Software and games from Colorado
June 12, 2019
I was very kindly invited to speak at DisurptHR Denver in April on the subject of using video to recruit the excellent talent. Here’s a recording of that talk!
My thesis is simply that you can do better at building relationships, trust and interest with prospects for jobs by sending video messages instead of plain text.
February 26, 2019
One of my favorite technology events, DVLP Denver was kind enough to allow me present a talk I’m pretty fond of, Serverless Hotdog Detection last fall. I was delighted to see that they posted the video of it yesterday!
Special thanks to the DVLP Denver video crew for the flattering aspect ratio! In the talk I reference this great talk from the creator of the serverless framework that I also recommend you check out! Happy geeking!
February 13, 2019
SaaStr Annual is a celebration of software in the cloud, focusing on the people and the companies that’ve thrived in this new medium. It’s very much not a technology conference, per se. Instead it’s about organizing people do deliver value to customers as efficiently as possible. It’s a bit of a VC feeding frenzy as well, with a number of sessions like, “VC Confidential: This is what your VC is not telling you.” So I took away a number of product-centric ideas that I’m excited to sprinkle around BombBomb this year:
December 15, 2018
Amazon’s Two-Pizza-Teams is a scaling methodology that suggests organizational designers ensure independence and speed by keeping ownership of products to teams that can be fed by no more than two pizzas. These teams need total decision-making authority of their product, and a clear understanding of what success means for them. This works well for Amazon as these small teams behave as composable units of opportunity and service for customers internal and external.
November 13, 2018
My wife Briana and I reached an impasse with our three-year-old a few weekends ago. A beautiful fall morning’s hike in the neighborhood park came to a howling halt as the tyke staged a rebellion.
Parenting challenges come in waves. You’ll find a rhythm that works, you’ll have a few weeks (maybe) of steady plodding, then wham, the kid’s a little smarter, and you have to adapt. In our turn, Briana and I had been leveling a scattershot of consequences and pleas. Some landed, some missed. Under the staring October sunshine our son had brought our family of four to a standstill.
November 6, 2018
I’ve recruited more than 30 excellent software developers and other technical staff to BombBomb in the last several years. This is my first position recruiting and building teams, and I don’t think I would have been nearly as successful with it if I hadn’t been using simple one-to-one videos.
My résumé reads in large part like a software engineer, and as such I get several recruiter emails every day. They’re bad without exception. “Hey I see you have some .Net experience yada yada”. Likewise I field a few voicemails of the same kind a couple times a month. All of these go in the trash. Everyone understands how this plays out, everyone knows that’s not working.