Tanuj Parikh

Let's be friends

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 19:43:54 -0400

GroupMe recently partnered with Balanced to power all the financial plumbing for our new Split feature. Building that partnership and working out the nitty gritty of that contract was a long and trying process. More than once we came to an impasse that looked like a deal-breaker; on one occasion I did in fact walk away.

Obviously, we ultimately got the deal done. Both because of, and to some degree, in spite of, what an extended and arduous negotiation it was, Jareau (Balanced’s co-founder) and I became friends. That’s been not only a personal boon, but a professional one as well.

During the negotiation, it was tremendously useful to have a good rapport with Jareau, especially when GroupMe’s Microsoft lawyers needed to play hard ball to protect our interests. I could let them take that tougher stance and then back channel with Jareau to find the middle ground. He was able to do the same from Balanced’s perspective.

After the partnership went live, we’ve switched from negotiating mode to account management. Having a good enough relationship to be comfortable calling each other, regardless of the hour, has been really critical to dealing with some issues that have come up since launch. Nothing crazy, but important deviations from the plan that needed to be addressed on both sides. We’ve been able to deal with these few situations quickly, honestly, and efficiently because we have a mutual respect and admiration for one another. Would things have been resolved if we had a strictly professional relationship? Probably. But it would have taken longer and been less pleasant. And probably conducted entirely over email.

You won’t become friends with everyone with whom you try to do a deal. But you should try. It makes things so much easier, regardless of whether a deal gets executed or not. BD is about building relationships, but it’s far more fun, rewarding, and productive to build friendships too.

Pretty excited about GroupMe 4.1, with two new features. Special...

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 14:10:00 -0500

Pretty excited about GroupMe 4.1, with two new features. Special thanks to Neil & Cam for originating the Split feature as a weekend hack and Jareau at Balanced for their support on the payments end.

groupme:

GroupMe 4.1

Just in time for our third straight year at SXSW, we’re introducing an awesome new version of our iPhone and Android apps with two great new features.

Buffering

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:54:08 -0500

Deals to use another company’s API usually require the most legal oversight and diligence, because you’re typically exposing your company and your users to another company’s terms of service, privacy policies, etc. — not to mention whatever potential liabilities are created by the new product you’re building.

One of the trickiest things to navigate in these deals is the balance between legal protection (contract clauses that may compromise the product) and product execution (building the best possible user experience). Being good at BD means placing yourself squarely in the middle of that tension, acting as a buffer between the product vision and the legal red tape.

After several months of negotiating an API deal for GroupMe, here’s what I’ve learned about the best way to buffer, in no particular order:

Be product oriented. Know what the vision for the final product your team wants to build is, inside and out. Stay involved throughout the design process, from initial wireframes to beta builds to the public release. Understanding how everything is supposed to work lets you evaluate how restrictions or requirements the API company’s lawyers (or your own) try to put on you could impact the final product. Better to catch any potential hiccups early in the development process. An added benefit is that with each contract revision or additional round of negotiating, you don’t need to run to (read: bother) your product team to see how the latest deal terms affect their work.

Don’t work in isolation. It’s inevitable that you’ll need to consult with your product team for certain things, so keep them in the loop, particularly for negotiations that are taking a while. If there are unavoidable legal clauses that affect the product, let them know as soon as possible. If the deal is getting delayed, tell them, so they can adjust development cycles and plan accordingly.

Pretend you have a J.D. Before sending a new draft of a contract or other legal agreement, particularly one that’s been redlined and has comments from the other company’s attorneys, to your lawyers, read it yourself. Try to understand all the legalese. You may not get it all right, but by presenting it to your lawyers with your own opinions/reactions, you not only gain their respect but you can frame the subsequent discussion. For instance, a change may be requested that your lawyers have no problem with from a pure legal perspective, but that negatively impacts your product. By getting smart about contracts and legal fine print, you can move negotiations to a close much quicker.

Push back. Don’t be afraid to push back against your own lawyers. Know what matters for the end product, and fight for it.

Good cop / bad cop. When asking for concessions from opposing counsel, find the right balance between making the ask yourself versus having your lawyers do it. It can help to frame it as a good cop / bad cop situation, with the lawyers being the hard asses and you using softer negotiating tactics in a backchannel.

Have a backup plan. Despite your best efforts, things may fall apart. Be sure that you, and your product team, have a backup plan. Other API’s may not be as elegant or do everything you want, but don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Do contingency work in parallel to negotiating the primary deal; don’t wait for it to fall apart. For BD that means making contact, queuing up legal effort, and evaluating terms. For product it means testing the API, talking to other developers, and resource planning. All that work may end up being redundant and ultimately unnecessary, but in the event you do need a fall back option, you’ll be glad you did.

"A goal without a plan is a wish."

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 12:08:14 -0500

“A goal without a plan is a wish.”

- (Herm Edwards, in the fantastic 30 for 30 documentary “Broke”)

I’ve been on vacation this past week, enjoying the quiet and comfort of my parents’ house. The plan was to spend time thinking about my goals for 2013, both personal and professional, and of course, devise corresponding plans.

But, as usually happens when I’m home and unplugged from the office, I’ve crossed very little off my to-do list, including the aforementioned goal setting. What I have done is completely decompress: read a few books, cleared through most of the saved articles in my Pocket, watched a lot of NBA, and played a ton with my sister’s new puppy.

And I think that’s incredibly essential to setting goals and making plans. You need clarity of mind and spirit to truly understand what goals you want to achieve. Only after really removing yourself from the day-to-day minutiae of life can you ask yourself the tough questions about what you want to achieve, and why - not to mention answer them with the necessary specificity to make realistic, actionable plans.

If a goal without a plan is a wish, then setting a goal without clarity of purpose is dreaming - somewhat real, somewhat not, and likely something you’ll forget.

Similar discipline is required when setting partnership and strategic goals. It’s easy to get caught up in metrics that you haven’t really thought through, or set goals at arbitrary levels (e.g., we need 5 partners live 3 months from now). Take the time to step back and unplug every now and then; recalibrate and reset your outlook on everything about your business. Then set some goals, make some plans, and get back to work.

Experiences Partner Program launches

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 11:13:58 -0500

Experiences Partner Program launches:

Really, really excited to announce our flagship partners for GroupMe Experiences. This is a big step for us in terms of scale and giving our customers even more awesome things to do with their friends.

Couldn’t be prouder of the team here that worked on this, from BD to product to marketing. And special thanks to Norm at Excursionist, David at Zozi, and Adam & Harris at Underground Eats for being fantastic partners.

experiences:

More Fun for Groups as we collaborate with Excursionist, Underground Eats, and Zozi

Two weeks ago we were excited to introduce Experiences by GroupMe — a new way to help groups of friends get together better in the real world. With Experiences, you can discover, plan, and collaboratively pay…

The Experiences Blog: Experiences by GroupMe Launches Today!

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 14:37:01 -0400

The Experiences Blog: Experiences by GroupMe Launches Today!:

experiences:

Experiences is the easiest way to do something awesome with your friends. We help you discover, plan, and pay for the amazing experiences you’ll always remember.

This past July, we were excited to introduce the private Beta version of something we’ve been working on all year:

BOOM.

Facebook on mobile: long road ahead

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 14:01:36 -0400

The native Facebook app released last month deserves all of the praise it’s gotten. Functionally, it’s worlds better than the company’s previous efforts in mobile (read: it’s actually usable). Now that the product is up to snuff - though there’s still certainly remove for improvement - the calls for Zuckerberg & Co to better monetize mobile will be even louder. (See: Barron’s declaring the FB stock worth only $15, partly because of their slow and underwhelming ability to monetize an increasingly mobile userbase.)

Facebook claims its new mobile ad units, Sponsored Stories, are doing well. But I think they’ve still got a long way to go. For the past several weeks, I see barely any Sponsored Stories in my mobile News Feed. And when I do, I either see the same pages repeatedly (Amazon, more often than not), or I see ads for pages I would never, ever like. For example, some random restaurant in NYC.

Together, these points speak to an inventory problem; namely, it seems Facebook doesn’t have that many buyers for its shiny new mobile ad product. That will change over time though, and it’s something I’m sure their ad sales team is already aggressively working on correcting.

A bigger issue is the technology one, particularly the algorithms that dictate what content, including ads, that users see on Facebook mobile. For a long time now, those algorithms have been different than those on the web. I see different content from different friends on web versus mobile. And almost always - for me, at least - the content I see on mobile is worse. Too often my mobile News Feed is cluttered with updates from “friends” I haven’t interacted with in years. For example:

I knew Siddhant six years ago, my sophomore year of college. After that he moved back to India and we’ve had negligible interaction on Facebook since (wall posts, photos, pokes, whatever), let alone even spoken. Similar situation with Kara. Yet their content is taking up valuable screen real estate on my phone. It’s mucking up the basic user experience of Facebook, which runs the risk of driving users away.

Perhaps even more crucially (at least as the markets are concerned) is that this algorithm problem extends to Sponsored Stories as well:

While whatever Facebook knows about me conceivably does give a good indication that I’d be a probable candidate to “like” Samsung or Amazon on the platform, showing me that Krupali & Anneliese liked those pages does not in any way incentivize that behavior. Frankly, I can’t even remember who Krupali is and I’ve maybe had 30 total minutes of 1-on-1 interaction with Anneliese in my life.

Facebook’s whole pitch to brands is that their ad units are more powerful because of the social context around them. But if that context proves to be hollow, users won’t click. And when users don’t click, advertisers stop spending money.

This is an engineering problem, one that I imagine Facebook will fix over time. The question is how much time, and whether advertisers will have the patience to wait.

Timing is everything

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 17:34:07 -0400

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about timing, specifically how doing things (e.g., executing a partnership) as quickly as possible isn’t always best, despite the highly en vogue “move fast & break things” startup mentality.

As a general rule of thumb, I try to take action on everything that comes across my desk within 24-48 hours. That could be following up after a call/meeting, responding to an email, addressing a social media mention, whatever. I don’t always meet this goal, but I strive toward it. (In fact it’s one of the things Jared holds me accountable to as part of Skype/Microsoft’s official performance reviews.) Prompt responsiveness is crucial to building good rapport. It’s also tremendously helpful in maintaining momentum during deal-making, which often stagnates without continual touch points to move things forward.

But I’m increasingly learning that there are times it’s advantageous to be a bit more deliberate, particularly when communicating with a potential partner. If played correctly, slowing the pace of response has upside. Not appearing too eager. Posturing for better terms. Buying time to think through options or gain (more) leverage. Using the silence to gauge how interested the other party truly is.

Knowing when to employ which tactic is something I’m still trying to figure out, but it’s clearly something decided on a case-by-case basis. A few important considerations:

1. Overall pipeline. Where does the partner/deal in question fit in the larger context of everything you’re doing? Do you need this first to open other opportunities (i.e., be the first domino to fall)? Or are you better served holding this for later because it has a lower (or different) value than more immediate priorities?

2. Product announcements. Are the partners part of a product launch or subsequent to it? What’s the story you want to craft to the press & general public? Will the partnership announcement be lost in the buzz around the new product or do those narratives reinforce each other?

3. Multiple partners. If you’re trying to launch with several partners at once, you’ll likely face a chicken-and-egg problem: partners won’t commit without knowing who the other confirmed partners are. It’s a delicate balancing act moving each individual relationship forward at the same pace. You want to get them all to a point you feel confident the deal will close before doing the big unveil, working through all the other issues first. Another wrinkle is if you engaged some parties before others, meaning you’ve got to move them all along at different speeds so that everything is ready at the desired date

Really excited to welcome Nike as a partner.

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 17:29:01 -0400

Really excited to welcome Nike as a partner.

So true; think about this all the time

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 17:26:39 -0400

So true; think about this all the time:

alexstechthoughts:

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received about doing product partnerships came from David Honig, of Vision Ventures.

At the time, I was working at Aviary and focused on third-party integrations for the web and mobile editor. David told me that while it is great to close a deal…

Reconnecting

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 11:12:09 -0400

So-called smart address book apps, like Brewster (or Sensobi, a GroupMe acquisition, before them), try to make how you communicate with your contacts as efficient as possible. A critical feature, for me at least, is an automatic notification to contact someone with whom I haven’t communicated in a while. It’s something I’ve been doing manually for my personal network for years, with a series of lists & spreadsheets that invariably become useless when I stop updating them.

It’s really important to do the same in BD. Often the first few times you talk to a potential partner, nothing comes of it. Or you meet someone with whom there’s no obvious business relationship. But these things are so fluid that reconnecting 3, 6, 12 months down the line may yield something awesome.

For instance, over a year ago, Steve & I had some preliminary discussions with Kristina Simmons, lululemon’s expert on emerging digital products. She’s incredibly plugged in and aware of the latest consumer internet trends / apps / products. We pitched her on a partnership, but couldn’t get anything to stick. There was interest on both sides, but no obvious opportunities.

Fast forward a few months to SXSW 2012… Figuring Kristina would be in Austin, I shot her a note to reconnect, inviting her to swing by the GroupMe Grill. We hadn’t spoken in months. And while we actually weren’t able to meet up at South By, it did restart a dialogue that led to this:

GroupMe’s API is integrated into lululemon’s latest mobile apps, for their Sea Wheeze half marathon in Vancouver and an internal employees-only leadership conference. We’re incredibly excited to work with lululemon, and we’re talking to Kristina about a bunch of other cool ideas.

Just because a first (or second, or third) meeting doesn’t result in anything doesn’t mean it won’t in the future. Stay in touch with everyone, develop relationships - good things will happen.

Bloomberg's long con

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 19:21:07 -0400

Before working at GroupMe & L2, I was at the NYC Economic Development Corporation. Most of NYCEDC’s work is conducted via real estate development, but I was on the small team focused on the City’s “innovation economy,” specifically how to make New York a better place for startups. Across all sectors, not just consumer web, although that’s what gets the most media attention.

At the time, and even more so now, I think the biggest benefit of all of the City’s initiatives (financing incubators & coworking spaces like General Assembly, seeding an angel fund at FirstMark, hosting business plan competitions, etc.) is the massive signaling effect it’s created. Individually, each initiative may not actually create new jobs on a scale that’s meaningful or help launch the next Facebook…but in aggregate, they garner continued media coverage of New York’s tech ecosystem. It’s basically a unified marketing campaign targeted at every aspiring entrepreneur in the world, screaming “HEY LOOK AT US. COME HERE, NOT THE VALLEY.”

Arguably the splashiest of these initiatives is the engineering campus on Roosevelt Island. It was no secret that Bloomberg wanted Stanford, the most marquee name in the business - and that fits perfectly with the idea that, if nothing else, all of this City effort is about the message it sends. Having “settled” for Cornell, Bloomberg then poured more money into tech/engineering schools at NYU and the just-announced data institute at Columbia.

Bloomberg (and his expert staff) are spending more and more money, just to send a message. Yes, a lot of tangible good will likely come out of these schools, but not for a while. He’s playing the long game, but with very immediate short-term wins.

What will be really fascinating is to look back in 10/20/30 years and actually quantify an ROI .

Find your champion

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 19:03:08 -0400

Navigating the layers of middle managers and faux-decision makers at large organizations can be incredibly frustrating, but it’s often an unavoidable part of forging high profile partnerships. Success hinges on identifying which of the people sitting across the table will be your champion: the person who understands your product, believes in your vision, and is excited about what you can offer.

It’s critical to cultivate that relationship, because that person will be invaluable. She has insight into internal politics, can identify the right decision-makers, and can deliver your pitch outside of scheduled meetings.

Treat it like a true relationship though, meaning that you’ve got to give something to get something. Do everything to empower your champion to succeed. Most of the times a person will be your champion because it aligns with her personal incentives (more often than not, it’s as simple as her wanting to look good at work by finding the next cool new thing). Understand those incentives and do everything in your power to help.

GroupMe Blog: Get Together Better

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 10:02:37 -0400

GroupMe Blog: Get Together Better:

groupme:

Experiences is the easiest way to do something awesome with your friends.

We help you discover, plan, and pay for amazing experiences you’ll never forget.

At GroupMe, we’ve always been motivated by our mission to help groups of people communicate and get together better. We’ve loved…

Know your target

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 20:49:00 -0400

Every few weeks I get an unsolicited inbound inquiry from a sales rep at a mobile ad network asking if GroupMe would be interested in working with them.

But none of GroupMe’s clients serve ads. Never have.

It would take a few minutes of work for the sales rep to know that. But the standard compensation structure for a sales guy doesn’t incent finesse. It’s a numbers game, so a few minutes spent tailoring a cold email is a few minutes lost.

Business development is different. Cultivating a partnership - a unique mutually beneficial relationship - requires an intimate understanding of the other party. Steve & I spend countless doing our research before making any contact with a prospective partner, regardless of it they’re a big company like MTV or a scrappy startup. A lot of our effort is guided by the principles I wrote about in my last post. We live and breathe their product so that it’s as familiar to us as GroupMe is. We read everything and anything we can to understand the company’s mission, culture, history, goals, and strategy. We talk to everyone we can.

Doing that gives us the best chance of pitching the right partnership from the start, and if that’s off the mark, of adapting on the fly.

You can never have enough information.

the busy trap

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 20:33:18 -0400

the busy trap:

charlesbirnbaum:

so much great stuff in this OpEd from Tim Kreider today, but this was my favorite excerpt:

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.

You should be very happy when you’re doing nothing, or you’re not really happy.

"I'm a people person"

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 19:24:12 -0400

When I’m asked what exactly doing business development at startup entails, I often think of that scene from Office Space in which the Bobs try to figure out exactly what everyone does. And then that one middle manager freaks out with his “I’m a people person!” rant.

BD at a startup is a lot of different tasks, functions and skill sets rolled into one, and it varies by stage of company, by sector, and most importantly by what your product actually is. But it does often come down to being a “people person.”

For instance, at a consumer internet company like GroupMe, one of the most critical aspects of doing BD is working with brands. I mean brands in the most broad sense of the term, from retail brands like Nike, entertainment brands like MTV, sports brands like Manchester United, and everything in between. Brands are important because they give your company validation, users, and eventually, money.

Think of your role in working with a brand as being an “external” product manager. That is, your job is to liase between GroupMe’s product - both current and what you know is coming down the roadmap - and a brand’s needs. When talking to a brand, you’re looking to know everything about their goals, plans, strategy, and constraints. Only when you understand all of that can you map their objectives to your product.

And you can only do that if you have a really good sense of product. You don’t necessarily need to know how to code (though that doesn’t hurt), but you do need to know everything your product is and is not capable of doing, so that you can creatively brainstorm with the brand rep. And if your product can’t do what they need or want, then it’s up to you to assess if the potential opportunity of partnering with that brand is worth investing engineering work to get something new built.

Process

Sun, 17 Jun 2012 17:06:00 -0400

When I meet new people who also work in tech, the conversation often starts like this:

Them: So where do you work?

Me: GroupMe

Them: How’s it been being part of Skype / Microsoft?

A perfectly valid question. Last August, our 19-person startup became a part of Skype, a much larger company with a much longer history. In and of itself, a pretty big change that was sure to present a unique set of challenges (and opportunities). But barely two months later, Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype closed, and we were officially Microsoft employees.

90,000 full time employees.

Another 90,000 contract workers, consultants, vendors, and other contingent staff.

35+ years of history, culture, and process.

Lots of process.

Often the biggest fear surrounding an acquisition is that the acquiring company will somehow pervert the acquired in some fashion: product, culture, or both. And often that fear boils down to a fear of process. It’s a necessary evil as a company gets bigger and older, but acquisitions often “fail” because process can stifle innovation, drain resources, and distract teams. Recent exposes on Yahoo’s strike out with Flickr and HP’s debacle with Palm only belabor the point. It’s why so many Instagram users were so upset when Facebook bought it. They were scared their favorite app was about to be ruined. (Jury’s still out on that.)

GroupMe has been fortunate to largely escape the downfalls associated with being aquired by a larger company, or in our case, two larger companies. Sure, we have to use Outlook instead of Google Apps and filing expenses takes a bit longer, but those are relatively minor nuisances.

That everything has gone well so far is partly due to our geographic isolation – we still operate independently in New York – but more a testament to great management. Both our bosses at Skype, and Steve & Jared, do a really great job of shielding the team from unnecessary process. We’ve got our product roadmap and our engineers are given the runway and the support to pursue it, with minimal interference. The same can be said for business development efforts. In every way that counts, we still believe ourselves to be a startup and operate that way.

That said, it’s inevitable that we will run into stumbling blocks. Instances when, were we truly still a startup, we would move faster. For the past few months, I’ve been dealing with exactly such a situation. Long story short, I’ve been trying to get approvals for agreements with external service providers that GroupMe needs to test some new product ideas we’re playing around with. Not the sexiest task, and not business development per se. But much of what I learned navigating the Skype/Microsoft corporate behemoth from London to Redmond and back can be applied to BD partnership building, or of course anyone who finds themselves suddenly part of a much larger organization:

1. Start early. Don’t underestimate how long it will take to get approval from all the required parties. Cutting it too close will negatively impact launch targets and development cycles, and the longer you’re delayed, the faster team morale will fall.

2. Over communicate. Not surprisingly, whomever you’re dealing with has other things on their plate and they’re often not going to care about your needs, at least not as urgently as you’d prefer. You’ll find yourself explaining the same thing – who you are, what you need, why you need it, what other options you’ve already explored – over and over again. It’s annoying and tedious, but it has to be done. Better to repeat yourself early on than lose time later.

3. Focus on the key decision-makers. Don’t be surprised if every time an email regarding your approval request is sent, more and more people are added to the cc line. It was pretty amusing to see an email thread that started with just me and a single compliance rep in Redmond balloon to over 20 recipients. As more people and departments are looped in, be sure to have a running list of who actually holds the power and who doesn’t. Know who you need approval from, and in what sequence.

4. Anticipate, and understand, concerns. Early on, you need to sit down and identify every possible pain point and potential risk associated with what you’re asking for. Think like a lawyer. Be paranoid. For each possible issue, prepare a solution and mitigating response. Even if it’s not the right one, thinking about it early will pay dividends later. Critical to devising solutions is understanding the other party’s reason for being concerned. Try to empathize with why certain processes and protocols are in place. Take a step back and understand that yes, for a 90,000-person company, that seemingly ridiculous extra step actually makes a ton of sense. Then scope it down to your level and figure out how to make it work within your constraints.

5. Respect resources. You can’t get things done alone. You’ll need the help of lawyers, finance guys, compliance reps, risk auditors, and more. Be cognizant of their schedules and workload, doing everything you can to make their lives easier when it comes to getting your specific project approved. Offer to do anything and everything you can to assist, and then actually follow through. It’s more work for you, but you’d rather have ownership over as many of the tasks as possible.

6. Queue it up. Related to #3, know exactly what steps need to be completed and in what order. Many times you’ll be able to pursue several things at once, laying the groundwork for step D while taking care of step A for instance. This is crucial to avoiding the small 1-2 day delays that can creep into a project from step to step.

7. Save your trump card. More likely that not, you may be initially frustrated in your first attempt to get everything approved. If you blow your trump card – in our case, asking Tony Bates, president of the Skype division at Microsoft, to intervene – too early, you may regret not having it later. You also don’t want to be the guy that steps out of the chain of command on a whim. Try to find a solution yourself, within established channels, before calling in the cavalry.

If none of the above help you get approval from your corporate bosses, then you can always go rogue: just do what you need to do, and ask for forgiveness later.

323 days

Wed, 23 May 2012 18:24:22 -0400

My first day at GroupMe was July 5, 2011. It’s been almost a year, and it’s been everything I hoped for when I joined. It’s also been incredibly eventful. Seven weeks after I joined we were acquired by Skype. We’ve launched several new versions of the product. I slanged ‘chos at my first SXSW. I got my first taste of telecom negotiations at Mobile World Congress.

Over the past 323 days, I’ve been fortunate to work with a tremendously talented team. I’ve learned a lot. But I still have a lot more to learn, many more people to meet, much to accomplish (and miles to go before I sleep). My ambition for this blog is that it serve as a collection of coherent thoughts. If anyone else finds it useful, great.

I’ve tried to maintain a blog several times in the past but never succeeded. Here’s to trying again.