July 22nd, 2009

Erica Stenquist jazzes up the walls of Berklee

My incredibly talented sister Erica Stenquist was recently hired by her college – Berklee College of Music, to create a mural for the dining hall. She was given a modest budget for materials and a generous check to liven up the walls.

I think the results speak for themselves – I think she might need to stop by the barren walls at CampusLIVE and work some magic!

Check out all the photos of the mural online.

July 14th, 2009

A great night out with Keith Ferrazzi and the Greenlight Community

Some of the CampusLIVE team and I rode the T into Boston last night for a Keynote by Keith Ferrazzi, by far the favorite author of our staff. He was speaking about his new book titled “Who’s Got Your Back“. If you haven’t read Ferrazzi – now is the time.

The CampusLIVE team with Keith Ferrazzi

I knew the night was going to be great after Keith ended up in our elevator. We introduced ourselves and he showed a genuine interest in what we were doing. We all headed into the keynote at this point.

Keith is incredibly inspiring and the exercises he had the audience go through clearly resonated with the crowd. After discussing how we all needed to go home and really put his ideas to work he pointed out our company to the entire audience. He said we looked like a “Group of Mormons” which everyone got a chuckle out of.

After the talk almost everyone took off – not us. Anyone who has read “Never Eat Alone” knows one of Keith’s big lessons is to plan your attack and to be audacious – Get out there and find a way to meet the people you want to meet. We knew Keith would appreciate us staking out his entourage after the evening.

We stuck at the exit of the room and like clockwork Keith walked by us and invited us to drinks after his dinner with the governor (Deval Patrick). I was impressed – I’ve never heard someone say so matter of fact that they were having dinner with the governor.

Keith Ferrazzi's Birthday Cake

It turned out that it was Keith’s b-day and the governor was having dinner with him and about 25 of his close friends. After the dinner we were invited into the party and had a great time with Keith and a lot of the Greenlight crew. We bounced some questions off him and got some great feedback. The even invited Mark to play some guitar for the guests – we couldn’t believe it.

Lesson learned: Always dress well and be ready for anything. You just may see the governor, sip champagne and cut birthday with your favorite author – all without expecting it.

We told Keith we’d get back to him in a few weeks after trying to implement some of his strategies. I have a really good feeling that his feedback is going to make a big difference.

July 6th, 2009

Do you bill a customer when it costs you more than whats due?

My bill each month for Amazon AWS web services is exactly $0.02. I have a self-hacked backup solution that runs through another cloud carrier. I use amazon for a few I/O calls a day – resulting in $0.02 in charges per month.

The question is, why do they bill me? Surely a CFO or smart board member realized that billing someone $0.02 actually costs them money. Merchant services charge flat fees + percentages for every transaction. This is usually something like $0.30 a 3.5%. I’m sure lower rates are negotiated by Amazon, operating on such a massive scale. But still, there is no doubt in my mind that Amazon spends more money on processing my payment than they make off me.

Another interesting scenario is when Comcast sent me a refund check for $0.24 inside an envelope with a $0.42 stamp on it. Why didn’t they just credit my account?

I wonder if any companies have policies where they just don’t bill clients when this happens?