Tag Archives: claremont mckenna

CMC’s Website Redesign: the good, the bad and the ugly

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CMC recently redesigned its website. Here are my thoughts on the redesign. Note that I don't have any data, and I haven't conducted any tests on users, so the stuff I'm writing here might be totally bunk. But if no one has any data, we might as well go with my opinion, as I've read the entire back collection of articles on useit.com, as well as Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, and CMC's Public Affairs Office probably hasn't.

The Good

CMC quick links bar The new "Quick Links" bar.

This has a good list of places that I visit most often. This should probably be contextual based on the page you're currently on, so the "Faculty" page would have different quick links than the "Students" page, but again they should be testing this on actual users.

cmc contact info Contact information on most pages.

Most pages have phone numbers and addresses listed in a prominent location. This is an excellent step and something I've called for.

The footer.
cmc website footer
On a site like CMC's where users have a diverse set of goals, you want to get people to where they are trying to go as quickly as possible. The footer makes this possible with a ton of deep links to pages you probably want to visit.

Much more readable faculty profile pages, as well as an acknowledgement that social media and student websites exist.

The Bad

Horribly small default font size.
small font size on cmc website
The default font size is 11px, which is fine for people under 40, but really difficult to read for people over 40, especially because users don't know how to change the font size in their browser. In addition, a small font size makes a link more difficult to click on because the target is so small - see Fitts Law. The small font size makes it hard to distinguish text in low contrast environments as well. cmc website small text

Not changing the color of visited links.
cmc visited unvisited links
On a Google search results page, I can see at one glance which links I've already visited, because they are purple. No such luck on CMC's site, which displays every link in blue. This violates rule #3 of Jakob Nielsen's Top 10 Mistakes of Web Design, and has been shown in tests to disorient users, and cause them to visit the same page over and over.

The menu bar text shows up inconsistently.
missing menu text
The menu bar is the series of grayish-red boxes, which as you can see contain no text. This photo was using the latest version of Chrome on a Mac. Props to CMC for trying to use Cufon but they need to work out the bugs and test in all browsers.

No mobile version of the site.
Mobile devices should load an alternate stylesheet that presents the main content without the fluff, to save bandwidth and optimize the information presentation for a smaller screen.

Clicking on the logo doesn't take you back to the frontpage.
When you click on the logo in the corner of every page you are taken to cmc.edu/discovercmc, instead of the homepage. This violates a well known usability convention: if the logo is clickable, it should take you to the homepage. I challenge you to find a top 500 website where this is not true.

No Analytics.
This means that Public Affairs isn't collecting data about which pages are popular, which keywords users are searching for to find our site, and which links are being clicked on, which implies they don't really care about how users use the site, and will hurt their ability to iteratively improve the site navigation in the future.

No caching site resources or minifying Javascript.
Page load times are slow; CMC scores only 63/100 in Google's Online Page Speed tool. Because no images, scripts or stylesheets are cached, they have to be reloaded every time the user reloads a page. This is costly in terms of speed and bandwidth. Fortunately this is easily fixable in Apache.

The Ugly

The homepage.
cmc frontpage Holy cow, this is a mess. Some of the problems:
  • No search bar. This is stupid - the search bar exists in the page's source but is hidden from the user.
  • Fourteen links to other pages. On a page whose goal should be to get users deep within the site as quickly as possible, having this few links is unacceptable.
  • Incredibly small link targets make the links hard to click.
  • No skip links for disabled users.
  • Changing the center image will require extensive Photoshopping to remove the background, which in the end will reduce the total number of changes made to the frontpage slideshow.
  • The "Discover CMC" link looks like an ad, and I missed it the first six times I visited the homepage
  • There's no way to determine at a glance what separates CMC from every other university. One of the boxes has some bland text below a "Why CMC" header but the page has to do better.
  • It's not clear where you should click to find any of the items described here:
    University Website
  • No meta description or keywords, which are essential for search engine optimization (SEO).
    cmc no meta
Fortunately, if my search habits are at all typical, most people use Google instead of the homepage to find resources on CMC's site. But the new homepage is the flagship, and it violates most usability guidelines. It reminds me of flash intro sites from the '90's that used to load when you went to Nike.com or Boo.com. Those flash intros looked really cool when they were presented to management, but loaded slowly and caused shitloads of usability problems, which is why sites don't have flash intros anymore. The homepage is a huge step backwards from the old page.

Big Ass Images that Convey No Information
Here's the homepage for current students:
cmc student gateway
And here are the parts of that page that are actually clickable:
cmc student gateway links
The prime real estate on the page is taken by an unclickable infographic telling us that upperclassmen return to campus on August 28. Here's the same information, in a more compressed format: 
8/28 Students Return
The image on the page is 465 pixels wide by 290 high, or 134850 pixels of screen real estate. My compressed version is roughly 150 pixels wide by 18 high, for 2700 pixels of screen space, a 4900% improvement in information density.

More generally, big ass images take forever to load (especially important on mobile devices) and don't contribute anything to the page. User test after user test shows users ignore filler images, and that visual bloat is annoying.

The SEO strategy/URL's are still awful.
To illustrate CMC's nonexistent approach to search engine optimization (SEO), I'll use the faculty page for my thesis reader.
ananda ganguly
The page looks OK - the email link is a little wonky but it's fine. Now, what are the keywords we'd like to use to describe this page? The biggest one is the name of the professor - Ananda Ganguly. The second biggest is his department, Accounting, and then maybe we want to also have CMC as a keyword.

URL Contains No Keywords
Let's look at the page URL, which Google uses as part of its PageRank formula to determine what's actually on the page:

http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/academic/faculty/profile.php?Fac=519

This URL does not contain any of our relevant keywords, making the page tougher to find in a Google Search.

Nondescript Page Title
Let's look at the page title, which shows up in the browser bar, and is the bright blue link text when the page shows up in Google results, as well as a large component in the PageRank formula:

ganguly page title
The page title is "Academics," which tells you zero about the page content. Since this page title is so non-descriptive, Google had to use its own algorithm to give the page a descriptive title in search results:
ganguly google title

Generic Meta Tags
Let's look at the page meta description, which shows up as the black text below the blue text in a search result in Google:
ganguly meta description
The meta description is "Academics and research at Claremont McKenna College," which is generic enough that Google has to try to find better text on the page to use. The result isn't optimal:
ganguly google text

No H1 Heading
Pages should have exactly one h1 heading containing information about the primary subject of the page text on the page. There's a perfect candidate - the professor's name, Ananda Ganguly. This text does not have an h1 heading - in fact, there's not a single h1 heading on the page.

No Alt Text for Images
There's a nice image of Professor Ganguly on the page. Images can't be crawled, it's important to provide an alt tag so Google knows what's in the image, as well as for blind users or users on slow internet connections. However, the image does not have an alt tag, so Google doesn't know the subject of the image.

Those are some really, really basic SEO optimizations. Figuring that stuff out would make CMC pages more prominent when researchers from other schools search for work done by CMC professors. I haven't done a thorough examination but I'm not confident that the rest of the site does much better.

Conclusion

I have the following questions for the CMC Public Affairs Office:

  1. When deciding what to emphasize in the site redesign, did you interview a single user of the site? Did you ask any students, prospective students, faculty members, staff members, alumni members, or parents, about how they use the CMC website?
  2. How does the redesigned site address the complaints raised by users in question (1)?
  3. Could you explain how the new frontpage does a better job of conveying CMC's brand than the old frontpage? When you showed the frontpage to prospective students for 30 seconds and asked them to say what set CMC apart, what did they tell you?
  4. What metrics are you using to determine the success of the site redesign?
  5. What was the decision making process during the design of the site? Was evidence from user testing ever presented to inform design decisions?
CMC's website hasn't been that great for years and it's good to see that it's finally getting more attention and resources. But while the new design is flashy, it's not clear that it became more usable, which is disappointing.

The Robert Day School is hurting CMC’s leadership efforts

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Note: I wrote this last year a few days after I was rejected from the Robert Day Scholars Program. This year’s Scholars were just announced, and I thought it was worth reposting.

Let’s say you had $360,000 to give away every year to undergraduates and you wanted to encourage future leaders, or increase the net amount of business success enjoyed by undergraduates at your school. What would be the best way to spend the money?

Observation #1: It’s difficult to predict who is going to be successful and who isn’t. Arguably, 2 of the top 3 earners that CMC has produced were C students when they were here. Robin Williams went to CMC and dropped out; so did Ben Casnocha. I have heard that Robert Day himself, and Henry Kravis, were C students; George Roberts would bet on horses at Santa Anita every day after class. Clearly, the Robert Day program wants to maximize the number of future Kravises and Robert Days, but Kravis and Day probably would not have had the grades to get into the program.

We can observe which students have taken leadership roles, and which students have high status, and we can give a work sample assessment, but these are merely rough indicators – the work sample assessment has only a 0.52 correlation with future job success.

One crucial factor is luck; people have to be at the right place at the right time, and it’s hard to predict which fields are going to be huge, or which person will start the right company or strike up the right conversation at a bar, or join the right startup. Maybe we can assign a percentage chance of wild success to every student, but I would guess that the difference between students in the top GPA decile and students in the bottom GPA decile is maybe 0.4.

Observation #2: If you want students to succeed, instead of telling students they are smart, tell them they are not working hard enough. There’s a reason successful coaches don’t tell their players, “You guys are so athletic and so good. You deserve your #1 ranking and you are all surefire lottery picks. Let me buy you some pizza.” Complacency is not a good leadership trait, and successful students/athletes hear “You’re so smart” more than enough as it is. It’s not clear that, even if you could identify successful students, that giving them a large chunk of cash is ideal, if it could make them complacent. While we give scholarship money to athletes, this is largely a prize so that they want to choose our program, and we take it away if they are unmotivated, or unsuccessful.

Indeed, the students who are rejected from the cash/status giveaway program might develop a chip on their shoulder and become more motivated than the students accepted to the program. I am reminded of Michael Jordan, who was cut from his high school JV team, or CMC trustee Augie Nieto, who was told by his thesis adviser that his plan to develop a series of exercise machines would not work, and he went on to turn the thesis into the multimillion dollar LifeFitness company. There is a selection bias at play here, but it would be good to study if the Robert Day program had a measurable effect, and if so, what that effect was.

Observation #3: Leadership skills, as well as skill at becoming exceptional, can be taught. Some high status students are natural leaders and others have the decision-making skills to become leaders but maybe not the body language, or ability to inspire others. Where should we focus our attention: on making the potential stars into superstars or on sharpening the diamonds in the rough? Given the luck-based nature of success, I would be tempted to focus at the margin but it depends on your estimates of the your ability to make a difference, as well as the goal of your program.

Recommendation: The key is to design your program to send different messages to different groups. To the group of super-bright, super-driven, super-body language, super-ability to inspire students, you want to send a message that says, Don’t get complacent, no one’s looking out for you, if you want to get anywhere you need to work harder. These students are probably going to out-earn their peers, and everyone knows it; if you gave this group money, you would probably get the least bang for your buck, as well as cause resentment among other students and professors.

To the group of marginal students, who maybe aren’t as driven as the top group, you want to send an encouraging message, and spend more attention, in the hopes of boosting their leadership skills and giving them confidence and a better chance of success in the workplace. In theory, you could achieve this by setting up a status and cash-conferring scholarship for a select group of students and then deliberately choosing the candidates you think are second-best.

Either way, you’re not touching the C students who might turn out to be brilliant, or lucky, businessmen. I’d probably want to arrange lectures for everyone on how they can increase their impressiveness, and on the importance of body language. I would purchase cameras for every teacher and instruct them to film students any time they present something, and also randomly during class discussion, and then give the tape to students so that they can see the effects themselves. Given that the group who will attend lectures will self-select to be the group that needs it least, I’d want to consistently emphasize the importance of these qualities, maybe give out a cash prize for attendance or include them in the core curriculum.

Conclusion: If I’m in a position to have $360,000 to give away every year, I’m probably interested in showing that I care about future leaders by giving away money, and less interested in actually increasing the number or success of future leaders, e.g. how the program is designed. At the margin, of course.

If I’m so negative about the effects of the Robert Day School on the student body, then why would I bother to apply? It’s usually easier to change organizations from within, and given that the opportunity exists, it would be silly to turn it down. I would like to see more CMC students become future leaders, as they are my peers, and it will make me feel prouder to affiliate with CMC. That said, being a rejected applicant, it will be difficult to suggest and implement any changes to the program, as most of my suggestions will be taken as sour grapes.

Thoughts on CMC’s Graduation, May 15

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  • The primary purpose of the graduation speaker is to reassure the parents in the audience that the 200K+ that they spent on their college education was worth it. The speaker’s impressiveness helps with this but they also should stick to one of a few topics: discuss the impressiveness of the students, the value of their education, the challenges of the broad world and how their sparkling degree helps them to meet these challenges head on, or how their education prepares them for a life of success, just like the speaker.

    Henry Kravis was the speaker today, and I have all the respect in the world for his ability to turn around companies and improve their management, but his speech didn’t fit the above criteria. Instead he decided to give lots of advice, in short bursts. He also mixed in current events terms like “iPad” and “Obama” to keep people on their toes. I thought it was pretty bad but the bar and expectations for graduation speeches are pretty low. He got a standing ovation.

  • Pretty much everyone from Kravis to Pam Gann to William Robelo-Lara either downplayed the amount of work that goes into getting a degree or played up the amount of drinking they or the students did at college. Andy says it’s because it’s impressive that you can drink and still get good grades. I think that it’s an attempt to reframe the relevant status game from “who gets the best grades” to “who can party hardest.” Because we can delude ourselves about partying hard but it’s difficult to delude ourselves about GPA, especially when the Summa Cum Laude students are wearing special tassels. It’s partly self defense. And, in the big picture, Kravis did just fine after school even though he did pretty terribly while he was here.
  • Airhorns! People blow airhorns because they want to show everyone else that they care about the student that’s graduating. Unfortunate. I’d prefer something more subtle, or more awesome, like releasing doves into the air, co-ordinating an Air Force flyover with my name being read. Surely there are better ways to show that you care about someone.
  • Another common graduation failure is that speakers don’t coordinate. Everyone starts their speech like they’re the first person to get to the podium. If you’re not the first speaker you don’t need as much of a hook, because everyone’s on the same team. Just say your bit and leave the stage before you think you should.

Fall 2009: Semester in Review

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Better late than never:

  • I started off the semester by ruthlessly pruning and declining activities. I stopped playing and refereeing intramural sports and I also stopped working out. This gave me lots of time every day; I went to the Athenaeum about twice a week, went to sports games, and read books for pleasure. Later in the semester, when I felt more comfortable, I added writing for the CMC Forum and coaching youth basketball.
  • I took a trip to Scotland for a week and still did well in every class. I overestimate the necessity of being on campus during the semester. I need to take more weekend and week-long trips. Especially because travel stimulates the brain; I was productive the whole time I was in Scotland and after I got back.
  • The decision I made that led to the most productivity was deciding to blog once a day for over a month. Blogging once a day got me in the habit of writing and thinking about things in terms of writing posts. I soon started submitting posts to CMC Forum, and landed a paid position. Within about four or five weeks I had more posts up than any other writer.
  • When I set my own hours for sleeping, I tend to sleep for at least nine hours, and/or take naps during the day. The optimal amount of sleep is between six and eight hours; not only am I awake for an extra hour but I don’t feel as tired during the day. When I am sleeping in a room by myself I sleep longer; when I’m sleeping in a room with other people I get closer to the optimal amount of sleep. For optimal productivity I should probably live with a room-mate.
  • In my long and illustrious academic career, the grade I’m most proud of is an A- in Algorithms this semester. That class was really hard, and I skipped most of the prerequisites, and I was the only CMC student in the class. Furthermore, the teacher held office hours right after class, instead of before it, so if the assignment was coming due and you had questions, you could be stuck. I solved this problem by working on the problem sets for two to three hours immediately after class finished. This way I could ask the teacher when I got stuck. I also learned how to use LaTeX, the formatting language.
  • I used a binder for each class to stay ruthlessly organized, with sections in each binder for Notes, Homework, Handouts, Tests/Quizzes and blank paper. I filed every sheet of paper that was handed out. This saved a lot of time when it was time for exams.
  • The best purchase I made this semester was a pair of plaid Chuck Taylors, which drew a bunch of compliments and which are probably now my favorite pair of shoes. I made a lot of non-purchases that were also good, see below.
  • I’m finding that it’s extremely difficult to deliver on everything I promise to do. Many people promise to do things because they want to signal reliability. The people they promise to may expect them to follow through, and then again they may not, because of the planning fallacy and because many people promise many things. I have cut down on the number of promises I make in the hopes of following through on all of them, signaling be damned (then again, writing this on my blog is also a form of signaling. My words are not reliable; hopefully my actions will soon begin speaking for themselves).
  • I started drinking coffee this semester. I only really noticed a difference in my energy level on two occasions. Maybe it prevented me from being sleepy but on most occasions it did not make me feel particularly energetic.
  • Probably my favorite two parts of my week were going to breakfasts with the same group of friends every day and going bowling on Wednesday nights. Scheduled activities with friends are excellent for my happiness. I should ensure that I have scheduled activities with friends wherever I am.
  • I took a tennis PE class. I’m much better at tennis. I also can bowl with spin now, and my scores are soon going to be higher than they were when I was bowling straight on.
  • I skipped only one class all semester. I missed three breakfasts. I completed every single homework assignment.
  • For the second semester in a row I did not buy any textbooks. I politely asked each teacher at the beginning of the semester to put the textbook on reserve at the library. Others I borrowed or checked out through Link+. When you are not sure how much you are actually going to use the book, don’t buy it.
  • My biggest enemy continues to be my own head, which tries to seize on any awkward moment, missed call, Internet criticism or forgotten invitation and construct an elaborate scenario, ignoring the vast majority of data points and focusing only on a few. Most nights are good and then some nights it’s hard to open the dorm room door and talk to anyone. This semester was probably my best yet in terms of mental health.
  • I wasn’t very successful in my goal of finishing every paper, and studying for every test, at least one day in advance. I did push out planning and work ahead of my usual schedule, which is do it all at the last minute. Next semester hopefully I will be able to move up deadlines. Betting people money, or putting money on the line is still the most successful policy for getting work done. If I could automate the process of making the bets, so that every time I have a paper or test, my friend knows that I have to finish a day early or pay up, I would probably be much more productive. I don’t stress much.
  • I had two large projects at the end of the semester that I did not manage very well. These projects were more or less the first time I had a month-long exercise that I had to complete myself. I am now aware that I need to work on time management for projects.
  • If you had to graph my effort for the semester it would look like this: A all the way through Monte Carlo/the day my controversial Forum article comes out, then about D from Monte Carlo until the Wednesday of Finals Week, then A+ for two straight days until I finished finals. This is good; I now know that I can work hard for exactly twelve weeks, which is up from previous semesters. With practice, in the future I will be able to push this number higher.
  • Cold calling is an excellent way to make sure students are prepared and following along. I have never prepared for a class more thoroughly than I prepared for Professor Meulbroek’s case studies, because if I got called on to begin the case, I needed to be prepared.
  • Teachers should be much tougher. For the second straight semester, I was positively surprised by the grades I received. I know people are drawn to teaching because they love students and watching kids learn, but students would be better off if they received a message that told them they weren’t working hard enough, than a message that says, “Your current work rate is acceptable.” I know that us students should be responsible for monitoring ourselves, but outside motivation never hurts.

CMC Silicon Valley Trip: Friday

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Applied Materials

  • Everyone knows Moore’s Law, that semiprocessor power doubles every 18 months. I asked if there was a similar law for solar panel efficiency. George Davis said no, mainly because his product is dependent on outside conditions like the weather. Solar panels are more effective in California than in Germany.

KKR

  • Some speakers are very good and know how to be interesting. They will take whatever question you ask and run with it. With these speakers, you want to ask a general question and let them run with it. These types of speakers are also good at ignoring the question you asked and answering the question you probably should have asked, or the question they want to answer.
  • Other speakers will stick to generalities, like “We worked hard and we had a lot of success.” Faced with this type of speaker it’s best to get very specific about what you want to hear about. “Could you tell us about the single biggest mistake you’ve made during your time here?” George Roberts, while brilliant, falls into the second category of speaker.
  • The BusinessWeek article about their plan to emulate Berkshire Hathaway was based off of one comment they made; while it would be great to be Berkshire, that’s not really their plan.
  • KKR is going public because the only way to grow their business is through growing the amount of assets they control. They can get more money if they go public. They’ve tried to go public four different times but failed; if your idea makes sense, be persistent.
  • One of their biggest mistakes was not changing management quickly enough. It’s hard to fire someone.
  • I asked Mr. Roberts if it was true that he used to spend lots of time proposing acquisitions while he was in school. He said yes; he would look up companies in an industry magazine and then write proposals. If the company didn’t write him back, it only cost a postage stamp. That’s a great attitude. Now it’s even cheaper, because of email. While striking a deal or getting someone important to write back is low, the cost of sending email or a letter is lower.
  • Another student asked his opinion on the financial crisis. Roberts in turn asked the student what he thought. The student said he didn’t know, so Roberts asked him what his gut told him. I thought that was interesting, because a lot of times your gut reaction is misleading. Consider most people’s gut reaction to a minimum wage, to a bubble or to free trade.
  • Roberts told us to go work for a company that sells a product, so that we can learn how businesses work. You can’t really learn about that on Wall Street.
  • I asked Roberts how he negotiates. He said most of all people do business with people that they like and trust. And that you need to be able to listen to what other people want. Good advice, I guess.

Chair Rankings

It’s important to have good chairs. Without further ado:

1. KKR

2. Microsoft

3. Applied Materials

4. EMC

5. Meebo (excellent chairs, but lose points for only having six)

6. Atlassian

7. Google/Youtube

8. Lockheed Martin

9. EA

CMC Silicon Valley Trip: Thursday

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Google

  • The trip started off with a very nice young lawyer showing us the campus and telling us about all of the Google perks and quirks. For example, every worker must be within 150 feet of free food, the building numbers start at 42, some guy built a vending machine that displays prices based on how healthy things are, we take lots of awesome trips, here’s a screen that shows what people are searching for in real time, etc. These are traps. The message that everyone should have taken from all of this is, We are fucking good at selling ads. They only afford all of the perks because the people that work there are unbelievably talented, and they don’t want those people worrying about anything besides organizing and archiving all of the world’s information, and otherwise doing really cool shit. All of the perks are like flashy traps. Never forget that Google is really good at making money.
  • Google is also very good at a meta level; they’re not only good at delivering relevant search results and selling ads but they’re also good at being a company. Everything at Google is well thought through, and works well. While you’re on the toilet, you can read a daily 1-page tutorial on good coding practice. The company is constantly re-evaluating what they are doing and the sort of proceses they use. The word several employees used is “It’s a mess around here right now.” It was a similar to the practice of the best teachers in the Atlantic article on great teachers from a few days ago – when evaluators want to come see them, they all say that the evaluator can’t come in right now, because they’re revamping their whole math curriculum or implementing a new module. The theme is constant improvement. Google is trying desperately hard to stay nimble and maintain the ethos of a small startup.
  • I observed that Google employees are very good at getting things done. When something should be done, like the chairs are uncomfortable or the recycling program stinks, Google people are very likely to just do it. Respect.
  • When you assemble the world’s greatest talent in one area and create an amazing culture, you can do unbelievable things. Most of the world’s greatest works of art were produced in two Italian towns in a period of about 100 years, during the Renaissance. The University of Chicago had pretty much every good economist and finance professor in the 70′s and 80′s – Fama, French, Coase, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Black and Scholes, Harry Markowitz, Kenneth Arrow and Friedrich Hayek were all there. I would argue there’s a similar concentration of talent in Silicon Valley right now.
  • Job titles are irrelevant. No one at the company does exactly the same thing for very long – people get shifted around within the company, they work on different projects, they learn about new things. The needs of a company change rapidly, so the idea of training people for specific tasks (or even trying to centrally manage an economy) is a little silly.
  • Monetary compensation isn’t as high as at other companies but Google outspends everyone else on perks, and rewards its top talent very well (In the range of baseball player salaries, according to Jonathan Rosenberg). Most people in SV are very focused on work-life balance; short commutes, and doing a job that doesn’t drive you up a wall with boredom or frustration. SV people recognize the importance of quality of life.
  • Jonathan Rosenberg is one of the top people at Google. He compared career hunting to surfing; your goal is to catch a big wave and ride it. Rosenberg continually tried to figure out what the next new thing in technology was, from creating information systems within companies, to helping companies collect outside information, to creating fast Internet connections, and finally search, moving from company to company as the hot new product changed. Larry Page and Sergey Brin convinced him of the money in search when they said, “Search is the moment that the user tells the computer what you’re looking for.”
  • It’s interesting to see how companies divide up the workspace. At Meebo, everyone was out in the open, with three or four people all facing each other in clusters. Same at Atlassian. At Google and EA, most people had three-person cubicles. EMC had tall individual cubicles you couldn’t see over, and corner offices. Google also had these cool yurt things that blocked out sound and had individual temperature control. Pretty cool.
  • Everyone has at least two screens, usually giant ones. Those aren’t cheap; companies must realize that having so many screens helps productivity.
  • The question ramble: In the face of silence, people get nervous. I love when someone asks a question and then starts to ramble on and on, trying to fill the silence. Often they provide a justificat
  • When you’re sitting around a conference table, you need to pick your seat well. The best seats are closest to the speaker, on the sides of the table. The next best seats are at the other end of the table, directly facing the speaker. The next best seat is in front of the speaker, so that if you were facing the table your back would be to the speaker (if chairs are there). The worst is on the sides, away from the speaker. Often the speaker takes the side of the table closest to the door. It’s a tactical mistake to walk all the way into the room and take the furthest seat; you want to take the best seat and leave the stragglers in the worst spots.
  • The opposite strategy applies for sitting in the backseat of a crowded car. The last person in the car never sits in the middle seat. Thus, delay moving towards the car by all possible means.
  • Google Labs are a way of telling employees that there aren’t any rules about which products get chosen; if you have a product you can put it in Labs. To get a product out of Labs, it needs to get used a lot. Google doesn’t care much about profitability for their products, because they make so much from ads. They have the luxury of time that many other startups don’t.
  • Rosenberg told a great story about how an internship he applied for came down to the final two applicants, himself and Mr. Perfect, who was tall and handsome and beat him at everything. Rosenberg hit it off with the employer’s administrative assistant and Mr. Perfect didn’t, and Rosenberg got the job. “If you want to know which first-year bankers are going to make it, ask the assistants which ones they like. The ones they like are the ones who are successful.” The lesson is be nice to the people that set your schedule; they work harder and for lower pay.

Youtube – Steve Grove ’00

  • Steve Grove is a great example of someone who gets stuff done. He proposed to the Kennedy School of Government that he would fly around the world and film their graduates doing all of these amazing things, and they agreed to fund him. So he got to go around the world for free and get some experience filming people.
  • Grove also wrote up YouTube and pitched a politics channel to them. He pretty much built the Youtube politics division from the ground up, and has interviewed many candidates. He took initiative and landed two really cool jobs.
  • It’s pretty cheap to generate video and post it on Youtube. How long until we have 24-hour coverage of a candidate? The Barack Obama Youtube channel, giving you 24 hours of Barack, commentary on Barack, testimony from voters, donor drives, etc.
  • Youtube’s starting to transcribe videos. This allows you to get an idea of the speech, and then read the rest of the transcription. You can also search within the video by keyword.
  • Before the JK Wedding video, Chris Brown’s “Forever” was #270 on the Billboard charts. After the video it shot to #4. Youtube begged UMG not to pull the video, now they share the revenues from ads based on the video. There’s money to be made there, instead of pulling content that you produced.

CMC Silicon Valley Trip: Wednesday. “Drive the boat, don’t let the boat drive you.”

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Lockheed Martin

  • Lockheed Martin’s only customer is the government, and they don’t have much competition, so I knew their facilities and company paraphernalia were going to be outdated and corny, but I didn’t expect them to be so outdated and corny. Walking into Lockheed Martin was like walking into a time machine. I doubt anyone at the company will ever check this blog, so I’ll say what I feel.
  • At the start of our visit we were ushered into a conference room, where a woman named Connie joked with us about acronyms. “What does POS mean?” she asked. The adults volunteered point-of-sale. “What else?” We all think it means “piece of shit,” but we weren’t about to say that. Connie says, “Parent over shouder! Right?” I thought this was funny, but we’d soon realize Connie had no idea of the other meaning of POS.
  • We then were played a series of Powerpoint slides with a voice-over. The voice over said things like, “At Lockheed we care about freedom, integrity, and ethics. We uphold the highest ethics and work to keep America free.” Clearly, Lockheed missed the presentation in third grade that explained you need to show that these things are true, instead of telling people about them. Hell, Soviet Russia wrote all sorts of beautiful things about the proletariat and the values of socialism, but when it comes down to it, Stalin killed over 30 million people through mismanagement. My point is that actions speak much, much louder than words. If you want to convince us you’re an ethical company tell us a story about some government official who wanted you to do something slightly unethical, and how LM refused to do it, or how LM debates the morality behind every new project it takes, or relate to your colleagues in a way that exudes trust and confidence. Don’t put that shit on a Powerpoint slide, because no one believes it.
  • Connie started talking about how she left the company but came back to it because of its superior ethics. I asked her to be more specific about the ethics involved at Lockheed Martin, because I was curious about the answer, considering that many people would consider it unethical to have an inherent interest in the growth of the defense industry, the placement of production facilities in many different politically states, and the production of weapons and systems that are used to kill innocent people. I’m not kidding, Connie was unable to produce an answer better than “The ethics here are good,” and this is the person you put in the front of the room to introduce the company to prospective hires? I just checked out their website, which is significantly better, but the whole thing reeked of a company that hasn’t faced much competitive pressure in some time.
  • We were taken on a tour of two separate facilities. The first was a giant room that tests optics for giant lenses like the kind that get put in telescopes like the Hubble. Pretty technologically impressive although I wondered about the cost and other things and the questions could not be answered, of course, because of confidentiality.
  • The second one was a facility that makes solar panels of the sort that get put on the wings of the Space Station and most satellites. I was amazed to learn that one panel, 15 feet x 5 feet, produces about 1000 watts, or slightly more than enough power for the average lightbulb. Power in space is at an extreme premium. Apparently you can’t just load the ship with lots of batteries, because they’re heavy and don’t last as long as the satellite’s expected life. The technology here was impressive as well.
  • Almost all of the CMC alums we’ve met so far have been white, and the vast majority have been men. The successful alums will mirror the composition of the school 20 to 30 years ago, which was overwhelmingly white and male. This doesn’t look so good today but I don’t know a good way around the problem. Hopefully people will understand that change is slow.
  • One CMC alum at LM spoke very slowly and idiosyncratically, which affected the way we thought about the things he was saying, and probably our initial opinion of his competence. I wonder why people like that do not hire speech coaches. Perhaps they are unaware of the problem, or the way they come off to others? Obtaining reliable feedback is difficult. He may be doing fine with his current speech patterns but he could be doing much better if he learned to speak in a natural way, pausing in appropriate places, putting the accents on the right words and raising and lowering his voice appropriately. Marshall McLuhan is still alive.
  • In the Q&A I tried to ask about the competition, to get the execs to speak about their business and the inherent inefficiencies, and Chris Jones asked about fixed-rate contracts vs. cost-plus contracts. The principal agent problem is alive and well in government contracting, and many rationalizations were floated, from providing a quality product for a high price to protecting America to being a ’boutique’ client, who charges high prices but delivers a quality product as well. Currently government officials cannot do fixed-price contracts because they make too many changes to the products they ask for. This is unfortunate.
  • I could never work for Lockheed Martin.

EMC

  • EMC brought a bunch of employees from all different areas of the business in front of us to tell their story and answer questions. While it’s entertaining to hear about people’s life stories, they only had a short amount of time in front of us and I wish we could have made more of it. For example, one sales executive started talking about how he set the record in Nordstrom single-day shoe sales with more than $10K in sales in one day. That’s outstanding, and since we’ve figured out the most interesting conversation we can have, let’s discuss sales for the next 20 minutes; I don’t need to hear about three other companies that you went to where you also were outstanding at selling products. Unfortunately most of my colleagues disagreed with me.
  • It was nice to hear from a bunch of different employees about what they did at EMC and what their jobs entailed. However it’s difficult to get a sense of how someone is as a manager from listening to them speak. Some people are good at speaking and could be bad bosses. Others are probably not very good public speakers but know exactly how to motivate people. I’m not sure the halo effect applies here – if being good at speaking means you’re probably also an effective manager.
  • Marketing differed by the age of the company, throughout the week. The newest companies we went to were the most interested and the most effective at using Twitter and Facebook to put their message out. Other companies were not able to do this so much. This could also be because the old companies are generally bigger companies.
  • There’s no such thing as a common acquisition; each acquisition is unique and each company is unique.
  • Are Australians really cooler than the rest of us or is a selection bias at play? Maybe all of the boring, uncouth Australians don’t make it offshore.
  • Repeating Peter Diamandis’s theme from yesterday, one of the key ways to contribute as a young person is to be extraordinarily enthusiastic. You need to give people a reason to recommend you and being enthusiastic is the best way to do it. If you do every task assigned to you extremely well, and ask for more work and do that extremely well then you’re someone that people are going to recommend to future employers. At our young age, we don’t know much about anything. Enthusiasm is key.
  • Several people at EMC told us that we should engage in more informational interviews. Hardly anyone says no to an informational interview (if you frame it in terms of “I need your help”), and you get to advertise yourself for free, plus I really like talking to people about what they do and what types of problems they solve.
  • One executive told a story about an acquisition that was almost complete, until the EMC execs and the company’s execs had a party, and it went “like a junior high dance, with all the EMC people on one side and the other company’s people on the other.” This emphasizes the importance of being likable, and selling yourself to people. If you are likable, and you can make other people feel good when they’re around you, doors are going to open. If not, you might succeed by sheer force but the odds are strongly not in your favor.
  • More good advice was to be extremely flexible. Prove you can do the work they assign you to and then you’ll be given better work and more responsibility. The key is to get in the door.
  • EMC gets points for staying away from slides and telling stories. Most of the speakers were very good at telling stories. Almost all said “That’s a good question” after the question asker wrapped up. I don’t know if they practiced that sort of thing but it makes the question asker feel very good, and it’s a good habit to develop.
  • It’s important to develop mentors that are outside of your direct company line, so that you have someone to turn to when you have an ethical decision that does not have a vested interest in the answer.
  • EMC had high cubicles and corner offices. I understand the company’s big but I think the open office is a much better solution. Cubicles serve mostly to preserve and reaffirm the status of the cubicle dweller.
  • One person who came and spoke to us found every single job he’d been at because a friend recommended him to the boss. Nepotism is alive and well. Networking is an important skill; everyone needs to get people in their corner, who would be willing to go to war for them. This is much harder than getting good grades.

CMC Silicon Valley Trip: Tuesday

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Electronic Arts

  • Electronic Arts had by far the best presentation of any of the companies we’ve been to so far. This is partly because they have excellent facilities, including a gym and fitness room (and gave us a product we wanted, a free EA game from the company store) and because as a large company that hires lots of college grads, they’re clearly used to showing college kids around.
  • What’s the most interesting conversation that we can have? That’s what I want to know and what I’m trying to talk to people about, especially because we don’t have that much time to talk to any one person. I would rather not waste time talking about what my favorite EA titles are. Today I tried to jump in by asking people what they are thinking about or working on right now, with good results. However,
  • I need to be careful because people expect me not to know anything. Silicon Valley execs were once young college students, and then they graduated and learned everything they needed to about how to run things, be effective, make good decisions and create value for a company. Currently I am a young college student; my role is to be a sponge. Tomorrow I will ask for advice instead.
  • An executive at EA repeated the line we heard yesterday about Wii bowling tournaments at retirement homes.
  • The number of different skills required to successfully produce a game is astounding. EA needs a great story, great engineers, great artists, and managers that can make eighty people work together and get a complex product out the door, when everyone’s going to want to stuff more features into it.
  • EA is currently producing a game called Dante’s Inferno, with nine levels based on the nine circles of hell. One member of our group wanted more stories based on classic stories. The developer pointed out the problem, which is that in good stories, not very much actually happens. Most storytelling involves setting the scene, describing the relations of the characters to each other and the changes in status that arise from events in the story. But in a videogame, especially an action game like the type the developer makes, you need lots of action and bad guys, all of the time. Video sequences in between the action can only tell so much of the story and give the player so much accomplishment. For a further dramatization of this point compare the fight sequences in Star Wars Episode 5 between Darth Vader and Luke (lots of conversation and emotion; little sword play), which are excellent, with the fight sequences in Star Wars Episode 1 after Qui-Gon is killed (lots of choreographed sword play, which is easy for video games to reproduce, but little passion and little story).
  • In Dante’s Inferno the main character is a pretty evil guy, with a dark history who does evil things throughout the game. We can root for this character in a video game but not in a movie; why? Off the top of my head, the audience is different, we are playing up the differences between protagonists in movies and video games, when we are the one controlling the character we think differently, or we think video games are “less real” than movies.
  • An EA executive mentioned his current project was to get his engineers to be more accepting of change. This point is echoed in FP2P by one of the interviewers, who points out how hard it is for any country to stay at the forefront of technological progress. To reach the bleeding edge a country must be willing to accept rapid and uncomfortable change, but once it experiences success the vested interests and the technology that got the country to the top begin to try to protect their interests against future upstarts, through legislation or by discouraging the competition. If I have five engineers that are using Maya, they’re going to compare themselves based on how good they are at using Maya. The best Maya programmer doesn’t want to switch to a new, better technology because he’s already the best.
  • In my opinion, EA still has a significant problem allowing users to share stories between game players and non-game players. Obviously they are excellent at developing a story within a game and allowing collaboration, competition and networking between players of that game. But if I spend three hours playing Madden and then my girlfriend asks me what I’ve been up to, what kind of story can I tell her? “I was down 14 points in the fourth quarter and then came back and won the game” is not compelling to a person who’s never played the game. In that sense while games offer utility to the people who play them, they don’t give players a story they can tell to non-players. When everyone in your network plays the same game, this isn’t a problem.

Atlassian

  • Just like every five year old wants to be Spiderman or a pro sports player, every high school and college kid looking to work in the Valley wants to work for Apple, Google, or start the next Twitter. Atlassian isn’t the sort of place college kids dream about working it’s where Silicon Valley bread is buttered; creating a good product that businesses and developers need, even if it has no flash to it.
  • Atlassian was profitable from day one and took no VC funding. Outstanding.
  • Because the developers were Australian, they had to do all of their sales over the web, which isn’t common for enterprise software. This led them to keep the product cheap, and make it absolutely exceptional. Both of those steps were crucial to their business.
  • Everyone at Atlassian said how much they enjoyed working there. The benefits are good and everyone works out in the open in the same office.
  • Atlassian’s in an extremely competitive industry; there are over 50 difference corporate wiki products, many issue/bug trackers and Atlassian competes both with enterprise giants like Oracle and Microsoft and with free products. It’s not hard to be cheaper than the large clients but the software also has to be good enough to justify paying about $1000 for a license. They are thus extremely sensitive to quality, making their issue tracker public, and allowing everyone to see feature requests.
  • I asked whether people steal the product, considering that Atlassian gives away the source code with every license. The company said yes, and that they don’t do anything about it because people who want to steal the product are going to steal it. Businesses don’t really want to steal things though, so they get enough paying customers.
  • We got onto the subject of blogs because the marketing team said that blogs are an important part of their marketing strategy, because they have to create and deliver a great experience for their customers. We then were told how blogs let us advertise how we think about things and that a blog is a good landing page for companies trying to find out more about you. Sounds great.
  • Luck has been another resonant theme of this trip. I spoke to one executive at Atlassian whose first company sold out to Cisco, I think, for $1.2 billion and second company sold to another large SV firm for $300 million. Other people became extremely rich and powerful because they were one of the founding members of a startup, or were in the right place at the right time. Some lucky people are probably not so good and some people that worked at failed companies are good. Of course, by virtue of being a rich white male over six feet tall, I have already hit the jackpot.

We also had a dinner in the city with entrepreneurs, which was fun, but it’s getting late here. Entrepreneurs aren’t very different than the rest of us, or more risky, but they are extremely good at getting things done and running projects. They also prefer to be their own boss. I’ll leave you with this video by Pete Diamandis about energetic fundraising. Tomorrow: Lockheed Martin and EMC.

CMC Silicon Valley Trip: Monday

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I’m currently in Silicon Valley on a networking trip sponsored by my school’s Information Technology Advisory Board. Each day, we visit two companies, and each night I will post summaries and thoughts. Here’s the recap of Monday’s action.

Microsoft

  • A common misconception about people from Silicon Valley is that they don’t care much about their appearance. That’s crap; most people that I’ve seen care very much about their appearance. They just care about it in different ways than we are used to. Case in point: our host, Scott Mauvais ’90, wore a ponytail to his mid-back, which is probably a very credible signal for non-tech types.
  • Mauvais earned points for opening the floor up to questions right away. For most speakers this is an effective tactic, and we had lots of questions about Microsoft.
  • At the same time, it quickly became clear that while Mauvais was knowledgeable about Microsoft and cared about the company, his area of expertise was limited to what he worked on, which was very much about enterprise software and very little about competing with Apple or putting together Windows Vista. Many answers started off with “I only know what I’ve been reading in the paper.” Students continued to ask detailed questions about other Microsoft departments.
  • Many students also enjoy using questions as signaling. If you hear anyone open a question with “I spent last summer doing X” or “I did a computer science assignment on X,” you can stop listening immediately, because they’ve already shared every bit of information that they care about sharing.
  • Most new Microsoft Stores have clauses in their contract that prohibit the landlord from allowing an Apple Store within a certain perimeter of the Microsoft Store. If an Apple Store moves within that range they have to pay 50% of the Microsoft store’s rent, we were told.
  • Mauvais had a good insight about the Mac vs. PC debates. For Microsoft, it didn’t make much sense to spend a whole lot of money fighting the Apple campaign, because if Apple increases its market share from 6% to 12% Microsoft’s revenues are not hurt very much. However, the campaign allowed Apple to define Windows in a negative light. Microsoft was not able to define Windows in a positive light.
  • Microsoft is trying very hard to move people away from keyboards and mice. I have seen the future, and it is a touch interface. Touch interface is more precise and allows for multi-touch and intuitive gestures. Microsoft had some cool demo touch screen interfaces, and a Windows Surface and they were pretty cool. It’s clear that we are just scratching the surface as to the best ways to interact and operate a touch screen computer. Unfortunately only two companies (Microsoft and Apple) are working on improving this interaction. We will see when Apple’s tablet comes out but I bet it will do very well.
  • Microsoft has bigger fish to fry than personal software; it will continue to lose the public relations debate to Apple, because Apple’s primary focus is on products for personal use. Microsoft has the enterprise market pretty much cornered (and still has an unbelievable edge in desktop computers). It will lose the PR battle but earn lots of money. This was also a constant theme in Mauvais’s responses. “We’re too busy making money,” etc.
  • Microsoft epitomizes the feature creep problem. When you have half a billion users or so, every single one of the features in their products is used by someone, who will be angry when that feature changes or is removed. Fifty percent of “new-feature” requests for Microsoft Office were for features that were already a part of the product.

Meebo

  • Meebo is probably the exact opposite of Microsoft: only 60 employees and the whole company is located on two floors. Our host was Robert Leon ’04, whose appearance was also carefully calculated. Robert pitches Meebo to other companies.
  • In the old days (and by “old days” I mean several years ago), most people found content by punching in queries to Google and entering sites through Google. Hence companies spent a lot of money on search engine optimization. Now, users are increasingly being driven to content through friends, via Facebook or Twitter or RSS. Thus sharing, and tools for sharing are extremely important. According to Meebo no one (fewer than 0.3% of users) clicks on the “Share This” links at the bottom of blog posts or on most web pages.
  • The most important lesson from Meebo was listen to your customers. Meebo started out as a chat client that allowed users on various platforms (AIM, Facebook, MSN Messenger etc) to talk to each other. That’s only a small part of their business now; the most profitable part of their business is that they figured out a way to allow people to share links and videos, really easily. Here is a video demo of the sharing software.
  • So far, the most effective innovation for sharing Web content has been YouTube’s putting the video URL immediately next to the video you are watching. I never thought about that before.
  • Meebo has over 100 million users (“reach,” in the sales community) so they are a valuable source for businesses like, for example, movie studios, who need to push awareness of their movie and have a big opening weekend.
  • According to COO Martin Green the whole web will be using Javascript floating bars at the bottom of the web browser, like Facebook’s, within the next year or so. I’m not sure if there’s a moneymaking opportunity here.
  • Robert made the excellent observation that when you are fresh out of college, you do not know anything. So in job interviews, you need to act extremely interested in the company at hand, and also act like someone who people would enjoy hanging out with. Especially at a startup, it’s important to be able to work well with colleagues, and be enthusiastic enough about the product to put in long hours. Robert pointed out that you don’t learn much in a liberal arts college except “how to think.” I would not even argue that much. Robert was, however, the social chair at CMC. Being a social chair is excellent preparation for a career in sales, and for making people feel comfortable around you, probably much more useful at the margin than trying for an excellent GPA.
  • Meebo subjects all new hires to an extremely extensive interview process. Not only does this show the applicant that Meebo cares but it’s an effective way to vet applicants. They also make every applicant go through a simulation of job tasks, so the sales people have to pitch the product to the hiring committee, or an administrative assistant has to explain what they’d do if the boss’s pager went working. This is excellent practice, as work sample tests are the most effective predictor of whether someone will be good at their job. In a small firm the costs of a bad hire are tremendous; it’s very important to get the position right. In general they like to promote people from within the firm, but if you need a lot of experience quickly they’ll go outside.
  • Meebo had this cool chart of how people communicate – you have Private and Public on one axis, and Real Time and Asynchronous on the other axis. So this is the breakdown:
    • Private, Real Time is SMS and Instant Messenger;
    • Private, Asynchronous is email;
    • Public, Real Time is Twitter;
    • Public, Asynchronous is like Facebook walls.

    We use all of these technologies. Everything in the industry is moving towards Real Time for everything. I handle SMS and email in the same program. The line between Private and Public is strong. But it’s a reminder that how you choose to communicate with someone is as important as the content. Marshall McLuhan lives!

  • “Startups either have customers or they have a business plan. Very few have both.” I don’t know enough about startups to say whether or not that’s true.
  • Static clients like AIM are dead. Everything is moving within other applications like Gmail chat or Facebook chat. That’s why Meebo had to adapt and move into other people’s sites, rather than staying with Meebo.com. Only a small percentage of their traffic is still using Meebo.com.

At dinner I sat next to a very successful executive who sells smart energy and renewable energy products. He also has three houses, one of which is one of about forty properties on a man-made lake in Palm Springs. His wife works at a solar energy company and agreed that lots of the gain people get from generating their own energy is canceled out by increased energy use; it’s not clear whether utility companies are actually substituting out of coal and into renewable energy, or just adding more renewable energy to their ‘portfolio.’ Solar technology is rapidly becoming cheaper.

This is turning into an essay, but I’ll close by saying that I need to work on being less critical. It is way too easy to be critical, especially because a lot of academia demands it; not many teachers ask you to write a complimentary essay. As Mr. Leon pointed out, a lot of your job qualification at this point is just being someone who people enjoy being around. I need to make my business more about making the people around me feel good.

Tomorrow: Electronic Arts, Atlassian and a dinner with entrepreneurs, including the CEO of Scribd. I’ll try to refrain from asking the VP of Marketing when Sim City 5 is going to come out.

Dean Huang to stay at CMC

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In an email to the student body, beloved Dean of Students Jeff Huang announced that he is going to stay at CMC. Jeff is a good guy and we’ve talked a lot, and as far as I know he does his job well, both as Dean of Students and as a philosophy professor, with some of the highest ratings in the evaluations book.

This is a little silly to say now, and obviously it’s sad to see anyone with whom you’ve developed a close relationship leave for greener pastures, but is it unreasonable to assume that CMC would hire a replacement dean that’s just as good? CMC would probably solicit close to two hundred applications for a replacement; surely one of two hundred is qualified, friendly, and understanding enough to take his place.

A similar neuron fires when I hear people discuss how going to CMC was the best decision they ever made. Was it really CMC that was the good decision, or was it going to college in general? Unless you’ve transferred, studied abroad or have significant reason to believe that CMC is special, you’ve got to assume that you would have had just as good an experience anywhere.

Another similar neuron fires when sports teams overpay for local heroes when their contracts have expired, something the Oakland A’s have chosen not to do probably twenty times over the past decade. Surely fans can fall in love with other great players, who are cheaper.

“Refusing to overpay for local heroes” is also a good way to describe my dating life for the past three years.