[Dave Heal's] Observations & Reports

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.

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.

Francisco Dao of 50Kings, writing over at Pando Daily, is trying to make fetch “smanker” happen. That’s short for “social media wanker.” If you live in an area of dense tech startup activity or are a sentient human of employable age, you likely know That Person.

The column makes a valiant attempt to carve out some real estate for his coinage in between “smang it” and “smerd*” in the Gideons Portmanteau Dictionary. But ultimately his Foxworthy-style questionnaire falls short of the comprehensive test that we need for wider adoption. As the unacknowledged hero behind an unsuccessful, decade-long effort to bring back “Opposite Day,” I know well the Sisyphean task he has set for himself.

*Small nerd, e.g., “What up, smerds!”

Francisco, if you’re out there, consider this blog post my offer to help. If catastrophic but edifying failure is also a badge of honor in meme proliferation circles, I am your man. I can also contribute my small but enthusiastic reserve army, the Opposite Day Brigade (ODB). They’ll turn the t-shirts inside out, I promise.

On to his list:

1. If you put your Klout score on your resume, you might be a smanker.
2. If you think having a Tumblr page automatically qualifies you for a press pass, you might be a smanker.
3. If you really believe the economy runs on “thank you’s” and not money, you might be a smanker.
4. If you’re socially inept in real life, but popular on Twitter, you might be a smanker.
5. If you think Mubarak was overthrown by Facebook and not by the blood of Egyptian revolutionaries, you might be a smanker.
6. If your idea of an awesome vacation is going to 140 Conference, you might be a smanker.
7. If you think “Liking” the Facebook page of a charity makes you an activist, you might be a smanker.
8. If you’ve ever thought you could survive on Klout perks and social media schwag, you might be a smanker.
9. If you claim to be an entrepreneur but six months in your “company” is still just a landing page, you might be a smanker.
10.  If you’ve ever given the advice “be authentic and engage in the conversation,” you might be a smanker.

This is a fine list, as far as it goes. But I have some quibbles. Mainly that a few of the ten are strawmen and are also not quite at the level of hilarity required to warrant inclusion. As David Foster Wallace proved in his non-fiction, if your made-up observations are either LOL-inducing or plausibly true, your audience will forgive you.

Re: #2, I don’t know of anybody who feels that merely having a Tumblr entitles them to a press pass. And I am a much bigger loser than Francisco and so keep the company of people who, if this was a possible thing to feel, would be inclined to. Now, if your Tumblr is on the level of Bon Iverotica or Annals of Online Dating, I see no reason why our Founding Fathers wouldn’t have wanted to give you the freedoms and benefits that come with the designation of “press.” Hell, I’d likely rather hear questions from the person behind Kim Jong Il Looking At Things than most of the White House Press Corps.

#4 is rather harsh on the socially inept. Plenty of delightful, smart folks are better in writing than they are in person. That shouldn’t get them branded as a wanker, or even the final 5 letters of the word wanker.

#5 seems to imply that there are people out there who envision Facebook as a giant 800 million person-Transformer. I get up every morning hoping to meet this kind of big dreamer, but I haven’t. If anybody knows of a Colorado-based meetup for these high-octane imagineers, let me know.

And Francisco, let’s also workshop “smanker” a bit. I have some suggestions for punchier Portamanteaus that might really blow this whole thing open. What do you think of “smoser” (pron.: /’smuzər/ (IPA), SMOO-zer)? Or how about “smassclown”?

Finally, in the interest of being constructive, here are a few off-the-cuff additions I would make to the original list:

1.) If you earnestly use the hashtag “#startuplife,” you might be a smanker.

2.) If your total number of tweets is less than 2x the number of times you’ve retweeted the pithy startup wisdom from Aaron Levie and Shervin Pishevar, you might be a smanker.

3.) If you enthusiastically post and endorse every single infographic that you see, you might be a smanker.

4.) If you don’t currently have a job and don’t actually have any experience doing much of anything besides tweeting in your undies but maintain that you are looking for a job in social media, you might be the textbook definition of a smanker.

5.) If you love George Takei and it’s not because of Star Trek, you might be a smanker.

6.) If, on any social media profile, you self-apply any or all of the following labels (guru, maven, visionary, intellectual, rock star, thinker), you might be a smanker.

Or: Why Does David Dahl Hate Janitors?

David Dahl is the CTO of Total Attorneys, which provides “law firm solutions” (ed: blargh!) for small law firms & solo practitioners. This appears to involve marketing, virtual administrative services (they will answer your phones and schedule appointments for you), and generally helping with client management. He recently wrote a blog post titled “Rethinking the Cloud” in which he responds to an ABA journal article by Joe Dysart that rightly expressed some caution about law firms’ increasing use of cloud-based software and storage [solutions!].

Indeed, increasing numbers of lawyers are expected to find themselves embracing and endorsing the same computing technologies they now view as risky once they decide the risk is worth it.-Joe Dysart in “The Trouble with Terabytes”

Mr. Dysart is half right. It’s true that most attorneys will embrace cloud technology in the next few years because it’s easier, more convenient and less expensive. But unless misunderstanding abounds, lawyers won’t be making that choice “in spite of the risks”. They’ll be embracing new technology because in addition to being simple, flexible and cheap, it’s safer than the way they’ve always done business.

Here, as elsewhere on the Total Attorneys website, Dahl asserts that not only is cloud computing safer than on-site, but that it’s so safe that “unless misunderstanding abounds” there isn’t even a risk analysis to be done. From the end of the post:

Cloud-based computing, though, is a complete departure from that trend—it may be the first major technological development that offers a solution to security issues for attorneys rather than throwing them into a complicated analysis of acceptable risk. [emphasis added]

This makes no sense. And even if the decision to move some portion of your data to the cloud was a no-brainer, deciding from among the various SaaS (software as a service) providers is no less complicated. I doubt that Dahl would dispute this if asked directly, but in his rush to create business-generating soundbites about the safety of cloud services he ends up ignoring the complexities involved and completely sidesteps the concerns of the ABA article, which raises some very real issues about privacy, data security and the ease with which the government can obtain access to your data.

Dahl’s case for the obviousness of cloud storage takes the form of a tortured analogy:

The security concerns raised in the recent ABA Journal article “The Trouble with Terabytes” reminded me of something I observed a few years ago when my wife and I were building our house. During the transition, we put some of our furniture and other random things in a storage unit, and the security was impressive. Security cameras monitored the premises every hour of the day and night; a locked gate kept the public out, and a lock on the storage unit kept my things locked in – I guess.. That was all very reassuring. Once we were ready to move in, everything left the storage facility, into the shiny new house with a couple dead-bolts – no constant video surveillance or levels of locked doors protecting my couch.

Most business data, even in law firms, lives in a place much more like my living room than that storage facility. Mr. Dysart encourages attorneys to question whether bank-grade encryption is sufficient to protect their client data. However, small firm and solo attorneys often store that data unencrypted on a local machine accessible not only to any employee but to the cleaning crew and the building manager.That data resides on a server protected by a door and a lock not unlike those protecting my couch, whereas cloud service providers typically use servers in secure data centers much more like the secure storage unit. And that’s only the beginning.

In the presentation I linked to above (“as elsewhere” hyperlink), Dahl once again needlessly impugns the janitorial profession. He seems to be exceedingly paranoid about the possibility of malevolent custodians. Which, when you really think about it, does make some sense as everybody knows that the greatest threat to data security is the steady and unacknowledged infiltration of janitorial unions by those seeking to destroy small law firms.

Before we go on, let’s be clear about one thing: David Dahl is not a lawyer. This is, on balance, a good thing for Mr. Dahl, but that does render him a bit more suspect when it comes to his pronouncements about the unalloyed benefits of cloud computing, especially for entities such as law firms that should be thinking seriously about the legal implications of moving their communications and data storage to the cloud.

The Stored Communications Act of 1986 (18 U.S.C. 2701 et . seq.)

The SCA regulates the circumstances under which a company (“electronic communication service” in the language of the statute) can divulge information about a customer’s electronic communications to a private party. Congress passed the SCA to prohibit a provider of an electronic communication service “from knowingly divulging the contents of any communication while in electronic storage by that service to any person other then the addressee or intended recipient.” S.Rep. No. 99-541, 97th Cong. 2nd Sess. 37, reprinted in 1986 U.S.C.C.A.N. 3555, 3591.

Sounds great, right? Well, the government has long maintained that an email is no longer “in electronic storage” once it has been read by the recipient. Moreover, the application of the Fourth Amendment to the Internet is kind of a mess, and the SCA is no small part of that mess. The statute allows the government to access remotely stored electronic communications in certain circumstances without having to get a warrant. Information that has been stored for fewer than 180 days requires a warrant, but 2703(a) & (b) state that for information that has been in storage longer than 180 days, the government may obtain that information using administrative subpoena or a court order. Essentially, for information older than 180 days, the government does not need to show probable cause. This section of the law is arguably unconstitutional, but it’s still on the books.

So, contrary to Mr. Dahl’s categorical statements, this would seem to be a relevant thing to consider when deciding between on-site and remote storage of an entire law firm’s communications. Moreover, once your activity moves to the cloud, you are no longer in control of data retention periods (unless you are able to negotiate this separately). If Google or Yahoo or your email provider of choice decides that they want to retain infinity years worth of data, when the government comes calling, there is no plausible deniability. On the other hand, so long as you’re complying with the laws regarding minimum retention periods, you are free to delete your records. Which means that if there’s nothing for the government to request, there’s nothing for you to divulge.

The final slide in the presentation linked above is the following:

I find this hilarious. #1 is not true in any meaningful sense. Being “already in the cloud,” by which I assume he means that almost all of us use a cloud-based service of some sort, doesn’t mean that moving your law firm’s entire infrastructure to the cloud isn’t potentially new or scary. #2 does not compute. The language here is rather ineptly invoking the 4th Amendment search standard from Katz v. United States, which found the government’s action constituted an unlawful search because the person demonstrated a reasonable expectation of privacy over the object involved. I don’t know what Dahl had in mind with this second bullet point, but the result is the creation of a false sense of security about the protections afforded by the law to electronic communications hosted by third parties. #3 may even be true based on the “more often” language, but given that Dahl never talks about the vulnerabilities associated with cloud storage, this isn’t a good faith description of the risks involved either.

It should be clear at this point that I don’t think that Dahl’s analogy of on-site data storage:locked house::cloud storage:high-security self-storage locker is particularly apt. For a much longer and more-expert take on why, check out privacy/security researcher Chris Soghoian‘s work. In particular, An End to Privacy Theatre: Exposing and Discouraging Corporate Disclosure of User Data to the Government & Caught in the Cloud: Privacy, Encryption, and Government Back Doors in the Web 2.0 Era.