Before the month is out, I just want to share a few things that gave me life as of late.
The Last Black Man In San Francisco
This movie was stunningly beautiful. When I saw the trailer I thought it was going to be sort of the same thing as Barry Jenkins’ Medicine for Melancholy but it was more like Atlanta if Atlanta was replaced by San Francisco. It was eerie but exciting to see streets I walk so very often these days through the eyes of “natives”. Spoiler alert: It’s not just about San Francisco đ
Tiny Desk Concerts: Lizzo and Jeremy Dutcher
Two of my faves recently had TDCs. So queer, so visually engaging, such music to my ears. What is it about that damn tiny desk that conjurs such sweet magic?
Me! on No Manifestos Podcast
I had a really fantastic conversation with my old coworker Stuart Sierra about tech and activism and other things for his new podcast No Manifestos. I am super pleased with how it turned out! Please do listen.
A few years ago when I was at Clubhouse I blogged about our process of becoming a geographically distributed team. In that case, the first stumblings towards global domination were not made to acquire talent but rather in an attempt to retain talent vital to our team (talent = people we really loved working with and didn’t wanna lose!). In that article, I outlined some of the ways we tried to bridge the gap and some of the things that were still just tough.
Since moving to Nylas and serving on the top-notch leadership team here, I’ve been even more privy to some of the business-side challenges of having a team where people are working from all over the place. SO I thought I’d pull together a quick blogpost of my learnings.
Things to Consider Before Opening Up Satellite Offices or Having Remote Teammates
People In Other Places Are Often In Other Timezones Too
I know it sounds obvious, but it needs to be stated. If you employ someone somewhere else, their day may overlap with yours a lot, a little, or not at all. You need to think about how that’s going to affect everyone’s ability to get things done. If your SF-based team is making most of your decisions synchronously in meetings or Slack, how will that affect your support folks in Berlin, your UX designer in Medellin, or your developer in New Zealand? Will they have to work odd hours just to keep up with HQ or can you start relying more on async tools?
When working across large distances across the globe, it is important to establish a baseline in every area for when they should be online and working and when they should stop and go live their lives. While you might sometimes need a teammate to work before or after their formal working hours, it is useful to know, clearly define in the calendar, and respect those agreed-upon working hours.
If you’re going to be working across significant time differences, I recommend trying to move meetings to times that work better for people and leaning more heavily on tools like Clubhouse and email that allow people to communicate on a more humane timeline.
Flights and Hotels Are Expensive
Cohesion across teams does require some amount of time spent together in fleshspace. Getting people together often means flights, hotels, and expensed meals. Just make sure you have the money for this — and that you earmark it especially for those purposes.
A/V Is An Investment…Good A/V Even More So
I am of the opinion that videochat software is painfully immature and being relied on too heavily for important communication. I use videochat every single working day and it is very much in the “can you hear me now?” phase. This is unfortunate because around the world in so many contexts people rely on it to make crucial decisions (read how Skype Trial has tragically become the norm for US immigration court).
Despite videoconferencing’s weakness as a replacement for “the real thing”, it is what we got. So doubling down to make it work is important. Headphones, good mics, fast wifi, and good webcams can cut down the distance between co-workers and enable you to have vital conversations with less muffle, crackle, and static.
When these all fail you — as they inevitably will — try to keep your teammate’s phone number nearby and just call them on the phone. I’ve had so many hours wasted fighting with videochat. Don’t let that be you and your team.
Employing People In Other States and Countries Can Be Costly and Time-Consuming
Different states and countries have different employment regimes. If you intend to employ people there, you will need to be in compliance with those requirements. HR companies like Gusto can likely help you with red tape, but it will still require some time and money to make sure you are following the rules of (and engaging the insurance market of!) the state or country where your fantastic new potential teammate lives.
Benefits Can Be Lopsided
If your company offers special perks to people in the office, you’ll need to carefully consider which of those you can/want to extend to people working from home or a satellite office. Things like free lunches and free office massages or whatever are often there to entice people to come in to the office and stay there. They tend not to be as feasible to make available to people who are working from home.
It is important to think about offering a benefits regime that doesn’t cause lopsidedness or ill-will when your HQ folks and your remote folks compare their cards.
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None of this is intended to discourage you from doing what you need to do to attract and retain great people for your company. The last 10 years of my career have been spent working in organizations and teams that span state and national borders, and I’ve rarely had to rule someone out because of their location.
Remote workers do work; geographically-distributed teams can and do work—even on a small scale. They just work best when you go in with your eyes open to the challenges.
âExperience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.â
And it is in that spirit that I lend another perspective, voice, and beating heart in the hope of unearthing some more truth around payment technology.
While it may seem like we in the tech world donât share much with a 19th century poet, I’d like to tell you a story.
In 1843, Edgar Allan Poeâs story The Gold Bug was published, which ended being the most popular and lucrative work he released during his lifetime.
Most of you have likely never heard of it. Youâre probably familiar with The Raven or The Tell Tale Heart, but probably not The Gold Bug.
However, it was this story that won him a whopping $100 at the time ($100 being the equivalent of a little over $3000 today), which was the total winnings from a short story contest held by The Dollar Paper, a Philadelphia-based publication of the day.
Edgar Allan Poe was actually was one of the first American authors to actually attempt to make a living purely through writing and as the headline of this blogpost indicates, he wasnât very good at it.
Unfortunately, Poe was the son of two actors. His father abandoned the family not long after Poe was born and his mother tragically died when he was just about a year old. An orphan, he was taken in by a wealthy merchant one John Allan who had young Edgar Poe baptized Edgar Allan Poe.
While a student at the University of Virginia, Poe repeatedly gambled away money meant for tuition and school supplies and eventually dropped out. This lead to him becoming estranged from his foster father Mr. Allan. Additional quarrels with Allan â who was rich and extremely adulterousâ lead Poe to be disowned by Allan and excluded from the will.
So no trust fund. No parents or foster parents to fall back on. Poe had just a pen, a vivid imagination, and dogged persistence.
So The Tell Tale Heart was published before The Gold Bug in January of 1943 and Poe was reportedly paid $10 for it.
His poem The Raven published in 1845 came on the heels of The Gold Bugâs success. However Poe was paid only $9 for it.
It was The Gold-Bug that drew standing room-only crowds to Poeâs lectures and  gained him fans across the globe in places as France, Russia, and Japan.
In fact , he was actually paid twice for the story. First $52 by Grahamâs Magazine a periodical for which he served as an editor but then he heard about the Dollar Paperâs contest and withdrew the piece from Grahamâs â notably never returning that initial $52 to Mr. Graham, mind you.
I donât begrudge you if youâve never heard of The Gold Bug. To be honest, Iâd never heard of it either before I sat down to write this talk. Having read it, I can’t necessarily recommend as it is to— put it bluntly–kinda racist. Without excusing racism, I do think the kernel of this story and Poeâs story more generally is useful in illustrating a central point I’d like to make.
THE STORY
In The Gold-Bug, an unnamed narrator travels to meet with an old friend, one William Legrand, who lives on an island near Charleston, South Carolina. Legrand is sort of an eccentric prodigal son type who is full of endless fanciful sort of get rich quick schemes.
So when our narrator arrives, LeGrand and his companion, a freed yet still in servitude black man called Jupiter explain, that while wandering through the woods they came across a live beetle that they believe was somehow made of solid gold.
Our narrator listens politely to the story and then slowly heads back home to Charleston never actually laying eyes on this gold bug since Legrand had curiously lent it out to a friend.
A month later Jupiter comes to the door of our narrator and beckons him to return to the island. LeGrand who is now sweatier and wild eyed than ever informs him that as it turns out on this excursion where theyâd come across the bug they also come across a scrap of paper connected to Spanish treasure hidden by one long dead pirate Captain Kidd. With that paper, LeGrand had been able to decipher the location back out in the woods where they’d be able to get their hands on the loot.
A month later Jupiter comes to the door of our narrator and beckons him to return to the island. LeGrand who is now sweatier and wild eyed than ever informs him that as it turns out on this excursion where theyâd come across the bug they also come across a scrap of paper connected to Spanish treasure hidden by one long dead pirate called Captain Kidd.
With that paper, LeGrand had been able to decipher the location back out in the woods where they’d be able to get their hands on the loot.
LeGrand says to our narrator
âThis bug is to make my fortune to reinstate me in my family possessions. Is it any wonder, then, that I prize it? Since Fortune has thought fit to bestow it upon me, I have only to use it properly and I shall arrive at the gold of which it is the index. â
After some cajoling LeGrand convinces Jupiter and our narrator to head back out into the woods to a particular tree. From there the instructions are very specific, they have to tie the gold bug to a string, climb up the tree, dangle the gold bug on a string through first the right eye lobe then the left lobe of a skull nailed to a branch at the top of the tree. Then Jupiter â who is doing all the work here â is to drop the bug and X marks the spot where they have to dig.
The narrator at this point relates a certain amount of doubt to us saying something we in the startup field likely all can relate to:
âUpon the whole, I was sadly vexed and puzzled, but, at length, I concluded to make a virtue of necessity –to dig with a good will, and thus the sooner to convince the visionary, by ocular demonstration, of the fallacy of the opinions he entertained.â
So after quite a bit of digging and shouting and napping and more digging they actually finally obtain the coveted treasure. When they’ve dragged it back to the shack, LeGrand explains to Jupiter and our dear narrator that he hadn’t been crazy after all that month. Instead it turns out he’d been wound up in an elaborate cypher which required quite a bit of code cracking and Sherlock Holmes style detective work.
In the end, Jupiter and our narrator are fascinated, and from what I could tell highly relieved that their friend had finally gotten he was looking for and would hopefully stop dragging them into the woods at night.
Now LeGrand with his righteous indignation about being due his fortune in life is surely just a thinly veiled version of Poe. And in some ways, Poe is himself not so different from us in the startup field.
Much like Poe, founders have a vision and some positive indicators from the market and people seem enthusiastic about what they are doing. But how do they get the fortune they believe is their due?
In Poeâs day he wrote on spec and the hope that he might win a contest or a small contract that he could go collect on.These days, tech founders throw together a pitch deck and a website and then try to set up a simple system for people to add their credit card and pay them.
So I shared this story with you because I think Poeâs life and work offers a few key lessons for the modern startup.
This wasnât simply because he was a creative and divinely inspired human being. He was scrambling for relevance and money. He was iterating and aiming to please.
In 1839, four years before the publication of The Gold-Bug, Poe published an article in Alexanderâs Weekly Messenger where he challenged the readers to send him coded messages to decipher. He received hundreds of messages so he knew the interest and audience was there for this kind of thing and thatâs what lead him to write The Gold Bug.
Poe wanted what we all want which is to deliver to customers and be paid for it. He was an artist to be sure but he was intensely concerned about being an entertainer and reaching what today we might call Product Market Fit.
So as Vice President of Customer Success at Clubhouse Software, I help customers find their way around and begin to master our product and I also oversee our customer support team. Support is responsible for being responsive to those customers, and support is also the frontline for fielding any payments problems.
I don’t know how many of you are old enough to remember this but in the 80s there was a commercial for a brand of hair products called Vidal Sassoon. Their tagline is âif you don’t look good, we don’t look goodâ.
The idea there is that your appearance and success in using their products was a direct reflection on them, and this is true in all manner of customer facing work. regardless of how chaotic or seemingly in flux the company is, the role of success and support is to make the company and product look pulled together and sleek.
We want our customers not only to choose us but to feel encouraged by their choice, both in the product they receive and also in the ways they interact with our company. As such, no matter how the product may we change we need the user experience to feel consistent from initial marketing touch straight through to payment.
In a recent whiteboarding exercise, my colleague in customer success worked with one of our engineers to devise what would be the âideal invoiceâ, working backwards from a list of customer complaints about our confusing existing invoice. This is frustrating.
The invoice should just work, so we can work on providing a great experience to the customer.
When we can’t decipher mysterious bank codes but the customer insists their form of payment is valid, we don’t look so good.When we struggle to make refunds or rerun invoices or when we have to read through convoluted logs to understand the how and why of a user’s billing history, we can start to lose customer confidence.
Our payment system needs to look good or else our product and our company start to look downright bad in the eyes of the customer.
INNOVATION
The second area after iteration where I think Poe can shed some light is in the area of innovation.
Poeâs Gold Bug arrived on the scene at a challenging but exciting time in this country.
The American economy had just rebounded from the Panic of 1837 a five-year depression that many believe was caused by Andrew Jacksonâs policies against the banks. At times during that depression, things got so bad that people were giving out this thing called a âHard Times tokenâ in lieu of pennies.
This is an abolitionist one. They came in many different themes.
But by 1843, the year The Gold Bug was published, a number of innovations made publishing cheaper and easier than it had ever been before.
These innovations include the first lithographic rotary printing press, a press in which the type is placed on a revolving cylinder instead of a flatbed. This sped up the printing process considerably and a form of it is still used today.
The inventor Charles William Siemens, of the same electronics company Siemens that exists day, had also helped to roll out anastatic printing, a process of printing using zinc plates that made copying of prints, designs, and literature faster and cheaper.
This is incidentally around the same time that Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage were pulling together their work on the Analytical Engine, largely considered to be an example of some of the earliest computer programming.
So lots of experimentation was going on. Electricity was in the air.
However as our poor unfortunate Mr. Poe discovered, there is quite a difference between riding a wave and being submerged by it.
While Iâm not an engineer, in the beginning at Clubhouse we were a tiny team and I worked very closely with the engineers to set up and maintain the payments system.
And the process hit us rather hard.
Enabling payments was one of the biggest hurdles to clear before we could formally launch.
Like at many companies our engineers were hired for their competency in the skills necessary for building our product. While we have to build or integrate and also maintain a payment system, that is not our product. We build and maintain a payment system so we can get paid for building our product.
Now the payment system is integrated in the backend and our backend developers work with a functional programming language called Clojure and a database Datomic. For those unfamiliar, Datomic is a system that is immutable, which of course means that an entity holds on to values over time and as such you get a lot of fancy âtime travel featuresâ.
For billing and more importantly for understanding a customer, that is so valuable.
Knowing who did what and when at any given moment in the span of the customer journey is so valuable. For example, if someone was an active user and then left for a long stretch that is useful to be able to trace back actions to find out what may have lead to them abandoning the product. Being able to see the fullest picture of the past and the present is important to people who do any sort of account management. And if you are interested in this, there is also a really great talk called “Exploring Four Datomic Super Powers” that I encourage you to check out. There is a lot of great functionality there.
However, for us, leveraging Datomic to get that full picture meant that we had to take on a large share of the complexity of the payment system and set up our own trialling and payment logic. Something we werenât terribly thrilled to do. Taking on this complexity also means that we have a hard time using the out of the box integrations with many analytics, metrics, and subscription management services.
Most of the integrations tend to only work properly with the vanilla implementation of payment processing not the sort of mixed up version weâve implemented.
So at Clubhouse we are still very much in the process of trying to find a middle way where we can leverage the cool innovations of the day like Datomic without losing the great functionality of the payments software andâ perhaps more importantly â the expertise of engineers who actually specialize in payments.
INTERNATIONALIZATION
The third area where Poeâs life and work proves illuminating is internationalization.
As I mentioned before, Poeâs work particularly The Gold Bug and later The Raven gained him popularity not just in the US but in Europe and even Asia. In fact, the great French poet Charles Baudelaire spent some seventeen years translating the works of Poe, often putting his own writing aside to do so.
Unfortunately all of this international fanfare proved of little monetary value to Poe. In Poeâs day there were no international copyright treaties. The absence of such treaties meant two notable things:
1) Instead of paying American writers to produce new content, American publishers often simply copied the work of British writers and issued it from their presses. There was no author to pay so all the profits could be pocketed.
2) Poe had no real way of brokering to get compensated if and when his work was issued across the pond. Though his work undoubtedly circulated around the world, as an American whose work had not gone through whatever arduous registration processes England or France or wherever required, he had no standing in court to make a claim on his works or their translations.
While I consider myself a copyright minimalist, I do sympathize with Poe as he was faced with a significant obstacle to getting paid. As we know, the primary convention for payment on SaaS software like Clubhouse is a major credit card, but that simply doesn’t work for everyone who would like to use our software and we also know that much of the rest of the free world has wisely rid themselves of checks.
According to a 2012 World Bank report, âat least 110 money mobile systems have been deployed, with more than 40 million usersâ. Some six years later, I can imagine it may likely be double that number.
When credit cards don’t work but mobile payment systems are on the rise, payment system purveyors should more easily enable tech companies to hook into the ways people around the world can and do pay for things.
When our products have avid fans all across the world, we need payment system providers us help us find more ways to let them pay.
THE EFFECT
To close, I want to share one last nugget of wisdom from dear old Edgar Allan Poe.
âThere is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a story….I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect.â
My ask is that payments system providers work with a consideration of the effect on customer success and support people like me, on engineers who are not payment specialists, and most importantly on our end user.
Help us iterate on our ideas while keeping the payment experience easy and constant for the user, help us leverage innovation without losing functionality, and enable us to cultivate an international user base that pays us in the ways that work for them.
And maybe, just maybe, weâll all get a little closer to our fortunes.
Finally! A talk at a tech conference by a black woman about *us* and how *we* survive and what *we* need.
2) Orphan Black
I realized I was a season behind so I raced through season 4 and am just rounding the corner on the final season. This show is amazing and its star Tatiana Maslany is the shit. No spoilers please!
This summer I co-founded CoLET: The Collective for Liberation, Ecology, and Technology. It’s a much-needed space for politically radical technologists. We finally got our website to a good place. I am excited to make a radical intervention in tech spaces and a tech intervention in radical spaces. Our time is SO now. Check it out when you get a moment!
4) Bookchin on Streetfighting with Nazis back in the day
I’m still on a Bookchin kick and someone in the social ecology community sent along this timely clip. Know your history, people!
These two women have gotten me through many a tough day and given me my whole life with their groovy, funky, punky selections on this monthly independent radio show brought to us live from the streets of London. I love you, Ruby and Josephine!!
I am speaking about engineering – support collaboration this week at The Lead Developer conference. If the topic interests you and you wanna dig in further, here are a few handy links.Â
 UPDATE (24 March 2016) I am no longer interested in giving talks on any of these topics or on anything related to tech diversity. For a list of topics, I would be interested in giving presentations on or (preferably) discussing a panel/roundtable session, see here.
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I just subscribed to the Technically Speaking mailing list  thinking I’d be helpful and keep an eye out for potential conferences to which our developers might want to submit abstracts/proposals. However, one item towards the bottom caught my interest enough to click. It was Chiu-Ki’s blog post from January 2012 where she resolved to be a public speaker. While I am not quite prepared to make such a resolution since I am still struggling with a tinge of imposter syndrome. I do think it might be helpful to at least outline some topics that I could talk about should I ever go out on a limb and try to speak on any regular basis.
Stuff I Could Talk About If I Wanted To Talk About Stuff
Free Culture and Open Licenses I did a highly educational and fulfilling stint at Question Copyyright where I was fully indoctrinated by a merry band of copyleft radicals. I actually did a lightning talk on the topic for a company gathering and (hey!) I even have a slidedeck. See below.
How To Contribute To Open Source When You Don’t Really Know How to Code
While I was lucky enough to have jumped into open source before  I realized it was supposed to be scary, I know a lot of people feel that while they are peripherally involved (via their companies or something else) that it isn’t really *for* them or that they don’t have anything to contribute. I actually have a whole blogpost on this topic and could add even more ideas to that old list.
Working With Remote Teams I’ve worked as part of the Operations team for a very small but very geographically dispersed company for almost fours years. I think my concrete experiences and suggestions about this could be interesting to someone somewhere. No? How Not to Contribute to Open SourceÂ
Over the years I have witnessed and heard many horror stories about absolute fails in companies contributing to open source. I could share some worst practices and then also share some best practices and strategies for course correction.
Why Women Should Contribute to Open Source Even Though It Is Oftentimes Unpleasant I actually have a slidedeck for this one too since I gave this talk in 2013 at Write Speak Code to a lovely and receptive group of women.
I’m still with the same company, but we recently moved to a new office. Lots of great changes are afoot and this is the third office we’ve worked out of in the two years I’ve been there…and the third office in a row with no private rooms. The issue of privacy bugged me a bit before I had a kid, but now that I am a working and pumping mother it has become absolutely crucial. I need a clean, quiet, and wired (electrical and internet) place to pump for 20 minutes, two times a day. I can pump hands-free so whenever possible I’d like to be able to take my laptop with me and keep on Leaning In and shit. I’d like to know that I can sit somewhere, undisturbed and un-spied on for forty minutes a day. I can only imagine there are other people, pumping and non, who would like the same.
Transparency is good. Open doors and visible co-workers, that’s all great.  But sometimes we need privacy. Sometimes we need to have uncomfortable conversations, sometimes we need to hammer out the details of Top Secret Project X. Why do media/tech companies keep designing offices where that can’t (shouldn’t?) happen? I recently heard this interview on CBC’s Radio Q with architect Raphael Sperry who’s organized other architects to stop designing solitary confinement cells in prisons. He says that architects have a social responsibility to uphold human rights. I agree with him wholly (in fact I think architects should stop designing prisons full stop!), and I’d argue that architects also have a responsibility to push for spaces that work for many different types of use cases, not just when 20-something year old dudes are programming together, drinking beer and getting along famously with no need for any privacy. I don’t know any companies where that is the case all day long, five days a week, do you? If you have any thoughts, just ping me. I’ll be sitting on the bathroom floor pumping. Related: (WSJ) Indecent Exposure: The Downsides of Working in a Glass Office (BusinessWeek) Working Moms Need More Than Subsidized Breast Pumps (Yahoo Finance) A womanâs place is in the home and the office: The case for breastmilk pumping stations in public spaces (Why Is Her So Stroppy Blog) The silent breast pump and other lies by power mums
