Blog @ Percolate

In the spirit of NYC’s bike to work week, here’s some guidance around buying your first bike. Like most things you read on the internet, please take this with a grain of salt, but know that I’ve been riding a bike to work for about 7 years (5 in SF and 2 in NY).

First of all, get excited!

Riding a bike is incredibly freeing. What used to be a 45 minute G train ride from Williamsburg to Prospect Park is now a 25 minute cruise with plenty of scenic brownstones in between. And with the immutable presence of fried chicken in this town, we could all benefit from more exercise.

$$$?

But aren’t bikes expensive? Not really! Depending on whether you want a used or new bike, you can find yourself a reliable steed in the range of $500. If you consider a monthly metro pass is $116 or even the cost of owning and maintaining a car (gulp!), bikes offer incredible value.

Buying a Bike

Option one – go analog (also known as, support your local bike shop):

Physically going into a bike shop and actually checking out the models is a great way to get to know what you like and see what’s out there. Bicycling.com recommends calling two or three different shops to get a sense of the styles and brands they carry in advance to save time. You can also get a sense of how amenable the shops are to first-time bike owners. 

Two bike shops I’ve found to be very good are Velo in the East Village and Bicycle Habitat in Soho. Even if you don’t end up buying your bike there, you can patronize these shops by picking up a light, or a lock there.

For a great first commuter bike, I recommend going single speed. New York is relatively flat, and single speed bikes are easy to maintain with less moving parts to break or have stolen. A bike with a flip-flop hub will enable you to switch to fixed gear. Even if you have greater aspirations of going from being commuter to a proper cyclist, the single speed will carry you through many a long ride up the Westside Highway or around Prospect Park.

Option two – the Internet:

Once you begin to familiarize yourself with brands, you can read up on various reviews. Bike forums are chock full of information and personal feedback around different brands so its easy to start to learn how models stack up in terms of quality. 

For example, in reading up on a frame I was considering, I learned that an online retailer (Performance) had a house brand that was more affordable and getting great reviews.

Option two and a half – Craigslist is your friend:

Once have an understanding of what brands are good and pricing, you can take a much more targeted approach to your Craigslist search. For someone on a budget, Craigslist can be a great path to getting value. Just understand like anything else from Craiglist, caveat emptor.

The Gear

In my experience – some of the most important factors that play in when owning a good commuter bike are having a good comfortable seat, good wheels and durable tires (saving the headache of a flat).

For seats I really like the Fizik Arione, but everyone’s ‘seats’ are different. You can always go the route of the classic Brooks saddle, but don’t forget the not so classic Nylon chain to help keep it from being stolen.

As far as helmets, my number one recommendation is to wear one. After that, buy something comfortable and not too expensive, because that way you can lock it to your bike without feeling nervous. Giro makes a nice range at accessible prices and if you are looking for something more urban check out Bern.

Comfortable sneakers with a hard rubber sole like Vans, Superga or Chrome will do you right. If you’re aiming for a bit of a higher rung on the style ladder, maybe a good wedge sole will catch the discerning lense of The Sartorialist

Overall – Get a bike you like, that feels good to ride and you’ll be excited to hop on in the morning, or after a long day of work.

So, I’ve Bought a Bike. Now What?

My Go to Streets for Navigating Manhattan are:

North: 1st ave, 6th ave & 8th ave

South: 2nd ave, Broadway & 9th ave

West: Spring Street , 9th St. & 21st St.

East: Grand St, Stanton St., Bleecker St. & 20th St.

A PDF of the 2013 Bike Map for New York can be found here.

Tips & Tricks?

Don’t be a jerk. Running red lights into oncoming traffic, darting in front of pedestrians and riding the wrong way is a fast path to getting hit, or at the least bad karma. And don’t get frustrated with salmon, those impatient cyclists or even roller bladers who feel the need to go the wrong way in the bike lanes.

Sandwiches:

Reward your new purchase by riding to Ferdinando’s in Red Hook and having their focaccia sandwich. It’s not easy to get to by subway and you’ll never look at ricotta cheese the same way again.

–
There are no shortage of jaywalkers, double parked delivery vans, and errant food carts to complicate your ride, but if you ride with respect and keep aware of your surroundings, you’ll do great and have a blast. Now get out there and enjoy yourself!

Questions? Say hi on Twitter. I’m @brosbeshow.

Have you ever tried to learn a new skill that you know to be valuable, but you can’t find the motivation to follow through? I’m remembering a time when I tried to learn piano and harmonica and guitar, but not only was I mediocre, that’s generous, there was no concert, no group band, no end goal that encouraged me to trudge through the difficulties of learning a new skill. Although, I’d like to argue that I’m simply better at enjoying music more so than I am at making music.

If you read my last post about interning at Percolate, you’ll know that I have been learning about marketing and branding–both new skills with definite end goals of getting better at my job. Since getting hired full-time, I have been assisting in measuring our clients success across platforms, a process that requires an in-depth understanding of the posting and engagement metrics of Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, of our tools at Percolate, and of the programming design of our tools.

As was true when I started interning at Percolate,  I realized that once full-time I would have to learn a new skill in order to be better at what I do. Fortunately, Percolate is swimming with intelligent people, so I asked our ever-knowing product manager Stacy where I could a) stay updated on the changes made to social platforms’ APIs and interfaces, and b) learn the basics about markup language and coding. She gave great direction.

Now, I follow Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr engineering and developer updates, and I take daily mini classes from Skillcrush to teach myself HTML, CSS and eventually Javascript (I have also used Codecademy).

What is most thrilling about learning to read and speak these languages (forgive me for continuing the language metaphor from my last post) is that there is an end goal: delivering report cards to clients. In order to confidently deliver the data on these report cards, I need to understand how Facebook formats a user ID and a post ID in a single URL. If Twitter makes changes to its API, I need to know what effect that will have on the data we can deliver to clients. By understanding basic markup language I can read raw stats on a post or a user. And once I know these things, I can comprehend the capabilities and limitations of our tools in relation to the platforms that are most important to Percolate. When I encounter a problem or a difficulty, I have the resources–both in people at Percolate and in what I’ve already learned–to power through to find the bug, understand it and fix it.

Unlike piano, I’m still learning about changes to social platforms and markup language. The goal of delivering report cards is real, and they keep coming in. So whenever a developer on Team Percolate feigns being impressed by my work, I take a little victory lap to celebrate that I’ve learned a new skill. And I have to say–it’s pretty fun.

Sound fun? We’re hiring. Come join us.

I began working at Percolate in October after having spent the beginning of my career working for a Fortune 500 company in Columbia, SC. While there, I learned sales, interfaced daily with clients and was exposed to a variety of procedural training. I quickly realized that the job, culture and city weren’t for me.

I’d lived and worked temporarily in New York a couple of different times and wanted to move back permanently. I’d always admired technology companies and been drawn to social media so I started applying to startups that looked interesting and would give me the opportunity to grow personally and professionally.

My search led me to Percolate where we’re building multiple products for marketers to create efficiencies in content marketing. Historically, social content creation has been a very manual process from ideation to managing content calendars to publishing across multiple social channels. Percolate’s technology creates a system around the content creation cycle to strip away inefficiencies by streamlining that process and rooting it into software.

Most recently we’ve partnered with Getty Images and Aviary, aiding in ‘Art & Copy,’ to visually inspire clients, mitigate risks associated with copyright law and allow for creative image editing.

My prior experience helped me implement a process-driven approach to my work. From prospecting new clients to sales outreach to client tracking, I’m constantly thinking about how to reach my goals efficiently and effectively, and that always involves products. I use products to systematize my sales process and drive efficiencies.

One product that has helped me manage tasks better is Asana. It helps me self-impose deadlines and provides structure to my weeks.

There are many other tools in my toolbox like Sparrow, Evernote and others that I’ll share in the coming months which are all meant to create a seamless workflow and reduce frictions. If you have any products you think I’d be interested in to help drive more efficiencies, please get in touch at Michael.Harris@Percolate.com.

I have always been fascinated by why some startups succeed and others fail. Many companies have similar ideas about how they want to solve a specific problem, but usually, only one, maybe two come out on top. Do they execute better or faster than everyone else? Do they have smarter people working for them? Or, did they do something unique with the culture early to set the standard?

In my opinion, the best thing any startup can do is establish a culture early that inspires everyone in the company to believe in one mission and pushes employees to succeed.

I co-founded a technology company in NYC and helped guide the growth of that culture. Anyone that has been a founder of a company can attest to certain things being lost in the commotion of daily work or areas where they felt they might have neglected as the company grows. One of the most important indicators of a successful company is culture: Do people love coming to work every day? At my startup, I was so focused on building a successful business that in hindsight, I could have done a better job contributing to building the culture.

At Percolate, Noah and James’ commitment to culture starts from day one. Our entire team believes in one common goal: Re-define digital marketing and communication. As Jim Collins, best-selling author of Good to Great and Built to Last says, “Commit to a set of core values that you will want to build your enterprise on…for 100 years.”

Building culture takes constant iteration and a willingness to fail and try again. Each Monday morning, both the product and business teams meet to set strategic goals for the week. We all then support each other in reaching those goals, and once Friday comes around, we celebrate our weekly ‘Wins’ with an all-hands meeting. This structure is an important contributor to building teamwork.

That teamwork is extended to new employees when they’re assigned a “Percolator” who acts as their mentor for the first few weeks to get them up and running. It’s present in our recently formed Percolate clubs to align similar interests inside the company like: art and culture; winter sports; bread baking; running; and yoga.  And, it’s present as we build our internal knowledge network, Barista, that both Greg and Noah discussed in previous posts.

Percolate has given me the unique opportunity to experience the growth of culture at a startup from the employee perspective after seeing it as a founder. Does our culture sound like something you’d want to contribute to? We’re hiring.

Part of the Percolate engineering team attended this year’s PyCon, held in (comparatively) sunny Santa Clara, CA. Attending the conference was an enjoyable, productive experience for us; it gave us a chance to think about the direction of our system and development practices outside of the frenzy of everyday development. Not to mention it was nice to relax in warm spring weather over a few beers.

Many good talks were given, and the hallways were abuzz with enthusiastic creators.

Relaxing after a “long day” of conferencing

“Readability counts.”

Of the many topics that were discussed at the conference, there was one theme that resonated strongly with me: the community’s focus on clarity and simplicity in the language. In particular, Raymond Hettinger gave a number of good talks that promoted using Python language built-ins to simplify the expression of ideas in code.

Let’s take a fairly contrived (but illustrative) example. In Java, if I want to sum the squares of a list of integers, I’ll probably write something like

public Integer sumSquares(List list) {
    Integer sum = 0;
    for (Integer i:list)
        sum = sum + (i * i);
    return sum;
}

The same idea expressed in idiomatic Python would read:

def sum_squares(alist):
    return sum(i ** 2 for i in alist)

I don’t mean to pick on Java here; it’s a language I admire for many reasons. That said, the relative readability of Python is a big win. Less boilerplate for the eye to parse means quicker comprehension. Logical omissions or faults are more easily identified, which decreases bugs and time spent reviewing. A clearer language facilitates more frequent deploys.

The contrast above might not strike you as being significant, but if you consider magnifying that kind of difference to web applications that are thick lattices of complex business logic, the contrast goes from pedantic to essential. I won’t sell old news, though; this subject has been well covered.

Hettinger also mentioned exciting additions to the standard library in Python 3 that will help make commonly-expressed ideas concise. For example, take the way we’d disregard an exception in Python 2.7:

try:
    content = f.read()
except IOError:
    pass

versus a built-in context manager in Python 3.3:

with ignored(IOError):
    content = f.read()

Pretty nice, huh? There’s nothing like being in a big room of people who get excited about this sort of stuff.

@raymondh delivering the goods.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the talks at PyCon was watching core developers negotiate the balance between language simplicity and convenience. Any additional “conveniences,” by necessity, introduce added complexity to the language. But if no conveniences are ever introduced, the result is overly-verbose, stiff code. Python’s leaders do an impressive job of managing trade-offs in this department.

“One– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.”

So, readable code helps us build Percolate quickly and safely. But the speakers at PyCon weren’t just concerned with simple syntax: they also discussed conceptual simplicity. Oft quoted documents included the sometimes-cryptic but profound Zen of Python and PEP8, the canonical source of style.

We’ve found PEP8 in particular to be a huge aid as the size of our engineering team grows. Many other environments I’ve worked in have been wrought with argument and frustration around proper code formatting; Python provides a standard. This encourages a uniform, consistent presentation and allows us to avoid many style-related arguments by appealing to a neutral document. This kind of standardization allows us to use automated tools that ensure new code is easy to read.

“Flat is better than nested.”

One of the most exciting parts of the conference for me was hearing Guido Van Rossum, Python’s Benevolent Dictator for Life, discuss his work on the new asynchronous framework Tulip. This project seeks to combat the hairy problem of asynchronous execution with a mechanism called coroutines. It is Guido’s attempt to unify a few disparate approaches in the Python ecosystem into a standard, consistent way within Python.

Almost every experience I’ve had with callbacks as a solution to an asynchronous problem has resulted in deeply-nested code that seems more difficult than necessary to trace through. The result is often lengthy debugging sessions. Guido’s approach with coroutines is exciting because it is an augmentation of Python’s flat function calls (prefix a “yield from” to the call), so we can read through code in a consistent way, independent of concurrency.

“Simple is better than complex.”

Percolate as a tool has many of the same aims that Python does, namely simplicity and effectiveness. Our trip to PyCon reminded me that there is huge value in studying the tools that we admire as we construct our own.

As we continue to grow the team we’ve realized that we need someone who is focused on recruiting, onboarding and nurturing employees. The challenge is that we didn’t have a good archetype for what we were looking for. How much should this person be focused on recruiting versus onboarding? What sort of background should we be looking for? So I tweeted out a request:

Anyone know any head of talent/recruiting I could talk to? Just want to meet some folks to get a better sense of the job.

— Noah Brier (@heyitsnoah) February 18, 2013

Luckily a handful of people came to my rescue and made some amazing introductions to folks at various talent/people/hr disciplines inside companies big and small who were willing to give me some of their time to help me understand what they thought the job took. As I was sitting in my fourth of these meetings this week, I got to thinking that it was worth writing up a blog post describing some of what I learned and how I think our approach is a bit different.

Director or Recruiter?
The first thing I needed to understand was where to start. Do we bring in someone more senior to oversee the process, build a team, etc. or do we bring in someone more focused on day-to-day recruiting? As I talked it out I realized that it was the former, not the latter, that we needed most as we were already doing quite well on the recruiting front and the primary need is to ensure that as we grow we continue to have a culture we’re proud of and employees who believe in the mission.

Growth, Growth, Growth
Another thing I heard over and over again, which shouldn’t be surprising, is to make sure that whomever we hire is able to deal with the ambiguity and change that comes from working in a high-growth environment. The company is changing, the product is changing, and whoever we hire to oversee talent will need to be able to adapt with us as we change. Along with this ability to deal with change was the need for creativity generally. Frequently HR is thought of as a dry discipline, but what’s really needed is someone who can come in and create talent products that are designed specifically for the needs of Percolate and can scale with the organization.

Listener First
Building on that last point, the person needs to be able to listen very very well. Not just to current and prospective employees, but also to the needs of the organization and the culture. I have a deep belief that the number one job of a product company is to find opportunities to build products everywhere. These products include processes and, for a head of talent, those processes need to be custom-built for who we are as a company. We have spent a lot of time documenting and building out these internal products already, so any head of talent needs to come in and fully immerse themselves in both who we are now and who we want to become before being able to properly understand how to build a talent department here.

HR Background?
This was a big question that I had for everyone I talked to and I got pretty consistent answers. Does someone have to have an HR background? No. It’s less important than the creativity, ambiguity, organizational, and listening skills. Is an HR background really helpful? Yes, it definitely is. There’s lots of specifics that come with an HR background that will save a ton of time as you get up to speed with overseeing talent at a company like ours and having experience dealing with those things will be hugely helpful. In the end it fell in the “nice to haves”.

Broadly where I ended up is that we’re looking for someone to come in and help take on the role of growing and nurturing the employees and culture. It needs to be someone rooted in working in a people-related role, but not necessarily someone so deeply rooted that they can’t come up with new ideas for helping us reach our goal of being the best place to work in New York City. If this sounds like you you should apply for the job right now.

Each basketball player who’s made it to the NBA/WNBA has been ‘the star’ for a portion of their career. I include portion because these young men and women were likely the centerpiece of their high school or college team. That status likely changed once they made it to the highest levels of basketball where there are 14 other ‘stars’ on the roster.

The great equalizer in NBA/WNBA isn’t height. It’s humility. Would you be able to accept your new role on a team of all-stars? How would you adjust after spending most of your developing life being told you’re the best only to suddenly be the second or third option off the bench? That’s the reality these players are facing.

One of my all-time favorite players, Chauncy Billups, is one example of someone whose years of hard work, right timing and a new team propelled him from role player to NBA All-Star. But, before becoming a five-time All-Star and 2004 Finals MVP, Billups was a NBA journeyman playing for five teams in his first five years.

I’ve followed Billups since he was in high school, watched him play at the University of Colorado and was excited when the Boston Celtics took him 3rd overall in the 1997 draft. But, things didn’t work out like he, or the Celtics, imagined. They shipped him off in a trade and he remained on the wrong teams until he joined the Detroit Pistons in 2002.

It all began to change once in Detroit. He was surrounded by equally hungry and talented teammates and had a visionary coach who saw the team’s potential to disrupt the Western Conferences domination from 1999-2003. And disrupt they would: Billups and his teammates in Detroit won the championship in 2004 and returned to the Finals in 2005.

We think about teams everyday at Percolate and over the last many months, we’ve attracted some incredibly talented individuals. Their backgrounds are diverse, and include banking, journalism, the art world, a major social network and recent college graduates, to name just a few. But everyone who joins Percolate, whatever their background, has one thing in common: he or she bought into our vision to redefine the future of digital marketing. And every single person at Percolate is doing his or her part to make this an incredible place to work.

Good news is we’re still hiring. We have 14 job openings. If you’re interested in joining our team, please get in touch because unlike the NBA/WNBA, you can choose where you play…

On Friday, the teams at Percolate – business and product – assembled for #hackpercolate 2013.

Nourished by a delicious and healthy breakfast and raring to go, we divvied up into teams to work on projects ranging from a mobile site to a dashboard view of key metrics in Percolate to an internal website that showed the occupancy state of the bathroom. Yes, you read that correctly and can read the dedicated post for how well that went.

Dispatch from Team Aroma (Arduino Light)

Team Aroma started with the bare materials of Arduino and ended with a product that shows – via LED smiley face –  1. when a client logs in and 2. when a client post is published via Percolate. Erik taught Sarah, Song, and Max to solder, which was key to connecting the circuits so that the display would work. Meanwhile, JOB and Luke worked on programming for the Arduino device (after Max did the original Arduino set-up), enabling it to communicate with the server and display a corresponding bitmap image. On the back end for the server, Danny checked for new posts and logins with Max’s help.

Great news, the team’s prototype worked on the first try–boom! Currently, we are trying to be fancy and get usernames to scroll that will correspond to the login. Sarah christened this project with the name “Aroma.” Erin also made an excellent presentation to showoff everyone’s hardwork. And, in the end, JOB cleaned up our mess. Thank you sir.

Dispatch from Team Perco-Users

The Perco-user team was comprised of two developers, one designer and five business folks with a shared goal of making it easier for all Percolate employees to understand the frequency of client usage.  Peter, an account manager at Percolate, tracks and analyzes client usage data daily.  He knows this information like the back of his hand.  However, Percolators in other functions don’t have easy access to this data.  Our goal was to fix that. We set out to build an internal dashboard that easily communicates software usage.  The ultimate objective is to understand client behavior to improve our product.

We began the brainstorm to find a balance between business need, creativity and product feasibility.  Once we had the general concept, each discipline got to work. With a framework for the dashboard, we needed to understand how to best represent the data to keep it easily consumable.  We decided it should be represented in two forms; an aggregate snapshot of all business, and a detailed breakout of each client.

In the end, the output was a blend of our unique perspectives from across the business. Now, everyone can understand software usage and work together – product and business – to get clients Percolating to their full potential.  Because the more you Percolate, the happier you are!

And, a very special thanks to Kate Whitlow for her fantastic and healthy catering services.

As a startup grows, so does the bathroom line.

Percolate has outgrown our office space, so the mention of Arduino technology during Hack Day kick-off quickly birthed an idea. We can build a way to check if the bathroom’s vacant from the comfort of your desk.

When Team Bathroom assembled–near the bathroom, of course–the first move was out the door. A shopping trip was in order.

At Canal Alarm Devices, the team picked up magnetic sensors to detect when the bathroom door opens.

Say hi everybody! From left above: April, Percolate office manager; Ian W, ops; Erik, mathematician; and Noah, co-founder and head of product.

There was a moment of reflection on Canal Street: How is this going to work exactly? The magnets tell a website if the toliet was vacant or occupied, if the door is open or closed. Visit a website to see and, if the door is closed, put your name–better yet, your Twitter handle–in the queue. When it’s your turn, you receive a tweet.

Then it was time to execute. Back at the office, April learned to code for the first time.

And Ian and Erik got to programming the Arduino.

Clearly, more field trips were eventually in order.

Meanwhile Brand Strategists Kunur and Jo selected the Twitter handle @PercolateWC and eventually wrangled a designer, Erin, for a crash-course in wireframing.

It took a bit of time for Kunur and Jo to find the wireframing templates.

At lunch, the team got a visit from Noah’s wife Leila. Clearly the Twitter bathroom reporter idea was born years ago: At Naked Communications, back when Twitter was first taking off, Noah sat near the loo and kept the office informed: “available,” “not available,” “hold off, someone took a while in there.”

Soon enough, Ian got the hardware working. Kunur, otherwise useless in these situations, put it on Vine.

And a working prototype was born in one working day. Awesome job Team Bathroom and on-the-fly recruits Doug and James OB.

What can be learned from a long walk? Teamwork.

The Bell Labs research facility in Murray Hill, New Jersey, home to some of the greatest minds, innovations and products of the 20th century was built in 1941.

The facility was designed with a 700 foot hallway connecting the research departments to each other and to the cafeteria. Why a 700 foot long hallway? Because Frank Jewett and Mervin Kelly at Bell Labs knew a longer walk between offices would increase the likelihood co-workers from different disciplines would pass, chat, and collaborate. They also knew communication was important for innovation and improvement, which is why they also adopted a strict open door policy for researchers, regardless of their level or seniority, encouraging entering and asking questions.

What can a team of 15 or even 40 learn from the Bell Labs model which had to accommodate 3,000 – 4,000 researchers? Well, there is a prevalent myth at small companies, particularly startups, as they grow that things were better “back in the day”. “Oh the good old days of working late into the night and doing it the hard way!” The truth is, it wasn’t better back then. As you grow the work gets better, more focused, and (for certain things) easier. Growth means there is a bigger team to rely on; more collective talent, more brain power, more heads for collaboration, more solutions and more hours back in the day. Stop to look around as you grow, there are probably more amazing people around than last year.

But one thing does change, and I’d argue this is the reason fast-growing companies yearn for the past. That thing is communication.

The challenge as companies grow is they require more physical space, and this often puts a real, literal distance between employees and teams. The entire company can no longer lean in at 9 PM and ask “how did we do today”? Teams get bigger and more specialized, decisions are made by teams, not by the company as a whole over lunch or in a rental car on the way to a meeting. So how do you keep the small, collaborative, intimate feel without adding a 700 foot hallway to the bathroom? Build systems which encourage, embrace and create value in cross team communications (particularly with the new guy).

Introducing Percolate

At Percolate we are building systems now to ensure we continue to maintain our open, questioning culture whether we have eight people or 3,000 sprawling across several international offices. In January we launched our first internal product to help solve this: Barista.

Barista was built to encourage all staff to ask and answer questions about Percolate, technologies, best practices, the neighborhood around the office, anything in fact. Anyone can ask and anyone can answer. Each question can be tagged with topics which can be subscribed to, you can even tag a question with an individual you feel may be best to answer it. The team also thought through asking questions well, as you write a new question we prompt you with similar questions which were previously asked; perhaps you’re not alone in wondering who painted our bathroom signs (Answer: Erik Dies).

As you grow communication is key, more so than an impressive reception area or a pool table; the systems real and digital that encourage communication, questions and curiosity ultimately matter more. Barista is the first step towards realizing our own 700 foot hallway and open door policy, but in a digital format that provides value to the whole organization and not just those in earshot of a good idea discussed over lunch.

If you’re interested in Bell Labs, I highly recommend Jon Gertner’s ‘The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation’