Jonathan Grubb

My girlfriend Kestrin has a copy of a new age visualization book called Ask And It Is Given. (She couldn’t take the cheesy foot-prints in the sand cover so, inspired by @lonelysandwich, she made a new book cover and renamed it The Ultimate Badass Report.) I made fun of it because it’s filled with slogan and platitudes; a lot of talk and very little action. Of course, she reads these books for a reason: they make her feel better if she’s down, and if she can implement some of the broad concepts it actually does make things go better in general. But that didn’t stop me from making fun of her, until I realized that the business books I’ve been reading are the exact same thing, except written for those who consider themselves businessy rather than spiritual. It’s all about stating the obvious and telling people to do things they should obviously be doing already: communicate, be honest, be organized, do what you love.

So here are a few business type books that make me happy when I read them, and may actually have some effect on my real life if I actually manage to implement the ideas.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

If you look hard you may be able to find the 7 million web pages about GTD, so I won’t spend too much ink on the concepts here, but this book changed my day-to-day life and stress level more than any other I’ve read. Specifically it got me to: keep an effective to-do list; put all my paperwork in one place; keep organized files; do small things immediately; only deal with each issue once.

The biggest shift in thinking may be the “do small things immediately” concept. When I see something that needs to be done, and I have the time, I default to doing it instead of waiting. Example: I keep a few checks in my car already made out to the f*$^# parking cops so I can pay my parking tickets within 5 minutes of getting them and never think about it again. This may just be called “maturity”.

Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People by Richard Shell

This may be the most businessy book I’ve read, and I recommend it to everyone who does anything that involves dealing with other people. Reading this book was like learning I had a membership to a secret club that I though only allowed old rich people. The recommendation came through Venture Hacks, so I’ll excerpt their excerpt:

“A better way to understand leverage is to think about which side, at any given moment, has the most to lose from a failure to agree… the party with the most to lose has the least leverage; the party with the least to lose has the most leverage.

“Leverage often flows to the party that exerts the greatest control over and appears most comfortable with the present situation.

“To gain real leverage, you must eventually persuade the other party that he or she has something concrete to lose in the transaction if the deal falls through.”

I went into this feeling like negotiation was a little dirty, and came out feeling like I can be open and honest without sacrificing my ability to be a strong negotiator. I use the theories and tactics from this book every day.

Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change by Kent Beck

Not just for programmers! There’s a lot of stuff that only applies to software projects, but much of it could apply to any type of project, like gardening or running a junior high school. My favorite concepts:

1) Embrace change. Things are going to change and your detailed plan will go to shit if you don’t have a system to constantly update and shift it. Their metaphor for project management is driving a car: you can’t pre-plan every press of the gas and turn of the wheel, you should just get a rough map to your destination and start driving. You’ll be able to make small corrections to stay in the lane and route around road construction, and of it starts raining when you’re half way to the beach you can change the whole plan and go to the museum instead.

2)  Measure your progress and adjust based on the results. In the software world this means running automatic tests all the time so you can see if your software is getting better or worse. In education it might mean lots of little quizzes to see if the class understands what you’re talking about rather than (or in addition to) grading based on giant catch-all exams. In gardening it simply means watering your plants today based on how they responded to yesterday’s watering.

3) Try turning all the dials to 10. When you find something that works, try doing it in an extreme way. If testing your code makes it better, try testing all of your code all the time. If reviewing code with another engineer for an hour a week makes things better, try spending 8 hours every day reviewing every line you write. If talking with other people makes things better, try getting rid of all the offices and sitting at a big table together. People really do all these things, and in many cases it really makes things go much better.

I’m not sure exactly how this concept applies to other areas, but I know there’s something in there. Plants like water, but flooding them with water will kill them. Unless you’re growing rice, which loves to be flooded. And rice is one of the most efficient crops to grow, so maybe this one does work for gardening.

I’ve heard that having two teachers in a classroom makes things run much better for students. It seems like it would increase the attention available for students even more than smaller class size, since one teacher can focus on a subset of students while the other runs the whole class. In both programming and teaching the second adult in the room places social pressure on the other to do a good job, the impact of which cannot be underestimated.

I should emphasize that you shouldn’t keep everything at 10, just turn it up, see how it works, and turn it back to whatever makes sense.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Not a business book, but everyone should read it. This book wrung out the last of any religious thinking I had knocking aroud in my head. Knowing that there is almost certainly no god makes things much clearer, and has made me happier about our situation in the world. It also makes it clear that religion is a scourge that, while encouraging some good behaviors, generally encourages people to do senseless things based on a promise of a better life after they die.

Religious people inevitably say that science is a type of religion, but this is incorrect for one reason: religion is based on a belief in something that cannot be proven, which science is based on all that is provable. If the existence of god were proven, reproven, and peer reviewed most science minded people would switch to believing in him, myself included.

Though there are endless subjects to discuss here, one of my favorties is the “there is almost certainly no god” thing. I know a lot of people who say they are agnostic because, given the omnipotence of god, he could exist even (or especially) if all proof and logic point to the contrary. Dawkins’ stance, which I’ve adopted as my own, is that this could be said of everything. So there is an equal possibility that we’re all created and controlled by god, or by my dog Batgirl, or white mice, or by a teenager playing an  version 10,000 of The Sims. (Statistically this last one is most likely.) So in order to be “agnostic” in relation to the Christian God one must also take the time to not quite believe in all the other gods that could possibly exists, inclusing the FSM.

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If I put all these ideas together I get a sort of platitude/manifesto of my own for the year. My Ultimate Badass Report, of you will:

You’re only on once, what you see is what you get, so you better do something good with it right now. Take small and measurable steps toward a giant goal. Work with the people around you. Turn the honesty, openness, and communication up to 10 and see what happens.

I just got back from the best burning man ever. I did a few things differently this year, which I’ll continue to write about for a few posts unless I decide not to.

#1 is a project I called The Treatment.

As you may know, one of the core tenets of burning man (at least the burning man that I participate in, not the dance music one) is doing things for other people. The most confused and, dare I say, wrong version of this was demonstrated by Troy (real name) who we met at The Duck Pond. He was hitting on my friend as her boyfriend and I followed along from a few feet away, knowing that his by-the-book PUA (look it up) tactics would fail completely. He finished his lame attempt at human interaction by offering each of us a cheap plastic rainbow peace sign necklace, and item so repulsive it turned me pro-war for the rest of the evening.

This is exact wrong version of the gift economy, giving out something that is meaningless to everyone and requires nearly no effort from anyone. But it did give me an idea. What if, instead of giving out a little something to each person I met (like the hundreds of drinks I poured at our bar) I gave everything I possibly could to one person?

I got my whole camp of about 30 people on board and vetted each passerby. It was easy to eliminate people: anyone who asks is out, hot girls are used to getting whatever they want, long time burners will be jaded, hippies just take and take. It took a half hour to find the right guy: obvious first timer, dressed in clean khakis and white button down shirt, walking alone, no water, slightly sad, fresh cast on his left arm. I invited him in for a drink.

When asked he told me that, on his way to burning man from Canada, an 80 year old man pulled out in front of him while he was driving 70 mph down a 2-lane highway. He swerved but still hit the guy at full speed. The police and insurance company wouldn’t tell him if the guy lived or died. If anyone ever needed The Treatment it was this guy.

The Treatment lasted about 6 hours. Noona, our camp costumer, picked out day and night ensembles to match his personal tastes and style. Every Karaoke song was dedicated to him, and he got to pick songs and singers, who would sing directly to him. There were more than a few hot girls in our camp, and plenty of love songs to last the evening. He was even serenaded by KP2, which gets me pretty excted no matter how many times she does it. I think Betty gave him her hand treatment — totally necessary to keep the playa from drying and cracking your skin — and she flossed his teeth which everyone needs after a couple days out there. I made him a custom water bottle, shade umbrella, and creepy baby head necklace/drink straw. Mason and Mellissa made him a tiny hat. Jason and Space Brother grilled him up some tender meats, each with a wine pairing, and he got to smoke as many of Ethan’s cigarettes as he wanted without anyone complaining. We gave him a good half hour of relationship advice and formulated a full strategy for him to make it with the woman of his dreams. When it was time for him to go out and see the rest of the city he left with a bag of goodies to give out to others, not peace sign necklaces but the kind of things people really want: canned coffee, booze, snacks, candy necklaces (a godsend to people in a certain state of mind).

He gave us one of the few things he’d brought along on his trip, which I will keep in the pocket of my NeverNudes (see forthcoming post) for their natural lifetime. The Treatment’s (as he came to be called) father is Indian. Like many middle class Indian Americans he is a pretty big deal back on the Subcontinent and is able to get things that are sought after by millions, like an audience with Sathya Sai Baba, the avatar and reincarnation of the saint Sai Baba of Shirdi. For Americans he’s the guy with big hair and an orange robe commonly seen on shrines in Indian restaurants and on taxi cab dashboards. The Treatment explained that, like me, he’s a software engineer / science type and has little use for religion, but that his father totally believed in this guy and that was worth something. He told me that Sai Baba’s go-to miracle is making ashes appear in his hand, and that the ashes are blessed, and that when your father gets an audience with Sai Baba he gets to take home some ashes and sprinkle them on the floorboard of his son’s car so when somebody pulls out in front of him and he t-bones their car he gets away with a broken arm and some nasty but temporary seartbelt bruises. Then he pulled a little canister of ashes from his bag and poured me some.

So now I have these magic ashes which I’ve been using to bless everyone who vaguely believes in that sort of thing, and anyone who has Indian parents who would be super excited about them getting an indirect blessing from a living avatar via some dude they met at Burning Man. Hit me up if you want me to mail you some.

When The Treatment came back the next day and asked for something innocuous (I think it was a gin and tonic) Noona told him that his treatment was over now, he was just another poor sucker like the rest of us, and he should go behind the bar and pour his own goddamn gin and tonic. I hope he realized that that was the best part of the whole treatment.

A solo show of new collages by Alexis Mackenzie at POVevolving in Los Angeles.

View press release here.

You can preview the show here (slideshow) or here (Flickr set).

{ povevolving.com }

{ alexisanne.com }

Saturday, Aug 2, 2008 ~ Opening reception, 7 - 11 pm.

Saturday, Aug 30, 2008 ~ show end date 

939 Chung King Road, Los Angeles, CA

A lot of people (like me) are moving from San Francisco to Los Angeles, by which I mean from Silicon Valley to Hollywood, meaning from the Internet/Tech industry to the Entertainment industry. It’s becoming clear that these will soon be the same industry, and there are some confusing overlaps and gaps in terminology which I will begin to examine here.

Example: When someone in LA says Programming they mean choosing which shows will be on a TV channel (or a video website, or a film festival). When someone in SF says Programming they mean writing software code.

SF: CEO
LA: Showrunner (on TV), Director (in movies)
If you’re like me you first heard of Showrunners when they became pivotal in the recent writer’s strike. In TV writers come up with an idea, convince other people to join the project, and seek funding. When they get funding they become the boss and are tasked with putting together a team and making a show that will gain viewers and make money. Sound familiar? It’s just like the VC startup system. And the Executive Producers fit in there too, sometimes like a Chairman of the Board, sometimes CEO, sometimes moneybags.

SF: IPO
LA: Syndication
When things go very well for a web company you go public, all your conceptual shares turn into real cash, and the people with a lot of ownership generally have enough money to last a lifetime. In TV this is going into syndication, the process I barely understand that results in Seinfeld being on every cable channel in the world. The reason this is a good thing? Residuals.

SF: Stock Options
LA: Residuals or Points
These both enable the line-level workers to share the wealth when the big money rolls in. With stock options you own a little percentage of the company, and with residuals you get a little cash payment every time your show/movie plays in any market. So when you’ve been working for a while you just get random checks every now and then because your episode of Roseanne is big in Russia these days.

SF: Business Plan
LA: Screenplay
It’s true that everyone in LA has a screenplay (or at least a Treatment, LAish for Powerpoint Deck). This is a good thing. Much like having a business that you want tostart someday, the screenplay represents each person’s dream of quitting their job, becoming their own boss, and making something they truly believe in.

SF: Business Development Executive
LA: Talent Manager
You know when you work at a big web company and there’s a group of guys (almost always guys) who went to business school and wear crisp blue shirts who spend their days making deals that the designers and developers don’t care about, even though it’s clear that this will obviously affect you at some point? The Talent Agents are those guys. Powerful, well connected, maybe good at golf, totally baffling to the talent.

This is an imperfect comparison though, since it sort of ends at dealmaking/golf/shirt preference. Now that I’m starting to understand how things in LA work I love the idea of talent managers, and I think there’s a place for an equivalent role in the tech industry. In LA the actors/writers/directors have other people to negotiate deals for them, help them decide which projects to take on, and handle billing and legal stuff. Wouldn’t this be great for designers and engineers? If someone else would shop around your resume and do due diligence on startups that wanted to hire you, and you’d just get a check? This sounds like a dream to me.

SF: ISP’s
LA: Studios
Both are megacorporations that you have to deal with even if you don’t like or trust them.

SF: Google Ads
LA: Product Placement, aka Embedded Marketing
Little things you add in to make some cash. If this is your whole business model you may be in trouble.

SF: Engineers
LA: Editors
Both spend hours in a dark room with big computer screens, going over and over things in painstaking detail.

SF: Designers
LA: Writers
Both shape the tone/feel of the product but need other people to make it happen.

SF: Producers
LA: Producers
Yay! There’s one word that overlaps perfectly. Producers run everything and manage the team, though they’re not necessarily the boss. Some types of producers do just what a Product Manager or Program Manager does.

Neigborhoods translate pretty directly:

Beverley Hills = Pacific Heights
Rich people live there in nice houses, but you wouldn’t really want to hang out there unless you’re going to a party at The Playboy Mansion or a Getty’s house, respectively. Rodeo Drive = Union Square, only go there to impress tourists or buy a nice new suit.

Silver Lake = The Mission
And I love them both.The big difference is that in Silver Lake you get a house with plentiful parking and a little yard, while in The Mission you can walk everywhere.

Santa Monica = San Jose
All the big tech companies are based there, but I find it kinda boring. I know some people who like Santa Monica and actually live there, which I can’t say for San Jose. If you are moving from SF to LA and think Santa Monica would be cool becuse of the beach and stuff just think of The Sunset + Fisherman’s Wharf. Which reminds me…

Hollywood & Highland = Fisherman’s Wharf
This is the place with all the stars on the sidewalk and, like Fisherman’s Wharf you should go there once and then avoid it. Exceptions: the Roosevelt pool can be fun, and you can take the train to the Kodak theater and sneak into The Oscars once a year.

This could go on forever, but you get the picture.
Downtown = SOMA + Bayview (Warehouses)
The Sunset Strip = The Marina (Douchy clubs)
West Hollywood = The Haight (Both upper and lower, complete with Wasteland and Buffalo Exchange)

I’m sure some of these are wrong, and I know I’m missing many roles, so please add/correct me in the comments. (Just use a real name and be nice.)

The good people over at LA Observed excerpted my previous post, giving my blog a little viewership boost and encouraging me to write some more. I’m not sure if they were making fun of me or not (ok, they were making fun of me) but I have very little to lose so I’ll just enjoy their ridicule. Also: I turned on comment moderation a while ago and have been following the method that works well for Laughing Squid: “Basically…if your comment does not add to the conversation, it will not be approved. Oh and we don’t feed trolls.” So I deleted all the comments calling me an idiot.

So without very much further ado, here are 8 clarifications on my previous post:

1. By Los Angeles I mean Hollywood, by which I mean the Entertainment Industry.
   I know, there’s all kinds of different people in LA, blah blah blah. When people in the rest of the world (including on the internet) say “LA” what they mean is “the place with all the movie stars.” Just like when they say “San Francisco” they mean “the gay city with the bridge.”
2. I do know some people who aren’t in entertainment.
   Just not very many. And I think they all work at Intelligentsia.
   It’s also worth noting that I’m uncomfortable with all the names/labels for the entertainment industry, which seem to include: The Entertainment Industry, The Industry, The Business, The Biz (people actually say this), LA, Hollywood, Movies, Television (as in “I’m in Television”), Film. If anyone knows a label for this industry that won’t make me want to cut out my own tongue please let me know.
3. Blogging isn’t just for nerds.
   It’s also for kids, who are also known as “MP3 pirates.”
4. People use the term “blog” incorrectly here.
   When my friend Peter made up the word “blog” it was intended to be an annoying abbreviation of “Web Log,” kind of like the Captain’s Log on Star Trek, but on the web. When Captain Picard was logging something in the Captains Log he would probably call it a Log Entry, not a Log. But people in LA say “I’m going to make a blog about this restaurant” when they mean “I’m going to write a blog post about this restaurant.” And it catches me by surprise every time. I’m like, “wow, you must really love this restaurant. How will you come up with a new thing to say about it every day?”
5. Some people don’t use macs.
   But you can avoid them by staying in certain parts oftown.

Ok, I’m bored with that list. The rest of the list will be about books I’m reading.

1. Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People
   Best advice so far: when going into a negotiation write down your goals and keep them in your pocket. You don’t have to read them, but having a written record of your goal will keep you focused and make it harder for you to change your goals once the other person starts making convincing points. (Recommended by Venture Hacks.)
2. Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America’s Favorite Addiction
   I’m just getting started, but it seems to probe one of the great questions of America: why does nearly everyone want to be famous when it’s clear that famous people are pretty miserable?
3. Travels in the Scriptorium: A Novel
   A novel about an old man who wakes up in an institutional room with no memories. Recommended by this coolguy we met in Sweden last month. Pretty depressing so far, but a nice contrast to the book on bargaining strategy.

It’s been about 8 months since I left San Francisco (along with my family, industry, and may friends) and relocated to LA. I wrote my first set of 8 LA things back in September, before I had learned:

1. Blogging is for nerds.
   Having a blog is still considered nerdy, which I still think is kinda funny because, you know, 3 billion people have blogs now.
2. Blogging is different when there are famous people around.
   This is probably the main reason I haven’t been blogging. Most of my friends here are in the entertainment business, so any social gathering is attended by a variety of producers, writers, actors, musicians, artists, and the occasional startup CEO. So how do you write a blog post about a typical night out and avoid having it read like a bad tabloid? Saying “I hung out with [actor name]” will pretty much always sound like bragging. Plus nobody else has a website, so if you want to make it clear who you’re talking about you have to link to their IMDB page, which also looks a lot like bragging to everyone outside Los Angeles. I mean, I feel like a douchebag just talking about it.
   Then some people actually are famous enough to be watched by tabloids, so anything you say about them or any photo you post of them has the potential to become gossip fodder. All the starlets love having their photo taken, but if hanging out with you feels like work I’m guessing you won’t be invited to the next party.
3. Everybody in LA wants a website.
   It’s fun to be here for this transition, to watch the whole entertainment industry turn toward the internet one person at a time. Even people who we just on strike over internet distribution rights have never heard of Hulu, and when I show it to them they’re blown away. And I’m talking about the people who are actually on the shows on Hulu — they’ve never heard of it. As soon as they see it they understand that the internet is the future (which I also think is funny since the internet is actually the present) and they need a web strategy.
4. Music people are still pissed about Napster.
   Mind you this is the music industry people, not the musicians. All the musicians I know owe their success to internet distribution and promotion, namely iTunes and MySpace. But some record executives still think of the web as the place where people steal music, full stop. Luckily old people retire eventually.
5. Entertainment isn’t so big, money wise.
   There’s this great little Java app (the only great java app) called the Map of the Market where you can compare the size of public companies. Go take a look. It’s divided into sectors: Energy, Health Care, Financial, etc. You’ll probably recognize the Technology section with big blocks for companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple. Then you look for the big Entertainment block, where all those rich movie stars hang out, and you find this little sliver hidden behind Wal-Mart in a sector called “Consumer Cyclicals.”
   Think of it this way: Will Smith makes $80 million when he has the best year of any actor ever, and Larry Page made $80 million today when Google shares went up 1.7%. (Please don’t check my math on that.)
6. Movie stars need the tools that bloggers already have.
   I’m working on a project with a great actor who will be launching a web company. When I launch something I make sure to tell my friends, email my business contacts, post links on my blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc so all my personal fans (that’s you) will know about it. But guess what? The movie star with actual fans doesn’t have any of these things — he has no direct line to those millions of fans. Too bad.
7. There’s no free wifi anywhere.
8. At least everyone uses a Mac.

Check out the awesome RVIP Lounge blog that Kestrin put together.

Check out these charts.

I wanted to compare something unknown (Brad Pitt) to something known, so I picked your friend and mine TechCrunch. The result: Brad Pitt destroys TechCrunch when it comes to search queries, while TechCrunch kills Brad in terms of pageviews. The same holds true when any movie star is compared with any tech blog.

I’m working on some analysis of celebrity websites and the results so far are surprising. I started with the Forbes Celebrity 100. Here are some very rough notes.

1. As expected, none of the top actors had a site while almost all of the musicians did. Other categories like athletes, directors, and comedians were mixed.

2. The Forbes list matches up pretty well with the number of searches on Google Trends. That is, people of a similar celebrity level tend to get a similar number of search queries. They spike above each other based on news events, but most stay in the same range.
3. Traffic on an individual celebrity’s site may be surprisingly low. I looked at Madonna as an example of a celebrity with extremely high stature and a nice looking website. According to the reliably unreliable Compete.com stats she only gets 25,000 visitors a month. So I’m guessing that an actor of similar stature, like Brad Pitt, would get roughly the same level of traffic.
4. At current traffic levels it would be a money-losing proposition for an actor to build out a big website and make money by selling ads and merchandise. I’d charge a few hundred thousand dollars to build and maintain a site like Madonna.com, and even if every single visitor clicked through to iTunes and bought a CD it would only make few hundred thousand a year. This is the best answer so far as to why actors don’t have websites.
5. Oprah is an exception to any rule. She has a huge site with very high traffic — it knocks all the others off the charts. I also found it to be the most engaging site I came across in my browsing. I’m not considering Oprah an actor (though she does act sometimes) and I really consider her site to be more of a brand site than a personal site. At the same time, Oprah and Martha Stewart are the prime examples of people who branded themselves and ported that brand to the internet. If all media as we know it ceased to exist tomorrow these two would have no problem porting their brands to whatever came next. Who wouldn’t want a brand like that?
6. That said, “Oprah” and “Madonna” get about the same number of daily search queries, so the market is there for Madonna. It just isn’t going to her website.

I’ve been looking at celebrity websites a lot lately. My conclusion: actors have terrible websites. I’m not quite sure why. They have the money, they benefit from exposure, they all have something to sell. My best theory so far is that their managers just don’t care about the internet, and/or prefer that information about their clients goes through other media outlets.

According to Wikipedia these are the highest paid actors and actresses. I’m not sure how accurate the numbers are, but you get the point.

1. Keanu Reeves
2. Bruce Willis
3. Tom Cruise
   
4. Johnny Depp
   
5. Julia Roberts
   
6. Cameron Diaz
   
7. Reese Witherspoon
   

8. Angelina Jolie
   

Looking at these sites and their whois.net records gives me another idea. For a lot of actors their main experience with a personal website looks something like this:

• Some guy registers “juliaroberts.com” in 1998 and tries to auction the name.
• Julia sues on the advice of her lawyers.
• The lawsuit continues for 10 years and Julia Roberts never wants to think about “juliaroberts.com” again.
• A new actress, say 21 year-old Juno star Ellen Page, thinks “if Julia Roberts doesn’t need a website I don’t need one either.”
• Some guy registers ellenpage.com.
• …