July 9 Meeting for Utah iPhone Developers
The Utah iPhone Developer Group has announced their next meeting. Here are the details. For those of you who are already working on iPhone apps, this is a great way to connect with the local iPhone developer community. If you are just getting started, or looking for resources to get your idea off the drawing board, come and interact with many of the leading app developers featured in iTunes. All are welcome.Join us for the 2nd Utah iPhone developers meetup.The first meeting was very well attended with over 60 people and standing room only.For this meeting we have gotten a much larger room so we can all fit more comfortably.DETAILS: Thursday July 9th at 6:30pm at the Technology Center at Novell, Building ‘A’We have two terrific presenters scheduled for this meeting. Each has outstanding experience with leading apps in iTunes. We’ll hear about marketing iPhone apps as well as a summary from the recent Apple Developer Conference. We’ll be discussing the new iPhone 3.0, 3Gs, and the latest APIs.
- Evhret Milam - Creator of Green Wars for iPhone and one of the top teams in the Omniture/BYU iPhone application contests.
- Michael Alvarez - Creator of Showtimes and Yellow Pages Directory and a few others. As you can see from his wall post they now have over 2 million downloads.
Big thanks to Zagg for providing food for this event and UVEF for the facilities.RSVP on Facebook. We look forward to seeing you all there.
GenSeekers Wanted
A few months ago I twittered about wanting to hire someone to travel for the next 365 days throughout North America for a special project (which is still in the works.) I even suggested the person may have to legally change their name, in the publicity-stunt spirit of Half.com, Oregon or DotCom Guy from Texas.
Within an hour or so I had 9 candidates who direct messaged me on Twitter or replied on Facebook wanting to learn more! This amazed me, and a few of them have reminded me over the past few months of their strong interest in such an adventure — an all-expense paid year of travel to every state, learning, blogging, meeting people, getting local publicity, doing deals.
As I said, this project is still in the planning stages, but we are now considering another project for a different division of our company that may also attract the interest of some adventurous retired couples or young couples who want to travel for a year and help us form partnerships all across the country.
I call this the GenSeeker Project.
GenSeek.com is a forthcoming website being built in partnership between FamilyLink.com and FamilySearch.org. It features a new version of the FamilySearch Catalog, and a myriad of social and Web 2.0 features that will enhance the usefulness of what is already the largest catalog of genealogy sources in the world.
There are millions of sources of genealogical and local history contest that have not yet been catalogued by the team in Salt Lake City. The new web site will enable libraries, archives and societies to add their unique content to the catalog, which will bring it to life in a new way and make more people aware of it for the first time.
But how shall we make libraries, archives, and societies all over the world aware of how GenSeek can help them bring awareness to their unique holdings?
While driving through Idaho and Montana last week, I stopped at a couple of small towns, checked out some historical sites and even tried to visit a pioneer museum. (It was closed.)
I love travelling to places I’ve never been before. And I realized, as I travelled, that in every town, city, and county across this country (and the world) there are interesting local historians and genealogists, librarians and archives in every location. Someone in every community feels a need to preserve and organize historical records.
In Sweden, there are nearly 2,000 local historical societies that preserve records. And from a population of 9MM people, there are 450,000 paying members of these local historical societies. That is 5% of the population. Astonishing really. But many families in these towns and villages have lived on the same land for centuries. Same is true of much of Europe.
With the western migration and the mobility of modernity, we don’t seem to develop such deep roots here in the U.S. But in the smaller communities we still do have roots. And individuals that are knowledgeabout about local history and genealogical records and are devoted to preserving them and providing access. Mostly these local history savants are probably old-timers with family ties to the area.
A lot of people live not too far from where they were born. (Source: FamilyLink survey, March 26, 2009)
How far do you live now from where you were born? (5071 responses)
- Less than 50 miles
- Less than a mile
- Less than 10 miles
- Less than 100 miles
- Between 100 and 1,000 miles
- More than 1,000 miles
I love driving to new places and meeting new people and discovering local history. I look up Wikipedia articles for virtually every place I visit (on my blackberry or iPhone) and am always excited to discover famous people or events, or in particular, entrepreneurs or inventors from these places. I love the stories that make local communities interesting.
If I had fewer responsibilities holding me back, I’d get a big kick out of getting in a car and driving for the next 365 days to visit interesting places. Someday, I think my wife and I will probably do something just like that. And if there’s a business model to support it, this kind of a road trip could last even longer.
So back to the GenSeeker Project.
What if we found some retired couples or other small teams who were willing to get in a car and travel for the next 365 days to thousands of communities across North America to meet with the genealogists, historians, archivists, and librarians in each community? What if they were armed with smart phones and smart applications that helped them find the right people to meet with in every community, and set up meetings as they went? And what if they had a group of people at company headquarters who helped them plan, communicate, document and publish things they learned along the way?
What if all the expenses were paid for by FamilyLink, including food, fuel and accomodations, and the autos were furnished as well?
Would we want one team, or two, or more?
Should we start by experimenting with a single couple/team for a month or two and see how it works out? Or should we jump in whole hog and recruit 3-4 teams and set them loose on this year-long historical and genealogical information-gathering expedition?
This project is also in the idea stage, but it is likely that if I start finding some interested participants, that we could start an experiment like this, for a month or two, as early as August or September.
So send me an email (PAUL AT FAMILYLINK.COM) if this sounds interesting. Please put GENSEEKER in the subject line, and make sure you explain the skills that you and your companion or team would have that would convince us to choose you to represent us (FamilyLink/GenSeek/WorldHistory.com) in hundreds of meetings with local groups across the U.S. as you immerse yourself in an historical travel adventure.
Utah Angel Investor of the Year
Filed under: Advice for Startups, Angel Investing, FundingUniverse, Utah Events
On Tuesday, June 23rd at the Hilton Hotel in Salt Lake City, FundingUniverse will be announcing the first ever Utah Angel Investor of the Year award winner.
The top 15 finalists for this award are Alan Hall, Craig Earnshaw, David Carter, Gary Williams, Hal Widlansky, JD Gardner, John Richards, Kent Thomas, Kyle Love, Mark Madsen, Martin Frey, Nobu Mutaguchi, Robert Kunz, Scott Frazier and Warren Osborn.
Having been a big fan of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards for many years, I think it is exciting that FundingUniverse is going upstream a little bit to recognize some of the many angel investors who help those entrepreneurs get businesses off the ground.
I personally appreciate several of these 15 angels because some of them were our early investors at Ancestry.com (back in 1998) and more recently in FamilyLink.com (2007-2009 funding rounds.)
I hope this becomes an annual event, and I hope it spreads nationwide too, because angel investors are the unsung heroes of our free market economy. VCs get a lot of attention because they back high-profile companies. But from what I’ve read, angels generally fund 30-50 times more startup companies per year than VCs, and they fund a ton of small businesses that never become high profile but do create jobs and add value to our economy.
Kudos to Brock Blake and his FundingUniverse team for launching this idea.
Hint to entrepreneurs: if you want some inexpensive networking time with Utah’s very best angel investors, I suggest you buy a ticket (it’s only $25 per seat) and show up Tuesday (with plenty of business cards for all!) 
SpeedRecruiting
A few years back, inspired by the book “Angel Investing,” we founded FundingUniverse.com and started holding SpeedPitching events–two hour events where about ten entrepreneurs could have a few minutes at small tables with 2-3 investors.
FundingUniverse SpeedPitching events have been successfully held in six states, and are held bi-monthly in Utah. They are very affordable for entrepreneurs and they are popular with angels and VCs because they get a little exposure to a lot of deals very quickly–and save them a lot of time.
Most investors will tell you that they know within a minute or two if they are interested in a deal. But most introductory meetings between entrepreneurs (who think everyone should love their idea and can talk about it passionately for a long time) and angels/VCs are half an hour at least. Often, they go a lot longer than that, because it’s hard to cut a meeting short without appearing to be rude.
Many investors have told me they love this approach to deal flow because it saves them time.
As an entrepreneur, given the stage that FamilyLink.com is at, raising capital is not taking up much time these days. What is taking up as much time as I can possibly give it is recruiting–finding candidates on LinkedIn, responding to candidates who find us, identifying needs for positions we need to create and fill, and then doing lots of phone and in person interviews.
I blogged early today about our plan to use a Billboard on I-15 to attract potential candidates here in Utah. But the more candidates that we get, the more time it takes to screen them, hold preliminary interviews, and then finally, get the top 3 or so candidates in face to face interviews with at least 5-6 hiring managers.
To streamline this process, what we really need to do is set up some kind of SpeedRecruiting event, where we can schedule 2 hours for all our top managers to meet with maybe two dozen or more potential recruits in a rapid-fire format. Each manager can have a prepared list of questions they want to ask each prospective employee. (It’s probably a good idea to ask the same questions each time to fairly assess the candidates for any given position.)
The goal of SpeedRecruiting would be to filter out candidates who aren’t nearly as impressive in person as their resumes suggest, and to identify top prospects for in-depth interviews with key hiring managers.
I can already see several potential flaws in this approach, but I’d like to know what other fast growing companies have done to speed up the recruiting process without ending up hiring employees that don’t end up as valuable contributors. Hiring too fast almost always ends in regret.
Have you seen any best-practices in this regard?
Help, we need suggestions here!
Recruiting with Billboards
Filed under: Billboards, FamilyLink.com, Recruiting, Utah Jobs
Several of the best Utah high-tech companies have billboards along the I-15 corridor from Provo to Salt Lake City that are focused on recruiting. I recall billboards from Omniture, Mozy, Property Solutions, The Generations Network, Orange Soda, and Doba. I’m sure there are others as well that I just don’t recall. I’m wondering if Move Networks has used billboards–but I can’t recall.
Omniture can afford to creating an ongoing serious of recruiting billboards–most of them with messages that only hard-core developers would get. But more recently they’ve mainstreamed their recruiting message with interesting billboards like “We need more Dougs” or “We need more Kates.” They followed that up with a “We have too many Mikes” billboard and then more recently, a “just kidding Mike” message, though I can’t recall the actual wording. They are definitely the 800 lb gorilla in Utah recruiting and billboards seem to play a big part of that.
Mozy’s billboard talks about afternoon meetings (probably for the developers who like to work late and sleep late) and announces they have a Ninja-friendly workplace.
Property Solutions is always looking for top PHP programmers, but their latest billboard announces a run for the cure for Rabies. When you go to the Rabies web site, you do see a “We’re Hiring” link and they do have several open positions. I really like the design of their recruiting pages.
The Generations Network has billboards that focus on it’s “one million subscribers and counting” message, but I can’t recall if it is explicity a recruiting billboard or not.
There is an excellent billboard from APX, I believe, that says “Change your Facebook Status to EMPLOYED” and says they are hiring 85 internal sales people. Very eye-grabbing. Great message.
Does anyone at any of these companies know how important the billboards are in actually filling jobs? I would love to have reader comments about the use of billboards for recruiting. I assume these companies find the billboards a good investment, because they continue them month after month and year after year.
I decided yesterday that it is time for FamilyLink.com to try a recruiting billboard on I-15. I’ve asked our marketing department to put together some ideas for this.
It might be nice to combine a key message about our growth, with an explicit recruitment message. For example, we have more than 40MM users of our Facebook application, and we are nearing the top 100 of all US web properties based on unique monthly visitors. More importantly, we are profitable and will be filling at least 20 positions in the next several months, although only about 10 of the job openings are currently listed on our corporate web site.
What are your favorite recruiting billboards?
What suggestions would you have for FamilyLink.com? Most people have never heard of us, though about 1 of every 6 Facebook users uses our application. The app itself is called “We’re Related,” so most people haven’t heard of FamilyLink.com.
What is the best recruiting call to action you have seen to attract interest in a company?
I’d love to hear your ideas.
Brainstorm Breakfast for Entrepreneurs in Rexburg, Idaho
I worked this week in Missoula, Montana where my brother and his family live. On my way home, through Idaho, I decided to stop in Rexburg, the home of BYU-Idaho, and do some networking with entrepreneurs here.
In the tradition of the old Provo Labs Brainstorm Lunches (nick-named Twinkie Talks because the restaurant we ate at gave us all twinkies) I am holding a Brainstorm Breakfast at Joe’s Filling Station (diner) at 727 North 2nd East in Rexburg.
So far, 4 entrepreneurs have RSVPd with a couple others who hope to come, but I think we can handle 8-10 without disturbing the restaurant too much.
The way it works is this: everyone gets a chance to talk about their business, and share their #1 problem that they want help with or advice about. Then each person at the table gets to make suggestions, if they have any, about that particular problem. So it’s a very open format. Every time I’ve done it, I’ve learned a ton, and had the chance to share some things I consider important too.
If I recall, the idea was originally inspired by the book, “Never Eat Alone.” I used to do these often when I was running the Provo Labs incubator, but since leaving that to focus 100% on FamilyLink.com I haven’t held any. But I think I’m ready to start them up again, partly because these always lead to possible hiring opportunities or business development opportunities.
So…if you are in Rexburg, and want to join us at 9 am, please RSVP by emailing me tonight or tomorrow. PAUL AT FAMILYLINK.COM or DM me on www.twitter.com/paulballen
To Blog or Not To Blog
So I’m definitely not unique in thinking this thought or typing this phrase. Searching Google yields 257,000 pages that contain the phrase “To Blog or Not To Blog.” So clearly a plethora of deep thinkers have pondered this question.
But the reason I am pondering whether to blog and how often strikes me as somewhat unique. So I decided to share my thinking and see if other entrepreneurs out there have dealt with a similar problem. I’d like to know how others have overcome the stumbling blocks to blogging.
First some background. I started blogging in November 2003, inspired by Phil Windley of Technometria fame. I blogged actively for years, usually several times a week. My primary topic was internet entrepreneurship and internet marketing. I was also in incubator mode, looking for new ideas to turn into businesses.
I sometimes blogged about things I knew a great deal about, from experience, and shared key things I had learned, particularly at Ancestry.com/MyFamily.com from 1996-2002, where my friends and I had built a highly successful venture-funded profitable dot com company, but had also experienced many of the disappointments of entrepreneurs who get caught in an economic downturn or bad business cycle.
I often blogged about new technologies and ideas that I had discovered but hadn’t tried yet, and I wanted to ask the blogosphere to comment on what they knew about them. I often remarked that blogging made me a better thinker and writer, but also made me much smarter because the community knew a lot more about most things than I did, and I would often get responses within 24 hours that changed the way I was approaching a new technology or an opportunity.
In the pre-Twitter era, I felt blogging kept me in touch better than any other way with the outside world, with employees, partners, and investors. In June 2005 I blogged that All CEOs Should Blog, because I felt it had helped me so much with open two-way communication that I found invaluable.
My most famous post of all-time was my prediction on the day of the Facebook Platform launch that “Facebook will be the largest social network in the world.” My enthusiasm was unbridled and I compared Mark Zuckerberg’s influence on the world to that of another 23-year old, Alexander the Great. That was a fun post. I couldn’t sleep until I had fully communicated my feelings about the biggest opportunity for internet entrepreneurs that I had ever seen.
Since then, Facebook has dwarfed MySpace in usage, and is the worldwide leader in social networking, with the possible exception of the Chinese social network QZone, which I don’t know very much about.
Thankfully my FamilyLink.com team and I drank the Facebook koolaid deeply, and have become in the past 2 years one of the top 10 Facebook developers in the world, with more than 40 million users of our We’re Related application and with many more exciting Facebook applications in the works.
We have become very profitable in the past 6 months, with monthly profit margins recently exceeding 20-30%. Our cash balance has more than doubled since January. We are building a world-class team of architects, designers, and developers. We have a full-time recruiter and are trying to add another 10-20 full time employees. We are closer to launching our flagship web sites, as well as greatly improved social and mobile applications. We are focused on family, genealogy, and history applications and content.
We are now starting to help other top Facebook application developers monetize their apps better, with our expert team at AdMazing.com, a division of FamilyLink.com.
So here is my problem:
When we were an underfunded startup, trying to create something out of nothing, trying to bootstrap our way to some kind of initial success, I found that blogging was just about the best way to tell the world what we were trying to accomplish. The more I blogged about new ideas, and possible strategies, and goals that we had, and technologies that we were exploring, the more helpful feedback I got from my readers, and the more I found like-minded people who could potentially become employees or business partners. In fact, many of our early employees and partners at FamilyLink.com (and WorldVitalRecords.com) were initially attracted to the business because of my PaulAllen.net blog.
I never specifically targeted investors in my blog posts, but I knew that dozens of my Utah business angel friends would occasionally read some of my posts, so they could see what we were up to.
I could easily write a blog post called “All Startup CEOs should Blog” because I personally found immense value by connecting with readers as a result of my blog. It may have been my most valuable recruiting tool, business development tool (I signed agreements with companies all over the world as a result of their feeling they knew me through my blog), and fund-raising tool–though I didn’t specifically use it for that purpose.
But how times have changed.
Now I find myself having dozens of important conversations about new ideas and new technologies and not wanting to blog about any of them. Our team is moving more quickly than any team I’ve worked with in the past. And our key metrics are all improving dramatically. And all the new ideas and technologies we are considering feel very proprietary to us. The last thing I want to do these days is to blog about our next big idea, or about the new technology we are using to gain a competitive advantage, or about tools we are building or using internally that make us more nimble.
I feel like I was in Startup Mode for several years trying to get all the attention I could from anyone who would listen, and now that our strategy is working, I’m feeling a need to switch to Stealth Mode — and that seems odd, because most Stealth Mode operations are early stage startups.
Expanding to the Bay Area
In fact, I really need to blog regularly, since we are considering opening an office in the Bay Area, closer to Google, Facebook and Apple, where we may recruit nearly 10 developers for our social and mobile applications. That is a big deal for us, and I know blogging regularly will help us with recruiting more than anything else I can do. (Next to my readers in Utah, I have more blog readers — and friends — in California than in any other location.)
Bottom line: I don’t have a blogging strategy at the moment, which means I post very rarely and get little value back from the community. I’ve never been in Stealth Mode before. And I’m wondering if I’m entering a dangerous world where success means less openness and less sharing, and therefore less value gained back in return.
So please, if you’ve found yourself in a similar quandry, please tell me what you did to get out of it. Did you stop blogging altogether? Or did you modify your purpose in blogging, and find success in another way? Or did you force yourself to continue blogging openly about things that might be considered proprietary because the advantages of opennness outweighed the negatives?
I’ve noticed that the blog by entrepreneurial legend Marc Andreesen has been on hiatus since August 2008 while Mark Cuban continues his prolific blogging. Why do some entrepreneurs continue blogging while others stop?
I need some help here. I’d like to start up again with a daily blog post or two, but I can’t muster the motivation or overcome the negatives to blogging at this stage in the game. Especially when it is so easy to Twitter a few times a day with little effort at all. But then again, I’m finding myself wanting to Twitter less and less, for similar reasons.
Any comments would be very welcome. (Especially from Phil Windley and other blogging pioneers/legends.)
Who Do You Know That Knows A Member of Congress?
I belong to a small non-partisan group called Americans Against Exotic Derivatives (AAXED). Our primary goal is to educate our elected representatives in Washington, D.C., about the conditions that led to the global financial melt-down.
Our first project is to get a copy of a very important book in the hands of all 535 members of Congress. The book “Infectious Greed” published by Frank Partnoy in 2003 documents all the major derivatives-related financial crises since the 1980s, and predicted (5 years before it happened) more and bigger financial meltdowns if the regulatory system didn’t change.
Frank Partnoy is a former derivatives trader, who teaches law at San Diego State University. He has appeared on NPR twice this year, and writes many articles and columns for publications such as the New York Times and Financial Times. I want our lawmakers, who create and oversee the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect consumers and taxpayers against fraud and foolery in the markets, to learn what Frank Partnoy knows.
For example, Frank documents how a .25% increase in interest rates in 1994 by the Federal Reserve led to the bankruptcy of Orange County within a year. Orange County’s 70-year old treasurer Robert Citron had been using exotic derivatives (highly leveraged bets that interest rates would NOT go up) to generate the highest returns of any US county treasury for years. But as soon as .25% interest rate hit, Orange County lost that bet, and lost billions of dollars, which led to bankruptcy.
What happened to Orange County has now happened in one degree or another to hundreds or thousands of banks, corporates, and purchasers of “mortgage-backed securities” and other derivatives products. In addition, there are currently $57 trillion dollars in outstanding “credit default swaps”–another derivative product–that mean that some people profit big when companies like GM go bankrupt. So more collapses of more large corporations are sure to happen. Large players with huge incentives for one outcome or another have ways and means to influence things going their way. Manipulation of markets (and even national currencies) happened in the 20s and 30s and happens all the time today–on a small and large scale. It’s a free-for-all right now.
The international banking system has become a Las Vegas-style casino, where traders sells big bets to corporations, banks, insurance companies, pension funds, private equity funds, and hedge funds, who all want to make big bets on interest rates, currencies, markets, and all kinds of other variables, so they can get the higher-than-average returns that everyone wants. This is all about greed.
Meanwhile, our elected representatives in Washington DC (who don’t understand precisely how bankers and traders make such obsene profits from derivatives but receive huge campaign donations from the financial lobby to maintain the status quo) basically allowed the lobbyists from the finance sector to write the laws that deregulated all this stuff. The International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) in particular had a major hand in actually writing the legislation that allows for hundreds of trillions of dollars of OTC derivatives to go completely unregulated by any federal or state agencies.
Partnoy’s books and articles document all of this very clearly. His personal website links to much of his work.
I want my elected representatives to understand how laws and regulations can prevent future economic meltdowns. Regulations can prevent bankers and traders from creating and selling exotic derivatives and structured financial products that claim higher-than-average returns and lower-than-average risk but in reality create massive global systemic risk.
The Obama administration is now talking about some regulatory reform that could reduce the risk of a future global meltdown, but may not be going far enough. Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett’s straight-talking partner of 44 years) says the financial industry will unleash an “awesome” lobby effort to stop any real reform. Munger says we should ban 100% of the kinds of derivatives that led to the recent collapse.
The banking sector, whose profits over the past several years have been obsene as they have created and sold hundreds of trillions of over-the-counter derivatives to buyers world-wide, does NOT want regulatory reform to stop them or slow them down in any way. They like their billions of dollars in profits and millions of dollars in personal bonuses that come as Wall Street “quants” invent new structured financial products that promise high returns with low risks, but in reality created hidden “toxic assets” that eventually come back to bite.
We need your help. We are trying to get a copy of “Infectious Greed” (2003) by Frank Partnoy in the hands of every member of Congress by the end of June.
But we don’t want to just send 535 copies to Washington, D.C. Instead, we want an actual constituent in each congressional district, preferrably someone with serious business or finance experience and credibility to hand deliver a copy of the book (and an accompanying quick reference guide) to their elected representative in person. Preferrably while they are in their home state–and not while they are in Washington, DC.
We want to make sure that members of Congress take this seriously, and either read this book personally or assign a senior staffer to do so. Frank Partnoy spends a lot of his time in Washington trying to explain all these complex financial and regulatory issues to staffers in Congressional offices–but we need more help.
I have heard from both bankers and legislative offices, “You must be one of only a handful of non-bankers in Utah that understand this stuff.” That is very scary to hear. I’m new to all this stuff. I first heard Warren Buffett warn about derivatives in 2005, but I didn’t start studying them in depth until last September. It is clear to me that if we don’t get enough of the general populous to understand how derivatives and structured financial products benefit traders and bankers while creating massive systemic risk (which puts taxpayers at risk for future bailouts and everyone at risk for future currency devaluation through inflation) and if we don’t get enough of our representatives to understand how they can prevent the markets from incenting traders to gamble with billions of dollars for short term personal gain, then we will be doomed to repeat history. The next global economic collapse will be years away, and it will be even bigger next time.
We need to find capable people with clout in every Congressional district in the country, who will at least hand deliver important scholarship to those in governing roles in our country, or will at most, personally spend time getting involved in researching the topic of derivatives and financial regulation and educating others.
We are looking for the following:
- More citizens to join Americans Against Exotic Derivatives (AAXED) –which is right now just a group on Facebook.
- Volunteers to help us identify business leaders in every congressional district who are interested in helping. We are using LinkedIn.com to find potential helpers in each district and are tracking all the congressional districts using a shared Google spreadsheet.
- A web site developer to turn the Facebook group and the Google doc into an interactive Web site, where people can join and get involved. We want people to be to tell us what congressional district they live in, and how they are connected to their congressional representative. (Who they know in congress, or who they know who knows someone in congress.)
- Donations to purchase more copies of “Infectious Greed.” We have about 30 copies already. (We don’t have a way to accept donations yet, but we can set that up quickly if someone wants to provide funds. It may be better just for people to buy the books and send them to us.)
- An editor to produce the Quick Reference Guide to Infectious Greed. We’ve already identified about 200-300 important passages that we want to capture, along with page numbers. We need someone to review this list, edit it, improve it, and lay it out into a simple card that can accompany the book.
- A volunteer to run a Twitter account where we will be tracking the discussion worldwide about derivatives and derivatives legislation. Since 117 members of Congress already use Twitter (or have a staffer that uses Twitter), we are confident that we can use Twitter (in addition to LinkedIn) to find people who are credible and connected to their representatives.
- Volunteers to maintain the Crashopedia website, which attempts to track the causes of the global financial meltdown, as well as efforts to regulate the derivatives industry, in order to prevent future collapses.
I understand that getting volunteers to organize a citizen lobby in such an esoteric subject area as derivatives regulation is nearly impossible. It’s not like recruiting a million people to protect their Second Amendment rights or to protest tax increases. The financial industry makes derivatives intentional complex, so that only insiders can understand how they work and what things mean. There are dozens of acronyms to describe the financial products that traders have been selling over the years–CBOs, SPEs, CDOs, CMOs, SIVs, CDSs, MBS, RBS, and many more. There are multiple regulatory agencies and government offices that average people don’t understand–the SEC, CTFC, GAO, CoC, OTS, etc.
And there are investment banks, holding banks, hedge funds, private equity funds, online clearing houses, exchanges, and millions of over-the-counter transactions that represent hundreds of trillions of dollars of “notional” value.
You need a college degree in finance, or experience on Wall Street, or hundreds of hours devoted to studying this topic to begin to get a sense of how dangerous and powerful unregulated derivatives are. Read the Wikipedia article on financial derivatives just to get a glimpse of how little you currently know about them–even though they are the biggest market in the world right now. By 2007 the Bank of International Settlements, which tracks the global derivatives industry said the total outstanding bets in this market were more than half a quadrillion dollars. A year later, they had grown by $167 trillion dollars — in just one year! This is absurd, to let the global financial system be completely dominated by derivatives bets. But “thar was gold in them thar hills” and still is, until something is done to stop this madness.
So it’s not easy to interest anyone in joining a citizen lobby for something like this. And it’s not easy to get members of Congress up to speed on these issues so that they can make legislative reform in this area a high priority for them. (Imagine how hard it might be for a member of Congress to find time to read or study a book. They don’t even have time to read the bills that they vote on.) Constituents will give them much more credit for getting an ear-mark stuffed into a spending bill that brings a new bridge or dam or highway to their home state. So they focus on what will get them re-elected, rather than on what the country (and world) needs most.
But even though it won’t be easy to get this done, we will try anyway, and hope to make a small contribution by trying to get the best articles and books on this subject in the hands of more people, particularly our representatives in Washington.
Please consider joining this effort. And if you use Twitter, please retweet my tweet about this blog post. You can find it at http://www.twitter.com/paulballen
First Utah iPhone Developers Meetup
Filed under: Mobile Phones, Utah Entrepreneurship, Utah Events
Last year I started a Facebook group for Utah iPhone developers. The group now has 146 members. Recently, Cary Snowden (of CrunchLunch fame) and Brad Hintze jumped in to help run the group, and they have actually started organizing real world (hopefully monthly) meetings for this group.
The first meetup will be at Novell (building A) on Wednesday, May 13th, from 6-8 pm. To RSVP, or for more details, click here.
With 12 teams of BYU students recently launching iPhone applications at the Omniture-sponsored competition there, and with recent BYU and UVU conferences on mobile development, there is a ton of local interest in iPhone development. iPhone 3.0 will absolutely change all the rules of the game, and give Apple an even greater leadership position in mobile computing than they already have.
This is the mobile computing platform that will transform industries. It’s a great opportunity for entrepreneurs. Whoever jumps on board early, will have a chance to shape/disrupt whatever industry they are in. You have an opportunity to catch this massive wave, and it’s not too late because iPhone 3.0 is still coming, and it provides more business model opportunities than ever before.
I won’t be able to attend, but I’m hoping that Ryan Hatch and others from FamilyLink.com who are working on our mobile applications will be there to network.
FamilyLink.com is hiring
We have several open positions at FamilyLink.com, and I’ve decided to blog about them in hopes that it will increase our pool of potential candidates and educate potential candidates on our hiring process–particularly our use of trust networks to vet candidates. If you are interested, or know someone who is, please refer them to our job listings at our corporate web site, or email paul AT familylink.com.
As background, FamilyLink.com is the developer of We’re Related, a top 5 Facebook application, with 37 million users. We also run web sites including WorldVitalRecords.com, WorldHistory.com, and will be launching GenSeek.com and FamilyLink.com in the coming weeks. We also run AdMazing.com, a niche advertising network with a family history focus. And our first iPhone applications will soon be approved for the App Store. We rank in the top 150 of all web properties in overall traffic according to Quantcast, are venture and angel-backed and cash-flow positive. We have nearly 50 employees and full-time contractors, including many that work in our Provo, Utah headquarters, and many that work remotely (California, Colorado, Seattle, overseas.)
For all key positions we try to use our LinkedIn networks. We reach out to 50-200 colleagues we trust and ask, “who do you know that is the best [job title here] you have ever worked with?” Then we actively try to recruit the top candidates that are referred to by our trusted sources. Internally, we like to ask, “Would Google hire this person?” (I mean, if the economy was good) because we are really looking for world-class talent. Like Google, we want to find smart people who get things done.
If we don’t get the right referral for a position by pro-actively querying our trust network, then we do accept applications via our corporate site, or through email. But in this case, our policy is to take a “try before you buy” approach — meaning, we will hire the top candidate as a contractor for a short-term project, to see how well they perform and how well they work with our existing team. We think this helps both parties determine if the fit is a good one.
We have a number of key positions that we are trying to fill right now, including an HR manager / recruiter, that will increase our ability to hire the rest of the positions more quickly. We already have some good candidates for some of these positions, and are working through the interviewing process, but none of these spots have been filled yet (and some haven’t even been posted to our web site.)
- HR Manager / Recruiter
- Usability Manager
- QA Manager (listed as Software Test Manager on corporate web site)
- Front end / HTML developers
- Product Manager for genealogy properties
- Controller
- Chief Genealogy Officer
- Content Licensing Managers (4-5 open positions)
- Project Manager / assistant to Chief Social Officer
- Twitter Interns (4-5 full time or part time summer openings)
- Outbound sales consultants
- Business Development / Marketing manager
In the coming weeks, we may be adding these positions to our corporate site, but if the right candidate emerges sooner rather than later, we will definitely jump:
- VP of Online Advertising Sales (should probably be located in NYC or west coast)
- Product managers for social applications/features
- Localization manager (for apps and web sites)
- Online Advertising Sales Managers
- Mobile developers (iPhone, Google Android, other platforms)
- Mobile product manager
- Product manager, WorldHistory.com
- Lead developer for genealogy properties
- Market research / internal survey manager
- User Interface Designer (reporting to current lead designer)
- Affiliate marketing manager (for WorldVitalRecords)
- Content Digitization Manager
If you want to apply for any of these positions, please make sure you have enough endorsements in LinkedIn that we know you are qualified and experienced in the position you are applying for.
Treat applying to work at FamilyLink.com the way entrepreneurs are told to treat approaching a venture capitalist. Almost all VCs exclusively look at deals that are recommended to them by people they already trust, including existing portfolio companies. VCs don’t have time to look at thousands of business plans that might be submitted “over the transom.”
Likewise, it is so important for us to build a world class team, that we often don’t have time to look at the dozens or hundreds of applicants that we might be able to find from posting job advertisements everywhere or scouring resume databases. What we need is for our trust network to tell us that you are a top candidate for a particular position. If someone we trust vouches for you, then we will put you through a series of interviews, where usually 5 or more of our existing employees meet with you to determine the fit.
We have an energetic, fast-paced, innovative culture, and we are on the cutting edge of application development on social networks and mobile platforms. We believe in investing in our people, including providing them with great equipment and sending them to many conferences and industry events for ongoing training and networking.
We hope to build a company that becomes one of the great places to work in Utah, with offices and remote employees in other locations as needed. For example, I’m trying to convince one or more of our developers to move to Silicon Valley so we can be closer to our friends at Facebook. I’d like to hire a VP of Ad Sales in New York City or possible San Francisco. We would consider hiring some of our genealogy team members to work in Washington, DC, and possible in 1-2 international locations — yet to be determined.
If you are interested in joining our fast-growing company, please help us find you by tapping into our trust networks and giving us sufficient social proof that you are right for us, that it makes the hiring decision easy. Or if you are an independent contractor or work for a company that could provide some of the services we need through outsourcing rather than hiring, please give us similar social proof from people we trust that we ought to hire your firm rather than fill some of these employee spots. We look forward to hearing from you.
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