Originally posted on the JESS3 blog.

What do venture capital firms need to consider for themselves and for their portfolio companies? A few visuals of wisdom from the JESS3 team.

Ten Things VCs Need to Know About Design

View more presentations from JESS3.

NB: This presentation was adapted from my original presentation “Ten Things CEOs Need to Know About Design” (which I delivered at the Startup Marketing Bootcamp in Boston) for the NVCA Strategic Communications Group Fall Meeting held on December 1, 2010 in Santa Clara, CA.

Whether you are a CEO, venture firm, lawyer, marketing professional, small business… these insights all apply. What would you add to this list?

Originally posted at the JESS3 blog under “Sex, Love and the Double Standard.”

Is there a double standard when it comes to women in the workplace? in the technology industry? What about sexual relationships, is there a double standard there? Put more directly: do you or those around you view and / or treat women differently than you would men in a similar situation. It may sound like a dated, 1980s feminism rant, but it’s more real than you think.

So, to take these questions head on, I joined a killer panel (sponsored by Love & Other Drugs FTW) last week that included:

• Cindy Gallop (former head of BBH America and now the founder of IfWeRanTheWorld.com, a web platform that turns good intentions into concrete actions);
• Host Rachel Sklar (Mediaite founding editor, Change the Ratio Founder, former HuffPo Media Editor);
• Sarah Kunst (contributor, event manager and woman-about-town for nightlife and scene site, Guest of a Guest);
• Brooke Moreland (co-founder and CEO of new hotshot startup Fashism);
• Producer Emily Gannett (marathon athlete, producer, founder, mega connector); and
• Leslie Bradshaw (President & COO of JESS3 — that’s me!) | I was also asked to share what it is like working with / for my S.O. (the Jesse in JESS3), first ever interview sharing on this topic if you are so inclined to watch it in full here.

As Rachel so eloquently remarks: “Each of these women brought a unique perspective to the topic, and we had a spirited and thoughtful discussion, some highlights of which are presented below. The full video from the session may be seen here. Cindy discusses the how the word ‘slut’ is ‘a condemnation and a point of aspiration and a point of pride,’ a clear negative on one hand but lately reclaimed by younger women, proudly.”

The following clips and contextual round up were provided by Rachel Sklar over on Mediaite.

Above, I share our own Alix McAlpine’s www.Sorry-Mom.com – tagline: “I Bang The Worst Dudes” Cindy finds the bright side – it’s a cautionary-tale dating advice site for men!Cindy dates younger men, “casually and recreationally,” but has one main criteria: “they have to be a very nice person.”Sarah thinks people should be able to “sleep with or not sleep with whomever they want” Also — forget about the stereotypes. “You can put all of these piece of being female together however you want.”“No one tells men, ‘Oh, you have three kids and you run a company? How do you do it all?’” “And no one asks a 37 year old guy, ‘Are you nervous about when you’re gonna have kids?’ ‘Why aren’t you married?’” “You wear your uterus on your sleeve.”Rachel talks about the “love” part of the equation — not “soft-focus LifetimeTV love” but the reality of like-minded professionals who meet at work or in the course of their work can spark. “Our workplace is our professional and personal playground – our work is our life and so we end up meeting people and working with them.” (Leslie is a co-founder with her boyfriend, the eponymous Jesse of Jess3.) Rachel asks Brooke if people treat her differently when they learn she is married. She says not really – or at least up until the ring is impossible not to notice. “When you’re married men still hit on you, but you have an out – which is good, in professional environments.” Also: “Having a visual symbol of your committed status helps.”Sarah talks about how age and gender play into how she is perceived as a professional — though in the nightlife scene chronicled by Guest of a Guest young women are the norm, sometimes, she says, she is subject to more dismissive assumptions. Recalling an event to which she brought a man who was a boldfaced name in the tech scene, she recounts how an acquaintance assumed that she was his date. When Sarah pointed out that the invitation was in fact hers, the acquaintance snorted: “What do you do that you can bring him?”Rachel asks Cindy: “How are women constrained by what they should and shouldn’t wear? And on the flip side, how are they enabled and liberated by that?” Cindy says that women often put those constraints on themselves: “It is actually the expression of personal style rather than suppression of t that can actually deliver desired business outcomes,” she says. “The way you dress and the way you look is a fundamental part of how you position your own brand.”Is there a “right” and “appropriate” way to dress, for work and otherwise? Remember Cindy’s advice about self-expression – but remember, too, that how you present yourself becomes part of your brand – so know what you want that brand to be, and how you want it to be seen. Says Brooke: “I do have to watch what I wear. When I dress too sexy or too skin-baring – it does give the wrong signal that you don’t want to give and you want to be taken seriously. And you shouldn’t have to think about that stuff if you’re a woman, but you do…like, ‘I should be able to wear this but maybe it’s not the best thing for me.’” Adds Rachel: “You have to step out of the normative way that you would like things to be and recognize that, okay, there’s a way things are.” But all that said – here’s some key advice from the founder of Fashism: “Everyone should have a Power Bitch outfit.”Can I sell ad space on my butt and still be taken seriously? This is not a rhetorical question – and the jury is still out. Ripped from the headlines!Compiled by: Leslie Bradshaw | President & COO, JESS3

Originally posted on the JESS3 Blog.

We have a mantra at JESS3 that keeps us working hard and keeps us focused on bigger, faster, stronger. Resting on our laurels is not what we do; striving for constant innovation and new levels of awesome, however, is.

Three ‘pages’ from our cookbook to achieve said greatness (after the jump):



1. Establish a pervasive, deeply integrated “Labs” or “Incubator” mentality. As you can see from our projects at JESS3.com, there is nearly a 1 :: 1 ratio of client project launches to JESS3 Labs launches (and that’s just the public stuff, just wait until you see what we’ve been incubating). This is no accident. We take the time to experiment with new ideas, platforms and partnerships just as much as we go after client work. Labs also cannot be ghettoized as a team that meets once a quarter, or rest on the shoulders of one person. It needs to be a company wide, top down, bottom up commitment of time, money and head count. And, in the lab, you need to be okay with failing and not proving out a hypothesis you hoped would work. It is in the failure and experimentation that stronger concepts emerge. We have at least 10x as many JESS3 Labs projects incubating as we do ones that actually launch, just to give you a sense of the volume needed to get to “the good stuff.” Another way to think about this is best summed up by foursquare’s head of client services, Eric Friedman, last month: Always Be Deploying (of course an homage to the A-B-C = Always Be Closing acronym made famous by Glen Gary, Glen Ross).

2. Approach it from an open cookbook mentality, be ready to share, test and recalibrate. In the same vein as a lab that is constantly experimenting, sharing your thinking, methods and theories are also paramount to making your last (fill in the blank) as amazing as possible. When Jesse and I heard this at the SEED Conference in 2008, it struck a chord with us. The idea of “giving away all of your secrets” in the way that famous chefs do might make the IP watchdogs on your team nervous — but for true entrepreneurs at the top of their game, the idea of giving away, sharing, “open-sourcing” if you will is actually empowering. Think of it like this:
- Part of this exercise says to the world: ‘go ahead and try to execute what I just did in the exact way I did and get the same great results.’ Nowhere is this more apparent than when you go to Canal Street in New York City and try to buy a “knock off” Chanel or Louis Vuitton handbag. It just ain’t the same. The details are off. The quality isn’t there. You can see it, smell it, feel it.
- Another part of this exercise actually helps reinforce just how much of a leader you are, in that if others are interested in learning your methods and replicating your success, like we all are when we buy the Joy of Cooking (we love you Julia!), then you are obviously as good as you say / think you are.
- The final part of this exercise should be humbling: others who experiment with the “recipes” that you’ve put out might in fact improve them and / or execute them better than you. The crowd-sourced feedback loop is a powerful one and the companies and individuals that are set up to cast ideas widely and be ready to tweak them based on input are well positioned to be ready to claim that they are in fact as good as their last project, meeting, shot, deal and call.

3. Get back in the trenches, grind out as many wins as you can muster, be prepared to suffer a few losses, get your hands dirty. Then: Repeat, don’t retire. There is no shortage of overnight experts in the social media space, there are also plenty of social media-related conferences to attend and at which to speak. You could make a whole career out of speaking at them, really. And if you are looking for retired generals ready to call social media audibles from their corner office armchairs — there are plenty of those, too. And, by retired generals, we mean to say people who haven’t fought down in the trenches day in and day out — and we are talking blood and bone under their nails level fought — since the 80s, maybe even the 90s and early 2000s. What there is a shortage of are things like good information designers (especially UX designers) and experienced, not just self ordained, social media strategists. Why is that? Because the barrier to entry when it comes to things like talking, attending and tweeting is much lower than the hard work it takes to become truly great at something (10,000 hours at last count). Aside from working longer days and weeks, we’ve gone after volume and precision at JESS3 to get us all at or above the 10,000 hour mark. We experiment with our own brand and projects, we deploy regularly to test theories, and then we apply the best learnings to client projects. Then: We recalibrate, refine and repeat. And, check our fingernails. They are dirty and stained.

+++

What do you do to stay sharp? Fire away here in the comments or @ message me on Twitter (I’m @LeslieBradshaw)… I am looking to — you guessed it — refine this thinking and build it out into something even bigger, faster, stronger.

Originally posted on the JESS3 Blog.

This deck was presented by JESS3 co-founder, president and COO Leslie Bradshaw (that’s me!) at the Future M / Startup Marketing Bootcamp on October 8, 2010 at The Microsoft New England Research & Development Center.

The focus of the presentation was giving CEOs and other decision makers insights from the world class JESS3 team regarding design best practices.

Ten Things CEOs Need to Know About Design

View more presentations from JESS3.

Since posting the deck on SlideShare, a few great reactions that have surfaced include:

• Rebecca at Passionately Alive (design as a guilty pleasure, now laid bare, we are glad to help fuel the passion)
  
• Guy Kawasaki at HolyKaw! (started a Twitter storm on Saturday, which has driven thousands of views and hundreds of tweets from this post alone)
  
• Hubspot’s Mike Volpe (sparked some great, additional thinking from our end — check out the comments)
  

We’ve also made the front page of SlideShare through organic love today. A huge thanks to the community for sharing it around on a weekend.

I have long been a supporter of gay marriage. Not because marriage is a perfect union.  Rather because marriage signals a deeper rite of passage into the highest echelons of society.  And while marriage regularly serves as the butt of comic strips, sitcom punchlines and guy talk, when it comes down to it, marriage is equated to productivity, normativity and demanding of outright respect.

As cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin so brilliantly posited in her 1984 essay “Thinking Sex,” there exists a universal, sexual hierarchy; being married, straight, monogamous, procreative and “vanilla” in one’s sexual / life is the highest form of existence.  And, without spelling it out so bluntly, the “hold outs” on the issue believe just this:

In that same essay, Rubin asks if we would in our right minds discriminate against someone for their choice of cuisine, their country of origin, their religious beliefs or even the color of their skin.  While there are still pockets of racism and bigotry in the United States today (and back in the ’80s at the time of the essay’s writing), neither institutional provisions nor legal barriers exist today that endorse the systematic intolerance that once was commonplace in our country.

So why do we allow for there to be institutional provisions and legal barriers in place when it comes to gay marriage?  For the Republicans, conservatives and even my fellow libertarians who try to make this an issue of religion or even of states’ rights: SHAME ON YOU. Neither Jesus nor the State would want inequity institutionalized. And to the Democrats / liberals like Obama too afraid to take a stance: THIS IS THE TIME. STOP PLAYING POLITICS AS USUAL AND DO SOMETHING.  The time has come to take a serious look at how we rationalize discrimination and inequity in this country.

Judge Vaughn Walker is leading the way in California, when he ruled on August 4, 2010 that “the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.”

Rightfully so, the Plantiffs alleged that Proposition 8 deprived them of “due process and of equal protection of the laws contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment and that its enforcement by state officials violates 42 USC § 1983.”  It is really that simple.

I know that this issue will continue to be a wedge in political discourse for years to come; but I also feel in my heart of hearts that change is moving in the right direction.  And my heart is glad.

Prop 8 Final

View more documents from Leslie Bradshaw.

One of the projects that I have been working on recently is the Content Grid.  First established as a back-of-the-napkin idea for my friend / mentor / client Joe Chernov to evolve his role from Global Communications and Social Media Director to Director of Content at Eloqua, the JESS3 team helped further flesh out the concepts behind the graphic and the visual representation itself.

So what is this thing? Some great posts to check out on the subject:

• Official announcement post from Joe on the Eloqua “It’s All About Revenue” blog
• My Guest Post on TECH cocktail “Content = Design“
• My Guest Post on Social Times “Strategizing Beyond Twitter and Facebook“
• Eloqua’s Thank You Post
• My initial blog post on the JESS3 blog
• The head of Ford’s social media, Scott Monty, also has a great write-up

To Jesse. Happy Valentine’s Day, in July. Regina captured my thoughts years ago about the color you have brought / bring to my life. And now, she does it again.