Sophia Perl of Wisdom

A personal story of mine about a $50 bill

In my senior year of college, I had to fly to Burlington, Virgina for a software engineer interview.  The flight was from LA to Chicago and then to Burlington.  On my leg to Chicago, I must have been bored out of my mind b/c I found myself striking up a conversation with a much older gentleman next to me.  It turned out that he lived in Chicago and had kids who were married, doctors, lawyers, etc.  It sounded like a great family life.  Then he proceeded to tell me about his wife and his friends (some part of the Mafia).  He would talk about going to funerals of his buddies and having authorities sitting outside the doors to see who attended.  He made it clear that he chose to stay out of that world, but nonetheless had childhood friends who chose otherwise.

We talked the entire flight.  I remembered how interesting his life sounded.  So then we landed and after we got out of the terminal, I told him it was a pleasure speaking with you.   We shook hands and I noticed he was slipping a dollar bill with a 5 on it to me.  I said no no, I can’t take this.  He said, take it.  That was the end of it.  When he finally walked away, I looked down at my hand and noticed it was a $50 dollar bill, not $5 dollar bill.  I was in complete shock.  Why would a complete stranger give me money?  In any case, I decided to keep the $50 dollar bill like it was a good luck charm.  ‘Til this day, I have not spent the $50.

Things that I learned from this experience: 1) You never know who you’re going to meet and what you’ll learn from their life experiences, inspiration, and 2) One day people are bound to give you something out of nowhere and you should not take it for granted, be appreciative.  I know that this posting is not business-related per se, but I thought that I would share a life experience that has stuck with me.  Maybe one day I’ll do the same to a young, up and comer - pay it forward.

Tips for shameless networking

There are some perks to being a woman - different perspective from men, having a baby (debatable b/c of the physical exertion), and access to women mags, yep you heard the last one right.  My mom called me one day and said I got you a subscription to Marie Claire.  I said hmm, OK, but I’ve never read it before really.  This week, I got my first issue.  I flipped through the pages and hit the “How to get a job” segment.  I was quite intrigued by the tips for shameless networking.  I’m not saying that I endorse these tips, but I would definitely say they do seem to be quite strategic.

From Marie Claire January 2009 issue:

• - sync up your workout schedule with executives at your gym, offer to spot them
• - get your kids or nieces/nephews to be friends with the kids of your industry’s power players
• - steal all the toilet paper from the office restroom and “rescue” the VP when they mistakenly enter a stall that lacks resources
• - frequent happy hours in the business district, buy a drink to the person who you are sucking up to
• - host a cocktail party and only invite your management level friends
• - AND THE BEST ONE OF THEM ALL…bring your business cards to funerals and distribute with a solemn, “I’m here for you.”

To add onto to this list, I would add:

• - send holiday cards for offbeat holidays such as Ground Hog’s Day, St Patrick’s Day, etc.  You will standout and your contacts will remember you.

Send emails to granny

One of my favorite websites is Springwise.com.  They feature novel business ideas from across the world.  This one idea I love, a printer that is linked up an email address.  So imagine your granny who is not tech savvy, you want to send her an email, but she doesn’t know how to use the computer.  This one service will have this printer print hard copies of emails for the granny.  She just needs to hook it up to a phone line.  Genius!  I love it.  OK, the only drawback that I can see is that granny can’t write back via email.  Then I wonder if you can control the font size of the print out.  Hmm…  This reminds of the photo frame services where you can upload pics to a website and the service will download the pics onto a frame that is plugged into a phone line.  I can see this working well for distant relatives, but not sure if I would pay a monthly service for this.  For some reason, I get turned off by subscription services (yes I know a cell phone plan is one).  I think that it’s great as a business owner to sell such services, but not so much from a consumer perspective.

Placing ads on anything even on school tests

There was a posting on psfk about a math teacher selling text ad space on his quizzes and tests.  The math teacher talked about raising some money to offset the costs of school materials and so forth.  I have never heard of such a thing, but I actually think it’s a good idea.  Might as well sell ad space to make up for the lack of funds.  Now I know that this opens up another issue, should companies be allowed to infiltrate the kids at school?  Well, you do see coke vending machines, when I was in high school we had taco bell items sold at lunch.  It’s happening already.  I do object to violating privacy of the kids.  I put my foot down there.

Alright, so this leads us to what else can you put ads on.  I read an article (I forget where) about a farmer with land near the freeway who had all of his sheeps wear sheets with ads on them.  He was eventually ordered to take the sheets off b/c it was distracting the drivers (if I remember that correctly).  One company offered to give a small Oregon (my home state!) town a bunch of computers/equipment in exchange for the name of that town.  Strange but the town took the offer.  The list is endless.

No matter where you decide to place ads remember that you want to be sure that you get a return on your investment.  That is harder to quantify/measure.

A pet project of mine based on collaboration

So lately, I’ve been looking into ways to get people to collaborate.  Don’t get me wrong, I am not looking into an HCI research project, I am looking at a specific problem and how a collection of folks (aka community) can help solve this problem.  As a side note, I’ve always had a tough time grasping the HCI field perhaps it’s because I have a biased - is it really science or fluff?  Okay, I probably just angered a few folks now.  Back to the topic.

Now sometimes it makes sense to have many people collaborate over many topics or sometimes it makes sense to have only a few people collaborate over a few topics and of course there is the in-between.   Something to consider is how you motivate people to collaborate around a topic that perhaps there is no incentive, but to help someone out.  Are there examples that support this?  I can’t think of any off the top of my head.  Maybe one somewhat related example is Amazon.com product reviews.  Why do people do it?  What do they gain?  What does Amazon gain by showing negative reviews of products that they sell?

Anyhow, I am not ready to talk about this pet project of mine because it’s still in alpha/beta mode.  It’s funny b/c I hear my tech friends talk about, “yeah this guy founded this and made this much, I could have done that”.  Sure anyone can implement a tech solution (whether desktop or web), but the real crux of the business is the idea and thinking about how to capitalize on that idea.  I think that is what most techies miss when they say “I can do that”.  Yeah they can implement the solution,  but they also have to come up with a viable idea.  I don’t think many people can do that hence the statistics on failed businesses within X amount of years of starting.  If you have the know-how, find a partner who has the good idea.  It’ll be a match made in heaven.

Free stuff, but only if you give out your private information

I was thinking about the economy and what others are saying.  There is a surge in food bank usage, people are foreclosing, and even universities are asking for donations for education and not so much for building names.  The concept of getting something free for your demographics information has been around for awhile.  Lately, I have been thinking about the value of getting free stuff (excluding celebrities who get free stuff just because).  I came across a website that let you sign up for a free logo’d t-shirt from businesses and another website that gave me free products to test out.  They’re all great, but isn’t the goal to get people to buy your stuff?  You could argue that it’s also to get feedback, but I will completely ignore that for the sake of my argument.   I am thinking that the target market is really not the free stuff enthusiasts. I will make a hard claim that the people who want free stuff are those who won’t pay for such things or do not have the money in order to do so.  So my advice to you is think twice about giving out free stuff.  What are you trying to achieve?  Who are you trying to win over?