Future of Work at Big Omaha

11 May

Our co-founder Philip Rosedale has been in Omaha this week for the Big Omaha conference. Yesterday, he presented some of his thoughts and ideas about the future of work, you can read a great summary about it in the Silicon Prairie blog, excerpt below:

“People come to co-working spaces not for market efficiency,” Rosedale said, “but for community.” Hence his latest venture of the last two and a half years, Coffee and Power. The application is meant to let you see where people check in and work. “Maybe you go to the cafe where that developer worked the other day,” he said, “because you need some development work done.”

While in Omaha, Philip also further explored a few of his strategies for sparking employee passion with Inc. Magazine in this article: 3 Weird, Game-Changing Ways to Make Employees Happy.

Happy Friday everyone!

Coffee Break: Today’s the Day

1 May

As announced here in the blog a few weeks ago, today at 3pm PDT, we will be giving the Coffee & Power website a brief coffee break.

If you have active offers, you have until 3pm (PDT) TODAY (May 1, 2012) to complete them.  After that, any remaining open offers will be automatically cancelled and can no longer be paid.

To close out your open offers:

  1. Log into your account at www.coffeeandpower.com
  2. Click on the Inbox tab and select My Offers
  3. View each open offer and:
  • If the offer is in “pending” status you may cancel, decline, or accept the offer.
  • If you are selling a service, please complete the work, then request payment from your client by click “Mark for Payment” directly beneath the offer’s status bar.
  • If you are purchasing a service, please pay your seller by clicking the “Pay Seller” link directly beneath the offer’s status bar.
Thanks in advance for your patience during this transition, if you have any questions, please contact support@coffeeandpower.com.
We look forward to seeing you after the break!

Reminder: Close all Open Offers by May 1

27 Apr
San Francisco sunset by El Frito
As you may have heard, Coffee & Power is undergoing some changes to our services.  In preparation for a re-launch featuring our new iPhone app, we have paused all listing activity, including creating listings and making new offers. However, you’ve got a few more days to complete any remaining open offers.

If you have active offers, you have until 3pm (PDT) on Tuesday, May 1st to complete any offers. 
After that, any remaining open offers will be automatically cancelled and can no longer be paid.

To close out your open offers:

  1. Log into your account at www.coffeeandpower.com
  2. Click on the Inbox tab and select My Offers
  3. View each open offer and:
  • If the offer is in “pending” status you may cancel, decline, or accept the offer.
  • If you are selling a service, please complete the work, then request payment from your client by click “Mark for Payment” directly beneath the offer’s status bar.
  • If you are purchasing a service, please pay your seller by clicking the “Pay Seller” link directly beneath the offer’s status bar.
Thanks in advance for your patience during this transition, if you have any questions, please contact support@coffeeandpower.com.
We look forward to seeing you after the break!

Coffee Break!

18 Apr

Coffee Break

With over 5500 listings and 3200+ transactions since Coffee & Power’s launch last November, we’ve come a long way from our original design and are very excited about the future. Based upon the feedback from our early adopters, we’ve started working on C&P 2.0, a reboot of our site that will include robust mobile options and more.

Be Back After the Break

In order to give the relaunch our fullest attention, we’re going to give the current site a coffee break while we focus on our redesign. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be switching off our current features and winding things down for a bit. After the break, we’ll bring the site back up with all of its new bells and whistles.

Don’t worry, we’re allowing time for everyone to finish up their open offers. Though your balance can transition to C&P2.0, you’ll have plenty of time to withdraw funds, should you want. While the site is on break, you’ll still be able to login, add or withdraw funds and transition your account (more on this below).

Here are the details about what’s happening:

  • No more Listings – Beginning today, all listings will be turned off and you will not be able to create new listings
  • Open Offers Grace Period – Over the next two weeks, you can finish up any open offers via your inbox
  • Cash Out – While the site is on break, you will still be able to login and add or withdraw funds

Transition Your Account

First, we encourage you to finish up any open offers as soon as possible. We’ll be sure to write more about our new direction over the next few weeks, but as preparation we’d also like to invite all of our current users to associate their current account with LinkedIn, to provide a seamless transition to the new C&P experience. Here’s how:

  1. Log into your C&P account.
  2. Open your account settings (click the arrow next to your username in the upper right then choose settings)
  3. On the settings screen, find “Connect LinkedIn” on the right side. Click this button, then follow the instructions to connect C&P to your LinkedIn account.

While we update the website, there’s still plenty of options to keep you busy on C&P!  The alpha version of our iPhone application is currently in the iTunes store. We’d love your help testing it out, download our iPhone app today.

Back after the Break

Keep an eye on this blog, follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook for the latest updates. Or, swing by one of our three Workclubs to spend a day coworking with us. Don’t forget to say hello if you do!  

See you after our coffee break!

C&P Workclub SF Event Calendar

11 Apr

We’ve hosted a few meet-ups and other events here at the San Francisco Coffee & Power Workclub and have created a public Google Calendar that you can follow to find out when things are happening. We don’t have a lot of events posted yet, but keep an eye on the C&P Workclub SF Google Calendar – we’re working to bring more fun events to our C&P fans!

Host Your Event at the Workclub!
Speaking of, if you’re in San Francisco and looking to host a meetup group, hackathon, how-to session, tech salon, or other tech event and need a space to host it, drop us a line with the details and we’ll see if we’d be a good fit!

Direct Calendar Links
Per the comment below, here are the various direct links to the calendar:

Stock Options Story in WSJ

3 Apr

The Wall Street Journal just posted a story covering the unique Coffee & Power stock option plan (previously discussed in this blog) and other cutting edge reward programs in other companies.

Read the story here.

What’s your two cents – would you be interested in crowd-sourcing your company’s bonus program?

Announcing Changes to Sponsorship

26 Mar

Almost exactly a month ago, we launched our sponsorship feature. Designed to help our community know who to trust when doing business with each other, it has been an experiment in building a large-scale network of trusted workers.

Thanks to the C&P community, we’ve received a lot of feedback about how to improve sponsorships. Today we’re announcing the following changes:

  • Both sponsored and unsponsored users can make offers on “I want” listings
  • Both sponsored and unsponsored users can create “I will” listings
  • We’ve added a new “invite” option to allow you to directly sponsor a new worker on C&P. Look for it in the user menu in the upper right.

We hope this will enable new workers to prove themselves to the community and build a strong C&P reputation. Let’s keep growing this community and please keep the feedback coming!

Stock options for decentralized development teams

19 Mar

I’ve spoken several times, most recently at SXSW, Silicon Valley comes to Lisbon, and our Portland Future of Work event, about the unique process we pioneered at Second Life to allocate bonuses by entrusting every employee with an equal amount of money to give out to everyone else in whatever manner they thought best rewarded contributions.  The process happened quarterly, gave each person an equal amount  to distribute regardless of role or level, and used a special auditing system to allow anonymous giving while limiting the risk of bad behavior as the company grew larger.  This was an effective approach which was accurate in identifying high performers at all levels in the company, and also (as you might imagine) an empowering and well-liked part of our culture.

In building Coffee & Power, we were emboldened by the experience at Second Life and wanted to extend this model to the distributed team working on C&P worldwide, including giving out stock options in the company.  The Worklist.net service has allowed C&P to be built by a global group of part-time contributors with a wide variety of experience levels and contribution.  We felt that these team members deserved stock options as much as did our smaller core team in San Francisco, and so we designed a system very similar to the one we used for cash bonuses at Linden Lab.   We think our approach is at least ‘good enough to criticize’ as a model for the increasingly decentralized startups out there.  Here is what we are doing:

Each quarter, allocate fully-vested stock options to all contributors to C&P, using two simple rules:

  • First, allocate 50% of these shares to all team members and contributors as a function of their total earnings (regular salaries, contracts, and payments made for jobs bid on worklist.net).  Inotherwards every dollar of earnings, whether as a FT employee or casual remote contributor, is worth the same number of stock options.  Everyone above a minimal earning threshold (chosen simply to keep paperwork and number of options holders reasonably manageable) is eligible.
  • Second, entrust this same set of people to each give out an equal number of the remaining stock options to each other, in whatever manner they see fit.  This process is quick (everyone gets two days to allocate their shares, no talking to others) and anonymous – your peers do not find out what you gave them.

By comparison, the typical process of allocating employee stock involves estimating up-front a FT employee’s likely contribution to the company (gleaned from their resume and the interview process), and putting a fixed number of stock options into their offer letter which vest over their first few years of employment.  This process seems less than ideal:  Part-time, contract, or smaller contributors to a project are left out in the stock allocation process, though they may have greatly helped the company succeed.   The process of guessing at value contribution up-front is often inaccurate, time consuming, and fractious.  People who later step up and make huge unexpected contribution are usually not recognized.  And unless you are fortunate enough to be among the first few employees (given the natural and well-documented irrational human optimism about the founding team’s ability to quickly build something great), you are likely to be under-compensated by this process.

By comparison, our approach seems both better in general and supportive of decentralized teams:   Giving out fully vested options quarterly as measured by your past performance in the collective assessment of your peers creates an environment in which you actually need to do great ongoing work to receive large amounts of equity.    Everyone is accountable to everyone, not just to management, creating a higher amount of internal communication and transparency, which is broadly recognized to improve results.  Managers are able to spend more time on planning and decision making and less time on offer letters and performance reviews.   And, perhaps most importantly, this creates a model is which a highly distributed team with different levels of FT/PT contributions can be given equity in the company.

It is important to note, and perhaps less obvious until you experience it, that the greatest benefit to such an approach is not in the accuracy of individual stock option allocations, but in the tremendous positive impact on the culture when a management team is willing to entrust the entire company to evaluate performance and ultimately shape the fate of the firm through the distribution of stock options.

I’d love to see other companies try something similar, and hear about their experience!  I’d also be happy to lend a hand to anyone with questions about implementing the process.

Video posted from Future of Work conversation

19 Mar

Last week’s event up in Portland was a smashing success – big thanks to everyone who was able to make it out to Urban Grind Wednesday night. For those of you who missed it, don’t worry, we recorded the conversation with Scott Kveton and Philip Rosedale and have posted it to our YouTube channel.


The video is the entire presentation (about an hour) and includes the Q&A session at the end. Enjoy!

Help Wanted: Coworking Ambassadors

14 Mar

We are looking for 10 to 20 people from the San Francisco tech community to help us roll out the next version of Coffee & Power.  We’re developing an iPhone app which enables C&P tech professionals who routinely work in public locations like coffee shops and coworking facilities to rapidly find one another and work together.

Your Help Needed
We need help testing and using the early versions of the app as well as greeting and helping newly arriving members as we scale up, and will potentially pay a small weekly stipend if you match these requirements:

  • You are in tech (design, development, marketing, management)
  • You cowork at a public location in SF (coffee shop, open co-working facility, etc) 3+ days/week
  • You have an iPhone (with iOS version 5 or greater)
  • You are friendly and approachable

Interested?
If you meet these requirements and could spare a little time every day to help us, email us at ambassadors -at- coffeeandpower.com with: your favorite places in SF to cowork, a link to your bio/resume/FB, and a quick description of the kind of things you do while coworking.

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