There are many things that I’m going to say that may have seemed completely obvious to me five years ago. However, until certain scenarios allowed me the luxury of experience, I was completely unaware of their significance within an organization. Hopefully, this list of observations will help you no matter how big or small you or your organization is.

1. “Experience is what you get, when you don’t get what you want”. I think I have a stellar resume filled with interesting projects for someone my age, but if you ask me to write a ‘failure resume’ it would probably be 10 times longer. Am I afraid of failing? Yes, and sometimes the outcomes are irreversible, yet, the most rewarding lessons we learn often come from failure. I know no one who understands this better than Jacqueline Novogratz. She’s done an amazing job of collecting information from her failures. Listen carefully to her here:

2. If you do want to fail, the best way at it is either being a micro-manager or stripping everyone of decision making. I’ve once had a friend (let’s call her Anna) ask me why her organization was focused on services instead of equipment sales when the latter had much better margins. The answer was always well hidden, but here it is. Services were listed on her time-card as hours whereas equipment sales were not — management was more concerned about making their number of employees justified. (In other words, management tried harder to look busy than profitable.) Further, they stripped employees from a lot of the decision, probably unaware of the problem they were creating. If we’re diligently overseeing everything at once, mistakes are going to be made and we’ll lose sight of the bigger picture. In short, we can never lose by giving people the dignity of decision making.

3. That being said, it’s probably better to make your organization more transparent to the people within it. I believe that people want to do their best in general as long as they’re treated fairly and they’re given a chance to prove themselves. Because of that, it’s a great idea to open up some of the problems to the bottom line. After management was laid off at Anna’s company, the new management made it clear where their financial was weak — service and sales. She then developed a system of keeping track of her customers and items they may need in the near future which not only made the customers happy, but increased the company’s sales as well.

4. Someone has a problem — Rejoice! Problems are good. Solving them gives us opportunities. Because finding the problem is often half the battle, we should often embrace them. As one female CEO has said, “find problems your company needs help on, and move forward with it”.

5. Like Anna, you don’t need to be promoted to address a concern. Letting someone else empower you to tackle a problem is something they teach you in high school.

6. If you’re not having at least a bit of fun, stop doing it. The most important thing in life, is simply to be happy solving the problems you are solving. Most people you meet will convince you that their 40-hour-a-week job does not define them — that cannot be further from the truth. If you’re going to spend 40 hours a week for several years doing something, it’s probably going to define you to a great extent and is going to affect your day-to-day happiness. To that I’d say, ‘choose your work wisely, and dream big’.

7.  Lucky number 7. Sometimes I think I’m very lucky, but in retrospect, there has always been a significant action that precedes my rendezvous with Lady Luck.

8.  And yet, at the end of it all, the most important thing is to be happy and feel loved.  Without that, everything else is a moot point.

For my little sister, Crystal.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens? But while I’m not out and about, and raising all hell, here are a few things that are on my list of birds to kill:

• Business books
• Study for the GMATs (hey, it’s possible)
• Try to fit a third world visit into my busy schedule
• Learn Spanish

I guess this means I may still subconsciously be on my extended vacation.

But probably like you, all I want is to make sure the wheels spin again — I’ve been rusting for a month too long now and I can sense it by the diminishing speed of my once lightening-face sassy retorts. I can be beat, so long as I can claim my pride and sass.

Anyway, what I really want to say is, “It’s on”.

A part of me wishes I could’ve came up with a catchier title, but to me, anything Jacqueline Novogratz is catchy enough.

I’m wary that a lot of non-profits reap incredible benefits for it’s board, and at the same time, are inefficient because they lack business sense. But with kiva, and other micro-financing organizations, we’re definitely on track.

Go ahead and admit it. Aid, welfare, donations, and any kind of handout is a big reason why a lot of our problems are perpetuated. I have no solutions to add just yet. You’ll have to wait for my September issue.

With love from San Jose California,
One, Winnie Tong

I’ve recently been out of the office for another disappearance act. This time, for a extended vacation in hopes of being a little more introspective. This time, in hopes of bringing back a little more knowledge. Being 23, I’m allowed a lot of these luxuries, but I’d hate to look back saying "there was no time like that present".

I’ll update soon. I promise.

I suppose it’s silly that I’m unafraid to publish these ideas on my blog. Maybe I’ll get in trouble, or maybe I’ll get fired. Maybe no one will even stumble upon this page and it’ll get lost in the black void that is the internets. Who knows. The point is, I think these are important lessons that I’m learning from exposure and hope that you’ll find it useful as well.

1.) Conduct a customer survey. This doesn’t mean you send them a standard survey with 50 fill-in-the-blanks to fill out. On the contrary, this may simply mean what you believe the customers needs are via an initial dialog with the customer or even by speculation. The purpose is to make the appropriate parties in your organization have easy access to the most critical information during the day of your demo or product presentation so the right questions will be asked later on. It can be as simple as answers about key value proposition, competitors, and concerns of budget, scalability, etc.

2.) Have Effective Communication. Like many of my peers, I can only work in an environment which is not an entity of it’s own. Thus, the reason why I am strategically placed in a position between marketing and applications support. One thing I have noticed is that everybody is keen of your work — from directors, to sales managers, to engineers. Everyone has a different opinion as to what is best, but ultimately, it’s up to you to decide what is best for the customer, and the customer alone. It’s important to clearly relay this information to the customer, and in turn, clearly relay this back to the product team so they understand your decisions. For ultimate collaboration, I highly recommend wiki-type setups, file-sharing portals such as dropbox , and *gasp* instant messenger services. This will save you a lot of unnecessary meetings, phone calls, and emails.

3.) Keep it Simple. Lists are simple, customer surveys are simple, collaboration should be simple, and so should your demo. The best demos are the ones who seem to have an even balance of marketing and technical information of the product — something that will wet the appetites of both managers and engineers in the room. In otherwords, a little bit of something for everyone. Moreover, make sure things run smoothly before you demonstrate your product, your screen and surrounding area is uncluttered, and make it look easy. Hey, Steve Jobs practices every step of his presentation days in advance. Maybe we should too.

I suppose I’m just perplexed as to why these things are constantly being ignored.

Between a full time job, some side work, and mandatory showers, I don’t get to see Chad very often. Heck, Chad even works half the weekend. But when we do make time to play, you can bet your pretty penny that we have a whole lot of fun. Grands of fun.

This is when $165 tickets per person for front row seats is worth every last penny.

Yes, that’s from a Cirque de Soleil show in Vegas. I came home raving about it for days, and every time I look at the previews, I’m reminded of the soul lifting music, the amazing engineering that went behind the rotating 75,000 pound stage, the 35,000 fucking hours it took to make the stage costumes, the dangerous acrobatics performed, and the incredibly creative kung-fu influenced dance moves. Even the preview of that show can make one feel incredibly unimpressive.

And ladies, just one tidbit before you decide to date a YC guy though: Any vacation the two of you have will be inclusive of at least 5 other YCombinator members.

I was admittedly sick for the first portion of the event, but attempted to watch it from my bed on justin tv. However, bing completely miserable, tired, and between the sheets, it was quite difficult to let anything sink in. Until DHH came on. (Here are the minutes to his speech )

Couple of things have really resonated with me.

1) Starting a business isn’t rocket science, as long as you don’t aim at somehow getting a lot of users and cashing out to retire. Most entrepreneurs he talks to today has focused too heavily on that.

2) Focus on solving your own problems. Your problems, like mine, are probably not unique. In the Fortune 5million world, it’s not out of touch to get 0.01% of that market. Do the math. Heck, maybe I should take my own advice sometimes.

3) Above all, don’t waste time — shorten your work days. This pushes you to be productive with whatever time you do have, and at the same time, you don’t have to waste your day. This brings bad bad memories of a summer quarter in which I took about 2.5 times the full-time units in one quarter. Least to say, I do not recommend this as I did a lot of work on the pooper, hauled a 15 pound backpack around all day, and ate all my meals in classrooms. This also reminds me of what the four hour work week had to say about productivity.

4) Bringing up Zappos as a business who has started out by making customers first.

Very traditional business values.

—–

Other awesome entries:

Mentioned at the talk was Fooled by Randomness .

Young man vs old man’s business models , insight on our different takes on the business world as structured by one’s life experiences.  A damn good read!

How working for the big corporation is becoming increasingly more like a trap. NYtimes . With a good comparison of wages & situations of today vs about a decade ago. (but, you know, this is nothing new.)

In more interesting news, it seems like Advertisement is the new porn now.  Although, I’m not convinced the market is saturated just yet.

(Things you should know within the next 5 minutes)

Intelligent paint turns dark pink when there is ice on the road. The transparent coating is said to be tested in France first to test it’s efficiency in preventing ice-related accidents. Now there’s a practical solution.

Seeking Alpha’s weekly quiz. See if you can answer questions about the losers in the automotive sector, the rallies against UBS and Deustche Bank, and other financial headlines.

Boston.com has an interesting article on why poverty is self-perpetuating. Simply put, "The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems."

Business Week’s favorite financial blogs. (In case you need to procrastinate further)

And a favorite amongst mine will always be those that shows the subprime mortgage crisis in pretty charts and graphs. As you can tell, this world probably seems quite frightening to a newly-grad like myself:

Chad and I have recently gone house-and-condo shopping with the clear conclusion that we will never be able to afford anything nice around here. A 2 bedroom townhouse was selling for $655k, and that was considered cheap. We’re saving up money, hoping for a move. At this point, I’d gladly run with that idea, but a big part of me is excited to see this all unravel before my bright brown eyes.

This week in Advertising/Marketing

Yahoo decides to launch a "stock market for Ads". Not a bad idea, but I sure hope you guys can convince Microsoft to buy you for more than $31/share. Well, mainly because I hold some Yahoo shares.

GoogleAds , I dislike them too. But if you’re an advertiser, I would imagine that GoogleAds is no longer your advertisement of choice. Check out the article for a great analysis.

Hilariously enough though, my boyfriend’s startup got slammed by SEOmoz last week. I think this was slightly unfair given that many of the sites listed are aware of this problem but are just in private beta mode. In addition, many popular startups such as facebook and reddit relied very little on SEO. SEO is great, but it really isn’t the end all be all as the author suggests. That’s not to say that SEO is not useful though … I just thought that rant was presented in a slightly fanatical way.

And now, for something a little more light-hearted — A comic portraying the difference between marketing, advertising, public relations, and branding .