I started running Product and Engineering at Change.org late this past April. One of the things that attracted me to the company was how successful they had been with such a small, focused staff. For example, my colleague Mark Dimas had single-handedly built the entire web site. As an engineer, Mark’s expertise is both broad and deep, yet amazingly, he seems to have almost no ego.

After assessing things within the organization in my first few weeks there, I realized that not only was there some technical debt (as can be expected when only one person works on a codebase), but in addition, there was quite a bit of organizational debt. Not only had Mark built the whole web site, but he was also doing network and system operations, technical support, and a whole array of other things to keep the web site running smoothly. I feared what might happen if he ever got “hit by a bus”.

I am an entrepreneur. My favorite part of entrepreneurialism is team-building. And my favorite part of team-building is the beginning stages. People who have built early-stage teams before will most likely either smile or cringe at that statement … they’ll smile because they know that the early-stage team are the foundation for the whole future. They’ll cringe because they know how detrimental it can be to hire the wrong people. The early-stage team members are the metaphorical Atlas upon whose shoulders the world rests. Hiring the right people at the beginning will go a long way toward making a team successful. Hiring the wrong people … well, I’ve done it, and let me tell you: it isn’t pretty.

I can best illustrate my point with data I’ve collected about hiring engineers here at Change.org. I’ve looked at 127 resumes. From those 127 resumes, I’ve set up 72 phone screen interviews. Of those 72 phone screens, I’ve invited 9 engineers on-site for in-person interviews. Of those 9 engineers, just 3 made it past all of the rounds of in-person interviews and received offers. And of those 3 offers, just 1 engineer accepted. For those of you not good at math, that’s about a 0.08% success rate on resumes received. 127 –> 72 –> 9 –> 3 –> 1 == 0.08%!

Some of you may be saying to yourselves, “That’s impossible — certainly there must have been more than just 3 viable candidates from a pool of 127!” To which my response is, “No, there weren’t.” When we are evaluating candidates, we consider mission-alignment (we are Change.org, after all), team fit, and skills and experience (in that order). We have met with a few candidates who had deep skills and expertise, but were not a team fit. Other folks seemed like they’d be great to work with, but didn’t quite have the depth of experience we need from them at this stage. With such a small team, we need folks who can hit the ground running, folks who aren’t intimidated by a large codebase, a large data set, or intense uptime requirements. We’re rapidly approaching 2 million users and get about 100 thousand new signups every month. We are profitable and need to stay that way. We need hardcore hackers, not hobbyists.

We are, right now, feeling the burdens of being understaffed. Still, .

Are you a Ruby / Rails hacker? Do you want to use your skills to make the world a better place? Would you like to work for someone who has (in the past) made hiring mistakes and understands that understaffed beats wrongstaffed? Drop me a line. We’d love to meet you.

Most of my adult life I’ve called myself a “social anarchist”. Make no mistake: I am (and always have been) fully aware that I am a white, privileged, male American. Nonetheless, my early studies of politics led me to believe that:

1. Bureaucracies don’t work. The larger, they are, the less effective they are.
2. Individual freedom is more important than collective welfare.
3. Any system created by humans will be corrupted by humans.

My conclusion was: don’t bother.

The United States was founded by a bunch of anarchists. Actually, it was founded by a bunch of privileged, wealthy, white, land-owning anarchists. Often, they were the cast-off nonconformists of European privileged society that placed pedigree above merit. Every system has its flaws …

Now I’m 36 years old. I spent most of 2009 traveling this beautiful wide world. And, unfortunately, I have seen the status quo that is hidden from view for most first-world privileged folk. It’s washing up on the shores of Koh Lipeh in Thailand in the form of Coca Cola bottles. Today, it’s washing up on the shores of the Gulf Coast in the form of crude oil.

I’m an engineer by training. Engineers like to think about problems of optimization. Human systems are just that: our attempt to optimize for certain variables. Unfettered capitalism is one such system. It tries to simplify everything by creating a system around the notion of “currency” — a universal unit of measurement from which and into which any resource can be “converted”. We’re optimizing to maximize the amount of currency in the world. Guess what: it’s working. However, that’s not the right variable against which to optimize! We should be optimizing for happiness, not wealth. My wealthiest friends are the least happy people I know. Past the point of “freedom to spend your time as you wish”, wealth inevitably makes people unhappy.

Like all such systems, pure capitalism is too simple. It looks great on paper. However, it doesn’t look great on the shores of small Pacific Islands — it doesn’t look great on the shores of Louisiana right now, either. The system itself is imperfect.

Does this mean I’m casting off my “social anarchistic” tendencies and becoming a Democrat? Hardly. Actually, I could never align myself with either Democrats or Republicans, since they are both too moderate for me. Politics is not linear. There is more than one axis. I am neither “left” nor “right”. In terms of social / moral politics, I believe the government should “butt out” (yes, gays should be able to marry, all psychoactive substances should be legalized, etc.). In terms of fiscal policy, however, my recent observations have made it very clear to me that regulation of huge corporate beasts is not only necessary, but imperative.

I find it quite depressing that so many of the world’s brightest people, many of whom are my friends (and / or family), fail to see that governments are no longer the enemy of “the people”. Well, maybe they are. But they’re no longer the most powerful enemy. Huge, multinational corporations now rule the world. And until we reign them in, everyone will suffer, including libertarians, startup entrepreneurs, and day laborers.

Unfortunately, I am not a political scholar. I am a businessman, an inventor, a technologist, and an entrepreneur. I don’t offer any solutions in this blog post. I’m just ranting, as usual. For this (and all of my other shortcomings), I apologize.

If you’re in California, though, I will offer this: don’t forget to vote today!

Today, I officially started as the full-time VP of Product and Engineering for change.org. You may want to ask me, “What?! You took a job?” I’ll admit, it wasn’t what I was expecting. As these things go, though, often a series of connections leads to a synergy that simply feels too good to disregard. In this particular case, I was introduced to Ben (the CEO) through my friend Tamara, and was immediately taken by his vision, his passion, and (to be frank) what he had already accomplished.

Ben is a true leader — the type of guy that when you meet with him you just can’t help catching a bout of his contagious passion. His vision, to be the platform where people use the organizational power of the internet to create positive change in the world, is nothing short of daunting. Yet he faces it not only with confidence, but with relentless enthusiasm. He’s surrounded himself with nothing but “A-players”, each of whom has played a crucial role in creating one of the most impressive businesses I’ve ever seen. Ben’s vision, it would seem, is truly within reach.

So what was it that finally hooked me? After all, there are many places where I might have found a job (although, to be honest, I wasn’t looking). After Founding and leading Zivity, I was almost certain I’d start something else once my travels completed. One thing stuck with me, though, from my first meeting with Ben. He said something to me along the lines of, “I look around San Francisco and the Valley and I see some of the most brilliant people in the world. And what are they doing? They’re selling icons. I believe our generation has something better to offer the world than FarmVille.”

I couldn’t agree more. The torch has been passed. It is our generation’s turn to take responsibility for the planet and its people and do our best to make it better. I, for one, believe that entrepreneurialism is the most effective form of creating the change we want in the world, and change.org sits exactly in the place where I want to be. It’s a Bay Area tech company with a simple mission: make the world better.

Oh, and remember … with great power comes great responsibility. Use your powers for something good. Come join us. We’re hiring. Bad-ass Ruby / Rails engineers wanted. Contact me: jeffrey [-at-] change [-dot-] org.

Today I had two meetings with friends of mine who are founders of “make the world a better place” type entrepreneurial ventures: Ben Rattray from change.org and Brandon Conard from GreenZu. Both meetings reminded me of what it means to be a “founder”.

Founders are “vision holders”. They tend to have a mission. Above everything else, they are committed to this mission, this vision. They do their best to organize a team of people around this vision in order to move it forward. They are willing to go without pay, without any kind of reward, to walk into unchartered territory, and, to convince their teams to follow them, even if it is “into fire”.

I saw a tweet today that was something along the lines of, “My exit strategy is my death.” These are founders. These are the people behind startups. Their vision and mission seem to be all that matters to them. These are the people who, quite literally, change the world.

Have you hugged a founder today?

Macworld was a big success for my budsock project. We sold enough of them on the show floor to nearly cover the booth costs, which was far beyond what I expected. My hope was to meet some people and get traction with distributors and retail (side-note: we did), and perhaps sell a few on the show floor. That’s exciting! The most important feedback we got was along the lines of: “This is one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen. I’ll take 3.” It ended up giving some validation to my relentless commitment to “function over form”, but also validated what many of those closest to me had said, which is that the lack of “design beauty” in the product is holding it back. With that in mind, I’ve started the process of designing version 3 of the budsock. I’ve enlisted Noah Guy, an extremely talented San Francisco-based designer (who also happens to be quite fond of cool gadgets) to lead the design process. I’m excited to see what comes of it.

As I’ve been thinking about the design and accumulating feedback from lots of people, as well as thinking about my purpose (which you can read more about here), I’ve decided that I want budsock v3 to, as much as possible, be an “upcycled” product. While in v1 and v2 I was pretty committed to the idea of “no plastics” and “organic fabric”, a recent conversation has led me to believe that I’d be better off turning some of the thousands of thousands of “waste” plastic bottles that get thrown away into something that saves people time and makes them happy. Although I haven’t spoken to Noah about it yet, I plan to push him toward upcycling with his design.

Onward and upward. Stay tuned, budsock fans …

After a year-long sabbatical during which I circumnavigated the globe (Mexico, Montana and Wyoming, Germany, Turkey, Thailand, and Indonesia), I’ve returned, recharged and ready.  For anyone who has never taken a long break, I cannot recommend it highly enough.  In the quiet spaces, I finally found peace with emptiness and stillness, and thus, myself.  With the people I encountered, I gained a deeper understanding of humanity and my sense of purpose.

Now that I’m back, I find myself full of energy.  I am patiently awaiting that moment where I find clarity on my “next big thing”.  In the meantime, I continue to try to monetize my various projects: BudSock, a few iPhone applications, and intermittent contract / consulting work.  If you have a contract-based project that you think I’d be interested in, please let me know.

Longer-term, what I’m looking for is an opportunity that lies at the intersection of information technology and green business.  It seems likely that I’ll start my own venture, but I am, of course, open to other early-stage companies.  If you know of any, please let me know.

Onward and upward …