  This habit displays itself in an answer such as this:

"What is meant by the word red?"

"Well, the next time you see some cars stopped at an intersection, look at the traffic light facing them.  Also, you might go to the fire department and see how their trucks are painted."

-- S. I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action

and:

"Beware, demon!" he intoned hollowly.  "I am not without defenses."

"Oh yeah?  Name three."

-- Robert Asprin, Another Fine Myth

And now, no sooner does someone tell me that they want to "facilitate communications between managers and employees" than I say, "Can you give me a concrete example of how you would do that?"  Hayakawa taught me to distinguish the concrete and the abstract; and from that small passage in Asprin, I picked up the dreadful personal habit of calling people's bluffs, often using the specific phrase, "Name three."

Ryan Tomayko: Your team should work like an open source project

Last week I linked to a quote by Zach Holman on getting people interested in your projects. His original text included a link to an excellent post by Ryan Tomayko , which argues for structuring your team in an opt-in format, much like open source projects. I've been reading more and more to this effect recently, but Tomayko makes a really great case. A few excerpts (n.b., I've reformatted a few of these due to weirdness while composing this post {grr...}. The spirit should be unchanged. Also, emphasis is mine.):

What we're learning at GitHub is that opting in to open source project constraints often results in better natural survivability characteristics for many types of business, product development, and operations activities. That is to say, processes designed to conform to open source constraints results in a project that runs well, attracts attention, and seems to be self perpetuating where the same project structured more traditionally requires much more manual coordination and authoritative prodding. 

Tomayko excerpts the GitHub product development documentation at length:

The processes and basic rules for communication on github.com projects are roughly the same as those of an open source project. Mainly, that development and operations follows these constraints where sensible: Discussion, planning, and operations process should use a high fidelity form of electronic communication like email, github.com, or chat with transcripts wherever possible. Avoid meatspace discussion and meetings...Work should be visible and expose process. Work should have a URL. It should be possible to move backward from a piece of product or a system failure and understand how it came to be that way. Prefer git, issues, pull requests, mailing lists, and chat with transcripts over URL-less mediums...Almost no part of the product development process requires that one person interrupt another's immediate attention or that people be in the same place at the same time, or even that people be in different places at the same time. Even small meetings or short phone calls can wreck flow so consider laying it out in (a thought out) email or sending a pull request instead.

And then goes on to "predict the decline of the office as the center of planning, coordination, and communication for software development organizations," while acknowledging their utility in developing strategy and celebrating milestones & victories: 

Lastly, working face-to-face in meatspace has proven extremely valuable in matters of strategic thinking and, obviously, for developing personal relationships, two things which are vital to a company's success.

I suspect that more and more product development cycles will move this way in the future, and think that the results will be overwhelmingly positive.

Intentions

Last week, director James Toback appeared on Alec Baldwin's excellent podcast, Here's the Thing. They talked a lot about the benefits of having full creative control over projects, but the big takeaway for me was on being forthright about your intentions. Toback paraphrases Karel Reisz's way of working:

Decide what you want, and then make your wishes clear to everybody you're working with. 

I think this is fantastic advice. 

Zach Klein on companies that allow us to play

via Nick Crocker. 

At the age of 23, Zach sold his company Vimeo. But as soon as he sold his company, he wanted nothing more than to have those wings again. He missed it. He realised he wanted to keep flying. Zach humbly offers advise on what he's doing now (DIY.org) and the lessons he's learned that have informed his own company.

Water will find its level.

This week's 99% Invisible  includes a short piece on the Strowger Switch, the 1878 invention that allowed telephone calls to be connected without a manual operator. Poignantly, Roman includes a bit about the inventor's reaction to the plight of those operators whose jobs would be eliminated due to his invention. His response, I think, is perfectly appropriate, and reminds me of this chart from McKinsey's report on disruptive technologies. From Roman's piece:

La Porte Indiana became the first place to have automatic operator-free telephone dialing. In a speech at the unveiling of the La Porte telephone exchange, the cantankerous Strowger addressed the issue of the 'hello girls' - the operators who would lose their jobs because of his automated switch. "I am often told that the the telephone girls would be angry with me for robbing them of their occupation. In reply, I would say that all things will adjust themselves to the new order. Water will find its level. The telephone replaced the messenger boy, as this machine now displaces the telephone girl. Improvements will continue to the end of time. Strike where they may."

Chuck Klosterman on agreeing with the Future

 Chuck Klosterman from his 2013 book "I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)." The key (to me) is the second paragraph; emphasis mine. (n.b., the text below is transcribed (carefully) from the audiobook. Punctuation may vary.)

And the worst part is that there is no other option. If a father stops his son from embracing the online universe, he is stopping him from becoming a competitive adult. It's like refusing to teach him how to drive a car, or boil water. You may worry about al the ancillary consequences, but you can't take away the experience. Avoiding the internet is akin to avoiding everything that matters. This is even true for adults. An author I know once explained why writing became so much more difficult in the 21st century: "The biggest problem in my life," he said, "is that my work machine is also my pornography delivery machine." The future makes the rules.

The future makes the rules, so there's no point in being mad when the future wins. In fact, the easiest way for any cutthroat person to succeed is to instinctively and relentlessly side with the technology of tomorrow - even if that technology is distasteful. Time will eventually validate that position. The only downside is that until that validation occurs, less competitive people will find you annoying and unlikeable. The future will retire undefeated, but it always makes a terrible argument for its own success.

The argument is inevitably some version of this: You might not like where we're going, and tomorrow may be worse than yesterday, but it's still going to happen whether you like it or not. It's inevitable. And this is what people hate. They hate being dragged into the future. And they hate that technocrats remind them that this is always, always, always happening. We tend to dislike cultural architects who seem excited that the world is changing, particularly when those architects don't seem particularly concerned whether those changes make things worse. They know they will end up on the right side of history, because the future always wins. These are people who have the clearest understanding of what technology can do, but no emotional stake in how its application will change the lives of people who aren't exactly like them. They know the most, and they care the least, and they kinda think that's funny. Certainly, this brand of technophobia has always existed. As early as 1899, people like H.G. Wells were expressing apprehension about a future "ruled by an aristocracy of organizers, men who manage railroads and similar vast enterprises." But this is different. This is about the kind of person who will decide what the future is.

Zach Holman

via Timoni. Original text on GitHub.

I’ve had a few really great ideas over the years of really awesome things I’ve wanted to work on, and sure, you get people saying “yeah that’d be awesome to have!” But then I couldn’t find anyone to work on it with me. That’s a huge indicator. It’s easy to get people to agree with you, but if you can’t convince them to donate their time to make the vision a reality, it’s a massive signal that what you’re doing isn’t great.

-Zach Holman

Jeff Bezos on being misunderstood

Amazon's Jeff Bezos at the Aspen Institute in 2009. Via The Motley Fool (emphasis mine).

If you look at where we are today, it's half luck, half good timing, and the rest has been brains. So in some ways, I think we have not been tested. You know, we were unprofitable for so long, and people predicted our demise for so long, that we did develop thick skins - which I think is very valuable for invention, because often times invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood. You do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, but for a long period of time, well-meaning people may criticize that effort. When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, 'Are they right?' And if they are, you need to adapt what they're doing. If they're not right, if you really have conviction that they're not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It's a key part of invention.

Jeff Bezos on regrets

Amazon's Jeff Bezos, quoted by The Academy of Achievement in 2008. via The Motley Fool (emphasis mine).

So, it really was a decision that I had to make for myself, and the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called -- which only a nerd would call -- a "regret minimization framework." So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, "Okay, now I'm looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have." I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision. And, I think that's very good. If you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, "What will I think at that time?" it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. That's the kind of thing that in the short-term can confuse you, but if you think about the long-term then you can really make good life decisions that you won't regret later.

Derek Sivers

Programming languages are like girlfriends: The new one is better because *you* are better.

Derek Sivers, in his 2007 O'Reilly post: "7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails."

The best question

The best question is the one that gets the most interesting response, whether it answers the question or not.

The best interviewer is the person who elicits the most interesting response - not the one who asks the most interesting question.

The best interviewee is the one who is able to both yes-and the interviewer (it's not about agreement, it's about agreeability) and provide the most interesting response to the question at hand.

Scott Belsky

From "Finding Your Work Sweet Spot: Genuine Interest, Skills & Opportunity" by Scott Belsky (emphasis mine).

As you contemplate your next career move or a new project, you should take the intersection of your genuine interests, skills, and opportunities into consideration.

Contemplate the three circles of the Venn diagram above  –  one circle encompasses your genuine interests; one, your skills; and one, the stream of opportunities available to you. An intersection between just two of the circles doesn’t cut it. A love for basketball and a connection to an NBA scout won’t help you if you lack the skills to play ball. You need to find YOUR trifecta. When you engage with a project that finds this intersection, you’ve entered your zone of maximum impact. In such a state, you are a potent force of nature  –  your avocation becomes your vocation. You can work with full conviction, without ambiguity, and you can transcend your reliance on short-term rewards and societal approval.

As leaders, we must help our partners and employees find work at the ISO intersection. Legendary managers seek to understand the genuine interests and skills of their employees, and are constantly trying to create opportunities within the intersection. Want to change the world? Push everyone you know to work within their intersection. Mentor people to realize their genuine interests, skills, and to capitalize on even the smallest opportunities that surround them. When it comes to your own career, make every decision with a constant eye for work in the intersection.

xkcd on Internet Privacy

Perfect. 

Grey pinstriped suits

I went to the headmaster of this school and I said, "I got an 800 in my math and I love art. Obviously I should go into architecture, because it's where the two meet." And this headmaster was very smart, and he said something to me that was extraordinary. He said "You know, I like grey suits and I like pinstriped suits. But I hate grey pinstripe suits."

And...I went to architecture school, and in fact I did *two* degrees in architecture before I realized that it was the grey pinstriped suit, and that *really* the mix of the [math and art] was computers. "

Nicholas Negroponte on the Seminars About Long-Term Thinking podcast. 

From my own archives: On Content

What follows here is excerpted from a personal email I wrote earlier this year. It remains representative of how I feel about my own content creation - reckless enthusiasm and all :)

It appears slightly edited, for formatting and privacy. 

- - -

The way I see it, there are really two types of content: curatorial and original.  

There are a *lot* of curatorial blogs. The best, e.g. Kottke, are *excellent.* The worst are just commonplacing, which is actually pretty cool. I suppose you could argue that curation in a digital age should occur in Evernote or a similar document storing platform, but at that point, who cares. It's fun to have an aesthetic perspective, and if all you do is reblog photos, what's wrong with that?

Original content is, to me, closer to the heart. I like this quote, from a recent post by Keenan Cummings:

But regardless of wherever that team and those designers might fall on the criticism-worthy spectrum, I’ve learned to not question the intentions and sincerity of anyone. It hurts my work. It makes me cynical, competitive, fickle, distracted. My heart is in the work that I do, and I do better to assume it’s the same for others.

But that's just from my perspective as a viewer - and I certainly don't mean to imply that you're any of those things.

As a creator it is - at least for me, in the point in my career - even more important that I defend shitty content. Shitty content is "a way to make your soul grow." And if you want to work in the idea economy - or, I mean *fuck,* any economy where you need half a brain to succeed - the best way to show employers/clients that you're worth their time is to: 1) be able to show them *something,* and 2) have been creating that something for long enough that you've gotten halfway decent at it.

viz., my blog.  My blog is silly - the things I write are *way* too long, and I'm too focused on creating a long argument that's based partly on something personal. I love writing this shit, but I'm still way green at it.  And if I want to work at a place like [REDACTED] - and don't I? - then I *need* to be doing it all. the. time. Or else someone else who is will get the job from under me.

With regard to the light drowning out the stars: I think it's not nearly as bad as that, you just need to believe in it. Spielberg: 

You shouldn’t dream your film, you should make it! If no one hires you, use the camera on your phone and post everything on YouTube. A young person has more opportunities to direct now than in my day. I’d have liked to begin making movies today.

But then again, consider who's talking. *Everything* is important to me right now, and remarkably little of it is getting looked at by anyone - let alone anyone of note. But I'm okay with that. Anonymity is good for me right now; it gives me the opportunity to make mistakes. Just give us all a year or two - once we've had a little more practice, we'll be showing *everyone.*

Paul Graham on Formidibility

Anyone who's randomly reading my blog and doesn't know Paul Graham should just stop now. His subject matter is both focussed and applicable to a wide variety of situations; his ideas are poignant; and his manner of presentation is perfectly tailored.  From his "How to Convince Investors" piece, posted 2013.08 (emphasis mine):

The most important ingredient is formidable founders. Most investors decide in the first few minutes whether you seem like a winner or a loser, and once their opinion is set it's hard to change. Every startup has reasons both to invest and not to invest. If investors think you're a winner they focus on the former, and if not they focus on the latter. 

...

There is a role for ideas of course. They're fuel for the fire that starts with liking the founders. Once investors like you, you'll see them reaching for ideas: they'll be saying "yes, and you could also do x." (Whereas when they don't like you, they'll be saying "but what about x?")

But the foundation of convincing investors is to seem formidable, and since this isn't a word most people use in conversation much, I should explain what it means. A formidable person is one who seems like they'll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way. Formidable is close to confident, except that someone could be confident and mistaken. Formidable is roughly justifiably confident.

There are a handful of people who are really good at seeming formidable—some because they actually are very formidable and just let it show, and others because they are more or less con artists. But most founders, including many who will go on to start very successful companies, are not that good at seeming formidable the first time they try fundraising. What should they do?

What they should not do is try to imitate the swagger of more experienced founders. Investors are not always that good at judging technology, but they're good at judging confidence. If you try to act like something you're not, you'll just end up in an uncanny valley. You'll depart from sincere, but never arrive at convincing.