Rants & Raves

All I know is that the best talent doing the best work will always win. What I don’t know is, what they’ll win or when they’ll win it. 

Today, we celebrate a huge win from one of the most talented teams I know, Tom Giannattasio and the crew behind MACAW. I’m excited that I can now share the news that Invision has acquired MACAW! What started as an ambitious dream quickly became a product with industry evolving potential. And now, it’s ridiculous talent and technology will make one of the strongest upcoming leaders in that industry, much stronger. 

If you do it right, they say you never lose; you either win or you learn. I have certainly learned much and won more than my fair share over the past decade. It’s not about always winning though; I just try to be slightly better than a coin toss. What I know to be right is that the best talent doing the best work will always win. It’s the only model I know, the only model I trust and the only model I invest with. 

The best experience you can ever have is being a part of a great team. When great talent is given the opportunity to do great work, great things happen! Talent wins. MACAW was one of the first companies we had ever invested in, but, we didn’t invest in MACAW, we invested in Tom; we invested in the model! 

The Model 

We had a crazy idea once when we started our very first company; what if we built a company the way we wrote code. We had no idea how to build companies, but we certainly knew how to write code! Start with finding someone else who had already done something similar, peek under-the-hood, reverse-engineer it and then make it our own while learning the process along the way. Instead of starting a company, we deconstructed someone else’s. 

We needed to survive and the consistent model seemed to be that we simply had to make more money than we spent; we needed profit. To get profit it appeared to us that most had to have revenue and the driver of revenue came from customers who needed a product that serviced a need. Product seemed to be based on technology and it was people that developed that technology. It became clear to us immediately that the greater the people, the greater the tech, the greater the product, the greater the customer the greater the revenue the greater the profit … so, what we needed was great people, great talent. 

Most people in our industry have no idea who I am. But, that’s what makes our industry so special. From our favorite speakers and authors to the newly graduated design students and interns … it doesn’t matter who we are; what matters most, is what we’ve done. It’s the teams we’re a part of, the code we write and the inspiration it becomes.

I’ve had a very fortunate career in my short time working in this industry; it’s taken me everywhere from One Infinite Loop, to Twitter and even The White House. However, what I’ve been most fortunate with are the people I’ve been able to call coworkers over those years. I’ve worked with some of the best talent this industry has and watched them inspire and grow that industry, one front-end experiment at a time.

In addition to rethinking big data in government in an attempt to save billions of dollars through the Office of Management and Budget, OMB; I, along with two other Presidential Innovation Fellows, inherited “RFP-EZ”. This was a highly successful initiative from the round one fellows sponsored by the Small Business Administration, SBA, in partnership with a larger “White House Small Business Procurement Group” through OMB’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy, OFPP. A majority of our focus on the RFP-EZ project was IT procurement reform.

Many in and outside of government blame the true failure of HealthCare.gov on the IT procurement process; being on the inside, I certainly can’t argue that! There are huge issues with how government procures IT services; and, the more we looked into the problem, the larger that we realized the problem was. So large in fact that we started with renovating “RFP-EZ” and quickly evolved into institutionalizing a “Procurement as a Service” revolution throughout the federal government. This revolution is a big part of the President’s “Management Agenda for Government Innovation.”

Our “tour of duty” was only six-months long, that’s not a whole lot of time to revolutionize anything, but it’s long enough to “get shit done”. My understanding of the inter-workings of government was rather limited, to say the least. However, within the first few weeks I realized that there were two primary ways in which things like this get done, through policy and through loopholes. Policy change takes significantly longer than six-months and requires much more knowledge of “the system” than I could ever wish to obtain, so, the “loophole” became my best friend – find it, understand it, expose it, exploit it … make change. 

There are three types of companies out there: those that win federal contracts, those that don’t and those that don’t even bid. The first lesson we learned was that the best person at winning almost always wins -- that kind of makes sense, right? It’s actually a really big problem. For example, if FEMA needs an iPad app developed for real-time disaster recovery efforts on the ground, who is going to win that contract? The company whose core-competency is making iPad apps or the company whose core-competency is winning federal procurements? You don’t have to work inside government to know the answer to that question; those best at winning always win. Not only does the best service provider who bid not win, the actual best service provider doesn’t even bid at all, because of the way the system functions … that is actually the largest problem of all.

There is an old-adage, “you can have it fast, cheap and good; but, you can only pick two”. That’s actually not true anymore, comparatively speaking. Today’s high-growth, typically small, technology companies operate at such efficiency that they now offer all three (compared to the larger competitive alternatives, dinosaurs). It’s the only way to function in an industry that moves at the speed of innovation. My first start-up was a perfect representation of this model; it’s how we ended up working with Apple, Google, Adobe, Oracle, Mashable, NASDAQ, Twitter and why we never worked with the federal government.

Jason Calacanis tweeted at the start of my fellowship something that became a constant reminder of this reality:

When I was young you wanted a 100-person company doing $20 million, today you want a 20-person company doing $100m. #efficiency

— jason (@Jason)

July 6, 2013

There is such inefficiency within government inherently that highly efficient technology companies actually can’t operate successfully; the model of efficiency breaks-down in an environment of inefficiency. The government is actually tremendously efficient, just at an incomprehensibly enormous scale that moves too slow for technology innovations, which contradicts its request and leads back to the original IT procurement issue at hand. Innovation and efficiency have become synonymous, if the government wants innovation but lacks the efficiency for it … something has to change, and it’s not going to be innovation.

In addition to meeting with just about every federal agency we could, I personally met with over one-hundred technology companies during my tenure. I met with everyone, from the one-man freelancer to the largest government contractors everywhere across the country from Atlanta to San Francisco. I got a deep understanding of how these organizations operate with their clients outside of government and how they operate with the government, if at all. The objective was to learn how the big guy wins, why the little guy thinks he loses and why the best guy never plays the game.

Rewiring the system

We all know the game is wired, but, once we started to understand how it was wired, we started to change everything. It’s no secret that many IT procurements are pre-wired; heck, even many government jobs are pre-wired … the winning candidate pre-determined and the public bidding process just an illusion of being “fair and open”. If many contracts are wired, that means there is probably commonalities among how they are wired … so, we started to create an algorithm to identify those commonalities. We, almost instantly, went through all of the data and found ten key metrics for flagging an opportunity as “wired” (there’s likely many more) – like completely omitting the title, description or scope of work; you’d have no possible way of knowing what to bid on unless you already knew exactly what to bid on. My personal favorite was using a term that didn’t exist to describe that same term. Several procurements actually copy-and-paste the services requested from specific vendor websites, letting them know “in-code” that they are the pre-determined vendor or service requested and thus alienating others. Identifying potential wired opportunities and the contracting officers that wire them was a huge first step forward.

However, the biggest thing wired of all, was the process itself … unintentionally so. Ensuring that all opportunities are fair and open isn’t helpful when the process to bid can feel overwhelmingly unfair and closed. For example, to get paid by the federal government, you must be in a system called SAM; it’s so bloated, broken and complicated that even most people working in the Office of Federal Procurement Policy have themselves struggled to sign-up for the system, many in government fail to even try. And because of this common knowledge of a flawed system, most contracting officers won’t even review a bid from a vendor not already in the SAM system, despite that being a big no-no. So, we had to develop a solution … it was basic “on boarding” strategy; remove all barriers to entry!

We started to develop a system called “SAM Helper”; a guide built on top of SAM to help make the process more intuitive. We couldn’t just fix SAM, because it was so broken, it’s code-base has been locked-down … a “don’t spend money working on what’s broken” mentality. SAM Helper was the “sign here” sticky-tabs of the real estate industry. For anyone that’s ever purchased a home before, the paper-work is overwhelming and daunting, but, a good agent puts little stickies to tell you what’s most important (because everything is technically important) and where the major call-to-actions are – where to sign and how to quickly and effectively get through the process. The goal was to get more companies through the system. And while quantity wasn’t the objective, it was a by-product of helping quality through the door.

Accelerating government

However, it wasn’t just unwiring a system, getting through a complicated process and removing restricted barriers. It was about getting the right companies, providing the right services, to bid and to win; and, most importantly, to want to do so. The solution, one of many, was acceleration. We started to develop the federal government’s first Start-up Accelerator (a.k.a “accelerate.gov” and “AccelerateUSA”).

This accelerator program isn’t your traditional accelerator program; there’s no equity given up, there’s no communal office space offered and there’s no pitch deck required. It’s also not for your traditional “tech start-up”; the program is designed for any company looking to do more business, or do business for the first time, with the federal government … and to accelerate the growth of that business through those opportunities. There is over 74 billion dollars in IT spend every year within the federal government, that’s a plethora of opportunity!

The program was designed to address three core areas of need: education/training, guidance/mentorship and outreach/networking. The strategy was to leverage pre-existing communities that have mutually beneficial incentives for local economic growth/stimulation to host, support, and lead pre-developed programs throughout the country.

Programs such as “Meet SAM” that would guide companies together through the SAM process – through hands-on and digital walk-tru experiences. Programs such as “GovConnect” that allowed larger and more experienced companies working with the federal government to connect with those new to government – you might ask why the big guy would help the little guy, but, consider sub-contracting and recruitment and it becomes synergistically obvious. Programs such as “N.I.TR.O” (just an internal name – New Innovation Technology on-Ramp Opportunity; love me a good acronym) that provide a new purchasing vehicle for new companies to quickly and more efficiently get into the system and win contracts on an accelerated schedule – this was primarily a way to work against the use of the pre-existing GSA Schedule 70 to circumvent the more traditional (open) procurement process. And, programs such as “MarketPlace” that allowed for easier discovery of opportunities to work within the federal government, making every opportunity an accessible one – even bringing forward opportunities from grants, challenges and research funding.  

One of the most fascinating projects I worked on while a Presidential Innovation Fellow was “PricesPaid”, an initiative of the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, within the Executive Office of the President, EOP. It was just one other developer and myself tasked with building a powerful web application that at its core simply exposes the prices paid for goods throughout all agencies within the federal government. A simple objective, with results of potential savings in the several tens-of-billions! Knowledge is power and while you’d think this information was readily available, it took a Presidential mandate for us to get access – it’s kind of a big deal.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of the OMB, we would have access to more data than you could consume in a lifetime, and it was our task to make sense of that data. My primary focus, as a designer and product lead, was on ensuring that we could see past the limitations that were the specific variables in the data-set; “that isn’t data being returned back to me from the database” is an common response to just about anything remotely “innovative”. However, in the end, it wasn’t just about our making sense of the data; it was about making the data sensible to our audience. The development-centric instinct was to take big data and develop a means of distributing that data … the power however was less in the data distribution and more in the data consumption! Delivering a record of a billion past transactions is meaningless without influencing buying behavior to reduce excess spending, increase competitive bidding and promote collaborative purchasing power in an effort to save billions.

We stood up a working prototype, MVP, within the first 28 days. Well, it was a good headline for the press; all we really did was customize open-source software to take one dataset and output it to a web interface … a more data-rich version of “Hello World”. The real power is when we started to evaluate how we outputted that data. There were immediate findings when sifting through the data: such as items being purchased for zero dollars, vast amounts of excess spending on items with low quantities and unnecessary IT overspending and redundancies. Immediately we were able to identify, exploit and then increase zero-dollar spending situations (how that occurs is actually fascinating and for a much longer-post), we were able to connect contracting offers buying like-minded goods to increase purchasing power through volume discount pricing and we were able to put the data in context which allowed a better understanding of Moore’s law and the depreciation of technology to adjust model and pricing recommendations with respect to time, supply and demand.

We like to say that within the first three-thousand lines of code, we were able start saving over three-billion dollars; but, that’s just another fun sound-bite. The truth is, however, that the program has the ability to save tens of billions of dollars over the next several years as it continues to evolve … no big deal!

The hurdles of government innovation

One of the largest issues within government is that there is such a strong focus on wanting to be innovative that it actually becomes a distraction from developing innovative solutions to real problems. It’s how we get so entrenched in buzzwords like “Open Source”, “Open Data”, “API” or “Design Thinking”. I was in a meeting on my last day where someone from the FDA was presenting on a pretty impressive web application that they had developed; the first question asked was, “are you going to open source this” … to which, the response was simply, “it’s built on open-source”. Sometimes you try to open so many doors that you can’t see the ones open to you. Have one presentation on “Story Telling” and the next 72 hours is nothing but how we tell our stories, until the next shiny thing catches our attention, like agile.

The biggest problem with buzzwords is when they become synonymous with solutions. Especially when the buzzword is easier to sell than it is for the salesman to accurately implement, or even truly understand. “Agile” was a constant development-centric solution with no understanding of it’s meaning or execution. You can’t sell agile as a holistic process when you’re not working within the holistic process. When most developers say “agile”, what they really mean to say is “agile development”. They require every aspect of the process to be more “waterfall”, except for the process in which they specifically work … it’s an irony that halters innovation in government most. I had a self-proclaimed “Samurai” (I think it’s like a “ninja”) who preaches agile as the savior of government tell me he was stopping all his work and doing nothing more because he didn’t have “all” of the designs … he wanted every single view designed and delivered before he’d begin; that doesn’t sound very agile to me. This particular Samurai certainly had the best intentions, but, it’s certainly no way to innovate government. Work hard, work fast and constantly be iterating on the process holistically along the way; you’re never done learning and there is no “finished product”. 

Understanding the weaknesses early became essential to avoiding the unnecessary, increasing efficiency and knowing whom to move-forward and when to move-on. Everyone in government wants to do “innovation”, but no one wants to do anything that is new, untested, uncomfortable and requires any level of blind-trust or risk. There is the buzzword and then there is the reality. 

Helping government make sense of itself

The PricesPaid initiative was a fantastic early example of how the simple distribution of big data can prove more harmful than helpful without the understanding of context to create new, more relevant, data. It was also a great example of how the buzzword wasn’t the solution, a solution was the solution … go figure!

The simple goal was to release the spending data of prices paid on goods throughout agencies in the federal government. The basic premise was that if you could see how much others paid for an item, you’d be better educated on how much you should be paying for a like-item. However, that premise requires a lot of effort on the user and can be very misleading, especially in the context of technology. If you knew what you were searching for, you could get a glimpse of the high-end and low-end of the spectrum of what others paid … obviously you’d want to see if you could get the lowest price possible, but, you’d feel comfortable knowing you landed somewhere in the middle (the average – or you could try to roughly calculate some version of the mean, median or mode). However, by simply providing a historical transaction record you’re basing purchasing behavior off of very misleading data. The data can be 15 to 24 months old, and we all know that you shouldn’t be paying for an iPhone 4S today what someone else paid 18 months ago; because of the depreciation of technology. Furthermore, if there is a downward slope of iPhone 4S purchases exactly inversely related to an upward slope of the iPhone 5 purchases, we could more accurately assume that there is a new model of iPhone and that you shouldn’t be buying an iPhone 4S at all!

Simply opening the data is like giving someone a set of encyclopedias. By actually understanding the data, considering context and focusing on the influence and changing of behavior is like giving them Google … you get exactly what you were after worst case scenario and you discover something more relevant that you didn’t even know you were searching for best case scenario.

One hundred and eighty days ago I was offered an opportunity of a lifetime, to join The Office of Science and Technology Policy, OSTP, through the Executive Office of the President as a “Presidential Innovation Fellow.” This was an amazing opportunity for me as I was preparing to leave a previous opportunity of a lifetime as Twitter’s first Design Manager. I, along with a select few, was brought in to tackle some of government’s largest initiatives, in a very brief “tour of duty”. And, brief it was; it feels like just yesterday I was walking onto White House grounds for the first time … full of excitement, ambition and determination. So, what happened during those six months? Did anything get done? And, what did I learn?

Spoiler: I did learn a lot; however, I didn’t come in for the learning experience, I came in for the teaching experience.

A unique perspective

Like most of my previous jobs, mine was a unique situation.  I was the only Presidential Innovation Fellow, PIF, to be assigned to two different projects: I was tasked with working on developing “PricesPaid” through the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, and continuing to develop “RFP-EZ” through the Small Business Administration, SBA. Our work within the SBA was actually a part of the larger “White House Small Business Procurement Group” through OMB. A majority of our focus on both projects was IT procurement reform, working directly with OMB’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy. I’m a designer and front-end developer by trade, but, I was actually brought on as a “Product Manager”; a role I was happy to except, as it is one that needs innovating in government.

I also found that being a designer was a rarity, in both the PIF program and government -- I was honored to be named “The Design Guru” by GovLoop in their “The 7 Most Fascinating Presidential Innovation Fellows”. Being a designer in a policy and development-centric environment meant an opportunity to help just about everyone on just about everything; in all I worked on about two dozen different initiatives within my six month tenure. I spent more time in PowerPoint than I’d care to admit; but, damn if those weren’t some good looking decks. If you’re going to pitch to the President of the United States, at least do it with some style, right?

It was one of the most frustratingly fascinating experiences of my life; it was exhaustingly interesting. Before the #shutdown, I worked twelve-hour days, almost every weekend and even spent my Labor Day and 4th of July weekend coding for IE6 (the department of defense is still rocking that classic).

It was a lot of work over a very short duration of time … as I started to write-up a summary of my experience, I found myself quickly on page six, with much more to say! Because no one is going to read a ten-page account of my adventures in government, I’m going to break this one up into three-parts: “Big Data, Big Budgets, Big Savings”, “IT Procurement Reform”, and “Designing Government”.

Until tomorrow, here’s a Dribbble preview of some of my design work while a Presidential Innovation Fellow at The White House (sometimes I had creative freedoms and sometimes it was just lipstick on a pig): 

I’m a strong community advocate and I invest heavily in it. But, the question arises, is an investment in community like other investments? Do you measure the return, and if so, in what form do you collect? It feels rather disingenuous to expect a return on an investment in something as communal as community, but I tend to look at it like I look at karma. The basic principle behind karma is that the more bad you do the more bad that comes back at you and inversely the more good you do the more good that comes towards you. The good willed nature of karma even has a bit of a selfish undertone to it inherently; are you doing good only in pursuit of expecting good in return? That just doesn’t sound very good at all. I am a result of my community and my community is a result of me … it’s symbiotic.

When I started my current position at The White House, they asked me a very interesting question, “what does government mean to you?” Being the community-centric entrepreneur I am, my immediate response was that government is essentially a community manager. We have this enormous community, the United States of America, and it’s a community in the truest sense; for the people, by the people. I left Silicon Valley to come back and serve that community, but why?

I’m not here to talk politics and I’m not here to start an autobiography … I’m here to talk about community and the behavioral economics that become mutually beneficial when incentives are in-line, communication is clear and people are put before profits.

A little back-story

I had the fortune of entering an industry at an extremely pivotal point, right after the dot-bomb-bust and right before the reemergence that was labeled “web 2.0”. It was a darwin’istic time when the economy helped ensure that the evolution of the Internet would be a stronger, faster and better place (with a sustainable business model).  It was a time when the young, ambitious and creative thinkers that were also technologically savvy were few and far between; it was an opportunity of a lifetime, it was the right time to bring life back to opportunity.

The timing was perfect; it was a time when while I was learning what I needed to learn, which was pretty much everything, my application of that learning could help shift an industry. The web-standards movement was at a tipping point, and what made it tip? It was designers! Designers who knew how to code and proved once and for all, if you can dream it, it can be built; built correctly, semantically and with never before seen flexibility! The Internet started to scale, for real this time.

It was my naive youthful thinking that a designer tipped anything or that my work made any dent in an industry significantly larger than my cubicle. I didn’t grow up in a home with a computer, I didn’t go to a high school with an Internet connection and there was no mention of HTML while an undergrad Computer Science major. We, the 30-somethings, always joke that we learned everything we know about “web design” from a Google search (or AltaVista at that time). But, it wasn’t just a search engine that finally explained the box-model, it wasn’t just Zeldman’s orange book that enlightened us to Web Standards and it wasn’t just my nerdy cubicle mate that discovered how to clear a float that was my formative web design education … it was a community.  And, for this reason, and this reason alone, I’ve been nothing but dedicated to “community”, especially in the context of technology. Because I would know nothing without this emerging community and thus I could do nothing more but equally contribute, but, why?

Participation as Profit

Several years later, after thousands of Google searches, I finally became pretty damn good at “web design”; and, eventually co-founded my own web design agency. Step-one was to survive long enough to get to step-two; step-two was to grow. Growth is a pretty ambiguous term; it was some summation of the parts in a pretty particular order: growing our skill set, growing our reputation, growing our team, growing our client list, growing our revenue and growing our community. Because, for we knew, if we could do one, that we’d be better positioned to do the other … at a scale otherwise impossible. The order never dictated the importance, but rather the sequence of events that would allow one proceeding to be the catalyst for the one following to thrive.

We survived and we thrived, always ensuring the community that helped us get there shared in the reward of our efforts. Our tax records will show, to your surprise, that we never reported a profit. Yet, we grew the company to a valuation well in the eight-figures. While we enjoyed the tax savings of zero profitability, the reason behind the numbers is a fundamental belief that “you make it to spend it”. We always had enough contracts lined up at the end of the year to get us through most of the year to come, so savings wasn’t a large concern of ours; however, investing our money was … and we believed in investing our excess cash in our community. We believed in community so much that we looked at our own team and our space as an extension of our community.

We sat on the board of community organizations, we taught at local institutions, we wrote for industry publications, we provided pro-bono services to non-profits, associations and community groups as well as hosted, sponsored, supported and contributed to just about any community event that asked it of us. We even opened up our own studio space to be one of DC’s first co/working spaces for the local design/development community. We never asked for anything in return, but we received more than we could ever pay back, ten-fold.  

We received the support of a community and the backing of an industry. We realized almost instantly that our reputation within the community for the community started to overshadow that of our coveted creative portfolio and elite client list. We supported our community because community was life; our industry moves faster than textbooks can be printed, and, we push the limits of our code and design beyond the trends … because, we’re asking the same of our peers and we need to consume more than we contribute in order for that contribution to be meaningful.

A community, not a commodity

Just like with karma, we didn’t do good in expectation of expecting good; but we had to put in at a fractional rate of what we were taking out or there would be nothing to take from and thus we’d have nothing to produce … and, we’d die. It’s survival, not overtly selfish survival, but survival similar to that in our relationship, our respect, of forests because of our dependency on oxygen. Like with our physical environment, a community should be a naturally beneficial relationship … however, like with physical environments, every now and then someone tries to profit from the relationship and risks destroying the ecosystem.

When karma works, people take notice. When good karma produces good-will that produces a good reputation that produces a good profit; someone somewhere is going to take notice and reverse engineer that model – doing good only because they’re expecting a good return; which is not good at all.  

Communities are delicate, fragile, fickle and sensitive … they can spawn with nothing more than an idea and they can die just as easily with a bulldozer masked behind good intent. Because all you have to do is split a community to destroy it.

I am who I am because of you

There are plenty of people smarter than I, there are plenty of people more creative than I, there are plenty of people more well versed in business than I, and most importantly, there are plenty of people with perspectives different than mine. If that weren’t true, community would be of little use beyond social interactions. I am a result of my community, but the magic happens when the community starts to become a result of me.

Because there will always be leaders there will inversely always be followers, but there are no owners … for once there is, that’s not a community at all. We can cultivate a community, we can manage a community, we can inspire a community, we can lead a community … but, we can only do so as members of the community, not owners or dictators of it.

Last week I (finally) announced that I had left Twitter, today I announce why the return to Washington, D.C. I’ve been asked to utilize the unique skills and experiences I’ve accumulated over the past decade, to serve my country; I’ve been selected by the Executive Office of the President of the United States as a 2013 Presidential Innovation Fellow. This is the second year of the program; it’s a tremendous honor to be selected, it’s an enormous privilege to serve and it’s an overwhelming opportunity to make an impact, on a massive scale.

The Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program pairs top innovators from the private sector, non-profits, and academia with top innovators in government to collaborate during focused 6-13 month “tours of duty” to develop solutions that can save lives, save taxpayer money, and fuel job creation.

I’ve been selected among a who’s who of the country’s well accomplished, including: Venture Capitalists from the likes of Sand Hill Road Ventures, innovators in Education and Health Care from organizations like KIPP and Mayo Clinc, PhDs and academics from institutions such as Harvard, Yale and MIT, as well as entrepreneurs who founded multi-million dollar ventures including ShutterStock, DMV.org and RideJoy; all complimented with some of the best development talent in the country, leading initiatives on APIs, Open Data, Cyber-Physical Systems and “Internet of things”.  And, this group working directly along-side industry influencers such as Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America, and Tim O'Reilly, who requires no elaboration. Working directly with the CTO, Todd Park, and CIO, Steven VanRoekel, of the United States; shifting our degrees of separation from the President of the United States down to just one.

When discussing “leaving the nest”, I mentioned how our focuses were out sync. One of the most surprisingly exciting dynamics to the Presidential Innovation Fellows program is their specific focus on people and environment over product. The program is a product of the people and the people are developing people-centric product – a true “for the people, by the people” methodology. The program is one created to bring in outside innovative thinkers and accomplished doers and place them within an environment where they can flourish, even inside the federal government. There are no project managers or arbitrary road maps and launch schedules … there are just big problems to solve; the program simply puts the right people, in the right room, to solve the right problems. The user-base is in the hundreds of millions, the dollars to be saved are in the tens of billions, the jobs to be created are enormous and the lives to be saved are immeasurable. 

It’s with great honor that I accept this position, it’s with great joy that I return to DC and it’s with overwhelming excitement that I join a new team to tackle some of the countries greatest challenges.

This is an exciting time to be working in our industry, especially as it relates to the federal government. When President Obama won his first term, his victory sent several clear messages throughout governments world-wide; one of those was, technology wins! The rate of adoption to new technologies, the open-mindedness of open-data, the accessibility of APIs all at a pace that was once thought unrealistic, has prevailed and with it unleashing unimaginable potential. I’m excited to be a part of the potential and part of the solution. 

Today was technically the last day of my contract with Twitter (nothing is ever final until the check clears); I’ve handed in my badge, the lawyers have dotted their I’s, crossed their T’s and that last big check gets deposited. I push publish and now I say thank you and good-bye. For those that know me well, my departure was presumably inevitable. I wasn’t hired for the job I leave, I never applied and in lieu of an interview I had a negotiation; I was acquired. I was convinced to join, I was asked to contribute and I was determined to make a difference.  Many start up with the simple aspiration of growing up, others thrive just to survive and a few with their eyes on an exit. This isn’t a story of starting a start-up, it’s a personal tale of exiting an exit.

Starting-Up

This story starts a little over six years ago when a colleague of mine sent me a very interesting instant message. Remember instant messages, the un-evolved DM of the past in the pre-Twitter era? He, after detailing his holiday plans aboard, simply said, “when I get back, I want to talk to you about starting a design agency.” And, my response, just as simply, “there’s nothing to talk about, let’s do it”, to which he replied only with, “lol.”

He, Alex, returned from holiday reading a post of mine very similar to the one before you; now realizing the ad/venture he had been contemplating had indeed already begun! And begin we did, from his living room with no clients to a 6,000 square foot loft in downtown D.C. with the world’s biggest clients. Until one day when the phone rang, like it often did, and on the other end of it, Twitter.  

We had built, arguably, one of the most talented creative teams in the industry; to which we were now being asked to break-up, despite our many best efforts. Our profits were grandiose: with our square footage, the comforts of our chairs, the ridiculousness of our conference tables and the size of our collective paychecks ever-increasing. The only thing outpacing the growth of our revenue was that of our reputation. So, the obvious question arises, when the show is so good, why look for the exit? The unglamorously simplistic answer is that we didn’t go looking for it; it just called us one day. 

We had been approached previously and had this conversation in some form with everyone from Public Relations and Venture Capital firms to Apple! But that call, at that moment, from that company … well, it was about timing and opportunity; actually, it was all about timing opportunity.

Exit Signs

Your hypothesis to my economic self-interest is probably not that far off. People will become wealthy, and, despite the cliché, it wasn’t about the money … however, a large influencing factor was what we knew could be done with that kind of money. A member of our team’s family that gave up everything to come to this country with nothing will no longer have to struggle. A member of our team’s family, an intern of all people, that hit an unfortunate streak of bad luck, will now get themselves out of bankruptcy. A member of our team’s spouse who, like many Americans, lost their job can now replace the fear of the unknown with the excitement of new opportunities. And, an entire community that supported us from inception, that we so quickly left behind, we leave better than we entered; with the establishment of an amazing co/working community, investments in multiple local start-ups, mentorships and even education and training programs for the aspiring creatives to the skillfully ambitious. It’s about people; it’s always been about people.

The show was grand, the premature exit justified and now a new adventure before us, in a 140 characters or less. As it turns out, there is a lot you can do within a 140 characters, and, we were excited to be a part of the team that defines that experience. We were early adopters to Twitter, myself user number thirty-thousand-ish, and while the product was one worth our admiration, it was the team that sealed the deal. I was excited to work along-side veterans such as Doug Bowman who had been inspiring me since I was first mastering CSS to the fun and passion that come with people like Josh Brewer and Mark Otto, famously known for his tireless work on Twitter Bootstrap. It was a product we loved, one we used more than any other on a daily basis, even more than email, only to be rivaled with the browser itself. We started and it was like a rollercoaster; the brand redesigned, profiles re-imagined, events discovered, in-Tweet media, filtered photos, Twitter Music and Vine! It was a brave new world, thinking about the scalability of the hashtag, pondering the future of the platform in the context of the future of the medium all in relation to an ambitious goal of reaching every person on the planet; it was exhaustingly interesting.

And like a rollercoaster, there were the ups as well as the downs. It’s no proprietary secret that I’m just one of many designers who have departed from the design team within the past twelve months. A simple search on Twitter itself will lead you to a number roughly over 40% of the team. But, I’m not here to talk about dirty laundry or even disparage a company that has given me such an amazing opportunity, both professionally and economically. So, for those who have been reading in pursuit of one of my famously passive-aggressive rants or in hopes of classic Jerry Maguire moment, I apologize for the pending disappointment. 

Out of Focus

However, I am exiting my exit, and there must be a reason! There is an interesting dynamic between the organization and myself. Twitter is focused on building a world-class product; that is not my focus. What an interestingly strange thing to admit too, right? My focus is, and has always been, on building a world-class team. For, like our original agency business model, I believe that if you find great talent, create an environment where great talent can thrive; that when great talent can do great work, the result is a “world-class” product. And, this is not to imply that Twitter disagrees with me; just that our focuses are different. Different enough, that I believe I will be more successful in my pursuits outside of Twitter, and perhaps the same to be said for Twitter. I joined Twitter to make a difference, and, I don’t believe that I am contributing to my fullest potential in the direction of my passion. I entered into a contract, I’ve lived up to my end and they to theirs … if we’re both not getting the most out of the relationship, it is best to allow each other to flourish independently. The classic, “it’s not you, it’s me”.

I join a surprisingly long list of acquired founders who ultimately decide to move-on, including the original founders of Twitter. Again, no proprietary secret there, one that I would argue should be celebrated more than thought of in a negative context. Entrepreneurs often struggle when released back into the captivity that is often thought of as employment, and like-wise, organizations often struggle with the notion of intrapreneurs and fitting them into the “org chart” (round hole, square peg). Like with the community we left behind at acquisition, I leave Twitter knowing that I leave it better than when I entered; the design team most specifically, significantly stronger today than a year-ago, ten-fold. The alumni list on the @design account is compromised of designers who have come and gone at Twitter, everyone on that list departed just last year. I hope my efforts keep me at the top of that list for some time; the team is now almost twice as large as it was before we joined and I expect nothing but continued growth and success.

Just before the acquisition, we were working with the industry’s leading brands pushing the boundaries of interactions and interfaces for the likes of Apple, Adobe, Google and Oracle; just to name a few. For those that watched the recent WWDC, every time they said “… and that was in the browser!”, we helped make that a reality. We were the guys on the outside of the organization, the fresh perspective, the outside-the-box thinkers … we were the consultants; and, it was a great place to be. For the sad reality is, once you’re on the inside (despite how you got there) you almost instantly lose that clout, that respect and thought-leadership … you’re just an employee. All of the exciting projects we worked on at the agency were outsourced out to us, an acquisition doesn’t change that dynamic. The exciting projects are still outsourced out and I simply miss being on the other side of that equation. This isn’t a Twitter specific comment; this is well-known corporate culture thinking that’s difficult to fight against, at least from the inside. I simply miss the other-side, a side where good ideas are more than just good intentions. There is nothing wrong with working in-house, and Twitter is an amazing environment to do it within (with an amazing team) … it just isn’t for me; it’s not an environment in which I thrive, it’s not an environment in which my contributions have the greatest impact. There is too much opportunity in this industry to do anything less than make an impact.

Making an impact

I’ll be leaving San Francisco. Well, by the time you’re reading this, I’ll have already left. I’ve been writing and re-writing some version of this over the past month; when I first notified Twitter that I wouldn’t be staying after my “one year cliff”. It’s gone from the uber passive-aggressive, “you’re doing it wrong, listen to me” to the pathetically-sappy, “I’m going to miss the team, the talent, the passion and the bacon station” – this is my somewhere-in-the-middle version. And, I’m not completely leaving the west coast, I’ll actually be bi-coastal for a bit longer. 

So, the other obvious question … what’s next!? I don’t make a decision like leaving Twitter lightly, just as with the decision to join Twitter. And, I don’t do it without something much more grandiose in mind – it’s big (twss).  I’ll be returning to D.C., well, for a stint at least. D.C. is my favorite city in the world and it’s what I’ve grown to call “home”. For any other military brats out there, you’ll understand more than most, just how important that is. As I mentioned earlier, we invest in a handful of local start-ups, some of which I advise/mentor and others I’m much more hands-on, with a few I co-found and still help run day-to-day operations. We actually have a fund in which we manage these investments, but that’s for another post, another launch and another announcement; it’s Bold!