Summation

administrative assistant at Stonebrick Group

Stonebrick Group is looking for an administrative assistant.

This person must be:
- highly organized
- skilled in event planning
- very task oriented and a problem solver
- very friendly and service oriented
- very self-motivated and self-managed
- technology savvy (Internet savvy, making labels, etc)
- discreet, confidential, diligent

The job consists of:
- organizing events (managing RSVPs, getting the venue, etc)
- data entry (business cards, etc)
- managing calendar and travel of a busy entrepreneur
- some menial tasks (like picking up dry cleaning and shipping at post office)
- working with a large number of highly-networked people
- serving Stonebrick's growing client base

- office in San Francisco
- full time. Pay is $30-45K.

Please email resume and references (list as many as possible) to: Auren Hoffman at jobs@stonebrick.com

UCOP Job Openings

UCOP Job Openings: good jobs site for opportunties at University of California Office of the President. Forward to me by my friend Stephen Perkins -- UC Berkeley class of 1996.

r21: WSJ on social networks

r21: WSJ on social networks

Chris Alden writes on WSJ on Social Networks:

In case you missed it, see WSJ.com - Six Degrees of Exploitation? for a fairly uninsightful take on the social network space. Despite very little in the way of real business activity, this has now made the Journal.

The article mentions Spoke Software -- which I highly recommend using. Spoke has a "public" product which is free. The web-based product allows you to find and connect to millions of other people from around the world. For full disclosure, I serve on Spoke's Board of Advisors -- but I did so only after being an early user of their product and finding great benefit on it.

Spoke hopes to sell more advanced systems to large sales enterprises to help them make sales and better compensate salespeople.

Arms Dealers ... a real threat to stability

Arms dealers are becomming an increasing menace to world stability. I highly recommend reading Peter Landesman's extensive profile for the New York Times on Victor Bout, reputed to be the the largest arms dealer in the world.

Search results leading to Summation

Sometimes I wonder where the readers of Summation are coming from. Many random readers come from search engines where they search for keywords and arrive here. In July, the top keyword searches yielding page views at Summation were:

Top 20 of 381 Total Search Strings
#	Hits		Search String
1	90	13.37%	auren hoffman
2	37	5.50%	summation
3	21	3.12%	silicon forum
4	11	1.63%	slayton capital
5	10	1.49%	auren
6	9	1.34%	clarium capital
7	9	1.34%	steve vachani
8	9	1.34%	summations
9	6	0.89%	get a free house
10	6	0.89%	stonebrick group
11	5	0.74%	gregory slayton
12	5	0.74%	how to get a free house
13	5	0.74%	psychographics
14	4	0.59%	andrei cherny
15	4	0.59%	auren hoffman stonebrick
16	4	0.59%	eileen tso
17	4	0.59%	hawaii superferry
18	4	0.59%	iggy ioppe
19	4	0.59%	joel hornstein
20	4	0.59%	mark gerson

Tennis with Congressman Bob Goodlatte

Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) is more than a nice guy, a smart politician, a savvy technologist, and a good father. Goodlatte can also move around the tennis court.

Lead21 arranged a tennis tournament with Goodlatte and some of our closest supporters (like John Multhauf, Chris Alden, Mark Conroe, Larry Chiang, Anthony Detoto, Patrick Shannon, John Gable, and others). In between serves we were able to talk policy with Goodlatte who serves as Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, co-chair of the Congressional Internet Caucus, and Chairman of the House Republican High Tech Working Group.

Congressman Adam Putnam

At a recent Lead21 event at the home of Alex Lloyd in San Francisco, I had the opportunity to discuss issues with Congressman Adam Putnum, a Republican from Florida and Chairman of the Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and the Census.

At 28, Putnam is the youngest member of Congress (he was elected when he was just 26) and is the youngest person in history to chair a subcommittee.

Arnold for Governor Cartoon

The Arnold for Governor Cartoon, by JibJab, was sent to me by Erik Bethel.

Pretty funny ...

Chris Nolan - Reporting * Writing * Talking

Chris Nolan recently launched her new blog. I know she'll kill me if I didn't post a reference to it here.

She has decided to not yet post a bio on her site. One thing this Democrat probably won't have in her future bio is that her brother is married to big Republican (and former GOP staffer) -- i know, that's not a lot of dirt ... but it is all i got!

Chris is a former columnist for the San Jose Mercury News...

Solving Education: PRINCIPALS AS CEOs

I wrote this article last year (published in Summation April 2002 -- see below) and a few people have been emailing me -- so i thought it would be worth republishing:

A few weeks ago, when Senator John Kerry (D-MA) was in San Francisco talking to a small group of Silicon Valley executives, he launched into an unexpected tirade: on teachers' unions and status-quo education.

This was a real shocker.

Kerry is running for the Democrat nomination for president in 2004 -- a nomination where teachers' unions often make the difference in get-out-the-vote efforts. But here was Kerry telling a well-heeled Silicon Valley audience that he believes that all public-school principals should have the right to hire and fire the teachers in their school.

Essentially, Kerry proposed that all public schools be charter schools, with the principal acting as the CEO. The principal would ultimately be responsible for the overall performance of the school and how well the kids were learning -- and be bonused or fired depending on overall performance.

Having principals as real CEOs (with the power to act) isn't a new idea -- but perhaps now is the time to put the idea into action. Several well-funded non-profits are training the next generation of public school (including charter school) principals in management, logistics, motivation, and more.

One such non-profit is New Leaders for New Schools (http://www.nlns.org) run by Jon Schnur. NLNS has an intensive one-year training for just 15 leaders. At the end of the program, NLNS helps these leaders get jobs as principals or helps them start a charter school of their own.

It is possible that Kerry's statement was made only to curtail the increasing support for school choice, but his proposal is a step in the right direction. And it is important that it is coming from a Democrat (Republicans have been suggesting these sensible reforms for years). Kerry has Nixon-to-China opportunity to help better our national education.

SUMMATION: Let's see Kerry put his money where his mouth is and have the Senate pass another sweeping education ("Leave-no-Child Behind II") that gives incentives to states that reform their education systems to give principals greater leeway. The House will surely pass any bill like this.