And So Begins the End of this SaaS M&A Cycle
… and hence the acquisition dies due to excessive capital requirements. It’s almost impossible to blend a profitable entity with a new acquisition that is burning tens of more millions per year, unless it’s a total make-the-company bet like Android.
AppSecute Launched In Beta With Revised Messaging
AppSecute, the New Zealand based startup focussing on the PaaS space (disclosure: Fellow CloudAve blogger and friend Ben Kepes is an investor in the company but I have no relationship with them), recently launched in public beta with a changed messaging. AppSecute started out talking about federated PaaS which, even though was an interesting idea, [...]
Mentoring TechStars Cloud, and an Invitation to Apply
Just looking at the success that TechStars companies have post demo day is a real validation of the program – it creates amazing team building opportunities, awesome visibility for the startups involved and fantastic access to angels and early stage investors.
How to Figure Out Your Competitors’ Revenues in About 70 Seconds
A friend of mine who heads business intelligence at a public web company taught me a little hack that does seem to work pretty well to figure out the revenues of any pre-public SaaS/web services company. Here is the formula: Take the # of employees the SaaS company has, as reported on LinkedIn’s Company profile [...]
Apple iOS / OS-X vs. Windows 8 / RT == OS Goulash & Predictions
All These Thoughts Derived at Seattle Coffee Works in Downtown Seattle, a good place to enjoy the use of an iPad or Windows RT Tablet. Ok, I’ll admit it, I have a soft spot in my heart for Windows 8. At least in the tablet form. I honestly prefer it over the iPad model of [...]
Continuuity Launches Big Data Application Fabric–Warning: Buzzwords Abound
Coming out of stealth today at Strata and Hadoop World is Continuuity, a company that is looking to position itself within the PaaS landscape as it gives organizations the ability to build, deploy and scale big data apps. All of which sounds dangerously like buzzword heaven so it’s worth taking a look at what Continuuity [...]
The 10x Rule: What Raising $1 of Venture Capital Really Means
Recently, a good friend of mine asked me how much he should raise in his round. He was lucky enough to have a range of options. My simple advice was: assume you have to return a liquidity event (sale or IPO) of at least 10x the amount you raise. Valuations change from round to round. [...]
Android? Car mode? Speakerphone auto-on? Bluetooth volume fail? Micro-USB design-flaw!
Are you -that is, your phone- suffering from the following symptoms? weeks or even months ago, “car mode” started to seemingly randomly get enabled ever since, that seemed to happen more often at some point, when you made or received a call, the speakerphone would sometimes be automatically turned on since a while, when you [...]
Patently Messed Up
What is innovation? It’s a simple enough question, except that it is not. Most innovation is synthesis of other ideas. Rare is there something entirely new that is invented. (And even then the argument can be made it is just synthesis.) And, is something really innovation if five other people come up with it concurrently? [...]
Gartner’s Latest IaaS Magic Quadrant Released–Meh With a Bit of Interesting
I’m not usually big on Gartner’s crystal-ball-gazing Magic Quadrant methodology – some people claim it’s pay-for-play writ large. I don’t know about that, it just seems to be a somewhat hokey, albeit scientifically-based, prediction of what might occur or, more often, hat already is. Anyway – with that said, the latest IaaS MQ is pretty [...]
Sorry, But Your Start-Up’s Team Isn’t Actually Any More Agile Than the Big Guys. Why You Really Still Can Win.
Perhaps the biggest misimpression/misunderstanding I had about Fortune 500 tech companies and start-ups was that start-ups are more agile at developing product. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Every tech leader has tons of talented engineers. In fact, every tech leaders has more surplus talented engineers — surplus — that you have in your entire [...]
Lowering Mobile Development Barriers to Entry
Icenium is today launching what would appear to be a very compelling proposition – an environment that enables cross platform mobile development that decouples development from a particular development environment, full suite of developer products and SDK. Icenium decouples the compilers from the platform and makes the SDKs available in
ETLs and APIs – A Thought Stream on the Matter, Are Things Really Changing That Much?
Often the tendency has been, and largely still is in Enterprises, to build things really large. Doing big design up front (BDUF) all the way to creating massive JavaScript libraries for generating JavaScript from non-JavaScript langauges, leading to a huge case of analysis paralysis and other such keywords that all point to the mythic man month or [...]
One More Reason to Take That M&A Offer – Sponsor Turnover
In the last 2 weeks, I met with two other CEO/founders whose companies had been acquired in the past 12-18 months. In some ways their experiences were different than mine. One was a consumer internet company acquired by an entertainment company. The other was a SaaS company, yes, but one that was basically pre-revenue. But [...]
A response to Geoffrey Moore: Manifest Disruption
Sometimes, when you see something sufficiently off-track, you need to respond, even when the person in question may be a personal hero of yours. Geoffrey Moore (yes *that* one), recently wrote an article about Cloud Computing that made me very sad. Besides being off-track, it felt to me as if Mr. Moore had spent more time looking [...]
