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Many of my friends consider Caroline Valentine, of Valentine And Associates, the first person to call when they have high-level HR/staffing needs. The last few times we’ve had lunch, I wished I had a recorder with me. Following a recent conversation about insurance, I wrote some of my questions down, and Caroline responded. |
Lynn Bender: Last time we met, you had mentioned several strategies which startups can use to reduce their per employee health insurance premiums. Could you elaborate?
Caroline Valentine: The most common strategy is to provide a plan or plans with higher $ deductibles and copays. For this to work and not result in a mutiny of the current employees on increased out of pocket expenses or higher salary offers to prospective employees to compensate, it must be accompanied by some form of pre-tax savings account – either an FSA (Flexible Savings Account) or HSA (Healthcare Savings Account). There is a third type, HRA, which is not commonly used, so I wont elaborate on it.
The difference is pretty simple. An FSA allows for pre-tax deductions to be used within the calendar for any healthcare related expenses. The catch of course is within the calendar year – it’s a use it or lose it plan. An HSA allows for pre-tax deductions to be used anytime needed. The employer and employee can both make contributions to the account. It grows over time and eventually can be transferred to a mutual money account (from simple savings) and then can operate as a retirement fund, participants are forced to pull money out after a certain age – but not just for healthcare related expenses- check out the links below for additional details on how both plans work -
http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/public-affairs/hsa/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_spending_account
If your company doesn’t already offer one, ask about it – the plans save $ for companies as well so your HR or accounting departments should be happy to hear you are interested.
Bender: Many of my friends work as independent contractors. Some are employed through a headhunter/recruiting firm, and have their insurance included through the firm. However, some firms provide no such coverage. Do you see any trends?
Valentine: As we all know, insurance costs are continuing to escalate upwards. For most firms, the solution is higher deductibles and co-pays, which I discussed in the answer to the previous question. As it becomes more difficult, we might see fewer firms willing to deal with the headache. On the other hand, if more consultants and contractors request (or even demand) access to benefits as a condition, the firms might reconsider. The size of the firm, types of clients and the firm’s financial stability are also factors to consider.
Bender: For IT pros who must seek coverage on their own, what do you suggest? I know that BCBS was offering individual plans, but for individuals over 45, the cost becomes prohibitive. Is it always better to find a group plan?
Valentine: Most of the major/national healthcare providers do offer individual plans – BCBS, Humana, United Healthcare, Assurant, Cigna, and Atena. Additionally, there are local and regional providers including Scott & White. It is important to research all of the available plans in your area and get a quote if you can. The process of determining rates is not an exact science and can varying greatly from provider to provider. It is not always better to find a group plan, but most of the time it is. Many organizations are providing members with access to healthcare plans – IEEE being one of them. There are many more – first step is identifying organizations focused on independent consultants as a core membership and it being a group you are interested in joining.
Bender: The idea of coworking has been getting a lot a press recently. For those starting or participating in a co-working venture, are there any special considerations?
Valentine: Coworking is different from simply renting space in a “business office suite” type of environment with a desk, door, receptionist, and conference room. The underlying intent of co-working is to create and foster community and communication – my advice would be to know that is a guiding principle, know yourself and how much community and communication you are seeking, and know what you want to give to and get from the arrangement.
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Omar Gallaga is the author of the popular technology blog Digital Savant on austin360. I caught up with him on blogging, improv, and sneaking up on Sarah Lacy. You can follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/omarg. |
MICHELLE:
Your Digital Savant blog allows you to diss the addition of a Motley Crue song to the video game “Rock Band”. Did you sell your soul to the devil or something? How did you score a gig that PAYS you to blog about video games?
OMAR:
I KNOW! That’s always the biggest revelation when I speak to students about journalism. It really started when I began working on the Statesman business desk way back in 1997. I’d always been big into video games and whenever there was an opportunity to write about a local game company (like Origin Systems), I always took it. After a while, I began writing more about personal tech and keeping up with the games industry became a larger part of my job.
Now, it’s probably only about 15 percent of my job, but I still try to keep up with what’s going on and play as much as I can. People forget, though, that sometimes you also have to play the really awful, worthless video games.
Surprisingly, not a lot of other people in the newsroom had a lot of interest in writing about the subject. I think a lot of people still think video games aren’t worth writing about unless you’re talking about the industry of interactive entertainment. I tend to think that there’s a lot culturally going on and that people my age (33) or younger have a lot of memories and cultural references built around games.
At the very least, it’s kind of nice not to have had all those hours I spent growing up playing video games be a complete waste. Now I also run a Web site about video gaming culture and history called Videogamey and I’m finding that I have more video game memories floating around in my head that I ever thought.
MICHELLE:
Your Digital Savant archives go all the way back to April of 2005. How did blogging and your blog in particular come about at Austin360.com?
OMAR:
It’s actually been even longer than that. Before Digital Savant, we all contributed to an “XL Blog” that was much more general. I would write about DVDs or movies or whatever else was happening. At the time, it was very experimental and only pertained to entertainment. Over time, we realized we should probably break them out into separate blogs and make them more thematic.
People in the newsroom knew that I had a pretty popular personal blog at the time that I’d been writing since 2000, so it was a natural fit for me. And technology is something I’ve always enjoyed writing about, even when I was editing our Spanish-language newspaper, ˇahora sí!. I kept “Digital Savant” going even as I was doing a whole other full-time job.
MICHELLE:
You were recently named “Employee of the Month” at the Austin American Statesman for your comprehensive coverage of your SxSW Interactive coverage. Do expand on your coverage of the conference, the disastrous Zuckerburg keynote and your run-in with Sarah Lacy.
OMAR:
It was very much a mix of good planning, long hours and some luck. My editor Sarah Lindner and I had been planning our coverage of South by Southwest Interactive for months. We’d shot videos of Hugh Forrest way in advance and had made plans to record a video of the Zuckerberg keynote. For a while, we weren’t even sure we were going to be allowed to do that and I was wrangling with SXSWi PR people over whether we would have any problems doing that or not. As it turned out, there was a whole crowd of people videotaping. But I got there an hour and a half early just to make sure I’d have a seat in the front row.
We taped the whole keynote in HD and had someone on staff waiting back at the newsroom to edit the video and post it as soon as possible. I handed the camera over when the keynote was done and we had a four-minute version of the keynote up within a few hours. As it was happening, I kept a log of interesting things that were said and things that happened and e-mailed that to the video editor so she knew exactly which clips to pull.
A few hours later, I was hunting for food and someone helped get me into an invitation-only event. Sarah Lacy happened to be there and I had my little Canon point-and-shoot. I overheard her talking to someone about the keynote and kind of laughing the whole thing off. I introduced myself and asked her if she wouldn’t mind saying what she was just saying on camera. She was very friendly and agreed.
As soon as I had the footage, I called my editor to tell her. By this time, Twitter and online blogs were already buzzing about the keynote and I knew we needed to get it up online. Our video editor had already left for the day, so I edited the footage myself on my Macbook and uploaded it to YouTube. Then it spread all over the Web after I posted about it on Twitter. It was just pure luck that I happened to run into her and that she agreed to be on video. By the next day, it seemed like the video was everywhere.
As for the rest of the conference, several of us kept in touch via text message or Twitter and we covered the conference in blogs and videos. We learned a lot. It was the first year I’d really thrown myself into SXSW in a while since coming back to covering technology and it involved commuting from New Braunfels every day and working 12-14 hour days. It was exhausting, but also really exciting. We want to do a lot more video next year and to find better ways to get updates out more quickly and efficiently.
MICHELLE:
Does the Statesman provide you will all the cool products you write about, and if so, do you get to keep them?
OMAR:
Companies send us videogames and tech products for review, but generally they ask if we want to review something first and I try to keep it very limited so we don’t get flooded with stuff we’ll never get to and have to mail back. Products that companies don’t want back (like video games or promotional junk) gets put in a company sale charity to benefit local schools.
I keep some video games for reference in case I think I may need to go back and play it again for an expansion pack or for future downloads. (Say, “Rock Band” or stuff on Xbox Live.) It’s not any different than what a music critic deals with: tons of CDs that end up in bins that you’ll never have time to review. Games usually end up in the charity sale or in a drawer, sadly.
MICHELLE:
How long do you think you’ll be on Twitter before someone throws your phone out a window?
OMAR:
My wife wants to throw my iPhone across the room sometimes. I haven’t gotten bored with Twitter yet, mostly because it went from being entertaining to useful for my job. I love it when big news spreads through Twitter or somebody posts something short, but profound.
MICHELLE:
Where are the best places to find you online?
OMAR:
My blog is at Digital Savant and I also write for Television Without Pity, Videogamey and a comic I do with my brother called “Space Monkeys!” at actiongravy.com.
I know of no one in Austin who knows more about Postgres than Decibel. For quite a while, he has been threatening to start a Postgres user group. He’s finally done it. Here is the scoop:
Event: Austin Postgres User’s Group - First Meeting
Date: Tuesday, May 6th at 6PM-8PM
Location Sun Microsystems (Map)
Building 8 - Longhorn Conference Room
5300 Riata Park Ct
Austin, TX 78727
The rough agenda will be:
6:00 - 6:30 Meet ‘n greet
6:30 - 7:15 Discuss goals for the AustinPUG
7:15 - 7:45 Presentation: What’s new it 8.3?
7:45 - 8:00 Wrap-up
Everyone who is attending will have to register as a visitor; to make this as efficient as possible, please RSVP to austinpug@decibel.org. There will be free Pizza from Mangia’s. When you register, please specify pizza preference: spinach, pepperoni, or Chicago style, etc.
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Cody Marx Bailey and his colleagues in College Station have been executing successful projects and events in rapid succession. While asking Cody if he would consider playing DJ at the upcoming Get Agile event, I took the opportunity to discuss some of the recent projects he has been involved in. |
Lynn Bender: It seems in the last year, Bryan/College Station has really established a reputation as a city with a strong, well-connected, technical community — not just as a place where people talk the talk, but rather where people put plans into action. Bryan/College Station was host to a very successful BarCampTexas II. It’s the location for the first co-working facility in Texas — The Creative Space (thecreativespace.org). You seem to be one of the main instigators. Tell me how this all came about.
Cody Marx Bailey: It really started about a year and a half ago when some friends of mine and I would all carpool to Houston for Refresh. We would leave work at 5, barely make it there on time, and make it back home around 1am. One night, on the way back, we decided that it was about time that we held our own Refresh in Bryan/College Station. We weren’t sure if it would go over, but we figured if we could get a few new faces out we would at least be that far along. We ended up with 40 or so folks coming out to hear Erica O’Grady give a talk on “The Flight of the Creative Class“. A few months later, I was able to schedule Google to come and give a talk. We had over 200 people attend and it was then that we realized that we had a real community in little old Bryan/College Station.
My friends and I were meeting after work at coffee shops, residence, and bars to get work done when it finally occurred to me that we were very close to catalyzing and forming the Creative Space. We opened up in August 2007 with 5 anchor residents that quickly grew to 10 and more recently expanded to 15 with the addition of more space.
Once the coworking office was established, the community was strong and energized, we decided that it was about time we held a BarCamp. We had attended a few BarCamps as a group so we knew what the expectations were. Our collective goal was to throw on a BarCamp and invite folks from around the state to come in and see what we had been up to. It was sort of our coming out party for our community and we knew we had to pull this off. We made several trips around the state to promote BarCampTexas II and let folks know that it was going to be awesome… and it was.
Bender: Your company, Downtown Cartel (downtowncartel.com), is one of the companies who operate out of The Creative Space. Can you tell me a bit about how The Creative Space functions, the services it provides, and how such a space benefits Downtown Cartel.
Bailey: Downtown Cartel is a direct result of The Creative Space’s opportunities. I was doing freelance work out of the space along with three other guys when it sort of dawned on us that we should work together and form a single entity to get behind. A couple of ruby developers, a python guy, some javascript and a little bit of magic later, we were official — working with some great clients out of both Austin and Houston. There’s a plethora of talented folks in The Creative Space that are all looking out to help one another and are interested in watching everyone grow. It sometimes feels like a family more than a company, but that’s because we’re a bunch of honest, good natured young professionals with tons of passion for doing great things with our customers and community. Downtown Cartel’s first product was hashtags.org, a tagging application for microblogging/twitter.
With respect to how The Creative Space functions, it is a rather loose organization of individuals. The goal is to provide a community space for anyone to come collaborate and innovate in all the creative type occupations. Since office space is never free we have several anchor tenets who have permanent desks in the space. However, anyone is welcome to borrow a spare desk when needed.
Bender: I keep hearing about a company called Fibertown, and how all you folks have fiber to the office. What’s the scoop?
Bailey: Fibertown is the development company that is transforming historic downtown Bryan into a modern technology campus. We’ve been fortunate enough to work with Fibertown to ensure the viability of the space and our businesses. The energy that we bring to downtown has already made a large impression on the professional culture in downtown.
We are situated on a fiber crossroads for five of the world’s nine Tier I internet carriers which gives us some of the best internet connectivity in the United States. We also have access to a brand new Tier IV data center just 300 feet away from our offices. With rent being a fraction of what it is in downtown Austin, Houston, and Dallas we’ve found Bryan/College Station to be a great place to live and work.
Bender: BarCampTexas II was a huge success. You managed to bring a large contingent of folks from Houston, Dallas, and Austin. Can you tell me about the event?
Bailey: Sure thing! We wanted to have a good sized BarCamp in Bryan/College Station and being nearly equi-distant from the big three we felt that it would provide a great place for everyone from around the state to come and geek out together. Folks from The Creative Space all made it out to events like GeekAustin, Houston Startup Happy Hour, RefreshDallas, etc to make sure that those communities saw that we were eager to host them. I think inviting people in person was a big factor in having 180 people show up from out of town.
Honestly, I think the kegs of Shiner may have played a big part in the success. Nothing like good beer, great people, and lots of bandwidth. Good things happen when kindling like that is provided.
Bender: I’ve wanted to go to the TED conference for years. Aside from the fact that it is 10K to attend, you have to be invited — and I am not expecting an invite in the mail. You did something about it and started the BIL conference and attracted a broad list of well-known speakers. You pretty much disproved that someone has to be in a place like Austin or Silicon Valley to put together an event of this caliber. Were there any special considerations or complications organizing the event from College Station?
As part of the Bryan/College Station contingent, we don’t let stuff like that prevent us from doing anything. We think big and execute our ideas. If you listen to every reason why not to do something, you’ll never get anything done. Once we decided we were going to do this, we got to work and reached into our social networks and started working the wiki.
What was originally going to be a few guys hanging out in Monterey became a 250 person unconference across the street from TED. We planned it so that BIL would be hitting it’s stride right when TED finished up. This allowed for about 10% of the attendees from TED to come to BIL and experience a community driven, distributed two-day unconference in the spirit of TED. I’ll admit, it was probably one of the most amazing events I’ve ever experienced. The intelligent minds that gathered that weekend in Monterey, California was nothing short of amazing.
Bender: With the rise of Social Media, there has been considerable talk about the notion of community. You and your colleagues have been able to move beyond talk and motivate each other to action. What advice can you share with folks in other cities.
Bailey: I think that leading by example is the best way to motivate others. Getting people excited about a vision and then leading them through the first couple of times really builds a track record they can trust. At first, there were probably quite a few doubters in the area. They said things like “it’ll never happen”, and “we’re too small to be legitimate”. If you sit around and listen to those people, nothing good ever happens.
The best advice I can give is to ignore the pessimism and focus on making things happen. The power of community and being able to rely on and trust them is priceless.
Cody Marx Bailey will be spinning as DJ SuperPhly at the upcoming GeekAustin Get Agile party.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before….
I am really looking forward to the Get Agile event this month. I went through my big phone book and found about 550 Austin fans of agile technology. Add the core GeekAustin folks (and subtract those that would rather stay home and download their girlfriend) — and we’re looking at a pretty good bash.
The co-host for this month’s event is Agile Austin. These folks are doing great things — sponsoring workshops, providing continuing education for software, project, and management professionals, as well as bringing industry leaders to town for speaking engagements. As far as I can tell, only about half of my friends are aware of them. I hope the rest of you can make it to the party and meet a few of these folks. If you’d like to learn more about agile in an informal environment, while tossing back a few drinks, this is your opportunity.
A note about the venue: There is plenty of room at Union Park. You won’t be standing in line to get in. And when I say that there will be valet parking, I actually call the valet company to send extra drivers. So you want to take advantage of it, you won’t have to wait to get your car parked either. The drinks at Union Park are generous and reasonably priced. For those of you who want to see how agile you are after a couple of drinks, we’ll be in the BoomBoom room.
Here’s the details:
Get Agile with GeekAustin / Agile Austin
Tuesday April 29th 6PM-9PM
at Union Park 612 w. 6th street (map)
Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/433148/
We have a few surprises in store as well — but we’re not going to tell.
To get on the invite list for future GeekAustin events, send email to linearb@gmail.com
Hope to see you there!
-Lynn
After outgrowing the last few venues, it became necessary to find something a bit larger for the upcoming GeekAustin Agile and WordPress events. Michelle had been telling me to check out Union Park, next to Katz’s, telling me what a great place it was. So, next time Jana and I had one of our whiskey and paté nights, we stopped by for a few rounds of Maker’s Mark. The drinks are very reasonably priced, there is a beautiful view from their upstairs patio, and Greg Bodle, the owner, is a great guy. Then we saw the Union Park BoomBoom Room:
It’s decided. Union Park is the place. Hope you can join us at the next event.
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Martin Galway, longtime veteran of the Austin game industry, sent me an note yesterday to let me know that his latest company, Certain Affinity, is seeking a IT manager. I took the opportunity to catch up with Martin on the latest news — including Plunder. |
Lynn Bender: So, how long has CertainAffinity been around? You’re one of the founders, yes?
Martin Galway: I am a co-founder along with the Max Hoberman, the company president. Max is the chap who designed all the multiplayer features of the Halo games. Max is an austin native who, after working in Chicago and Seattle for decade, decided he had to come back. When Max met a few of us ex-Digital Anvil folks, we decided to start a company together.
Bender: Martin, it seems like you’ve been in town since the early Origin days. Are you an Austin native as well?
Galway: A school friend of mine had moved over to Austin and was working at Origin. He recommended me to come over in early 1988 for some freelance audio work. I immediately fell in love with the place - and Origin, who happened to have no audio staff at the time. They liked my work, so we started to talk employment. After some visa wrangling, I finally made it over at the end of 1990, and started Origin’s audio department. In 1996 a group of us left Origin and started Digital Anvil.
Bender: How did Certain Affinity get started?
Galway: In mid 2006, I was picking up the pieces after Microsoft had closed our beloved Digital Anvil studio (what a soap opera!). At a July 4th party, I was introduced to Max Hoberman who, while still on the Bungie payroll and still working on Halo 3, had finagled his return to Austin after ten years in the Bungie wildernesses of Chicago and Seattle. Max said he needed to come back to Austin - understandable! We formed Certain Affinity soon after, with Max as president, and by November we were off and running with nine staff and our first project, a map pack for Halo 2. That came out in April 2007, by which time we’d begun some original IP designs. We got Valve interested in us enough to land XBOX360 co-development work on their upcoming action-horror title Left 4 Dead, but continued work on the original stuff, and you’ll be seeing the fruits of both this year.
Bender: Everyone is talking about your new game, Plunder. What is the scoop?
Galway: That’s one of our original IPs - due out in the middle of this year from Capcom. It’s an easy-to-learn, action strategy title featuring pirates - basically you have to keep the other ships away from your stuff while you build up your empire. There’s tons of cannon fire and sinking ships everywhere, but it’s all viewed from hundreds of feet away so we don’t think of it as a violent game. Plunder is enjoyable for all ages, and we’re working to make sure it has depth enough for hard-core players, while people who don’t think they’re up to a conventional action title can still feel comfortable playing it. As one example of the simplicity - there’s no aiming, and no fire button! You just sail your ship up alongside the enemy, and a thrilling sea-battle automatically ensues. Anything you sail up to that you can fire on, you fire on. Sail away to stop the battle. In our play tests, all the non-gamers love it because they’re able to feel equal to the hardcore gamers.
Bender: I noticed that your games are geared mostly for the xbox. Do you have plans to extend to other platforms?
Galway: We are mostly an XBOX360 company, since that’s our recent background. Plunder will be on XBOX360, Playstation 3 and Windows.
Bender: In your email, you said that Certain Affinity needed an IT person. Can you tell me about the position?
Galway: We’re up over twenty staff now and I’ve been overloaded for some time. We’ve started to hire infrastructure people that make the company tick over in a much more professional way than me trying to do it all myself. The IT person will help solve our communications inside the company as well as with external partners, improve security, backups, and keep all our software and systems in peak condition. If they have other skills closer to development, there are always opportunities to get stuck in and help out. And - play our games of course, that’s important.
Bender: Do you have a jobs page that we can link to?
Galway: Sure. It’s: http://certainaffinity.com/jobs.htm
Bender: Thanks for giving me the latest news. I’ll be calling about that playtest. ;)
To get in the mood for the upcoming interview with Gordon Montgomery of Neudesic, I scanned Google for podcasts dealing with UX. I stumbled on to Gerry Gaffney’s User Experience Podcast (UXpod). This is a real gem. UXpod has over 30 high quality interviews with leading figures in User Experience including Luke Wroblewski, Joel Spolsky, Elizabeth Rosenzweig, Steve Krug and many others.
You might have paid to hear some of these folks speak at conferences. Thanks to UXPod, you can experience them in your car on the way to the office. If one of the lectures isn’t interesting, just fast forward to the next. It’s not like being at a conference where everyone sees you leave the room. You can stop them while you head in to UpperCrust for coffee, and you can make them start all over again if you get distracted by the driver next to you. Not even Tim O’Reilly can do that at a conference.
Happy listening, and see you on Mopac!
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Julie Gomoll is the president of Launchpad Coworking, which will be the first official coworking space in Austin, TX. Currently Launchpad is in the exploratory demolition phase, but but you can track its progress as well as read more about coworking on the Launchpad Coworking blog. |
MICHELLE: How did you learn about coworking, and what originally piqued your interest?
JULIE: The idea started in my twenties — I wanted to open a cool bar where smart people hung out and had great conversations. Then I realized I didn’t need to hang out in bars and that people who were hanging out in bars all day weren’t having such interesting conversations after all. I realized my dream was really about building good community. So I started thinking about a coffee shop. Now I’m in my forties, and I like to hang out and work in coffee shops, but find them lacking. I started to think about doing something using the coffee shop model, but in a way that would better facilitate work.
I was talking to Tori Breitling about the idea and she said told me about a coworking group and said, “Look what these people are doing.” I thought we could do that — a coffee shop with extra room for coworking. We got so into the whole coworking idea that we flipped the idea around, and it evolved into a coworking space with an attached coffee shop.
I’ve always been a big fan of collaboration. I’m of the mind that sharing information makes us smarter and stronger. In the eighties, I ran my company Go Media, the company I eventually sold to Excite, that way. One of my philosophies was that I wanted everyone I hired to be able to teach me something. I hired people who knew things I didn’t. I like people who work with me instead of for me. For example, back then I was doing production on the Mac but I wanted to know about design so I hired a designer.
I applied this philosophy to working with clients, too. I might say to a client, “You don’t need me to do this, I can teach you how to do it yourself.” Telling my “secrets” not only didn’t lose me work, it got me lots more work.
With LaunchPad Coworking, I get to learn about architecture, IT stuff, café stuff… I’ve never done anything in food service, that’s not my world, so I hire people who know what they’re doing and it’s great, I get to learn a ton. So we’re not just building a coworking space, we’re also coworking within our company and learning from each other.
MICHELLE: Your team ranges from UI experts, to designers, to an ex-manager at Jo’s, to entrepreneurs and marketers. How did y’all meet and then decide to start Launchpad?
JULIE: I’ve known Tori — now our user experience architect — since ’85. She’s one of the first people I met when I moved here. We’ve worked together at Go Media, Excite, Halsoft and now LaunchPad Coworking. Marie Hwang I met through Tori. And Tina Rosenzweig I met through Marie. Susan Price is someone I’ve known since my job at TypeThree, my first job in Austin. Susan and I have been in some ways coworking since we met. We’ve often run our companies from shared space so we could be around each other’s smart clients and smart coworkers.
I’m the one who decided to start LaunchPad Coworking, and I put the team together, but making it happen certainly has been a collaborative effort.
MICHELLE: When do you open, and what’s going down when you do?
JULIE: We’re opening in July. Before we open we’ll do a couple of days of dry runs — get people from the local community to come in and see how it works. It’s a different kind of space and a different business model so we want people to come in and test the design of the space and the software that we’ve developed.
We’ll have an opening party a couple of weeks after we’re open. We have more people interested in that party than I can fit, though, so perhaps we’ll have several parties :)
I’m eager to see what works and what doesn’t once we’re open and to make necessary adjustments. I think it’s going to be a massive learning experience from day one.
MICHELLE: Right now I am cooped up in my dark duplex writing these questions. If Launchpad was open right now, how would it make writing this post a more pleasant experience?
JULIE: You’d be in the nice, spacious, light environment around other people, some you know, some you don’t know. It’ll be an inspiring place, a comfortable place, with access to great coffee and food. You can still work alone if you want — put on your headphones or put up a Do Not Disturb card — or you can talk to people around you, ask for advice, ask for ideas, get to know your other coworkers and build community. And you’ll be around other people who want the same thing.
Do you have any other ingenious events planned to get internet geeks like me away from their desks at home and coworking at Launchpad?
JULIE: As far as ingenious events, we will have some. We’re just getting our event strategy in place, but we know for sure we’ll have Nova Science Now Science Cafes, for example, (www.sciencecafes.org) — these involve conversations with scientists on current science topics. But day-to-day this is about a good place to work and a good place for community.
MICHELLE: If someone wanted to follow Launchpad’s progress, what should they do?
JULIE: We’ve already got a lot of interest, people are already wanting to make reservations. I can’t wait to get our software up so they can start doing that online!
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Jason Cohen founded Smart Bear Software on a bet. The bet paid off. Profitable and cash-flow positive since Q4 ‘03, Smart Bear was recently acquired by the software testing firm, Automated QA. During a recent conversation about agile practices, Jason mentioned that Smart Bear was employing agile practices in their marketing strategy. I asked if I could interview him for GeekAustin. |
Lynn Bender: Jason, it seems like only a few years back when GeekAustin saw the first Smart Bear job posting.. Since then, you’ve gone on to win the Jolt award for Code Collaborator. I believe, however, that Code Collaborator wasn’t your first product. Could you tell me about your suite of tools and the market they serve?
Jason Cohen: Yeah, it was just a few years back when GeekAustin ran our first posting. By the way that’s also where I found employee #1!
Code Historian was our first product — a version control system data-mining tool. Version control is used primarily to keep developers from stepping on each others’ toes, but there’s a lot of useful data in there that’s generally hard to get at. We had everything from a “time-line diff” where you could get a diff of a file between any two points in time with one click to a system that transferred version control data to an RDBMS for real reporting.
Code review wasn’t in the original game plan. I stumbled into this hole in the developer tools market because people were abusing Code Historian in order to do reviews. By listening to my customers I made my way into code review.
Sounds agile already doesn’t it? Morphing yourself based stakeholder input rather than sticking to some pre-determined long-term master plan. If I hadn’t done that, we would certainly not have the same success.
Bender: When we last discussed agile methodology, you mentioned that Smart Bear employs agile methods in business and marketing. Could you elaborate on this?
Cohen: The traditional business plan looks out 2-4 years. Marketing — especially in print and events — takes months to plan, expects targets to be met months in the future, and campaigns often run 1-2 years.
These time-lines are as far-sighted and pre-planned as traditional waterfall software development, and at Smart Bear we don’t have them. Our marketing efforts can last 1-2 months, and can be set up in less than a month. We measure the response and adjust accordingly.
Bender: Traditionally, it seems that marketing has been driven by that elusive quality called inspiration. Once found, this is usually followed by pre-launch preparation, and then a massive launch. This is a heavyweight approach. Are there ways to insert agile practices into these steps — or do you simply have to discard this approach entirely?
Cohen: It’s a tricky answer because some things in marketing are beyond your control.
For example, print ads have a 2-3 month lead-time, and often you have to sign up for 6-12 months. Tradeshows can have a 12-month lead-time to get involved and 6 months lead-time for preparation. You can’t change these timelines, so to some extent they exert non-agile control over your efforts. For example, if the new print ad talks about features in v4.0, it’s going to come out 3 months from now and you’d better have released those features by then!
However the majority of our marketing efforts are, in fact, very different from the usual approach you described. We don’t talk about artsy-fuzzy things like ‘inspiration, we start early, and we fail-fast. We throw out the traditional model completely except for these issues of timeline.
Bender: Your book on code review is prominently advertised on the Smart Bear website. How does this fit in to your agile marketing strategy?
Cohen: We give away something of real value — a book about code review. It’s a physical book and and we print and ship it for free. There are sample chapters on-line so you can see that it’s full of genuinely useful information, not a sales pitch. We ask where you heard about us and people tell us. We know they tell the truth because if they came in from a web page we save the referring URL and we can see that the text they type in does match the referring site, so we assume it’s accurate for the other marketing efforts too.
We know books lead to trials because in our live demos the potential customer has always gotten the book. Over 50% of people who get a live demo end up purchasing, so there’s a direct and substantial correlation between getting books and purchasing.
We use the book to determine which marketing efforts work. Sure, it costs money to print and ship books, but what’s the value of not only promoting your product and earning trust in your company, but simultaneously measuring the efficacy of every marketing campaign?
Bender: Programmers have a suite of pre-built tools to drive the development process. Can you tell me a bit about how you manage test-driven marketing? I am guessing that there is nothing like JUnit for marketing.
Cohen: Ha, yeah there’s not.
The idea of test-driven development is to set up the conditions for success, then write code until the conditions are met. It also implies that you continue to measure continuously in the future to make sure you don’t regress.
We approach our marketing the same way. It’s only a question of time and money to get a print ad in 7 magazines, to get a booth at 20 tradeshows, and to spend $10k/month on Google ads. But you don’t have infinite time or money, and you know half those marketing efforts are a complete waste. So you have to measure which ones work and only spend money there.
So first set up the test cases. Maybe it’s “We get an average of 100 leads/month from this ad.” Or “We get 5 sales from that tradeshow.” Then you try it, and measure it (measurement is the hard part). Then it either passes or fails. If passes, we might spend more money but we’ll definitely stay with it. If it fails, we’ve spent a known amount of money, that’s OK.
Then there’s the “continuous testing” part. We’ve found that in marketing it’s often true that an ad can work in a magazine for 2 years and then stop being effective. So there’s the regression bug testing aspect as well.
We just use a single table in a database for book orders. We have a bunch of regex’s that look through user-supplied “how did you hear” (it’s fill-in-the-blank to prevent people from selecting an item at random) and mapping it into a set of 30+ fixed categories. Then we just “group by” that and count the books, usually grouping by date etc.. We use MS Access to generate a few reports.
One of the neat reports is “ROI.” Here we have a little table (updated by hand in Access) with how much money we’ve spent in each campaign, then we link that to the book orders. So it’s “Cost per book” on the advertising side; add in the cost to print and ship times the number of books and you have your total expense.
Bender: Can you tell me a bit more about the test metrics?
Cohen: It’s often difficult to link a sale to a marketing campaign, which is ultimately what you want to know. That is, if I spend X dollars on campaign C, I eventually get Y dollars in revenue. Most people are happy if Y > X, even if Y isn’t much bigger, even with overhead. We’re like that.
But tying the X dollars to the Y dollars is a lot of steps. When they got from your ad / booth / mailer / phone call to your web site / sales rep, did you record that fact? When others in the same group try out your software, do you link that to the original guy who found you? When you get the purchase order from accounts payable, can you link that as well?
Often even the first step is hard. Print advertising is notoriously difficult. You can try a fancy URL, but techie people know that’s unnecessary. Print-ad sales reps tell you you’re buying a brand, but that’s not my experience.
Bender: Putting the stakeholders first is considered to be one of the core agile values. Can you tell me a bit how this works in marketing / business development?
Cohen: It’s tautological to say that marketing should be driven by customers’ desires, behaviors, pains, etc., but so often it just isn’t.
Take IBM WebSphere (http://www-306.ibm.com/software/websphere/). It’s almost impossible to get any real information from the site. Tons of links to nebulous places, empty text like “Extend access to business processes, applications and information to anyone anywhere.” Was this site designed to serve a potential customer, or just a hierarchical dumping ground for a mountain of information?
Contrast with Safari (http://www.apple.com/safari/). In 5 seconds I can see what it is. I can download with one click, or I can get screenshots and brief, tantalizing descriptions of what it does. Isn’t that what you want from a software web page 90% of the time? This is designed with the curious, time-strapped user in mind.
We’re always in our customers’ heads. Everything we make — print ads, website, product screens — we ask ourselves questions like: What is the use-case? Is this really what I want to see, or is this just what we’re trying to push down their throats? Is this serving a specific purpose or is it fluff? Are we communicating something useful with every phrase or are we speaking in generalities? Are we really solving a specific problem for the customer?
If you don’t ask these questions, you’re not treating your potential customer (the ultimate stakeholder) as the most important thing.
Bender: Do you ever think we will hear marketing people talk about SCRUM and sprints?
Cohen: I doubt it. Although it would be nice to get iterations, 2-week deadlines usually not important in fact.
The “meetings” part of scrum is to get everyone the same page, but in marketing a lot of times either the projects don’t intersect at all (tradeshow planning versus print ads; once the copy and art is done there’s nothing else to interact on) or everyone works together almost continuously anyway, checking things out many times per day — sometimes even like “pair programming. The “release SOMETHING INTERESTING regularly” is probably a useful technique.
Bender: Will you be in town for the Get Agile with Geek Austin party this month?
Cohen: You bet! GeekAustin parties are always a blast.
Bender: I’ll see you then. Jason, thanks for taking the time.
I am more fortunate than many. I only spend about 20 mins a day on Mopac. Thanks to IT Conversations mp3s, Mopac has become my IT classroom. Leading up to this month’s GeekAustin Agile Happy Hour, I decided to fish around for agile podcasts and conference proceedings. Here are two of my finds:
Agile Toolkit Podcast. There are a lot of great interviews here — enough to keep you busy for a few months. In particular:
Team Agile Interviews. Includes interviews with Kent Beck and Johanna Rothman.
With all these resources, we’ll all be scrum masters in no time. Just don’t forget to stop for gas.
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I first became acquainted with David Neff, the local director of Web, film and interactive strategies for the American Cancer Society, through the his participation in the Social Media Club of Austin. David has both a background in programming and public relations. At SXSW08, David a panel called The Future of Volunteers: Adapt or Die. Now that the dust has settled from SXSW08, I caught up with David to find out about his latest project: |
Lynn Bender: Tell us about SharingHope.TV
David Neff: SharingHope.TV is one of the first User Gernerated Content Communities built by a non-profit. On the community anyone can share video, audio, photos and artwork about their cancer experience.
Bender: The first? That is surprising. CMSs have been around for almost a decade.
Neff: Ahh but not one’s around User Generated Content — at least not video, photos and artwork.
Bender: Did you build the system from the ground up, or did you start with an existing framework — like drupal or jive? How many developers were involved, and how long did it take to complete the project?
Neff: We had 3 developers involved and they were all local Austin talent. The site was completed in around 6 months which was a record turnaround for us!
Bender: I find it hard to believe that the site was the work of three guys. It’s an incredible site.
Neff: The entire site was built in PHP5 on the ZenD framework while our entire registration system was built on Ruby. The API for the flash encoding and player as well as other calls was purchased off the shelf from a company called VMIX. Ian Mouton was the php programmer and Tom Brown our OpenID and Ruby expert. If you need a Rails person here in town check out Tom Brown. Our web designer was Nicole DeZalia who works for us here at the American Cancer Society, I was just the brainchild and project manager. We are running SharingHope.TV on Slicehost and on Ubuntu Gusty. Slicehost has been an amazing provider.
Bender: Did you start with more or less a complete set of specifications, or did you modify the specs as you were building out the site?
Neff: Oh we modified the heck out of it. We knew we wanted certain things such as categories to group media, openID support, Creative Common licensing of materials, etc but it was very fluid. We are totally in love with OpenID.
BenderCan you tell me a bit about the pros and cons of OpenID? I’ve heard mostly praise, but a little grumbling as well. It seems that adoption by service provider is growing much faster than adoption by the user base.
Neff: Although I am not an OpenID expert I know that the average user is really tired of signing up for u/p u/p u/p again and again. Even here at the American Cancer Society you had to have diff logins for all our Web properties. From one message board to another, etc. OpenID really helps us solve that problem for the avg user. Now it’s up to us to educate them. We plan to implement it on all our Web properties in the next year and half.
Bender: If you had to start the project again from scratch, is there anything you would have done differently? What advice do you have for folks considering similar projects?
Neff: yes I hope we can at least get our employees and volunteers on board to help that adoption. I would say that if you have to invest in one form of “Web 2.0″ technology (and I do hate that term) it should be user generated content. Listening to your constituents and what they have to say is one of the most important things any non-profit for for-profit can do. We have built a community for people to share their cancer experiences in digital form and that will give other hope.
Bender: A couple of questions regarding non-profits. Several houston-based social media experts, like Erica O’Grady and Ed Schipel, say that Austin is a huge center for non-profit activity. Do you find this to be the case as well, and if so, to what do you attribute that?
Neff: I would say that would be true to an extent. I think it has to do a lot with our “Social Good” attitude in Austin. We are a very caring and friendly city. Also being near the capital has a lot of advocacy benefits when it comes to influencing laws. I do wish more people came to the 501 Tech Club here in town. Imagine Geeks and Non-profits folks (I’m both) meeting and sharing ideas.
Bender: Tell me more about the 501 club in Austin. Is that similar to NetSquared?
Neff: yes very similar except I think we have livlier discussions.
Bender: A few of my friends who do fund raising often tell me that it is easier to ask for $10,000 than $100. However, looking at the campaigns of Barack Obama and Ron Paul, I’m not sure that is still the case. With respect to cancer research, organizations like the Susan Komen Foundation seem to be proving that to be no longer the case as well. Are the new tools we have at our disposal changing the non-profits in fundamental ways?
Neff: Oh yeah we totally see the rise the the micro-donation and the micro-volunteer. We have people donating in Linden Dollars in Second Life. So, yes we see the rise of the micro-donation to be very important. In fact every video on SharingHope.TV has donations tied into it. We think that is a first to tie online video into donations. Will it work only time will tell?
Bender: Can you tell me something about the role of the Creative Commons in sharinghope.tv? You seem to have given it prominent mention.
Neff: Yes we really really want to honor the wishes of the media creators on www.sharinghope.tv. — meaning that we give them 4 options to license their materials. We also found a bunch of local bands and bands from San Diego that have licenesed their music for people to use in their videos on the site. The options we give people are listed here: http://www.sharinghope.tv/creative-commons and the music we offer them to use (so we don’t get sued like YouTube) is can be found here: http://www.sharinghope.tv/music.php.
Bender: What kind of opportunities are their for folks who may not have money to donate, but would be willing to code for a good cause? I remember that the League of Technical Voters codeathon attracted over 50 coders who devoted a weekend.
Neff: I know I was very jealous! We have a host of “Dream projects” that we need help on from updating old asp pages to helping us implement new API’s on SharingHope.TV
Bender: Do you have any specs online for these unfinished projects?
Neff: no but I could do that or have people contact me if they are interested. There is a views API and a plays API that we need to put on SharingHope.TV but would love to find a coder to volunteer to do that. We are also looking for someone to just help us make minor php tweaks
Bender: Well, if you put up a specs page, I’m sure that quite a few of us would be happy to link to it.
Neff: Consider that done. I know the VMIX API has a dev wiki as well. Also I am just looking for coders to blog about it in general for publicity and to let people know about the site — to show off all our tech….non profits can do cutting edge technical work as well!
Bender: you mentioned that you were the project manager. I’m finding more and more that the key skills to have are no longer having a knowledge of data structures and algorithms but rather a knowledge of scoping and managing projects. How does this compare with your experience?
Neff: What you are saying is very true. I can’t code PHP worh a crap but I can read it and help people stay on track. Scoping is a skill all int itself today. Currently I am the Director of Web, Film and Interactive Strategy. So I come from a Web Development and Communications background. Which is nice to be able to understand and write code and talk about it.
Bender: You spoke at SXSWi this year. How was your panel experience at SXSW?
Neff: Oh I love SXSW. Hugh and the folks do such a good job. We did a panel on the Future of Volunteers and where we need to be in 5 years to recruit them and keep them interested. As you might imagine that will involve a ton of digital outreach. Check out the video here: http://www.fispace.org/home/2008/03/adapt-or-die-th.html
Bender: Our audience is pretty geeky. Any new projects in the works that you can tell us about?
Neff: Oh I know your audience is geeky! That’s why I read it and I love the happy hours. I recommend them and 501 tech club all the time. As far as new things we are swamped right now coding out all the specs on SharingHope.tv and just telling people about it. If you know anyone with cancer please point them our way. We are here to help!
Bender: David. Thanks for your time.
