Category: General
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Vote
There’s a certain frustration around the democratic process – while “every vote counts” we can’t help but feel that our actual vote is an infinitesimal part. I’ve been impressed with recent efforts, and of course Contactually is part of that (our preference is to cancel all in person meetings). We can go further than that,…
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Angry Shakespeare Slackbot
I was curious about the big move to chatbots, and how that applies to Contactually and user interfaces in general. So, as an exploration, I built a simple bot that runs on Slack. And just for fun, it’s a bot that lets you hurl insults extracted from Shakespeare’s works. Say hello to Angry Shakespeare. Building a chatbot is…
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Resiliency
One of the qualities we look for in all of our hires is adaptability. One is almost guaranteed to have a different job with different tactics than they signed up for, and someone who stubbornly thinks that they can simply one they did yesterday will drown. Adaptability has a cousin that is just as valuable…
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Being right
As the most tenured person in Contactually (dating back to origination of the idea), it’s no surprise that I am a host to many opinions. What the perceived correct answer to a question is, next best action, how to interpret the data. With greater frequency, my opinion is overruled. While some may think a…
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DC Tech Meetup
The first DC Tech Meetup was held over five years ago. Around 150 people gathered in our law firm’s meeting room to hear a couple demos. Next month we’re hosting our 47th meetup. We have over 16,000 members of our group. Each night attracts anywhere from 400-900+ people. The staying power of this, organized by otherwise-busy…
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Levels of the business
On Monday morning, I was reviewing copy for an email campaign for new trialing users. On Monday afternoon, I was in a room full of VCs and their Limited Partners, discussing how turmoil in the middle east was impacting global financial markets. One of the more intellectually enjoyable opportunities as a founding CEO is to…
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Legacy
One of the exciting things about going from “doing it all yourself” to “doing it mostly yourself with some help from employees” to “your employees do everything” is seeing the outcome and impact of what they’ve produced. One of the interesting things to see is what employee contributions have a lasting impact – which becomes…
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Staying Technical
My foray into entrepreneurship began soon after I took my first post-graduation job, when I found my nights and weekends being spent coding. To my surprise, ~9 years later, I’ve come full circle – spending nights and weekends coding. My teammates who have the unfortunate duty of sitting near me hear me give the same…
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Taking planning seriously
We’ve always taken the idea of planning seriously, but have recently focused on improving the act of planning. We’ve iterated through different planning methods, and have now handled on what we believe is a really elegant homegrown planning system. I’ll share that at some point. We took a step back and realized that one of…
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A little less of the credit
A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit. – Arnold H. Glasgow There are many lessons I’ve learned these past few years, but just as many things that haven’t been active lessons, rather observations. When we closed our A round, our…