Who is the happiest man in Silicon Valley today? It has to be David Scott, chief executive of 3PAR. If he’s not the happiest, then he’s at least the guy who has made the most money in the past month thanks to the over-the-top bidding war for his previously obscure company.
According to a proxy filing in July 2010, Scott owned 2,923,468 shares in 3PAR, or about 4.6 percent of the company’s stock. On Aug. 13, those shares closed at $9.65 per share, making them worth $28,211,466.20.
Cue the bidding war. Dell threw in the towel on Thursday after Hewlett Packard offered to pay $33 per share. That makes Scott’s shares worth $96,474,444. That’s a nice 350 percent return in about three weeks.
The other big winners:
Mayfield Fund holds 2,992,752 shares, about 4.8 percent, worth $98,760,816.
Menlo Ventures holds 9,371,361 shares, about 15 percent, worth $30,925,4913.
Here’s an odd thing. Today, a former colleague sent me an email saying they had just called the Facebook switchboard. When the automated attendant came on, the second option was for “law enforcement.”
I agreed that seemed unusual, so I called myself (650-543-4800). Sure enough, “law enforcement” is the second option. But the full message was also amusing.
The message starts with the expected, “Thank you for calling Facebook…For customer support, press 1. For law enforcement, press 2.”
Law enforcement comes ahead of business development, marketing, press, and employment verification in the list of options.
Is Facebook really getting that many calls from law enforcment? Apparently so. When I pressed 2, the next message says: “This message is only for members of law enforcment. Please note that due to a very large volume of incoming calls, the current call back time is two to four business days. For faster response time, please leave your work email. A member of Facebook’s security team will email you in a timely manner.”
So, what do you suppose all those cops are calling about?
In the past year or so, I’ve grown increasingly impressed with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Though he’s still young for a guy running the most important company on the Web, I felt he was growing into the CEO role. This was a reflection of his strategic insights, the way he’s expanded Facebook’s user base past 500 million, and his improved presentation skills. That last bit may sound shallow, but the ability to stand up in front of the world and convery your ideas and persuade people to believe in them and follow you is a critical skill for any tech CEO these days.
Given all this progress, I was left doing double-take after double-take as I watched the livestream of the Facebook Places announcement Wednesday afternoon. I lost count of how many times I found myself thinking, “Did he really just say that?” or “Did they really just do that?” It bordered on the surreal at times, and easily ranks as one of the most bizarre corporate announcements I’ve witnessed while covering Silicon Valley for more than a decade. To be clear, it wasn’t just Zuckerberg, but the whole crew of Facebook execs who toddled across the stage.
But let’s start with Zuckerberg, since he was up first.
When he first hopped onto the makeshift stage set up at Facebook, Zuckerberg seemed a bit lost. Holding up the microphone to his mouth, he said so the whole room (and the Web audience) could hear: “Hey, do I have to stand on this thing? Okay….It’s a driftwood stage we constructed. Awesome.”
Awkward pause.
Then, Zuckerberg explained the Facebook tradition of holding a launch party when they have new products. “These are a lot of fun to do, so thanks.” Another awkward pause.
Then: “This is going to be a long interesting summer. We’ve got a lot of interesting products we’re working on.” Pause. (Would I be nitpicking to point out that summer is two-thirds over?)
Then: “The thing we’re going to talk about tonight is a new Places product that we’ve been working on for a few months. Uh, awhile”
Okay.
Then, Zuckerberg told a story about how he knew the product was ready to go when he was showing it to his girlfriend and they discovered that Facebook VP Chris Cox and his girlfriend were at a restaurant next door.
“I was in Menlo Park, and I never go to Menlo Park. I’m always at home or in the office.”
“When that serendipitous moment happened, I knew that the product was ready to go. And we were ready to start sharing it with the world and help people stay connected wherever they go.”
What struck me as odd, as I listened to Zuckerberg and some of the Facebook execs that followed, was that they sounded like they had just discovered the wonder of location-sharing and check-ins. Zuckerberg explained that Facebook Places was intended to do three things: Help people share where they are in a “nice and social way,” help you see who is around you, and help you see what else is going on. Fine. But that’s pretty much what Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, Where, and many others, have allowed you do for a couple of years now. Facebook is a relative late comer, though potentially a game changer given its 500 million users.
Then Zuckerberg was followed by a gauzy, Hallmark-card-y video that tugged at your heartstrings with some warbly music and shots of people interacting in the real world, all thanks to the magical thing that Facebook had just discovered:
Up next was Michael Sharon, product manager for Facebook Places. “Places is not about broadcasting your location to the world,” he said. “It’s about sharing your location with your friends.”
And again, he went through the list of wonders that pretty much every other check-in service has allowed you to do. Check-in! See who else has checked in!
What should they have done? While many of other early leaders in the space appeared on stage after Sharon (Gowalla and Foursquare), I think Facebook should have acknowledged their pioneering work. And then pivot and say: Hey, these are great, but it still leaves this gap. Define what that gap is: These are early adopter services. Facebook represents a way to bring location sharing to the masses. The more people you know who use this type of thing, the more useful it becomes. Facebook’s opportunity is to bake this into its platform, make in a mainstream activity, and let other people build applications on top of it, just as they have on Facebook’s main platform.
After the competitors left the stage, Cox appeared on stage to kick the weirdness quotient up another notch. He started out with an attempt at a joke that sucked the air out of the room: “The thing about Facebook employees is that we’re all closet sociologists.” Um, huh? “We all get on a bus and go to the Stanford library and check out books on the history of designing public spaces.” Hello, is this thing on? “That was a joke.” Ah, thanks for clearing that up. Cue nervous laughter.
This was all leading up to Cox’s sociology lecture. He gave a nod to noted sociologist Ray Oldenburg, who was apparently sitting in the audience. Cox then elaborated on Oldenburg’s theory about “third places.” He started by filling us in on particularly obscure sociological term that describes the first place: “home.”
“Home is where you wake up, it’s where you go to sleep, it’s where your family is, it’s where you eat and it’s where you go to digest and reflect upon the experiences you had during the day.” Got that? To recap, home is where you eat, sleep, live. There will be a test on this later.
Second place: work. (Do I need to explain that?) The third place is called….”the third place.” These are bars, restaurants, anywhere people go to share their lives with other people.
“Oldenberg made a pretty crazy hypothesis that the technology we were creating in the 20th century was in danger of destroying the third place. There was a fear that now we have television and phones and radios, we would just sit at home on our couches rather than going to the amphitheater to watch the play, rather than going out to have coffee, we’d just call our friends on the phone. Rather than experiencing the world outside, we’d cloister ourselves indoor…Over time, these third places would be destroyed and we’d be sitting in these pods. It’s like Wall-E, with these fat people rolling around in their bubbles.”
But!
Cox: “Technology can be the thing that pulls us out. Technology does not need to estrange us from each other.”
“Maybe one time you walk into a bar, you sit down at the bar, and you put your magical 10-years-into-the-future phone down. And suddenly it starts to glow. ‘This is what your friend ordered here’. And it pops up these memories…’Go check out this thing about the urinal that your friend wrote about when they were here about eight months ago.’ ”
Cox explained that all these check-ins, photos, and videos could be gathered on pages about a place to create “collective memories.”
“That’s dope.”
Yeah, he said that.
“Too many of our memories are still stuck at home, gathering dust on a shelf.” Now those stories are going to be on Facebook! “So that maybe one day in 20 years, our children will go to Ocean Beach, and their little magical thing will start to vibrate, and it will say, this is where your parents had their first kiss.”
As one journalist remarked to Cox later: He practically had tears in his eyes at this point.
Cue Zuckerberg back to the stage to introduce the product team. This included attempting to pronounce the name of one Indian engineer on team. ”Did I get that right?” Zuckerberg asked. “Awesome.”
For the finale, Zuckerberg recounted the tales of Facebook’s legendary hack-a-thons, in which people stay up all night working on a project not related to what they work on during their day job. Apparently, someone at one such event decided it would be cool to build a “launch switch.” Which would be: a wooden plank on the side of the room. That gets pulled whenever the launch a new product. But first, a gong must be banged:
Phew. That’s a wrap.
Now, I know I’m older (41) than probably just about every single person who works at Facebook. But the event felt like I was watching some guys in their dorm commons room knock back a few beers and practice their first presentation. Maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise given Facebook’s famous roots in a college dorm room. But it was hard for me to imagine the group I saw overseeing the massive company Facebook would become if it ever does an IPO.
“The affair started late and Zuckerberg had some awkward pauses while on stage. But the 26-year-old handled himself well enough as he introduced a new feature that will likely make rivals in the location-based services business tremble with fear. We’ve uploaded scenes from the press conference in several videos for your enjoyment. You’ll also see the company’s video describing Facebook Places, which lets you share your location with friends, find out where your friends are, and discover new places.
I always find it fascinating to see how one of the world’s youngest billionaires at one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley handles himself on stage. He seems like a pretty ordinary guy, just one more coder among many.”
“One final observation: We thought Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg were at the top of their games tonight. Mark was relaxed and in his element, and after a couple of challenging and awkward public appearances recently, seeing him in his element was refreshing. Facebook, meanwhile, is positively bursting with excitement and energy, as might be expected of a company that has wrested the center-of-innovation mantle from Google and is really, truly changing the world.”
I agree with the bit about Facebook taking the mantle from Google. But if this was Zuckerberg was “at the top” of his game, then I’m terrified to think what those other appearances were like.
Joe Nocera is one of the business columnists I respect most. So it’s rare that I find myself in strong disagreement with his take on an issue. But his blistering column about why he thinks Hewlett-Packard really got rid of CEO Mark Hurd is one of those instances. And since things in the New York Times have way of becoming conventional wisdom, I think it’s worth explaining why his theory is almost totally improbable.
To be clear, I’m not defending the HP board or Hurd. As Nocera writes:
“In fact, the directors should be called out for acting like the cowards they are. Mr. Hurd’s supposed peccadilloes were a smoke screen for the real reason they got rid of an executive they didn’t trust and employees didn’t like.
The stand-up thing would have been to fire Mr. Hurd on the altogether legitimate grounds that the directors didn’t have faith in his leadership.”
I agree with that statement as written. And yet, I don’t agree with its larger implication. Yes, HP’s board is looking more and more like craven weasels every day. And they’re digging their own hole by not coming out with a plausible explanation for why Hurd was really ousted. I agree with Nocera completely on that point.
While we don’t know exactly what Hurd did, it’s clear he did something. He had some kind of relationship with Jodie Fisher that went beyond professional but stopped short of sex. And whatever it is, he clearly shouldn’t have done it. He put himself in this pickle and has only himself to blame for that. And like the board, Hurd is also not explaining himself to the world, though most likely his separation agreements contains a non-disparagement clause of some kind. While telling the truth and stating the facts ought not to be considered disparaging to anyone, even if it makes them look bad, no doubt HP lawyers would use anything as grounds to recoup the $40 million or so that the board is paying Hurd to go away.
So where does Nocera go wrong? It’s with his conjecture on what the board’s real motivation was. In a nutshell, Nocera is arguing that the board secretly has disliked Hurd for years, in part due to his power play during the HP spying scandal. In the recent book, “The Big Lie: Spying, Scandal and Ethical Collapse at Hewlett-Packard,” former BusinessWeek writer Anthony Bianco claims Hurd was really the main actor, but managed to pin the blame on board chair Patricia Dunn.
Nocera then goes on to note that employees detested Hurd, citing an internal survey in which two-thirds of HP employees said they would bolt the company for another if they could find a similar job. Nocera writes:
“Then there were the company’s employees. The consensus in Silicon Valley is that Mr. Hurd was despised at H.P., not just by the rank and file, but even by H.P.’s top executives.”
So here’s the leap Nocera wants us to make: After several years of massive layoffs, savaging the HP way, and not being a nice guy, the board was looking for an excuse to ditch him. In essence, Nocera wants us to believe that all of the sudden, the board of HP developed a conscience.
When you look at it like that, you realize this theory is nonsense. First, let’s remember this is, in fact, just Nocera’s theory. Like all of us on this story, he’s on the outside looking. He doesn’t point to a source or an internal memo or anything that bolsters this theory. He mainly relies on conversations with ex-HP workers, who not surprisingly despise Hurd.
Next, the Mercury News has reported that Hurd and the HP board were in negotiations for a new contract until the sexual harassment allegation hit. That would seem unlikely if they really wanted to force him out somehow.
But the part of this that I have the hardest time swallowing is that all of a sudden HP’s board suddenly started caring about what employees thought of Hurd. After all, in its various configurations over the past decade, the HP board has signed off on the mass firings of more than 94,000 employees. This was part of a deliberate strategy to reinvent the company that was launched by ex-CEO Carly Fiorina and perfected by by Hurd. Here’s what I wrote on this subject back in June, when Hurd announced another 9,000 layoffs:
“It’s a ruthless, brutally effective strategy launched under former CEO Carly Fiorina and practiced with precision by current CEO Mark Hurd. Without question, the strategy has transformed HP from being the sickly also-ran at the end of the last century to its present position of dominant front-runner.”
The other side of this strategy is the $45 billion that HP has spent on acquisitions under both Fiorina and Hurd. The most recent of the deals was the acquisition of Palm, but HP is still digesting numerous others, including 3Com and the much larger EDS. To one degree or another, these deals were orchestrated by Hurd as part of a relentless march that increased the overall number of employees at HP from 88,000 (pre-Compaq merger) to more than 300,000 (current employment after layoffs).
Many of these most recent acquisitions remain very much works in process. There are complex integration and strategic issues to be worked out. Hurd, though rightfully dinged for being less than a visionary leader, still obviously had some strategic and operational plan in mind for all of this. And no doubt he communicated that to other executives. But he had developed a strong track record for pulling all of these things off. His successor will have to not just lead HP forward, but sort out this massive integration puzzle. HP’s board would be seriously crazy to jettison the architect of all this in midstream without a darn good reason.
Even worse, the HP board got rid of Hurd at one of the most dynamic and challenging times in the industry’s history. As a result of all the mergers and acquisitions by HP and others in recent years, the competitive landscape has completely shifted. HP now finds itself in direct competition with Oracle (thanks to the Sun Microsystems deal) and Cisco Systems (now that HP has gotten into networking via its 3Com acquisition) while at the same time the company is taking on IBM even more directly in the services market (thanks to the EDS deal).
That’s a lot for any new CEO to walk into. Plus, let’s not forget the company now probably needs to hire a new board chair and president. After this, it would smell bad if they don’t break all of those jobs up. When the board says all is well, carry on, well, I can’t believe they’re really that delusional.
For all these reasons, though, I think Nocera’s theory is just plain wrong. I admire him taking a strong stand and delivering a strong critique on the board’s handling this. But his reason for doing so is off base. When Nocera refers to “the real reason they got rid of an executive they didn’t trust and employees didn’t like,” the truth is that we still don’t know what that reason is.
Finally, a word about the Journal story today. The story relies on a source who claims the board was angry about Hurd’s settlement with Fisher, which supposedly short-circuited their own investigation and caught them off guard. I have a hard time buying that the board didn’t know Hurd was talking to the woman about settling, but I suppose it’s possible. But for me, the story boils down to this sentence:
“The account of thinking at the board—which has faced criticism to the effect that it rushed to judgment and that the ouster wasn’t warranted—contrasts with an account given by someone familiar with Mr. Hurd’s thinking.”
In other words, it’s “He said, She said.” And it still feels like we’re not closer to knowing the real story here.
Since the announcement that it was killing Google Wave, Google has turned on the spin by proclaiming how they “celebrate our failures.” There is a lot to admire about Google, and one of those things is its ability to experiment and, as CEO Eric Schmidt said, “try things.” It’s not just hard for many organizations to find the culture and capacity to do that, it’s hard for them to acknowledge when those things don’t work.
“But in its statements to the world, Google rarely sounds like it’s celebrating these missteps. It doesn’t really document anything that was learned. It just seems to say as little as possible to move on.”
But the bigger problem I see at Google is its approach to developing those new things. Just because you enable it, or allow it, doesn’t mean your approach to you develop new products and services. And what strikes me about Google is that so many of these products seemed dead on arrival.
With everyone talking breathlessly about cloud computing, it seems I rarely hear this mega-trend being called into question. The advantages of moving your computing onto the Internet seem clear: Lower costs, more efficient management of resources. What’s not to like?
According to BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker, the answer is: Plenty.
I had a fascinating conversation with Klinker about the state of his company, BitTorrent of San Francisco, which became the basis for my Sunday column about how TV remains the dominant way we consume video.
But one subject that didn’t fit into the column was Klinker’s views on cloud computing. In short, he sees the move to cloud computing to be a trend that runs counter to the very nature of the Internet.
“Cloud computing is a harkening back to centralizing everything,” Klinker said. “That’s just not the model that made the Internet so powerful.”
Over the past few years, as I’ve moved into a more public role at the Mercury News as a business and technology columnist, I’ve found myself being called on to do more and more public speaking. At the same time, I’ve also been involved in organizing various digital journalism conferences and bar camp-type conferences.
One of the trickiest challenges that I’ve found in all of these settings is finding ways to engage the audience and drawing then into a conversation and turn them into participants. This is particularly important when the format is geared toward conversation, like a bar camp. But it matters just as much when I’m up there speaking solo, or moderating a panel.
As I’ve begun to study how others do this, one person I’ve been following is Heather Gold. She does so many different things, it’s hard to put her into one category. But a few of her roles: Presenter, stand-up comedian, consultant, former Apple employee, new media star (check out The Heather Gold Show here). But a common thread that runs through all of her work is the question of how to draw people into a conversation. For a good overview of her thoughts on this, check out the video at the end of the post from a Web 2.0 conference last year. And I also suggest checking out her TummelVision podcast, which Gold says is about “human connection in tech, biz and culture in an era in which the ‘audience’ is the medium.”
I’d been in touch with Gold, a former Bay Area resident who now lives in New York, about these questions, and earlier this year, she invited me to attend one of her UnPresenting workshops in San Francisco. The goal, in short, is to “learn how to read the room and transform your presentations into conversations.”
It was done in a flowing style, where the various participants were called on to stand up in front of the room and tell stories while at the same time trying to involve the rest of the group into the conversation. The goal is tell your story, be as authentic as possible, draw stories from the audience, and build on those to create a kind of momentum around the conversation. Let me tell you, as a relative speaking novice, it’s incredibly hard to pull off without feeling forced and stilted.
One important distinction here is that we were trying to get away from the idea that this was a performance where you take on a different personality. The goal is to be more authentic, more yourself, which can be terrifying. “We are all afraid of being judged,” Gold said at the start. “We’re afraid who we are isn’t okay.” So, the tendency is adopt a kind of showbiz personality on stage.
These days, as presenting has become even more critical in corporate and tech settings, there’s pressure to over-prepare and over-rehearse. Part of that trend includes the growing use of PowerPoint both to dazzle the audience but also as a performance crutch, to create a format to fall back on when you’re on stage. The problem, in Gold’s view, is that this creates distance between the presenter and the audience because there’s no sense of who the person on stage really is.
“You can so stuck in structure, there’s nothing of you in there,” Gold said. “I’m trying to get people to prepare less.”
There’s no easy way to boil down the various tips and critiques we got that day: Make lots of eye contact with the audience, even when you’re talking to 2,000 people. Tell lots of personal stories using “I” as much as possible to personalize things. Ask questions of the audience, but even more important, listen carefully to the responses and find a way to build on them to keep the conversation going. This can involve a fair bit of improvisation, which can make things seem a bit, well, terrifying if you’re used to having every moment carefully scripted.
If there was a single key takeaway for me, it was how important listening is in such a setting, something I don’t hear a lot of people mention when dishing out public speaking advice.
“The challenge is for you to go for that feeling of connectiveness,” Gold said. “Everyone wants to be listened to.”
It was time well spent, as I think we were all far more comfortable (certainly less terrified) of putting ourselves in front of a group without a complete map of where the whole thing would go and how we’d get there.
If you’re interested in learning more, Gold will be in the Bay Area next month for a mini-tour, including offering her UnPresenting worksh0p on August 8. More details are here.
Upon returning from vacation this week, I saw that Reel Video in Berkeley had indeed closed. I had written about its problems before leaving. Founder Stuart Skorman was trying to pull together some investors to buy it back from the corporation, but couldn’t get a group together in time.
Sorry to see it go, but thanks for many years of happy viewings and good memories.
The conference brings together past winners of the foundations’ News Challenge program (of which I was one) along with some other folks working at the edge of new journalism forms. The News Challenge program funds innovative ideas to build new news tools. I’ll be posting some summary thoughts from the sessions over the next few days. But to start things off, the foundation is announcing the 2010 winners of the News Challenge program.
Each of the grantees provides a little glimpse at how people from a wide spectrum of backgrounds looks at the future of news: video games for news; local wikis; community video editing tools; live news maps; community funded journalism. I wanted to highlight a two from the Bay Area:
During much of the election, the tech world’s attention has focused on former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina in their respective gubernatorial and senate races. Both had big war chests, and both won big. Now we’ll see if they can do the same in the general election.
But there were two other valley tech candidates running last night, and both lost. Let’s take a look.
Subscribe via RSS all feeds