It is with a mixture of proudness, sadness, and well-wishing that we would like to announce that Robert Hodgin, one of the founding partners of The Barbarian Group will be stepping down as a managing partner, and leaving the full-time employ of TBG at the end of this month. The Barbarian Group doesn’t expect Robert’s departure to have any impact on its business, for reasons we’ll describe in a moment, but Robert definitely leaves his mark on the company and will be missed.

Robert has been with us since the first meeting of the founding partners in Benjamin’s loft in late 2001. He was one of the first generation of groundbreaking Flash artists, and was instrumental in establishing TBG’s creative and executional chops, nurturing the first group of creatively and technically savvy flash artists that helped TBG rise to prominence in 2002 and 2003.

Through the years, Robert has transitioned from Flash to other technologies, most notably becoming an early adopter and proponent of Processing. He also moved out to San Francisco, and helped us set up shop on the west coast. Of late, Robert has been participating in the development of new technical frameworks within TBG, most notably with Cinder, our in-progress C++ visual development framework, on which Robert will still continue to work. Robert has also pursued his technical art relentlessly, blogging his experiments both on our blog and on his highly acclaimed personal blog, Flight404.com.

Robert’s work continues to be groundbreaking, innovative, and unlike anything anyone else is doing (except, of course, for those who have been, shall we say, heavily influenced by Robert). It is also the work of an artist, and not the work that people often wish to engage a full professional services company for. Our new arrangement with Robert allows him to pursue projects that he couldn’t previously pursue, while still giving TBG access to Robert’s unique skills when the situation calls for it. We’re excited, Robert’s excited, and there are probably a million potential clients of Robert’s that can afford to hire him now that are very excited as well.

So please join us in wishing Robert good luck in his future endeavors. He’ll be blogging soon about the transition and we’ll post that here as well. Then we encourage you to follow his future work at www.flight404.com. Farewell, sir!

So I had dinner with my friend Liane last night, and I realized that we never actually blogged on the site here about the amazing project we spent a good chunk of last year doing for Liane Mullin and her partner Desiree Gruber. And in talking about the project last night, and all that they’ve been accomplishing since launch, I was totally impressed, and realized that I SHOULD TOTALLY TELL YOU ABOUT IT.

So, in early 2008, we met with Desiree and Liane, who were, at the time (and still are) working at a company called Full Picture Entertainment. Full Picture is best known as the creators and producers of the hit show Project Runway. Full Picture is also a PR and marketing company, and their clients include Heidi Klum, the host of Project Runway. We also had the joy of meeting Jane Cha, the showrunner of Project Runway and another Full Picture team member. They had a vision for a new fashion and beauty site and community, as viewed through the prism of models. The top model’s inside secrets into fashion and beauty, as well as a compendium of their likes and dislikes. It would also include information about all the top models. Famous models would participate on the site.

When we met Liane and Desiree, they hadn’t gotten funding for their new startup yet, so off they went. They quickly met the people at Polaris, and they entered into a partnership. We re-bid for the work, introduced ourselves to Polaris, and got the gig. And by mid 2008, off we went.

We finished up and launched the site in time for spring fashion week in March of 2009.

Since then, the site’s been growing and the Modelinia team has expanded.They’ve built full content team, found themselves a CTO and a marketing exec. It was a joy to watch all of this, of course. As an entrepreneur, it was highly-rewarding to watch the modelinia team grow from 2 to where it is today. And it’s been fun, over the last 4 months, watching them improve the site, and the content, and learn what works and what doesn’t. Watching them acquire sponsors and grow their traffic, and improve their content. It’s been a fascinating look into online entrepreneurialism, and we’ve enjoyed it immensely.

Liane and Desiree have become great friends of ours, and we’re proud to have helped them fulfill their vision, building the initial build of the site, branding the company, designing the site, and offering a ton of flash and tech development.

They’ve brought it in house now, of course – many of our startup clients use us as a virtual team until they can get a dedicated team in place. It allows them to get going on development even before they’ve found a CTO. It’s never a perfect transition, but it allows for progress even in the face of daunting HR challeges. We think it worked pretty well here.

In any case, if fashion, beauty or beautiful models are your thing, check out Modelinia, or follow them on Twitter or any of the other social networks.

And thank you, Liane and Desiree, for letting us meet so many beautiful models. I think Toby’s stakeholder interview of Iman may be one of the best things we’ve ever done.

Hi
So once a month on the second Tuesday at 9am, (this month it’s TOMORROW July 14!!, 2009), come to Katz’s Deli on 205 E Houston St @ Ludlow, and have breakfast with us!
Bring a business date or a coworker you need to catch up with.
Nobody really shows up for breakfast there, and its big and empty and rad, so it will be a good time.

Pass along to interesting people. You don’t have to rsvp or anything, just show up!

Thanks!

Benjamin & Noah

http://cometoourbigbusinessbreakfast2ndtuesdays9amatkatzs.com/

Man I wish someone had told me this before I started in business, but Fred Wilson perfectly sums up the best approach to dealing with revisions to legal documents. I have to do a TON of these, and I find every time it gets the least bit difficult or contentious is when we’re going back and forth with redlines and not actually talking. 95% of the time, talking rapidly clears up every issue. It kind of amazes me so many people to try to go through this without talking.

My habit of long-winded comments on blogs continues, this time in response to Valleywag’s call for Mark Zuckerberg to resign.

My comment:

I wrestle with this one every day. It’s interesting you’ve come down so strong on the resign camp. And while I recognize Zuck’s managerial limitations, I think it’s probably best if he stays. It’s a close call for me, but on balance two arguments win it out for me.

First, what we are all dreaming about for facebook to do is to have another “hit.” We all, I think, are subconsciously secretly hoping it’ll do something awesome, and become totally cool again. OK, maybe we’re not all wishing it, but i think we can all say it’s what they need. And let’s face it, that’s hard. I think I prefer Zuck’s relentless efforts at trying to find that, even when it sometimes fails, like the last redesign. And I can’t think of anyone else who would have the chutzpah, naivete, or balls to keep doing that. Certainly not Marc. Marc would turn it into the good days/parts of Yahoo! – competent, solid, always there, profitable, and boring. And since this thing isn’t public, and it’s my understanding that Zuck still owns the largest share (if not a majority?) and everyone else invested in it with that understanding, they should go for it.

Okay that was a long “one reason” – but I guess we can summarize it as “Facebook needs to keep trying radical things, and Zuck does that like no other.”

Secondly, and this is a bit of a hedge because ultimately Zuck’s responsible, but WTF? He hired a bunch of seasoned, qualified executives, and what did that get him? A COO’s as responsible for this mess as a CEO, especially when they’re the supposedly seasoned executive.

—-
Zuck should fire Sandberg, issue a mea culpa to the entire company, learn from his mistakes, and keep going. It’ll cost him his licks, but it will fix things, and he’ll learn from it. He’s young, but not too young to learn his lessons and improve from them.

Got a little riled up this evening reading a TechCrunch article from guest author Eric Clemons from Wharton on Why Advertising is Failing on The Internet. I got a little riled up. Mainly these posts irk me in how we’ve just been hearing the same old, same old, for years, even as people do interesting, compelling, effective stuff on the internet every day.

Anyway, here is my long-winded reply:

Okay. I see you significantly revised your article in the update, and, really, this is more a problem of an inflammatory headline, but I think a comment from an advertiser is warranted nonetheless. Take a second, look me up. I know what I’m talking about. Honest. I do advertising. On the internet. And it works. And I make money off it. And my clients are happy. And I don’t care two whits about banners, search, or any algorithms.

Advertising is not failing advertisers, and it’s not failing consumers. It’s failing everyone who expected it to fund the whole of the internet. But advertisers are just like everyone else. Why would we pay someone (websites) for something (messages) we could get for free?

You’ve got a few fundamental logical problems with your assessment. Let’s dissect a bit.

First, you say “advertising is failing.” But your argument here is not that it’s not working, but simply that it’s not the web’s economic salvation. You’re conflating the failure of advertising as a means of funding all the fun the internet has with the efficacy of advertising as a means of impacting users’ behavior. They’re different things. It’s doing each of them well to different extents. Just because it’s failing to fund the whole internet doesn’t mean it’s failing to influence consumer’s purchase patterns.

Secondly, you list the age-old problems with advertising. People don’t like it. They don’t trust it. Whatever. it’s a red herring. It’s always been the case. The internet didn’t change anything about that. Advertising worked before in the face of these obstacles, and it works now in the face of these obstacles. We all like to bitch about advertising. It has challenges. Nonetheless, it still works.

Next, you’re conflating the need of websites and media properties to make money with the need of advertisers to make ads. Just because there are different ways for sites to make money now means nothing. So what? Fewer sites will run display ads? What does that have to do with the existence of advertising? Will it stop someone needing to market their product just because Facebook found another way to make money?

And lastly, like everyone in the tech world (though you seem to not be from there), you seem to be under the impression that all advertising online is display ads, text ads, and maybe a rich media unit here or there. But the definition you give is more broad than that. You said it yourself. It’s getting a message in front of people where they’ll see it, in order to influence them. It’s not clicks. It’s not this page or that.

Here’s the stone-cold fact. Your analysis is outdated. Effective advertisers have already adapted to the years-old “new” reality you outline. It’s more expensive than anyone hoped, it’s less profitable for agencies, and it’s a hell of a lot harder than everyone hoped, but the fact is it works.

Been plowing through the back catalog of my RSS feeds, trying to catch up after SXSW, and I found a great discussion over at Alley Insider about 15 roles every startup needs filled.

The most fascinating part is the back and forth, I think. The original post posits many of the 15 are unneeded or can be combined – we started with six, and I think to some extant that it was true that you can combine some in the short term. But very rapidly, most of those positions need to be expanded out into individuals. If anything, I think the 15 roles (plus the obvious omission of biz dev, called out in the comments) is a great map for scaling your organization from whatever it is you start out with.

Also, the discussion in the comments is really interesting – gives a lot of insight into some of the key challenges, debates, and viewpoints about team size and startups. Lately, personally, I’ve been landing on the side of larger teams – experts who aren’t torn between divided loyalties, and each important aspect of a job having a dedicated advocate. There’s a TON of internal debate about such things, though, and no shortage of people here at the company that feel smaller teams are more effective.

Personally, I think sometimes we let our nostalgia and our personal enjoyment get into this conversation a bit. It’s easy to look back on “the good old days” when we were all running around like chickens with our heads cut off, making a great project. But sometimes I look at our work now, an old project that I remember fondly as being a great project, side-by-side with a new project done via a process, and the work is almost always better now. And people have personal lives here, which I think is a pretty great accomplishment. Really, a lot of the times process probably gets a bad rap, as it has to compete in comparison with our nostalgia.

Nut that’s a whole different topic. Look at the roles, and tell me what you think – I think UX designer and biz dev are the obvious omissions. I also have a hunch toolsmith, lead developers and CSS coder could be combined, but I’m sure that’s probably a bit contentious.

I am currently cooped up in my house with a bad fever. I just spent 13 hours in bed tossing and turning and sleeping and having those fever dreams.

Luckily, being a workaholic, three of these fever dreams had relevance to my job, and I thought I’d share them with you.

First, I had a dream about Jennifer Aniston and her agent bickering about whether or not she should attend a launch party for one of our sites. Her agent didn’t want her to do it – he thought it was beneath her her. But Jennifer tried to explain that this wasn’t just a normal PR party, it was a PR party for a website, so the potential audience was increased by the potential online viewership. She told her agent she had to keep her “ladyviews” up. “Ladyviews,” apparently, is something like a Q Score, – which all celebrities compete against each other for. Jennifer started rambling on about how her ladyviews were down 10% in the last month, and this was not good, damn it. Somehow, in my dream, I knew that ladyview meant one lady viewing one female celebrity one time. Sorta like an all lady, celebrity banner click.

Next, I had an incredibly complicated dream where I was part of a team at a secret startup who was trying to integrate the nation’s power grid with Twitter. This seems kinda pointless now, but when you’re lying in bed with your iPhone and a fever, the thought of being able to tweet to your thermostat to turn it up or down seems kind of wonderful. Everyone talks about Twitter like it’s maybe the next phone system or utility, but I like the idea of it being integrated with the power grid. I think this came from those GE ads during the superbowl.

Finally, my last dream involved me being an intrepid Daschiel Hammett-like reporter who was working on a conspiracy case involving the selection of which iPhone apps appeared in TBWA/Chiat Day’s commercials. There are like ten Taxi applications, and there are like many Tip calculating applications. One of the last things I saw before I went to bed last night was one of those ads, and I remember wondering idly how they chose which tip calculator app to feature. In my dream, it transpired that I uncovered a kickback conspiracy between TBWA and the creators of specific Taxi and Tip applications. Then they show me dead, in an all blue and glass computer room, much like the one in Antitrust. I had been offed by the nefarious assasins of TBWA. (please note: this is fiction. TBWA don’t sue me)

OKAY, so the other thing I’ve been thinking a lot about in my fever is last night’s episode of Gossip Girl. First off, if you’re a fan, OMG BEST EPISODE EVER, RIGHT? But let’s keep to the subject of the internet here, otherwise I should be posting this in my Livejournal.

- * SPOILER ALERT * -

In this week’s episode, cell phones are banned from the school, and one character uses the phone to text a website (Gossip Girl) a tip about a student and a teacher having a potentially inappropriate relationship. Ultimately, the student gets disciplined for this, though they have no evidence other than another student’s word it was their doing.

Now, this is where I think it gets interesting and relevant to us here on the internet. First, there was one scene where all the parents, at the PTA meeting, briefly contemplated suing and shutting down Gossip Girl. Though in the end, one parent rightly pointed out that even if they succeeded (there was brief talk of subpoenaing the ISP), a million more would crop in its place.

I thought this was kind of awesome, and I applaud the Gossip Girl writers for being more forward thinking than the RIAA on this front. Additionally, Serena routinely says that “the only thing you can do about gossip websites is to not let it get to you.” This, of course, is advice that those in our good metropolis of NY could probably take to heart a bit more.

Additionally, there was one more interesting thing on Gossip Girl regarding the internet last night. So, as far as anyone can tell, Gossip Girl is a tip-driven blog, with a single editor who takes the tips, and writes stories around them. This, it should be noted, is intrinsic in the show’s plot. They often talk about wondering who Gossip Girl is (his/her identity is secret), and Gossip Girl narrates the show in a commentary-style voice. This is important. Gossip Girl is not a user-generated community, and Gossip Girl is not a forum site. This becomes important in this episode because the teachers and parents routinely refer to the student “posting” “slanderous material” to a website.

But in fact the student did no such thing. She sent a text tip. The tip was like five words. With a question mark. She passed on a rumor to one person, and that person elected to turn it into a innuendo-laden (though still not slanderous if you listen to the actual text) blog post.

So where does the truth lie? Where does responsibility lie? The student tells her dad that she “may have sent a tip in” and the dad elects to defend her against the PTA, but later learns that she essentially knew what was going to happen, though she did not, in fact, lie to her dad.

Is the student guilty? And is the lack of comprehension between texting a tip to an individual and posting on a forum intentional? Is it important? Did the teachers and PTA confuse the two to the detriment of the student? At the very least, the lack of technically correct terminology irked me.

Damn good episode, though. Last ten minutes? Best they’ve ever had.

N.B. I apologize for ending at least one sentence with a preposition and combining two topics into one, but when you have a fever, you can get away with stuff like that.