The Economics of Austerity, Silicon Valley Style

The election is over and, for those of us that haven't been making mad money on all of the campaign advertising, we're back to the realities of our current economic situation. And while many now associate Silicon Valley with software companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter, there are still some of those old school businesses that design and produce actual silicon. Unfortunately, the economy is not really smiling on the semiconductor industry these days.

Semi is notoriously cyclical, but what we're seeing now is in many ways part of a larger evolution that is reshaping the industry. Over the past year and a half, there's been some consolidation among the larger manufacturing equipment players -- the merger of Lam Research and Novellus, the acquisition of Varian by Applied Materials -- that speaks to the dwindling opportunities at the root of the ecosystem.

There are fewer fabs. CapEx news releases are sporadic. There are still a lot of questions about when, if, and how much these manufacturing facilities will invest in next generation process technologies. Further upstream, you don't have the pull of a Moore's Law fueled PC industry driving waves of new system purchases each year. Sure, there are ICs being designed, chips being sold and devices being built, but there isn't the same momentum.

But the biggest boon to the industry in the past five years has been things associated with green technology. While the technology for photovoltaics and LEDs have been around for a long time, the push for innovation and broad scale implementation spurred a host of new businesses, new equipment and industry transformation. All of those things meant investment, spending, and new opportunities.

So here's a quick history refresher. In 2008, we had the collapse of the economy courtesy of the financial markets, the sub-prime and all of that. Then 2009 was a bleak year -- everything was down. That was also the year when the government pushed through the stimulus with a push towards green tech. But things started to come back in 2010 and by midway through the year, the Semi industry motor (and emerging green tech) was going. In 2011, you started to see some shake-out, consolidation and the collapse of Solyndra, price wars happening in solar panels, and the market starting to pucker. And now 2012 has been another year of poor performance.

So what happened? Well, on the one hand, if we look at things from the not-a-big-enough-stimulus perspective, it looks like we poured gasoline in the carburetor for a few minutes of action, but we didn't getting the car running. Add to that the Congressional Republican's efforts to bring government to a halt and make Obama a one-term president, and you basically have limited government incentives to drive the market for green tech. Instead, you had conservative media pushing climate change as a hoax and Solyndra being pumped as a scandal. Green tech became a political liability.

However you want to frame it, the simple reality is that the economics of austerity -- the cut, cut, cut, and cut that we've been subjected to since 2010 -- has choked the life out of our economy. Instead of investing in growth and a strategic future, we've been railroaded down a path of zero investment wrapped in 'thrifty, debt-conscious' packaging.

Governments have unique powers to influence markets. By defining incentives for strategic goals, they drive fuel from the investment tank into the engine of the economy. By establishing incentives like mandating that all buildings meet certain levels of green compliance or all residences add solar panels, governments establish a pull that draws energy and investment into the market. In the same way, if the government codified a mandated goal of having 1 Gbps universal broadband, it would spawn a surge in many tech markets.

Keep in mind that this is not like the government saying, "we need a million Justin Bieber dolls". Nobody is pushing for frivolous investments. Things like green technology, broadband, and transportation infrastructure are CapEx investments in the future of the country and in the future of the economy.

Will You Survive The Extinction of the Creative Class?

So here's some rather lengthy Sunday reading for you. It starts with this collection of articles posted on Salon last week, kicked off by this post, No Sympathy for the Creative Class - Art in Crisis, by Scott Timberg. It's a great exploration of how the 'Creative Class' struggles these days, fueled by the economic downturn, American anti-intellectualism, and to some extent, technology and the Internet. It's a long read, but well worth your effort.

While I think that the piece leans a little heavily on the struggles within the traditional arts, he also touches on the creative class in business -- graphic design, writers, and architects. One aspect that I think that he kind of glances over is that, within this sector and the idea of commercial creative, you once had a much larger 'working class' creative. These aren't necessarily people dancing, painting and sculpting, they are people in the corporate world participating in the same kinds of 9-to-5 tasks as... fill-in-the-blank because if you follow that logic, then you've also already hopped on board part of the anti-elitist rhetoric that the piece references.

Anyway, totally worth a read and probably something that I'll write more about going forward.

Social Classes in the Workplace

For me, one of the interesting aspects of the Frank Rich piece that I previously linked to was bringing together the idea of surprise over the great sense of mourning at the loss of Steve Jobs coming from participants in the #Occupy Wall Street protests. As noted in the Rich piece, some media figures characterized this as hypocritical.

Yet those demonstrators who celebrated Jobs were not necessarily hypocrites at all—and no more anti-capitalist than the Bonus Army of 1932. If you love your Mac and iPod, you can still despise CDOs and credit-default swaps. Jobs’s genius—in the words of Regis McKenna, a Silicon Valley marketing executive who worked with him early on—was his ability “to strip away the excess layers of business, design, and innovation until only the simple, elegant reality remained.” The supposed genius of modern Wall Street is the exact reverse, piling on excess layers of business and innovation on ever thinner and more exotic creations until simple reality is distorted and obscured. Those in Palin’s “real America” may not be agitated about the economic 99-vs.-one percent inequality brought about by the rise of the financial sector in the past three decades, but, like class warriors of the left, they know that “financial instruments” wreaked havoc on their 401(k)s, homes, and jobs. The bottom line remains that Wall Street’s opaque inventions led directly to TARP, the taxpayers’ bank bailout that achieved the seemingly impossible feat of unifying the left and right in rage against government—much as Jobs’s death achieved the equally surprising coup of unifying left and right in mourning a corporate god.

That bipartisan grief was arguably as much for the passing of a capitalist culture as for the man himself. Finance long ago supplanted visionary entrepreneurial careers like Jobs’s as the most desired calling among America’s top-tier university students, just as hedge-fund tycoons like John Paulson and Steve Cohen passed Jobs on the Forbes 400 list. Americans sense that something incalculable has been lost in this transformation that cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

Anti-Business, Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Success, Socialist, Communist and Un-American
Historically, and with particular energy during recent years, the political right has tried to apply a broad brush of anti-capitalism. During the Cold War, it was used to equate the values of the political opposition with the values of "the enemy." During the Obama administration, it's been used by the right as an avatar for "Obama is black" and to channel the political energy drawn from that. Rich's piece is, in part, an effort to debunk aspects of #OWS as they have been characterized in the media, with a key one being the idea that #OWS was anti-business.

What struck me about this was how it tapped into many aspects of workplace culture that we all deal with. For many people in the workplace, few things are more frustrating than managers or colleagues that receive accolades for not doing anything, collecting fat salaries and workplace kudos while skating by on the hard work and talent of others.

And while this perceived inequality may just be an aspect of our cultural DNA, the natural reaction of humans working in groups juxtaposed against the perceptions of self, there is also an underlying aspect that connects back to Steve Jobs versus Finance -- Steve Jobs did stuff. His success was built on the creation of things, not collecting money from some Bluto-style counting game (one for you, two for me, one for you, three for me).

Most of us have have little animosity toward those that work hard and to the success that comes through entrepreneurial efforts. This is part of what makes Tony Stark's character in Ironman likeable. Similarly, we have an established hero mythology for "the guy that rose up through the ranks to lead the organization" and it's implied understanding of the values and principles gained through participating in the mechanics of the business operation.

This is one of the more enticing prospective benefits of working in a start-up. While most organizations inevitably draw a certain amount of slackers and free-riders that surf the waves of bureaucracy, there's not really any room for dead wood in a start-up. It's also usually small enough that people can recognize strong contributors.

The Reality of Social Classes in the American Workplace
One point that I would counter the themes in Rich's piece is the notion of an absence of social class here in the US. Even here in Silicon Valley, there are entrenched social classes in the workplace.

Ask any admin if there is a hope of escaping their role. Try to find a job outside of the field or the industry that you have been working in and you will come face to face with an entrenched establishment. While social class may not be defined at birth, it's not far off from the career chip concept from Futurama.

In career social classes, your status typically doesn't advance more than 1-5% of your salary annually. Your class may be defined by token milestone adjectives like "senior", but realistic changes in your status tier often require changing companies. Often, attempting to break this career social class structure is real goal behind going back to school, relocation or changing jobs.

This is also the American Dream that lies at the heart of working at a start-up -- the opportunity to re-invent yourself, to escape the bounds of your existing career class and redefine yourself through your ability to respond to a new set of challenges -- the new frontier. One of the reasons that people like start-ups is that, because start-ups tend to have more needs than resources, there tends to be greater opportunities to expand the boundaries, to be entrepreneurial, to win success though initiative and innovation.

Hope Springs Eternal
As I noted in this previous post, it's unlikely that we'll see an Arab Spring in the business world. Nor is it likely that we'll see things go the way of the London riots. Don't expect a revolution or transformational class reform in the workplace. And while the odds are pretty good that, of the people dreaming of a more open career environment with less rigid social classes, few are anti-business. After all, the first step in the entrepreneurial dream comes from envisioning the possibility of a change, from thinking different.

Class Warfare and Occupy Wall Street - Frank Rich in New York Magazine

Here's a link to a great piece that I came across by Frank Rich published in New York Magazine. The Class War Has Begun is a nice look at how the classless nature of American society -- or at least our concept of social equality -- has affected class struggles since the great depression. There is a lot of food for thought in this. It's sparked a couple of interesting post ideas for me. Check it out.

Pervasive Politics: Right Wing Ideologs and Economic Tensions Invade Non-Political Discussions

The other day, I was reading a post about jobs in the online version of EE Times. The post reflects on the notion that, even in sophisticated manufacturing like the technology that comes to life in wafer fabs, the trend over the past forty years has been an exodus from the US. While technology has been going global, jobs have been going away from the US. The post then talks about an EE Times effort to try to build a list of what the top jobs for the future are with these trends in mind.

What struck me about the post was not the flavor or the content, it was the comments. The usual political rhetoric surrounding who's to blame for the economy quickly bubbled to the surface. It's not the first time -- comments on posts about Solyndra were more focused on themes of political corruption and questions about the validity of climate change.

I was similarly struck by a similar experience surrounding Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference. At Dreamforce, they connect you through a Chatter application that enables you to engage with all of your fellow conference attendees and to follow conference threads. One of the keynote events featured Marc Benioff discussing technology with Eric Schmitt. In addition to his current role at Google and past roles at Sun and Novell, Schmitt has also provided technology guidance to the Obama administration -- technology, jobs, and the potential solutions to the ailing economy was one of the topics that came up. You could almost feel a tense ideological discomfort coming from some of the audience in Moscone South that afternoon, and that tension boiled over into the Chatter stream in days that followed. Again, no comments on Schmitt's reflections on the challenges of a hardware business or a market leader from his days at Sun. Instead, the comments were about how awful it was to bring politics into a business conference.

On the same day when I read the EE Times post, I happened to catch this segment of NPR's Marketplace Money radio program. It's a discussion with commentator, David Frum about his decision to step back from providing commentary on the program. The long and short of his discussion is that, while he still considers himself a conservative, he doesn't feel like he represents "the view of most people who call themselves Republicans and conservatives these days". Why? Here's how he explained:

We have got a sick patient -- the American economy. And we can see that the patient in the next bed -- the European economy -- he's looking even sicker and there's a real risk of contagion. And what I think we have to do at a moment like this: Have a very, very open creation of money and credit. This is not a moment for government to be cutting back. Here's where Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes agreed. They didn't necessarily agree about why to do this medicine, but as to what the medicine was, they did broadly agree.

In short, I think this underscores that sense that ideology and rhetoric have overshadowed analysis and reason. The take-away: if you get two experts to agree on what the solution is but the solution doesn't match your beliefs, then you need to find another expert.

The worst aspect of this superheated ideological energy is that it bodes poorly for the prospect of real, corrective action. To understand just how bad it is, consider this great article by Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair about California's struggling economy and a reflection on the Schwarzenegger years. A colleague recently forwarded me this link after we spent some time talking about statistical analytics and Wall Street finance. But if you had any doubts about how bad our economic situation is, consider this quote from the article:

San Jose has the highest per capita income of any city in the United States, after New York. It has the highest credit rating of any city in California with a population over 250,000. It is one of the few cities in America with a triple-A rating from Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, but only because its bondholders have the power to compel the city to levy a tax on property owners to pay off the bonds. The city itself is not all that far from being bankrupt.

These are real, complex problems. Put in product terms, these are critical issues. We need corrective action. We need solutions. Put in Frum's terms, the doctors tell us that our sick patient needs medicine -- but there is still a vocal segment that insists on faith healing or that sickness is divine will and some sort of grand moral failure. Unfortunately, in many of our business and communication channels, analytical discussions of solutions are often being taken hostage by this ideology and political rhetoric, by the voice of anti-science, anti-reason, and anti-analysis. It leaves you wondering whether as a society, we're going to let be able to prevent these macro forces from running everything into the ground.

The Job Application Process and Marketing - The Hidden Message Behind the Differences Between the Front Door and the Back Door

Just the other day, I happened to come across a job listing with this listed as the application process that you must follow or, "Applications that do not adhere to the format will be ignored." According to the job post, you need to send an email to a specified address with a specific subject line (I've stripped that information out in order to provide a layer of anonymity). Here is how they specify that the rest of the email should be formatted:

- In the first line of the e-mail include your education details
- In the next 3 lines include your last 3 job titles, employers and duration
- In the following line include your desired salary
- Include 3-5 bulleted points listing your top strengths and your top measurable achievements, please be concise
- Attach a writing sample
- Attach a summarized one page resume -- preferably in .PDF format

Now it's not unusual for businesses to look for ways to screen candidates, but this one struck me as really pushing that envelope. I began to reflect on the entire approach, what it said about the position, about the company and about the process.

Why Would You Ask A Potential Employee to Structure an Application This Way?
The most obvious answer might be to establish a screening process that reduced the volume of submissions. Of course, the question that this points to is, what volume of submissions do you need to hit for it to be too much? At one end of the spectrum, you probably have numbers like Google, while at the other, the number may be zero or one. Even with the volume of resumes that they receive, Google doesn't force candidates to jump through hoops like this.

When it comes to demand generation marketing and the front door of the company, most businesses have strategies for addressing inquiries and screening leads. While web-to-lead forms may provide a low-pass filter that helps increase the likelihood of a lead qualification, we also use techniques like lead scoring to further automate the filtering process. What's more -- if you scan enough leads (assuming a certain amount of data beyond basic contact info), you can develop your own internal sense of scoring pretty quickly. Long story short, if the goal of this "structured" method of pre-screening is to streamline the process, the underlying message seems to speak more to laziness or lack of capability on the part of the reviewer than an actual process improvement. That's probably not a message that a business would want to communicate.

Another objective of this process structure might be an effort to escape the automated loop of volume job submissions. By asking candidates to do something different, this might filter out candidates that only had a casual interest in the position or make bulk applications -- application spam. But the corresponding question that you have to ask is, if you need the candidate to escape the existing application ritual, is it necessary to create such an extensive list of requirements? Stepping through a web-based form could achieve the same goal. Clearly, there is some deeper motive at play.

Please Be Concise
I think that the most telling aspect of this requirements list is the statement, "please be concise." The statement, along with many of the accompanying requirements, carries the tone of a school teacher setting down homework requirements for students. And it's just as pretentious as that college instructor who said it the last time. Layered underneath the words is the message, "our arbitrarily imposed structure is more important than you."

Clearly, this is not a job where you have the opportunity to transform their operations. This is not a position where they expect to be awed by their candidates. This is role that will execute on a specific set of parameters as though they were working the line in a factory. Creative ideas? Alternative approaches? We have no use for them here. Did I mention that this list of requirements is for a marketing role?

Communications and Your Customer
Imagine if this set of communications rules were customer facing. Instead of job requirements, imagine if you were to use this kind of framework or phrasing in your RFP. Of course, that hypothetical doesn't quite match because to make it truly similar, you would need an existing standard for RFPs, but then force customers to restructure their existing materials to match your RFP format. The whole prospect seems ludicrous. So, why would it be okay for prospective employees, for potential contributors to the health and well-being of your business?

When the economy is bad, some businesses treat is as a license to push employees harder, to drive the business on the desperate sweat of workers who can't afford to demand better. In a market where jobs are rare and your flexibility to change is limited, some use it as an opportunity to make people lick boots and jump through flaming hoops, they promote fear and profit from it.

If you're a marketing professional and you see a job listing like this, I would suggest that you close the listing and walk away. The language that they use suggests that they aren't open to new ideas -- your work here noteworthy, just another homework assignment. No creativity. No fun. Just work.

Branding Pivot: The Ladders Moves Away From Only $100,000+ Focus

In my bulk emails this morning, I received an email from The Ladders tagged with the subject line, "Bye-bye!" A quick review noted that they're abandoning their "only $100K+ jobs" focus, instead focusing on operating a curated board. Here's a clip from the email:

We're expanding, and today we say "bye-bye" to helping only those over $100,000 and "hello" to helping all career-minded professionals. TheLadders now takes all salary levels and shows the right jobs to the right person. So while we're saying goodbye to our narrower segmentation, we are not saying "goodbye" to keeping your job search on TheLadders relevant, focused, and targeted.

So, for example, you won't see jobs that pay half (or double) what you're currently making. You won't see jobs outside of your field — we still won't show sales jobs to finance professionals, or marketing jobs to technologists. And we won't be letting in scammy jobs, work-from-home schemes, or commission-only opportunities — we'll still be vetting every job and every recruiter before we allow them into our community.

I never liked the $100K+ positioning myself. I always felt like it put too much emphasis on numbers and not enough emphasis on the quality of the candidate or the job. My sense is that now, when the economy is so crappy and the job outlook so bleak, that finding any fish in the opportunity pond is a hunt. Still, other than a slight scent of despair, do you really feel like this expansion of their audience does anything for you? If you were an established customer under the old $100K+ umbrella, do you feel a greater sense of connection now that they have expanded their marketing circle?

Regulation that we all agree with...

As I've noted in the past, I really try to avoid writing about politics here. However, sometimes I can't help myself. The other day, I was working on this post -- sort of a funny idea that had been percolating in the graphic design part of my mind -- but I wasn't really feeling it was publish-worthy. Then I came across this second, slightly related story in the news, and I knew that the two must be published together.

Here's what I started...

One political meme that gets a lot of traction these days (there's a whole party built around it, more or less) is the idea of less government regulation. Everyone hates regulations... why should the government make rules? We can do so much better without all of these government regulations, etc.

Have you ever tried to park your car in a lot with no lines?

When you park in a lot that has been striped, you may find yourself periodically frustrated -- the lines are too close, there aren't enough close spaces, that guy took two spaces, etc. At the same time, there is an established sense of order. Instead of complete chaos, your parking lot problems tend to be more like Seinfeldesque notions of mismatched numbers of hot dogs and buns.

Most parking lots are systems that are ripe with with frustrations. They may cause you to question the motivations, logic or intelligence of your fellow humans -- or perhaps the rather low regulatory threshold that we set for enabling people to operate a vehicle. But who would really question the idea that the structured space increases utilization over an unregulated space? 

Then, I came across this story, GOP Jobs Plan: More Snakes? Here's an excerpt.

GOP members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee today called attention to a proposed regulation that would restrict the transportation and importation of nine types of snakes, including the Burmese Python.

In a new report entitled "Broken Government: How the Administrative State has Broken President Obama's Promise of Regulatory Reform," GOP members cited the proposed snake ban as one of seven examples of red tape choking off job growth in an already ailing economy.

Now admittedly, if I hadn't seen this post, I wouldn't have known about the constricting force that snake-selling regulations have on our economy -- perhaps even the global economy. At the same time, this probably wouldn't have made my top ten list of solutions to fix the economy, much less my top seven. Still, the creative part of me is pretty impressed -- in terms of message, this is truly an example of out-of-the-box thinking.

Amazon Cuts Affiliate Programs As California Enacts Stupid Anti-Affiliate Internet Tax Law

Last week I received an email from Amazon notifying me that they would be ending their affiliate programs for any publisher that resides in California. If you haven't been following this issue, you might be surprised by the news surrounding this story. For me, the biggest surprise is that the State of California, home of Silicon Valley and the heart of Internet innovation, could find itself going down such an idiotic path.

What's Behind the Anti-Affiliate Tax Law
In theory, sales tax rules are supposed to be pretty simple -- if you buy something from someone, then the state gets the merchant to collect a percentage based on that sale. Of course, the actual laws are much more nuanced than that, but that's the principle in a nutshell. When it comes to buying stuff on the Internet companies like Amazon have essentially said, "we don't have any operations in the state, so we're not going to collect sales tax on sales that get shipped to states that we don't have operations in." In that way, Amazon and many Internet businesses have used operational location and sales tax to strategically eek out some competitive pricing advantages.

As states like California find themselves sinking deeper into a revenue hole, victims of the crappy economy and the economic catastrophe macro forces, they're scrambling around looking for any sort of revenue life raft that they can cling to and might float politically. It's worth noting that this whole situation is exacerbated by the anti-tax Republicans and their jihad against government -- they've taken the ship of state hostage and will blow it up unless we all fly to anti-tax fantasy land.

The Challenge of Taxing Internet Sales
Over the past ten years, more and more people buy stuff over the Internet. Often, people will go to brick and mortar retailers, look at products, then price-shop to find the lowest price and order it online. That includes no sales tax and free shipping. It's unfair to local merchants and it's just one of the reasons why we've watched local specialty retailers become an endangered species. But the problem isn't Amazon or the Internet, it's that as the world grows flat, interstate and international commerce lines become incentive zones.

The problem isn't the Internet. The problem is that now, for many items that you purchase, the point of sale approach to tax has undergone the same transformation as local newspaper classified ads. In short, it doesn't make sense as an instrument of revenue generation. Instead, it becomes a disincentive for businesses to attempt to compete in brick and mortar businesses in local markets unless there is an inescapable local component to the product or transaction. This legislation is like trying to tax Craig's List in order to subsidize the world's local newspapers.

Since businesses like Amazon don't have operations in the state, the state decided to change it's tax code to consider Affiliate marketers to be "operations" any money paid out as a sales commission, as though, by publishing links to Amazon products for sale, we bloggers and web site publishers are suddenly different from publications that run print advertising. Consider, what's the difference between a print advertisement and an affiliate advertisement except compensation at a Pay Per Click level instead of what's basically a PPM advertising model in the print world?

By attempting to use affiliate marketing as the lever into online transactions, California closed the books on the Amazon affiliate program -- and anyone in California who received income from this (and payed corresponding state income tax based on this revenue). Essentially, they just killed some number of Internet-based jobs. And they knew that it wouldn't work. Prior to California signing this into law, Amazon has actually shut down the Associates program in Illinois, Hawaii, Connecticut and North Carolina because of similar legislation.

The Heart of the Problem
While the anti-tax Republicans might want to look at this and wave it as a "taxes are job killers" bloody shirt, the real root of the problem goes back to this Republican anti-tax anti-government jihad. California has been in this budgetary hole for many years. From the state's education system to our social infrastructure, we watched as so many of the institutions that were the gold standard for the US and the world deteriorate under the influence of the greed-heads that only want to ask, "why should I have to pay for that?"

In this case, it didn't matter that the law doesn't work because California state government can't discuss possible solutions that might work. They can't negotiate raising revenue with the anti-tax terrorists. Instead, this budget driven law was more like Maxwell Smart trying to balance the budget and stop the impending explosion with yet another attempt to push out the problem a bit longer. "Would you believe several hundred million dollars in tax revenue from internet sales tax on Amazon? Would you believe several million Farmville bucks? How about a couple of free items in World of Warcraft?"

Why Are People Shocked About Flip?

Earlier this week, Cisco announced a restructuring that basically eliminated the Flip camera group, a company that they bought for $590 million a few years ago. Following that announcement, I've seen a number of posts that reflect a sense of shock surrounding the death of the product. Me, I'm more surprised that people seem surprised.

When the iPhone 3GS was launched and included video capabilities, there were numerous articles and posts about how iPhone video would be the death of the Flip. Since that time, there's been a lot of innovation in mobile video on the smartphone platform -- Apple even added iMovie and basic video editing to the platform with the iPhone 4. Meanwhile, the Flip platform hasn't evolved. This leads to several questions:

• Was the acquisition simply a strategic blunder on Cisco's part?
• Was this a technology or other resource acquisition?
• Was this the result of a large organization being unable to provide the fertile environment needed by a start-up to prosper?
• Would a start-up version of Flip been able to innovate enough to remain competitive?

In the end though, this shift in the market has been going on for two years. I'm not really sure how that constitutes a surprise.

Whom you should hire at a Start-up: A Repost and An Obeservation

Earlier this week, there was an interesting post on Techcrunch. I always like these types of posts when I come across them. Whom Should You Hire at a Startup? (Attitude over Aptitude) by Mark Suster is another post from a VC and former entrepreneur on how to look at the problem of building a strong team in a start-up. It's a short, easy read and I recommend going through it before you move through the rest of this post.

The area that I wanted to explore is one that is touched on in his second and fifth recommendations:

2. Find people to “punch above their weight class”
5. Attitude over Aptitude

If you add up some of his statements like

It means that many management teams I know feel the need to hire people who have “done it before” and frankly many VCs encourage this. It’s a mistake. When you hire somebody too early who has already “done it” you often find somebody that is less motivated in tough times, less willing to be scrappy (as many startups need to be), more “needy” and less mentally flexible / willing to change their way of thinking...

You said, “Eff experience. I want to know whether you can deliver. If you can, you’re golden. You’ll go a long way. If you can’t – you’re toast. Are you up for it?” It’s Tristan Walker of FourSquare. They hired him when he was an MBA. He had no right asking for a senior biz dev role at one of the hottest companies in the US. But he was ready to punch above his weight class. And he pushed for it.

You might wind up with the take-away of, "don't hire tired experienced people, hire hungry inexperienced people." If that was your take-away, I recommend that you read his other post from his blog, Who Should you Hire at a Startup? This post presents a more comprehensive look at the role of talent, capability and experience, and provides some additional insights.

The Reality of Experiences That Make You Tired
While it's easy to see students coming out of school with a hunger and a naive sense of excitement, most of us that have struggled in difficult employment environments understand that there are a lot of pressures that can wear you down, weigh on your sense of enthusiasm, and make you a bit cynical. After all, if everything at work was exciting, challenging growth, you probably wouldn't be motivated to do something different. And when you interview, this is one of the challenges you often face in positioning yourself -- you don't want to seem like a grumpy curmudgeon that simply can't get along with the people you work with, but you need to position some clear reasons why you're considering this change. But regardless of how you present it, people want smiles in interviews and you're carrying frustrations.

So here you have the "Attitude / aptitude" issue wrapped up in a microcosm of perception. Perhaps the driver for your frustrations are the bureaucracies of your current employer or tired of being told that you don't know how to do your job because the organization doesn't follow your recommendations. Perhaps it's all driven by your frustrated desires to have a more senior role or more control of the process. It's even possible that you've tried to do more, only to be shot down as 'not getting it', too inexperienced, or not the right fit. In one sense, this might put you in the "punch above your weight class" group, but it also depends on the individual.

People react to adversity in different ways. As a long-distance cyclist, I've seen very tired people face hills near the end of a ride and get angry. I've seen them give up. I've also seen people who dig deep and continue to work, continue to push to get to their goal. In the case of people that you're considering for a start-up, while the environment that you're hiring them from may suck, I think that what you're looking for are the people capable of continuing to turn the pedals when the going gets tough. That doesn't mean someone who is happy to continue turning the pedals in a bureaucracy, but that's really back to the attitude question.


So What Do You Think?
Can somebody who is coming from an environment where they have been beaten down, told that they don't know what their doing or that they are doing it wrong be successful in a start-up? Can they succeed in an interview? Perhaps more to the point, if you're looking for a position where you can "punch outside of your weight class", do you really believe that a company will consider an "underqualified" candidate in today's job market? In other words, are you targeting a market where you have a realistic opportunity?

Follow-up On Google Hiring: A Kinder, Gentler Google

Following up on my post, If Google Posts A Job Opening, Does It Really Count As A Job Opportunity, I came across this article that was pushed out on Twitter by Google Recruiting (@googlejobs). Google tries new angle on hiring by Richard Waters of the Financial Times is an interesting read into how Google is trying to change their hiring practices and culture. I felt so moved by the piece that I thought, maybe I should go ahead and send them my resume and apply for a couple of openings. I am one of those "people with entrepreneurial, rather than purely intellectual, talent." Then I got to the last sentence of the piece, "It is currently receiving 75,000 applications a week," and, remembering my original post, I decided to write this blog post instead.

If Google Posts a Job Opening, Does it Really Count as a Job Opportunity?

We've all heard about Google's exclusive hiring practices and how they go through extraordinary efforts to hire what they consider only the most exceptional candidates. So it struck me the other day as I waded through a LinkedIn job search where where the first two or three pages of results were Google listings, if Google posts a job opening, does it really count as a job opportunity?

Consider this recent news from Google, Google gets 75,000 job apps in a week - for 6000 openings. That works out to about 1200 applicants per job. While you could look at this from a lot of angles -- hiring on internet scale, the compelling value of Google's work environment strategy, or even the real sucktacular nature of the economy -- let's think about how many of those 1200 people actually have a shot at that job. While you could argue that 1 in 1200 is a lot better odds than you have for winning the lottery, your odds of winning the lottery are simple probability. For those 1200 individuals, there are factors for qualification, differentiation, and probably a bunch of invisible, unspoken ones as well. For many of those 1200 applicants, the odds of winning the Google job lottery is actually zero.

Is a Google Job Listing the Equivalent of Spam?
Out of that group of 1200 people applying for an opening at Google, my guess is that there is probably a list of preferred candidates drawn from employee recommendations or other more direct submissions. But let's assume for a minute that the process is open. Following on the themes that I talked about in one of my Please Hire Me posts, how do you differentiate yourself in a pool of over 1200 people? Imagine a person reading 250 resumes per day for per position with a constant stream of new resumes coming in all of the time -- and that's just reading them, not following up, etc. If you think about that kind of scale, at best you're looking at an algorithmic scan of them all. At worst, you're looking at a giant pool of resumes that are simply ignored.

Think about what that means in terms of timing for when you submit you're resume. In the old days, you might have a week or two to position yourself, customize your resume, and focus your cover letter. If you're submitting to a position at Google, all that time you spent has just put you in the back of a chronological line 1200 people deep -- 1200 people whose 15 or so skills listed as requirements also match the position.

Finding the Deeper Meaning in Google's Applicant Volume
If you think about that pool of 1200 or so candidates and the difficulty of filtering that pool, you might start to wonder whether that type of process would yield a top-tier, unique candidate. Or even the most qualified. So, if you can't find the perfect drop of water when you're looking at the lake, why would you use a process that created so much water? What if the purpose of having so many candidates isn't to look at the candidates, but rather to provide statistical data that supports the idea that you looked at lots of people before you selected the candidate that you chose? The question is, are those 75000 resumes really about 75000 candidates or simply better justification for the 6000 that Google does choose, assuming that they fill each position from the pool that was generated that week. What about the candidates that they target and recruit, like from Apple or Microsoft?

The funny thing about all of this is that many job search sites (like Linked In) include check boxes so that you can just search listings from a specific company. When you look at the numbers, perhaps what they need is support for exclusion filters or Boolean search terms like, "not Google".

UPDATE:  I did a some research and experimentation using the Linked In search function. It turns out that there is Boolean support in Advanced Search. You can use AND, OR, or NOT, but they have to be in capital letters. While I was able to make this work in the Keyword search field, the company field doesn't appear to support Boolean search. So, if you want to filter Google out of your search results, you can add NOT google to the Keywords search, but you also risk filtering out jobs that might include Google as part of a skill or a capability.

Aftershock, Income Inequality, and Why Everyone is Angry at the Economy

The other day on NPR's Fresh Air, they had Robert Reich on, talking about his new book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future. I found the interview both entertaining and informative. The basic thesis of the book is that, in terms of recovery from our current economic troubles, we're hosed. According to Reich, the underlying issue with the economy isn't just about banks or stimulus, it's about an income inequality and the impact that it's having on the overall economy. Reich goes back and highlights a figure from the Great Depression who addressed some of these issues, then points to some larger changes that would be needed in order to bring jobs back to the economy and purchasing power back the middle class.

One quote that I found particularly amusing, Reich pointed out that when they go to mainstream America and tell them that the recession ended back in June 2009, that people laugh at them. The people who are out of work, underwater on their mortgages, and struggling to make ends meet are keenly aware that if your indicators say that we're out of the recession, then your indicators suck.

This is something that is an underlying pain point for the current administration and one of the issues that's driving trends as we move toward the election in November. Regardless of what the economic dashboards say, regardless of what the stock market numbers say, the Main Street economy sucks. But there is actually a bigger theme behind this.

For some time now, there has been the adoption of this idea by the media and in political circles in Washington that if the stock market numbers are high and the market appears strong, then the economy must be healthy, happy, and thriving. The Bush administration used this same logic to make a case for the performance of their economic policies, despite poor employment numbers and a generally lifeless economy. It's also a core message to the whole concept of 'trickle-down' economics, "they are doing well and it's only a matter of time before that starts to trickle down your way. Wait for it... Wait for it..."

But one job is not always equal to one job. Remember when they wanted to make "burger assembler at a fast food restaurant" count as a manufacturing job -- it makes it easier to mask the gushing flow of manufacturing jobs leaving the local economy.

When the financial system was on the edge of collapse, our government rushed in the paramedics to rescue the financial services industry. We bailed out Wall Street. We bailed out GM. We bailed out the banks and AIG. But when it came to saving the suffering middle class through programs like extended unemployment or mortgage relief, the people we elected did little to help. Those initiatives sank and drowned. For home owners that found themselves in loans that were underwater, there has been no adjustment, no correction, no bail out, just a continuing parade of foreclosures and terrible unemployment. This sense of inequity is part of what's driving the anger.

On Marketing and Message
If you look at all of that anger and the energy behind it, then connect it to messaging, you can see some of the challenges that the current candidates are facing. For Democrats, they position themselves relative to the bail out and say, "see, we saved the economy," but that doesn't match the reality that people are experiencing or perceive that they are experiencing. It doesn't really matter whether there was a victory on paper or not -- it's like telling someone who's computer was infected with a virus, "I've been able to rebuild your operating system, but all of your files, your photos and your data are gone."

Meanwhile, Republicans say, "see, we told you the bail out was a bad idea. They just made matters worse." But with marketing and message, people gloss over history, so it doesn't really matter that the collapse and the TARP bailout both took place under the a Republican president, nor does it matter that when it came to the stimulus bail out, Republicans sat on the economic Titanic and fought to prevent Main Street access to lifeboats.  Whether or not Republicans offer a solution or a recipe for anything other than a return to the policies of the previous administration doesn't really matter, instead there is an audience that can connect with single message that bailout equals bad idea.

If you follow Reich's thesis, real resolution won't happen until this income inequality can be addressed. And with most of the current approaches centered around "the health of Wall Street" as though it were an engine instead of an indicator, the larger outlook will probably remain bleak (or worse) for some time.

The Great Irony of the Bailout
The great irony of the bailout is that people that directly benefited from it are also angry and frustrated. Here is an interesting segment from the episode of This American Life titled 'Crybabies' that aired recently on KQED. Continue through the intro on 'Outrage' to this first section on Wall Street. Here's a synopsis from their site:

Act One. Wall Street: Money Never Weeps.
Ira with Planet Money economics correspondent Adam Davidson on why—even after everything President Obama has done to save Wall Street, actions which have led to record profits and bonuses—Wall Street seems ungrateful. Adam and producer Jane Feltes head out to a Wall Street bar where they're told by three finance guys that there's no reason to thank the President for saving their jobs. Planet Money is a co-production of This American Life and NPR News. (14 minutes)  

A Populist Pressure Cooker 
Overall, a poor economy stresses its constituents. People are unhappy and looking for change, but finding themselves powerless to make changes. Stuck in an underpaid, overworked job with increasing productivity expectations? If there are no jobs, you have no freedom to change jobs or find a better situation, and there is no pressure on the employer to make your work environment better. And like a stove with the burner on high, tensions and stress within our society keep increasing.

Take California as an example. We have a situation where the laws and ballot initiatives have mandated levels for the majority of spending for the state, making real change impossible. Meanwhile, term limits, super-majority requirements and the demographics of the legislature mean that most budget 'problems' get rewritten and pushed into the future. Several years ago, frustrations with this situation exploded in the recall and the election of a populist reformer. And yet, despite publicity, a famous name, and host of proposed reform programs, nothing really changed and no problems were solved. Nowadays, you often hear proposals of revolutionary reform like a Constitutional convention, but I haven't seen the signs of a real movement for anything like that. And so, with politics what you have now are people spinning messages of reform on top of a system and product that isn't really going to change fundamentally.

In Reich's interview, he noted that the current policies were not reforming the economy sufficiently to change the imbalances highlighted in his book. However, he was optimistic that, over time the government would come to understand that the reforms-to-date were not sufficient to correct the bigger picture, and begin implementing stronger reforms. I don't agree with him on this point. A conspiracy theorist might suggest some sort of overarching system that benefits from keeping the pressure cooker on high, but I think that the truth is much simpler. Like a business with shrinking markets and uninspired products (fill in your example here), government and politicians intrinsically avoid bold vision or substantial change. Imagine if we had some sort of entrepreneurial start-up incubator model for new government policy and reform.

Leading Indicators of a Craptacular Marketing Job

When you're a marketing goomer that gets wrapped up in projects that involve the finance and accounting side of the business, you often find yourself rubbing shoulders with the people that Dilbert called "the trolls in accounting." And you're probably also likely to find that they have an almost religious hatred of your role and all it represents (spending money). That being said, over the years I've worked with a lot of people in finance and accounting and got along well with most of them. Often I find that we share a sense of practicality and an overall disdain for puffery that tends to mask a lack of real substance.

One of the funniest places to find this kind of puffery is in job listings. As an example, I recently came across a listing describing a necessary skill as being able to leverage adoption techniques and four key performance indicators of a successful Customer Value Journey (I probably can't use that phrase -- it might be trademarked). And while there is probably a line of candidates forming with platitudes on their lips and gold in their hearts, you won't find me digging into the resources of my background looking for Carlos Castaneda books or channeling my business-metaphysics background.

Sometimes this stuff just seems crazy. I once worked for a company that based their performance reviews on values that fit an acronym of the company name. Imagine if the Constitution had been written like that. Back in the dot.com era, I interviewed with a company that basically had no idea what they did, and I couldn't even get a sense of their direction during the interview (we mutually agreed that we weren't a good fit). The saddest part of the whole thing is that, when you see stuff like this on TV it seems funny, but it's different when you know that there are so many people who are desperate for work and willing to take even the suckiest jobs.

Tax Incentives and Economic Stimulus - Macroeconomics from a Marketing Perspective

As we sit here on Labor Day weekend, there are a lot of news stories being published about the poor economy, the high unemployment rate, and about how much these things suck and that they don't seem to be getting better with any speed. In politics, the current economic situation typically get's split into two solution paths:

• For Republicans and conservatives, it's all about tax cuts. The strategy basically boils down to the proposal that, "if we can just make it less expensive for business to buy new equipment, they will buy new equipment, grow their business, and that investment will trickle down through the economy."
• For Democrats and some liberals, it's about economic stimulus. This strategy basically boils comes down to the idea that, "if we spend money to fix roads and the transportation infrastructure, then all of those people who build roads will have money to spend. When we fix the roads, it will make transportation easier for everyone and society will benefit. In addition, it will make it easier for manufacturers to transport their stuff."

Now I realize that these two positions overly simplify the debate over economic stimulus and how to fix the economy, but this simplified approach will make it easier to get to the issues that I want to focus on. Keep in mind, I'm not an economist, just a marketing professional with an understanding of politics and some common issues that businesses wrestle with.

Tax Incentives, Infrastructure Stimulus, and The Myth of 'If We Build It, They Will Come'
Everyone remembers that quote from Field of Dreams, but this is a common theme in the business world. Despite MRDs, PRDs, user profiles and various other customer requirements documents, business people (sales, marketing, and engineers) love to design and build without taking customer usage or markets into account. Often, these forays into bad design result from good intentions, but like kitchen-sink functionality, the sum of it's parts is often worse than a simpler, more well-designed and focused product. That being said, let's ask some questions and do some target market analysis to evaluate the actual opportunity for success from the various approaches.

For me, the tax incentives for businesses to invest in their capital equipment is fairly easy to deconstruct. While it's easy to see that businesses have a lot of money and business spending certainly drives the economy, businesses don't behave like individuals. You won't find a business sitting around waiting for the price of an XBox to drop $50 before they buy one. Instead, if there is a market, or a demand that they can't meet with their current equipment, then they will invest. And while the tax incentives may help tip the scale in terms of some ROI edge cases, it isn't the kind of thing that you can count on for long term growth -- if you could by a refrigerator every year because you got a credit on your taxes, would you go through the hastle and cost to do it particularly when this year's model doesn't change functionality much beyond last year's model?

Meanwhile back in the other camp, while I like the idea of smooth roads and infrastructure, at best this is only a partial solution -- like the number of companies that added 'app-stores' in the wake of Apple's success with the iPhone. While it's probably a feature that has been long neglected, is it a platform-changer? In other words, does it change the status quo enough to open up new investment, new growth, new technologies and markets? Instead, I would suggest that it's akin to trying to solve the problems of traditional media by having the government buy new printing presses.

Market Successes in the Heart of the Economic Downturn
If you want to find the engines for economic resurgence, look at the markets that have been successful in the past year or two and what's driving them. Here are a couple that I would highlight:

• Green Tech
• Solar
• LEDs
• Hybrid vehicles
• The Smart Phone Economy
• Smart Phones
• Applications and software for smart phones
• Social networks

These market segments have been growing in spite of the struggling economy. What's driving them? What's the secret to success? Why are average, everyday consumers spending for precious dollars for products in these segments in spite of the bad economy? More importantly, what can we do to facilitate these markets? Or markets like them? Here are a few topic areas -- some of which have come up, others haven't.

• Expanded wireless spectrum availability or mandated investment
• Expanded broadband coverage
• Expanded communications network bandwidth
• Network Neutrality

In the end, should we be focused on paving the highways or the 'Information Superhighway'?

Is the US Government Finally Getting It Right On Broadband Internet Access?

It was either yesterday or the day before when an article on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News caught my eye, Google dangles super-fast Internet; cities leap to compete for network. What struck me as funny about this article -- here in Silicon Valley, you might think that you are the only region in the country that is desperately seeking more bandwidth. Suddenly, you look around behind you and there are thousands of communities, millions of people who are just as desperate as you are.

If you look at it from the consumer side of the equation, the desire is for faster network speeds and more bandwidth is ubiquitous. The problem with broadband network access and bandwidth isn't a technology problem, it's a revenue problem. Specifically, it's a "why should we spend anything on expanding our capacity until we have maximized our return on our existing infrastructure investments" problem, and it's being managed by your friendly neighborhood network providers like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. Imagine if your Internet access was limited by the local news paper -- and they tried to maximize the amount of money they made on both Internet and paper sales. Or imagine if your Internet access was limited by the record companies attempting to maintain and maximize revenues on CD and DVD sales (oh wait...).

So, when I came across this article this morning from the New York Times, Effort to Widen U.S. Internet Access Sets Up Battle, I felt compelled to say a couple of silent words of thanks and write this post. Don't get me wrong, while I'm optimistic, I'm not expecting success. Over the past decade and a half, the push to see a universal high-speed network infrastructure has been matched by the glacial resistance of the Bells. Perhaps with this initiative, there is finally some light at the end of the fiber.

The Job Boards Have Started To Roll

Note: I first started this post back at the beginning of September. Since that time, I've continued to see increased activity on the job boards, plus whispers from contacts that suggest things are starting to turn around again.

Starting around the beginning of September, postings on the job boards seemed to start ramping up. Economic confidence appears to be showing more signs of confidence. Of course, being on the front end of this wave can be a mixed blessing.

If you're unemployed, any fish on the line is a good thing -- sometimes it's just a question of how good. For job seekers, problems arise when tight markets and limited opportunities force you to deal with those companies that look at a struggling labor market as an opportunity to exploit. Some companies approach the labor market like the stock market -- buy low, sell high. These companies attempt to leverage employee (or potential employee) desperation to save some money on salary-based operating expenses. Carried to the extreme, some use economic events to cull their ranks of expensive talent, replacing them with new, 'more desperate' staff as the hiring market transitions -- think pro sports and the salary cap.

When times have been tough and you're at the front end of the ramp back up, companies may try to leverage your despair to undercut your salary negotiation position. The funny thing about this is that, while this approach may make sense on a by-the-numbers strategy, it overlooks the fact that 'human capital' is not equal to traditional corporate assets. A key factor in your performance is psychology. When was the last time an enterprise software or a manufacturing tool went through a period of reduced performance because it was sad, frustrated, or felt exploited?

This corporate strategy starts with the idea that anyone can be replaced with little overall difference in the operation of the business. Want to fall on your sword? Big deal, there are thousands of marketing pros out there, just waiting in line to take your underpaid, overworked place. It's the worker-turned-factory-production-equipment concept applied broadly across all parts of the business.

While it's easy to hate the 'exploiter' strategy, businesses can find a lot to like about it. The Exploiter mindset is often an institutionalized value. So even if you hate it, don't go in expecting it to change. Unless you're stepping into a senior executive role where you have the ability to shape culture, you're probably not going to be able to change it directly. For most exploited employees, change usually means finding work with a new, less exploitative employer. And for potential employees, that means that a focus of your new job will be looking for a new job.

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So what's the take-away from all of this? Back in this post that I wrote in July, I noted an article talking about recruiters looking for "soft candidates", candidates who already had a job and were less interested in changing jobs. To that end, keep in mind that whenever you get into negotiations for a new job, no matter how desperate your current situation feels and how good the new job looks -- always approach the deal with the idea that you can walk away, that there is another opportunity waiting just around the corner. Ultimately, there is only one you and whatever you sign on for is going to eat a big chunk of your life.

Mediocre Product Marketing Is Ruining Obama's Approval Rating

Continuing on the theme from my last post, I think it's important to recognize why we're not getting bold reform -- mediocre product marketing.

As a country, we didn't start out with the idea of a 'mediocre reform' product. During the ramp up of the election, there were a lot of promises made about making real reform. Since that time, the job of specifying the product and ironing out the details has fallen to our very own product marketing team, Congress. Acting like a consensus product team that's focused on making safe choices, Congress (with the aid of the White House) has gone the path of safe, uncontroversial features. And while we keep expecting Obama to step in like Steve Jobs, demanding innovation and insisting on a noteworthy product, instead he has chosen the passive management approach, determined to let the country sell what his Congressional product group has designed.

It's one of those great rules of marketing, compromises and safe product choices do not make extraordinary products. They don't engage and excite customers. They don't inspire passion.

Where's our Purple Cow?
Recent polls have also marked a decline in Obama's approval ratings. While conservative columnist David Brooks points to a decline in support from 'independent voters,' economist Paul Krugman writes about declining support among Obama's progressive base. Whatever your political point of view, the real takeaway from this is that nobody is passionate about compromise.

When the debate shifted from a discussion of principles and values, from a leadership discussion focused on the moral imperative of "the right solution" and the essence of the product to a discussion about compromise, a host of audiences instantly became unhappy. They knew that their interests were being sold out.

Instead of focusing on the essence of the design, our Congressional product marketing group is moving toward selling us a crappy product using a laundry list of non-essential features (look, it also has a calendar, a clock with seven different time zones, and an alarm with 148 different ring tones). This non-design approach to design, the feature creep / baffle-em with BS method, is why you get some of those products that are packed with features, but essentially unusable. It's also why Apple's iPhone, with it's 'one-button' interface marked such a design contrast to every smart phone that preceded it.

Crappy Product Marketing Meets Lack of Executive Sponsorship
Keeping everyone focused on the essence of the design starts with defining that core mission. Imagine, in the debate about health care reform, if the objective was defined more narrowly and more boldly. What if, instead of trying to patch the system, the objective was defined something like this: We believe that everyone in America has the right to essential health care and that maintaining the public health is a fundamental component of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Like "provide for the common defense", we are going to ensure that we provide for the common need for health care. By eliminating the costs and concerns of essential health care from individuals and businesses, we can build a better, stronger workforce, stronger companies, and a stronger country.

Perhaps, if we started with some core design goals, our Congressional product development teams could create a decent product and we might get some bold reform.

The Economic Downturn and The Recovery

When you're a marketing pro, you're always monitoring the ebb and flow of economic currents, markets and trends. Recently, there's been a lot of news coming out about promising economic indicators that seem to point to a possible end to the economic downturn. While we're all hopeful that the economy has turned around, one trend that hit my radar centered around news stories about people who are still struggling to find a job.

While the economists can debate whether the downturn has ended, how fast things might ramp back up, and where things are going from here, the job-struggle story fits in with something I've been thinking about lately. Politics? Perhaps, but I think it also touches on a couple of good Silicon Valley marketing themes.

Has there been any real change?
While the Economic Stimulus package focused on 'shovel-ready' infrastructure projects and the TARP bailout was an "all hands bail", throw-buckets-of-money-over-the-side in an effort to right the sinking financial industry, neither of these efforts focused on core transformation or revitalization.

During the past eight years, the government kept pushing the meme that Wall Street was profitable and therefore the economy was strong. For the Bush crew, job statistics were Yet Another Inconvenient Truth. While some may buy into the economy is great message, for most of us that work, the job market is one of our key economic indicators. There are a bunch of us out here in Silicon Valley who remember a time about ten years ago when it wasn't uncommon to have two or three companies fighting to hire you.

These days, the job boards tell a different story. Beyond the few opportunities, what's also telling is the kinds of opportunities that you see listed -- a lot of the openings are administrative positions, openings that may be there from turnover and consolidation. You don't see a lot of the types of positions that you'd associate with growth and new product development.

Reform Takes More that Duct Tape and Chewing Gum
While some may see the 'dot-com' bubble as a result of a land grab across the emerging Internet, the real driver behind all of the dot-com growth was free-flowing investment and the push to develop new opportunities. The build-out of the Internet -- that investment didn't simply represent web sites with sock puppets and pet food, it also included broadband networks, infrastructure, and all of the tools needed to build those next generation platforms.

And while a lot of the growth was written on bad paper that was funded by our retirement savings, the opening of a newly accessible market with broad reach spanning across a range of economic sectors -- network infrastructure, hardware, software, and even the potential for an average goomer to create a web-based business -- combined with some easy entry points and little personal risk for entrepreneurial failure meant the dot-com boom was big for everyone.

If you want to see another example of a new market opening up, look at what happened with Apple launched the iPhone application store. According to Apple, it now receives 8500 new applications and application upgrades every week for review -- and they've reviewed over 200,000 applications. That's over 200,000 entrepreneurial ventures.

Bold initiatives. Whether that means eliminating the risks in being an entrepreneur through programs like eliminating the fear of losing health care coverage or whether it means programs that open opportunities and markets (like a mandate to transform the nation's broadband network infrastructure, increasing bandwidth and making availability to everyone equivalent to lifeline phone service) are what we need. The goal shouldn't just be to bring the economy back to the point where it was at just before the banks started to fail, it should be to bring it back to a time jobs, investment and innovation were the norm.