I love data. I love comparing it with more qualitative analyses of my product. I love finding trends in it. But I hate spreadsheets. I need to consume data viscerally.

In traditional retail, visitors to a store are in the same physical space as the employees, allowing collection of more ambient data about store ‘usage’, e.g. foot patterns, visitor reactions, etc. Not so on the web. For many web startups, I think there is a disconnect between what management thinks users are doing their site and what users are actually doing.

Years ago, when I ran a web hosting company, I remember I’d hooked up my home computer to chime with a ringing cash-register when the site made a sale, and to play a less pleasant buzzing sound when someone emailed a complaint.

Nowadays, I’m more serious about collecting and reporting data on my product. Figure A, above, is the trends viewer we use at Ignighter. It’s nothing more than a regular pc with a web browser displaying some charts on updates every few minutes with latest site usage data, that we put in a prominent location. Pie charts, line graphs, and segmented data, oh my!

It’s ambient, it’s visceral, and it’s useful because it allows impromptu team chats about trends in site usage during the day.

And I think that’s a big win.

Bottom line:
Data is only useful for driving decisions when it’s relevant, easy to understand, and all around you. Make it stupid easy to see trends in your product.

I was having a conversation with my father the other day about the opportunities that advances in science and technology have created for the future-minded and tech-savvy in my generation.

He’s a physicist by calling, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise, given the context, when he quoted the founder of classical physics, Sir Isaac Newton:

If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.

~Sir Isaac Newton

That got me thinking. My grandfather was a pilot in the air force. He lived through the Great Depression. He ran a gas station in his later years. He had to work very very hard. My father worked years and years as a programmer and then a graduate student to get his PhD and, even then, it took him a decade to get his own team and make a name for his work.

Taking a look at my peers in the startup world and what they’re working on, it is clear to me that the business landscape has changed so much since the days of my parents and grandparents. Startups like Foodzie, DailyBurn, Devver, EventVue, Occipital, Retel, and Next Big Sound are creating massive disruption in their respective industries. In some cases, they are creating new distribution channels or even entirely new products. And, many of them are in their twenties and thirties! How is that possible?

They are standing on the shoulders of giants, of our forefathers. People like Linus Trovalds, the creator of Linux. Some are built upon the backs of hundreds of open source programmers, who write and refine languages like PHP or Ruby. Or, on Sun Microsystems., or the work at DARPA, or at Bell Labs. All of these projects created more value than they captured. And, all of those disruptive startups are dependent upon commoditized electricity, hardware, data storage, and internet access, among many many other things.

It’s truly amazing to take a look back and reflect on all of the things that had to’ve happened in order for the tech landscape to look the way it does today.

Sometimes, in technology, it’s easy to focus on the negatives that are associated with things that aren’t working. I know I curse AT&T every time my iPhone fails. And I poke fun at the Microsoft Windows machines running IE6 that my buddies in corporate America have to use every day. But, on the other hand, you have to respect what those companies have done to grow the technology sector.

Life in tech today is pretty great. The internet is very much a meritocracy, and the barrier to creating a company has probably never been lower.

Take some time and reflect on all the things that had to go right to get you where you are today.

I sat in a meeting today where a developer kept droning on… and on. and on… It would’ve been great if we were meeting to discuss system specs, in the context of software development. But, we weren’t. It was a business-driven meeting.

As a student of all things start-ups, I’ve noticed lately that many software developers have a horribly boring habit of rambling. And, as an engineer, I understand the premium put on being exact. On communicating every last detail, and getting every angle of a problem across.

But, man. Some people, they just don’t notice when the eyes in the room start glazing over.

As a profession, engineers are widely heralded as being comprised primarily of introverts. But, somehow we suck at delivering short, well-timed, and accurate answers. It really seems that being concise is just not in our nature as engineers.

But, it has to be. Because it shows credibility and professionalism. And, your co-workers will be appreciate it.

Next time you’re in a meeting, and you’re given the talking stick, try the following. Take a deep breath. Think about the context of the discussion. Think about what you know about the person who is asking you the question. If you know the answer, position it clearly and summarize it concisely in 2 or 3 sentences or less. Don’t worry about being 100% exact. People will ask follow-up questions if they need to. If you don’t know the answer, it’s okay to just simply state that you’ll get back to them.