On Friday, December 1st, 2018 I confessed the biggest screw up of my career on stage at the Dr. Phillips Center. I also talked about how fear leads to failure and 5 steps each of us can take to be more open in the workplace.

In case you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to lately, I’ve been building educational content for Vue Mastery, my new startup.  There’s not much on the website quite yet, but we’ve been blogging, helping produce the Official Vue Newsletter and Podcast, and we produced the video on the front page of the technology (if you hit the big play button).

It was the second week of the Human Element Practitioner workshop, and I was in the shower trying to solve a mystery. Twice the day before my girlfriend (at the time) had been vulnerable with me and both times I’d made light of it. She got angry at me, I apologized, and then she got angry at me for not getting angry at her. I was frustrated and confused.

She was convinced that I had pent up anger at her and it was now coming out in other ways. She was convinced that I was “poking” at her in these moments of vulnerability because of built up anger or resentment. I didn’t think this was the case, but something didn’t feel right. I went over the clues in front of me:

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At a hackfest in 2006

From 2006 to 2009 Jason Seifer was a close friend, and as of last Saturday he is no longer with us. I’m really sad about this.  We made an amazing team those few years, co-founding a blog & business (Rails Envy), educating people on Ruby on Rails, and creating a bunch of funny videos.  In early 2009 we had a falling out and because we didn’t account for what would happen if we hit a crossroads in our business.  We had to shut down the blog and company we both had worked so hard to create.  It sucked.

I regret the way things went down, which is part of the reason I was driven to create some videos on how to deal with equity more fairly.  It might have saved our friendship.  The following years I reached out to try to repair things, but he never was interested.  I wish I would have tried harder.  It sucks not having any more chances to repair the friendship, or at least an opportunity to say thank you.

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Two months ago I thought I knew what Open Source meant, but it turns out that I didn’t know the half of it.  Since then my new show Open SourceCraft has published eight episodes and is now available to watch online or by subscribing to the audio or video feed.  In these interviews, I’ve learned how open source has enabled people to get jobs, built communities, and created new business models.  Here are some of the trends that have emerged.

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I will be building a new company in the next few years, and I know what my biggest competitive advantage will be. It won’t be about compensation, an innovative idea, or even about putting people first, as you might have heard in my talk on the subject. It will be The Human Element, a powerful, simple, and practical approach to help create the authentic, ideal, organization as created by Will Schutz.

The best way to experience and learn this approach is by taking an immersive five day workshop called “The Human Element”. Before I left Code School I brought this workshop to my leadership team, and many of them described it as a life-changing experience. Recently I took a course to become a Licensed Human Element Practitioner so I can teach the workshop myself.

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The actual room at Pluralsight in Salt Lake City.

It was a Tuesday in late October 2015 and I was dreading the conversation I was about to have. I was sitting across from Aaron Skonnard (CEO) and Greg Woodward (CFO) of Pluralsight, two people who I had come to admire and respect. Unfortunately, I had to tell them that I wanted to leave the company, Code School, that they had acquired 12 months prior. I felt like I was going to be sick.

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There are more than a few ways to use content to drive traffic.  As I’ve built my businesses I’ve discovered a few ways to do this effectively, but I always knew there was more to learn.

A month ago I attended Content Marketing World in Cleveland.  The conference was full of Content Marketing Directors, VPs of Marketing, and Consultants who get paid to take content and use it to drive revenue.  I learned a ton from these people, so put together a talk which I initially gave FLBlogCon.  Enjoy!

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In 1997 I was in my first year of college. Instead of the feelings of excitement and anxiety, that were the norm of young students, it was for me a time of loneliness and shame. I felt stigmatized and broken. Little did I know it at the time but these traumatic events would empower me to create the safe and successful culture at Envy Labs and then Code School. I want to show you how one lead to another, with the hope it might help you in your journey.

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I’m sure you’ve heard people say that team is everything and ideas are worth nothing. I think this mostly true, though I’ve run into many entrepreneurs who believe that it’s mostly their idea is what will make them successful. They are usually the ones who make you sign an NDA just to give you a glimpse of their project.

If we assume the best way to ensure your success is to put people first, how exactly do we do that? In this talk I go through the most important principles to put people first.

Concepts like:

• Giving Effective Guidance
• When and where to give Guidance
• Dealing with bad habits
• How to deal with bad meetings
• Understanding your human tendencies to make up stories and get defensive
• Resisting defensiveness
• Conflict resolution
• How to be a coach
• Growth vs Fixed mindset
• How to give effective feedback
• Celebrating and appreciating people
• The importance of vision and goal setting

Many of these principles I learned working with Laura and Stephanie from Key Talent Solutions.  If you want to help your team grow in these areas, get in touch with them.

Click here to signup for Part 2 free.

About 8 years ago equity broke my business and severed one of the best friendships I ever had. If we would have set things up more fairly in the beginning this all would have been avoidable. Instead we had to dissolve the business and abandon the brand we both worked so hard to create.

In case you’re not familiar, your “equity” refers to how much you own of a business. In the startup world it’s what I might want to pay you until we start making cash. Equity is kind of like a promise for future cash. If you work for me for equity I’m promising you I’ll try to make it worth a lot some day when we sell the business or some other financial event occurs.

In my opinion the only fair way to do equity is something called the Dynamic Equity Split. Instead of equity being divided up in the beginning (too early) or when investment comes (too late) this method divides up equity as the company is built. Equity is dynamically based on the quantity of resources each person puts in.

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