[Dave Heal's] Observations & Reports

A Very Long Instagram Caption Mostly About Travel Inspired by a Travel SNAFU

checkenginelight

 

So I was gonna post this picture on Instagram, captioned by a dumb riff on the Most Interesting Man in the World formula. Something like “I don’t always drive the length of a country where I can’t speak or read the language in a rickety rental car, but when I do I like to do so in Jordan with the check engine light on and 100 yards of visibility.” And I’d have hoped all my friends laughed at the terrible photo and stupid caption and that my dad was momentarily horrified about the situation before he hopefully laughed too.

And then, #loltravel, a funny thing happened on the way to the Gram. Shortly after I took the photo my car broke down in the middle of nowhere on a 4-hour winding drive through sparsely populated towns on my way from the deserts of southern Jordan to the north end of the Dead Sea.

And it turned out fine! Because most things like this turn out fine! And this got me thinking about why we travel and why we *should* travel, especially to places that are harder to travel to & in, and also why it’s very easy not to take on that kind of travel.

So, today my Jordanian rental car broke down while carrying me, my dirty undies, a hitchhiker (sorry Dad), and his young son. They spoke little English & I speak no Arabic. And yet they not only offered to stay & try to help even though they (seemingly) had urgent-ish business near Amman and we were still hours away, but they *were* able to actually help. Easily!

They got me to a mechanic who at least figured out the one thing that was most acutely wrong with my car — I still have no idea what it was — and 2 hours later we were on our way again, catastrophic engine problem solved but check engine light still ablaze.

This scenario, which had admittedly been in the back of my mind since picking up the car at the airport with a tablespoon of gas remaining and the check engine light already on, made me realize that it’s often merely the thought of one of these mildly uncomfortable to borderline intractable travel SNAFUs that prevents us from going on these trips at all.

Something like the idea that you might get off a 10-hour flight and get on the wrong bus because you don’t speak the language and your brain isn’t working. Or you might fall ill and not be able to sort out how to get the proper help. Or you’ve watched enough NatGeo to know that even friendly, English-speaking Australia has all sorts of fucked up mystery animals waiting to poison you and drag you back to their family to eat you and turn your remains into tiny furniture.

Or maybe you merely end up with a dinner that is a stew full of organ meats because the word for “stew full of organ meats” in some foreign tongue is unknowably similar to our word “pizza.”

Yeah, sometimes it’s very easy to talk yourself into going to Indianapolis instead.

I believe it’s a fact that most people are fundamentally good. And if you’ve traveled at all you’ve had the experience of having a meaningful conversation through a language barrier, sometimes only using the expressive power of your face & body and proper nouns like the names of famous soccer players or idiot presidents.

So it should not surprise us — and yet it does, often nearly to the point of paralysis— that when you have an emergency in a foreign country you can usually find someone to help you, even if it requires charades, and you are, like I am, so hopeless at charades that you have been pre-denied for entry into all of the world’s mime colleges.

Think about how easy it would be for one of us to get help for someone in similar circumstances in our home country. You call a friend or look up a mechanic nearby, wave someone else down on the road, and you’ve saved someone. You’d barely expect the effort to be noticed, and yet the idea that you might expect the same in another country seems somehow beyond imagining.

Easy thought experiments like this & experiences like mine today should convince us to do *more* adventurous travel. The risks are quite low that anything goes wrong at all, let alone irreparably wrong. But worries are rarely about statistics and actual risk, are they.

And yes, traveling somewhere where “irreparably wrong” even feels like a remote possibility might require you to believe there’s at least a commensurate payoff. Even though routine activities like ordering dinner or navigating public transport might be strange or hard elsewhere, that newness has to be part of the adventure or at least offset by the pleasures on the other side of the anxious uncertainty.

And part of that payoff, fairly uncontroversially to me, is that travel meaningfully expands your world to interesting (& often great) new food & art & people and—maybe more importantly — it exposes you over and over to what can be a fairly banal truism, but one that becomes powerful the more you internalize it: we are all actually the same much more than we are different.

Setting aside the geopolitical implications of this lesson, recognizing the fundamental goodness and humanity in others affects how we live every day, who we seek out as friends, and who we advocate for and how forcefully we react when others try to deny their humanity and emphasize their Otherness.

Travel exposes you to the humanity of others in both large and small ways, but the more uncomfortable you make yourself, whatever your version of interpersonal discomfort is, the closer you come to understanding — really understanding — that people will mostly look out for each other face-to-face. And to the extent people and politicians forget or ignore that lesson, it becomes clearer & clearer to us that they are acting in bad faith or on bad information.

This was not meant to be some elaborate but oblique allegory about how Donald Trump is a provincial dipshit. Really the point I wanted to hammer home was to please go on that trip to the place that seems so Other it makes you nervous. Do your homework and don’t be a moron of course, but go. Buy the ticket, take the ride, as a guy I used to idolize once said. You won’t regret it and you *will* be better for it than if you *only* went to Indianapolis again.

Startup Templates: Diversity Initiative Announcement

This is the third in a series of Startup Templates designed to make it easier for you to publish some of the most commonly written pieces of startup copy. You can find the first entry, the Acquisition Blog Post, here, and the second, the Job Description, here.

[Company] Announces Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

To learn more about [Company’s] long-standing commitment to diversity, please see our [press release from 2008] and our [blog post from 2010].

Diversity is a real hot issue in our industry! Which is why here at [Company], we are so excited to be launching our Diversity Commitment initiative today, a six-part roadmap we will use to foster diversity and inclusion amongst our human resources.

We want the makeup of our company to reflect the vast range of people who use our [app for upper middle-class Peter Pans who never learned how to fold their own clothes]. And while we’ve been working towards these goals for a while now — as you can tell by last year’s refresh of [the stock photography on] our website— we wanted to make our goals public today.

As part of our renewed commitment, we’ve appointed an EVP of Diversity and Inclusion, Timmy Winthrop, who has worked with our executive team to conduct a thorough evaluation of where we are today and where we can go moving forward.

“Timmy comes to us after 3 months as a business development manager here at [Company]. After he quickly realized that ‘business development manager’ was a deliberately confusing name for an entry-level sales person, we had to find something else for Timmy to do,” said CEO Chad Dalrymple.

“We’re really excited about Timmy and believe strongly that what he lacks in brownness he makes up for in gayness,” Chad said.

Timmy has agreed that even though he doesn’t represent a group that Silicon Valley traditionally thinks of as an underrepresented minority, he’s more than capable of leading a rising tide of diversity initiatives that will lift all boats. “I have a job opening on my team for a black community strategist to go deep on the blacks, and we will probably follow suit with the ones from West Side Story,” Timmy announced at our All Hands Off-Site earlier this week.

As part of our Commitment, we are pledging to:

1. Include LAY’S® TAPATIO® Limón–Flavored Potato Chips in our industry-leading snack bar

2. Invest in internal and external tools to encourage our employees to interact with diverse people. For example, last week at our First Annual Bl’hackathon, the winning project was a tool that recommends one new black person to follow on Twitter every day

3. Conduct yearly bias mitigation Lunch and Learns

4. Sponsor a Diversity Breakout Session at TechCrunch Disrupt [led by 5 suuuper woke cis-gendered white guys]

5. Copy and paste this blog post into next year’s blog post and include some new charts and [humblebrag mea culpas re: lack of progress]

In addition to revisiting our success towards these goals next year on our Diversity Blog — which you can always find by navigating to our Writings page and then clicking on Blog and then Extras and then More and then Diversity Blog — we will ensure we remain accountable to you by also addressing our progress in the release notes for our iPhone app’s highly anticipated 2017 Dantooine Release.

We are keenly aware that [pablum about how tech is not a friendly place for minorities and how we know our company is no exception]. And not only do we think that a more diverse [Company] is better for our users, but it’s better for our business! [Citation to that one McKinsey report everybody cites].

If you want to join us and make an impact at [Company], you can write to Timmy at diversitydude@[company].com. Nobody else here thinks about these issues now that Timmy’s on the case.

Startup Templates: Acquisition Announcement Blog Post

…with Handy Founder-to-Employee Translation

This is the first in a series of Startup Templates designed to make it easier for you to publish some of the most commonly written pieces of startup copy. Why reinvent the wheel, I say!

[Ed: Cross-posted to Medium.]

This Is Just The Beginning

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” — Steve Jobs

To our friends and customers:

Today I am pleased to announce that we are joining forces with [Acquiring Company] and have entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired. The last [# of years since founding] years have been an incredible journey for[Acquired Company], full of ups and downs. But none of this would be possible without our amazing team and our [users/customers]. We couldn’t have done it without you.

We started [x] years ago with the idea that by combining [currently in vogue area of focus] and [extant but no longer sexy area of focus], we could change how you think about [mundane daily task].

I want to assure you that [main product that our customers love and cannot do their jobs without and/or have not been convinced to pay for] will remain [available and/or free] and that we are not going anywhere. Both [Acquired Company] and [Acquiring Company] share a vision to change the world by allowing you to [buzzword your buzzword’s buzzwords]. We have long admired [Acquiring Company]’s [flowery adjective indicating uniqueness] desire to craft value-add, customer-focused solutions while also building a great team and culture.

Going forward, I want to assure you that [Acquired Company] will still be the same old [Acquired Company] that you have grown to love. Our mission remains unchanged. We will simply have more resources to continue building products that delight our customers.

We are excited to share more about what we’ll be working on together in the coming months. The possibilities are [word suggesting implausible infinitude] and we are only just getting started…:)

Stay tuned!

In the meantime, please join us and the [Acquiring Company] Family for a webinar on [date].

Onwards and upwards,

[White Guy Name] & [White Guy Name], Founders

Note that the transaction remains subject to satisfying customary closing conditions

Translation:

This Is The Beginning of The End But Some of Us Are Rich Now and Don’t Care.

“The [key emoji] is to enjoy life, because they don’t want you to enjoy life.” — DJ Khaled

To the families and friends of our employees, PR professionals, and the 42 people who still read TechCrunch:

Today I am pleased to announce that we are getting drunk before breakfast at a party we are throwing so our employees will think this acquisition is an unqualified good when it is likely so only for a small percentage of us.

The years since our founding have been full of stress-induced anal fissures and no small number of near-divorces and we have decided we need to chill the fuck out and get the VCs off our backs.

None of this would be possible without our amazing team. No, seriously, we *literally* couldn’t have done it without them. It’s really hard to build a venture-scale business as two dudes in a dorm room and if we had not been incredibly good salespeople with a plausibly good idea we never would have convinced this many talented, hard-working people to work here in exchange for free beer and soft t-shirts. We will be forever grateful and richer than you.

We started [x] years ago with one idea and then that kind of sucked and we were about to run out of money one night and spent 50 of our last dollars on mushrooms and drove [White Guy Name]’s leased Tesla into the desert and looked at the stars until we came up with another idea that we could repurpose our technology for and seemed different and maybe better but we couldn’t tell. Then we got TechCrunch to do a big write-up about how disruptive it was to a stodgy old industry that people secretly hated and we were off to the races!

That product became our bread and butter. And we are going to keep it available until such time as the press has mostly forgotten about us and it starts to get buggy and frustrating for our users, and then we’re going to write another blog post in this space announcing that it’s going to disappear and be folded into some boring, underfunded initiative with a crappy corporate name and a trademark.

We have no idea what a “solution” is, but we are going to grit our teeth through our vesting period while having a lot of 10am coffees with venture capitalists and talking incessantly but privately about our Next Thing.

[Acquiring Company]’s culture sucks real bad, and they acquired us in part to try and change that, but in actuality we are likely to be subsumed by the Borg. It’s really hard to change a large company’s culture. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. We saw this coming during the negotiations and also because we’re not stupid, but [Acquiring Company] assured us things would change and really there is very little we can do.

Going forward, you’ll get to use our product until our corporate overlords decide that it no longer makes sense to offer it and we get asked to work on other stuff. Our mission will change whenever they say so because them’s the breaks! We have been promised more resources and the ability to remain autonomous, but keeping both those promises would obviate the need to do this deal at all and would mean that [Acquiring Company] is full of morons. So that’s probably not going to happen.

This deal is going to take a while to close and we’re not allowed to say anything even remotely interesting to you until that point. But we promise you a banal, substance-free update at least once before then. It seems highly unlikely that this acquisition will actually result in anything good for our existing customers or employees, but we do retain a shred of hope that we can prevent [Acquiring Company] from totally destroying what we’ve worked so hard to build.

Stay tuned!

If you sign up for our joint webinar, you should just go ahead and delete your account.

Up and to the right,

[White Guy Name] & [White Guy Name], TEDx Speakers and Burners Without Borders Executive Committee Members

Note that the transaction remains subject to satisfying customary closing conditions

The Best Worst First Date

[Cross-posted to Medium]

You’re definitely going on the first date. I know this is America and you don’t have to do anything you don’t want, but we’re assuming for the purposes of this Einsteinian thought experiment that you are definitely going on the first date.

That being true, what is the worst place you could be invited on a first date that would not foreclose the possibility of a second? Keep in mind that the suggested activity could be anything. So you may get invited for coffee. Or you may get invited for dinner. Or a trip to an art museum. An art museum! That sounds nice, doesn’t it?

But maybe that art museum is full of Che Guevara pop art and your date goes to the gift shop to buy a poster *on the way in.* Would Starbucks be good enough? I’ve heard from veteran daters that it is. What if it’s one of those understocked Starbuckses that is attached to a grocery store? How about Wendy’s? Maybe you, like me, enjoy few things more than a well-timed Frosty, and your date goes to the Wendy’s near campus so often that he (or she!) knows when the fresh batch of fries is coming out and, well, any date that includes “fresh batch of fries” by definition gets a second date.

This is the discussion some friends and I had for approximately 30 minutes while watching the Super Bowl. The loose consensus of our collection of mixed-gender 30-somethings seemed to be “Olive Garden,” and while I think there are places worse than the Olive Garden that would get a second date, I couldn’t convince the group. Yes, my time at the University of Michigan Law School was a total waste.

I also think “Olive Garden” can’t possibly be the answer because of its unusual ironic appeal for most suburban-raised millennials. The unlimited salad and breadsticks feel like cheating, even if the breadsticks are butter-drenched packing peanuts molded to resemble a tiny baguette. There have to be worse chain restaurants that would get you a second date. For me, if all activities are up for discussion, then almost any full meal is going to get a chance at a second date. But I also drove across Michigan to speed-eat a 5 lb. hamburger covered in sour cream and nacho cheese during a minor league baseball game, so…

When the alternative is a short coffee because someone swiped right at midnight after a night of drinking and is just trying to get this over with, a full meal feels like a real commitment, one more likely to get a proposal than a mere second date. But maybe I’m easy to please.

What do you think? What’s the worst place for a first date that would still get you to drag yourself across the second date threshold ?

Micah Baldwin wants you to break the bullshit curse

Forgive me if this post is a bit pedantic, but it’s not clear to me that Micah has identified precisely where the aforementioned bullshit is housed or how much of it there is. Of course, his general advice against bullshitting yourself and others is sound. But that in itself is not terribly instructive. And some of the situations that presumably gave rise to Micah’s post aren’t actually the kind of thing I’m guessing he would identify as bullshit upon further reflection.

The post starts out:

How are you?

In your head, how did you respond? Did you automatically blurt out “fine”?

My freshman English teacher, Mrs. Carter, once told me that answering the question “How are you?” with anything other than “I’m fine” was a waste of breath.

People don’t really care how you are.

It’s the same with honesty. People don’t want honesty.

Not to get all liberal arts here, but humans are complicated. One of the things that separates us from the blue-green algae, other than the extreme delight we take in captioned pictures of misbehaving cats, is our complex language. And Micah’s lead-in here is an example of one of those manifestations of linguistic nuance that cranky people adduce as evidence of rudeness or selfishness but which are actually just people being people. We make some noises with our mouths and they may sound like other noises, but there are all sorts of other cues we use to figure out whether someone is asking how we are or whether they are essentially saying “Hello.”

The latter use is what is known as “phatic.” Wikipedia, as always, has the authoritative example:

Similarly, the question “how are you?” is usually an automatic component of a social encounter. Although there are times when “how are you?” is asked in a sincere, concerned manner and does in fact anticipate a detailed response regarding the respondent’s present state, this needs to be pragmatically inferred from context and intonation.

So, no, the fact that you say how are you and someone says they’re fine is not sufficient evidence of a bullshit artist at work. Likewise if you ask somebody about their startup and they say “we’re killing it.” Now, that is a dumb thing to say because it has become a meaningless cliche in the startup world. You should probably maim that person. But if you are an investor in or advisor to that startup and that is the beginning and end of their response to your inquiry about how they’re doing, then that startup’s problem is not bullshit but simple interpersonal communication. And that might cause you to second-guess your investment in those people.

I guess if you’re a real hardliner about maximizing every breath you take on this planet, then you may have issues with the entire enterprise of phatic communication. But that strikes me as a different point altogether and also a battle not worth fighting. Don’t be that person who spends their life trying to convince people that we should say we drive on a driveway and park on a parkway.

The post continues:

“How’s it going with your company?”

“We’re killing it.”

Shut up.

I’ve taken to answering that question with “It’s interesting.”

Blank stares and fear that I am eliciting a response flow over faces.

“It’s interesting” is a more honest answer, I guess. But if that person’s intention was not to get into a long conversation—or any conversation—about the health of your company, then that may come across as needlessly aggressive or weird, especially if there’s no elaboration. This kind of communication may look like a question, but it is often our way of marking the beginning of an interaction by eliciting a short and mostly meaningless response. A way of establishing that the other person is listening to you and not still trying to commit to memory the lyrics of Big Rock Candy Mountain.

The more important point is that the people asking this question are not necessarily being insincere. Their blank stares are likely not because they don’t care about you or your company. People who want to have an actual, in-depth conversation will usually, if they’re at all proficient in the interpersonal arts, communicate as much to you.

Micah goes on to suggest that these kinds of answers (“We’re killing it!”) reflect self-deception, and that this contagion of bullshit goes on to infect a person’s relationships. Relationships with friends, family, investors and others who deserve more than a phatic “How are you?”

He ends the post with a call to action:

I challenge you to take a day and care. I dare you to listen actively and when you ask someone “How are you,” that you demand a deeply truthful answer.

When your employees, investors and friends ask about your business that you tell them truthfully whats going well, and areas you need help. It’s amazing. People, especially friends, by default, want to be helpful. It’s a gift to provide them the ability to participate in your happiness.

I think Micah’s right that people often preach but actually abhor honesty. Most people are afraid of being exposed as a fraud. That their companies are houses of cards, that they are less smart or fearless or whatever than they’d like other people to believe. And many of us will engage in pathological amounts of self-deception in order to avoid confronting even the notion that we might be less than we portray ourselves to be.

All of this is a problem in the startup world as well. Because it’s inhabited by humans. And Micah’s right to call attention to the need for honesty and sincerity and a willingness to listen to one’s friends and peers. But if his diagnosis of the problem is correct, and I suspect it is, the symptoms are not to be located in these routine moments of small talk but in the unwillingness to follow that up, at some point, with real substance.