It's a small world (or, all negotiations are serial)

How many times do you come across people you never expected to see again, having one of those "small world" experiences? All the time, right? I've been listening to a bunch of the negotiation podcasts from the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series. One of their biggest tips is that when you are negotiating, you should expect to see the person that you are negotiating with again.

This one really resonates with me. I've seen a lot of negotiations be carried out as one-time events, where at least one party tries to "win" by getting more than their share of the pie. The problem with that is that the party who "lost" will try to get their rightful share of the pie back in some form. Here are a couple of examples I can think of right off the top of my head:

1. My landlord is making way too much construction noise. We've spoken about it, and he's agreed to things like not working on Sundays. He has not fulfilled his side of the deal. There's nothing I can do about it now, but at some point, he'll want something from me, and I'll be less likely to give it to him.

2. When I left Dovetail, Brett negotiated the departure in bad faith. It was so bad, that I will never do business with him again. This is an extreme case, but the point is that it's a small world, and probably we'll cross paths again. If he'd negotiated in good faith, I would have considered doing something with him again, but since he didn't, I won't even though we have a long history of working together.

3. I am writing this post from my friend Tim's ski house in Tahoe. I'm not a part of the share, but he got the others in the house to let me use it, which was really nice of him. In this case, he's gone out of his way to do something nice for me which costs him almost nothing. He didn't have to do that, and he's taking a risk that I mess the place up. Instead, I'm going to leave it in better shape than I found it so that he looks good in front of his housemates and I have a higher chance of being invited back.

I am going to listen to this advice, and always think of any negotiation I enter into as one of many future negotiations. Generally, it's much better and easier for both parties to come up with a "win-win" solution instead of trying to split the pie and having one side "lose".

Please don't mess with my home

I've noticed that people have very strong reactions to messing with their homes. Something that might otherwise be no big deal turns into a very big deal when it comes to your home. My landlord, Howard Cooper, is currently renovating the apartment below us. They took it down to the studs and are doing structural work, so there is massive pounding noise into our apartment. That's really annoying. REALLY annoying. On top of that, Howard lies about the work schedule. He has repeatedly told me that he will not have them working on weekends, but then they work both Saturday and Sunday. I had a bad experience with my last landlord selling her home, and I have friends who have problems with their landlords as well (stay away from Citi apartments!).

So, while the pounding is really annoying when I'm trying to work or enjoy the weekend, it's not the end of the world in the grand scheme of things. Despite this, I find myself getting much more angry and annoyed about it than I think is warranted. I thought it was just me being psycho, but my friend Jim is behaving the same way - he's getting way more angry than he would otherwise get.

This leads me to think that the home is sacred and deserves special treatment when you deal with it since people will act irrationally about it.

Please don't mess with my home.

The woman's version of "No friends on a powder day"

I went to the day-after-Christmas shopping excursion with my wife today. In skiing, there is a saying: "No friends on a powder day." The saying alludes to the notion that on the best skiing days, the skiing is so good that you don't wait around for your friends to catch up - if they're too slow, sorry, see ya in the lodge tonight and learn to ski better for the next powder day.

The day started off on the wrong foot- Saks opened at 7 instead of the traditional 8, which meant that others had already gotten a lot of the good stuff in the shoe department, where the best deals (~70% off!) were to be had. Nevertheless, a few bargains were still picked from the wreckage. A quick pass through the clothing area at Saks revealed there wasn't much to buy there, so it was on to Neiman Marcus, which opened at 9.

Unlike Saks, there is a men's department at Neiman Marcus. The women scattered through the store, and the first call came from Katie, Mary Ann's Mom: "Come down to the men's department, great stuff down here." I abandoned my post as sherpa/helper and went down to the basement, where Katie introduced me to a guy who could help me. I should preface this whole thing with the fact that Mary Ann had told everyone that I needed clothes for Christmas, and I even agreed that after 2.5 years with no salary and a low burn rate mentality, that my wardrobe could use some help. The guy that Katie pointed me to pointed me to the other end of the store and told me to look around and he'd "be right with me." I got to the other end of the store and nervously looked around - the racks were filled with $400 army pants and things which looked like they were torn and spray painted on. To me, this stuff looked like it came from the salvation army. I wandered around for a bit, and when the guy didn't show, I went back upstairs to get Mary Ann's help.

A short time later, Mary Ann's friend Charlotte showed up. She hadn't planned on going shopping that day, but wanted to see the spectacle, so stopped by. Mary Ann sent Charlotte back downstairs with me. Her idea was to find the best looking salesperson down there and see if he could help me. She did that, and I described what I needed. He brought a bunch of pants which were too tight on my fat butt, so round 2 fit better. Charlotte went to work finding some cool shirts. Mary Ann eventually came down with about 15 bags for me to bring to the car, and started yelling at me for trying stuff on too slowly.

After trying a few things in a frenzy, so as not to waste one moment (the sales end at noon!!), we chose a few things and the tailor came over to mark where to let out the butt in the pants. I was left behind to pay. The damage was $1500 - ouch!

This evening, we looked through the stuff I'd gotten. It turns out the pants were NOT on sale and cost $595 plus $24 in tailoring. Clearly I had sucker written on my face for the salesperson. I knew when I was there that I was getting jacked by the way he was only somewhat attentive, acting like I was poor and out of place. It's true. I do not want to spend my money on $600+ pants. Ever. If I had $100M, I probably still would not. I bitched about this to Mary Ann, as I put her partly at fault for not helping me through the process. I want her to stop whatever tailoring is happening and return the $600 pants, as I am already proven to be bad at dealing with these sorts of things. Her response: "You need to learn how to deal with this stuff." In other words: "No friends on a powder day!"

My plan for dealing in the future: do not deal. I don't want any more clothes for Christmas or birthdays or whatever. I will get my own clothes my own way. Maybe I won't look quite as good, but at least I'll won't have to learn a $600 lesson, and the day after Christmas will be much more relaxing next year.

Thoughts about Apple as a company

• The only company that can truly do both hardware and software. This is the main source of their competitive advantage

• Probably Steve Jobs is key to this advantage. I hear he’s pretty crazy. Without him, they will probably be in trouble.

• They are not very good about servicing their products. They make it easy to buy them, which is a good idea, but they don’t provide a similar level of service/support for their products. I think that damages their brand since they’re not fulfilling their brand promise of “easy to use”. If it breaks and it’s hard to fix, that’s not good. I think that in the long term, they’d be better off doing a better job of support.

• People knock them for making their old products obsolete. I can understand that it’s frustrating if you buy something that the “wrong” time, but in general I think it’s a good strategy. Technology moves too fast, you can’t support all the legacy stuff all the time. This is a big problem for Microsoft, but it’s also the source of MSFT’s competitive advantage (keep collecting fees from entrenched users)

• I like that when you buy a Mac, it comes with all the stuff you need to use it. You don’t have to go buy all of these ancillary programs and install them, each one of which probably tries to install another toolbar and reset your home page, etc. It’s also nice that the Mac doesn’t come with tons of third party trial apps that will break the computer if you try to uninstall them.

• Their products are so much better than the competitive products that they are able to attract really top talent. Same with Google. A very nice virtuous cycle. A lot of industries are like that - people want to go work where they are working on cool stuff.

Is a homeless person's pet also homeless?

I just read in the paper that some vets did some volunteer work to help people who brought their pets to Dolores park. The headline read "Vets who fret for homeless pets". To me, it sounds like the pets are homeless. I would say they are not. My (limited) experience is that dogs and cats think of "home" as wherever they get their food. If a homeless person is giving a dog food, then that pet is not homeless, its home is with the homeless person.

While I'm on the homeless subject, I've always thought that there is no scenario under which giving money to someone on the street will help them get off the street. This does not apply to street performers (Bush Man makes $60K/year), just people that beg. Does anyone know about this subject? Is it possible for them to get off the street from direct giving?

The ultimate FB app (or, what I learned at Stanford)

I went to Stanford the other night for the presentation of the Facebook class's apps. In case you don't know about it, they did a 10 week course about making Facebook apps at Stanford this fall. It was taught by a psych professor who specializes in persuasion, so it wasn't all about hacking and making cool stuff.

Based on those learnings and my own learnings, here is the ultimate viral growth app: Free Money. Here's how it works:

1. Add app, with the instructions that if you invite 20 friends a day for 10 days, you will get $20 sent to you in the mail. The app is one page - instructions and an invite box.
2. Turn it on, let everyone invite everyone else.
3. If anyone actually invites 200 friends (it's OK to invite more than once) then put up a text area requesting their mailing address and telling them that it's 6 weeks to process their check.

Within a few weeks, you will have millions of people using your app. You might have to tweak the wording to get people to believe that they will actually get their money. Maybe you can even make money doing this if you can get people to sign up for various mail-in offers, etc, ie lead gen. You'll probably get in magazines and on CNN.

This thought exercise is meant to evidence the big problem with FB apps right now: in order to go viral, you have to make your app not very functional, and instead spend all your energy on making some sort of viral invitation machine. From there, you can make something more engaging.

Facebook has to change this - people are getting sick of the invitation machine apps, and developers who want to work on more interesting apps, but can't get a user base, are getting sick of having to compete with the invitation machine apps.

The City Tax

I've lived in San Francisco for 7.5 years now, and I'm starting to get a little sick of it. What my friend Dylan calls the "city tax" is the reason. This weekend, our car was broken into near Crissy Field. Mary Ann actually saw the guy do it. $600 for a new window, plus the hassle of an insurance claim on the stolen cell phone. We've also had 2 flat tires on our car in 6 months because the streets are full of glass and nails and other debris. $1000 for 5 tires since we had to replace the spare too. As I type this from my house, I am listening to heavy construction noises from the renovations taking place on the apartment below us. In the apartment before that, the landlord was selling the place, and harassed us to the point that we had to get a lawyer involved. The cops don't do anything about crime (20% murder solve rate in SF), but they are more than willing to give out pointless no left turn tickets and tickets for not having a front license plate. The list continues from there, but you get the point.

Maybe I'm old, but the city is really starting to wear me down. The time to move out to the suburbs draws nigh.

Do power tools and pot smoking mix well?

The apartment below me is being completely renovated, including removing and changing some of the walls. That means real power tools like circular saws and stuff. The guys who are doing the work are pot smokers. Really. When MA leaves for work in the morning, it's wake and bake time for them - the building's hallways are filled with pot smoke. Today, amidst the sawing noises, I walked into the other room and smelled pot smoke in my unit. Seems like these guys are smoking pot while using a circular saw. I have nothing against smoking pot, but that just seems like a bad idea, kind of like drinking and driving a boat around at night - just bound to end in disaster. I will not be surprised when the ambulance comes to pick up the guy who sawed his arm off accidentally.