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darksaiyangoku · 4 years

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Monty Oum & What RWBY Means to Me

5 years ago, the RWBY and Rooster Teeth community was stricken with the tragic news that Monty Oum had passed away at the young age of 33. He was a very talented young man with a knack for creating some of the most bizarre yet fucking awesome concepts, his fan films Haloid and Dead Fantasy, his work on Red vs Blue Seasons 8-10 are considered landmarks in the show’s history and RWBY is now one of Rooster Teeth’s top franchises.

Today, I want to honour him and show the world that they’re missing a bright star.

A Brief History of Monty Oum

Monty Oum was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1981. A highschool dropout, he was making fan animations as early as 2002, with his most famous, Haloid, being released in 2007.

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This got him noticed by many people in the gaming industry and he even managed to get a job at Midway Games and later Bandai Namco as a combat designer in 2008. However, he soon realised that the gaming industry wasn’t as appealing to him as he thought, so he left to peruse filmmaking.

In 2010 he met with Bernie Burns from Rooster Teeth and was hired as lead animator for their hit series, Red vs Blue, for their 8th season.

Now I’m not familiar with Red vs Blue, outside of a few clips that my friends showed to me back in college. But from what I��ve seen, Monty brought a level of energy for Seasons 8-10, featuring a lot of his signature stylistic fight choreography. It was during this time that he had an idea for his own series that he wanted to make. He pitched it to Bernie, who agreed to it if he could deliver Season 10 of Red vs Blue.

Once Season 10 wrapped up, featuring Elijah Wood no less, Monty teamed up with his friends and fellow Rooster Teeth employees, Kerry Shawcross and Miles Luna, and created his crown jewell; RWBY.

RWBY

Between late 2012 and mid 2013, four trailers were released promoting a new series for Rooster Teeth. These featured four girls wearing elaborate and colourful outfits, an anime styled aesthetic, kickass music and the epic fight sequences that would soon become synonymous with this series. The trailers were named after the colours associated with each of the characters; Red, White, Black and Yellow. It would later be revealed to coincide with their names; Ruby Rose, Weiss Schnee, Blake Belladonna and Yang Xiao Long.

Once the final trailer hit, it was announced that the premiere of the first episode would be held at the next RTX Event. Following the premiere, the series would be released on a weekly basis on Rooster Teeth’s YouTube channel and their own website. 7 seasons later, RWBY has proved to be a huge hit and has since become Rooster Teeth’s flagship series.

I first heard about RWBY when my friend showed it to me in college back in early 2014. Before heading to my first lesson early in the morning, he took out his phone and showed me this cool trailer of a cute girl killing demonic wolves with a scythe-gun. My jaw was on the floor and I was really impressed with it. He told me that it was part of this new anime series and that I should give it a watch. Unfortunately I never did, as I was busy with other anime and TV shows at the time.

Then 2 years later, tragedy struck. During one of our weekly sessions in our anime club, it was announced by my friend and leader of the club, that Monty Oum had unfortunately passed away. For the rest of the day, we dedicated ourselves to watching the original four trailers and some clips of Red vs Blue in his honour.

I was shocked to say the least, especially considering the fact that I wasn’t very familiar with his work at the time. But from watching glimpses of his work, I could tell that he had so much talent and passion and he was dedicated to leaving his mark on the world.

Fast forward a few years later into 2018, I was at my lowest point. I returned home to my parents and reconnected with my family again after a period of isolation. After a rough patch, which I’ll talk about another time, I was beginning to feel like myself again and it was on one faithful day that I decided to boot up YouTube and watch RWBY.

Not only did I love it, I was hooked! The characters, the storyline, the influences from fairy tales and mythology, the anime aesthetic, the fight scenes and the music. I loved it all and watching it brought back a creative spark in me that I didn’t feel in quite a long time. Throughout 2019, I was hit with new motivation to resume my own project; a novel series inspired by superheroes and mythology. Alongside that, I also delved deep into the RWBY fandom and discovered a whole host of amazing fan-content such as comics, fan art, cosplayers, fanmade music, AMVs and of course, fanfiction.

RWBY fanfiction really cemented my love for the series and it moved me how much fans looked up to Monty and his creation. Their expression of love through this medium was heartwarming, to say the least and their creative passion really shone through with their own alternate takes on RWBY lore. But at the same time, all the admiration I had was accompanied by guilt. I felt so horrible that I never looked to Monty Oum or watched RWBY much sooner and I if I could go back in time, I’d watch RWBY when it first started airing.

Even beyond the amazing fan content, I’ve also met great friends through this fandom and many of them on tumblr and Discord. We share ideas, theories and our own works because this series and the man who made it filled our hearts with joy.

So to Monty Oum, I thank you for creating such a wonderful series and inspiring me to get back into writing. Thank you for building a community where other creators can get together and share their works through you. Your legacy will live on, through us and through RWBY. My wish is to become a creator that’s just as talented, inspiring and amazing as you.

R.I.P Monty Oum. 1981-2015. We will carry on your spirit, as fans and as aspiring creators.

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#monty oum #rwby #red vs blue #haloid #rooster teeth #rwby fandom #rwby fans #rwby fans united #tribute #thank you #thank you monty #cold rwby #casey lee williams #jeff williams #monty oum tribute #rip monty oum #rest in peace

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ngochasarchive · 3 years

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There have been many posts recently regarding first years striking out with investment banking recruiting.

Now that we are nearing the end of the recruiting cycle, I wanted to provide an update on a prior post that was incredibly helpful for investment banking and Cornell Johnson hopefuls, linked here

'20-'21 was an undoubtedly challenging recruiting cycle for all involved. Not only were fewer firms across the Street recruiting, but the sheer uncertainly resulting from COVID-19 lent itself to much more conservative recruiting decisions, both in terms of headcount and selection. That being said, I believe Johnson held its ground and placed a significant number of investment banking hopefuls, on par versus prior year.

IB Opportunities

Nearly every firm runs a structured recruiting process on campus. Firms that came to campus this year, in no particular order, include: GS, JPM, MS, BoA, Citi, CS, UBS, RBC, Wells Fargo, Evercore, Lazard, Moelis, Greenhill, Guggenheim, Jefferies, Houlihan Lokey, Cain, MTS, Piper Sandler, Simmons Energy, Baird, TD, Greentech, Marathon Capital, and Harris Williams. We also placed at Rothschild and Miller Buckfire. Several firms that did not run processes this year include DB, BMO, William Blair, and Barclays. Classmates also received round 1 invites at PJT. As mentioned last year with respect to Goldman, some of these firms that don't consider Johnson a "core" school will cut 50-60% off the resume drop and maybe extend 3-4 round 1 invites. Johnson students placed into top groups at their respective firms.

The (Virtual) Process

The process can be largely broken up into two phases: Phase I includes on-campus interviews, briefings held by the banks, and on-campus networking. Phase II includes hours of Zoom/phone informationals and coffee chats. The process was a bit accelerated this year given the late start. Phase I kicked off a few weeks after orientation and lasted until the last week of October. Phase II ran until winter break in mid December. During Phase II, candidates were allocated 8 hours of interview slots to meet with 4 banks each week. While under normal circumstances, there would be logistical challenges of meeting with more banks each week, the virtual environment enabled candidates to meet with as many firms as possible any hour of the day. At my peak, I met with 15 banks in one week with coffee chats beginning as early as 6:30AM and as late as midnight. The virtual environment enabled candidates to cast a wider net. There are explicit instructions on where you need to be, what technicals you should be prepared to be asked, what emails to send, who to send them to, and even what specific time to send the emails. Each week, you may be cut from certain bank’s processes depending on your performance the previous week. Performance could entail a tech-screen, behavioral interviews with alumni, informationals, and all the other soft-skill interrogation that is par-for-the-course during IB recruiting from any MBA program.

While I had the benefit of not wasting 10 hours per week traveling to and from NYC, the process was absolutely exhausting. On any given day I had 2-5 hours of informationals + class. Sunday nights, when banks inform if you've been cut, can be demoralizing, and being on top of your technicals, recent transactions, and firm knowledge is mentally draining. Serious candidates were lucky to sleep 5 hours per night and were on the recruiting grind 7 days per week.

A large reason the process is so exhausting is the extremely high standards Cornell Johnson alumni have for their candidates. Candidates must first pass through Johnson alumni before being put in front of other and more senior members of the bank. Johnson alum take the recruiting process very seriously and expect excellence. Compared to a colleague at Stern I probably had 2x the number of informationals and coffee chats, reaching well north of 100. From a technical perspective, Johnson leverages its own set of technical prep questions and the 400 guide. Each week, Johnson candidates are given a set of technicals to be proficient in. Alumni are aware of where we are in the guides and those questions are all fair game to be asked in our informationals. Alumni are also aware that questions asked in informationals are shared essentially in real time over Slack and really push the boundaries of acceptable questions to ask. In one such coffee chat, the interviewer pulled up a case study over Zoom and asked that I create the pro-forma balance sheet from provided information. The technical knowledge necessary compounds and questions get more challenging week over week. Week 1 may include the simple walk me through $10 of depreciation. Week 5 will feature napkin LBOs.

Evaluating the Process

Candidly, my choice to apply to Johnson on a whim was absolutely worth it. The recruiting process was insane, but gave me the structure I needed to get an offer. The schedule was very demanding, coupled with a heavy fall course load, but the schedule gave me the chance to demonstrate my abilities. Even in a virtual environment, my class was very close and worked together throughout the process. I believe this experience creates a bond amongst first years and alumni immediately share that connection. Year over year, we are making in roads at more firms, achieving "target" status at new shops, and generally have developed an image of having the grindy/scrappy mentality that firms look for in summer associates. Johnson gets a lukewarm reputation on various forums for its place in the rankings, but Johnson is absolutely a heavy hitter in IB placement.

I will plug thoughts on competition, negatives, and closing remarks from last year's post because they remain the same:

Competition:

I did not feel competition with classmates while recruiting IB at Johnson. I am not naive; I understand that at some level IB offers are a zero-sum game. However, at Johnson, the sheer totality of structured opportunities changes the thought process from “PrestigiousBank1 has X offers this year so I am competing with my classmates for those offers” to “There are going to be at least 12 offers from one of PrestigiousBank1, PretigiousBank2, or PrestigiousBank3 where I am in the running and if I stay on my game I can get one of them.” That attitude is emphasized by the finance club and behavior which prioritizes yourself above classmates (such as backdooring processes or telling multiple banks they are your number 1 choice) is explicitly discouraged by Johnson alumni at the banks. Your classmates are your support system and alumni expect you to go through the gauntlet together. This attitude creates strong connections amongst the class which translates to a strong Wall Street network. Alumni emphasized this point repeatedly in informationals.

Negatives:

Some people would consider the structure a negative if they are supreme networkers who perform best in entrepreneurial environments. That person is not me so I can’t really speak to it. I think the largest idiosyncratic “downside” to Johnson is that the structure and close alumni network make it neigh- impossible to hoard offers. Alumni will know through their friends where you are tracking so nobody is able to sit on 5-6 offers. 95% of candidates will only have 1-2 offers at the end of the day. Frankly, I don’t consider this a downside. By limiting hoarding offers, we maximize our placement across the street.

The other downside worth mentioning is difficult to evaluate. As of this date there are a few strong candidates without offers. Still, there should be at least two more offers coming through the pipeline. From talking with friends at other business schools, this was a down year for IB recruiting but apparently there are deserving folks who strike out every single year from every single school. I don’t believe the few deserving candidates we currently have without offers are inevitable, but I also can’t identify a specific weakness in the process that led to their outcomes.

Overall:

Anybody who wants to recruit IB out of their MBA program should send an app to Cornell Johnson. It is an ideal safety for someone targeting CBS or Wharton, and if you can wrangle money out of Johnson vs going to some of the other strong finance programs at full sticker price, I think Johnson could be a no-brainer. If you are a career switcher who just wants to get into IB, Johnson will give you the opportunity to recruit across every name brand BB and EB on Wall Street. And if you are a finance stud who wants to work for the best groups at the most prestigious banks in the world, Johnson will let you control your own destiny.

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Having a professional background in finance helps from a learning curve perspective. Those with finance backgrounds have to put a little less effort into learning technicals relative to pure career switchers that have never looked at a P&L before.

I recruited amongst CFAs and CPAs and while they were able to get their foot in the door with banks quite easily, I don't believe they were materially better off than career switchers because cultural fit and personality are far more important than technical proficiency. A few classmates had significant M&A and capital raising experience and they were by far the most sought after.

As every banker will say, technical proficiency is a "check the box". Johnson gives every IB candidate enough resources to "check the box" with every firm. At the end of the day, it comes down to cultural fit, being someone that bankers want to work with, and demonstrating interest in the career path.

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Q: When (if) they ask about where you see your future career path, is it frowned upon to say you'd like to end up in Corp Dev/Fin after 2 years as an associate or are they looking for the "career banker" response?

A: If you were interviewing for any other job, would you tell the hiring manager that you are planning to leave after a year to pursue something else?Conversely, if you were the hiring manager, would you give an offer to someone who doesn't really want to be there?Play the game, drink the kool aid, you were born to bank.Also, just my opinion, if you go into IB with your eyes set on something else, you will be absolutely miserable.

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daveykonatta · 7 years

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SnB VS

Now that this anime came to conlusion i wanted to share my opinion since there are too many things that I do not want to save for myself. It had some good moments and certain characters and plots that i really enjoyed, BUT:

First of all: It amazes me that the director allowed all this mess to happen, especially because he is the same person that worked in Genesis. The scriptwriter on the other hand…. What was she thinking? If she didn't understand the previous season then why she was hired to do the job? Oh yeah, it’s supposed that she has experience with romantic plots and that's why they left her do everything with Char/Nina but that isn't even well done. I know there's people who liked and loved these new characters, but lest face it: their romance was rushed and looks more like a teenager crush than the supposed tragedy and ruin they want to sell us.

Yes, they invested in beautiful dance scenes and I can tell that the first dance in episode 6 is quite enjoyable (the animators and musicians did a really great job), but the writer trying to make us feel sorry for this “sad love history" is a huge mistake when we have the rest of characters in the background strugling with significantly more important issues (I speak of slavery, oppression, murder, deprivation of liberty and poverty).

I can't feel bad for Char losing his mother if in the present they hardly give us opportunities to empathize with him and his poker face. I think that if instead of using all that screentime to see him eating, being shaved or bored in his throne it could had been more significant to lear about his past; maybe flashbacks about his mother along with the time he passed looking at that tomb (the only thing we know about him). The part that may keep you interested about him (besides trying to “understand him” as the rest of characters during 24 episodes) is to learn about this big plan he has, BUT they used this to hook the audience and keep it as the “big revelation”.

Nina on the other hand has serious emotional issues and is so unaware of herself, she started as an interesting MC with many possibilities to develop (she is so fast and stronger than any, she can turn into a dragon! She is friendly, funny and lovable) but for some reason the scriptwriter being a woman decided that we don’t have enough female characters used as the romantic interest whose goal in life is decided by the path the male chooses.

Nina spent this whole season being there, more as a viewer of the story than the one who leads it (what’s the point of the MC if is not this?), and she struggled trying to understand Char instead of thinking by herself. She chooses to hide everything from her friends about her relationship with the king only to make this plot dramatic. But when Rita, Favaro, Jeanne and the rest of characters around her start to acknowledge what’s going on NOTHING happens! At least nothing dramatic; we only have Favaro giving her love advices, and he doesn’t care much about being imprisoned who knows how much time and for what thanks to the king, he limits himself to tell her the evident, but doesnt do anything to stop the king and in fact lets him alive because of the love Nina has for him. So, the advices he gives doesn’t consider what kind of person Char seems to be and are based on his vision of love towards Amira and what happened to them, which is stupid considering who they are and the differences between their stories.

The only moment Nina makes a choice happens after one of her friends (a child) dies, thanks to her love interest orders. But the consequences and guilt of this dead are only blamed on one person (who latter payed with his life). All this to makes us suddenly think that the king has nothing to do with It because that was an old order, so Nina can move forward and love him again. Yei!

I’m not saying that Nina wanting to be with the person she choose is bad or that she is too selfish; putting aside her flaws when love is on the table, she is a good friend (she put herself in danger for them several times) the problem here is that she put this man she barely knows over a pedestal and lost herself because of this: first she is empathic when Aza was in trouble and risked her secret to save him (even when she doesn’t consider him a friend), she seems mad at the king when hears him threatening to kill the demons if Azazel doesn’t return to fight, then she tells Char that she doesn’t like him and that he is a bad king (before knowing who he was), after this she suffers with Jeanne at the prison when she told her story.

But once she finds out he is the same person she liked then everything else doesn’t matter anymore, she stops thinking about what happened to her friends, she doesn’t care about goods being killed, or demons wounded and starving on the street. In fact, the scriptwriter had the guts to use those streets where the demons are living in poverty to create a romantic atmosphere between Char and Nina. So romantic and pure

Thanks to that romantic plot that wasted time, at the end we are left with several omissions and plot holes should I mention that all the plans of the perfect and lovable king were based on a source as reliable as Martinet?. And when the moment of revelation comes (although at this point we already knew) we realized that all was for nothing: Charioce passed all those years enslaving demons, killing goods and destroying their homes, using his own people to build a stolen weapon, and then bringing back Bahamut to the Capital to NOTHING. Nina went throw this journey of self-discovery No this no, Mugaro, Kaisar and Ale died along with several others, Rita went back where she started (puppet zombies, remember?) Jeanne lost her child after being banished from her home, Aza went through his painful usage ever for NOTHING.

Favaro said it in the final cut: Bahamut is still alive, and that was obvious: we are talking about an existence stronger than every demon or good portrayed till now; Satan and Zeus sacrificed themselves only to seal him for a couple of years. But thanks to power of teenage crush it only took Nina and Char 10 seconds this time! Amazing

NOTHING else than portraying Char as the big hero who had to suffer and pay a big cost in exchange of the lives of his people. The cost of his actions: he is blind now. Another plot hole since the Onyx soldier died in very graphic ways and the power to use the weapon seemed to require a significant amount of energy, but the Ikemen Char is almost intact (I bet Mugaro will gladly choose being blind than dead).

What was the conclusion for the rest of characters? Right, they didn’t had enough time so they tells us very quickly that Jeanne lives with the goods, and decided to left Char alive, Aza went somewhere, and decided to left Char alive, Lucifer and all the high ranked demons who? are nowhere to be seen, and they let Char alive, Gabriel and the rest of goods, nowhere to be seen, and they let Char alive.

But that’s good, because now the things are different, for example the slaves are now payed and decided to stay in Anatae (of course, Cocytus was destroyed). The arena is closed. I guess, because there was no time to clarify that. (The demons of the red district are payed now, too? Or they closed the place?) Who knows. People of Anatae is now able to worship their goods again? Doesn’t matter, any of this. Because the romance between Char and Nina was the principal problem to solve. But I forget, she is mute now. So, not only she chooses everything thinking first on Char, she also payed for him. Lovely

Conclusion: They had 24 episodes, the double of time than Genesis; that should have been enough to explain things but they managed to make a mess full of plot holes and the MCs stayed almost the same through the history, the problem that they presented to us in the first 8 chapters was put aside and magical solved with money at the end, and in top of that they killed characters whose porpoise was unclear. Mugaro my poor child. Talking about animation I think it was better than Genesis, and the music is great. But as a fan of the game and the previous season it left me really anoyed. The disappointment came since chapter 12.

#shingeki no bahamut #virgin soul #i will return to play shadowverse #if you enjoyed the show good for you #just my thoughts #everyone can speak their minds

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tak4hir0 · 4 years

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It’s hard for me to believe, but I’ve been working in the software tech industry for 10 years now. For the vast majority of that time, I’ve either been a product manager, or a founder with a heavy focus on product. With the trend on Twitter of 1 like = 1 insight or spicy take, I decided to jump on board the trend and do one on product management. It appears to have resonated: Should I get in on the 1 like = 1 take (max 100) train and tweet about product management? 10 Likes and I'll start a thread of product tips and 🌶️takes. — Jason Evanish (@Evanish) January 2, 2020 So 100,000+ impressions later, it seems that it really resonated with people. With the ephemeral nature of Twitter, I wanted to preserve those takes for easy future reference, so this post represents them. 100 Insights + Spicy Takes on Software Product Management There’s some great discussion around many of the tweets, so I encourage you to check out all the discussions here. The trick to tell if there’s a reply to a tweet is to look at the speech bubble in the bottom left corner of each tweet: If the tweet says 1 in that area (like Tweet 2/), then the only reply is my subsequent tweet in the thread. If it’s more (like Tweet1/) then there are replies to click on and see. Anyways, let’s get onto the takes: 1/ Being a PM is a job of influence. The best PMs are the mayor of their area of work. You need to be able to build coalitions, and get buy in from a wide group of people. That doesn’t happen by accident. It takes work. 2/ The best PMs are autodidacts. They’re constantly curious and always learning.If you don’t like learning lots of new skills from sales, to marketing, to negotiation, to EQ, to design, don’t be a PM. 3/ PMs are also like a point guard playing basketball. Done right, they set up many others to look great.A strong collaboration makes your designers create better designs, and the engineers ship a better product faster. Those assists don’t show in the score sheet but matter. 4/ PMs also are limited by their team. If you are missing key players or have weak players at other positions, it will often look like the PM is weak, because they have to cover or fill in gaps.Two of the toughest are PMs w/o good design help or lacking a good tech lead partner 5/ There are many ways to become a PM. You cannot major in product management, so everyone gets their start different ways.If you think you want to be a PM, look into how people you follow did it. You may be surprised how varied it is. 6/ The best ways to become a PM: A) Excel at a growing company & ask to transition (seen it work great for marketers, customer success, design, & engineers) B) Do a side project or startup to show you can PM (this eliminates the chicken or egg problem of having never been a PM) 7/ Getting an MBA won’t help you become a good PM.It won’t make you a better PM if you already are one, either.If you want to become a GM at a company, an MBA makes sense, but it doesn’t help product managers. 8/ I’m sure the previous tweet is going to get some replies from a Sloanie, HBS grad, or Stanford MBA.As is always the case on Twitter, exceptions always get mentioned, but do not disprove the general statement. Save $200k if you love PM and don’t get an MBA. 9/ Most of the worst PMs I know or have heard about are either former engineers or MBAs. – MBAs often bring ego + don’t want to do the real work (talking to customers, iterating, etc) – Engineers can struggle with the interpersonal & relationship building side of PM’ing. 10/ If the sales team is at war with your product team, or people try to go straight to your engineers for pet requests, those are your fault.The #1 mistake that good PMs make is not building relationships across departments. Fix it with peer 1 on 1s: https://jasonevanish.com/2015/09/24/product-managers-peer-one-on-ones/ 11/ The #1 mistake mediocre & bad PMs make is not talking to customers.It’s scary getting outside the building, and they instead choose to be master BS artists.If this is you, change your ways in 2020. I wrote how-to’s I wish I had when I started: https://jasonevanish.com/product/ 12/ There are 31 flavors of product managers. An A+ PM at one company would be terrible for another company.If you’re hiring, recognize this could explain a short stint on a resume, and if you’re job hunting, don’t apply to PM jobs that don’t match your skills & strengths. 13/ PMs fit differently based on a variety of factors such as: – The business model (Ecommerce vs. SaaS vs. Ad tech are dramatically different jobs) – Company stage (Think public company vs. Series B vs. Seed) – Company culture (How are decisions made? What do they value?) 14/ The interview process for product management is completely broken. 15/ There would be no need for a whole market for products to “Master the PM Interview” if the interview process was actually good at most companies. 16/ The best interviews see if you can do the work *you’ll be hired to actually do.*Unfortunately, most PM interviews are veiled in hypotheticals that have nothing to do with the job, and are basically trick questions.Mastering trick ?s has nothing to do w/ being a good PM. 17/ Most product teams don’t check their applicant tracking system nor respond to applicants who apply cold.This is ironic given the trend of calling PMs “Mini-CEOs”, and recruiting is one of a CEO’s most important jobs… 🙄 18/ If you want to get a response on an application, get an intro into someone on the team.Don’t have a network? Search LinkedIn for lower level PMs. No one asks them for help, so they’re more likely to respond & have a call/coffee to discuss the culture, then refer you in. 19/ The first PM hire at startups is almost always a sacrificial lamb at the altar of learning for the founder.Read more why and what to do about it here: https://jasonevanish.com/2019/04/28/second-1st-pm/ 20/ The best job if you love startups is to be the *2nd* first PM hire, as you get all the opportunity, equity, and influence…all thanks to the PM that came before you.They died on hills, and helped the company learn what they actually wanted. 21/ Most customers don’t report bugs or give feedback.They just quietly suffer, or churn and then maybe tell you. 22/ I follow the “Rule of 10:” If 1 customer has an issue, there are probably 10 more that didn’t say anything. 23/ If you have an issue, get in the habit of sending a note to those affected. It’s good service AND it helps you quantify issues.I’ve had many engineers be surprised when they see that 2-3 tickets is actually affected TONS of users. Getting a list to email helps quantify it. 24/ Customers don’t care how hard (or easy) a feature was.All they care about is if you solve their problem or make it possible for them to do what they want to do. 25/ Quick Wins (aka – simple things you can do to make the product better for your customers) is a great way to let your team recharge and build some momentum after shipping a big feature.Sometimes customers are more excited by this than your big feature. 26/ Product/Market Fit exists for both buyers and end users.You can have one and not the other, and it will cause your business to sputter. 27/ Never become a PM at a company where the founders don’t understand what a PM does. You’ll get no credit for wins + all the blame for any problems.Fateful last words include “that feature went really well, but I have no idea how you contributed” & “Why can’t you just…” 🤦‍♂️ 28/ Jeff Bezos was right when he said this: “The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it.” The problem is most PMs don’t talk to enough customers to tell this is the case. 29/ There’s nothing like doing product management in Silicon Valley. There, PMs are mostly considered vital and valuable parts of the company. This changes who does the job, and how they work. 30/ If you want to be world class at product management, you need to work a few years in Silicon Valley for this reason, and many more.Being around that many product obsessed, super smart people, will level you up rapidly. 31/ A long time product consultant in NYC told me, “NYC product is 20 years behind the Valley.” That feels directionally accurate.I think there are *many* smart, great PMs in town, but it’s structural/cultural issues that undervalue product here: https://medium.com/@Bosefina/how-to-be-a-product-driven-company-in-nyc-342fd689877e 32/ The mascot of NYC PMs would be Eeyore.The amount of self deprecation I’ve seen/heard that really feels like “haha, it’s funny, but I’m actually sad about it” has been one of my biggest surprises.Product is undervalued in many cases here! 33/ One of the hardest remote jobs is being a PM.Collaboration and innovation are where the magic happens, and that’s the greatest weakness of remote work.There are ways around some of it, but it takes a lot of conscious effort. 34/ If you’re a remote PM, use any flights or face time you get to try to solve your biggest challenges.Nothing remote can compare to the energy of being in the room at a white board with your designer and engineer(s) working on a problem. 35/ Also document, document, document, and share, share, share.You can’t walk by your pod and tell them about a great customer interview, so you need to find other ways to share what everyone needs to know…in a light weight way they’ll actually read/see. 36/ On the flip side, remote can help bring out some of the best work of your designers and engineers as they can more easily get into deep work and focus.Try doing that in an open office… 37/ The #1 skill to develop to be a better PM is to become a better writer. 38/ Writing touches everything you do as a PM: – Product specs – Updates to customers – Updates to stakeholders – Note taking in meetings – Notes and takeaways from customer interviews – Writing good survey questions – Communicating to your team 39/ To become a better writer as a PM, write more: – Blog posts – Internal documents – Tweets + Tweetstorms ;) – Personal notes to collect and organize your thoughts. – Emails and experiment with templates you use. 40/ The other way to become a better writer is to read more. Read regularly, and you’ll find your vocabulary gets stronger and you always learn. 41/ My favorite books to help you write #1: Tested Advertising Methods amzn.to/2sHa6OH – Copywriting goes everywhere from the marketing site, to help docs, to inside your product – You probably have to write some of that – The lessons apply beyond that H/t @LarsLofgren 42/ My fav books to help you write #2: Never Split the Difference amzn.to/2Ff5HoL – You do a lot of negotiating as a PM. This teaches you a better approach whether working with an angry customer, negotiating with another team for resources, or deftly handling your boss. 43/ My favorite books to help you write #3: How to Win Friends & Influence People amzn.to/2ZJOLQG – PMs are in the people business and this is the gold standard to working well with other people. This applies as much to what you write as what you say. 44/ The best way to earn respect from an engineer is to have data to back up what you tell them. Show them the customer interviews & quotes, or the analytics/data and you’ll engage them much more in what they’re building.This wins many more people over than a batle of opinions. 45/ The easiest trap to fall into as a PM is to ship things and never check the results of your work.Set a reminder for yourself 2 weeks or 2 months (depending on your company stage) later to go back and see what worked or didn’t. 46/ Setting up analytics and measurement of a new feature is as important as making sure all the buttons are where they should before launching your feature.It should be part of your product spec. (I like @joshelman‘s approach for that https://jasonevanish.com/2014/06/03/how-to-write-a-product-thesis-to-communicate-customer-needs-to-design-and-engineering-teams/ 47/ Ship early, ship often. 48/ I follow the “Estimation Rule of 2X:” Any project’s estimate is always off by 2X. – When it’s 2 vs 1 day, or 2 instead of 1 hour, it’s not a big deal. However, the bigger the project, the more brutal this becomes (4 weeks vs 2 weeks, 4 months vs 2 months is a problem). 49/ PMs should be tool agnostic. Whatever your engineers will actually use and keep up to date is the project management tool you want to use.The tool you love for the burn down and gannt charts is not the hill to die on if all your engineers hate it. 50/ “Your startup either dies, or lives long enough to end up using Jira.” This saying I used to hear 5 years ago still seems true. 51/ PMs should be infinitely curious. If you see something you don’t understand you should want to investigate. – Look into the analytics, ask the engineer to explain why, ask what motivated your designer to go that direction. You’ll learn, and it often sharpens their thinking. 52/ If you’re a Senior PM or higher, you should be mentoring people inside and out of your company.It’s great to give back AND it will make you a better PM. 53/ Every time I help someone as a mentor, I walk away with a few new ideas and usually a reminder of a few things I know I should do that are slipping. 54/ It’s never been easier to get a mentor. A few ways people have reached me, and I’ve gained help: – DMs on Twitter – Well crafted Linkedin messages – Cold emails after they read my blog and found my email address on there. – Replies to blog post emails from subscribers. 55/ Creating a bonus structure for PMs is a very risky move*. If your company’s needs to change, you want PMs to be flexible, but that’s hard to convince them if their bonus says otherwise.* Exception = E-commerce it can work since it’s easier to have a consistent target. 56/ Being pedantic is a terrible trait for a PM.Care about the details, but in a tactful way. Know what hills to die on, and how to have both strong opinions, *and* loosely hold them. 57/ The art of knowing where and how to draw the line between high quality and shipping on time is one of the hardest skills to develop as a PM.Those that master it are worth their weight in gold.I like @Wayne‘s essay on this: https://blog.usejournal.com/want-to-build-an-incredible-product-strive-for-the-delta-of-wow-f184b716af18 58/ Being a founder, even if your startup fails, makes you a much better PM. – You appreciate other roles more as you likely wore their hats – You learn to ruthlessly focus on the metric that matters most – You learn to deal with extreme constraints & the creativity that breeds 59/ A good PM is like glue & grease: – Glue to hold things together and fill in gaps – Grease to make things run more smoothly and adapt to changes 60/ Feature voting tools are for mediocre PMs. 61/ Show me a feature voting site for a product and I’ll show you a graveyard of unanswered customer requests and a lot of noise. 62/ Show me a product team that relies on data from feature voting, and I’ll show you a team that thinks they know their users a lot better than they actually do.Some day I’ll finally turn this into a blog post it deserves: Cool to be able to better track and organize what comes in via Intercom for PMs, but feature voting is terrible product management. Thread: https://t.co/ycodNk7XxX — Jason Evanish (@Evanish) July 29, 2018 63/ Companies that struggle with endless debates about their products and roadmap typically are arguing opinions, which ends up creating lots of politics and the most important person in the room making calls. 64/ Companies focused on their customers settle their debates one of two ways: 1) They ask “What’s best for the customer?” 2) They plan an experiment or table the discussion until they get some data/evidence 65/ Disagree & commit is an essential skill for any PM.You need to do it sometimes, and so does everyone else on your team.The key to avoiding resentment is to measure the results of the decision. Everyone is wrong sometimes, and that’s okay as long as you fix it later. 66/ Great product leaders are unsung heroes: Their teams get all the credit if it works, and if it doesn’t, they are the ones to have to answer. 67/ Getting customers to talk to is hard and interviewing them is time consuming, which is why so many PMs rarely do it. 68/ Getting customers to talk to you is a team effort: – Get customer success to forward you customers with issues in areas you’re fixing – Reach out yourself (email, @intercom, etc) – Partner with marketing on surveys & reach out to interesting answers. – Talk to sales leads 69/ Joining a company to change their product culture is like signing up to climb Everest in shorts.It may be possible, but there’s a good chance you’ll die trying. 70/ Product managers pre-product/market fit have a 10X harder job than those post-product/market fit. 71/ The stronger the product/market fit, the easier it is for any product manager to look smart and deliver wins.A lot will be obvious, and in many cases, anything you build will work. 72/ Being hired as a PM to help a startup with a solution looking for a problem always leads to failure.The power dynamics and negative inertia are too great. Also, the founders should have been figuring it out, not a hired gun with 0.5-2% of the company. 73/ Some PM jobs are really project management jobs with a power struggle left off of the job description. 74/ Sharing wins and happy customer quotes are great ways to give your team a jolt of energy.We have a Slack channel dedicated to it at Lighthouse called #HappyManagers specifically because of this. Anyone can scroll through to read stories, quotes, and testimonials. 75/ When something is broken, the best way I’ve found to motivate a designer or engineer is to share the customer’s words directly.It’s one thing when you say it, but when they hear a customer say it, it hits their ego differently in a good way so they want to fix. Side note: My favorite story of exactly this happening was also one of my proudest moments as the PM at KISSmetrics: web.archive.org/web/2012112303… 76/ Beautiful designs aren’t always usable or accessible designs. 77/ The #1 thing I’ve always had to remind designers I’ve work with is “Do you think a 50 year old with bifocals can read that”? 78/ McDonald’s theory is a great way to get your team unstuck:Suggest something you know will be rejected to get you back on the track of what you all do want. medium.com/@jonbell/mcdon… 79/ Harsh truth: The best products don’t always win.Sales & Marketing machines can be just as dominant, if not more so. 80/ In some markets, adding more features to demo & put on your pricing checklist is more valuable and important than any of the features being particularly good or useful. 81/ Tech debt doesn’t matter right until it might kill you. 82/ Adding another feature won’t help your company win if the ones you already have are broken. 83/ Tech debt is rarely talked about publicly, but many well known startups (both successes and failures) have faced major reckonings because of it. For example: 84/ As a rule of thumb, once you’re onto something charging to or past P/M fit, spend 20% of your time on tech debt.This keeps it from crippling you and halting all progress (or killing you) later.A nice overview is here: https://blog.crisp.se/2013/10/11/henrikkniberg/good-and-bad-technical-debt And the legendary Marty Cagan wrote about it here: https://svpg.com/engineering-wants-to-rewrite/ 85/ My favorite way to pay down tech debt is to revisit/iterate on old features. This way you squeeze in a few quick wins (remember tweet #25?) along with fixing a troubled, decaying part of the product.It also helps keep the engineer(s) working on it thinking about customers. 86/ I knew @SlackHQ Channels could help with customer bugs and issues, but I was pleasantly surprised how well it also works to source customer development & product feedback fast.This is an amazing post on the topic from founder/CEO @stewart: https://slackhq.com/shared-channels-growth-innovation 87/ Always be iterating on your processes. What worked for a small team or company will break as you grow.Fortunately, said breaks are predictable: https://getlighthouse.com/blog/company-growth-everything-breaks-25-employees/ 88/ The best way to iterate on your process is to make it a habit: – Post Mortems (even when things go well) – Peer 1 on 1s to get individual/private perspectives – Ask for feedback after a ticket is closed (What can I do differently to make that easier/better next time?) 89/ The best way to scale being a customer driven company is to get everyone involved.You can’t be everywhere, but you can teach bits and pieces to others. Teach them how to ask a good followup question over email, or to do some of their own interviews. 90/ You need thick skin as a PM. You will fail and need to find another way. You will take more blame than you probably deserve.I’ve interviewed and been rejected by more companies than you’d ever guess. Lost many deals. Been flaked on by customers over and over. It happens 🤷‍♂️ 91/ Focus groups are a disaster. Customer development is *one* customer at a time.You need to hear their individual stories and situations, not group think. 92/ Remember what Steve Jobs said on simplicity:“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end”The best solution is usually not the first idea. Keep pushing to get it right to unlock magic. 93/ Sometimes the best move is to kill a feature, not add another. 94/ My favorite way to learn is to read based on the biggest challenge I’m currently facing.This insures you immediately apply it to your work…and I find also motivates you to finish reading faster.I’ll share some good places to start after #100 95/ The product tours industry feels universally overpriced.None of them show you how to calculate ROI for what they charge, and typically it’s a small part of successful onboarding + educating users. 96/ Onboarding is really hard.- Customers don’t read. – They skip overviews and tours. – They quickly get bored of videos…then complain they “don’t get it.”And it’s still your job to help them get to the AHA! moment. 97/ The best way I’ve learned to make onboarding work is to use a lot of “lead bullets” mixed with experimentation.A little bit of everything makes it so there’s something for everyone.Ideally, you’ll simplify & help them focus on 1 thing, but that can be resource intensive. 98/ @intercom is the best product category for startup PMs since the development of modern analytics changed how we measure and made data accessible to everyone. 99/ Some mistakes you can learn from others and avoid. Others end up being learned the hard way.Be nice. What’s obvious to you may be a difficult lesson for others, and vice versa.This is especially true in product given how varied all our backgrounds are. 100/ Time management is a crucial skill as a PM; know where all your hours go every day & make sure you get the important stuff done.This video is a great way to conceptualize that: VIDEO Further Reading: Want to learn more PM skills, my reply here gives a few people to start with: – Read lots of books. My favorites by category here: https://jasonevanish.com/bookshelf – Rafael Balbi: Who are some great PMs you regard from the west coast? I’ve been interested to learn more about these differences. A few off the top of my head (some aren’t PMs anymore or were pm minded founders but their blog posts and presentations are still gold) @cagan @joshelman @BrianNorgard @rrhoover @jmj @hnshah @Pv @seanrose @Bosefina @cindyalvarez @DesignersGeeks @wfjackson3 @ShaanVP @danolsen Also would add @kennethn and his great blog: https://kennorton.com/newsletter/ and the classic post by @bhorowitz Search for their blogs and you’ll find gold mines. I’d also add that part of it is company structure / culture, not a difference in skills. It sets you free to do things that in a different structure and valuing of product that wouldn’t allow or would be serious upstream swimming. I’ve dedicated the last 5 years of my life to helping people be better managers. If you have a big team to manage, sign up for a trial to make your 1 on 1s organized, motivating, and accountable, or tell your eng. manager to check us out: getlighthouse.com Learn something? Give this tweetstorm a Retweet or a Share: Should I get in on the 1 like = 1 take (max 100) train and tweet about product management? 10 Likes and I'll start a thread of product tips and 🌶️takes. — Jason Evanish (@Evanish) January 2, 2020

#Building Customer Driven SaaS Products | Jason Evanish

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radikylie · 5 years

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Since I'm looking at colleges right now I'd love to hear your stories! I hope this year goes well for you even with the awful conservative roomie

Ooh that’s so exciting! Be sure to visit them if you can, you’ll know once you step on campus whether it feels like home. And thankfully we are not roommates, but I will have to work with her on like a daily basis! I’m gonna write a long one so sorry not sorry but there’s a lot to unpack at my school lmao.

But I’ll give you some background to my university so you can understand everything else better lmao. My university was historically an all-women’s college until like 2 years ago, which was really sad because I specifically wanted to go to a women’s college. The trend of interest in attending women’s colleges and those who actually attend them are slowly declining the last decade or so. We have had men in our classes through our adult degree program but they were never living in the residential dorms until now. Last year we had about 10 male students, vs. now the 100+ men and although they are still very much a minority, the campus climate has drastically changed.

Ok so my job is the grad assistant to the women’s college which my boss (dean of the women’s college and associate provost) piloted this program last year and its not completely separate from the university but does have distinct programming and privileges for women. ANYWAY, my boss hired me bc my senior year I took her very last class as a professor called sex roles in sociology and I wrote a very terfy response paper to a documentary we had to watch called Just Gender. And basically I wrote how its not “just” gender and that it hurts, etc. She told me I wrote an excellent paper and asked if I had plans for grad school, I had no idea at the time. And that’s how I got this job so thankfully my boss is aware that I am very rad-leaning in politics and feminism.

OKAY so last year we had a queer prom thrown by our LGBT club, which the sentiment was nice but everything here as the word queer slapped on to it. I had to endure two long and frustrating meetings about how to come up with a mission statement for the women’s college that had to be inclusive. Like we weren’t allowed to just say women, had to be those who identify or not but then they were all stressed about binary people and it was so painful.

The second meeting my boss had me meet with the LGBT club to do a focus group thing on their thoughts of the mission statement and whether it was inclusive and/or tips to make it better. The trans man president got upset and started to crying bc I used the term biologically female. There were lots of demi’s and aces, even a trans man named aiden. And then the normie gays and the kweers got in a HUGE fight bc they live in the LGBT house together and the normies accused the kweers of being white, selfish, and exclusive, also lowkey racist. As much of a train wreck that was, and super exhausting as well, boy did I sip some motherfucking tea that night.

A few months ago all the kweers got into a massive fight with the athletes about the male soccer coach being fired (reason still unclear). The athletes protested it and made local news and made this dramatic AF twitter video about it. So the gays felt like (and other regular normies) have been protesting better living conditions, and food, etc., for years and no one cares, but now that these annoying boys do something everyone is all like omfg. They felt the athletes could have been using their time and energy to protest things that actually matter, and they accused the male athletes of being extremely sexist and racist and that they are the ones causing all the sexual assault and rapes on campus.

Oh ya the kweers made a fb meme group and I got invited to it but I just creep it occasionally. Sometimes they’re p funny but most of the time its just really cringey. And then they invited alumni to be on the page where they just shit talk the school all the time which probably hurts some of our relationships with alumni.

Idk I feel like I could say a lot about this clusterfuck of a school, but I still love it and if I can be that one rad women who can make even a small difference in a few womens’ lives then I think this job is worth it. I hope to be hired by them full time next year when they evaluate the program and decide if they want to continue doing it.

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accountancyandtaxupdate-blog · 5 years

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Women in Finance winner Anna Anthony, EY, on her career, gender pay gap and the changing industry

We recently launched our inaugural Women in Finance ranking, spotlighting women who are leaders, trailblazers and transforming their respective industries. Anna Anthony from EY won the top spot based on votes from our audience. We sat down with Anna to discuss her career trajectory, the gender pay gap, the danger of conformity and how to help women thrive in the financial services industry. Anna Anthony has to wear many hats. As EY’s managing partner for EMEIA Financial Services tax and legal, she leads 1,700 people across 14 different markets. On an average day you may find her advising clients on a range of international tax issues, from US tax reforms to Brexit, or in the office setting market strategy, hiring partners and expanding the firm into new markets. In her downtime you might find her tracking jaguars in Brazil or polar bears in Canada, as part of her hobby of wildlife photography. When asked to pinpoint what traits make her successful, Anna credits her drive to constantly learn and evolve, her energy and her optimism. She chose to specialise in tax after completing a law degree and qualifying as an accountant at PwC, seeing it as a good cross over between the two. Working as an international tax adviser keeps you on your toes, she explains, because “everything changes all of the time.” “Particularly when you work in tax, the law changes in some way every year, so what you were expert in last year may not even exist this year. You’re constantly reinventing yourself, which is quite hard work actually.” Although it’s a constant challenge, Anna says, “It’s also the reason I really like it.” “There’s always something new, always something different. If you’re the kind of person who likes a challenge, change, and learning new things, then it’s a really good job to have.” Agility is key to thriving in this field, as Anna explains “you have to move with the market, and you have to move with what’s happening with your clients.” When asked to name her proudest professional achievement, she says it has to be making partner in 2008, “just because I don’t think I ever really believed that I would.” Anna rose to partner at only 30, an impressive feat not least because of the speed of her trajectory, having joined the firm only four years prior at one level above graduate. She will celebrate her 10 year partner anniversary this year. What comes a close second, Anna says, is now being in a position to bring other people through to partner. “That’s pretty special”, she says. It is evident that Anna takes pride in her role as a leader and team player, naming her colleagues at EY as her favourite part of the job. The feeling is clearly mutual – evidenced by the wide margin of votes by which she secured the top spot on our Women in Finance ranking. She describes her leadership style as inclusive, collaborative and honest – “when it comes to the good and the bad”. She stresses the importance of a diverse leadership and taking in different points of view. “My worst kind of meeting is when everyone sits in a room, one person talks and everyone else just nods. What’s the point of that? We might as well have just sent a memo.” “I like an environment where everybody is quite challenging, which then allows me to have lots of different data points.” However, a collaborative approach is of the utmost importance especially considering Anna works across multiple countries and markets – “no single approach is going to work across all of that.” That being said, she is decisive once she’s made up her mind and happy to take action after taking in all the data points. “I am quite results-orientated and I like to see progress”, she says. On women in finance When asked whether she believes a glass ceiling exists, she says “there is definitely something that you have to break through – but I think the fact that there are challenges for women to progress into senior roles is more acknowledged and transparent than it was. There are increasing examples of women who have managed to break through that barrier – not least all of the women featured in this short list.” Discussions around the gender pay gap have been particularly prevalent in recent months, with all firms being required to publish data earlier this year. “I don’t think many firms are proud of the figures they’re publishing”, Anna says, “but I’m really glad we’re talking about it.” “We actually took quite a big front foot on that,” she says, as EY was the first accountancy firm to publish its partner pay gap data, going beyond the UK pay gap regulations. The firm also went beyond the legislation to provide its BAME pay gap data. Anna emphasises that equal pay – ensuring a man and women doing the same or a similar role are paid equally – is different to gender pay gap data. ”UK pay gap regulations are designed to show differences in the average (median and mean) earnings between men and women, as a percentage of men’s earnings. Figures across the board suggest a lack of women in more senior roles and fewer men in less senior positions.” So what can we do to help women travel up the corporate pipeline? “Talking about it is a good start”, Anna says, lauding transparency as an important step to fuel debate around parity and diversity and to push firms to act. There is also more firms can do to support women on their career paths in terms of diversity targets, mentorship and sponsorship. Anna finds targets to be more helpful than quotas in boosting diversity, but emphasises that that is a very personal view. She explains that some dangers come with diversity quotas, in that there is a risk the individual will be undermined by the view that they only got the job due to being part of a quota – and this refers to external perceptions as well as internal confidence. “That can make it incredibly challenging for the individual to do their job and be as credible in that role,” she explains. That being said, she supports quotas on pools for consideration. “So if you have a promotion spot I’m quite happy that the interview quota has to be 50/50 male-female for example. We have a policy of proportional promotions.” Targets, on the other hand, she says she is a big fan of “as long as they look at behaviour, not outcomes – so what are you doing to try and hit your target.” “We have targets all the way through the organisation on all different kinds of levels,” she explains, starting with a 50/50 gender split target at student intake. It is especially important to level the playing field right from the beginning. Anna also credits mentorship and sponsorship as having helped her throughout her career. She says she has had several mentors, within and outside of EY, who have helped with things like guidance and self-belief, and is now a mentor herself to others. EY runs a leadership development programme for high performing female senior managers, called Accelerate@EY, which offers coaching, training, self-directed learning and sponsorship that supports and encourages women’s professional development. Although appreciative and supportive of mentorship, Anna believes sponsorships often go unsung and were in fact more effective in propelling her career. “Mentorship is about guidance, but having someone senior in the firm really backing you and saying ‘think about Anna’, and saying to me ‘think about yourself’ – that made a much bigger difference I think actually in my own personal progression than mentors.” She says that often sponsorship comes into the process too late, in a “oh someone’s going for a promotion, let’s find them a sponsor” situation, and that beginning this process early is crucial for truly fostering rising talent. Visibility is also of utmost importance, Anna says, crediting initiatives such as the Women in Finance ranking for highlighting successful women and helping other women believe they can do it too. “I’ve found that there can be a quite strange lack of confidence in women that for some reason they think they can’t do it, but if you ask them why they can’t do it, there’s no real reason. The example seems to be that I haven’t really seen anyone else like me do it. “So the more you can highlight people like them the better – and that’s never one single woman, there’s no role model that works for every single person, you just need more of them so that people can relate to one of them, or aspects of them.” When asked what advice Anna would give to a woman starting her career in this field, she says the most important thing is to be yourself. “That might sound really silly but I think there’s a lot of people, not just women, lots of people who feel like they need to look, act, behave and talk, the way other people do in order to be successful.” On the contrary, Anna says, being yourself in a professional setting is crucial because you can’t sustain a career not being yourself, and a lot of the profession is actually about standing out – “finding your USP and running with it.” On the changing industry While ever-changing international issues such as Brexit and the US tax reform dominate her client-facing role, Anna says the other big change impacting the accountancy industry is dealing with technology and its impact on workforce. Anna explains, “Because all of us are people firms at heart, our business model for many years has been that we sell our people – and technology is changing that somewhat, because there are certain things that people have always done that technology now does better, faster, and cheaper.” What the industry must do now, she says, is harness the opportunities brought by technology and figure out “what do your people do vs what does your technology do, and how do those two things fit together.” With the rise of flexible working and “one firm for life” becoming an old work model, Anna says the biggest challenge will be “figuring out how firms best work with technology, while maintaining what is core to their culture, and always keeping in touch with clients’ issues.” “And I think they’ll all do it quite differently actually, because the cultures of the firms are quite different.” On looking ahead Finally, we discuss what’s next in her career progression and where she sees herself in five years. To that Anna says: “I honestly don’t know. And the reason I say that is I’ve never really known. I’m not too set on where I’m going because then I think I might ignore other things that I could do.” Most positions she has held in the firm have been for a maximum 2-3 years, so she says in five years it’s likely she’ll be doing something different. “Will it be entirely different? Maybe, maybe not. Will it be with EY? I hope so. I think there’s loads still to do with this firm.” “I hope still at EY, I hope doing something I still love. What that is, I don’t know. We’ll find out.” Join us at 9.30am on 17 May for our Women in Finance webinar, as our expert panel discuss these topics in addition to debating how we can drive progress and change to improve opportunities and advance the careers of women in finance. Register here! The post Women in Finance winner Anna Anthony, EY, on her career, gender pay gap and the changing industry appeared first on Accountancy Age.

https://www.accountancyage.com/2018/05/09/women-in-finance-winner-anna-anthony-ey-on-her-career-gender-pay-gap-and-the-changing-industry/

#Career #People In Business #gender pay gap

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billehrman · 7 years

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“Get On Board Or Get Run Over”

Spoken like a true diplomat, NOT, but those were the words spoken from our President this past Thursday at his first press conference. Clearly he possesses no emotional intelligence sending a message to the media and his major antagonists in that way.

He does not understand how to disarm his naysayers and enroll them into his agenda and worldview. Someone that I know and trust agrees with my thinking and in the next breath said “but I’m glad that he said it.” This is analogous to the election where most citizens would not admit out loud that they supported him; yet they voted for him once in the ballot booth. I get up every morning only to read/hear negative press about Trump, his team and his agenda in the media fully expecting the markets to decline; but low and behold, they go up both here and abroad. What gives? Is the investing public so foolish or do they see that Trump’s reflationary agenda is not only good for the United States but for them as well. A strong America is good for most everyone excluding maybe Russia and China; although they, too, will benefit economically from an expanding U.S. economy.

Trump remains true to his word and continues to go down his list of campaign promises checking them off day by day. If you simply listen and accept what he says, profitable investing is not that hard. I keep questioning whether the markets, especially the reflation beneficiaries, are ahead of themselves despite only being in the early days of a Trump Presidency. But then I go back to my days when I was CIO of the Quantum Fund and remember how George Soros would stay invested in a trend until he felt that it was over. He would never get off in the early innings and would add on any weakness. Investing, not trading, was his way to create real wealth. Same with Paix et Prospérité.

Trump, at the Boeing facility on Friday, said that his mantra is “Hire America, Buy America” which sums up his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” in a nutshell. He went on to repeat that his administration would:

Cut taxes for individuals and businesses including a deal to repatriate foreign retained earnings currently over $2.3 trillion dollars

Reduce the regulatory burdens including Dodd-Frank that have held back businesses of all sizes

Change trade policies to create a level playing field for U.S. corporations

Repeal and replace Obamacare with a better alternative for all Americans

Reduce/eliminate waste and abuse in government while using its purchasing power to lower costs

Make America energy sufficient

Improve our National Defense/Intelligence while adding support to local police forces

Rebuild the infrastructure of America

Protect our borders with a new and stronger immigration policy

Appoint justices to the Supreme Court who view the Constitution like former Justice Antonin Scalia

Raise the status/respect/reliability of America as a leader/partner on the world scene

Quite a mouthful! Do you believe that the media and the Democrat establishment can stop him because they don’t like him or his tactics or that he does not have the people in place or a majority in Congress to implement his agenda? How do you explain the rise in stock markets everywhere since his election, the increase in the slope of the global yield curve, the rise in commodity prices, and the huge increase in both consumer and business optimism? Trump is not running a popularity contest but is leading a call to action as we were stuck in the mud long enough under the Democratic administration. Don’t be fooled by the rise in the stock market under Obama’s watch. It was all fueled by monetary policy pushing rates near 0 here and negative abroad. Economic growth was anemic at best while corporate profits declined.

So what is the road map to Peace and Prospérité? First. one needs a global perspective with an understanding of the relationships between and amongst all nations as it pertains to economic, monetary, political and social issues, as there will be winners and losers. Invest at the margin looking to own those nations/industries/companies that will be improving and sell or short those whose incremental returns are in the process of peaking.

Trump’s agenda to “Make America Great Again” along with “America First” clearly means that the U.S. will be on the rise as its global position improves at the margin. Then drill down further and analyze what industries will benefit most from his policies, both domestic and foreign, and which industries won’t. It is equally clear that the reflation beneficiaries include industrials, financials, technology, industrial commodities like steel, aluminum, copper, chemicals, and energy, capital goods and stay long the dollar while those that won’t include retail, large pharma, consumer durable and non-durable companies, utilities, REITSs and bonds of all durations. Owning foreign multinational reflation beneficiaries that have a large component of their U.S. businesses manufactured here will benefit too. The U.S. will become the engine for global growth once again and most of the benefit will accrue to those industries/companies located here.

I want to digress for a moment and comment on active vs. passive management and fees. I re-entered the hedge fund arena in 2013 to prove that investing rather than trading was the only way to create real wealth utilizing a global macro-economic perspective and in-depth fundamental independent research. Hedge funds as an asset class was under attack as it had under-performed for several years. What investors fail to realize is that hedge funds/active managers really achieve most of their out-performance when markets decline and rarely stay ahead in up markets as they always hedge to a degree. Passive or index funds are always fully invested which means that they go up with the market and down with the market rarely outperforming over time. We have had a straight up market for 8 years now so you can guess the consequences on relative performance.

Secondly there has been a proliferation of hedge funds after 2008, which is akin to a cyclical company expanding its capacity at the top of a cycle, which exacerbates its next downturn. There continues to be shakeout in the hedge fund industry just like in many industries over the last several years with the weak falling by the wayside.

Finally I want to say that not all hedge managers are alike. Why did Apple become an innovator again and a huge success once Steve Jobs returned; why has Nucor in the steel industry been able to increase its dividends each year over the last 38; and so on and so forth. It comes down to management. When I invest in a company, I look first, second and third at management as I know that great management can succeed in virtually any industry in any environment and will create real value for its investors over time. Same for the hedge fund industry. Do you really mind if great management teams earn big bonuses if they create huge returns for their investors? Management fee is another story, as I believe that it should not be a big profit center for large hedge funds that earn incentive fees too. Finally I believe that hedge funds should provide hurdle rates equal to the 10-year risk-free return with high-water marks and no gates.

I am very proud of my accomplishments and success at Paix et Prospérité over the last three years and want to personally thank our investors and all of you who have read my blogs week after week. I hope that it has created real value for you as it does for me. Keep the comments and questions coming.

Finally I want to suggest that all of you listen to or read the transcripts of year-end results for all the companies that you are interested in investing in. Managements are discussing their goals for the following year along with their strategies for the future. It is clear that business has improved since Trump’s election, as there is a sound of optimism that I have not heard for years. The order books show it too. Even if you don’t approve of Trump’s tactics, his strategy to “Make America Great Again” is being heard everywhere and spirits are rising.

Remember to review all the facts; pause, reflect, be patient and consider mindset shifts; adjust your capital allocation and risk controls; do in-depth independent research and…

Invest Accordingly!

Bill Ehrman Paix et Prospérité LLC

#$AA #$ARNC #$AAPL #$AMGN #$AMZN #$BAC #$BMY #$BHP #$C #$DOW #$DD #$HD #$FB #$GOOG #$HAL #$MRK #$GE #$HON #$RIO #$NUE #$HUN #$ITW #$FRX #$FTV #$F #$JPM #$WFC #$PNC #$GS #$MS

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warninggraphiccontent · 4 years

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26 June 2020

We're jammin'

Back in 2018 (remember 2018? simpler times), a number of us from the IfG, some of our friends from Full Fact and Nick Halliday spent 90 minutes trying to map the government data ecosystem. That is, we had lots of pinpoint cards and scribbled the names of organisations that had some sort of responsibility for data in government on them.

You can find that original effort here. It was a bit rough and ready, we never turned it into anything beautiful, but it was useful for understanding the data landscape across government (and more than supporting our hunch that one of the challenges of data in government is the multiplicity of meanings of 'data' and the proliferation of players involved).

Just over two years on, and with a National Data Strategy expected later this year, I thought it was time to revisit the map. Since we can't physically come together around some post-its, I've turned the old 'map' into a series of slides using Google Jamboard (the first time I've used it). Please do take a look - and add, copy, edit, remix, amend as you see fit (within the parameters suggested on the first slide, of course).

We know lots of people found the original helpful for navigating government data - I hope this one can be even more useful.

And if you're in a collaborative mood, I'm always looking for additions to the following open spreadsheets:

Reports related to data in UK government

A 'data' reading list

Data-related developments in the UK's coronavirus response.

Briefly:

If you can't get enough of the words 'jam' and 'data' being juxtaposed, then you must check out DataJam North East...

...and if you can't enough of public sector-related data meet-ups, then we have a fantastic Data Bites for you this Wednesday, 1 July at 6pm. Register here. Previous events here. It's an admin data special courtesy of ADR UK.

Have a good weekend

Gavin

Today's links:

Tips, tech, etc

Will Covid kill off the office?* (The Spectator)

Don’t expect a flexible work revolution (HR Magazine)

Make video conferencing tools work across government (GDS, via Oliver)

#dontgobacktonormal

Graphic content

Viral content

COVID-19 VACCINE TRACKER (Milken Institute)

How the Virus Won* (New York Times)

An expanding epidemic (Reuters)

Coronavirus (COVID-19) in the UK (GOV.UK)

Coronavirus: How does the UK's death toll compare with other countries? (BBC News)

Revealed: data shows 10 countries risking coronavirus second wave as lockdown relaxed (The Guardian)

Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count* (New York Times)

How Somalis in east London were hit by the pandemic (FT)

Understanding excess deaths: variation in the impact of COVID-19 between countries, regions and localities (Health Foundation)

Rainy days (Resolution Foundation)

Air pollution rebounds in Europe’s cities as lockdowns ease* (FT Data)

What are the symptoms of COVID-19? Only 59% of Britons know all three (YouGov)

The government's daily Coronavirus briefings (Oliver for IfG)

Viral content: consequences

Summer brings hope and fear to Britain’s beaches and seaside towns* (FT)

Corona Shock – June* (Tortoise)

Prospering in the pandemic: the top 100 companies* (FT)

Scandinavian and Asian countries are on the way to normal everyday work - economic recovery in real time (Neue Zurcher Zeitung)

The last three months of Citizens Advice data (Gemma)

UK government and politics

Labour councils in England hit harder by austerity than Tory areas (The Guardian)

Dominic Cummings could face inquiry over special advisers (The Guardian)

Freedom of information; civil service staff numbers (IfG, now updated)

Environment and energy

UK and global emissions and temperature trends (Commons Library)

PIPE DOWN: How gas companies influence EU policy and have pocketed €4 billion of taxpayers’ money (Global Witness)

AMAZON GOLD RUSH: The threatened tribe (Reuters)

Sport and leisure

Why Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool are on cusp of Premier League glory* (FT)

Pyramid scheme: This should have been the week of Glastonbury at 50 – will music festivals ever make a comeback?* (Tortoise)

Everything else

Seventy-five years after the UN’s founding, the world order is at risk of collapse* (The Economist)

The Human Genome Project transformed biology and medicine* (The Economist)

The N.Y.P.D. Spends $6 Billion a Year. Proposals to Defund It Want to Cut $1 Billion.* (New York Times)

Where Banks Don’t Lend (WBEZ)

Mapping London’s ethnic diversity (Niko Kommenda - though note this)

Aid Transparency Index 2020 (Publish What You Fund)

Thread (David McNair)

Trump vs Biden: who is leading the 2020 US election polls?* (FT)

What to consider when visualizing data for colorblind readers (Datawrapper)

Meta data

Viral content: contact details

Coronavirus recovery - six data protection steps for organisations (ICO)

The data rules for reopening pubs and restaurants... (me)

Concerns raised about pubs collecting data for coronavirus tracing (New Scientist)

Businesses face privacy minefield over contact-tracing rules, say campaigners (The Guardian)

The UK needs a track-and-trace system we can trust with our data (Institute for Global Change)

Viral content: I call app Britain (and elsewhere)

Google and Apple's diktat to governments on coronavirus contact-tracing apps is a troubling display of unaccountable power (Tom Loosemore for Business Insider)

The UK’s contact tracing app fiasco is a master class in mismanagement* (MIT Technology Review)

Tracking and tracing covid-19—what are the promises, limitations and risks? (Babbage, The Economist)

Apple 'not told' about UK's latest app plans (BBC News)

Does any country have 'a functioning track and trace app'? (Full Fact)

NHS Covid app didn’t pass the test but it still points way to the future (Evening Standard)

The public inquiry... (medConfidential)

No, the government hasn’t installed a coronavirus app on your phone (Which?)

Coronavirus: Ireland set to launch contact-trace app (BBC News)

French give cool reception to Covid-19 contact-tracing app* (FT)

Viral content: local data for local people

Whitehall not sharing Covid-19 data on local outbreaks, say councils (The Guardian)

Local data for local places can help save lives (ODI Leeds)

City-wide data in London: pandemic response & recovery (Part 1); Where we want to get to (Part 2) (Smart London)

Viral content: everything else

“Agreeing to do it in four weeks must’ve been a moment of madness”: Inside the team that built the UK’s furlough scheme (NS Tech)

Covid-19 has made me rethink how I publish, share and coordinate UK food data (UK Data Service)

This open source project is using Python, SQL and Docker to understand coronavirus health data (ZDNet)

Coronavirus: Artificial intelligence to 'rank' NHS patients to help clear post-COVID backlog (Sky News)

Covid-19: The Disaster Automation Was Waiting For (Tribune)

'We're using data during this crisis like never before' (via Sir Chris Ham, via Graham)

How coronavirus reshaped the NHS* (Wired)

Covid-19 and lack of linked datasets for care homes (BMJ)

Uber, WeWork, Airbnb – how coronavirus is bursting the tech bubble (The Conversation)

International Public Health Identity Systems Monitor (Ada Lovelace Institute)

Viral misinformation

Damian Collins MP: Social media firms must take responsibility for harmful Covid-19 disinformation (Press Gazette)

Coronavirus misinformation, and how scientists can help to fight it (Nature)

Countering Disinformation (Cardiff University)

Canaries in the Coal Mine: COVID-19 Misinformation and Black Communities (Shorenstein Center)

UK government

Digital Secretary's closing speech to the UK Tech Cluster Group (DCMS)

The UK’s digital strategy should be the wholesale elimination of administrative burden (Richard Pope)

Helping service teams make decisions about authentication and identity assurance (Technology in government)

Home Office faces court challenge over 'discriminatory' visa algorithm (Civil Service World)

Amazon UK executive to advise GDS on gov.uk (NS Tech)

We’re creating a DfE Service Manual (DfE Digital - discussion here)

If government is mostly service design, is most government service design databases and rights (Richard Pope)

Making it easier to access and use earth observation data (Defra digital)

Questions: Data Strategy (House of Lords)

Big tech

Andrew Yang is pushing Big Tech to pay users for data (The Verge)

CEO of Open Technology Fund Resigns After Closed-Source Lobbying Effort (Motherboard)

Why on Earth did Facebook Just Acquire Mapillary? (Joe Morrison)

Data justice

Data Justice Lab publishes guidebook on data literacy tools (Data Justice Lab)

If the idea of tech not being neutral is new to you, or if you think of tech as just a tool (that is equally likely to be used for good or bad), I want to share some resources & examples in this thread... (Rachel Thomas)

Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm* (New York Times)

Everything else

Data sharing, US style (Wojtek Kopczuk, via Tom)

Data-informed/enabled vs data-driven (Amanda)

Combining Crowds and Machines: Experiments in collective intelligence design 1.0 (Nesta)

360Giving’s Datastore: a coming-of-age story for open data infrastructure (Open Data Services)

Why ‘digital’ is not separate from organisational resilience. (Cassie Robinson)

WHO DO THEY THINK WE ARE? Political Parties, Political Profiling, and The Law (Open Rights Group)

Tool (Open Rights Group)

How the BBC’s Shared Data Unit teaches journalists to find the news 'hiding in plain sight' (The Drum)

Dealing with rejection (FOIMan)

Opportunities

EVENT: Data Bites #12: Getting things done with data in government (IfG)

JOB: Head of (or Director of) Advocacy (Open Contracting Partnership)

JOB: Grade 7 Developer (MHCLG)

JOBS: Big Brother Watch

JOB: Data Engineer (The National Archives)

We’re hiring engineers! (EBM DataLab)

JOB: Ethics Research Scientist (DeepMind)

JOBS: Ethics Team, Public Policy Programme (The Alan Turing Institute)

JOB: Senior Data Scientist (Business Intelligence and Analytics) (Ordnance Survey)

INVITATION TO TENDER: Demonstrate the impact and value of tools developed within the OpenActive initiative (ODI)

CALL TO ACTION: Audit reform (Luminate)

And finally...

#dataviz

Body language... (Wired/Reuben Binns)

While listening to council meetings in Montreal, local mayor Sue Montgomery decided to knit in red when men spoke and in green for women... (#WOMENSART, via David)

19 Data Graphs All About Disney That Are Beyond Fascinating (Ranker, via Heather)

Coronavirus in Florida (Dare Obasanjo)

Watch the impact of the internet in 3 mins (V1 Analytics, via David)

Everything else

Cryptography... (Josh Glendinning)

Stickers (Andrew Newman)

A Woman On TikTok Sang A Song Calling Out People For Using Racist Statistics, And It's Gone Super Viral (BuzzFeed)

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topicprinter · 5 years

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$5m recurring revenueEach user manages up to 2000 propertiesStrong opinions on Slack and Google AdsRental property software-as-a-service is a niche very few have heard of. Nathan Miller stumbled upon it through his own property management struggles and create his own software. He now helps those in the industry operate portfolios of up to 2000 homes. The company makes $5m/year in recurring revenue and more importantly, Miller has opinions on Slack and Google Ads that are difficult not to agree with - NathanWhat does Rentec Direct do?Rentec Direct provides property management software to landlords and property managers that have from 1 to 2000 properties. We specialize in working with property managers that don't have the budget to spend tens-of-thousands on software, but want all those cool features. In fact, because our software is newer and more agile than many of the "oldies" in the industry, Property Managers on our platform are outperforming some of the old industry-standard software.The Rentec TeamWho uses it and how much does it cost?Our pricing starts at $35/month, and we are the only option that has no setup fees. It makes it really easy for somebody to get started and organize their operation really fast. We also uniquely don't have any hidden fees. We include all the core components necessary to be a property manager in the software including a merchant account to accept ACH and CC payments, electronic signatures, and email/text communication right within the platform at no additional cost. We also offer wholesale rates on tenant screening which saves our clients about 50% over our competitors. We've attained this by making some amazing relationships in the background check community as well as aggregating over 14,000 property managers.Was it a lightbulb moment or gradual process?Lightbulb moment. I was a landlord and there were no suitable or affordable products that I could find to manage my rentals. With a background in development, I created a free product designed with myself as the consumer and made it available to all landlords nationwide. The first version was ugly but functional, and about six months later I was astonished to see hundreds of people using it. Ultimately, the demands from the users outgrew what my personal needs were so it became necessary to hire development and support staff and create a Pro version with a simple pricing model that anybody could afford. We had a lot of people switch, and that jump started what Rentec.Have you been involved in the industry/started your own company before Rentec? And how did you validate the idea?I was managing about 5 properties myself, using spreadsheets and old fashioned pen and paper. [ Side note: I'm astonished how today in 2019 there are tons of landlords still doing it this way, even with dozens of properties. ] I was spending too much time keeping track of records and I was even forgetting fairly important things; did I already charge them a late fee, or which house was it that needed the new fridge. It was clear I needed a better way to manage these properties. I was extremely familiar with the internet (it was my job), and did a thorough review of options available to me as a small time landlord. I found software that property managers used at the time, but the costs were in the tens of thousands of dollars, so that wasn't an option. I also found a couple of startup software packages that claimed to do what I needed, but they were buggy at the time and had a questionable future. Fun fact: One of those software packages I considered over 12 years ago is today one of our closest competitors - but they went the funded route whereas we went at it organically so we have starkly different business models.Did you have any experience/expertise in the area?I'd been a landlord for roughly 10 years, and a software developer for 15 so I understood both industries. I also had business and management experience from my prior business life at VISP.NET. That experience provided me with a wealth of knowledge so I was able to get things at Rentec going on my own, with no investment.How did you fund the idea initially?Blood and sweat and about $500 from my wallet. In its infancy Rentec was pretty bare bones. We used a couple of old Dell servers, which I did the configuration and development on myself. Even though the equipment was old, I was emphatic about it being reliable, so for every old server we turned on, there was a 2nd old server configured to take over. Once we had a few hundred users, the revenue paid for servers at Amazon which allowed us to scale rapidly. Amazon also had a "free tier" which really helped us out that first year as well.How did you get your first 10 sales?We gave the software away for free for about a year, followed by an optional Pro version which free users migrated to. Being pretty cheap myself, I assumed nobody was going to switch. But to my surprise, there was a huge percentage of people using the free version that were eager to get their hands on new features and live customer support.Why have you chosen not to take on funding?My goal, above and beyond profits or fame, is to create a long term positive environment for myself, our employees, and our customers. People being able to love coming to work not just because the job is cool, but because the people are cool. The funding model often destroys this sort of vision and I wanted to avoid that at all costs. While you hear about funded companies giving huge bonuses to core staff, and all of those staff running off and immediately buying Teslas, what gets buried more often than not in those stories is how two years later they don't meet their projections and they lay-off half or more of their staff. I know this because we've hired those laid off employees from Silicon Valley a time or two and have given them stable careers here at Rentec. There's actually a surprising amount of truth in the show "Silicon Valley". I sure hope they release the next season soon. Aside from that, I had a great job that I could have stayed at the rest of my life when I founded Rentec, but when I saw that Rentec could positively affect more lives than the position I held, I got really excited about the possibilities of that and devoted a lot of my spare time to the project.Where did you meet your cofounder/founding team/early employees?Craigslist mostly. Our first employee worked on a commission and made something like $23 her first month. We love to reminisce about that today. Today, she is still with the company and makes a bit more than $23. :)Who built the software - do you code? How do you hire top developers?I wrote the first version of Rentec. It was very functional, but super ugly. I designed the software using my properties and tenants as a model, then later on expanded into the property management field. We've gotten most of our current developers from local job ads or word of mouth. The big job sites don't work in Southern Oregon, so we rely on Craigslist and word of mouth to get our open positions out there. We're in a small town and when somebody hears that there's an opening at Rentec it creates some buzz because everybody knows how much fun it is to work here.Does it work outside the US?Yes, the software works worldwide, but the bulk of our clients are US. Some of the extras we offer like tenant screening and online payments only work in the US. As such, we're really focused on the US only at this time.What features are you planning to add? Any upsell plans?We just added a cash payment network so tenants can pay in cash at over 20,000 locations nationwide, including any 7 eleven in the country. We are also in the midst of a very large overhaul which will give our software a fresh modern look and feel.What has been your best marketing channel?Google was great at first because we had a good product and it ranked really well. Back in 2009 Google still offered organic results and would rank good, legitimate products. Now Google is all about ads. If you look at the first page for popular searches, you'll see more ads than you will results, and it's difficult to even tell that they are ads any more because they blend them in. Would you believe if we advertise our product on Google, it can cost us over $100 just for a click, and most clicks aren't going to convert. It's crazy and makes a viable lead from Google cost as much as $1,000. Google, like so many other funded companies, has put profits ahead of everything which in the long-run is a disservice to the quality of their product. Now most leads are either paid via a channel that caters to property managers (like Capterra or Software Advice.. both owned by Gartner) or come to us through our educational blog. Over the past 4-5 years we've really put a ton of energy into creating quality material that helps property managers become better at their jobs. That material has paid off because property managers are reading our content and relying on it, and when the day comes that they want to automate their operation or replace their current software they look at us as an industry leader.What stage were you at when you raised money?Well….. The $500 that came out of my wallet was the only money we "raised". So it was definitely in the startup stage. :)How is Rentec better than its competitors?Primarily we have superior customer service. We accomplish this by hiring customer service staff who have experience in the industry. Sure it's more expensive, but our customers get 10x better support than they would at any competitor. We literally blow our competitors out of the water when it comes to happy clients.We also have more attractive pricing. For a property manager starting out, our pricing begins around $35/m vs our nearest competitor at $200/m. That $155/m savings can mean the difference between profitability or not for a new property manager.We don't have investors to listen to. I see our competitors consistently raising their prices as frequently as 2x a year, and operating in a way that makes their investors happy rather than their customers. We don't have investors, so we can focus entirely on our customers. Fun fact: we've never forced a price increase on our customers, ever! A few years ago we were able to drop our tenant screening prices from around $29 to $15, but that's the only rate change we've done to our clients, and it was very well received!What is stopping a clone from taking market share?Nothing really. That's the beauty of a free market and it's a really good thing. Knowing that XYZ Corp could start up a new property management software tomorrow keeps us on our toes and keeps us innovating. Can you imagine how degraded modern software would become if there wasn't competitive pressure to keep them innovating? There's a lot of market share, and we're happy to welcome new competitors, but nobody will ever be able to touch our excellent customer service.What are the top apps your business could not run without?Google Apps. The collaboration available within Apps is so refreshing and necessary for our organization. Not to mention apps comes with corporate email is nice.PHPStorm - our developers love this application for developing our software. The software costs about $200 per seat, but easily saves us hundreds of hours per year, so it pays for itself 50x over!Slack - I actually feel Slack is sort of a trendy chat client for businesses today that doesn't necessary provide the value it should for the cost, but we do need an internal messaging platform and slack is as good as any. We appreciate that it integrates with some of the other services we use, but honestly we're not married to Slack if another platform came along.What are you going to work on in the future?I'll be focusing on Rentec Direct for some time. It's growing, it's fun, and there's plenty for me to do. We'll continue adding features and functionality and strengthening the system to work well for our clients for the future.Are there any releases you can tell us about?It's a long way out (probably 9 months at least), but a fresh overhaul of the entire system is in the works to be responsive and will also include a fully functional app usable on all tablets and phones. None of our competitors have that so it'll be an amazing differentiator - assuming they aren't also working on that right now of course.Where do you see the company in 5 years?In 5 years we'll hopefully have been on the INC5000 for 8 years running, our margins will be stable and growth remain around 30% per year. All while maintaining a tight group of no more than 20 employees. Rentec will be contributing greatly to our local economy and helping our community thrive through local neighborhood improvement projects.How are you staying ahead of competitors?We're far more agile than our competitors. When we decide to attack a new feature, we can typically do it in 1/5th the time of our competitors and with 1/10th the staffing. We've found ways to be immensely efficient and the payoffs are huge. Our efficiencies also make us more profitable, so we're able to provide a product that is feature-par with any of our competitors that costs 30-50% less. It's incredible to think about this, but we have about 14,000 customers and our nearest competitor has somewhere around 15,000. Yet, we have 15 employees, and they have around 300. We'll be able to use these efficiencies to remain relevant and very competitive.Would you ever sell Rentec?I have zero interest in selling. Provided my staff and I are having fun doing what we do, it's not even on the table. We consciously make choices to keep, what could be a fairly boring business, fun and exciting for our staff. Part of that is honing in on the market that *we* want to serve rather than trying to expand outside of our ideal customer. We work with the fun customers and let our competitors deal with the headaches. :) Aside from that, I truly enjoy what I do and I enjoy coming into the office every day. This month we have a cornhole tournament among staff, and the winner gets the prized covered parking spot. Next month will bring more fun and games, and of course awesome improvements to the software as usual.If you enjoyed this post, the original post is here.

#/r/entrepreneur #reddit

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electricsaver1200 · 5 years

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Don’t be like Dr. Samuel- he got HOSED!

No matter what business you are in, if your business has at least 2 employees, you need someone to have your back when you aren't there. Someone needs to be accountable for ensuring your resources are used efficiently & effectively in your company. Not everyone cares as much as you do about your business. Once upon a time, there was a good Doctor named Dr. Samuel. He had a manager for his office, he had a supply officer to keep an eye on responsible usage of supplies, and he had trained staff who were good at their jobs. One day, he received a bill in the mail from the Electric Company. When he opened it, he was in shock! His bill was triple what it normally was and he hadn't changed ANYTHING... or so he thought. You see... while Dr. Samuel was at his 2nd office, a cute new employee (who happened to be dating the office manager so he didn't correct her actions) thought Dr. Samuel kept the office too cold so started greeting all the patients with the front doors of office open all day and left the AC running all day long. With outside temperatures in the 90's, the poor air conditioner was working nonstop. This put Dr. Samuel's usage way above his normal business operation. Dr. Samuel didn't know what to do. He called his power company and claimed there must be a mistake. They insisted it wasn't a mistake. Then Dr. Samuel called the air conditioning repair company. They came out to take a look at the air conditioner and found nothing wrong with the unit. Frustrated and not knowing what else to do, Dr. Samuel went to the extent of installing a clear locking case over the thermostat in his office to ensure no one would be fiddling with it. But, his bills never lowered. Not knowing his business operation changed the moment he left, was his downfall. Don't be like Dr. Samuel, he did not live happily ever after. Having staff means that it's not just you making the decisions in your company. Whether you like it or not, you cannot do everything in your business all by yourself. If you want it to be successful and expand to being more than just you operating it, you have to rely on others. That means other people will be making decisions on your behalf. Hiring the right people to be on your team, well that's a given. Some have someone in charge of supplies to ensure things aren't wasted. However, many business owners NEVER even think about this... someone in charge of energy management in your company. Someone who is accountable for not just supplies, but also utilities? Do you even have a plan to teach your staff how to properly use your equipment and be efficient with your resources? Energy rates have been on the rise, or at the very least DEFINITELY haven't gotten less. How much will energy bills be in the next 5-10 years? No one knows, but the best thing you can do right now for you & your loved ones is to take action. By reducing your energy consumption, you can fight back!

Start At the Basics

Adopting certain measures without investing heavily would be a good starting point. Make sure your investment, no matter what energy saving product/or measure you do will be a good return on your investment. How long does the product last compared to the cost? Does it require any maintenance? What is the total cost vs. savings to implement such a project? These are important questions. And don't forget to account for electricity rate hikes in the future too!

Educate and Motivate

Create awareness among employees to cultivate new power saving habits. This will help in saving energy. Maintaining energy economy and keeping in mind its importance will, largely depend on educating the concerned people on the subject. Conducting programs that motivate the staff to carry out the functions of energy saving will give positive results in a large way. This represents one kind of measure taken towards energy saving without much investment.

Identify the Root Cause of Energy Consumption

Whether you are assessing your home based business or a larger business property, this is important. No property or business is the same. A proper survey of high-energy consumption areas will help pinpoint so you can take necessary action to control them. Certain work places could require huge lighting, while others have a lot of refrigeration or motor driven equipment. Assessing WHAT is costing YOU the most money will help you lower your costs fast.

Have a plan in place

Everything starts with a plan in place, and practice makes perfect. Your rewards and benefits will follow. Even with the worst plan in place, it is better than NO plan.

A Dedicated Manager

A company that is serious in energy saving must appoint a dedicated manager to this function, and his/her responsibility would be to support and check that all activities are functioning without wasting energy. Such dedication alone can affect efficient saving of energy. Giving the manager &/or staff bonuses/treats/parties/gifts for accomplishing simple goals in the workplace makes everyone on the team jump onboard and help oversee that the overall target is achieved.

Good Suppliers are a Rarity, Choose with Care!

Whether purchasing something for your home or business, always check if the supplier is a reliable, trustworthy source. Professional companies that have UL safety certification, BBB accreditation, many happy customers, and safe/consistent quality products are a must. This tells the tale of how they have done business in the past, as well as, can they handle the size project your business needs without any problems?

Capital

Though, it can sometimes be tough to get financial help from the banks, you could rely on the carbon trust, associated with Siemens Financial Services, to invest on any energy-saving project.

Learn from others

It is good to read about other energy-saving projects, and adopt the useful features in them to your system to save time on research and to avoid making mistakes in implementing your own project. This is called due diligence and is easy with Google nowadays.

Reputation Building

The world is closely watching those who are serious about reducing carbon footprints. Trust and respect are two important rewards for your involvement and results in this arena. But aside from that, there are many other benefits to your company as well as the planet for using less energy. If you look at your business in 10 years, what does it look like? Is it expanding, contracting? Are you able to retire comfortably? By implementing measures to reduce your energy costs, this can mean the difference between comfortable and unbearable. Take action now, visit our site for more info: http://www.electricsaver1200.com We hope you enjoyed our post as much as we loved having you here. For even more helpful energy saving tips, read our guide here. Be sure to like/share our posts with your family/friends who YOU want to benefit. And follow our blog! Be sure to visit our site: http://www.electricsaver1200.com Source Save

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photographerguide-blog · 5 years

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<em>Black Panther</em>s Director of Photography Is a Cinematic Superhero

New Post has been published on https://photographyguideto.com/must-see/black-panthers-director-of-photography-is-a-cinematic-superhero-2/

Black Panthers Director of Photography Is a Cinematic Superhero

As Hollywood events go, there are few more congratulatory than film festival awards ceremonies, where everyone wants to cheer for the Next Big Thing before they get huge. Yet, at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the biggest applause at the awards show wasn’t for a director or actor—it was for Rachel Morrison, a director of photography on the festival jury. “Earlier this week,” host Jason Mantzoukas said while announcing her name, “she became the first woman ever to be nominated for the Academy Award for cinematography. Her historic nod is for last year’s Sundance hit Mudbound." Out in the audience, Morrison smiled sheepishly; at her side, fellow jurors Jada Pinkett Smith and Octavia Spencer whooped up a storm. The audience stood to clap.

Read more: http://www.wired.com/

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kellyp72 · 5 years

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Going Solar: look before you leap (then leap!)

(updated May 19, 2019)

Global investment in renewables continues to grow

According to the “Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2018” report published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and the Frankfurt School-UNEP Collaborating Centre, 2017 was the 8th year in a row that investment in renewables exceeded $200 billion. Most of this investment has been in solar and wind energy. As a result, the cost of solar energy has become cheaper and easier to implement by businesses and individuals alike.

What we are witnessing, near the close of the second decade of the second millennium, is a veritable global revolution in the development and distribution of solar energy technologies and a renewed commitment to combating climate change.

Why is solar becoming more affordable for the average homeowner and even for low-income households? And most important, how can you benefit from the development of solar energy technologies, even if you still can't afford to install solar panels on your home (or even if you're not a homeowner)?

While the boom in solar energy development in over the past 8 years is nothing short of astonishing, given the apparently lackluster support it received in the first decade of the 2000s, this is not the first time we have seen a surge of interest in solar energy. In fact, solar has a long history of use.

The past century has seen a few milestones in the implementation of solar technologies for industrial and individual applications in the United States, beginning with the development of silicon PV (photovoltaic) cells by Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller, and Gerald Pearson at Bell Labs in 1954. Two decades later, the oil embargo of the 1970s led to renewed interest in alternative energy sources, including solar. The price of solar cells dropped dramatically, from $100 per watt to $20 per watt. Most of us who lived through those decades can remember solar PV panels being installed on the roof of the White House during the Carter Administration (and later removed under the succeeding Reagan Administration, though Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, would later give a big push to research on renewables by founding the National Renewable Energy Laboratory).

Over the course of the past 75 years, countries in Western Europe and Asia have taken major steps to cultivate solar energy technologies. In the 1960s, France and Japan developed large-scale solar technologies for industrial applications. By the 1980s, labs in Australia, Germany, and South Wales made significant strides in advancing solar technologies for smaller-scale use. In the 1990s, more countries hopped on the bandwagon of solar, but it has only been within the last 15 years that the development of solar energies can be called a breakthrough on a global scale. The regions that have the best access to solar energy: Africa and the MENA, have also accelerated the pace of development in their renewables industries. In December 2017 I had the privilege of visiting the world’s largest concentrated solar farm in Ouarzazate, Morocco, where I learned about the country’s plans to integrate solar energy with social development programs. There are other major solar projects underway in the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Israel, and Jordan that seem promising for the long term objective of weaning the world off fossil fuels and decreasing global carbon emissions.

China remains the world’s leading manufacturer and distributor of solar panels and related equipment, with Germany and the US following behind. The downside of China’s continued dominance in this field is being felt mostly by industry competitors and their employees. As cheap Chinese solar panels continue to flood the markets (possibly enabled by advantageous subsidies from the Chinese government), other companies around the world struggle to compete, with many of the smaller outfits having shut down in recent years.

For the average consumer, though, it has been advantageous. When coupled with financial incentives from federal, state, and local governments, solar panels are more affordable than ever for the average homeowner.

What to keep in mind when switching to solar

If you are interested making the switch, there are some things you can do to take advantage of the boom in solar energy, but there are also some things you should keep in mind:

whole system solar or heating only?

First, there are major differences in cost and installation between whole-system solar and solar that is used primarily for heating hot water. Basically, whole-system solar replaces all of a home’s energy: sir conditioning and heating, lighting, fans, appliances, and other electronics. These systems require you to have a good grasp of how much energy you consume so that you can purchase enough to meet the demands of your entire household. Solar domestic hot water systems are used only for heating water, but unlike whole-house systems, are not dependent on the weather for their efficiency.

While it is possible to self-install solar panels and related equipment for your whole house or hot water heating needs, there is a big learning curve to do so. Consumers will have to weigh the cost of this effort as well as the cost of hiring a technician to fix any problems they may inadvertently cause because of a lack of experience and/or technical expertise.

grid connected vs. off-grid systems

One other thing to keep in mind is that there are big disparities between off-grid solar systems and grid-connected systems. Again, off-grid systems require a considerable amount of planning, can be affected by the weather, and require efficient capacity for storage of excess energy and its later distribution through the home. Short-term storage for peak power loads can work for anywhere from a few hours to a day. For longer storage or areas where access to solar energy is minimal, a Seasonal Thermal Energy Storage System (STES) can be used. STES is one solution being used in Scandanavian countries like Denmark. These technologies use a variety of underground storage (e.g. pits) and mechanisms for distribution of the stored energy. Alternative options include a home battery backup system. Tesla motors sell one such battery (the “Tesla Powerwall”) that is said to be highly efficient.

Efficiency vs cost

While the cost of panels, as mentioned earlier in this post, has come down considerably, their efficiency is something that should not be overlooked. Some of the Chinese manufactured panels are priced under market value, and one reason may be that such panels are not very efficient at capturing solar energy. This is one area that may, in the long run, prove advantageous for non-Chinese manufacturers that have survived the market glut. Notably, some of these manufacturers have slowed production, focusing instead on improving the efficiency of their panels.

What about financial incentives to switch?

Finally, several manufacturers of solar panels, installation companies and distributors offer loans and other financial incentives to homeowners to make the switch to solar. Buyers should be aware that some of the advertisements for free or low-cost solar installation may not be completely free.

Ask lots of questions, including these

Some questions you should consider before signing any contract for solar panel installation (even if it is free or low-cost) include the following:

Is the use of the phrase “free solar panels” really pointing to a solar lease or solar purchase power agreement (PPA)? In either case, the company installs the panels for no up-front charge, but later charges you for the electricity the panels produce. Comparison shop to get the best deal, and consider buying the panels outright or financing them with a zero-down, low-interest loan.

How soon are you planning to move? It may not make sense to purchase solar panels if you are planning to move within the next 10 years, and a new buyer may not want to be locked into a contract that remains tied to the property even if it has been sold.

If you use a grid-connected system and are not home during the daytime, when your system generates the most solar energy, you may find yourself using energy from the grid more often than you’d like, which may translate into a higher-than-expected energy cost. In this case you may try timing your large electric appliances (like washing machines and dishwashers) to run during the daytime.

If you are planning to purchase a system that is tied into a grid, you may be able to recoup some of your financial outlay by reselling energy to the utility company. If you are in the UK, however, keep in mind that the government may slash your “feed-in tariff” at certain times of the year. The “feed-in tariff” is the payment you receive for all the solar energy your system generates (which is generally paid via an energy supplier), whether or not you actually use it.

Other ways to take advantage of solar energy options

What if you are not a homeowner or are wary of purchasing solar panels at this point in time? You can still take advantage of the solar boom in several ways.

For example, you can try using solar-powered outlets to power your devices, walkway lights, or a lantern (especially useful for night walkers or kayakers). These devices are easily and cheaply obtained in your local home improvement stores, camping or outdoor activities store, or online.

If you are in the job market, consider working within the solar industry. It is a rapidly growing industry in the US and parts of Europe and the Middle East. Solar job boards and links to training events are easily obtained online. Find out more through the websites of organizations like the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) in the US, sign up for job alerts at RenewableEnergyJobs.com/UK, Career Jet in Canada, or get in the know about opportunities opening up in the EU by attending and networking at the Intersolar Europe Conference and Exhibition, to be held from May 15-17, 2019 in Munich, Germany. For the Middle East, check Energy Jobline and Bayt.com. These sites contain the region’s largest databases of employment opportunities in the environmental industry, including solar.

Finally, according to Greentech Media, investment opportunities in renewables continue to increase. Many of these investments are considered extremely safe for long-term and short-term investors alike.

There are all kinds of ways you can benefit from solar. The times demand a change in how we consume energy, so why not take advantage of the opportunities out there?

Like this? Please pin!

#solar energy #renewable energy #climate change

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fashiontrendin-blog · 6 years

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Kieran Culkin's Shirt Is Off

https://fashion-trendin.com/kieran-culkins-shirt-is-off/

Kieran Culkin's Shirt Is Off

When Kieran Culkin first started reading the script for “Succession,” he wondered whether it had been sent to the wrong person. The HBO powers that be originally thought he’d be a good fit for the character of Greg, a bumbling nitwit who gets high in his first scene and spends the rest of the first season failing to sidle his way up the ladder of a massive media and entertainment conglomerate owned by his great-uncle, Logan Roy.

Almost from Greg’s first line, Culkin knew he was wrong for the part. “He’s already a lot younger than I am, and just the voice ― I was, like, this is not me. I am not right for this.”

When I met Culkin at a small restaurant in the Noho neighborhood of Manhattan last Monday, it was just as clear to me as it was to him that he’s too old to play a character like Greg. But something in the Roy family’s dark saga held Culkin’s attention anyway. He said he kept reading the script, which follows the foibles of the billionaire Roy clan as its individual members vie for power within. A few pages later, Logan’s overconfident third son, Roman, appears, led into a meeting by a man hired explicitly to burn sage.

“Hey, hey, motherfuckers!” Roman proclaims to a room full of his father’s business associates.

“And I was, like, ‘Oh, who’s this fucking guy?’” Culkin said.

Culkin eventually got the part of Roman, an incompetent and lazy man-child who believes he wholly deserves the title of chief operating officer, even though he has little interest in doing any of the work that comes with it. Among the many nefarious faces that make up Logan’s Waystar Royco empire, Roman stands out as perhaps its most cynical ― a ratings-obsessed media executive motivated solely by profit. At one point, in his interpretation of corporate disruption, he takes off his shirt in a meeting, flexing and joyfully screaming “Blood!” at the thought of layoffs. During another, he gleefully tells his sister about a new viral video that is “evidence of precisely the kind of disgusting, liberal, metro butt-love that makes our viewership angry enough to buy pharmaceuticals.” To Roman, nothing could be better.

Culkin can’t say exactly what drew him to the morally depraved heir, described by his father as a “moron” and his brother as a “walking fucking lawsuit.” But it’s not hard to imagine some small part of Culkin was intrigued by the idea of playing such a sneering member of a media empire.

After all, Culkin’s distaste for the tabloid industry is beyond well-established. (“No matter what’s written there, it’s a total lie, even the person’s name, lie, lie, lie, lie, everything’s a lie,” he once told New York Magazine.)

But let’s not lump Culkin into that hyperpartisan Level 10 “FAKE NEWS” category of 2018 American paranoia. Mostly because when he told me “Now it’s a thing, ‘fake news,’” and I said, jokingly, “Fake news. You’re a believer,” he got nervous and pushed out a quick “no,” immediately realizing the millions of different ways such a quote could be aggregated, recirculated, quoted out of context and otherwise misinterpreted. You can almost see it now, can’t you? “Kieran Culkin Joins the Chorus: Media Is ‘Fake News.’”

Culkin’s distrust is of a more justifiable form, born out of a lifetime of his surname showing up in headline-grabbing tabloid fodder. From the moment his parents, Kit “The father from hell” Culkin and Patricia Brentrup, entered into an ugly, obsessively covered custody battle to when the National Enquirer proclaimed his eternally famous brother, Macaulay, had “6 Months to Live” in 2012 (he’s still alive), Culkin’s last name has served as a way to move and make paper ― the most intimate moments of his life repackaged as factually questionable entertainment content to sell ads against.

Ron Galella via Getty Images

Macaulay and Kieran Culkin at the fifth annual American Comedy Awards back in 1991, just months after the release of the blockbuster hit “Home Alone.”

“There are things that are out there in the world as fact because it was written in print that are just completely false. My brother did not divorce his parents. They did not fight over his money,” he said. “But that’s out in the world as fact.

“I learned at a very young age to be, like, ‘Oh, I get it: It’s bullshit,’ shit that’s written in print.”

In person, Culkin ticks most of the boxes of adulthood: In his 30s. Takes his coffee black. Enjoys talking about his favorite East Village dives. Married five years. Nice watch. Clothes that fit. Hair slicked around his head just so. Like Roman, Culkin drops a “fuck” or “shit” every ninth word or so, as when he said to me, “Hold on, I’m going to eat the fuck out of these pickles. You say something for a minute, ’cause I’ve got a mouth full of shit.”

But no matter how many fucks he lets out ― and by my count, he let out around 25 over 40 minutes ― Culkin remains stuck with a membership to the official Former Child Actors club. Macaulay, or Mac, if you’re in the know, was always the main draw ― history’s most famous kid actor without a drink named after him. But Kieran was there too, in “Home Alone” and “Home Alone 2.” He found himself on the stage of “Saturday Night Live” before the age of 10, and schmoozed with Jay Leno on “The Tonight Show” before his voice dropped.

Which is probably why ― and here I’m guessing ― Culkin might have been a bit annoyed when HBO suggested he audition for Greg.

But after 10 episodes of watching Culkin-as-Roman take part in his family’s imperious game of human chess, it’s hard to imagine the actor playing anyone else. If Jeremy Strong ― who plays Kendall, Logan’s cocaine-addicted second son ― is the show’s tragic star, Culkin is its nervous energy. There’s something in the way he pushes out a phrase like “What a pathetic beta cuck,” or belittles doctors and waiters alike.

What sealed Culkin’s interest in his character came in the first episode during a family softball game, when Roman points to a kid on the sidelines, the son of the site’s groundskeeper. Everyone grows quiet as Roman whips out his checkbook and starts writing a check for $1 million. Hit a home run in their game, Roman tells the boy, and the money is his. For the child and his family, it’s a potentially life-changing moment. For Roman, the child is nothing but a momentary subhuman toy to mess with and cast aside. After the child is tagged out at home, Roman can’t control his laughter. “I’m sorry, I can’t give it to you,” he says as he tears up the check. It is a degrading, truly awful moment of television.

“Oh, I get it,” Culkin remembered thinking, “he’s a fuck face.”

When Culkin filmed the scene, he embodied evil, letting out a cackle so cruel it sets the show’s moral compass for the remaining season. Culkin himself is not sure where his ability to play somebody like that came from.

“Being able to connect to some degree, not in a positive way, with these characters is odd to me because I don’t know the multimillionaires, I don’t know the super-rich, yet I know assholes like that,” he said. “I can’t even quite specifically pick out who I know that is exactly like that, but it’s weird that you can still, for me, relate.”

“Succession” suffered from a slow start, only truly hitting its stride around Episode 6, when Kendall leads the board in a tense vote of no confidence against Logan, who’s recently suffered a stroke, unleashing a sequence of events within the Roy family that are both comical and horrifying.

Culkin owns up to that. “The first three episodes to me, it’s not like they’re unwatchable,” he said, “but it’s not quite the show yet.”

Which, according to him, is fine. Some shows don’t grab you on first watch, and one in particular in his opinion: “I probably shouldn’t even say this on record. The example I have is actually [the British comedy] ‘Peep Show,’” which was coincidentally also developed by “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong.

But the first season of “Succession” gained enough momentum before concluding Sunday evening for HBO to pick it up for another season ― making this the first time Culkin has ever been part of a television show that made it to Season 2, according to his IMDB page, a small victory in his more than two decades on-screen.

Culkin’s most acclaimed role came in 2002, when he earned a Golden Globe nomination for his role in “Igby Goes Down.” But that time the victory led to a full-blown existential crisis.

United Artists via Getty Images

Claire Danes and Kieran Culkin talk at a coffee shop for a scene from “Igby Goes Down.” Culkin entered an existential crisis after the film and took a breaking from acting.

“[I] found myself at the age of 20 with a career I never chose, [and I] freaked out,” Culkin said. “I think everybody around that age has some sort of crisis. Usually, it’s like a straight-up ‘Oh, I don’t know what I want to do.’ Mine is, ‘I don’t know what I want to do with my life, yet here I am doing it.’”

Culkin took a break before eventually returning to acting, mostly because he wasn’t sure what else to do. “I was just sort of doing it in the meantime,” he says now. He took parts in movies like “Lymelife” and “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.” Did two episodes of “Fargo.” Performed multiple versions of a stage play he loved, Kenneth Lonergan’s “This Is Our Youth.” In 2014, he was still apprehensive. “I often think about getting out of this job, but I’m terrified that there’s nothing else,” he told The Daily Beast.

Since then, Culkin said, something clicked. He remembered coming home from work one day and thinking, “Oh, I think I’m actually enjoying this.”

“I think I know what I want to do now,” he said to himself. “I think I should do this.”

Now deep into his 30s, Culkin has established himself as a stronger and more serious actor than the “essentially retired” Macaulay ever did. And in Roman, Culkin has stumbled upon something as special as it is sinister. TV Guide described Roman as “the very definition of the hate-f―k,” but he’s probably more accurately categorized as sexual overcompensation personified. He tells his brother that his “face is drowning in pussy,” despite the fact that his various partners claim he rarely wants to have sex. He masturbates to his office view of New York City while a string of emails piles up behind him. (“It’s to gain some sort of control,” Culkin surmised.)

More interesting than his sex life, though, is Roman’s complex relationship with his manipulative and emotionally abusive father. While most people want to prove their competence to the people around them, “Roman, for the most part, doesn’t give a fuck about that,” Culkin said, adding, “If his girlfriend says, ‘No, but you did a great job,’ it’s like: ‘Fuck you. Don’t patronize me.’” What he wants, Culkin said, is his dad’s approval: “That’s the only person that can get him, the only person that can look at him and make him nervous.”

Logan does exactly that when Roman prepares to stand against the tycoon in the vote of no confidence. With his father staring down at him, Roman can only muster a meek “maybe” before he slouches into his chair like an admonished child and votes with his father. Thanks to Roman, Logan lives to fight another day atop his dynasty, while Kendall is forced, temporarily, to surrender.

Earlier, in Episode 2, Roman finds himself watching as the world repackages his family’s tragedy into viral content. He and his family are huddled together in a New York hospital, awaiting information about their famous father’s deteriorating health post-stroke, like characters in a Gothic novel, when Roman starts scrolling through Twitter. His sister, Shiv, asks what people are saying.

“Eh, rumors, you know,” Roman replies matter-of-factly. “Some of Twitter says he’s dead ― and also a good deal of rejoicing at our father’s potential demise.” He notices a short video of the “South Park” kids yelling, “Oh my God, we’ve killed Logan! We’re bastards!” and asks an employee to “find out who these fuckers are and report them or screen grab their shit.”

When Culkin’s own father was hospitalized after suffering a stroke in 2014, TMZ, The Daily Mail, Perez Hilton all repackaged the tragedy as well. The National Enquirer pounced, too, running a headline that read, “Macaulay Culkin Rejects Dying Dad: ‘Rot in Hell!’” But unlike Roman, Culkin wouldn’t have been sifting through Twitter. “That would never be something that I would do willingly,” he says of social media more generally. “Because already at a young age, there was a public perception of me.”

Francis Apesteguy via Getty Images

Kit Culkin, Macaulay Culkin, Kieran Culkin and Patricia Bretnup pose for a photo one month after the release of “Home Alone.” The father is now estranged from his children.

Like Roman, however, Culkin and his siblings have a less than ideal relationship with his father. By all accounts, they have been mostly if not entirely estranged from Kit ever since their mother won custody of the children in the 1990s. Patricia, the mother, claimed during the custody battle that Kit had been abusive, and Culkin’s brother Macaulay has continued to do so throughout his life.

“He was a bad man,” Macaulay Culkin told comedian Marc Maron earlier this year.

When I asked Kieran Culkin if he has spoken with his father recently, he answered with two no’s so quickly that I couldn’t bring myself to ask a follow-up question, only saying, for reasons still unbeknownst to me, “Fuck ’em.”

“Fuck ’em,” Culkin agreed. “I’ll go on record: Yeah, fuck ’em.”

After a lifetime of his last name being splattered across the front pages of tabloids, Culkin seemed ready to move on from the controversies that have dogged him since he was a child actor with moppy hair and oversized clothes. That’s not him anymore.

What we’re looking at instead is Kieran Culkin, age 35 ― no longer a Greg and fully embracing life as Roman.

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apinkyposhlizblog-blog · 6 years

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asistente virtual en español

Issues to Outsource to a Virtual Assistant

Working with a virtual assistant can shave hours from your workweek, but being aware of which tasks to delegate can be tough, regardless of whether you happen to be starting up or rising a company. Most virtual assistants are contract or freelance workers who do their jobs from home and target on administrative duties that are equivalent to people of an executive assistant or secretary. Internet websites that specialize in contract employees, such as odesk.com and elance.com, have thousands of listings for virtual assistants.

With all the quantity of virtual assistants are increasing, their knowledge now runs the gamut, making it much easier to discover someone that fits your organization, says Jaleh Bisharat, vice president of marketing and advertising at oDesk.com, and that is based mostly in Redwood City, Calif. In 2012, oDesk had 25,000 postings for virtual assistant jobs, compared to about two,500 in 2008.

Entrepreneurs can use virtual assistants for anything from creating vendor or customer support calls to sending out thank you cards to potential customers. It is critical to create believe in, just as you would which has a everlasting employee. "They turn into a staff member who just happens to function remotely," Bisharat says. Not absolutely sure in which to start out?

How do I develop into a virtual assistant? I worked being a virtual assistant and I have employed my very own virtual assistants also. Here are my suggestions to have started.

one. Decide in the event you will operate as an independent contractor or an worker Independent contractors are self-employed and run their particular enterprises. Around the other hand, some VAs want to perform for an established corporation that matches VAs and consumers.

Ways to Come to be A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT Up to date February 1, 2018

Several years ago I wanted to boost our family’s cash flow, but I didn’t desire a ordinary job. I had responsibilities I couldn’t promptly drop or hand off to another person so flexibility, producing my own hours and operating from home were essential. Also, I did not possess a massive budget for new products or elaborate training. I grew to become a virtual assistant. It turned out for being the ideal runway for a full-time online profession.

Ways to develop into a virtual assistant.

Disclosure: Some links under are my affiliate links, that means, at no further value to you, I could earn a commission if you ever click by and make a invest in. Go through my full disclosure policy right here.

What on earth is a virtual assistant? A virtual assistant (VA) offers providers to men and women, organizations or organizations, nevertheless they do the job online in place of going into an workplace.

It is a fantastic work-at-home chance and 1 with the most cost-effective ways of making money on the net since it’s just a matter of charging many others for a ability you presently have.

Currently being a VA (virtual assistant) is terrific because you simply charge for a talent you previously have. CLICK TO TWEET What do virtual assistants do? The net has made it feasible to accomplish a broad number of items remotely, or, “virtually.”

Lots of people hear “virtual assistance” and consider only of administrative tasks like typing and answering emails. But the selection of duties VAs do is far more broad.

There are actually numerous providers it is possible to deliver almost. Right here is really a partial record:

E mail management Calendar management Travel arrangement Writing Ghostwriting Graphic design and style / creation Web style / growth Researching Editing Tutoring Audio / video / photograph editing Consulting / counseling / coaching Bookkeeping Copywriting Promoting / Promotion Social media management Undertaking management Customer service Transcription Programming App improvement Data entry Visioneering (men and women send you images of their room/house/yard and you give recommendations for improvement) Anything else you'll be able to do not having obtaining to become from the same bodily spot as your client Just how much do virtual assistants make? It will depend on your skill level as well as the style of service you offer.

Tasks like data entry may fetch $10-$15 an hour, but if you have a specialized skill or expertise, you might make $100 bucks an hour or far more.

Most VAs set their own charges, which means you are in manage. This really is an additional cause many people are building the leap into virtual help.

How do I turn out to be a virtual assistant? I worked as being a virtual assistant and I've employed my personal virtual assistants too. Right here are my recommendations to have started.

one. Decide in case you will operate as an independent contractor or an worker Independent contractors are self-employed and run their very own corporations. Over the other hand, some VAs desire to operate for an established enterprise that matches VAs and clients.

Independent contractor vs. employee Not absolutely sure if you need to do the job for oneself or perhaps a provider? Right here are the positives and negatives for every:

Pros of being an independent contractor

You operate for on your own, which means you contact all of the shots. You set your personal pricing, you select your very own customers, you may be your own boss. Your get the job done hrs are set completely by you. Any dollars you make goes right for you, as opposed to being funneled by means of your employer who keeps a percentage. Cons of getting an independent contractor

Operating and remaining responsible for your very own company. Like creating any business, this solution requires a great deal of time, energy and hustle. The responsibility rests absolutely on your shoulders. Discovering your individual customers. This will be difficult, mainly with the beginning before you decide to have pleased clients who can recommend your providers. Right here while in the U.S., you're responsible to withhold and pay your personal cash flow taxes, like Social Protection, Medicare, and so forth. Pros of remaining an worker

You may be only liable for your deliver the results with the agreed upon instances. It’s an awesome circumstance for those who desire to clock in and clock out without having getting to worry in regards to the business otherwise. Customers are normally matched with you by your employer, or, present a platform wherever it is uncomplicated to connect with new consumers. No desire to find all your clientele oneself. You have a built-in assistance procedure. A lot of companies supply assets, resources, neighborhood and assistance for his or her VAs. Cons of currently being an worker

You should response to an employer. This might imply you may have tips to observe. You could possibly have less flexible hrs dependent for the customers your employer matches you with. Your spend is typically determined to suit your needs. You could favor currently being an independent contractor if:

You like networking and hustle. You are an entrepreneur at heart. You like obtaining total manage. You dislike being an worker. You really don't need quite a bit of income appropriate away (in the event it requires a even though to build up your client checklist). You may favor currently being an worker if:

You want getting able to clock in and clock out. You’d rather someone else obtain clients and tell you when and wherever to demonstrate up. You like clear boundaries so deliver the results does not spill above into other parts of your existence. You need income ideal away and really don't have or power to “pound the pavement” or establishing a home business. What about starting up at a VA corporation then moving out on my own? This is achievable, however it might be tricky. There are legal and ethical challenges to take into account.

Most VA corporations incorporate clauses inside their legal contracts prohibiting you from taking their clientele with you in the event you make a decision to depart. Such as, you might need to agree to not make contact with any of their clientele for a specified period of time. Put simply, when you work for a VA enterprise and are matched that has a client, you can’t depart that company and inspire your client to hire you on your own.

Nevertheless, for those who make a decision to depart a company and start your personal VA business as an independent contractor, and come across your very own clientele, this might be an option.

two. Obtain a web page That is necessary for independent contractors. Folks need to become able to uncover you, so a presence for the internet is critical. It gives you a additional specialized visual appeal, an opportunity to highlight a few of your competencies and an opportunity to describe your practice.

Use my step-by-step guidebook to setup an internet site, or possibly a blog site if you need to regularly include articles. (Note the publish title is “How to start a Blog” however the same measures function to start out a web site with this particular one smaller tweak).

Independent contractors: a must-have An employed VA: optional (but not a terrible concept in situation you ought to venture out on your own later)

Be beneficial When you interact on social media and network with other VAs, be really mindful to not come across as spammy. Mass emails or “cold” emails to people that really do not know you are seldom profitable.

I recognize the will need to produce an revenue, but consider the time to offer you beneficial knowledge initially. This might are available in the type of truly helpful content articles written on your blog site, or it might are available in the type of genuinely valuable (and respectful) tips to an individual you meet on-line.

In my situation, I casually made available some ideas to a good friend on Twitter and it turned out to be the begin of a functioning romance that lasted fairly a whereas. Wherever can I perform being a VA? If working as an independent contractor and acquiring your very own clientele isn't your thing, look at doing work to get a provider that matches VAs with clients. For some VAs, the assist in finding consumers is worth sharing the profits.

Suppliers to contemplate are Belay Remedies (formerly eaHelp) and Upwork. I’ve personally hired VAs from both. Belay can be a even more elite services with extremely thorough employing and matching processes. Upwork can be a more substantial platform and less difficult to join, but you will be competing with far more VAs for your similar jobs.

Some other suppliers to think about are Priority VA or Fancy Hands. I really do not have individual working experience with both, but have heard really good things about them.

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Items to Outsource to a Virtual Assistant

Employing a virtual assistant can shave hrs out of your workweek, but knowing which tasks to delegate may be tough, no matter if you're starting or growing a company. Most virtual assistants are contract or freelance workers who do their jobs from house and target on administrative duties that are related to individuals of an executive assistant or secretary. Web-sites that specialize in contract employees, such as odesk.com and elance.com, have 1000's of listings for virtual assistants.

Using the amount of virtual assistants are growing, their skills now runs the gamut, producing it simpler to seek out somebody who fits your organization, says Jaleh Bisharat, vice president of marketing at oDesk.com, which can be based in Redwood City, Calif. In 2012, oDesk had 25,000 postings for virtual assistant jobs, in contrast to about two,500 in 2008.

Entrepreneurs can use virtual assistants for almost everything from making vendor or customer service calls to sending out thank you cards to prospective clients. It really is critical to build believe in, just as you would which has a long lasting worker. "They become a crew member who just happens to deliver the results remotely," Bisharat says. Not certain exactly where to begin?

How do I develop into a virtual assistant? I worked as a virtual assistant and I've employed my very own virtual assistants as well. Right here are my suggestions to have commenced.

1. Come to a decision in the event you will operate as an independent contractor or an worker Independent contractors are self-employed and run their particular organizations. About the other hand, some VAs choose to do the job for an established corporation that matches VAs and clientele.

Tips on how to Turned out to be A VIRTUAL ASSISTANT Up to date February 1, 2018

Several years in the past I desired to boost our family’s earnings, but I did not desire a regular occupation. I had responsibilities I couldn’t immediately drop or hand off to another person so versatility, building my personal hrs and functioning from household have been crucial. Also, I did not possess a substantial spending budget for new equipment or elaborate coaching. I became a virtual assistant. It turned out to be the perfect runway for a full-time internet career.

Tips on how to develop into a virtual assistant.

Disclosure: Some links under are my affiliate backlinks, which means, at no additional value to you, I may possibly earn a commission for those who click by and produce a invest in. Read my complete disclosure policy right here.

Precisely what is a virtual assistant? A virtual assistant (VA) presents providers to men and women, organizations or organizations, but they get the job done on the internet in place of going into an office.

It’s an outstanding work-at-home chance and one particular in the most cost-effective methods of earning profits on-line for the reason that it’s merely a matter of charging other folks for any ability you previously have.

Currently being a VA (virtual assistant) is great simply because you just charge for a ability you already have. CLICK TO TWEET What do virtual assistants do? The world wide web has created it doable to carry out a broad variety of points remotely, or, “virtually.”

Lots of people hear “virtual assistance” and suppose only of administrative duties like typing and answering emails. However the choice of tasks VAs do is much more broad.

One can find many solutions you are able to provide pretty much. Here is a partial list:

E-mail management Calendar management Travel arrangement Writing Ghostwriting Graphic layout / creation Net style and design / advancement Studying Editing Tutoring Audio / video / photograph editing Consulting / counseling / coaching Bookkeeping Copywriting Advertising and marketing / Promotion Social media management Task management Customer support Transcription Programming App advancement Data entry Visioneering (men and women send you pictures of their room/house/yard and also you deliver strategies for improvement) Anything at all else you are able to do with out acquiring to get within the similar physical area as your consumer Simply how much do virtual assistants make? It relies on your ability level as well as the variety of support you give.

Tasks like information entry may well fetch $10-$15 an hour, but if you have a specialized skill or skills, you can make $100 bucks an hour or extra.

Most VAs set their own costs, so that you are in handle. That is one more explanation many people are creating the leap into virtual help.

How do I develop into a virtual assistant? I worked like a virtual assistant and I've employed my personal virtual assistants likewise. Here are my recommendations to have began.

1. Determine in case you will operate as an independent contractor or an employee Independent contractors are self-employed and run their particular organisations. About the other hand, some VAs choose to work for an established organization that matches VAs and consumers.

Independent contractor vs. employee Not confident no matter whether you want to do the job for your self or maybe a enterprise? Here are the benefits and drawbacks for every:

Pros of staying an independent contractor

You perform for yourself, so that you contact the many shots. You set your individual pricing, you choose your individual clients, you are your own personal boss. Your perform hours are set completely by you. Any cash you make goes right to you, in place of getting funneled through your employer who keeps a percentage. Cons of staying an independent contractor

Working and staying liable for your very own organization. Like making any enterprise, this solution takes a lot of time, energy and hustle. The responsibility rests totally in your shoulders. Choosing your very own clients. This will be hard, specially on the beginning before you have completely happy clientele who can endorse your services. Right here within the U.S., that you are accountable to withhold and pay your own personal earnings taxes, like Social Safety, Medicare, and so on. Pros of getting an worker

You might be only accountable for your operate with the agreed on occasions. It’s a terrific predicament for anyone who favor to clock in and clock out devoid of acquiring to be concerned in regards to the enterprise otherwise. Customers are normally matched with you by your employer, or, produce a platform where it’s straightforward to connect with new consumers. No have to have to search out all your clients yourself. You've got a built-in assistance strategy. Countless corporations produce assets, resources, local community and support for their VAs. Cons of being an worker

You need to solution to an employer. This may possibly suggest you may have pointers to comply with. Chances are you'll have less versatile hrs based within the clientele your employer matches you with. Your shell out is usually determined to suit your needs. You could possibly prefer currently being an independent contractor if:

You like networking and hustle. You’re an entrepreneur at heart. You like possessing complete control. You dislike being an employee. You do not require quite a bit of cash flow perfect away (while in the occasion it takes a when to build up your consumer record). You could possibly prefer remaining an worker if:

You prefer staying ready to clock in and clock out. You’d rather somebody else obtain clientele and inform you when and the place to show up. You like clear boundaries so deliver the results does not spill more than into other elements of your life. You may need cash flow appropriate away and don’t have or power to “pound the pavement” or developing a business. What about starting up at a VA enterprise then moving out on my personal? This is often possible, nonetheless it could be tough. There are legal and ethical troubles to think about.

Most VA businesses incorporate clauses within their legal contracts prohibiting you from taking their consumers with you if you ever come to a decision to leave. One example is, you can should agree to not get in touch with any of their customers for any specified time frame. Quite simply, if you ever operate for any VA corporation and are matched which has a client, you can’t leave that business and motivate your consumer to hire you by yourself.

Yet, in the event you decide to depart an organization and start your own VA company as an independent contractor, and discover your own personal customers, this may well be an alternative.

2. Obtain a web site This is often very important for independent contractors. Consumers need to get able to seek out you, so a presence to the internet is vital. It gives you a a lot more specialized appearance, a chance to highlight a few of your capabilities and a chance to clarify your course of action.

Use my step-by-step guidebook to setup a web site, or perhaps a blog if you want to often include articles or blog posts. (Note the submit title is “How to start a Blog” but the exact same actions work to begin a website with this particular 1 little tweak).

Independent contractors: a must-have An employed VA: optional (but not a awful idea in situation you need to venture out on your own later on)

Be valuable As you interact on social media and network with other VAs, be rather mindful not to come across as spammy. Mass emails or “cold” emails to people who do not know you will be seldom profitable.

I know the desire to produce an earnings, but take the time to give handy information and facts initial. This could can be found in the type of genuinely valuable articles or blog posts written on your blog, or it could can be found in the form of genuinely valuable (and respectful) guidance to someone you meet internet.

In my case, I casually presented some suggestions to a pal on Twitter and it turned out to become the start out of the working partnership that lasted pretty a whereas. Wherever can I deliver the results like a VA? If operating as an independent contractor and locating your own clients is not your point, look at operating for any organization that matches VAs with clients. For some VAs, the assistance in acquiring customers is worth sharing the income.

Corporations to think about are Belay Remedies (formerly eaHelp) and Upwork. I’ve personally hired VAs from each. Belay is often a extra elite service with really thorough employing and matching processes. Upwork is usually a greater platform and simpler to join, but you will be competing with much more VAs for the very same jobs.

Another suppliers to think about are Priority VA or Fancy Hands. I really do not have private knowledge with both, but have heard good factors about them.

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