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Quora: How was Frank Chen recruited to Andreessen Horowitz?

Some great insights below from Frank Chen, and generally speaks to me about the wisdom of picking quality people to collaborate with over anything else:

I got a piece of advice too late into my college career for me to use it in college. That advice was, “take classes from the great professors rather than classes whose description in the course bulletin sound interesting.” It turns out that the great professors will make their subject material fascinating, relevant, and engaging. I was a senior by the time I figured this out, so it was too late to re-take all my classes. So I’ve been making up for lost time with my career choices. And hanging around Marc and Ben has turned out the way you’d expect hanging around those two would turn out—it’s been the ride of a lifetime.

— Frank Chen on how he got recruited to work at Andreessen Horowitz.

Harvard Business Review turns 90

Was really fun and interesting to attend a birthday party for the Harvard Business Review the other week in NY – the big 90 !

Great crowd, and a fantastic series of quick interviews/panels with folks like Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and Burberry’s CEO Angela Ahrendts – who commented that 25% of all purchases, in her industry, are now originating on mobile.

Don’t urinate in public

Some great bits from this interview: 7 Leadership Lessons From A Mind-Meld Between Twitter’s Dick Costolo And Venture Guru Ben Horowitz

So how does a person deemed worthy of promotion end up becoming the caricature of a bad boss? “The number one kind of bad thing people do when they get promoted from individual contributor to manager,” Horowitz says, “is that they have some kind of platonic form of manager in their mind, and they try and be that platonic form, which is not them. The manager all of a sudden … goes from being somebody who you can talk to just like a complete jerk.”

But even when someone is promoted because of his or her cutthroat style, the problem comes when they try to change. Horowitz recalled the story of basketball player Charles Barkley, who had a reputation off the court for getting in bar fights, getting arrested, peeing in public–it overshadowed his on-court performance so much that Nike cast him in a famous series of ads in which he proclaimed “I’m not a role model.” Suddenly he was freer to be himself on and off the court, and some of the pressure came off. The Barkley story, Horowitz said, is a perfect example of the importance of retaining the personality that got you to the management role in the first place.

“The best advice for managers is: You’ve got to be the person you want to work for,” Horowitz added. “And don’t urinate in public.“

Definitely worth a listen to the full audio interview:
http://soundcloud.com/fast-company/dick-costolo-ceo-twitter-in

Mind Blown: Transfer your Google Voice from one Google account to another

A few days ago I spent some time cleaning up my address book, but I forgot that there was one additional place where it was a mess, Google Voice.

I had a Google Voice account tied to an older gmail account which I had set up before Google Voice was available for Google Apps.

That meant that my Google Voice account also had a completely separate contacts list which meant incoming calls & SMSs were often not identified, even though I had that person’s info in my other address book.

I was pretty sure I was stuck with this, when I decided to search around, and boom, I found (via Google of course) a “I want to transfer my Google Voice number to another account” page:

I clicked through the form, and then it forced me to be logged-in to both accounts in the same browser, and not even 5 minutes later my account was transferred.

Amazing.

This is a huge milestone for the Jetpack project – which is becoming a must-have WordPress plugin. Really excited to see this out in the wild.

Matt's avatarJetpack

The past nine releases of Jetpack have started to reveal our vision for next-generation features that will boost WordPress’ incredible success by making it more social, more connected, more mobile, and more customizable.

Over three million downloads later, we’re excited to report that the community has embraced this seemingly impossible vision for combining the best of hosted and non-hosted WordPress. This tenth release brings some of the most-asked-for features into the hands of millions of Jetpackers.

Publicize to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr…

You no longer have to jump through hoops and developer portals to connect your blog to your friends on your favorite social networks. Through Jetpack and your WordPress.com account, you can connect to each network with just a few clicks and broadcast to your audiences and followers across several networks, making WordPress your true digital hub. Activate Publicize from the main Jetpack page in your dashboard, then go…

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Props to Dick Costolo of the Feedburner Mafia

There are still moments when print has an impact that’s unmatched in anything available in digital form — and that’s definitely the case with a business section cover in the NYT:

Lots of people talk about the PayPal mafia (and rightly so) – but I’ve got my eye on the Feedburner mafia ! Beyond Dick Costolo, you have from the BD team alone, Rick Klau now a partner at Google Ventures, and Don Loeb at Adobe (via Typekit). All great folks, and they were awesome to work with back in the RSS Feedburner days.

And big props to Dick for a great NYT story and for leading Twitter under an intense spotlight.

It’s as if every move at Twitter is judged like it’s being done by your hometown NFL coach. Everyone is a Monday morning quarterback and everyone has an opinion on how Twitter should run their business. And in the meantime, Twitter has built a fantastic business, and in my view one of the most addictive and useful service on mobile today.

[If you haven’t read it already, definitely worth a read “A Master of Improv, Writing Twitter’s Script”]

Best Session at Dreamforce 2012: Colin Powell & GE CEO Jeffery Immelt

I dropped by the Salesforce conference this past week (aka Dreamforce) to get a sense of what was going on and what the new trends were in various SaaS/Cloud applications.

But by far the best session was an interview conducted by salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff with General Colin Powell & GE CEO Jeffery Immelt: