Tami Reiss

Great article from Womens2.0 on 2011 trends and what’s next.

http://www.women2.org/a-venture-capitalists-take-on-2011-trends-whats-next-for-2012/

My dad sent this to me. It’s a list of quotes from Steven Wright. They are humorous…enjoy

(and don’t ask me where #7, #23, or #32 are)

1 – I’d kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.

2 – Borrow money from pessimists — they don’t expect it back.

3 – Half the people you know are below average.

4 – 99% of lawyers give  the rest a bad name.

5 – 82.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

6 – A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.

7 – A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

9 – All those who believe in psycho kinesis, raise my hand.

10 – The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese

11 – I almost had a psychic girlfriend. But she left me before we met.

12 – OK, so what’s the speed of dark?

13 – How do you tell when you’re out of invisible ink?

14 – If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.

15 – Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.

16 – When everything is coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.

17 – Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.

18 – Hard work pays off in the future; laziness pays off now.

19 – I intend to live forever. So far, so good.

20 – If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?

21 – Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines.

22 – What happens if you get scared half to death twice?

24 – Why do psychics have to ask you for your name?

25 – If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.

26 – A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.

27 – Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.

28 – The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the
bread.

29 – To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.

30 – The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard

31 – The sooner you fall behind, the more time you’ll have to catch up.

33 – Everyone has a photographic memory; some just don’t have film.

34 – If your car could travel at the speed of light, would your headlights work?

Now that I have a steady job, this blog might as well get more personal. As always the theme will be how connections rule the world.

I’ve posted in the past about the importance of putting things out there, actually requesting something to happen.  My philosophy is that if you don’t tell the universe (and preferably an actual human being) what you want, chances of it actually happening are slim.

So here’s where it gets personal… two years ago a tall reddish-headed guy walks into my temple. Because of my innate attraction to the gingery folk I go over and introduce myself. He ends up being a great guy who I completely crush on but is totally immersed in a long term relationship. We become friendly and share many mutual friends. Over a year later, that relationship comes to a crashing halt and he is devastated.

On a hike with a mutual friend I say “When so and so is no longer broken, I would really like to go on a date with him. Please tell him then.” It turns out that our friend didn’t think it was appropriate to wait and told him pretty immediately. It was a good idea because my crush spent the next 7 months figuring things out and then evaluating whether or not he wanted to date me too.

Last week this all came out during proclamations of mutual attraction. We’ve had the most excellent week together and I’m finally understanding what everyone else says about how easy a relationship can be.

I’m not saying that this is the guy I’m going to spend the rest of my life with (though ask me in a few more months and I may), but there’s very little way that we’d be able to explore the possibility of what we can create together had I and our mutual friend not passed the word along…

Rocco is a wonderfully friendly beagle that will be staying with me for the next 3-6 months. Come over and meet him!

More info:

Rocco is 11 months old and has an awesome family that just moved to Australia. Before they put him through the rigorous quarantine process they want to make sure they really want to live there. (Let’s be serious it’s Australia, who wouldn’t want to live there?)

So… Rocco is mine for the next 3-6 months while they make their decision.

Even more info:

Rocco loves long walks on the beach and toys that squeak.

Web 3.0 is the Social Web right? So why shouldn’t it be helping us get fit and be healthy? Well it is!

I was very impressed with the tools available online and on my iPhone to help connect me to resources and other individuals who had similar goals.

My goal was to lose 20 lbs by my birthday on March 22nd. I only lost 18, but for less than 3 months of work that’s AWESOME! (or at least that’s what all my connections online were telling me).

What tools was I using?

1) Google Talk : This one was simple, I posted my goal for the first week and then my progress. It was great having my friends cheering me on. It also encourages friends to invite me to activities that would promote my goals.

2) Twitter: @tamireiss was filled with many similar updates about my goals and accomplishments. The larger community wasn’t as responsive as my personal network, but still great to hear from them.

2) Myplate from Livestrong: This is like weightwatchers but FREE. Either on their iPhone app or the web users can enter daily food intake and exercise expenditure. What is really cool is their distance tracker where people like you and me can share our routes.

Now, he’s to the last few pounds and keeping it off. At least I know who to connect with to help.

So I just posted 40 jobs that were sent to me from my friend Gabriel to the website and tweeted the link and am helping others retweet the link too. Let’s see how many people we can get jobs

http://tamireiss.com/tami/non-profitlegalngo-jobs-in-la/

I can’t believe it, I have 2 apps that are actually in the Apple Iphone App Store… craziness!!! More to come… more to come!

http://mystartrax.com/startrax-blog/

Six months ago, shortly after I left a bad employment situation, I contacted my friend Andrew Warner to help me find “my new home”. He connected me with many entrepreneurs and people throughout the Los Angeles tech scene. One of the first lunches I went on through an Andrew connection was with Eric Stephens who then was at Mahalo and is now at Etsy. Eric encouraged me to start a blog about all the cool companies and people I would be exposed to which is how Tami’s Network was created. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Eric for doing so, as blogging (even if you update as infrequently as I have) has been truly fun. My blog has been read by some really well known CEOs and CTOs as part of my interview process for part time work over the past few months. It was an opportunity to show people that although I was fresh, I had some idea of what was going on.

Now I will tell the story of how connections and networking got me my new position as the Associate Project Manager on the Technical Consulting team at Cornerstone on Demand (a Talent Management Software as a Service company in Santa Monica). I will be referencing points I made in other posts to show how no individual networking technique created this opportunity, but a combination of many (yes I know there are a lot of hyperlinks, but it’s to make a point).

I was called two weeks ago an acquaintance of mine who is the Assistant Director of HR at the company called me about the position. She said to me the CEO remembered working with me on a small project a few years back and that she remembered when I had volunteered to run her sister’s kitchen for a charity event. They both were impressed with my organizational skills, my calm in a fast paced stressful environment, and ability to talk to people at many levels. These are skills they felt would be helpful with their needs and because the CEO had seen me recently he wanted to check in to see if I was available to apply. I spent a week interviewing for the position, and know it would not have been mine had I not been sure to send thank you emails every step along the way.

Also, I am quite sure that I would not have been as strong of a candidate without spending the last six months learning as much as I could about technology per recommendations from Mark Geller (of Klickfu) among others. With this encouragement I have invested the last three months working under the dream team of Mike Jones, Mike Macadaan, and Sean Percival at Tsavo Media. I have learned so much in such a short time because they and the rest of the Tsavo team are so bright and were always happy to spend an extra minute to explain all aspects of our products and sites to me. Thank you.

Now for the new job, what does an Associate Project Manager on the Technical Consulting team at Cornerstone on Demand do? And how does this fit into my career experience and goals? At CoD I will be facilitating conversations between our clients and our programmers during the sale and implementation of the product. I will help understand the needs of the customers and various users and then work with our technical team to create tailor made talent management solutions in a very timely manner.  The company provides a Software as a Service, meaning everything is web-based (the future for everything technological), and is recognized as a leader in the field of human capital management. I will be drawing on my experiences both at Farmers in product development and my years in event planning to help me prioritize, juggle, and come up with the best solutions for every problem I am presented. Cornerstone has an amazing track record with their clients (98% retention) and staff (95% retention) so I should be there for the foreseeable future. There’s tons of room for growth and they have me on a great career trajectory within the company already. I am really excited to start this new chapter.

Now for some other questions:

Will I be moving back to Santa Monica? As great as being walking/biking distance to work would be, I’m going to hold off  at least until my lease is done at Casa de Flores and save up some money so that when I move I can outfit my new apartment/home with some pretty cool stuff.

Will I continue to blog? Of course! But only with big updates, I have twitter for the little stuff. I’ve been toying with the idea of changing the blog into a challenge to see if there are 6 degrees of separation from Tami. Sort of a give me a person’s name and if I can’t figure out how we’re connected within 6 degrees I’ll give you a $100. But I think I’m going to hold off because I’m going to be a little busy.

What about the Iphone apps? They are doing great, please check out the website over the next few weeks. After some beta testing we realized some problems needed to be addressed and are working on them right now. Within the next two weeks we will be submitting them to Apple. Jamie Diamond will be helping me develop a PR pitch and will promote them with me during the initial launch. I have decided to blog about the experience of developing the apps and will be having a daily or weekly update on the sales and profitability of the 11 apps. No one seems to have done this, and everyone wants to know, so I’ve decided to tell them. One of them will be free (ObamaTrax) but ad supported, so we will get to test how price impacts number of installations and whether through ads the app will still deliver revenue. The other app that I hope will gain a large amount of popularity is IphoneTrax, which will be a blogregator for Iphone related business and technology news; it’s the app that every Iphone user needs. The other 9 apps are also blogregators but focus on celebrities such as Tween Stars and Pop Stars. I’m hoping to make back my investment with them and make some extra money to potentially develop some more of them for sports teams and dynamic ones that will allow people to choose what they want to blogregate. It would also be nice to be able to take some of the profits and purchase a home in the LA area (but that’s more of a dream situation).

That’s all for now.

Email I received from Mogees June 2, 2009:

Dear Mogees User:

We regret to inform you that the Mogees service will be terminated on 6/15/09 (two weeks from today). We recommend you take the necessary steps to remove the Mogees SDK from your application before then. We will make the final payouts sometime before the end of the month.

We would like to thank you for being a Mogees user. Best of luck with the success of your applications!

Best,

The Mogees Team

It’s been over a month since I’ve posted, but it’s not that I haven’t been busy networking and learning, it’s that I’ve been working on myself.

It’s great to make new connections, contacts, and friends, but it’s really important never to forget about the person you’re stuck with for the rest of your life… YOU!

Things I’ve been doing to connect with myself, in no particular order of importance or level of help connecting to me.

1) Waking up for 4am yoga… yeah crazy I know… my roommate heard about it and we wen. We were two of four people crazy enough to be there. I slept through most of it, but hey I tried something new.

2) Walking around my neighborhood to Momo Sushi. It’s a 3 mile loop and I got to watch Culver City High School beat Beverly in baseball while eating.

3) Making dinner for a friend. Sometimes a nice dinner at home with whatever I an find in the pantry/fridge and great conversation is the best way to remind yourself where you come from and who you are.

4) Watching old movies. I have a thing that I like to see the classics. In college I took an American Cinema course to be forced to watch films like Singing in the Rain, Girl with a Yellow Ribbon, and the Godfather. It was great! In the past few weeks I’ve watched All the Presidents Men, Boondock Saints, The Emperor’s Club, and Full Metal Jacket… this week hopefully I’m going to watch Taxi Driver.

5) I returned to Rockclimbing. This was an activity I took up the last time I was unemployed and was looking for something that would provide positive reinforcement in the absence of a man or a boss. This weekend some friends and I went climbing in Point Dume on the beach in Malibu. There was a pod of dolphins and humpback whales that cam by just a few hundred feet off shore. It was amazing!

6) Free Yoga class at Lulu Lemon. The instructor was amazing, and during the class I came up with the name for one of the sections of the Iphone Apps (”Xtras”) and a quality tagline “Stalk and Talk with StarTrax”. Mental clarity often comes when you aren’t trying to connect with anyone but yourself.

7) Reading my favorite magazine… The Week. Much like other things I like, it pulls together pieces of columns from top news sources to provide less biased reporting on the top stories from the previous week. If you’ve never read a copy, I’ll give you one. It might be the best news in print. I haven’t gotten the chance to pick up a book to read, but maybe sometime soon.

Catching up on my DVR/Tivo. I have a guilty pleasure… it’s called Brothers and Sisters on ABC. Until I got a DVR I used to watch it on Abc.com, but I’ve always watched 2-3 episodes at a time. I’m not very good with waiting for cliffhangers to be completed, so catching up with a few episodes at once works out nicely.

9) Going to NYC. I maybe the only person who goes to New York and relaxes, but the GEL 2009 conference was a great excuse to visit my two best friends and sisters who live there, and not do very much else. I think I had 80 emails on my blackberry that collected while I was there, but I got to them eventually and no one seemed to be too mad to wait a day or two. In NYC just sitting on buses and subways for long periods of time can be a very meditative experience.

10) Walking my old dog. When I lived in Santa Monica, land of the lucky people, my roommate had a wonderful golden retreiver named Bella. She’s the best dog ever… chill and friendly… and super soft to pet. When I was forced to move out (my roommate’s fiance was moving in), it was agreed that I would get “visitation rights” with Bella. Now that I’m in Santa Monica practically every day to work at Tsavo, I get to go over and have Bella accompany me on a long walk along the ocean at least once a week. Few things are as relaxing an calming as walking along the ocean, listening to the Beatles, and having a friendly companion like Bella.

11) Sleep. I’ve been sleeping a lot more. It turns out that every day is better if you’ve gotten some sleep the night before. Who would have thunk it? There was a point in January/February where I was sleeping 4-5 hours a night and working my tail off. This did not make me happy and didn’t make me that fun to be around, so I’ve been sleeping more. It means I can’t be at as many events, or be there for after parties, but I feel better, and as mentioned in the beginning, it’s all about ME for this post.

Please tell me what you do to connect with yourself….