August 28, 2009
What always surprises me about folks in software is…
- How few people ask for help: meeting your peer at another company helps you steal ideas and makes you seem open-minded and — here’s the thing — you’ll believe them, and listen to them and act on what they say — and when you explain your rationale to others you’ll be able to cite a credible reference.
- How readily people offer help: it’s flattering and fun to help and often involves a free lunch.
Redfin’s brown bag program is a case in point. Andy Liu showed us the light on SEO. Ben Elowitz explained conversion in terms of education and trial, which is why we published a real estate glossary. Scott Jacobson talked about running Amazon Marketplaces, which is why we simpified our agent recommendations and launched our partner network. The whole Urbanspoon crew helped us build a shiny new thing, which we’re just about to launch. And Paul Goodrich pulled our head out of the sand — just in time! — about how to scale a business.
Almost every time someone comes by to give us a brown-bag lunch, it has become a catalyst for change.
Last Wednesday it was Jonathan Sposato and Peter Roman who gave a talk on how to design a beautiful website like Picnik. They talked about the dandelions that pop up as you complete each field in Picnik’s registration system, and the progress bar that impulsively accelerates through the last 10% .
They talked about spending time in the beginning on their brand, not arguing about the abstract names of a category — not about, say, whether Redfin stands for transparency or honesty or openness — but getting to very precise feelings by multiple examples, examples of words and pictures and things they liked and wanted to be like. They showed pictures of chairs designed in 1941 and the latest architecture in Gramercy Park and images of kids with their parents and color swatches.
It was something I really agreed with because I have always felt that the most magnificent accomplishment of any work of art — and any brand is a work of art — is a sustained and precisely expressed emotion. It has always seemed to me that the people with the most emotions, the best emotions, struggle to sustain them.
But the real insight came at the end of the talk when Jonathan explained that they worked so hard to delight people — Picnik tries to give everyone a little surprise — because the Picnik folks come from a gaming background. As executive producer of Halo, Jonathan had to make the shell casings fly from the gun and bounce off the wart-hog in just the right away. It was a totally alien perspective for most of us, since we come from a business software background where people are users — someone forced to use our product — not players.
There’s probably a good case for the stripped-down-to-the-metal speed and functionality of Craigslist or Google Chrome. But it is hard to deny the emotional appeal of being more painterly in our design.
Anyhow, the two things that I got out of the talk were that Redfin should stop trying to win a logical argument with consumers about why our home-buying service is clearly the rational choice, and start pumping on the glands and the heart — our site sometimes seems masculine and cold. And the other thing is to think sometimes like a gamer: what if our users were players who didn’t have to do anything unless it was for pleasure?
It’s an active debate at Redfin — we took years off Sasha Aickin’s life by introducing rounded corners into our user interface, to make our delightful site more delightful — so it’s hard to know where to draw the line. But Jonathan and Peter made a good case, and you can tell already from sitting in Redfin meetings that it changed how we think. Thanks guys!
February 17, 2009
Redfin launched its 2009 brown-bag lunch program last Friday, where employees and guests speak on how we can broaden our horizons beyond our little startup and develop our careers.
I addressed the first topic, public speaking, mostly because in 2002 I had attended part of a road-show boot camp that Sequoia Capital put its executives through before an IPO. The CEO and the CFO were the stars of the road-show, so I wasn’t the main attraction and didn’t participate in all the exercises, but the one session in which I did participate was one of the most useful of my professional career.
The man who ran the boot-camp seemed fantastically old yet emphatic, like a wizard. I wondered if at one time he coached other Sequoia alum, like Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, and was surprised that he didn’t seem to mind working with us. I have no idea what we paid him. Here’s what I learned, with a few extra suggestions of my own…
1. Go with what makes you comfy: a slide deck isn’t an end in itself, but a means to an end: to help you comfortably speak to strangers. Your slides should be like an old lady’s shoes: it doesn’t matter how they look so long as they feel comfortable. For this reason, editing someone else’s slides sometimes makes the slides better but almost always makes the presentation worse.
2. Give yourself cues, not a script: the audience has read every slide before you open your mouth, yet most presenters still say each bullet aloud. Why? Because the slide has so much text that there’s little left to say. Compare that to each slide in a Steve Jobs presentation. It’s a haiku, sometimes less, just a title and an image, sometimes nothing at all. Steve, not the slides, tells the story. If you have less text on the slide, you’ll find yourself looking at the slides less, and the audience more.
3. Don’t present at your presentation: a good presentation isn’t a presentation at all. It’s a dialog. PowerPoint is an evil matrix of command and control, squashing interruption. The only question that many presenters ask, “does that make sense?” — is really just a brute request to continue. A good presentation is a dialog between you and your audience. The last two words I think of before starting into any presentation came from Muhammad Ali, who from the depths of his Parkinsonian catatonia gave a speech to Emory students consisting entirely of: “ME… WE.” These are the barest elements of a great speech.
4. Mingle beforehand: during your presentation, use the questions, stories, names of people you talked to in the audience before the presentation started. If you’re presenting on the sense of smell for example, you could mention that ”one of your colleagues just mentioned that the smell of pizza now reminds her of all your late-night bug parties.” You don’t have to call someone out by name to establish a connection.
5. Ask questions: it’s the best way to engage an audience.
to find common cause: (”how many of you wish there was a scent-based art form?”);
to set up a surprise: (”anyone want to guess how many different smells the human nose can register?”)
to gather information: (”What smells would be in your olfactory memoir?”)
People will initially be hesitant to answer your questions, so your first question should come early and be easy to answer. It helps to have a friendly face you can call on. And it’s not a big deal if you answer it yourself; you still got people thinking rather than just listening.
6. Establish eye contact with anyone who will give you the time of day.
7. Overdress, then roll up your sleeves: always take the preso more seriously than the audience
and dress for the event. I learned this from Jim Flatley, a colleague who ran field operations at my last job. Deeply disturbed that I’d moseyed into a staff meeting in socks with no shoes, Jim immediately pulled his pants down and asked “Glenn, do you mind? I’m just more comfortable this way.” Now I dress up to present. But I think it’s effective too to build intimacy with an audience by taking off your coat halfway through, like Diddy at one of his parties.
8. Eat light, eat protein: it supposedly keeps you sharp. John Kennedy asked for a papal dispensation to eat bacon on the day of his great inaugural speech, a Friday. Don’t worry about milk; the idea that it coats your vocal cords is untrue.
9. Arrive early so you can relax: I’m usually cross at the beginning of a presentation because I barely have time to get the slides on screen. My brother, the one who left corporate life to save the environment, used to tell me that Hitler let crowd excitement build by arriving late and rushing on-stage. I took this advice for years, but it never worked for me. It’s petrifying to look out into an audience and have no idea what people are thinking. If you arrive early enough to mingle, you can adjust to what the audience wants.
10. Never turn down a mic: big, bearish men love to say they’ll be fine without a microphone. They probably refuse to ask for directions, too. Without a mic, you’ll sound pretty haggard at the end, and you’ll lose straight-away most of the vocal range you could have had for dramatic effect. Even in a room of 30, ask for a mic.
11. Tell stories: a story has at least one character, and a plot. Rather than explaining the three reasons why your startup will win, tell the story of how you came to believe in it: “I was buying a place and I realized I could find out more online about a hair-dryer than a house.” Be personable, not argumentative.
12. Show some passion: a former 60 Minutes producer was once trying to pump me up for a “Today” show interview. He said many people would be drifting by the TV without even listening, and their first cue that I was saying something interesting would be whether I looked interested in it myself. “Now,” he said, approaching the high point of his shtick. “Aren’t you interested in what you’re going to be talking about tomorrow morning?” “No,” I said. “You’re screwed,” he said. And I was!
13. Belittle only yourself (a little): your project is to please. It should be illegal to give a presentation without a few jokes. And the butt of all those jokes should be you. Obama would have been insufferable if he hadn’t started almost every campaign event with a few self-effacing wisecracks about how his wife keeps him in check.
14. Use simple words: imagine if, instead of saying “tear down this wall,” Ronald Reagan said “eradicate this fortification”? Simple words are more powerful; Martin Luther started a revolution with eight simple words: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” A professor once told me to use Anglo-Saxon-based words instead of so many fancy Latinate terms. “Which is which?” I asked. “Hit your thumb with a hammer,” the professor said. “The next 50 words out of your mouth will be all Anglo Saxon-based.” During my brown-bag, Chris Glew called out his favorite example: instead of ocean, say whale road. Now you’re talking Chris! Our goal isn’t to sound smart; it’s to be persuasive.
15. Be spontaneous: Martin Luther King was about to flounder in his most-famous 1963 speech for the Civil Rights March on Washington when Mahalia Jackson called out “Tell ‘em about the dream Martin.” Listened to in its entirety, what’s remarkable about King’s speech is how unremarkably it starts. Fortunately, King soon veered from the prepared text to give a variant on a speech he had tried out before, in what became the 20th century’s greatest prophecy. If during your speech you discover in yourself a vein of genuine emotion, follow it. Your audience will be alive to the risks, and reward you for it.
16. Move as fast as possible, but not fast: If you ever ask yourself, “is it time to move on?” move on. I have never, ever listened to a presentation without wondering “when’s lunch.” If you’re running late, don’t rush, just be concise. If you don’t have time to be concise, skip slides. And even if you’re not running late, you should not speak to every bullet on every slide. You’re not Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. If I ever get to make my case at the Pearly Gates, my opening argument will be I skipped slides and let the crowd eat early.
17. Move, then be still: a salesman from Buffalo once told me he liked to find a few people scattered across each audience, and then move around the stage at key points in his presentation to establish eye contact with each one. For most people, the moving part is easy. What’s hard – especially for a spaz like me — is standing still after you’ve moved. Just look at Gordon Gecko in his overwhelming “Greed is Good” speech: he moves easily around the stage and into the audience, but stands stock-still to make each of his major points. For the final 20 seconds of his speech, he doesn’t even blink.
18. Hold the basketball: if you hold your hands in front of you as if you’re gripping a basketball, it will encourage you to gesture in measured ways. I was told this by the great Dan Fabulich, organizer of Harry Potter and open-source conferences, someone who travels with a large bag of dice for serendipitous gaming opportunities. However unlikely a source for sports metaphor, Dan is a fantastic speaker.
19. Know your wiifys: a wiify is what’s in it for you, a one-line summary of each slide that explains why your audience should care about it. The you isn’t your bottom-line as a speaker, it’s the bottom-line of your audience. The goal is to connect to their reptilian brain, promising money, sex, power. For each slide, you have to imagine someone yelling “I don’t care.” If you actually write out a wiify for each slide, your presentation will be much more crisp, and you’ll be able to adjust if the prior speaker goes long or a key audience member announces he’s leaving early. You should be able to whisk through the highlights of an entire deck in five minutes, without hurrying.
20. Never leave without the ball: make sure you understand the question before attempting an answer. Nothing is more deflating than an audience-member saying, “Actually, that wasn’t my question.” If you don’t understand the question, apologize, and ask the person to repeat the question, but never imply the question was poorly phrased. You can also repeat the question yourself, to affirm that you’ve understood it before answering, to prune away any negative distractions, and to give yourself time to think. A perfect example of answering a question before you understand it came during George H.W. Bush’s 1992 debate with Bill Clinton. It is hard to remember now that, basically until Bush answered a question he didn’t understand, #41 was the overwhelming, post-Desert Storm favorite.
21. Never say “good question”: unless you want to say it for every question. The person who asked the “good” question will like it, but the next questioner may feel slighted. If you want to affirm each question, do it in different ways: “wow, I’d never thought of that,” or “hey, thanks for asking.”
22. If you have to cut off questions, give notice: Norman Schwarzkopf, the Desert Storm general, ran press conferences like military drills. Nearing the end, he would say, “two more questions.” Then, “one more question.” Even though most journalists didn’t get to ask their questions, he never seemed rude or abrupt.
23. Start every answer with yes, no or a number: it drives me crazy when presenters don’t answer the question directly, instead using their “answer” to repeat their spiel. In any presentation, as early as possible, you want the audience to have some measure of control. So get right to the point and answer the dang question, then (if you really must) do your spiel. And if you don’t know the answer to a question, say “I don’t know.”
24. Come up with a fun title: especially at a conference, where you’ll be competing in the program guide with other talks in other rooms.
25. Always say thank you: even if you flub horribly you can still be humble. Provide your contact details on the final slide so people can find you and your slides via email, in the blogosphere or Twitter.
There’s plenty more good advice, but that was the list we came up with during the brown bag. If you have other suggestions, please leave a comment! And if you’d like to come to the next brown bag, on what venture capitalists are funding these days, sign up here.
Neurotic post-script…
Make the slides look sharp: yes, the slides are just a prop but I still fuss over their formatting anyway. The hallmarks of a good slide, about, say, controlling feral cat-population are:
- 5 lines, 5 words per line, max: though I break this rule all the time
- 2+ bullets: if you only have 1 bullet, you don’t need bullets
- Parallel structure: the bullets are consistently either
- imperatives (find cats | capture cats | transport cats)
- nouns (large dogs | dead mice | snakes)
- sentences (Rob finds the cats | Sarah captures the cats)
- Consistent capitalization, punctuation: if you start using periods, use ‘em on every bullet.
- 1 font: this is arguable;
- 0 animations
- Meaningful titles: avoid generic titles for each slide like “Cats (continued)”
- Native charts, created by the presentation software: which look better than pasted-in spreadsheet charts
For more public speaking tips, visit alltop.
October 27, 2006
As part of our brown bag lunch program, Farecast CEO Hugh Crean visited Redfin Friday for a talk on the Art of the Deal. Hugh was a corporate development bigshot at Priceline, and an equity analyst at the fierce DLJ investment bank before that. He talked about something I’ve never been good at, which is how to negotiate deals.
Here are a few of Hugh’s tips:
Know both sides of a deal: understand before being understood. Always enter a deal asking “what do you need?” You can learn everything you need to know simply by asking, which gives you the same advantage as a poker player who is last to bet. I once read an obituary of a legendary sports agent whose signature opening move was to never be first to open his mouth; squaring off with general managers who knew his game and wanted to beat him at it, the two sides would start off by staring at each other in silence for five minutes. Looking for this anecdote, I came across this beauty of a quote from Leigh Steinberg: “it’s fine not to be a totally finished person.” George Burns took Steinberg to his first baseball game.
Establish the boundaries of what is negotiable, and then don’t cross those boundaries; it just irritates people.
Both sides have to win. Hugh said, “always be direct and straight with people. You can’t trick people into taking a bad deal.” There is a particular kind of wheeler-dealer who sees business as a matter of being savvy rather than creating value, of finding new ways to screw people, but most deals depend on both sides getting what they need. Richard Parsons, the CEO of Time-Warner, is famous for this philosophy.
Keep it simple: hard deals, complicated deals never get done. If you get too fancy, people find ways not to do a deal. Time kills deals.
But for the most part, time is out of your control. Accept that you can’t make a deal happen on your own.
If things don’t work out, keep smiling and move on. Life is short, and no deal is easy.
Always know the decisionmaker. Be direct: “Are you the person who ultimately makes the decision? What is your process? What is the best way to work with you?” But also treat everyone as important, from the janitor to the CEO (Hugh worked the room so thoroughly before his presentation started that I started to worry he would recruit all of our employees away); if someone is in the room while a deal is being negotiated, she is there for a reason.
I can’t help but add one bit of advice I got from my old boss, John Kunze:
Be prepared: most people believe that their quick wits and dazzling personality will carry the day in a negotiation; this in part stems from the idea that a negotiation is the fun part of business, the part you see enacted in the movies. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been negotiating a now-or-never deal and wanted to hit the pause button, so I could look up an old contract (”what did we pay last time?”) or ask a stupid question (”how many shares were there outstanding again?”). What this means is that when the chips were down, I wasn’t prepared. Like anything else, a lot of deal-making is knowing the value of what you’re getting or giving, and thinking through what you’re prepared to exchange for it. Without preparation, executives can waltz into a deal two months in the making and give away the farm.
Aside from the advice, there were some good moments during Hugh’s talk:
My third-favorite moment was when Hugh began talking about how to tell when the opposing side is uncomfortable: legs are moving, hands are moving, neck veins become engorged, hair gets brushed away, people blink faster (in a panic, I tried to remember if I did any of these things while Hugh was opening things up with his Farecast pitch, which was so good that I found it THREATENING). Hugh’s catalog of human frailty reminded me of a blog posting on how to spot liars (for example: when you change the subject, a liar is relieved to move on). Hugh said that you can talk more slowly to calm a room, or more loudly to pick it up.
My second-favorite moment was when Hugh answered a question from Bridgette about how to handle a situation in which a negotiator was trying to bypass her to get a deal done. The plucky Bostonian stuck out his jaw and said “If anyone comes at you in this life, FIGHT.”
And my all-time favorite moment was when Hugh told a story about his younger brother, a boxer who fought against heavyweights half-again his size, in places like Maine, while the audience (older? fat? sometimes not even paying attention?) was served dinner (steak? probably not even with a vegetable). Hugh’s brother got mauled but, he told Hugh, “when the bell rang we were at 50 – 50.” I love that story.
It came to mind this morning while I was chewing over one last story, written by the great Michael Lewis for today’s New York Times on football coach Bill Parcells, who, after his divorce, keeps everything precious to him in a manila folder, including an anecdote written on yellowed paper about a fight fought three decades ago:
He didn’t see the Hart-Antuofermo fight in person but was told about it, years ago, by a friend and boxing trainer, Teddy Atlas. It stuck in his mind and now strikes him as relevant. Seated, at first, he begins to read aloud from the pages: how in this fight 29 years ago Hart was a well-known big puncher heavily favored against the unknown Vito Antuofermo, how Hart knocked Antuofermo all over the ring, how Antuofermo had no apparent physical gifts except “he bled well.” “But,” Parcells reads, “he had other attributes you couldn’t see.” Antuofermo absorbed the punishment dealt out by his natural superior, and he did it so well that Hart became discouraged. In the fifth round, Hart began to tire, not physically but mentally. Seizing on the moment, Antuofermo attacked and delivered a series of quick blows that knocked Hart down, ending the fight.
The Redskins video is still frozen on the screen behind Parcells. He is no longer sitting but is now on his feet. “This is the interesting part,” he says, then reads:
“When the fighters went back to their makeshift locker rooms, only a thin curtain was between them. Hart’s room was quiet, but on the other side he could hear Antuofermo’s cornermen talking about who would take the fighter to the hospital. Finally he heard Antuofermo say, ‘Every time he hit me with that left hook to the body, I was sure I was going to quit. After the second round, I thought if he hit me there again, I’d quit. I thought the same thing after the fourth round. Then he didn’t hit me no more.’
“At that moment, Hart began to weep. It was really soft at first. Then harder. He was crying because for the first time he understood that Antuofermo had felt the same way he had and worse. The only thing that separated the guy talking from the guy crying was what they had done. The coward and the hero feel the same emotions. They’re both human.”
August 31, 2006
Redfin this week launched a brown-bag lunch program to teach ourselves how to be better at our jobs. So now we’re on the look-out for brown-bag speakers to talk about stuff we don’t understand, like how to read term sheets, or how to manage employees, or how a new programming language works.
Since this blog is as much about start-ups as it is real estate, we’ll touch on a few of the brown bag topics here, too. Hopefully we can pick up some pointers from the comments.
Today’s topic is public speaking. Guy Kawasaki has written the authoritative guide in eleven easy steps (his best advice, by far, was to focus on entertaining, and to tell stories) leaving us with the dilemma faced by the kung fu alcolyte addressing his master: what whiteness can we add to that whiteness, what candor?
Answer: steps 12 – 23!
12. Take your time. You have something important to say.
13. Start with a joke. It immediately establishes that your project is to please.
14. Quote others. It lets someone else talk. People perk up for quotes.
15. Use large, funny graphics. Search Flickr (try the colorful tag) and Google Images. The images can be completely irrelevant (I learned this from a speaker who once explained his odd choice of graphics by saying “I like animals”) . Most PowerPoint decks are a sensory-deprivation chamber.
16. Get a wireless microphone and move around (slowly). Only a Beckett play leaves all the actors rooted to one spot.
17. Have a good time. Most speakers stifle their own excitement to be speaking. Channel bad nerves into energy. Someone’s aunt, a lady I barely knew, once told me that a human being’s most important trait is the quality of her energy.
18. Work off an empty stomach: Norman Mailer’s advice from Armies of the Night, to give you that savage edge (his other recommendation was to get blitzed).
19. Reach for an emotional moment: Martin Luther King’s famous speech reached its apogee only after gospel singer Mahalia Jackson said “Tell ‘em about the dream Martin.” Without emotion, communication is pointless.
20. Look ‘em in the eye. If the lights aren’t too bright, make eye contact with people at different places in the room. Pick one person out, make eye contact for a few seconds, then connect with someone else.
21. Me –> we. Find a way for the audience to interact. Muhammad Ali’s great commencement address, which consisted of only two words (”Me…” — here he put his hand on his chest — and then reached from his Parkinsonian catatonia out to the crowd to say “WE”), was speaking perfected to near-speechlessness.
22. Don’t read the slides & welcome questions: the bullets are points of departure for you to say something interesting. PowerPoint is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control & prevent dialog.
23. If you get the sense you’re running long, stop.
