Three Cups of Tea is the most inspiring book I have ever read.

It is the true story following Greg Mortenson, a mountaineer who attempts to climb K2. On his way down, he stumbles into a tiny village in Pakistan and vows to return one day to build a school for the children there. He is successful, and is urged by others to continue building schools for underprivileged children across Pakistan. His story is remarkable, and the amount of impact he has managed to bring as one man with audacious goals is astounding.

I felt a personal connection when he told of his experiences in Peshawar. Samasource works with a group of women in Peshawar who have collectively formed the Women’s Digital league, and they are now earning income through the internet. They were previously unable to do meaningful work outside of the home for cultural reasons, but now say that they are earning as much as the men, if not more. I dare not compare my work to Mortenson’s, but it felt great to learn that our goals are very similar.

This book reaffirmed my desire to do good, and I encourage you to find a copy.

I recently experienced two of the most informative and useful meetings of my life. Lloyd Taylor, the former VP of Technical Operations at LinkedIn, and Olana Khan, the former COO of Kiva, graciously donated their time to speak to us about how to organize our technology goals. We had been in the process of formalizing our thoughts for an upcoming board meeting, but their expert feedback allowed us to cement in some much-needed structure. In addition, we also were given invaluable advice about how to lead an effective technology team in general.

Preface – Agile Development

First, I should set the stage by describing our new development process. Because Samasource is a tiny organization with no shortage of exciting new ventures to pursue, we adopted an agile development framework. This idea has gotten a lot of traction, and Eric lead us through the implementation. He actually wrote up a monster post about it on his blog, but I’ll briefly summarize here.

We divide our attention into short sprints, each lasting one or two weeks. Sprints represent all of the tasks that we will be focusing on during that time, and allow us to keep our minds off of other distractions until it comes time to organize the next sprint.

Each sprint is comprised of various user stories, which encapsulate a qualitative end-goal. For example, one user story from our first sprint was “Website Visitors Understand the Mission and Trust the Org”. What this does is it allows us to focus on the real impact that our work will be making. We will not be blindly executing tasks from stale to-do lists, and will make sure that each project has tangible impact.

And each user story is made up of tasks, which are small, discrete items of work that take a short amount of time to complete. This allows us to quantify the work that will be done.

This system of agile development allows us to be flexible from week to week with what we prioritize, ensures us that we are working towards a real goal with measurable impact, and breaks the work down into bite-size pieces. With this basic system in place, we can begin talking about business organization and the steps we can take to make the engineering team as effective as possible.

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I recently saw Gogol Bordello perform live for the second time. The first was a year (two years?) ago in San Francisco, and it was the wildest, most exhilarating event I have ever attended. Many concerts have “that one song,” that brings the entire audience together in a fever of enthusiasm to focus entirely on the music and the performance. Gogol Bordello managed to maintain this state for the entire 2 hour show. The rush of being in a huge crowd of people screaming in unison and immersed in the moment, led by the gods of gypsy punk, was indescribable. But enough about last year.

The Oakland show was pretty good. The guys brought us a show as wild and passionate as ever before, so I think the crowd was the missing factor. There was nothing wrong with it per se – A few too many sweaty, angry men in the mosh pit for my tastes but that’s almost unavoidable – so I’m willing to bet that the San Francisco crowd that night was just too good to follow. Everybody in that theater was there to see the band, and loved – lusted, even – the music they performed. That just doesn’t happen every day, and it has earned Gogol Bordello a permanent place in my heart.

Originally posted on the fbFund blog

While a Stanford undergrad, I began my online career with gleeful audacity. The Monday after Facebook Platform launched, my friend and I released Facebook’s original Graffiti application. We were unexperienced and had no viral component, so we soon lost the battle to Mark Kantor et al.’s version. But Graffiti gave us excitement and hunger. The following fall we enrolled in Stanford’s course on Facebook applications, using the opportunity to develop Send Hotness. This time, we nailed the virality. A few advertising payouts later, we were the proud owners of two companies. Doped up on adrenaline, we loved every minute. I stepped down eventually once I remembered that I had schoolwork to do, but I felt sure that this was my path.

Fast forward to April 2009. Graduation is pending, and I have the thrilling chance to commit my waking hours to some product. As it turns out, I basically had one choice:

We’re developing a real-time, web 2.0, social algorithm-based consumer-facing interface that will revolutionize what users do when they [blank]

Many were great products, but I was saddened by those whose blanks were literal. They revolutionized where there was no value, turning a frivolous activity into a a well-designed and sexy frivolous activity. I needed more than that, and I looked for a way off of this path to inconsequence.

This is when I met Leila Chirayath Janah, the founder and CEO of Samasource. Having been in operations for 6 months at the time, Samasource’s mission was to bring dignified, computer-based work to women, youth, and refugees living in poverty. They recognized the tremendous untapped talent in impoverished countries and strove to bring prosperity by providing a sustainable livelihood. This is an idea that will change the world, and I was hooked from the start.

I now have the privilege of being Samasource’s VP of Technology, and we have truly been blessed by being invited to participate in fbFund REV this summer. It’s an unexpected meeting of my past and current passions, and it has been tremendously fruitful. The Facebook platform, as well as other social channels, have a huge potential to effect social change and support these initiatives.

Samasource’s project this summer is to bring our services to the Facebook platform by allowing partners in rural Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to offer quality assurance and testing to application developers. I believe that Facebook can bring together resourceful entrepreneurs and skilled rural workers in a way that was previously unheard of. As an application developer you are working one-on-one with a real person from across the world. This is a very moving realization, as I found when first inviting our service partners to join the site. For these individuals, having a Facebook profile is itself a powerful first step. Many have little or no web presence, and this will be their first chance to build a legitimate online reputation. Imagine the excitement of becoming plugged into such a dynamic international network for the first time, seeing no limit to where your work can take you.

So as it turns out, I am now committing my waking hours to a great product. We are remodeling the means by which an individual can rise out of poverty. We are enabling people to make socially responsible decisions that will change a life forever. Samasource is revolutionizing by giving work.

I was pointed to Paul Graham’s post about programmers running on a separate schedule than other people. Programmers run on the “maker’s schedule” and prefer to work in large chunks of time, with units of at least half a day. Others, particularly their bosses, operate on the “manager’s schedule” and have things defined into hour-long chunks. Interactions between the two typically cause friction:

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

This is bullshit.

I’m not attacking Graham; he is merely pointing out the problem and explaining how he responds: by placing managers on the maker’s schedule. But this mentality is held by too many programmers, each of whom strokes his or her ego by running on a special schedule and taking advantage of the night, while the inferior mortals sleep.

Come on people, wake up (seriously, it’s 11 am already). This is not an issue of inability; it is an issue of discipline. I admit that interruptions are hard to recover from, and that a ten hour block is more productive than five two-hour blocks. But wasting an entire afternoon because you have an appointment at 3 is childish. Programmers get into a mode of thinking where they believe that the work they do is somehow more intense and more specialized than that of others. “I’m going to strap myself down and work for twenty hours,” they say, “because this is serious business. You can’t just scoot into your chair and tippy-tap for a few hours. You could really hurt yourself.” Again, bullshit.

I had the pleasure of attending Eric Ries’ presentation on The Lean Startup. Among the huge wealth of insight he had to share, one particular anecdote stuck with me. His company had traced the root of a particular problem to insufficient training procedures for new hires. Upon speaking to a manager about this, the manager explained that he agreed the problem was there but that he had so much to do he couldn’t possibly devote several days to setting up a training program. Ries suggested that the manager take one hour right then to do whatever he would have done for the first hour of establishing the training program. The manager retorted by highlighting the absurdity of this response, but Ries persisted, and off he went. The result of his hour of work was the creation of a new wiki page with a dozen bullet points stating some things that were good to know. This turns out to be reasonably useful, and more importantly, a subsequent hour of work the next week could expand this and get a lot more done.

I know it doesn’t always apply, but it’s commendable and inspiring. At work the next week, I found myself with 2 hours before a lunchtime meeting. I could have putzed around the internet for a couple of hours and saved my productivity to increase momentum in the afternoon, but I didn’t do that. Instead, I set up a quick database table and enabled logins on the website. After lunch I had a few minutes before a phone call, so I enabled logouts on the website. Rinse and repeat, you’ve got a social networking site by supper.

My point here is that anybody can be productive in any amount of time. It’s difficult, sure, and requires discipline. But productivity feels great, and it makes you far more flexible as a worker. It’s comparable to the sensation of waking up early to exercise and realizing how much time you had been wasting by sleeping past lunch. If you haven’t experienced this yet, I highly recommend it as well.

Profoundly moving

By Muriel Barbery, this novel is the story of two hyper-intelligent individuals living among Paris’ high society: Renée Michel, the concierge of the apartment building, and Paloma Josse, the shockingly perceptive 12-year-old. They seem to embody everything that the privileged elite should be but isn’t; the juxtaposition of their wisdom and class against the frivolous and shallow natures of those around them constantly lashes out at the empty finicking of the bourgeois lifestyles.

At the same time, this tiresome emptiness is contrasted with Japanese aesthetics, which often find beauty in simplicity. The line between nullness and emptiness is a thin but important distinction. Japanese art and culture are a constant source of peace for the two. Surely it is no coincidence that the arrival of the Japanese man is what brings new meaning into their lives.

The book is incredibly dense with wonderful material. Most of the book is structured to have one profound thought per chapter, and this adds up to a huge mass of wisdom and perceptiveness. Most authors, having arrived at one of these insights, would probably attempt to write a book about it, a masterpiece (they hope) which pivots around a truly thought-provoking idea. Barbery, on the other hand, had the audacity to fill the book with these thoughts and reveal one per chapter. It almost feels wasteful, seeing myself briefly appreciate the beauty of one chapter before hurrying off with excitement to see what will come next.

I wish I could comment more on the significance of Tolstoy, but I am grossly ill-versed. Maybe I’ll revisit this after reading Anna Karenina and re-reading The Hedgehog and the Fox.

Amazingly imaginative

This is the story of Oskar Schell, a young boy who is on a quest around New York City, attempting to solve a mystery left in the wake of his father’s death in the 9/11 attacks. The story is told in the form of narratives, letters, and journal entries from the perspective of three individuals, and their interwoven stories are revealed expertly in parallel. The book works as a scrapbook, with the reader discovering elements from the story appearing on the pages, as though they had been pasted in.

The best part of this book is the people you meet, and the stories they tell. Oskar meets a great number of people around the city, and each offers a delightful kernel of his or her life. Alongside these quick glimpses are stories and asides presented by the major characters, not necessarily relevant but always illuminating. Every anecdote is a gem that begs to be savored, and I often found myself setting down the book so I could digest.

This, I believe, is my absolute favorite book. I recommend it to everybody. Written by Jonathan Safran Foer, I believe it to be far superior to Everything is Illuminated.

Hooray! Along with 18 companies and one other non-profit, Samasource was chosen to participate in fbFund’s incubator program this summer. Check out the full list of winners on VentureBeat or InsideFacebook.

What this means is that we’ll have Palo Alto office space, lots of media attention, an official Facebook seal of approval, and possibly free lunches /crossfingers. The catch?

Due to the way fbFund is structured, the non-profit startups cannot receive funding (Facebook dev blog).

Bummer…

Samasource’s Facebook product will allow developers to create work opportunities for underprivileged workers by setting up periodic testing for their active applications. With Samasource, developers lower costs, reduce poverty, and improve their applications. Being chosen as a fbFund winner, despite not entailing cash, is extremely significant. Samasource, along with Vittana, the other non-profit winner, is poised to be a frontrunner of social entrepreneurship within the Facebook ecosystem. Being able to work with Facebook officially should greatly increase product quality, market penetration, and overall social impact. Samasource also will provide a valuable service to application developers, so I have high hopes for the success of this project.

Now a quick word about changes within fbFund. Previously the fund awarded grants to the winners, but this year the funding is in the form of an equity investment (more coverage here). This makes sense, and I think it’s a reasonable change. It does put the non-profits in an awkward spot, but I believe that’s just growing pains. Two non-profits were chosen this year, and that’s a big deal. Optimism tells me that social entrepreneurship will hold a much more prominent position in the years to come. Exciting things are happening in the world of social change, and Samasource is fortunate enough to be able to make an impact in a high-visibility environment. We will not disappoint.

Today I ate dinner alone. I think there is nothing wrong with that, but you just don’t see people alone in restaurants all that often (Aren’t you going to be bored? Do you want a magazine or something?). Eating meals, in most cultures everywhere, is regarded as a social activity. I would like to explore why, and have a few hypotheses.

Everybody has to do it. Three times a day, nearly everybody will eat food at roughly the same time. People share this activity, and so it makes sense for that time to be designated for social interaction. If everybody had tea at 3, or went to the gym at 4, then those would just as strongly be considered a social activity.

We are forced to sit down. In our busy lives, we are either doing something or are on our way elsewhere to do something. We need to eat though, and eating takes a few minutes, so we take a break and sit down. Meals become social times because they are the only times when social interaction is reliably possible.

For some, the social aspect of meals is essential. I have friends who refuse to spend meals alone, going out of their way to seek a companion or else not eating at all. This may even be the norm. Again, you never see people eating alone at restaurants. Why is this? When did conversation turn from a pleasant circumstance into an essential feature? If hypothesis two is true, then it may be because we depend upon meals for interaction. That doesn’t explain not eating, though. If you are forced to eat dinner alone, the conclusion ought to be, “Oh well, I guess I’ll eat alone today,” and not, “My meal is ruined, so I’ll settle for a quick sandwich.” Conversation is so essential that in its absence we lose all motivation to put effort into a meal. Solitude is preventative of food consumption.

No. That’s not true. Solitude prevents meals, and we resort to mere food consumption. A meal then, ought to be defined as an instance of eating food with others. We have redefined our culinary habits to be inherently social.

Where, then, does that put me? I usually eat meals very quickly, eager to get on with more interesting and productive parts of my life. Conversation is enjoyed, but only in the capacity of my minimal meal time. On the other hand, I enjoy good food and will seize any chance to eat well, even at the cost of doing so alone. It seems I regard meals primarily as food consumption, and enjoy it for gustatory factors. It is probably indicative that I required this posting to realize that meals are inherently social.

But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I am a sociable person who appreciates food. I enjoy conversation at irregular intervals and don’t mind time spent alone. Don’t get me wrong though, I would love to have dinner together. In fact, let’s do it soon.

I saw a girl at a bus stop who appeared to have a cigarette in her mouth. “Yuck,” I thought. Then, I realized it was a lollipop. I immediately wanted to become her friend.

You see, there is something special about lollipops. As far as your mouth is concerned, you could just as well be eating a normal hard candy. But the stick makes a world’s difference. You are proclaiming to the world, “I am enjoying a candy.” There is no way to be inconspicuous about eating a lollipop. You have committed to this act, and do so with no shame.

And anybody who feels such passion for candy is all right in my book.