Joe Stump on How to Turn Past Mistakes Into Future Successes

In Chapter 4 of 14 in his 2012 interview, Internet entrepreneur Joe Stump answers "What Role Has Reflection Played in Shaping Your Personal Growth?"  Stump finds reflection the only way to leverage past mistakes and turn them into future successes.  Stump writes a bullet point list of mistakes made at his previous company, SimpleGeo, and uses this to guide his next company, Sprint.ly.  Joe Stump is a serial entrepreneur based in Portland, OR. He is CEO and co-founder of Sprint.ly, a product management software company.  Previously he founded SimpleGeo, which was sold to Urban Airship in October 2011.  He advises several startups - including attachments.me and ngmoco:) - as well as VC firm Freestyle Capital.  He earned a BBA in Computer Information Systems (CIS) from Eastern Michigan University. 

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: What role has reflection played in shaping your personal growth?

Joe Stump: I'm a big fan of learning from mistakes. I'm definitely a trial and error kind of guy, that’s how I learned how to program. You could make a solid argument, that’s how I've learned to start companies. So, I think that reflection is the only way that you can leverage your past mistakes into future success.

So I've spent a lot of time, particularly after SimpleGeo, reflecting and I actually wrote a long document, basically this long bullet point list. It was basically a punch list of things that I had messed up on and that bullet list, that punch list of mistakes basically very much guided me as I went on to create my next company.

Erik Michielsen: Can you give a couple of examples?

Joe Stump: Yeah. Yeah. I think, so, at SimpleGeo, I think we raised too much money too quickly and we hired too many people too quickly before we had really figured out what the product was fully going to be and how we were going to take it to market. So, basically everything was kind of done backwards.

So at Sprint.ly, I have the mantra of like -- I beat the drum of what I call the three S’s, small, slow, and steady. We're building a company that I hope to work at for possibly decades and you don’t do that overnight. So, that’s probably been the biggest lesson that I've taken away. We had amazing people and amazing investors and obviously plenty of money in the bank at the time but it was putting the cart before the horse in a lot of ways.

Joe stump on How Experimentation Enables New Product Development

In Chapter 7 of 14 in his 2012 interview, Internet entrepreneur Joe Stump answers "How Do You Balance Experimentation and Commitment in the Projects You Pursue?"  When looking at new products and new companies, Stump uses experimentation to scratch the itch about interesting ideas and then decide if and when to commit to a larger project.  He shares his experience hacking on email attachment management, putting it on Github, and eventually helping young entrepreneurs found startup attachments.me.  Joe Stump is a serial entrepreneur based in Portland, OR. He is CEO and co-founder of Sprint.ly, a product management software company.  Previously he founded SimpleGeo, which was sold to Urban Airship in October 2011.  He advises several startups - including attachments.me and ngmoco:) - as well as VC firm Freestyle Capital.  He earned a BBA in Computer Information Systems (CIS) from Eastern Michigan University. 

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: How do you balance experimentation and commitment in the projects that you pursue?

Joe Stump: I'm always experimenting. I think that’s a really important part of what I do in building products. I think it's really important to focus your experimentation and scratch those itches. I actually think that that increases focus because I look at new ideas. When I'm focused on a new product, a new company, I look at new ideas as, particularly ones that don’t apply to my new product.

Obviously, I'm always having new ideas about the product. I look at them as almost like cancerous because if I allow them to germinate -- I'm the type of person that like, “That's a pretty good idea,” and then I’ll ruminate on it for a little while and I'm like, “That’s a really good idea.” And then a little bit longer, then I’m like, and then I start checking out of the other one. So, experimentation allows me to kind of like satisfy my little need to explore that, and usually I’ll explore it just kind of enough to scratch the itch and then I can move on.

Erik Michielsen: Could you give me a couple of examples of projects or itches?

Joe Stump: A couple of things that I've done, I created -- for a long time, back in like 2001, 2002, I was doing a lot of consulting work and had a ton inbound email and IM from clients and stuff and email at the time, I mean, the very best email client out there was terrible, right? And I was like, “it would be really awesome if I could take all of my email and kind of index it by not just subject and body, but the attachments.”

There's a lot of really great data in emails. It's still the primary mechanism for sharing on the internet. There's a lot of URLs in there, a lot of photos, a lot of videos. Obviously your real social network is in your email at the large part. So I kind of like thought that was a cool idea and I had always wanted to do that and ended up actually scratching an itch over a weekend and built this thing where you could log in to Gmail and then it would index.

It was like a little internet crawler that would crawl through your email inbox and then would basically, you could do things like show me all the photos my mom sent me last week, show me all the PDFs that my lawyer sent me last month, show me all the Excel spreadsheets that I've gotten from my accountant. It took me three days to kind of hack that together and the proof of concept was awesome. I was showing it to people. I'm like, “Check this out,” and they're like, “That’s really cool,” because you could click on someone’s name and see all the attachments that they’ve sent them. You could click on a month and see all the attachments you got in a month. You could slice and dice in all sorts of different ways.

And basically I just scratched that itch and left it stagnating on GitHub for months and then met a guy who had just graduated with his masters in Natural Language Processing. And of course, email is like that guy’s wet dream, right? There's just gigabytes of text and he got really excited about it and he was like, “Can I hack on it with you?” and I was like, “Of course, it's just gathering dust on GitHub, fire away.” And that company went on. Those guys, he recruited in a friend, they went on to leave their jobs, helped them raise 500 K and by the time this video hits the internet, they’ll have closed theirs hearsay.

Erik Michielsen: What's the name of that company?

Joe Stump: Attachments.me, and it's pretty amazing now because they have taken it and completly ran with it and they’ve built it now and they're like this really crazy content router. So, you can literally say -- a lot of services send PDFs as receipts. GitHub is a good example. So they send an invoice once a month with the receipt as a PDF attachment. So now in Gmail, I can say, “Please route all PDF attachments from GitHub to my Dropbox GitHub receipts folder,” and it just happens automatically. You don’t have to do anything. It's really nice.

Joe Stump on Management Career Advice on Finding a Mentor

In Chapter 9 of 14 in his 2012 interview, Internet entrepreneur Joe Stump answers "At This Point in Your Life, Where Are You Seeking Advice and Coaching?"  Stump references his goals to be a good businessman, programmer, partner, son, and brother.  He recognizes the domain specific nature of each and highlights the importance of cycling in new opinions regularly.  As his career responsibilities progressively become management focused, he turns to new mentors, including his father, who provide outside perspectives from different industries.  Joe Stump is a serial entrepreneur based in Portland, OR. He is CEO and co-founder of Sprint.ly, a product management software company.  Previously he founded SimpleGeo, which was sold to Urban Airship in October 2011.  He advises several startups - including attachments.me and ngmoco:) - as well as VC firm Freestyle Capital.  He earned a BBA in Computer Information Systems (CIS) from Eastern Michigan University. 

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: At this point in your life, where are you seeking advice and coaching?

Joe Stump: A number of areas. I continue to leverage my Jedi Council. I have a number of mentors. I find that you can’t – I mean look, long term, I have to be a good businessman, I have to be a good programmer, I have to be a good boyfriend, partner, husband to my lady, and I have to be a good son and brother. And those each take different skill sets. And so, the mentoring that I seek out tends to be a little bit more domain-specific.

I also try to cycle new opinions into the Jedi Council. So, what I seek out now, like it's changed a lot. I used to lean heavily on a lot of programming mentors. I'm not programming as much anymore so I don’t really lean on them so much. I've actually been leaning a lot more on my dad when it comes to management. My dad’s a great manager. He’s done great things where he’s at and I like talking to him about that because he gives me an outside perspective from a completely different industry on how to interact and build employees up.

I have a friend of mine who is also kind of an engineering manager similar to me and he has this saying about employees. He treats employees, he thinks of employees like campsites and that you should leave them better than you found them. So, getting that outside perspective, I think is really important. I think it's been a really great bonding experience. My dad now calls me and will ask me questions about management, which I think is kind of funny.

So yeah, so what I look for in a mentor has definitely evolved over time because my career has evolved. Like, I'm no longer – I’m not sitting and banging out 10,000 lines of code a day. I'm managing, I got to do accounting now, I got to do – like I’m management benefits, I got to talk to lawyers, I have to read contracts. So yes, seeking out different advice now from different people has been pretty important.

Joe Stump on Bringing Entrepreneurial Optimism to Cynical Cultures

In Chapter 10 of 14 in his 2012 interview, Internet entrepreneur Joe Stump answers "What Has Working Internationally Taught You About Communicating Across Cultures?"  By advising a British company, Stump learns how a culture of optimism contrasts with a culture of cynicism and doubt.  He compares general country cultures - American, British, Indian, Chinese - and how an entrepreneurship mindset is influenced by the national mindset.  He details what he did to transform the mindset inside that British company to be more opportunistic and confident.  Joe Stump is a serial entrepreneur based in Portland, OR. He is CEO and co-founder of Sprint.ly, a product management software company.  Previously he founded SimpleGeo, which was sold to Urban Airship in October 2011.  He advises several startups - including attachments.me and ngmoco:) - as well as VC firm Freestyle Capital.  He earned a BBA in Computer Information Systems (CIS) from Eastern Michigan University.

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: What has working internationally taught you about communicating across cultures?

Joe Stump: I'm an adviser for a company in the UK. I go over there and I spend about a week every quarter over there. And I think Americans and Brits kind of like to think that it's big brother, little brother, we're in the same family. Our cultures are drastically different in a lot of ways and I think working with them -- it was really disheartening to come from the startup world where everything’s “can do” attitude and go to an environment that -- I mean this was named, the company I work for is named one of the top 50 companies in the UK to work for.

They're a great company. I love working with these guys. But there are little things that really kind of trick you up that were kind of like a bummer. Like, in the United States, a grilled cheese company got $50 million in funding from one of the best venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. That is the very definition of like all ideas go. It's wide-open space. There are more eternal optimists bred everyday in the United States than anywhere else, right? The American dream is basically if you want to do it, it's yours for the taking, whereas in I talk with -- Alex Hunter is a buddy of mine. His wife is from California. He spent considerable time here. Actually he doesn’t even have a British accent anymore, he spent so much time here.

But he’s from Britain and he’s put it best to me, in Britain, I mean, everybody knows that they have a very cynical sense of humor right? And I think that pervades the entire society. Where he says, “You come up with a new idea,” and like British society will go, “Oh, you have a new idea? Let's see if it flies.” It is like poopoo it before it's even had a chance to even get out on the launch pad. And working with that company in the UK has taught me that when I come in and I’ll say, “Hey, guys, we need to do X, Y, and Z so that we can move on to this next phase.” They will be, “Well, we really can't do X because of A, B, and C.” And I'm like, “You can do X. What you're telling me is that you don’t want to do X because of A, B, and C. You can fix A, B, and C.”

There is no unsolvable problem, right? And I think that’s something that really comes up a lot across Europe. They're a lot more conservative I would say. Exact opposite when you go to India and Asia. Man, those guys are like, it's wide open territory. I mean, like, dude, China is growing. That is a massive economy, a billion people and it's growing at 10 to 12% a year. It's really interesting. You go to all these different places and the emphasis because of culture, like emphasis in South Africa, for instance, is on revenue, early revenue. A lot of the investment deals are all tied to revenue goals and stuff.

Europe is a little bit similar. The United States they’re like nobody thought Facebook was ever going to make money and now it's making $4 billion a year. Right? And because of our culture, we're a lot more open to risk and we’ll go ahead and take that. And I think that now that other major economies are starting to sputter to life and they're starting to get their own version of the American dream, India and China, I think are two very good examples

There are a lot programmers in India that are just like starting to realize that they don’t have to work at call center. They can go and they can raise a small amount of cash and they have a billion people there that are all ready to pay a little bit of money. If you can get a billion people to pay you 10 cents, that’s real coin, right? So, they're embracing it. And also because travel is becoming cheaper, obviously they're making more money and their economies are coming up so they're able to come here. It's been really interesting to see that the America dream is alive and well and it just happens to be in a communist country and India, which is a socialist country. It's been interesting.

I like interfacing and talking with people like that. I like spreading the dream. Like and I've been telling -- we actually had a little luncheon at the company in the UK and they were like, “What's the most frustrating thing about working with us?” I was like, “You guys are so much better than you give yourselves credit for. Quit being so cynical.” You can do it. You just got to like go do it. This isn’t like rocket science stuff here. Every time I’m like, I come up with something like, “We need to fix this,” and they're like, “Well, maybe we should probably do this other thing instead.” It’s just like…Just do that, get it over with, move on to the next thing.

It was kind of funny. There was actually some nodding in the room and then afterwards one of the guys came up to me, he's like, “I'm really glad you said that because I didn’t even realize that I was doing that. And now I realize that I'm poopooing stuff that I know I can do and I don’t even know why I'm doing it. I don’t know why I'm poopooing this. I can do it.” It was really cool that they were like, “Yeah, we can do that.” They’ve really grown as a company. I’ve seen them -- It's a 1,200 person company and I've seen them move more, and more quickly, they're getting a lot more confident that they can take on those bigger challenges. I didn’t have a whole lot to do with that other than basically saying you know, telling them that, “Look, guys, you can do this. You just got to do it.”

Joe Stump on Startup Founder Advice on Working With Venture Capitalists

In Chapter 11 of 14 in his 2012 interview, Internet entrepreneur Joe Stump answers "What Were the Main Learning Points From Starting and Selling a Company?"  Through starting and selling SimpleGeo, Stump gets a clear understanding of how the sausage factory works in the VC land. He first learns the Internet startup talent ecosystem - programmers/builders, luminaries/speakers, founders, and investors/venture capitalists - and, in particular, how the game is played at the top of the investing scene.  He turns a founder frustration - how venture capitalists overshare information - into a founder strength. 

Joe Stump is a serial entrepreneur based in Portland, OR. He is CEO and co-founder of Sprint.ly, a product management software company.  Previously he founded SimpleGeo, which was sold to Urban Airship in October 2011.  He advises several startups - including attachments.me and ngmoco:) - as well as VC firm Freestyle Capital.  He earned a BBA in Computer Information Systems (CIS) from Eastern Michigan University. 

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: What were the main learning points from starting and selling a company?

Joe Stump: I don’t even know where to begin. The main learning points that I took away from SimpleGeo, I think, were I got a very clear understanding of how the sausage factory worked in the VC land, right? There are a few layers of sediment in the startup world. There are the implementers, the people that are banging out code, they're writing design, stuff like that. Slightly above them are the luminaries in that area, right? They are the people that go and speak at conferences about the new Java script frameworks that they're writing, and things like that.

One kind of layer above them are the founders. Those are people that go out and have a crazy idea and decide they want to build a company. And then the layer above that are the investors and VC. And you really don’t have any insight into what's going on until you kind of like move your way up. So I got a very clear, terrifying view of what that top layer is and understanding how that works was important to my long-term success. You have to know how the game is played.

Erik Michielsen: How is the game played?

Joe Stump: That game is like Lord of the Flies on steroids. I mean, it is cut throat. You know, people will -- There's so much drama that happens behind that investing scene that nobody sees. There are things like -- you talk to entrepreneurs, other founders. I call being a founder, being a part of the fraternal order of founders. You just don’t know what it's like until you’ve like actually been in it. I've had founders tell me, “I want to raise money from both of these guys but this guy won’t invest if this guy invests.”

I've had other people tell me that investors have called them and threatened them with their livelihood if they don’t do a deal in the way that they want them to do it. Investors gossip non-stop like even if you sign – even if they're a board member and they have a fiduciary responsibility to keep their mouth shut, they’ll gossip all day long. So understanding -- The biggest lesson I took away from that is like you can't trust anybody. But what you can do is leverage that.

Something that I've been doing more recently and the ways that you can kind of leverage that -- I probably shouldn’t be saying this but, is I know that if I go and tell somebody that so and so is doing really well and if I can strategically leak positive information about a company that I've invested in or I'm an adviser in to other people that are like -- and get out ahead of that company.

A good example of something that I might do is in a company that I'm advising in or invested in, I have deep insight into what's going on, right? And I usually have a strategic six to twelve-month window ahead of what they're planning on doing. And if I know that bits of data over here are going to help them six months from now and they're going to need this person or this firm or this capital in six months, I can leverage that gossip in the way that -- and that distrust and basically deploy knowledge ahead of time and just set the stage up ahead of time.

And I think one of the biggest lessons I had that I took away from -- really from all that experience is I love sausage but I hate the sausage factory. I don’t want to know how it's made, right? So I've tried to remove myself from that a little bit. And I think the other lesson that was really hard for me to swallow, you hear about really crappy things happening to good people and what's really frustrating is these people that are doing really crappy things are being exalted. These investors are being exalted on every blog, tech blog and everything as being like -- All they do is help founders. Well, I know for a fact that people that you say help founders have destroyed founders. So, don’t tell me that that’s actually how it happens.

The thing that was really difficult for me to accept was people would say “it's just business”, which is the MBA way of saying, don’t hate the player, hate the game. There are a few players that I legitimately hate because they have strayed way beyond what I think is acceptable human interaction but it has allowed me to embrace the parts of the game in a way that allows me to work with people that probably otherwise I wouldn’t want to, in a way that benefits everybody.

Joe stump on How an Entrepreneur Learns the Startup Investing Game

In Chapter 12 of 14 in his 2012 interview, Internet entrepreneur Joe Stump answers "How Have Your Entrepreneurial Pursuits Taught You to Be a Better Investor?"  After raising money for three companies, advising a venture capital firm and investing his own money in three companies, Stump shares what he has learned about startup investing.  He describes the portfolio theory approach VC firms take and how as an entrepreneur he has learned to compete as a portfolio firm.  He learns the mechanics of angel, seed, series A and series B investing and how to negotiate contract terms.  Joe Stump is a serial entrepreneur based in Portland, OR. He is CEO and co-founder of Sprint.ly, a product management software company.  Previously he founded SimpleGeo, which was sold to Urban Airship in October 2011.  He advises several startups - including attachments.me and ngmoco:) - as well as VC firm Freestyle Capital.  He earned a BBA in Computer Information Systems (CIS) from Eastern Michigan University. 

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: How have your entrepreneurial pursuits taught you to be a better investor?

Joe Stump: So, I've been involved in a number of ways with venture capital, raising money. I've raised money now for two companies myself and I've helped a third company raise money as well. I'm a fund adviser for Freestyle Capital and I've invested my own money into three companies now. And the things that I have learned are that there are billions of dollars that are being deployed in what at times appears to be a very chaotic manner.

VCs work off of portfolio theory. They invest in a hundred companies and they expect 95 of them to fail for the most part. And what that lesson taught me as an entrepreneur is if you're one of those 95, guess what, you are competing with 95 other people for probably 20 percent of their time because they're spending the other 80 percent of their time on the five winners. So, that’s a harsh reality to learn but it's good to know and I think that there are times when getting the attention of your VC and your investors can actually be a bad thing. I mean, not that they're bad people or whatever, but it's nice to sometimes work without having the pressure.

So, I know founders that will withhold good information for just a little while longer so that they can have a little bit more breathing room and then they're like, “Ta-Da! We're one of the five!” and then the VCs are like, herd over. And they’re like …  and they bear hug them, you know, and they’re like oh god. It's like when your mom gives you a hug, you're like, “Mom, stop.” You know.

So, that’s been interesting to learn about. The way that... What's been really fascinating to me is like someone like me that dress like me, looks like me, says the F word as much as I do, can walk into a guy’s office who manages billions of dollars and then I’ll show him -- well, with my last company, I didn’t even have a PowerPoint presentation. I didn’t even have a presentation. I had a financial model in Google Docs, a product document, and a prototype and they were just like, “Oh yeah. Let me pull out the check book, and just write you a giant check with lots of commas in it” and you're like, “Really?” It seems -- Growing up in a blue color family in the Midwest, it seems like you're cheating somehow, like you're stealing money or whatever. So, that’s been really interesting.

A lot of people on the outside view it as like oh this – that the firms don’t really talk with each other and that they're always competing and they do compete for deals. But it's not really like that at all. They talk a lot to each other, they will actually -- I won’t say fully collude but I mean there are a lot of times that the VCs are back channeling with each other a lot more than entrepreneurs really realize. And then you just learn the basic mechanics like I know now that Angel investors, depending on the Angel investor, they want between a half a point and one and a half percent. They want enough that we’ll take their $20,000 to $100,000 investment and turn it into a million dollars, right? If you're the first point and a half in, that can happen if it’s one of those five companies.

I now know that seed stage, they generally want between 12.5% and 17% of the company. I know that the series A wants 20 percent, series B, things start going back down because hopefully by then you're making money and what not then looking at more anywhere between 10% and 20% and the C is definitely kind of in the 10% range. So the basic mechanics of understanding how that game is played has been invaluable to me.

I've been able to negotiate better terms for myself, I have been able to…I advise a number of companies, I've been able to return sheets over and tell them, “Hey! Maybe we shouldn’t do that. Maybe we should do this,” and getting clear insight into how the VCs interact with each other and who likes who and who doesn’t like who and how they work together has made me a much stronger -- I won’t say opponent, but like when I go into the ring with those guys, like I know who’s going to say what to who and how that’s going to all work out. And knowing the players in the game makes you a better player.

I almost feel like one of the best defensive basketball players of all time: Dennis Rodman. That man watched hundreds of thousands of hours of video and it was all so that he could know his players, his opponents inside and out. And being an adviser, being a fund adviser, investing my money, et cetera, that’s my way in to understanding the game and my opponents and who I'm going to be going up against as far as the next -- who goes on down the line and getting insight into their mentality.

I read an interview once about Dennis Rodman and they were talking about how much of a fanatic he was about watching tapes and he got so good at it that he could literally say by the time the guy flicked his wrist – so you’re talking about the ball is maybe one-third of the way to the rim. He will be like, “That’s going to bounce off the back of the rim off the left side. That’s going to bounce off the front of the rim straight down the lane.” That’s how good he was. Doing that has taken me from being a blue-collar kid that grew up in a cornfield to somebody who can negotiate contracts with some of the best MBAs that our country has and it's really fun.

Joe Stump on Learning Entrepreneurial Business Skills From Lawyers

In Chapter 13 of 14 in his 2012 interview, Internet entrepreneur Joe Stump answers "What Has Working With Lawyers Taught You About Business?"  Stump learns basic employment and contract law during college business law classes.  As an entrepreneur, Stump learns far more about how to mitigate and minimize risk as a startup founder and business owner, for example, reading contracts to filing tax forms.  Joe Stump is a serial entrepreneur based in Portland, OR. He is CEO and co-founder of Sprint.ly, a product management software company.  Previously he founded SimpleGeo, which was sold to Urban Airship in October 2011.  He advises several startups - including attachments.me and ngmoco:) - as well as VC firm Freestyle Capital.  He earned a BBA in Computer Information Systems (CIS) from Eastern Michigan University.  

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: What has working with lawyers taught you about business?

Joe Stump: It has taught me a ton. I went to business school in my undergrad, so I actually had to take some law schools. I'm sure you had to as well. And it’s just like -- The law classes I had to take, I think I had to take two of them and they're very basic employment kind of law classes. But they do give you a window into how contracts work, like what is the basic you need. You need mutual consideration in a contract. What are the basic things? So I at least had that luckily because a lot of my peers that are programmers that become founders, they get this legal paperwork, and they’re like, what do I do?

But the things that the lawyers have taught me over time is basically what to look out for in contracts. The lawyer’s entire job – their entire job is to mitigate and minimize risk, right? And so, they’ve really taught me that your business is under constant attack and you have to watch out for that. A lot of us, a lot of business people think that the attack are competitors or market environments. The attacks can come from within like employees, partners, clients, investors.

So, you need to basically -- the lawyer is there to help you navigate those tricky waters and there are so many laws out there and so many ways that you can structure contracts that I didn’t even know existed until I started working with lawyers in and around my business. It's made me so much smarter and it's actually allowed me to even move more quickly, it saves me money. I was talking to an investor friend of mine. There are a couple of really common mess-ups that founders do in startups.

First of all is they don’t get contracts for consultants. So, early on, you're moving really, really quickly. You're like, “I just need this code down. I need another set of hands,” and then you just hand out a GitHub key and people start hacking and then the problem with that is if you don’t have a contractual relationship with somebody and you just have like a couple of emails and IMs, that does nothing but cause your lawyer to lose his hair, right? Because that person, there are automatic employment laws in a lot of states, particularly in California. California has some very European-esque employment laws.

So, watching out for that has saved me money. Personally, myself in a company early on in SimpleGeo, my co-founder hired a contractor and we ended up at the time, we didn’t end up getting paperwork and it end up costing us, when we ended up letting that guy go, a lot of money.

Another common mess up is there's this thing called an 83-B and you're supposed to file this with the IRS when you get equity in a company and that starts your capital gains clock ticking. That’s something lawyers do. It's just kind of automatic stuff. My co-founder in SimpleGeo at his first company did not file that and that was the difference between 15 percent tax rate and a 48 percent tax rate when he sold his company and he ended up paying 33 percent more in taxes than he should have.

So, what I’ve basically learned from my lawyers is -- it's interesting. I've learned a couple of things. First of all, I learned how to read contracts and I know what to look out for, which actually is kind of ironic. The lawyer has basically trained me up to the point where I'm like a junior paralegal and I'm like saving myself money. So I redline and read all the agreements that I get before I go back to the lawyers. The other thing, and it saves me money with employees, it's saved me money with taxes. I very, very happily write my check to my lawyer. Accountants, they're very similar. Those are the easiest checks for me to write along with my employees.

Joe Stump on How to Make Product Management Easier for Developers

In Chapter 14 of 14 in his 2012 interview, Internet entrepreneur Joe Stump answers "How Are You Learning to Improve the Product Management Process for Developers?"  Stump provides the background for what motivated him to co-found software company Sprint.ly to make product development easier.  Joe Stump is a serial entrepreneur based in Portland, OR. He is CEO and co-founder of Sprint.ly, a product management software company.  Previously he founded SimpleGeo, which was sold to Urban Airship in October 2011.  He advises several startups - including attachments.me and, through its acquisition, ngmoco:) - as well as VC firm Freestyle Capital.  He earned a BBA in Computer Information Systems (CIS) from Eastern Michigan University.

Transcript:

Erik Michielsen: How are you learning to improve the product management process for developers?

Joe Stump: I talk to a ton of developers and just listen to what they're doing. I do a little bit of consulting as well mostly around product management and team management, a little bit around product as well. I think product management spans a big area. It spans strategy, what should we build, when should we build it, why are we building it, all the way to asset allocation and whatnot.

So, basically I've been working in this space. I've been leading and managing teams for almost a decade now and I've kind of taken a lot of those lessons and what I find is every team behaves slightly differently and the thing that I’ve probably – the thing that’s stuck out most to me over the last kind of decade or so is that when you assemble teams, like each team is like a little snowflake and they all behave and look and act in a slightly different manner. And in software engineering, there’s like, there are all this process paradigms, agile, scrum, waterfall, kanban.

And what I found is teams generally will embrace parts of each of those. Very, very few teams will embrace those fully. And what I’ve done is – I mean every developer at some point in their career has been frustrated with one of their tools, and said, “One day I'm going to rewrite a better mousetrap and I'm going to make a better tool.” And I'm happy to say I'm realizing that dream finally.

I recently -- The first week of December, I launched my new product. It's called Sprint.ly. And Sprint.ly is really the manifestation of almost 15 years of frustration with the product management tool. These tools I found have generally fallen into a couple of different camps. One camp is they're built for product of business to manage resources. Developers hate those. They don’t really like using those. They don’t have a lot of things that developers want and for, to do their day to day stuff. So the features in those skew much towards really resource planning. And then you have bug trackers built by developers for developers.

So you have two completely different types of software that are trying to address the same problem for two different parties at the table, right? Really my approach with Sprint.ly has been I think a little bit different whereas in first of all, I'm trying to build a tool that unifies those two camps. I actually found more than a handful of customers when I was talking to them that the developers were literally using one tool and the project management people were using another tool and then they would copy and paste stuff back and forth, which I think is insane.

So, we've been building Sprint.ly in a way that I want to get everybody using the same tool. So that has forced us to decrease barriers. And we built a tool, a lot of the tools out that are in product management, certainly the bug trackers are very technical and very difficult to understand. So we've kind of done away with that. It looks a little bit more like a consumer product. And the other thing I wanted to do is I wanted to increase transparency. So I talked to – you talk to the developers and it's almost like companies in software – like software companies are two black boxes warring at each other.

You have the makers on one side and you have the business and manager people on the other side and they're like, “What are you doing?” and the other one is like, “What are you doing? Why are you doing that? Why are you doing that?” So really, I want to build Sprint.ly kind of into the UN of product management software where everybody comes to the table, everybody can see what everybody else is doing. I think sometimes my software development peers make things a little too complicated.

I guess over time, I’ve just learned that when you're building products and working with teams that you need to spend more time listening than talking because that’s when you'll realize what the problem is. There's a couple good quotes around product that I like that I think emphasize that, which is “don’t give the customer what they ask for, give them what they want.” And then there's a really great Henry Ford quote, which is, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Jon Kolko on How to Make Design Strategy More Implementation Friendly

In Chapter 14 of 21 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, design educator Jon Kolko answers "How Do You Make Strategic Thinking More Implementation Friendly?"  Kolko references user experience or UX managers and how they work to make design thinking actionable or tractable.  He notes heuristics, gross principles, and best practices do not work, putting emphasis on the financial or quantitative metrics instead. 

Jon Kolko is the founder and director of the Austin Center for Design.  He has authored multiple books on design, including "Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving."  Previously he has held senior roles at venture accelerator Thinktiv and frog design and was a professor of Interactive and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).  Kolko earned his Masters in Human Computer Interaction (MHI) and BFA in Design from Carnegie Mellon University.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How do you make strategic thinking more implementation-friendly?

Jon Kolko: That’s a good question. And it’s like the first question that anybody who’s sort of in a UX management role will ask when they learn design thinking or design strategy or any of these fancy buzz words is how do you make it actionable and tractable. And I think the answer has a lot to do with the way that you tie it directly to the wants and needs of the different stakeholders. And so, gross generalizations don’t work, heuristics don work, best practices don’t work. The things a designer does have to be buried in the minutia of details related to the stakeholders in order to get traction and buy-in. Typically, that means understanding numbers and finances and goals and metrics. And it's a lot of the stuff the designers typically sneer at and go like, “That’s not my wheelhouse. I don’t like it. It makes me uncomfortable,” but that’s how you take a design strategy and you create something that’s implementable,  and tractable. Equivalent in softwares, you can write abstractions, different requirements or wire frames but if you want it to be tractable then go write some code, erase all the little metaphors and middlemen and get to the heart of the thing you're trying to do and the same is true to service. So any time that you're designing, any time that your designing the design artifacts or abstractions, and they're super, super effective, those artifacts, but getting to the core of the thing is the way that you can make it tractable.

How to Apply Psychology Passion in Business Work - Hammans Stallings

In Chapter 3 of 22 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, innovation strategist Hammans Stallings answers "How Do You Apply Your Passion for Psychology in Your Business Career?"  Stallings' undergraduate education in economics and psychology help him learn how the world works.  For Stallings, his psychology passion helps him generate new approaches and ideas to better understand people and human behavior in a business environment.  This is Hammans Stallings' Year 2 CYF interview.  Stallings is currently a Senior Strategist at frog design.  Previously he worked in business strategy at Dell and investment banking at Stephens.  He earned an MBA from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, a MS in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and a BA in Economics and Psychology from the University of Virginia. 

Transcription: 

Erik Michielsen: How do you apply your passion for psychology in your business career?

Hammans Stallings: Psychology has been my -- my secret weapon of sorts, so if you go back to my -- my undergraduate where I spent time to studying economics and psychology, two fields that have not always kind of gotten along. And I spent a lot of time in kind of a state of cognitive dissonance where I was comparing and contrasting how the two fields thought about people and thought about explaining the world.

If you recall, I was very close to going to graduate school for psychology and I'd decided not to because I didn't quite yet know what I wanted to be or how I wanted to make an impact, so -- spent five to six years kind of in the wilderness wandering around before getting to come back to a role where I can work directly upon my background in psychology. That said, when you study those things, those ideas change kind of how you see the world and change how you frame up any situation, as well -- I spent a lot of time studying decision making, cognition and learning and memory.

So, it was always something that I could benefit directly from myself and so I can -- I could always understand that there were any heuristics and biases that might be kind of falling but from a less, say selfish introspective kind of use in psychology toward using them, using those tools and frames as a way to kind of understand other people. I find that business tends to -- to lack I would say, that kind of theoretical framework around people and tends to use one of oversimplification, say marketing is a field. It has people do a lot of self-reporting. We know from psychology that that's really quite bogus yet the entire subcategories in marketing really rely on that assumption being true and it's not. So, I would say that my passion for psychology allows me to -- to sort of see through that, and to see through the self-report and other kind of assumptions like that as bogus. To create new things that maybe are in better fitting with what I know about people.

So it means creating new tools. It means creating a new way of framing up how people are responding, and how they're using things. So, having a background and a passion in psychology for me means that I'm able to generate new things, generate new ideas, whereas, a lot of people I think accept the tools of their field as kind of a given and they don't understand the -- the limitations of those tools. So having a background in a field that, I'd say, should be like a lingua franca for -- for applied social science means that you could actually do cutting edge, you know, creating new tools and new perspectives on -- on people.

Why Psychologist Chooses Design Career - Hammans Stallings

In Chapter 4 of 22 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, innovation strategist Hammans Stallings answers "What Inspires You to Work at the Intersection of Design and Psychology?"  Stallings finds psychology work making peoples lives more meaningful and products and services more useful is an intrinsic motivator.  After graduate school, Stallings looks for an opportunity to use his background and found design work a great outlet for his psychology passion.  This is Hammans Stallings' Year 2 CYF interview.  Stallings is currently a Senior Strategist at frog design.  Previously he worked in business strategy at Dell and investment banking at Stephens.  He earned an MBA from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, a MS in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and a BA in Economics and Psychology from the University of Virginia. 

How to Make Learning a Lifetime Pursuit - Hammans Stallings

In Chapter 9 of 22 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, innovation strategist Hammans Stallings answers "What is Your Approach to Lifelong Learning?"  Stallings notes how he chooses to work in areas where new problems constantly appear.  This forces him to constantly learn new things so he is better prepared to resolve problems.  He references his work applying behavioral psychology for retail consumers to business model design.  This is Hammans Stallings' Year 2 CYF interview.  Stallings is currently a Senior Strategist at frog design.  Previously he worked in business strategy at Dell and investment banking at Stephens.  He earned an MBA from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, a MS in Technology Commercialization from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business and a BA in Economics and Psychology from the University of Virginia. 

Idan Cohen on Developing a Passion for Building Products

In Chapter 8 of 19 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, Boxee co-founder and head of product Idan Cohen answers "What is the Source of Your Passion for Building Things?"  Cohen references his joy creating beautiful products or useful devices.  He appreciates a holistic product design process and compares it to the 20th century Golden Age of furniture design. 

This is Idan Cohen's Year 1 Capture Your Flag interview.  Cohen is co-founder and head of product at Boxee Inc, an online video software company.  Previous to Boxee, Cohen held telecom software innovation and developer roles at Comverse.  He was a Captain in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and graduated from Tel Aviv University with a Bachelors of Science degree in Geophysics and Art.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: What is the source of your passion for building things?

Idan Cohen: It’s basically creating beautiful useful devices or products that are also—I put a lot of emphasis to how the process—what is the process like. A lot of things can look very nice from, you know, from outside or from the surface, like I really appreciate for instance, Apple for actually engineering the inside of their computers, and making them look beautiful. 

It’s magnificent when you open, like the Mac mini which is probably the most negligent product Apple is doing, but it has this beautiful thing that when you open it and when you look inside it’s just beautifully laid out, and I’m sure that they have actual people that are in charge of making that look nice, so for me, it’s all about the whole process being, you know, holistic and very aesthetically pleasing. So at the end of the process, it’s about creating something that’s functional but you really enjoy the process. 

So I like working with materials, software is somewhat of a material designed in a lot of—you know, that’s pretty great how the last 5 years were not about the actual technology, but much more about the user experience and the design, because I think that the design is much more coming closer to kind of like the golden age of furniture probably in around like, you know, the previous century, which was much more creating beautiful things, and putting an emphasis on materials. So it’s somewhere between these—and that’s what I’m attracted to, I really, really—it’s not about software, it’s not about internet, it’s about products.

Idan Cohen on How Family Supports Creative Childhood Passions

In Chapter 9 of 19 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, Boxee co-founder and head of product Idan Cohen answers "Where Has Your Family Been Most Supportive in Your Career Development?"  Cohen notes a common challenge in present day that his family does not understand his entrepreneurial product work; however, he shares experiences from his formative years where his parents encouraged Cohen to learn to use tools and pursue his passion for building and making objects.  This is Idan Cohen's Year 1 CYF interview.  Cohen is co-founder and head of product at Boxee Inc, an online video software company.  Previous to Boxee, Cohen held telecom software innovation and developer roles at Comverse.  He was a Captain in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and graduated from Tel Aviv University with a Bachelors of Science degree in Geophysics and Art.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: Where has your family been most supportive in your career development?

Idan Cohen: That’s a good question ‘cause I don’t think they understand what I do.  Maybe when I was writing more code then they could understand, I don’t think they did really always understand what products that were, you know, the result of that code, these days, I think that they don’t even understand, you know, what’s my role and kind of like how do I make things happen, and it’s a little bit sad, actually that they don’t understand that, ‘cause a lot of—I think that for a lot of people, what they do has a lot to do with kind of getting appreciation and getting the pride from their family. It has a lot to do with that.

So I kind of—it makes me a little bit sad that they don’t understand that. But on the other hand, I think that my family always pushed me to be a creator and a maker. So when I wanted a computer, when I was 6, my mother sent me to a summer camp to learn programming, and I got the computer only after that—those 2 months of learning how to write code. ‘Cause for her, you know, you—sure, this is a tool, you need to first learn how to use a tool and then you can do something with it. When I was about 10, then I went—in the steps of my brother, I went to an aero-modeling club, which is a very geeky thing, and we built model airplanes out of like wood and then more and more actually advanced technologies.

And that was for me great, it was working with my hands, for me, the way that I work with like an exact-o knife or you know, with just a—my ability to work with a knife is parallel to just—it’s like the extension my hand, and I think it’s just because this muscle memory of for years, just working with a knife and cutting things. And it’s so important to just get kids I think to create things and learn how to use tools, as a 12-year-old or 14-year-old I think, I started using a lathe to create metal pieces and for 5 years I was working part-time with someone just as an apprentice to learn how to work with metals. And for me, that was so important because today I see anything and I can—just I can know how it was machined and I can imagine how I can create something like that or I can aspire to create something like that.

And I think that’s—that was very important, so my family maybe doesn’t understand what I’m doing now but they definitely had a huge part in getting me there by just all the time giving me these tools of, you know, learn how to make things. And then you’ll get there, you’ll be able to create products or—and it’s so much more important than just being an accountant I think. Just being able to create physical objects.

Idan Cohen on How the Army Teaches High Tech Job Skills

In Chapter 10 of 19 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, Boxee co-founder and head of product Idan Cohen answers "How Has Your Military Training Been Most Useful in Developing Your Career?"  Cohen shares how he is recruited into the Israeli Army to help build reconnaissance satellites.  He learns physics and programming working with a senior team and, after transitioning into intelligence, learns life skills by managing teams. 

This is Idan Cohen's Year 1 Capture Your Flag interview.  Cohen is co-founder and head of product at Boxee Inc, an online video software company.  Previous to Boxee, Cohen held telecom software innovation and developer roles at Comverse.  He was a Captain in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and graduated from Tel Aviv University with a Bachelors of Science degree in Geophysics and Art.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How has your military training been most useful in developing your career?

Idan Cohen:  First of all, it was very important part of my career today because I went into the army and I was recruited to this very small group of kids, extremely smart and extremely weird, everyone else were smart, I was the only—I was probably the odd guy out. It was 6 girls and 2 guys, 2 boys and we were actually building the reconnaissance satellite, the Israeli Army’s reconnaissance satellite, which was just amazing like up to that point, there were engineers probably in their 40’s and 50’s, some of them from the Russian military industry and some of them actually were in NASA before and they were the ones building that satellite and then they decided that—actually maybe 18-year-olds with the right, you know, with the right guidance can do that as well, at least they can write code where needed and, you know, they can be guided into it. 

And they took us and for 6 months they taught us physics, which up to that point I didn’t know anything about physics, I didn’t learn that in high school, and they taught us how to write code, and we were writing kind of code for the satellite itself and code for the ground station. 

And that was extremely interesting, just being in this—in the company of these 40 and 50-year-olds, which were building something huge. And we were just these—a group of 8 and then the next generation was another 8 so we’re kind of 15 kids—it was really 15 kids with about 50—with about a group of 50 50-year-olds, all working on the same thing which was this huge thing that was costing millions and was going to go out in space. It was extremely interesting and for me that definitely got me into software much more ‘cause I had a few years in high school where I wasn’t really writing any code. And it was suddenly brought me back to an interest in actually creating software and how that can be—how can that bring me to create important things. 

And then later I went and I was an officer and I had another 2 years where I was actually doing much more of kind of like intelligence work which was also very interesting because it will suddenly being in charge of other people for the first time, so as a 20-year-old managing, you know, 10 or 15 other 18-year-olds and being their commander and taking care of their needs, and I think that there’s something—the most important thing about the army in Israel which is very different—it’s not—I’m not sure if I would like my kids to go there, or it will be a choice that they could make, but I think that what makes it so important in our people who come out of Israel, in our education and upbringing compared to people for instance who go to college, is just you get a lot of responsibility, as an 18-year-old, it’s not about, you know, someone’s paying for your college, and you can choose if you wanna study or you wanna drink your way through it, here it’s just—yes, you have to do that, but there’s a lot of responsibility with it, and if you’ll take that seriously, you can actually also maybe get, you know, some—you can get some skills and you can get experience, and it can help you for life. And I think that makes it very interesting, so that’s kind of what I came out with, like skills and experience for life.

How to Choose a College Major You Can Use All Your Life

In Chapter 11 of 19 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, Boxee co-founder and head of product Idan Cohen answers "How Did You Choose What to Study at College and How Has It Remained Relevant as You Have Gotten Older?"  Cohen references his time at Tel Aviv University and his shift in studies from computer science (CS) to physics and art history.  He takes a physics class and loves it.  As the math gets more complex, Cohen complements the physics classes with art, photography, music and architecture classes.  He finds apprenticeship or on the job learning the best ways to learn techical skills and recommends using the college experience to build useful day to day life skills and tools. 

This is Idan Cohen's Year 1 Capture Your Flag interview.  Cohen is co-founder and head of product at Boxee Inc, an online video software company.  Previous to Boxee, Cohen held telecom software innovation and developer roles at Comverse.  He was a Captain in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and graduated from Tel Aviv University with a Bachelors of Science degree in Geophysics and Art.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: How did you choose what to study at college and how has it remained relevant as you’ve gotten older?

Idan Cohen: So I chose to study physics and art history, and I got there in a pretty weird way, because I started off—I started off studying—I did one semester in CS, in Computer Science, and I just—I already knew how to program and it was a lot of math, and it was just like very theoretical programming, and I was just not interested and disengaged, and then I said, okay, I’ll switch to—I actually did a semester in chemistry, and I said, okay, this is also interesting but then I saw that actually what’s interesting for me is physics, then I did a semester in physics and I said, this is great. I enjoy it. It’s a little bit of like a manual for universe, you suddenly understand how things work, from very big things to very small things, to just this thing moving on the table and friction between the table and whatever, and gravity, I loved it. 

But I needed something a little bit more for the soul and as I saw the math getting more complex, I took art history in addition, and that was great because suddenly I was in the university, I was going to these very, you know, technical theoretical math and physics classes but then going and studying about art and photography and music and architecture, and it was awesome. 

Looking back at it, then I think it’s all just tools for life, and I think that that’s what most people should look at when they’re going to college, if you are going to go to college, I believe a lot in just apprenticeship, you know, a little bit like, we—like the path that I took, I mean going for instance into the army then having someone to learn from, how to code, or how to, you know, whatever we did there just—but someone that works with you, so you don’t need all of the theoretical knowledge but someone will help you get into it, and I really believe in that, just learning on the job. 

And on the other hand, there’s very few real professions that you can come out of academia with, so, you know, if you wanna be a medical doctor, probably you need to go there, although, as well, by the way, they learn a lot of theory and then they learn a lot on the job. If you wanna be an accountant or a lawyer, probably you need to go there ‘cause there’s a lot of theoretical material that you should learn. But then there’s so many things that just have nothing to do with sitting in class and studying. 

So if you are going to go there, just make sure you’re gonna study something that is very broad, very shallow, but is gonna give you tools—thinking tools that you can apply later in life. So from, you know, just understanding history or how things were made, and why, and being able to appreciate a work of art or, you know, physics, and just even though I probably forgot a lot of what I studied, and just being able to look at things and understand better how the—you know, what they’re made out of, and how exactly they function, I think that’s great, it’s just—it’s really useful day-to-day tools, and I wish that people would focus more about that. 

I think that when they go to college, they are so obsessed with what they’re gonna do in life, and we’re so privileged compared to our parents for instance, that probably we’re gonna—every 10 years, we’re gonna change what we’re doing, like there’s something about today’s environment that just allows us to do that, so don’t focus on that, just focus on what theoretical knowledge you can obtain now that will serve you through life, and not necessarily through the next 10 years.

Idan Cohen on How Critical Thinking Improves Product Design

In Chapter 12 of 19 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, Boxee co-founder and head of product Idan Cohen answers "What Have Your Experiences Taught You About What Makes a Product Great?"  Cohen talks about the satisfaction that comes from playing with things in everyday life.  He references the importance of critical thinking in the problem solving and design process.  He emphasizes the importance, whether it is with an object or a person, of linking the criticism to a positive development pathway or objective. 

This is Idan Cohen's Year 1 Capture Your Flag interview.  Cohen is co-founder and head of product at Boxee Inc, an online video software company.  Previous to Boxee, Cohen held telecom software innovation and developer roles at Comverse.  He was a Captain in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and graduated from Tel Aviv University with a Bachelors of Science degree in Geophysics and Art.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: What have your experiences taught you about what makes a product great?

Idan Cohen: I think that it’s just day-to-day life, when, you know, all day we play with things, and it’s just the feeling and, you know, it’s the frustration that we get through playing with them, or it’s the satisfaction we have after playing with them because they were so convenient or so simple or so beautiful, or so—I don’t know if I had specific experiences that helped me understand that better, but I think that we should all—it’s kind of like—I think that also it’s either you have it or not. There’s people who just get frustrated with things but don’t understand that it’s frustrating them and don’t understand—and don’t think all the time how can they fix that, and there’s these people who eventually end up making things with just, you know—they see the problems all the time, they’re very critical which is a good and bad character to have. 

It’s a little bit tiring to be very critical all the time. And I can be that but then that also teaches you, you know, every time you criticize something, just make sure you also think how can I do that better. And also when you—even if it’s about people and what they do, then if you criticize, just make sure to also figure out with them how that can be improved.

Idan Cohen on How to Be a Highly Valued Computer Programmer

In Chapter 13 of 19 in his 2012 Capture Your Flag interview, Boxee co-founder and head of product Idan Cohen answers "What Separates a Good Programmer from a Great One?"  Cohen looks back on his own experience writing code as well as what he has learned managing programming teams.  He finds two paths computer programmers may take to be valuable to their groups.  The first is working quickly to iterate, produce, and iterate.  This is especially useful on front end design.  The second is a more reasoned approach that is built on efficiency.  He finds this more relevant to back end coding and design. 

This is Idan Cohen's Year 1 Capture Your Flag interview.  Cohen is co-founder and head of product at Boxee Inc, an online video software company.  Previous to Boxee, Cohen held telecom software innovation and developer roles at Comverse.  He was a Captain in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and graduated from Tel Aviv University with a Bachelors of Science degree in Geophysics and Art.

Transcript: 

Erik Michielsen: What separates a good programmer from a great one?

Idan Cohen: I’m a very bad programmer, but I—And I haven’t been writing code for a few years, but when I was writing code, and the best thing about it was that I could do it very fast, and I could—like really, really fast, horrible, horrible code, but just make something work. And I think that that’s a very important character in a programmer, so either you can weep out things very fast, and make them work in some way and then a little bit have someone else, you know, delve into it and just make it work better, and, you know, work the right way maybe, from the back but just making sure that you can do it at the front end, and the—much more creating the experience as fast as possible ‘cause that helps people understand what you’re making. 

Then on the other hand, there’s people that can really dive into it and understand how it works in the back end, and how it should work, and what’s the right way and what’s the efficient way which I definitely don’t know anything about, because I was never really interested in. So I guess it’s hard for me to judge exactly how that should be made, I think that there’s more technical people that can say that, you know, could answer to that. 

But I think that these are 2 things that are important, so even if you’re not a good programmer, if you can weep out functional things very fast, it’s still a huge advantage, I think there’s people who just dive into details too soon, and—not the wrong details, the back end, not the front end functional details, the back end  functional details and that’s sometimes not the right thing to do.