The first car I bought out of college was a 1972 BMW 2002. I grew up in California, in the Bay Area. That part of the world was awash in amazing sports cars, and I was deeply obsessed with them. That 2002 in hindsight was a brilliant choice — it’s now a highly sought-after classic.
Years and years later, deep into my career as a full-grown adult, I learned to embrace the value of “lots of inexpensive failures” as the key to gaining insight and experience. Let’s just say that, to my “barely adult” me back then, the 2002 must just have been the embryonic moment when this belief took root.
I got the car shortly after taking a job at LSI Logic (see earlier posts on that company here, here, here, here, and here) and simply needed reliable transportation.
Where “reliable” is more properly defined as “fun, sporty, functional, and reliable.”
I grew up in a household where my dad saw cars as nothing but transportation and utility – he cared nothing about design or driving experience. In fact, when he bought our family station wagons, he told us his opening line with the car salesman was “show me the cheapest car you have on the lot.”
Not surprisingly, there was an awful lot of daylight between his view of the role a car could play in one’s life and my one.
But something I knew for certain was that the BMW 2002 was a glorious car. I saw them every day in and around Berkeley. The car is beautifully designed, with a near indestructible engine and transmission. It handles with precision and grace, and overall it’s one of the most lively, fun sports cars you will ever drive. It also served to clearly establish BMW as the sports car and sports sedan powerhouse it is today. The 2002 literally cracked open the US market for BMW.
And I’d been lusting after one of these for years.
I forget where I bought my 2002, but it was tan — how did I choose that color? — with a chocolate brown interior. An uninspired choice I would rectify much, much later in life.
Here’s a 1972 BMW in that awful color (not mine… mercifully I did not keep any photos of it)
Once it was in my hands, I immediately set to upgrading it. I had never worked on a car before, so this was a big, generally fun adventure.
My resources? Back then there was no internet. You had to go to the auto parts store and buy a printed manual for your car, like the Haynes Manual. The manual for my car covered six models, spanning 18 years. So let’s just say that for any particular model and year, the information was broad, but thin. The book, after all, was a little over two hundred pages. Maybe fifty pages for each model. Yep, broad but thin.
For the next two years I replaced or upgraded almost every moving part on that car. I worked on it during the weekends, since I had to drive it to work on Monday. This created a few somewhat stressful Sundays and some profound learning moments.
Like when I replaced the Solex carburetor that the factory provided with a higher performance Weber, marveling at the beauty of that device when I picked it up at the auto parts store.
Note how sad and unsuited this carb isAnd note how exquisitely well suited the Weber is
Solex Carb Comparison with a Weber Carb (now including gaskets!)
I quickly took it home and got to work, removing the Solex, unplugging the vacuum hoses and throttle cable, scraping the intake manifold mounting area clean and then… realized I did not order a new gasket. Hadn’t thought about that. It was now after 4pm on Saturday. I borrowed my parents’ car and headed to the car parts store in a mild panic.
There I learned that car parts stores don’t stock gaskets for Weber carburetors — especially for obscure German cars — so I would have to order one, and it would be in by the next weekend. Oops. I kept my parents’ car that week. The following week, with gasket in hand, I mounted it and the Weber on the manifold and bolted it in place. But wait, there’s more.
Re-attaching the throttle cable was easy. But those vacuum hoses? I hadn’t labeled them when I took off the Solex. Oops.
This was decades before the internet, and the Haynes manual did not have diagrams for Weber carbs. The factory shipped them with Solexes, so that was the diagram in the book. And you can see that diagram was no help.
I did my best, but the engine ran a bit rough — I had clearly misconnected something.
Luckily there was a wrecking yard in the industrial flatlands of Berkeley that specialized in BMWs. I headed there, and the guy who ran the place, who was in his late 20s, opened the hood and within minutes “cleaned up the vacuum hose hygiene.” I remember that place was loaded with 2002s, Bavarias, and even a few 3.0 CSs. Today those cars — especially the 3.0 CS — are simply unobtanium. To think there was a wrecking yard containing just those cars is incredible.
Later in my car upgrading journey I got new shock absorbers for the front and rear suspensions. I started with the front: I read the manual and realized I would need to get a spring compressor to replace the McPherson strut cartridges. I headed to the auto parts store and rented one for the weekend.
And of course the Haynes manual had diagrams for the front suspension but no real instructions for how to disassemble it and replace the shocks. I spent the better part of eight hours sorting all this out and successfully replaced the right front shock.
And with everything I learned from that right front unit, I was able to make quick work of the left one, replacing it in under an hour.
I did not have enough time that weekend to swap out the rear shocks, which were super easy. I could do that next Friday after work, before heading up that same night to Lake Tahoe to go skiing.
This work is pretty straightforward: after you jack up the rear of the car, it’s fairly easy to access where the shock is attached to the lower trailing arm of the rear suspension via a single bolt. The other end of the shock absorber is attached at the top of the top of the “shock tower” through the rear body sheet metal, also with a single bolt. That top bolt is accessed through the trunk, where it protrudes.
Super easy. I left work early to get home a little before 5pm, and by 6:30 I was on the road to Tahoe. It was dark by the time I left heading out on Highway 80 for the four-hour drive.
As I approached Auburn, I started to hear a knocking from the right rear of the car. I figured I could deal with that when I got to the condo I had rented for the winter. As I approached the mountains outside Auburn, it had started to snow lightly. By the time I was approaching Donner Pass, the snow was less than an inch and not sticking, so nothing to worry about.
But that knocking from the back was getting worse. So I pulled over, got a flashlight and looked into the right rear wheel well and could clearly see that the shock was banging around in the shock tower because I must not have tightened the second lock nut at the top of the shock tower, so both it and the securing nut had vibrated off. I opened the trunk and found the two errant nuts — at least now I could get everything put back together.
First I would need to jack up the right rear of the car, take off the wheel, get the shock back in place, and make sure I put everything else back together.
And as everyone who works on cars knows, the way you take a wheel off a car is to first loosen the lug nuts before jacking it up. It makes it so much easier to get the force you need on the lug wrench and eliminates the risk you’ll pull or push the car off the jack. And you reverse this when putting the wheel back on.
So I loosened all four lug nuts, got the car up on the jack, and went to work.
I was able to get the shock absorber positioned at the top of the shock tower and pushed the top through the mounting hole. My hands were getting pretty cold by then, though. You see I had plenty of skiing gloves, but nothing light enough to do this kind of car work, so I was working bare-handed. It was past 10pm and well below freezing.
I ran around to the back of the trunk, threaded the nut on the protruding shock absorber mounting bolt, and tightened it down, hard. By now my fingertips were getting numb.
I put the wheel back on the car as quickly as I could, threaded the lug nuts on and tightened them, lowered the car off the jack stand, threw all the tools in the trunk, closed it, hopped in the driver’s seat, closed the door as fast as I could, and cranked the engine over, pushing the heat lever to full on and the fan as well. My hands were frozen.
I got back into traffic, and pretty soon I was headed on my way, up and over Donner Pass.
Just after cresting the pass, headed downhill, I felt the right rear of the car drop with a loud CLUNK. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw a rooster tail of sparks arcing into the air behind me. And to my right I saw a wheel rolling past me, getting further away the more quickly I slowed down to stop.
Once the car stopped, I got out and ran around the back to see that the wheel I saw heading down the road was, in fact, my right rear wheel. Those sparks were the suspension scraping the pavement.
Holy crap, I forgot to tighten the lug nuts when I lowered the car off the jack. So I had sped off with loose lug nuts, and the nuts must have slowly worked their way off the lugs.
This was before cell phones existed. The thoughts going through my head then were pretty dire. 11pm on a Friday night, in the Sierras, light snow falling. In need of a tow. But then what? Where was I going to find a spare rim and tire for a 1972 BMW in Lake Tahoe?
Remember, this was the mid 80s, decades before BMWs became mainstream. As important, decades before tech bros took over Tahoe with their BMWs.
So I had no choice. I got out my flashlight to see if I could find… anything.
To the right of the car, the side facing away from traffic, I could just barely see a thin trail in the snow — the trail my tire had made as it fled my car. I followed the trail like a hunter tracking an elk, down the road and down the hillside.
Lo and behold, there it was, resting on its side. Easy to spot, with the light flickering off of those distinctive “bottle cap” wheels I had upgraded to.
I grabbed that puppy, triumphant, and hauled back up the hillside to my car.
But the lug nuts. There’s no way I was going to find those. Not only could they have come off one-by-one over a mile or two, they were the same color as the pavement. And while I had some spare parts with me, no one keeps spare lug nuts.
Then I did the math and realized I had twelve lug nuts on the three remaining wheels. If I took one off each wheel, I’d at least be driving with equally compromised wheel integrity.
So I backed one lug nut off each of the three remaining wheels, got the errant wheel attached with the three lug nuts I had just harvested, and was on the road again.
Ah, to be young and carefree.
I got to my rented condo well after midnight, and the weekend unfolded as planned. I spent two full days skiing with my crazy friends, and I mean crazy — we liked to jump off the cornice to the left of the Headwall chair at the resort that is now known as Palisades. More on that at a later date.
I drove home feeling somewhat triumphant, having averted disaster while having an awesome skiing weekend. Monday I went to the auto parts store and picked up four lug nuts. Why just four? That’s all I needed, obviously. I would never do something dumb like that again.
Here is the orange 1973 2002 I bought a few years ago. With this car I corrected my poor color choice of my first 2002 and bought one someone else spent their time and energy fixing up. Absolutely crazy fun.
Everyone should own a 2002. What other car can provide this much adventure and offer so many ways to gain experience? Where experience is “the disaster that didn’t kill you.”
I was a sophomore at a small private high school right at the junction of Oakland and Berkeley. An odd place, a two-story warren of cinderblock classrooms, whose courtyard seemed to capture the ambitions and vanities of the students and staff, focusing them, amplifying them. But I did not really fit in as I had carefully avoided ambition of any kind.
But it was through rowing and the influence of my rowing coach that I found the courage to name an ambition and to act on that ambition. More importantly, I learned to name an ambition that was about more than me, it was about a group. That together as a group, we could have the courage to aspire, to risk, and to win.
An arc of self-discovery so similar to the one eloquently told in Daniel James Brown’s novel, “The Boys in the Boat.”
My classmates came from families who had high expectations – about their own lives and the lives of their children. In that respectat least, my parents fit in. Unlike mine, many of the parents were wealthy, well educated, and motivated. They held high aspirations. They were keen observers of status and stature. And were climbers of social ladders. It was that intersection of interests that captivated my parents.
As children of poor immigrant parents, when it came time to prioritize the lives for their own children, my parents focused almost single-mindedly on education. Not the learning part, not what it does on the inside of a person, but what it gained for you on the outside. The assurance of success, the label, the stamp of approval, a permanent, durable barrier separating the difficult and meager experiences they had from the ones they wanted for us.
The society of this school seemed to cleave cleanly. It was a world where there walked those classmates who knew what they were capable of and had a sense of purpose that was derived from this knowing. And there were the others, like me, struggling for identity and self-substance. Where the word “uncertain” all too frequently could be used to describe my actions and thoughts. A lack of comfort in my own skin.
What could be said for the students could also be said for the school itself. An ambitious emerging institution, whose headmaster’s self-conscious quest for legacy and status could be seen and felt for what it was. Like its students, the school was in its formative years, manifesting assurance and purpose in some areas, tentative uncertainty in others.
There were fewer than 150 of us altogether. A pecking order was established first and foremost by academic prowess, with a similar structure and sorting extended to sports, clubs, and socializing. Wherever you turned there was classification, evaluation, stack ranking.
I had no idea how I got accepted into this place. For as long as I could remember I put the very least amount of myself into school. It wasn’t so much the time, it wasn’t even the effort. It was more basic than that. I methodically and subtly perfected the requisite motions and appearance of participating in an education, while also perfecting the ability to fail, miserably — making a bargain with myself that the freedom of this choice was worth what the price I paid in humiliation in the classroom and at home.
Deep down, if I had had the courage to look closely at myself, I would have seen I lacked the confidence to name ambitions in general, with schoolwork just being the place where I confronted this most visibly.
Yet there did exist a refuge in all of this; sports offered a way to hide in plain sight. The hours spent on a field with others, the hours spent on my own, training, running, riding my bike to get in shape, were hours I was away from the constraining expectations and operations of my education.
It was how I could create a sense of belonging to the school. Soccer in the fall, baseball in the spring. Bookends. Never the star, but always a player.
So, when the headmaster informed us at a daily assembly that the school would be starting a crew team, I was immediately interested. It turned out the father of one of the students had rowed and encouraged the headmaster to start a team. The father even produced a coach, Daig O’Connell, a recent graduate of UC Berkeley and a former member of its varsity team. Anyone interested in joining could come to a meeting after school that day.
Who else would sign up for this? The room filled with a few people, people like me, at the margins of the academic and social strata. The folks who were athletically inclined, but who played in the shadows of the more talented and more ambitious.
We were like a human equivalent of the “Land of Misfit Toys.”
I think Daig couldn’t quite get comfortable with his own experience with crew and the context of our school. Jeez, he’d rowed varsity at Cal, won loads of races, championships, everything. And at Cal there was nothing glamorous about crew; it was serious, hard work.
Daig introduced the term “candy ass” into our lexicon, a term for someone who liked the benefits of hard work but who was unwilling or unable to produce it. At the time we laughed at the mental image and mocking nature of this insult. But it wasn’t until months after he left that it dawned on us he was really speaking about us. We didn’t really work hard. We weren’t serious. And for all Daig’s experience, he just wasn’t a leader.
So while we raced once, it was a slap-dash excuse of a performance; most certainly we could never have been accused of being fluid or graceful. And it came as no surprise that Daig quit at the end of that first season.
But we’d formed some sort of connective tissue within ourselves to one another. We’d found a refuge, an identity of our own creation.
The headmaster? He was hooked. Crew team + private school = exclusive image buff. That seemed to be comfortable math for him.
So he sought out another coach, and soon we were told we had a new one named Giancarlo Trevisan. Giancarlo had an even more impressive pedigree than Daig. He’d been a member of the Italian national crew team and a member of their Olympic team too. Those latter credentials must have been the icing on the cake to bring him on.
There he stood, in pressed slacks, lace-up leather shoes, a neat collared shirt, and one of those light khaki jackets that were so popular in the sixties when he was rowing but looked so awkward and odd in this era. Giancarlo seemed serious, but in this room it was hard to tell if he was serious about his sport or just uncomfortable in these academic surroundings. Maybe it was that he was simply aware of where he found comfort, and that it wasn’t here, indoors.
He was tall and thin, and had the chiseled, dark features we all associated with the stereotypical Italian. His nose seemed to cleave his face in profile; it pointed the way to his smile, or his scowl, both of which began in his eyes.
It was at the first practice the following week, when we stepped into that boathouse, that we realized this was a world wholly different from the one we’d experienced the year before with Daig. Giancarlo was all business, all discipline; matters about rowing, and effort, and expectations were not negotiable. Giancarlo was a leader.
Miles (who later rowed Varsity Heavyweight at Cal), me, Betsy, Humphrey, John and Giancarlo front and center.
We’d carry the shell to the dock, hoist it over our heads, swing it around and place it in the water. No joking, no horseplay. He’d be there, in his launch, watching and waiting. That khaki jacket, those pressed slacks, but with his leather lace-ups replaced with Converse All Stars. And we’d slowly paddle off to begin a workout. He would idle alongside, his face, his demeanor narrowly focusing on the process of learning not so much about how to row, but how to make use of yourself deliberately, openly.
At the “catch” the oar is quickly flipped ninety degrees by the inner hand (the one closest to the oar blade) and dipped into the water. Just as quickly the legs are driven down, with arms acting as a tether, pulling the oar through the water until it’s just about to hit the stomach. Quickly the oar is pushed down while the inner hand again flips the oar 90 degrees, turning the blade horizontal, and you push it away, slide forward, and start the stroke all over again. Hundreds, thousands of times at each practice.
There begins the suffering. Blisters develop on palms and fingers. Butts become sore and numb from sliding up and back on the seat — and I mean that literally, how a part of your body can be both incredibly sore, while also being numb. That inner hand’s forearm becomes leaden from flipping from horizontal to vertical, vertical to horizontal with every stroke. Every time someone’s oar scrapes the water on the backstroke just as it’s being flipped vertical, water gets scooped into the air, hitting whoever is behind in the face with a cold, greenish slap.
Rowing is a complicated sport. The shell is long and thin, with triangular metal “riggers” jutting out at alternating sides, where the oar is locked into place and pivots. One is perched on a seat that slides on rails with feet laced into footrests. Completing a stroke entails pushing the oar forward, blade parallel with the water as it pivots in the oar-lock, body sliding forward until the chest is flat against thighs, with arms extended out to the side the oar is anchored to.
Rest comes in only two sizes: everyone or no one. So caring for yourself, your needs can only be done in motion, in concert, with the rest of the boat. It was this juncture where Giancarlo focused our attention: we were individuals together. It was there that we could see and feel the bright line connecting his passions to his ambitions, his experience to his expectations, his anger to his humor.
On one particularly miserable afternoon early in the season, cold and gray, a light drizzle had succeeded in soaking us just enough so those backstroke splashes felt personal, meant to harm. We were well into the day’s workout, wet and weary, when Giancarlo directed us to turn around, and row another 4,000 meters. And to alternate the tempo between ¾ and full power. Grueling and painful on a good day, but today it just seemed tortuous.
Then John, who rowed the two-seat, said what we were all thinking. “No, I’m not going to do that, I want to go in.” The reaction this provoked in Giancarlo was unambiguous and instantaneous. He was furious and turned his launch around, tilting it over in the turn almost on its side. The rage on Giancarlo’s face was purple and ugly.
In that small launch, with arms and legs flailing, he seemed to be desperately trying to reach across the water and grab John, making the launch rock with each convulsion. “What did you say? You’re going to turn that boat around, now!” He barked these statements in his heavily accented English. He was offended as much by the insubordination of John’s action as he was by the broken commitment to the group, how John had unraveled the group’s integrity. John wanted to go in, because he was tired. But no one could go anywhere by themselves.
Newton’s Third Law saved John: the motion of Giancarlo’s arms towards the shell sent the launch further away from us, which sent Giancarlo into an even greater rage. And made it even harder for him to find his words, because he had to divert his energy and concentration to the rocking launch.
We heard John’s laughter next. It broke the moment. Giancarlo stopped moving, his breathing loud and labored, and then he too broke into a smile, and laughed. And we sat there, letting our relief fill the space where tension and anger had previously been. Giancarlo spoke first. “So, are you ready now?” That was his compromise. The same instruction, but phrased as a question. It called John’s bluff while letting him save face.
We picked up where we had left off, but this time John, without saying a word, helped turn the boat around, and out we went for that next 4,000 meters. Each of us made a little wiser, a little more connected, a little more trusting in each other, and in Giancarlo.
In the boat my skin felt just a little bit more close-fitting. My uncomfortable self worked so very comfortably in this crew team. Removed, away from the school but still part of it. Away, but belonging at the same time. And no place to hide. From myself, from my team-mates, and especially from Giancarlo.
* * * * *
I lived about 25 miles south of my school, in a town not far from where Giancarlo lived. Practices happened in downtown Oakland at Lake Merritt in the late afternoon, and the school would give us rides there, but we needed to make our way home on our own. When practice was over Giancarlo would give me a ride home in his VW bug because my house was on his way home. We’d talk rowing, and life, all the way home. I don’t remember a lot of the specifics, I just remember the relaxed and open tone.
Those drives home, he seemed to know what questions to ask to get a sense of my landscape within, he seemed to perceive that the path I took to become what I was in that boat was neither direct nor easy. Perhaps this is what great coaches do. He saw that little piece that shone through in spite of my best defense. That person I really was and would become.
Over this first season we spent hours and hours together on and off the water, him driving alongside us in the powerboat, shouting instructions in his heavily accented English. I think I saw and experienced every emotion that I was capable of manifesting. Frustration and joy, calm and anger, impatience and flexibility.
I just kept rowing, and he kept teaching. I’d never had to make a choice about a goal and face the possibility of failure, of being out in the open with my ambitions. But this was exactly what Giancarlo was striving to impart, to coax to the surface. For each of us personally, for us as a team.
Other people — our parents, our teachers — had provided much of the basic outlines of our lives. This crew team was different. It was a choice, and there was no place to hide. We’d chosen to grasp the link between a goal and disciplined, hard work. We had to say to ourselves, “I will do this, I want this,” and be witness to that commitment.
We began to understand courage, to take those first glances within and see who and what was there.
With enough practice, technique, skill, and strength, a crew team moves the boat together, not like a marching band, standing next to each other and coordinating movements. But together as if each member was born at the same moment and shares some deep genetic connection. It’s called “swing,” and it’s about becoming able to communicate without speaking, thinking the same thoughts at the same instant, to move and think together as one. And when you achieve swing, this incredibly hard work we are all putting in somehow becomes almost effortless.
It’s swing that enables each member to pay attention to energy levels, reserves and motion within the boat without needing a single word being spoken.
Hands away together, at the same height and speed. Seats forward together, in unison, oars in the water, at the same time and depth, legs driven down with the same transmission of power. Completely effortless, but requiring every ounce of energy and concentration each rower can muster.
At one particularly intense and frustrating practice, we were working on our “power series” — a set of 10 or 20 strokes in the middle of a race where the team might need to put some distance on a competitor or catch up to one who is ahead. It’s a series of strokes meant to break the complacency, break the rhythm in a good way with deliberate, powerful changes. And on this day we just weren’t making a crisp shift in tempo and intensity, it was ragged and disjointed.
Giancarlo was getting frustrated. We were not translating his direction into the actions he expected or felt we were capable of. He was struggling to find the words to convey how differently he wanted these strokes to be and feel. Maybe it was the wind carrying his voice away, but we couldn’t understand what he wanted and it just wasn’t working. And we were frustrated too, because we so wanted that effortless feeling, that sense of unison.
A momentary convulsion rippled through the boat, and it had started with one of my teammates, Humphrey, completely breaking our concentration. What was it? It sounded like laughter. I heard Humphrey blurt out, “Did he say ‘put a pickle in the water’?” In an instant we stopped rowing and doubled over in laughter. Giancarlo swung his launch around but, unlike with the outburst months ago from John’s insubordination, this time approached us with a sense of trust. We were stopping for a reason not related to avoiding effort and strain. We were stopping out of a sense of playfulness, confidence, and assurance.
As he got closer Humphrey shouted to him, “Did you say put a pickle in the water?” Giancarlo cut his engine and let out a laugh. “No,” he shouted back. A pause. “I was saying put a big hole in the water — with your stroke.” That accent did us in. We all laughed, together.
Our four, in the Oakland Estuary, trailing whoever we were racing (“pickle in the water” visible in the upper left corner of the photo).
I think it was there, at that moment, that we realized just how much we had committed ourselves, to our ambitions, to Giancarlo, and to each other. We had learned how to speak the same language, and it had nothing to do with accents. It was having a vocabulary that let us speak of our ambitions. As we approached the competition season, it began to weigh on us that all these months of practice would come down to six minutes of racing time. An entire season’s worth of racing amounting to less than an hour on the clock.
In a race, the rowing is done differently than in practice. The countless hours you’ve spent on the water going back and forth and back and forth are replaced with a sharply defined standoff: you, your competitors, a 2,000-meter straight line, a start and a finish.
Just beginning to move at the start is different. In practice, you just start. No drama, no tension. In a race the start is almost overwhelmingly defined by drama and tension. The rudder is held by someone to keep it in line with the rest of the competitors. Everyone is crouched, seats slid forward, arms and oar extended, so that when the command to start the race is given, the first action is to aggressively apply power to your oar, to move off the line and into the course as quickly as possible.
After the completion of that first stroke, the seat slides forward only part way – to speed the next — and down it goes again. The next time it slides forward a little more, and then again, and within five strokes each rower is taking the full length of the slide, and making long and fast fluid motions. It feels like the slow uncoiling of a tightly wound spring, and it’s a struggle for the team to settle into the more sustainable rhythm needed for the rest of the race. With the start complete, the coxswain takes command, keeping track of where the boat is relative to competitors, getting a sense for the energy and timing of the group and each rower.
Anyone who feels the boat losing ground to a competitor can’t do much on their own to affect that. They need to somehow convey urgency and aggression to each other without any one of them becoming the person who disrupts the progress by going too soon, or pushing or pulling too hard or too fast. They rely on the coxswain’s commands and that unspoken communication among the rowers to understand who has reserves and who doesn’t.
The coxswain’s primary job is to be the jockey of the boat — to understand the race strategy, and adjust the tactics to confront how the race is unfolding — to understand the state of the crew, to read the rower’s abilities, reserves, and confidence. To motivate and direct. The cox also steers the boat, holding a rope in each hand, which trails back to the tiller at the stern of the shell. The rope threads through wooden dowels, which act as grips, and also serve the same purpose as drums did on roman galleys. Those wooden dowels are slapped against the side of the boat (the gunwales) and produce a loud “crack” that is felt as much as it is heard by the rowers. To keep time, to signal urgency.
The coxswain’s more nuanced, more intimate, more fundamentally critical role is communicating where the boat is relative to the competitor.
Competitive progress and results in a race are spoken of using a special lexicon: “seats” (how many seats – places in the boat – a boat is ahead or behind the others), “open water” (that there is a gap between the leader and the next boat), and best of all “lengths”, (how many lengths of a boat separate the leader from the next boat).
We had no idea how good we were, or more importantly, could be. No real first-hand knowledge of how we stacked up against other crews; the prior season had told us so little. If anything it informed us of desire, but what was murky was not knowing if what we desired was achievable. Candy asses or worthy competitors? We didn’t know.
Until our first race.
This is a sport where uniformity is considered a requirement — same height means same stroke length, making it easier for everyone to move together. Same weight/build means more uniform stroke power, making headway more consistent and smooth. But we were a dog’s breakfast of athletes. We ranged in size from 5’ 8’’ (me) to 6’ 3” (Humphrey), more than one of us stocky and muscular, one thin as a string bean.
Like the flight of a bumblebee, where the laws of physics say it shouldn’t be able to fly, the sensibilities and experience of the rowing community said we’d make a poor crew team. We had joined a league with 30 years of history, rowing against schools that had worked to create reputations, had legacies to care about and care for. They were older schools than ours, schools that had earned the elite credentials our school was so actively striving to emulate, or surpass.
A first-time crew coming from this yet-to-be established school, its role in the local education landscape still forming, and with a coach who spoke with an Italian accent — well, whatever reputation preceded us inspired little in the way of fear or respect.
So that first race meant a lot to all of us. When we arrived, the other teams couldn’t believe their eyes when we got out of our cars and walked up to the dock with Giancarlo. Redwood High was the reigning champion, and the first thing their coach said to Giancarlo was “Where’s your varsity?” Not only unwelcoming, but just plain rude. Giancarlo explained, in his accent, that we were in fact the varsity.
It was the nervous look we got from him that told us what we needed to know. Nervous because he wanted to get us on the water, in his and our element.
We got in our seats, tightened the laces on our footrests, put our oars in the oarlocks, closed the cages, and pushed off the dock. We paddled out into the open water and waited for Giancarlo to pull alongside in his motorboat. The warm up was focused, nervous, and silent. Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes of practicing starts and making sure we could transition to a steady tempo for the longer middle section of the race.
“You know what to do. Fast off the start, and then settle down, find your rhythm,” he said as he turned the steering wheel and peeled deliberately away from us. Just as he was about to leave earshot, he added, “Put a pickle in the water,” and punctuated his joke with a broad grin. He was nervous, but not too nervous to be himself.
He’d watch us from his launch, alongside the racers, as we made our way up the course. Out of earshot, out of sight, and out of mind.
We headed to the start line, a series of four small platforms anchored in the water, each boat pulled up to a platform. We backed up to ours, and a race official leaned over and took hold of the boat’s rudder.
Each of us had his seat drawn forward, oar extended, blade in the water, tensed and ready to drive his legs down for that first stroke. We were all waiting to hear the official say “Etes-vous prêt?” (are you ready?) and then the pause before he says “Partez” (go).
Coiled, tense. But the official said “Boat 1 bow-seat take a quarter stroke” to point the boat. A flush of activity in the boat, and we coil again. More silence.
Again it’s the official calling out “Boat 3 two-seat take a quarter stroke.”
More silence. More agony. But then we heard it, “Etes-vous pret?” and a rush of adrenaline hit my bloodstream like a fire hydrant knocked over in a car chase, and the knot in my stomach hurting, burning. Then we heard “Partez.”
The noise was deafening. Seats sliding, oars snapping back against oarlocks, breathing, water splashing. Each rower struggling to keep a clear sense for how the weight was shifting with each stroke, how quickly seats were sliding forward, how much strength got put into the leg drive, into each sweep of the oar.
Those first ten strokes were violent indeed, each rower close to panic, struggling simply to keep up.
As we transitioned from the start sequence to the more deliberate tempo of the race, we also began to let go of individual fears to secure a tighter grip onto collective fears, our collective self.
We were now 50 yards into the 2,000-yard race.
As we found our rhythm, we began to get a sense for what needed to be done. It was subtle, but in these frantic moments, this calm place emerged. We could feel our advantage before we could see its manifestation in our position on the water.
The boat seemed to lift little by little out of the water. We could feel the effort of each stroke seem to diminish the more we moved together. But none dared look to the left or the right, to see where we were against our competitors. Finally someone shouted, “Where are we?”
Our coxswain Betsy shouted back, “We’ve got two seats on Bishop O’Dowd, down a half a length on Redwood. Open water on Berkeley.”
What? Redwood HIgh is the reigning champion, and we were only down a half length. And Berkeley High? They had 2,000 students to choose from. The news hit us like bricks, but bricks from behind, roughly propelling us forward.
Now we could hear the other coxswains, shouting similar updates to their teams. Frantic, loud.
Pickles in the water. We focused on rhythm and channeled our energy, our confidence, to our oars.
“Twenty power strokes, on my mark,” shouted Betsy. We leaned into ourselves, our reserves, but not in a desperate way, in a calm and comfortable way.
At the end of our twenty Betsy delivered the news. “We’ve got open water on Bishop, pulling even on Redwood, 1,000 yards to go,” she shouted. We felt good.
We heard Redwood’s cox call for twenty. “Twenty more, now!” came the response. And there was no desperation or panic in her voice, because she could see how nervous the other team was, she could see the upper hand coming our way.
More pickles in the water: large, comfortable, deliberate, well sized.
Five hundred yards to go and we heard, “We’ve got two seats on Redwood!” She’d stopped telling us about the other teams, they were behind us, and no longer relevant. Instead of calling for power strokes, she just had us pick up the pace in general. Slapping the wooden tiller handles on the gunwales of the boats, making that slap/crack sound we could hear and feel.
We began rowing away from them. The crack of Betsy’s tiller handles was faster than the crack we heard from Redwood. And Redwood could hear this too. And she just kept at it. We no longer had the breath or the energy to ask where we were, and she wasn’t saying. We were more worried about how long we could hold on to this pace than knowing our exact position.
“Twenty more strokes to the finish, give me twenty power strokes!” And that was all we needed. Twenty brutal, grueling strokes, arms, legs, shoulders, lungs — everything on fire.
We crossed the finish line, not sure of anything. Betsy screamed, “We won, we won, we won!” as we slumped over our oars, chests heaving, but quickly leaving that behind to start celebrating. Splashing each other till we were soaking wet with fetid lake water. Screaming with delight and pride.
We looked over at the Redwood team, and the dejection and defeat on their faces was etched in angry acid. We weren’t supposed to win, or even come close.
There was Giancarlo, pulling up alongside of us, a bursting, barely contained smile. And for a moment, we were all there together, unsure of what all this meant. And we lingered, just a bit. In this place of comfort, certainty, trust. Knowing we’d be rowing back to the dock differently than we had rowed out from it.
It was hard to contain the excitement, harder still when we saw the anger, the dejection, frankly, the embarrassment of the other teams. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The boat was up and out of the water in a flash, cleaned and put away even quicker. Giancarlo exchanged pleasantries with Redwood’s coach, but it appeared nothing pleasant was taking place between them.
For the rest of the season we continued to line up at starts with that knot in our stomachs and Giancarlo’s sparse but playful sendoffs. With the same violent conversion of power and energy into fluid, efficient motion. And in the process we made a transformation, gaining an understanding of who and what we truly were, and found rare comfort there.
We won, a lot. Went all the way to the league championship. And won that too.
Our eight, on the right outside lane, at the Nationals in Philadelphia. We would finish third.
Along this arc of achievement, we found a place where our fear and our bravery were held comfortably together in our hands. Making silent pacts with our inner voices, speaking words of hope and naming goals. Articulating ambition, feeling its texture, knowing its taste in our mouth, its scent in the air. Most important, gaining an understanding that ambition and humility can and should be close, intimate friends.
It wasn’t about success, it was that we went down a path of our own choosing, guided and driven by acknowledged ambitions.
* * * * *
A little over a year ago my parents mailed me a set of old photos and awards from when I was a kid, and in with these were some photos of my time on the crew team. Pictures of us, taken from a bridge overlooking one of our races, where we’re all little dots in a boat, with oars outstretched, all perfectly parallel. As we had so meticulously been trained to do.
My favorite photo is the one taken just after we had won the league championships. All of us lined up, holding our oars in the air. We’re wearing shirts that said “CPS Varsity Crew,” our inside joke, going back to that first race. With expressions of joy on our faces. Pure joy. Misfit joy. There’s Giancarlo, kneeling in the front. That wide grin visible, and, if you knew where to look and how to read his expressions, a certain sense of pride. For us, and for him.
So there I was on the phone with my friend Miles, a member of that first team, having not spoken to each other in more than twenty years. We each spontaneously, independently remarked that rowing for this man was the first time each of us had ever felt like a success, at anything. That we had ever felt valued, and valuable, for simply who we were, and who we could be.
It was heartbreaking and wonderful to see how he had had the same effect on each of us.
Giancarlo gave us this place where we could take our very first personal risks. He taught us to be deliberate, and to acknowledge and manifest our own ambition, and he gave us the opportunity to learn what it was we had within ourselves.
The early 1980s were a sort of a “between” era in semiconductors – between the era of predominantly manual chip design and fabrication and the era of computer-driven design and highly automated production.
One awesome aspect of working at LSI Logic in this “between” era was that so many of the founders and executives there had been in the semiconductor industry from the very beginning of its existence, or pretty darn close to the beginning. And they had stories to tell as they helped propel the industry forward.
In my first year at LSI I was in a meeting with Wilf Corrigan (co-founder/CEO) and a small group of executives from one of our customers – they were there to check out our fab and processes. One of these visiting executives was someone Wilf had worked with ages ago.
At a break in the meeting he and Wilf started swapping stories of the early days of the industry, back when he was a manufacturing engineer. He said something like “do you remember when we were at Transitron, and we’d hold the wafers with tweezers, dip them in acid to etch them, and then look at the second hand on the wall clock to time how long to keep them in the acid bath?”
Then they both laughed long and hard. Because that’s how they made semiconductors in the 1960s.
In the 1960s and 1970s semiconductor manufacturing was still largely manual. Wafers were literally carried from one manufacturing step to the next. Photolithography machines were manually set up, aimed, and operated.
In the 1980s all of that started to change. As a result of Moore’s law, the line widths of semiconductor traces were steadily shrinking, the density of devices per wafer were increasing, and the size of the wafers were themselves increasing – from 4 inch diameters in 1975, to 6 inch diameters in the early 1980s – to today’s 18 inch diameter wafers. And the reasoning is pure economics – an 18 inch wafer can produce 200x more chips than a 4 inch wafers.
An 18 inch wafer
This also meant that fabs had to get much cleaner. Contaminants smaller than specs of dust could get in the way of a photolithography trace or cause a short between two metal lines and as wafer sizes grew, process variations or human error were that much more prevalent.
So conditions you could tolerate in a fab in 1975 would cause serious manufacturing yield problems in the factories of the 1980s. This is when the concept of a “clean room” took hold – a manufacturing environment with a system that could control the amount and size of airborne particles.
That latter metric – size of particle – would become super important. In the early 1980s Class 10 fabs were just becoming necessary – so in a cubic foot of air in the fab, there could only be 10 particles whose size is 0.5 microns. Class 1 fabs were being talked about, but no one could afford them in the 1980s.
Today, clean rooms are orders of magnitude cleaner than Class 1.
This is also when “bunny suits” became mandatory. It was when automated wafer transport systems were just coming on line, so wafers could be stacked in sealed “boats” and these could be transported between manufacturing stations and removed only when the wafer was being operated on.
Back in the mid-1980s wafer defects were pretty evenly caused by airborne contamination (airborne particles), process errors, equipment errors, and human error. This has changed a lot, today automation has almost completely eliminated human error, and technology has almost completely eliminated airborne contamination.
Final yield ultimately determined how many chips met the specification the customer had ordered. Poor yield meant they were getting less than they expected – and would have to make some painful adjustments to their own manufacturing schedules and revenue plans. Good yield meant we could either sell the customer the excess or stockpile them for follow-on orders.
Back to the stories.
In my second year at LSI we hired a super talented VP of Manufacturing, Travis White. He was a talkative and friendly Texan and loved to wander into the cubicle area where the marketing folks were and tell us stories about “way back when.”
I remember him telling us a story about when he was running a fab for Texas Instruments, and their yield suddenly plummeted. It was a true crisis and he and his team spent days and weeks analyzing their manufacturing data and processes and couldn’t figure it out. They were running out of ideas and understandably, the CEO and TI’s customers were getting impatient. They’d gone through all their processes, checked all the machinery, again and again. But could not find what was killing their yield.
So Travis walked down to the fab and just spent time looking around, observing.
And then he saw it.
They’d changed suppliers of semiconductor boats and needed to secure them with rubber bands. And a well intentioned supervisor had gone out and purchased a container of rubber bands for each work station.
Rubber bands dusted with talc. To make the bands easier to pick up.
And with every ‘snap” those talc particles were floating through the air, finding their way onto the wafers. That was what was killing yield.
Travis was as horrified as he was amused that something that simple could wreak such havoc, and go unnoticed.
He could wander into the marketing area because we literally had a semiconductor fab attached to our building in Milpitas, CA. In fact, the fab was the majority of the building.
It was a key selling point for our customers. We could walk them to the back of the office portion of the building and they could look through observation windows to see a few steps of the manufacturing going on, with all the employees busy at work. Some of our competitors couldn’t afford their own fabs, or had other companies make their custom semiconductors. But we had our own fab and controlled that part of our destiny.
More generally back then there were lots of semiconductor fabs in the valley – AMD, Intel, HP, MMI, National Semiconductor and dozens of others. That’s where the “silicon” of silicon valley came from.
I believe only Intel has a fab in Silicon Valley today. Everyone else stared down the face of the multi-billion dollar investments required to stay on the leading edge of semiconductor technology and outsourced their manufacturing to a small number of companies in Asia who act as “foundries” – you give them your design and they make the finished chips. Companies like TSMC and Samsung.
Even Intel is staggered at the expense required to build state-of-the-art semiconductor processes and fabs, and has recently acknowledged it can’t compete with these foundries. They themselves may start using them, or be faced with some serious investments to keep up.
So I frequently think back to Travis White’s stories and Wilf’s stories. It was awesome to be working with them when this industry was truly growing up. A small window of time at a point of significant industry transformation.
To this day I smile when I come across a rubber band that has talcum powder on it. Or see a wall clock and think of Wilf Corrigan, holding a wafer with tweezers checking the second hand on that clock.
And in that earlier post I took a very liberal definition of CRO – which could confuse folks. I’m expanding the topic of optimization (of which CRO plays a huge role) to cover the entirety of the customer journey all the way to satisfied, enthusiastic user of the product. Let’s just refer to this as optimization.
For the marketing team, there’s likely three orgs at work here – an SEO team optimizing organic traffic volume and patterns, a CRO team looking at how to make the most productive use of that traffic, and a product team (product managers and product designers) ensuring the user experience pays off.
Optimization isn’t just throwing an A/B test up and seeing what happens. It’s about getting super focused on understanding the journey that a visitor is taking and the purpose of the journey. And then using data inform where you focus and improve that journey. This is easy to do for one particular customer’s journey, it’s super hard to do at scale for everyone you are targeting.
While to people deep into marketing this is well known, I’ve lost track of the number of executives, salespeople, and partners who don’t really understand this.
At its simplest, optimization is about examining the path a customer or prospect follows in getting a solution to a problem they have. And then it’s about ensuring that the solution they found really does solve the problem.
The path to the solution follows the “customer journey” model popularized by Hubspot, which I like because it helps you understand what type of engagement is most effective based on where that prospect is in their journey.
At first the prospect is looking for information – to help them understand what kind of problem they have. This means you need to understand the problem AND the words the customer us using to describe their problem. Their words.
On the last marketing team I led, we’d use the prompt of “there’s someone awake at 3am, they can’t sleep because of a problem at work. We need to know the words they’re typing into Google at 3am to describe their problem.”
Your content describing the problem needs to be fully search optimized for those terms. And that piece of content they find needs to also provide a set of terms that visitor is going to remember and use to describe the kinds of solutions to their problem. Because if you do your job well with this first piece of content they will search for more. Ideally follow a link in that first piece of content they found.
This creates the next set of content. And the terms in the first stage of content now align with the terms in this second set and your search optimization needs to be heavily focused on this second set terms. Now you’re providing more specific information about the kinds of solutions to the problem exist. Helping guide the visitor to a solution they can choose (ideally yours).
In this second phase you need to provide a set of specifics about solution capabilities, advantages and drawbacks, and how to select. Again, this content needs to be optimized to get the visitor from the first stage to this content, as well as provide specific terms that will guide the visitor to your solution in this next phase.
There arethree types of search terms to optimize for: navigational, transactional, and commercial. Up until now we’ve been dealing with “informational” search terms and strategies. The visitor is not prepared to make a buying decision yet. So “transactional” search terms and strategies would be premature and would send the visitor elsewhere. And data will tell you this. If you’ve got a low conversion rate across phases, that’s where you need to dig in and figure out why.
At this third stage, the visitor wants a specific solution. Yours. Now you show up with a set of search terms that are about transactions. They are about selecting the solution. And the visitor is ready to buy.
You can see how complex this gets. At every juncture connecting these three stages of the journey, there’s a different strategy for optimizing the conversion at each stage.
And we haven’t even talked about how this can change by persona, by type of company and size of company.
But the optimization doesn’t stop there.
Let’s assume the visitor has chosen your solution to evaluate. They fill out your form and submit it.You have literally minutes to contact them. That’s because at the pace we all work today, that prospect will have completely forgotten the form submission and your company by tomorrow. On my last team we got our repose time to under 10 minutes. That’s right, within ten minutes of that potential customer sending in a form asking to be contacted, they were on the phone with a sales development rep (SDR).
And let’s assume that the SDR qualifies that opportunity, and an account rep made a sale. What happens the first time the customer (likely not even the person who purchased) uses the product you sold them?
That too has to align with the terms and expectations set during that journey. Because the cycle doesn’t end with the sale. In a lot of respects the real journey begins with the sale. It causes that customer to want more of the product they bought, and be interested in learning about the other products they might not have considered originally. A happy, satisfied customer is what also causes more prospects to learn about you by sharing their experiences. And one of those people they tell will head to a browser, and type in a phrase that should bring them to you, and the process starts all over again.
For CMOs today, this whole landscape is pure gold. optimization is measurable, it connects words to actions and connects prospects to products. It’s everything you’re responsible for, and it now is informed and driven by data. What could be better?
It’s been a little over a week since Donald Trump won the US presidential election, and this is playing out as expected. Republicans are the “winners” and Democrats are the “losers.” The obsession with winning at all costs – and the Republicans paid quite a price for this win – is what has polarized our nation, and gridlocked our government.
But with Trump it was different. Let’s not look at his policies – politics is about differing policies, and democracy is supporting the President whether you agree with his/her policies.
And throughout the campaign, the keen observers were reminding us “Trump is not the issue, it’s that so many people support him – that’s the real issue.”
True story. As shocking as it is to confront a country led by a racist, sexist bully, it’s even more horrifying to contemplate that people chose that kind of a leader.
So don’t fear Trump. Fear his supporters.
And “his supporters” are people in your community.
The people you shop with, you go to school events with, that you socialize with. For them racism and sexism were not deal breakers. That’s the alarming part of this election.
And there is real fear. In the days after the election our high school age son came home from school sharing with us that his friends and their families are worried about their safety and security. These are naturalized American citizen families of Vietnamese origin, Sri Lankan origin, Mexican origin, middle eastern origin. They are living in fear today.
What they fear is what might happen to them in their community because of the color of their skin, their gender, or their religious beliefs. They certainly don’t fear that Trump will personally discriminate against them, or threaten their safety or well being. It’s that the people they live in this community might. The people who at some point decided that racism and sexism were not deal breakers.
I live in a community with a national reputation for supporting disabled students. The university campus here has sent numerous disabled athletes to the Special Olympics. How should they feel in their community when they see the leader their community members vote for is someone who openly mocks the disabled?
I don’t believe that the people in our communities that supported Trump believe they’re racists or sexists. But the moment of choosing Trump is the moment of truth.
I honestly struggle to imagine an explanation from parent to a daughter explaining why they voted for Trump yet somehow are not in some way endorsing sexism. Would it go like this?: “I’ve decided to vote for Trump, but even though he has repeatedly demeaned women and admitted to groping them, you should feel safe in a society with him as a leader.” Really? How safe can you feel as a woman today, with the Commander-in-Chief setting a tone of blatant sexism?
When you talk to really effective leaders they will tell you the most significant aspect of leadership is setting the tone of the organization. Setting the tone of what your expectations and standards are. Setting the tone for howwork will get done, how decisions will get made, how people will treat each other.
A tone is being set that racism and sexism are ok. That it’s ok to make fun of the disabled. That it’s ok to pass judgment on the men and women in the military because of their race, creed, or national origin.
Put another way, if someone on one of my teams said what Trump has said about women, I would have fired him. And I wouldn’t have deliberated whether or not his ideas and plans about his role in the business had merit. Because none of that would have mattered. I don’t tolerate discrimination on my teams. Zero.
If someone said what he said in a job interview, I wouldn’t has thought “maybe he has better ideas than another candidate?” or “I dislike the other candidates more than this one” – that’s the last I would have seen of them.
Generally speaking, I can’t imagine an ethical corporation that would hire someone who demonstrated the behavior Trump did during the election cycle – regardless of how well they might do the job.
You can like Trump for his policies, but unless you’ve rejected his racist, sexist, mocking of the disabled, dishonoring of our military men and women – then you are enabling racism, you are enabling sexism, you are enabling the diminishing of the disabled and military. Because you can’t say “I support the disabled” and support someone who does this:
So where does that leave us? I’m not sure. What do we do when we live in communities made up of people who through their vote for Trump seemed to say “Racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination were not deal breakers.”
It seems to me the obligation for reconciliation lies with them. The responsibility for explaining to the people they see in their community how they could support a candidate like Trump and yet be intolerant of racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination. They bear the responsibility of safeguarding the members of their community who are of different races, creeds, and colors. And the rest of the community will need to hold them accountable for their actions.
I was one one of Uber’s best fans – I must have recruited a dozen friends and colleagues to the service, because it fundamentally is just so much better than taxis or car services. Wonderfully inspired idea, and at the street level, brilliantly executed. I loved it.
And I use the past tense because I did love it. But not anymore. The trickle of moral lapses by Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, have become a roaring torrent. Uber has an ethics problem, but most importantly it has an ethical leadership problem.
Which is why the details of the plan to smear journalists who create unflattering views of the service pushed me to the point of being all done with the service. So, on November 25 I sent my request to Uber to cancel my account, as “the moral cost to me of doing business with your firm is more than I can afford, and I have happily created my first accounts at Lyft and Curb.”
And in efficient Uber fashion, I received this confirmation of my account cancellation, which is sad. The service and drivers are great. But that’s not enough today. You have to believe in and trust the people at the top. And I can do neither with Uber the way it is being run right now. Travis – until you show some leadership and I won’t be back.
I have personal heroes – folks who have lived their lives in ways that give me inspiration and a vocabulary to name my own ambitions. People who are unafraid to say what they believe, regardless of what it will cost them.
Few people outside of professional cycling know who this man is, but he’s the journalist who first suspected Lance Armstrong of cheating, and spent 13 years doing the difficult work of uncovering the evidence and speaking the truth. And he became the target of all Armstrong could throw at him.
“WhenLance Armstrong won his first Tour de France in 1999, David Walsh wrote in The Sunday Times that he watched the race in sadness. Armstrong’s astonishing exploits, just three years after his successful battle with cancer, did not make sense to him. Rather than joining the unquestioning journalists who lauded the American’s achievements, Walsh called for an inquiry into the Tour de France in July 1999,….”
Think about the context. In 1999 – the first year of Armstrong’s comeback – Walsh calls this out. And for the next 13 years pretty much everyone else tells him he’s wrong. It costs him his job, professional and personal relationships. How lonely it must have been for him.
I am a huge cycling fan, and my family and I spent five vacations in the French Alps to watch the race in person. In 2006 through a journalist friend, we struck up a dialogue with David to encourage him to write what became “From Lance to Landis” – his first english language book that laid out the evidence Armstrong was cheating.
David flew to France and spent the weekend with us. I was awestruck at the simplicity of his motivation: to expose a lie. It wasn’t personal, it was about values. This was a man of principle outraged at the crime he clearly saw but was incredibly inconvenient and unpopular to expose.
Over dinner long into the night, and then again at breakfast the next morning, the talk centered on the crime that was happening in plain sight. Incredibly we were sitting with him at that dinner when his phone rang – another journalist calling him with the news that Floyd Landis had tested positive at the just completed Tour de France. Talk about being at ground-zero at a pivotal moment.
Looking back I can’t believe that weekend actually happened. What brought us together? I would like to think a sense of shared values.
This is a man whose humility, values, and sense of purpose we can all learn from. A true hero. I’ve got a few other people who serve this kind of inspiration, I’ll write about them later. For now, thank you, David.
A little over a year ago I started a new job, and a big component of my role was to help the company bring a lot of scale to their marketing, and bring a higher tempo and user focus to the company’s product development. This meant taking three groups of already high performing teams, and leading them into territories unfamiliar to them, while also helping them develop skills and capabilities new to many.
This is the kind of job that comes around in your career rarely. Tremendous, tremendous fun, and the best part is it’s only just beginning. We’re growing like crazy, and are about to enter that phase of the market where we have the right offering at the right time, and are about to see some pretty breathtaking expansion.
And I found myself explaining how I work, how I manage, and many of my core values as a manager, but also as a person. A lot.
So much of creating the opportunity for the rapid experimentation, fast failure, “iterate to excellence” team performance is based on how you work as a team, not what you work on as a team.
I mentioned this to my wife in a text message while on a train headed to work, and she pointed me to an interview with a CEO about his “user manual” – a one page document that lays out how anyone in the company can easily understand how to work with him. I LOVED it. A combination of approaches, philosophy, and personal values.
By the time I got off the train I had a complete draft of my User Manual. Check it out, I’m on v4.3
By the time I’d plugged in at the office I published it to everyone on my teams via Chatter, as well as my counterparts on the exec team and a bunch of others I work with frequently.
Folks on my team appreciated the transparency, and it’s made it so much easier to engage with other teams and get to a place of trust and performance that much more quickly.
But the best part was for me. Any time you have to be intentional about something, and write it down, you learn something about yourself.
I work with a lot of startup companies, and am currently involved with three that share the same characteristics: pre-product, pre-revenue, and at the very beginning of fundraising. And I’m having the same conversation with all three. It goes like this:
The cost of getting a company to scale and even to profitability has dropped dramatically in the past ten years.
The nature of venture capital has shifted from an early stage focus to late stage or even growth equity investing.
Angels and experienced high net worth folks have stepped in to fill the role VCs served for early stage investing.
A viable fundraising strategy can default to a path that doesn’t assume VCs participate at all, or perhaps only towards the end.
Let me expand on each of these points.
COST OF GETTING TO SCALE – THE RISE OF THE MACHINES
There are a lot of factors at work here, to the benefit of entrepreneurs. The rise in cloud computing means that fixed infrastructure expense has largely been eliminated from the business plan, and this will only get better (Amazon just announced it’s 19th price decrease in six years). Virtual teams + Google Docs drive OPEX down even further unburdening you from lease costs.
The shift to “inbound marketing” – social media, blogs, SEO, viral – can drive large volumes of traffic at significantly lower costs (60% less or more) than traditional “outbound methods – and at higher conversion and retention rates. It takes a lot less of your marketing budget to reach and acquire users. With the shift to freemium and subscription business models you can also let your most active users decide for themselves to pay for your services through in-app messaging and offers – significantly reducing the cost of sales.
I call this the “Rise of the Machines” because metrics and machine-driven resources/methods do much of the heavy lifting at a fraction of the cost of human-intensive alternatives. Josh Kopleman surveyed his portfolio and found “…that companies today are 3 times more likely to get to $250K in revenue during an eighteen month period than they were six years ago. ”
VENTURE CAPITAL IS DEAD – LONG LIVE VENTURE CAPITAL
The money that VCs invest comes from “institutional investors” – pension funds, endowments, insurance companies – and these institutions allocate their investments across a wide range of “asset classes” to manage and diversify risk. They tend to make these allocations based on ten year return performance averages, and beginning in 2009 (as my partners and I found out with unfortunate timing) the ten year return for the VC asset class went negative.
That’s for tough the VC industry overall, but if you look at the top 20-25 firms, the ten year return is quite good. So what institutions did was stop putting money in general into the VC asset class, and only put money into the big, established firms. This caused fund sizes to swell (Accel’s most recent fund was $1.35B+ comprised of $475M “early stage” + $875M “growth equity” funds), which incents those firms to put larger and larger investments to work in each deal (to justify their partners’ time).
So at a macro level, investment into VC funds dried up for all but the top firms (reducing the total number of VC funds) and poured into the top firms, shifting their focus to larger investments in later stage firms.
ANGELS BECOME ANGELS ALMOST LITERALLY
At the same time early stage VCs moved out of the market, a wave of experienced tech executives who had made fortunes building internet companies became very active investors. They brought more than deep pockets, they brought valuable insight and experience and even better – intensive, engaged roles with the companies they funded.
And along the way, incubators emerged as mini-factories where angels could become involved with lots of companies and let the law of large numbers help them there. Overall, angels are investing 40% more than they were even a year ago – now over $700K per round, and there are concerns there’s a bubble happening with incubators. But the headlines are, angels have stepped into early stage investing at a scale and role traditionally reserved for VCs.
STARTUP FUNDRAISING HAS NEVER BEEN BETTER, AND WORSE
What this means for startups is you can get your business to scale with ten times less money that you needed 10-15 years ago. $3M – $5M. If you plan well and are well connected you can do this with individual investors who add a ton of value and will roll up their sleeves to help out. The real benefit is you can also find individuals who share the same expectations you have for the outcome of the business. A 5X return on $3M may be the right outcome for the business and for investors who define success as a financial return coupled with a durable business that solves a problem they care about.
It also means you can liberate yourself from having to map your business and outcome to the trajectory that many of the larger VC firms need their investments to align with – they need billion dollar exits to generate the billion dollar returns they committed to their institutional investors.
Don’t get me wrong here. VCs are an important and valuable catalyst to the technology sector and the economy – and many are out there doing what they’ve always done to identify the next great disruptive business. And for your business, a VC can be the exact right fit either at the beginning or once you’ve gotten to scale.
It’s just that now VCs are playing a different role than they have in the past, and for startups this means it’s a brand new, unfamiliar, day out there.
I hate leaving something undone, unresolved, and I am sorry to tell all of you that I have done exactly that with this blog.
So, this is the last post of OpenAmbition. I have run out of the space inside me and within my life to keep it alive and vibrant. Which is incredibly sad. Sad given how much enthusiasm and life so many of you sent my way to start it, and more importantly, to keep it going.
I hope and look forward to returning to this. It was fun, exciting, inspiring, exploring why we take risks, why the prospect of failing, and the act of failing, can help motivate us and inform our successes.
Thank you, all of you, for the help and encouragement to breath some life into this idea. This blog brought me together with so many friends, introduced me to new ones, and brought the best out of all of us.
Miles (who later rowed Varsity Heavyweight at Cal), me, Betsy, Humphrey, John and Giancarlo front and center.
Open Ambition 