[From Startups Must Hire The Right People And Watch Every Penny. Or Fail.]

I don’t think that this is reserved for just startups. I think this, and Jason’s points also apply to any department that is put in a startup-role within a larger company. My department for instance is the Tech department in a record company. You can’t get any more startup oriented than that.

Insofar as how we run, we treat it as such. We watch our spending, try to be innovative and agile, try to be transparent (ie, this blog) and most of all try to give a good return for our investors (who happens to be the entire rest of the company).

Here are some of our rules

Good Tools Make Good People Happy - Everyone in my department gets the best tools I can possibly get them to do their job. That means large screens, fast computers, any software they need, professional memberships they need and extending to the chairs. My view is: to us, the computers are as essential as an A&R reps speakers.

Open Source = Healthy and Fun - We use open source everything as the backbone for our technology infrastructure. Not only does it mitigate huge costs in terms of support and acquisition, but it forcibly injects our department into a larger community outside of the building. We end up working with people who are in very different industries and all the better because of it.

Skype is Your Friend - We use two Skype rooms during the day, one for our internal discussion and one for discussion with “active partners” (ie, all developers working on projects). Skype is nice because it’ll download chat history when I sign in from home, so I can catch things I miss, and its a progressive archiving chat engine. We tried Campfire but no one liked it. We seldom use Skype for voice, mostly its just chat.

Wiki’s are Great - We have two Wiki’s, one for internal documentation and process, and one for external. They work great if you keep them organized.

MacMini’s are the best - We have 5 MacMinis laying around. Only one is permanently in use as our department file-share server and Wiki servers. THe rest we use to quickly provision up and provision down test servers, demo engines, Intern computers or what not.

Life is Important - We all sometimes struggle with this. Me more than the rest of my team I think, but I do think its really important that we all have lives outside of work. Its very hard to do this sometimes, and I think too much focus on work causes a very roller coaster up and down, where one minute you’re all for work, and the next you don’t want to think about it. A balance of work/life keeps you focused, but not too focused.

Friendship is Equally Important - You aren’t always going to like the people you work with all the time, but its important I think to always consider yourself friends more than just coworkers. If you have a shared mission, a shared passion and shared experiences, you’re much better off. We have a bit of a different situation in that we’re one of 10 departments. This makes this super important as its up to our unified presence and barriers to enforce what the boundaries of our department are, what the rules are and what our identity is.

Innovation is More Important than Production - I believe this firmly. If you get too bogged down in day to day, you loose the spirit of innovation. Sometimes there needs to be freedom to allow things to break, as the act of fixing is better than just turning the same knob every day.

Well, actually it was yesterday. My computer at work (a Quad Core Mac Pro, 4 500mb drives) was acting super flaky, and I fully intended to take it offline and run disk warrior on it. Yesterday I had to rearrange my office because I got a new desk (a vintage Eames conference table!) and when I brought the computer back up, it’d start launching all my login items, then die.

When I rebooted from a startup disk, Disk Utility couldn’t fix the disk and crapped out. Then Disk Warrior mounting from another machine through Target Disk Mode would also crash.

Uh-oh.

As a side note: I keep one of the 500 meg drives in my machine completely empty and unmounted for the specific purpose that if the machine dies, or I need to test a new OS, I have a spare boot disk.

I had a Time Machine backup from 5AM that day, so I rebooted from Leopard install, selected “Restore from Time Machine Backup” and crossed my fingers. It allowed me to specify the volume to restore to, and which snapshot to use.

Queue 5 hours of waiting and then….

System rebooted, and it was like walking into a … well, Time Machine. The machine was restored EXACTLY like it was at 5AM that day. The e-mail, everything was the same. Once it caught up, all was back to normal. I wiped the former master drive (it was a node corruption, which is hard to fix without a format) and everything was great.

Lesson: invest in a Time Machine disk that is equal to double the size of your master drive.

Yes, we’re adding an amazing talent and advocate of technology to our team to join the already packed pool of amazing talent and technology advocates.

That means that Warner Bros. Records will have not only the only real tech department in the record business but one that contains:

- An organizer of it seems nearly all LA tech social events
- A talented guitarist who I think is the only admitted Phish fan in the building
- An amazing artist who specializes in unicorns and pirates
- The owner of melodramatic.com
- Someone who toured with Slash AND Jessica Simpson
- Someone who knows the scoop on Geek Squad and porn raids
- And our newest member, who as of yet I don’t know any esoteric facts on (sorry Jessica!)

This is an amazing group of people to work with and WBR would be nothing without them. Or at least far less geeky. A team of 8 can do the work of 30 if you’re good! Or if you don’t sleep.

[From Clever, Clever Girl » Hello WBR - Big Changes for 2008]

WBR is seeking an Operations Engineer to assist the Operations Director in the maintenance, development, scaling and handling of the infrastructure for our Internet operations.

E-mail also if you’re willing to do some contract work offsite.

“Paper is a slow, expensive, and cumbersome way to transmit news, and as online news sources mature, more and more users will find they no longer have any use for dead tree publications.”

[From Techdirt: Your Website Shouldn’t Be Just An Electronic Version Of Your Print Publication]

I can’t, for the life of me, understand why we are reading this in the year 2008?

So. I worked in newspapers from the age of 16 to 22. I was the first Webmaster in fact for the Orange County Register. I wrote a lot of mini-manifesto’s when I was there to vent frustrations with the glacial pace of movement, as well as frustrations that the same people who went to school, studied Marshall McLuhan and Baudrillard the same ways I did, couldn’t apply Understanding Media to their own media tools.

Plus, I also loved Futurist Manifestos.

Choice quotes from manifesti circa Ethan in his formative years (this circa 2000):

“The Internet is not a medium for the presentation of static pages of content, where you expect a user to just read it and not react. By its very construction, the Internet lends itself to people communicating with other people, and as far back as the beginning of the technology, e-mail and discussion groups formed the core of the online experience. When you provide your visitor with a “voice” in the context of your website, you are not only engaging them in a way that is much more tangible and active, but you are also promoting the notion that your site is a unique place where the user has a say in its construction. Too often websites are constructed under the “if we build it, they will come, buy and leave” philosophy. What this fails to do is engage the user in active participation, which is the fundamental model for Internet “surfing” in general. “

And hell, in high school (circa 1997):

“The newspaper paradigm is executed in such a way that growth into the new media industry is hampered by lack of resources and funds. However, with the use of a common database subsystem and a minor alteration of newsroom and newspaper development workflow, the execution of a standard print media version of a newspaper, as well as a new media (i.e. Internet) version of a newspaper could be seamless and indistinguishable from each other.”

This is my desktop right now, showing all Safari Windows. I need someone to write a piece of software treats my browsers/tabs as if they were stacks of paper I could sort at a desk. I keep things on the screen because I need information from them. There is a tipping point where I you get past the point of knowing where your information is.

You’d think now with Core Animation, someone could come up with a way of shrinking windows/tabs to stacks, plus auto-logically grouping tabs according to thematics? Please?