"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." - Mark Twain
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
When Your Customers' Customers Sell For You
Yesterday, one of Gnip's (a social media company) sales people forwarded an excerpt from a prospect to our internal all-company alias. In it, the prospect was reaching out to us because their customers/prospects were asking that they use Gnip's services. This has happened several times over the past year or two, but the email reminded me of how important this moment is.
These customers of our prospect want reliability, sustainability, and full-coverage in social data, and they believe (correctly) that they can only get if the tools they are considering buying are using our stuff. So cool!
When your customers' customers demand that your product be used by them, you are winning. It's a moment in time when the value you have created is so pervasive, that downstream customers a) know you exist (a challenge for a "powered by" play) and b) want you being leveraged by the products they want to buy.
It took Gnip awhile (a few years at least) to get to this place, but, we're here (realistically have been for awhile now).
It feels so good.
Thanks for forwarding that along Tommy!
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Day In Pictures: Another (Awesome) Tuesday
Today was full of great interactions. The evolution of this "day in pictures" thing has been interesting. People are falling into a few categories (to be expected).
- People I know who are fine with their picture being taken (or at least tolerate it with a smile on).
- People I know who are growing weary of this thing I do. I'm trying to key into this and will eventually stop taking pics of them even though they're not able to tell me "no."
- People I know who have never been comfortable with me taking their picture. I still ask these folks anyway though... someday I'll get a picture!
- People I know who want me to take their picture with them throwing me the bird. I sometimes do this, but it just winds up looking silly and cliché, so I tend not to publish these. Sometimes it's cute though.
- People I don't know who are fine with it.
- People I don't know who are clearly not fine with it, but don't tell me "no." This is an interesting scenario. When it's _really_ clear they're not comfortable I come up with some gentle way of bowing out. When they're on the edge, I give them multiple opportunities to kindly tell me "no."
I always ask someone's permission before taking their picture.
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Tuesday meditation led by the one and only Shannon. Pic taken 30 seconds after a 20 minute sitting. Still dazed. |
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Greg runs Engineering at Gnip. Awesome spirit in this guy. 30 seconds after meditation. Still in the zone! |
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Anne writes software at Gnip. She joined us for meditation today. Giggly and still in the zone in this shot. |
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Josh immediately following meditation. He does science-y things on the dataz at Gnip. |
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Nick applies his big brain on the software engineering side of Gnip's house. Felt like we spent half the day together. |
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Anthony from our San Francisco office joined us for a huge partnership opportunity conversation. |
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Shannon M. writes software with Gnip. In this meeting we talked about pair-programming. She's a bright light with awesome energy. |
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Brooke is a fellow Nine Inch Nails fan. He and I are brothers from another lifetime. He writes software like he's on a mission from God. |
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Eric keeps the trains running on time. He's an engineering manager at Gnip. We somehow got him to put his keyboard down to help us herd cats, and everything is better as a result. |
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Spent at least half the day with Greg. Here he is carefully listening to Brooke talk about pair-programming, and how he's generally not a fan :). |
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Katie W. is figuring out how to help our customers be all they can be with Social Data. She's spearheading our training curriculum. |
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Becky at Amante Coffee who pulled my afternoon cappuccino together. |
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Longtime friend and colleague Scott H. He runs the Data Science house at Gnip and is someone I trust with anything. |
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Sam R. just moved to Boulder and he's helping us out with some perspective on high-volume streaming technology stacks. Smart kid with great energy. |
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Myatt with Goldman Sachs. He knows how money works. |
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Katie with Goldman Sachs. These two came up from Dallas to spend time with their Colorado folks. She knows how money works too. |
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The Kendra Current. Broke my body down at put it back together at the end of a long day. |
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Kyle couldn't settle into Jax so we went to where I eat nearly every other meal; Rio Grande. David here brought "the usual" over for dinner. |
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Kyle happy because we got food at Rio (his favorite). |
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Lizzie helped us at Kitchen Upstairs with digestifs. She's an artist. While everyone else thinks Kyle and I are a gay couple, she doesn't buy it even when we try to convince her we are. |
Labels:
photography
Thursday, January 2, 2014
Bridge
After years of driving by this mysteriously elaborate concrete bridge just off of Boulder Canyon (Highway 119), I finally had a chance to shoot it today. My good friend Kyle was willing to drive me down to it after skiing. Everything shot at 17mm with aperture around 5.6.
Labels:
photography
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