Sokanu: The Blog

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Jobs At Sokanu

Sokanu is the place to find your passion in life. Our mission is to connect every single person with the career they are meant to be in. We believe that the way the world approaches career discovery needs to be fundamentally changed. At Sokanu - we care about two things; building a great company, and helping every single user find what they are meant to do.

We're looking for people to help us achieve our vision. We are committed to building a cutting-edge technology company where people love to work and can be as productive as possible. After all, if we are helping people find what they love to do - shouldn’t we be intensely passionate about the work we are doing? We have a culture of optimizing for learning and growth as we strive to continually improve as individuals and as a team.

We are located in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia - and are working with some of the smartest people in the field of career discovery. We work very, very hard each day to achieve our mission - and will stop at nothing to achieve it. If you are interested in fundamentally changing the way humans approach career development; using neuroscience, psychology, technology and design - please contact us! We are currently hiring engineers and product designers.

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Engineering

We are focused on building a culture with strong engineering values and goals because we believe that it is the key to building a great company and product. We use continuous deployment that gets checked in goes live to production within minutes, no matter what time it is. As a web developer at Sokanu, you will be responsible for building, optimizing and maintaining the platform, as well as laying the foundation for a scalable, flexible, data-driven platform.

What We Look For:

Experience with a range or both back-end and front-end technologies. This includes, but is not limited to Python (and the Django framework), MySQL. You should know these technologies backwards and forward.
A strong team member. You should be familiar with some form of revision control, like git, hg, or subversion. You should also strive to write clean, maintainable, and reliable code.
Strong working knowledge in creating, optimizing, and maintaining a scalable, fast-growing, data-heavy web application. Bear in mind that you will be building a web application -- not a search engine or rocket ship.
Extraordinary software engineering talent
Experience with web applications, databases, distributed systems, algorithm design, and machine learning a plus
Passion for learning and a curiosity that leads you to discover and share new things
Ability to think beyond the code alone, have big ideas and the courage to voice them

Send examples of your work, code samples or resume (or your Github profile) to jobs@sokanu.com

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Product Design

At Sokanu, we believe that design drives emotion. And we can only succeed if we manage to deliver an environment that is conducive to learning, discovering and growing. People need to emotionally resonate with the product - wanting to share it with their friends and spend a lot of time exploring the content we offer. We are a design-focused company, from the psychology of UX work all the way to pixel perfect code. You will help shape and drive the product every single day.

What We Look For:

Strong portfolio including self-started projects
Extraordinary product, interaction, and visual design talent
Curiosity and passion for crafting amazing, beautiful experiences
Excellent communication skills and ability to explain your design decisions
Substantial experience designing interactive online products
Ability to build what you design (familiarity with Python a plus)
You should be ready to make Sokanu the primary focus of your life

You should be comfortable with autonomy and ownership of large areas of the product but open to and interested in gathering feedback. An ideal candidate will have the potential to grow into a strong leadership role over time.

Send examples of your work, code samples or resume (or your Dribbble, Github, Forrst, etc... profile) to jobs@sokanu.com

Finding Your Passion: Step Two

*Note: This is the fifth in a series of posts leading up to the launch of Sokanu. In this series we will be discussing the core purpose behind the Sokanu vision as well as outline what our product does. For a full list of posts in this series see the left hand column of the blog.

In our last post, we began to discuss what steps Sokanu is going to take in order to help you find your passion. We explained how difficult the problem is to solve because humans are organic creatures. We began to discuss the first step in the process, which is helping you identify a cluster you may be interested in.

In this second post, we are going to talk about how we can begin to segment individuals into careers that they may be interested in. Imagine that you have found one or two clusters that you resonate with. Let's use Trades as an example. Under that cluster, you will see a number of careers. such as:

Sheet Metal Worker
Electrician
Plumber
Carpenter
etc...

Obviously these careers all have attributes related to the cluster that you are in. When you click on one of these careers, you will see a lot more information on it. Absolutely everything we have discovered about that career is packaged into something we call a "career portal". The goal of each career portal is to have the highest quality, best curated content on the internet brought to you in one place. In order for the content to make sense to you the user, you will need to be able to quickly assess whether you are potentially interested in that career or not. In order to do that, the career portals need to present the experience of each career in a beautiful way.

Our theory is that you, the person looking to find your passion in life, already know internally what you resonate with. By virtue of being in one cluster, you have elimated 90% of the careers on the site. Already Sokanu is getting a lot smaller for you. Now, when you see these career portals, you can easily let us know your intent by "following" the careers that interest you most. I won't say much more about the details of the career portals, because that's something we will reveal when we launch.

So how does this help? How does following a few careers help you find your passion in life? Well, this is just one piece of the puzzle. Another piece of the puzzle is your social graph. We all have Facebook accounts, but do we know what all of our friends do? What careers are they interested in? Are all of our contacts really "friends"? Are some of them more job-based? Some distant connections? Some people you don't even know at all?

Sokanu's goal here is to help you understand better who your friends are, how they relate to you and what help they can potentially be in your quest to find the perfect career for you. Once again, I'll leave the details until launch - but your "social graph" is a very powerful thing, and the way that we all consume information and advice has drastically changed over the past few years. We are guaranteed it will change again soon.

At first glance, Sokanu is going to look very large. But as you begin to use it, it will become smaller and smaller, eventually only showing you exactly what you need in order to help you make an informed decision about what your passion is. Our goal is to build an experience that is totally customized to your needs and situation at your point in life. This is the only way we can truly adapt to organic, growing people. Will we build the perfect system off the start? Of course not. But what you are going to see in the near future is the first step in a journey to help every single person on the planet find the career they are meant to be in.

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What if you have no idea where to start? How can you identify with a certain "type" of career to know if it is right for you? These are all questions that make Sokanu "tick" and I can't answer them in detail right now. But in our next post I will talk about the problem of having no direction to start in. I will also talk about some strategies that we will be taking to start to shift the current model of thinking about career decisions into a more intelligent, collaborative world. Stay tuned.

New Series

As Sokanu gets ever closer to our alpha launch, we are introducing two new series to our blog. They will directly feed our ecosystem that is Sokanu but will provide a unique experience to our blog. The two series are called So Your Thinking Of Becoming A... and Success Series. We have pretty large goals with the two of them.

So Your Thinking Of Becoming A...

Our goal is to create an entire spectrum of careers that you can get an inside look into. Read about becoming a veterinarian, a surfer, a leech farmer, anything you can think of. Try and find something that matches your passion. We will be proving a variety of content across multiple of categories in order to give the best coverage to the largest number of people.

Success Series

We will then provide interviews with leading experts of each career to give you a behind the scenes look at what that career is really like. By asking non-generic, specific questions relating to the passion behind the career, we hope to give a real-life look at what each career is like.

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The goal of these two series is to let you, the reader, really experience what a career path is really like. We want you to understand what your personal hedgehog concept is, and part of that is understanding what you are deeply passionate about. Remember, the three points to the hedgehog concept are: find what you are deeply passionate about, understand the economic engine behind it, and understand if you have an aptitude towards it. We are going to try and help you answer all three of those questions with these posts.

Our first So Your Thinking Of Becoming A... will be posted tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Finding Your Personal Hedgehog Concept With Sokanu

There is a concept in the book Good to Great by Jim Collins (a must read for any business person) that is intended for business use, yet is an amazing concept for everyone around the world. Basically, in business, when great companies are analyzed and researched, there is a distinct formula that they follow that allows them to be great, not just good. Remember, good is the enemy of great, not just in business but in life.

So what is this formula? Jim Collins calls it the hedgehog concept, and it is extremely simple. It is a concept that comes from the understanding of the intersection of three circles. Take a look at the circles below:

We can see that each circle represents a certain characteristic. Let's look at each in more depth.

1. What Can You Be The Best In The World At?

Remember, this formula is for producing great, not good companies. If we adjust this saying down to everyday life we can say what do you have a natural aptitude towards? In order to have a chance in a specific career field, you must first have a natural aptitude towards it. For example, if I wanted to be a world class actor, I'm pretty sure I should give up now. I don't have any natural acting talent whatsoever, and there is no way, come hell or high water, that I can be the best in the world at it.

This is one of the first mistakes people enter into, whether it be in business or their personal lives. A high school student may be forced into taking classes that they know they aren't good at, just because of the pressure from parents and peers. Many people are highly artistic and terrible at math, yet those ideals are squashed and they are forced to take four years of math with limited arts. And when it comes time to apply for university, parents will "guide" them into taking the most prestigious professionals, regardless of the caliber of the child. Even though that child might thrive in a welding class, they are instead forced to study law.

Students, like businesses, will not become great at something they can't be the best in the world at.

2. What Drives Your Economic Engine?

Once again, this is mostly a business title, and we can rephrase it into: how can you make money? Simple. Once you determine what you have a natural aptitude towards, you can then determine whether or not it is economically viable. Now, keep in mind, very often if you do what you love, the money will follow. And you should never be guided primarily by the luster of riches. However, remember that this is a business book, and thus it makes sense. But if we look at it a bit further, we can see that it also makes sense for individuals.

If you have a natural aptitude towards becoming a professor of history at a local college, but want a 2000 square foot condo overlooking Central Park, it may not happen. Now, if you decide to pursue another venture to supplement that income, that's awesome. But the love that you have won't always drive your economic engine to the highest tax bracket. But if you truly love what you do, this should not matter. You should be thinking "wow I can't believe I am getting paid to do something that I love!", which brings us to our next point.

3. What Are You Deeply Passionate About?

The last and most important thing is finding something that you are deeply passionate about. It's all fine and dandy that you are good at history, you know that you can make decent money becoming a professor, but do you love it? I mean really love it? What do you stop and watch when the TV is on? Is it whenever someone mentions the word history? What do you read day in and day out. What blogs do you read on the internet for pleasure? Usually all of these things point to the same idea. If so, you have probably found your passion.

To me, to be deeply passionate about something means to try and find success in your life. And as I have said before, success = happiness. So understanding what you are passionate about will essentially lead to your happiness. It is extremely important. In business, Jim Collins references this because if you do not understand the deeper purpose behind your company, you will never become a great company. This is the problem with so many of the companies today.

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So how does Sokanu help with all of this? We usually pitch Sokanu as "a place to discover your passion in life" but it is more like "a place to discover your personal hedgehog concept". This concept is so simple, yet really holds the secret intersection to success in life. We think this is the key to overcoming the huge problem of globalization and the pace of change present in today's society.

Sokanu aims to be the place where someone can come to determine what they want to do with the rest of their life. We will be combining all three elements of the hedgehog concept in order to give people the highest chance of becoming great. We will be revealing more details as we get closer and closer to an alpha launch. Stay tuned.

The Innovation of Common Sense

I was having a conversation with my co-founder this afternoon discussing Sokanu. We were talking about how first time founders cannot possibly know all of the things needed to know to run a proper startup. I read voraciously, trying to learn everything possible about running a company with the highest probability of success. The issue I find is that the more I read, the more I feel like I am not doing.

Startup advice is abundant, and yet still 90% of businesses fail. I read about customer development, agile development, lean startup principles, iterations, continuous deployment, metrics, A/B split testing, financial forecasting, IPO's, M&A, pivot tables, j-curves, venture capital, dilution, preferred shares, business models, sales channels, funnels, marketing chambers, CPM's, optimizing landing pages, Adsense advertising, etc... Founders read all of these things every day, amazed that all of this information is available for our consumption. But is it really all positive?

My co-founder takes the opposite approach. She works hard on the company, doesn't get involved in the tech community and just keeps focused on product development, the current task at hand. She doesn't know whether a site is coded in PHP or Ruby, if they were featured on Techcrunch or whether the founder has three CS degrees from Stanford. If she runs across a site that is actually useful, and I mean actually useful, and easy to use, then guess what? She signs up. End of story, no questions asked.

I was getting frustrated today as I explained that I didn't know if we were taking the right steps in building this company. But what if I don't optimize our metrics at the correct time? How are we going to raise capital if we don't know what our business model is going to make in year three? My financial forecast has to be redone, I didn't do the correct formula for our cost per customer acquisition.

My main issue, after watching company after company launch and get funded was, are we being innovative enough for an alpha product?

She answered with the best answer anyone could give. What is innovation? What makes these other companies so innovative? No, our innovation is common sense.

After reading book after book, blog after blog, that is the most practical piece of advice I have ever been given. So many companies build products and forget about common sense. They get caught up in the details of web technology and what everyone else is doing. They forget about simply making a product that people want to use.

For me, common sense in the tech world boils down to two things.

1. Do people need/want your product

2. Does it make sense to use.

As un-revolutionary as these sound, that's all it comes down to. Let's look at each in more detail:

1. Do people need/want your product

Have you ever found a restaurant, whether it be in a big city or just the local town, that has terrible ambiance and average service, yet has amazing food? I'll give you an example of one near us. There is a Greek restaurant in a pretty ugly part of town (not a great location) about 15 minutes away from us that we continue to come back to. The decor has not been updated since the 50's, the glasses are tiny and we make sure not to ever get the water. (weird taste) Yet, as soon as we order the chicken souvlaki with salad, rice and tzitziki, all of those problems go away. We can just sit there and enjoy our meal.

Now what does this have to do with a high-technology product? Well, everything. The mainstream market will continue to use a product, regardless of look and feel, if the product is needed or wanted. An excellent example of this is Craigslist. Let me share with you a quote that I came across the other day.

“Craigslist gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon.com. eBay has more than 16,000 employees. Amazon has more than 20,000. Craigslist has 30”

eBay and Amazon are both great products, and need the huge team in order to produce the revenues that make them multi-billion dollar companies. But Craigslist is the ugliest product I can think of on the internet, yet people still want to use the product. (lots of people, mind you)

This is an example of common sense innovation.

2. Does it make sense to use.

The second part of common sense innovation is simply if it makes sense to use. This is part interaction design, part product development. Google is the master of this principle. Back when they first started out, they were not even close to being first to market in the search space. Lycos and Yahoo were already huge companies, and Google was a drop in the bucket. They had a hard time raising any money at all.

What separated them? First part - interaction design. When you went to Google.com you would see a lot of white space, with a text box in the middle with a search button. That interaction design forces the user to search. What else are you supposed to do? There is no way to make a mistake. It makes sense to use.

The second part - product. What made Google unique from Lycos or Yahoo was their idea to rank search results by a combination of Google's Page Rank as well as their other unique algorithms. The end user doesn't care about the algorithms, but the end product makes more sense to the user. Google = better search results.

Google, through these two ideas, made sense to use. It is both easy and provides the information necessary for making the user happy.

Common sense innovation is so simple, yet rarely implemented successfully. And that is because our idea of innovation is becoming diluted.

Here is the Wikipedia definition: Innovation is a new way of doing something or "new stuff that is made useful".

We, as a society, believe that unless we invent something like the iPad, make public space flight available or make mass produced electric cars we are not being innovative. But unfortunately, innovation is relative. What seems innovative to people in the poorest 1/4 of the world (electricity 24 hours a day) seems archaic to us. What seems technologically innovative to someone living in Niagara Falls (social media) is drastically different than someone living in Silicon Valley. (location based software)

Innovation, as Wikipedia puts it, is a new way of doing something. If we invent a new way of making our product easier to use, we are being innovative. If we are building a useful product that is needed in the world, we are being innovative. If we simply are using applying common sense to a highly complex technological problem, we are being innovative. The innovation of common sense is a highly powerful product development idea, and applies to any market in the world.

The bottom line? Make things that make sense.

Start With Why - How To Run A Better Business & Live A Better Life (Part 2)

HOW

If WHY is intangible and is simply a belief, then HOW is the process you take to make that belief happen. Once you know WHY, HOW will you bring your WHY to life? HOW's are the strategies, guiding principles or values that inform the path you will take in pursuit of your WHY. They are the road map or the code of conduct to start to move a WHY into something useful and tangible. They are, quite literally, the actions you take or the environment in which you work best.

If we relate this to real life, it comes down to what your morals and beliefs are. Every step that you take in life is guided by your WHY. If you understand your purpose in life, then the decisions you make become much clearer. Let's look at how a business would implement their HOW in correlation with WHY:

To determine who to hire. For example, does the person fit in with the company's vision? It does not matter if that potential employee is the most talented person in the world, if they do not believe in the same WHY, the company can never be great.
What investors to consider. Many companies feel that money is money, no matter what the investor believes in. This is false in any great company. The investors must be aligned with the integrity and morals of the company. There is more to an investor than just money.
Partnerships & Sponsorships. Are you sitting at dinner ready to sign a deal with a huge partner but your intuition says no? This is your gut telling you that the potential partner is not aligned with your WHY. Once again, not all money is good money. Terrible partnerships can ruin a company in the long-run.

As we can see, HOW an owner runs the business determines HOW successful that business will end up being. But what about in everyday life? How can we use the Golden Circle to determine improvement in our day-to-day activities?

Well, let's take a look again at the Golden Circle.

Once we have established our WHY, HOW falls directly underneath. In life, this means that whatever path we set, the HOW is the actions taken to achieve that goal. Let's take a look at the example from Jenny from the previous post. Remember, she wants to be the world's greatest marine biologist. Let us now evaluate HOW the actions that she takes affects that goal:

The process throughout high school. Jenny, with her goal, is able to easily make decisions on what courses to take during her four years of high school. While her classmates are worried whether or not to take Grade 11 Biology or Physics, Jenny has already predetermined the necessary classes she needs to take. This is HOW she goes through high school.
The application process to university. She knows that there are only two schools, Princeton University and Boston University, that offer the level of quality that meets the "standard" for her WHY. (more on standards in later blog posts). Therefore, she writes her SAT's with these two schools in mind, flies down to visit the campuses early on in the year and is already emailing back and forth with the marine biology professor. Jenny is extremely focused on getting into these two schools, and so HOW she goes about applying is very orderly.
Majoring in university and finding a job. Jenny flies through university, acing her courses because of her focus and passion for the subject. She graduates with a degree in marine biology at the top of her class, even though she admits she is just an average-minded student. Her love for marine biology allows her to excel in a school setting. When it comes time to find a job, she has already mapped out the possible employer candidates and has been in constant contact with them. Due to their recognition of her WHY, Jenny receives multiple offers for jobs. HOW she approaches her studies and job application ultimately leads to her success in finding a job.

But HOW doesn't just govern the professional decisions that Jenny makes. It also allows her to easily make personal decisions. Remember, Jenny wants to be the greatest marine biologist in the world. Let's see HOW her decisions affect her personal life.

Lifestyle Choices. With Jenny so focused on being the best in the world, she refuses to do anything to harm it. This means that drugs, smoking and alcohol are not part of her HOW. Jenny knows that these activities will only hinder herself from achieving her goals. HOW she lives her life directly affects her WHY.
Personal Relationships. Jenny realizes that she can only really associate with people that also have a WHY. While she can still have casual friendships, her real friends are those that understand what she is going through. HOW she selects her friends and mates are based on their WHY in life.

Seeing that we can easily filter out certain paths in life using HOW, there is only one stage to the Golden Circle left. That category is known as WHAT. WHAT is the result of your belief (WHY) and the actions that you take? (HOW) The next post will deal with the tangible results that are created as a result of the Golden Circle.

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February, 19, 2010
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Welcome

Hi!

If you have made it to this page, thanks so much. It means you took the time out of your day to come and check Sokanu out. We are hard at work right now building the best possible product for you. However, considering that we cannot possibly deliver the best product without your help, there will be polls and questionnaires that will be posted on this blog. We appreciate any help and/or input!

Currently Sokanu is in pre-alpha stage, working on building the alpha product for everyone to try. If you haven't already, you can sign up to be one of the first alpha testers at Sokanu. We look forward to sharing this exciting journey with everyone and working to inspire and create success in everyone!

Stay tuned...

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