The GleepLog

Leaving the Peach

The short version: I’m leaving StarPound and moving back to Orlando with my family.  

Atlanta has been my home base since I moved here in 2003 after the small company / startup I worked for mostly imploded.  I’ve thought about moving back a lot because I still have family and friends there.  Recently an opportunity came up to make that happen and after giving it a lot of thought I decided to go for it.

It wasn’t easy.  I’ve lived here a long time now and I have a wife and kids now.  I thought with the housing market like it is that we’d be stuck forever but we found someone that wants to rent our house from us.  

In the end, making a big decision like this is pretty scary but having an entrepreneurial streak in me, I’m ok with taking risks.  There are some times when you have to fight your way out of a rut and really stretch yourself.  This is one of those times.  The easy, safe answer would be to keep my head down and stick to the status quo but that’s just not my style.

The technology / startup community in Atlanta is great and has grown tremendously since I came here.  I plan on staying in contact with all my new friends and acquaintances.

I talked to a number of companies in Atlanta that offered me positions as tech cofounder, architect, engineer etc and many of them were very tempting.  In the end, the position in Orlando may turn out to be only a temporary diversion.

Like Tom Petty said, “The future is wide open”.

Thanks Atlanta, Keep in Touch!

Lesson Learned… #aws

So it turns out this:

elb-configure-healthcheck prod-lb —healthy-threshold 2 —interval 30 —target “http:80/index.php” —timeout 15 —unhealthy-threshold 5

and this:

        RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} !https

        RewriteRule !/status https://%{SERVER_NAME}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R]

are not compatible…

Resolutions are for Suckers.

So once a year you decide you’re going to lose weight, get in shape and finally learn to speak Italian? fuck that.

Here’s what you need to do.  Write down some things you NEED to get done.  READ that list to yourself EVERY DAY.  If anything on that list is still on that list in a year then YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.

Pursue. Attack. Destroy. Repeat.

Here is your homework: Do something dangerous that makes you uncomfortable.  No, do something that scares the fuck out of you.  Check back in with me when that’s done. 

Just Fucking Do Something.

To all the non-believers:

unlike what you’ve been taught by your television, it is necessary to alter the world in order to have lived in it.  If you fail to change the course of history at all then no action you ever took meant anything.  if that doesn’t bother you then you are already dead.

if you don’t know the shape or size of the dent you will make in the universe then hurl yourself at it with all your might and do the most destructive, violent, creative thing you can think of.

if you make a big enough impression in the universe, others will see it and want to make their own.  if you fail to make any impression, continue hurling yourself into it until you succeed. 

if you hit it hard enough you might just get lucky and blow the whole fucking thing up.

in all cases the most common mode of failure it INACTION. when presented with choices, choosing naught is immediate failure.  

1. if you risk nothing you die anyway.
2. if you take the easiest path you die anyway.
3. if you live in fear you’re better of dead.

choose a course and attack it with FEROCITY.  pursue it with every sinew of strength you can muster. let no obstacle deter you.  nothing else matters.

do something that makes you hate yourself for not doing it better.  fuck being comfortable. 

JUST FUCKING DO SOMETHING. 

CAN’T WAIT.

Recruiting begins with Selling Yourself

For a long time it’s been status quo for companies to have a “jobs” or “careers” page on their website.  

Sometimes it’s something hideous like a link to some outsourced portal that will suck the life out of you the moment you try to search for an opening in one of their 117 global offices (Looking at you, multinational defense contractors…).

At small companies, though, it’s usually just a list of a few job openings that may or may not still be open depending on how busy the person with access to the content has been lately.

Startups

And then there is this new wave of catchy, compelling and soulful attempts to sell the visitor on the corporate culture.  This movement isn’t new but it’s become ever more fervent and creative.  

Take, for example, the infamous Hipster campaign to give a year supply of PBR as a referral bonus. 

Good Examples

When I took a job at CoffeeCup Software my interest was due in no small measure to their creativity and humor.  It was clear from the “About Us” page that they took pride in their little company and enjoyed working together.  Once I started there I realized quickly that their culture was real and I quickly assimilated.

Similarly, the Twilio jobs page has evolved and now shows their own strong company culture and unique brand of personality and humor.  

Having worked there I can tell you that their strong company culture is one of their biggest success factors. More about that in another post maybe…

Another good example I saw today is the Wordpress Engine team.  Lots of emphasis on fitting in and being at home.  

They’re clearly looking for the right person instead of just a warm body.  

To do that, they lay out their corporate culture before you and let you judge for yourself how you fit it.  

What about your company?

What does your jobs page say about your company? Can visitors to your site get any sense of your company culture?  Do you get serious applications from serious talent or crazy random CV that make little or no sense?

While many CAN, some DO

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about motivation.  What is it that makes some people willing to push themselves to the breaking point?  Why doesn’t everyone have that drive?

Mostly I’m curious about the subject because I have an 11 year old daughter and I’m trying to inspire her to think big, dream big.  Think Different.  I wish I could go back now to talk to my 11 year old self and give that shy young man a pep talk.

So when news of Steve Jobs passing away exploded on Twitter yesterday as we were sitting down to dinner it was all I could do to stay composed in front of the kids and I didn’t even know the man.  He was my childhood hero.  Steve was the ultimate Doer, the very definition of a driven individual with an unwavering belief in himself and what he was building and he was an inspiration to millions of young geeks.

When I was 5 my family bought an Apple II and I learned to write BASIC programs.  I wrote a number guessing game for my younger sister after learning how to generate random integers in a magazine.  My dad and I soldered a new resistor onto the motherboard to replace a faulty potentiometer that controlled the brightness of the display.  We punched holes in floppy disks.  I hacked my SE/30 and my Performa with ResEdit.  I removed all the vowels from a friends keyboard mapping as a prank.  I built games with Hypercard.  I wrote music on a NeXT cube using CSound.

I remember hearing stories about the groups of computer enthusiasts that built the first personal computers and the first switches and routers.  I was fascinated by the idea that two men in a garage could start a company that could challenge the giants of industry.

When I started my own company a few years ago I knew I was up against formidable odds.  Pursuing companies with a 5 year head start and millions in revenue from my couch didn’t seem crazy to me and that’s because of the trail that was blazed many years before by brave, driven people.

My company ultimately failed when my co-founder and I stopped pushing ourselves but I never regretted starting it or closing it down.  Ultimately if you don’t believe in your idea then nobody else will either and you shouldn’t be doing it.

Here’s the thing.  You only have so much time.  Spend it doing something that gets you fired up.  If somebody has to push you to do something, you’re doing the wrong thing.  I left my Fortune500 job a couple of years ago because I had been there for 6 years ( a huge chunk of my life) and it wasn’t going anywhere.  It needed to be about more than a paycheck for me.

Do Something.  Be Something.  Rest in Peace, Steve.