I screwed a lot of things up. I started running again this week, a year later. This morning I went for a 4 mile run. My third this week. Zero pain.

So what’d I do right this time that I screwed up last time? And by extension, what’s the best way to safely get into running (whether you’re already in shape, or not)? Here we go, from the very first decision on up:

1. Choose the right shoes. This is *huge* – and harder than you’d think. When I decided to start running a year ago, I thought I was going about this the “right” way. I went to a running specialty store. They had a computer hooked up to a pad I stood on that looked at how I stood. They told me I needed a “stability” shoe. Turns out the problem was you still needed someone to interpret what that computer/pad setup spit out – and they got it all wrong.

In a nutshell, you either “underpronate”, “overpronate” or are neutral. Underpronating basically means that you walk on the outsides of your feet (this is what I do). People with high arches will tend to underpronate. People who underpronate, it turns out, get less natural shock absorption. Read: you’re particularly likely to get knee / leg pain, etc.  Apparently only 3% of runners really do this. Overpronating means that your feet fall inward. People with flat arches are particularly susceptible to this. 20-30% of runners overpronate. Neutral means what it sounds like.

If you underpronate, you need a neutral shoe *without* a lot of support. You do want decent cushioning though, since you provide yourself less cushioning. The reason you don’t want a ton of support is that when people talk about “stability” or “motion control” shoes – this means support to keep your feet from falling inward (what an overpronator does). The kind of shoe you, the underpronator, want is generally called a “cushioning” shoe. The reason, incidentally, that I had so much pain last year is that I got a “stability” shoe, which was pushing my feet outward – when they were already naturally falling outward. My IT bands were killing me after running, for example. Turns out that overpronating, which basically bows out your legs, puts extra stress on your IT bands!

If you overpronate, depending on how severely, you either want “stability” or “motion control” shoes. These have built up inner soles, which are designed to keep your foot from falling inward.

Neutral folks seem to be steered by the web toward the “stability” type of shoe.

Here’s a good link for figuring out your foot type from Runners World: http://bit.ly/udlbj5. The Zappos running shoe fit guide is also really good: http://bit.ly/vYnP6E.

2. You have the right shoes, now get the right clothes. You don’t want cotton anything. No cotton shirts, no cotton socks, no cotton underwear. They’ll just absorb all your sweat, get really wet, and either overheat you or make you cold. Cotton socks are more likely to cause blisters, as a result. Rather, you want that fancy (generally lycra) looking running stuff. Those materials produce less friction and get rid of your sweat. They’ll naturally keep you at more the right temperature, too.

3. Use the “right” stride when you run. Without getting into the whole barefoot running thing, after reading a bunch of literature it is quite clear that you do NOT want to run by striking down with your heel, with your foot far out in front of you. Rather, you want to strike mid-foot. The best way to think of this is “keep your feet under you”. When running, if you stand up straight, don’t look down, and lean forward to gain speed, you’ll see that your feet naturally strike at about mid-foot directly under you. You get a lot more natural shock absorption this way.

4. Start off with the right distance and pace. I initially did way too much distance. My heart and lungs were in great shape from biking, as were the biking-related muscles in my legs. But the running related stuff – how much stress my shins were used to, the muscles related to running, my feet, etc, were in pretty bad shape. If you’re just getting started from the couch, a plan I’ve found to help get you to the point where you’re running 3 miles (or a 5k) is here from Cool Running: http://bit.ly/tqoTG4. If your situation is more like mine, where you were already in pretty good shape, but not for running, I found that starting with a 2.5 mile run on flat surface, at about a 10 minute per mile pace (6 miles / hour) was about right. I then took a day off. Then day 3 I did 3 miles at 6.4 miles / hour. Then another day off. Then day 5 was 4 miles at 6.5 miles / hour.

5. Stretch! You should technically do so after a 3-5 minute warm-up walk, and definitely should do so after your run. Some of the worst pain I’ve had from biking has come from a lack of stretching. My gut is that it’s doubly important, particularly post run, when running. Without going into a ton of detail, here’s a great link from Cool Running that goes over stretches that I’ve found work really well: http://bit.ly/tUaCne. I’d only add this one, http://bit.ly/v0TxDC, an IT band stretch.

I’m pretty sure those are the basics to get you running without a ton of pain. I’ll update the post if I discover other key points.

my normal wheels are custom – they’re HED C2 Belgium rims with CX-Ray spokes and Chris King R45 hubs. i run them with Continental GP4000s tires. they come in at about 1020 front and 1160 rear – without a cassette.  on the other hand, i recently traveled to Hawaii and took my old “heavy” wheeels. i decided to give them a spin when i got back today, on roads i’m accustomed to, and oh my did things feel sluggish. they’re Mavic CXP 22 rims with Specialized hubs and an unknown, non-bladed spoke. there’s a Specialized Armadillo on the front and a Continental Gatorskin on the rear. the front weighs in at 1390 grams and the rear 1730 grams. so the total weight difference between the two wheels is a rather massive 940 grams, or almost exactly 2 pounds!

so what differences did i feel? first – the good. even though the wider rim on the C2s is supposed to provide a smoother ride – largely by letting you ride at lower pressure – the heavier wheels provide the smoother ride. this even though i ride the HEDs at just under 100 PSI and the CXPs at 110. i’d actually almost call the CXPs boat-like in comparison. kinda Cadillac to BMW, if you will. why? my guess is that the heavier wheels just absorb more of the impact. i think that’s where “the good” ends.

that whole thing you read on forums when people say “when i push it just wants to go”. well, i never got that – until today. push as i might, the damn bike just kind of wanted to stay put. i never knew how good i had it! i also noticed my cruise speed was lower – i’m guessing because of marginally worse aerodynamics – lack of bladed spokes and a narrower rim causing more upset in the transition of the air from tire to rim. climbing, things were even more noticeable. i went up Old La Honda today – it was just much harder. i had to use a taller gear much more than normal. there were sections of the climb where i just couldn’t believe how hard it was to push the rig up the hill! the most interesting thing was that i got demotivated – largely because i’m probably used to riding a much snappier ride.

i looked back at my strava data and found a couple of marginally comparable OLH climbs – similar average wattage. this climb – my 10th OLH climb recorded on Strava – was my slowest. i did it in 25:13. i averaged 240 watts. another ride where i averaged 237 watts took 23:56. on another OLH climb i averaged 247 watts and did the climb in 24:09. the only equipment difference was the wheels and wind is rarely a factor on OLH. the biggest externality would probably be how hard i pushed on the relatively flat sections. i’d say it’s fair to say that the wheels cost at least 1 minute heading up OLH.

net: i had no appreciation for how much lighter wheels really do make a difference. of course, 2 pounds is a lot! if you get lighter wheels, it’ll be damn hard for you to go back.

A little while ago we began to realize that as teams formed within the company there was an increased opportunity for tribalism. As Martin Green (Meebo’s COO) pointed out, now people worked more with people in their own group than they did with people in other groups. There was the potential for “I work for team XYZ at Meebo” instead of “I’m on team Meebo.” Once tribalism begins to form, it’s not long before each group internally begins to complain about how another group isn’t helping them. Let that dynamic go too far, and as Peter Fenton recently pointed out to me, antibodies can form between groups, which are incredibly challenging to clear.

I’d argue that lack of empathy is the number one source of tribalism. Sure, there are things that every company does to try to keep teams working well together. Company BBQs, birthday celebrations, promoting cross-team lunches, etc. But if each individual within the company doesn’t empathize with the life of another – the internal pressures, external pressures, performance measurement, family obligations, lifestyle demands of work – tribalism will form, even with those company picnics.

The engineer needs to think about how the sales person is measured and how little sleep and how many planes they’ve probably been on in the last seven days. The sales person needs to think about the difficulty the engineer has when context switching from one project to another. Of course, people don’t know what they don’t know. But if they began from a place of empathy and assumed there must be some pressure (or assumption) in that other person’s life driving their reaction, they would easily arrive at a mutual understanding.

A few months ago, when we began to detect the slightest bit of tribalism forming at Meebo, I began talking about how important it was that everyone at the company empathize with the unique pressures others in the company face. That did the trick, and we nipped it in the bud.

I began this post writing about empathy, but it became a post on how tribalism forms from lack of empathy. There are so many more situations, from M&A negotiations to sales to interpersonal relationships where more empathy from both parties – working to truly understand the pressures and assumptions of the other – would make a world of difference. I’ll keep trying – I hope you do too.

So what’s a Show person? Let’s use modifying your car as an analogy. If you’re a Show person, you’re more likely to tint the windows, throw on a rear wing or throw on bigger wheels. There’s no real performance enhancement to your car after doing these things – it won’t accelerate faster or turn any better, but it sure does look faster (even menacing!) to the casual observer.

A Go person, on the other hand, will modify their car in ways no one can see – unless they go for a ride. They’ll modify the suspension to make it turn better, the ECU to make it accelerate faster, or maybe throw on a short shifter to make it shift quicker. No one can see these modifications on the outside by just looking at the car, but they’re all designed to make it perform better.

The inner “I wish the world were purely meritocratic” side of me wishes that only Go people won – but that’s just not the way the world works. For certain personality traits I often think it’s better to be largely on one side or the other…Followers versus Rule Breakers, for example. But in this particular case, I think you need a little bit of both to win.

Show people tend to be good at getting people to follow them. They’re fantastic at convincing folks of things and getting them to follow their lead. They’re so good at the sell, that they often convince very Go oriented people (who naturally tend to look down on Show people – admit it – you do) that they’re in fact Go people themselves. Now, if they’re too far over on the Show side of the equation, things tend to fall apart – their followers come to realize that they’re largely hollow. But if you combine a Show person with a smart person who has great insights that they lead other Go people to execute on – you end up with a very powerful combination.

And it turns out purely Go people don’t tend to win without a little bit of Show either. Go people are fantastic at building things, accomplishing things, getting things done. The problem is, they may not be able to get people to notice. Dean Kamen, much more a Go person than a Show person (and obviously wildly successful), recently talked about how much it bothers him that he has built amazing things that could revolutionize people’s quality of life in developing countries, but he’s just not been able to get society to adapt quickly enough to adopt these technologies. Go people execute on and build amazing things – but if success is defined by how much one creates impact in the world, you’ve got to Show people how great what you just built really is.

And for me, that’s the rub. At heart I’m definitely more a Go person – I don’t want to Show people what @Meebo has done, I just want us to do it and have people magically discover it. But, I’ve learned a lot from Meebo over the last few years – and one such lesson is you really do need to get out there and Show people the amazing things you and your team have built. If your goal is to maximize impact on the world – you’ve just got to have a bit of both Show and Go.

Ok, some background. When I lived in NYC I took a trip out to Coney Island – I think it was roughly 2000. Now, I’ve never been to Russia, but after visiting Coney Island I thought I knew what Russia must be like. For those of you who’ve never been – Coney Island, and in particular, Brighton Beach, has a large Russian population.

But then my Russian friends told me I was dead wrong. According to them, going to Coney Island was like visiting Moscow in the 1960s. They told me that the folks from Russia who settled in Coney Island kept the culture of 1960s Russia and stopped keeping up with cultural shifts back in Russia proper.

Interesting point – you grow up somewhere. You’re trained somewhere. You start your life or career somewhere and you are what you’ve grown up in. But what happens when you move away? Culture’s always changing – and when you’re gone, it’ll keep changing without you. Would you even notice if culture back “home” moved on and you were stuck in the proverbial past – all the while self identifying as a person from back home?

Welp, I’m pretty sure it’s happening to me. I’ve lived in California for the last 6 years, but spent the first 25 years of my life in Connecticut and New York. I still feel like I’m from the east coast – oddball New York Jewish humor and all. But there are these little things that bite at me every time I head back east – and it usually centers around food. My favorite cafe in New York became a Tasti-D-Lite. Then I read, from California, about the owners of my favorite Vietnamese restaurant being arrested for violating labor laws (that one shut down!). Tonight, walking around New Haven, I discovered that my favorite Indian place is now also no more – they used to know me by name.

I’m not sure that I’ll be able to identify the subtle split between my old New York culture and present day. At some level, the world behaves the way you want to see it – and I frankly can’t really see that New York’s new “way” has drifted substantially from mine. That said, it’s pretty clear I’m at least really out of date on the best restaurants – most of my go to joints are now gone and I really have no way of creating strong bonds with new ones – I’m just not here enough. At the end of the day, I take this as a sign – I can’t see it, but I’m pretty sure I’m stuck in New York’s past.

My canned answer goes something like this, “Someone who takes ownership and is proactive, yet at the same time is team oriented, collaborative and open. This is a really hard mix to find.”

At Meebo, we believe strongly in these traits. Ownership, Proactive, and Team are three of the 5 areas we both actively look for in our interviewing process and use to assess employee performance once someone’s joined Meebo.

Yesterday I found myself talking to our newest group of employees at Meebo about what this really meant and figured something out. I always knew this mix of “I’m super team oriented” and yet “I’m a rock superstar who OWNS my projects and PROACTIVELY carries them through” was basically an oxymoron. I finally realized the trait someone needs to have in order to contain all of these attributes in a single person: humility.

When I talk about the ideal configuration of a founding team, I often mention the need to have at least two people with synergistic skills. The underlying assumption here is that you want people who are great at their particular area of expertise, but that no one is good at everything.

So it dawned on me, in talking this out with roughly 8 new Meebo employees yesterday, that someone who is unbelievably good at what they do can truly take ownership of their particular area and, by default, be proactive in it. And if this same person is not caught up in how great they are at this particular thing, but rather knows their own boundaries, then they will naturally work with others to fill in their gaps.

Yesterday Meebo announced XAuth along with Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Yahoo!, Disqus, Gigya and JanRain. The goal of XAuth is to make it easy to know which services a given user cares about and then to reduce the friction in connecting that user to those services.

The media made a lot of hay over the fact that Facebook wasn’t part of the announcement. Many (though not all) cast XAuth as the rest of the industry versus Facebook. That was not the intent (nor was it part of our media briefings). Rather, here’s why XAuth mattered enough to Meebo to push the industry to adopt it as a standard:

Meebo has been connecting users to various social services since 2005. One of our early learnings was that users have different types of content they talk about and share on each type of social service. Think about the type of content you personally put over a social network versus IM versus email versus Twitter. For most people, all of these styles of communication are relevant, but what you put over each network differs. In addition, for each style of communication, there are multiple players. The decision tree gets complicated pretty quickly. XAuth attempts to solve this problem by signaling which services a user actively cares about so those services can be readily available to the user as they browse the web.

So is XAuth competitive to Facebook? Nope – it doesn’t seek to replace what Facebook does today – rather, the goal is greater efficiency for publishers and a more relevant experience for users. Here are some specifics:

1. XAuth does *not* replace Facebook Connect, or anyone else’s external APIs, for that matter. Rather, XAuth is a way to know which of these connection choices to put in front of the user. Once XAuth does its thing, the connection happens via existing APIs, like Facebook Connect or Google’s APIs.

2. Facebook already has a way to ping their servers and ask if a given user is connected to Facebook (what XAuth enables). Since Facebook is not currently part of XAuth, this means that Meebo’s Bar (or other services) needs to look up whether a user is connected to a given set of services in *two* places — Facebook’s servers and XAuth’s. Were Facebook to be part of XAuth, this could be accomplished in *one* ping. No difference in user experience, but better performance for the website.

3. Prior to the XAuth announcement, we ran it by folks at Facebook and had a good technical conversation with them. XAuth came together quickly and Facebook was likely just a little busy with planning for f8. I obviously can’t speak on Facebook’s behalf here, but hope they’ll become involved.

4. Given how large Facebook is, were they to be part of XAuth, they’d frequently show up in the list of services a user cares about anyhow.

XAuth solves a really simple problem that’s been around for a while — how to help connect users to the services they care about most. From a selfish Meebo point of view, it also pushes all of the various services to make their networks easier to work with, as Facebook has done with their own. My hope is that XAuth, in the end, lets users more easily connect with all their friends as they travel around the web.

Seth

Doing a quick scan of the *latest* job held by a few of the new senior managers, you realize that each of these three teams are pretty homogeneous within themselves. However, comparing these teams next to each other, they’re quite different.

MySpace
Former consumer internet entrepreneurs and startup execs.

Owen Van Natta, the new CEO, was the COO at Facebook as it transitioned from startup to largeco. Jason Hirschhorn, the new CPO, was an exec at Sling Media before it was acquired by EchoStar. Mike Jones, the new COO, founded Userplane and then Tsavo before heading to MySpace. And as if to prove the point, MySpace recently bought iLike, and 1/2 of the press release was about the founding team.

AOL
Former consumer internet large company execs.

Tim Armstrong, the new CEO, came in from Google where he was President of the Americas Operations. Brad Garlinghouse, the President of Internet and Mobile Communications was SVP of Communications and Communities at Yahoo! before joining. Jeff Levick, the President of Global Advertising and Strategy, was VP of Industry Development and Marketing in the Americas at Google. Admittedly, there’s a chink in the armor on this one – Armstrong got to Google in 2000, when it was still effectively a startup.

Yahoo!
Former enterprise large company execs.

Carol Bartz, the new CEO, was the CEO of Autodesk prior to joining Yahoo!. Carol was there for 14 years. Ari Balogh the EVP of Product and CTO, joined before the new team came in. However, he fits. Prior to Yahoo! he was EVP and CTO and Head of Global Product Development at Verisign. He was there for 10 years. Bryan Lamkin, the new SVP of Applications, was previously the SVP & GM of the Creative Solutions business unit at Adobe. He was there for 14 years.

This all raises two questions:

Is one of these team compositions inherently more likely to succeed in a turnaround effort of a large consumer internet company? You could argue the startup guys at MySpace are scrappier and have direct domain expertise. That said, maybe the AOL folks have an advantage – they’ve most recently operated large consumer internet companies and have seen systems, functional and not, which can help them guide the company. The Yahoo! folks, frankly, would seem the odd team out. Large company enterprise people running a consumer internet turnaround? Well, I remember when I joined IBM as my first job out of undergrad. I felt like my outsider perspective actually let me see broken things more clearly. Perhaps this is the inherent advantage of the Yahoo! team?

Do these teams recognize their biases? Like I said, in founding a startup it’s critical that you create a founding team with synergistic skills. That likely goes for management teams of large companies as well. The problem, though, is that just like folks tend to found companies with people like themselves, they also tend to hire people like themselves. I’m just as guilty as the next. Hopefully these management teams recognize they lean one way or another and work to compensate accordingly.

What do you all think? What are the inherent advantages / disadvantages of the various teams?

Look at what’s happening today. iPhone, a proprietary hardware device, which runs OS 3.1, a proprietary OS. It works really really well, and it’s beautiful. It’s an awesome consumer experience. Meanwhile, a bunch of manufacturers are about to release a whole slew of mobile devices running the Android OS. And of course, they’ll almost certainly be priced below the Apple solution, and likely be more open to developers, too.

So, last time it was Apple v Microsoft. Looks like this time it’ll be Apple v Google/Android.

So far, it seems like the same dynamics, on a similar timeline, are unfolding. I wonder if there are any market dynamics in mobile / 2009 that’ll make this one play out different than last time around?

On my way into work this morning, the left turn signal at the corner of Shoreline and Villa (for those who care, when switching from southbound on Shoreline to eastbound on Villa) missed my arrival, and even though it was 9:30am and you’d expect multiple cars to come up behind me, there I sat for three cycles of the light. Still no one.

So, I called the cops. “Here’s the situation. (insert here everything i just wrote above). What should you do?” The officer who answered the phone asked me to hold.

A few minutes later she came back. She said something to the effect of, “None of our officers who ride motorcycles have that problem at that intersection.” I responded that it may be because their bikes are heavier than the one I ride. Regardless, it was happening to me, so I’d like to know what the proper procedure is.

“Turn in the other direction.”

Ok, but there are three lanes that head south on Shoreline I’d need to cross to make a right. I’m in the fourth lane over waiting for the turn signal. So it’d be just as illegal (and more dangerous) to make a right from the fourth lane over on the left.

Her response: “None of our officers have this problem, including our officers who ride dirt bikes. I can’t tell you to run the red light.”

I explained I understood this. However, I just wanted to know what I should do in this scenario.

Growing more frustrated, she suggested that I back my bike up, cross to the other side of the road since no one was coming down the road, and take the right.

At this point, I didn’t even bother with mentioning the light is positioned on a downhill, and I couldn’t quite back a 500 pound motorcycle up a hill (most motorcycles – mine included – don’t have a reverse gear). Not to mention that just because cars weren’t coming behind me in the left turn lane didn’t mean that there weren’t plenty of cars passing at 40 mph as they shot down Shoreline.

Now, to the officer’s credit who answered the phone, she did research for a few minutes with other officers who rode motorcycles. She also suggested that I call the traffic engineering bureau and report this (I did – turns out they knew this particular light had been a problem in the past – they thought it was fixed and would increase the sensitivity again). I wish, however, that she had constructively worked with me to find a legitimate solution rather than constantly point out this didn’t happen to any of the officer and that she couldn’t tell me to run a red light. I’m pretty sure I took a constructive tone on the call…I wish I could say the same for her. Instead, so fixated on not telling me to run a red light, she gave me a bunch of less safe options.

seth

ps – shoulda just used Google in the first place – 21800(d)(1) CVC “The driver of any vehicle approaching an intersection which has official traffic control signals that are inoperative shall stop at the intersection, and may proceed with caution when it is safe to do so.” Net: run the light.