As I thought more and more about it -- it made a lot of sense to hire a PR agency. At the minimum, they could help with local coverage in support of the festival which would help build up a press kit / etc. and you never know who might see those articles, TV reports, etc. On the far end, perhaps they could even help with getting larger, national media or industry specific media (e.g. either magic specific media or entertainment specific media.)

As someone who has frankly hired a lot of vendors / contractors (I use the term "vendor" loosely here -- I'm basically trying to distinguish it from any sort of full-time employees to make this post more specific) -- the process usually goes something like this. For any particular position / function, there's some group of people I know / have heard about before. I actually keep a Google Doc labeled "To Hire - Startups", "To Hire - Film", etc. that I add to anytime I hear of someone that someone I trust recommends. From there, I usually email out either to a subset of my friends or to an ex-Google / ex-Amazon email list for additional recommendations. 

In this case, one of the startups that I work with had previously told me about their PR agency -- a smaller one from the home state of the founder -- and how wonderful they were. Reasonably priced, very scrappy, and got them a ton of PR when they were nobody. I remember checking out their website and though their bailiwick is clearly businesses, they actually had done PR for a doc before and got amazing publicity. It was a doc short and they got a segment on Good Morning America, etc. (The director of the doc was a former tech exec and even wrote that this was the best PR agency he's ever worked with.)

As I was thinking about who to hire or even who to potentially engage -- it dawned on me that it might be tricky to hire a traditional entertainment PR firm. Here's the list of likely clients for an entertainment PR firm (at least in terms of films):

1. The Avengers (i.e. big blockbuster films whose studio is paying some large order of magnitude more for the firm's services than I am)

2. The Descendants (i.e. mid-size films made by well-known and widely celebrated filmmakers)

3. Films that got into a more prestigious festival than mine -- I'm quite proud that my doc got into Nashville but it's factually not as prestigious as Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca, Toronto, Cannes, and Berlin.

4. My film

So when those firms are out pitching to... anyone really -- if they have those other films in their stable, who are they going to pitch? Has to be 1-3 before they get to my film. (or they give me a very junior account executive who doesn't have those other films and that's problematic for other reasons)

I suppose the only place they would pitch me first is places where my film has a distinct angle -- in my case probably either business media (because of my personal background) or magic media (because of the nature of the film). But the entertainment PR firms are frankly not super likely to have better relationships with those media outlets anyway.

I think it's really easy to get caught up in the prestige of any individual firm when looking to hire. There's a certain amount of aura / social proof / etc. associated with them. Because they have such great case studies / examples -- it's almost like, "If X firm works with Y film, then they can do the same for me." Now -- I should note that I think there are pretty specific variants to this line of thinking. For example, for my movie poster, I went with a firm that has big name clients (they do a ton of work for Sony Pictures Classics and had done the posters for several Oscar nominated films this past year.) They're not traditional big though -- I looked at some of the big ones and even their websites have a completely different (highly polished) feel. However, I loved this firm's work. It had a very evocative yet distinct feel and several of their posters became some of my all-time favorites. (Including one for "Sketches of Frank Gehry" which got nominated for a key art award.) [link] I frankly still thought they would be too big / too expensive for me -- but I figured, what does an email cost me? They got back to me immediately, watched a very early cut of the film, and told me they'd love to work with me. They had a discounted rate for indie filmmakers that I could work with, they were extremely accommodating (they preferred to work on the poster during their slower months, before awards season, and when I didn't get a far enough along film to them to do that -- they still worked fast, did great work, and had no problem handling the change), and did great work I thought.

The common thread in both cases was that I knew who I was going in -- I was the small fish but needed someone who both had experience working with this type of client but also had ideas / a vision for where to take the work.

It's just been a couple of weeks with Dittoe (the PR agency I hired) [link] but I must say, I've been quite impressed. They're smart, aggressive, and I've learned a lot just in watching them work. They're slowly building up interest within the magic community (multiple magic publications are interested in screeners and just today I had a magic group requesting a screener because they'd like to show the film to their membership) along with strong outreach to wider known / national media. I find what they've done with social media (Twitter + Facebook) to be very smart and their overall strategy to be thoughtful. Even in their proposal -- among other things, they listed out who they would go out to and it's pretty clear what type of tact / angle they would use. I also like the fact that I personally like and respect them -- I want people who represent me to be people I would like to represent me -- because they're an extension of who I am.

We'll see what it turns into, but I'm hopeful. My final point though, is that I'm really glad I invested the $ into this. I have a friend who got his first film into Sundance a few years ago. In his words, he basically expected that once it got in, his whole life would change -- and it didn't. Even today, he's struggling to gain traction. When I was at Sundance earlier this year, I met a producer who has had several films in Sundance and I recounted this story to her. She then said, "Unfortunately, getting into Sundance is just the beginning." While PR is not cheap, docs (and any film) are expensive and ultimately, my PR cost will be a fraction of my overall doc cost. However, I think this investment will give the doc its best chance to succeed -- and that's a really worthwhile investment to me.

Manish and I, by the way, are friends and we used to work together at Google. He's currently a venture capitalist at Highland Capital [link].

Davida (the principal) mentioned that our panel was so popular that she had to cap signups at 30 and they had a waiting list. These panels can be a little difficult to navigate. In this particular case, there was no formal agenda, so frankly -- it was Manish and I riffing a little while the room warmed up enough to begin asking questions beyond the "sample questions" that Davida had provided them. Honestly, I was really afraid we were boring them or saying inane things until I was interrupted by the theme music from Super Mario Brothers. (It plays over their speaker system to let them know when to switch classes.) When they told me what the music signified, I said, "Oh, do you guys need to go?" To which multiple people shouted, "No! Keep talking!" I took that as a good sign though it's certainly possible they just didn't want to go back to class :)

Both Manish and I spent a lot of time talking about the various companies we worked at, what we learned, how it helped us prepare for subsequent jobs, and so forth. It was all nice and good. Then towards the end of the talk, one of the students asked, "To what extent does money factor into your career decisions?"

Wow. I didn't see that one coming. But I decided to take that one since I felt like I have a particular perspective on it.

I left amazon.com for a whole host of reasons, but one of the reasons was because I wanted to do something more entrepreneurial. I failed. Looking back, the reasons were pretty clear and maybe I'll delve into them in a future post, but after that failure, my mind was oriented around, frankly, getting more money. If I couldn't get something off the ground because I didn't have enough money, well, I would find a job that would pay me more money, save up, and then give another go at it. I should note that at this point, while I wasn't literally running out of money, I kind of was. I had a non-trivial amount of money in my bank account (~$20-25K) but with no income, that money was going quickly. I moved into the basement of a friend's house (initially they had me house sit while they were on vacation in exchange for free rent and I just ended up staying there for a while). I would save money on everything -- one example is Subway had (and still has) a deal where you can get certain foot-long subs for $5. So I would buy a footlong meatball sub $5 for lunch -- and then eat half of it for lunch, and half of it for dinner. So for someone who really never wanted for anything money-wise, this was a very strong wake up call as to why you make money.

After a difficult and humbling job search, I ended up getting a number of job offers -- including one from Google. At the time, the tech crash had occurred and there weren't a lot of tech companies hiring. Google was one of the few. But even more interestingly, for those that knew, Google was one of the very few chances to change your life. Why? Google fit all the criteria -- it was pre-IPO by a couple of years, it was still reasonably small (800 employees when I joined), growing very fast, and the whisper was that it was already profitable. That's a sure bet. You never know what your stock options will be worth, but this stood a good chance that they would be worth something significant.

I remember interviewing at Google. It was weird and quirky. While I was waiting for my first interview, in the lobby was a gift-wrapped arcade machine (I think) and the discussion that I overhead mentioned that one of the venture capitalists was giving it as a holiday gift to one of the founders. That was completely outside the bounds of my understanding. 

The core group of my interviews were just fine. I met, I think, half a dozen people who all seemed perfectly nice and I was in full-on interview mode. At the end of the day, the recruiter brings me in for 5 minutes to meet with the VP -- he was apparently driving a candidate to the airport or picking someone up at the airport, but even though he was tight on time, they wanted to make sure he met me. Ok. He pretty much asked me only one question -- something about whether CPCs would be higher for a more general search term or a more specific search term. I talked about how more specific terms are likely to result in a higher CPC because it's more targeted and brought up the example of comparing why someone would pay more for the term "Canon S100" over the term "digital camera". He seemed to find this acceptable and then left. 

As the recruiter was walking me out, it was around 630pm, and literally, the entire office was still there. Everyone. They were working away at their cubicles and it was dead silent save the sound of typing of keyboards. No one was even on the phone. I saw my life, I knew exactly what it would be like, and I knew I would be terribly unhappy.

To answer the student's question, I said something to the effect of, "I knew I would be unhappy at Google and I took the job because I knew I would get paid more than I would get paid anywhere else."

Mark Suster wrote a blog post a few years ago where he espoused the theory that in any job, you should be learning OR you should be earning [link to blog post]. The problem is that people want it all -- they try to learn and earn simultaneously. 

My first job out of college was at amazon.com. Because I had a competing offer that offered me a more senior title, amazon.com offered to match that offer (which was for a "Product Manager" title -- a title usually reserved for folks coming out of an MBA program or promoted into after a few years of working). However, my pay was set at the level below that. It's possible I could've gotten more money but I didn't bother negotiating because I got what I thought was the most important thing -- I got that title, and got it with a legitimate tech company. To amazon's credit, within a year, they adjusted my pay by bumping up my salary almost 50% -- but my crystal clear focus in that initial offer was to learn -- it didn't matter that my salary was way below what others with an equivalent title would be getting. (As a matter of reference, one of my colleagues -- her signing bonus was what I got in first year comp + signing bonus)

I remember telling myself before I took the Google offer that I had to get my mind straight. That I had to understand what I was doing. That I was taking a job where I believed I would be unhappy in exchange for the fact that I would get paid. And I took it. And I was deeply unhappy for at least the first year and a half. Now -- despite this unhappiness, I would say that I worked the hardest when I was unhappiest. 

I had a friend / colleague in a very similar situation in terms of unhappiness, and we would get together every week or two at this cafe in Menlo Park called Barrone, order some drinks, and literally sit in silence as we wallowed at how miserable we were. At one point, maybe 15 months in, I called my brother and said, "I don't think I can make it." And he told me the most liberating thing that he could've said at that point. He said, "Then leave. You made it over a year. You don't have to stay." For whatever reason, that gave me all I needed to stay and stay for 4 years. Now -- I should note, that the last couple of years were relatively enjoyable and I should also note that I don't say all this in a blame Google sort of fashion. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if I could've carved out a far more compelling, interesting, and enjoyable existence at Google with a number of small changes. I certainly don't put all the blame on myself, because in so many ways, Google was great for me, and great for lots of other people -- and I don't want that to get lost in this blog post.

Around maybe 2006 or 2007, one of my friends who was a pretty senior person at a prestigious tech company told me that some folks at Facebook had inquired as to whether or not she'd like to join them. I knew Facebook and I knew them for a while. They were Google but even earlier than when I joined. They had all the attributes too -- they were going to be huge. I told her, "Whatever you do, go to Facebook. Even if you know you're going to be unhappy, go there, because you can work there for 4 years and then retire and do whatever you want for the rest of your life." She didn't go -- for a combination of reasons. Some of it was she'd have to take a temporary pay cut (her base + bonus at her current company was likely way more than what Facebook would pay) and some of it was pure comfort (she was in meetings with the senior management team of her company and these were very well-known people in the industry. Back then, Facebook was not the Facebook of today -- it was a good, but relatively early stage startup.) Her not going, conservatively, cost her $10MM. Probably a lot more. Only she can decide if that made sense or not, but she did tell me recently, "I should've gone."

At least the way I interpret it, the conundrum with her job was that she sort of was getting both -- she sort of was learning (though she wasn't ridiculously happy with the extent / scope which is partly why Facebook intrigued her) and she was sort of earning -- she was well paid in terms of yearly copensation but her overall compensation over the long-term was nothing like what it would've been if she took a little more risk and jumped to someone like Facebook.

The overall advice I wanted to convey to this student is sometimes you have to make very significant tradeoffs. The easy answer would've been, "Money is important but [insert all other more noble pursuits / attributes / etc. here] are more important." I was clear about what I wanted, what I needed, and the fact that I worked at Google has enabled me to do what I've done the past 5 years and those have been the best 5 years of my life. For that, I'll always be grateful to Google. But to do so, I had to say to myself, "I'm taking this job because of the money and only because of the money."

When you work in a company, there's a pretty strict hierarchy. You report to someone who reports to someone who reports to someone (and depending on the company and your position within it -- there may be more or less layers between you and the CEO.) It's then natural to get caught up in your "career" and how you're doing in terms of both your title and relative standing in the company. It's not always true -- but the relative distance you are from the CEO is often a way one mentally constrains oneself in terms of performance or even future performance. There's talk about your career path, how to "grow" (i.e. you're not good enough currently and the people above you will teach you how to get better), etc. In the right hands, it's mentorship and a smart way to teach people and open up new opportunities. In the wrong hands, you're being told this by idiots. 

I like to talk about the entrepreneurs that emerged from Google -- because if you took a poll of the various leaders within Google, I'm pretty sure that most of the most successful entrepreneurs would not have filtered to the top of the list. Instead, I'm sure they would've identified quite a number of both senior leaders and promising up and comers -- those who were among the more favored, as the ones most likely to succeed. What's different though -- is life isn't a committee of the in crowd. In the outside world -- life is a market. It's a place where people can rise or fall (often) based mainly on their talents. Ev Williams, who at the time had already co-founded Blooger, was buried at Google. He left and founded Twiter. Dennis Crowley, despite Google buying something very similar in Dodgeball, could not get Google management to pay attention to it. He left and founded Foursquare. Two of the hottest startups today -- Pinterest and Instagram, came from ex-Googlers, who would not have been at the top of internal lists as most likely to found a startup like Pinterest or Instagram. 

My first point here is very simple. Powerful and successful people don't always know what's right. There's a fallacy that exists in the world where once you're successful -- it's presumed it's because you know what you're doing. Both that person thinks so and the world thinks so. Witness the number of failed second acts. Sometimes they fail for reasons outside of their control -- but often they fail for a simple reason, the reason they did well in the first place was because they got lucky, not because they were good. The people who succeed over and over and over again -- well, now you have a pattern. 

The second point is over this concept of shared values. There are people in this world who think on a similar wave length -- a lot of it is how you treat other people, but some of it is also how you think and see the world. How you do business and your mentality around it. It's being able to have a meeting with someone -- take a single issue, and breaking it down and coming to similar conclusions. This isn't surrounding yourself with yes men or only people you agree with. This is someone that you share values with. Last year, I met someone who is both particularly well known and powerful in his field. A group of us were walking out to get dinner and he did something slightly unexpected. He went out of his way to hold the door for a doorman who was bringing in some packages. Out of his way. I immediately took a liking to him. Here's a person who probably has people kissing up to him all day. People who want things from him. People telling him how smart or how good he is -- and having it reinforced by the nature of his position. But with that small act, I immediately thought to myself that this person was probably, at his core -- someone that I would like and respect because if you care for people you don't know and people who can't "help" you in your career or otherwise -- well, that's a check mark in my book.

You don't have to have shared values with someone to be able to work with or do business with that person. It just makes it more difficult when you don't. That's probably an area I'm most torn about -- because there are so few people in the world where you go, "Yeah, I love doing business with this person." And I would argue that I'm someone that does business with a lot of people. Earlier today, I met up with a friend who effusively thanked me for putting them in touch with a particular contractor. He was saying how this contractor was competent, nice, punctual, responsive, etc. Then we said, "Isn't it strange that those attributes aren't the minimum bar, but the pinnacle?" They're hard to find though -- so when you find them, you hold onto them for dear life.

Before I conclude here though, I want to get back to the fallacy of success. That fallacy is so tricky because when you get a piece of advice from a successful person -- that's automatically filtered through the idea of, "You should listen to this because they're further along than you are therefore they must be right." That's not right. But more importantly, always listening to someone else is not the way to get better -- that's the way to always needing to listen to someone else. The core is having your own opinions and sharpening it so that you can say, "That's probably crazy." and following your instincts.

We started shooting the film about 18 months ago. When I moved to Los Angeles, I was on the hunt for interesting things to do and in previous cities, there always was the, "Top 10 Things to Do in ..." -- and I found the equivalent for L.A. On that list was to take magic lessons with Mark Wilson at the Magic Castle. I thought that was pretty cool -- I remember his book when I was a kid. I thought of it like being able to take boxing lessons from Mike Tyson. Over time, I ended up taking all the magic classes at the Castle (they offer Magic I -> IV and something called "The School for Scoundrels") -- and simultaneously, I had just come off of producing (and writing / acting) in my web series, "The Consultants". The latter is important because previously, I had never produced anything so the idea of producing something was quite daunting. While producing "The Consultants" was frankly far more difficult than I imagined -- it did open up the sense in my mind that it was doable. We can buy a camera! We can buy sound gear! We can buy lights! (previously we had just rented everything.) I'll chart that full journey in another post -- but needless to say, we bought gear and started filming. Made a lot of mistakes, but I sort of knew that going in. I said to myself that I could spend the next however many months learning about documentaries and then filming, or just go out and do it and screw things up (and it was painful) and learn that way. I knew the latter would be quicker, so that's what I did.

The magic portion came naturally as I simply hung out at the Magic Castle a lot -- and got to know a lot of magicians. I think the idea that someone can be any creative profession -- let's take something like acting or singing or painting -- you tell that to most people and they think it's crazy but at least they know that there are some non-trivial amount of people doing it. Odds are long, but doable. You tell someone that you're a magician, and they can't even fathom that. That's the story that got told to me -- magicians would tell people they're a magician and people would enthusiastically respond (b/c it's cool to be a magician!) and then ask them, "So what is it you actually do?" So I wanted to examine that -- the business side of actually being a magician and in the course of that, ended up following three pretty different (and hopefully compelling) stories of people who want to make this profession their career. They come from totally different worlds, have different support structures, and are at different life stages. At the core of it though, they love magic. They're passionate about something, they know what that something is -- and they want what I think most people want -- which is to be able to spend their time on something that's meaningful to them.

Fast forward to today -- we finished a cut of the film late last year (we still need to replace the temp music, color correct, and do the sound mix) and started to submit to festivals. The trailer you see was cut by Kyle Traynor -- a very talented editor who cut my short "Will & Fiona" and was recommended to me by my good friend Kate VanDevender (who always has dynamite people recommendations.) The wife of our DP works at a big trailer house company and offered to provide guidance / support / etc. in the process of making the trailer. (which proved invaluable in terms of putting us in touch with someone to write the script, giving notes, etc.) The website was built by a designer/developer tandem that has worked with a startup that I advise (very robust content management backend). It's frankly really nice to get it out there and have something tangible for people to see and a home for the project.

Next steps: finish the film and start showing the film. We have a screening already lined up at Vanderbilt's Law School next month -- their Entertainment & Sports Law Society was interested in screening it so I'll be there afterwards for a Q&A.

Bridesmaids
Laugh out loud funny. One of the best and funniest movies I've seen in years -- I hope it gets multiple Oscar noms because it's so well deserved.

Elite Squad: The Enemy Within [link to trailer] 
This might have been the best film I saw all year and maybe one of the best I've ever seen. The third film in Jose Padilha's trilogy on Brazil's world of drugs / corruption / slums -- the first being the documentary "Bus 174", the second being "Elite Squad", and now "Elite Squad: The Enemy Within". It's Brazil's official entry for the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film. 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Justin Bieber: Never Say Never
I'm sure some people will think it is absolutely ridiculous for this to be on any list -- but it's a good doc. More importantly, it gives an inside look into how a pop star is made / created / the value of work. Chronicling Bieber's rise from an unknown YouTube sensation to his discovery by Scooter Braun, to Usher's involvement with his career -- it's as informative as it is entertaining.

Midnight in Paris
Maybe my favorite Woody Allen movie of all time. It's so creative, imaginative -- and to be blunt, it was so unexpected that Owen Wilson would be near perfect as Allen's latest muse. To hear Allen's words come through his mouth was just a delight. A fun, thoughtful, and intriguing film. Not to be missed.

My Week with Marilyn
This is a fun, great, and well done movie. Quick, fast-paced -- the time just melts away watching this movie. Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branaugh are brilliant as Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier. Just a wonderful film.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes
It's too bad this film doesn't get more acclaim. I hope it gets nominated for the writing -- it's smart and imaginative. It's an origin story that feels fresh. Wonderfully entertaining with very good performances all around (particularly from Andy Serkis -- whose motion capture work is being pushed for an Oscar nom, which would be a first.)

Shame
This is a pretty great movie. Its notoriety (Fassbender plays a sex addict) perhaps overshadows a bit the brilliant work that both Fassbender and the director, Steve McQueen, does in the film. Wonderfully shot, lit, casted -- a story with almost no exposition -- it's just great.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
I thought this film was just a tour de force. It's verging on 3 hours and I enjoyed every minute of it. I had no familiarity with the books or the Swedish versions of the film and was totally enraptured throughout the movie. Rooney Mara as Lisabeth Salander is mesmerizing. It's a very graphic film but constructed so well -- it's like watching a pro's pro work.

The Help
Another film based on a best selling book, "The Help" is wonderful. It's hard not to be overly enthusiastic when you see great films -- which "The Help" certainly is. Captivating performances from the entire cast -- but especially from Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer who play the two primary maids in the film. Mood and tone are remarkably evocative. So enjoyable. 

Warrior
Going into this film, I didn't expect much and was blown away. This film could've been terrible and it wasn't -- it was great. I've liked the director's (Gavan O'Connor) work for a number of years and I think he's easily done his best work here.

X-Men: First Class
Perhaps the most uneven of the films on this list (primarily because of so-so performances from a handful of the actors -- I won't get into it here, but it's been written about extensively) -- but otherwise I loved this film. I'm a sucker for origin stories and there's an intriguing darkness and undertone that the filmmakers explore. Fassbender (again) is great in this film.

[

Nelson, thanks for writing this post. As a PM, I've often struggled with quality improvements vs. new features. Using a notion of value is good, but have you seen good approaches to quantifying value? I personally haven't seen many. And typically find that it boils down to a "gut feeling" judgement of the group of people working on the product or maybe some attempt at determining financial value, which can also be pretty loose. (Maybe a follow-up blog post?) Is it even important to do so much analysis in fast moving markets?

]

Unfortunately, I've done quite a bit of financial forecasting in my life. When I was an intern at Reader's Digest, I devised the core financial model / projections used for gifts.com (which the finance department seemed to have adopted). At amazon.com, forecasting seemed to permeate every ounce of their DNA. Finance was a dominant group at the company -- and not because of any sort of force of personality -- but just because they depended very heavily on forecasting for guidance in terms of which initiatives to pursue and not pursue. Thus, for nearly every project I was working on -- nearly the first thing I did was to create a set of financials. 

I broadly think forecasting is terrible. It's generally terribly done and rife for corruption. So why is it terribly done? Forecasting requires three distinctly different skills sets. 1) core understanding of finance / analytics. 2) creativity / intuitive gut feel for numbers and how data / markets work. 3) Simplicity in the display and construction of information. (without this last one, forecasting then boils down to a black box / "just trust me" -- the execs *should* understand exactly how you arrived at that number and that process, along with the number, should be able to stand up to their scrutiny. I always strived for my models to be understood to a lay person. The assumptions are clearly laid out and it's something that -- with some guidance -- someone else can understand how the model works and why I constructed it that way.)

Think about this combination of traits though -- it's rare (but not impossible) to find a really great finance person who also has a great intuitive feel for product, how products grow, and to display information in a simplistic way. (BTW, some of the *worst* models I've seen come from consultants. They're invariably good at #1. Decent at #2. Terrible at #3. If you've seen a slide deck on this type of material from a consultant and the room's eyes glaze over -- you know what I'm talking about.) The alternative is to take someone who is good at product and then have them build a model. The problem here is the PM suffers from both a lack of time to do this well and potentially little to no experience with respect to finance.

Ignoring all this -- let's say you've come up with a forecast. Maybe you even think it's a good forecast -- then what's the problem? The problem is that forecasts are frequently abused. When resources are allocated based on forecasts -- what will happen? Well, self-interested individuals (which we all are) will then artifically (either consciously or subconsciously) inflate their numbers so they're more likely to get resources. Then when those numbers don't pan out, maybe they get a slap on the wrist -- but rarely is the penalty for having an incorrect forecast to be anything more than mild. Also -- most corporations don't work as a dictatorship, and in some ways, I think this type of work should work that way. Let me explain. Resources are typically allocated in a series of meetings, or at the minimum, in a meeting where there's a group of execs weighing in. Then when a set of forecast(s) are shown -- then there easily could be open warfare in terms of the legitimacy of each individual forecast (with obvious self-interests at play such as which group will get resources.) It's a colossal waste of time. The way it could work well would be if the CEO basically commissions each of the forecasts. Either from the same individual / group or from a set of individuals / groups that he trusts. Then he can refine and filter that information in the context of other information. But there's the big difference. The forecasts there are actually being used for the purposes of allocation of resources -- not for political manueverings for resoures. The CEO can then ask the question, "X and Y seem pretty close in discounted lifetime value. I'm concerned about your assumption in Y. Why did you choose to go with that number instead of a lower number?" The discourse is around getting to the best answer without, hopefully, ancillary considerations -- or if there are ancillary considerations, those are acknowledged to everyone involved.

So is forecasting a waste of time? Not at all. I actually found forecasting to be an enormously useful part of my work and background. The reason is that when you build a model -- you understand all the sensitivies of the business and which metrics you *have* to hit. When I was in college, my friend and I developed a business plan for Princeton's Business Plan Competition for a startup called "Grocers Solution". Whereas Web Van, Home Grocer, and other folks would be a one-stop shop (buy groceries online and have it delivered) -- we would partner with existing supermarkets to deliver groceries. Seemed like a decent idea. Here was the problem. When I built the financial model -- there was absolutely no way I could make it profitable by eating into the margin of the groceries. So even when I somewhat artifically tweaked the margins upwards to see what happened -- it wasn't close. However, when I tacked on a $4.95 delivery charge -- all good. I'll note that WebVan / Home Grocer went out of business, all those types of businesses generally went out of business -- and the one that has persisted (Fresh Direct) -- has thrived, with a delivery charge. I'm not saying I was right / prescient -- I'm just pointing out that that's the value of doing forecasting. It very simply said, "If you want to charge the same price as those found in a supermarket -- which you probably have to for psychological reasons -- you can't offer this service without charging for it."

This type of work would allow us to focus our efforts (overcoming customer resistance to a delivery charge) and potentially not even start the company if we thought that (or getting supermarkets to pay a service fee) were non-starters.

So getting back to Wayne's original questions -- the boiling down of this work to "gut" feel and the necessity of doing this work in fast moving markets.

In a world where the analysis process is corrupted -- this analysis is broadly a waste of time. But let's say it's a world where the process is not corrupted -- and I want to emphasize process. The process is critical. How it's commissioned, how it's done, and how it's reviewed. So that involves getting people you trust, having a single exec sponsor who reviews, critiques, and then approves, and then using that as a significant (but not sole) determining factor in the allocation of resources. In this world, I think the analysis is absolutely critical.

1) It tells you how the business works. Maybe you realize the business needs 10 million users before it's profitable. Maybe you realize the business needs customers to actually pay you money (i.e. can't monetize sufficiently via ads). Maybe you realize that the support costs are so high that the business is unprofitable on a fundamental basis. Gut feeling gets you so far -- it guides you in terms of where you're at and what you need to look at and, frankly, you may even be right 80-90% of the time. But this is just work. It's work that gets you just a little bit more information -- but potentially critical information. There's nothing quite like staring at a model and thinking, "I don't see how this business makes sense with less than 10 million users..."

2) It *is* good for comparative purposes. Of course, this is when you trust the people doing the analysis and the process -- but if you run two pieces of analysis, and one projects $10 million in revenue and the other $50 million -- that's a clear difference and something that gut feel will not necessarily tell you. I want to emphasize this. One of my favorite interview questions was to ask a candidate to estimate Wal-Mart's annual revenue in the United States. Few people had an intuitive (and accurate) gut feel for this number. In other words, after they came up with a projection -- a lot of folks didn't know if their projection felt high or low. That's a projection for a store that probably all of them have been to and in an industry that's readily understandable (brick and mortar retail). Imagine then trying to project the benefit of a new feature for a mobile ads product? Or the benefit of expanding ZipCar to Des Moines, Iowa. Or the revenue from digging a new oil well in Western Canada? My point here is that all of them requires a lot of specialized knowledge to have a good intuitive sense -- and it's rare, even for people who work in that indusry, to get to that stage. At the minimum, the way I think about it is, why guess? Why guess when the alternative is just work?

3) When the analysis is good, it properly frames the conversation. Is it about revenue? Is it about number of customers? Is it about cost savings? When you stack product A vs. product B and product A has higher revenue -- then someone goes, "But wait, there's XYZ benefit to this too." That's great. Then you can have a larger conversation about what you (as a company) truly care about. It's not blind adherance to a stack ranking in terms of revenue. Maybe there are ancillary benefits. Maybe you're keeping a partner happy. Maybe it's an expected value type equation -- here's what we project in $ but there's a 15% chance of a huge pay day. Maybe it's competitive -- you need to invest in an area to keep a competitor distracted or investing in an area they don't want to. You no longer have a mish mash of ideas with unknowable value. Here's where you put a stake in the ground and say -- you want this valued? Here's the value.

In college, one of my professors was on the board of Reader's Digest and he arranged an internship there for me. This was 1999 and they astutely realized (or I should say, their CEO, Tom Ryder realized) that the Internet was coming and it would be transformative. They had a small new media group that did the things you would expect a new media group would do for an old line publication company -- digitizing existing properties, etc. -- but they also had a new initiative called gifts.com. They had acquired a number of valuable URLs and wanted to create businesses around them. (I know, it's odd that Reader's Digest would create a subsidiary around giving gifts -- but I'll leave that alone in this post.) I spent most of my summer working on gifts.com.

Reader's Digest had engaged a branding firm to help with creating a logo for gifts.com. In their pitch meeting, this firm showcased the work they did with a major auto manufacturer. They had a few PowerPoint slides which showed dozens of logos. It detailed their thoughts and ideas and how it evolved over time as they refined their thinking and the client gave input. This eventually coalesced into the logo that was chosen -- which was quite good.

One of the things Steve Jobs talked about was how working on product was partially a function of bringing all your other sensibilities -- all the things that you learned from interacting with the world -- bringing that back to your work. In his Stanford commencement speech [link], he talked about dropping in on a class at Reed that dealt with typography -- and how this ultimately informed not only his desire to offer many fonts in the Mac, but also the importance he placed on having the right fonts and beautiful fonts and the work they did. I think that's a huge, continuous part of being a good [fill in the blank in terms of jobs] -- basically anything associated with product. That your own sensibility keeps getting better, more refined, and that you have a larger and larger library of things to draw upon. That you have good taste, and likely, strong opinions about what is good and not so good.

But before that (or even after that) -- how is it that one makes good design choices? How does one know what good work is? This is where I want to stress the idea of comps -- the lesson I learned when I saw that ad agency pitch. If you showed me one logo -- maybe I think it's good, maybe I think it's bad. More problematically, let's say I have a sense of how I felt -- I'm leaning one direction or another. Unless I was a designer, it's unlikely I'll know exactly (especially with an early stage design) -- what I want changed. Is it too big? Too bright? Too sharp? Too complex? Too difficult to see? I'm not sure. I'll likely say something to the effect of, "I like it but don't love it." That's borderline useless feedback.

Let's say, however, that I saw 3 design. Or 5 designs. I am then going to start formulating an opinion about which ones I like and why. Maybe some are too boxy. Or some don't evoke the core concept of the product. Or the color palette isn't quite correct for some reason. I'll then say things like, "I like X from design A and Y from design B." I'll start to be able to have an opinion and give feedback in a way that a designer can use and implement. We'll be able to iterate. 

I was talking with a startup founder earlier today and he mentioned that he was thinking about hiring a UX designer. One of the things that I've found surprising in recent years is how design has evolved. My sense of design is very simplistic. As a product manager, I worked off of two sets of documents. The product requirements document (PRD) -- which basically summarized what the product was and why we were building it, and then a tiered list of features. Tier I was everything we needed to get done in the immediate release. Tier II was stuff that we should get to if we had time. Tier III was stuff we probably weren't going to get to but it was good to have important features listed for reference. The other "document" was mock-ups. These were not wireframes. These were not some sort of intermediate set of drawings. They were non-functioning Photoshop files / jpegs / etc. -- that essentially showed exactly how the product should look (and work.) These were very clear. If we launched a product that didn't look and work like the mock-ups -- there was no confusion. One could easily pull up the mocks and compare it to the live site and ask, "Is this the same? How is this different?"

So why is this important and how has the world changed? I often see wireframes or UX designs or some sort of intermediate mock-up. These roughly show what elements are on a page without explicitly laying out how they will look and function. That's kind of useless to me -- or at the minimum, doesn't add additional value to me beyond what I previously had. The PRD says, "Here's everything we're building and what it needs to do." The mockups say, "This is how it look and works." So where do wireframes fit in? I don't think they do. What additional value do wireframes have over that world? Worse -- wireframes give the impression of shared understanding. You look at the wireframes and go, "Yeah. I think that's what we need. A search box. A place to log in. A section ot merchandise this item. etc." People think they're on the same page. However, give those constraints and you can easily have 1000x different takes on it. Details matter. What ends up happening is some variant of the wireframe appears. The product is built. The PM is unhappy -- it's hard to iterate from that space. You need a space to iterate and a working product is not that space. It cost a lot of engineering time to get there. Battling it out over the designs and working through those issues when things are just in Photoshop is the ideal place.

Getting good looking products is hard -- frankly, you need to start with a great designer. But even with a great designer -- it takes this type of work. It takes a shared understanding of what the product is and how it should work -- but then it takes that process. The way I like to work is that I'll literally sketch -- maybe on a piece of paper or on a white board -- different major screens of a product. Just draw out boxes of what should be on each screen. Basic functionality. I'll then give that to the designer and talk with him/her until they felt comfortable with it. They then create their conception of the product. If you have the resources -- have them come up with multiple versions of the product, or at least the home screen. I'll often tell a startup that what they've sent me is too safe. That their stuff is functional and logical but not inspired. That's what you want -- inspired. Have the designer go to town. Have them work on something without constraints. You don't have to go with it -- but that'll become an option. Or elements of it may be things you like and later incorporate. Have 3-5 versions of the product. A few will likely be close variants. But maybe 1 or 2 are totally out there and it'll get you thinking, "Oh, maybe this is it." Remember Gilt and RueLaLa and their siblings? Those aren't Silicon Valley designs -- they're NYC designs. Giant pictures? Emotional / evocative? Those people come from a different world than the people who designed AdWords. So push those boundaries or at least allow your designer to present you with options. Come from a world where options are available so then you can actively say no -- because if you've never seen it, you won't be able to know if it (or elements of it) might be right for your product.

I want to open this post on Steve Jobs. Walter Isaacson has written a great biography on him [link] and in it, it profiles Jobs in terms of how he works. The particular aspect of his personality / work style that has been lauded has been has relentless pursuit of perfection. Take the MacBook Pro -- an already amazing and beautiful machine but then to take it to the next level, they created a unibody enclosure. If you're not familiar with what I'm talking about, check it out on Apple's website and watch the video where Jonathan Ive walks through it [link].

The story of Jobs and his work style essentially gets reduced to well-meaning individuals saying they can't do something, or miss many important details, or are pushed just to get something out the door -- and Jobs pounds the table, fires people, calls people stupid and insists on revision after revision until the product is perfect. A site to behold. The iPad. The iPod. The iPhone. The Apple Store. This is true to a large extent but I think is also slightly dangerous thinking. The first reason is Jobs had at his disposal, essentially unlimited resources. Revisions, delays, many many prototypes -- are all very costly. Especially within a large company where you have high fixed costs (salaries). The second reason is that the greatness of what we know Jobs primarily for (let's say Jobs from 2000-2010) ignores a vast history of Jobs' work. Jobs has always had a brilliance about him -- but also, to some extent, failures attributable to his quirks. One of the points that Isaacson makes in the book is that a key part of the Jobs narrative is the idea that his firing from Apple was the best thing that ever happened to him because it changed who Steve was -- that that piece of his narrative is not true. Instead, it is causation and correlation. Jobs' firing allowed him to form NeXT and suddenly Jobs was able to indulge in all the quirks that he previously could not at Apple. So he insisted on having the walls in his factories to be painted white and for the place to be spotless (incredibly costly and unnecessary.) He built a super high end computer without a market. He worked and reworked the product so that it might be years delayed. Don't get me wrong -- ultimately Jobs came up with something that became the heart of OS X -- but, the lesson was clear. Jobs had to balance the things that he did great (intuition / judgement, relentless pursuit of perfection, recognition of great ideas) vs. the things that he did less so (shipping a product that was good enough but not perfect.) He brought those lessons with him back to Apple and became the CEO he never was.

It's hard to argue against quality improvements, but that's what I'm going to attempt to do here. I think it's slightly reductionist to boil down the argument to quality improvements vs. new features. It makes sense in the context that if you have X number of engineering hours -- they can only work on so many things -- so that might be bug fixes, minor site enhancements, or a new version of the product. What will it be? I want to frame this argument around the concept of value though. Here's how I think about product. Product -- and why people use / pay for / invest in a product -- is all around value. Why do we use our car? Why do we pay for insurance? Why do we buy a new bag? All of them provide some form of value. Perhaps it's pure utility -- or maybe it's piece of mind, brand value, or a hedge. But all of it is still around value. Even if we don't pay for the product, we still pay for it by investing our time to use it.

In the context of value -- how does quality improvements vs. new features fall? Let's think about a product fundamentally. I'll use two examples of sites that I used today -- amazon.com and Fandango. Outright bugs (e.g. broken links) are rarer -- but I still find significant quality improvements even in a site like amazon.com. Maybe it's a detail page that's screwed up, or a problem with the shopping cart, or missing sort functionality. At the other end, there are tons of useful features that I (and surely lots of other people) have thought of or seen elsewhere that sure would be useful for amazon.com to incorporate. However, amazon.com is a rock solid site. Transacts billions of dollars every year and I can buy a huge swath of products and get it delivered to me in 2 days. It is not a buggy site. So in a case like that -- because the fundamental value is there, they likely will be pursuing new features / new initiatives. Let's take Fandango. This site is horrendous -- easily one of the worst sites I've ever seen by a company. I'm not even trying to use the site but a couple of specialized movie theaters in Los Angeles exclusively use Fandango. 3x the number of necessary steps to purchase a ticket, telling me a screening is sold out when it isn't (and I know because when I go back through a second time, I'm able to buy a ticket), me getting lost in the site when I'm trying to do the primary thing the site is built for (purchasing tickets.) In the case of Fandango -- I would put *all* my resources into quality improvements and none into new features. Why? The core thing it's supposed to be good at, it's bad at. It's negative value. I have such a horrible experience that I actively try and avoid using the site. They need to completely revamp the user experience. They need to simplify the site. They need to get someone with taste so that ads and popups aren't assaulting a user. 

That's the theoretical -- let's drill down a little into more practical aspects. The bugs system I'm used to has a classification of bugs from P0 to P4. Here's a rough breakdown:

P0: site is down
P1: not critical, but something is really screwed up and needs to be fixed soon. Search is buggy. Homepage formatting is off. Link is broken. You're not paging someone to fix it, but it needs to get done.
P2: this is the next set of things you want to get accomplished. Could be a new site feature or it could be a more subtle improvement like giving users more options to sort their search results.
P3: a nice to have set of features but you know in the back of your mind these probably won't be tackled for a while
P4: won't get to these unless they get upgraded. Used more to keep a log of every idea / feature request / etc.

For a site launch, it's basically clear out all P0 and P1 bugs -- and then ship it. You might argue a little over what's a P1 bug -- but the team then at least has a shared understanding of what's critical to get done before you're ready to send off. The trickier part is what to do once the site is launched. Note that for many companies -- once the product is out there, you rarely see improvements. I purchased something from B&H Photo today. I'm pretty sure that website hasn't really changed in a while -- they're probably in maintenance mode. Forget new site features, they're probably not doing much even in terms of site quality. So across the board -- knowing that many (maybe even most) websites don't continuously improve and sharpen the customer experience, I think it's critical to invest a reasonable amount of resources against quality improvements. I would estimate 20-30%. 30% right after you launch because there will be more obvious things to improve with it decreasing over time as you close out various bugs / small improvements. The balance, 70-80% of remaining time, should be devoted towards new site features / hitting a next version of the product. That's the lifeblood of product. Constantly iterating and improving. Apple is one of the great companies of my lifetime and their work is staged. Each new release of each product is eagerly awaited. So getting a great new version is critical. 

There's something a little more subtle that underlies this entire posting and that's the product manager and his/her personality. I think self-reflection / awareness is a critical (and often missing) trait of product managers. Why? Let's take me for example. By nature, I'm a little more cautious by nature. So in response, I generally try and ship a little early. I know that I like to have time to really get everything tightened up, so I balance that by pushing myself out the door a little sooner than I'm comfortable with. Over time, I've been able to balance my own personality and judgement (one obviously builds up a library of examples over time -- both things they've worked on directly and things they've studied) -- to figure out when something should / shouldn't go out the door and the next steps associated with it. 

I frequently see product managers / startups fall into two categories. The first is the ones who don't want to ship. They're more cautious by nature -- worried if their product is good enough and they keep refining it over and over again. It's hard to argue with this position, but I'm going to try to. The problem with this is not that fit and finish is not important. It is. The problem is it can be difficult to know the difference between fit and finish and fundamental improvements to the product. Especially for a new product, there are a lot of site features that are potentially useful but work before they're really useful / deliver value. However, information at this stage is sparse. Users don't really know the product that well (even if it's a new version of an existing product.) It's only when the user actually uses the product will you get that information. That's why it's critical to ship. You get a brand new set of information in terms of how the product works, what delivers value, what improvements you need, etc. I like to say that I feel differently about a product at every stage: when we whiteboard, early mockups, actual mocks, internal alpha/beta, when it's live. Every stage -- I can feel the product just a little differently. This is not even counting actual user feedback -- this is just my own gut intuition. That's why you need to keep pushing the ball forward -- so you can get to the next stage to get that intuition and feedback to know what best to do.

Here's the second group. I suspect it's this second group that causes the first group to act the way they do. The second group is comprised of the folks who don't know their product is half baked. They're either inexperienced or, potentially, just have bad judgement. Maybe not fundamentally bad judgement -- but it's sort of like when you see people who wear clothes that don't fit them. It's not that they couldn't understand when a shirt does or does not fit them (forget about how it looks on them), it's just that they don't know. I think the first group thinks of these people and says, "I don't want to look foolish like those people so I'm going to make sure my product is perfect before I launch." I chatted with a startup the other day and they do something around the visualization of data. The CEO told me how they were early but they were getting amazing feedback and that they were aware of bugs and issues but in the spirit of getting an MVP out there (this seems to be the new catchy term of the day "minimum viable product) -- they put it out there. He quite liberally talked about the failings of the product. Here's the problem -- I literally could not understand their graphs. Could not understand them. I tried to gently tell the CEO this by saying, "Can you walk me through how to read your graphs?" This is fundamentally what this startup does and I didn't understand it. I should point out that a) as an economics major -- I've seen more graphs than I'd like to in my lifetime and b) as someone who used to work with data warehouses pretty extensively at amazon.com -- I do have background in using and displaying quantitative information. So for them to think that this is something that they would show customers, investors, etc. -- I just totally disagree.

In all cases though -- it's a sense of where you might fall and then calibrating your judgement / behavior accordingly.

Engineers would often outlast me on a project. I might work on a version of a product and then move onto another project while the engineering team was much more stable. Months later, I would still be getting emails saying that XYZ bug got closed out. Here's what happens. Engineers will literally go through how you prioritized bugs and close them out, one by one, in rank order. That's one of the reasons the role of the product manager is so critical. In terms of day to day work -- you're literally saying, "Work on this, not that." You're deciding whether it's more important to fix a typo on the homepage than to incrementally get closer to v2. At the heart of this question is judgement and value -- having good judgement to know those tradeoffs and a fundamental understanding of your product, how it delivers value, and where investment needs to occur to maximize that value for the customer.

A little backstory. One of the people that's been very involved with my film has been Penny Falk. Penny was the editor of the Joan Rivers doc, "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work", which came out last year and was picked up by Showtime. She also won the editing prize at Sundance for it. I saw the film at Sundance, loved it, and was chatting with one of the producers of the film, Seth Keal, after one of the screenings who later became involved with my film. Seth was of great help -- especially technically, he basically guided me in terms of all the equipment they used for their film and I simply replicated it for my film -- I saw their film, it looked great on screen, so I figured I would use whatever they used. As someone who knew nothing about cameras, sound, etc. -- this was huge -- and of great comfort. Seth then introduced me to Penny and she's been invaluable in the process -- looking at early pieces of footage, giving guidance in terms of potential storylines, etc. In any event, when I started to look around for an editor, Penny recommended my editor, Erik Dugger -- she and Erik had co-edited a film together and she thought he would be perfect for the film. Besides loving magic, she thought he and I had a number of similar qualities in terms of our personalities and would work well together, and she was exactly right.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago -- Erik finished a rough cut of the film (basically a film you can watch from start to finish but is "rough" in the sense that there might still be a bit of work involved before it gets finished.) He brought in several of his editor friends to do a screening (including Penny, of course.) This is not your typical screening where it's shown for friends and family and there's a Q&A afterwards. This is all work. We sit, watch, takes tons of notes, and then go through everyone's thoughts afterwards. We're not interested in platitudes -- just all the nuts and bolts. What didn't you understand? How did you like this character? Did that storyline work for you? etc. etc.

When I was younger, one of the things that I never really did very well was to take in feedback. I was young, ambitious -- and who can take in feedback when what you're looking for is to show everyone you can do it and you should get more responsibility? I think one of the great things that has happened in the past several years, after I left Google, is that it freed me to be a student -- a true student. Not a student that only cares about getting a good grade -- but a student that's just intellectually curious and passionate about learning. For example, I have 30 minute Skype calls with Sunny, my Mandarin tutor in Beijing, 3x/week. I don't get any grades -- there's nothing at stake for me except that I want to get better at speaking Mandarin. I get to learn for learning's sake -- and it's wonderful. I've done this in a wide variety of disciplines in the past few years (including obviously filmmaking and acting) and it's been incredibly freeing and satisfying. But one of the things that I've learned -- is to take in feedback -- not to be thin skinned about it, have some distance between you and your work, and to take advantage of the years of wisdom and experience that others bring to the table.

That Sunday night, I felt extremely fortunate just sitting in a room with a bunch of very seasoned editors. (Collectively, films they've worked on have been on HBO, Showtime, PBS, National Geographic, etc.) They clearly had such a strong grip on storytelling and, very importantly, had strong opinions about what was and was not working. They weren't arrogant about it in the slightest -- it was just work to them and problems to be solved and areas where the film could get stronger. It's a process that they all do for each other and serves as a wonderful little ecosystem that outputs high quality work. Interestingly -- there seems to be a relatively large contingent of documentary film editors who all live near each other in Fort Greene in Brooklyn. Penny, I thought, had a great quote that night. She said to use what we liked, discard what we didn't like -- if one person said something, maybe it's something to note. But if two out of three or three out of three said something -- that's something we had to fix. Their solutions might not be the right solutions -- but they, in all likelihood, identified a problem.

We took all the feedback -- did a bunch of work, and had a 2nd editors screening tonight. It was a very similar experience only much sharper -- and frankly, much much shorter, which was unexpected but also fantastic. Whereas last time I had a voluminous amount of notes, this time it was maybe half a page from the editors there. There's stuff to be done for sure -- but in the words of one of the editors who hadn't seen the film before, "I hadn't expected to see such a finished product. I think you can screen this now." Now, I'm not trying to pat ourselves on the back in the slightest. There's a whole bunch of stuff we want to do -- and also, it was a little disconcerting for me just seeing the two different versions. Erik created a very slimmed down version of the film so obviously we lost a lot of stuff that we liked enough to put in in the first place. In almost all cases, I agreed with the changes -- but in some, I'm still debating it in my head. But regardless, it's a situation where we'll be hashing it out tomorrow to figure out exactly what -- not necessarily a final cut -- but a fine cut of this film will look like as we'll start submitting to festivals in the next few days.

One of the things that I regret about my time at Google is that I didn't take as much advantage of the collective intelligence / expertise to inform my work as I would've liked. I think one of the things that are bad about corporations is there are lots of places where feedback is forced upon you. Obviously anyone within your chain of command will feel the right to give feedback in terms of your product (or work.) Then there are senior people across the company who also want their voices heard. Some have great insights and thoughts, others are just politicking. This often devolves into design by committee -- which is horrible.

However, what I think gets lost in that system is a spirit of desiring feedback. You're so focused on just dealing with the feedback that you have to get and not focused enough on the feedback that you want to get. All these editors came because we want their feedback and they came because they wanted to help -- no compensation (though I later bought them amazon.com gift cards to thank them for their time.) That's what I would've loved to have done for the products / projects I worked on. Go to the other product managers or managers across the company that I respected and said -- hey, take a look at X. Give me any and all thoughts that you might have. And do that over and over. I remember when I worked on the Report Center for AdWords -- I got a chance to work with two fantastic product managers, JP and Richard. JP was one of the most creative product managers I've ever worked with and has always served as a good reminder to myself in terms of how I can push myself to be more creative when I conceptualize and think about product. Richard was one of the most organized product managers I ever worked with and also one of the most freeing -- he specifically told me, "It looks like you know what you're doing. Let me know if you need any help, otherwise reach out when you're ready to launch and we'll help get you out the door." I've tried to emulate that quality that Richard brought to my own work -- which is when I meet someone that I think is good at what they do, I want to let them do their thing, make sure I can be helpful where I can be, but otherwise not try and gum up the works.

Getting feedback is so important, but just as important is getting feedback from a source you trust. Whether it's good or bad feedback, if you're not receptive to it, it doesn't matter. That's something that I continually work on -- building a strong network, in many diverse areas, of people that I can rely on to give great feedback and help continually improve the quality of my work.

The short itself is super short -- only 3 minutes. There are some reasons for it which I'll get into in a second -- as well as some big benefits to being that short. The genesis of the short was one day, when I was walking with a friend of mine and we were trying to find a place to go for lunch. We saw a restaurant and she goes, "Let's not go there, that place is for poor people!" I found this to be an odd comment but then I played the "what if" game and said to myself, "What if instead of a restaurant for poor people... it was a restaurant where people went to have affairs?" I have no idea why that particular thought popped into my brain -- but it did and that was the genesis of "Will & Fiona." It's a short about a guy and a girl, one married, one not, one who thinks they're on a date (the married one), and one who thinks they're just work friends socializing (the unmarried one.) All taking place in a restaurant where people go to have affairs because the staff there is so discrete.

When we filmed the aforementioned web series, "The Consultants", it was broadly pretty successful. We ended up being named a finalist in a Producers Guild of America's competition and I was invited to present it at a conference at the Tuck Business School at Dartmouth (which was pretty awesome and a little surreal :) ) The downsides were that I never figured out how to really build an audience and it was a ton of work to produce -- so much work that we never ended up producing any more episodes after the initial 4. Thus, I was racking my brain trying to figure out how to just get more stuff done.

On the content side, I wanted to keep developing my skill as a writer and I started working with Nick Wiger, who is a writing instructor at UCB in L.A. He's terrific and coaches privately (if anyone is interested, email me and I'll send you his contact info) and we started working on a number of sketches. My goal was to have a bunch of material that was lightweight to produce (e.g. takes place in a single location.) With his wonderful help and guidance, I came up with "Will & Fiona" and a number of other scripts. With my frequent producing partner, Kate VanDevender, we ended up shooting it at a bar in Los Angeles called M Bar (which is owned by an actor so they're very friendly towards production crews) in September. We edited it quickly and then started submitting to festivals.

A few notes. I didn't fully know this at the time, but it turns out the short short films are easier to get into festivals than longer films. So for instance, it can be easier to get a 3 minute film into a festival than a 17 minute film into a festival -- the reason is because it's harder to program for a longer film, you just need a bigger block of time. But if you have something like 3 minutes -- if you like it and it fits, it's not that hard to slot in. So this definitely worked to our advantage (and I've subsequently heard this feedback from a number of festival programmers.) This goes counter to almost the general conception of what a short film is because I think most people think of a short film as being something around 15-20 minutes. But a film is a film -- as long as you can tell a complete story in a given set of time, you're still good to go. 

"Will & Fiona" is starting to get into festivals which is pretty cool -- I've only been as a participant in the past so it's great going as a filmmaker. (By the way, one of the organizers told me they had 106 submissions this month for the 6 slots so, to be blunt, I was actually kind of surprised we got in :) Statisticaly those are terrible odds!) This festival is on the smaller side but it's in a wonderful location (gorgeous 75 seat theater) and there's a really nice reception area / bar / lounge where there's an after-party. I would estimate that the crowd was about half filmmakers / half local folks who just like film or comedy. The festival is run by two filmmakers -- one has made a couple of features and 30+ shorts while the other recently co-wrote a screenplay for Marvel with Stan Lee. They're also quite funny and have a great schtick on stage to keep things moving and very light.

I really loved the other films that screened and laughed at every one of them. One was a short essentially about moms and baby strollers in Park Slope which, while obviously having a very specific regional feel, is one I know all too well as I used to live in Brooklyn Heights. I actually got kind of nervous in my seat watching the other shorts because "Will & Fiona" went 4th and I so liked all the other films and started thinking to myself, "I really really hope they laugh at "Will & Fiona"." And they did! The first thing though, I will say, is that the footage looked great on the big screen -- such a testament to our wonderful cinematographer, Daniel Lynn. And they didn't do any sort of post work to the footage (at least as far as I know). They asked me for either a DVD or Quicktime -- I gave them both, and they just played the full res Quicktime file and that was it. I had only previously shown it to my brother -- so it was a little weird watching it in an audience full of strangers and seeing what they reacted to / where they laughed / etc. I had seen this film at various incarnations -- when I wrote it, being on set and playing "Will", when it was edited, and finally now watching it as an audience member with other people. I think the biggest takeaway for me is to keep putting yourself out there in terms of jokes / funny moments / etc. -- you just never know what lands, what lands big, what lands small -- they had a guest judge who did a lot of TV writing and I remember at one point that he laughed heartily at a joke that no one else laughed at which I thought was great! (and also very informative -- to not worry about whether every joke lands for everybody.)

The entire Iron Mule community was great though. Afterwards we got to just hang out, grab beers, and later went to a bar where we chatted more. Quite a number of folks very generously came up to me afterwards and complimented me on the film -- which obviously I really appreciated. It's kind of weird for me to be complimented on anything comedy related because I definitely don't think of myself as funny -- in fact, the reason I do a lot of comedy is mainly because of medium. Comedy lends itself to the web (and to shorter pieces often) -- and that was that. So it's not necessarily part of my identity in the sense that I think, "Oh, I want to be a funny guy!" but it's always nice when people compliment you on your work.

It was really terrific getting to know other filmmakers. I was talking with one of the other filmmakers and she was telling me about the logistics of shooting on NYC streets (not as hard as I would've imagined!) She actually has a really interesting story. Iron Mule has a "Wanna be a star?" contest where an audience member can be part of a short film that gets screened the following month. (Basically, audience members who want to can enter a random drawing to be in a short film that will be written, shot, and edited all in time for the following month's screening -- pretty great and a little intense!) In any event, Melinda was the director for this month's "Wanna be a star?" film and wrote and shot a really cool short film with lots of references to the film "Chinatown". But she pulled together a good looking film in a month, with no money, shot in multiple locations throughout NYC -- it was just great. I know some of this sounds strange, but as someone who has dealt with the nuts and bolts of production -- I'm always so impressed when people do things that look good, do it cheaply, secure hard to get locations, shoot in places that I haven't shot before, etc.

Hopefully there's more to come! We recently got into a Las Vegas film festival and are still waiting to hear back from others. I think the big thing for me though is basically around getting things done. I definitely encountered a fair share of "Why are you doing this?" type comments when I was initially working on it. Well, the reason is because when you have material -- you can put it out there and see what happens. It's great learning -- and I'm always looking for vehicles where I can just improve as an actor, writer, and producer -- and great fun too. It was a lot of fun pulling the project together and obviously I had just a wonderful experience last night too.

One of the things that I like to do in L.A. is to go to a lot of Q&As where various directors, producers, actors talk about their work and background. One really strong common thread is that they all somehow found a vehicle for them to hone their craft. For some of them, it was a break -- they got on a show and then got exposed to great people and went to work every day. (This is largely how I view myself and tech actually -- I obviously benefitted greatly from just being able to work at places like amazon.com and Google.) Others didn't get that break or were too young to get that break and instead just did their own stuff -- started making movies when they were 12 or shot a short every month for a year (Ruben Ortega did that) -- and it was just more and more opportunity to work and improve. Hopefully this and other things will be that for me.