Why I work...

I was out at dinner the other day with a girl and the subject of work came up. This was a little deeper than "what do you do?" She's working to secure an angel round. We'd talked a bit about my real estate work (I own and manage five rental properties). She asked what I liked about it and my response was "being in control of it." I think that was poorly worded as she interpreted that as "I like telling people what to do."

I was speaking a bit from jobs earlier in my career. In a role where I led engineering at a tiny startup, I watched, bewildered as our tiny business disintegrated because we blew up our main customer relationship. That made me want to get toward sales, thinking I could better control things over there. Presales roles were frustrating in a similar way. Good reps were a pleasure to work with. Bad ones failed to follow Sidney Weinberg's recommendation to be "long term greedy." This would lead to torpedoed relationships and lost sales. Sometimes it wasn't even short term greed driving failures, just sloth or stupidity. Regardless, it's frustrating to watch promising opportunities whither, particularly if you cold called to create them. Knowing what to do and not being able to do it is frustrating. The worst short term greedy reps have very hard careers because they never get into the virtuous cycle of old relationships feeding new relationships, with happy past customers peppering their career and referrals.

When I said I enjoyed "being in control," I really meant something more subtle. A lot of the pleasure in property management comes from building a system that works. I'd argue that desire is in our fundamental nature. Shrodinger made this clear, defining life as an "entropy reducing machine." A rental property is part of a larger machine. Simplifying dramatically, I see three parts:

1. Tenant - The property provides a place to live for someone. Ideally, it's a good place to live at a fair price.
2. Maintenance - The property also provides employment for a variety of tradespeople. Contractors, plumbers, cleaning services and so on all benefit from working with the property manager.
3. Owner - The property also provides the owner a return on investment. That might be leveraged with loans, in which case it is intimately tied to our larger financial systems and the investment returns of many people as well.

So, much of the pleasure of property management is devising a machine where these three parts operate in harmony, benefiting everyone while providing a good return. It's good business. At the same time it's a little ecosystem.

As a child, I enjoyed building things with Legos. In high school, I began learning about bikes and had a good time putting them together. Building on that, I took welding and machining courses in college. While I never developed anything close to the skill that would be required to be a commercial welder, I did have a blast putting together tall bikes and choppers with friends. There's a pleasure to building something static like a Lego model or a bike. However, that pleasure is greatly enhanced when it's part of a larger, functioning system. Similarly a beautiful vacant house, slowly falling into disrepair is a missed opportunity.

Property management is fun because of the level of responsibility and control I have in making the machine work. I get to interview the tenants. I get to hire the contractors. It's been nearly a decade working with some of these people. The ones who do well are rehired and trust develops. That trust flows both ways. I know that quotes are going to be fair because we've already done 30 jobs together. At the same time, they know I'm going to be reasonable on timelines and pay promptly. We win together.

If that trust is breached, there is leeway based on the strength of the relationship. Some relationships falter. Being able to invest in the mutually beneficial relationships and end the negative ones is the key value of the control I mention above.

This is a complex system. It's relationships playing off against physical assets all working together in harmony to benefit everyone. This reduces entropy. It aligns with our very nature.

This dovetails into the question of what management is as well. The contractor I've worked with the most, Mike, knows his business really well. As an example, the city planted a cherry tree on the sewer line at one property. When I called Mike to deal with the sewage flooding the basement, I wasn't concerned with the intricacies of sub-trade timelines and their individual costs, what kind of pipe he was going to use or where the backhoe and asphalt would come from. All I really wanted to know was when the tenants would be able to move out of the AirBnB I'd put them up in and back into the house. Initially he didn't know. It took a while to get a handle on the problem and come up with timelines. Mike knew I had confidence and felt no need to make things up to placate me. Similarly, I knew the limits of my skills and that I wasn't going to be offering Mike any useful advice on how to replace 10ft of sewer line while convincing the city arborist that they'd made a horrible mistake. I did take pictures and learn about the process a bit. That was interesting. One of the great parts of working with others is learning from them.

Similarly, in my job at Oracle there are people on the team who know far more than I do about how our Instance Pools work, the process of listing in our Partner Image Catalog and Object Storage configuration. My job isn't to second guess those people or try to catalog their time and increase their sense of urgency and production by whipping them into shape. Instead, it's to eliminate bureaucratic hurdles and low value (or negative value!) distractions coming in from all directions. My goal is to do this so the intelligent, driven people working on the team can focus on their jobs without distraction. I'm under no illusion that I have the skills or context to swoop in, saving the day, acting as some sort of super employee. Too many people think that's the role of management. Instead, good management is about trust, enablement and unblocking.

In my software focused career, I've gravitated toward complex sales. I've enjoyed working with financial institutions on messy integrations. From a commercial perspective, I've found OEM and the channel fascinating. At times I've, somewhat cheekily, argued that any deal can be characterized as an OEM. For five years I've been mostly in the channel, increasingly focusing on cloud marketplaces. About a month ago I (happily) ended up in a role focused squarely on managing partners and how they work with Oracle Cloud Marketplace.

The opportunity here is ridiculously large. While AWS doesn't break out Marketplace revenue, I've heard it estimated at $500m. Similarly, Microsoft made some comments at Inspire that seem to imply their monthly revenue in Marketplace is $90m. I believe those figures are both the sourced revenue. Influenced IaaS spend and network effects for deployments (rather than standalone applications) probably make the true impact many times that.

The Oracle Cloud Marketplace launched in February with single VM BYOL. Multi-VM stacks based on Terraform launched in June. Much more is coming. Of course, these are just features. Maybe they rise to the level of product if you're being a bit grand. Regardless, they don't have value in a vacuum. Once again, simplifying like the houses, the Marketplace needs three parties working in harmony to have value:

1. Customers - purchasing software via the Marketplace and using it to drive their business
2. Partners - selling software in the Marketplace and generating meaningful brand awareness, leads and revenue from the programs related to that.
3. Cloud - the cloud providing the IaaS and programs that make all this possible, creating virtuous cycles by expanding the ecosystem while charging fair rents for Marketplace transactions.

There are many ways the system could break. We could launch new features in the Marketplace without any listings that leverage them. Similarly we might get two out of three right, launch a feature, recruit some partners and never get any customers. That would have no value for anyone. In fact, it would have a substantial negative value given all the wasted time and effort. There are many ways for partnerships to fail from paper partnerships like logo listings and white papers with no audience to integrations in search a customer who doesn't exist and never will.

The road to a successful partnership is pretty narrow. It involves many different aspects working in harmony simultaneously. The technology needs to be solid. Contracts must be put in place. Integrations need to be created. Marketing has to drive interest in those integrations and listings. Then, as all those aspects began to fire at once, sales needs to step up and nurture leads falling out of the funnel to close. As leads turn to contacts to opportunities, later funnel aspects begin to come into play - consulting and support. While some of these can be pipelined, a number need to spring into existence simultaneously to ensure an MVP that benefits customer, partner and cloud. Specifically, the partnerships, marketing, integrations and infrastructure all need to fire in conjunction. Without that you don't have an MVP, you have a value destroying time sink.

This is complex. It's also great fun. It's building a plane in the sky style stuff. I think a lot of our competitors have failed to offer cohesive programs to link all these parts together. Nonetheless they have gigantic businesses in this space. A lot of our opportunity is to do that better, learning from their earlier mistakes. If tech debt laden with poor partner alignment does well, imagine the impact of new technology and a great strategy executed well. The opportunity is enormous and highly positively asymmetric.

We have a great installed base and an enormous portfolio of LOB applications to lean on. At the same time, we're a laggard in the cloud space and need to overachieve to catch up. It's a challenge and an opportunity. If it works, it'll be by building a system where our customers, partners and Oracle can all get value working together. I see a lot of my role as an advocate for partner value. I love the relationship aspect of it and knowing that if we do the right thing these relationships will improve and I'll be working with the same people, perhaps in different roles, in years to come.