Am I Blog Enough For You?

This is most odd, but I found an email that I wrote eight years ago on the web. I actually found it a few months ago but then I lost it, so I had to re-find it. I couldn’t find it with a search engine, so I called up the guy who posted it and said, “Hey! Where’s your blog.” That’s so much easier than using a search engine. I’m going to have to do that more often.

I rather enjoyed rereading my email. Nothing satisfies quite so well as one’s own old writing. Except for poetry, of course. But I have written 0 poems, so I don’t have to worry about that. There are many more emails like that one. They start out as rants, then I go back and meticulously edit it and remove as many obvious influences as possible.

I remember the mood I was in when I wrote it: more amped up than mad but still mad. By 1998 I had acquired the decadent European habit of drinking coffee after lunch and tea in the afternoon, which probably made me easier to set off.

But oh how shitty product managers and product marketers have dogged me throughout my entire career. The worst part is that it’s impossible to tell great marketing people from shitty ones until it’s too late. The only signal with a reasonably high correlation that a marketing person being shitty is an MBA. People with other majors from Stanford seem okay. I don’t know what it is about their MBA program. The signal with the highest correlation of a marketing person being competent is an MBA from Harvard, unless they mention the word “facebook” not referring to facebook.com.