How to Throw a Good Hack Day at Your Company

1 02 2012
burning hot

source: gizmodo.com

At Xobni, we made some changes to the Yahoo! recipe for Hack Day. Here are our startup-optimized keys for a successful Hack Day:

  1. When: To minimize disruption to our roadmap, and allow the team to focus completely, we hold our Hack Days right after a release. We try to do at least two a year
  2. How Long: We start our Hack Days on Thursday evening at 5pm and present on Tuesday morning. So the total time consumed of work was 2.5 days (in the end, about one full day more than Yahoo!…and we spanned the weekend…which allowed the motivated to work four full days on their hacks)
  3. Focus: Unlike Yahoo!, we encourage our employees to focus on Xobni. The rules aren’t too much more specific. Some employees even turned in culture hacks, such as fake TV commercials for the product
  4. Presenting: We extended the time to present from 90 seconds to up to 3 minutes. At Yahoo! it was routine for people to get cut-off during their Hack preso. 3 minutes is way more than enough.
  5. Prizes: We made our prizes better. Rather than just fame, we added prizes for best hack to include things like iPods, iPhones, Kindles, etc. For second place, we do $100 Amazon gift certificates. You could consider going even more elaborate…but there is an issue with that. If the prizes are too good, the people that lose feel like they are really missing out, and rather than feel good about their hack, they feel jealous and disappointed.
  6. Patents: We video all the presentations and send the patent committee through them later looking for patent potential. In the last hack day, we added nine new patent ideas to our patent backlog. Each patent application pays $500 to the responsible contributor…another benefit to the employee for their hard work and creativity.
  7. Judges: Unlike Yahoo!, all our judges come from outside the company. As our employees all love startups. They want to be founders of their own startup some day, so I always include at least one VC as a Hack Day judge (some are investors in Xobni, others are not. We also look for great entrepreneurs (Nirav Tolia was a judge, Michael Arrington was a judge, Joshua Schachter was a judge, ). We invite hackers with great street cred, like the lead product manager for Mozilla’s add-in team. We have had members of Y!’s original Hack Day team, like Daniel Raffel or Leonard Lin. Lastly, we invite subject matter experts from UX, engineering and product. A great judge panel will be 3-4 people. They will need to commit 2 hours to participate. I don’t think we have ever had a judge who didn’t love participating.

At the time I wrote this post, the team was 18 people, and submitted 24 hacks in a hack day, which is 1.2 hacks per participating employee…an over 100x increase over Yahoo! About 20% of hacks make it into the product in one form or another within 6 months. Over half of the hacks greatly influence future development or changes. Some hacks have been transformative for the product or our business model.

In fact, in our current state, hacks are even more critical to the company. I credit our successful hack days as a significant contribution to giving our team the feeling that they can create something interesting or cool without permission and show it to us. About a third of our new products come from this type of process, no hack day required. It is just every day business at the company now.





How Yahoo! Did Its Hack Day

1 02 2012
Mashup or Shutup

source:yahoo.com

Yahoo! gets flack for all sorts of things. But, of course, there are and have been so many great things about Yahoo! I worked at Yahoo! from 2005 to 2008, and loved almost every day I was there. Perhaps the days that stood out the most to me during my time there were its Hack Days. I was fortunate to be working at Yahoo! when the team organized the first Hack Day, championed and driven by people like Bradley Horowitz, Caterina FakeLeonard LinChad Dickerson, and a bunch of other inspiring people I worked with at Yahoo! Hack Days had an incredible energy.

The early Hack Days at Yahoo! followed roughly these rules:

  1. Anyone in the company could participate (engineering to support team)
  2. 24 hours – Thursday afternoon to Friday
  3. Typically 1-2 hack days a year
  4. 90 seconds to present (tightly enforced – two projectors, so next hack was setting up as the other presented)
  5. Many award types (Hack Most Likely to Generate $1B, Hack that Should Have Been Done By Now, Best Maps Hack, etc.)
  6. You could submit as many hacks as you like
  7. Hack teams could be one to many
  8. Hack can’t be something that is simply part of your daily work, it has to be an original hack
  9. Mashups, APIs, standard platforms, etc. all preferred vs. one off hacks.
  10. Hack Days were festive. Lots of food was provided all through the night, the preso day included tons of junk food snacks and laughs and applause were very common.
  11. Need not be restricted to Yahoo! products or platforms
  12. Judges were all from the company (I was lucky to be a judge one time, but regular judges included File, Jerry and other high profile and subject matter experts (like Larry Tessler)
  13. All participants got a very hip Hack Day t-shirt made just for that event…very collectible within the company

At the time, we had about 12,000 employees, who generated about 120 hacks (about 1 per 100 employees) As many know, Yahoo! hosted external developer Hack Days, as well. At the first external Hack Day, Yahoo! paid for Beck to play (ridiculous and amazing). For their second they hired Girl Talk.

Jump to the next story to see how we changed Hack Day for a startup.






What are you trying saying? Rethinking the elevator pitch.

24 04 2009
The elevator pitch

The elevator pitch

Most elevator pitches are terrible. They try to do too much with too little time. Startups should think of them as teasers, not my 60 minute pitch in 15 seconds.

I started thinking about the elevator pitch this week after I received a PPT makeover candidate. I did do a makeover on their slides, which I will blog about in the next week or so. They had generally good looking slides, but the material was so heavy with words, I just kept thinking, “What are you trying to say?”

Here is their elevator pitch. It captured the issues I was having with the overall preso. Note: their bolding, not mine.

Product XYZ is a new generation Productivity suite that is connected to all the services that you already rely on : IM (gtalk, msn, twitter,…), Mobile (Nokia, iPhone, soon Blackberry and Windows Mobile), Email, Desktop (Adobe AIR application), and allows you to Collaborate with your colleagues thanks to exclusive and intuitive social features.

Two things seem to be happening here. One, they don’t communicate the value of their product (ie, pain relief) to the customer. Second, they are tripping over buzzwords.

First Attempt: Let’s try to make this plain english, and really extract the unique value proposition:

Product XYZ is a suite of collaboration web apps that is different from competitors because:

  1. It integrates directly with existing IM services, email and mobile phones.
  2. It’s offered as software as a service versus installed software.
  3. It connects with the major social networks.

I think this is easier to understand, but it is still “wrong”, as it is talking about how they built it, versus how it benefits the customer. I don’t know the product well enough to be accurate with this next attempt, but that has never stopped me.

Second Attempt: Let’s focus on pain versus how they solve it.

Collaboration applications have been left behind. Bloated install software, not integrated with the mainstay tools of business users like IM, email and mobile phones. And perhaps worst of all, today’s collaboration software is alarmingly unconnected to the social web. Product XYZ is different.

Third Attempt: What about poking a hole in the collaboration software market itself?

The primary competition for collaboration software like WebEx is substitutes: mainstream communication apps combined with social networks. Product XYZ is a different web collaboration service. It attacks this major market vulnerability by harnessing IM, email, and mobile phones and working with a users’ social network.

We still don’t know exactly what they do (which is true…I have never seen a demo), and you could argue I am still hypey with buzzwords like “social network” and “harnessing” and “market vulnerability”, but the audience are certainly hungrier to see the demo and see if Product XYZ pulls it off.

With Xobni, we typically combine both of these techniques. Here is a sample of what we might tell a potential investor:

MSFT’s Outlook is a massive mess of an application, and yet has over 400M users and an ecosystem over $10B. Xobni makes a plugin that makes Outlook suck much less. We add lightning fast search that knows the difference between a person and an email. And we automatically combine email addresses with rich profile data from the web like Facebook and Linkedin profiles. After just a couple of minutes using Xobni, like TiVo for your TV, it will be hard to use your inbox without it. Let me show you what I mean.

Often times, I edit this down even further. Again, I just need to earn the chance to tell them more, not to close the deal during the 15 seconds. This has been successful for me so far.

Anyway, I am curious to hear your thoughts on how to improve the startup elevator pitch, and certainly open to better examples.





Yahoo! Corp Slides Make Shit Look Shittier

21 04 2009

Quick Note: I know I have disappeared for a bit. Sorry about that, I got a bit busy with the $10M Series B closing, the new product launch and the birth of my son. I will get back to regular blogging soon.

Yahoo! has been doing badly, but looking at their corporate slides, you would think they were doing much worse. I worked at Yahoo! for over 2 years. Every time there was a quarterly all-hands, I cringed. Not because the stock was dropping, but because the corporate slides are so amazingly crappy looking. You really have to go out of your way to make these things as bad looking as they are. A lot of what the company does looks pretty darn good, but when it comes to making PPTs, they have some dude that seems to have a corner on the market of making ugly ass slides.

Let’s take a look:

WTF? These are so friggin' bad.

WTF? These are so friggin' bad.

Here are my major issues:

  1. Logos: One logo is enough. Why two? Why is the Y! so big?
  2. Headline: Sucks, it says nothing
  3. Colors: Purple and yellow! Gag, these colors look awful together. I know those are the old colors, but for charts and for today (not 1996), they look terrible together.
  4. Colors: There are two purples. Why? One for the Y! logo and one for the chart. Makes no sense
  5. Boldness and Lines! There are outlines to the chart boxes. Why? Every font is bold. Why? Why is there yet another line between the title and chart?
  6. Chart legend: Looks ridiculous
  7. 3d! I hate 3D charts. This is a perfect example of how they make data harder to absorb.
  8. What is my take-away? They know this slide is going to be reprinted. Help tell the story they want to tell.

In 8 minutes, I remade this slide. This is not a great slide now, but it sucks so much less.

It isn't perfect. But in 8 minutes, it is much better.

It isn't perfect. But in 8 minutes, it is much better.

In my revised slide, I increase the data fidelity. For example, I have added faint lines behind the bars to show the information from 12 months earlier. This added more data to the chart, but eliminated one of the bars. I have eliminated the legend. I have added a “why?” so I can tell a bit of my story. I tried to use a tone that is matter of fact, but unsatisfied (#3). I have made all the colors consistent. I have eliminated the garish yellow in favor of 75% shade of the purple. I have made the headline informative. I could have said, “Revenue is down. We are going to change that.” for more attitude, which seems like Carol Bartz’s style. Maybe added an f-bomb. The notes are smaller and in plain english. I have added a lot more white space.

For more ideas on how to make presentations that don’t look like crap, see my post: 20 Tips to Make Your Presos Suck Less.

What do you think?





Good Post on White Space (see Tip 14)

24 03 2009

Tip 14 of my 20 tips to make your presos suck less is to make things smaller and leave more white space. There was a great post, White Space: How to Get It “Right”, from Think Vitamin on using white space in web design. It is perfectly applicable for your PPT presos.

White space is your friend.

White space is your friend.





Why London Sucks (or PPT Tips 13 & 14 – Tell a story. Make things smaller.)

3 03 2009

Tip #14 on my 20 Tips to Make Your PPT Preso Suck Less is to make things smaller. The default text, line spacing, bullets, titles, chart settings, basically everything for PPT and even Keynote are simply too big. As a result, it is very hard to make an engaging slide. Here is a quick example of a slide at the default template in PowerPoint.

PPT with a standard theme applied

PPT with a standard theme applied

If you are cringing right now, that is understandable. But these types of slides are VERY common. And it violates a whole slew of my tips, including 1, 4, 6, 8, 11, 13, 14 and 17. Mostly, I really hate how big the text is and that awful blue background with color text title.

Keep reading to see how the slide changes.

Read the rest of this entry »








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