There's been a lot of talk about money lately here in the Valley, it seems.

Whether it's a product of the exceptional $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook, Google's $3.2 billion Nest buy, the IPOs of Twitter and Facebook, sky-high valuations of private companies, or a real and growing gap between the 1% and the rest, discussion of venture funding rounds and money often appears to be as big a conversation point as the products and innovation that's made this place unique.

As my colleague +Scott Knaster often notes in his blog "Witless to History", he and I are good examples of the typical longtime Silicon Valley employee - people who have been close to the action, but never quite in the center of it. No acquisitions to our name. No multi-million IPOs. But it's not necessarily a lack of effort on our part.

As I wrote nearly five years ago in "Good People, Bad Companies", one typically needs both skill and luck to deliver a dramatic change in life status. Great employees work for mediocre companies, and mediocre employees are sometimes rewarded handsomely for being in the right place at the right time.

So I posited the question, if we celebrate our financially successful entrepreneurs, what about those who've toiled away with similar effort for similar amounts of time, but never got that financial windfall? And in the reverse, what about people who have made quite a bit of cash, but didn't go the textbook route?

What if a person who had put in an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, got lucky by striking it rich on the Lottery and, instead of making $20 million via some acquihire, they made $20 million by picking the right six numbers? Is that someone who should be held in the same level of esteem?

What if they took a two week vacation and played their cards right, making millions at a World Poker Tour event? You may not like watching poker on TV, but you'll find some of the best players come from the Ivy League schools with top degrees, but they prefer pocket Jacks to JavaScript - so they're smart folks practicing their craft.

What if their "Poor Aunt Hortense" passed on and left them some money, or  what if they correctly saw that marijuana related stocks were going to go nuts on the NASDAQ this January, and they made ten times their money? Would they be congratulated?

Silly questions, maybe - but not any more silly than writing posts about how Box CEO Aaron Levie has a "small" position of around 4 to 5% of his white hot company. If we are at the point now where having single digit percentages of stock of a company worth billions of dollars is to be mocked, I too look forward to being mocked in the same way.

It seems to me that while we recognize the true value of an individual extends well beyond their bank account, the entire plot of which companies are raising funds, which funds are raising rounds, which companies are valued at what, and which people made cash is outstripping the story behind why some of them are making money.

The technology that many of these newly rich people have invented or impacted is changing people's lives for the better - be it in connecting people around the world, saving energy, or keeping memories safe forever. They're taking risks and solving problems that are hard - and that dedication is being rewarded. And that should be okay - as should the rare soul with the mathematical chops to make it big in the professional poker world (it's super duper hard), or the guts to pick stocks worth less than a penny, and see potential. If you do it right, consistently, why not reap in the rewards?

What I think we risk by acting as commentators on what people make as much as we are commentators and users as what people actually create, is that we start to reinforce a false mantra that those with greater wealth are those with greater worth. People who do exceptional things have been compensated at exceptional levels for a long time, be it in business, sports or entertainment. And there are no guarantees. As I wrote back in August, it can take an equity event (or two) for an entrepreneur to even afford to stay in the Valley, so you're seeing people play Frogger on LinkedIn, moving from hot company to hot company, hoping to stay on the right one that helps them leapfrog tax brackets.

The 20th hire at a multi-billion dollar acquisition will always make more money than the co-founders of a non-profit, no matter how hard either of them works. That they ensured the financial well being of their family, possibly for generations, is to be lauded. But it doesn't make them better human beings. It's important for us to not lose sight of those for whom there are other goals, or for whom luck has not always been there. It's very hard to win the Lotto.

Disclosures (per usual): Google owns Nest. I own Nest products. I'm not great at poker, but wish I were. I do play the stock market, sometimes even those penny stocks - because, why not.

The costs of home ownership extend well beyond the mortgage and annual rites of property tax. Since buying our home in 2010, I've often mildly complained about getting "Benjamin Franklin'd to death" with all the underpinning recurring costs - from water to garbage to energy utilities - and that's not even addressing the repairs you can't just pass off to a willing landlord.

Long on our whimsical 'to do' list has been to consider going solar. We've always known it was good for the environment, to create our own energy and give it back to the power grid, but after months and months of getting notes from PG&E saying we were using well more than our unfair share of electricity, thanks to keeping three young kids warm and in clean clothes and dishes on a daily basis, I made an investment in solar - calling up Sunrun, and getting panels on our roof that will be making energy for at least the next twenty years.

If you're familiar with how PG&E and other utilities do business, they start off your service at a low rate, and the more you use above average, the higher the rate goes. So if you used 2 or 3 times the amount of a typical home your size, you could be paying multiples on top of that per month. We got tired of getting these nasty notes in the mail about how we were wasteful people, and didn't feel PG&E accounted for our having three kids who just loved to get things dirty. So in comes solar and down go our costs.


And just like having a Fitbit helps me measure my own habits, and the Nest thermostat has helped us reduce our energy use and track when we use our air conditioning and heating, the availability of data can quickly show us our impact. With Sunrun's solar panels tracking data to their customer portal, I can compare the energy we're creating with our PG&E history showing how much we typically use.


With our panels being active just over a week's time, I can see our average kilowatt hours of energy created surpass all but our most active days from the last few months. And our projected electricity bill has dropped from the average of hundreds of dollars a month to zero.


As I've gone through the process of evaluating solar and making a decision on how to invest, many people are curious to how quickly we'll make back our initial costs. What we've managed to do is take a variable bill in the low hundreds a month to a static $22 a month, keeping our line open to PG&E in the event of demand outstripping supply. And that doesn't even consider that energy costs are hardly likely to be stable over the next twenty years. Our long term calculator shows us saving more than $65,000 over the lifetime of the contract, and we should be in the black, so to speak, in five years, if not sooner.

Virtually eliminating our electricity bill has the same kind of relief as you've probably felt when you pay off an existing car loan or send in the final check for a student loan. It cost you money, but now it's behind you, and the next paycheck will stretch out a little further. And if I have to admit it, the panels on top of our roof look pretty cool - it's like getting caps on your teeth to show a little bling to the neighbors. For the first time in a long time, I'm looking forward to our energy bill.

Disclosures: Nest was recently acquired by Google (where I work). I bought my Nest thermostat last year and bought four Nest Protect smoke alarms earlier this year, all at full retail. Also, if I can get you to join Sunrun, I get a referral bonus. So let me know if I can get you on solar, and I can get a few bucks too.

Back in the olden days, or at least to the 1980s, proud parents would take photos of their family, have the film developed at a photo lab, and then take the hard copies of these photos home. Some of the photos would be placed in keepsake books. Others would be framed. But you pretty much had to be in the same physical location as the person holding the photo. They brought the photos to you, and you looked at them, lovingly, or at least passively, for a moment, before handing them back or to the next relative down the line.

Entire histories of lives come and gone are frozen in these physical collections - to be viewed irregularly, as memories are shared with nostalgia. But in the last two decades, our ability to take an exponentially increasing amount of photos, more quickly, in higher quality, and share them instantly practically anywhere, has turned the notion of scarcity on its head. Now anybody, should you choose, can see any photo you've ever taken, on any number of social outlets of your choice - whether you're using a phone or a more professional camera, or even +Google Glass.

With these barriers out of your way, with everyone having this seemingly infinite capability to capture practically every moment, you're also seeing people's intent for distribution change not for nostalgia to the past, but for a time sharing window of minutes or days. Photos are no longer looked back on as bits of the past that one happened, but in many cases, a lens (so to speak) into a shared present. Here's what I'm doing right now. Here's an experience I just had that you need to know about and engage with... right now.

There's a well-worn saying in the world of politics: "All politics is local", spawned by former House Speaker Tip O'Neill, who explained that a politician succeeds by understanding the needs of the people who voted them into office. What directly impacts the individual's happiness and well-being will almost always trump a more philosophical issue - even if it is one of national interest.

Product development isn't all that different. The success of creating an engaging community with social software, or a popular application for mobile, or the latest hot website, derives from how the individual user feels when interacting with your product. No matter how much one group may enjoy your service, if an individual finds it to be complicated or questions its value, you're going to have a challenging time getting them to visit a second time or do more than quickly uninstall your app - as opinions are formed practically instantly.

Get this formula wrong, and you might end up with a site that may have a lot of registrations or an app with a high download number, but actual usage that lags far behind what is expected. This problem can lead to an almost unnatural amount of user churn, as the population of initial signed up users needs to replaced, not just with new ones to keep growth high, but to backfill those who've stopped using a product. Product success takes more than a good idea, but an entire package - from a clear message of what users get from your product, a fast and smart interface, and near-immediate benefits.

Users don't want to spend a lot of time setting up your application, filling out forms, or hunting for good content. They want to immediately see value, and later tailor it to their specific needs. So don't hassle them by obscuring the app's intent, and hiding the most important, informative or exciting elements behind a nest of menus or a maze of choices. If users are often confused, there's a good chance it's because you made a mistake.


Unsurprisingly, not every application is for everyone. Sites or applications tend to find audiences of similar groups - be it by age, geography, life stage, or any matter of personal preferences. It is a rare event when something crosses the chasm from audience to audience and becomes so mainstream that "everyone" is on it, or "everyone" is using it. That doesn't necessarily mean that by not reaching everyone, the product has failed, but that there is a ceiling on its potential. The company behind the tool then has to make a decision - whether to optimize the product to be an incredible experience for the limited audience, or to modify the product further, potentially at risk of alienating its original users, to attract a wider audience.

You can see this tug of war as initial users of a product (see: The Five Stages of Early Adopter Behavior) can be excited about the prospect of a service reaching the masses, only later to be annoyed at how a service has changed when the mainstream does arrive. It's all too common to see people migrate from community to community online or switch from app to app to keep one step ahead of the pack.

This makes every product decision critical, as well as the ability to listen to user feedback, take rapid action, and act on bugs that impact wide audiences. As I've experienced many times as an early user or as an employee at companies making user-facing software, it's very likely that bugs or quality gaps impacting one person also impact many other people who haven't spoken up yet. Tackling the most reported bugs, even if they are small ones, can be as critical as stopping a short-term outage, depending how forgiving your customers are.

And we as users need to understand that just because we love something doesn't mean everyone will. Other people have different needs, usage patterns and work environments. So while we can embrace the role of an evangelist, what fits us may not fit everyone. I often find, even at home, that my wife's preferences for software and hardware differs from mine. Cast the net wider, and you can see greater diversity in terms of preferred applications, news sources and more. Just because I love something doesn't mean you will, and just because as a developer, you expected me to use a product in a certain way doesn't mean that I will, nor will others. (See: Stop Telling Me How to Use Your Products)

The best product managers I've seen are exceptionally patient and compassionate. They don't bully users into following a strict instruction set, and don't mock you when you come to a different conclusion. They genuinely want to know where they can improve, and learn from you, to ease the onboarding process and make their product even more inviting to the rest of the world. Even if they may be focused on the big picture, every individual user counts, and that makes all difference between success and stagnation.