I’ve written about SocialBrowse before (here). It’s a great site that lets people share things they’re reading on the Internet. By itself, that wouldn’t be unusual, and there’s lots of competition: Friendfeed, Digg, Del.icio.us, and others.
I haven’t written much here about personal branding, which is something I’ve gotten into in recent months. In fact, I do seminars in personal branding, and I’ll be starting my own website (BrandingMe.com, which currently points to my personal website). Here are the first five results of a recent Google search on my name:
You can impact your presence on Google, just as I have – and that’s the main point of my seminars. The results vary widely. On this day, LinkedIn showed first, as usual (for me), and big sites like ZoomInfo and Facebook showed up next. Younoodle is a great site you should check out if you’re interested in start-ups. It’s often high on the Google results.
But for you SocialBrowse fans, look what’s next: my SocialBrowse profile! That’s great, because the links I share and the comments I make can give a potential business partner, client, or employer a better idea of who I really am. So I get all the benefits of SocialBrowse – the reasons I gravitated to SocialBrowse rather than Friendfeed – plus I get a free and effortless boost in my efforts to create an Internet personality.
And that’s what personal branding is all about – controlling the image of yourself that other people will see.
Here’s a neat way to promote yourself and/or your services: save your LinkedIn profile, and then edit out the “resume” pages, which will leave just your recommendations.
It’s pretty easy if you follow these steps (click on the pictures for larger images):
Open LinkedIn, sign in, and edit your profile. Look for the PDF icon.
Click on the icon, which will create and download a PDF of your entire profile. If your setup doesn’t automatically save the file, be sure to save it somewhere you can find it.
Open www.PDFHammer.com and click on the button to start PDFHammer. Here’s the part of the website you’ll work with next:
Navigate to the location you used to save your profile using the Browse button. When you’ve highlighted the proper file, press the upload button. After your file uploads, you’ll see this screen:
Now, highlight the pages you want to remove (for me, pages 1-4). You can highlight more than one page by clicking on the first page, holding the shift key, and clicking on the last page you want to delete.
Delete these pages by pressing the big red DELETElink:
Almost done: now, press the “Export Final PDF” button, and save the PDF on your computer.
This is a great tool:
If you’re job hunting, send your recommendations along with your resume when you apply for a job.
If you’re pitching a consulting client, send the recommendations along – if your recommendations are good, they will help you land your job.
Post them on your personal branding site or your blog, for the whole world to see.
Print the PDF out for your family, so they can see that other people think you’re great.
The late George Morrow was the best raconteur I’ve ever met – you might say he was the Garrison Keillor of hi-tech. Just like Prairie Home Companion, George needed at least 90 minutes to tell you one of his stories – and usually they were just as funny as the stories on radio.
Sadly, I don’t remember George’s entire chronicle of his (claimed) invention of the first PC bootstrap loader, but I’ll recount what I do remember.
The first microcomputers just sat there and blinked their lights, but did nothing unless you knew how to flip their paddle switches in the exact order. This booted (boot-strapped) the computer. At this point, the computer would be ready for keyboard input. In 1977, we didn’t have disk drives – you loaded your programs from the keyboard, from a cassette tape deck, or from a paper tape reader on a big clunking Teletype machine. Boy were they loud – and they could shake a concrete building.
George’s great contribution was to put the boot-up sequence that enabled the keyboard and I/O devices into a programmable read-only memory chip. Any microcomputer with one of these chips would be able to boot from the instructions on the PROM. (By the way, it’s entirely possible somebody else invented this first – I only know George’s side.)
George had several side-stories that went along with how he came to invent this process, and they revolved around his relationship with Bill Godbout and his recycled parts store in a Quonset hut near Oakland airport. I’ll reduce this very long story to a short version – Bill had a way of finding surplus parts of all kinds, and George spent a lot of time rummaging through Bill’s parts bins. On one of these trips, George found the PROMs he used for his bootstrap loader.
But what made the story really fascinating was that somehow Bill had become the owner of 10,000 dildo motors. Only Bill and God know why, and neither of them is talking. This made for a very interesting branch of George’s story.
Well, after George got his PROM set up, he took it up to Processor Technology in Berkeley – the home of the SOL micro, which was probably the third microcomputer, and arguably the most interesting. The company was run by Bob Marsh, and Lee Felsenstein was the designer of the SOL and its “personality modules.”
Processor Technology got its start making memory boards for the S-100 bus computers, like the IMSAI and the Altair. Because IMSAI was late in delivering their memory board, and Processor Tech was already shipping theirs, they were doing very, very brisk business.
So in the end, George didn’t sell his PROM to Bob, but nevertheless his life was changed by seeing – as George described it – money sitting everywhere. In fish bowls, hanging out of drawers, on shelves. Orders for the memory boards were coming in with cash in the envelopes – and they were so busy they couldn’t get to the bank often enough to deposit it all.
It will probably seem odd now, but that memory board was either 8 or 16k. That was heaven, because the original micros had only 4k of RAM.
In the end, processor Technology lived its too-short life and folded. George went on to start other computer companies (Morrow ThinkerToys was my favorite). George funded Newstar software so he could get a less-expensive version of WordStar. He also funded the company that made the first truly portable computer – a design that Morrow Designs had to sell to Zenith (remember their computers?) to stave off bankruptcy.
George died a few years ago, and I miss him. We didn’t talk often enough because you always had to allocate at least 2 hours to a phone call. Now I’m sorry I didn’t do that more often.
Excellence, mediocrity, and even malfeasance start at the top. Pretty heavy, especially when you think about this in the context of national (and international) politics.
There’s a place where you get to control this, though, if you’re lucky.
When I started working at Sorcim, everybody had the same size office cube. The benefits were the same for everyone, and although pay levels were different, everyone was otherwise on an equal footing.
Boy, that felt good – especially since I came from a very large firm where you could tell management level by the size of the desk and the height of the office chair.
This attitude started at the top and prevailed throughout the company, largely due to founder Richard Frank. In general, we were a happy, productive, and peaceful crew until the founders brought in a “professional management” team. Suddenly, there were perks for the new VPs, and the worker-bees became second-class citizens. Employee morale tanked, especially since the singular accomplishments of the managers was that they had achieved MBA status from top schools.
When I got to run a company, I remembered Richard’s role model, and treated my employees the same way. And I never asked anybody to do something that I wouldn’t do – in fact many times I pitched in to make sure I knew all employee job functions, which ensured that I wouldn’t ask them to do something ridiculous.
Again, a small, happy crew, despite very adverse circumstances (you know the drill – wondering where/how to make the next payroll twice a month). Everyone felt like they were part of an extended family, and everyone knew that I cared about them as individuals as well as employees.
The absentee owner decided to sell the company after I restaffed it and got everyone trained, and the new owner came in and destroyed everything. He started mandating, rather than asking how he could help people do their jobs better.
He took systems that were working and replaced them with systems he preferred. He never got initial buy-in for the new systems, which is critical if you want people to use them. He didn’t understand that if you make the users part of the change decision they are much more likely to appreciate and implement the changes. His only consideration was what would be easier for him. This led to a vastly increased workload; for example, the support people had to use two different CRMs, and our new hosted exchange service was constantly going down.
Meetings with this new menace were always painful, because everyone knew that each meeting would culminate with a new system that would have to be implemented in addition to the old one, and in almost every case the new system worked worse.
Within 4 months, we had lost 70% of the staff, and most of our institutional knowledge. The new owner would dictate new systems, but he never finished implementing any of them, because he would quit when the implementation got too hard. Then others would have to pick up where he left off. So he lost respect twice – first because he didn’t deliver on his big promises, and second because the new systems made lots of extra work, but had no benefit. In fact, the customer satisfaction levels decreased sharply because we no longer had access to data (billing and support) that we once had.
Nobody respected the new owner. Nobody wanted to work for him. He kept very short work hours, but expected everyone else to work at twice their already substantial workload. Frustrated, maltreated employees led to sloppy work and a “who gives a crap” attitude. It all started at the top.
In the end, he flipped the company, and one month later everyone who was still there was laid off without severence.
Many people think of Bill Gates as a monopolist, but my opinion is very different.
In 1983, Microsoft was busy developing the first version of Windows. I was working at Sorcim, and we were making our own windowing system. It was obvious to everyone that the industry was moving in the direction of graphic interfaces, but at that point, the only commercial windowing system was Apple’s Lisa. Nobody had mice, and only a few computers were networked. There were also some pseudo-graphical programs like ContextMBA.
Windows 386 Promotional Video
It’s long, but watch the whole thing, it’s hilarious
True, we knew the Mac was coming. And VisiCorp had already shipped a graphical interface product (VisiOn), but even compared to the original slow Macs, it was glacial and clunky. Oh yes, Digital Research, which was still a player back then, was working on its own windowing system, called Gem.
Gates came to visit us in the Summer of 1983 to try to get us to port SuperCalc to Windows. It was an impressive show – Leo Nikora was running the show, and Microsoft brought along a few OEM VPs (Compaq, Data General and others).
We didn’t think that Microsoft was building Windows properly – in fact, we had rejected some of the technology they were using. And they wrote the original version of Windows in C, which had real performance issues back then. In contrast, being the “real programmers” we were, we were doing everything in Assembler – and we made all our own graphic engines.
We took a totally different approach from Microsoft’s. First we acquired some basic windowing technology (maybe another blog post – it seemed awfully similar to DR’s Gem). But the biggest difference was that we commissioned Umang Gupta to develop a database kernal as the core of our system. (Gupta left Oracle to start Gupta Technologies, and our project – and a similar project from Lotus – funded his startup.)
We had a lively discussion. Gates had no bodyguards in those days, and he was just a geek like everyone else in the room. Another point of perspective: Microsoft sales were about $74 million, and ours were close to $20 million, so we were within striking distance. Lotus was the biggest microcomputer software company at that point, with $100 million in sales.
So we fought – in a friendly geeky kind of way – about how a windowing system should be built. And we were right about one thing: Microsoft had to reprogram Windows in Assembler to get even the rotten performance they got on the first version of Windows.
How does this tie in with this post’s title? I wondered if you would ever ask…
We had great ideas. Arguably, our product would have been better than Microsoft’s for at least two reasons:
We had better programming staff, and our applications were much better than theirs.
We spent a lot of time on the plumbing – the database kernel – so all the applications would work from the same data (which is still problematic in Windows).
Phillipe Kahn and Steve Ballmer in a quiet momemt
Ah, but Bill delivered – and we didn’t. He stayed on course until he finally built a reasonable version of Windows (yeah, I know, we’re still waiting). He did this because he was a much better manager than our president. And many people fail to realize just how good Gates has always been at picking a #2 man. He could always be a product visionary because he had management strength behind him.
While Microsoft struggled to make a good windowing program, Sorcim hit a stone wall, and the board (and our investors) forced management to sell the company to Computer Associates. (No, not the people who went to jail, but their predecessors who should have — oops, better not say that.)
The moral of this story is that Gates is rich because he’s smarter than I am, because he had control over his company, because he didn’t sell out to Computer Associates, and maybe because he had a little luck along the way.
But I’ll say this: he certainly earned my respect. I may not have liked his products or some of Microsoft’s business practices, but I surely respected his competence and persistence.
Inspired by Ian Griffin, I’m – well inspired – to try podcasting. Let’s just say my first entry (not ready yet) will be for the optically challenged among us.
If you want to try this too, it’s not very hard – check out Ian Griffin’s Professionally Speaking blog. I heard Ian speak a few days ago, and he made it all seem wonderful and within grasp. Of course, Ian is a professional speaker, so that may influence his thinking.
For me, it’s just a new road to examine on my trip to some still undefined place.
Most of Ian’s podcasts are interviews – and he’s got a really slick way of capturing his victims. He carries a small digital sound recorder around and gets people at conferences and other events to go off in a quiet corner somewhere to talk for a few minutes. Sort of like an audio-only Robert Scoble.
Well, I like that idea a whole lot, and I’m going to try it out myself. First post, though, will just be me talking to you. I’ll try to have that up in a few days. This is all part of my personal branding experience. Publishing is a good way to make yourself visible on the Internet, and podcasting brings an entirely new level of fame (infamy?) because the WordPress Podcasting plugin automatically gets you iTunes exposure.
Pretty soon, I won’t be able to walk down the street without being stopped by admirers. Or maybe not.
I was just updating my Windows installation, and I downloaded 64 mb in a couple of minutes. That got me to thinking about what downloads used to be like…
My first modem was 300 baud, which I used to communicate with an IBM mainframe. I remember setting up a client with a 1200 baud modem back around 1977 – it was the hot new technology, and it cost about $1,000!
But the experience that always hits home for me was when my partners and I sold Newstar software to MicroPro in 1986. There was a quirk in the California tax code that enabled us to avoid sales tax on the transaction if we transmitted the source code electronically. (Silly law, but it saved us a lot of money.)
Well, we went right out and bought the latest and greatest 9600 baud Hayes modems – I can’t remember, but I’d bet they were also about $1,000 each. We spent an entire day trying to get the two modems (located about 40 miles apart) to work, and finally fell back on using 1200 baud modems. Can you imagine transferring the source code for Microsoft Office at 120 characters per second?
Oh yeah, these early modems used proprietary technology. The early 9600 baud Hayes modems would only talk to other Hayes modems, so when 9600 baud usage spread, we had to get new modems!
So every time you curse a slow download, be thankful you’re not doing it at 300 baud!
I suppose there are many people who scratch their heads wondering what Twitter is all about. I’ve found a couple of things I find useful there, but overall the service is more of a curiosity than a necessity to me. I really don’t need to know when somebody I’m following goes to the bathroom…
I only follow three Twitterers (is that right?), and one of them isn’t even a person, it’s the Mars Phoenix Lander. The Phoenix doesn’t post often, but since it’s hardly front page news anymore, it’s a good way to keep up with what’s happening on Mars, in case I have to make a quick departure after the elections. I also follow a company I’m very interested in – this is a great way to get news out about what your company is doing, and this company clearly “gets it.” (This is not a reference to Team McCain.)
I tried following one of the important tech bloggers, but I found his tweets totally useless, since he always pointed to posts that I already see in Google Reader.
Tonight, I saw the real power of what Twitter can do. The site started a new service that does real-time coverage of the presidential race (which is starting to look like a potato sack race for one of the candidates, but that’s a different topic). I discovered this when I was looking for some coverage of the final presidential debate.
The website is http://election.twitter.com/. If you keep the page open, you’ll see real-time streaming tweets from people commenting on the campaign, and the screen keeps scrolling as new comments come by. Really neat – sorta like the marquee displays on cable news channels, except without their filters.
Here’s a screen capture from October 15, 2008. Click on it to see a larger version.
A long time ago, I tried a photo editing service, but the link and the product are long gone. So I just (Oct. 2020) popped in the picture that was once there. That black and white mug shot is from 2000.
I guess I should mention that the color photo was taken at a Halloween party in 1972. I don’t usually walk around with a hatchet in one hand and a drink in the other.
Once I wrote about personal branding and my early internet and microcomputer experiences.
Now I have a new reason to write: I’m fighting the biggest battle of my life. I’ve been diagnosed with ATTRwt – transthyretin amyloidosis, wild type – a previously untreatable rare disease that affects primarily my heart.
Now, that Vyndaquel (Tafamidis) has received FDA approval, I’m hoping to share my experience and knowledge. Early diagnosis is the key!
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