reecepacheco.com

Do Not Praise Her Appearance

Fri, 25 May 2012 00:50:39 -0400

Excellent point.

Graduation season has triggered some memories for me, memories of sitting in my friend’s backyards as their parents toasted their futures and we lavished well wishes upon each other.

But specifically, I remember hearing time and again my female friends being complimented thusly: “You are such a beautiful, smart, talented young woman, and I couldn’t be more proud.”

I have one request for anyone with a graduating daughter/sister/friend—do not praise her appearance as the first thing in your toast. Don’t mention her appearance at all.

Teaching young women that their appearance is the first thing you notice tells them that looks are more important than anything. By telling her that she is “beautiful, smart, talented” (and believe me, it is almost always said in that order), you are suggesting—if unconsciously—that it’s most important she not lose her looks. You are prizing her face and body above her accomplishments and hard work. In a world where over 50% of young women say they’d rather be hit by a truck than be fat, this mindset isn’t something that should be encouraged, especially at such memorable events.

This has been a post.

"You guys are rewriting the book on teambuilding – from transporting a 25ft. wide piece of turf up 10..."

Thu, 24 May 2012 10:46:44 -0400

“You guys are rewriting the book on teambuilding – from transporting a 25ft. wide piece of turf up 10 flights of stairs to chaperoning goats around Austin to hiking and whiskey tasting – you’ve pretty much got it nailed.”

- A friend of mine wrote this to me in an email recently. I take it as a huge compliment, because she works at a company with a great team culture.

But what’s funny about the stuff she lists above, is that none of the activities mentioned were purposefully meant to be “teambuilding” exercises. As I said in my post about our recent day-off…

No trust falls. No drum circles. No purposeful ‘team building’ exercises… We were just together… enjoying our own company…

You can do those teambuilding things, but you can’t force a team to gel. A team gels when they’ve got common values and share common culture. That starts with the hiring process and I’m super proud of the feedback we get from everyone in our reviews about how much they appreciate our team (which has grown from 4 to 11 full-time in under a year).

The sentiment was summed up best by our teammate Josh, who on our day out said, “This is great… but we’d have fun doing anything.”

I’ll close this up Andy Swan style: Find awesome people. Do awesome stuff together. Win.

"Spent the last 24 hours battling xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx and another weird bug I exposed in the hunt...."

Tue, 22 May 2012 22:49:27 -0400

“

Spent the last 24 hours battling xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx and another weird bug I exposed in the hunt. The amount and style of xxxx xxxx xxxx we’re doing made this a bit of a tricky bitch, but I made that bitch my bitch. Bitch.

You should not get xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx in your dashboard. Please bring it to my attention if you do. (Please also bring whiskey. I’ll be pissed).

”

- Email update from our beloved CTO.

Slow Down to Speed Up

Sun, 20 May 2012 10:06:33 -0400

Last Friday, our team piled into a couple cars and drove up to Minnewaska State Park Preserve for the start of a company day off for everyone.

While Dan and I had scheduled this well in advance, we didn’t have much of a “plan” for our Shelby road trip. I simply stuffed my backpack with lunch supplies and we set off into the woods.

No trust falls. No drum circles. No purposeful ‘team building’ exercises… We were just together… enjoying our own company, enjoying the outdoors, and doing something other than building Shelby ‘the product.’

But we were building Shelby ‘the company.’

As a company, we work well together. Respectfully, intelligently, creatively. There are no fights and no one is burning out.

So why the ‘day off?’

A few things that Dan and I have learned while building two startups and multiple products:

Endurance is important. You can’t sprint all the time.
It’s better to avoid burnout, than to burnout and try to recover.
Loosely structured time together allows for great understanding and empathy to form, as well as creativity to flow.

Furthermore, one bonus lesson really stuck out to me throughout the day…

When hiking, it’s easy to fall into deep focus on each step of the trail. A loose rock here, a log there, a puddle there… and if you go too fast without looking up, before you know it, you’ve gone down the wrong trail or worse, gotten off the trail completely. If you don’t course-correct quickly, you then find yourself in a bad way, or at best, you have to backtrack eating up precious time.

So, while hiking through the woods as a big loose group, we consistently stopped to check our location, made sure everyone knew what trail to follow, and then set out at our pace together.

We slowed down, to speed up.

This is true for startups, too. We focus intensely on our product. We get an idea and we want to sprint after it. We’re builders, so we build… and while it is a great and necessary skill to build rapidly and iterate, it is imperative not to lose sight of the big picture - the trail map, if you will. This means taking careful, purposeful steps. Taking the right trail. Doing it the right way the first time, so you never have to backtrack.

I didn’t try to hammer this lesson home, but it presented itself and I was glad for it.

But all lessons learned aside, we hiked up into the mountains, breathed in the fresh air, enjoyed the views, avoided some dangerous wildlife (snakes), took some pictures, and had a few minutes of pure golden silence.

On the way home, we stopped off for a surprise whiskey tasting at Tuthilltown Spirits (Henry and I were DD’s) and capped the day off with burgers by the sunset at Pier i Cafe on the Hudson River. An awesome day, with awesome people.

Sadly missing from our day off was our teammate Mark who works remotely in CA. (We poured one out for you buddy).

Some more pics below:

Team pic. Beware of Dan.

HELP!

Chris in his best ‘female superhero pose.’

Myles

Hudson Whiskey

Sun soaked burgers and beers along the Hudson.

Day[0] as Intern[1] at Shelby.tv

Tue, 08 May 2012 17:00:12 -0400

I first connected with Zach over a late night email thread many months ago. Yesterday, he walked through our doors here at Cyberdyne, took one look and said “this is perfect.” Can’t say I’m not super excited about that kind of excitement for what we’re doing here. Great to have you, Zach.

shelbytv:

As I swung open the door at “Cyberdyne Systems” yesterday morning, I wasn’t sure what to expect. A few months earlier, after chatting with Reece and Chris about a potential internship, I’d been assigned to Project G.O.A.T.S., during which I was tasked with the odd job of finding (yes, seriously) real-live goats for SXSW. Most interns have to do some kind of cold-calling, but have you ever tried to convince local farms and mobile petting zoos that you just need to borrow their goats for the weekend to use as mascots at a giant tech conference? Not as easy as you might think.

So clearly the team at Shelby was crazy right? Well, yes. But is it pure insanity or the kind of directed madness that gets results? You tell me: Top Brands at SXSW

So this team matched the kind of brand awareness reserved for giants like Nike and CNN on a budget that probably cost less than the actual flights to Austin? Count me in.

Fast forward to my first day. I smiled as I passed the signs for Cyberdyne Systems that indicated Shelby headquarters. I was greeted by Reece, who’d lined my desk with a bunch of awesome Shelby gear and welcomed me to the office. It was pretty clear from the start that this office was a straight out of a tech entrepreneur’s dream. There’s a conference room set up with webcams, whiteboards lining the walls, a command center/workspace with tons of monitors, and an astroturf covered ping-pong room with a drum set and an original N64.

I sat down with Reece, who briefed me on the company mission and his “Get sh*t done” philosophy. He said that he wanted me to attend conferences, shadow some of his meetings, and he even put a reading list together for me of some of his favorite books and blog posts, part of which you can find here. It’s almost like he wants me to learn something during my internship. Weird, right?

I spent the rest of the day getting set up and playing with the brand new Shelby GT which, if you haven’t checked it out yet, is awesome. Do yourself a favor and sign up for the beta here. FYI, I’m crashing at Chris’s desk for the time being, right next to my favorite picture of all time:

But with all of the craziness and eccentricities aside, there’s one more thing that’s very clear when you step into the Shelby.tv office: focus. For the majority of the day people are jacked in, headphones on and in complete concentration. Sure there are group meetings, lunches, and rounds of ping pong in between, but I’m guessing it’s this level of focus that got them to where they are today. I’m so excited to be joining the incredibly talented team for the summer and will continue to update you on my progress.

- Zach || intern[1]

Classic. RIP MCA

Fri, 04 May 2012 14:44:02 -0400

Classic.

RIP MCA

fuck. that. shit. xkcd tells it like it...

Fri, 04 May 2012 12:10:48 -0400

fuck. that. shit. xkcd tells it like it is.

garychou:

kenyatta:

xkcd - A Webcomic - Dreams

sarahchristine:

walpaper:

(via thakker)

#12experiments: April Showers Bring May... Sobriety?

Wed, 02 May 2012 10:25:46 -0400

New month. New challenge. But first, let’s look back at Vegetarian April. The name says it all. I went vegetarian (not vegan, not pescetarian, just vegetarian)… and it was awesome.

[One of my veggie lunches posted to Instagram. People seemed to dig it.]

While many people who “go veggie” suddenly feel amazing, I did not suddenly feel “so much better,” largely because I already eat pretty healthy. But I certainly realized that I don’t need to find a way to include meat in every meal, and overall I did feel lighter and a bit more alert (hard to go into food coma after eating tofu).

What I loved about this experiment, was the perspective of being a vegetarian. With that lens, you look at menus differently. Your options while traveling dwindle. Your ability to ‘participate’ in a feast is lessened. I particularly felt this in Amsterdam last week. While out for a traditional Dutch meal with friends eating meatballs and wurst and I was stuck with a plate of mashed potatoes and sauer kraut. But I’ve been a black sheep most of my life, so it was nothing new.

Will I stay vegetarian forever? Not likely. I love my dad’s pan-blackened scallops too much and I do like to try new foods in new places… but will I reconsider getting meat with my lunch everyday? Absolutely. What I’ve learned is that I can sustain myself without meat and I’m happy about the environmental savings that means for the planet as well as the health implications for my body.

Finally, unlike previous months, April was the first month where I completed my experiment to 100%. I didn’t break once and I’m super proud about that.

So what’s next? Sober May.

That’s right. No alcohol in May. I honestly don’t think this will be that challenging. I didn’t drink my entire freshmen year of college (will explain later), so if I can do that, I think I can go one month. And to be clear, I don’t have any issues with alcohol, I just feel like recalibrating to 0 will be a good thing and help me stay clear-headed during a month in which I want to further focus.

But to up the ante, I’ve decided to ditch coffee/espresso and my beloved 5 Hour Energy, too! Not that I really have a caffeine problem either, but lately I’ve been abusing it more than usual and I want to curb that habit ASAP. While I’m yet to drink any tea this month, I may keep it around once in a while. Maybe not.

Point is, no liquid stimulants or depressants this month. Game on!

An American in Amsterdam: TNW Conference 2012

Tue, 01 May 2012 16:06:50 -0400

A few months ago, my friend CBM suggested I go to The Next Web Conference. At first, I thought - “Amsterdam’s cool and all, but I’ve already been and I’ve got a startup to run…” But when a free conference pass turned up, then a free hotel room from a friend who couldn’t cancel, and finally acceptance into TNW Startup Rally - a pitch competition at the Conference - it was a no-brainer.

So last week, I flew to the city of pancakes, pot, and prostitution - wait, I mean Pancakes and Pitches! Pancakes and Pitches! - to see what the European tech scene is all about, show Amsterdam what’s new with Shelby and of course, represent America.

I was excited to see a great turnout for the Conference, with startups, investors, and press from all over Europe. Amsterdam, UK, Sweden, Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic were the “locals,” but teams flew in from as far away as South Africa and Korea as well. So cool to see that type of entrepreneurial energy.

Compared to my trip to Italy last month, there was definitely more appetite for risk in this crowd, but it still lacks the full ecosystem of NYC or Silicon Valley. That being said, I think it will get there. It just takes time, knowledge share, and continued investment.

The Startup Beta Rally, in which we participated, featured existing companies that are launching something new. So I got up and showed a quick demo of Shelby “GT” - our new version in private beta. [You can get on the invite list here].

The judges - including awesome people like Werner Voegels (Amazon CTO) and Alexis Ohanian (Reddit founder) - liked our vision, so I then had the chance of presenting to the larger audience on the main stage… the largest audience I’ve ever to which I’ve ever presented. Pretty fun, though I admit I wished I’d had my team there with me like TechStars Demo Day last year.** [It’s just more fun when you get off stage and have Spinosa waiting with a giant “FUCK YEAH!”]

Besides the Startup Rally, there were a bunch of great speakers like Hilary Mason (bit.ly), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit) and Chad Hurley (YouTube founder). There was also some fun activity outside, as TNW crew had a live cow in a pen for a game they called Dungville. I’ll let you figure it out from the pic.

The conference ended with the announcements of the winners for the Startup Rally and I’m really proud to say Shelby won “Best Overall Startup.” It felt great to nab that victory as our team worked really hard to get Shelby “GT” ready for launch at TNW. They got the job done. All I had to do was tell our story.

With the conference all wrapped up, I caught up with a good friend and local Dutchman, Jeroen, who took a big group of us to a super local Dutch restaurant for dinner. Really fun times with friends old and (mostly) new.

I didn’t partake in the coffee shops and usual tourist traps because I really don’t like doing touristy things (in particular, those things), but I did walk around a ton and just explore. Amsterdam is a beautiful city and unlike most cities I’ve been. I definitely recommend going.

Special thanks to my friends Courtney Body Myers, Sophie Op den Kamp, Harrison Weber, and the whole crew at TNW for having me, and to Jeroen for being our guide all weekend.

**[Speaking of which, I can’t emphasize how much of an impact TechStars Demo Day has had on my ability to prepare a pitch and present it to an audience. This time around, I knew exactly how to prepare and how I wanted to tell our story. Thank you to TechStars, in particular the members and mentors of our class for all the help].

When I get a cold sales e-mail from a random service, I'm like

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 13:37:35 -0400

a little late to the game here, but the runningastartup.tumblr.com is pretty good…

runningastartup:

thelaurenproject: From our IRC chat room; finally publishing...

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 11:59:51 -0400

thelaurenproject:

From our IRC chat room; finally publishing this b/c Reece is out of the country and can’t stop me.

To this day…none of us knows what he was trying to say.

I made a new friend today… Yeaaahhhh… I could get...

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 14:13:07 -0400

I made a new friend today…

Yeaaahhhh… I could get used to this.

When Brian first pitched “Butt Art” to me over a...

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 11:13:00 -0400

When Brian first pitched “Butt Art” to me over a year ago, I thought… “oh O-Hours… another crazy one…” but as he told me his story, the passion and excitement he has for teaching kids to draw and saving those memories was so tangible I couldn’t help but cheer for him.

Fast forward a few months and he has this amazing iPad app that is really fun to play with (I know it’s meant for children! I was just testing the UX! ;)

Point is, it’s a great product, built by a great team and I’m psyched to support Everything Butt Art on Kickstarter!

(via Kickstarter - Everything Butt Art - Building creativity from the bottom up)

Twitter - doing the right thing

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:01:00 -0400

Yesterday Twitter announced the Innovator’s Patent Agreement.

The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended.

I, and many other smarter people on the internet, agree that this is a huge step forward in fixing the mess that is patent litigation. There are, of course, some people questioning the Agreement’s definition of “defensive,” and for good cause.

In my experience, any good legal team can figure out a way to spin a good argument for their client, but it’s my hope that the mission driven purpose of the IPA - the “why” of the Agreement if I may - will encourage innovation for the good of the world, not the greedy, and it will help decision makers do the right thing.

While we don’t have a burning need for the IPA yet, I am certain we will adopt it here at Shelby.tv. Congrats to the Twitter team for stepping up here and doing the right thing.

A favorite quote that is all too relevant:

…But he still thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right; he had never learned how people could want to do otherwise; he had learned only that they did. It still seemed simple and incomprehensible to him: simple that things should be right, and incomprehensible that they weren’t. Atlas Shrugged

Sins of Omission

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:10:53 -0400

100% agree

As my college coach used to say (or yell, rather), “Make errors of Comission, not Omission.”

Nothing worse than getting scored on standing around flat-footed. Don’t let that be you.

Hustle. Make Plays. Win.

brycedotvc:

The more I work with startups, the more I’m convinced that they rarely die from the things they do; rather, they die from the things they know they should, but don’t.

Doing the wrong stuff is fixable. If your action isn’t getting the results you want you can always tweak it, or stop doing it altogether.

But, not doing never did anything. And not doing is the most deadly of startup sins.

Not saying no the the hire who isn’t a good fit because you just need. someone. NOW. Not firing them because you’re worried about a ship date, or what the team will say, or not wanting to be “that guy”. Not killing a product or project you know isn’t going anywhere. Not following up on leads. Not speaking up. Not trusting yourself enough to act when you know it’s the right thing to do.

The sins that require action are hard to ignore. Sins of doing the wrong things in the wrong amounts create friction and movement in one direction of the other.

But sins of omission move effortlessly. You’ll never even notice them.

Sins of omission are the silent killers of startups.

Check out my awesome sister @omgal dropping knowledge about...

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:17:21 -0400

Check out my awesome sister @omgal dropping knowledge about marathon recovery on Fox News this morning!

And congrats to all my friends running the race!

Ode to @Shelby

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 16:57:53 -0400

Awww… we’re blushing!

Thanks Jordan.

beautyinbreakdown:

The value proposition of Shelby.tv is simple: it aggregates all the video links that is shared by people in my social networks (FB, Twitter, Tumblr). It’s a web application that I initially found superfluous, but now use regularly.

In fact, the more I use the service, the more I’ve come to realize why I need it. I’m often missing many of the videos that people share as my feed updates so quickly. When I’m just checking Twitter on my mobile for quick updates, I don’t have the time to watch a 3 minute clip of Linsanity’s greatest moments. The Shelby team has done a great job in developing a simple platform that plays cool videos that are relevant to me with minimal effort on my part.

User-generated video content is exploding — Youtube is now seeing 60 hours of video uploaded every minute, compared to just 6 hours per minute in 2007. This increase in volume, however, has made it so much harder to find quality content. Lately, I’ve found the suggested items in my Youtube feed to be lackluster, if not seemingly random. Shelby’s user-curated approach piggy-backs off existing social networks to populate my personal video channel. I especially like the video autoplay as soon as I land on the page — kind of like turning on a TV!

I think that Shelby can go a step further in video curation by following Turntable.fm’s crowd-sourced model. Sometimes, I’m just in the mood to watch ridiculous Epic Meal Time episodes, or cool dance videos. Just as how each DJ room on Turntable is theme by music genre, “channels” on Shelby could feature various video topics, such as sport clips, cat videos, or music performances from the 70’s. Watching videos on Shelby now is an asynchronous activity, while these “channels” would make it synchronous and thereby more social.

For now, Shelby’s social functionality only consists of sharing videos via e-mail or Twitter. However, I often wish that there was a way I can highlight a scene or a line from a video clip when I’m sharing it with my friends. If Shelby can implement social video annotations or user-generated subtitles (kind of like Canvas for video), it could become the destination to watch online videos with others. As XKCD points out, Youtube parties are so common in this day and age… and no viewing party is complete without a snarky comment or two.

The Shelby application is already awesome — and I’m really looking forward to watching it (note: pun intended) grow its user base and develop its product! Have you tried Shelby yet? What do you think?

just noticed, my life on the road…

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 13:58:01 -0400

just noticed, my life on the road…

"I'm your guy!"

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 15:08:06 -0400

Two years ago today we got an email from some guy with the subject “I’m your guy!”

We were hiring for our first engineer to join Dan as we built HomeField and this was the first hit we got from a blog post and some tweets about the job.

On paper, this guy looked pretty good. Built a couple apps, PhD in physics, college rower… but he also wasn’t a native coder or startup guy… regardless, we started ‘dating’…

The first contact we had was when he and Dan attended a NY Tech Talk. It was meant to vet him technically. Instead, Dan and him talked at length about how their wives are both teachers, they both like the Mets and craft beers. SWOOON!

So he was a fit culturally, but what about technically? We had to test that, so who better to vet him technically than me, the non-technical founder/ceo, right? <sarcasm>

I met with him and asked him to explain technical issues simply and he did. Dan liked working with him, so we put him through a month long tryout. He even agreed to come up to my parent’s house on Cape Cod for a week with the team before joining full time.

If you know my team, you already know I’m talking about Henry and my point in retelling this story is that he joined HomeField at a time when we were still figuring things out [in particular, our hiring process]. He worked without salary. He made it through TechStars with us. He stayed with us in our switch to Shelby…

I couldn’t be more grateful for that loyalty and dedication… that attitude of ‘doing whatever needs to get done’ and belief in the team goes such a long way in forging relationships and a strong team.

The line you hear is that “startups are like rollercoasters” and it is true. Rarely do early stage/first time founders have everything figured out. As an early hire, you have to be ready to throw yourself to the fire and deal with whatever comes your way. Henry’s done just that and it’s part of what makes working with this team so special.

Thanks for being our guy, Henry.

In closing, I thought I’d share this video I shot in fall of 2010, in which Henry nearly loses his shit as we assess some of the software our HomeField customers used on a daily basis. Laughs ensue…

Love that @Andyswan is blogging regularly again and particularly...

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 09:44:22 -0400

Love that @Andyswan is blogging regularly again and particularly love this.

No one owes you anything.

Expect nothing. Earn everything.

andyswan:

You never know when you might inspire someone to do great things.

What is routine and a hassle for you might be extremely important to someone else.

I forget this sometimes. Looking at my phone while my kids are discussing with me which superhero is stronger. Pushing off an email that probably just came at the wrong moment. The list goes on and on…

The other side of the coin is that it’s important to stand out. Make sure he shakes your hand. Follow up. Be interesting. Look him in the eye.

No one owes you anything. Be there and be ready.

Win.