What I do all day
People often ask me what I do all day. Or, more specifically, they are often surprised at how many things occur in the company that I don't have direct control over, or, in some cases, don't even know about.
I was standing in the Lot18 kitchen the other day foraging for snacks, and one of my engineers was surprised to hear that I didn't know exactly what our regular FreshDirect food order contained. I told him that I probably had less idea than him of what treats lay inside which kitchen cupboard. And that as much as I love Swedish Fish and Triskets, it's not my job to manage purchasing that closely.
"What do you do all day then?"
I spoke for an hour at an Executive Education event at General Assembly last week. The topic was leadership.
I speak at a lot of events and conferences about either the wine industry, or starting a company in New York. I'm pretty confident I have something to add on these topics, but leadership is so nebulous, and with people like Ben Horowitz saying: "If CEOs were graded on a curve, the mean on the test would be 22 out of a 100." I wondered if I should be IN the audience, rather than in front of it.
I was taught that a CEO needs to be good at three things: money, people and decision making, and my talk revolved around what exactly occupies my time:
- Money: Put simple, don't run out of it. Startups die when cash reaches 0. To me, this means two things: raise financing and manage spending. Fund raising is only done periodically, but can be a 2-4 month whirlwind each time. Updating financial forecasts, setting budgets by department, and tracking return on invested capital, however, are ongoing.
- People: Hire and retain those better than you deserve. Part of this is recruiting, but a lot of it is cheerleading. Convincing the best and brightest to leave their high-falutin' jobs to come grind it out in the trenches with the rest of us, then convincing them that they didn't just take on a job, but a mission. I'm always recruiting, and I'm always speaking to the team, as many of the 100+ people as I can on a weekly basis.
- Decisions: Sales people make sales, engineers make code, managers make decisions. Part of that is "strategy", but I'm still not sure what exactly that word means, the rest is execution. To me, that's listening and learning as much as I can about our evolving and mutating organization, so that when presented with a choice I know which direction to push for. The reality is that I'm often wrong, but the key is to be nimble, to back off mistakes once the picture resolves sufficiently to see. CEOs are forced to make a lot of decisions, in rapid order, and with imperfect information in each case. Its the opposite of a Business School case study - those were complete and may as well have been wrapped in a bow. My day to day is much grittier, layered with real world consequences and emotion, and uncertain.
That's it. That's what I do all day. Given the mean score above, I'm glad there's no easy way to be graded on this.
When the web goes down
Apologies to anyone that tried to visit Lot18 between about 11:00pm and 11:45pm ET on Monday night, as the site was unavailable.
Specifically, the site itself didn't go down so much as the whole hosting service we rely on - Amazon's run East Coast data center (East 1) - bringing down other companies including: Foursquare, Instagram, Netflix, Reddit and many others.
As Lot18 has grown over the past year, we've upgraded our infrastructure repeatedly. More servers, more backup, more layers of protection. We now run with multiple database servers, remote backup storage and even the ability to provision and spin up new servers to meet demand (free shipping spikes, for example) with literally 1-click, but when the infrastructure we rely on fails, our site fails too.
Ultimately this was a power failure, and so no data was ever in danger of being lost. It also, and luckily, happened at an off-peak time, so the impact was lessened, but we're still looking into ways to reduce our dependancy on any single point of failure. As the service continues to scale, as more people use the site concurrently, and as the volume of transactions increases we'll make sure to layer on additional security and protections.
Does diversity come at a cost?
"We try to have around 20% of international students, as we find the diversity comes at a cost"
Those brutally un-encouraging words were said to me by an admissions officer from a top tier US business school during my application process. If ever the was a time I wished I'd had F*** You Money, this was it.
I wasn't born here. I moved to the US in 2003, and for 8 years, I've labored under the incredibly complex US immigration policy, during which time I've held 5 different Visas and one funky Training Certificate. I've spent several tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers, and dragged investors, co-workers and business partners into this merry little immigration dance. Finally, this year, I can put this behind me, as I have finally been granted an O1 Visa, aka Alien of Extraordinary Ability, which theoretically allows me to work in the US for up to 15 years, so long as I stay in the same field ("digital marketing" - I cast a wide net). Once I hit 48, I'll re-evaluate.
Its good to know that anytime someone tells me my marketing ideas are stupid, I can now retort that as a Digital Marketer of Extraordinary Ability the US Government has deemed my marketing skills to be a bit good, otherwise, its nice to not have to worry about it.
US immigration law is broken. With over 50% of Silicon Valley Founders (America's Growth Engine) being foreign born, you'd think it would be easier for Entrepreneurs to start up shop here. Despite the fact that I've raised over $20m for the companies I've run, created over 100 jobs for US Citizens, paid millions in corporate tax, and a healthy amount in personal tax too (don't forget that I'm ineligible for whatever meager social security payments everyone else will be entitled to), I've still had to dance for my Visa for years.
The bright hope is the Startup Visa, and its something that's slowly gathering steam, with VCs like Fred Wilson and Brad Feld pushing for it. You can learn more, or, petition your local leaders here.
As a result of being an Englishman in New York, I think more about diversity than ever before.
At Lot18 we have an eclectic mix: some folk here have seen genuine combat (we stopped making trite "code ninja" references after hiring people that had served tours in Afghanistan), a lot of people from the wine industry, and for some reason, a hell of a lot of the team are theatrically trained or practicing clowns.
Like the value you can get when you first put a dev, a designer and a biz person in the same room, the different ages, race, sex, religion and cultural backgrounds are one of our great assets. We're building something that has a potential market of hundreds of millions of people, and our potential customers look like all of us.