The game, asks you to guess how old Santa is, you have to guess from 1-60 until you find the ride number. I’ll embed the game here once I learn how to do that :)

###

print("Guess Santa's age.")
from random import randint
secret = randint(1, 60)
guess = 0
while guess !=secret:
g = input("How old is Santa? ")
guess = int(g)
if guess == secret:
print("You win")
else:
if guess > secret:
print("Too old.")
else:
print("Too young.")
print("Now he'll bring you presents.")

CNN highlights the efficiencies of getting around in Uber

CBS covers the recent news about Uber’s C&D’s

Super excited to have the chance to come down to New Orleans (even in the midst of quite the crazy week at Uber) to talk at TribeCon. This is my maiden voyage as far as conference speaking gigs goes so, yes I’m a bit nervous that I can entertain, but I’m pumped to make people think a bit. With Baratunde, Micki, and Ben as features speakers the expectations are quite high… they’re all pretty rad.

Either way, I’m going to be sharing a few take aways on problems. I’ve found that startups are really centered around problems. Without them *probs* innovative solutions couldn’t exist, and without them you wouldn’t be a startup, because no startup road is smooth. So, how do we deal with problems? What do you do with problems? How do you empower problems to work in your favor? That’s what I’m going to provide a teeny tiny bit of my experience in breaking down.

Further, real estate agents and investors talk about location as their must. I fully believe that problems, are the startup equivalent to real estates, location. Thinking through problems and making decisions on how to solve, resolve, and dominate is the life blood of a startup. Being as this conf is about communities I’m going to share how I’ve found problems to be a driving force in rallying communities. I may not be a community expert, but I’ve seen a few problems recently.

Last week TechCrunch ran an article leaking the news that UberCab had closed our Seed round of funding. Our initial hope was to hold that news off until we could launch a new site (coming soon) along with the funding announcement. We had hoped to completely own the telling of that story, but as we realized, this wasn’t going to be the case, so we had a decision to make. Option 1: Keep quiet and let the journalist fill in the facts of the story, or Option 2: Provide the details and influence the story to be told accurately. We would have loved to keep control, but we had to embrace reality and influence the outcome as best we could.

So, what can you do about it? Sometimes nothing. But, my gut tells me that when things get out of control, or out of your control (big difference), you should guide the situation where possible. So, when we got news that the funding announcement was leaking whether we liked it or not, we decided to provide all the information that would be needed in order for the story to be correct. We decided to provide details and keep some influence. We confirmed funding amounts and investors involved. We opted to provide the journalist, who’s job it is to post this type of information when they have  access to it (gotta love them for it), all of the details in order to report accurately.

In the end it turned out to be the right decision. While the attention we’re getting for raising money is not something that we necessarily wanted this early, it’s helped awareness of our product and the problems that we’re solving for YOU our users, which is a win. Now however, there are entities and “ankle biting” competition that will inevitably pop up. Now that the story was told pretty accurately, it’s time for us to getting back to things we can control.

At first I thought it best to completely stay away from this story, then I realized after a conversation in our office tonight that there are some interesting details in this story that may make sense for me to collect and reflect on. This is a collection of the posts on the AngelGate drama going around in the venture financing world. If you read the following articles in order, and some of my personal insights provided below, you’ll understand what’s going on and  have a great understanding of the topic from multiple, differing, but all intelligent perspectives.

Format is:

Name of author (sentence summary)

My insight/review, blah blah blah.

Enjoy.

#####

TechCrunch (this is where it all started)

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, went to a dinner with some super angels, meaning people who invest early stage, but with other peoples money (some definitions may vary). Arrington was tipped off on the dinner and had a hunch that it was about price collusion in early stage deals. So, he just showed up in typical hard nosed journalistic fashion…

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/21/so-a-blogger-walks-into-a-bar/

Dave McClure (we’re not bad, we’re hustling & a healthy fuck you)

Dave’s approach is consistent and honestly I kinda like it. He basically makes the claim that these meeting happen but no, they weren’t colluding on prices. They generally meet with some of the big names to make good things happen and help direct the industry in a positive direction.

http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2010/09/fire-in-the-valley.html

Ron Conway (blasting super angels)

Ron is a stand up angel and I hope someday I get the chance to work with him. This letter (that was intended to be private) got out and of course published on TechCrunch. He basically calls out some negative super angel behavior and attempts to disassociate with the crew that is potentially acting in an unethical fashion. If there’s anything I took away from this, it’s that some nasty things were going down around that table.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/23/ron-conway-angel-email/

Brenden Mulligan (can’t we all just get along)

This post is probably the least circled of all the posts here. However, its one of the most honest and innocent summaries that I’ve seen and I have a huge amount of respect for it. Brenden is a good friend and he literally nailed this one. If I were to write a post with my thoughts, I’d probably just ask to repost his. The gist is chill out, we all need each other.

http://bmull.com/dont-let-this-angelgate-crap-drag-out-communi

Mark Suster (reality sets in, advice for entrepreneur)

Like I posted on Marks blog tonight… Every time I have an interaction with Mark, whether twitter, or reading his blog, I have a growing respect for his perspective and realistic, balanced approach to business and life. This is the best response yet to a very sticky but interesting topic. It’s fair, it’s real, and it like most things I agree with, sides a bit with the entrepreneur about how to handle what is inevitably the real world. His advice is a little bit deal with it, and a little bit, how to deal with it. Thanks Mark.

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/09/23/what-entrepreneurs-should-do-about-price-fixing/

I’d like to start using one blog for all of my posts.

I’d like the videos and pictures from http://ryangraves.org to go to the same blog that I write more thoughtful posts, like yesterdays on Job titles and recruiting. I see no reason to split them up. Because I have friends at Posterous and it seems, after great review, to be the simplest platform, I’d like to use it to drive the blog. But I want to keep it on a custom domain & I want to keep this theme, it’s simple, relatively new and I still like it a lot. So here’s the details…

Specs wanted:

• one blog for all content types
• custom domain (probably ryangraves.org)
• driven by Posterous
• must have this theme

Problem is, I’m not sure how to keep this theme on Posterous. I’m not sure which domain I should make the main. And I’m not sure if the aggregation of blog is a good idea from an audience/community perspective. I write/post to engage people in things I find interesting. If that dies because of some change, it wasn’t worth making.

Can you guys provide any thoughts or feedback on these Q’s?

This is going to be a short post, because the reality is that I don’t know a ton about this topic. But I’m right down in the mix of it and I’ve got a few first lessons that I think might be valuable for the folks who are as fresh as I am. I don’t mean to discredit what I’ve learned and I don’t mean to state this as gosspil or any kind of genius, it’s just real and from the trenches.

Title does matter.

In posting a job, it’s absolutely critical that you get the job title correct. It matters for the company to guide the structure of the team, it matters for the individual to provide clarity on what her responsibilities may be, and it matters for marketing and getting people interested in applying for the job. It needs to be clear and descriptive enough that in one glance the persons applying will have a solid idea of the work they will be doing. Similarly, it helps to have enough buzz words that it’s at least some what appealing to an applicant…if not sexy. There’s trends in job titles and as an executive hiring for those roles it’s pretty darn important to understand those trends.

UberCab is currently hiring for an awesome business side startup role that will be responsible for huge growth of our company if executed on correctly. The job started out as ‘City Manager’, thinking that this person would own the overall operations of a city. We thought the generality of the title would imply great responsibility and opportunity, I was wrong. We realized that nobody understands what the hell a City Manger would do. The title had to change.

We rewrote the job post and title to read ‘Operations Mgr’. This seemed closer to what we needed but soon realized that Operations Mgr was attracting a type of person that’s was way off from what we needed. It attracted an older crown who had “operations” experience doing projects with construction companies and the like. Not our target. Operations Mgr could also be misread in the startup world for a technical operations role, which this role is not.

Finally, we’re on Business Operations Analyst, first because it captures the unique business side startup opportunity that we’re offering. Second, the role is heavily operational in that there will be management of our fleets on a day to day basis. And third, the title of analyst implies someone that may be a bit junior but will be data driven and work their ASS off. In the consulting world analysts are the grunts, well in the startup world we’re all the grunts. Our understanding of this role and the title that we’ve chosen to recruit for it are optimized and iterated upon and now we’re really starting to see the type of resumes we originally setup for.

I’ll keep this post update with our hiring status & you can apply here > http://ubercab.com/jobs

There are many beneficial factors I could write about when it comes to why Silicon Valley (or more specifically, San Francisco) is awesome for starting a company. The reality is that there are very specific business benefits that I’ve experienced over the past 5 months in launching a business and seemingly popular product in SF. The strongest of all of those benefits is the value of customer forgiveness.

In the first 2 months of UberCab being live in the app store, we’ve seen tremendous *but early* growth. We went from doing 5 rides in a single night, to nearly 50 rides in a single night. Bam! We’ve gotten here quickly because we’ve made our product easy to use and awesome to talk about, and the organic word of mouth that everyone covets so dearly is exactly what has driven our growth. But greater than the value of social web word of mouth is the fact that customers are using these channels to help us improve, and we’re listening.

About a month ago we went through a relatively small stretch (a few days) of wacky billing. 1 of 3 trips had a completely wrong total fare and we decided, because we’re a lean & scrappy team that we were going to go face down on fixing the issue and combat the potential bad press with PHAT customer service. It worked. We found that if approached head on, the problems of inaccurate fares were actually an opportunity to expose ourselves to our surprisingly forgiving customers in our most vulnerable state. For that, they loved us. We solidified a number of customers that I suspect we’ll have for a long time to come just because we honestly explained our error, hooked them up with Uber credits, and sincerely said, Thank you.

Launching products in New York, Chicago, or wherever else, I’m convinced that you wouldn’t have the same customer forgiveness as you’d see in the Valley. People here understand product infancy, they understand under resourced teams and they generally respect the sheer man hours and passion that goes into making a product work even half the time. It’s truly been mind boggling the amount of love, forgiveness, and sharing we’ve seen around UberCab over the past 2 months being live.

All I can say now is, thank you dear clients for sticking with us. We won’t stop busting our ass, being PHAT on customer service, and generally working hard so that you keep saying, WOW…and forgive us from time to time.

**value of customer forgiveness might be coin-able, if so feel free to quote ;)

The importance of being represented well online is as high today as it has ever been. With the potential of being hired (or not) riding on a Google search, or a look through your Twitter feed, the name you make (or break) for yourself on the internet is critical. With social media going from nerd to main stream the projection of your reputation from the real world to the web has happened quickly and people have made their careers riding that momentum.

Whether you’re Gary Vaynerchuk turning a daily internet wine show into a career building and advising web businesses, writing about using a personal brand to build a business, and eventually owning the Jets ;) …

OR

If you’re Tila Tequila strutting your way from MySpace to MTV and beyond…

The web acts as a megaphone for a persons reputation. An individuals reach and impact is expanded at zero cost, and because of it, everybody should embrace their reputation or if I have to say it, personal brand on the web.

But, the idea of a “personal brand” has been taken too far. Personal brand is just a trendy way to say, my ego! Get over it. Over the past few weeks I’ve had one too many experiences where an individual loved talking about the way that sharing certain content or associating with certain people (on twitter) or venues (on foursquare) might affect their brand. Stop talking about your brand and start living it. If you’re trying to project something different onto your online personal brand than you project into your offline real life, then your online reputation is first, flawed and will not be sustainable. Second, you’re a fraud and your ‘personal brand’ is just a fasle projection of your ego. So give it up.

The great personal brands out their are the one’s that are 100% consistent with their offline counterparts. That is all.