I’ll never forget the first time I heard the Beastie Boys. I was 9 years old (just about to turn 10) and my friend Trystan brought his Walkman to school. This was in early 1987, so Walkmans were a very big deal. At recess, we retreated behind the tires to listen to some music. I put the headphones on and he hit ‘play’. I was hooked the moment I heard the opening strains of “She’s Crafty” – it was by far the coolest thing I had ever heard, far cooler than the Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen I had listened to previously. While I had heard of rap, this was the first time I had ever heard any. That was the first time that I had ever felt down, truly down, with something bigger than myself.

As I grew up, hip hop became a lens through which I could view the world. I lived in a very small town where hip hop was known as ‘n***** music’ and the hockey playing fucks used to harass me, but I didn’t care. Hip hop was bigger than me, bigger than my town, and far bigger than the little minds that I once wanted to impress. Hip hop inspired me, a middle class white kid from Saskatchewan, to delve into Dr. Martin Luther King and learn about the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King inspired me to stand up and speak out against what is wrong.

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On January 28, an entrepreneur named Jody Sherman committed suicide. In a year already marred by tech suicides, Sherman’s death was especially shocking. His company, Ecomom was loved by its customers and had managed to raise a total of $12 million (including $5 million just six months before. After Sherman’s death however, the magnitude of the shock increased – within a few weeks, the company announced it was broke and entered into Assignment for Benefit of Creditors. Unanswered questions circulated – how can you go from $5 million to near bankruptcy in six months?

Yesterday, Business Insider (whose coverage of the Jody Sherman death has been excellent) shined a light on that question. You see, Philip Prentiss (Ecomom’s controller) just published a detailed look at the company’s operations in the last few months of Sherman’s life. Business Insider posted Prentiss’ entire case study to Scribd and if you’re remotely interested in either accounting or entrepreneurship, I encourage you to read it.

Prentiss’ case study provides an incredible look at the death rattle of a startup with poor financial controls. And it contains many lessons which are critical in today’s startup climate.

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Ever sit, watch a company do something stupid and think that there is no possible way that they could make this situation any worse? That’s what I thought on April 19, when CipherCloud filed a DMCA takedown against Stack Exchange to make them remove a question about how they perform encryption. The question itself (which has been restored) was reasonable and then the people who answered it chose to look at the information that CipherCloud made public and make educated guesses about how it actually works. Some of the answers were (rightfully) critical of CipherCloud’s technology.

In choosing to file a DMCA takedown, CipherCloud chose to pull out the biggest stick in their bag. With the exception of some screen shots from their website, the answers given were thoughtful and were wholly original, despite being based on the (limited) public information on CipherCloud’s website. I’m always critical of DMCA takedowns, but I’m more critical of DMCA takedowns when they’re used to stifle legitimate debate about whether or not a security product is actually secure.

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What’s with these homies dissing my girl? Why do they gotta front? What did we ever do to these guys that made them so violent? (“Buddy Holly” by Weezer)

Adria Richards used to be a Developer Evangelist with a well-funded startup called Sendgrid. She was at a Python conference when the people behind her started telling jokes that made her feel uncomfortable. At that point, she had a choice. She could sit in silence and just take it. She could quietly talk to event organizers. Or, she could take a photo of the offenders and try to shame them in public.

Ms. Richards chose to walk through door number three. At that point, the burden shifted to Playhaven – the company which employed the two men in question (and thus had their logo associated with the the incident). Playhaven had a choice. They could make a public statement and use this as an opportunity to educate the men involved (and take a leadership role in the technology industry). Or, they could pull out the biggest stick imaginable and start firing people.

Playhaven chose to walk through door number two. Rather than show some leadership and turn this into an educational moment, they chose to fire one of the individuals responsible. In a statement to Venture Beat, Playhaven CEO Andy Wang implied that the individual in question was fired for multiple reasons. So, it is possible that this was the last straw and that Playhaven did act responsibly.

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I don’t usually talk about personal things on my blog, but I need to get a whole lot out or I’m going to explode. This will have nothing to do with technology, business, user experience, or any of the other stuff I normally write about. Rather, this is going to be about mortality.

I first came to terms with my own mortality when I was working for a company called Netsecure Technologies. I loved that company, worked with my best friends in the world, and made the corporate mission my own. Passion is my biggest strength and most crippling weakness – I began to take our customers’ (many of whom remain close personal friends) problems very seriously and started working too many hours. Working too much created a really bad spiral – I stopped sleeping, stopped exercising, and started eating horribly. Since I wasn’t sleeping, I started drinking obscene amounts of coffee and, everything caught up.

My first clue that something was amiss came in November, when I started having chest pains that would radiate across the tops of my shoulders to my neck. I went to see a doctor and he wanted to check my blood pressure. That reading was high – so high that he took me to another room to make sure that his machine wasn’t broken. Turns out that my blood pressure was really that high and, as he said, “Either you make changes, or you’re going to die.”

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The data driven marketer walked into the office building ten minutes before his appointment. He was dressed perfectly for the interview – crisp charcoal trousers, crisp white tshirt, and a distressed, vaguely military inspired blazer and was excited by the opportunity in front of him. Director of marketing with a hip, young, tech startup? A perfect role for the DDM…

Author’s note – I bet a large percentage of rejected porn scripts start off with something very similar.

The interview itself was going well. The young founders (DDM guessed they were significantly younger than his 35 years) had great technology at the core of their company and there was a tremendous amount of opportunity in their market. But then, things got off track with a simple question…

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This morning, Collette pointed out a Facebook ad from a company called Breezi. She found it odd that Facebook kept showing her the ad so many times after she clicked it. My interest in ad technology took over and I asked her to click through again so that I could see their site.

When she clicked the link, I noticed an odd URL parameter and decided that I wanted to check out some HTML. A moment later, and I saw this:

localStorage.setItem('BreeziApp_TrackVars',...

I don’t like that much, so I decided to do some tests. And sure enough, when I fired up the javascript console, I confirmed that Breezi was storing tracking information (ie – in Collette’s case, it stored that she clicked a Facebook ad) in our browsers’ local storage.

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I hurt my shoulder bouldering last weekend, but went out last night for a short session in the gym. It was a perfect session – I felt light and my shoulder didn’t hurt too badly. I’m not a very good climber and climb in a very difficult bouldering gym. Because the gym is so difficult, if I don’t completely focus, I fall.

Being completely and utterly focused on one task feels very strange. I don’t compulsively check my email accounts when I’m bouldering. Hacker News isn’t important. Capital markets no longer exist and I have absolutely no interest in what Zynga just traded at. I am there…completely connected to my body, 100% focused on the moment.

Being completely and utterly focused on one task feels very strange.

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Ravi Shankar died yesterday at the age of 92. Other writers are talking about how he introduced Indian ragas to western audiences and how he popularized the sitar. I’m going to talk about how his music made me feel.

I dropped out of University when I was 21 and despite a few aborted attempts in other faculties, didn’t go back full-time until I was 28. My first semester back was a tremendous shock. Not only was I significantly older than my classmates, but I had forgotten so much about how to be a student. And, the times had changed (dramatically).

I don’t recall seeing anyone carry a laptop when I started University in 1995. And I know that I did not see my first cellphone at the University until around 1997. In 2005, laptops and cell phones were part of the standard student uniform. In 1995, the web was really in its infancy. Distractions like Livejournal, Facebook and Youtube simply did not exist. Those distractions proved to be dangerous…

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There’s a dangerous new tribe of marketer…

Most at home on Twitter and on a variety of blogs, this new tribe is most noteworthy for its penchant for speaking in absolutes. For example, this new tribe likes to say things like, “advertising is dead.” At first glance, this tendency to speak in absolutes seems odd because this tribe appears to be extremely well read. However, if you dig a little deeper, you quickly realize that as a whole, this tribe is well read, however, its members all read the exact same books written by the exact same people – the tribe’s so-called ‘thought leaders’.

At its core, marketing is the formalized study of how people make economic decisions. As a science, it fits somewhere between economics and psychology. These sciences acknowledge that behaviour is far from rational and difficult to predict – our reactions are highly variable. Every decision we make is impacted by natural tendencies, natural conditions, social factors and learned behaviours.

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