Cto school notes may 14

/Cto school notes may 14

Malcom Casey: @malcolmcasey from Skillshare

• Process
  • Align product vision and goals
    • Everyone on team is involved
    • Not top down
    • Product planning and prioritization
      • Identify top problems the product is facing or the users are facing
      • 2 weeks
      • Ask why 5 times
      • What does successs look like, how can we measure thay
    • Product sprint
      • Identify owners and milestones
        • This can be a junior person.
        • Doesn't have to be an expert
        • The owner is in charge of just keeping everything on track, not necessarily implementing all of it
        • They call the owners 'zookeepers'
      • Don't micromanage
      • Strategy
      • Product design
      • Implementation & deployment
      • Verification!
        • Make sure after releasing that the hypotheses were validated
        • Decide whether to keep or kill it
      • Meetings
        • Keep them focused
        • Use hip chat/email/etc, get the feedback
        • As soon as they are ready to make a decision, then schedule the meeting
        • Keep the meeting to 15-30 mins
    • Product design
      • Sketching
        • Everyone on team would sketch, come up with a few solutions
        • 3/1 process (cf apple)
        • Come up w 10 solutions, pick the best 3, refine that, pick the best 1
        • After everyone has done this, agreed, likes it, the move on to wireframes, flows, etc
      • Wireframes
      • User stories & flows
      • Product design != ux/ui design
  • Never "launching" always shipping
• Tools
  • Product design
    • Ux/ui.
  • File mgmt
    • Dropbox
  • Product mgmt
    • Trello
    • Google docs
    • Used to use pivotal tracker but it didn't work for then
  • Bug tracking
    • Lighthouse
  • To do list
    • Behance action runner
    • Asana
• Culture principals
  • PayPal mafia (graphic showing how all the early founders went on to start new successes)
  • It's not about making ideas, it's about making ideas happen
  • Creating great team
    • Not about rock stars, about finding a team that meshes well.
  • Over communicate
  • Transparency
    • Tell employees about vc talks, where the company is going, etc
  • Create solutions not problems. Think about how to fix, mot just pointing out problems
  • Ship it
    • Done is better than perfect
  • Startups within startups
  • Set unrealistic deadlines
    • Estimate what you can do, then aim for 1.5x that
  • All new hires sign an agreement that they understand and agree with the culture
  • Simplify and enhance focus
• Focus
  • Finding the most important thing to work on is critical
  • Startups don't starve they drown (in ideas)
  • Focus means saying no to distractions, not saying yes to the one thing (Steve jobs, paraphrased)
• Questions
  • How to get focused?
    • What experiments do you want to run, what can get done in 2 weeks
  • How many hats do ppl wear?
    • 3-4. Helping creative process, (developing), analytics driven (a/b testing), teaching everyone SQL to look at DB, recruiting
  • Does all the shipping cause bad bugs to go live?
    • Baseline testing. Err on shipping first, fixing later
    • They have had critical bugs but they fix quickly, they keep users happy
  • What's the turnover?
    • Haven't had anyone quit. Everyone who has left has been the company's decision
    • Very transparent, strong culture
  • What's the hiring process?
    • Mostly referrals
    • Don't use recruiters
    • Inbounds/branding/team branding
    • Etsy does a good job of this and is an inspiration
    • Very thorough process, multiple phone interviews, homework, meet everyone, check references, keep it within 3 weeks
    • Try to hire for where you want the team to be 12 months from now
  • How many have you let go?
    • About 5 in a year
  • How do you find the balance of too much and too little process?
    • No right answer.
    • Play around with it
  • Any special incentives to keep ppl engaged/motivated?
    • Allow ppl to take as many classes
    • Allow ppl to go in groups of up to 4 and spend company money to do anything they want
    • Give lots of freedom and responsibility

CTO Artsy Daniel Doubrovkine: Pressing the big reset button (@dblockdotorg. Slides).

• How do we feel about resets?
  • It's negative, happens as a consequence of failure
  • Always happens with drama. 'slam the breaks'
  • Compared to changing the wings on a flying airplane
• Examples
  • Exhibit 1 Microsoft windows vista/longhorn
    • Dev began in 2001
    • Very feature-bloated. By 2004 clearly going nowhere
    • Reset in 2004 on top of windows server 2003
    • In 2006 it was released as vista (major failure)
  • Exhibit 2 Microsoft office 98 & netdocs
    • Netdocs was created by microsofties who thought the Internet would kill office
    • Net docs 1 was java, effectively an office reset
    • Net docs 2 reset in C++
    • Net docs 3 reset as a service
    • Spent $500M over the years, 500 devs
• Why do resets happen? Survey of about 2000 reset projects. Data from CTO club in NYC and personal network
  • 4/10: sunk cost kept them from resetting
  • 100% say due to some type of failure
  • 7/10 faced strong opposition to resetting
  • 2/10 blame pure product failure
  • 3/10 blame pure tech failure
  • 2/10 blame ppl failure
  • 3/10 resets led to success
  • 4/10 led to failure
  • 100% of projects that weren't reset failed
• When is it right to reset?
  • always, provided you are 100% sure the project is failing (Ed: tautology?)
  • Find truth-Sayers, trusted ppl who will be honest & help you know if it is really failing
  • Measure how much cost sunk & how much value it is providing
    • Questioner points out: this is the sunk cost fallacy, better to focus on the value
  • Don't be a chicken
    • (chicken & pig committed v involved story)
    • Only those that are committed should decide
  • It can be a smart career move to make the hard choice
  • Can be very dumb career move if you fail or the organization doesn't support you in the reset after you hit the button
• How to reset
  • Act now, decisively
  • Invest in trust capital
    • Have to compromise in order to gain trust. For every year of trust capital you have a about a month to burn when in a reset
    • Build it by helping others achieve their goals
  • Double or nothing
  • Split execute
  • Under promise & over deliver
    • Audience points out: this is the exact opposite of Malcolm Casey's strategy
• Aftermath of a reset
  • People forget very quickly how bad it was
  • Don't expe t to be glorified afterward. This is just part of your job
  • Making decisions about when/where to continue dev paths is always part of your job
  • Foster a culture of frequent but smaller resets
    • Experiment often
    • If things are posed as experiments, and you let devs try their ideas, you will keep evolving (Ed: and they will be happy)
  • Stop at the top
    • When you're at the top, don't get comfortable...try resetting then to make it even better
      • Ed: wha?!
• Questions
  • How is the data calibrated?
    • (audience grumbling/saying 'let him speak')
    • Somewhat anecdotal
  • How does that affect the code base?
    • Depends, not necessarily software/code (e.g., could be purchased CRM software, when to throw in towel?)
  • When ppl from the outside advocate reset, it's not good. Is that a personal opinion or from the data?
  • How do you connect the concept of reset to tech debt?
    • They are well connected. I don't like working in environments where you need to explicitly pull out tech debt. That should go without saying
  • I pivot on market more than on technology. When you pivoted/reset the tech/rewrote did you get the founders to buy in too?
    • Yes, that is critical, also critical to show that it is promising quickly

Why metrics important. "what gets measured gets done" Avoid biases in judgment. Numbers don't lie.

5 types: vanity, actionable, predictive, cohort, funnel

Vanity: impressive but don't really mean anything to your business. Vanity metrics are usually aggregate. Funding is too. It doesn't directly relate to success (bc funded startups fail all the time)

Actionable. When you measure it you know what to do. Measure the outcomes and see if your hypothesis is holding true. You have to agree ahead of time what metric to base success on. Cost per acquisition. Find that out early. Big data: FB learned that when women update their profile photo men spend more time on the site. And women are more likely to change theirs when they see other women change. You can use this to get men spending more time on site. Actionable metrics are per-person metrics.

Predictive metrics: Value: What we are doing adds value for customers. Net promoter score: "how likely are you to recommend this?" 1-10. 8-10 are promoters, 1-6 are detractors. Promoter - detractor / total. This is the nps. This is something that you can compare cross industries and products with.

Must-have metric: how disappointed would you be if you can't use this product? You want to see 40% of your users very disappointed. (determined by Sean Ellis) This helps you see if you have something unique.

FB growth metric: w/in 4 weeks of launching a campus, got 90% of the users FB value metric: missed it

Groupon: they started out as a WP blog selling 2-1 pizza coupons.

Groupon's growth model: paid. Their customer is the business, and they have salespeople to get more businesses to sign up.

Funnel metrics: They measure the life cycle of your user. AARRR acquisition activation retention referral revenue Measure how customers move through these stages Determine weaknesses.

Cohort metrics Segmenting user based on when they joined. This helps smooth out seasonal/temporary metrics. Kissmetrics. Mixpanel. Most startups will have to build custom solutions to capture their metrics, because each startup's important metrics are different.

Lean Cust Dev Class

Two biz purposes: mktg & innovation

Find customer for product before you build anything.

Lean startup is: pre-marketing

Startup def: institution designed to deliver a product under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Startup is all about experimentation and uncertainty.

How do you know what the next step is?

Myth: lean == cheap Lean is about efficiency, investing just enough to validate assumptions.

Myth: lean is only for tech. Not so, it's just about experimentation.

Lean startup story: grocery delivering where they manually delivered groceries to their alpha customers by hand before building any tech to support, just to make sure that they really were delivering what customers wanted.

Why are founders reluctant to ask people about what they think about the idea? One reason: they are afraid of someone stealing the idea. Not so, ideas are cheap, execution is the hard part. Validate the assumption!

Myth: lean replaces vision with data and customer's wants. Vision is very important but your strategy (I.e. solution) needs to be responsive and validated.

UX how to ask questions do experiments to get useful feedback: First step: is there a problem worth solving? The riskiest part of the biz is rarely the solution. Don't say: 'here's a solution, do you like it?' They will say yes for the wrong reasons. How do you ask Q's that explore their experience? "here is a scenario. Have you experienced this? what did you do in this situation?" How did they actually solve the problem? Ask behavioral questions. Need to learn if there is a problem worth solving. The word problem is not always the perfect word (in the development of a game, for example).

Scientific method. Try to disprove hypotheses.

Startups that succeed are the ones that iterate enough before they run out of resources. Failure is not bad, it is part of the learning process. Learn from each failure and use that knowledge to pivot to a new iteration.

Surveys don't give a lot of info. Qualitative interviews give tons of info.

Caveat: in rapid iterations your objective is efficiency in finding product market fit. It's possible to have small enough selections of people that you don't fully validate your assumption (ie you get a false negative).

Good falsifiable hypothesis: [repeatable action] will produce [measurable outcome]

When you ask customers questions, you can't rely on what they say. When people say they will buy X, they will not. (they believe they or someone will, but people don't honestly know themselves that well and aren't that good at predicting their own future behavior). Cf Dan Gilbert quote

How do you decide the next step?

Entrepreneurs are too attached to their ideas. Until they give it a chance to see if it will fail, they can't know if it will succeed.

When you design experiment, start w the single most critical idea. What will break my biz if it is not true? What is most critical and most unknown?

"get out of the building" and work on validating your ideas.

We humans are really good at projecting and experimenting in our heads but bad at predicting others' behavior.

Customers don't care about your solution, they care about their problems. -- Dave McClure

Your obj is to find an early adopter, not a mainstream consumer.

The early adopter: a) has the prob you want to solve and b) they are aware of it. [And bonus if c) they already are trying to hack some solution to it]

You want to find them and build them an MVP.

When you have a lot of uncertainty, it doesn't take much more data to reduce it significantly.

Surveys assume you know the right questions to ask. -Ash Maurya

Myth: Customers don't know what they want. They *do* but they probably can't articulate it well. So don't ask them what they want, ask what they do (in situations like the problem you are trying to solve).

MVP are experiments meant to invalidate your riskiest assumption. Important not to focus on the word 'product'. It's not necessarily a product.

MVP phase 1: talk to people find out how they've solved this problem, see if it's really a problem. MVP 2: product pitch. Can be as simple as paper. Show it to someone and ask "would you use this?"

MVP 3: 'concierge' build something that is just barely enough to be usable, probably w lots of manual help Groupon is a good example. They just emailed ppl, printed coupons and sent them to them, to see if ppl would like this. Didn't build any tech. Tested it w PDFs and email. 'wizard of oz': build a frontend but no tech backend. Example early Charles Schwab wanted to see if ppl would do online trading so they built a frontend for ppl to enter orders but on the backend it was human traders seeing those orders and executing them.

Qs: How to find best ppl to do interviews? Come up w 'persona', find ppl who fits that persona. One type of pivot is 'customer-segment' pivot which is changing to a different customer persona and doing more interviews. ]]> http://coryforsyth.com/2012/04/14/intro-to-lean-customer-development-class-notes/feed/ 0 http://coryforsyth.com/2011/11/09/cto-school-session-4-recruiting-and-hiring/ http://coryforsyth.com/2011/11/09/cto-school-session-4-recruiting-and-hiring/#comments Thu, 10 Nov 2011 03:52:49 +0000 cory http://coryforsyth.com/?p=337 .mindmap li { list-style: none; background: none; padding: 0; margin: 0; } .mindmap li>ul li { list-style: disc inside none; display: list-item; } .mindmap p { margin: 0; } .mindmap span.foldopened { color: white; font-size: xx-small; border-width: 1; font-family: monospace; padding: 0em 0.25em 0em 0.25em; background: #e0e0e0; VISIBILITY: visible; cursor:pointer; } .mindmap span.foldclosed { color: #666666; font-size: xx-small; border-width: 1; font-family: monospace; padding: 0em 0.25em 0em 0.25em; background: #e0e0e0; VISIBILITY: hidden; cursor:pointer; } .mindmap span.foldspecial { color: #666666; font-size: xx-small; border-style: none solid solid none; border-color: #CCCCCC; border-width: 1; font-family: sans-serif; padding: 0em 0.1em 0em 0.1em; background: #e0e0e0; cursor:pointer; } .mindmap span.l { color: red; font-weight: bold; } .mindmap a.mapnode:link {text-decoration: none; color: black; } .mindmap a.mapnode:visited {text-decoration: none; color: black; } .mindmap a.mapnode:active {text-decoration: none; color: black; } .mindmap a.mapnode:hover {text-decoration: none; color: black; background: #eeeee0; }

Vivek Sodera from RapLeaf @vsodera

• + - recruiting at Rapleaf
  • start out interviewing 25-40 engineers/month, goal was to increase that multiple times
  • pattern recognition
  • by the end: averaging interviewing 1200-1300 engineers per month
  • philosophy: pass over someone good rather than pick someone bad
    • passed candidates were picked up by google, facebook, etc
• questions

  • + - how many were/are you trying to hire?

    • wanted to keep lean, didn't want to drastically effect culture
    • hire 1-2 per month
    • hiring 1 out of 1000, or 1 out of 1500 people

    + - if you know you only want 1-2 people a month (for a total of, say 10-ish), why not sniper and just choose those people and go after them directly?

    • part of the rejection marketing is to get the word out about the company
    • it's not just hiring, it's also marketing for the company
    • rejected candidates sometimes ended up becoming customers

    + - how many man-hours did you spend on this process?

    • hiring is the most important thing, so that's always their primary focus

      not everyone in the company is involved in the recruiting...the first 15 people were, after about 20 hires not everyone was involved

      depends on where the company is. When you're small you're going to work your ass off finding people and figuring your process

      over time their engineers got much better at pass/failing test results

    + - when you were bringing in 1-2k people per month, how many were involved?

    • the ops specialist who was managing it
    • new engineers would get trained on how the process works and to bring in new people

    + - what about online contests/games for devs?

    • yeah, useful, but sort of low ROI

      helpful if you have a platform you can make available for them to use/learn on

      example: they had their own brilliant dev come up with a very difficult problem, and market it around (to ACM entrants, etc)

      • 50% respond, try it out
      • got a handful of decent apps

      great to find research-minded thinker types...but if you're small maybe you need a *doer* more importantly

    + - q about interns: are they a good use of time?

    • 40% of the interns they ended up hiring full-time
    • vetted them well
    • summer internship

    + - did you ever measure your cost-per-hire

    • outsourced lead gen was the cheapest by far

    + - did you use adsense, facebook ads?

    • yes...but fb ads didn't do well
    • what ended up working was going to conferences (posting little ads above urinals in the bathrooms)
    • played with auto-retweeting, auto @mentioning people who say certain things...

    + - what's the referral process?

    • at one point giving 10k if the person was hired and stayed for more than 90 days

      toned it down to 5k (which was contested)

      if you send us someone who passes the first round, you get $20, 2nd round you get $100, etc etc -- didn't get much success from that

    + - what was best?

    • outsourced lead gen
    • send very informal emails (lowercase words in subject line)
    • a paragraph or two tops...the PS was the call to action
    • A/B test up the wazoo
• + - snipering vs shotgunning
  • snipering
    • passive candidates
    • lots of experience
    • looking for vp eng, cto level roles
    • number of hires small (1-5)
    • outreach via recruiter, referral, phone, email
  • want to give the impression that it's hard to get into your company
    • message is: we want high quality people
  • shotgunning
    • looking for active candidates
    • 0-10 year experience range
    • looking for lower-level positions (software engineer, manager, director)
    • large number of target hires (3-100)
    • the person who runs this is the operations specialist (they build the machine/funnel)
    • need to clearly show what your culture is
    • (preferred approach)
• + - rejection marketing
  • want to give perception that your company is sought-after and exclusive
  • bring as many people into the pipeline as possible
  • and reject as many people
  • rejectees will tell friends, friends will want to apply to see if they are "up to the challenge"
  • increases the number of high-quality organic applicants
  • feed the funnel with low-quality candidates (they will get rejected and tell their peers)
• + - building a recruiting machine
  • define and document core values
  • + - modify recruiting/interviewing flow for scalability
    • phone interviews don't scale to this many candidates...hence online tests
    • "here is what we would ask you in a phone interview, you have an hour to get back to us"
  • hire ops specialist to run the machine
    • they own this
  • outsource menial tasks
  • make the copy interesting
    • no one gets excited by '3.5 years of X, 2 years of Y'
    • think of it as a brochure for your company...
  • fire recruiters, they suck

    • they are working with X companies, maybe you have a retainer

      if they come across a great candidate, they will send their best people to the companies paying the highest commission (which will not be your company)

      they all source from the same places, they all have the same candidates

      caveat: there are some awesome recruiters (but are very rare0

      doesn't like getting candidates from recruiters...they (the candidate) are often lazy...it's a lazy approach to looking for a job

  • iterate, iterate
• recruiting channels
  • outsourced lead generation

    • create a fake linkedin profile

      add linkedin open networkers (they have tons of reach)

      once your linkedin network is highly expanded, you can find more people

      also: odesk...find cheap labor, pay people to go on linkedin and look for types of people, scrape the data...email thousands of those people, see who you can bring in

      get those people onto a monthly newsletter so you can keep emailing them

      • the newsletter was engineering-related
  • direct mail blasts
  • content for developers
  • social media outreach
  • ads/flyers
  • university outreach
  • distributed job posts
  • developer-centric events
    • events that had free beer/sandwiches, learning opps for developers
  • research data sets

Kurt from Intent Media @kurt

• Kurt from Intent Media @kurt
  • internet ecommerce advertising company
  • 2.5 yrs old
  • 42 people
  • just raised $20MM
• questions
  • + - what to do if you come in to a startup as CTO and there's a team there that doesn't agree with you?

    • get credibility

      look at every set of commits that comes in...comment on them if necessary

      (audience suggestion: pair program w/ some of the developers to get familiarity with the code, and respect)

  • + - approx what team size do you stop being a coding cto?

    • it happened organically

      it got to the point where there were so many meetings that he couldn't block out 3- or 4-hour blocks to code

      have to make the decision whether you are coding all the time or you are going to protect your engineers from distractions so they can be coding all the time

      "I never had a 4-hour block, so it was never worth getting started" on some coding

      try to keep engineers out of meetings

  • + - how should the biz side relate to engineering? what level of communication is appropriate?
    • they still all work in an open space
    • priorities get decided upon by sales, bizdev, chief product officer
    • along w/ that, he adds technical thigns like "we need to upgrade rails"
    • present the biz folks with a list...this is what we can do...what do you want me to do
  • + - Q: You  have a CTO above you...so what does he do and what do you do?
    • Kurt handles inward-facing stuff
    • CTO handles outward-facing stuff
      • investor relations
      • he's technical, not a technologist
    • they have each other's backs
  • advice on what to do with an underperforming engineering team and an overbearing demanding biz side?

    • used to work at thoughtworks (agile consulting), they would go into places and consult on agile

      there's a 'consulting answer'

      in a startup environment, the answer is fire those people

      if someone is underperforming, there's no point in saying "let's wait a while and see"

      • never gone back and said, "glad I waited to get rid of that person"

      along with that, if you come in to an underperforming team and it continues to underperform, it looks bad on you

      little more tricky on the biz side of things

  • what are other ways you protect your team or other things the team needs protecting from?
    • protect from: meeting/overhead that you can absorb
    • don't let some sales guy go talk to them to get something developed that they need developed
    • minimizing distractions
    • letting engineering run the show (sort of)
  • can you comment on your hiring process vs vivek?

    • part of it is a numbers game

      need to get out there, meet people, find people

      referrals is a huge part of the way to do it

      open-source some of your company code that is not core to your business...people will use it, fork it, develop it...hire those people

  • do you involve engineers in hiring?
    • yes
    • multiple interviews, multiple tech interviews, a non-tech interview
    • have recruiters in-house
• one of the first employees -- in charge of creating a dev team
  • half engineering/qa/data science
• + - culture
  • if you have an engineering culture it has to permeate the entire company
    • can't just be siloed to the dev side
  • they work on 2-week iterations, releasing 4x a week
  • there's a company meeting every tuesday...very open
    • the biz people explain how they are goign to close a deal this week
    • then if it doesn't close that week they explain why the following week
• + - first steps
  • make it a strong engineering culture
  • the first 2,3,4 hires really set the tone. they are important
  • first hire needs to be a tech guy, needs to be a doer
• + - coming in to a new situation
  • if you come into a place that is in a bad situation
  • need to change engineering, force people to write tests, write good code
  • all the consultants except for one fired themselves
  • "this is an engineering company, engineering always has a say"
  • can't let biz or sales guys run over the engineering
  • have to constantly broadcast information
    • whole company needs to know where the build is
    • what's coming down the pipeline
    • make it clear to see what the tradeoffs are
  • if you are one of the first...at some point you are not an engineer anymore, you are overhead

    • your job is to make it so that the engineers can write code (unimpeded)

      when the CTO is trying to write code, there's no air cover for the rest of the engineers, they are vulnerable to biz folks sneaking in requests, distractions, etc

• + - hiring
  • at an early stage, when you really need to hire, you can't always get the perfect person
  • + - you need to build to your team's strength
    • e.g. he likes ruby, they built first stuff in ruby
    • for the backend ad server, they could only find java guys to hire, so they built in java
  • + - need to keep people challenged
    • don't let people get bored
    • if they get bored, they will leave
    • have to let engineers be engineers
    • if you lose a couple of really good people, it is a waterfall from there on out
    • anyone here (in this room) can walk out the door and find 10 new job offers for more money
  • he brought in people he worked with before, they all knew they would work together well
• + - development

  • allow engineers to code

    every afternoon has time blocked out when no one is allowed to talk to engineers so that they can work

    + - be constantly refining how things are done

    • have an engineering/product retrospective every six weeks where we sit down and talk about what's wrong and how it can be made better

      sometime that's "there are too many meetings"

      sometimes it's "this bizdev person keeps bothering me with requests"

      important thing is to have the input/feedback loop and keep building the culture toward what you want it to be

    keep asking: does this feel right?

    • you have to keep defending what you are there to do

I was lucky enough to make session 3 of CTO School tonight, where Peter Bell, CTO of Skinn.io, spoke about Project Management, Quality Assurance, Estimation, user stories, metrics-driven development, and more. As I've come to expect, it was a very informative and thought-provoking session. I'm looking forward to the next one. Here are my notes:

• specular
• obtrude
• cruciform
• applique
• gimbal
• incursion
• chert
• invaginate
• connubial
• parenchyma
• irrupt
• divest
• umbrage
• exacerbate
• merrythought
• sally
• discursive
• thanatology
• plaint
• imperious
• imbrication
• cowl
• spindle
• prolix
• dyad
• dyadic
• labial
• agnate
• anfractuous
• stridulate
• carmine
• blancmange
• iterant
• timorous
• bandolier
• forbearance
• prostrate

1. ✩Lush Life by Richard Price (January 4th, 2010)
2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (January 12, 2010)
3. Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullman (Jan 16, 2010)
4. Zodiac by Neal Stephenson (Jan 21, 2010)
5. Lowboy by John Wray (Jan 28, 2010)
6. black swan green by David Mitchell (Feb 23, 2010)
7. how to lose friends and alienate people by Toby Young (Feb 14, 2010)
8. ✩The believers by Zoe Heller (Feb 12, 2010)
9. ✩Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (Feb 5, 2010)
10. Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini (Feb 10, 2010)
11. Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo (Mar 29, 2010)
12. Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card (April 11, 2010)
13. ✩Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi (May 7, 2010)
14. The Nimrod Flip-Out by Etgar Keret (May 11, 2010)
15. ✩Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky (May 15, 2010)
16. Spook Country by William Gibson (May 20, 2010)
17. The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson (May 31, 2010)
18. ✩A World Lit Only By Fire by William Manchester (June 30, 2010)
19. ✩Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver (June 10th, 2010)
20. Distracted (June 15th, 2010)
21. Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli (July 1, 2010)
22. ✩Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (July 26, 2010)
23. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (August 5th, 2010)
24. ✩Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl (August 10th, 2010)
25. Logicomix by a group of folks (August 14, 2010)
26. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest by Stieg Larsson (September 1st, 2010)
27. Vurt by Jeff Noon (September 7th, 2010)
28. ✩The Secret History by Donna Tartt (September 20th, 2010)
29. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (Sep 24th, 2010)
30. Wake by Lisa McMann (Sep 26th, 2010)
31. The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare (Oct 4, 2010)
32. ✩The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender (October 24, 2010)
33. ✩Open by Andre Agassi (November 7th, 2010)
34. ✩Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (November 19, 2010)
35. ✩The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris (November 23, 2010)
36. I, Claudius by Robert Graves (December 26th, 2010)
37. Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill (December 29th, 2010)
38. ✩Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde (December 30, 2010)

1. January
• Maho Bay, St John, USVI* (pictures)
• Brooklyn, NY*
2. February
• Red Hook, St Thomas, USVI
• Maho Bay, St John, USVI*
• Bangkok, Thailand (pictures)
• Chiang Mai, Thailand
• Chiang Mai Highlands, Thailand (Trek)
• Chiang Rai, Thailand
• Luang Prabang, Laos
3. March
• Koh Samui, Thailand
• Logan, UT*
4. April
5. May
• Allentown, PA (Father-Uncle-Son Road Trip V. pictures.)
• Strasburg, PA
• Gettysburg, PA
• Front Royal, VA
• Charlottesville, VA
• Blowing Rock, NC
• Asheville, NC
• Pigeon Forge, TN
6. June
• East Hampton, NY
• Bovina, NY
7. July
• Jersey Shore, NJ
• Maipú, Chile
• Santiago, Chile
• Reñaca, Chile
• Great Barrington, MA*
8. August
• St Louis, MO
• Montauk, NY (pictures)
9. September
• Montauk, NY
• Great Barrington, MA* (pictures.)
10. October
• Binghamton, NY (Nat'l Mini-golf championship. pictures
)
• Seattle, WA (Visit Jenna. pictures)
• Key West, FL
• Manhattan, NY*
• Fort Lauderdale, FL*
11. November
• Atlantic Ocean (Cruise. pictures)
• Fort Lauderdale, FL*
• Logan, UT* (Thanksgiving. pictures)
12. December
• Maho Bay, St John, USVI* (pictures)