this was passed on by a friend, it’s an interesting way to either get your homepage viral, entertain new viewers or annoy a customer on a mission. Checkout HEMA’s page … you’ll need to let it load. i don’t think backcountry.com will be ascribing to this anytime soon 
two weeks into the new gig @backccountry.com and like any new opportunity i’m getting to know new faces, a new culture and some new technology. maybe i should use the word “different” instead of “new”. is ecommerce new technology?
back a few months ago when i was first interviewing w/ backcountry and thinking seriously about a jump from mozy a friend of mine asked why i would even think about ecommerce “it’s not very bleeding edge”. at least compared to the mozy distributed file system (20+ petabytes, processing power, redundancy & protocols) or other cloud computing services an ecommerce platform lacks the blood.
but maybe my friend is wrong … first of all i’m sorry for using “cloud computing” it’s a buzz word like web 2.0 that won’t go away because no other pithy definition exists for distributed web application and storage environments exist. however, over the past few years ecommerce has been influenced by social applications like facebook, twitter & the variety of blogs out there. of course the subject of “community” and “conversation” , which are enabled by the above mentioned applications, but now the bleeding edge for ecommerce companies and the googles of the world is to create context through implicit/explicit actions and crunch models to provide rich experiences online.
a negative example: i buy a lot of things from amazon, but why do they keep recommending Nintendo Wii games to me. i’ve not bought a Wii game from them in over a year? at some point that should decay from their recommendation algorithm and move on.
backcountry.com is a great catalogue, but it’s not a great user experience. i’m excited to tackle this challenge. as of today i’ll be working product management for community projects, content surfacing and all things bike (realcyclist.com & hucknroll.com). ecommerce, not so old hat in my opinion.
so saturday i did the irresponsible thing and didn’t go to class; it’s snowed for 3 days straight here in Utah. so you could say the responsible thing was to make use of God’s given blessings. that i did and headed up to Sundance w/ my brother and a friend to catch some freshies and hopefully make an “epic” day out of it.
we were a little late (around (9:30 am) to cut first trails in some of the areas, but w/ a little bit of resourcefulness we found a few untouched lines and had an absolute blast. barrett and i had not been on the mountain since i was in high school and he was a ski bum in Park City, so it was great to ride w/ him. it’s amazing how good he is despite the hiatus and the fact he’s gotten fat and old. don’t worry i suffer from the fat and old part too (i felt all 30 years and 200 lbs on the mountain).
one thing is for sure i look forward to some more days on the mountain w/ barrett this season and getting some new gear from backcountry.com to ensure a little more productive outings:
that and a little of the class playing between the ears and i think it would be pretty sweet. next ski day is Feb 01 @ the Canyons. after that i’m looking for the next snow fall to head up to Powder Mountain for some cat skiing.
i’ll throw up some pics later …
it’s official, i’m now spending my days as a billy w/ the rest of goats at backcountry.com. like every new kid i spent my first week in gearhead training; a five day crash course in customer service and the labyrinth that is inventory mgmt. by the end of the week my trainers (shawn & angela) had me completing customer tickets, tracking order, handling miss-ships, refunds, exchanges and even chatting w/ customers about gear. pretty sweet! i have a profound appreciation w/ the frontline troops and the warehouse dudes.
next week i start product mgmt in lovely park city, ut. hopefully it’s less product mgmt and more customer innovation. backcountry has done some great things and i think their site is a great catalogue for gear, but buying experience has opportunity to be wicked awesome. anyone who’s experienced buying their first set of skis or road bike can relate to the challenges of dropping $1000 bucks on gear.
the haul from provo to park city is going to be long, but beautiful. i’m going to keep an open mind for now.
backcountry has way more than just that one site; it will blow your mind:
yeah i had the same reaction. i’m keeping an open mind on this one too. odat stands for “one deal at a time” which means you get wicked prices on closeout gear. the sites are pretty innovative in fact, in that they motivate impulse buying, which is pretty hard online. they do this w/ limited quantities, time limits, showing you how many people are on the site and swapping new deals all day long. great concept.
one thing i realized during my week as a gearhead … snowboarders are retarded. they care way to much about matching boots, pants and board :p
i hate to admit this but the most exciting part about this job in my head at this point is the gear and wicked discounts (sorry discounts are only for me and dependents). need to start planning some adventures for this year.
the last month of my life i’ve been head down in my studies, so i was probably the last to find out lawrence lessig is going offline w/ his creative commons blog after 7 years and 1753 posts. lessig has done a tremendous job evangelizing the diminishing returns of the current copy right and patent law in this country; creative commons is a project of his own creation allowing artist, scientist and others to have an open license to share and contribute more innovative ideas.
from his announcement he is moving his attention to the change congress project, which fights the corruption of campaign contributions by special interests groups to US representatives. i’m not totally on board w/ his new project as i believe campaign contributions are financial form of free speech that shouldn’t be regulated. i’m interested in following his work in this area and see how he will reconcile his ardent support for free speech and campaign finance reform.
i do believe that our US reps are becoming more and more corrupt through their dealings w/ special interest groups and financial donations, but i would argue free speech needs to stand on its own regardless of some of the negative consequences.
i’m working on an essay for Constitution Day @ UVU, thus, i’m putting the creative commons license on my blog as a reference. i really wish google docs would create a CC add-in. i’ll post the essay this weekend when i’m done.
Constitution Day is thursday september 17, 2009.
Hidden Diamonds, No More Cats and the True Opportunity of the Constitution of the United States by Clint Gordon-Carroll is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
you wanna go to law school? yeah, well you’ll need to take the lsat. this is the standard acceptance exam for law school entrance. the basics are these: it’s scored between 120 and 180 (similar to other standardized test like the SAT; just drop the 1 and add a zero). if you are wondering a handful of people score a 180 every year, so it is possible, but usually these folks have problems in the head . four sections + one extra for the psychomatricians (one reading comprehension, one logic games and two reasoning sections). 101 total questions and you don’t loose any points for guessing. w00t!
i’m embarrassed to say i scored dead average 
but the following week i increased my correct answers by 9. i’ll take my third practice test on saturday and hope to increase my correct answers by another 10; this will get me into the 80th percentile (160+). my ultimate goal is a 173 (yeah, i know i have a crap load to do to get there). i’ve already put 70+ hours in studying which is scary b/c “some experts” claim you need 300 hours to reach your peak for the LSAT. i’m a little scared b/c school starts next week and i’m taking a nasty load of classes (21/24 credits) and i’m going to have to be ready by Dec 6 for the actual test. ulsar?
so where i am at and where i need to be is pretty interestin; i’m answering about 65+/- question correct. i need to be +90. i’ve been looking at my two practice tests and analyzing problem area’s where i can have the most impact over the next couple of practice tests. since logical reasoning is two sections and i’m leaving about 24 points on the table that has naturally been where i’ve been working. ironically, many students spend much of their time on the games section, i’m not even finishing the game section in the practice tests, but that’s not where most the points are. i’ll keep working on the game section each week, but make the big push closer to the test. this is b/c doing the games correct hasn’t been my problem; it’s been doing them fast enough. this will just take practice.
well i better get back to studying …
It happened a few weeks ago; I’ve been hiding under the radar until now, but my days at Decho/Mozy are over.
I have to say at the time leaving felt great! And now … well it still feels great 
Mozy was a great place to work!! I can’t say enough about the guys I worked w/ and especially the engineering team; they are an amazing group of guys w/ talent that would be difficult to match. I will miss those guys the most.
As for irreconcilable differences, well let’s just say being managements watchdog will always get you in trouble (in addition EMC has a clause in their comp package that doesn’t allow me to say anything negative about the company or it’s employee’s; they should thank their lucky stars I signed it … )
Nevertheless, I leave w/ excitement for the future and gratitude for the friends and experiences I’ve had over the past two years.
So what’s the plan? Law school? Omniture? Fusion IO? Startup? Maybe! They are all possibilities, so we’ll just have to see.
Special thanks to my friends at Mozy for all their support and love.
Late,
GC
nearly two years ago i decided to leave novell and join mozy, which was not a tough decision in itself, but one major motivation for joining mozy was the opportunity to work for josh coates, mozy’s CEO and founder. i didn’t know at the time that josh was pretty much hands off at mozy waiting for the big payload from the EMC acquisition, but what i did know came from a google-stalker search: cal berkley graduate, founded scale8 and watched it crash & burn, internet archive project, sabbatical in utah and then founded mozy and won a bunch of awards as an entrepreneur.
so when i got to mozy as employe number forty-something i often walked past josh’s office waiting for him to pull me into his office and ask me who the hell i was; this never happened. but over a few months and few interactions in meetings, chats in the hallway and his office and of course some heckling from him during my company lunch presentation on arbitrarily increasing mozy prices b/c we want more money (a total failure i should write about sometime in the future). nevertheless in this short time i learned a lot of little things from josh, but i also learned one really big thing (lesson):
YOU NEED LEADERSHIP TO FOCUS.
it’s just that simple. businesses that fail eventually realize they needed to focus. good companies that survive have just enough focus not to fail. successful companies have leadership and real leadership knows how to focus. mozy as a startup is a great example of focus …
NOTE: sometimes the ideas and words focus and simplicity are playfully interchanged and mean the same thing and rightfully so b/c simplifying a complex task or project into smaller more manageable and consumable parts makes focus more natural and achievable. i don’t think you can have one w/o the other.
in the beginning mozy had a very simple product: online backup. focused at a very simple market: consumers and small businesses. the company’s mantra exemplified simplicity, “set it and forget it”. even pricing was simple: $4.99 a month unlimited storage (sure it got a little more complex for small business at $0.50 a gb). though the product functionality didn’t always translate into simplicity we were focused and iterative trying always to improve.
josh had learned the hard way in an earlier startup, so he set the focus. he was the leadership and he made sure everyone understood the focus. yeah, there were times when he understood strategically stepping out of focus was important, but it usually had a certain objective w/ a certain advantage. e.g. the early deal w/ GE (stepping into enterprise software … blah!)
this is pretty anti-climatic, but this all became cognizant after a meeting i attempted to lead on improving the restore experience in the mozy service. i had invited all the necessary stakeholders and had even invited josh, though he was extremely hands off and more of a distraction in meetings than anything else. the meeting was randomized by differing ideas and opinions and by the end of it nothing was accomplished (sounds like most meetings, why is that?). but i took a few minutes after the meeting to ask josh what i could have done differently. in the josh coates nonchalant manner he told me my leadership style sucked big time and that was demonstrated by my lack of upfront objective in the meeting and inability to keep the team focused on that objective. if the objective is reached in 15 minutes then end the meeting. if the objective isn’t being accomplished in 15 minutes end the meeting.
how focused are the leaders in your company? don’t confuse busy w/ focused … executives and management are always busy, but are they always focused?