Adaptive Path Blog

I pulled together a slidecast, with audio, of “10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment.” Bryan Mason and I gave this talk at SXSW 2008 Interactive. I’ve already described the talk here (we gave a version of it at Web 2.0 Expo SF in April) but the SXSW folks recently made the audio available.

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I’ve posted the slides from my presentation at last week’s MX Conference here in San Francisco. Titled “A House Divided: Two Perspectives on Managing the Customer Experience,” this talk is an evolution of my past efforts to pull from my prior career as a professional cook.

Here, I use my restaurant experience as a lens to interpret Glushko and Tabas’ work on getting front and back stage organizations to cooperate in delivering superior experiences. I hope you enjoy it.

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Recently I attended Startup School, a one day event put on by venture firm Y Combinator at Stanford University. Speakers included Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, and a bevy of other Valley heavies. Videos of their presentations here. If you only want to watch one, make sure you check out David Heinemeier Hansson’s (funny!) presentation on how to make money. Easily the best and most entertaining of the group.

Generally, they day went much as expected; which is to say “how do we cash out as quickly as possible?!” What startled me more than anything else was the lazy lip service given to listening to users given in almost every presentation. Apparently mentioning listening to users is all you have to do. Term sheets? Check. Sustainable unfair advantage? Check. Iterate rapidly? Check. Listen to users? Check. I can haz fundz now?

Perhaps the only person who really got it was Paul Graham of Y Combinator, who told the audience “make something people want.” And in that company, that’s pretty sad.

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