If you haven't discovered
Guy Kawasaki's blog yet, add it to your news reader right now-- it's consistently pretty good. His latest post is on
How to be a Mensch. He has pretty good advice on how to be a well-respected, noble person. Its certainly something I try to be.
When I was in college, I was president of
UChicago's AEPi chapter for a year. As a mostly Jewish group, we were all well aware of what being a mensch means. When we were considering someone for membership, we would always used to ask ourselves: "Is this guy a mensch?" -- If so, these were the guys we pursued the most aggressively. Like in most recruitment situations, having great guys attracts more great guys, and makes for an all-around better chapter.
"Menschdom" is not just something we can aspire to as people, but as a company as well (in a sense). We try to do this with Openomy. So in Guy Kawasaki style, here's a list of ways you can make your organization be more mensch-like:
- Be approachable: Your users *need* to trust you. I think its the little things that count the most here-- For example, we don't have any generic corporate email addresses may or may not have a person attached to them. If you have an Openomy question, we want you to email us directly.
- Tell it to 'em straight: This one is related to the previous point. One of the coolest emails we've ever received was a person complementing our privacy policy and our terms of use. They are written in plain English, no legalese, and they both explain things clearly.
- Be Fair: On our FAQ, we say: "Currently, all storage is 1gb. The plan is to increase this in the future. Let us know what you think is fair." (emphasis added). If you think our service is a rip off, we want to know about it. Everyone deserves to get their money's worth.
- Set the right kind of goals:Companies are supposed to be profit maximizing. While that may be true in general, I want my company to be "fun maximizing." We're here to build something cool, that we enjoy building, and that our users enjoy using. If your product is cool (and evangelizable as Guy would say), then the profits just take care of themselves. We take this approach to an extreme on Openomy: we have a list of projects that we eventually want to implement on the site. Instead of doing them in order we think of them, they are prioritized by how cool they are. While it does mean that a few features spend much more time on the list than others, it lets us whip out some coolness pretty regularly.
To elaborate on this last point: Of all of the blogs that have written about us, the post I'm the most proud of is not from a big name blog. Instead, its a post from back in November on a blog called
Tempus Fugate, that said:
They don't appear to have much of a business model, just a keen sense of "do-it-right"-edness. That's a technical term.
The coolest fact about Openomy is that it appears to be running solely out of a desire to build something useful, learn some lessons, and potential help some people. This may not sound ordinary, but in the universe of online ventures, it can be anything but normal. I recommend you check them out. It's worth making note of their upbeat and positive attitudes and attention to detail.
This blogger gets what being a mensch company means. Thanks for the kind words. (PS: The "business model" aspect is coming. While we value fun more than profits, the reality is that we can't pay for this out of pocket forever. The delay is related to the last bulletpoint: adding credit card processing isn't really that fun :))
When
Ian and I were coming up with names for our
Openomy servers, we symbolically named one our most important servers 'mensch.openomy.com'. Actually, all of our servers are named after Yiddish words-- can you guess the names of the rest?
