July 13, 2009.
“How are you enjoying being a manager, Jaan?” Atiq asked over a boiling cup of milky Teh Tarik—pulled, frothy, black tea—made by special request for Atiq by one of Ubatoo’s sous-chefs from Malaysia.
With the countless recruiting trips and press interviews, it had been several weeks since Jaan and Atiq had a chance for their usual one-on-one meetings. “Managing is not for me, Atiq. I don’t know how you do it. Personally, I’d rather be left alone. I’ve been working on my new project for a month now, but being a manager is really slowing it down,” Jaan replied.
“What project is this? Completing Touchpoints, I hope?”
“Nope, it’s brand new. I’ve been thinking about where our next breakthrough will come from. The more I think about it, the more I realize Ubatoo already has a massive amount of information about people who are online. I want to see how much we can find out about people not online.” Jaan bounced up to the whiteboard and grabbed a marker, ready to write the moment the need arose. “My mom—she never touches a computer. In fact, she’s afraid of them. Normally, you’d think that Ubatoo couldn’t get any information about her, right?”
“Sure,” Atiq shrugged.
“But I, and my brothers and sisters, write e-mails about my mom and my parents all the time. In fact, the pictures we upload, quite a few have her in them. It’s too easy. Atiq, I don’t know why we haven’t done this before.” Jaan was drawing stick figures in rectangles representing photographs on the board with labels of “Me,” “Brothers,” “Mom.” He continued, excitedly, “Try this, just go to any photo sharing site, ours or any of the others, look at how many pictures have labels on them like ‘Me and mom,’ ‘My mom,’ or even ‘Mom and grandma.’” Another stick figure of grandma. “You’ll get hundreds of thousands of images. If we recognize the woman in a few pictures that I uploaded with this label, voilà, we’ve got her.” A bull’s-eye drawn over the figure of “Mom.” “We know what she looks like, who she’s with in the picture, and what her relation is to the person who uploaded the picture—me. We know she’s my mom. If we know something about me, then we know something about her, too. If we know something about my brothers and sisters, which we do, then that tells us even more about her. With just a little bit more work with the data we already have, we already know a lot about my mom. We just have to put it together.”
“Why would we, though?” Atiq asked skeptically.
But Jaan wasn’t listening. “It’s not even that hard. When I buy a present for my mom, what do I do? I buy it online and have it shipped to her. Sometimes I even attach a note, like ‘Happy Birthday’ or ‘Hope you feel better,’ or ‘Thought you could use this.’ Think how much information Ubatoo has on my mom. Birthdays, illnesses, her likes and dislikes, her address, hobbies, her kids—and never once did she touch a computer.”
Atiq hopped out of his chair and grabbed the marker from Jaan’s hand. He drew a few more boxes with “father” and “classmates” written in them, and arrows pointing haphazardly around the board. “It’s not just you and your brothers and sisters. If your mom’s friends, old classmates, or even your father, for that matter, are online and they talk about your mom or buy her presents, we have all of their profiles to use as well. With all your mom’s relationships, we’d certainly be able to profile her. There are old class rosters and yearbooks online, too; they must have information to mine as well.” Atiq darkened the circles of the bull’s-eye centered on “Mom.” “Very nice, Jaan. We should have done this earlier. It’s so obvious.”
Jaan smiled a very satisfied smile.
Atiq stared at the whiteboard a moment longer, imagining connections drawn between the hundreds of stick figures that would eventually be connected to “grandma,” new sources of information being brought online from the mass of photos their users had uploaded, and profiles being created on people who had never touched any of their products. “That’s clever, Jaan. I’ll take it upon myself to find some people to work with you on this,” Atiq promised. Then he added, “Might want to keep it quiet until we give our PR department a chance to develop a positive spin on this before news of it leaks, though, okay?”
Focus, he had to remind himself, focus. “But listen, Jaan, I really need you to wrap up Touchpoints, too. I’m counting on you for that. We need to deploy it across the company, and it’s not going to happen without you.”
“Don’t worry so much. I’ve got an eye on it. The interns are already using the system every day, and the new hires are creating additional features. It’ll be done and fully deployed this summer. I don’t need to supervise it as closely anymore.”
Struggling not to let his frustration show, Atiq replied, “Jaan, you’re in charge of it. Keep a close eye on it, okay?” Good scientists don’t always make good managers, Atiq thought to himself. He’d have to remember to get someone to take over Jaan’s management responsibilities soon.
“How are the interns doing, by the way?” Atiq asked. This was the first time they had spoken about them since the conference call about Aarti and William on the second day of intern season.
“They’re fine. I don’t talk to them much—I’ve been so engrossed in my new project. I usually just e-mail the interns and the new hires when a new project comes in for them to work on. So far, they’ve finished the projects quickly, so I imagine everything’s going well. Don’t worry, I’m working them hard,” Jaan replied with a grin.
“I hope you’re not burning them out. When’s the last time you met with them?”
“Atiq, they’re interns. Don’t worry about them. We can always get a new batch,” Jaan joked.
Atiq wasn’t smiling.
“I worked with them for a week when they first arrived. They’re up to speed,” Jaan continued more seriously.
“Jaan, maybe you could meet with them more? It might be a good idea to suggest a few more interesting projects, too. I don’t want them getting bored and doing something pointless for their summer.”
“Okay, I’ll try to find out what they’re working on. Just let me get a bit further on my project, and I’ll set up regular meetings with them.”
Management by negotiation—this was all the pushing Atiq could do. Hire the brightest minds and herd them like cats. Push too hard and they’ll leave the company. Ubatoo’s competitors would happily entice them before their resignation letters finished printing. Ubatoo’s culture would never allow for a more direct order to be given, unless, of course, it was from Xiao.