A blog about big ideas and incremental progress from Tristan Harris.

I was watching an amazing talk last night about leadership from Benjamin Zander, an English classical music conductor.  He has the most inspiring way of talking about leadership. To think like a leader, you always have to speak about a goal as if there is no doubt in your mind.  If you want to put a PC on every desk and classroom in the world, then you need to believe it. That’s how you move from a naïve idea, to building one of the world’s largest multi-billion dollar companies.

Watch Benjamin’s TED talk below and you’ll see what I mean. 

 
Also, be sure to listen to the Chopin piece he plays in the video. I’m going to use Apture to link it up for you so you can listen to it separately and even see the song and the composer’s history. Isn’t empathy great?

I’m even going to include the sheet music:

{ 2 comments }

This is a favorite video of mine.  I still hold myself to this philosophy even after three years since I first saw Steve Jobs‘ commencement speech.  Even if you’ve seen this video before or heard the speech, watch it again.

When I worked at Apple several years ago, I’d see Steve walk into his design review meeting every Monday just a few doors down from my office.  As often as I saw him, I never got a chance to speak to him about his speech, but I always admired it.  The man is terrifying to his employees for the perfection he demands and the asshole he can be about his opinion. But you have to respect him for the ridiculously high standards he holds for the products Apple creates.  I’m sure there’s nicer, more respectful and polite ways of managing teams and inspiring to do their best, but I can also see how the absolute best is still beyond what most people consider “good enough” and  Steve consistently pushes things farther.  

What’s interesting at Apture is how we as a startup with only a few youthful engineers and one product designer can hold ourselves to the same bars of quality.  It’s one thing to have more than ten thousand employees, employ some of the best graphic and interaction designers in the world and pay them more than $100k salaries – but it’s another thing to take a tiny group of people of 4-5, pay yourselves light salaries, and accomplish comparably beautiful and functional products that exceed people’s expectations.  We also do this not only for our product’s success – but to help communicate Apture’s culture.  In our case, we hope to communicate how much we care about design.  

At Apture we’ve spent hours and hours replaying the animation functions we use, stressing out over the gradients in Apture’s windows, the colors we use in the product, and the multiple revisions of the interaction flow in the Media Hub.  It’s endless.  We probably spend too much time on this.  But we care about every pixel and every time slice.  It also costs us too.

As a startup, how do you balance your limited resources with your effort to inject your products with the same levels of detail users see in the most popular commercial products? Assuming your resources simply can’t compete of larger companies like Apple or IDEO, then you can’t possibly win.  Given the impossible tradeoffs of tight deadlines, how do you prioritize a pixel over a launch date?  Or a launch date over shaving off three seconds in your product’s responsiveness?  Obviously you have to quantify the value of the outcome of each decision, and then triage.. We have our own method, but I’d love to hear yours.

{ 1 comment }

Wonderful video about Pixar’s hiring strategy and how you should hire “Interested” but not necessarily “Interesting” people.  I really agree.  The candidates you want should be fidgeting in their chair with how excited they are about their ideas, and proven that they have the focus to master something, anything, with the required level of discipline:

{ 0 comments }

The purpose of this blog is to share some of my experiences, advice and philosophies with other entrepreneurs, friends, and the curious who find it useful or interesting – particularly stemming from my experience starting Apture.  

I’ll also share personal thoughts and experiences from time to time, varying between anything from existential philosophy, entrepreneurship, the semantic web, digital media, new findings in research psychology, to interesting music, dance and art. I am naturally an integrator.  I love taking ideas from different fields and finding the common, emergent patterns weaved consistently through our day to day experience that seem to resemble truths… it’s very meta so bear with me.  For those of you who know me, you’ll also know that I dash between different ideas a lot, like a seemingly odd ADD kid, but when I do, it will be with purpose and reason.

I have a hard time separating my professional life from my personal life, so this blog will encompass a mixture of both.  This is because for me, work is a very personal thing.  l talk a lot more about this in the coming posts, but as Steve Jobs once said, “the only way to do your best work is to absolutely love what you do.”  And in Silicon Valley, you need to be producing your best work to succeed, which means you better as hell love what you do.  Needing to love what you do inevitably makes your work a very personal thing, and I take pride in the deep emotional attachment I have to my work.  I also think our personal lives, inadequacies, strengths and friend and family relationships possess a tremendously underestimated influence over our work.  Supposedly, Max Levchin (CEO and Founder of Slide)  is obsessed with success to compensate for the fact that he never learned how to ride a bike.  Others because they have something to prove to their mom and dad. I would bet that most entrepreneurs in general have something to prove, and it’s most often personal.  I will happily share my thoughts about the personal life/work life interplay too.

In Silicon Valley, taking a company from seed of an idea to a large successful business is incomprehensibly hard work to most people who haven’t tried it. There are thousands of things to learn and you’re drinking from a firehouse all at once.  There are many things I wish I knew before I started.  From learning how to manage teams, delegation of work, technical decisions, the value of relationships and networks, people, persuasion, hiring and firing, creating legal frameworks, the typography of a logo and a brand, and even mundane things like how the spatial arrangement of office furniture affects the internal culture of a company – in this blog, I’ll do my best to share what I’ve learned along the way, and welcome any comments you have as well.  

One of the best things about blogging is the ability to involve other people. Until now the only way people could participate on blogs was by commenting.  

As an experiment, I’m going to try something completely new: I’m going to let other people use Apture to annotate my blog.  

This is a first. That means that anyone who has access can expand on my ideas, link up words on the page, or even link up the existing Apture windows that I’ve linked to additional content. If you email me and promise not to annotate my blog with inappropriate content, I’ll add you to the list of Apture Site Editors for my blog.  This is a first in the history of web annotation tools, since my blog is not collaborative like a wiki, but this lets me safely spell out and preserve my voice, while letting you layer over your take. I’m looking forward to see what happens.

Tristan

January 26, 2009

{ 3 comments }