Productivity & Process

Does your day ever look like this?

Mine does. I find that I often hit the ground running Monday. Filling up the entire day with getting things done. But by the time Tuesday rolls around I'm bogged down by a double whammy of less enthusiasm and less to do. Things take time to process - designer need to design things, writers need to write things, and so forth. I'm left twiddling my thumbs or Facebook stalking.

I now realize that this is because I am spending way too much time behind the desk. My extensive traveling so far this year has opened my eyes to the effectiveness we gain by meeting people face to face. So I am making a New Quarter Resolution. For the second quarter the TaskUs and Smarter Social Media team will be spending less time behind the desk and more time outside. More events, more drinks and more time to wander around. I've met some of my best clients and connections doing things totally unrelated to business. So that'll be an essential part of this philosophy.

We are still a fledgling business so if this strategy fails we are toast. But I think we risk more by staying stagnant.

Hyatt & TaskUs

Yesterday we announced a major sweepstakes in partnership with Hyatt Place. In recognition of the millions of overworked, road warriors, struggling to balance work life and personal life, TaskUs teamed up with Hyatt Place to give back.

For those of you who don't know Hyatt Place is the hotel for entrepreneurs and business people. They offer free wifi through out the entire hotel, 42 inch plasmas in every room and a 24/7 coffee bar stocked with snacks and goodies to eat on the run. If you read this blog you know that TaskUs is the premium virtual assistant service.

Together Hyatt and TaskUs are offering 20 winners a two night stay at the Hyatt Place of their choosing and 30 hours of free personal assistant service. All you have to do to enter is head on over to Hyatt Place Helps and fill out the form.

Happy tasking!

Cyborg Inc.

During the process of rapidly growing TaskUs to over 100 employees, Jed jokingly said "I'm starting to feel like a cyborg!" I passed it off as a funny, over dramatic joke. But lately, I have been hearing that word a lot in articles covering the Service-on-Demand market. Technology has advanced to such an extent that many things previously preformed by people in high paid professions are now being preformed by computers. But some of the most advanced processes still lack 100% accuracy when done by machine so a human must intervene at various stages in the process. The current Service-on-Demand is neither a labor market, nor a technology market. It exists at the intersection of the two. Simply put its a Cyborg market.

The three biggest Cyborg services are translation, transcription and sentiment scoring. Each of these services can be completed by sophisticated algorithms, algorithims that are improving daily, but are far from 100% accurate. On one side of the spectrum rest Pure Technology Solutions. Think Google Translate, Google Voice or TweetFeel. Each of these solutions is 100% automated and therefore (a lot) less than 100% correct. Have you ever read a webpage translated by Google, or seen a voicemail transcribed by their automated solution. Check out these examples:

One would think that 140 character tweets would be easy for a computer to score as positive or negative, but a close look shows that context is essential. If I say, "Inglorious Basterds was sick!" I mean it was a fantastic film (POSITIVE). If my mum says the same thing she means it was gratuitously violent and difficult to watch (NEGATIVE).

At the other end of the market are Pure Service Solutions. These consist of online translation services that charge $0.10 to $0.25 per word, depending on the amount of checking and editing required. Firms like Trusted Translations and Applied Lanaguages are good examples. In the transcriptions industry firms like VerbaLink and GMR offer 100% human transcripts for $1.50 to $4.00 per audio minute depending on the number of speakers and clarity of the audio. Finally, high-end sentiment solutions are availible from Neilsen BuzzMetrics, Visible Technologies and Wird Sentiment all of which charge $5,000 to $10,000 per month for comprehensive sentiment scoring for a particular brand.

In between is the avant-garde of Service-on-Demand - Cyborg Solutions. At their best these are symbiotic solutions in which technology improves the efficiency of labor, and labor improves the accuracy of technology. My friend Jamie's company Phonetag is a great example. Their voice-to-text algorithm is more accurate than Google's! Yet, unlike Google, they charge their customers for voicemail transcription so they have to have humans go in and clean up the results assuring (almost) perfect accuracy. Humans have also been used to improve the results of automated webpage translation. There are paid services like Smartling. But more interestingly their are armies of translator volunteers helping to translate huge sites like the Economist and Facebook. Again these people piggy back off of algorithmic translation to improve efficiencies. Finally most reputable auto-sentiment solutions like TweetFeel Pro and Radian6 offer the ability for humans to rescore results. A few of these companies are also thinking of offering a hybrid model in which automated sentiment scores are cleaned up by an army of humans.

For now those of you wanting to launch your own cyborg's can turn to the solutions like Amazon's Mechanical Turk - crowdsourcing in which freelancers around the world offer to rescore tweets, provide translation, even clean up your Google Voice messages all for as low as one penny per activity. Mechanical Turk is an amazing idea. Who wouldn't want to crowdsource their tedious data entry for rates that amount to $2.50 per hour? But Mechanical Turk has yet to really take off because of two major flaws - reliability and security.

The former issue has been addressed by startups like CrowdFlower and CloudCrowd. These programs tap into Mechanical Turk's labor pool and use another algorithm to predict the accuracy of individual workers. Customers can then submit tasks and request levels of accuracy - the more accurate the more expensive. Rates range from $3.00 to $12.00 per hour.

I've been very impressed by all of these innovations in the Cyborg Market but I don't think anyone has got it yet. Service-on-Demand is a new industry that has caught the eye of individuals because it sounds sexy - Everyone can have their own army of assistants! But the real consumers of Service-on-Demand are not individuals, they are business. Dollar for dollar businesses will outspend individuals by 100:1 in this industry over the next decade. And if there is anything businesses demand as much as service its reliability and security. Brand matters in this area and you can't build a brand off the reputation of 100,000 freelancers who disappear frequently, work while they are watching TV (if in the US) or fighting off a Typhoon to hold on to internet and power connection (if in the Philippines).

Security is even more important for many corporate clients. Can you imagine any Fortune 500 company ever asking 100,000 people to score the sentiment around their brand?! Imagine all the negative reinforcement that they would lay themselves open to. Or how about a lawyer or doctor (the two largest consumers of transcription services) asking people chosen at random to transcribe their notes and depositions? Sure enough someone would end up transcribing the results of their neighbors mammogram.

So I think that there is room - a wide open gap, in fact - for a reputable, secure Cyborg Corporation, set up to utilize the ever changing advances in technology to deliver reliable results, while securing the entire process from the human variable.

This is the company that I want to build.

Money, Money, Money...MUN AY!

I've started three business - Access, TaskUs and Smarter Social Media. What went into these business in no particular order was: free Starbucks Wifi, Overnight Flyers, over generous developers, very tight fists, fourteen security guards and the relentless (emotional) support of family and friends. What didn't go into any of them was a significant amount of capital. Access, the series of all age nightclubs Jaspar and I used to run every summer was started with $6,000. The first summer we grossed well over $100,000. TaskUs was started with $25,000. And Smarter Social Media grew organically out of TaskUs.

So there you have it, my ventures to date have been funded with a grand total of $31,000, not counting the tireless, unpaid hours Jaspar and I have committed to each.

I'm not opposed to capital. I just never had an attractive way to raise it. My parents aren't rich and I never felt that I deserved venture or angel funding. I also never wanted to dilute the ownership I had over my ideas. But I am beginning to reconsider.

Over the past three months I have grown our TaskUs operations center in Manila from 12 to over 100 people. The company is stronger than ever. The final meeting with my management team their yesterday was amazing. Everyone has a role and is executing it relentlessly. So much so that I am beginning to feel unneeded.

None of this would have been possible without money...lots of it. Late last year I secured a partnership with a large US public company that has funded all of this growth. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have poured into our operations and the effect has left me feeling like I am running an actual business.

At Smarter Social Media we have a much smaller staff of 8. All in our Santa Monica offices. I have written before about how being in LA allows us to keep labor costs down. But it still ain't cheap (especially when compared with Manila!) That said the business is profitable. So I'm starting to wonder what a capital infusion could do for that business. In fact I'm starting to wonder if I will ever start a business with $6,000 or even $25,000 ever again. Having a large capital base now appears almost essential. To hire the right talent, build a sustainable organization and secure and number one or (at worst) number spot in the market.

Broadband Essential

Fred Wilson did a post yesterday on The National Broadband Plan. As an American I'm embarrassed by the broadband situation in our country. Both TaskUs and Smarter Social Media have offices in a building that is owned by the City of Santa Monica, a city that is supposed to be known for its "progressive" attitude. For the first year in our offices we had one option for internet - Verizon that ran a whooping 3 mbps download speeds on its best days. Fortunately this changed when Verizon rolled FiOS out in our area. We are now on a more comfortable 50 mbps plan. But still, for the better part of 2009 I was running on speeds barely faster than those found on a good 3G connection. Pretty pathetic for the second largest city in the worlds leading economy.

Simply put boardband access is no longer a nice to have. It has become has become a daily essential for work and life. It has become a utility like water, power and electricity. Those running on 56K modems (or even Verizon 3 mbps connections) are lighting their homes with candles, in what should be a fully electrified grid. But its not. Millions don't have access to truly high speed internet, and those that do find access is often unreliable.

Today I was sitting in our office in Manila and the internet went down. This is something you would expect to happen in a developing country. And it does happen. But no more frequently then our FiOS stops working in Santa Monica.

LA, LA Land

Mark Suster had a great post yesterday on Starting a Technology Company in LA. Mark was the spokesperson for our city in Fast Company's series of profiles of startup hubs outside Silicon Valley. All of these are definitely worth a look. Check them out here: LA, NYC, Austin, Boulder, Chicago, Boston.

I've started two companies in LA: TaskUs and Smarter Social Media. Neither one is really a tech company. But we have had to hire tech company people - developers, content creators etc. - so I've begun mixing in the tech start up scene here. From my experience I've found one major advantage and one major disadvantage of being a tech startup in LA and they both relate to talent.

Let's start with the negative: Developers are VERY hard to come by. Finding a competent, affordable developers is very difficult. Finding one with a good attitude, who is prepared to work hard is damn near impossible. Competent developers will run you $80K - $150K, easily. Then they'll work 6 to 8 hours a day and keep their work totally obscure. I've written before about my $12,000 mistake in this area. Maybe, great developers are hard to find everywhere. But something makes me think they'd be easier to find in Menlo Park.

Now on to the positive: Non-development talent is cheap! If you are looking for content creators, American Administrators (in the case of TaskUs), or Social Associates (in the case of Smarter Social Media) there is no better city in America than LA. All of these positions can be hired for $10 an hour and the hires themselves aren't dopes. We're talking Harvard, Standford and UCLA graduates. Why you ask would someone of that pedigree work for $10 an hour? They are living the dream baby! They are aspiring actors, writers and directors. As long as you offer them flexible working hours they'll work hard at $10 an hour. This phenomenon was pointed out to me by my fried Tyler Crowley. It helped him and Jason build Mahalo into the most popular Question and Answer site online today.

One final note on why I love the LA startup scene. All of the people in tech here are amazingly approachable. In stark contrast to the hierarchical, ego maniacs in our city's entertainment industry, everyone in the startup scene here is relaxed and friendly. Over the past few month's I've had great conversations with some of most successful people in the industry like Matt Coffin and Mark DiPaolo.

Dork State of Mind

Those who know me know that I am a huge Jay-Z fan. I also happen to be a geeked out entrepreneur. So when I saw this I went wild!

AutoMarket

In high school my SAT tutor nicked named me AutoMaddock. It didn't stick but the name is useful for this post.

My friend Brendan Cooper ran a great article yesterday in which he discussed his frustrations attempting to navigate the web presence of major brands. In the post he briefly mentions two types of companies - those that have Advertising Influence with those that have Advocate Influence. I think this is a really good way to look at corporate marketing programs, so I'll write about it today.

Companies with Advertising Influence push a message out to their customer relentlessly. They inundate the masses with billboards, radio ads, TV spots and online banners, all vying to hijack your attention, and ultimately influence you in their favor. Today I was at SM, the largest chain of malls in the Philippines. There are plenty of brands in SM with major Advertising Influence. But I came across one that really hit home - Whatchamacallit - a candy bar with peanuts and carmel. There was a small Whatchamacallit billboard advertisement in my elementary school. In first grade I walked past it everyday and slowly but surely I found myself really wanting to try a Whatchamacallit. This was my first conscious experience with Advertising Influence.

To find companies with Advertising Influence all you need to do is think of companies that you see everyday - Coca Cola, Verizon Wireless, Honda, Geico, McDonalds - the list goes on. The one thing all of these brands have in common is that they are fighting for your attention. They want to remind you that they exist. More important, they want to tell you over and over again who they are. Coca Cola will refresh you. Verizon has the best 3G coverage. Geico is insurance with a sense of humor. To accomplish their goal this they spend tens of millions of dollars every year and employ tens of thousands of people, to tirelessly hijack your attention.

In stark contrast, Advocate Influence is effortless. Company's with Advocate Influence find their customers do all the work for them. They tell their friends, they write blogs, tweet and post updates on Facebook. This is the essence of word of mouth. Companies with Advocate Influence include In-&-Out Burger, iPhone (from Apple), and Emergen-C. All of these companies also pay for Advertising Influence. But the one thing that defines the companies with greatest Advocate Influence is that they do not need to spend money on advertising. In-&-Out could never run another radio ad again and they would stay enormously profitable. The iPhone could drop all of its commercials and still continue to sell millions of units. Emergen-C need not advertise in parenting magazines to retain its core group of users who also double as its best marketing force. And that's the point really - Companies with Advocate Influence need not employ a marketing staff because their customers do all of work for them. What's more, their customers market the product better than a marketer ever could, because they do it authentically.

Baby Girl

Driving through a forrest of palm trees in the center of Hispanola, Rich and I started arguing about the rise of China. Rich's points were strong and supported, as usual. China is a economic powerhouse. This year they will have the 2nd largest GDP in the world and by 2050 they will have the largest. Their authoritarian system is a benefit as it allows them to move quickly and decisively as a country. I, on the other hand, have never been sold on the rising Dragon. I think China is headed for troubled waters and in arguing with Rich I made one point that really stuck:

50 million unmarried men!

Both Rich and I are avid fans of The Economist, and the day we returned from the Caribbean we discovered our knowledge source running a cover story that described the situation far worse than I had argued:

What happened to 100 million baby girls?

Here's a section from the article:

"XINRAN XUE, a Chinese writer, describes visiting a peasant family in the Yimeng area of Shandong province. The wife was giving birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes , “when we heard a moan of pain from the bedroom next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accusingly: ‘Useless thing!’

“Suddenly, I thought I heard a slight movement in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xinran remembers. “To my absolute horror, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail. The midwife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two policemen [who had accompanied me] held my shoulders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’

‘But that’s...murder...and you’re the police!’ The little foot was still now. The policemen held on to me for a few more minutes. ‘Doing a baby girl is not a big thing around here,’ [an] older woman said comfortingly. ‘That’s a living child,’ I said in a shaking voice, pointing at the slops pail. ‘It’s not a child,’ she corrected me. ‘It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it. Around these parts, you can’t get by without a son. Girl babies don’t count.’”

The situation is not always like this. In many cases the baby is not born at all. The Chinese and Indian preference to have a son has combined with ultrasound technology to make sex-selective abortions very common. But whether it be the slaughter of a baby girl after birth or the abortion of a girl in the first trimester it is repulsive. 100 million baby girls have been murdered for the past twenty years.

Beyond my repulsion there is a far larger concern for Chinese society. Over the next two decades 50 million men will get married and have families in the US. In China and India two times as many will not be able to get married, have sex and have a family at all! The unmarried, unfamilied, unsexed man is a dangerous, dangerous thing. Put 100 million of them together in a developing nation, living under an authoritarian regime and you have written a prescription for chaos.

Passion

When I landed in Manila in January I felt like I was on drugs. That is the only way to describe it. For days I was running on a natural high. I was so excited to watch the project that I had slaved away at for over a year finally be watered with the financing needed to flower. We went from a dozen employees to well over 100 today - that's just over two months for anyone who is counting. We built out the office, strengthened our management team and addressed all of the fun legal stuff that comes with growing in a legitimate operation.

Today I'm back in the office. It is my third trip to the Philippines this year and the passion is lacking! Not for the team. They have held strong in their passion, treating each day as if it were their first on the job. But I have found myself in a bit of a funk. This is a product of a couple things:

1) I was sick all weekend. The tireless travel schedule seems to have finally caught up with me. I felt a little sick the first few days in the Dominican Republic. It went away and came thundering down one week later after I arrived in Manila. I spent the past two days beneath the sheets in my hotel room.

2) The ship is built. I look around at the office and everyone is working efficiently, everyone has a role, and though there are performance metrics that still need to be met, everything is running pretty smoothly. To put it simply I am no longer needed. It's nice to have me here to craft strategy, inspire the team and oversee things. But this is a fully functional operation.

3) I lost my developing country virginity. Coming to the Philippines was my first, first hand experience with dealing with a developing country. I have navigated the streets and the legal system, and though this has left a few bumps and bruises, the experience has become routine and the sex appeal has worn off.

Now, before you go thinking that I have gone off into a bout of depression, know that I realize that passion ebbs and flows. No doubt I will feel excited and passionate over the next few days. However, it's a natural experience to have the occasional passionless day.

Dominican Republic - Part 2

After my ass-tendering experience in Vega, we headed to Santo Domingo - the capital of the Dominican Republic. For two nights we stayed by the beach. I swam, ran and slept...a lot. The beach was filled with native Dominican's which made for a fun experience. Fisherman caught octopus and oysters and served them on the sand, raw and fresh. Children flew kites, taking advantage of the breeze coming off of the ocean and occasionally challenging one another to a fight, in which they would tangle the stings of their kites together, crashing the flying colors to the ground and running to see who could retrieve the kites first.

As exotic as I found all this, the Dominican's were equally entertained by my pale complexion. I swam deep out into the bay beyond all of the other swimmers and traversed my way down the beach. When I came ashore a group of dark Dominican's were playing Futbol in the water. They looked at me laughingly as one of the beautiful Domincan women demanded, "Blanco, lleva me!" Embarrassed, I hurried ashore tripping over some rocks and landing hands first into a group of sea anemones.

After I had extracted the anemone's thorns from my fingers Luis took Rich and I to the most beautiful restaurant I have been to...ever. The restaurant was a pier that stretched out into the turquoise waters of Boca Chica. With white coaches and flowing white sheets, the restaurant was something you would only find the Caribbean. All of us agreed, had we any women with us we would have sealed the deal. Instead, Luis and Rich's uncles tipped back the bottle of Johnny Walker while Rich and I tried to entertain ourselves with intellectual banter.

The next day we drove across the center of the country, fields of palm trees and small villages, led us to Samana - where I found heaven. Cayo Levantado is a small island off the coast of Samana. It has two white sand beaches and a single hotel. With us on the island were no more than 100 other travelers. During the days I swam in the clear waters, laid in a hammock on the beach, drank out of coconuts and pineapples and finally circumnavigated the island in a kayak. I have been dreaming of doing all of this for over the past year and in three days I made it all come true.

When it was time to leave, I felt sad. But not the kind of sad I expect most people feel at the end of a vacation. On the other side of my sadness lay an excitement, anticipation and eagerness for the adventures to come. Which is what has brought me right the way around the globe to Manila, where I am today.

Dominican Republic - Part 1

I landed in Santiago - the Dominican Republic's second largest city - on Friday afternoon. The airport tells you everything you need to know about the country. The lush palm trees that line the runway remind you that you have arrived in paradise. While the backwards bureaucratic policy that requires every foreigner to pay $10 just to enter, remind you that you are in a developing nation.

I met Rich (by best friend from college) and Luis (Rich's father) in the parking lot and as soon as we had pulled out on to the Dominican highway, I had an ice cold Presidente in my hand. We spent our first night at Rich's families house in Santiago. The following day we were up early to trek into the mountains that surround the city. A large portion of the Dominican population are from el campo - the countryside. These mountain people live without electricity or running water.

Fortunately we had a large Toyota SUV, for the one hour drive up into the mountains required us to scale dirt and mud roads that had all but washed away in the recent rains. When we arrived at Rich's uncles cabin I was overcome by the tranquility of the outdoors. Not since my trips to Ireland as a child had I been to such a peaceful place. I hiked down to the stream that runs behind the cabin and meditated from half an hour while Rich and Luis snacked on fresh Chicharon - fried pork skin.

That afternoon we were back in the city. I was exhausted from all the travel, but it

was Dominican independence day so there was no time for rest. We went to Vega - the home of the last true Dominican independence festivals. The event is a demonic one. A street festival that is reminiscent of Mardis Gras with one major addition. Soon after the start of the festivities crews representing the different neighborhoods from around the entire country flood the streets, dressed in identical demon/dragon costumes and armed with cowhide balloons. Their object - to wallop everyone who is not dressed for the occasion. Naturally they target young men. Unfortunately for me, young, gringo men seemed to be their favorite targets.

I wanted to get hit. It was part of the cultural experience. So when the

first sting of cowskin cracked against by backside I jumped in the air, howling in pain and delight. He got me good I thought and turned around to shake the hand of my attacker. Having had the experience we headed for the car, which is when they got me again. The second smack was unlike anything I have ever felt. It was certainly the the hardest I have ever been hit on the ass. I didn't see him coming and afterwards I didn't seem him go. It was as if a ghost had snuck up on me and disappeared. Whoever he was he sent me jumping six feet in the air, butt bruised and thrill gone.

When I'm Not Writing...

I'm living.

I spent the past week in the Dominican Republic and didn't touch the blog once. I admire the discipline of daily bloggers who refuse to give up their craft even when traveling. But I am not one of these writers. For me the blog is a reflection of my life. Whether it be work, travel or love, I live it, then write it if it's worth recording.

This past week deserves recording. A year ago I sat down to determine what I wanted for myself in the next six months - a dreamline, a vision. One of my dreams was to travel to a Spanish speaking country, lay on a beach and drink out of a coconut. It took a year but I did it this week - a beach, hammock, a coconut and so much more. Over the next week I'll cover the whole trip over a series of posts.

Estrella said to me, "you are 23. You think you have conquered the world because you graduated high school. Graduated college. Started your own business. It's only when you get older that you see that the dreams you have today don't come true."

Nearly, every dream I put on paper over the past year has manifest. So I humbly disagree...