The Internet Home of Jonathan Cavell

Finding Talent When You’re Not a Big Boy

Burgher Jon — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:02:44 +0000

The Pirates seem to be close to a deal with the New York Yankees to trade a minor prospect or two to the Yankees for veteran starting pitcher A.J. Burnett. The deal, on its surface, would seem to be the exact opposite of the Pirates’ MO. It’s not though, it is anticipated that the Yankees will assume all but $10 Million of the remaining $33 Million owed to Burnett over the last 2 years of his contract. As it turns out, this is just another creative way to put a talented player (especially one who may be even more talented than he appears) on the team at a relatively low price.

In addition to my excitement as a Pirates’ fan, I think its worth drawing a relationship to the business world. Hiring in business is one of the most difficult tasks any company faces whether that company plays baseball or builds software. While there are clearly some differences between hiring baseball players and hiring talented people for your company (no stat sheets for companies, no need to placate season ticket holders, etc…) there are enough commonalities to be interesting. In particular, I think small companies can learn these three things from baseball:

The first similarity is that great people have a ton of value, especially in the right position. Mark Zuckerberg is famous for saying that a great engineer is worth 100 average ones and he’s probably only exaggerating slightly. In 2001, statisticians estimate, that the Giants won 12.5 games more than they otherwise would have because Barry Bonds was in their lineup (if the Pirates had won 12.5 more games last year they would have been over .500). This may not be true of a great starting pitcher (who only plays once every 5 games), a relief pitcher (who only plays 80 innings in a season), or a catcher (who has to give up some offensive ability to play solid defense) but finding the great ones and paying them appropriately is worth every dime.
Like Baseball though, not every company has the dimes to pay the all-stars. Albert Pujols, the LA Angels first baseman, makes an average of $24M per season, that’s more than half of the Pirates’ payroll. If the Pirates wanted to hire him, they literally would have to fire 3/5 of their starting rotation, their best reliever, their starting shortstop and their catcher. Similarly, Facebook and Google have made headlines paying lower level engineers millions. I’m not calling the big companies (and big payroll teams) wrong for doing this, I’m just saying that most companies (and most teams) need to get comfortable with finding another way than straight giant contracts to lure talented people.
Like baseball, there are ways to come up with talented people at companies without spending a fortune. In baseball there is an odd twist in the rules that allows teams to hold on to players for the first 6 years of their major league careers for much less money than they could make as free agents. It’s this little rule (and maybe a bit of luck) that is the basis for the Pirates ability to compete for most of last season without spending a fortune on players. Similarly, small companies have a lot of tools at their disposal to find and retain talented employees without spending a fortune. Having a strong network helps you find people the big guys may miss. Having a fun or interesting corporate culture helps you retain people who aren’t money driven. Offering people a chance to win with the underdog (and benefit financially) is something a company like Google can’t do.

How do you like that, I managed to go almost 600 words of relevant business wisdom just so I could brag about the Pirates on the blog!

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

Burgher Jon — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 15:42:31 +0000

I came face to face with the downside of working for a startup this week. Unlike a super-sized corporation, small ones have a tendency to change directions in a hurry. The company I have spent the last few years at decided last week to make the strategic move of cutting a fair bit of their development in order to focus on selling the products that we have already built. Unfortunately that means that there is not nearly as much need for the strategic thinkers and designers in the Product Management team.

With the company moving away (for now) from building things (my true passion) it is time for me to go. I spent a splendid week last week in Charlotte shaking hands and sharing memories with one of the best teams I’ve worked with. The only hard parts came when I had to educate the sales staff (who’ll be stuck demoing the product without me). It was hard to walk through the product on screen and see just how much progress the team and I had made over the past 7 months and it was really challenging to see the things I still wanted to do and know that I wouldn’t be around to see them implemented. When I became the product manager of what is today called Visualization Studio, it was an undurused feature of another tool. In the past 7 months we have turned it in to Adaptivity’s most used product. A job is supposed to be just a job, but I have never been able to look at it that way. Adaptivity’s Visualization Studio was my first software product and it was my baby, it was unimaginably hard to leave it just as it was growing in to its own man.

Last week I focused on making my peace with leaving Adaptivity, and this week my focus turns to finding my next gig(s). I have had a humbling number of ex-colleagues reach out to me and several of them have pointed to me some potentially amazing opportunities. I have a couple meetings with personal mentors over the next couple days so that I can begin to sort out what it is I want exactly and how I weight things like money, travel, benefits, working for a startup, etc… From what I’ve seen so far, it’s going to be a very interesting next couple of weeks. If you know anyone who might be interested in chatting with me, feel free to pass on my resume or say so in the comments or drop me an email jonathancavell .. gmail .. com.

The Technology/Humanities Pendulum

Burgher Jon — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:02:59 +0000

As I read Steve Jobs biography I became very interested in just how non-technical he was. Don’t get me wrong; he had a grasp for technology and probably as much engineering skills (hardware and software) as most people in technology, but he didn’t become Steve Jobs and Apple didn’t become Apple because of his technical ability. Apple became the world’s largest company because of Steve Jobs ability to apply an artistic flare that made the technology more accessible, less intimidating to the masses. Essentially Jobs real talent was not in advancing technology, but in advancing humanities.

What I have been thinking about lately is WHY this was the case. Why is Apple the worlds largest company instead of a company (say Intel or IBM or Cray or Cisco) that’s better at making technology achieve new feats of speed or size? The answer that I’ve come to is that computers, and many other fields where the raw sphere of possibilities is advancing, grow in phases. For a little while there is growth in technical capabilities; the micro-chip is invented and then powered to go faster, display screens get smaller, memory capacities advance, etc… At some point the technology stops becoming the limiting factor. It’s at that point that the creative/artistic/humanities people need to begin to come up with more/better ways to use the technologies that are in front of them. It’s the creatives that can look at a 3″ hard drive and see an iPod, read a text and envision Twitter, understand that 4G doesn’t change how fast we do things on a phone, it changes WHAT we do on the phone.

Apple is the largest company in the world because we don’t primarily need faster/smaller right now we need more functional/easier to use. I think we’re going to be in that mode for a while, but at some point the speed of the ideas will outpace the technical advances and the pendulum will reverse.

Sauerkraut Sunday: Super Sauerkraut Salad Edition

Burgher Jon — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 04:35:50 +0000

It’s late on Superbowl Sunday, so you’re not getting very interesting Sauerkraut bits today. All I could find on short notice is the above recipe for “Super Sauerkraut Salad” (find the original here). Since it’s Superbowl Sunday, it seemed appropriate enough.

On to the purpose of Sauerkraut Sundays… As I go through the week, I use Twitter to send out little updates and links. I realize that I do this quite a bit and that not all of you use Twitter, so with that in mind I’d like to take Sunday to do sort of a week in review. I’ve selected the most useful of my tweets from the last week and placed them in to the categories that I use in this blog.

Pittsburgh AND Startups/Social Media!!

Google's Pittsburgh Office named one of the 15 coolest Tech offices in the US (complete with tour): http://t.co/00XgUrEJ

January 30, 2012 1:40 am via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

The Internet Home of Jonathan Cavell

Finding Talent When You’re Not a Big Boy

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

The Technology/Humanities Pendulum

Sauerkraut Sunday: Super Sauerkraut Salad Edition

Pittsburgh AND Startups/Social Media!!

Business

Me

Pittsburgh

Social Media

Sports

Other

Blog Posts from this blog

$100M Without Sales

Have You Caught The Irony in Criticizing Romney for Bain Capital?

Better or Worse, Your Call

Sauerkraut Sunday: The Whole Wall Edition

Pittsburgh AND Startups/Social Media!!

Business

Enterprise IT

Me

Personal Technology

Sports

Other

Blog Posts from this blog

Integrating Services and Why Google Doesn’t Bother Me

My Evolving Thoughts on Fun