37signals, on of my favorite software development companies, and creators of the Ruby on Rails Framework, have made the move into a whole new territory.
Easy Money
They have essentially decided that it is easier to bring together content and content consumers than it is to create markets. Nice insight. A few years back they did the same thing that Joel Spolsky did which is realize that all the traffic they had was worth something, other than just as potential customers for their product. Becuase the market of people who were reading their blogs, and visiting their website was already self-segmented and was of high value (people interested in specific things, and ready to take action) they decide to find a way to resell this attention.
Maybe they prefer to sit comfortably leading and managing the economi-verse that ruby on rails has become, and using their prestige to become connectors instead of producers. It is definitely a more fun work environment if all you need to do is opine, and judge. Production and creation are definitely riskier and require more sweat.
Who can blame them, after the success they’ve had they deserve a little bit of laurel resting.
DISCLAIMER
We had chosen Haystack as the CodeName for the project we are currently working on, and I was looking forward to the day that we might drop the money down to purchase this domain, so of course I have a little bit of spoiled grapes about losing out to them. On the other hand I do like their design.
In fact this is the main thing I like about 37signals is their aesthetic.
Thomas was more than a word smith, he was an artist with lexical paint. In response to the news that Thomas was dead (sadly delivered not in person, or in comfort of voice but by Facebook message) my good friend and mentor Dr. David Ray wrote:
It’s impossible to live as if one actually believes it, but there is truth in that saying “Tomorrow is promised to no one.”
I completely agree with this sentiment, living in this way would be akin to enlightenment, understanding the vanishing nature of time and being able to be “aware” of it as you live is in fact impossible. It is not surprising that Buddhist monks live in isolation and meditate all day
long. This is simply what is necessary to concentrate fully on self-awareness.
Fundamentally this approach is flawed however b/c it lacks actual interconnectedness. While it make create a connectedness with the wonderfulness of the universe it loses a connectedness with the NOW as it vanishes, it eliminates the grief from the loss of time
and thereby reduces love to universal constant, without variance and therefore without the illusion of specialness.
For my part I will take a middle road, and try to remember more often than when a friend passes away, that I love the friend…but love is a verb. And simply to feel love no matter how deeply or in how enlightened a state, to feel without acting is an illusion of a different sort and I am not hungry for such dreams.
Thomas and I use to joke, sitting around drinking a beer at his house in Home Park that we were doppelgangers. I think the idea was that we had come from very similar backgrounds, similar upbringing. We both had older, more intellectual brothers. We both believed in doing stuff more than talking about stuff. T Peake was almost 3 years older than me. He taught me most everything I know about appreciating music, and about opening my mind, and listening harder to find the true beauty of things.
I remembered that advice well when I moved to Arizona, and began to see the beauty of the desert by looking harder, learning to see what the desert hides, at sunrise and sunset, a place full of life, not barren and harsh.
Sometime in the early 90s not long before I moved away from Atlanta, I ended up in Hilton Head with a girlfriend, and Thomas and I took a ferry across to Dalfuskie Island in SC. What a strange little trip. We had not seen each other for most of the summer, and ended up being there together by accident. Thomas had brought a boom box, but left his tapes behind. We scrounged around my backpack for a tape and found Pharcyde. Not a favorite of either of us, but we put it on, and the 4 of us (I can’t remember who he was with) rode on this little electric golf cart through dirt paths of the island until we came across a beautiful patch of beach. It so funny, b/c we all agreed that hip hop was not the music score you would have expected, but it combined perfectly and gave us a wonderful little time. We all stripped down to our underwear, ran out to the ocean and then basked in the sun on the sandy beach for a few hours eating snack bars and drinking bottled water.
Not long before this trip Thomas took a Whitewater Rafting trip with his family and firends down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon. When he came back he talked about it for hours. How amazing it really was, beyond the normal Wow, it was a life changing experience. “I can’t wait to go back there and hike down to some of the places we rafted by…” I don’t know but I do believe he returned to the river a few more times. For certain he and his bride Dena went there again to go camping this year, and after a fantastic, peaceful and beautiful trip Thomas set off on a last hike down to the river. Along the way, he slipped and fell.
I saw this video and it made me think of him.
His Professional Profile Photo, does the man justice
Hanging out with Thomas, life was like some kind of Journey, it always felt like an adventure. He was one of the most enthusiastic people I have ever met, and no one I have ever known savoured every minute of life as much as he. He picked up friends every where he went. Someone commented that he never knew a stranger, only friends he had not met yet. For more info on his funeral and other ways to tribute to him see here.
I regret I won’t be able to make it to the service/memorial party on Tuesday, but I am hoping I can arrange to be there to celebrate him in December with the rest of the hundreds of people whose lives he effortlessly changed.
The Service of Thanksgiving and Celebration of Thomas’s Life will be celebrated at the Trolley Barn in Inman Park in Atlanta on Tuesday, September 29th from 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM.
There will be a private graveside service earlier that day.
In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the East Atlanta Kids Club, 659-A Gresham Avenue, SE, Atlanta, GA 30316 or to the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America, 322 Eighth Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10001.
Recently I posed the question “What do you think about an open Salary policy, total transparency in compensation at a company that is less than 40 people, is this a good idea? Or a recipe for disaster?” I received a Lot of Responses. I can’t Imagine what would have happened if I had asked : “How do you feel about profanity in blog posts?“
Why don't you ask our opinion?
I never expected to receive so much feed back from the Question I posed on Linked in. The image above is just poking fun, becuase honestly the main feeling I got was genuine concern. The responses were passionate, but mostly concerned that I was in a position (which I am not) to make such a policy change, and that if I do it, that I will RUIN the lives of the hypothetical 40 employees. This was pretty touching, my friends, and strangers were very concerned that I would be weilding abusive and destructive power around in the name of “progressive management”.
Trust me, I would never do that kind of policy change without consensus from the team. But still I do ulimately think its a good policy. The idea is simple, if you are a strong enough manager, you will deal with the inequity in pay structure. The question is whether you deal with it transparently or just try to deal with it internally and privately.
But i cannot believe how much a firecracker this quesiton was. So many people felt compelled to answer it.
It seems like people think that Salary Inequality and transparency are like Priests and child abuse scandals, let’s not talk about it, and let’s just accept that it happens.
If we address it by making it public, it will destroy us.
I find this attitude puzzling. So do a few other people.
At Ignite, we didn’t have a total transparency policy, I mean, we didn’t post salaries on the intranet…but we did talk about them openly, and every one knew the overhead rates, and the billing rates. I though that helped, especially when it came time to talk about pay cuts due to falling revnues. But hey, our pay scale was pretty fair, and was closely tied to billing rates, so it was easier. But I first thought of this 6 years ago…when the Boeing Air Traffic Management division was laid off. The Company president went through the overhead rates in explicit detail. I found this had a huge impact on how people felt about the decision. It didn’ t help if you were one of the ones getting laid off, but it did make clear that the reductions were not just management whims in a stcok market slump
Besides ! Also, if Suze Orman is in favor of it, it can’t be that evil and scary ? Actually 1 of the comments privately messaged me that it migh have a positive impact on Gender Inequality in Salary. If that turns out to be provable, what more reason do you need. Its not just “unfotunate” if you have Gender Inequality going on in Salary. In the United States, it’s illegal. Eliminating illegal practice through transparency is probably worth having to work hard to define a fair and equitable compensation strategy.
One colleuague, (a european whose family comes from a former Soviet Block state) even told me it was Communist! Since when, did open and transparent equate to Soviet Totalitarian Communism?
When our baby Soren died a few years back, one of the most cathartic experiences I had was working with our friend and master carpenter to build a tiny casket from some brazillian wood, with pegs and glue only. Rami helped me make it pretty ornately, but it was no bigger than shoe box.
I was heartned to read our friend Ryan and Sherman’s Memorial blog about Ezra who passed away this year recently where they described the funeral. Particulary I though about carrying the casket together as a family.
And having no hearse. And Ryan building the casket.
How good. I think it must have helped with the greif. Cella and Josiah and renee all helped with the pegs in the final part of putting Soren’s casket together and that memory will always help me when I feel sad.
I recently came across a number of interesting uses of Twitter that I thought were inspiring. The thing about facebook that really made it take off and hit the media in terms of buzz and attention was their Application Framewok. That’s the part of the facebook website that allows other companies to write Extra things.
You’re probably using many of these on a regular basis, but the whole concept of allowing third parties to have such an impact on the User Experience of your company’s product is insanely innovative. It would be as if Coca Cola licesended its secret syrup and allowed third part soft drink companies the ability to create New Drinks from the Coke sauce.
But that’s just what they did, with a LOT of restrictions however. You can only do things that fit within the Facebook API. Creative Application developers have done a lot with this limitation (games, mash-ups, music referalls, and integrations to other existing products)
