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It’s complicated

Holland != Netherlands and that’s fine

Holland != Netherlands and that’s fine
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The Netherlands is a tiny country with only 17 million people. Most people in the US would not even be able to point it out on the map and that’s understandable – most Dutch people won’t be able to pinpoint South Dakota or Wisconsin on the map either.

The confusion is about Holland and The Netherlands. It’s not helpful that the Dutch government promotes The Netherlands as Holland. Also, most people in the US do not have a real idea what Holland or The Netherlands is. Usually, I just say I’m from Amsterdam and that works much better.

On Saturday, I was chatting with an American friend and another American friend from across the table yelled he could not follow the conversation. My friend said that’s ok, “we’re speaking European.” I brought this up because Americans see Europeans as more European than Europeans themselves.

Europe is complex and the countries even more. Did you know that France and The Netherlands share a border? That many European citizens are born, raised and live in the Caribbean but use dollars instead of euros?

This video explains it perfectly – and it never ceases to crack me up:

That’s just The Netherlands. You could make a video like this of many European nations.

Email bankruptcy is no excuse

Inbox zero vs inbox infinity

Inbox zero vs inbox infinity
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An article from the Atlantic was making the rounds this week. It makes a case for letting go of inbox zero and just accepts that your inbox has tens of thousands of emails. The author goes even as far as setting an out-of-office responder on his email.
 
Now, most people I know already do this – without the auto-responder. They handle email like Twitter, they jump and in and out, they read some.
 
Most personal conversations have moved from email to text. I think part of it because the newsletters have made email impossible to use. Their mailboxes are flooded with newsletters from every company who ever got their hands on their email address. You can beat this problem, I’ve done it.
 
I can imagine that people with public facing jobs like journalists or venture capitalists suffer from an overload of inbound email. But it’s not really an excuse to declare email bankruptcy. There are plenty of ways to reduce inbound of managing it better.
 
I think the lesson here, you need to manage it. It’s like every other part of a business. Without active management, it’ll run out of control. It’s like building up personal debt as opposed to technical or organization debt.
 
Last night, someone said to me they feel the same about Slack. It’s too disruptive and requires too much attention. I remember we had those problems at Karma and we put in place some rules and re-arranged the channels. Like everything else, it needs management.
 
Declaring inbox infinity or email bankruptcy is just an excuse not to solve a problem but just accepting you’re going to live with it. I refuse to accept that

You could just use a mailinglist

Alternative to Facebook

Alternative to Facebook
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I’ve written about this topic before, but we lost something powerful when social networks turned into social media. Yesterday, I was reading a blog post by Chad Dickerson on the topic. I had the pleasure of meeting him a couple of times when he was still CTO at Etsy and I was CTO at Shapeways. He’s a very thoughtful and soft-spoken leader.

In this post, he highlights much of the same sentiments I had about Facebook. In a way more eloquently than I ever can, he writes:

“This environment is incredibly WEIRD. It’s supposed to be about human connection yet so much of what occurs is dehumanizing. Why do we do this to ourselves? This whole thing is very unhealthy.”

His chosen solution is to use email and specifically a newsletter to keep the people he cares about up to date:

“There is very little performative aspect to writing an email to a known list of people since you’re not (consciously or subconsciously) fishing for “likes” or other comments.”

“The replies I get are much more personal and informal than what I used to see on Facebook.”

“I don’t sit there and think about what other people might think about what I’m writing — just the person who emailed me. To me, this is closer to what true friendship is like.”

I agree wholeheartedly. I’ve done something similar with a finsta after Path got shut down, but the outcome is the same. The conversations are personal and the lack of the act of performance is liberating.

I feel there’s an opportunity for a real social network again.

Lowering the barrier of entry

Openness drives innovation

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Yesterday, someone asked why I’m so much in favor of open systems. In his opinion much of the value was created through closed systems. And he’s right, you know. But many of these closed systems can exist and scale because of open systems.

Just imagine the following:

You can create a shopping site and reach a worldwide audience via WordPress or Shopify. You invest around $30 / month – let’s say on Shopify and you’re in business. That’s the power of an open internet.

Compare that to Uber where they raised $21B to roll out a cab service to customers in 600 cities in 65 countries [source].

That’s the difference between open platforms and closed platforms.

Open platform foster innovation because the barrier of entry is so low.

Hard to explain hobby

Audiophile truth

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I’m distracted today and I’ll have to keep it short. This is a great cartoon from The New Yorker which sums up my audiophile hobby.

Corporate-driven open source communities

Slow communities, fast companies

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I wrote this when the news came out that Microsoft was adopting Chromium for their new browser.

I’m always fascinated by how groups of people organize themselves to get things done. There are many types of organizations, but here I would like to focus on companies and communities. Everyone understands what I mean with companies, but my definition of communities in this context needs some explaining. With communities, I mean loose-knit groups of people working together to further a particular goal. This ranges from open source communities to lawmakers. The fundamental difference between the two is their organizational structure. Communities tend to be organized wide, distributed and relatively flat while companies are – mostly – hierarchical. The difference in leads to different types of decision making and pace.

For instance, communities are slow and are indecisive. It takes a long time to create consensus across a group. This slows down the pace of whatever they want to achieve. We all know governments are slow decision makers and are even slower in implementing them.

Companies, on the other hand, are fast and decisive. They are focused and can get a lot done in a short amount of time.

Of course, the world is not black and white and sometimes governments can act fast and companies can respond slow. I’m just generalizing here.

Communities tend to be reliable and stable over time. Companies tend to come and go.

I find this fascinating when public and private come together like with the Linux kernel open source project. It becomes even more fascinating with Chromium which is a private-led open source community with mostly private participants. Time will tell but I’ll be watching closely.

Collecting data comes with big responsibility

Contrarian view: collecting private data for good

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Sometimes the media goes on a tangent and seem to agree universally on a particular issue. In those circumstances, I like to explore the contrarian viewpoint to balance my own viewpoint. In this post, I’m going diving into privacy and especially Facebook and Google’s hunger for collecting your data.

Both Google and Facebook have one single main revenue stream and this is serving you ads. Their secondary target is to serve your appropriate content at the right time. This is the reason they collect this data.

Ads become more relevant for you when the advertiser can target you more accurately. Advertisers know which cohorts of people are interested in a certain product and by targetting specific cohorts they see better conversions. As a user, this is a good thing because you get served relevant ads. The end result is that you don’t get pestered with diaper ads if you don’t have kids. Of course, sometimes this fails, but in general, this works very well.

The other goal is to optimize your attention and keeping it as long as possible. Facebook wants to know who you interact with outside Facebook so they can propose potential friends for you. For a long time, Facebook offered my cleaning lady as a potential friend. The only way they could’ve known that is because she and I had each other’s phone number in our phones.

More friends mean more posts to see and more likes to collect. Both are primary indicators for engagement which lead to longer attention. Longer attention means more opportunities to show you ads. But longer attention also indicates that you as a user have a better experience on the platform.

The same applies to Google. By collecting your location, Google can tweak the search results for you. If you search for let’s say “Barbershop”, I’m interested in the ones in my neighborhood and not on the other side of the country. And let’s say I clicked on their website and it isn’t too farfetched to show me retargeting ads to remind me of that barbershop I was interested in. Retargeting is one of the most effective ads available. You’ve shown interest in the past so it’s good to remind you.

There is no secret conspiracy going on here. These companies collect data to serve you better. What’s wrong with that?

The outrage is about the abuse of information and the realization that these companies collect all this data about you. The ownership of private data comes with great responsibility. Both companies have not always been diligent about the handling of this data and are not upfront how they use that data. As a user, we do not have control about our own data and how it’s being used.

There’s no agreement between the user and the company on which data can be collected and how this data can be used by the company.
As a user, you get limited to no control or insight in which data has been collected or how it’s been used.
I’ve no problem with Google or Facebook or any other company collecting private data to improve the service they provide to me. But without a clear agreement which data is collected and how this data can be used, I’ve lost control and as a user that makes me unhappy. In pursuit of revenue, data can be abused for unethical reasons. A good example is the Cambridge debacle and the US elections.

Even with the GPDR and all the attention in the media, I don’t feel that we made much progress on this except creating universal awareness.

Hey, I followed the rules! What more do you expect from me?

Corporate rules and rigidness

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This post is from the “attic”. I wrote it a few years ago.

When I was speaking to employees of a large corporate I was doing business with a few years go, they talk about the company as an external thing. As if they cannot control it by themselves. There is a certain feeling of helplessness on a beast they cannot tame. I think this a symptom of a corporate going too corporate. It boils down to control. Every team, department, and leader inside a corporate is fighting for control. Creating control is about being essential and necessary. Without these, a part of the organization could become redundant or less important. But also makes the corporate rigid and bloated.

So how does a corporate get there? In essence, values are important in any organization. Values apply to how do your work and interact with others. To contain and monitor behavior which is not in line with values, rules are enforced. And it is here where the problem lies.

Rules are invented to streamline communication, set expectations and boundaries. But they do not leave room for a lot of interpretation. It is a careful balance. It is similar to the constitution and laws of a country. If laws are applied everywhere and all the time, society becomes unlivable. Some rules and values are more important than others. The important ones are applied more rigorously than lesser ones. “Though shall not kill” is an important one, but at the same time does not apply to soldiers at war. Laws are often open for interpretation. And this key to a functioning society.

In corporations, the organization has often fewer options for appeal while the rules are very specific. This makes them rigid.

How can a company be better organized while still keeping a method to control?

It is about the freedom to act to what is best for the organization. It is best to focus on values first. Values can be broad or very specific. Rules should only apply to procedures. For instance, every new customer is credit checked before delivery. A certain type of flexibility on any procedure or rule is fine as long as a person takes responsibility. So if a salesperson wants a delivery before the credit check that the salesperson is responsible if it goes wrong. That should always be clear.

An organization littered with rules tends to make people feel responsible about their actions. “Hey, I followed the rules! What more do you expect from me?”.

We’re not all the same

Personalized product ratings

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Nowadays everything is rated. Products are rated on Amazon, TV is rated on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, venues are rated on Yelp and Google Maps and even our cab driver has a rating.

Often though I feel like the ratings do not reflect my personal experience. It makes me pause when I look at ratings in general. Can I trust them? Do they reflect how I would feel about it? Sometimes I go down the rabbit hole and actually read the reviews left by people and then I get even more confused.

To give you a few examples. I look at the 4-star rating of the Amazon Show, but I would not give the product more than 2 stars. Or with IMDB, sometimes I love a movie which has 3 stars and sometimes I dislike one which has 5-stars.

Ratings are great and helpful but only to a point. It’s very much a filter bubble of the audience of the platform and not necessarily a good reflection of your or my personal taste.

I wish that ratings could be personalized to my own expectations of a product.

Your data is out there

Control your personal data

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This week Quora got hacked and the account information of 100M users was exposed. The week before Starwood admitted they were hacked for several years and details of an estimated 500M people were exposed. And then there were the hacks of:

  • Yahoo (3B accounts)
  • Equifax (143M accounts)
  • JPMorganChase (83M accounts)
  • Anthem (80M accounts)
  • Target (70M accounts)
  • Evernote (50M accounts)

Just to name a few. It’s safe to say:

  1. Your information is out there
  2. We’ve a major problem

Routinely companies ask for sensitive information and often they need that information. Just think about the HR department of a small corporate who collects SSN info and health care benefits data. If companies this large get hacked, you can bet that these smaller companies get hacked too. Worse is that they probably don’t even realize they are exposing that data. The problem is that as a consumer you’ve no choice in the matter, you’ve to share your data to get access to services.

I don’t think we’ll ever solve the problem that companies get hacked. We might be able to improve the situation, but it won’t make the problem go away completely.

The question is more what we can do to mitigate the need to share sensitive information with companies. Or at least put me in control of how my data is used. Why can’t I link my SSN and its activity to my email and let me approve transactions before they take place? At least, it will give me control. I can’t keep the information from leaking, but I can keep it from being abused.