I remember having a conversation with my father during the last few months of summer before I went away to college, when he gave me one of his expectations of my college experience: “you won’t have time to party, since you’ll be in the library all the time”. My memory of my reaction to that was one of disbelief, and the thoughts in my head akin to a mischievous elf getting ready to pull the wool over someone’s eyes.

It turned out the way my college career played out I did indeed spend a lot of time in the library (and even more in the computer lab – good ol’ CSIL), but in all that studying I almost missed the biggest lesson of all.

The lesson isn’t really all that earth shattering: it’s make friends, and keep in touch with those friends.

I graduated over 10 years ago, and I’ve recently realized that my friends are the most important resource I have in business. In college I had the good fortune to become friends with some great people: a few that I’ve hired and worked with, a few that I’m doing business with, and a few that will undoubtedly lead to success in my career going forward. For example, from UCSB Computer Science (CS) I have remained in touch with Lisa Kavanaugh, who came to work with me at Ask.com and is now a VP of Engineering of the web development team. I’ve also got friends from UCSB CS who are now at LinkedIn, Sony Online, Slide, and a number of other companies that I can now contact if I’ve got a question or need to meet someone who is an expert in the products they are working on.

Another of my friends, Scott Kim, is now the CTO over at Ask.com. We first met when we interned together at IBM in Austin (looking around the room during orientation, where the instructor helpfully explained to us that we needed to “leave our gun racks at home”, I spotted Scott, a pretty normal looking guy). He worked on a project called Java OS (pretty sure killed now) that summer, and I worked on an internal project that I’m pretty sure never went anywhere, but the relationship we established over 10 years ago is still alive and kicking today. We email a couple times a week to talk about personal stuff, but we also share job leads, references, startup tips, and almost everything else.

Speaking of Ask.com, I met some of my closest friends while working there, and now that they’ve left Ask they are incredible resources to have to reach out to and talk about any subject in the valley. My startup is now moving to do some PR work, and I have a great friend who did PR at Ask and is now a Senior Manager at a PR firm who is happy to help all he can. When we need connections into mobile advertising I have another friend from Ask Ad Operations who is now at a major mobile ad network, and is happy to help. The point is that all these relationships were developed while I was seemingly focused on another goal: success in my career and in business.

At the end of the day nothing is going to make up for a poor work ethic, or sub-par skills. But I know if I work hard and achieve success, a big part of it will be the incredible friends I’ve made along the way.

Dad: that’s one of the most important lessons I hope to leave with my children as they embark to college someday.

This morning I woke up and checked my email to find this message from opentable:

** Please do not reply to this email. It was sent from an unattended mailbox, and replies are not reviewed. See below for contact information. **

Dear Simon,

Thank you for booking your recent reservation through OpenTable.

We would appreciate your feedback about your experience at The Tipsy Pig on August 22, 2010. Please take a moment to fill out our Dining Feedback Form:

http://fb.opentable.com/df.aspx?re=….

Thank you, and we look forward to seeing you again at OpenTable.com.

Bon appétit!
Your OpenTable Team

NEED HELP?

http://support.opentable.com

UNSUBSCRIBE:
If you’d rather not receive future Dining Feedback Form emails from OpenTable, please click the link below:

http://fb.opentable.com/df.aspx?re=…

Now, I think opentable finally following up and asking their users to write reviews and give feedback on the restaurants is a great thing (though it took yelp rocketing to tremendous success for them to get their act together – I’ve long thought that opentable should integrate review content to make it even easier to choose a restaurant). More companies should ask me how my experience was with their product, especially when they are simply a platform for the actual service provider. But why are they sending such an unfriendly email to solicit my feedback?

First, witness the very top of their email:
** Please do not reply to this email. It was sent from an unattended mailbox, and replies are not reviewed. See below for contact information. **

When I read this I’m thinking: “Look, we don’t really care about you. We want to market to you, sell you something, maybe even ask for your feedback, but we want to make it easy for us and hard on you”. We haven’t bothered to link up our email system with our customer support system because it’s too hard or too expensive or we’re busy with other things, so we’re just going to tell you that we’re going to ignore you, the customer.

Now let’s look at the content:

Dear Simon,

Thank you for booking your recent reservation through OpenTable.

We would appreciate your feedback about your experience at The Tipsy Pig on August 22, 2010. Please take a moment to fill out our Dining Feedback Form:

http://fb.opentable.com/df.aspx?re=EAV%252bFQ5fXaQ%253d

Thank you, and we look forward to seeing you again at OpenTable.com.

This isn’t bad, but there isn’t much here. Why isn’t opentable telling me what my feedback is going towards?

• Is it going to a public review site like yelp to I can help others?
• Is it for opentable to use internally?
• How long will it take me to write this feedback?

I have no idea from this email, so I pretty much have to click the link to go to their site and find out. Or, more likely, I’ll just click delete and forget about it.

This is 2010: if you want feedback from someone, make it easy! How great would it be if you could just reply – like you can with Posterous – and write your review in your email client? How much more likely would I be to respond and check it out if I knew why I were doing it?

A lot of people complain about big chain stores, like Starbucks or Walmart, because they feel like the companies lack soul and prevent small local businesses from flourishing. I recognize this might well be true, but it’s not clear to me that small local businesses are necessarily great either – if I think about the reasons I choose a store or product, brand really stands out as a differentiator, because a brand stands for certain attributes. For example, I know that at Starbucks I’m going to get a pretty decent cup of coffee, a terrible bagel, and a clean, comfortable place to hang out. Whether I’m in my home town of San Francisco or around the world in Thailand, I know that experience will be there.

I wonder why more small services don’t have big chain-brands. Why is there no Starbucks for dry cleaners, so I know that the quality of my wash will be good no matter where I go? Why is there no Starbucks of tailors so I can get sized and a great pair of pants hemmed wherever I go?

There must be dozens of businesses that are just waiting to have a unifying brand – what else am I missing?