I spent the day Wednesday doing telephone support and here is an email someone sent to support@fb after speaking with me:

When the Founder answers the phone, that’s the kind of company I want to do business with.

Just FYI…

Good to speak with you Mike! Thanks for your time.

Thanks,

Kevin Downey

Daniel was good enough to shoot this ticket my way and I can’t tell you how many of these notes I’ve received over the years - but it’s not just me who gets them. Levi does, so do our development and marketing teams. Customers get excited when they know they are being served by people who can make an impact on the business. They feel engaged and so they should.

Bar none, The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment is one of the best reads I’ve had this year (it’s a blog post).

If you don’t know Marc Andreessen of Ning and Netscape fame, his entrepreneurial insights are head and shoulders about just about anything you can find anywhere - check out his blog.

P.S. Marc…where’s part 2?

I am young, I am inexperienced - at least when compared with senior management at established companies. What I have going for me is that I know that and I accept it.

It’s great starting companies, but odds are you need help to do it successfully. On many occasions I have recommended advisors for entrepreneurs, but it’s not just leaders who need advice - your staff do too. Why? Because you can’t do all the hard work. When you are running a fast growing company your staff are wrestling with tough problems, and when they’re doing that they *deserve* help that you probably can’t give them.

We’ve had a fantastic response to our OSX Dashboard Widget, and are working hard to improve the functionality and vitality of all the 3rd party add-ons that have been popping up.

For those just joining the conversation, Widgets are like little mini-applications that run on your computer. The first widget-like things were probably the Desk Accessories (initially known as desk ornaments) introduced with the very first Macintosh computers. In the modern incarnation, they are little chunks of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and they provide such things as the current weather, sports scores, flight status, and movie listings. All widgets run under a program such as Dashboard, Yahoo! Widgets (formerly Konfabulator), Google Desktop Gadgets, Windows Vista Sidebar, and gDesklets. Usually a widget has to be written for a specific widget system; you can’t run a gDesklet in the Windows Vista Sidebar, for example.

Just a quick announcement for anyone who may be trying to reach us in the office today: the office is closed for Victoria Day Monday, and we’ll be back at it Tuesday.

If you are interested in the history surrounding this May holiday, Daniel wrote about it here.

When I was a kid, my dad would occasionally travel for work. When he did he would sometimes bring me home sand in a bottle, or once he brought me home what looked like an empty bottle, but it was actually full of warm, sun-soaked air from wherever he was returning from. He would explain that he was trying to bottle some of the things he saw and experienced so I could share them with him.