Tal Ziv

I thought we were better than this.

I live in two very different worlds and my opinions are swayed by both. In one, the startup world, we believe that we get out what we put in. We believe that it is mostly a meritocracy (save for the old boys clubs). You will be washed out if you slack. We live for growth and speak in iterations.

In the second world, of steal and arms and bullet-background-papers, the mindset is different. Career paths are set – sure you can march slightly faster than the other guy, but not by too much. Work slightly less hard and you’ll get the same pension and medical benefits. Work significantly harder and the chances are that you will not get significantly more. Here we live for multiple concurrent government pensions and a way to work the absolute fewest hours for maximum pay.

These worlds are usually at odds, and occasionally difficult to reconcile. The startup/private world makes sense but, in comparison, lacks the strict formal system whose context makes the career military world make sense.

The case where official guidance is to do “less with less” – that is, no attempt to increase efficiency – is unacceptable, regardless of political pragmatism.

——

To set the stage; months ago we could not agree on how to spend the money we had, and the money we had not. Being responsible big boys, we told ourselves that we’d lock ourselves in this very room until we licked it. But we had places to go. And things to do. So we said, fine. We can leave. But we all must wear this ankle bracelet. If we do not return in time, the bracelet will cause a limp. Not to worry, we told ourselves, it will just be a  minor limp. The truth is, this is novel and we are neophytes, who knows how lame we will be.

Eventually, we forgot about the bracelet. It became unnoticeable, a chipped tooth your tongue became bored with.

Instead of returning to that very same room when the time elapsed, we nervously phoned each other about that bracelet. If it might be something bad, why did we agree to this lunacy? Silence on the line.

A vague threat is no threat at all, but we still fantasized about a mini ankle explosion. Or perhaps seeping white gas. When the time came, neither effect accompanied it, with the exception of the calls. Did you feel anything? No? Hmm. OK.

So the bracelet company returned to consider the lack of effects. They queried the effects department and were shocked with the answer. The effects department queried the sub-departments and reported back. Across the board effects were muted. The departments, apparently, are so comfortable that they can handle the prescribed pain with ease. Sure, a few desks were relocated away from the windows but no external effects would be transmitted. In fact, department heads were beaming with pride at how well they handled the pain.

The effects department fluttered with worry. They’d be out of a job if they could not affect effects so they hastily issued an all-department edict. Do not do your best, they proclaimed, do your worst. Make it hurt. Make it visible. Let there be lines!

The department heads confusedly saluted and made it happen. Processes were convoluted and productivity artificially contracted. Lines grew.

Through it all, I courageously thought we were better than theatrically faking injury like a football (soccer) star. I was somewhat shocked when the TSA ordered artificially longer lines. Compulsive and aggressive inefficiency is a clear case of (Fraud,) Waste (& Abuse). But, whatever, the TSA was always the epitome of inefficiency.

And then the military came whispering loudly. The effects are terrible, the commanders said, but we can manage the mission without interruption. Aghast, the generals ordered: No, do “less with less” (a direct quote). Make it painful. At the end of a day’s service, your troops will need to complain to their families. Complaints will grow and Horton will hear a Who from the growing din. Horton will return to that very room to remove the bracelet. After all, if we can do the same with less, then less will become the new norm, the generals said.

With the stage in complete focus I retracted and considered. Did these orders reach me directly from an Air Force general? Specifically, society is not publicly outraged yet, so you and I need to stoke it. It’s shocking to consider that our revered core values – those I memorized 16 years ago – were also sequestered and curtailed.

——

If you know me, you probably debated me on this topic and I thank you for it. The common objection is that the current federal worker efficiency is the status quo, regardless of how inefficient or efficient it is. Granted, but so what? Their potential efficiency (all else equal and barring long-term effects) is what’s important, and, specifically, how to reach that potential. Artificially handicapping efficiency for any reason, especially for political arm-bending, is an absurdity somewhat acceptable to society only by it’s extreme degree of absurdity.

Thanks to Daniel Horton and Jason Satran for commenting on early versions of this rant.

Business Insider was kind enough to pull out all the images from Bill Ackman’s awesome presentation yesterday at the Sohn conference, but they forced us to scroll through two football fields of slides.

Here’s the deck in an easier format:

1. Train is about 10 minutes late. Not bad. Freezing.
2. Got a seat! Good start!
3. Switch trains in Newark. Mass confusion with thousands of people. All terminal signs are broken. People not happy and lots of police.
4. Announcement: Train’s not coming. Sad people.
5. Announcement: Train’s coming. Happy people. More pushing.
6. Train’s here! But it’s full, sorry. Squish in side. Squish more! Most people don’t make it on. Zero seats but I have about 1/2 sq ft to my name. Success! 
7. Train’s moving, almost there! 
8. We’re stopped.
9. We’re stopped some more. 
10. Announcement: We’ll be here for awhile.
11. We’re stopped.
12. We’re stopped some more.
….
20. We’re stopped.
21. We’re moving slowly!
22. Made it to Penn Station!
23. Mad dash and push off the train. Wait, why are all the escalators flowing the wrong direction? We’re stuck down here.
24. Run to escalator. Push emergency stop button. Policeman raps  his baton on the window. Policeman runs, I run. We’re both running. He’s fat, and I got my Puma’s on.
25. I’m out! Free!
26. Resolve to work from home until all trains are working properly. 

If someone would have told me a week ago that we’d have to push our launch date by two weeks, I’d have thought it might be from plenty of reasons, such as a hard-won partner getting cold feet. Or a complete loss of our code, although my co-founder would likely choke at just slipping two weeks. I wouldn’t have thought the slippage might be from a silly low pressure system that should have been terrorizing blue haired ladies in Boca (and I’m an Air Force meteorologist).

If someone would have told me a year ago that I’d sell my house in Hawaii, move to NJ, and buy a moped, I’d have thought I must have gotten a divorce. I mean, NJ? A moped?

With the future omnisciently known, it’s damn hard to guess the course that brought you there. And in the roughest of courses it’s hard to be the trite water flowing through the brook. Some part of you is always smashing into a rock or flipping upside down. It’s turbulent and never calm in all places. But it all flows as one, smoothly.

My co-founder Mike and I set out nearly nine months ago on our own brook. Our goal was simple: to make it easier to find and research senior living options. We set out to make a new class of research tools and for the first time ever provide an unbiased view on different senior living communities. It might sound pedantic if you’ve never had to find care for your parent. You might expect there to be a Zagat-like service with expert reviews, or at the very least a TripAdvisor-like service with family reviews of these communities. We had the same incorrect expectations.

Our brook was rocky and turbulent, although in retrospect no more than any of yours. At times uncomfortably wide and at others equivalently narrow and fast. We hung on through plenty of internal rocks (read: f-ups), and our fair share of external ones, Hurricane Sandy taking the lox. Just two weeks ago our lead photographer was burgled and lost all her camera gear, and week of scheduled shoots. In September our mystery shopper had a death in the family. Our first NYC office didn’t believe in notification and decided to refinish the floors while we worked. Every day we’d come in and find our desk in a different place and caked with dust.

What seem like large boulders in front of you become nothing but a hump in the flow of the rearview. I’m typing this on my laptop, in the dark, on an air mattress, in my sister’s basement, with borrowed power from a Panera Bread an hour south of here. We’re sick of Wegman’s rotisserie chickens, waiting on gasoline lines, and smelling like gasoline. But all this will be a hump in the flow of the rearview in only 7-10 more days.

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I took my first digital picture in 1997 with a rented camera at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. And instantly I was hooked.

It was a Kodak DC120 touted as “a cheap megapixel digital camera. 1000x1000 pixels for under $1000.” (although it wasn’t a true megapixel camera since the sensor resolution was less than 1MP.) The very first picture:

Ever since then I’ve been snapping away with dozens of increasingly better cameras. I am the definition of an amateur photographer but I take lots of pictures. Lots.

Each picture on the DC120 was 50kB. Now I mostly use my iPhone 4 and a Nikon D5000, a Costco special, and file sizes are between 2MB - 6MB. Multiply that by lots of pictures over 15 years and I need lots of space to store it. The story of how I learned the importance of album back-ups the hard way follows — skip down to the table if you want to just see the Flickr alternatives.

By 2002 I had the foundation of a huge a family portfolio. I just moved to Hawaii and settled into a great house in Aiea Heights overlooking Pearl Harbor. It seemed like a nice neighborhood but within a week of the movers delivering my boxes of crap, they came back and stole it all. I didn’t care about much of it except for my camera, laptop, and PDA (yes I had one in 2002). This was pre-ultra-cheap external hard drives and all my photos were on my laptop. Bailey, the beagle, was still in quarantine but I think they could have just rubbed his ears for a moment and he would have acquiesced. After lots of cussing and incredulity towards the less-than-helpful HPD, I called every pawn store in town and found my laptop at one across town. The theif had to present his ID and a thumb print but HPD still didn’t prosecute. This was my first lesson in how things work on the aina.

The next day I signed up for an online photo sharing/storing site. I can’t even remember which one it was but I quickly switched to fotki. Back then, fotki looked more or else identically to how it looks today. But that was pre-web 2.0 and it was ok. It was cheap and fit the bill of unlimited storage. Over the years I added gigs and gigs of pictures. My parents and sister joined the party and added their own pictures and the pixels went forth multiplied.

Flickr wasn’t launched until 2004. After admiring their design and community I finally bit the switching-cost bullet in 2010. Fotki made it too easy to ftp in and download all original photos and folders intact. I uploaded to Flickr and we were set.

But my parents and sister hated flickr from the beginning.

They didn’t understand the difference between collections and galleries. They didn’t get how you can upload a photo to flickr and it not be in a set. It’s somewhere in the ether. My mom uploaded thousands of photos into the ether. My flickr ether is a mess. And periodically I re-explain the uploading process but it never sticks.

And flickr stagnated over the years as Yahoo sucked the life out of it.

So I’m ready for a change. Or so I thought. I researched all the alternatives I could find and compared them in the chart below. It’s a bit of an eyesore but the bottom line is that there still aren’t materially better alternative. Sure there are better ones, but there are no ideal choices. No one’s eating their cake here.

I analyzed the alternatives based on what I need for dual purpose of family sharing and the all-important off-site backup: 

• Folders/Sub-Folder: Flickr didn’t have “sub-folders” (called galleries) until years after they launched. I can’t have all 15 years worth of albums in the root level.
• Unlimited Space: I need lots of space.
• Export Ease: I’m fickle and want to be able to get my photos back when I want them. Flickr is terrible at this but I can’t blame them — it keeps all of us locked in.
• Videos: These are new over the last five years but not essential.
• Aesthetic: Shitty design sucks.
• Price: I’m a cheap skate.

Disclaimer: I did not sign-up for all these products so much of this analysis is from the outside in. Export ease was particularly hard to predict. It may be wrong — if you know better, just let me know and I can make a note.

I created this for my own decision tree but hope this helps you choose the appropriate service for your needs. I’m also curious to know if I missed any stellar service that I should consider — please do let me know.

We’ve been on the hunt for exceptional talent since even before launching Silver Living. We need highly technical engineers that are an awesome fit with the rest of the team. And we need kick-butt photographers to work remotely and who love to take photos in low-light. We’ve been very fortunate to have great interest for these positions and have seen lots of prospects.

Lots of prospects means lots of resumes, and they range from succinct and useful to just plain terrible. The objective of this post is more about what you should do rather than what not to do, but I still need to highlight some pitfalls. These might seem (painfully) obvious but they’re real-world examples.

1. Cropped PDFs - Never send a pdf with the edges cropped to where you cannot read the end-of-line text. Especially if you’re applying as a graphic designer.
2. Text bombs - Easy on the long-narratives. More show, less tell. TL; DR.
3. Readability - See example below. Arrows indicate text direction. Don’t expect reader to turn the monitor.

How companies hire is radically changing. The supply / demand balance on many skill sets is way off. Resumes just aren’t that useful for these positions. Most people prefer to see what someone’s done rather than read about it. Show us the designs, code, pictures, compositions, applications. Show me how you grew into your latest mindset. What pet projects do you have that relate to these skills — or, even better, what passion projects?

Today my good friend sent me a BI article detailing how useless the airport body scanners are. How much money’s been wasted on them. How much money will continue to be wasted on them. His note was “perfect for you.” Only it’s not.

Every time I read these stories it’s like a punch in the gut. In this case, a failed acquisitions program manned by some guy at DHS who thought this would be cool toy. Sure it involved more than that but how hard is it to do the cost-benefit on these things? Don’t they have napkins to scribble on? This might not constitute Fraud, Waste, and Abuse in the officialsense but it certainly is a huge waste in common sense.

Witnessing FW&A first hand is a common occurrence in the government. When I was in the Air Force we all had our funny FW&A stories which usually went like this:

• Remember when 20 flat-screen TVs showed up at our office and we didn’t even have enough wall space for them? Yea, I think there are still four new ones in the closet.
• We’re not allowed to have a conference but if we just call it a training session then the unit will pay for the coffees & snacks. We can’t pay for breakfast this way so we’ll just call it lunch, and then have two lunches. 
• Whoa, why did you buy $1000 worth of paper and pens? It will take us 5 years to use this all up. Answer: Oh, I had to burn the rest of our budget on something and I can use the p-card at Office Depot. I also ordered four printers. 
• Where’d you get that air-conditioned trailer? Answer: HQ bought it once we told them that they can use it when they visit us in the field. 

These are true stories. But they’re not necessarily against the rules. Multiply these by the entire federal government and you end up with stories like the full-body scanners. Or enterprise computer systems deployed in 2012 but based on Windows XP.

Units routinely place “unfunded requests,” like the 20 TVs, on the chance that at the end of the year there will be some money “left over” that must be spent. It goes to the unfunded list. Why not save it for next year? Terrible truth is that the unit cannot save the money, it flows back to the ether and when the powers that be allocate a new budget they see that you had leftover money — so they give you less next time. You’re penalized for saving money. (slight nuance: the TVs were paid for with Global War on Terror dollars. Give us 20 TVs and we’ll find Osama and the weapons of mass destruction — how can you deny that?)

I’d argue any day that the integrity level in the military is much higher than in the rest of the government. Sure we have lunatics and thieves and murderers, but at a lower rate than the general population. The failure is that most people don’t think of these stories as FW&A because they’re allowed by leadership and just so-damn-prevalent.

In some of the extreme instances (back to the airports) you get political meddling. Kip Hawley recently wrote a piece in the NYTimes in essence saying: I tried fixing it but I was powerless against the outside interests, including politicians. The head of the TSA couldn’t even stop his blue-shirted army from making us take our shoes off. 
The common argument I get is that any savings is just a drop in the bucket. It’s a ludicrous argument because the savings is measured in real dollars, not as a percentage of the total budget. But that leads to a bigger problem: what do you do with the savings? In the military there’s a concept of “the color of money”. Is it meant for O&M? For construction? For travel? Shift from one bucket to another and you’re on a short road to a brain damaging process. Save it for another year and you’re penalized on your next budget. No wonder the termCatch-22 caught on.

We’re structurally inefficient. At our core. The entire apparatus must be replaced to make any change. Long-term incentives (don’t think executive comp and Lehman Bros) for the decision makers. Encourage savings. Dictating arbitrary 10% budget cuts gets far less bang for the buck.

This is all common sense to anyone who’s worked in the private sector, but that’s not to say it’s non-existent. In the startup world you’re given more responsibility than you would be at a larger company. Buying equipment, services, sundries is not limited to the office administrator. I’ve seen misallocation of resources at startups, simply because their interests aren’t aligned. A hire who’s in it for the short term, coupled with immaturity, will quickly go astray. In the early days (typically read: years) all employees should be partners. Partners with aligned interest in the combined success. How we achieve partnership is up to each of us differently — it’s a bond between the team individually and the common goal.

Unit cohesiveness in the military is a common term but military cohesiveness is not. Government cohesiveness is not. Country cohesiveness is not. When you get to that level our individual desires outweigh the then-diluted common goal. And when that happens you get full-body scanners that aren’t actually effective.

I come from a technical background with experience in cleantech, M&A, and even the weather — but I’m not a social worker or gerontologist. Besides repeatedly chasing down my escaped beagle at an assisted living facility down the block, I hadn’t given much thought to senior care or senior housing. So it’s justified when people ask why I changed careers and am dedicating myself to it.

My Savta is in a “senior” community in Southern Florida, where all good Jews move once NY gets too cold (wasn’t it always this cold?). My other Nona had Alzheimer’s and eventually required 24/7 care by an unimaginably patient and giving Filipino caretaker. (Anecdotally, I’ve only heard fantastic stories about Filipino caregivers.) Unfortunately both my grandfathers died from heart attacks, and both at young ages. Women make up the vast majority of residents in nursing homes as most of their husbands pass away first.

The experiences with my grandparents was the genesis of my exploration about how it will be if/when my mother needs long-term care. My mother was really the first to introduce me to the industry several years ago as an interior designer (PVZ Design) specializing on “aging in place.” The more I dug, the more I realized what an immensehole is approaching. Everyone knows the demographic stories — we’re getting older (because of the baby boomer bump coupled with increased lifespan) and having less children. There are lots of pretty graphics and editorials on this topic but, so long as facts haven’t died, this is as factual and irrefutable as it gets.

The hole in our sights is that this mass of our population will require more care than is available today, and more than is projected to be available tomorrow. As with (almost) all other disciplines, it boils down to economics and the effect of those economics on people. A key research report out of the RAND Corporation concluded:

The growth in long-term care utilization we predict in this paper is quite substantial. The nursing home population is likely to grow by 10-25% more than current trends in disability would predict. This will have impacts on statewide Medicaid systems and the economy at large. Indeed, this might even be a rosy scenario, because we have not considered the response of long-term care prices. Another possibility is that the price of nursing home care will rise sharply and Medicaid eligibility will contract to limit growth in nursing home residence. In this case, the greatest costs will be borne not by state governments, but by sick and disabled individuals who may be unable to afford the high price of nursing home care. [emphasis added]

There are lots of great industries with aspects of altruism to dedicate yourself to. I’m still an extremely strong supporter of cleantech (and advise on the side). Then there’s the Facebook Revolution in Egypt and and Twitter Revolution in Iran. And who doesn’t love a veteran? But as un-vogue as it might seem to my friends, senior care is where I’m focused.

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