The Best Mistake I Ever Made

Editor's Note: In response to my good friend Kevin Fox, who shared on his blog today how the college selection process, aided by a youthful blunder on his part, helped launch his career. Unsurprisingly, I've got a similar story, and that makes it time to share.

In 1994, I was applying to colleges. The oldest in my family, I was the first to move on from high school, and beyond the occasional lecture from guidance counselors at school, I was pretty much finding my own way. My best friends and I essentially banded together, comparing SAT and ACT scores, and scoured the college ranking and comparison books, even mocking the terms "Selective" and "Highly Selective", used to separate the good schools from the great.

Money constraints and a non-perfect high school record wouldn't have led me too far out of state. My best friend and I eventually settled on UCLA as our dream school. He was going to major in Film Studies, and I had picked Communication Studies, as close as I could get to Journalism. I applied to UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC Davis, as well as Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah, which would have pleased some of my friends at church, while keeping me intellectually bored, and, in the event of complete disaster, I even filled out a form for Chico State, playing the role of obvious safety school.

Between my friends and me, we thought we had the process nailed. I wrote the essay over and over and had it reviewed by my teachers, knowing I might be on the bubble. I packaged up the essay with all my materials and sent it in the mail on the first day possible to UCLA, Berkeley and Davis, along with $120, $40 for each of the three schools' admissions fee. For UCLA, I listed Communication Studies as my major, with Political Science as the alternate. Berkeley placed me with Mass Communications as my major and Political Science as the alternate. If I remember correctly, Davis was English.

Three weeks later, I got a thin envelope back from the UC Regents. Expecting some kind of confirmation, instead the letter included a $40 refund from UCLA - stating that Communication Studies was open only to junior transfers, making me as a freshman ineligible. As I had selected other UC campuses, and the Regents assumed each school of equal valor, they just sent me my $40 back, instead of what I thought was the more obvious move - moving my application forward with Political Science.

Needless to say, I was panicked, and nobody had any real good advice. I essentially reapplied to UCLA and sent back the same $40 admissions fee, with Political Science as my intended major this go around, but this time seeing the envelope leave my house near the end of the 30 day period, not the beginning. I'm pretty sure this didn't help, as open slots for the impacted schools became more scarce.

In the ensuing months of my senior year in high school, we all played the waiting game. BYU was the first to respond, and I got in. I didn't see that as a big deal, although many friends of mine from church had received rejection letters. Chico State let me in, to no surprise. But the big wins were to come in March, from the UCs, especially UCLA, as my best friend and I shared these aspirations of being roommates and challenging one another for four more years and as we started our careers.

Come early March, Davis led off with a big fat acceptance envelope. I remember marking off an X in the Yes column on an index card at home, with UCLA and Berkeley yet to respond. I was 3 for 3, with 2 to go. But the next day brought a big shock. Instead of the big envelope, a small one from UCLA came with the well known refrain, "We regret to inform you... blah blah blah... lots of applicants... don't let the door hit you on the way out... blah blah." I was stunned and felt hollow - faced with the concept of not being with my best friend, and facing a reality of having to pick between the nearby but non-thrilling UC Davis and the complete life change that would be shipping off to Provo to be a Cougar.

This being at the very beginning of the era of constant communication, I had my mom's cell phone, playing chauffeur for my younger siblings, so I couldn't call her, and when I called my best friend, I just started to tell him before the reception was so bad that hung up on me. I was devastated, and it's all I wanted the world to know - that my dream had been dashed. In the days afterward, as I saw other friends get their welcome notes into the Bruins fold, the school counselors would pause their congratulations, turn toward me with concerned faces, and ask, "Now, how are you doing..."

After the promised deadline for acceptance letters, I finally heard back from Cal. A big, fat, glorious acceptance envelope filled my mailbox in late March that changed everything. My mom, lacking irony, exclaimed, "That's like getting into Stanford!" when I proudly announced I had the opportunity to become a Golden Bear, ruling out the Aggies of Davis and putting BYU way back in second place. The acceptance letter from Cal put UCLA as less critical, and started me feeling like I had accomplished something. I wasn't going to be palled up with my best buddy, chasing our dreams, but instead got the opportunity to stake out my future on my own at an incredible school.

Attending Berkeley ended up being a godsend, placed remarkably close to Silicon Valley as the tech revolution expanded through the first dotcom boom, and placing me with startups before I even claimed my double major degree in Mass Communications and Political Science.

Had I attended UCLA, I could have transferred into Communications Studies my junior year. It's probable my best friend and I would have even more great stories to share beyond those we still dredge up from high school. But it's just as likely we'd have met fewer people because we were too comfortable and cliquey. It's especially likely that I'd have ended up well outside of tech, and the unique experience that is the Silicon Valley. Maybe I'd have ended up writing for the LA Times or joined MySpace or Mahalo - spending my unfair share of time on the Web in Southern California and not the Bay Area. But my mistake of entering a major unavailable to freshman entrants changed my life - pushing me in a direction I'm happy with and continue to be fulfilled by.

As Kevin writes in his own parallel story, the mistake in the short term may have been awkward and disappointing, but the long term benefits of this choice ended up probably being the best mistake I ever made. By the way, if you're not reading Kevin on his blog or on his Twitter stream, you should.

Redfin Highlights Schools Alongside Real Estate Search

Two months ago, I told you about how my wife and I used Redfin for practically the entire process of searching for and buying a home. If there were properties not listed on the site, we simply didn't see them, as we leveraged the company to track our favorites and discover new options. Even after finally picking one and moving in at the end of July, I haven't stopped window shopping - partly to ensure we made the right choice and to watch macro changes in the area - and I was pleased to see the service has added a new wrinkle to the site, displaying area schools with every single query - making area education options as important as any other facet when choosing a home.

Now, when you search for properties, not only due you see which properties are on the market, and which have upcoming open houses, but you also see school locations, as well as how they rank relative to their peers on a 1-10 scale, based on standardized test scores. Obviously, for a family with children, the higher an area school's ranking, the more appealing the property, and the lower the school's quality, the more likely it is that one's neighbors and neighborhood will have some issues.

Redfin Adds Schools to Real Estate Searches

The integration of education data in Redfin's real estate service is more than skin deep, as each school is now profiled on the site, with basic facts and even parent's reviews. According to Redfin's blog, the service will even soon let you search for homes within a specific district, a big deal for some families.

An Area High School's Profile On Redfin.com

In the areas of the country served by Redin, the product has eclipsed Zillow and others in many ways, and it looks like it could deliver the same level of detail for schools as it has for new properties. You can even start with a school's description and find homes for sale in the neighborhood, effectively turning the real estate search process on its head. If you're looking for a home and want to find data on schools in the area, Redfin looks to be leading the pack.

Won't Be Long Before These Future Marketers Major In New Media

Sometimes, it doesn't seem all that long ago that I myself was in college. On other days, it seems like I am talking about somebody else, when looking back on my time at UC Berkeley. With my 10 year graduation anniversary having passed a few months ago, I found myself back on a college campus this afternoon, with the opportunity to speak to a roomful of students at San Francisco State University, focused on a rapidly changing world of Marketing. And what I encountered was a class of future-thinking young adults trying to grok a fast-changing world where social networks are potentially more impactful than traditional media outlets.

Invited to speak by the class' professor, Shari Weiss, I hoped to illustrate my dual role - both in terms of being a technology blogger, but also my real world decade of experience working in public relations and corporate marketing, and how, finally, these two worlds are colliding, as I help companies get a bigger voice in the social media space.


I Don't Go Too Long Without Mentioning Google Reader
The gulf between what was considered "new media" when I was at Cal and what is "new media" today for these students is tremendous.

As I recalled this afternoon, in 1998 I was excited to see my Journalism professor approach how the Internet was affecting reporting and publishing, only to see my excitement dashed when she rolled in a projector and showed us a feel-good documentary on the founding of Yahoo!, featuring Jerry Yang and David Filo. My disappointment in the lack of forethought in this course was so great that I did not attend lecture the remainder of the year, dropping in only on discussion sections and for the final, which I somehow passed.


Initial Feedback on the Discussion Looks Pretty Good
In contrast, the array of topics challenging the students at San Francisco State brought a smile to my face. In quick presentations, teams tried to tackle the future of advertising, the world of Facebook applications, how to utilize Twitter for business, and I saw future topics spanning such sites as YouTube and LinkedIn.


I Swear I Could Have Talked For Hours On This Stuff
Some part of me was jealous, but I also felt a bit like an unofficial teacher's assistant, sitting in on the presentations, and trying not to correct small mistakes or provide answers. It was clear, that for the most part, the students see real potential from these new networks, where others of us are just coming up to speed. As I showed them, you don't have to be a traditional cool company selling to consumers to get new media. But it's becoming a requirement, to act and engage with your customers as peers. That the future marketers and message-shapers of the world are already getting the message bodes well.

I was glad to get the opportunity to drive up to The City and share my position on the changes I have seen, and hope I was able to make an impact. Thanks to Shari for inviting me.

The Great Debate: Is College the Right Path to Succeed?

In my family, college wasn't so much an option, but an expectation. That was no surprise, given my dad had an M.D. and my mother got her doctorate in educational technology, alongside more than a decade's teaching experience at primary and secondary levels. In fact, my own decision, thus far, to not attend graduate school or get an MBA has been a greater source of internal debate. So when I saw at the end of last week that Daniel Brusilovsky, a 16-year-old friend of mine who operates the Teens In Tech service, which I advise for, was thinking of not going to college altogether, I considered him out of his mind.

Of course, mine was not the only opinion. With the very public examples of tech leaders such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and others who have not completed their degrees, it can be tempting for an aggressive entrepreneur to point their way for leadership. And yes, some college courses, like high school, seem to have almost no value for whatever you may eventually choose as your career. I personally know I derived as much benefit from working at the college newspaper as I believe I ever did from my college courses at UC Berkeley. But if I had tried to jump straight from high school to Silicon Valley, I would have been dead on arrival.

Rob Diana touched on some of these points this morning in his article on the reputation economy, but even if you're not a huge fan of FriendFeed, you should see the debate that has been raging the last few days, embedded here. Enjoy, and participate here or there. Up to you.

Welcome To The Reputation Economy

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)


Everyone knows a good reputation is a valuable thing. With all of the activity on social media Web sites, your reputation can now come from a number of sources. You could be a well known blogger or entrepreneur, or even what some people call a social media whale, describing those people heavily active on social media sites. Because of the amount of public dialog that people now participate in, your reputation is even more valuable.

Where Does Reputation Start?

There is a fantastic conversation on FriendFeed regarding whether some of today's bright teens should go to college. I was late to the conversation and decided against participating because I had a larger topic in mind - this blog post. The reason I bring this conversation up is that for most people, their reputation building is started in college. Not only do they build reputation by what they do, but they start building something the moment they attend the school. For example, if you attend a fine university like Berkeley, people immediately assume certain things about you. The same can be said for any of the Ivy League universities, high tech universities like MIT and Carnegie Mellon, and other top schools. By having a degree from one of these schools, you have stated that you can survive a difficult and competitive environment, and for someone interested in joining or building a startup, this is excellent experience.

Obviously, after or alongside schooling, you are continuously refining your reputation through your work experience and other activities like blogging or social media use.

What Does Reputation Get You?

Technically, reputation is one of those "investment" items that does not have a direct return. However, your reputation may get you that interview you wanted. It may not get you the job directly, but it may get your foot in the door. If you get into the freelancing business, much of your initial contacts will likely be due to your reputation as well. Similar to your education though, it is something that needs "care and feeding". It does not go on autopilot, it is something that needs to be steered through various obstacles. How you handle these obstacles in your career directly affects your reputation, as well as your success.

Is Reputation More Important Than It Used To Be?

Reputation has always been important, however the area of importance is changing. Before the Internet, reputation may have been critical to getting the sale or a new job. Now, your reputation can be seen and tested every day by your social media activity and your blogging. The management of your reputation is now of critical importance. You just need to look at the various situations that "went viral" or took on a life of their own. People being fired for comments on Facebook is not an uncommon thing anymore. An advertising campaign can fail so badly (i.e. MotrinMoms) that it incurs that wrath of moms all over the Internet.

Welcome To The Reputation Economy

Reputation is now worth almost as much as revenue. FriendFeed is the perfect example of this. The reputation of the team is stellar. Because Paul Buchheit has a fantastic resume and has had great success, when he says real-time conversation is the next big thing, people are listening. Because he works for FriendFeed, people are watching FriendFeed closely. To compare the effect of reputation, look at me. I have a decent reputation in social media circles, but if I said that real-time conversation was the next big thing (without Paul saying it of course), I might get a link from another blog or two. That could even be the end of the conversation. So, never underestimate the power of reputation because it may be as important as actual currency.

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

Berkeley's Neil Henry Takes On New Journalism Reality

Though only a near-decade removed from my time of studying for a Mass Communications major at UC Berkeley from 1995-99, there are precious few professors who I can recall having made significant impact. In the mass communications department, a pair I distinctly remember was the dynamic duo of Neil Henry and Thomas Leonard, who teamed up to teach a number of the core classes to the major, and helped shed light both on how today's media has been shaped through history, and where they expect it to go.

Today, Henry's name gained significantly more recognition around the Web, as he penned a editorial for the San Francisco Chronicle focused on what he termed "The decline of news", set in motion by a massive reduction in advertising spending with newspapers, which in turn eliminates funding for reporters and investigative media. Instead, money has moved online, to sites powered by robots, he says, and that this move, amid reduced professionals in the newsroom, in favor of amateurs, will be significantly damaging, resulting in "a world where the craft of reporting the news fairly and independently is very much endangered; and with it a society increasingly fractured, less informed by fact..."

Old media is in a state of crisis today. Readers are leaving in droves. Newspapers and magazines are folding. The money isn't there, and media is not always financially rewarded for a job well done. Henry raises the alarm bell that with fewer trained journalists, or "trained watchdogs", as he puts it, those creating scandal could get away with it. While he admits that the millions of blogs online offer a new source of news, he doesn't believe the quality to be on par with those who have studied the craft and gone through journalism school.

Most controversially, Henry says that companies like Google, who have risen the top as new media leaders, should accept responsibility for media's future, and they should support journalism schools, even as their algorithms serve to replace more traditional methods of collecting the news. But here, while I respect Henry a great deal, and enjoyed his classes, I have to disagree. Google as a business has no new edict to save an industry under assault. The industry itself as a whole needs to change to survive.

It is worth noting that Henry took a very old world approach to his perceived crisis. He wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper, albeit one with a strong technology foundation. Yet, even though he went the old world route, I found it not through a printed copy of the Chronicle, but through new media - the blogosphere. While bloggers do read the online version of the Chronicle, it is the new media which is spreading his message.

Other bloggers who are quite one sided in their own views of the argument, like Mathew Ingram, Scott Karp and John Battelle, champion continued evolution in media, as I do.

Some of my biggest frustrations with the Mass Communications course content at UC Berkeley was the slowness to pick up on the Web's sure impact on media. Though it was in a class taught by Henry and Leonard where I first learned about The Drudge Report and the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the attention to the Web was little and far between. When in another course, the professor's idea of a new media lecture was to show a video on the founding of Yahoo!, after I had offered to help prepare a more in-depth presentation, I simply stopped attending her lectures for the remainder of the semester out of pure frustration.

A decade ago, the onus for change in journalism was there, and those calling for adaptation by the new leaders to help out those left behind simply missed it right before their eyes. It is not Google's obligation to bail out the Chronicle or to train the journalism students at UC Berkeley. It is Google's obligation to make money for its shareholders, and continue to improve its products, period. They are not a charity organization. If a generation of journalists finds the road ahead hard, then personal decisions will have to be made, and companies will have to make adjustments. That's business.

Intellequity: A VC-like Concept to Tackle Higher Education Debt

With June right around the corner, college campuses around the country are seeing commencement exercises and graduation ceremonies filled with pomp and circumstance, as they hand thousands of students pieces of paper that exit most of them from the campus and into the world of earning a living. Some may already have started new jobs. Others may just be starting that search now. But for many, the years of schooling have already put them deep in the hole financially. While the mood on the day of graduation is a gleeful one, the issue of debt is very real, one that could be haunting some for a very long time.

Uber-blogger Chris Pirillo highlighted this issue in a two-parter today on Student Loan Solutions and Student Loan Debt, concluding that he doesn't know if student loans are "more of a hindrance than a help." The major issue, he writes, is that forward-looking young adults are expected to get an education, whether we can afford it or not, meaning some are weighed down "with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt before we’ve even had a chance to see whether or not our higher education was actually worth the price of admission."

While I was in college, I occupied an odd middle ground where my parents' collective income was too high to qualify me for financial aid, but their month to month struggles meant that the tuition checks going home weren't always covered on time. Some months, the way I'd find I was negligent was that my meal card for on-campus dining would simply stop working, sending me to nearby eateries in Berkeley, bleeding away my already low cash on hand. But the good news was that I managed to pull through, getting a degree in four years without establishing debt. Other friends of mine, also entering their early 30s, did qualify for financial aid, but also racked up debt, some into the six-figure range, and to date, haven't made much headway. In fact, one of my best friends, whom I've known for half my life, may have to file for personal bankruptcy just to clear the deck and start over.

In the heady dot-com mania of the late 1990s, when everybody had a business plan sure to make millions, I had come up with what I saw would be a sure solution - a program I had dubbed "Intellequity". The concept was that instead of basing loan agreements on current cash on hand or current income levels, I would set up a company that doled out loans to promising students or recent graduates. The better the prospects seemed for a student, the better the loan terms would be. Effectively, based on a detailed matrix of experience, grade point average, major, brand name of the attended school, and a small battery of aptitude tests, and interview, we would offer loans that would not come due until the applicant began their first salaried job.

The student would not incur a specific dollar value of debt at all. Instead, the way the "Intellequity" project would be funded was through asking for a small percentage of future income over a set period. For example, if $10,000 were the loan amount, and the candidate were to have established a 2% payback rate over an 8 year period, they would pay Intellequity 2 percent off the top for 8 years. Assuming the applicant made $500,000 in salary over the 8 year period, the pay back would be the same $10,000. But if they made more, the company would gain a profit. If they made less, it would be our loss. If the payback rate were higher, say at 3% or 4%, the return would be that much greater as well.

Those applicants who didn't see their career paths pan out they way they had planned would not be equally burdened as those who had skyrocketed, those who we had taken a chance on. The risk would have been transferred away from the student who started accruing interest right away, but instead, to those of us funding the individual. In effect, it would be acting like a VC firm, not for a business, but for an individual. Some investments, as with VCs, would be duds. Others could make millions. And Intellequity would become a partner with the student, finding them better paying jobs and opportunities, hoping to push the individual toward a route that would make them more money in the end.

Would bringing a VC-like environment to the student loan process work for everybody? Of course not. But it sure would make things interesting, and it would eliminate the problem that some students find themselves in from the day they walk the stage and throw their mortarboards in the air - one of being alone and in debt from the very beginning.