Hopefully he is the last..
December 19, 2011
December 12, 2011
Military Tales: The Christmas that Almost Wasn't
I haven't written a good military tale in a while, but this particular military tale is one that brings tears to my eyes every time I tell it to some one face-to-face. I decided that it was about time to share it with the web. To give you a bit of background on this story, it was Christmas of 2003 and it was the first year I became a single mom. I was going through my divorce at the time and my finances were horrible. I'd rather not go into the details, but I can assure you that the financial hole I was in wasn't due to carelessness. I was cutting coupons, receiving WIC benefits and going through a very nasty divorce on a salary of about $1200 USD a month in the San Francisco Bay area.
During this period of Airman Tia's life, she was far away from her family and the majority of her friends were people she smoked with outside at the military hospital on break. For those non-smokers, smoke breaks are a great bonding exercise. Lots of topics would come up and I got to know some really great people and folks who could share common woes. During this particular Christmas I was feeling rather lonely and stressed. It was going to be my first Christmas as a single mother and the only person I had in my life was my 2 year old son (some of you know him as @the_clone).
Unfortunately, due to my financial woes, I couldn't afford Christmas at all. I had reserved myself to skipping it entirely because I figured my kid wouldn't hate me too much at 2 for not getting anything for Christmas. I didn't make a very big deal about it either, I felt pretty horrible deep down about it but logically I knew it wouldn't be the end and I wasn't terribly religious any how. When asked by my peers at the smoking patio about what I'd end up doing for my son for Christmas, I'd just say it'd be a light one because money was tight. This was accepted mostly, until one particular individual pieced together a bit more of what was going on from other stories and had gotten me to admit that I was a bit more stretched than I let on, the reason I was in a financial bind and my exact christmas plans. I wasn't really close to this person but we spoke regularly during smoke breaks.
Skip forward to Christmas eve, December 24th. I was sitting at home alone with my son because I had been talked out of working by my boss and there was a knock on the door. I didn't really get visitors often so I was pretty reluctant to answer the door, thinking it would be some one asking me to come to work after all. When I finally opened the door, there was no one there. I gave a look around and eventually my eyes fell upon the ground, where in front of me was a large box filled to the brim with wrapped gifts (I'd estimate at least 10 - 15) all addressed to my son from Santa.
I maintained my composure as I offered a confused smile to my porch light and pulled the box inside and sobbed. The next morning, my son destroyed the wrapping and there was a lot of great toys for a little boy of his age to play with. To this day, not a single person has claimed responsibility for that charitable act. I know it had to be my military coworkers from the smoking patio, folks I wasn't terribly close to but because the military was a family, they took care of me. I have even retold that story (years later) to one of the individuals I believed to be responsible for orchestrating the gifting and he said nothing.
I think that was one the most meaningful thing anyone has ever done for me in my life and it's the reason I'm a sucker for charity and doing things for people I care about. It was the best and most memorable Christmas I'll ever have. Thank you MSgt. Anecdote & friends, you've touched my life forever with such a simple gesture.
November 01, 2011
July 05, 2011
June 18, 2011
Elevator Pitches: It's Everyone's Job
I'm not really one to write Startup advice, but there are a few topics that I feel rather strongly about and have found in my startup endeavors are actually helpful.
Most of you reading this already knows what an "Elevator Pitch" is already, but for those outside of the marketing world your Elevator pitch is a short one or two sentence summary of what your product/service/organization does and what it's business strategy is.
Most people think that only your CEO, bizdev folks and marketing crew needs to have their elevator pitch down but that simply isn't the case, especially in the startup world.
In San Francisco there are tons of tech events people end up going to, some of them are hack-a-thons for developers and others are networking events. If you work at a startup company, you'll eventually find yourself at one of these events and you will be asked "So where do you work? What does your company do?"
I've noticed most of the time, people end up asking me those questions just because they want to give me their elevator pitch and need a polite way to transition to conversation to their own company. Either way, you're going to have to be able to sum up what your company does in as few words as possible and get the point across.
Yeah, I'm looking at you developers and Q&A/Support staff. I'm know all of this marketing speak hurts your brains and makes you want to gouge the eyes out of the startup douchebags who talk non-stop at you (usually about their product that is like Y for Z), but you're going to have to suck it up and toss out your elevator pitch. It benefits your company and makes you look like you're more involved in your company than just the code or your realm of the code.
Elevator pitches can be really hard to come up with the more complicated your product or service is. I couldn't imagine having to come up with an elevator pitch for Cassandra at marketing party to a bunch of folks who don't know what a distributed database is and why some one would use it. That being said, you have to make sure your elevator pitch is in simple plain English. A marketing guy's eyes are going to glaze over if you start talking about the Dynamo model or clustering and a programmer is going to decide they're done talking to you (marketing folk, I've got my eyes on you) about how their "value justification is a long-tail solution to cloud optimization for the content optimization for the BuyerSphere." Ew, I feel kind of dirty writing that sentence, but I digress.
I'm not saying that marketing folk aren't technically competent or developers have a short attention span.... but at a party you're one of a dozen people they've talked to and if you can't tell them something quickly and simply then you've lost your chance for a good elevator pitch. So do try to avoid too much technobabble or marketing buzzwords. If you're super lucky, the person you talked to will remember your pitch and be able to repeat it to some one else.
