Moments after reading the inspiring post by 37 Signals post about why NOT to be in San Francisco, I got this Facebook Message from Dave Troy (of the highly addicting Twittervision) regarding the upcoming SocialDevCamp East that excites me very, very much. So much, in fact, that I wanted to share:

Subject: The Revolution Begins in Baltimore

Hey folks,

As we gear up for SocialDevCamp East in Baltimore on May 10, one of the things that we’d like to highlight is the diversity of Web 2.0 talent available here on the east coast.

The conventional wisdom today says that to make it as a social startup, you should a) move to San Francisco (preferably East Bay or SOMA), b) meet a bunch of cool people (natch), c) get funded (cake!), d) get featured in TechCrunch, e) build your startup to 500,000 users, f) get snapped up in an early acquisition by Google for $90M, g) repeat.

For lots of reasons, the odds of this working are low and getting lower. Why? For one, this is the conventional wisdom; everybody’s doing it, why shouldn’t you? Loads of ditto-heads are creating a glut of ideas. They all can’t win.

Second, VC investments are often a trailing indicator of successful business sectors. VCs follow what has worked previously, which leads to persistent failures at the end of a business cycle. Why else do you think they need to rely on outrageous 100x returns? To make up for their last round of losses.

Why do you live where you do? Family, a partner, school, friends, or do you simply love where you live? There are countless talented people who have made the same choice as you, and they’ve made this choice not as a runner-up to a life of glory in the Bay area. They’ve made the choice as a matter of personal identity and conviction.

As I meet members of the tech business community along the east coast, I hear two things consistently. One, that the Bay area is getting weird these days, and that they are “all smoking the same air.” Second, that the “VC community doesn’t get it here,” and that it’s hard to get funding and launch a web-based startup on the east coast.

Sorry, but we can’t have it both ways. We must choose: do you want to live in the Bay Area and sustain the vagaries of that echo-chamber culture, or do you want to grow where you’re planted and build viable businesses here?

The fact is that we can’t expect to improve the tech startup climate on the east coast if we don’t come together and make it what we want it to be. And that means we need to stop looking over our shoulder at the west coast and start building businesses here and now, using telework, co-work, or traditional workspaces.

The 37signals blog covered this topic today, and reflected many of my opinions on the subject:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/987-are-you-sure-you-want-to-be-in-san-francisco

This is part of what we want to address at SocialDevCamp East. If we want to have a thriving startup culture here, we need to build it — one relationship at a time.

Best,
Dave

Ironically…I found out about this event from the guy who seems to always be hooked into everything in San Francisco…and still manages to keep on enough of the pulse on the East Coast to be one step ahead of me. Thanks Chris. Someday, I’ll know about something before you do. Someday.

Tonight marks the 1 month anniversary of the evening before I left for Austin, Texas to attend SXSW Interactive 2008. In 6 days, it will be 1 month since I returned home to Philadelphia and began processing all I had learned and accomplished while at the conference.

I’m thinking about how much has gotten done in the last 30 days and what’s changed since leaving SXSW. While I’m making my own notes, I’d love to hear from other people how their last 30 days of reflection (and recovery) have gone.

So tell me:

What are you up to these days?
Who/what is inspiring you?
Who/what has changed your perspective?
Who did you meet that set you on a path of achieving awesome?
Who do you miss the most?
Have you been following through on the things you promised yourself you’d do when you got back from Austin?

I’ve been doing a bunch of video comments over at GaryVaynerchuk.com because, quite frankly, the dude is nailing it time and again and he knows how to get me fired up. So here we go: how to build a legacy through education.

Remember, the point of a legacy is that it cannot, and will not, ever die!

Tags: education, legacy, garyvaynerchuk, tara hunt, change the world

I’ve been in a funny spot for the last several weeks as I rock between my previous workflows of being wholly responsible for production work to being in a pseudo-management position and doing more advising, strategy, and writing. I’m still not entirely comfortable with it, mostly because I feel like I’m diluting the amount of the end product that I’ve actually “done”.

This is turning into a dangerous conundrum because every time I slip back to thinking that the only type of “doer” is the one on the production line, I get down on myself and upset about my contributions. Clearly, I know this is irrational. I’m still working. I’m working my ass off. But something felt out of sync.

Lets switch gears for a second.

Ze Frank. Internet performer (genius), educated thinker (genius), master DO-ER (mad respect).

I was introduced to Ze last year at the end of his run of producing “The Show”, his daily take on existence that he distributed over the internet from March 17th 2006-March 17th 2007. Having met Ze briefly before I knew who he was, or more importantly, what he was, seems to be a theme from SXSW Interactive 2007 (where we met at the Yahoo! Bartab). As tends to be the case, I researched him a bit after the fact and realized that I had just brushed shoulders with inspiration and didn’t know it…and that this inspiration would strike again.

And it has.

After taking a 1 year leave of absence from his community, Ze reappeared a few weeks ago on Twitter. Watching Ze emerge was kinda like watching an infant grow up over the course of a couple of days. He didn’t really understand the whys…he didn’t really understand the hows…he just asked questions, tried things, and waited for feedback.

Then he did something that was out of the norm of most developing children. He colored (PUNNY!) outside of the lines, with complete disregard for the ruler aimed intently on slapping his wrists.

Inspiration.

From speaking to my buddy Erik Kastner (internet famous CSS3 Image Hider, FlickrSpell, Befuddler, his contributions to the creation of the acclaimed WineLibraryTV and supporting infrastructure at WineLibrary, and countless other bits of awesome. Clearly a doer.), his contributions to Ze’s latest project have opened his eyes to what makes Ze “tick”.

Ze, I don’t know you and can’t pretend to, but if I had to guess, the one common thread between you and I is our complete and utter disregard for the norm. In fact, I think it goes a bit deeper than that. We strive to break the norm, in experimental, observational activities.

You see, as Ze got his legs for the twitter community, his realization that norms had developed in the first place made him uncomfortable enough to say, “EFF THIS!” and only 4 days after exploding onto the scene, turn several thousand users (including a number of the twitter co-founders and employees) into active participants in a new construct that came completely from his imagination.

Ze colored outside of the lines by starting ColorWar2008.

I’m thinking about my own childhood, and education in general. I’m thinking about the activities that education tries to push on us, and at the same time, I can pinpoint a couple of educators I’ve had in my life that with one hand, imposed rules and regulations. With the other hand, though…certain educators would smile and half-encourage my misbehavior, believing in the fact that I wasn’t being destructive, I simply had a varied perspective. Coloring outside of the lines was my immature way of exhibiting that.

One more Ze-specific anecdote before I come back to my point:

In this video from TED 2006, Ze describes being in a perpetual state of “80%”. I agree and think that most creative people are as well, and really like being there. What Ze does that’s so freaking magnificent is his ability to extend that experience to people who aren’t typically the types to color outside of the lines. Who aren’t the kinds of people who think they can just “try stuff”. The reason I think people idolize Ze isn’t because he’s funny (and he is), and it’s not because he’s smart (and he is). It’s because he’s repeatedly come up with ways to invite people inside his vision, and then at the same time…gives up a good portion of the vision TO the new participant and lets them run with it. That’s inspiring. That’s awesome.

I’ve done my best to conduct myself in the last year to do similar things for my peers surrounding me. As I’ve written about before, by coming up with simple, basic tools to let people share your vision is about as close to a sure-fire way to improve the world around you as I can think of.

I’ve gone on the record before saying IndyHall was a self serving venture in the fact that I wanted it myself. I was able to find others around me, give them their own box of crayons, and tell them that it was OK to color outside of the lines. By doing that, I created the surroundings that I wanted for myself in the first place.

Back on point

Alright. I’ve rambled enough. What’s my point. I was talking about doers, and related, doer-enablers. If it isn’t clear from the lack of structure in this post, I’ve been feeling like I’ve lost a good deal of my focus.

Remember when I mentioned the “80% complete” feeling that most creative people thrive on? Well, once in a while, that feeling sinks and you find yourself stuck in a rut of “always 20% done”. With no light at the end of the tunnel, motivation drops, productivity drops, quality of work drops, and distractions become your biggest enemy.

I’m not longer sure which of my contributions to society are most valuable, both for me and for the people around me. Am I a better doer, or a better doer-enabler? And most importantly…can I make a living (or at least not run myself into debt) being a doer-enabler?

I don’t know the answer. I just needed to get this stream of thought out of my head and out into the world rather than cryptically being frustrated by my own hesitations to execute. I’m not a hesitant person. I don’t know why I’m hesitating now more than ever.

I still haven’t found the focus I’m looking for, but at least this clarity helps me reassure myself that I’m on a path to look for it. This post is an early step to opening myself up to new roads to travel down while searching for that focus.

Here’s to finding my 80% again.

UPDATE:

Another way to look at all of this is finding balance between two sub-types of social capital: bridging and bonding. As if by magic, one of my good friends and mentors, Tara Hunt began twittering about this balance right around the same time I made this initial post. See:
Tara on detecting bridge vs bond
Tara on balance
Tara on the exhaustion from balancing them
Tara on creating mentors

Thanks for accidentally pitching into the mindshare, Tara!

Reed’s message is touching and accurate: donating blood is such a simple act that can make such a huge difference. I know, lots of people don’t do well with needles or are afraid of blood. But think about it this way: what’s the last thing you risked something of yourself for someone else?

As an entrepreneur, I discover daily the ways which not only I, but other people assess risks. Most of the time, the risks people are taking are self-serving. Regardless of the outcome (positive or negative), they are the only person that benefits. I read about and see people make really terrible risk assessments all the time. Donating blood, however, has a KNOWN positive benefit with practically no risk at all.

I can’t think of a better place to dominate your fears while being surrounded by people who support their peers and their risks every day: IndyHall.

We’re having a blood drive here next Saturday, March 29th, from 9am-3pm. We’re only at about half of the donors we need so PLEASE consider committing to a spot and donating.

You need to reserve a spot, and since this is nearly an entire month in advance, setting aside a time should not be difficult. The Red Cross makes it easy (yay! webapps!) to register and select a slot ahead of time online. You can visit our donor registration page to find out more.

One of our friends who’s afraid of needles and knows her risk of passing out has stepped up to bat to be an excellent example for those of you still on the fence: Ruth Kalinka not only jumped up and registered, but she’s also coordinating an ice-cream after-party at the Franklin Fountain afterwards to reward everyone for their bravery. THAT’S awesome. Thank you Ruth!

A big thank you to Reed Gustow for not only helping coordinate this drive, but for helping recruit people as well. I really, really appreciate it.

When:
Saturday March 29, 2008
9am-3pm
Where: IndyHall
How: register here.

Tags: indyhall, indpendents hall, red cross, blood donation, reed gustow, ruth kalinka

I’m on the plane back from SXSW Interactive 2008.

I’ve slept a total of 14 hours in 6 days.
I’ve eaten about 3 actual meals in 6 days
I’ve been to 3 panels/sessions throughout all of SXSWi08.
I’ve now heard the phrases: “@alexknowshtml, right? I totally follow you on twitter! *high five*” and “someone told me I need to know who you are”. Weird.
I’ve known who the unicorn was all along.
I’ve had more ah-ha moments than I can count.
I’ve jumped the line. More than once.
I’ve rick-rolled an RV full of people.
I’ve hugged people in real life that I’ve only ever interacted with online.
I’ve rolled up on a larger-than-life town with a larger-than-life posse from Philadelphia.
I’ve experienced a real world meetup of the global coworking email list
I’ve disagreed with people, and was disagreed with.
I’ve sucked (like, pathetically sucked) at bowling while the entire IndyHall team kicked an incredible amount of ass, all along showing serious IndyHall pride. In the form of a can-can dance to bohemian rhapsody.
I’ve consumed so much caffeine that I literally began to vibrate.
I’ve been inspired, and I had opportunities to inspire.
I’ve successfully completed the co-leadership of a core conversation about coworking.
I’ve exercised my undeniable ability to throw one hell of a party by taking over an empty bar called the Mooseknuckle, and filling it with a couple hundred of my closest friends + Robert Scoble. 2 nights in a row.

Accordian at Mooseknuckle IndyHall Party
Originally uploaded by bmenoza.

Gary V and his brother AJ fanboy me almost as much I fanboy them.
I’ve shook hands and shared passions with my peers.
I’ve was reminded how smart my friends are.
I’ve was reminded how lucky I am.
I’ve brainstormed.
It thunder-stormed.
I’ve drank wine from at least 4 different types of containers. Only one was really meant for wine. One of them was the bottle the wine came in.
I‘ve slept on a ranch with goats. I mean, the ranch I slept on had goats present. You know what I mean.
I’ve put my foot in my mouth. Sorry.
I’ve found some emotions that I’d ignored for a long time.
I’ve reminded myself of the perspective I’d been searching for.
I’ve been stunned, absolutely honored, by a comment on my previous post from Kathy Sierra.

Uh oh.

What I DON’T have, is the ability to speak out loud. I spent so much time engaging in reality that I completely blew out my vocal chords and have lost my voice progressively over the last 2 days of the conference. In fact it was gone on the 2nd to last day but that did not stop me from continuing to connect with people, despite the pain of what felt like having swallowed a hedgehog. The spiky blue kind, no less.

Where I lost one voice, I discovered more about another voice. Not the one in your throat (though that voice plays a very large part in this other voice), but the one in your heart.

4 cornerstones of the heart-powered voice:
Voice is passion.
Voice is inspiration and being inspired.
Voice is not asking for permission.
Voice is ownership. And not the singular kind of ownership that we don’t like.
(note: I’m interested in how else you define voice)

One of the reasons I love this industry so effing much is because of the voices that my peers have. The ability to do all of the things I listed above were things I did in the last 6 days, but they’re things that almost anyone can do, as well, assuming they have the properties of voice I listed above.

Again, I consider myself beyond lucky to work in this community (the internet in general, as a community). I work in an industry of peers. Business hierarchy and “internet celebrity-dom” aside, the “rock stars” of my industry are, as I’m quickly learning, people who share the same types of voice that I do. That we all do. Rather than have the Talent:Fan::Leader:Follower relationship of film, music, and many other creative communities, there is a mutual relationship in which everyone simply respects what one another are working on.

Most of the time. (more on that later)

There is the “compete with rather than compete against” type of interaction where there is enough room for multiple properties in the same space and as a result, people force one another to improve their craft (and the craft around them, as a result) rather than force one another entirely out of the realm of competition.

Most of the time. (again, more on that later)

The events of the last 2 weekends have me setting out to inspire as much as I’ve been inspired. To do as much good as has been done for me. By sharing my voice with so many of you, in real life, on this blog, at SXSW or any other conference…I feel like I’ve been privileged to further this goal faster than ever before.

If you have a voice (the 4 point version, again, not the kind that I lost because I don’t know when to call it quits), I want to hear it. I may not have a specific interest in whatever it is that drives your voice, but I’m interested in the fact that the people around me HAVE voices in the first place.

I realize that I lost my voice this weekend because I spent 6 days sharing my voice with everyone I came in contact with. You know what happens when you share all of the slices of pizza in your pie? You end up not having a pizza yourself.

All I’m asking of you is to share a little bit of your voice with me to help my recovery.

Video comments rule, by the way, because they let me hear your voice. Both kinds.

Tags: sxsw, sxswi, sxswi08, voice, passion

Om nom nom nom

Originally uploaded by Judxapp.

I spent this weekend in beautiful South Beach Miami attending FOWA (Future of Web Apps), one of the most acclaimed conference events in our industry at this point in time. Not only did I have a fantastic time taking in the familiar sights of SoBe, but connecting with old friends and new on the most pressing, important, and interesting issues that we’re facing today. To all of the old friends that I got to catch up with, it was great to see you and don’t be such a freaking stranger. To all of the new friends that I made, I look forward to seeing you again (many of you in Austin in just a few days) and continuing to inspire and be inspired by one another.

Before I go any further, I want to give thanks ONE more time to Alex DeCarvalho and his team for organizing Barcamp Miami, and to Ryan Carson, Mel Kirk, and the whole Carsonified team. All of these people worked their ASSES off to give us all an opportunity to engage over the last few days. I’ve spoken to Alex and Ryan individually about this and their organization and involvement are clearly crimes of passion, and the results of their respective events show how valuable their passionate contributions are. I told Ryan how impressed and inspired I am by how and what they do, and that I was even more impressed by the vote of confidence FOWA being in Miami was for the new and very exciting Miami tech/social/web community. I hope that some day I have the ability to give they way Ryan and his crew do.

Thanks out of the way, and on to the meaty stuff.

I don’t really care to give a run down of each and every presentation, or every presenter. I’ll just hit a few key points in my mind,

I will say that I was honored to have Brad Neuberg present for my coworking session at BarCamp, and having his input and conversation was out of this world awesome. Brad’s effectively the godfather of the movement that I pour my heart and soul into, and while he’s since stepped out to openly trust a couple of new ambassadors including myself to carry things forward, hearing how appreciative he is of our work was wicked cool, and hearing his view on how things are going based on where they came form was unique and I’m grateful for it.

Kathy Sierra goes one step beyond her blog “creating passionate users” by creating people who create passionate users. Her words are consistently brilliant and inspiring, and as I’ve said many times before, there’s nothing cooler than hearing someone you respect reciting the mantras you live your life by. One of the biggest takeaways from Kathy’s presentation, for me, was the notion that real (physical) world interaction is the only place where real problems get solved. The fact that our brains are tuned to read faces, body language, and other nuances that the internet obscures makes it difficult, if not impossible, for us as software creators to deal with unless we prepare by talking to the actual users before we build the application. This sounds a whole lot like my constant reminder to the coworking community, and other community-driven ventures, that you need to be building your community before you build the construct that they will eventually spend their time in.

Furthermore, Kathy spent time on of the idea that the realest problems that our users face are social, and far less technical. As geeks, we do the thing we understand best and work our faces off to reverse engineer social problems and base our applications around them. I think the important concept suggested here is a very simple and obvious cycle that I’ve been unintentionally living. When a geek converts a social problem into a technical “solution”, its for the purpose of using the tools that we know best to generate metrics and optimize the problems with the social situation. In the best situations (and the best apps), the new solution that comes from the optimization done by the software has a very real and measurable effect on the real life problem that was initially identified. The circle is closed when a good online community surrounding the digital problem/solution pair spends time interacting with its community offline as well. This could be something large scale like attending and interacting with conferences like FOWA, or it could be something like hiring a community evangelist whos entire job is to work FOR the community members and listen for more real world problems.

At the root of all of this is the fact that technical problems are easy to solve. Social problems are the bitches of it all. But they’re the most compelling, and that’s why we’re all here.

Taking this idea one step further, we can jump to the end of the day of conference speakers to my good friend Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary’s presentation was the first of the day to not include any slides because, well, Gary just doesnt roll like that. Gary’s presentation was about community building in the future (though I’d argue its how we need to build communities NOW), and building a personal brand around a product or service, but where I think he did a good job of allowing me to connect the dots back to Kathy’s talk in the beginning of the day because he talked about the importance of giving, giving, giving until your effing face falls off…and then giving just a little bit more…to your community.

One of the things this got me thinking about is that despite the fact that there is a notion of giving online (think Facebook “gifts”, think Ma.gnolia “thanks”) that do a VERY good job of simulating the effects of giving, there is nothing that can replace a tangible exchange. Someone who I spoke with last night asked me if I thought that was why people still send informal letters via the postal service when e-messaging is free and faster, and I my response was a very enthusiastic yes. Much like you lose the ability to read a facial expression online, you lose the ability to exchange a certain unmeasurable but very important energy when ideas, information, or tangible goods exchange hands in physical space.

So lets connect some more dots.

The internet has given us a great deal of ever-improving tools for collaborating and exchanging information online. Its easier now than ever before to work in distributed teams, to keep everyone in synchronization with the information that they find most valuable for a given need.

What the internet hasn’t done, and what I’ve heard many luddites say, is that it doesn’t do a very good job of reminding us to “get out of the pool” once in a while and remember what its like to be involved in one of those real world giving exchanges.

Drew Olanoff posted on his tubmblr last week after we went to see Foo Fighters together and had a really great opportunity to catch up, all because he saw a tweet of mine saying I had a free ticket. Twitter is, in my opinion, a product that does an exceptionally good job of closing the circle that I discussed before. What’s even cooler about twitter is that it closes the circle of real world problem->online solution->real world solution in different ways for different people (more on that soon).
This goes beyond software, and I think Gary’s presence isn’t they only example of that. Coworking is, in my opinion, one of the best ways to get the effects of some of the best online communities in an offline format. I almost view our office as a brick and mortar version of a really fantastic forum-style community where people are there, within a given topic (or skillset) to get something done but a constant and persistent “off topic” channel allows them to slip out of their usual comfort zone, or even better, into someone else’s comfort zone. The “accidental education” and “acceleration of serendipity” that occurs in these types of formats is wild and amazing, and why I think people are drawn to online communities because they have a very low barrier to create and join.

Which brings me to my final point (for now). I’ve talked to a LOT of people in a LOT of different places all over the world about their desires to set up coworking, participate in coworking, etc. Over and over, I hear something like, “I want this here but we have this problem that’s really unique to our area”. I’ve asked many people to explain their problems that they face or fear that they will face if they were to attempt to fire up a coworking community, and I have a secret.

You all have the same problems.

Your problems are not special.

If all you do is focus on your problems, you’re not special. In fact, I think they call that “complaining”.

The most common issues I’ve heard are those of real estate costs and availability, physical location accessibility (no one place is ever central enough), not enough people are around to pull it off, local cultural implications, “someone is already kinda doing it nearby but it doesn’t really work for me”, or everyone spends more time talking about doing it than actually making any forward motion.

Thats only about a half of a dozen problems, and they are nearly all technical. The exact problems that I’ve discussed may vary slightly, but ultimately, a great deal of the problems can be boiled down to one or a couple of these factors.

Thats literally hundreds of times that I’ve heard about the same 6 problems. And every time, “well in location x…..its hard because…”.

If this doesn’t illustrate that you’re problems arent what makes you special, I don’t know what will. Everything offline has a barrier to entry. What sets your community or potential community apart isn’t your problems, it’s how creative you can get with your solutions. Instead of focusing on what you can’t do, think about what you do have that no other place in the world does. Use that as your base, use that as your solution.

I think there’s a great deal of value in prototyping your solution using online tools, but don’t lose sight of the fact that the end goal should be an offline interaction.

I’m speaking specifically about coworking because its one of the things that I hold closest to my heart, but once again, I think that this construct of thinking can be overlaid on top of lots of other social problem->technical solution->social solution transactions.

I plan to revisit this topic, but that’s the majority of the dot-connecting that went on for me this weekend.

A few other takeaways from FOWA Miami 08:

• Kathy Sierra’s use of light profanity and cute puppies in her presentation are based on her understanding of what things our brains are tuned to. You should use those things to your advantage, too.
• Matt Mullenweg continues to impress me as a speaker and visionary (and a dude who’s even younger than me). His notions about scaling are very interesting to me, especially a this point in my life, my career, and all of the things I’m interested in. The fact that scaling people and communities is much harder than scaling business and applications further reinforces the fact that technical problems are easy, social problems are the ones that kick our asses.
• Tantek and Brian Oberkirch are two of the smartest people I know, and two of the nicest people I know, and two of the geekiest people I know. A really fantastic conversation I had with Brian the morning after FOWA helped me reassure myself in some decisions and conclusions I came to this weekend, and an exchange with Tantek at the beach party last night also reinforced some of the techniques that I will continue to use to interact with the communities I care so much about. Thanks to both of you for helping organize the content of this event and for being such great people in general.
• Blaine Cook, who talked about how you get your app to the masses, took a bit of a beating (a friendly beating with a feather pillow, of course) as his phone rang and twitter crashed while he was on stage talking about it. Blaine is clearly shockingly, shockingly intelligent and more importantly, capable of keeping things on the level. If I had the kind of responsibility he has towards twitter, I’d be WAY jumpier. The most valuable thing I think Blaine said though was regarding their decision to stay with Ruby on Rails. The fact that more mature development platforms have had the same stumbling blocks that Rails has now, and have simply had more time to mature, doesn’t mean that Rails is less viable. What it does mean is that RoR needs someone to find the stumbling points and be prepared to fix them for generations of Rails developers to come, and Twitter itself and the practices of Blaine and the team at Obvious are doing a very good job of rapidly discovering those stumbling blocks. Twitter is more than just a service, and more importantly, in my opinion, Twitter isn’t about Twitter.com. Again, more on the Twitter topic later.
• As always, hallways at conferences have some of the coolest interactions with some of the smartest people. Remember, not all smart people are comfortable on stage, but in a one on one setting, they will blow your mind. If a presenter doesn’t make you swoon, go out in the hall and meet someone new. It’s ok. You’ve already paid for the conference.
• Cal Henderson from Flickr is a unicorn of technical knowledge and impeccable presentation skills. I’d love to talk to him more, if for no other reason that I love the style of slides he uses (similar to what Tara Hunt uses), driven by large words overlaid on pictures to illustrate points. I’d love to master that technique to supplement my speaking skills.

And finally, in general, you don’t have to be big to be big. You don’t have to be big at all. Be honest. Be transparent. Don’t pitch me, bro. Engage me. Do cool stuff, stuff that makes you happy. Do it from your heart, not from your wallet or your PR deck.

And don’t even get me started on PR in social media right now. I’m a bit of a fireball on the topic, so I’m going to try to calm down before I spit out anything I don’t really mean.

Thanks FOWA Miami 2008 and all of its attendees for kicking ass. 4 more days until SXSWi08.

Ahhh…crap.

Tags: fowamiami2008, barcampmiami, community

They say (good) things happen in 3s

A few months back I marked the 1 year anniversary of my independence. Along the way I’ve made contacts and friends across this wide and amazing industry, and even built a home for some of them to spend their time during the work week.

I’ve alluded to, in various places, a new project that I’ve been working on since not that long after that 1 year announcement. Not that it’s been much of a secret but as of today, there’s one more tangible piece to the puzzle in my hands, and those would be my new business cards for Round3Media that you see above.

Over the last year, the types of and scale of the projects I’ve gotten involved with has changed dramatically. Lucky for me, there’s always opportunity for growth when you’re willing to take some initiative and be challenged. Through the year, I’ve had the privileged of working with a number of extremely talented folks, and in an effort to scale things properly, we’ve formed Round 3.

The Name

We kicked around naming and branding for quite a while, and as I expected, the one we fell in love with was the one we least expected.

Ken, Bart, and myself (founding partners of Round3) have all started multiple companies. For all of us, Round3 is our 3rd company. There are 3 of us (supplemented by a well rounded talent pool). There are three phases (or rounds) to most web projects: discovery, design, and development. Round3Media just made sense.

There are some strangely exciting coincidences that have happened while we’re starting up surrounding “threes”, so we’re pretty sure that’s a sign we made the right decision.

The Team

Round 3 is comprised of myself on the technology front, Ken Rossi on the design front, and Bart Mroz on business and project management. Ken’s designs and clients combined with my code have comprised a large portion of my portfolio in the last year. Frankly, Ken was the designer who convinced me that I had what it took to go out on my own in the first place. Bart’s been a huge part of day to day operations of IndyHall and continues to run a successful freelance project management operation.

To supplement our “core” team, we’ve brought Johnny Bilotta and Jason Tremblay on as contract-to-hire associates. Johnny’s designs have appeared ALL over the place recently, from the initial creative for the IndyHall website and business cards, to a number of branding initiatives we’ve done together. Jason’s been active in IndyHall since early on as well, and has been behind the technology for a number of local projects including www.wcdish.com and some of the tech behind the West Chester Restaurant Festival. We’re excited to have these two incredibly talented individuals who are interested in joining our mission.

As far as structure of the team, it’s our goal to keep things as flat and low to the ground as possible. There are three “disciplines” we’re representing (design, development, and business/project management). Beyond that, project and company goals will be discovered together. For as long as we have the ability to keep communication open and not end up with a super-tiered ultra-mega-globo-corp type mentality that I’ll get into a bit later, this seems like a step towards an ideal working situation. Why? Well there’s some problems that need fixing.

The Mission

What’s the mission, exactly? The way we see it, there’s a huge gap between the independent contractor and the agency. And don’t get me wrong, they both have their place. What I’m interested in experimenting with is the space between them.

Working as an indie is great. You have freedom, you have flexibility and agility. You have independence. You can keep your overhead low, and deliver high quality products for a great value.

On the flip side, it’s difficult to be held accountable by larger clients for larger projects. Also, if there’s a need to collaborate, there tends to be some scrambling to get things together and unify the communication for the ad-hoc team. It’s doable, and it’s a very powerful thing (i’ve done it for a long time and we do it every day at indyhall). It just takes more time and energy than most are willing to put out.

Agencies have a high level of accountability and structure. To their credit, the additional organization necessary to pull off larger projects and accounts are absolutely necessary as a supplement to the talent they employ. Certain clients and project types simply cannot be handled by a solo talent.

On the flip side, that additional organization adds cost (both time and money, as projects become more expensive and take longer to execute as information moves through the ranks). This also means that there’s a rather large amount of “whisper down the alley” between a project coming in, and the person executing the tasks.

Finally, as an indie, you rely on collaboration. There’s very small group of superheros who are actually good at hybrid skillsets. You may KNOW HOW TO wireframe, design, build XHTML/CSS/Javascript, as well as back end data driven architecture, but the odds of you being REALLY, REALLY good at all of them are much lower than the chances that you’ve lied on your resume and listed every piece of software you’ve ever heard of as a “skill”. It’s OK. I’m not chastising you. I’m encouraging you to pick a skill to be a rockstar at, and find other complimentary rock stars to work with. If you put 3 rock stars together, you’ve got the makings of a band. That’s what I want to see on a project: less drum solo, more collaborative singing/songwriting/performance pieces. And a little cowbell never hurts.

So really, what’s the mission?

Its our hope that over the next several months, Round3Media will give us an opportunity that a number of other very talented groups have begun to explore. We’re going to dig deep and find out what can be done in the space between indie and agency. Rather than scramble at each project to figure out who’s working on what, and what pieces we need to pull together, we have some stable business process that over arches over our individual indie “practices”. Its a step towards unity, but not so far away from the individuality or freedom we crave.

To follow the band metaphor from above, think of Round3 as a jam session for talented ‘artists’. The session is always at the same place at the same time, but what happens at each jam session is totally unique and special. We’re going to create a construct for business to take place in, but the creative side of web production and marketing will all be more like a pick-up “jam session”.

At the core, for me, this is all about scaling indie methodology.

Process vs Results

When the NotAnMBA guys were in town a few weeks back, they were inspired by the culture at IndyHall and similarly, speaking with Tony from CoworkingNYC. They made a post about a common theme that came out of our conversations and that the majority of us put much higher value on results than process.

Rather than caring when you get to work, where you’re working from, or that you’re “following the rules”…we’re actually more interested in people who are willing to bend or break the mold, try new things, innovate, and get to the highest qualty end result by “any means necessary”.

That openness and freedom for the people that we’ll be working with as Round3 grows is key, I think. It’s the type of process that an indie works on, because they don’t have a boss to answer to. Instead of worrying about the process that I had in mind when I delegated a task, worry about the end product that I had in mind. How you get there, how you meet or exceed my expectations (as an employer or a client)? So long as communication stays open, I’m a happy camper.

So where do we go from here?

Up, is our best guess. We’ll continue to work at IndyHall as we have been, and honestly, not much is going to change. Individually, we’re bringing some really interesting client work to the table that we’d have turned to the talent that sits around us every day for collaboration.

There’s going to be some transitioning of our existing client bases as we try to bring as many of them on board as we can. We’ve all worked hard to build client relationships over the course of our careers, and nothing would make us happier than seeing them served by the results produced by Round3 talent.

For me, personally, I’m going on the road. The next few weeks are travel heavy, as I attend Future of Web Apps in Miami this upcoming weekend and SXSW Interactive 08 in Austin, Texas at which I’m presenting (more on that soon). All along the way, I’ll be showing off not just the cool stuff that I’m directly involved in (IndyHall, Round3, etc) but will be spreading Philly love in any way that I can. I’m so excited to get to show the world, even in these two venues alone, what the talent in Philadelphia is up to. If you see me at either of these events, ask me about what’s going on in Philly. I’ll give you an earful of excitement, for sure.

The IndyHall community is one of my proudest accomplishments of my entire life. Round3, though only at its inception, is yet another moment in time that I’m insanely proud to be a part of, and I’m so excited to see grow from the seeds we’re planting.

Tags: alex hillman, bart mroz, business process, creativitiy, indyhall, jason tremblay, johnny bilotta jr, ken rossi, round3media, scaling indies