The dreaded 10x, or, how to handle exceptional employees
The reality (myth?) is that there are engineers who are ten times more productive than other engineers (some would argue 100x, but okay). Jon Evans, who is CTO at HappyFunCorp, dives into the strengths and weaknesses of these vaunted people and how to manage them and their relationships with other team members.
The anti-10x squad raises many important and valid — frankly, obvious and inarguable — points. Go down that Twitter thread and you’ll find that 10x engineers are identified as: people who eschew meetings, work alone, rarely look at documentation, don’t write much themselves, are poor mentors, and view process, meetings, or training as reasons to abandon their employer. In short, they are unbelievably terrible team members.
Is software a field like the arts, or sports, in which exceptional performers can exist? Sure. Absolutely. Software is Extremistan, not Mediocristan, as Nassim Taleb puts it.
A guide to Virtual Beings and how they impact our world
If your 10x engineers are too annoying to deal with, maybe consider just getting virtual beings instead. The inaugural Virtual Beings Summit was held recently in San Francisco, a conference designed to bring together storyline editors, virtual reality engineers, influencer marketers and more to consider the future of “virtual beings.”
I have to say (and I don’t say this often): I was really inspired by how much is going to come from this space in the coming years.
Extra Crunch media columnist Eric Peckham attended the show and discusses his lessons learned about where this new market is headed.
We’re in the early stages of evolving virtual assistants from computers spitting out basic information in a robotic voice based on a human input — like a voice-based Google search — to virtual companions whose voices and conversational abilities feel more human. Passing a Turing Test isn’t the point here though: we don’t need our virtual companions to be exactly like humans, just to be able to engage with us in a high-EQ manner and convey emotional sensitivity (the way Pixar can make a robot or toy cowboy that we feel an emotional connection to).
At the Virtual Beings Summit, Ryan Germick (a principal designer at Google) explained this best. The dozens of staff now working on the editorial side of Google Assistant are giving it the persona of a “hipster librarian,” he said.
Wall St analyst Laura Martin on the fate of Netflix, breaking up Google, EU regulation, and a decade of more money for Hollywood
In addition to covering the Virtual Beings Summit, Eric also got a chance to discuss the future of media with noted media analyst Laura Martin who is “the senior analyst covering entertainment and internet stocks at leading investment bank Needham & Company.” They have a wide ranging conversation about a media landscape that is transforming rapidly.
Martin: Most of the new entrants into the video space do not need to make money in video, so they can overspend on content because it’s subsidized by a sister subsidiary like phones or e-commerce or social or search.
Peckham: How long is the window they can run at a loss here — overspending on content to secure market share — before investors become much more critical? Whether we’re talking about Apple or Amazon or Disney (because it has the theme parks). Or can they can always operate at a loss and count it as a marketing cost for their other product lines?
Martin: It’s a bigger problem if you are a pure content play like Netflix where your valuation is predicated on a single asset. It’s also a big problem for those 4,000 apps that are sitting on Roku. Whatever profits they were making are under downward pressure because somebody will soon be able to spend seven dollars and buy the Walt Disney Company’s subscription service.
The Exit: The acquisition charting Salesforce’s future
Lucas Matney is back with the next edition of “The Exit,” his series looking at the major venture exits of the day and the people behind them. This week, he talks about Salesforce’s massive $15.7 billion acquisition of Tableau with Scott Sandell at NEA, who owned 38% of Tableau at the company’s IPO in 2013. Learn why Scott invested in Tableau, and how he thought about the growth of the company over its history.
Matney: In the pre-IPO life cycle of Tableau from 2004 when you made your first investment to the later rounds, there were some big things happening with the broader global economy. Was their some belt-tightening at Tableau during the financial crisis?
Sandell: So, Tableau’s core was built on less than $2 million in capital, even though we invested a lot more than that. The company was incredibly parsimonious with the capital that we had given them, which I think was one of the signature reasons for why they were so successful.
And I’ve found over and over again, that people that are incredibly careful with capital are often more successful.
And, in the case of Tableau, there was this adjustment that I remember happening in October of 2008, so right in the middle of the global financial crisis. It was right after the board meeting, and I went into Christian’s office as I usually did just to chat about things and we talked about whether we should make some adjustments to our plans.
We’ve been growing something like 100% per year for the prior couple of years, and we were talking about whether we should be trying to grow at that same pace or if we should pull back a little bit. We decided to be a little bit more conservative in our hiring plan and just see how things developed.
And if you look at the revenue trajectory of Tableau today, 2009 is the only year in which the company wasn’t growing like crazy. So, at the time that was a pretty tough decision but it turned out to be a good one.
Frontiers in civility: Facebook and YouTube’s moderation failure is an opportunity
Few issues have hit the social media world harder than the challenge of creating safe online spaces for all people. Devin Coldewey analyzes the nuances of creating the right kinds of moderation that protect free speech while also encouraging safety. He also looks at how Facebook, YouTube and really any content company can think about their rules and regulations, and how this could even be a competitive advantage against incumbents.
Startups in the social space have an opportunity to create significant inroads in new niches while the offerings from the bigger players are poisoned by their inability to keep their houses in order.
Consider the idea of starting a new social network, using the term loosely, a few years ago versus today.
Not long ago the threat of Facebook cloning and thereby eliminating a competing app was a serious one. But the company’s track record on new products recently has been very bad, trust is continually dropping to new lows, and of course even the very idea of a single social network for all purposes has become almost quaint.
There are still the challenges of traction and building a viable product, of course, but it’s not a foregone conclusion that it will be crowded out by Facebook. Creating something “sticky” with the younger demographic has always been difficult, and I wouldn’t expect one out of fifty startups or apps targeting it to amount to anything. But products have a better opportunity to succeed and fail on their merits now than they have for years.
Inside the history of Silicon Valley labor
Talking about improving the lives of people in tech, our resident tech ethicist Greg Epstein interviewed Louis Hyman, who is “a Professor at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and Director of the ILR’s Institute for Workplace Studies, in New York.” He is also the author of Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary. They discuss the changing power structures of Silicon Valley, the history of labor rights in the industry, and what the future of immigration holds for tech.
Epstein: Can you clarify why that doesn’t work again and again? Because the industries are increasingly powerful financially and/or politically, so employers are given a free pass? Or other reasons?
Hyman: Historically, whenever these attempts are made to prosecute employers, the government simply does not enforce the law. It is… shocking. A more satisfying solution to illegal employment would be penalizing the employers who seek to subvert our laws.
This plan was first tried, and failed, in California in the early 1970s. In California, in the decade after its passage, no one was prosecuted under the law. Gaylord Grove of the San Diego Office of the Labor Commission told an interviewer in 1982, “Oh, we don’t enforce that law…It’s a dead law.”
[And when] the California law failed, its failure went unnoticed. The logic of employer sanctions, with its moral high-ground, became a model for national policy, starting with President Carter in 1977. Meanwhile, of course, undocumented laborers were still being captured at electronics factories across the state and deported, with no consequence for the companies themselves.
And so part of the story in the book is that failed legislative and regulatory history and it’s disappointing that this basically happens again and again and nothing changes for the actual workers who are rounded up and put in detention facilities.
‘The Operators’: Experts from WeWork and Brex talk marketing – Getting the most bang for your buck
Finally, we have an EC-exclusive transcript from the latest podcast episode of “The Operators.” In this episode, hosts Tim Hsia and Neil Devani interview Christiana Rattazzi, Head of Tech Marketing at WeWork, and Elenitsa Staykova, VP of Marketing at Brex, to discuss how they build marketing operations at two of the fastest-growing startups in the world.
Staykova:Yeah that’s a good question, I would say it depends. It depends on the marketing strategy. For Brex, I’m still relatively new at the company, but the strategies that I’m implementing at the moment have to a few things. So we are splitting the budget into top of funnel brand campaign that you cannot directly tie to attribution.
Then the second big bucket of our spend is around the tactics that you can then point the finger and say “I did this type of tactics which contributed x amount of sign-ups or activations, you can tie them directly to acquisition, and then a really small part of our body is being spent on tests and things that will prepare us for the future. So then, if that’s the strategy, what we’re creating would depend, so for our brand campaigns you know we have both creative.
You might have noticed our billboards here in the city, but that type of messaging is very specific for the audience that we’re trying to reach, which is the startups and guess what, there’s so many in San Francisco alone. And then the rest of the big spend for assets it’s around acquisition and that big channel and the goal here is to create synergies among the various channels between digital paid campaigns, email, events that we sponsor and we go to, and each of these channels will have different creative and assets, but it all has to tie together to the story we’re trying to say.
Thanks
To every member of Extra Crunch: thank you. You allow us to get off the ad-laden media churn conveyor belt and spend quality time on amazing ideas, people, and companies. If I can ever be of assistance, hit reply, or send an email to danny@techcrunch.com.