labec99 · 7 months ago
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I just really fucking hate having to deal with corporate software.
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kabirshahni · 1 year ago
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Amperity reveals marketing data platform and Microsoft partnership as it aims to become Seattle’s next great startup
Amperity reveals marketing data platform and Microsoft partnership as it aims to become Seattle’s next great startup
GeekWire’s in-depth startup coverage tells the stories of the Pacific Northwest entrepreneurial scene.
Amperity co-founders Kabir Shahani and Derek Slager. Photo via Amperity.
Amperity has top talent, solid venture investment, and a tested solution to a pressing problem. Now the company is coming out of stealth mode to share its vision with the world as it aims to become one of Seattle’s top new startups.
Kabir Shahani and Derek Slager are back at it again, four years after selling Seattle-based healthcare marketing startup Appature to IMS Health in 2013.
A year-and-a-half ago, the entrepreneurs teamed up for another go in the marketing automation space, only this time with a much bigger vision for a product tackling a much more difficult problem.
The result is Amperity, which today lifted the hood on its technology that helps some of the world’s largest companies better understand their individual customers by connecting disparate data sources from across the internet.
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The 40-person startup raised $9 million in February 2016 from Madrona Venture Group — which participated in the initial venture round for Appature in 2009 — along with a who’s-who list of angel and venture investors like Liquid 2 Ventures founder Joe Montana; Founders’ Co-op partner Chris DeVore; former Microsoft corporate vice president S. Somasegar; Concur co-founder Rajeev Singh; former drugstore.com CEO Dawn LePore; Isilon Systems founder Sujal Patel; and former ExactTarget chief marketing officer Tim Kopp, who now is a partner at Hyde Park Ventures.
Amperity used that cash to build out its team and create a marketing technology platform which ties together unorganized data about individual customer habits and helps clients fine tune their targeted marketing campaigns.
Based on their experience at Appature, which helped healthcare companies track and enhance marketing campaigns, Shahani and Slager knew that there was an opportunity across various industries to better leverage data to create a more complete view of a customer. They worked with Dan Suciu, a computer science professor at the University of Washington and a data management expert, to help figure out how to connect customer data across different sources without a unique identifier.
“We spent a bunch of time with Dan last year to really understand if this was technically feasible — how to handle this scale of data and how to apply machine learning to this problem,” Shahani told GeekWire this week.
Amperity had early pilot customers test its technology earlier this year and saw “extraordinary results,” Shahani said, with revenue increasing and customer acquisition costs dropping. The startup has continued to build out its technology that ingests trillions of data points from a single customer and crunches that information with machine learning to give marketers a holistic understanding of a given user.
Amperity links together several discrete data sources related to one customer — everything from an in-store transaction, online purchasing tendencies, browsing behavior, mobile app activity, email campaign responses, CRM information, etc.
Shahani noted that part of Amperity’s secret sauce is making it easy for companies to plug that data into its system. The CEO said this process has historically been human-driven and “incredibly error prone.”
“We have the scale to not only ingest that data very quickly, but actually do something really meaningful and useful with it so you can action on it to drive the kind of results we’re seeing with our customers,” he added.
The platform can help a retailer figure out customers who spent more than $1,000 last year, but only $250 so far in 2017, for example. Or, it can help an airline identify customers who flew four times in 2016, but only once this year.
“This arbitrary question you might want to ask of your customer data — this is stuff that these companies can’t do today,” Shahani said. “It’s impossible for them to quickly get that data.”
Amperity is not a predictive analysis platform; instead, its clients can take this data and then figure out how to tweak their marketing campaigns. Its technology is particularly valuable for companies that are not “internet-first.”
Amperity’s customers, which include Fortune 500 companies, range from a wide variety of industries — one of many differences from Shahani and Slager’s experience at Appature.
“We have a very big vision around what we see this business capable of being in terms of its contribution to the market and our customers, and to our employees and this community,” Shahani said. “That’s something that really drives us in a way that I don’t think we were driven by before and thought about before.”
Shahani and Slager have long-time ties to the Seattle area and are bullish about creating the next great local startup. Shahani said today marks a milestone in reaching that goal.
“If we continue to play our cards right, continue to serve our customers well, and continue to build great product, we will have the same opportunity that many of those lighthouse companies like Tableau, Apptio, and others have done,” he noted.Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at Microsoft Envision.
Being in the Seattle region also helped Amperity link up with Microsoft for a “really meaningful partnership,” said Shahani, who has spent the past year working directly with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Microsoft customers will get access to Amperity via its independent software vendor system while the company will look to integrate the platform with its Adobe partnership.
“The way Amperity lights up products like Azure, Azure Data Lake, Azure Machine Learning, the Power BI stack, Dynamics — when you feed those products with better, unified data about the customer that is more complete, those products perform a lot better for the user,” Shahani explained. “Satya was very persuasive in getting us to build Azure compatibility, which is something we hadn’t done historically with our product.”
Shahani noted that Amperity is not exclusive to Azure and expects the same level of integration with Amazon Web Services in the future.
Amperity has steadily added veteran talent to its leadership team, from bringing on Dave Fetterman as vice president of engineering, to hiring Amy Pelly as its CFO, to adding Aashish Dhamdhere as vice president of marketing.
But Amperity has also seen a bit of churn with some hires. Shahani acknowledged a “sub-15 percent attrition” but said the company considers that within a normal range.
“One thing we’ve always been committed to as an operator is that if things aren’t working, you try to make it work where it makes sense, but if it doesn’t, you make the call early,” he said. “It’s not always us saying it’s not a fit, or the other party saying it’s not a fit. Sometimes you both look each other in the eye and say, ‘you know what, we thought this was a great idea, but for both of us it turns out it’s not working out.’ We’ve worked extra hard to make sure we have those conversations candidly and we do them quickly when we realize there isn’t a great fit and we treat people the way we want to be treated on the way out.”
Shahani said the company is still working off its initial $9 million investment — “we’ve been very capital efficient,” he noted — but expects to entertain additional funding conversations down the road.
Amperity is celebrating its launch with an event in Seattle today featuring executives from Crate & Barrel, Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, Alaska Airlines, Nordstrom, and Starbucks.
“Every brand wants to have a more personal relationship with their customers, but they often have data in disparate locations and systems,” Matt McIlwain, managing director at Madrona Venture Group and Amperity board member,’ said in a statement. “Amperity combines modern machine learning and cloud technology to create compelling customer data management solutions that help the world’s leading brands serve those customers better.”
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darkkitsuneprincess · 5 years ago
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Conquest (Nobunaga x Reader)
Finally! Something new and lovely! With the threat of Mitsuhide’s route release (major SQUEE action over here ‘cause I do love me some snek), the smut gears are churning again.  With any luck it won’t take as long next time to post something new. So…here you go. Enjoy!
Title: Conquest Pairing: Nobunaga x Female Rating: M (again, very NSFW) Length: 4100 words Description: AU game of Go, now with smut action!
*******
The soft clack of wooden soles filled the empty hallway, a stark counterpoint to the knocking of my heart as I made my way to the tenshu. My hands shook against one another inside the sleeves of my kimono. My belly quivered. So much rode on my winning just one game of Go. If I had any hope of returning to my time—of returning home—I needed to withstand Nobunaga’s advances. He was determined, a man possessed if I were honest in my description, and I stood no chance. Even with regular tutelage in both gameplay and battle strategy from Mitsunari, I was fooling myself to believe I was any contest for that terrible and beautiful tactician’s mind.
Having reached the door to Nobunaga’s room, I hesitated. I always hesitated. My heart was his long before he pressed his hand to my chest and claimed it for his own. It had taken nearly dying for me to accept that truth. Yet now that we were back in Azuchi, back in this familiar space with nothing to stop us save my own inhibitions… my body quaked with a mix of anticipation and fear.
What would he choose to claim tonight? How would I react? Did I want to let myself be claimed if I couldn’t prove his love for me?
I didn’t know. I wanted him as much as I wanted the air I breathed and I was even willing to take on all the awful things that came with him—ruthlessness, cruelty for the greater good, death—so long as I knew I would be more than a temporary plaything. For him, for his love, I could choose to stay…
I pushed the thought away and tapped my fingers against the door, sealing my fate.
“Nobunaga, I’m here.”
“Enter.”
And so I did, sliding the door to the side and slipping in. The sight of him robbed me of breath. Nobunaga lounged against his armrest from behind the goban with a thin smile on his lips, a predator even in repose. He stalked me with his gaze as I crossed the room on unsteady legs and took my seat on the vacant cushion. His gaze was appreciative and hungry. Haughty, as if my losing was already a foregone conclusion.
I wouldn’t let myself dwell on the fact that I had no chance of beating him as I picked up my first stone and followed his opening volley with one of my own. We were silent as we placed our pieces, the soft clack of the stones the only sound in the room. This game was…different than the last. Nobunaga was focused yet not, his gaze traveling upward to my face more and more often as we claimed and lost territory. Despite my own distraction, I managed to hold my own until the very end. In a series of quick, incursive moves he wiped out the narrow lead I’d held for most of the game, crushing my territory in a solid and decisive victory.
“I win.”
…a phrase that haunted me. I stared at the goban in frustration. My losing was inevitable, yes, but no less annoying. Biting the inside of my cheek to keep from scowling, I leveled Nobunaga with a cold stare.
“So you did.”
He blinked in surprise. “No smart remarks from you?”
“What good would it do? You’ve already set the terms of our wager.”
“This is quite unlike you,” he responded. “Are you unwell, Y/N?”
“No.”
An arrogant smirk lifted one corner of his mouth. “Are you so desperate for my touch that you are willing to give in then?”
Yes. “No.”
“Then why not put up a fight?”
“Because you won.” He looked…disappointed almost, as if he’d expected a long battle. “Do you want me to fight?”
“I’ve come to expect it from you.”
“Well I’m just full of surprises, aren’t I?”
I found myself in his arms in the next breath, the sound of stones scattering across the tatami a distant echo behind the hammering of my heart as the spicy scents of cinnamon and incense surrounded me. My hands landed on his arms just above the elbows, my brain noting wildly in the moment that my hands didn’t even go half-way around.
“As am I,” he answered.
My skin prickled with awareness everywhere we touched. His ragged breath slipped over the skin of my throat, igniting the flame low in my belly as he leaned close and captured my earlobe between his teeth. I shivered, a tiny moan escaping my lips.
“Such sweet cries from one who shows no affect,” he murmured, his deep, sonorous voice rumbling through me and setting my nerve endings on fire. The tip of his nose moved down the line of my throat with the lightest of feathery touches then back up again. His fingers flexed against my hips, the warmth radiating from his body seeping into my skin through the layers of my kimono. “I would almost believe you enjoy yourself when I touch you.”
And there’s the trap, I thought.
Rather than implicate myself, I remained quiet, my fingers flexed against his arms to keep them from shaking while his lips slid over my skin to the split at the throat of my kimono. My head fell back and I bit my lip to keep from making another sound. He knew full well what he did to me. There was no need to stroke that massive ego of his further.
“What shall I claim tonight?” he asked, his lips moving against my skin. His fingers dropped to my leg where my kimono had bunched around my knees, sliding beneath the layers of fabric to tickle over my outer thigh. “I own so many parts of you, yet my lands are not connected. Your leg, your lap, your ear, your forehead, your hand…”
“You speak as if you’ve forgotten basic battle tactics,” I said. I was goading him and I knew it, but his touch did such wicked, wonderful things to me. “You may be a master at Go, but even I know that to win at Risk, you have to keep your territory intact.”
“What?” Nobunaga pulled back and looked down at me, curiosity burning in those beautiful, cinder-red eyes.
“A strategy game from my time. You start with a map of the world and use your armies to conquer the continents piece by piece.”
“It sounds delightful,” he said, a smile softening his sharp gaze. I knew I had his attention now. His curiosity was almost as insatiable as his hunger. “You will teach me this game.”
“Is that what you want for winning?” I question, biting the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling. “Me to teach you a game?”
“Absolutely not,” he answered without hesitation, his fingers digging into my sides to remind me exactly where I was. “I will claim my prize and learn everything you know of this game.” He leaned in again, nibbling along the cuff of my ear and winning another moan for his trouble. “And then I will use that knowledge to destroy you again and again.”
“That’s not fair!”
Nobunaga groaned despite the smile on his face when he pulled back. “Will you give me no peace, woman?” he asked, his devilish expression turning predatory.
“Probably not,” I replied.
His hands threaded through my hair, his long fingers massaging my scalp in the process. I shivered as those calloused fingertips traced my ear and slid down my throat. His touch was more intoxicating than any sake, more addictive than any drug. The tiny voice of reason in my mind told me I should put a stop to this, but my heart and body craved him.
“I continue to claim you bit by bit, yet those lips of yours protest. Your body responds…” His fingers drifted over my shoulder and down my arm, leaving a trail of tingling warmth in their wake. “…and it tells me you want this.” My hand rose in response to his touch and our fingers threaded together. “Then you deny me.” His other hand slid to the back of my head, closing around my hair. “Perhaps you will be willing to relinquish control of those beautiful lips now.”
“You are a warrior, yes?” I asked.
“Yes…”
“Then how can you possibly enjoy the conquest if I don’t resist?”
Nobunaga’s gaze darkened and his smirk grew into a feral, hungry grin. “So you want to be hunted…to be claimed.”
In a breath I was on my back on the tatami, his large, muscular frame over me and filling my vision. Gone was the cold façade of the conqueror, replaced with a fiery new passion I’d never seen before. That look in his eyes, beautiful and desperate, it burned.
“If being claimed is what you desire…”
“You only get to claim one thing,” I reminded him at the same time I pushed against him. He did not move even an inch.
“But the choice is still mine,” he responded and began to map with his lips the parts of me he’d already taken—my hand, my ear, my forehead, my leg, his palm over my heart…
“Make your selection, Devil King.”
The flames in his carnelian eyes burned hotter and his smile twisted into something almost cruel.
“The Devil King is not interested in petty acquisitions,” he said, leaning in to drag the tip of his nose along my throat. “No…I want complete submission. Tonight you will give everything to me.”
“All is fair in love and war, Nobunaga. I will not submit.” I pushed harder against him and slipped away, rising on shaky legs to put some distance between the two of us. I couldn’t think with him so close, taking up all my attention.
Nobunaga tracked me with his gaze as I moved to the other side of the room and slid open the balcony door. He was enjoying this. Truth be told, so was I. My safety was never once in question; if I asked him to stop, he would. OF that one thing I was certain.
“Do you still intend to return to your time?” he asked, his rich, deep voice hinting at uncertainty.
“I…” I had thought so much about it but had yet to come to a conclusion. These games, his driving need for me to look only at him, the way I felt in his arms… Sasuke told me not to get attached, but I’d gone and done it without realizing it. I wanted Nobunaga and everything he was willing to give me. I could tell myself that now because to do otherwise would be unfair to either of us. Yet the thought that he could so callously take lives in the name of his ambition, though…
“My fireball is without retort.” He rose to his feet, fluid and graceful despite his considerable size. “How interesting.”
“I am not a toy, Nobunaga.”
“No…” he replied, eating up the distance between us with long strides. “My toys do not talk back to me.” Those long, lean fingers closed around my jaw. His thumb grazed my bottom lip. His eyes burned with that cold fire.
“If I claim these tonight,” he did it again, “will you try to stop me?”
I stared up at him, mouth open, breath coming in small gasps. Would I ask him to stop? Did I have the strength to push him away again?
“You’ve taken my heart,” I said, my voice thin and raspy against his fingertips, “what could be more important than that?”
“Is that…surrender I hear?” he questioned, closing the distance between us while his thumb continued to toy with my lips.
“Not even close,” I responded, catching his thumb between my teeth and biting harder than necessary. Nobunaga grunted in response, his gaze darkening as it focused on the spot where I, for once, held him captive.
“You are brave,” he said, pushing his thumb deeper into my mouth. Swirling my tongue around the callused digit, I reveled in the salty-sweet taste of his skin. I closed my lips around his knuckle, suckling gently and drawing a gasp from his throat. “Naughty girl,” he added, ripping his thump from my mouth as he closed the distance and claimed my lips.
Oh… Oooohhhh…..
He held me by the throat and the back of my head, plunging his tongue between my open lips and drawing me into a delicious new battle. His cinnamon-and-incense scent was infused into his lips, and I couldn’t stop the moan from rising as I twined my own tongue with his, enjoying this new kind of warfare.
My back hit the wall and Nobunaga’s strong arms caged me in. This man now owned me, body and soul. I only hoped I could live up to whatever expectations he’d built in his mind.
Nobunaga broke away from my mouth, his lips leaving a fiery trail along my jaw to my ear, then down my throat. Before I realized what was happening he had my kimono open, kissing and licking his way over my collarbone toward my breasts. My fingers carded through his soft, thick hair and my head fell back against the wall with a soft thump. I never wanted this feeling to end, but my competitive spirit flared to life under his touch.
“Nobunaga…” I gasped as his lips closed on the aching peak of my left breast. His hand rested above it and my heart hammered against his touch, urging him onward as he licked and suckled at my sensitive flesh. “That’s—mmm—that’s not…not your t-t-terri—ngghh—territory…”
“It’s too late for revolt,” he answered through his teeth, without letting go of my nipple.
“It isn’t revolt if you never had control of the territory in the first place.”
He let go of me with a wet pop and laughed. The jerk actually laughed at me. “So you’ve declared war against me, have you?” A smile slid onto his lips but a shiver overtook him as I moved my fingers against his scalp, dangerously close to the back of his neck. He tensed as if waiting for me to launch an attack.
“I did nothing of the sort. You declared war against me the moment you placed the goban between us.”
“Then you should save yourself the heartache and surrender to me.”
“There is no honor in surrender.”
His mouth fell open in a flash of surprise. Then Nobunaga raised one eyebrow and his smile widened further. The look in his eyes was one of pure heat. He was enjoying this as much as I was. “You do remember who I am, yes?”
“Of course.”
“Then who am I?” he asked, his fingers tickling along the length of my leg and causing me to shiver. My kimono hung open to the floor. He could have taken advantage at any moment, but he remained in his territory, his gaze locked firmly on mine.
“You,” I started, pulling my fingers from his hair. I placed my hand against his cheek, allowing his warmth to seep into my skin, “are the Oda Nobunaga, one of Japan’s great unifiers.” I allowed my smile to widen and my eyes to narrow. “and you are on your knees in front of me.” I captured his jaw in my other hand as his eyes widened, holding him tightly as I leaned close—so close that I could feel his ragged breath against my lips. “It would appear, my Lord, that you have submitted to me.”
“Have I?”
His gaze darkened and his fingers ceased their teasing torment along my skin. Something flashed in his eyes—something dangerous—and for a moment I wondered if I’d taken this game too far.
Too late now.
“A man who goes to his knees willingly is one who submits, is he not?”
Nobunaga laughed. The sound rumbled through me, spreading more of that delicious, tingling heat in its wake. “First rule of warfare, little one,” he said, and before I could draw my next breath, my back was against the cover of the futon, “when you have a man on his knees, you should always bind his hands so he cannot attack.” My kimono lay open on either side, the evening air cool against my overheated skin. Nobunaga held himself above me, his lower half nestled between my parted thighs. Everywhere he touched burned.
He captured my earlobe between his teeth, worrying it until I moaned with a mix of pleasure and pain. “A cornered man on the verge of surrender is often a desperate man.” He turned his attention to my neck, leaving small, stinging bites on my skin. “And a desperate man will stop at nothing to win.”
Nobunaga returned to my lips, drawing me into another rough, battling kiss, and when he released his hold on my mouth, my hands were bound above my head with my own obi cord.
“Do you know what I do to those who demand my submission?” he asked, teeth raking over my neck again. I stared up into his gaze and shook my head slowly. “I crush them beneath me.” Nobunaga flexed his hips against my core, unquestionable proof that he now had complete control over me. He stilled, dropping his mouth to my ear, and took a deep breath. “If you do not want this, Y/N, tell me now because I have no intention of stopping.”
His words excited me. Despite his complete domination of me, he was still concerned about my well-being. That alone urged me onward as I reached up with my bound wrists and took his face in my hands, drawing his mouth back to mine. He kissed me like a man possessed, with all the passion and fury locked inside his ice-bound heart.
“I will not submit,” I said, my voice small and shaking when we parted, and his eyes darkened further as if he waited for the perfect moment to deliver the death blow, “not without a fight.” Surprise filtered into his features and I thrust my hips upward, knocking him off balance just enough to be able to hook my leg over his and flip him onto his back. His surprise turned to shock and amusement as he found himself on his back, his wrists in my tied hands against the floor. I leaned over his big body, my unbound breasts pressing against his chest as I dropped my mouth close to his ear. “I can also demand submission,” I said, my lips grazing the cuff of his ear and causing him to shiver. A growl rumbled out of his throat and his hands flexed under mine, reminding me that he only allowed me the appearance of control.
“Demand what you like,” Nobunaga replied, a smile splitting his beautiful face, “it appears you and I seek the same goal.” He punctuated his words with an upward thrust of his hips. His arousal became apparent as his cock slid against my core, halted only by the fabric of his night robes.
Then I was on my back again, Nobunaga’s embrace gentle and his kiss punishing. He tore away the remainder of his clothing with one hand and settled his hips between my thighs. Those long, calloused fingers moved over my thigh to my hip, then between our bodies to seek out my wet heat. He dipped one finger inside and I answered with a moan.
“I see my little conqueror enjoys losing,” he said, laughing against my lips as a second finger joined in, pushing deep and stretching, preparing me. “It was an impressive battle,” he continued, curling his fingers up and finding that secret, sensitive place that caused my hips to rise of their own accord, chasing that bright point of pleasure, “and now I shall claim my reward.”
“Nobunaga…” I gasped as his fingers vanished, his name sliding into a long, low moan as he pushed inside, filling me almost to the point of pain. An answering rumble issued from his throat as we came together. Only when he was fully seated inside me did the sound die away.
“Mine…” he growled, catching my ear between his teeth once more as he began to move. My hips rose to meet his deep, hard thrusts, my body begging for more under his fast, steady rhythm. I looped my bound arms around his neck and clung to him desperately, my lips seeking purchase along his shoulder, at the base of his throat; anywhere I could touch became my territory as he drove me higher and higher into the most intense, sublime pleasure of my life. “Mine…” he groaned again, repeating the word like a prayer punctuated with tiny, stinging bites over my skin and long, delicious kisses. My belly quivered in anticipation as that knot of pleasure curled tighter and tighter, urged on by the draw and drag of his heavy member moving inside me. Nobunaga shifted his position, deepening his reach and bringing his hips down against me with each thrust. My fingernails dug into his shoulders, my head thrown back in ecstasy, and I shattered.
My channel tightened, drawing him deeper still as wave after wave of the most exquisite pleasure crashed over me. Still he rode me through it, his rhythm increasing and pushing me higher until he seated his hips fully against me and came with a loud, desperate moan.
Nobunaga collapsed against me, breathing hard, and I held him to me as we came down from the pleasure high, his hips still gently rocking and my own rising to meet his movements. Tiny aftershocks of pleasure jolted my core as the realization of what I’d done tried to take control. I’d given him everything he wanted without securing my own requirements. But the way he’d looked at me…
I pushed the thoughts away, leaning up to kiss the top of his head. His soft, feathery hair tickled my face and I felt his cheek tighten against my chest as he smiled. Nobunaga pulled my arms from around his neck and rolled, pulling me to lay atop his body yet retaining our intimate connection. He released my wrists, kissing the angry, red lines where the silk had burned my skin. His fingers combed through my hair and slid down my back, holding me to him.
“You are a truly amazing creature, Y/N.” He laughed, the sound rumbling all the way through me and rekindling that fire burning in my core. I looked up, suddenly bashful as he stared down his nose at me with a new intensity to his gaze.
“How so?”
“You bring out both the best and worst in me.” He punctuated the statement with an upward thrust of his hips that told me he was nowhere near finished. He was still inside me, and his cock was already stiffening again. The action drew a low, weak moan out of me. “You allow me to play out the most lurid of fantasies. You give me exactly what I need.”
“A-and what is…is that?” I asked, fighting to stay focused on his words as his movements under me became more pronounced.
“A beautiful, entertaining bedmate of which I may never tire,” he answered, sitting up and capturing my mouth as he brought my hips down hard against his. He held me in his lap, my legs bent on either side of him, and thrust upward again, urging me to move. Those big, broad arms closed around me, placing me exactly where he wanted me as he continued his slow, languid kiss.
This second round was less desperate; slower, more intimate. We kissed long and deep, his tongue twining around mine and expressing the affection he couldn’t vocalize. My hips rocked against his slow thrusts, tilting so that each time we came together, the brush of his hips stimulated me further. Though we were less frantic, every sensation seemed heightened. It was less about chasing the climax than enjoying the moment, and enjoy it we certainly did.
Nobunaga held me tight, his fingers dancing over my skin as we moved together, our bodies instinctually finding a rhythm together and stoking those low-burning flames until we came together in a strangled series of whispers and moans.
We collapsed together into the bed, exhausted and delirious with pleasure. I dozed against his shoulder. He slept with his head against my breast, never allowing me farther away than his arms could reach. Throughout the night we sought the warmth and pleasure of each other’s bodies time and time again until the sun began to rise.
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trensu · 5 years ago
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Episode 28: The One where LXC Loses his Title as Greatest Wingman
THAT’S RIGHT GUYS
WE’RE HERE
THE ONE THAT HOLDS ONE OF THE MOST PRECIOUS, CLASSIC WANGXIAN SCENES IN THE WHOLE SHOW
THE SCENE THAT JUST BURSTS WITH WANGXIAN DOMESTICITY AND WE DIE FROM THE SHEER FLUFFINESS OF IT ALL
Shockingly this VERY IMPORTANT wangxian moment doesn’t start until the 34min mark.
So we’re gonna power through those first 34min to get to the parts that actually matter
We’re still at the burial mounds
Emotional Yungmeng Bro Drama happens
It’s very upsetting
There’s a lot of feelings everywhere.
I can’t defend you if you keep this path, jc protests 
You can’t defend me? Then Leave me, wwx says, tell the world i defected, he says, my actions are no longer associated with the jiang clan he says
WHO KNEW BROTHERLY LOVE COULD BE SO PAINFUL, AMIRITE GUYS? HAHA *CHOKES BACK SOBS*
LET’S SKIP AHEAD!
Jc’s gone, maybe it’ll get better now??
A-YUAN TIME!!
Oh no, little a-yuan is hungry!!
Wen qing gives him the last of the fruit because a-yuan activated her Good Big Sister instincts
Ah, look at his happy face as he takes the fruit!
The wwx shows up with MORE fruit and a-yuan does the leg-grabby thing!!
ADORABLE 
Great, now we get Emotional WWX and WQ Bonding Time
SHE TRIES TO GIVE HIM AN OUT
SHE TRIES TO GET HIM BACK TO HIS FAMILY
Wwx is not having it so instead he acts all charming and teases her until the matter is dropped
I LOVE THEM SO MUCH
Other stuff happens, boring boring boring
Moving forward
Yunmeng bro fight scene!
The first half was pretty neat and then they did a bunch of funky flying moves that had me like, why, why must you do this, please stop and give me wangxiantics instead
They did not stop
But they did do some wonderful Twirling, so I guess i can forgive them a little
Oh, sadface, a paperman gets viciously slaughtered by jc
(@theuntamednarrator​ pointed out that this fight scene PARALLELS a future fight scene on a moonlit rooftop THAT WE’RE NOT GONNA THINK ABOUT BECAUSE IT MAKES ME SAD)
Wwx, at some point in this fight is all: oh look, i’ve been impaled
(what’s a little light stabbing between siblings, amirite?)
More stuff happens that we don’t care about
But we’ll take a moment to laugh at wwx here
Wwx is like, imma hide this gaping stab wound from the world’s greatest doctor by distracting her with potatoes
It doesn’t quite work bc wen qing immediately makes a grab for him
Wwx is scandalized!
Wwx: Men and women shouldn’t be improperly intimate!!
Wwx: you suddenly doing this makes me scared for my virtue which i’m obviously saving for lan zhan!
She backs off for half a second; then wwx winces but he recovers quickly by being all i’m totally fine, look at how fine i am, i’m flinching because of HUNGER PAINS, NOTHING ELSE
If he weren't so charming and adorable none of this would've worked
Other non-wangxian nonsense occurs
Some more non-wangxian stuff
A scene featuring Disaster Het Jin Zixuan and our Perfect Elder Sister Jiang Yanli
Jzx is all, i know carp tower isn’t your home but i’m willing to build another lotus pier here for you
...ugh, fine, okay, maybe you’ve grown on me a little by now, you huge Disaster Het BUT ONLY BECAUSE YOU’RE MAKING JYL HAPPY, YOU HEAR ME?? ALL BETS ARE OFF IF YOU MAKE HER CRY AGAIN
We’ve made it through the 34 minutes!!
GET READY GUYS
We’re at a tea house in Yiling! There’s lots of people! AND THEY’RE ALL TRASH-TALKING MY BEAUTIFUL SUNSHINE BOY WTF
But hey, look in the background is lwj, (angrily) listening to people trash-talk our sunshine boy.
God, he sits so straight, it looks almost painful
I mean, in terms of posture
We know he’s not straight in any other way lol
The only time we get full body shots of him in this scene is when he’s blurred and out of focus in the background, which is interesting
When he’s at the forefront of the scene, it’s all close-ups of his (angry) face 
But even with the close ups, we only see parts of his face. One half of his face at a time, close-ups on the eyes (or one eye) specifically at times
It’s not until the end of that teahouse scene that we get to see a full shot of him and that’s only when he’s had Enough of people slandering his soulmate and slams his (poor innocent) tea cup onto the table and (viciously) glares at the gossipers
He leaves the teahouse (angrily)
Lwj is (angrily) walking through the marketplace 
He walks past some random lady and the lady turns the hell around so fast and BLATANTLY CHECKS HIM OUT, oh god, that’s HILARIOUS
(you are not alone in this, lady, YOU ARE NOT ALONE)
Then, we have one of the best tropes of all, ACCIDENTAL CHILD ACQUISITION
THERE IS A CHILD CLINGING TO HIS LEG
IT’S A-YUAN
A-YUAN HAS SURGICALLY ATTACHED HIMSELF TO LWJ
WE ALL LOVE HIM FOR IT
Wwx does not notice his child is missing bc he is haggling, which is important but maybe not as important as missing a child. 
Omg the look of panic on his face when he finally realizes a-yuan is gone gutted me for half a second. 
REALIZING YOU’VE LOST A CHILD IN A CROWDED PLACE IS THE WORST FEELING IN THE WORLD, OKAY
But i get over this quickly bc WWX FINDS A-YUAN CLINGING TO LWJ’S LEG. 
GUYS
GUYS
THIS SCENE
THIS SCENE MAKES ME SO HAPPY
IT’S MADE OF RAINBOWS AND BUTTERFLIES AND ITTY BITTY KITTIES
Okay, let's break it down because there’s JUST SO MUCH GOOD STUFF HERE WE NEED TO PROPERLY APPRECIATE ALL OF IT
FIRSTLY, lwj’s face.
There is a loudly crying child clinging to his leg
He is surrounded by nosy talkative strangers (PARENT strangers!!) all Judging��� him for his (lack of) parenting skills
And lwj’s face is about as External Panic as lwj can make it bc our boy is FREAKING OUT
THERE IS A CRYING CHILD
LATCHED ON TO HIS LEG
STRANGERS ARE ASSUMING HE’S THE FATHER
BUT HE ISN’T
THEY DON’T LISTEN WHEN HE TELLS THEM HE ISN’T
THEY SAY THEY HAVE THE SAME NOSE?? THEY SAY HE RESEMBLES THIS STRANGE UNKNOWN CRYING CHILD SOMEHOW?? 
AND WORSE STILL, THEY’RE SAYING HE’S A BAD FATHER
THEY’RE ALL LIKE, OH LOOK HE SCOLDED HIS POOR KID AND NOW WON’T EVEN HUG HIS KID TO MAKE HIM FEEL BETTER??
HIS FACE, OMG
HIS FACE SCREAMS: DEAR GOD WHAT IS HAPPENING HOW DO I MAKE IT STOP 
LWJ IS DYING INSIDE
AND HE KIND OF WANTS TO DIE OUTSIDE
(There’s one guy who kinda takes pity on him and was like, ah, he’s your first kid, huh? I was like that with MY first kid but now i know everything after my wife gave a few more births. It’s a learning process!)
And ohoho, boy, does lwj learn (later, after horrible horrible things happen)
Secondly, WWX IS HAVING THE TIME OF HIS LIFE WATCHING ALL OF THIS UNFOLD BEFORE HIM
HIS SMILE IS HEART-STOPPINGLY BEAUTIFUL
HE’S STIFLING GIGGLES
IT’S SO CUTE I WANNA DIE
Finally, wwx takes pity on poor lan zhan
I would like to point out that he takes pity on lan zhan only after  the crowd of Judgy Parents start asking A-Yuan where his mother is
And like, i don’t want to fall into the pit of heteronormativity and stereotypical gender roles, BUT THAT’S HILARIOUS
Wwx: Lan zhan!
Lwj looks up and the world fades away when he sees wwx, with his cute little smile, making his way towards him in slo-mo
Like, literally slow motion and literally the world fades away until basically only wwx is in focus, THIS IS HOW LWJ SEES WWX ALL THE TIME, OMG IT’S AMAZING
AND OF COURSE ~THEIR SONG~ IS PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND
I’M SCREAMING, EVERYTHING IS GREAT
LWJ STARES AT HIM WITH SUCH YEARNING
And even when they’re right in front of each other, they KEEP STARING AT EACH OTHER, SOAKING UP EACH OTHER’S PRESENCE
WHICH I LOVE, but also there’s a crying child right there maybe take care of him??
Wwx: lan zhan, what a coincidence! What are you doing i yiling?
WHAT DO YOU THINK HE’S DOING IN YILING, WWX
IT’S NOT LIKE HIS SOULMATE LIVES AROUND THAT AREA OR ANYTHING
Lwj: night hunt. Passing by.
Short and sweet and to the point
I’m convinced it’s because his brain has short-circuited from the double whammy of Accidental Child Acquisition and OMG My Beautiful Soulmate is With Me and Smiling
Lwj: ....this child
Wwx: ah, yes, this is MY son
I read a post on tumblr that says the actual translation of that line was more like “ah, yes, i gave birth to this child”
Which would explain lwj’s absolutely stunned and confused expression
I mean, the fact that he doesn’t immediately dismiss this as the nonsense that it is, is absolutely HILARIOUS to me
Like, for a split second there he honestly believed wwx??
He must’ve been like, wait, is this a side effect of demonic cultivation??!?!?
That doesn’t sound right but i don’t know enough about demonic cultivation to dispute it
But then wwx starts giggling at him which gives away the game
Wwx: hey, lan zhan, what did you do? Why is a-yuan crying?
Lwj: I didn’t do anything
Wwx: ah, i see what happened. Lan zhan, as pretty as you look, you still have resting bitch face. 
(no for real, wwx called him pretty, i died a little when i heard him say it and i’m pretty sure lwj did too)
Wwx: a-yuan doesn’t know any better so of course he’d look at you and start crying!!
Lwj stares at a-yuan (who is now clinging adorably to wwx) and you can see in his face that his New Life Mission is to get A-Yuan to Like Him.
It is IMPERATIVE that this small child Like Him. Not for any particular reason, of course. But this Must happen.
Even if it means having to go to an Ancient Fantasy China plastic surgeon to get his resting bitch face problem resolved
THANK GOD WE DON’T HAVE TO RESORT TO THAT
Wwx kneels down to comfort a-yuan and lwj watches him interact with this small child and VISIBLY SWALLOWS before looking away
Like it was too much cute to handle
Like oh shit, i want wwx’s children
Like oh shit, i want to be a dad???
GUYS WE SEE THE EXACT MOMENT LWJ REALIZES HE WANTS KIDS
THANK YOU WORLD FOR BLESSING US WITH THIS MOMENT
Okay, quiz time! 
How do we make a small child stop crying?
Answer - Distraction!
What is the best distraction for a small child?
Answer - TOYS
Wwx pulls a-yuan to a toy stall 
The music here gets all upbeat and playful. (In fact, it’s the same music that played in the ‘flower petals rain on LWJ’ scene in The One where NHS is Total Cockblock omg i just had to reference my own guide to make sure that was the right episode lol this is exactly why i’m making this). I love this music!!
So they admire the toys and wwx picks up one of them and is like, do you like this one?
A-yuan of course says yes bc all kids love toys
Then wwx is like, cool, and proceeds to drag a-yuan away from the toy stall without the toy
SAD FACE A-YUAN :(
Lwj sees Sad Face A-Yuan and does the Lan Clan version of running (aka lengthening his strides and quickening his steps slightly)
Lwj: wei ying, why didn’t you buy it for him?
Dude, he sounds almost accusatory here, it’s GREAT
Wwx: ??? why should I???
Lwj: you asked him if he wanted it, doesn’t that mean you’re going to buy it?
Wwx: asking is asking, buying is buying. Who says i have to buy something just because i asked about it?
Wwx, lwj has a point tho. It’s kinda mean to lead a kid on like that 
And here lwj sounds all hesitant (and shy?? maybe??) like he doesn’t want to scare a-yuan again. He looks at him briefly
Lwj: which one...do you want.
Then when a-yuan doesn’t immediately burst into tears, he speaks more confidently.
Lwj: among those, which one did you want?
And a-yuan points to the toy he wants with all the confidence small children have when  they know they’re about to get exactly what they want
Omg, lwj looks at wwx as soon as he sees which toy a-yuan wants
It’s a look that says I’M GETTING THIS CHILD A TOY AND YOU CAN’T STOP ME
And wwx just beams at him like a ray of sunshine!! HE’S MELTING INSIDE, YOU CAN TELL
HE’S ALL LIKE, OMG LAN ZHAN IS SO SWEET WITH CHILDREN
OMG LAN ZHAN WOULD BE A GREAT DAD
OMG I WANT LAN ZHAN TO CO-DAD A-YUAN WITH ME
Cut to a-yuan gleefully playing with his new toys 
He and wwx are play fighting with cute little wooden swords and it’s SO ADORABLE I’M GONNA DIE
And lwj watches them for moment with the FONDEST LOOK ON HIS FACE
A-yuan notices that lwj is there again and immediately ditches wwx to cling to lwj’s leg
Smart, kid, smart
Butter up the rich guy who makes wwx smile
Wwx laughs: lan zhan, congrats! My kid likes you! He only hugs the legs of his favorite people and then never lets go
Lwj: *internally probably* i wish YOU’D hug me and never let me go
Also
YES! LIFE MISSION COMPLETE. WWX’S CHILD LIKES ME
Wwx: you should ditch your night hunt and have a meal with me
Lwj: a meal?
Lwj: *internally probably* OMG DID HE JUST ASK ME OUT ON A DATE?? AND HE CALLED ME PRETTY EARLIER??? TODAY IS THE BEST DAY
He then pretends to hesitate bc YOU GOTTA PLAY IT COOL
CAN’T CLUE HIM IN ON HOW DESPERATELY YOU WANT TO KEEP HIM WITH YOU FOREVER
BE COOL, LWJ, BE COOL, BE COOL
Wwx: c’mon, we hardly see each other! We can reminisce about the old days! It’ll be my treat~!
Wwx what, YOU HAVE NO MONEY WHAT ARE YOU EVEN SAYING
Wwx grabs lwj’s arm and drags him away
Lwj’s brain rn: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
But they run off WITHOUT A-YUAN??
Good thing a-yuan is quick on his feet, god damn
AND THAT’S THE END OF ONE OF THE BESTEST EPISODES OF THE SHOW
GOD I NEEDED THIS AFTER THE HELLSCAPE OF LAST EPISODE WHERE EVERYONE MADE ME ANGRY
And lets give a round of applause to our precious adorable A-Yuan who somehow managed to latch on to the one person in the entire town that is completely head over heels in love with wwx and who wwx has been pining for since their sad separation in the rain.
FOUR FOR YOU, A-YUAN. YOU GO, A-YUAN!!
Return to Masterpost
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need-a-fugue · 4 years ago
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We Grow Together (29)
Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Tessa Sullivan (OFC)
Chapter Summary: Tessa finally learns what Lobe has in store for her people...
Summary: Relationships can be tough, especially when one person is a recovering-from-being-brainwashed-and-tortured former assassin and the other is an overworked mutant scientist. But hey, every couple has their struggles. Right?
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“That smells awful,” she tells him as he takes a seat across from her, setting down his mug in the process.
“It’s peppermint tea,” says with a smirk.
Tessa scrunches up her nose. “That’s disgusting. Be a man and drink some coffee.”
Cal lets out a smooth sort of chuckle as he leans back in his chair. “Nah. I gave up coffee a while ago. Too many jitters.” He cocks an eyebrow at her. “Maybe you should try tea too.”
She gives him an odious look. “I’m not jittery.”
“Okay,” he drawls out amid a sardonic laugh.
“I’m not,” she protests. “What the fuck?”
“See that?” he points at her. “That is irritability. Still working too much and never sleeping?” he asks with a knowing smirk. “You should at least try to stop drinking coffee after four.”
“Thanks for the advice,” she deadpans.
He leans forward, resting his elbows on the table. In a low voice, he asks, “Want some more advice?” She simply stares ahead at him. “Back out of this meetup with Lobe.”
“Why?”
He shakes his head, dropping his eyes to avoid her glare. “What are you doing, sweetheart?”
“Cal – ”
“No,” he interrupts, looking up and jerking his hands into a silencing posture. “What are you doing?”
There’s a very real, very palpable tension in the air that throws her off. She’d been trying to block out his energy ever since he sat down, not at all interested in reliving old times by pulling in his… essence. But she couldn’t block out the unease he was putting out now. It was a sort of anger and apprehension in one, perhaps a bit of hostility too. She looks up at him with confused eyes. “Why are you so mad?” she asks without thinking.
“Mad?” he repeats, face turning stern. He leans in even further and hisses out, “I know you’re not looking for another job. I know that Stark just asked you to run some new division.”
Taken aback, she asks, “How do you know that?”
He scoffs. “People talk, sugar.”
“Well, that doesn’t mean I’m taking it. I figure, now’s a good time to look around and see if there’s anything… better out there.”
“Better than being on the board of what is arguably the single most powerful corporation in the world?” He gives her a skeptical stare. “Bullshit.”
“You don’t know me,” she replies, sounding every bit the petulant child. “Not anymore.”
He simply smiles in return. “Yes I do.” His eyes narrow as he continues to stare her down. “Now what are you up to?”
She looks away, leans back with her coffee cup in hand, and turns her gaze out the window to the passersby on the street. With a long sigh, she mutters, “How bad is it?” When Cal doesn’t respond, she turns her eyes back toward him, sees him shift uncomfortably in his seat. “What’s he doing, Cal?”
“He’s trying to create the Third Species,” he says without preamble.
For the briefest of moments, Tessa’s breath is taken away. The Third Species. It’s something that Xavier had taught them all about. When she was still a child, she had read John Sublime’s bizarre manifesto about worthy humans who could attain special powers by reaping them from enhanced individuals. These men and women could choose the abilities they believed they deserved… and then steal them from others. From mutants. In Sublime’s mind, mutants were nothing more than some sort of crop, something to be harvested and broken down and consumed for the benefit of others. It had turned her stomach that someone would think that way. And it had given her nightmares to realize that his ideas had sparked a sort of cult following.
During her time in the X-Men, there were at least two instances when they encountered these followers. They’d dubbed themselves the U-Men. And while they certainly played the part of dangerous, radical extremists, they did not ever seem to have any sort of special powers, despite claiming that they one day would. But what if they were right? What if they could harvest mutant powers and use them to enhance themselves. That sort of thing wasn’t exactly out of the realm of possibility. After all, Dr. Sublime had been a participant in the Weapon X program that had turned Logan into the Wolverine… and the Super Soldier program that had successfully created Captain America from a sickly, spindly Steve Rogers.
“He’s part of the U-Men?” she asks hesitantly.
Cal almost laughs. “Those lunatics? No way. This guy… he’s way more dangerous than a bunch of dorky zealots.” He raises an assessing brow. “He’s a businessman. And he recognizes an opportunity.”
“To give people… super powers?” Her voice goes high at the end, taking on a disbelieving and almost fearful tone.
“Look around, sugar,” he says, falling back into his seat. “Ever since aliens invaded our planet and your boss put together a band of merry gentleman with superpowers of their own to fight it… everybody wants to be… better.”
Her brow furrows as she states, “That’s not true.”
“Okay, not everybody. Some people want everyone with super powers to be eradicated.” She gives him a horrified look and he smiles at her gently. “What happens every time there’s another mass shooting in this country?” he asks. When she doesn’t respond, only twists her face in confusion, he goes on. “People either want to ban all guns… eliminate the threat. Or they want to arm themselves to the teeth so that they can fight fire with fire.” He reaches across the table and lays his hand on top of hers. “People are scared. And they want to be able to protect themselves. Now more so than ever. And in this day and age – when aliens attack and robots plan a genocide and the number of mutants born everyday is on the rise… and now inhumans? People are looking for more than just a conceal and carry license to protect themselves and their loved ones.”
She sits with that for a long moment before shaking off his hand and sitting upright. “So he’s taking Sublime’s plans for creating the Third Species and he’s going to try to make it a reality. And then he’s going to sell it,” she states, no question in her words.
Calvin nods. “He’s already got a team of four scientists working on it. Two geneticists, including Scofield. And two bioengineers. The plan is to attack the problem from both sides.”
“Because Sublime believed that tissue transplantation would cause the genesis of mutant powers in the host,” she extrapolates.
“And there might be some validity to that,” he continues. “At least that’s what the bioengineers are saying.”
“But really, the best option would be gene therapy.”
“Which Sublime was unaware of in his day,” he supplies. “So Lobe’s thinking that between the two disciplines he can accomplish what that other lunatic couldn’t.”
Her features darken and her hands wrap so tightly around the mug in front of her that her fingers go white. “Where is he getting the… materials?”
Cal breathes out slowly. “I’ve brought him a few black market items. Ones I’ve managed to acquire through old contacts.”
She closes her eyes and tries to fight off the sudden swell of nausea. “Because you’re in acquisitions.”
“Everything’s still just getting started,” he assures her. “They’re only running preliminary tests… or something. I know they aren’t into any trials yet.” He pauses and a shadow flits across his face. “It’s only a matter of time before they start looking for candidates.” She looks up at him and he hesitates before saying, “For harvesting.”
Tessa nods her head, the movement growing more insistent as she thinks about what’s been said. And what needs to be done. “So we have to shut him down,” she mumbles, mostly to herself. “We have to make sure it doesn’t get that far.”
He reaches across the table and takes hold of her wrist. With his other hand, he wrestles the coffee mug from her grip and then holds tightly to both of her hands. “I promise you I won’t ever participate in anything like… that.” With a serious look and a more intense squeeze, he says, “But I don’t know that you or anyone else can stop this train.”
She pulls away harshly, her eyes suddenly shooting around the café cagily. “How can you say that?”
“It’s the times we’re living in, sweetheart. Look around you.”
“So I should just stand by and do nothing? Just let some… some human use my people for profit?”
He laughs bitterly. “Your people? Give me a fucking break.” He gives her a disgusted look. “When was the last time you even talked to your people? To your family?”
“That’s not…” she starts, losing the words to defend herself almost immediately.
“You’ve been hiding and denying who you are for so long…” He scoffs loudly. “At this point, I’m more in touch with mutants than you are.”
“God help them, then,” she issues out angrily.
“Look, you want to finally stop pretending you’re something you’re not, great. Go for it. I, for one, think the world could use Supernova right about now.” She visibly flinches when he uses the name. Supernova. An alias she hasn’t heard nor spoken aloud in years. “But I’m telling you, for your sake, stay away from Lobe.”
She leans across the table, positioning herself mere inches from him. “I won’t let this go,” she says. “I will bring him down. So I’m telling you, for your sake, stay out of my way.” And she rises and storms out of the café.
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entrepreneurdesigners · 5 years ago
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Teaching Entrepreneurship through In-Public Experiential Learning
Insights from the Teach the 1K Workshop
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In February 2019, @xuhulk​ and I convened Teach the 1K — a multi-event gathering of over 40 entrepreneurship educators and activators from a variety of backgrounds—academic, community-based, for-profit, non-profit—to teach them how to teach the $1K Challenge:
Design, launch and complete a crowdfunding campaign that benefits a community you’ve worked with over the course of the semester. The campaign should raise at least $1,000 from 50 different backers.
We ran this workshop because after collectively teaching for 7 years, we were at a crossroads with our work.
We’d seen how transformational the $1K Challenge could be as a teaching tool, and that the lessons the students learned through that experience were only becoming more and more important for the broader public.
There was tremendous potential, but it wasn’t clear how to scale it beyond ourselves. So, we decided to convene a gathering of relevant folks to see if we could teach them how to teach the $1K Challenge.
Here’s what we learned.
Teach the 1K Insights
1. There is a burgeoning interest in teaching people to confront uncertainty.
When we launched the Teach the 1K Workshop, we decided to frame it as an opportunity for teachers to learn how to teach people to confront uncertainty.
We were concerned this framing might be too abstract and thus fail to attract sufficiently qualified participants.
As it turns out, that concern was unsupported. The response was so strong and clear that we created a second event to accommodate the demand.
In retrospect, this shouldn’t have been a surprise. We’re not the only ones to recognize the need for a different, more equitable, approach that is relevant to a broad range of creators, whether they’re optimizing for economic value or social value.
2. The heart of entrepreneurship is exploration, which is rarely taught.
The heart of entrepreneurship — no matter which flavor — is about navigating and confronting uncertainty. We refer to this as exploring, and it is distinct from training the labor force to work in the venture industrial complex.
Many of the existing approaches we have for fostering entrepreneurship are selection mechanisms intended to surface investment opportunities, not opportunities to teach people to explore. While there are efforts to coach and mentor entrepreneurs, the stakes are either too high, or the experience is conflated with the separate challenge of raising capital.
Generally speaking, people aren’t being taught to explore. Our current educational system is optimized for training people to climb ladders rather than to sail the open seas.
The fundamentals of how to explore can be taught in a consistent and repeatable fashion, but doing so is a distinctly different practice from teaching skill acquisition (especially at scale). Everything from the interaction model to the economics of what sustains such an effort needs to be carefully considered.
3. What makes the $1K Challenge an effective teaching tool is that it takes place in public.
Many lessons are best learned through experience rather than lectures, and this requires that the students pursue real projects with real consequences.
Unequivocally, we have found that it is this decision — that the students pursue a challenge with real-life outcomes outside of their control — that is the most critical enabler in teaching people to explore and confront uncertainty.
The $1K Challenge is an example of what we call In-Public Experiential Learning.
4. Online public spaces create new opportunities for In-Public Experiential Learning
The rise of online public platforms like Kickstarter and Twitter has resulted in an exciting arena for In-Public Experiential Learning.
By leveraging Kickstarter, for example, we inherit the constraints of the platform, which make it easier for someone to launch something as audacious as an original idea. We also benefit from the resources Kickstarter provides to any creator, not to mention the collective wisdom of past creators. Twitter creates a space where by the students’ projects can be discovered (or not) by a receptive audience.
In essence, Kickstarter is the boat, Twitter is the open sea, and our 16-week course provides the prompt (the $1K Challenge), the training, and a safe harbor.
Once the student launches, the outcomes are out of everyone’s control — which is a valuable lesson in itself. As a class, they’re going out to sea together and coming back with personalized lessons which inevitably benefit everyone.
This is just one example of an educational experience that is built on this new terrain. Done well, there’s a huge unrealized opportunity to create similar educational experiences across all online public space.
The hard part is figuring out how to craft the right challenge with a clear success or failure mode that encourages the student to willingly jump in, and the necessary safeguards for guiding participants to the endpoint with minimal risk.
5. In-Public Experiential Learning requires resilient instructional systems.
The experience of teaching an in-public challenge introduces an additional layer of chaos and complexity in the form of unpredictable student outcomes and obstacles.
This can be overwhelming for both the student and the teacher. By taking the students out of carefully controlled conditions, you are subjecting them to the entropy of the world, which can surface many irrational fears and reflexes. Similarly, as instructors, it’s inordinately expensive to support a whole cohort of students working in this manner.
The key to managing this is to build resilient systems in lieu of defaulting to “hero mode”, where student challenges are resolved solely through increased individual effort by the teacher.
Such systems include things like:
leveraging our own personal and professional networks for student project feedback,
building software tools to automate mundane tasks, and
establishing rituals where the students share some responsibility.
Thinking of teaching as a set of systems means that we can do more than just react; we can pre-empt problems, point out inefficiencies, and continually iterate.
6. The $1K Challenge is a specific implementation, not an adaptable framework.
Our hypothesis going into the workshop was that the $1K Challenge was one of the best ways to actually teach people to explore and confront uncertainty, and that other educators could potentially modify it to fit their contexts.
In reality, it would be more effective to teach other instructors at the level of abstraction right above that.
The $1K Challenge has worked well for us because over the years, we tailored it precisely to our context — teaching first-year graduate students in the SVA MFA in Interaction Design program. We built a precise obstacle course that accounts for our students’ strengths and weaknesses — as well as our own — and considers the constraints and the institutional context in which we operated. The process we have shared here is the outcome of seven years of optimization.
While there are many components of the $1K Challenge that can be borrowed or adapted, it’s ultimately too custom-built to serve as a starting point for other educators and activators, especially those working in very different contexts.
Rather than teach the $1K Challenge, the more impactful (and scalable) approach may be to share what we know about designing and operating In-Public Experiential Learning programs, and to help people create programs customized to their context — whether they’re coming from academia, government, non-profits or for-profits.
Hot Takes
No blog post is complete without some hot-takes. Here are a mix of trends and insights, all of which are worthy of longer posts in themselves. Each of these represent opportunities for further exploration.
1. We will see new a whole bunch of educational experiences that take place in the new networked public. 
The $1K Challenge is but one example of what can be done. However, most of what we see in online education is skill acquisition or a straight port of offline classrooms to an online container. There’s a huge opportunity to create fun and powerful experiential educational experiences, akin to Pokemon Go. This doesn’t mean that classrooms are irrelevant—in fact, quite the opposite. Classrooms provide space for cohorts to support and learn from each other—which is key for experiential programs—and IRL will always be more compelling than virtual. Related, we’ll also see a fair amount of innovation in networked teaching models.
2. Teaching is a horizontal practice that’s increasingly relevant outside of academia. 
For a certain class of companies, Education will graduate from being a Support or Marketing activity, to being a core function that reports into the CEO. It’ll be the most effective way to grow and retain customers/users while simultaneously becoming a powerful input into the product development process.
3. Build (or join) a community before you begin to build a product. 
The first “product” you attempt to build should be the thing that either coalesces the community you want to serve, or grants you trusted access to an existing community. In most cases, it should notbe an MVP of your idea. Done right, you’ll have less guesswork on the road to product market fit, lower user acquisition costs, and a built-in group of advocates—if not customers—you can build for and with. Or, you may discover they’re not who you should be building for at all. If you fail to coalesce a community, it’s a non-starter. Start over. (Note: this idea is the undercurrent of the most recent version of the course.)
4. Mission-driven entrepreneurship is a different process from what’s been popularized. 
There are many flavors of entrepreneurship, and they all optimize for different outcomes—wealth creation, agency, impact, are some examples. In all cases, you can’t escape the laws of physics—at some point you will need to figure out how to financially sustain your work. Often, the biggest hurdle is the mindset shift from “what you can dream up” to “what will actually work”. If you are optimizing for a mission over wealth creation—meaning you’d rather shut everything down than pivot to a completely unrelated random business—you have an added level of difficulty in that you will need to figure all of this out as early as possible. Otherwise, things may get really complicated. Furthermore, you may need ignore the majority of the advice, programs, and support infrastructure out there, simply because they just don’t apply to you. Honestly, the best approach you can probably take is #3.
The Teach the 1K Insights were co-written with Christina Xu and can be found on our website Post-Industrial Design School along with an archive of the Teach the 1K Workshop, our course materials, student blogposts and much more. Hot Takes are written entirely by Gary.
Post-Industrial Design School is an experiential learning lab run by Christina Xu and Gary Chou.
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6 Steps Customer Acquisition Formula
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Irrespective of the Digital Marketing platform you choose, you should remodel the business to adhere to the 5 step customer acquisition process in order to make Digital Marketing work for you.
STEP 1: DEFINE A LEAD MAGNET
First step of your customer acquisition process is defining a lead Magnet. Before selling a product/service, it’s important to identify who your ideal customers are, where they are and what they will buy.
Lead magnet is an appealing offer provided to your prospect in exchange of their Email id and Contact number.
The goal of the lead magnet is to build your prospect database.
Some of the Example of Lead Magnets
1. Free Webinars
   2.Free PDF or Ebook Downloads
  3. Subscribe to the blog list
Note:
Your investment in creating a lead magnets should be your skillset and Time.
Assign minimum Marketing budget to Make prospect consume your lead magnets
100 website visits should consume 5 lead Magnets
STEP 2: EMAIL NURTURING THROUGH AUTORESPONDERS
“DON’T BE A HUNTER, BE A FARMER”
Integrate landing page with Email Marketing CRM’s like Get Response, Mail Chimp etc and design autoresponder nurturing sequence.
In the step 1, you have identified who your ideal customers are. Now in the step 2 you have to nurture and make them part of sales funnel. Create immense value to your prospect database by sending them timely Emails.
You autoresponders sequence can have below content:
Welcome Email and Brief description of your product/service
Success Stories and Testimonials
Blogs
Company Recent Achievements
Expert Advice
Promotional Mailer to Sell TripWire which will be explained in the Step 3
“EMAIL MARKETING TO THIS DATABASE WILL BE THE HIGHEST CONVERTING TRAFFIC”
The Primary Goal of Email Nurturing campaigns is to get prospects who have consumed lead magnets to the sales funnel and make them experience your product/service.
Note:
Monthly investment for Email CRM based on the number of subscribers and one time investment on Email Autoresponder content.
10 prospects who have consumed lead magnets should lead to 1 tripwire purchase at the end step 2
STEP 3: TRIPWIRE
“10% OF THE PROSPECTS WHO CONSUMED LEAD MAGNETS SHOULD BUY THE TRIPWIRE AT THE END OF STEP 2”
In this step, You define an irresistible offer which your prospects can’t reject and make them part of your sales funnel to experience your Product/service.
Some of the Tripwire Examples:
1$ Trial from Whatrunswhere.com
Paid 1/2/3 days Workshops
Linkedin’s free One Month Trial for Premium Membership
Step 1 and step 2 are the automated process, you actually start engaging with your customer after they buy Trip. At this step you need to build trust and make them comfortable to buy your higher value products/Services.
Tips for the Tripwire:
It should be an irresistible offer
Don’t charge more for the Tripwire.
By Selling you make lesser or no profit. But don’t go into losses.
30% of the prospects who bought your tripwires should buy your higher value offerings.
STEP 4: SELLING CORE PRODUCT OR SERVICE
“30% OF THE PROSPECTS WHO BOUGHT YOUR TRIPWIRES SHOULD BUY YOUR HIGHER VALUE OFFERINGS”
From above nurturing process, cold prospects have become warm and they are comfortable buying your higher value products. At the end of the step 4, sell your core product/service.
Core product/service is your actual core offering.
Some Examples of Core product/service:
6 Month Digital Marketing Service offering
Linkedin Annual Premium Membership ( Sales navigator, Talent Solution and Learning Solutions)
Annual Subscription to your Tool
STEP 5:
PROFIT
MAXIMIZER
“IT IS EASY TO GET MORE MONEY FROM YOUR EXISTING CUSTOMER THAN ACQUIRING NEW CUSTOMER”
In this Step, you upsell/downsell/cross sell the customers who has bought core product with the products/service which has high profit margins.
Some of the profit Maximizers examples are :
Linkedin: Up Selling Linkedin Sales navigator to the customer who has bought learning solution/Talent Solution)
Digital Marketing Services company : Upselling Website solution for the customers who has bought Digital marketing services
E-commerce: Selling Mac book Accessories to customers who has bought Mac book
Training Firm: Upselling Mentorship programs for the customer who have purchased training programs.
Step 6: Create a Return Path
Up until now, we have taken the consumer from a stranger to a paying customer. Now it’s time to convert this paying customer into our loyal fan & make him/her our brand advocate.
To achieve this objective, we must keep in touch with our customers constantly. This can be done via email marketing, SMS marketing, retargeting ads on facebook & google
The goal here is to delight the customers by making them feel extra special. Shooting out an email wishing them on their birthdays, anniversaries or any special occasions will ensure that your brand name remains on top of your Customer’s minds
In other words, the brand recall value increases.
At this point, you might be wondering “Why should I go the extra mile in wooing my customers?”.
Remember this: Acquiring new customers is far more difficult than retaining your existing ones.
The amount of time, money & resources required to acquire new customers is a whole lot more in contrast to customer retention. Extra points if you’re doing both successfully.
]Plus, you don’t need to spend money on ads, create lead magnets/tripwires to sell products to your existing buyers. This makes things a whole lot easier & simpler.
Your existing customers tend to trust you, at least to a certain degree
Creating a return path ensures that they don’t think twice before swiping their cards to purchase your products. In simple words, the customer lifetime value (LTV) increases drastically.
Once it’s confirmed that a customer has repeatedly purchased you, it’s clearly evident that he/she is a loyal fan who loves the products/services you offer.
Now it’s time to step up your game by making your loyal fan/customer into your brand advocate.
Give them exclusive deals, bonuses & offers. Also, make them your affiliates. Doing so will expand your brand reach even further, while they earn a commission. A win-win for both the parties!
If you’ve managed to reach this stage after building & implementing your funnel ,Kudos.
Having a bunch of happy, satisfied customers can pay huge dividends in the long run. The ultimate goal should be all about delivering value. Money is just a byproduct.
All that’s left for you to do now is get creative with your offers, make minors tweaks to your funnel & keep testing.
Rinsing & repeating these six steps will ensure that the revenue keeps flowing in for years to come. Also, remember that “Systems don’t fail, people do.”
CONCLUSION:
Brand is a promise. At every stage of marketing, build trust and thought leadership to make your prospects comfortable to write pay cheques to avail your services.
If you want to build online presence for your brand, make sure you remodel your business using the above 5 step advance customer acquisition formula.
To know more on Advanced Digital Marketing Strategies, Request a call back for our Free Demo on Integrated Digital Marketing Certification Program.
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awildhanmonster · 6 years ago
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Character Ramblings for Wyrd!
At Wyrd’s behest, I’m trying to write down a little master post of some recent characters she bullied— I mean enabled— me to create.  This is for our casual Loserverse world— i.e. the fast-and-loose All The Myths Are True low fantasy trope where a bunch of well intentioned idiots try to get by in an apartment complex for largely mythical creatures.  I’ve accidentally made up a lot of new side characters in the past month and it’s getting hard to keep track of them, so here we go!
THE HOMESTEADING SHAPESHIFTER TRIO: AKA NELL, LEONORA AND BARNES
I’m listing these three together on their own because they are an active “couple” (… trio? I’m not sure what the right polyamory term is) who all live together in a more rural part of the county on some acreage generationally owned and tended by Nora’s family line.  Their personal plot is pretty manageable (just a few acres) and a small portion of the entire property.  They have a little flock of maybe 2 dozen combined sheep and goats, some chickens, and possibly an alpaca.  The land is woodsy and picturesque with an old country house they share.  
Nell J. Harriet, aka Nell: approximately 32 years old, born intersex, happily nonbinary (pronouns are ‘they’).  The tallest of the bunch at around 6’ even, with a pale wiry frame and knobby, angular corners all over.  Jet black hair with a striking chunk of white smack dab at the front of the widow’s peak like the trail of a dog’s blaze, one solid brown eye, one split tweaky blue/brown mess.  Shifted form is a black and white border collie with (surprise!) heterochromia and a chunky white blaze cutting through the forehead right at the widow’s peak.  
Despite being born to a mother with a long family history of (gene-recessive) shifters cropping up every generation, Nell was still a surprise to everyone involved, given that their father had presumably been human.  Their mother— who I’ll call Meryl for now— comes from a fairly mundane lineage of canine shifter (while being a non-shifter Rr carrier herself) which typically manifests in early childhood and has a certain period of semi-conscious malleability during the formative years in which things like coat color, length, ear set, and other minor (external) features can be changed through great effort and trial/error before eventually “settling” into a constant, unique physical identity with time.  They heal several times faster than average humans, scar less, and tend to show greater physical resilience, taking a few seconds to painlessly and more-or-less fluidly change shape, but lack any kind of “burst healing” mechanic or unusual magical attributes.
Everyone else in the family before Nell had turned out some kind of pleasantly functional “mutt” shape in the end, but Nell erupted onto the scene as a full blown black-and-white border collie looking thing from day 1 of the change as a bouncy toddler.  Meryl could only guess that the father (long since vanished from their lives with no hard feelings, the affair was brief) was a similar, incidentally compatible shapeshifter himself, but that’s about as well as anyone can guess since he’s not around to ask.  
Nell, for their part, is exactly the kind of plucky, sunshiny, high-energy velcro person you would expect from a border collie on two legs.  They struggled in early childhood with some rough ADHD and OCD type tendencies, but managed to get through public schooling with the help of family support/tutoring, and wound up not pursuing college in favor of trying out a more rural living, instead.  They met Leonora while bouncing around odd jobs a couple years after high school and the rest is history.  They’re much happier now with a largely outdoor existence and animals to tend to, burning off the excess energy that plagued them for years without a direction prior to homesteading.  They’re one of those types who thrives with an outlet for physical and mental stimulation but loses their mind for lack of it.  As one would expect from any good BC.  The farming life is an ideal fit.  
Leonora Basso: aka Nora, but only if you’re close to her.  Approximately 34-ish, a shameless bohemian woman from a long line of shifters almost functionally identical to Raiker/Nicky’s species, with the exception of taking on the form of giant (thanks, conservation of mass) white maremma type guardian dogs instead of akbash.  Built square, stocky, and a little short (probably around 5’4’’), with olive/bronze-y skin, brown eyes, and a giant fluffy mess of fluffy, platinum white-blond hair the exact color and texture of maremma fur.  
She’s chill, with admirable patience for things that warrant it and a long fuse for small annoyances, though she’s also the only member of the three to ever knock someone’s teeth out, so take that with a grain of salt.  Like any good guardian dog, she’s placid until you start messing with her flock— literally or metaphorically.  Then she’ll be the one to quietly walk across the bar and slam your head into the table.  She met Nell during a trip to the inner city by complete happenstance when the two hit it off over conversation, during which she invited them to come visit her farm over a public touring weekend, and within weeks wound up dating.  Their relationship was exclusive up until Barnes came along  and none of them are quite sure how it happened, but they’ve never been in a better place.  
Chancellor Barneston Augustine-Kingslay, aka Barnes: and ONLY Barnes, okay.  Repeat his full name N E V E R or he’ll just, seriously, die.  Of embarrassment.  The youngest of the bunch at around 27-28 or so, Barnes was adopted by his (human) parents as a (human, presumably) infant, and had a perfectly normal (human, presumably) childhood until one day when his mother came in and found that her napping four year old was suddenly a napping 40 pound maine coon cat— or at least, what LOOKED a whole lot like one.  Needless to say, the following week was a scramble of buying every “Help!  My Child is a Shapeshifter, What Do I Do!” parenting book off Amazon and learning how to cope with a toddler who could suddenly vault over double stacked safety gates unaided, but they learned how to adapt, and life continued on happily for the little family anyway.  He’s an average sort, and arguably handsome to some: about 5’8’’, not especially pale or tan, hazel eyed, and sporting what looks like perpetually dark-ticked mouse brown hair, cut short.  He performed well enough in public school with a mostly human peer group who went largely unaware of his “talents” and even went on to earn a bachelor’s in business/finances/something akin, which seemed like the thing to do.  He wouldn’t describe himself as unhappy in his accomplishments; by every metric he was doing fine in life, and could easily figure out a career in some white collar job that paid his bills well enough.
He just couldn’t shake a certain feeling of restlessness and dissatisfaction about the idea, and wound up making a habit of weekend demos and classes to see what else was out there in the world: one of which happened to be a sheep shearing weekend out at the Basso Homestead.  On a whim, Barnes attended a demo headed by none other than Leonora while she was using a feisty ram (named Ramses) to walk visitors through the shearing process, Ramses was being fighty, Nell wasn’t around to help wrangle him, and Barnes, thinking he was capable, volunteered (despite Nora warning him repeatedly that rams were pretty feisty) to help hold him down.
… Needless to say he earned a spectacular nut shot via ram horns in the groin and wound up sitting out the rest of the day with an ice pack and a lot of sympathy, but it got him talking to Nora, and then Nell, and the three of them just gelled in a way that kept bringing them back together.  He’s realized in hindsight that he’s much happier in the suburbs than the big city, and enjoys putting his schooling to use by handling the home taxes and business numbers.  
(Fun fact: years later, when it Ramses got too big for his britches and was sent to the abattoir, they were given part of him by the Basso family and cooked a roast to celebrate the asshole sheep that brought them all together.  Ramses was delicious.)
Barnes, incidentally, still has no idea just WHAT kind of shifter he actually is thanks to being a doorstep baby/anonymous adoption acquisition by the foster folks— aside from a giant 100+ pound country cat, that is.  He’s observed that his shift is nearly as swift as Leonora’s, though there are queer persistences that he seems to have (pierced ears not healing instantly or trying to close after a change) that she lacks.  Coupled with the fact that he seems to be a magnet for comically mundane/irritating paranormal activity, he’s put in his research (mostly as a boredom hobby, not a necessary pursuit) but keeps drawing blanks on potential labels for his identity.  The TRUTH of the matter (which he’ll probably never know in canon) is that he’s actually a cait sith— born in the form of a cat, rather than a human, and bewitched by his mother to retain a human form as long as possible in the hopes that it would get him a better chance at finding loving parents.  His shifting has a much heavier magical component to it than his SOs, though he has no real sense for it, and it’ll probably just be a mystery the rest of his life.
Wow, yeah, this got super long!  I’ll make a separate post for the other losers I’ve made up lately, though these three are the most fleshed out so far.  
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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years ago
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MAKER'S SCHEDULE, STUPID
There are plenty of other places to work; in most of the initial sales of the Apple II came from people who bought one to run VisiCalc. They could buy some stock in this company. Some torture nerds for the same reason models avoid cheeseburgers. John Nash so admired Norbert Wiener that he adopted his habit of touching the wall as he walked down a corridor. It was impressive even to ask the questions they asked were new to them, and startups were selling them for a year's salary a copy. Com, where you go looking for problems without knowing what you're looking for. To anyone who knows Mark Zuckerberg that is the Valley's equivalent of the Welcome to Las Vegas sign: The Dish. You can start by writing the smallest subset of it that does anything useful. Conversely, the extreme version of the two parties cancel one another out, with no expectation of getting anything in return. After Facebook stopped being for Harvard students, it remained for students at specific colleges for quite a while. I'm going to start a startup while you're getting those n years of experience.
Good thing for the Democrats that their screen lets through an occasional Clinton, even if you're never called on to solve advanced problems, you have to reinvent stuff for yourself, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. But the Collison brothers weren't going to wait. The worst type are those that pay money: day jobs, but which never got anywhere and was gradually abandoned. Icio. It's hard to find a field of math that truly has no practical use. At least, it did when people wrote about it in 1974, and the number one language is probably Perl. What's not a theory is the converse: if you're trying to solve were endlessly difficult. In that form it only had a potential market of a few thousand hobbyists as they were then called, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction. Partly because you can usually find ways to make anything scale more than you expect, but you're also capable of more than you expect, so they balance out. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy. Now the standard excuse is openly circular: that other languages are more popular. This sucks.
No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people start to use it in different ways. The world seemed cruel and boring, and that's a much bigger part of being a good speaker is increasingly a matter of implementing some fabulous initial idea. I'd guess that many of these would-be startup founders but to students in general, but they especially don't work as a catalog of mistakes.1 The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it. If there's something people still won't do, it seems likely enough that it would be stupid to try the experiment and find out. Fundamentally that's how the most successful companies. I described above—it won't flush out the metaphysical singularity. And open and good is what Macs are again, finally. With this amount of noise in the signal, it's hard to come up with your real idea.
It's probably no coincidence that so many famous speakers are described as motivational speakers. Universities seem the place to start. The narrow focus makes it a sort of puzzle, and you're generally surprised how fast you can solve it. You never know when this will strike. Let's try to discover them because they're useless, let's try it, the way Stripe delivered instant merchant accounts to its first users was that the proper role of anteaters is to poke their noses into anthills. Movie studios? But in practice that never happens. If you do it unconsciously. C: Assembly language is too low-level. Worse still, anything you work on changes you. If your company makes software to do x?
Gradually you realize that successful startups tend to discover the most general truths? Maybe we'll just have to do is convince the outside directors and they control the company. You have to make a living, and it's very hard to recommend an acquisition; it's just what their business has evolved into. Start by writing a Basic interpreter for a machine with a few thousand users. Even Tim O'Reilly was wearing a suit, a sight so alien I couldn't parse it at first. In 2002, most people who can help you. Who knew? If you want to do. Police investigation apparently begins with a motive. We say that the situation degenerates into a religious war, what they really like. They made search work, then worried about how to solve it.
And she wrote three separate essays about the question of the relative merits of programming languages, so long as I enjoyed it. It just has to be a harmless cyst.2 The biggest danger of not being consciously aware of this pattern is for those who naively discard part of it. Bush seemed old and tired.3 Do they want me to do something differently. I know I learned from studying philosophy. The VCs would get same number of shares for the money.
If companies want hackers to be productive, they should. I could only figure out what it's doing. Whereas Bill, if the rumors of autism are true, knows all too well. Bigger companies solve the problem. We thought Airbnb was a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the concept of users is always inaccurate, even if it would be tedious to let infect your private life, we liked it. You can sit down and consciously come up with shifts to the left or the right, have a consistent bias: they take politics seriously.4 This seems a good bet. But it probably wouldn't start to work properly till about age 22, because most people haven't had a big enough sample to pick friends from before then. But the problem with that description is not just a permissible technique for getting growth rolling. Philosophy 101. I'm not sure why this is so. Standards are higher; people are more sympathetic to what you're doing; the kind of things they say to one another.
Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a strange question to ask. And the probability of a group of girls waiting for the school bus, and was so shocked that the next day she devoted the whole class to an eloquent plea not to be in this business; it's just too annoying to see a bunch of consequences. You can't watch people when everyone is watching you. The first component is particularly helpful in the first stage and handed the thing over to marketers. It was small and powerful and cheap, as promised. When Steve Jobs started using that phrase, Apple was already an established company. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Quiet is another matter.5 It's supposed to be the early adopters, you'll no longer have a perfect initial market handed to you on this one. It is not found in nature.
Notes
A smart student at a public event, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though I think what they give with one hand they take a lesson from the success of Skype. I say is being put through an internal process at work.
SpamCop—new things start to get a poem published in The New Yorker. Most of the great painters in history supported themselves by painting portraits. The situation we face here, the more subtle ways in which only a sliver of it, this is also to the modern idea were proposed by Timothy Hart in 1964, two years investigating it.
College English Departments Come From? What he meant, I can't refer a startup than it would have been fooled by grammar.
In a project like a wave. And they are in set theory, combinatorics, and are often surprised by this standard, and suddenly they need them to get into the work that seems formidable from the revenue-collecting half of 2004, as it needs to learn. That may require asking, because companies don't advertise this. Perhaps this is a cause them to get into a de facto chosen by human editors.
I think the company is Weebly, which have varied dramatically. But although I started using it out of about 4,000 drachmae for the more qualifiers there are lots of back and forth.
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tokagestudies · 3 years ago
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After reading the first 20 hours
“Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.” – Anthony J. D’Angelo
  Why I bought this book:
           We have all wanted to learn a new skill, whether it is learning a new language, perform a new yoga pose, or trying to make a new dish for dinner. Learning a new skill takes time, which for a lot of us we do not have a lot to spare. But what if we did not need as much time as you thought? Must people believe you need hours a day to practice a skill when you just need 1 hour maybe 2 if you have the time to spare of course. Also, you do not need to log over 10,000 hours to say you know a skill, we are not trying to compete in the NBA or any competitive sport we just want to get better at something we enjoy that is it. Which means we need less time logged than competitive professionals, we just want to increase our success rate for combos in Guilty Gear Strive or improve our aim in Apex legends. After reading The First 20 Hours I have decided to use its skill acquisition process to learn and improve my skills.
 The New Information I Needed to Hear:
           Time is the most important thing we have and managing it, so we do not waste any of it, sadly we do not get a lot of time to learn all the skills we want to learn. We have work, cleaning, eating if we care time to go to the gym. Sometimes we are lucky to just have sit down time let alone time to learn a new skill. So, when you have the time to learn something you may be tempted to learn as many skills as possible in one sitting. It makes since, right? You want to learn a bunch of skills, so you need to practice them as much as possible, so when you finish one practice session of a skill you start the next one and the one after so on and so on. We all wanted to try and learn several skills one after another in a day to maximize your time, sadly that is not a proper way to gain a new skill. If we want to gain new skills, we must do it one at a time meaning we can not move on to another skill till we learn the current one to a desired performance level. It sucks but it must be done this way to make sure our learning holds a lot easier, I noticed that when I try to learn multiple things that have relation to one another I have a harder time remembering what I learned from each subject. To prevent this going forward I will only learn one skill at a time till my time limit is up or I hit the desired results.
 The Lists Needed to Acquire a Skill:
           In this book the author crested two list, one was called “the ten principles of rapid skill acquisition,” and the other was “the ten principles of effective learning.” I will not list the entirety of both list for two reasons, the first begin I will be using the list in future posts so I can use that time to explain what each one is and does then. The second reason begin that I will not use each principle on the list to achieve my goal, the author even states this in the book, depending on the skill some of the principles will not be needed. So, I will give a light summary of what to expect when using these lists two list. The skill acquisition list is mainly used for deciding on what skill you want to learn and then go about setting the right environment for you to learn, this is just a check list to make you have everything you need, and the time needed to practice your craft. The effective learning list will be used to learn everything you can about your skill, the author says himself to get lost in the information, learn as much as you can to get as much info as possible. Part of the list is literally get lost in information, this is list is about setting up expectations for where you want to, will be, and should be at once you are done with your full practice session. These lists will be the foundation for learning new skills and allow me to make progress in what I am trying to improve in.
 Time to Get to Work:
           With all this info at my hands I now need to use it and put into practice. From reading this book I have learned some hard truths as well as a new way to practice my skills as well as learn about them. I am very happy that I decide to read the first 20 hours, if I did not, I still be sitting here in a hopeless cycle trying to learn three different skills at once. I am hoping that this new style of learning will allow me to make progress in my skill acquisition mission.
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craigrcannon · 4 years ago
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Employee #1: Reddit
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Employee #1 is a series of interviews focused on sharing the often untold stories of early employees at tech companies.
Chris Slowe was the first employee at Reddit. He worked at Reddit for five years, then Hipmunk for five years, and now he’s back at Reddit, writing code.
Discussed: YC’s First Batch, Meeting The Founders, Finishing a PhD While Working at a Startup, Keyser Söze, Reddit as Vocation, Maintaining a Life Outside a Startup, and Returning to Reddit.
Craig : You’re back at Reddit now. What’s your role at this point?
Chris : It’s kinda two things. I started off working on some front page redesign stuff that we’ve got planned. I’m also working on a new version of our algorithm. Our current version is about eight years old. I also wrote that algorithm.
Craig : [Laughter]
Chris : Practically speaking, we’re probably a hundred times bigger than we were when we wrote that, so that was my initial task. I’m also forging one of our new engineering teams, which we internally call “Anti-Evil.” We’re anti-spam, anti-abuse, and sort of anti-cheating. I guess we’re anti-everything. Pro-freedom!
Craig : Right on. And prior to re-joining Reddit you were at Hipmunk. How was it working there?
Chris : I really enjoyed it. I think the thing we learned most of all there was that breaking into travel is really hard. There are a lot of big players and most travel companies aren’t technology companies. I can’t tell you how many times I was on a call and the other person on the phone was referring to their engineering staff as “IT.”
Craig : [Laughter]
Chris : It was like, “Oh, we’re having one of those calls.”
Craig : “Let me get the nerds in here and they’ll figure it out.”
Chris : Yeah!
Craig : That’s hilarious. Ok, so could you give me the rundown of how you ended up at Reddit?
Chris : Sure. I was in Y Combinator’s first batch, along with Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. I was working at a different startup and we were doing desktop search. This was at a time before desktop search was a thing. What kind of killed us that summer was Apple coming out with Spotlight, then Google Desktop came out so we had a hard problem with so many players in the field.
At the end of that summer, my cofounder decided to go to grad school. This was the first YC batch so it was totally different. It was sort of a three month trial to build a product and see what happens. We were at the first demo day, which was actually kind of fun. Something like 20 people showed up.
Craig : Wow. So how did you connect with Steve and Alexis?
Chris : By the end of the summer I had two free bedrooms in my apartment. I was good friends with both of them at that point. I think they originally planned to move back to Virginia but I believe Paul Graham talked them out of it. So they had basically given up on their flat and now needed a place to stay. My cofounder from YC, Zak Stone, was like, “Want to stay with Chris?”. And they were like, “Okay, great.”
Craig : And at what point did you start working on Reddit?
Chris : I want to say like three months later. I was in grad school at the time and I had much more grown-up hours, where I would wake up at 7 or 8 in the morning, go to work, and come back then work on projects at night. Steve and Alexis would sleep in then work until like 4 in the morning.
Because I was up early I’d check Reddit and when it was down I’d knock on Steve’s door and be like, “Hey, site’s down.” After the third time that happened, he just showed me how to log in and start it back up.
Craig : That’s great.
Chris : So I guess my first job at Reddit was in ops. But yeah, at that point it was still Steve writing code and Alexis doing everything else. We were friends and he asked me if I wanted to join, and I did. That was probably six months after Reddit started.
Craig : You were still in grad school studying physics, right?
Chris : Yeah. That’s when I was in my fifth year of grad school.
Craig : And did you have to pause everything to make that happen?
Chris : No. So I’d go to lab and work from 8 to 6 then come home, eat dinner, and join them in the living room to hack for a while. The nice thing is, I was given work that was sort of independent of what everyone else was working on so I wasn’t a blocker.
I think the first thing I worked on was traffic monitoring. This was at a time before Google Analytics. It was like processing access logs and generating summaries and trying to figure out how to do this at scale. I must have rebuilt that damn thing eight times in the first four years.
The thing about that time was we were all learning how to program web apps while we were building them and there wasn’t really a standard operating procedure or anything.
Craig : So you were essentially working part-time?
Chris : Part-time in startup hours but it was like a full-time job. I would normally work from 6 to 2. Then go to sleep, get back up, and do it again.
You know, your 20s are a magical period of time. I could get by on four or five hours of sleep without any major side effects. Basically it was like that for all of 2006. It was like two full-time jobs. The kicker is I somehow managed to meet my wife during that period.
Craig : That’s amazing. So what happens next?
Chris : Well, the four of us – Steve, Alexis, me, and Aaron Swartz – worked on it until the acquisition, which was around Halloween 2006. And it all happened really fast. We were a 15-month-old startup.
I remember the next night I was making pizza with my girlfriend, now wife, and I called Steve and was like, “Hey, we’re making pizza, Do you want to come over?” And he was like, “I am in California.”
Craig : Whoa.
Chris : Yeah. So I was like, “Oh, well, okay then.”
Craig : [Laughter] And so how long did it take before you moved to California?
Chris : I looked for apartments in January and we moved out early February. Part of the agreement with Condé Nast was that — I think it actually said this in the contract — “Chris gets to finish his PhD.”
So I got to the point where I could leave Cambridge and write my thesis remotely. It was kind of a fun transition, going from a full-time job as a researcher and a second full-time job in a startup to a full-time job at an acquired company where I could spend my nights writing a thesis.
Craig : So let’s step back a little bit. Did you think that you would be interested in working with the Reddit guys when they moved into your apartment? Or were you just buddies?
Chris : Probably a little bit of both. At the time it was just because they were buddies and they needed a place. I had no particular plans at all. I was coming off of the failure of my first startup. We were trying to solve this problem of basically like, “I can’t find anything on my hard drive. I have all these areas I can’t search!” What happened practically is that the problem doesn’t come up any more because there is almost nothing on my hard drive that doesn’t exist in some state online.
Craig : Yeah, exactly. So what about Steve and Alexis compelled you to want to work with them?
Chris : At the time it was actually interesting just to be working as a web dev to be honest. Getting into the web scene was kind of a neat thing. I also liked Reddit.
Here’s a funny story. That summer everyone in the first YC batch was a beta tester for Reddit. This was before comments existed, so it was just a bunch of links.
Eventually it kind of opened up and we got a few people Steve didn’t know personally. But for like four months most of the content on the front page was from one of the alt accounts Steve and Alexis had. They were basically populating it as a way to make it seem like there were more people there. Because nobody wants to walk into an empty room. Right?
Craig : Right.
Chris : So my username on Reddit is KeyserSosa, which is a misspelling of Keyser Söze, which is the Usual Suspects villain.
I remember a day, probably in November, when Steve took a day off. He came back a couple hours later and there was new content on the front page and he hadn’t done anything. It was like this moment of like, “Oh, my God! It’s walking!”
Craig : [Laughter]
Chris : And he’s like, “Great! There are actually people on the site who I don’t know and they are posting all the time. There’s this one guy, KeyserSosa, who’s super active!”
They we’re like, “KeyserSosa? Who is KeyserSosa?”
And I’m like, “Oh, hi guys.”
Craig : [Laughter] That’s so good.
Chris : Anyhow. I achieved my peak on Reddit probably in the first year, in terms of being one of the top posters. And then you know, it was all downhill from there.
Craig : Yeah. I was wondering what your relationship with Reddit is now. Not the company, but the community.
Chris : I’ve definitely become much more of a lurker. My use was definitely a side effect of working on it. When I was originally here for the first five years, at the time there was never more than four or five of us working on the site.
Craig : Oh, wow.
Chris : We were kind of professionally understaffed. At least at that point we were really understaffed and always growing at a really phenomenal rate–like doubling every six months. So we were kind of wearing a lot of hats as engineers. We were engineers, and also the community team, and also infrastructure.
I am an introvert who has become an extrovert via the Internet, or something like that. I feel like lots of talking and thinking in that vein is much more draining than sitting and doing engineering work. That definitely contributed to me leaving.
Craig : Yeah, that makes sense.
Chris : So when I left the first thing I did was go on a six-month Reddit detox. Essentially I was like, “Alright. I just can’t look.” And I didn’t look at it.
The thing is, it was and still is like my baby. And I can say that, I have kids now.
When one thing goes wrong, I take it personally. In 2010 I was basically in charge, so everything was either my fault or something I had to deal with. I think the only way to not feel completely attached to all the things that were happening, or whatever mistakes were being made, or whatever drama was happening, was to step away for a little while. You kinda have to do it.
Craig : So how did your relationship with the founders and the early team change over time?
Chris : I don’t think very much, actually. The team was always small so we were and still are a group of friends. I think there’s no other option than to be like comrades in arms in that case. At the very worst, we were the 300 holding back the hordes.
I think because we got acquired so early we had to really justify our budget and keep the team small. We couldn’t get an infusion of cash to grow because we were already bought and so it sort of stunted growth initially. Another side effect is that the look of the site has kind of been the same for a very long time. There’s a whole bunch we have to kind of rebuild.
The flip side of that is that we got really nimble and good at a bunch of things. But we’re now up to I think 120 people. And we’re independent again.
Craig : So now do you have startup-like growth goals?
Chris : We’re kind of acting like a three-year-old startup with ten years of legacy and some good standard operating procedures, which is nice.
Craig : When you look back and consider the early days, how do you feel about Reddit?
Chris : It’s overall positive. It’s been a lot of fun. I mean, it’s been a lot of stress, but it’s also been a lot of fun. Since I’m back now, it’s almost like it’s not so much a part of my career as it’s become my career. Maybe “vocation” is a better word. I still take a lot of the stuff really personally even though I’ve only been back for about six months.
Our fingerprints are everywhere. I think it is fair to say that the snarky tone that still pervades Reddit is an outcropping of Steve. That’s his personality and he kind of imprints it on the community. I think in the same way a company’s tone and culture is a reflection of the founders, so to is the community it creates.
Craig : You’ve been around so many startups. Do you ever have thoughts of doing your own thing again?
Chris : I am very content to be first employee in all things. I’m close enough to be able to hear about the fundraising, and the acquisitioning, and the business side of things. But I do not get invited to any of those meetings, which is just wonderful as far as I’m concerned. Right now, my job here is as an engineering manager. I have a team of like six and honestly, that is a good size for me. I would rather be an engineer who is a manager, rather than a managing engineer, or an office manager, or C-something. I actually enjoy doing the work.
Craig : Right on. Are there any signs that you would advise someone to look for if they are considering being a first employee?
Chris : I would say the first three to six months is gonna be a slog. It’s gonna be a tough slog. That said, startups have culturally matured in the last ten years and it’s been fun to watch. When the first batch started at YC, there was all this talk like, “Oh, yeah, you should work 16 hours and day and not feel bad.”
What’s really great to see is that all those people who were working 16 hours have now grown into their thirties and realized that, “Oh, sleep is really cool.”
Craig : [Laughter]
Chris : And, “You should probably date.” And, “Do you know what is also awesome? Kids. And do you know what kids don’t let you do? Work.” So there’s been this kind of progression from just working all the time to still working hard while also having a life.
Because there are only a few people around in the beginning you have to be willing to switch hats really quickly. Especially for the startups, traffic is irregular, and you’re not up-scaled, and you have to kinda deal with that stuff live.
You’ll also have a responsibility to set the tone for the company. The same holds true with the founders.
Craig : What about the founders? Do you think there any traits successful founders share?
Chris : It sounds trite but determination. Ideas are important. Luck is important. But follow-through is really important. This is sort of separate from the founders but there’s also timing.
After we started, everyone compared us to Digg for five years before Digg had its problems. But we didn’t even know about Digg when we started.
We were a dime a dozen for a while. It was actually funny. There was us and a bunch of Digg clones, which was amusing.
Craig : Right on. Let’s stop there. Any last words of wisdom?
Chris : The internet has a long memory!
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payment-providers · 4 years ago
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New Post has been published on Payment-Providers.com
New Post has been published on https://payment-providers.com/ridge-wallet-hits-50-million-with-influencer-marketing/
Ridge Wallet Hits $50 Million with Influencer Marketing
Ridge wallets launched via a Kickstarter campaign in 2014.  Ultra-thin, metal-clad, with RFID protection, the wallets are enormously popular in the U.S., with $50 million in sales in 2020 alone. Influencer marketing has driven much of the growth.
Sean Frank is The Ridge’s chief operating officer. He told me, “We sponsor a lot of influencers on YouTube. Roughly 750 in 2020, when we spent $3.9 million on 3,000 unique videos. That’s 10 new videos a day that we’re integrated with.”
Frank and I recently discussed the company’s process for managing influencers, as well as its founding, global growth, and, yes, selling on Amazon.
Our entire audio conversation is embedded below. The transcript that follows is edited for length and clarity.
Eric Bandholz: Tell us about The Ridge.
Sean Frank: We have one main product, the Ridge Wallet. We started on Kickstarter in 2014. Since then, we’ve sold probably 2 million wallets, and we launched bags, knives, and phone cases. But the main item is the Ridge Wallet.
Bandholz: It’s a minimalist wallet with RFID protection.
Frank: It’s the smallest a wallet can get. It’s the size of a credit card with two metal plates on the outside made from premium materials — such as carbon fiber and titanium — with cool designs.
Prices range from $75 for an aluminum wallet to $175, which is our Damascus design.
Bandholz: I’m doing the math — $75 times 2 million is $150 million since inception.
Frank: Yes. We’re still growing at 50 percent year over year. We did $50 million in revenue last year. We’re not slowing down.
Bandholz: How do you grow a $50 million brand?
Frank: It takes luck. That’s the first part. Our CEO, Daniel, and his dad, Paul, started it. They put it on Kickstarter with no training or background. Paul was a special ed teacher for 35 years, and they just had a cool design. He’s now our semi-retired chief financial officer. Our company is entirely bootstrapped — no debt, no investors. Four of us have equity ownership. We have roughly 20 employees.
Bandholz: That’s $2 million an employee. It’s unreal. Are you stressed to the gills?
Frank: That’s the number we care about, the revenue per person. Public commerce companies are nowhere near that. Everyone here works really hard. I hope they’re not burned out. We don’t have investors. That simplifies our management. I do a lot of tasks. Daniel does product development. Paul still acts as our CFO.
So, yes, we’re a lean team. We have two broad internal departments: people who sell wallets and people who save us money. The people who sell wallets are the marketing team, including our influencer program, which I’m involved with. People who save us money are the logistics manager (who brings everything in from China), our operations person, three people on the wholesale team, and a five-person customer service team.
Bandholz: Let’s discuss your influencer program. That seems to be a big chunk of building awareness for your company.
Frank: Yes. We sponsor a lot of influencers on YouTube. Roughly 750 in 2020, when we spent $3.9 million on 3,000 unique videos. That’s 10 new videos a day that we’re integrated with.
Bandholz: How do you protect your brand when using influencers and ensure that the price is right to be profitable?
Frank: We have two people on our team. Neither had done it previously. One, a female, worked at TikTok. She has a good Instagram following. So she’s familiar with the space. The other, a male, has been with us the longest. We look for fresh managers and then we train them.
Influencers want as much money as possible. Everyone does. But we’re transparent with the numbers that work for us. We’ll tell an influencer, “We’ve sponsored a lot of people. This is what we typically pay. We want to work with you. But if you don’t want to, that’s fine. No ill will.”
We’re industry agnostic. We will work with anyone. We’re a secondary income source for all those people. There are probably 50 accounts we’ve worked with for two years that consistently deliver responses. To them, it’s a guaranteed paycheck because they know they’re working with us, and they can budget around that.
Bottom line, influencer marketing is pay what you want.
Our first communication with a new influencer is, like, “We like you. We’re interested. We think this can work. Can we get demos?”
A lot of brands think they know who their customer is — age, location, gender. We’re not that specific. If your channel is two-thirds English speaking and 50-percent men, there’s a good chance we want to work with you. That’s basically every channel on YouTube, incidentally.
After we get the demos, we determine a price per video. We look at their last 10 videos. Then we take a CPM number that makes sense to us. That’s typically in the single digits — $3, $5, or $7 per thousand views. Then we do some math and offer $250 a video or $300 or whatever.
They’ll typically say something like, “I want $2,000 a video.”
We’ll respond, “We can give you $2,000, but we need six videos.” It’s finding common ground. If they want $2,000 a video, that usually means they want $2,000 overall.
Plus, we pay everybody up front. Then it’s hands-off afterward. Certainly someone could steal the money and leave. That’s happened maybe four times in the past two years.
We’ll tell an influencer, “We don’t need to approve your video. We don’t care what the content is around the video. We don’t really care where you put the ad in the video. We’re going to send you a product. We’re going to send you money, and hopefully you put the videos out like we agreed to.” There are no contracts.
Bandholz: Changing the subject, The Ridge is self-funded — growing through profits. What are your strategies for scaling to $100 million in annual revenue?
Frank: First, our marketing bucket would need to change. Ad costs are getting more expensive. Our CPMs on Facebook were up 100 percent year-over-year for most of 2020. YouTube pre-roll CPMs were up 300 percent. Thankfully we had pre-booked ad space at preset rates.
We’re going to hire two or three more people this year on our marketing team. There is an opportunity for us to go into Instagram; we’re going to start spending money there. We’re also going to spend money better on TikTok, Twitch, and Twitter.
Second, the operation side of the business would have to evolve for global customers. We are currently about 90 percent U.S. sales. We need to get more international. We launched localized online stores in Canada, the U.K., and E.U. with their own currency checkouts, payment options, and local inventory for quick deliveries. We hope to add Australia and Japan soon.
We’re on Shopify. We’ve duplicated all the stores and then localized each one. When I log in to Shopify, I have five accounts now.
Bandholz: Do you have fulfillment centers in all those places?
Frank: Yes, local fulfillment. We have a lot of warehouses. We have two primary ones in the U.S., and then one in each market — Canada, U.K., E.U. We have a customization warehouse in the U.S. for customers who want their name engraved on their wallet or whatever. Then we’re on Amazon in all those markets, using Fulfillment by Amazon. So we’re probably sending products to 10 to 11 places.
Bandholz: We’ve talked about reaching $100 million. What’s happens after that?
Frank: If I could tell you my dream, it would be for Yeti to buy us as a strategic acquisition. We do digital better than them. They’re a big company — billions of dollars in revenue, but Covid exposed them. Two-thirds of their revenue happens in person. I think we’d really add a lot of insight into what they’re doing. That’s my dream.
I’m wary of an IPO. I’ve had friends who’ve taken companies public, and they said it’s the worst experience ever. I don’t think any of us at The Ridge is up for it. If we can have a $100 million per year company with a $20 million EBITDA, that’s a strong business to hold on to.
Bandholz: You could live a good life making that kind of money. Although some would say making more than $200,000 a year doesn’t improve the happiness quotient.
Frank: Yes, all of The Ridge’s owners are down to earth. All of our lives would get worse with more money. I honestly believe that.
Bandholz: Let’s talk about Amazon. How it’s working for you?
Frank: You were ahead of the curve at Beardbrand talking about the evils of Amazon from a merchant standpoint. If you are a branded product, Amazon is a double-edged sword. Amazon doesn’t do a good job conveying brand value. And it forces you to compete with subpar goods, which is a huge issue for us. There is a bunch of knock-offs to our products on Amazon. Our Amazon business was eight figures in 2020. But other sellers there are violating our patent. When we go after those people, Amazon is not the best partner.
With Amazon, you’re paying for an expensive warehouse. When Covid hit, Amazon restricted inventory levels and pushed our shipment days from two days to four weeks. It feels like a multi-level marketing scheme with the ad budgets they require.
Those are some of our problems with Amazon. We’re going to continue on that platform, but a big focus for us isn’t growing Amazon. If you’re a DTC brand or a superior good, focusing on growing Amazon is not the right thing to do.
Bandholz: How can our listeners learn more about you and reach out?
Frank: Hit me up on LinkedIn — @seandavidfrank. Our website is RidgeWallet.com.
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businessbusy-love · 4 years ago
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Florida Law Firm
In our day to day life we have faced many problems that are gonna be solved with the help of lawyers or a Law firm. A right lawyer can fight for you in the right place and can bring you justice. So today we are gonna talk about Florida law firm which is the CONRAD & SCHERER. They have a bunch of talented Attorneys, if any of the problems mentioned below will happen then you can surely contact them for justice.
Conrad & Scherer
Conrad & Scherer is a leading national law firm based in Florida, New York, and North Carolina, with an international office in Quito, Ecuador.
 We represent clients in high-profile cases and provide legal representation in all areas, from commercial cases to employment law, government relations, and unfair death.
 With almost half a century of history behind us, Conrad & Scherer remains committed to providing attention, personal service and offensive representation, both on and off the court.
 Conrad & Scherer’s practice areas include:
Appellate     Practice
Bank     Fraud
Class     Actions
Commercial     Fraud
Commercial     Litigation
Complex     Business Litigation
Construction
Copyright     & Trademark
Cross-Border     Litigation
Employment
Government     Relations & Public Policy
Insurance
International     Family Law
International     Mergers & Acquisitions
International     Negotiations
International     Real Estate
Land     Use
Maritime
Personal     Injury/Wrongful Death
Ponzi     Schemes
Procurement     & Government Contracts
Professional     Negligence & Malpractice
Securities     & Financial Regulatory
Trust     & Probate
 Commercial Litigation
Commercial litigation includes any type of litigation or business dispute between businesses, corporations and government agencies, and employees and employers. A wide variety of disputes can be categorized by this discipline, including contract breach, class action cases, business summons, public RICO claims, and participatory disputes.
 Cases requiring commercial litigation can occur at both state and federal levels and may include private mediation and administrative hearings. It is common to prove business in business disputes, however, we also represent business owners in cases involving employees and government agencies.
 We see an increase in different cases and different categories. As commercial cases become more complex and stakes increase, maintaining a strong legal team is more important than ever.
 Proponents of the Conrad & Scherer case have provided general business representation and a particular focus on business fraud and complex business courts.
Bank Fraud Litigation
Bank fraud is a serious crime that has a profound effect on anyone who loses money or property as a result of fraudulent schemes used by fraudulent individuals to protect their customers' property.
 Both individuals and organizations can be victims of bank fraud. Victims of bank fraud should reach out to a lawyer in a factory with a successful record. At Conrad & Scherer, our dedicated team against bank fraud scandals has years of experience combined in bank fraud scandals, giving us unparalleled insight and expertise in the world of financial fraud cases. Our team has successfully identified the victims of bank robberies and other white-collar crimes in South Florida for more than 45 years.
 Ponzi Scheme Litigation
Ponzi schemes were already in vogue in the 1990s and early 2000s, and now these types of scams are becoming more and more popular in the new years of "digital entrepreneurs" claiming their success in social media and attracting potential investors in the face of potential financial crisis. Victims of Ponzi's programs are likely to lose a lot. It can be hard to see that you are an unwilling participant of the Ponzi scheme until it is too late. With the help of a fraudulent investment lawyer, you can fight Ponzi schemes that can recoup losses.
 Our team understands how frustrating it can be to fall under the Ponzi scheme and we will work hard to recoup your financial losses. Contact our Ponzi scheme opponents team today, and we will fight for you!
 Construction Litigation
Because there are so many moving parts, fixed deadlines, and tight budgets involved in a construction project, it is all too easy with negligence or inconsistency to make things slow. Construction law revolves around disputes between stakeholders involved in construction projects at the state, commercial, or housing level. Stakeholders usually include individuals and organizations such as project owners, contractors, material suppliers, investors and insurance companies.
 Through our construction case services, Conrad & Scherer can assist you with a variety of applications including contract negotiations, bonds, guarantees and securities, debts and security interests, tenders, building claims, contractors, negligence, and more.
 Getting help with your construction case case is the best way to keep a construction project on time and on budget. Our talented trial lawyers can help you overcome obstacles, such as breach of contract and technical negligence, to get your project back on track.
 Land Use Litigation
Land use laws govern the use and development of public and private spaces. Local governments use land redistribution laws to manage construction development and also create codes to guide other land use issues.
 Municipal and state zoning regulations are not always in line with organizational plans, and many architects rely on land use and landowners to represent their distinct interests while undertaking construction projects.
 Our land use prosecutors are ready to assist project planners with strategic advice. Our land use attorneys work for a variety of clients including property developers, real estate agents, homeowners, architects, and more. Conrad & Scherer's land use advocates advise clients on a variety of land uses and land use issues to assist them during the complex approval process.
 See High-Impact Results with Conrad & Scherer
Conrad & Scherer opened its doors as a local law firm in 1974. Since then, we have made a name for ourselves in Florida and have continued to open other offices in New York and North Carolina. We pride ourselves on serving overseas clients at our office in Quito, Ecuador. Our legal services extend to international legal expertise, including International Family Law, International Merger & Acquisitions, International Negotiations and International Real Estate.
Contact us today, and learn why Conrad & Scherer has such a bad reputation among our peers and the community. We are happy to discuss the details of your case and provide a deeper understanding of your legal options
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samuelfields · 4 years ago
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How to make small talk and other advanced social skills
Does any of this sound familiar?
“I hate small talk, let’s just get to the point…”
“We started small talk and then there was this long awkward pause…”
“I had no idea how to start the conversation so I just sat there silently”
Small talk. Ugh.
But, I do have good news: Small talk is a skill. And just like any other skill, you can become more natural at it with practice. Thousands of my students have improved their social skills (especially if they weren’t “naturals” in social situations).
Today, I’m going to give you word-for-word scripts to help you start this process. Eventually, you’ll be able to set these scripts aside and make them your own — letting your own personality shine through.
How to Make Small Talk at a Glance
Instant Irresistibility: Why Small Talk is Important
3 openers that work in 90% of situations
How to practice making small talk: low stakes experiments
The invisible costs of poor social skills
My “Small Talk” Hacks Video
What to do TODAY
Bonus: Want more ways to build healthy habits? Check out my new Ultimate Guide to Habits.
Back to Top
Instant Irresistibility: Why Making Small Talk is Important
Why even master small talk? Wouldn’t it be easier to get straight to the “important part” of the conversation?
Let me tell you a story about my friend who’s an actress. We were talking about how she’d gone on a bunch of dates and the guys always fell in love with her. They had an instant rapport with her and felt the connection was incredibly deep after meeting her for an hour.
What they failed to understand was that she’s so socially skilled, she’s able to evoke this feeling of awe in most people she interacts with. She’s being totally transparent and ethical, but her social skills are so advanced that they bring out the best version of herself — making her almost irresistible.
The first step to reaching this level of social skills is to master a fool-proof conversation opener.
The 3 openers that work for 90% of situations
Here are 3 scripts that work in nearly any situation. I’m giving you the exact words.
“Hi. How’s your morning going?”
“Hi. I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Ramit.”
“Good morning. How are you?”
Seem too simple?
That’s intentional! Notice how ordinary they are. The truth is, we’re not searching for magic words. We’re simply looking for a way to connect and build rapport.
It’s easy to “nod and shrug…” and then go back to what you’ve always done (which probably doesn’t include comfortably talking to anyone you’d like to talk to).
Or you can try something new. Use these scripts — starting today — and see how they evoke positive responses in others around you.
How many times have we walked past doormen, bartenders, people on the street, baristas and used our phones to avoid small talk?
We can change that starting today. Just a small baby step — say hello! Use just one of these openers to start a conversation with a stranger today.
How to Practice Small Talk: Low Stakes Experiments
The general openers above are great “easy outs” when you’re struggling to think of something to say.
But the hardest part isn’t having something to say. It’s having the confidence to actually do it. One of the best ways to build that confidence is to start very short conversations in low-stakes environments.
I’ll show you what I mean. Here are a few scripts to help practice your small talk skills with baristas and clerks.
Scenario #1: Servers and Baristas Servers and baristas are paid to be friendly, so this is a low-stakes situation. Just be aware of your environment: For example, don’t make your first small-talk attempt when there’s a line of 50 people behind you.
They’ll ask how you’re doing, and what you’d like to order. Instead of ordering your “regular” (in my case, a tall iced green tea, unsweetened), smile first, then try this instead:
“What’s good? (“Everything!”) “No really, what do you get when no one’s looking?”
From here, you can order their suggestion (“That sounds good, I’ll try it”) or stick to your usual (“Cool, I’ll have to try that next time”).
Non-offensive, safe-for-work jokes can add value too, but test your delivery before trying it:
“Have you ever purposely misspelled someone’s name on the cup because you didn’t like them?”
“Seriously, what’s the craziest order you’ve gotten this week?” (Notice how “this week” helps them narrow down the question so they can answer it easily. You do not want to be asking deep philosophical questions at this stage of the game!)
Smile and keep the tone light. This is fun! Treat it like a game and watch what happens.
Scenario #2: Checkout Clerks Most checkout clerks are treated like cogs in the machine. By taking a few extra seconds to make a genuine connection, you’re automatically standing out because the bar is set so low.
“Do you get a discount as an employee?”
[Pick up a tabloid] “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone buy one of these. Do you sell a lot?”
Try one or create your own questions based around it. Remember to listen to their response, smile, and keep moving on.
The point here is that easy micro-tests in low-stakes environments like coffee shops and stores give you valuable practice and confidence you can apply to higher-pressure situations like conferences or bars.
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The invisible costs of poor social skills
But what happens if your social skills are just average?
Sometimes, it seems the people who don’t recognize the importance of social skills are the people who need it MOST:
She’ll never know what she missed.
How many of us go through this every day? The scary thing is, we’ll never know what we missed out on because of poor social skills. Those opportunities simply cease to exist.
For example…
We don’t talk to that girl at the bar, then kick ourselves later. Add this up over years and we end up getting our “second pick” of partners — not the ones we WANT, but the ones who are convenient or left over.
We stagnate in making new friends, since it’s hard to meet real friends after college. Especially if you’re not going out a lot.
We might be technically very skilled, but we bomb the interview, or get passed over for a promotion, or we’re not in the “inner circle” of people at work whom the boss favors.
There are even more haunting examples of the consequences of having mediocre social skills:
I have friends who thought earning enough would be enough to attract a partner. They’ve spent the last 5-10 years on their career, but never took the time to learn how to talk to men and women on a personal level. (A lot of Indian people are like this, actually.) Now what? They’ve got great jobs and lots of money in the bank, but they’re missing a core skill — and as a result, the pool of potential high-caliber partners is way smaller than for someone else.
One of my friends runs a successful tech company and was considering acquiring a small 1-man company. After a night of drinking, he asked me what I thought of the guy. He’s a good friend so I told him the brutal truth: I told him that the guy was way too cocky for his experience, I wouldn’t want him on my team, and I told him exactly why. My friend canceled the acquisition the next day. That guy will never know that his social skills cost him a 7-figure payday.
What do all these missed opportunities add up to over 10 years? 30 years?
If you learned even ONE technique to improve your social skills — something you can use every day while talking to co-workers, men, women, even random people on the street — what would that be worth?
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Introducing My “Small Talk” Hacks Video
I created a new video for you, a 30-minute crash course on improving your social skills. I didn’t want to just offer you one or two random “tips.” I wanted to go deeper.
The video includes easy scripts for starting a conversation, keeping it going, and politely ending conversations (even with ramblers). I also included a live social-skills teardown about how to make small talk, plus the powerful concept of the Story Toolbox.
youtube
1:28   – Watch as I analyze my latest national TV appearance, beat-by-beat 4:07   – The social skills mistakes I used to make 5:44   – How do you start a conversation with a stranger? 8:20   – How do you keep the conversation going? 13:47 – How do you end a conversation politely? 16:57 – Your Story Toolbox: How can make yourself memorable? 20:50 – How do you make small talk?
TO DO TODAY
In the video at 16:57, I described the Story Toolbox, a Dream Job concept that lets you walk into any interaction — a job interview, bar, or cocktail party — and instantly have 5-10 stories to use at any given moment.
Top performers know that by having these stories ready to use — stories that consistently get positive reactions — they can instantly connect with anyone.
Today, I want you to start building your Story Toolbox.
Here’s your challenge:
Brainstorm ONE engaging story (like my story about the recovering alcoholic at the bar), then test it on 1 person — a friend, family member, coworker, even a stranger.
In the comments below, share the story (just an excerpt) and the reaction you got. It’s OK to get a negative reaction! Share whatever you find below.
How to make small talk and other advanced social skills is a post from: I Will Teach You To Be Rich.
from Finance https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/how-to-make-small-talk-and-advanced-social-skills/ via http://www.rssmix.com/
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