Aspirin Business vs Vitamin Business

A few years ago, I heard Rob Walling explain the difference between an aspirin business and a vitamin business: in an aspirin business, you don’t try to convince customers that they need your product. Instead your customers have a problem – a “headache” – and they know it. They go looking for a solution – your “aspirin” – to make their problem go away (or at least make it better).

On the other hand, if you have a vitamin business, you constantly have to convince your customers they need what you’re selling. Vitamins supplement our diet and supposedly make our lives better in some way – they promise to make us healthier, more vibrant, etc. In a vitamin business, your customers can survive without your product, so your job is to show them how much better their lives will be with it.

You can build a great company selling either aspirin products (like this one) or vitamin products (here’s one I use and one I don’t use), but it’s extremely important to know which kind you have and to be intentional about which selling approach you take. One of my favorite products, You Need a Budget, is so useful to me that I thought for a second that it was an aspirin company – but actually, they’re an extremely effective, high-quality vitamin company.

The company I work for, Moraware, is very much an aspirin company. Our customers reach out to us, typically as they’re growing, either with a scheduling problem or a quoting problem. We have a product for each, and our sales approach consists mostly of making sure that customers indeed have one of the problems we solve. Our ongoing product development approach attempts to solve those problems slightly better each day (an extremely slow process) and occasionally to solve a new problem (an even slower process).

Aspirin businesses like Moraware tend not to be sexy but instead try to be useful, consistent, and predictable. Our biggest responsibility is simply to make sure we don’t screw up our customers’ data, because our customers now depend on us to run their companies. Our biggest challenge is that our customers have many more problems that they’d like us to solve – most would prefer our regular-strength aspirin to morph into extra-strength (OK, I’m almost done torturing the metaphor, I promise). Unfortunately, even the tiniest improvement takes a long time to implement.

I often get frustrated that we don’t have every feature our customers ask for – and they get frustrated, too. What I’m ever-so-slowly learning is that we’ll never have every feature that customers ask for! Because of that, it’s better to focus on each customer’s problems that they’re trying to solve whenever they reach out to us. By focusing on their problems, then we’re in a better position to say “here’s how we can help” (whether it’s a great solution or a mediocre one) or simply “we don’t help with that problem, but maybe look in this other place.”

Over time, we’ve added significant capabilities to our products and will (slowly) continue to do so – but at any moment in time, we can only sell the product we have, which means we can only solve some kinds of problems well. It sounds so simple, but those end up being the problems we focus on – the ones where we actually can provide good solutions. That’s the essence of being an aspirin business.

Birthday reflections

Today was my 47th birthday. In most ways, it was just another day, but I got to enjoy a nice dinner with my family, and my parents even came over for cake after their line-dancing class. Life is good.

Since today was a work day, I spent time reflecting on my career. I tend to focus on things I haven’t accomplished … but today seemed like a good day to look back on all the good things I have done and to appreciate the work environment that I enjoy today.

I work for a great company with great people. I’m not solving world hunger, but I do help people build better businesses (albeit in an extremely narrow niche). I’m building new work muscles – particularly in the simple-but-critical area of helping customers. I work hard, and I learn something new every day. 

My job affords me the opportunity to develop myself and improve. I figure I have 10-20 more years left in my career, and I’m looking forward to finishing it strong. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to learn over the rest of my career, but I’m sure looking forward to figuring it out.

Onward and upward!

Moraware is hiring a programmer

Moraware is looking for a programmer. Not just any programmer – the right programmer. The right programmer has these qualities:

  • Very good with C#, SQL Server, and HTML/JavaScript (plus not afraid of learning anything else)
  • Great problem solver
  • Awesome to work with

There’s one more tactical requirement – being in the Pacific timezone or acting like you are. Getting up to speed will require plenty of time communicating with Ted, our founder and lead developer. We’re only a 6-person company (4 of us on the customer team and 2 on the development team), so we don’t have a lot of ceremony. Instead, we talk to each other. A lot. The right programmer has to enjoy getting on the phone and working through things as much as necessary. That’s just easier if you’re in the same timezone. For the first six months or so, it will probably be nice to spend some time in the same room together, too, and travel tends to be easier if you’re in the same timezone. We currently have developers in Reno (Ted) and California (Derek).

Everyone in the company works from home, which I happen to love. Moraware got me a stand-up/sit-down desk with a couple of big-ass monitors attached – based on my experience, having a good work environment really makes a big difference in your productivity, health, and simply enjoying your job. Moraware will make sure you’re comfortable while you’re working.

Moraware also pays really well, and we share in the profits of the company – which have been going up steadily for years. I currently make a little more than I did at Microsoft, so I’m quite happy with the pay.

More importantly, I enjoy getting up to work each day. We have about a thousand customers paying us money every month, and keeping everything running smoothly for them is a big responsibility. It’s amazingly interesting and motivating trying to figure out ways to make our customers more successful. And while we’re all focused on the challenges of growing our business, we’re not at all uptight about it. I’m healthier than I’ve been in a decade, and I’ve been able to get there thanks to an awesome work situation.

As for the software development work itself … it’s all about solving problems for customers, not using technology for its own sake. If using carrier pigeons is the right technology to solve a problem, then we’ll use carrier pigeons. More specifically, we deliver a browser-based SaaS solution. We’re still using a home-grown C# display library that spits out HTML – Ted wrote it long before ASP.NET MVC even existed, and there’s currently no reason to change it (although improving the mobile UX might prompt us to do so in the future). We use SQL Server as our data store, not some fancy document database, and we have a separate database instance for each customer. A lot of the heavy lifting happens in the database. We also do some crazy, modern, awesome things with JavaScript (see www.moraware.com/countergo – that’s all done in a browser!). If you just want to use the latest and greatest technologies, this isn’t the job for you. If you want to use whatever technology is currently the best fit (based on all sorts of messy, real-world factors) to solve problems for customers, then reach out to me at patrick@moraware.com to start a conversation.

I wrote about a customer support / sales position last year – I should have followed up and mentioned that we interviewed lots of really good people, and we hired two as a result. One is my sister, Kathleen Teodoro … Harry didn’t want to hire family, but Kate is simply amazing at customer support and sales. We also hired my friend Jason Pliml, because he’s a rare business talent who influences the company in a variety of useful ways.

After that round of hiring, we wrote down some of what we learned – most importantly, we learned that we need to hire people who support our values. I’ll share them with you if this job sounds interesting, and you think you’re a good fit. To get started, just email me at patrick@moraware.com with your qualifications and reason for interest.

Work at Moraware!

Moraware is hiring! We need more help doing many of the same things I’m doing: customer support, training materials, and marketing. As the newest hire (I started at the beginning of 2014), I’m in a unique position to say why you should consider working here, too.

The basic pitch is that you’re going to love it. I know I do. I’m simply happier than I’ve been in a long time. Having a job I truly enjoy is a big part of being happy for me. I suspect it is for most people.

Moraware, how I love thee …

Me, happy working at Moraware

Me, happy working at Moraware

So why do I love working for Moraware? For starters, I work with awesome people. I talk with my boss, Harry, every day – and I enjoy his company. It doesn’t feel like a “work call” when I talk to my boss. We’re just talking about the various things we’re trying to accomplish and figuring things out together.

I left Microsoft because I wanted to be an entrepreneur – but I wasn’t thrilled with the poverty that often accompanies such a journey. Moraware appreciates and nurtures my entrepreneurial side while paying me a damn good salary. It’s a nice balance for me.

I love learning – I absolutely crave it – and I’m learning a ton working for Moraware. Every day I absorb more of what it means to run a software business. Recognize that we’re not technically a “startup” anymore, because we clearly have product/market fit. We’re just a small, profitable software company with no outside investors. I’m employee #6 (or #7, depending on how you count), and every day, I’m learning more about the ins and outs of the company. I’m experiencing the “daily grind” of helping keep the company running. It isn’t glamorous like a TechCrunch startup, but it’s interesting as hell. Most of our daily work involves doing things for customers (like, you know, answering their questions and helping them use our software).

In addition to being paid well and learning every day, I get to work from home and have a fair amount of flexibility in my time. If I need to take Gus to gymnastics in the afternoon, I do. If I want to take a break to play catch with him, I do. However, since I’m the only person in the company in the Eastern time zone (everybody else is in the Pacific), I try to protect my mornings between 8-11a for work, since that’s when I add the most value being on the phone.

The challenges of working here

We have many of the wonderful problems that you’d expect a growing company to have … most of which fall under the heading of customers wanting even more from us.

Bottom line – there’s a lot of work to do. There are so many additional things that I could be doing and would like to do, but I just don’t have enough time. That’s kinda why we’re hiring again. Some things aren’t what I expected. While it’s nice that nobody micromanages me, it can be intimidating, too. Since I’m responsible for my own work, it’s pretty obvious what I do and don’t accomplish. I want to pull my own weight and earn my keep – obviously the company wants that, too. We need more people who pull their own weight and don’t wait around for instructions.

Working from home is awesome – but it’s not for everybody. There’s something to be said for seeing your coworkers in person. Specifically, it’s easier to connect about random things at the proverbial water cooler, and when you share an office, people pick up on more nuances of mood changes. There are brief industry events every couple of months – Harry and I go to some of them, partly so we can see each other in person once in a while.

One of the primary draws of this job for me is also one of its biggest challenges. I wanted to work directly with customers in support so I could learn all the stuff that comes with that – and one of the things I’ve learned is that customer support is emotionally draining. I like doing support for 2-3 hours, but I run out of gas if I do it for much longer than that.

Who we’re looking for

Years ago, Joel Spolsky summed up what everyone needs in an employee: smart and gets things done. We agree.

Another word Harry has used is “Impressive” – we want people who are truly impressive in some capacity that we need. You might be truly impressive at being high energy or truly impressive at connecting with people or truly impressive at creating training materials (I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Kathy Sierra is welcome to work here if she chooses). No offense to all the wonderful average people out there, but we’re not currently looking for average. Show us why you’re special.*

Even though we want you to be impressive in some way, we also want you to be a generalist. We want people who can do a lot of different things. Just as important, we want people who are more interested in furthering the overall success of the company than in finding abstract perfection within their own role.

We want people with something to gain (crap – that means Kathy probably isn’t a great fit, unless she has a latent passion for countertops). I have a lot to gain in this job … there are parts of entrepreneurship that I suck at (specifically – the making money parts), and I’m addressing those gaps by working here. Maybe you’ve always worked for a huge company and want to find out what a small company is like. Or maybe you want to test your brilliant hypothesis for improving self-service help. it doesn’t really matter what it is, but before you take ANY job, you should know what you have to gain by working there.

Finally, we’d like to improve our diversity in gender, age, race … everything. We have several middle-aged white dudes already, and although we won’t discriminate against short guys with awesome hair like me, it would be nice to get some fresh perspectives.

What you’ll (probably) be doing, at least at first

We need more help answering the phones and responding to emails. We’re growing every day (They like us! They really like us!) … and we’re getting pretty stretched in customer support.

Maybe that sounds terrible to you … yet you’ve read this far. Customer support is more interesting than you think. It teaches you a certain reality about software that you don’t get from programming (both Harry and I happen to be programmers). It tells you how you’re company is really doing … every day, people tell me what they love and what they hate about our product.

A good customer support person isn’t necessarily someone who’s already done it. To be good at customer support (in addition to our general requirements of smart and gets things done), you must be:

  • Energetic – always “on” with customers
  • Extroverted
  • Empathetic
  • Extremely good at listening to people and solving their problems

(See what I did there? With the 4 E’s? That’s marketing, baby … BTW, Harry doesn’t have any empathy, and Susan – our other support person – isn’t even extroverted! So technically you just need most of these qualities.)

Again – we’ll need you to answer phones and respond to emails … but that will take up about half your time, because it’s really hard to do customer support well for a whole day. It’s simply too draining.

The rest of the time, it would be nice to help make customer support less necessary in the first place by improving our online help and training materials (a concept straight out of the Customer Support Handbook). I’m working on it, too, but there’s plenty of work to go around.

Beyond that, there’s marketing (we just hired nickd to help us make our website suck less – oh my God, there’s so much work to do), operational work, product management/design work, improving our testing processes … so, so, so much to do. My current title is “Customer Support and more” … that’s probably a good title for you, too.

It only took me about a week to learn our software, but it took me at least a month to understand how our customers use it – that’ll be where you start, too. Where you go from there depends on you.

OK, ONE MORE THING – our customers are all businesses and mostly small businesses. We need somebody who’s passionate about the problems of small businesses. It’s not enough just to answer their software questions – we want somebody who is motivated to dig deeper with our customers and ask why. We want somebody who can look beyond a question being asked and figure out what business problem is causing the question to be asked in the first place. That’s a lot easier to do if you find small businesses really interesting.

What you get

Hopefully I’ve given you a sense of what it’s like to work here. To summarize what you’ll get out of it:

  • Great pay
  • Great benefits (health, dental, vision, 401k, profit sharing)
  • Great people
  • Great working environment
  • Great learning opportunity

How to apply

If you’ve read this far, then you must be intrigued … if talking to customers sounds interesting to you, then email me and/or Harry and tell us:

  • What you hope to gain by working for Moraware – why are you excited to work with us?
  • What’s “impressive” about you – what would make us excited to work with you?
  • Why you think you’re qualified (a resume with something resembling a cover letter is traditionally used for this purpose)

I can’t wait to hear from you!

* I’m apparently impressive at being impressive – when Ted (the other owner) was describing to me what he wanted me to do for Moraware, he summarized it as “becoming the Patrick Foley of the countertop industry” … I don’t even know what that means, but <sniff>, he had me at hello.

Rolling with it

One aspect of my new job that intrigues me is that I’m the first person in the company to be living in the Eastern time zone. Everybody else is in Pacific, so I’m usually going to be the first person working each day. Once I know what I’m doing, I’ll be manning the phones first thing in the morning to increase the amount of time that customers reach a live person.

I’ve never had a business (i.e., non-music) job where the timing mattered, and what excites me is the opportunity to develop good habits. There’s a 3-hour window where it’s clear I’ll be doing the same things every day, and I want to make those the “right” things.

For me personally, running is a part of that. I’m more awake and energized when I run first thing in the morning, so that’s my anchor habit of the day – wake up at 6:30, put the running clothes on, and get my butt out the door. Once I’m outside, instinct takes over, and my body kicks itself into gear (quite a low gear, but still).

The beginning of any habit is a critical time. Your mind plays tricks on you, and you negotiate your way out of your original best intentions. Often, you have to blast past your own resistance to achieve your goals. I know that resistance – I’ve blasted past it before. I expect it.

So I was expecting to find some resistance to getting up in the morning, and I was ready.

But when I got up this morning, it was 9 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit). That’s without wind chill. 9 degrees below zero.

I’m equipped to run down to zero, but at my current level of fitness, I don’t think it’s safe for me to run much below that. So I let the resistance win today. I went back to sleep for an hour, and I’ll run later today – it’s supposed to reach a balmy 18 degrees by the afternoon.

I hate treadmills, so If this happened all the time, I’d have to use the indoor track at the YMCA (7 laps to a mile – it’s awesome), but I think today was an outlier. Sometimes you have to roll with it … you win today, resistance, and I tip my hat to you. Tomorrow I will crush you.

Day One

I love the concept of New Year … it’s the perfect time to start over, to start something new.

Today I started my new job at Moraware. I set up all my new accounts for email, internal chat, the help system, etc. Everything is new and shiny. I’m even wearing my Moraware t-shirt while I go through all the email I’ve ignored over the holidays (and watching Michigan State win the Rose Bowl). It’s a good day.

IMG_0257

The new job is the most obvious big new thing for me this year – and I really want to knock it out of the park – but I have other big new things, too. I’m still enjoying my running streak (day 767 today), but I want more from running this year. I want to run the River Bank Run again in May. If that goes well (meaning that my overall energy is up and I have the time), then I might run the Grand Rapids Marathon in October, too. Maybe even the Huff 50k in December again – but if I do that, I’ll be way more conservative than last time.

But those are all things I’ve done before – I need a goal that I haven’t done, so I’m setting out to run 1,000 miles this year. I might have actually run that much in 2006, but I wasn’t recording my miles. Now I use Endomondo, so it’s easy to track my actual distance. Besides targeting a nice, round number, running 1,000 miles will force me to increase my mileage back to the point where I’m genuinely in shape. My doctor keeps telling me I need to lose a few pounds, and when I run more, it happens naturally.

I also want to write more, publish more podcast-type things, and make more music … but I haven’t worked out explicit goals for those yet. That’s OK. This is just Day One.

What new things are you starting in this New Year?

Two years of running every day

Today marked the second full year that I’ve run at least a mile every day. 731 days. That puts me at #366 on the Official USA Active Running Streak List.

I started my streak on 11/27/2011, but my motivation for committing to it came a couple of days later when my uncle Frank called to tell me he couldn’t run with me as planned, because he was at the hospital. I decided right then that I would run every day until he could join me. Frank ended up being diagnosed with cancer and was never able to run with me again. I decided to keep my promise as long as I can anyway, and I think about him and others I miss every day at the beginning of my run. Recently, my aunt Betty gave me some of Frank’s cold-weather running things, and I’m happy to get some more use out of them. I was warmer today than I would have been otherwise, thanks to Frank (and Betty).

FrankIt’s strange how and why we grow close to people. My mom was one of 13 kids, so I have a lot of aunts and uncles on that side of the family. I’m closer to some than others. I wasn’t particularly close to Frank until 2006, when I started running longer distances. Our family reunion was always at my grandma’s rustic cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which was about 7 miles from Lake Michigan. Every year, Frank would run to the lake. Everybody thought he was crazy, but not me. After crossing the 7 mile threshold earlier that year, I couldn’t wait for the reunion to join him on that run.

As it happened, the day before the reunion, I told Paula I was filing for divorce, so a 3-year-old Gus and I went up and camped together. I was unbelievably raw and on the verge of a breakdown, but the love of my whole family held me up and kept me going. Frank and I connected on that run in a way I never expected. He prayed for me and opened up to me and became my friend. Before long, he was my best running buddy, and he even gave me coaching that helped me to a great marathon run a couple of months later. The infusion of love that Frank and my big family gave me that weekend in the summer of 2006 convinced me to love my way through the challenges in my marriage, and miraculously, we kept our little family together. One Day At A Time.

Frank and I ran often until that day he called me a couple of years ago. God I miss him, but I’m so happy that we got to know each other. I will keep that memory going a mile at a time for as long as I can put one foot in front of the other.

We just lost my aunt Mary, and we lost Barb a couple of years ago as well. I’ll see the rest of my aunts and uncles and numerous cousins over the holidays, and I’ll hug them and wish I knew them a little better.

-Patrick

My Beautiful Mind

At Business of Software 2013, Greg Baugues spoke about depression and the stigma surrounding mental illness. The only way to eliminate that stigma is to talk about it. So I am.

pfviolin-young

When I was a senior in high school (1987), I applied to one school, the University of Southern California. I filled out the application in one pass – in ink – including the essay. I had very high test scores, all A’s except for one B (I was robbed!), and I knew where I wanted to go. I was confident bordering on arrogant. Sure enough, I was accepted as a Trustee Scholar, one of 20 incoming freshmen awarded full academic scholarships to the university. I was also awarded a small, additional scholarship from the music department that I could apply toward my room and board.

In retrospect there were healthier school choices for me. I should have gone to a school closer to my home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. But I had made up my mind that I was going to study with Eduard Schmieder, who had gained a reputation as one of the best violin teachers in the world. (Here’s part of the audition tape I submitted – I found it in a box the other day … it makes me cringe to listen to it now, but it was an OK effort back then.) I wanted to study with Dr. Schmieder because my friend Pieter Schoeman was going to USC to study with him – I adored the way Pieter played, and I wanted to be like him. (Pieter’s sound is so distinctive that years later, I heard a violin solo during a Lord of the Rings movie and knew it was him. Sure enough, when I got home and Googled it, I found that the London Philharmonic Orchestra had performed the music for the movie and that Pieter was indeed the concertmaster.)

Dr. Schmieder didn’t really understand me at the time. Most of his students were from countries other than the U.S. (Pieter was from South Africa, for example), and he would normally have a new student live with him for a couple of months until they were acclimated to life in Los Angeles. He figured I didn’t need that, since I was an American. He didn’t realize that I probably needed it more than anyone. I was a 108-pound, 5-foot-4, androgynous boy who had figured out how to be reasonably cute in Michigan. Los Angeles is full of beautiful movie stars and wannabe movie stars that continuously breed and make more beautiful people. I was 18 but looked 12, and I didn’t adjust well at all. I wanted so badly to fit into the school at large, but I was a runt and an oddity.

I took way too many classes and honors everything (of course); for the first time in my life, school was HARD. I never did homework in high school, because stuff just made sense the first time I heard it. I’d complete assignments between classes or as the teacher was talking. I won math competitions and aced every math class without trying … until my senior year of high school, while taking second semester calculus from the local community college. Once we got to the point of finding the volume of donuts, math was finally hard – so I just dropped it! The point is that I never learned how to work during high school, so college was a real eye opener for me. Everything was just damn hard.

Music went OK my freshman year, but it was a big adjustment for me to be an average-at-best musician. I was used to being the best in my tribe or close to it, but USC had a great music school, and Dr. Schmieder had a monster class. I was just another violinist who didn’t stand out in any positive way. That was a difficult blow to my ego. My fondest memory of that year was practicing in my dorm room one day and sounding so good that when Pieter heard me through the window, he thought I was someone else.

I have an impulsive side, and somewhere in that freshman year, I found a new religion in Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism. Jumped right in and started chanting twice a day. Just made sense to me.

One evening I was offered the opportunity to smoke pot for the first time … I inhaled deeply, and I liked it. A lot. Some people say that they can’t really feel anything different the first time they get high. I am not one of those people – the first time I got high, I visually hallucinated for about 6 hours. I traveled across time and space and visited all sorts of family, friends, and historical figures. Jean-Luc Ponty made sense to me for the first time. It was awesome. I called my mom the next day and told her how great the experience was – I didn’t really understand why she wasn’t as excited about it as I was. I didn’t get high again my freshman year, simply because it wasn’t offered to me. It seemed like a trip to Disneyland – something you did only on special occasions.

On the last day of my freshman year, the dean of the music school called me into his office and told me that they were taking away my supplemental music scholarship. I was devastated. I was also pissed, since I had about a 3.5 GPA. I wasn’t living up to my own standards, but I wasn’t doing THAT poorly. I learned that it was fairly common for the school to take away scholarships after freshman year so that they could get new freshmen locked in. An alternative theory occurred to me about 20 years later, when I remembered that there was a name on the front of that scholarship – I had never bothered to contact the benefactor and just say thanks … maybe offer to serenade them or something. I don’t even remember who the benefactor was. I wonder if that would have made a difference.

Instead of recovering and growing stronger over the summer, I had to deal with my girlfriend breaking up with me. We had a “mature,” “accepting” long-distance relationship (i.e., we knew we were going to sleep with other people), so I thought we’d survive as a couple. I honestly thought I was going to marry her, but nope. She found someone she liked better. That wasn’t just a blow to my ego – it was a rip in my universe. My heart was broken, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. I just pressed forward.

Update, October 2019: Recently, while going through a box of music that I hadn’t touched in 30 years, I found a stack of all the letters she had written to me. It was illuminating to see all the variations of “still waiting for a letter from you.” Seeing my inherent selfishness reflected back to me through her words, it reminded me how easy it is to oversimplify a breakup by saying, “She found someone she liked better.” In truth, we were just young (she was still in high school) and both had needs that we were unable to meet for each other when I left. I think she was more self-aware and honest about that than I was. Thus, my heart was broken.

For my sophomore year, my roommate and I moved into an off-campus apartment that we shared with a couple of other guys. Guys who happened to get high every day. I figured that if I was only joining in 2 or 3 times per week, I must be exercising restraint. But I learned from these “experts” that I don’t react to pot the way most people do. Apparently, pot affects me the way LSD affects most people. My new druggie friends found my wild hallucinations fairly entertaining, and they were kind of protective of me. They tried to slow me down a bit and said they’d never let me try anything harder than marijuana. I think they were actually a bit worried about me.

I learned later that it was known to be a really bad idea to combine smoking pot with religious chanting. On the one hand I was letting go, and on the other I was winding up. In the moment, I was receiving positive reinforcement, so I thought I had simply figured out something that was expanding my horizons. My violin teacher was quite a bit happier with the way I was playing that year, and I had a couple of communities (pot and Buddhism) where I felt I belonged.

And then I stopped coming down. Even though I wasn’t smoking as much as my roommates, the effects seemed to last much longer for me. After a while, I lost my ability to sleep, staying up for what seemed like days at a time. I started acting weirder and weirder, even when I wasn’t smoking. I have an odd sense of humor anyway, but my filter was OFF. I made bizarre connections about everything – something as innocent as going to the mall seemed like a date with destiny.

On one such adventure, I remember having a tripped-out conversation with someone from the Tracy Ullman Show – looking back, I’m pretty sure she was asking if I wanted tickets to a taping. Her conversation with this wacked-out kid wearing painted-on jeans and talking in profound aphorisms must have left quite an impression, because Tracy herself referred to a “Patrick Firstman from Grand Rapids, Michigan” in her next show. This of course freaked me out when I saw it on TV (I saw it on a rerun years later and was amused to see that I hadn’t imagined it). These types of self-fulfilling prophesies happen all the time when you act so comically weird that people notice you.

I went through a freeloader phase, where I thought people should just pay for things for me. Sorry, everybody! If I still owe you money, send me a bill! During this time, I played a gig at a recording studio and “befriended” a gentleman who wanted to hang out with me. He bought me a nice dinner, took me back to his place … and was severely disappointed when I rebuffed his advances. As he drove me home, I remember feeling guilt that caused me deep, physical pain, as  if I had been kicked in the balls. At least I think that’s what happened.

I spent a fair amount of time thinking meta “thoughts about thinking.” I remember being aware of multiple threads of thought at the same time and generally being able to maintain them simultaneously. I tried to see how many different thoughts I could keep going in my head at once, almost like juggling. Fun stuff.

As things started getting worse, I remember going to classes and being super weird. The worst was an orchestra rehearsal where I must have been mumbling or something – maybe I was un-showered, maybe I was trying to flirt with my stand partner … I don’t remember anymore – I just know that I was having a great time making music, but somehow I was making everybody else uncomfortable – the whole damn orchestra. At the end, the conductor addressed the orchestra saying something like “please don’t come up and talk to me after this rehearsal.” My face gets red just thinking about that episode, even though I can’t describe it very well.

The memories aren’t all bad. One consequence of my emerging psychosis was that I made connections all over the place. Connections are the foundation of humor – so the world seemed very, very funny to me much of the time. I was just cracking myself up left and right. In Matt Groening’s “Life is Hell” series, he made a mock cover for “Annoying Street Lunatic Magazine.” One of his headlines was “Thinkin’ about String” … that headline captured a certain essence of my experience perfectly – it still makes me laugh every time I think of it.

From Matt Groening’s Work is Hell (shared without permission, sorry) – click to read in all its glory

And Pink Floyd! The Grateful Dead! During this time, they started making sense to me, and I’m still fond of them. I suppose that’s something.

Eventually, however, my short-term memory stopped working, and I even lost my ability to speak for a while. I could imagine what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t form the words. I think it was at that point that I started getting scared – and I noticed the people around me getting more and more scared as well. I was no longer “a little odd” – I was clearly messed up. Yes, it was funny in its own way, but I was hurting pretty badly, too. I had an image in my head of the person I expected myself to be. As my world became more and more complicated, I felt more and more pressure to make sense of myself in it. I expected myself to be perfect, and as I was distorting my own reality with delusions of grandeur, I was simultaneously punishing myself for not living up to those delusions – and for not being able to snap out of what was happening to me and get my shit together.

I could tell more stories, but that’s enough for now.

When I was a small boy, my mom had experienced something like I was experiencing at USC, and she knew she had to do something (she later wrote about this same story from her perspective). She called some relatives that I trusted, and they somehow managed to put me on a plane (I think it was December 7, 1988). It was approximately like checking a cat onto a plane without a pet carrier. I’m pretty sure I shoplifted a Disney-themed toothbrush holder during a layover in Kansas City and gave it to somebody at my gate. Again, sorry. It was an imperative at the time, I assure you.

One of my memories of smoking pot is that the other people in the room who were also smoking pot “glowed” to me in a certain way. I don’t know if it works that way for other people, but for me it was as if the boundaries between people got smeared a little (in a pleasant way). After I stopped coming down, that effect was less prominent but more present. When I got off the plane in Michigan and my parents picked me up, my dad glowed like a neon sign to me, and my mom looked like a beautiful watercolor. It was a huge relief to see them. I forgot to get my luggage (and my parents were a bit more concerned about me than my stuff), so some of the funniest artifacts of this time are lost to me. That’s a bit disappointing. I would have liked to include a picture of my wardrobe in this post – it would have made a hippie proud.

I was pretty distressed by the time we got home. It was exhausting dealing with my spinning thoughts as well as being on the receiving end of the way people looked at me. This whole time, I was still me, even though I was messed up – and I could tell by the way people looked at me that something was wrong. That night, my dad led our family in a rosary, and I remember that made me feel a lot better. It was like chanting, except that my family could join me – so it had an additional, comforting aspect to it.

The next day, my mom took me to our family doctor, and this man might have saved my life. For the first time in weeks, somebody looked completely normal to me. This kind man had been around the block a few times and wasn’t shocked at all to see a kid struggle at college and come back with a screw loose. We had a pleasant conversation where one of us brought up the fact that my mom thought I needed to go to the hospital. I asked him if he thought that was a good idea, and he said, “Yes, I do think the hospital’s a good idea – I think it would do you some good.” OK, then. I’ll do it.

So my parents took me to Forest View Psychiatric Hospital (the better of the two in our city), and I signed myself in. THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT. If ever you are in the situation that my family was in, do your best to have your loved one check himself into the hospital instead of getting him committed. Once I started getting better, it was so helpful to know that I could just check myself out when I was ready. No need to throw a drinking fountain through a window to escape.

The first thing they did was give me sleeping pills. That alone helped a lot. Then a psychiatrist prescribed me a powerful antipsychotic called Trilafon (12 mg, I believe). It was as if all the gears in my brain had slipped apart and were spinning wildly – the drug acted like molasses to slow down the gears so I could put them back together. The psychiatrist also intuited what makes me tick, so he outlined a couple of paragraphs in a clinical book and handed it to me. “Here, this is what you have.” Cannabis Psychosis. There it was, right on the page: “a psychosis brought on by using marijuana, a condition that affects 8 in 20,000 marijuana users” (btw, why the hell didn’t they write that as 4 in 10,000 or 1 in 2,500?) …

WOW! It’s ME! All this time, I thought the world was getting weirder and weirder, and now this smart-looking man with the airplane propeller in his office explained to me that I was sick – it made so much sense! The world was fine all along, but I wasn’t! That was a huge relief, and by simply learning and trusting in this fact, I knew I would get better quickly.

I spent an intense week or so as an inpatient that was kind of like being in a monastery to me. I felt more alive, not less. We were a bunch of wounded souls trying to get better, spending most of the day reaching out to each other and sometimes connecting. Someone introduced me to Jethro Tull. We played a lot of ping pong and pool. I tried to like cigarettes but just wasn’t into it (where are the hallucinations? what’s the point?). Family and friends visited me, which was kind of weird, but I was still happy to see them.

After I was “normal” enough to sleep at home, I went back to the hospital every day for about a month. We did group therapy and arts and crafts – pretty much day camp for grown ups. After that, I saw a psychologist once a week for about 6 months or so.

Once I started digesting what was going on (ultimately before I even left the hospital), I was pretty damn embarrassed. Replaying various scenes in my mind was more terrifying than living them, because it was an opportunity to beat myself up and worry about what other people thought of me. Thankfully, I stumbled on a book by C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, which describes a bus ride through heaven and hell. A guide of sorts was trying to explain shame to the protagonist:

Don’t you remember on earth—there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right? Shame is like that. If you will accept it—if you will drink the cup to the bottom—you will find it very nourishing: but try to do anything else with it and it scalds.

That sentiment helped and in fact helps to this day – I recognize that this experience is part of who I am and always will be.

But there were practical matters, too. Before landing in the hospital, I had a scholarship to a prestigious university, and now that was gone. I learned that I could get my scholarship back only if I paid for the semester I had just pissed away – and I didn’t have that kind of money. Also, a side effect of the anti-psychotic drugs was that I couldn’t move my fingers very well – it felt as though they were stuck in molasses – so I wasn’t sure I’d be able to play the violin well again. But after a while, they gave me drugs to stem the side effects, and I got back to work.

I called Dr. Schmieder, who was still shaken that one of his students had flipped out but ultimately relieved to learn that I was OK. He suggested I contact his friend Arkady Fomin at Southern Methodist University, which I did. I attended Fomin’s summer music program at SMU, then was awarded a scholarship by the music department and attended the university. I was pretty much back to normal before wandering off in another direction a couple of years later and becoming a computer programmer.


It would be way too easy to blame my experience on marijuana. Yes, it was the trigger, and I used that knowledge to my advantage. It was comforting to know that if pot caused this problem, then just don’t smoke pot … problem solved! But that’s a gross over-simplification. My mom experienced a psychotic episode. So did my grandma. At least one uncle. At least one cousin on the other side of the family. If there’s a genetic tendency toward psychotic experiences, I certainly have it.

I knew all along that there were other factors contributing to this. Remember that girlfriend who broke up with me? That hurt a LOT. My inability to process that heartbreak might have been enough to trigger an episode on its own.

And there’s an even more complicated issue – the parts of me that led to my psychosis are arguably the BEST parts of me, not the worst. I’m an exceptional problem solver and pattern matcher, and I’m really creative. These qualities served me well as a musician, and once I applied those skills to computers, I turned them into a career. Those “good” qualities are the parts of me that spun out of control, and I’m not alone. Research appears to support a link between creativity and madness. I suspect that everybody has the ability to push the limits of what their mind can take, but I just live a bit closer to that edge than most people. I think that if I had been born into a different culture, that closeness to the edge would have been celebrated – perhaps I would have been part of a family of shaman.

That high school girlfriend once took me sailing on Reed’s Lake and shared some profound wisdom with me. “If you never tip your sailboat over, you don’t really know how fast you can go. Of course, if you spend all day with your mast in the water, that’s not sailing, either.” Well, I found out how fast my mind could go … but the boat didn’t just tip over, it ripped apart, and I almost drowned. Although I talk about it with humor, let’s be clear – it sucked, and I don’t ever want that to happen again. But I do want to sail again – I want to do great things, I want to have fun … I want to use my strengths, even if they’re dangerous. Coming back from a crash is hard. I’m still not sure I’ve fully dealt with it. I’m pretty sure I haven’t in fact.

I think the biggest lingering side effect is low confidence when I get close to doing something truly good. I’m fairly extroverted, I generally have low inhibitions, and I genuinely like myself, so most people probably think I’m brimming with confidence. I’m not. I have moments when I get really excited and caught up in solving a problem or being creative, and confidence is simply not an issue. And then I eventually come down, and it’s time to do the WORK, and I have to drag myself through low confidence bordering on despair just to get my name filled in at the top of the page. Yes, I’m like Ricky Bobby trying to get back in a racecar. Once I get immersed in the work again, then I’m fine, but it’s sometimes really hard to get there.

I’ve always loved puzzles, but only ones where it isn’t obvious if there’s a solution or not – I’m not crazy about things like Rubik’s Cube, because I know that there’s an algorithm to solve it, and I just don’t find it amusing to find that algorithm (that’s work for me, not play – and I’d rather do real work). Poker, on the other hand, has infinite variability and unknowns (because it’s really about people) – so I love it. The greatest non-obvious puzzle in the world is running a business* – that’s why I love startups. I get so much energy from working on business problems or even just talking about other people’s business problems. Working on my first real attempt at a startup last year with Jody Burgess was a double treat, because for some reason, Jody understands my wacky mind and can handle it. Unfortunately, the flip side of being non-obvious is that succeeding at business is really hard. I haven’t succeeded yet, or at least I haven’t been able to make a living from my own business yet. I’m hopeful that my new job with Moraware (I start in January) will be a nice compromise, because I’ll be working on non-obvious problems that excite me while making a steady living and taking care of my family. The founders, Ted and Harry (coincidentally both USC grads), also seem to appreciate my wacky mind more than most. We’ll see.

About 8 years ago, my wife and I had some serious problems with our marriage (this was the real reason I joined Microsoft – because I was barely hanging on and Microsoft was a life raft). I started seeing a psychologist again while working through that process, and even when we managed to “fix” things after a couple of years and keep our family together (one day at a time), I decided to continue seeing my shrink on a weekly basis – simply because I can. It just seems like a smart, cautious step to have a professional help me keep tabs on my sanity. Why not? Interestingly, we had never spent much time talking about my psychosis until I decided to write about it.

In fact, until hearing Greg’s talk at BoS2013, I hadn’t thought about my psychosis more than maybe once a year. After deciding I was going to write about it, I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot and thinking about the lasting impact it’s had on me. I certainly don’t understand all of it, but it seems useful to explore it a bit more. There’s quite a bit of emotional scar tissue … maybe I can get rid of some of it and grow.

That’s all I got. I hope that more people will talk about depression, anxiety, ADHD, psychoses, and other mental illnesses, because they affect people that YOU know and love. They’re a part of our world – they’re a part of us. Why is it so different from breaking a leg? I got sick; I went to the hospital; I got better. It’s just one of many stories in my life.

Thanks for listening. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out in the comments, twitter, or by email.

-Patrick

* OK: #1 Women, #2 Business, #3 Poker

Business of Software 2013

Another Business of Software conference has come and gone, my 4th year in a row to attend. A month ago, I assumed I wouldn’t be attending (couldn’t justify it as a consultant), but since I met my new employers at the conference 4 years ago, it seemed only fitting to connect at the conference this year and finalize our arrangements. Harry and Ted always attend, and it’s a huge perk of my new job that I’ll get to join them. I look forward to keeping my streak alive for many years.

This year’s conference was great as always, but I found myself in a very different place. I’ve learned so much from BoS in the past – now I’ll finally get to put that learning into practice at Moraware. I was listening to sessions more calmly than in the past and with a keen eye for things I can use right away.

Kathy Sierra’s presentation on making bad ass users was probably my favorite … the density of information she conveys in such an entertaining and interesting way – she is a virtuoso speaker. And oh yeah, her talk described exactly what Moraware wants to do for its users.

Dan Siroker’s talk on A/B testing and Patrick McKenzie’s expansion on similar topics – these defined key tactics and skills I will be learning in my new job. I was pretty damn excited to hear Patrick explain that learning to do these things will make me quite valuable.

Sarah Hatter always talks about making customer support and the whole customer experience great … well, my business card title will probably be either “Customer Support” or “Customer Experience” at my new job, so everything she says is highly relevant to me (and she’s a blast on stage).

Paul Kenny’s personality profile workshop was incredibly timely and relevant. Ted, Harry, and I all compared our profiles over dinner, and it was very useful. I think we’re going to get profiles for the other people in the company, too, and talk about them at our next get-together (the conversation is as important as the profile).

Bob Moesta and Chris Spiek did a great interview of Tyler Rooney’s car-buying saga and showed us how to uncover the Job To Be Done that customers are looking for. I also attended their workshop after the conference, and it was incredible. Harry, Ted, and I are going to be diving into these techniques the first day I start (and in fact we’ll be practicing the techniques before I start).

Even the Lightning Talks were great. Des Traynor’s (cheating) talk was absolutely brilliant, and I look forward to seeing an expanded version next year.

All the other talks were great, but most of the rest were geared toward owners, so they didn’t apply quite as specifically to me.

The most important talk of the conference was by Greg Baugues. Greg shared his battle with depression and ADHD, and it was deeply moving. The main point I think he wanted us to take away is that we need to talk about mental illness more – and GET HELP. The only thing that makes it different from a broken leg is the stigma we place on it. Patrick McKenzie added to this topic at the end of his own talk. I didn’t know Greg before the conference, but Patrick is a hero of mine – there’s nobody I look up to more. It was inconceivable to me that he struggled with depression sometimes as well. I have a hard time holding back tears just thinking about this. After Patrick’s talk, I chatted briefly with another conference friend who cheerfully implied he struggles, too.

I made up my mind then that I would share my own experience with mental illness. The short story is that I experienced a terrifying psychosis when I was 19, while attending the University of Southern California as a music student. I spent time in a psychiatric hospital and was prescribed powerful psychotropic drugs that helped me recover. I got better pretty quickly, but it left a mark, obviously. I don’t think about this episode at all on a day-to-day basis, but I’ve told a few close friends over the years. It’s a hell of a story, so I usually feel comfortable when I tell it (I like holding court), but I’ve never talked about it publicly. I was surprised to discover how hard it was going to be to do so (for a few hours after deciding on this yesterday, I would well up with tears each time I thought about it). My motivation for talking about it casually is simply to further Greg’s goal and to help remove the stigma about mental illness … but I’m curious about how it will affect me personally to talk about it more, too.

It’s going to take me a while to write it down and do the story justice, so I’ll have to leave you with that teaser for now. If you can’t wait, you can read my mom’s account of my mental illness. It’s chapter 2 of a book she’s slowly writing. Chapter 1 is about her own mental illness. If you want to go all the way there, it might make sense just to start at the beginning. (Chapter 3 is my grandmother’s mental illness … spot a pattern?)

Mark Littlewood puts on a hell of a show. I hope to see you there next year …

Cheers,

-Patrick