“Look at me, I’m better than you because I have more expensive cool stuff” is an attitude which just shows how shallow one really is.

Sadly for him, Calacanis buying a Tesla failed to impress me. I didn’t know that apart from being a famous scientist, Tesla is also the name of an expensive electric car. Now that I know it exists, I’ll have more to say about it later.

No doubt celebrity and showmanship are a central component of JC’s business advertising strategy, I would have never visited Mahalo except for his appearances on TWiT. But as you mentioned, there is a real danger behind JC’s (and many other Web startup impresarios’) cult of flamboyant personality around himself. Many of these men have something to fall back on while their troops have nothing in reserve. The ground floor startup workaholic does not have millions saved in the bank, when s/he burns themselves out, they have nothing to fall back on. The cult leaders are rich enough that they can burn themselves out – cause they can follow it up with a vacation to Tahiti. If I burned myself out, I’d still have to get up tomorrow and look for a new job.

But then again, America and its uneasy relationship with celebrity (and the consequences of this liaison) is a whole ‘nother can of worms.

Society does need risk-takers: look to any nation’s armed forces and emergency services for outstanding examples of bravery. However in those cases the end result is primarily for the society’s good, not for personal gain.

The other problem with is that if people burn out, the rest of us have to pick up the pieces — either personally as family, friends and neighbours, or societally through the burden of increased healthcare costs.

Nice point about the celebrity architects — and of course we see the over-rated “stars” in any field.

I’m an architect and I see this sort of issue all the time. The superstar architects are able to get interns to work insane hours for insanely low pay (like 12 hour days for $400/week). I’m not one of those, no-one can pay me that little for that much work for the privilege of putting their name on my resume.

That said, I think that there is a major cultural problem that you do address, which is best summed up in your penultimate line, and we really do need to knock down the high stature of the “high-risk/high-reward/high burnout” approach to life.

However most of those readers would have commented back on whichever higher-traffic site they first came from, because there’s where the discussion was. And it soon became obvious that there were two diametrically-opposed viewpoints. Everybody said their piece a few times, then stalemate.

And after that, 36 hours later or whatever, it was the storm in a teacup over Mark Zuckerberg’s supposedly “disastrous” interview at SXSW. The feral goldfish had moved on. This piece has only scored 500-odd readers so far (plus RSS traffic).

It’s also a few too many words for the poor little petals.

@Joel Brians: What we’re actually talking about here is the different approaches to treating employees — as disposable meat-assets or as, well, people. Still…

All you’re really saying is that 37signals’ products don’t do everything for everybody. They’d be the first to agree. In the same way if I buy a Ferrari, it’s fine for driving around the city but “sooner or later” I’ll want to drive off-road and then it’s no good.

Given that you don’t actually address any of the issues we’ve discussed, and the wording of your comment sounds like a canned PR testimonial, can I assume you’re just some dishonest lackey whoring Wrike? If so, have the balls to say so — you’ll earn more respect that way.

[Stil says: I've edited this post to remove the hyperlink until I get confirmation back from the poster that he's not a PR person for Wrike.]

Maybe all your readers agree with you?
Are we all ‘Yes menPeople’?

<Sigh> I was looking forward to a noisy debate.

Also, he’s right when he analyses Calacanis’ “offering” with Mahalo:

Yesterday [at the Gnomedex conference, 10 August 2007], and in all his previous marketing, he rails against advertising and spam, which ironically, was exactly what he was doing to the environment at this mostly non-commercial conference. What we said (and I wasn’t the only one speaking back to him, I wasn’t even the first) was a response to this. It didn’t come out of thin air. If he had given a similar speech to venture capitalists, if he offered them no way to win, they would have had the same response, but it probably wouldn’t have been as patient or polite. Now, clearly he doesn’t have the same respect for us that he has for VCs. But it seems that to some extent the success of his company depends on winning over the people here at Gnomedex. If it didn’t, he should have stayed home, because his pitch, as delivered, doesn’t work here, because he didn’t offer us anything we want. We get a better deal from Google, believe it or not.

Some of his argument against Google rings true, very few people love them as we did in their early days, but their proposition to web writers and podcasters is basically fair, it’s a win-win. We get flow from them, they get ad revenue. They also offer us a way to put ads on our sites, so we can profit financially from the relationship. Nothing in Jason’s pitch offers us anything like that. No flow, no money. And technically, it’s not a platform, so we can’t build on it.

I don’t get Mahalo.

It’s just pages with news that’s culled from elsewhere. Then if you search and they haven’t manually created a page for that search, it bounces you through to Google and the rest of the existing major search engines. Now I read somewhere that The Long Tail of Google searches is that, sure, there’s a lot of common searches like “britney spears” and “toothbrush sex”, but there’s a huge number of one-offs. So a good deal of the time Mahalo just bounces you through to Google anyway.

What’s the value-ad for me over, say, a combination of, say, ABC News and Google? Particularly when I can combine them on an iGoogle page anyway?

@Crispin Harris: That is a truly excellent point. I had a contractor like that once: he simply didn’t understand that the project he was working on was to create a system for the client to use — and then we’d arrange the next project. We had plenty to go on with, but he tried to create a sinecure for himself.

He was also a Debian Linux / Python zealot but this project, mostly complete, had the five servers running on Red Hat. He started changing everything to Debian — even though that’d mean completely re-doing the testing and documentation. Then, when the client enquired about the delay and cost, he had the gall to lie to them and say it’s what I’d asked him to do.

Needless to say, we lost the client. The cost to us was approximately $80k of future projects which had been discussed and were nearing approval. The cost to him was instant termination.

@jason: Oh well spotted!

As an aside, I’ve discovered Calacanis once tried to convince Jimbo Wales to run advertising on Wikipedia. Now the argument about whether advertising is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing is irrelevant. It demonstrates such a fundamental misreading of Wales’ character that it’s further evidence that JCal lives completely within his own ego bubble.

And now I can’t find the quote

When you find someone who has made themselves indispensible; fire them.

The intention here is that an organisation needs team players, and not empire builders or people who will not share knowledge. (There is also an expectation that you will give the person an opportunity to change thier behaviour :-).

JCal’s policies will tend to build the latter — people who push hard for the presumed IPO reward — they will work to ensure that they are not fired. In my experience, this is usually acheived through making yourself indispensible.

I have spend a large amount of my professional life cleaning up environments that had been built/run/managed by people who couldn’t (or woudln’t) create documentation.

I then write the documentation, simplify the environment, and set it up in a direction/infrastructure that will last the next 5 years. I get paid handsomely for this, and I greatly enjoy walking away from a customer that no-longer needs my assistance.