The End of Musivu

It's a bittersweet announcement: Kris and I are ending Musivu, the online music school we started on in late 2012. 

I'll do a separate post with the techie/startup-oriented postmortem, but most importantly this was a terrific journey with my brother.
(Edit: The tech postmortem is now up.)

We each started this from a place of frustration. We each found ourselves angry with the organizations for which we worked and craving independence. And of course, more income.

In 2012 I was soaking up the collective works of the Y Combinator community, learning all I could about startups and better ways of doing business, while working a day job effectively in a website factory.

With perfect timing, Kris called me on Skype one weekend and basically asked "I wanna teach music online... how can I do that? Can you help?"

It didn't take long for the light bulb to go off and for us to test the market. Our  first course went on Udemy at the very end of 2012. It worked. We'd go on to acquire 2,000 users on Udemy, between our free and paid users there.

By early 2013 we incorporated, and by early 2014 we even had our own booth at one of the biggest music education conventions in the USA.

2014 might have been our best year. We had cash from Udemy still coming in but we managed to launch our very own site, run moderately successful ad campaigns, acquire customers... it really felt like we were on the verge of greatness.

Greatness didn't happen, though. Subscriber numbers ebbed and flowed as Kris and I tried new approaches to keep cranking up the subscriber numbers. In the fat months we built the bank account, and the quiet months drained it. 

We never went broke and never had to add our personal funds back in. I never really thought about that until just now. I'm actually pretty proud of that. It proves that wealth can be created from nothing.

More importantly, Kris and I learned a ...wealth of stuff. 

He can state his own case in his own words, but to paraphrase our previous conversations, he got bitten by "the [entrepreneurial] bug". He's gone on to build the Q escape rooms and they're performing fantastically.

I learned a huge amount of technological knowledge. I could throw so many technical terms out here that it'd look like a software engineer's resume. I think it was that, just as much as my day job experience, that qualified me for what I do now at Sony.

It would be easy to be regretful about closing up Musivu. It's in human nature to stress a sense of loss. Plus, we still believe that there are more economical ways to teach music to anyone who wants to be a musician, and it's like an itch that will forever go unscratched to know that we didn't crack that nut.

But when we look at Musivu's entire circle of life, Kris and I got exactly what we wanted: independence. We got out of the systems that were eating our souls. 

And I had a great time chatting with my big bro, whether it was starting with the basics over a Skype connection in Tokyo, or talking about the future in paradise cities like San Diego or Fort Collins. Family business can indeed be a thing - but you need a great family to do it.

For me, it's much, much more sweet than bitter to be done with Musivu. It so clearly changed our lives for the better.

Career Tip: Specialize!

Preface

My new year's resolution for 2016 is to be more giving. Five months in, it appears that the most help I've provided is to people on their job hunts. So I'm writing here to generalize the thoughts I give.

If you're someone I know and you and I are talking careers, I'm not writing this to replace the contact I have with you. I'm just hoping it helps more people, too.

This will be a short series of posts. I previously wrote about Supply and Demand, as a means of helping you frame your career management and negotiating jobs.

Don't Make My Mistake

Many students, myself included, came out of school wanting to show our flexibility. Somewhere along the way, we're invariably told that we can and should do anything. 

This is nonsense. Beginning in your schooling, your individual experiences will be distilled into a small number of short phrases that actually describe you.

In my case, the list of actual phrases read as follows, in 2011:

  • Japan expert / Speaks Japanese
  • Video game industry expertise
  • Business Analyst
  • Statistics

That was it. Sure, my resume showed other things, but my resume sucked back then. We'll cover that in an upcoming post.

These phrases describe what you can do, starting right now, as evidenced by exactly one of two things:

  • Existing work experience (this includes internships)
  • Academic credentials

And that's it. Anything else you may wish to use to apply for a job, such as an online course or a passionate desire to learn a subject, doesn't count.

Specialties Are These Short Phrases

Your particular combination of short phrases is your set of specialties. This set evolves over time, and like a bonsai tree, you can prune certain ones or let them grow.

I listed my specialties coming out of grad school, but that was 5 years ago. In 2013, my list looked like:

  • Japan expert / Speaks Japanese
  • Experience working in Tokyo
  • E-commerce industry experience
  • Adobe Certified Expert in Adobe Analytics

Compare the two lists, and you can pretty accurately guess what happened, even if you've never met me. The true story is that I met a Japanese e-commerce company, they liked a combination of 3 out of 4 of my specialties. 

They took a Japanese-speaking statistician with a business bent, and turned him into a Japanese-speaking analytics pro. I have to admit that the company's decision made a bit of sense.

Mix and Match

In 2015, the list evolved a little to look like:

  • Japan expert / Speaks Japanese
  • Adobe Certified Expert in Adobe Analytics
  • Experience in a consulting firm
  • Experience in e-commerce
  • Expertise in video games

By 2015, I began to pick among previous experiences and present the best combination of them to fit the job I wanted. Video games had been out of circulation for a few years, but it was perfectly OK to pull that back out. 

Be Rare

There are not too many people who have Adobe certification, speak fluent Japanese, and have US work authorization. This has worked in my favor.

Having a rare combination of specialties limits the number of companies who want you, but the ones who do will really want you. This results in higher salaries, better retention (i.e., raises), and a higher profile to leap from should you decide to move on. 

This Will Be Your Resume and Your Interviews

Your specialties will form the backbone of your next job application, and your resume will be a part of that. We'll do that next time.

We'll write a resume that shows momentum, and then use that to direct the conversation in interviews.

Thanks for reading. I'd like to hear what you think. Tweet me at @blakerson.

Anguish

I have never seen, before or again, anguish the way I saw it on my Japanese friends' faces when I came in to school on March 11 (US time). 

Those friends were exhausted from a night spent half a world away from their loved ones, wondering if each one was alive. They watched endlessly repeating footage of destruction, of explosions at Fukushima Daiichi, of explosions and fires on Tokyo Bay, of salarymen walking home without mass transit - if they were well off enough to live close enough to work to not need mass transit.

The apocalypse happened.

For some of them individually, the worst was yet to come. I don't remember who out of the crowd lost friends, if any. But as these friends largely worked for the Japanese government, it was their responsibility to clean up this mess.

"I can't grab a drink with you on spring break anymore," one told me, deflating my selfish and immature excitement to cheer him up. "I have to rewrite Japan's nuclear energy policy." 

He wasn't kidding. He was surrounded with textbooks detailing nuclear reactors as he said it.

Later, another would be habitually sent to the stricken prefectures to promote disaster-stricken regional sake. He was condemned to a life of alcohol and radiation amidst the wreckage - at least for the two year duration of the assignment.

And the one who had to rewrite nuclear policy? He later became the foot soldier of a ministry's mission of apology. He had to go to the same region, and on behalf of the government, apologize for its negligence. And absorb the brunt of the citizenry's anger. Japanese anger does exist - despite the constant refrains that the people are restrained, it's more of a bottling up of emotions. And when they burst, they explode.

Japan is known for its workers' perpetual exhaustion. It's one of the nuances of the word salaryman, which they invented. But salaryman exhaustion is nothing like this. Nobody works like the government workers in the best of times. And to top it all off they had the weight of a country on their shoulders.

All of this happened in a time when the plant's radiation output still wasn't well-understood. The best one could do was carry a smartphone app that sent a notification of a change in measured radiation, and give a jaded laugh at the gallows humor of a populace eating irradiated food.

Just as if the apocalypse had happened.

To see their faces 1, 2, maybe even 3 years after the disaster, the bags under their eyes were ingrained. 

But the expressions of sharp disbelief were no longer there.

Career Tip: In "Supply and Demand," Provide the Supply

Preface

My new year's resolution for 2016 is to be more giving. Two months in, it appears that the most help I've provided is to people on their job hunts. So I'm writing here to generalize the thoughts I give.

If you're someone I know and you and I are talking careers, I'm not writing this to replace the contact I have with you. I'm just hoping it helps more people, too.

This will be a short series of posts. This is the first one, and it's because I encourage you to have the correct mindset about your job search.

The default way of thinking about "getting a job" harms you.

When we're young, it seems like "getting a job" or "getting a job I like" is a destination we'll reach by using little more than luck and a resume free of typos. It's often characterized as an audition process. We talk about making it past the current round of interviews and into the next one. We're all but sitting by the phone, waiting for it to ring. 

I've learned that this is a toxic mindset. It harms your ability to get jobs, and the ones you do get will be lower quality for challenge, leadership, and compensation.

There is Supply and Demand. You provide the Supply, not Demand.

These two economic concepts are tightly related:

  1. Supply and Demand
  2. The Labor Market

The labor market, being one of many kinds of markets out there, is characterized by supply and demand. That's the definition of a market: a place where buyers (demand) and sellers (supply) come together to buy and sell.

Consider who's handing money to who in this transaction. Companies, which use money to buy your labor, are the demand. You, as an individual willing to sell your labor, are the supply.

You're the person with something to sell. So act like it.

The canonical document to reset your expectations of the labor market and hiring process is patio11 on Salary Negotiation. He writes to a technical audience but his understanding of companies applies to everyone. I'd strongly recommend reading his posts on labor no matter what. But here are the most relevant points to the immediate discussion, with the supposed company my invention, not his:
  • Most companies buy an unbelievable amount of labor. A company of 2,000 employees, averaging $150,000 of costs to them a year after salary, taxes and benefits, means the company spends $300 million a year on its employees. 
  • An extra $5-10k in your salary is a drop in a $300 million ocean.
  • Suppose the typical tenure at that company is 3 years. Using back-of-the-envelope math, that's 700 employees coming/going in a given year, which means two heads turn over every day counting Sundays. That's 10-15 hires (not interviews, but actual signed/sealed/delivered hires) a week just filling in gaps, before accounting for growth of the company. HR drones see the mundane routine of this hiring transaction, yawn, and to quote patio11, think "I wonder if the cafeteria has carrot cake today?"

In light of these figures, I think it's safe if we relieve ourselves of all the heart-pounding moments of interviews and calls and replace them with something a little more pragmatic and lower in blood pressure. And cold-blooded. We'll get to that process in additional posts, but while we're focused on the mindset...

If there's something you want, you have to find the right buyer for your skills

There are consequences to the new mindset that you're selling and the company is buying. Importantly, it stops you from believing a few falsehoods about your job search:

Falsehood #1: You can get that job in a highly competitive city if you just make it through the process.

I have too many friends who want to move to a cool city (take for example San Francisco) without taking into account what SF companies deal with.

Suppose you're a generic marketer. Companies in SF don't need to hire you and bring you out to SF. The area is already lousy with marketers. This is true for pretty much any role that isn't "software engineer from a top university." 

From the company's perspective, you are added expense and trouble. 

The expense is straightforward: those already in SF don't need relocation assistance. 

The trouble is because companies are risk-averse. If you were offered a job and relocated, then something went wrong during relocation or you bailed right around your start date, then not only is the company on the hook for some expense or liability, but then Mike the hiring manager and Sam over in HR have to explain to their managers why they chose you over the litany of local candidates for whom these things wouldn't have been an issue and wouldn't have cost the company 1-2 months of time in filling the gap on Mike's team.

Mike and Sam are aware of this. Why should they stick their necks out just because you like San Francisco's latest food trend?

It is possible to get a job in a city where you are not residing. It's also possible to get relocation assistance. But it requires that you not be generic. You have to be a specialist possessing skills which are needed in your field (or at a specific company) but are not already available on the local labor market. 

Falsehood #2: You can win a career shift on the back of your prior (unrelated) experience.

Suppose you're an artist by education and by career. You have a degree from a known university, specializing in graphic design, and you've worked in graphic design since graduation. You've had some exposure to websites, so you start applying to web engineering jobs. From the company's perspective, they fear you being a hanger-on, dragging down the productivity of existing engineers by requiring all kinds of hand-holding. Not to mention, there are probably engineers already applying to this job. It's possible to close this gap, but not immediately. I'll discuss how to do that in a later post.

Falsehood #3: Your desire for a company's [environment/perks/culture] mean you can work there.

We all have preferences in terms of working environment, company size, hours, travel, the balance of pay vs perks, team size, competitiveness, location, and many more things. And it's great to want those things. If we decide that one company is the right set of characteristics for us, that's great, but it means nothing until that's true and the company decides they want to buy your labor.

From the company's perspective, your desire means nothing (in the best case). The company's concern is filling in the hole left by Dave when he quit without warning, which makes Mike's life much more inconvenient since there is one person's work to be done. 

I previously mentioned the best case. I mean this. In the best, case your desire to work for a company is disregarded by the company. In less-than-best cases, less-than-scrupulous employers will use your desire against you in negotiation. Commonly this equates to lowball salaries, poor benefits, no relocation assistance, and other hallmarks of an employer that does not respect you as a skilled professional. I would encourage you to avoid these situations.

Don't be driven by demand

I believe that these falsehoods are driven by the mistaken belief that we're on the demand side, that we're choosing The One Job and then throwing ourselves at it. When we think of ourselves as the demand, and phrase things in terms of "I want ...", it drives us toward places where we can't sell our labor effectively. That ends up somewhere between unemployment, a lowball salary being accepted, or dissatisfaction on the job.

Coming soon

I'll write more posts about isolating your skills, creating a resume that shows momentum, and keeping interviews short and sweet without breaking a sweat.

I'd like to hear what you think. Tweet at me: @blakerson

The Future

The Future, as defined by Back to the Future, has come.

I wanted to write a great deal of thoughts. But this one post stood out above all the memes, pictures, and Christopher Lloyd + Michael J. Fox reunion stuff:

Happy ‪#‎BackToTheFuture‬ day, people(s). Cool as it was all going to be, keep in mind Doc & Marty had no internet. Great Scott!

--Bill Nye