Leaked today and linked to broadly — Valve new employee handbook
I’m ready to sign up and start next week. I don’t know that this model would work for every industry and for every scale company, but man is it compelling. Nice work, Valve.
Tag Archive for Seattle
Another awesome spring day in Seattle #frickingrain
Eat your heart out, rest of the world.
Inside the light rail tunnel — highlight of my week!
Looking down the tunnel from the UW campus — thanks so much to folks at UW College of Engineering for arranging, and for Traylor for hosting. If Traylor hadn’t been so darn good at their job, completing this link early, we would have actually seen the borer in operation. But fascinating to see all the infrastructure to support the boring operation — the trains, material delivery systems, etc etc.
Decent article in Seattle Times about maker resources
Good article in PNW mag yesterday about maker resources here in the Seattle area. The particular things I noted:
- Ignite Seattle — regular talks about projects, tho next event postponed, hope this is still active
- Dorkbot Seattle — also on hiatus this month but seems like my kind of thing (apparently lots of electricity involved)
- Nerdnite — more talks and sharing
- Metrix create space — parts, workshop, courses, community
- ALTSpace — another maker space
- Jigsaw Renaissance — and another
- Seattle Maker Faire — annual event showcasing projects
- make Seattle
- Geekwire — really more startup focused but leaking into maker space a little
As an aside, it is so odd that in 2012, the Seattle Times would go to the trouble to research, write, and distribute this article, but then in the web-published version, not link to any of the resources mentioned in it, leaving it to people like me to scrounge together all the links. The web version of the article seems like the afterthought, and the Times misses the opportunity to create the web-based page of record for “Seattle Maker”. I would have thought by now the web version of the article would be paramount, and the print version would be a derivative of that page. But obviously I don’t get it.
In general I don’t get the whole Seattle Times web strategy — and in 2012 that means I don’t get their overall business strategy. Why do they continue to hide their brand under the nwsource domain? It clearly seems like they just don’t care about the web. No other media company of substance behaves this way. Strange.
Ignition news roundup — Symplified, Whiptail
First off, we are surving the 2012 Snowpocalypse. Office traffic is light but folks are here.
On the business front, it was announced that we led a round in Symplified. Great company building some pretty essential tools to manage employee identity and engagement across the web, can’t imagine how companies manage their voice and presence without this.
We also joined the investor group behind Whiptail, who build high-scale SSD arrays to replace spinning disks. Spinning disks — seems like we will look back at these in 100 years and laugh, or at least class them as a steampunk kind of gadget.
Excited to work with both companies.
Feels like the Seattle economy is on the cusp of an expansion
I had a great week last week that left me feeling incredibly optimistic about the Seattle economy.
First, Techstars Seattle Demo Day. What a super event, lots of coverage of it. Great young companies, enthusiasm, great pitches, good progress in fundraising. Big audience with great energy. Super job by @andysack and everyone involved, a model for everyone else in the Seattle community who wants to nurture startups. We need more of these events, not just in cloud/web. I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurship events at UW and they are constrained by mentoring, hiring, seed financing — exactly what the techstars guys are providing. One of the companies, Romotive, has also done a great job leveraging Kickstarter and have generated a lot of early revenue — the rise of crowd-sourced pre-sales/funding is a fascinating and positive evolution.
Everyone was hiring at the event. As an indicator of how desperate people are to hire, I had two guys try to hire me. If you think I am the answer to your problem, you are pretty desperate.
Then I spent the better part of a day in a meeting with the UW College of Engineering Visiting Committee. Some great data on the College of Engineering — most programs are massively oversubscribed, turning away students in bunches, doing a great job placing students. Great evolution in programs, great facilities, great staffing. The College could probably push out many more engineers and is constrained by state economic policies; with tweaks to tuition and governance, it seems like the pipeline could open much more broadly. And we also had a chance to listen to President Young speak who seems to have a very open attitude about IP licensing, he seems to recognize that getting IP out of the university and to work is important.
I left the two days feeling like a lot of piece parts are coming together fast. Seed funding. Crowd sourcing. Mentoring. Training/Education. And with iteration and tweaking, we could see an explosion of economic growth in the Seattle area. Exciting times.
Metrix Create Space
Scott mentioned this place, have to get there. Via this pretty useful capitol hill blog
EveryBlock β A news feed for your block
EveryBlock â A news feed for your block. Early but interesting aggregation of community data sources
Tesla in Seattle
— good crowd looking at the Tesla this AM.