We did this for two reasons. One, our new SF apartment was less than half the size of our old Austin condo. There simply wasn’t going to be room for most of our stuff. Our furniture was too big to fit in the new place and there was way too much of it. Two, we didn’t relish the prospect of hiring movers or driving a U-Haul van halfway across the country. We did a few calculations and decided it would actually be cheaper to buy new things when we got to SF. So we sold or gave away all of it. My parents kept a few boxes of books and a couple pieces of furniture we couldn’t bear to part with. And when we were down to a pile that would fit in the car, we packed it up and set off.

It’s been a surprisingly easy adjustment.

Occasionally, people ask me if I miss anything from our old place. These aren’t questions about whether I miss Austin or our friends there, because of course I miss them. No, these questions are about the things we left behind.

I sometimes miss my clothes and my closet. We had a spectacular master closet – it was huge. Everything was organized by color. There was a whole wall of shoes, lined up in pretty rows from the floor to the ceiling. There was even a row comprised entirely of purple, lavender and blue pumps. I’d collected these shoes over many years – I even had a pair of Adidas Gazelles from 1997. There was a cabinet of sweaters and a shelf full of sundresses. I don’t really need either of those these days. When we moved, I gave all my shoes and clothes away. My sister and some friends took most of them, and the rest I donated. I like to imagine people all over Austin wearing little pieces of me. Sometimes I see pictures my friends post to Facebook and someone’s wearing a shirt or a necklace I used to wear. That makes me smile.

I miss our books. I think the biggest sacrifice in this whole endeavor was getting rid of so many books. Hayes and I had hundreds of books. We kept a box full, and left a few more with my parents. But the rest we sold at Half Price Books or donated to Goodwill. I miss those books. Yes, I read books on my iPad or iPhone, but I still prefer a physical, paper book. I’ve always loved books. As a child, I spent hours roaming the stacks in the library where my mom worked. I love the way books smell and the sound a book makes when you crack it open after it’s been on the shelf for a while. So this has been the hardest part – not having all these beautiful books around anymore. Even if I did judge them by their covers and organize them by color.

But really, I don’t miss much else. This new apartment and our new simpler environment is just so easy. It’s much faster to clean now. I can find anything in a few seconds, because there are really only two places something could be. I don’t worry about someone breaking in while I’m traveling, because what are they going to steal? Even if every dish in the house is dirty, I can wash them all in about 10 minutes.

It’s nice to think that I’m surrounded by only two kinds of things – those I really need and those I really love. My physical life has been distilled to its most important elements. And practically, I love knowing that next time we move, it’ll only take a few hours to pack, instead of a few weeks.

At the end of conversations about the move, everyone always asks, Would you do it again? A year later, my answer is still an immediate, unqualified yes.

It’s a great position for someone looking to work at a fast-growing early-stage startup. We’re looking for someone who can manage our sales leads and grow our customer base. Some experience in sales, marketing, biz dev or communications is a plus, but for the right passionate and smart applicant, that’s not required. The ideal candidate is in (or near) San Francisco or Austin, but we’ll certainly consider qualified candidates in other areas. It’s a part-time position to start, but can/will evolve into a full-time role if we find the right person.

You can read the full job posting here. If you’re interested – or know someone who is – please let me know! My contact info is on the About page here.

Now, I’m certainly not claiming that these are the only things you need to build a successful startup or even that these pertain to every single entrepreneur out there. These are simply some of the lessons I’ve learned that have helped us over the past few years. I’m sure there are plenty of other things you should be doing. In fact, I’d encourage you to share some of those things here if you have other ideas.

1. Be helpful. Help other people when you can. They’ll remember it. This goes for everyone – be nice to customers, co-workers, other entrepreneurs, neighbors, whoever. It’s a simple southern rule, but it’s a good one. Be helpful and courteous to everyone. It’s worth the time it takes. Plus, no one likes a self-absorbed asshole.

2. Make friends. Networking sucks; this is a scientifically demonstrated fact (really, it is). But you still need to do it. Build relationships, even if you don’t see the strategic value of a particular relationship right this second. The more people you know, the better positioned you’ll be later. Building a large, strong network takes years, so start now. Relationships I started 10 or more years ago are still incredibly valuable to me today. (PS – I wrote up some small talk tips if you need something to get started.)

3. Learn about and then get over your competitors. You obviously need to know what others in your space are doing. But don’t spend all day stressing over what they’re working on, how much they tweet about being in the office on weekends, how much money they’re spending on marketing, and everything else you could possibly worry about. Stay aware of them, but don’t let them freak you out. There’s always going to be someone else doing what you’re doing. So just keep doing your best work and try not to get bogged down in anxiety.

4. Know what you’re good at (and what you’re not). Work to your strengths when you can. It’ll keep you happier and more productive if you’re doing things you’re good at. This means that you need to delegate the tasks you’re not good at. One, you can’t possibly do everything. And two, someone else might be able to do some of those things better. As a wise Appozite advisor once said, successful businesses don’t build their cultures around founders’ weaknesses. Know what you can do and more importantly, what you can’t.

5. Keep going. If I had only one piece of advice for a new entrepreneur – or really anyone struggling with anything – it would be to just keep going. Do not quit. Perseverance is an incredibly useful trait for running a successful startup. Overnight successes really don’t exist; it almost always takes years and years for that awesome startup you just heard about to become an “overnight success.” This is true for most of us. So stick it out. Of course, simply sticking it out won’t guarantee success, but quitting definitely won’t get you there.

Lately, I’ve realized just how important these five simple things are. We wouldn’t be where we are with TweetReach if it wasn’t for the relationships Hayes and I have built over the years. And if we’d thrown in the towel any of the million times we might have wanted to, we definitely wouldn’t be here now. We still have a long way to go before we’re where we want to be with our startup, but over the past few months I’ve seen how incredibly crucial the above five things really are.

Got any to add? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

This commercial was the most-tweeted-about Super Bowl ad of the night! We used TweetReach to perform analysis on tweets about Super Bowl ad. I wrote an in-depth blog post about this commercial for the TweetReach blog that went into more detail about the ad’s stats, but I wanted to talk why I personally liked it here.

Detroit has been hit hard in the past few decades as the U.S. auto industry has struggled to compete with increasingly popular imported vehicles. Images of the devastating decay in the Motor City are haunting. In recent years, both General Motors and Chrysler – two of the Big Three auto makers in Detroit – filed for bankruptcy and received billions of dollars in federal aid. And while Detroit and its big car companies have been very public examples, they’re not the only ones who have been struggling lately. It’s been a rough few years in the United States as we’re fighting to get out of one of the worst recessions in the last century.

The Chrysler commercial was not just an advertisement for a car (the new Chrysler 200, actually), but it was a statement of hope and a commitment to the future. And I don’t think I’m the only one who felt like maybe this ad wasn’t just about Detroit. It was about all of us. And this is why it resounded so strongly with so many people. In the midst of all the other silly, immature, even mean-spirited ads for soft drinks and snack foods, the Chrysler ad felt honest and authentic, which made it really stand out.

In the ad, the narrator says:

I got a question for you. What does this city know about luxury, hmm? What does a town that’s been to hell and back know about the finer things in life?

Well, I’ll tell you. More than most.

You see, it’s the hottest fires that make the hardest steel. Add hard work and conviction. And the know-how that runs generations deep in every last one of us. That’s who we are.

That’s our story. Now it’s probably not the one you’ve been reading in the papers, the one being written by folks who have never even been here and don’t know what we’re capable of. Because when it comes to luxury, it’s as much about where it’s from as who it’s for.

Now we’re from America – but this isn’t New York City. Or the Windy City. Or Sin City. And we’re certainly no one’s Emerald City.

Replace “city” and “town” with “country” and you’ve got a beautifully worded commentary about the United States. It’s been a tough ride, but we’re tough. We no strangers to hard work and difficult times, but we always come out stronger than before. Or, to paraphrase Eminen, “This is the United States, and this is what we do.”

Or, maybe I’m reading too much into it. Maybe it’s just an advertisement. But it feels like something important.

You can read the full analyses on the TweetReach blog – there’s one for CES and another for Verizon iPhone. Up first, the post about CES tweets. Here’s an excerpt:

We used the TweetReach Tracker to monitor tweets for one week around CES (the two days leading up to the event, the four days of the event, and the day after the event). And during that week, we tracked:

443,290 tweets
from 136,738 contributors
generating 1,112,409,883 impressions
reaching 42,200,045 people

I love this CES Tracker because it’s just enormous. It’s the first Tracker that’s generated 1 billion impressions, which is particularly impressive given that it ran for only one week. And it’s intriguing to see how the number of tweets per day peaked on the second day of the conference (CES officially ran from 1/6-1/9). I don’t know about you, but I tend to be most excited – and tweet-happy – about a conference on the first full day I’m there (which was 1/7 for CES), but then my energy starts to fade in the later days. Seems like that happened for lots of CES attendees. There were 140,000 of them, by the way.

So, after thinking the CES Tracker was so compelling, I couldn’t wait to see today’s tweets in our Verizon iPhone Tracker today. (In case you didn’t hear, there’s a Verizon iPhone now.) We’ve been tracking tweets about Verizon and iPhone for a while, but things really heated up during the official announcement today. Here’s an except from our analysis:

Verizon iPhone tweets peaked at more than 56,000 in one hour. As a comparison, the highest number of tweets per hour about CES was 9,641. In one week, 136 thousand people tweeted 443 thousand times about CES. In less than one day, 103 thousand people tweeted 175 thousand times about the Verizon iPhone. Tweets about CES reached 42 million people in a week; tweets about Verizon iPhone reached 33 million people in a day.

And my favorite part:

What this tells us is that Apple can basically do in one day what 2,700 other tech companies did in an entire week at CES. No wonder Apple is the world’s second most valuable company.

So, if these snippets interest you, take a look at the full posts. At the very least, I can promise more pretty graphs.

Full posts:
Tech blogs rule CES. Tech brands don’t.
So, did Apple and Verizon overshadow CES? Oh yes.

First, some background

When I was working on my Master’s degree at NC State University, I helped run the Writing and Speaking Tutorial Center. Part of my job there was to give presentations and workshops around campus to help students and staff develop better communication skills. Invariably, workshop attendees would ask for help with conversations and small talk. These workshops were usually focused on more formal topics, like public speaking and presentation skills. We didn’t even offer a conversation workshop; it simply didn’t occur to us that people would want something like that. After all, as many as 75% of people have a fear of public speaking, but I’ve never heard stats like that about conversational communication.

So I began to develop a set of go-to small talk topics and tips I could provide to workshop attendees and students in my classes. I even set aside entire class days to practice conversation. These classes were often my students’ favorite days of the semester.

A few years later, I started going to tech and startup events regularly, as part of my role as a co-founder of a startup. And suddenly I realized why everyone wanted to practice their conversation and small talk skills. This stuff is hard! I remember the first tech happy hour I ever went to in Austin. I stood in a quiet back corner for at least 20 minutes, steeling myself with a beer to go start that initial conversation with whatever unlucky stranger I ran into first. And I’m a pretty chatty, gregarious person, so I didn’t expect to get that nervous (which of course made me even more nervous). I’ve spoken to audiences of a thousand people; why would a conversation with one person freak me out? But there’s something particularly intimidating about those kinds of networking events.

I started to rely on that set of topics and tips I had taught my students. The list was expanded and refined as I worked on my PhD and attended more and more startup and academic events. Even now, I quickly scroll through it in my head at every happy hour, party, conference or seminar I attend in San Francisco and elsewhere, and I can always come up with something to talk to a new person about.

The formula (a.k.a. the Fore Cs)

Which leads to me to what I call the “Fore Cs” (laugh if you want – when I was in high school, I wrote an advice column for our newspaper called “Jennerally Speaking”, so I’m impervious to teasing about my questionable wordplay). Of course the Fore Cs aren’t actually foolproof or magic, but they are a reliable set of topics you can use to get any conversation going. Because I think that’s the hardest part – just getting the conversation going. Once you get started, you’re golden.

• Family – Do you have any children? Spouse/partner?
• Occupation – What do you do for a living? Where do you work?
• Recreation – What do you do for fun? Any hobbies?
• Education – Where did you go to school? Been to/ever thought about grad school?
• Community – What neighborhood do you live in? Have you always lived here? What’s your favorite restaurant in the area?
• Current events – Did you hear about a recent news event?
• Calendar – What are your plans for the upcoming holiday?
• Climate – Can you believe this weather?

These topics are not listed in order of importance or usefulness. Depending on the situation, some will be more appropriate than others. And please don’t ask these questions exactly the way they are written (if you do, you might be the most boring person at the event). Instead think of them as generic examples you should customize, fill in and expand upon for your own use. Try to contextualize or personalize these topics as much as you can, given the specific event and person you’re talking to. Use these topics as starting points and poke around until you find something that your conversation partner latches on to. And yes, some of these are most definitely clichés (anything about the weather, for example), but can they still work to get a conversation started. You just need to break the ice.

To round it out, some conversation tips

Even if you have a list of possible topics to discuss, a good conversation needs more than a topic. Here are a few other conversation tips:

At the end of every year, I always like to take some time to remember the year and think about all the things I’m grateful for. So here are a few of my favorite moments from 2010.