I love my FriendFeed. Here’s a list of top bloggers who are using the service. Why do I love it? It’s one place you can find all my stuff and, even, comment on it. It’s amazing the discussions that a 140-character “Tweet” on Twitter can generate. I subscribe to a ton of people on FriendFeed and notice that often the conversations after a Twitter message will be 1000x longer (and generally more interesting) than the Twitter itself. Good stuff, this weekend I’ll try out SocialThing too. I got a demo and it looked pretty cool as well (although it doesn’t support as many services).

I’ve met and interviewed hundreds of CEOs and, while you get a sense with many of them that they have leadership skills — after all, why are they CEO if they don’t — it’s rare that you hear a story that so clearly defines a real business leader.

Yesterday I met such a guy: Chairman of Rackspace, Graham Weston.

Why do I know he’s a business leader? Well, let’s back up and start from the top.

Yesterday he drove me around the neighborhood in Windcrest, Texas.

This is not a place you’d probably like to live. It’s economically depressed. How depressed? Well, even the local Walmart closed down.

We drove around and I saw store after store that was shuttered. Evidence of the economic troubles this neighborhood is going through is all around.

So, when Jack Leonhart, mayor of Windcrest, came to Graham and asked him to move Rackspace’s headquarters there, it’d be understandable if Weston would have answered “thanks, but no thanks.”

He probably should have, because when he brought that idea back to Rackspace’s employees and executives they thought he had been doing some illegal drugs somewhere.

It was an idea that everyone hated so much, several Rackspace executives and employees told me, that when Rackspace hired a firm to do focus groups with employees that firm quit after almost getting assaulted at employee meetings. They thought it was a hopeless idea.

After all, there was even a well-publicized shooting at the bus stop in front of the mall.

But today Rackspace is moving into the mall (video of Graham showing me the mall from the outside), right on schedule, and everyone we talked with yesterday thought it was the most exciting thing that Rackspace had ever done.

Wait a freaking second. How did one guy who had an absolutely crazy idea that 1,400 people hated, including his partners, turn this all around in about a year?

Leadership.

Don’t take my word for it, listen in as I talk to Graham and Rackspace co-founder Dirk Elmendorf about this. Elmendorf, in the video, told how Weston convinced 1,400 people one-by-one and turned a crazy idea into reality.

Business leadership. There it is. Thank you to Rob La Gesse who introduced me to not just Graham and Dirk, but a whole range of interesting geeks in San Antonio, TX. That video shows us at a beer fest last night where I met one of the guys who built the first Wifi modem along with a famous developer who built much of the stuff behind the Amiga.

We shot most of the interview on our HD camcorders, so we’ll have that up on FastCompany.tv in a couple of weeks.

In that interview you’ll hear his latest crazy ideas: he’s opening up Rackspace to the community and won’t build a security fence around the Rackspace plant to keep them out. In fact, he’s putting a park right in front of the building. More of that and more about Rackspace’s business in the interview we did with our professional equipment.

UPDATE: I just spent an hour talking with Sarah Lacy and apologized directly to her, and then we had an interesting talk about the industry, sexism, her interview and why she took the line of questioning that she did, and her perspective. I highly recommend you read Brian Solis’ post following up on this interview, because it gives her perspective and matched what I learned from her (that the SXSW conference planners wanted her not to take audience questions, wanted her to take the interview in a more business-centric direction because Facebook had a separate developer-centric event at SXSW, etc). Anyway, there’s lots of lessons here for everyone involved. Me, audience, Sarah, conference planners, etc. Dave Winer and I discussed it on a podcast this morning too.

+++

When I arrived 15-minutes into the now famous interview of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, by BusinessWeek reporter Sarah Lacy the audience had already turned (it was two days ago and it still is the #1 topic of conversation on blogs and at SXSW, which is the conference that this happened at). Usually I try to get to these things early, and sit up front, but I had other interviews and things going on and I’d already been warned that there wouldn’t be any real news at this event. Facebook is working on some major new features, but they simply aren’t ready to show off in public. I’m already hearing rumors of another F8 event (last year’s event, where Facebook first showed off its application platform, seems like it was 10 years ago, which tells us a little bit about how our expectations for instant gratification are increasing).

I arrived in the overflow room because I already knew from watching Twitter that the main hall was packed. When I walked in I met people leaving already and I could tell they weren’t leaving to go to the bathroom. They were leaving in protest. My friend Francine Hardaway wrote later that she walked out in disgust. Susan Bratton was so disappointed that she wrote four blog posts about it.

I found a seat and asked the guy next to me how it was going. “Not well, it’s really boring,” was the answer.

I listened for a few more minutes and watched the audience reaction and realized that it wasn’t just boring but that the audience was building up hostility toward what was going on at the video screen.

But let’s back up. I refrained from blogging about this because I then became part of the story, due to my Twitter stream. Here, let’s look at that now:

12:43 p.m. March 9: Zuckerberg is giving lots of PR answers. Lacy is asking too many business questions. (this is about 45 minutes into the interview, if I remember right).

12:47: lacy needs to study guy Kawasaki. His interview of ballmer was 1000 times better

12:53: Twitterer’s hate Lacy.

12:58: Sarah Lacy lost control of the interview because she just isn’t very good. Twitter is going crazy with critiques.

01:00: @markwallace Lacy didn’t do her homework on the audience. This is a geek/designer/creative audience. Not one focused on business.

01:01: They want to hear about APIs and platforms and what Facebook is going to do.

01:01: She is totally getting defensive now, really poor empathy for the audience.

01:02: The audience as getting outright hostile toward Lacy and she basically asked audience to send her a message about why she sucked.

01:04: The audience is asking Zuckerburg better questions than Lacy did. Totally agree with @heiko.

01:06: @techcrunch I know Zuckerberg is no easy interview. But yours was far far far better than Sarah’s.

01:07: @techcrunch she totally lost control of the interview and had no clue how she was coming across. Still doesn’t “I thought it was going well.

And on it went. Onstage it went worse. Audience members had taken over the interview and Lacy made things worse by trying to argue with them about how well the interview was going. The audience had decided that it wasn’t going well. Later Lacy rubbed it in, by Twittering: “seriously screw all you guys. I did my best to ask a range of things.” She also went on YouTube to try to explain what happened to her from her perspective.

We had turned into assholes. It wasn’t just the back of the room, either. Nor was it just the overflow room. People in the front of the room were yelling out questions. The entire audience erupted for a 26-second applause line when Zuckerberg asked Lacy to ask questions (which confused Lacy, because she was unaware that the audience had been turning against her).

The audience turned into assholes was the conclusion of Mike Arrington, founder of Tech Crunch, who, wrote a post, saying this was nothing more than a witch burning.

Some other analysis: Jemima Kiss in the Guardian’s blogs: The peculiar Mark Zuckerberg keynote interview.

College professor and famous blogger, Jeff Jarvis, had the most accurate early analysis that I could find in a post titled: Zuckerberg interview: What went wrong.

Brian Solis spent five hours with Lacy after the interview and did a bunch more reporting before writing a very long, but most excellent, analysis of the events. He also explains why Sarah Lacy was the interviewer, and gives many details about the friendship between Zuckerberg and Lacy.

My thoughts?

1. This interview was doomed before it happened. Several of my friends didn’t go because they already knew there wouldn’t be any news. After all, if there was going to be news, Kara Swisher would have reported it and she would have been invited to have been there. We also knew that Zuckerberg probably would be boring (he reminds us of Bill Gates who, despite giving speeches for 30 years, is still boring). The expectations on Zuckerberg are so high now, that he’d have to do something like Ballmer’s Monkey Boy dance to meet them.

2. The muttering continues, even last night. In fact, one woman, who I won’t name here, is going to moderate a panel discussion today and she told me “I hope I don’t pull a Lacy.” Overall, now that the emotion is out of it for the most part, people are still saying this was an interview gone bad and are disappointed that Lacy lashed out at the audience instead of trying to figure out what they wanted.

3. Zuckerberg himself, yesterday, realized that he didn’t answer the questions the audience wanted to have answered, so he did a “redo” of the interview, this time with just him in front of an audience. The consensus there is that this one went much better for both Zuckerberg and the audience.

4. There is quite a bit of sexism that is a subtext here. Lots of people in the hallways commented on her choice of clothing (she wore a short skirt that made her legs very prominently displayed). And on n her flirtatious behavior (she twirled her hair, many people told me afterward, like a schoolgirl in love). I tried to ignore this, but I now am pretty sure that if a guy were doing the interview, and did just as badly, that the audience wouldn’t have turned on him so harshly. This was amplified by her constant bringing up of personal situations (she bragged that she was hanging out with Zuckerberg at a party the night before).

5. Several people last night thought this was great PR for Lacy, noting that her book sales had gone up, and that now everyone knew who she was and, even, felt a little bad for her, so that’ll lead to increased attention next time she does an interview. I sort of agree with that analysis, noting that I’ve had a bad time on stage, too (at LeWeb several years ago our keynote was generally panned and the audience got a little hostile toward us there too — that didn’t stop me from being asked to do more speeches, and, in fact, made me a better speaker).

6. Zuckerberg himself is a very tough interview. Why? Cause Zuckerberg is no Gary Vaynerchuk or Guy Kawasaki. In fact, Zuckerberg is a geek who is far more comfortable talking about memcache or architectures than he is in answering questions for the press, or being in front of audiences (although I thought he stepped up his game in yesterday’s Q&A quite a bit). He reminds me a LOT of Bill Gates. I remember meeting Bill Gates at a conference party in the mid-1990s and couldn’t get him to be social, but when I switched to talking to him about compilers he got very passionate and went on for 20 minutes about the topic. Same with Zuckerberg. He really isn’t that comfortable talking about his business, or other things, but when you start digging into him technically he comes alive.

7. Zuckerberg is also a tough interview cause he gives PR answers. Now we know one other guy who does that: Steve Ballmer. But notice how Guy Kawasaki gets Ballmer to knock it off in this video of their interview on stage at Microsoft’s Mix08 conference: he calls Ballmer on the bullshit. Compare this interview to the one that Lacy did, and you’ll see how to do an interview with a CEO well, and poorly.

8. This wasn’t the only audience revolt at SXSW this year.

9. The audience at SXSW is quite unlike any other. These are people who blog and Twitter and Facebook and Meebo and use tons of other social networking tools. They also are snarky and are used to being heard (egotistical, even, just like your friendly local blogger). So, when they are in audiences here they expect to be part of the event. Most speakers here know this, and take advantage of the interactive demands (I was watching Twitter and videoing my own panel yesterday, so I knew when our panel was getting boring, or wasn’t on track with what the audience wanted). Most speakers here take the pulse of the audience often and early, going to questions and such. I wouldn’t speak here if you haven’t attended before. Also, this is not a business audience. Most of us really don’t care whether Zuckerberg is worth $1 or $15 billion. We want to know what Facebook’s developer platform is going to do. Or how Facebook is going to give us more control over our privacy. Or, how Facebook is going to make our data portable (I asked Zuckerberg about my getting kicked off of Facebook yesterday in his QA session and several attendees came up to me afterward saying they were happy someone finally asked Zuckerberg about that).

10. I’m going to try to interview Sarah Lacy, and I’ll apologize for my part in being an audience asshole, but I’ll also explain to her why I’d do it again. I hate being captive in an audience when the people on stage don’t have a feedback loop going with the audience. We’re used to living a two-way life online and expect it when in an audience too. Our expectations of speakers and people on stage have changed, for better or for worse.

Anyway, I’m sure we could continue discussing this for a long time, but I have to prepare for another panel discussion this afternoon that I was added to (come and heckle me, er, be an audience asshole!) Right after that panel we’ll go for BBQ with about 100 people. I hope Sarah comes along, we’ll break bread. Either way, we can fit about 120 people in, so meet us there. Afterward we’ll go to the RockBand party (wait until you see the video I participated in!) and then onto the Digg party.

Here’s the video of Mark “unplugged” in a Q&A at SXSW where he took a variety of questions from audience members.

We were tired of waiting in line for the Google party at SXSW. So, what did we do? We went to Twitter, just like CNET said.

Who throws the best “unofficial” SXSW parties? The same guy who throws the best “official” ones, of course!

Scott Beale!

What did he do last night after getting tired of waiting in the Google line?

He found a bar that was empty. Sat down in the back. And Twittered “Alta Vista Party at Ginger Man.” In the video I shot of the Google Line, you see Francine Hardaway as she found out about Scott’s party and follow us as we walk down to Scott’s party. At the end of the video you see Scott Beale explaining the whole thing.

We were among the first eight there. Soon there was 50 or so. Gotta love Twitter!

Why “Alta Vista?” Well, Alta Vista is the search engine that Google basically relegated to a footnote in history (it was #1 back when Google was born).

Of course Scott got revenge. The line for his party later in the evening was even longer than the one to get into the Google Party. Which, of course, he apologized for on Twitter.

Damn, lots of comments are coming in. Most calling me a butthead.

Interesting that on FastCompany.tv we’ll have an interview up in about a week with Jason Calacanis. Why a week? Because I’m not going to force Rocky, my producer/editor, to stay in his hotel room and do work just to get a few more hits today.

So, let’s take them on.

Brian Sullivan says: “This is all fine as long as the “owner” is plugging in the trenches as well and making similar time, committment and comfort sacrifices.”

Calacanis doesn’t disagree. He says he will always work harder than anyone on his team.

Christopher Coulter says: “Jason is a slave driver, breaking OHSA and common sense rules, treating employees as prisoners, whilst adopting Marxist economic outlooks, filing that under hard work is going seriously mental. He’s a lawsuit in the making.”

Funny how Christopher makes shit up about people. The night I was there they bought sushi for everyone. Everyone has huge monitors (most people there had three expensive monitors on their desks). Everyone had a $700 chair. Everyone I’ve talked to who work at Mahalo really loves working there. The two “smokers” notwithstanding.

Coulter continues: “There’s people that work very hard, and there’s slave labor, having a family is not the definition of slackerdom (in fact those with families tend to be the MOST loyal, as the singles are out to court companies and move up at whims).”

Right, many of those at Mahalo (and both employees at FastCompany.tv) have families. You’re missing the point. You CAN have a family and be a productive worker, a team player, and a nice guy.

Coulter continues: “And furthermorehence, some people are more efficient with their time, slackers can grant the appearance of hard work, but it’s the product output that matters.”

This is true. Many people think I’m a slacker, going to conferences all the time and hanging out with Calacanis in fun venues (driving a Tesla, etc). You’re right. Judge people on the output they generate. I guarantee you that if those two smokers had been the most productive that Calacanis probably would have moved the lunch crew outside to join them. Calacanis measures everything about his team’s productivity (that’s why he buys all his workers multiple large monitors, he knows those make his workers more productive).

Coulter continues: “Luck actually has more to do with success than hard work, right time, right place, right product, meeting the right demand.”

I’ve found that the lucky generally are also the ones who work to make that luck. Luck matters most at the meta level anyway. Mahalo does need a little luck to make it big. But that luck will probably be generated by whether they have the best search results. THAT depends on having productive and happy employees who work together as a team.

Coulter continues: “And yah know (just for a sense of history, as I have a good memory), you were on the OTHER SIDE of this argument, when it was Electronic Arts ruining families, and all the bad press that got. You were VERY pro-family then.”

Is Electronic Arts a startup? No. The reason I was mad about Electronic Arts is because it was a systemic abuse of workers due to poor management techniques. That’s VERY DIFFERENT from Jason’s points, despite what Coulter is saying. Jason’s workers are working hard because they have the opportunity to see a huge reward. No one at Electronic Arts is going to see the potential rewards that Mahalo’s employees will see. I know a few startup employees who work for no money. Why would they do that? Because of the potential upside.

Thunk writes: “You, Robert, have described your home-life as fulfilling, so I imagine that you are no workaholic, because otherwise you would hardly ever see your family.”

Keep in mind, that I don’t think what I do is work. Work is putting a roof on a Dallas building in the middle of summer. What I do is NOT work of that kind. And I’m extremely fortunate for that. My son, Milan, is six months old and he’s been to Europe twice already. I include my family in my work. Patrick, my 14-year-old, has been to many of my work functions and gotten dragged to many boring geeky events. I think that’s good for both of us. And I haven’t always been there for him, and right now I’m at SXSW and doing other interviews, which is keeping me away from my family for almost two weeks.

But, again, we’re talking about startups. Startups need people who will pour themselves into the work and, at least, be part of the team. If you want a 9-to-5 job, go work for a bigger company. I’ve done both and startups require more committment than other kinds of companies do.

Dom writes: “Should people be fired if they have a bladder problem and need to go to the restroom every 2 hours to relieve themselves?”

That doesn’t require much time and isn’t a flaunting of teamwork, which is what was going on with the smokers. Also, to tie a bodily function to something optional, like smoking, is ridiculous. I expect my readers to make smart arguments, if you want to make arguments like these please go back to Digg.

Solo writes: “I’ve been at companies that demanded long hours and it’s funny how quickly the marginal return of those additional hours approaches zero.”

Jason doesn’t demand long hours. Most of his workers get in at 11 a.m. He actually is quite liberal with work hours.

AC writes: “First of all people who work 40hrs/week are not slackers. They’re good workers (assuming they really do work during that time).”

That’s true, but startups don’t need “good” workers. They need “great” workers.

Anatoly says: “Robert, get a clue. You measure people by the work they produce, not by the number of hours they put in.”

Good point. But if you can do more great stuff in two hours than I can in eight, please give me a call, I’m hiring.

Duncan Riley, of TechCrunch writes: “I never once defended slackers and that you’d suggest that I did speaks volumes for you and your low opinion of human beings. “

No, you took Jason’s words out of context and put a sensational headline on them. The two people he fired were slackers, were not producing what the rest of the team’s members were, and weren’t team players to boot. Maybe you should go and interview Calacanis and find out what he meant before using it to push your own agenda. One, which, I find your own employer doesn’t agree with.

Anyway, I am at SXSW and gotta run to the Google Party. Just a little “work/life” balance thing I gotta do. More later. :-)

Jason Calacanis has started a big argument where Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch has stood up for slackers everywhere (he couches it in language of “pro family” in the family/life balance). The thing is, Duncan might talk to his boss, Mike Arrington. Did Mike get to where he is by slacking off and hanging out with his friends and having a “real life?” No. He worked his ass off. I’ve caught Mike on several occasions working until 3 a.m. or later. And he still is doing that work ethic. Of course, that hard work pays off: Mike was on the Charlie Rose show this week.

I’ve been in several startups and have witnessed first hand the ascerbic aspects that slackers bring. Believe me, this is the #1 killer of startups. If you don’t get rid of unproductive people (or even better, avoid hiring them in the first place) your startup will go down.

Jason also told me about two employees who’d be outside smoking while the rest of the company was working hard during lunches. He fired those two. Why? They weren’t team players.

Another killer I’ve seen? Assholes. Every entrepreneur should read “The No Asshole Rule.“

But, to Jason Calacanis’ point, how do startups save money? I’m practicing one right now: share hotel rooms. It’s a pain in the ass, yes, but it sure stretches that travel budget further. At CES one year I even stayed a night in a Hostel. This was while I was working at Microsoft and could have spent $400 a night on a hotel room (I don’t recommend going THAT cheap, by the way — you need to be able to lock people out of your stuff).

Funny enough I sat next to Adobe Evangelist Mike Downey last night. He just attended the Microsoft Mix conference. Did he have his tail between his legs? No, but he did admit to me that Microsoft is very committed to beating Adobe. He said Adobe has a few tricks of its own. Of course I captured part of our conversation, while sitting in the plane. Watch for more videos coming from SXSW later today (I’m supposed to meet up with Kyte in a little while where the CEO will show me its streaming video service). Qik just updated its Website, too. I love competition!

Yesterday Guy Kawasaki tried to give Steve Ballmer heck about Windows Vista, but he didn’t manage to really nail Ballmer with something specific.

I have one. Dell a few weeks ago sent me a new Tablet PC to use for a month. I have been using it exclusively for a couple of weeks now, and it is the only machine I’ve taken to Mix and SXSW. If you’re at SXSW please do ask to see it, if you need a Windows machine, it’s certainly one of the ones I’d choose. Why? You can put an extra battery onto it which will give you more than five hours of battery life. This is HUGE. I forgot how much I missed long battery life on the Mac (I only get two hours on my Mac).

The machine is well built, well designed, and fun to use.

So, why do I still like my Mac better?

One simple little thing: the Mac starts up and shuts down properly every single time.

My Dell? It doesn’t always startup right. Just now, I opened it up, which doesn’t turn it on, like the Mac does. But that’s a nit, which just requires hitting the power button.

Today when I did that it promptly blue screened. My Mac has only done that once and it turned out I had a bad set of RAM. This isn’t the first time the Dell has given errors or problems on boot, either.

Once it starts up, by the way, I like Vista just fine and it even has some things I like better than the Mac (the fonts on Windows are more readable, for instance and things do seem snappier on my Dell, plus that darn battery life is just wonderful, especially when I’m flying across the US like I’m about to).

It’s a real bummer, too. Because I want to love Windows and most of the tools to build great Silverlight experiences will be on Windows and not on the Mac. Not to mention that killer WorldWide Telescope.

I checked with my friends who run Vista on laptops and they noticed the same thing, that they have had problems with sleep and wakeup on their laptops. What could be causing this? I’ll show it to Dell on Sunday and see if we can figure it out.

My team can’t edit my Google Calendar anymore. Why? Because it says that it has been edited too many times by the syncing software I’m running (which is both Plaxo and Google’s own service). It was working perfectly until I added Google’s own syncing software. I’ve now changed the number of times that I’m going to sync to see if it lets my team members back onto my calendar. It still is letting me edit it, but Rocky hasn’t been able to edit it for the past day.

Anyway, be warned if you’re testing out syncing systems like Plaxo or Google’s.

UPDATE: A Google engineer wrote me and said that they don’t recommend using Google’s Calendar Sync with other sync systems like Plaxo.