Airbnb Co-Founder sez: “Don’t Fuck Up the Culture.”
Berkun replies: “A Critique of Don’t Fuck Up the Culture.”
Lots to consider here.
Category: General
Thinking About TechMore
After my conversation with the Chair of the Business and Management Department at Skidmore College, I have quite a bit of brainstorming and reaching out to do – not to mention actually figuring out what it is I’m trying to create.
It seems like the vibrant tech worker community in Saratoga Springs and the student body at Skidmore are a match waiting to happen: the question is, what should the final product look like? Here are some important pieces I’d like to hit:
- Applicable and welcoming to non-business & non-computer science students. Both because they make up the majority of Skidmore students and because I was such a student.
- Beneficial in both directions: this has to be a symbiotic relationship in order to be appealing and sustainable for both sides.
- Fit into the existing infrastructure: it shouldn’t take an act of Congress to find a place for this program to fit – it should mesh with existing institutions and programs at Skidmore.
In order to hit these first three pieces, I need to do some research – mostly in finding out what the existing career development and tech ecosystems at Skidmore are like. I’ve sent some emails out to additional members of the faculty and staff – here goes nothing!
Internal and External Service
When we think about service and support, it is very easy to think only of our customers, of the folks who have purchased our products or processes – we answer their questions, ensure their happiness, and so forth.
It’s worth considering that we cannot provide excellent service to our customers without first providing excellent service to one another – it’s always been my position that the very best way to serve a customer is not to put them first. Rather, there are a few groups of people who must be served with excellence and hospitality before we even reach our customers. In a restaurant, these are your vendors and your co-workers. This is sometimes called internal service – as opposed to customer-facing support or service, which would be external service.
This mindset applies to any business, especially in the tech sector – if your internal communications are flawed, if you don’t have a culture of mutual respect and support, it is impossible to extend really excellent hospitality toward your customers.
The WordPress.com Transparency Report
I am so very pleased and proud to work for a company that is on the forefront of both publishing and the rights of artists and authors on the Internet. Having had a chance to work with the legal team at WordPress.com has been a highly educational, and inspirational, experience.
Automattic’s mission is to democratize publishing, and a fully informed citizenry is the foundation of any functioning democracy. Keeping our users and the public fully informed about our policies on responding to government requests has always been important to us — and now, more than ever, candor in this area is vitally important.
In keeping with these principles, we’re pleased to release our first transparency report. This initial report summarizes the number of government information requests, takedown demands, and national security requests that we received during the second half of 2013. In addition to giving our users full transparency about the volume of these requests, we also hope that publicly reporting our data will help hold all parties (including us) accountable.
A few highlights of our report:
Information Requests. For the second half of 2013, approximately 0.0001% of the 48 million sites that we host were subject to a…
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Something something Hegel
Simon Ouderkirk 