Jobster

On Armchair Quarterbacks

Oct 12

Awesome quote shamelessly pulled from TechCrunch (I’d link to their Crunchbase entry if I could), who shamelessly pulled it from Yossi Vardi, who shameless pulled it from Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

This really resonated with me in light of the public (and anonymous) attacks on Jason Goldberg (CEO of Jobster) on the Seattle PI blog. I make no bones about the fact that I wasn’t always supportive of Jobster’s (or Jason’s) strategies. But the guy deserves credit for making a run at it (and I wouldn’t count Jason or Jobster out of the game yet!). He also deserves a ton of credit for getting an entire industry to look at Jobster to save online recruiting… If it turns out that Jobster doesn’t save online recruiting, there’s a small army of people who should step up and share part of the blame (including myself). Scapegoating is just stupid.

Life News – So Long Jobster!

Jul 11

I generally don’t use this blog for life news. I figure if you know me well enough to care about what’s going on in my life, you probably would already know anything I could mention. But, given that this particular tidbit has professional ramifications, I figured I’d throw out a short post.

At day 366 of my tenure at Jobster, I submitted my resignation. For those of you who haven’t been keeping score at home, Brian Fioca and I had sold a small web startup to Jobster about a year ago. Working at Jobster was a pretty amazing learning experience in a lot of ways, but it became clear to me that I am better suited for smaller and more early-stage companies.

My current professional plans are to keep my eyes peeled for the “next big thing”, preferably a very early-stage startup with considerable equity opportunities.

In the meantime, I’m doing a bit of consulting work and working on RescueTime (which has some potential to be the aforementioned big thing). I’ve already taken on two short term consulting gigs (both with startups) that are pretty darn interesting. Given that I was gone from Jobster for all of a week (the week of July 4th at that), I’m pretty comfortable saying that there is a fairly endless supply of consulting work to be had.

Nonetheless, I’m always keeping my eyes peeled for more. So if you bump into an opportunity that seems like it might be a good fit for me, let me know!

“Get in, Get it, Get Out”

May 14

Just read a great article on BBC by way of Slashdot about Web 2.0 (tip o’ the hat to Brian Fioca, who IM’ed me the link) It liberally quotes usability-zealot Jakob Nielsen who, as you can imagine, is not all that enamored with the Web 2.0 movement.

As usual, someone more famous than me summarizes some of my thoughts better than I’m capable of.

What I find strange about Web 2.0 is that we web geeks are losing sight of the fact that the vast majority of people use the internet as a tool. They want information. They want pictures. They want music. They want to buy stuff. They want to search for jobs.

But do they really want to socialize online, just for the sake of socializing?

Certainly teenagers do. I suppose I would too if I had a job that was 8am-3pm, had virtually no responsibilities, and had 16 weeks of vacation time.

There’s a great new study out that says:

15% of Americans don’t have an internet connection
10% view the Internet as a “hassle” (probably because ever site is trying to get them to join their community)
About 50% of the population “doesn’t use the internet very much. I’d presume that when they DO use it, they use it as a utility.

To me, the most exciting startups are those that solve problems. That provide a transactional product or service. That, in the words of Nielsen, allow users to “get in, get it, get out”.

I tend to be suspicious of businesses that are trying to create an online “community”. You can certainly build a successful business by doing so. But I think online communities are extremely challenging to build, and they tend to turn off the much-more-massive audience that Nielsen talks about. Amazon would be a LOT less easy to use if they were constantly bombarding me with community features.

Look at LinkedIn. They’ve been around since 2002. They’ve gotten over 28 million in VC and they have a tremendously viral service (WAY before it was cool to be viral!). They are the poster child for social networking for grownups. Yet they’ve only managed to collect 9 million accounts in 5 years (and I’d wager than only a fraction of those are active given that it’s nigh impossible to delete a LinkedIn account).

To this day, I still hear people ask, “So what can you DO on LinkedIn?” I’m hard-pressed to give an answer.

At the end of the day, there seems to be a pretty finite number of adults for whom social networking is at all relevant. And there’s a huge pile of sites that are vying for the attention of these busy users. I’d wager that the only ones who are going to succeed (on a grand scale) are also going to allow the other 90% of the internet audience to “get in, get it, and get out”.

Blog Widgets

May 13

I am, in general, not a huge fan of huge piles of widgets on blogs– I don’t really know why. The only reason that I can think of is that too many widgets offend my delicate design sensibilities. Blogs covered with widgets tend to look like patchwork quilts to me. Even though my blog template is pretty much a slightly-altered version of a free WordPress template, I like the clean look.

Yet here I am, dropping a second widget on my site… Not only does it happen to actually match my current blog template quite a bit better than the first blog widget I added (sorry Mark!), but it also happens to be one that I helped build.

So, without further ado, I introduce you to BlogBuddy (the gray flavored widget on the right). You can get yours here!

Phil Bogle, CTO at Jobster, was the technical genius behind the widget. See his writeup here.

Blog Buddy is decidedly a beta project– many of the features that I think really will make it sizzle are still to come!

Linebuzz Starts Humming

May 07

Jobster alumnus Mark Maunder has put his travel blogging startup on hold for a month or two to pursue his muse… Which, in this case is (drumroll please) inline blog comments! It would be irresponsible of me not to mention Mark’s wife and biz partner, Kerry– who is quite likely the only reason that this thing has gotten off the launch pad…. Kerry is a seasoned QA manager and has almost certainly kept this thing from being a bug-ridden pile o’ PERL code.

It’s in “soft-launch” phase and they are working out a few kinks, but I think it’s a pretty exciting idea. So try it out here, head over to Linebuzz.com and bury Mark and Kerry in feedback and bug reports.