Doing business the Sphere way….

This is a good shot of the Sphere business team during a strategy session, courtesy of Lu at COD Ranch. This is, quite naturally, our preferred mode of operation…in front of a roaring fire, laptops at the ready, coffee/tea in hand. In this photo (counter-clockwise starting from left): Josh Guttman, Adam Embick, Jeff Yolen and Tony Conrad.

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Sphere - On The Rocks?

Smoky and the team are on a ranch in Southeastern Arizona (we’re staying at the COD Ranch - hat tip to the gang at Automattic who found the place) for an on-site get together - most companies call that an off-site but for us, it’s a rare opportunity to all be in the same place for a few days of hanging out, coding up a few new features (look for announcements soon) and to consume just a few beers

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Salon ’sphere

Welcome aboard Salon!! Salon is the latest publisher to join the Sphere universe. They join Reuters, Time, WSJ, AOL, CBS, Washington Post, Newsweek, Major League Baseball and many others already in the Sphere. Salon is an online-only publisher that produces seven original content sections as well as two online communities — Table Talk and The WELL. The content sites, updated daily, include News and Politics, Opinion, Technology & Business, Arts & Entertainment, Books, Life and Comics. Founded in July 1995 by David Talbot, Salon has been widely acclaimed and recognized in the media for its compelling and provocative reporting.

They were equally innovative with their use of Sphere’s technology, designing a further reading box that sits beneath the main content section of every story. Sphere powers related articles from Salon, related blog posts from the Salon blog network and related stories from third party mainstream news outlets - as you can see if you scroll down the page on this recent Barack Obama article. The feature has been a big hit, generating very high initial click-thru-rates, which tickles us all…..another example of great execution and teamwork by Adam’s team working with the Jim Ruga and Brent Whitney from Salon. Well done all!!

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Some PR

Josh in the spotlight on Jason Falls’ Social Media Explorer…..he also updated our blog this week

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Cigars Everyone

Troy and his wife Kate have a brand new baby girl. Troy joined us in 2007, a great addition to our talented client services team.

Congratulations, Kate and Troy.

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Bienvenue Josh…

Josh on December 18th, discussing the best value proposition in widget-ology…..

 

Virtual Champagne

Our co-founder, Martin, celebrated his birthday today. Working in a company with a virtual office, the best we can do is offer a Virtual Champagne toast - here’s to you Martin, Joyeaux Anniversaire!

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Virtual Pizza, Anyone?

End of September, Om Malik asked me to share Sphere’s experiences (on his new, very popular blog Web Worker Daily) of what it’s like to build a virtual company. Everyone of our key team members are living in different areas - the four founders are based in San Francisco, Seattle & Denver. We have team members living in Vancouver, Portland, Phoenix, Denver, San Francisco, New York, and Boston. Our Advisors are based in San Francisco, Connecticut, New York, Boston and Atlanta. In the post, we talked about the tools we use to keep everyone on the same page, working toward the same goals.

We also talked a little bit about the challenge creating a culture that serves as a foundation for success. The culture piece is a little less straightforward. In fact, I’ve never met five of our key team members. Here are a few obvious things we do to develop a feel for each other:

• we make sure we talk multiple times each day, EVERYDAY
• we do a group call every Tuesday (Tech team) and Friday (Business Team)
• we engage people on a series of projects before signing them on as team members
• the founders meet physically at least once a quarter

We’re also trying a few new things. We’re opening our internal blog up to our Advisors and Investors who have a vested interest in Sphere - we hope this will foster a stronger bond between our team and the people most supportive in helping us pursue our dream. Another example, last month we had a pizza party - the idea was that each team member would receive a pizza at their homes for a group call and mini celebration of our accomplishments to date – it kinda worked and kinda didn’t. Everyone was excited about it but it was logistically a bit hard to pull off. A couple of our team members did get their pizza (see below photo from our SysAdmin Mike) while the rest of us were jealous to hear their greasy hands on their keyboards. I think we’ll try it again as everyone liked the idea.

If you’re building a virtual company, we’d love to hear your thoughts on what does/ doesn’t work in your virtual environment.

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Finally - An Advisor For Each One of Us On The Team!

It’s hard to put a value on a winning team. It’s like the commercials touting quality time and precious moments. It’s priceless.

It’s one thing to know you have a good product or to feel instinctually that what you’re doing is right, groundbreaking even.
It’s quite another thing to attract the caliber of talent that’s been drawn to the Sphere Operating Advisory Board.

Simple yet sophisticated, Sphere has already won accolades from the technical press and blog community, which is no small feat in the Web 2.0 era of daily launches of new app’s. The applications for Sphere’s technology are brimming with promise. We announced yesterday that Josh Macht and Ron McCoy are joining our Operating Advisory Board (see announcement). Adding the editorial production expertise of Josh and technical acumen of Ron can only signal wise and important developments to come.

The Sphere board of Operating Advisors is already a stellar group. Toni Schneider, the type of guy you hope you get to work with on a number of fun problems. He led Oddpost, helping Iain (Lamb) and Ethan (Diamond) to change the web mail space and now he’s working with Matt Mullenweg (also a Sphere Advisor) and the Wordpress community to create an intuitive, community driven blog experience. Matt, wise beyond his years and just plain brilliant brings a wealth of knowledge about blogs and bloggers. Wordpress gets some of the best buzz in the blogosphere for simple tools, openness and responsiveness. Mary Hodder was thinking, writing and talking about blogs before the term was a hot button. Her instincts about the user experience and community are noteworthy. And, if you know anything about Scott Kurnit, you know he’s one of the quickest and sharpest minds working behind the scenes for the companies he thinks are both interesting and valuable to the net community.

So with Josh and Ron, we now have six Operating Advisors to work alongside our six team members - one for each of us - :). More importantly, we’ve added depth to our team to help us think through scaling and how editors and algorithms can work together to create a great discovery experience. These guys are already making a big difference in how we think about both of these areas and I’m excited to see if you like some of the upcoming changes we’re making to the service. A great product, a warm reception, a winning team. Priceless. Stay tuned.

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Calling All Rock Star Engineers

Sphere is Hiring

Sphere is getting too popular, so we’re hiring! We’re looking for some talented, passionate self-starters to join our team and help us keep up with Sphere’s growth. We’re looking for:

• a Partner Engineer to help us create and deploy solutions for our publisher partners;
• a Software Engineer - Search to help us grow our infrastructure;
• a Crawling Team Member to help keep content acquisition humming along; and
• some talented QA people to help us ensure quality across all of our processes.

If you’re a talented, motivated, Web 2.0 enthusiast who can maintain superlative productivity in a distributed environment, check out http://www.sphere.com/jobs to get more detail.

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