1)   When things get heavy, be sure to find yourself.  I know that might sound a little strange, but pressure can come from two places. Either external forces are pushing on you or you are pushing on yourself…regardless of the source, stepping outside of those two voices and finding the mind that is with you regardless of context is where to begin any stressful day.  Meditation has become an amazing tool for me to return to myself every morning…but it’s not always easy.  The main idea is when you are yourself, acting naturally, and not forcing things, you are at your maximum capability to address any contextual situation…pressure and context are ephemeral…treating them such is the best way to move through them.

2)   Remind yourself that you are capable. It is one thing to believe that you can solve a contextual problem or challenge.  You can stare at something that isn’t working or is disappointing and say…”if I analyze this situation, there is a way out…”  That works sometimes…especially if there is a visible path to somewhere different…but I think that’s more of a band-aid approach…sometimes there will not be a very visible path…it seems stupid, but sometimes I just say to myself “dude, you are good at this…don’t sweat this moment.”  It’s hard to have and believe that dialog with yourself if things aren’t swinging your direction.  Lot’s of people rely on friends or mentors to provide that voice and reassure from afar…but if you can get to a point where you can find yourself and your base self is confident and a believer in you…steps 1 and 2 together tend to put stress in it’s place.

So that’s pretty much it.  Took me years to find these two practices…and I’m not always able to implement them…but they’ve been helpful to me and I hope they are helpful to you.

I’ve never really articulated that before.  There are so many factors that drove me to start another company…frankly not all of them were about optimizing for my happiness…but it is true, that when I am creating, I am happy.  You build a startup to change the world.  You build with a mission in your heart much bigger than “personal happiness”. You build with the interests of your entire team and the entire world in your mind.  So many reasons why doing this makes sense….but it is a wonderful cherry on top…one which I would not require in order to continue down this path…but a cherry none the less, that when I’m creating I’m in my happy place.

I’m not sure what I will do when I get too tired to create like this anymore.  I’d imagine creating children and a family will feed this same need.  But I can’t paint and I can’t play the guitar…so for at least the foreseeable future it seems that creating technology companies with people that I love will be what keeps me smiling.

The ideal candidate

-       you were born with your sleeves rolled up

-       you might be trying to move from another industry into the tech/startup world (my last right hand guy came from Goldman Sachs)

-       you are the hardest working person you know

-       you are a self starter who can get things done without a lot of direction or help

-       you might have an MBA, but one is not required

-       operations, execution and project management excite you

-       you have deep attention to detail

-       you like research and analytical thinking

-       you are upset by the experience of using the internet on your phone

What you’ll get

-       a ground floor seat on our rocket ship

-       I’ll teach you everything I possibly can

-       You’ll spend your days sitting next to some of the brightest minds in our industry

Commitment: 4-5 days per week, 2-3 month gig

Start Date: ASAP

Send resume / relevant web links to: jordan.cooper@gmail.com (put Intern/Apprenticeship in subject line pls)

I was riding the subway the other day and I saw an advertisement for a casino in Rockaway Beach.  Two large red dice tumbled almost out of the poster, rolling in my direction.  I was reminded of my days as a college student when I could not get enough of gambling…it wasn’t about winning or losing, although of course I loved to win…rather it was about dropping into this zone of chance, playing games in my head, trying to become one with the game, see around corners…literally to participate in this perfect rule of chance that I could not influence but could act in.  There was a meditation in the turn of a roulette wheel or the flip of a blackjack shoe that I craved…To gamble was to surrender completely to the forces of chance…to a rule of the universe that I could not control…I could almost drop into the rule, or that energy, and ride it….

I believe people “pleasure seek” to areas or arenas where we can fully surrender to a rule or law of the universe that is, again, completely out of our control…and although we don’t realize why, it is the surrender to this rule or law that brings us closer to flow state.  Riding a wave, in fact, when referencing the ocean, is yet another example of flow emanating from surrender.  We paddle and position and work and exert, and then, as the wave takes us, we surrender completely to the force of the sea.  We jump out of planes to drop into the law of gravity…again, surrendering completely to a fundamental state or law where we cannot influence or act upon it, but can become a part of it.

As we walk through day to day life, it feels that we are interacting with many forces, as universal and fundamental as chance or gravity, but perhaps more complex and less visible…we have a choice to either participate in surrender or attempt to control the daily moments of our lives that are tied to these rules or forces…our instincts, or at least my instincts, have always been to control…to exert my will on the way things happen, believing that control to be a path to success and happiness…but as I grow and learn to surrender, I find so much more grace and success and happiness in letting things happen as they will, in “dropping into” the forces that pull me in various directions or situations, more listening and riding waves than paddling or controlling them.

In work, it is so hard to surrender.  The very word “work” seems at odds with surrender. Brute force seems like such a powerful tool to get to where we want to go.  But surrendering to the self, listening to the fundamental rules and forces pulling on you, your company, your team, your market…and simply “dropping in,” participating, instead of pushing…I think is where the flow state lies.  Sometimes the market will ask you to push, to force, because that is the way it expects to interact with you…I haven’t fully resolved how to surrender even in these moments that seem to command an exertion of my will. Sometimes it really feels like controlling for an outcome is necessary…but every time I let go, and surrender without fear, the outcome trumps that of control.  The games that Michael Jordan owned were not the ones he stepped onto the court trying to control…it was when he was “unconscious,” listening to himself and to the forces and rules around him, to the physics of the court… in which he chose to participate, but not control, that he did the greatest damage.

I hear the market asking me to write my future story.  I hear the market asking me to begin exerting my control…but my heart says fuck control…seek surrender…and my story will emerge.

Let’s make it real.  I’ve had paperwork for a new bank account from SVB sitting on my desk for a week.  I would never ask Doug or Eric to deal with this administrative task because our engineering effort is much more important than having a bank account.  The same logic applies to a founder’s time.  In a previous life, I would have stressed that “return SVB paperwork” wasn’t getting crossed off the list…but the reality is…there is no possible way that getting that bank account in place is going to push our company 6 months closer to the promised land…so I will leave that SVB paperwork sitting there until I need to wire a shit ton of venture capital into it, and then I’ll focus on it.  Instead, I dismiss that “small things” voice and spend the mental energy thinking deeply about how to construct our early team.  The impact that the next 3 people we bring on will have on our company is so great…almost nothing else matters at this point…especially not “return SVB paperwork.”

There is a tendency to think that crossing everything that can be done off a list is the same thing as progress…it certainly is a visualization that you are getting shit done…and I guess that can be true, but it is certainly not optimal progress.  Slow down, keep your day simple, find the 6 month levers, and allow yourself the mental space to get those perfect…early days of company creation are no time for optimization and incremental wins…Developing instinct for any given effort to know without stress or deliberation if something is “now” or “later” is so valuable.  Some of it comes with experience, and there aren’t a lot of shortcuts to developing it, but I am consistently amazed at how productive a simple day can be.

I wrote this about the mobile internet a few months ago.  I didn’t publish it because it felt pretty raw and not necessarily representative of what I aspired to solve as a company, but I just reread it before sending to a friend, and it still feels pretty true…so here ya go:

when you take your phone out of your pocket, i want you to feel limitless.  When you open the internet on your PC there is a sense of infinite opportunity that is lost on mobile

We have sacrificed that sense of infinite opportunity in the name of instant access to known habits and intentions

We have done this because the internet is a vast and nuanced environment.  On our phones it is very difficult to move around in it.  It’s hard to move between corners of the web.  It’s hard to make a mistake.  It’s hard to see content and take actions.  It’s hard to engage with an internet that was designed under the assumption that you would be seated with a keyboard and mouse when accessing it.

In many ways, you could say Apple is spawning a new internet, free of these challenges.  The architecture is different (it’s not truly the web), but consumers don’t care.  Apps submitted through the appstore are where users get to enjoy some of the experience of the internet (communication, information consumption, etc) delivered by designers and developers who didn’t have a keyboard and mouse in mind when they tried to figure out how to help you do what you are trying to do.

I think this is half right. Apple’s focus on quality and consistency of experience does, in fact, solve much of the frustration existent within the web on your phone.  I agree with Apple…I want to banish the “old web” from your phone forever.  I want to banish the concept of a centralized browser as the way you access the web on your phone. But the long term solution is not to throw away the infinite opportunity that we have come to expect.  It is to design access that honors both that promise of infinity and the requirement of usability, independent of what edge you happen to be interacting from.  To get there I think the web needs to be completely reimagined.  Some of the underlying infrastructural components that brought infinity to the desktop are surely welcome in this new mobile paradigm (at least evolutions of them, if not mirrors), but new infrastructural components must emanate from the realities of modern hardware and interface.  We must think of what the web would look like and feel like and work like had we never seen it on a PC.  And we must not let one company’s vision of this future dictate it.  Influence it? Most certainly…I am deeply grateful for how far Apple has pulled us into the future.  But they will not get us to infinity on their own.

Anyway, last night we got to talking about existence, the purpose of life, achieving one’s destiny, dealing with death, and a myriad of other related concepts.  It was nice to exercise this part of my brain.  One thing that I realized, which I think is fascinating, is that weather or not there is something before or after the “embodied life” (embodied life = traditional concept of human life from when we are born till we die), one of things that is unbelievabley special about this period of time, is that we are in a form that is capable of changing things.  In a world where there are particles (matter) and waves (energy), the human form is this unusual composite, or combination of the two, that is capable of mixing shit up and moving it around.  I can lift a glass, move a particle, rearrange the way that things are in this form.  If I were to exist in some form after death, as a tree, or a glass, or pure energy, or really any other distribution or composite of particle and wave, I may well participate in existence, but I may not be able to change it.  Especially where you examine such concepts as space and time, it seems that this window of embodied existence, especially on a system level, assuming we are part of a broader system or set of things that exist, is the part of any cycle where we have our chance to rearrange or improve, or simply impact existence as a whole.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that I value change deeply.  Look upper right of this page and you’ll see how important impact is in a human’s life.  Sometimes I wonder if people fear death, especially as it nears, when they are dissatisfied with the way things are in the world (or their small sliver of the world) and they realize that they are running out of time in this special “embodied form” when they have the capacity to change or reorder things.  Those who can find peace or satisfaction in the way things are, perhaps come to accept death more easily, where they don’t feel this deep feeling that their work as a change agent is far from done.

All of this brings me to the following: whether there is something after this, whether I will persist or not, I do not know. What I do know, is that I have this unusual super power that all other embodied beings have, which is to change and reorder the way things are…I can change existence…and I’ll be damned if I don’t use it, consciously, every single day.  I can’t help but view this embodied life, however long or short it may be, as an incredible opportunity…and one that I am deeply grateful to have.

NOTE: This post took a weird turn and got a little long (but fun).  If you just want to see the job spec for “Founding Designer / Info Architect / UX Specialist” it’s at the bottom. If you want to pick out details of my new company through strange and abstract metaphors…read on

I realized today that I sort of mailed it in on my post about our desire to bring on a “founding Designer” for my new project.  “Founding designer” really tells you nothing except that we are looking for someone with some set of design skills to join our small group attacking the mobile web.  I’d like to get a bit more specific.  In the spectrum from information architecture to graphic design, with UX maybe lying somewhere in the middle, I believe for our specific effort someone who enjoys the IA bleeding into UX side of things would be happy in this environment.  A new friend at lunch today described IA through the example of one who helps a supermarket decide where to shelve what food/products…and I think that analogy is really interesting. One of the inherent constraints of the mobile web is it’s sheer breadth and vastness relative to the real estate available to display it.  How do we take the worlds collective information and knowledge and fit it into a screen that is 4 inches? It’d be like asking the minimart to house every brand and product on earth in a 1000 sq ft space.  Well we could take the aisles out, and fill that space with shelves, but how would people move around? We could leverage the storage in the basement, and store extra skus there, we could only display the products relevant to the people in the store at the time, we could be really smart about dynamically changing product on the shelves based on the customer, we could build underground tunnels for the customers to access a warehouse down the road, we could install ladders in the aisles and double the height of the shelving, we could remove all the products and just install tablets with images of products on the shelves, and drop ship the goods to the customers house, we could rip out the cash registers and replace that space with products, and let the user checkout on their phones, we could change every rule about the way you think a supermarket works, with the one expressed goal of showing the customer every product they want to see (and ideally none of the products they don’t), while still adhering to the core principles and needs of a customer of a supermarket which are to discover the food, pay for it, and consume it wherever they want to eat….

now, that was a bit of a rant, but replace “food/product” with “data/information/urls/apps/actions/content/whatever” and replace “supermarket” with “mobile web/browser/app/operating system/smartphone/whatever” and you see why a designer who gravitates toward IA style challenges might enjoy a problem such as ours.  You might assume that our engineering team is the magic wand that gives you doubleheight ladders, basements and warehouses, dropshipping, etc…and just sit down and help me think about where to put the food, and the aisles, and the ladders, in order to let our customers see every food product in the world without stressing out, or closing applications, or giving up, or accepting defeat, or running for their 13 inch screen (unless we are helicopting them there from our store with white gloves and champaign)….This is an impossible problem that is possible…I know what your thinking…that a search box is seductive, but it’s not the answer. You might think that an infinite vertical scroll of all the food is the answer (especially because that’s the cop out that 85% of native applications have subscribed to)…its not.  And even if you do figure out where to put all the food, and what food to put where, we need to think about how our customers are going to grab the food, and do they have shopping carts, or QR readers? Do we deliver, or do they wheel flatbeds out to minivans? Should products be actual size, or miniatures, or jumbos? Do users want to remember what they saw and order from home, or do they want to act now? Act now, awesome, but what if they can’t reach? Or carry? Go go gadget UX…what if we invert the shelving and have the user pass through the store twice? Second time around the high shelves are low and the low shelves are high?  HOW THE FUCKETY FUCK DO I SHOW A USER…I MEAN CUSTOMER…EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING THEY NEED AND WANT FROM THE WEB..I MEAN SUPERMARKET…NO I MEAN WEB…without frustrating them, or making them feel like my supermarket is tiny and fragile and constrained relative to the mother fucking 1 Billion square foot COTSCO with mile wide aisles that they’ve been going to for years.

Because right now all I see is incremental attempts to jam COTSCO into the footprint of a mini-mart…but you can’t wheel those flatbed pallets around in aisles this small…so some genius platform peeps said “I know, I’ll just put the products outside the store”…it makes so much sense…I’ll just take the stuff that most people buy and I’ll put some shelves up OUTSIDE the store, so a user can just drive up, take what they want, and never have to try to navigate these tiny little aisles…but they didn’t realize…or maybe they did…that I don’t just go to the supermarket for my staples…sometimes I want to try something new…or sometimes I want to try something that I only try once a year…how does Matzoh fit into the outdoor shelving solution?  Do we build a special shelf, just for Matzoh even though people only eat it 10 days out of a year? No…matzoh probably stays inside…and if a user wants to find it, they can deal with the small aisles, and make bad decisions, and not touch and feel it before they buy it…

NOT IN MY WORLD.  I WILL NOT ALLOW MY DESIRE FOR THE UNUSUAL AND NUANCED TO BE SQUASHED BY THIS APPCENTRIC NIGHTMARE OF OUTDOOR SHELVING DUCKTAPED TOGETHER AS THE COSTCOS DIE AND THE MINI-MARTS RISE.

So these are my problems, and they require ground up solutions from brilliantly creative, patient, flexible, confident, ambitious, and courageous people who either have experience or extreme will to throw at them…. As it happens, I tend to roll with engineers, who want to solve these problems through creative and sound engineering innovation.  I am starting to spend more time with design minded folks who share our ambitions, and more than that I don’t really know…on our small team, I spend a lot of my time thinking through both technical and design solutions to these problems…but the voice and eyes of our user is underrepresented in what amounts to a lot of system design to date…I have strong feelings and desires…and I think every user of the internet is suffering right now on their phone…and the question I have for you who might come lead consumer facing product design at our company…is do you want to internalize this suffering?…and help create the supermarket of the mobile world (understanding that it’s really a chain of supermarkets that share common infrastructure…which makes life harder because not every store is the same)…I’ll support and challenge you, and we’ll all be your family…and our mission is your destiny…and out impact will be the greatest achievement of our collective lives…let’s jam: Jordan.cooper@gmail.com

The short “job spec” version:

About Newco (sorry I know it’s painful, we’re running the trademark search on a better name/brand, will update shortly): Newco is a technology company with the mission of generating or participating in every mobile web view on the planet.  We pay attention to browser technology, OS level functionality, content delivery, navigation, and any user story that begins, middles, or ends with “user opens the web” (I use “web view” loosely and frankly “mobile” loosely).  We want more of those user stories to happen on people’s phones and we want those stories to end happily.  We are sad that many, if not most, end poorly.  We would like to integrate the web more deeply into every action you take on your phone, and we would like to more deeply integrate every action you take on your phone into the mobile web.

We are three (CEO, VP ENG, CTO): Our last company worked out well, so we decided to work together again.  There is one spot open on this core team through the bootstrap phase and then we will likely become a 15-20 person company over the next 18 months.  You can google around and do your research on “Doug Petkanics” “Eric Tang” and “Jordan Cooper.” (try to do it on your phone…see how fun that is).  Anyway, I think this is a once in a lifetime type opportunity for the right person who is looking to make their mark on the world. See detail below:

Founding Designer / Info Architect / UX Specialist: Half of our challenge and value is in improving the way people move around the internet on their phones.  Banish the concept of the “old web” from your brain and we can begin there.  (The other half is more on the technical/data/architectural side, which you’ll be exposed to, but don’t need to sweat). There are tradeoffs at every turn between the infinite possibility and promise of the web, and the ease of accessing it on this constrained device.  The job is to help lead our thinking at every turn, in every flow, and turn sad user stories into happy, or even better, “mind blown” user stories.

Desired Traits:

-       Belief in yourself and your talent

-       Desire to go big and dedicate your life to this one mission

-       Patience

-       Ambition

-       Work ethic

-       Comfort moving/bridging between abstract and concrete

-       2-15 years product design experience in relevant arenas 

The Package: 1) Supported Autonomy 2) A real stake in the company. Like if things really work out you’ll never have to think about money again stake. And if things go as well as last time, you might have to think about $, but you’ll probably be able to buy a house or something 3) Competitive cash comp to live comfy in NYC 4) 100% healthcare, benefits, etc.

Contact: Jordan.cooper@gmail.com

Oh, and for the overly smart analysts and financiers in the making on wall st, who are making jokes around the water cooler and discrediting Mason with “I told you so’s” as though you are somehow his intellectual or professional superior…unless your name is the one on the door to your office building…get real…you are not even in the same atmosphere.  

For the last few months I have been working on a new project…and I’d be lying if I said I haven’t reexamined my perspective on what is worth sharing and what is worth holding back. Bijan wrote this post today which crystalized an archetype of founder for whom stealth mode is a reasonable form of operation.  He writes:

“I do appreciate what stealth mode represents to me — namely an idea that takes a long time to build with founders that are wonderfully proud, crazy ambitious with a healthy dose of paranoia.”

A little while ago we incorporated our new company under the name Coopkanics, Inc., not because we had a secret to hide, but simply because we needed to start building “that thing that takes a long time to build”, and while we had a vision for what it was, we didn’t have a brand or a product that was worthy of “market facing” ink.  Our intention was not to be secretive.  Ask me what we’re working on and I’ll tell you.  Out intention is, however, to be straightforward about where we are and where we are not yet.  And right now we’re at “Coopkanicks, Inc.”…3 (arguably) smart guys, who have had some success in the past, working on the biggest thing we could possibly find to work on.  Full of ideas…started to build em, and doing it reasonably efficiently.  Anything more than that would simply be premature, so why sell it?

People always expect you to sell them.  They want you to convince them of your work.  When I meet someone who assumes this position with me, I stare blankly at them.  When I meet someone who wants to engage and contribute, I go as deep as I possibly can.  I guess you could say my position is “selectively stealth.” If you are and idiot, arrogant, or opportunistic “I am working on the mobile internet, and I don’t know much more yet” If you are intelligent, curious, and engaged, “I am working on the mobile internet, and here is everything I know so far.”  Regardless of which conversation I am having, one thing I will not do is sell you.  We are where we are…which is a space that I fear many “stealth founders” can’t live in.

The other side of Bijan’s version of stealth, which I abhor, is the founder who hides behind stealth when they don’t yet know or have confidence in what they are building.  They can’t live with where they are.  It takes a special kind of chicken to mask uncertainty as some sort of strategic decision to stay quiet about one’s work.  If you aren’t confident enough to say “this is what I know, and this is what I don’t know yet” and you’re keeping things under wraps until you have a story to sell, you are doomed.  And if you are hyping your company and brand while playing this game, you are triple doomed.  Unfortunately, I think 1 out of 10 stealth founders are Bijan’s long term thoughtful archetype, and 9 out of 10 are blowing smoke while they try to figure it out behind the curtain.  Those people give stealth a bad name.

I think it’s not about stealth vs. open…I think it’s about sharing what’s worth sharing thoughtfully.