Jamie Thingelstad

Work

I leveled up my webinar broadcasting capabilities with the addition of a green screen. This setup worked incredibly well with Zoom for our all team meeting today.

Here is what it looks like in Zoom with a virtual background applied.

The theme for the team meeting was a live show where I was the host in the control room. It was a lot of fun to do.

Home office desk with monitor, keyboard, microphone on boom arm, and headphones beside a teal green screen curtain and Herman Miller chair. Man wearing headphones and a black band t-shirt speaking into a microphone in the KCRW Air 1 radio studio

These results are incredible, and seem almost unstoppable.

“America’s biggest tech firms reported dizzying figures, as each surfed on the pandemic’s waves. Amazon’s third-quarter sales grew 37% year-on-year, to more than $96bn; it hired 50% more staff to cope with the demands of locked-down households. Alphabet was the only giant whose share price strengthened, as Google’s ad sales recovered, especially on YouTube. Apple’s iPhone sales were even weaker than expected, while overall revenue and profit held steady. Facebook blew past glowering governments’ scrutiny to report quarterly revenue growth of 22%, with a prediction of better to come over the holidays.” — The Economist Espresso, October 30th, 2020

In Paul Jarvis Sunday Dispatch today he highlights how he disagrees with the assumption in “main-stream startup culture” that you have to “move at break-neck speed”. I started writing a reply in email and decided to make it a post instead. 🙂

I think Jarvis is largely right on this. I strongly dislike the growing use of the word “hustle” in startups. It feel cheap and underhanded (to pressure or coerce). Hustle and pivot are now widely accepted terms, and both describe what are likely failure modes.

Also bringing in physics, fast isn’t enough. Speed in a direction is needed. Velocity. A lot of speed at all costs ignores the fundamental question of “where are we going?”

Maybe ignoring where you are going is why pivot and hustle are so prominent in the language?

It was great to see the current ACE Leadership class present at todays MnTech Board meeting. They formed multiple teams and engaged with Genesys Works, Lunar Startups, Reve Academy, PCs for People, and Technovation[MN]. These teams worked with their non-profit partners to do analysis on recommendations, new programs and other ways to continue to drive their mission forward. This was a great way to learn more about these groups and what they are doing, further develop technology talent with real world experience, and give back to organizations that are doing good in our community! 👏

Amazon’s marketing strategy with Ring seems to be:

  1. Make you worry about something you weren’t worried about yesterday.
  2. Sell you a product to try and counteract that worry they created for you.
  3. Try to distract you with technology that seems from the future.
  4. Give lip service to privacy concerns.
  5. Create a large volume of data to sell you more things.

First time we’ve had a full unplanned Xfinity service outage during remote work and school. Switched everyone to use their phones as hotspots. Hopefully service is restored soon. There is major construction a block away that I suspect is related.

Update: Service came back after only about 15 min. Wonder what the issue was… 🤔

Xfinity outage notification showing unplanned service interruption for ZIP 55424 affecting 51-500 subscribers from 09/17/2020 to 09/23/2020