“Create more value than you Capture”

I have a new personal maxim. For myself. And a new personal standard for the people I spend time with, both socially & professionally, in 2012.

Create more value than you capture. ~Tim O’Reilly

As we grow our business, I’m finding than the type of people that are worth my time follow this maxim, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Think about the traits of someone who creates more value than they capture..

• charisma (social value)
• intellect (informational value)
• humility (social value)
• generosity (societal value)
• leadership (societal value)
• abundance (monetary & otherwise)

as opposed to someone that doesn’t.

• neediness (social non-value)
• sloth (monetary non-value)
• cheapness (monetary non-value)
• envy (emotional non-value)
• greed (emotional non-value)

Reads like a list of universally attractive / unattractive traits of human nature.

Take a look at businesses that create more value than they capture..

• search engines
• social networks
• NGOs
• doctors
• retail stores

as opposed to ones that doesn’t.

• cable companies
• banks companies
• insurance companies

Reads like a list of industries that are ripe for disruption huh?

I think that attraction to value must be something that’s deeply evolved into the psychology of all social animals.

After reading Steve Job’s biography this past week, I was struck at how much time he spent adding value to his products. According to the book, his successor, John Sculley, was more interested in attempting to milk profits from Apple’s products than Steve. When Steve came back in the late 90s, the turnaround was tremendous. Great product = value to the user = success.

See you in 2012.

#occupytheweb with us: Change the Terms of Online Contracts

2 weeks ago, the #occupywallst protestors were been kicked out of zuccotti park in Manhattan. It’s time to move the protest to the web. It’s time to #occupytheweb

I am announcing today the relaunch of TOSAmend with Law Professor, Zev Eigen. We’ve ironed out the kinks and now we think TOSAmend will hold up in court – at least for some contracts .

What is TOSAmend?

TOSAmend is a free & easy way to sign up to your favorite web-service while REJECTING their erroneous, overbearing, unreadable, terms of service. TOS stands for Terms of Service.

Click here to to download it.

Wait, that’s legal?

After TOSAmend v1, launched, we had some debate about it’s legal viability. The consensus for v1 was “Neat thought expiriment – but doubt it would hold up in court.”

Since that time, I teamed up with law professor Zev Eigen of Northwestern University School of Law, who specializes in research on online form-contracts, to improve the functionality of the applet to increase its legal viability

Click here to read the blog post on the legal nitty gritty, by two law professors (Zev Eigen and Florencia Marotta-Wurgler from Northwestern and NYU Law Schools respectively)

Who cares?

Take a look at any Terms of Service document. They’re completely one-sided. When you check that ‘I Agree’ button, you sign away even your most basic of rights.  They’re in legalise. They’re unreadable.  Even if you could read them, it would take you all day. And you’d have to spend countless more hours just trying to understand the lawyer-talk in them.  And yet, they are REALLY important – Should any discrepancy between yourself and the other party be brought into a court of law, they will could potentially have a HUGE effect (monetary, or otherwise) on your life!

The #occupywallst protestors have been kicked out of zuccotti park in Manhattan. It’s time to support the plight of average consumers everywhere by standing up to one-sided, non-negotiable terms of service documents. It’s time to #occupytheweb

I want to download TOSAmend

I thought you’d never ask.

1. Check out the terms of your use of this bookmarklet
2. pause to note the irony of TOS for TOSAmend, and continue only if you accept these terms.
3. Drag this link into your browser bookmark bar: TOSAmend
4. Visit the signup form of your favorite websites and TOSAmend it.
5. TOSAmend will auto-generate an email that will be sent to the company on the your behalf.

I’ve tested in Chrome and Firefox. IE version forthcoming.

When you use the TOSAmend bookmarklet, it will modify the TOS on the page, and pass the amended terms back to the site (via the ‘TOSAmended’ GET or POST parameter), where the web-service can either accept or reject them.

Here’s a 15 second demo of this bookmarklet in action:

Get Involved

1. Follow @TOSAmend on twitter.
2. Join our google group.
3. Check out facebook.com/TOSAmend.
4. Contribute to the codebase
5. Oh, and I’m @owocki on twitter. Happy to answer your questions there.

#OccupyTheWeb with us. Spread The Word

1. Tweet about @TOSAmend
2. Like TOSAmend on Facebook

Read the Blog Post

Many thanks to Zev Eigen and collaborator Florencia Marotta-Wurgler, who have authored a short piece about the legal issues relating to using TOSAmend.

Download the paper in .pdf or .doc format, or read the full text below.

Click HERE to download Professor Eigen’s research about form-contracts. link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=370999

Click HERE to download Professor Marotta-Wurgler’s research about form-contracts. link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=352742

What if Consumers Could Change the Terms of Online Contracts?

What do you think?

Leave a comment below or @reply me on twitter

Startups @ Scale: Make the abstract actionable

This post is pretty technical. If you don’t cross your 1s or circle your 0s, then it’s probably best to move on to something more fruitful for you, business monkey.

I’ve always thought that a major challenge in building a dev team is continuously improving how effectively you can respond to changes in your metrics day-to-day. One of those tasks I face is a sweep daily of our error logs. If you, like us, run a website, and you’re properly logging everything, then your error logs probably look something like this:

(These error logs have been scrubbed of any actual usage or error data)

Oct 7 01:34:14 10.182.41.217 httpd: app14 JSError http://www.ignighter.com/Inbox/ 31732521Script error.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.23) Gecko/20110920 Firefox/3.6.23 [version1.xxx] [OnErr:] [_GET:uerystring:EL/,E:JSError,EI:http://www.ignighter,EI2:31723 Script erro,type:error]

Oct 7 01:34:22 10.182.36.33 httpd: app1 404 http://ww1.ignighter.com/http://ww1.ignighter.com/Referred from UID Email: None IP:66.249.171.179 Location – Los Altos, CA [version1.xxx]

… etc ad nauseum ….

The problem: a lack of actionable information

Confusing? Probably. Boring? Absolutely. I’d be willing to bet that your eyes just skipped right past those error logs to the beginning of this paragraph. Getting one of these in my inbox every morning is pretty-much a recipe for a wild goose hunt every morning. (and not-so-fun one at that) It’s a real gumption trap for my team.

Providing Value

This post is all about making that wild goose chase into an effective process. With that in mind, I recently delivered a project to increase the effectiveness of Ignighter’s error log maintenance process. There are some questions that I’ve set out to automatically answer for my team, and that’s what this post is about.

• What’s the root cause of each error?
• What is it’s urgency?
• How often is it happening?
• What does the timeline for these errors look like?
• Who’s in charge of figuring them out?

If you ever work for an Ignighter development team, here is an example of an error log email you might get from me.

Subject: Error Action Items for Thursday 10/06/2011 (109629 items)

LEADERBOARD:

	kevin : 941 	(801 phpErr's,140 SQL errs )
	steve : 56427 	(56408  unserializableClsoure errs, 2 Redis Errs, )		- you're way past your ballmer peak bro
	mike : 59529 	(56468 EmailWithoutMessageException errs, 3061 404 errs)		- every day this happens, a fairy dies
	john : 353 	(353 phpOutOfMem errs )		- less than 500.  keep it up!
	joe : 20975 	(20975 JSError's )		- you MUST watch this video today ==>

The error log aggregator is the arbitrator of cleanup responsibility. The first thing in the email ‘leaderboard’ which heckles a developer if a service they are maintaining has many errors! That means I don’t need to send needy emails to a developer asking them to clean things up anymore. It’s worth noting that heckling your team will only work if you have the kind of culture that supports lighthearted fun and constructive criticism. ( we do )

Next, we display the most prevalent items in the error log. Nothing fancy here, but I now see what the most pressing issues are.

(Again, These error logs have been scrubbed of any actual usage or error data)

LOG SUMMARY (20975 items):

	56468	EmailWithoutMessageException
	56408	unserializableClsoure
	20975	JSError
	2466	404
	800	phpErr
	353	phpOutOfMem
	140	SQL
	2	RedisConnectInstance 

From there, I aim to provide as much actionable detail about each error type as possible for the critical types. See below example of MySQL errors (of which much Ignighter-specific information has been scrubbed).

So, what?

Now that we’ve all aware of the volume/priority/assignee of each type of issue our system is encountering, we’re all much more efficient.

Want to build your own? If you’re any good with awk or graphite, you could probably do the same for your team with a modest hour or two investment.

How does your team keep on top of application metrics and logs? Leave a comment below.

If you’re a developer who is looking to work in an efficient, fun, environment that empowers you, check out Ignighter’s open positions..