Uncrunched

We used to see this a lot with MySpace hires, where new execs would come on board having never used the product.

I think Twitter’s new PR Chief Gabriel Stricker is a great PR exec from my past interactions with him. But the man went through the entire interview process without ever actually having sent a tweet (here’s his account)?

From Reuters: “Former Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker is moving to Twitter to lead its communications team, he announced Wednesday via his first-ever tweet on @gabrielstricker.”

Huh. That would have been a nonstarter for me.

Update: Someone sent me a message saying Gabriel used to have a private Twitter account, so the Reuters story isn’t accurate.

A few weeks ago I posted a picture of a dog, calling it “the perfect photo.” Well, I think this one is even better.

Meet Tess, a two week old Blue Heeler. She and her two healthy brothers were born in the Skagit Valley Humane Society where I’ve been volunteering the last few weeks. Her mother June and the suspected father were found and brought into the shelter just a couple of weeks before that. The staff there has been taking great care of them since then.

Tess was unfortunately born with a severely deformed right front leg. There was a discussion about whether or not to save her. This is the main county shelter that takes in all dogs and cats without question. That means when all the space is full, the animals must go somewhere else. A lucky few get into the local no-kill shelters, but they only take highly adoptable pets. A tiny number get into specialized shelters for older or troublesome animals (like pit bulls). The rest are euthanized.

The Skagit Valley Humane Society isn’t a no-kill shelter, but they put down very few animals. There’s no timetable for adoption, and unless the dog is extremely sick and unlikely to recover, or extremely dangerous. Some of the dogs have been there for a long, long time.

So back to Tess. Given the cost of removing her leg, and the possibility that she wouldn’t survive, the shelter was considering euthanizing her. I was working that day and watched as a group of staff formed to discuss Tess. Someone suggested that the staff pitch in for the surgery.

Remember that the people working at a shelter are doing it out of love (or they should be), not because they’re being paid well. Most of the staff also volunteers since there’s a lot more work to be done than there’s budget to pay for. These are some of the best people I’ve ever met. But they aren’t rich. Pitching in to save a puppy, which is just this week’s big problem, is a real hardship.

Anyway, as you can see from the picture above, Tess had the surgery and she’s doing really well. She’ll certainly be adopted in a few weeks when she and her brothers are ready.

A happy ending.

But not really. Whoever adopts Tess would likely have adopted a different dog if she was euthanized. That dog probably won’t get adopted at all now. He or she, along with 3-4 million other dogs and cats, will be euthanized in the U.S. this year alone.

A good friend of mine is getting married later this year. A couple of weeks ago she told me she and her fiance will be getting a dog or two in the near future, and they know exactly what kind they want. She knows I’m a dog person and I think she told me because she thought I’d be excited for her.

I wasn’t excited for her. I strongly suggested that instead of buying from a breeder they adopt their dogs instead from a shelter. It may not be a purebred (although 25% of the dogs in shelters are), but instead of making the dog and cat overpopulation worse they can make the situation better.

My friend can balance out the situation with Tess by making the decision now to adopt only from a shelter. That dog that wouldn’t be adopted because Tess lived would now have a home.

Both of my dogs, Laguna and Buddy, are shelter dogs. They’re more or less purebred labrador. Given how hard it is for me to leave the shelter after I volunteer I suspect that I’ll have one or two more dogs by the end of the year.

But that still leaves 4 million dogs and cats that will be killed this year. So please, consider adopting a shelter animal. You won’t regret it.

PS – Cleaning the shelter, which mostly means cleaning up a lot of dog shit, is a highly humbling experience. Even if you’re just going there to walk the dogs, volunteer. It’s stunning how few people do. If they knew how great they’d feel afterwards the shelters could start charging people to work there. I started off thinking I’d volunteer for a half day every week or two. But after seeing how short handed they are, I’m gladly volunteering three mornings a week now.

Here’s a picture I took today, just after finishing the cleaning, of a spaniel mix who was abandoned by his owners. He’s one of my favorites and I keep thinking he’ll be adopted when I come back next, but he never is.

PPS – It’s amazing to me that there is no vet in the county that is willing to donate their time for free to the shelter. There are a few that give discounted rates, mostly for neutering and spaying, but vet bills are still a very significant cost for the shelter. It seems to me that it would be a great deal for the vets if one or two of them were willing to do all work for free that the shelter needed, including their costs for materials and medication, in exchange for publicity in the shelter and on the website. But none apparently want to. Even the local newspaper charges full price for adoption ads. Shameful.

If you’ve read my stuff over the years you know that I love simple things that work well.

If you sit down with me and after ten minutes of describing your company I have no idea what your product is, things aren’t going well. This actually happens in about 10% of pitches I hear.

If you sit down and say two sentences and then I start babbling about how awesome that is and repeating it to you in an understandable way and then suddenly I’m on my phone downloading your app or visiting your website, things are going much better.

So, Crowdcall. Yesterday Pat Gallagher and I had lunch with Randy Adams in Palo Alto (yes, he looks a little bit like Jeff Bezos). Randy is a tech legend – one of the first board members of Yahoo, the software architect of NeXT, founder of the ill-fated but audacious SearchMe, founding board member of Funny Or Die.

Randy’s involved with a new startup, CrowdCall. Here’s what it does – easy, free conference calls with your contacts, without the need for them to download an app, no service to sign up for, no new conference call numbers to store.

When you call someone you can just hit “add call” and get a bunch of people on the phone (this is how we do CrunchFund partner meetings). Or you can use CrowdCall, create lists of groups that you call frequently (think family, team meetings, etc.) and with a single click call all of them at once.

That’s it. You don’t even create an account when you download the app, and the people you call don’t need the app.

It’s brilliantly stupidly simple and it is clearly now one of the daily-use apps on my phone. CrowdCall isn’t going to change the world. But it fixes a problem in an uncomplicated way.

And now it’s spreading like crazy. All I did was tweet about it yesterday. NextWeb saw that tweet and posted about it. Then Life Hacker. Then CNet.

Whenever someone is called for the first time via the app, CrowdCall sends out a text message about the service to that person. They don’t send it out ever again. But that’s how the service is spreading virally.

Thank you, Randy, for showing me CrowdCall yesterday. I hope we become shareholders soon.

Image lifted from Cnet article linked above.

I invested in Snapguide, which launched today to a mountain of positive press, well before CrunchFund was formed last year, although the investment was later transferred to the fund. It was an incredibly easy decision.

Back in 2010 Daniel Raffel and Steve Krulewitz left their senior product/engineering jobs at Yahoo and Google, respectively, to start a new company. I broke the news about the startup, although they wouldn’t tell me what they were going to build (I don’t think they even knew yet).

It didn’t matter. I told Daniel I wanted to invest. He and Steve are what’s called “blank check guys” in the VC world. That means you invest in them if you can no matter what crazy ideas they have, because they are so smart and so driven that they’ll likely figure out a way to win big eventually.

Mike Volpi at Index ventures put together a round, and I invested, in June last year.

So what is Snapguide, who’s Leslie, and why will she love it?

Leslie is a TechCruncher who may have written the saddest tweet ever about trying out Pair (a social network for couples) even though she doesn’t have anyone to try it out with.

Leslie says she’ll try out any app if we’re an investor, so she needs to try out Snapguide today. The app is full of amazing how-to guides, and it doesn’t require a boyfriend to use it properly. But that description doesn’t adequately describe Snapguide.

First, it’s made for mobile devices, and it assumes you’ll have that device with you while you’re following the guides. Lots of big, beautiful pictures and videos. Easy to follow directions. And you can chat with other users and the guide creator as well.

There are already some great guides on Snapguide, even though it just launched. But what the service really needs is new guides! There’s something that you are amazing at, right?

Maybe you have the best ever recipe for something that you made up and perfected over the years and want to share. Or you know how to build a house using only duct tape and old tires. Or you are the worlds leading expert on making sock puppets. Whatever. Make a guide and see if the world loves it. I bet they do.

More on Snapguide at Pando Daily, TechCrunch, GigaOm, LifeHacker and AllThingsD.

When I see my quote about the new batch of Y Combinator companies printed in this CNET article by Daniel Terdiman it just looks weird to me, different than how it sounded to myself when I thought/said it (bolded the part about the innocents):

While some of the teams that are part of Y Combinator include tech industry veterans, many are made up of first-time entrepreneurs, and that’s something Arrington finds refreshing.

Arrington said he appreciates that the teams coming out of Y Combinator tend not to be jaded and are mainly made up of “young guys that have never been screwed over” by standard Silicon Valley politics. And these teams are “re-energizing Silicon Valley with the fresh blood of innocence,” he said.

Of course, Arrington has a vested interest in the success of many of the companies presenting here. He said CrunchFund will likely invest in about 15 of the startups in the current Y Combinator program.

I meant “innocents” not “innocence” but the meaning clear. Only in print it sounds so jaded and sinister – like we’re sending lambs to slaughter.

What I was thinking when I said that is more about the “man in the arena” stuff, how entrepreneurs should fight on in the face of constant criticism from the press and other people who express jealousy through criticism, as well as the exhausting, cumulative and soul destroying wear and tear that entrepreneurs endure as willing or unwilling participants in Silicon Valley politics.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you know what I mean. If you aren’t, you probably don’t.

Anyhow, back to Y Combinator. Twice a year I get to sit in on a magical event, where dozens of new bright eyed and bushy tailed founders get on stage and show the world what they’ve built.

They talk about how they want to change the world. And no matter how absurd their dreams (one founder today said “our software will literally be installed on every Internet connected device in the world”), I can’t help but be swept up in the moment.

So what if a year from now some of these founders will have failed miserably. So what if others get churned through the machine and come out the other end a little less than whole. A few will become giants and lead future generations of entrepreneurs. And in six months or so a whole new batch of ’em will be coming through again. And they’ll be just as bushy tailed as the last ones were.

Today was a good day in Silicon Valley. It was Y Combinator Demo Day, where everyone is a unique and special flower, with nothing but happy days full of promise to come.

I remember way back in 2007 when Facebook first launched their app platform. Developers were free to add their own advertising and user transactions, Zuckerberg said, and Facebook wouldn’t take a cut.

Developers flocked to Facebook and a symbiotic relationship emerged. Some developers got fat and happy on money made from Facebook users, and Facebook eventually started forcing developers to use Facebook’s credit system, where Facebook took a non negotiable 30% fee.

No developers really yelled “bait and switch,” although Zynga came close. If they don’t care I don’t care, and everyone seems to be getting along fine now.

Still, I find the way Facebook phrases its tax fascinating. “Facebook paid more than $1.4 billion to game developers (and other app makers) in 2011,” said Facebook today (this was previously reported too).

That’s sort of like the Federal government issuing a press release that they “paid” citizens whatever they didn’t take that year in taxes. It suggests Facebook’s thinking is that all of the money is theirs, really, and that they passed so much along is worth of a back slap. Or it’s just brilliant PR. Or both.

Awesome.

This probably doesn’t violate any laws, or even Google’s new privacy policy, but it is definitely creepy. If you search for “pet meds” on Google and you’re signed in, Google pre-fills your gmail address into the ad widget. That doesn’t mean they’ve automatically sent it to the advertiser – God help them if they did – but it sends the absolute wrong message to users about where Google’s priorities lie.

And for it to be happening now, while they are rolling out their new privacy policy and taking criticism from all over the world, is just dumb.

I go to Google to do searches. I don’t go there to do social networking, but they thrust that into my face. And I certainly don’t go to Google to have it pre-fill personal information into advertisements for me. Stop it.

Someday I’ll use this photo for a post about TechCrunch, probably after they’ve had a very tough day and with the suggestion that Eric Eldon is somehow that dog. Alexia will probably be the guy. Until now, it’s just awesome. From the New Jersey SPCA Facebook page.

I rarely get writers block, but I’ve aborted multiple attempts to write about the leadership change at TechCrunch yesterday. So I’m going to keep it simple.

I’m exceptionally bummed that so many people have left TechCrunch. Of the top ten all time tech writers according to TechMeme, six were from TechCrunch: myself, MG Siegler, Erick Schonfeld, Leena Rao, Jason Kincaid and Robin Wauters.

Of that group, only Leena remains at TechCrunch. And many other stars have left as well – Paul Carr, Sarah Lacy, Vaughn Brown, Heather Harde and Greg Kumparak.

When I was fired from TechCrunch I at least knew what was coming, and I tried to position it for the best possible outcome. Or at least to avoid the worst outcome. I failed, that worst outcome has absolutely materialized, but I had a fighting chance.

With Erick gone all of the top leadership of TechCrunch, and the majority of the writing talent, have left.

Putting the why aside, one thing’s clear to me. Arianna Huffington seems to enjoy fucking with TechCrunch in her leisure time. She put all her weight behind Schonfeld when I left. But within a few weeks the rumors were that she was furious at him for the way the news broke about MG Siegler joining CrunchFund.

I doubt Erick even realized, but he was a marked man from that day on. Yes, something that petty can piss her off.

So now Eric Eldon is in charge, who joined TechCrunch after I left. I’ve known Eldon for years, and I think he’ll be really good at running TechCrunch. The kumbayah moments have already appeared. The staff, out for blood a week ago with Kincaid leaving, for now, is sated.

But when Jonathan Abrams joked yesterday that “In the future, everyone will be editor of TechCrunch for 15 minutes,” it was funny because it rang true. It’s hard to keep your job running TechCrunch these days.

In the old days of TechCrunch we were pretty good at deflecting the constant gripes from the old school press and the mobs they occasionally kicked into existence.

TechCrunch still has to deal with that, but in the modern era they also have to watch their back, because they have a very touchy psychopath conducting a game of musical chairs to the death. In other words, she has the TechCrunch staff running around in circles, afraid they’ll be the next one out.

As Paul Carr quipped yesterday, a good first move by Eldon would be to refuse to hire a number 2 who’s name is Eric(k). That hasn’t worked out too well for the last two people to run TechCrunch.

But more seriously, Eldon does have a tough job. He has to get page views up, which have declined by around 50% since I departed last year (with Siegler singlehandedly the majority of the loss). TechCrunch has never cared much about page views. But AOL cares a lot about page views. So TechCrunch needs to start caring about page views too.

He also needs to try to keep TechCrunch on the top of the TechMeme leaderboard. It’s an important indicator of the quality of writing, and the number of scoops.

If he can avoid embarrassing Arianna and do those two other things, he should be able to keep his job for a good long while.

Next I could write about how pleasing Arianna and having editorial independence simultaneously is impossible. But I won’t.

I could also write about what TechCrunch could do to bring some of the shine back, but I won’t do that either. I gave my advice on that to Eldon privately by phone yesterday, along with my congratulations. He can take it or leave it. But either way, I won’t take credit, or bitch if they fail. Like Sarah Lacy at PandoDaily, this is his show. His era.

Now, if things do go sideways, I do have some public advice for him. Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight with Arianna. She’s smart and she’s mean as hell and she tends to win her fights. I lost. Erick had no chance whatsoever. The poor guy woke up yesterday thinking that everything was peachy. He went to bed without a job.

Good luck to you.

In 2010 the relationship between Facebook and Zynga became strained over Facebook’s demand that Zynga use Facebook Credits (and swallow Facebook’s 30% fee) for games. The relationship became so strained that Zynga was preparing to launch its own network outside of Facebook.

Like the 1962 U.S. standoff with the Soviet Union over the Cuban Missile Crisis. If things went to war both sides would lose big. But neither side wanted to back down.

Eventually Zynga did back down, swallowed the fee, and went on to its IPO.

I was reporting on the strain at the time, with sources close to both companies. But there was information I was never able to get my hands on. Emails back and forth, supposedly, that were alarming, entertaining, or just plain threatening, depending on your point of view. I tried hard, and failed, to obtain those emails.

Lawyers could get their hands on those documents, though, as part of a lawsuit. And they’d likely become public if that happened. That’s why this Facebook Credits lawsuit is more than just a little bit interesting to me. It’s mostly just historical curiosity at this point, but I’d like to know how close they were to firing the nukes.