Imagine a World With Unlimited Capital, and See Where It Takes You
There’s an exercise BigCos do, that I was asked to do, that at first, I thought was a waste of time. The exercise is: ”How would you run your business if short-term revenues didn’t matter?” I thought (and still think) in that context it was a bit of a trick question. First, of course revenues [...]
54% of blog posts contain pure facts
A post by Dion Hinchcliffe on “social business maturity” made me laugh and cry at the same time. It’s one of those misleading semi-analytical semi-research posts that will be joyfully accepted by most people as solid truth. However, it ain’t. If it’s anything solid, it’s solid suggestimation. Why? The post smacks the reader in the face [...]
Why You Should Kill Your Competitor in SaaS
IMHO, most SaaS CEOs/founders aren’t Killers. They can’t be. They’re Builders. In fact, the two jobs of a founder/CEO are antithetically opposed to zero-sum and attack thinking. First, at a strategic level, the founder/CEO has to see the future, a positive future, that is 100x bigger than today. Focused on putting the internal pieces together [...]
HP Announces Private PaaS Powered by Stackato
At HP’s Discover event here in Frankfurt today, the company will be announcing a private PaaS offering, built on top of Stackato, the PaaS which is itself a fork of the open source Cloud Foundry initiative. HP has entered into an agreement with ActiveState, the company behind Stackato, to OEM its platform and integrate it [...]
Why CloudFoundry Spin Off Is Interesting
The rumors are true with VMware publicly announcing that CloudFoundry will be spun off as a separate organization along with EMC’s Greenplum and VMware’s vFabric. This unit will be headed by Paul Maritz, former CEO of VMware. This leaves VMware to focus on their Software Defined DataCenter initiative which they announced during last VMworld. I [...]
I Don’t Know about CEO Coaches. But We All Could Use CEO Trainers.
Once you’ve been venture backed, if not before, you’ll hear a lot about CEO Coaches. The classic example is Bill Campbell, CEO coach to Steve Jobs, Google, now Mark Pincus, and other leaders in between. VCs generally have great networks of ex-CEOs and want to help, and plug you in with a CEO coach. The [...]
On the insignificance of (Re)tweets to a post
In a discussion about blindly ReTweeting yesterday, I remembered that I once did a short analysis on auto-tweets. An auto-tweet is a schedule you set up against an RSS-feed or any other trigger, which tweets the URL with a title, some of the post itself, a fixed word or hashtag, etc. Some “thought-leaders” use it [...]
Why TwentyFeet is Total Twash
Yet another Twitter analytic tool has made it into the spotlights: Twentyfeet
Like most if not all other tools that try to measure Twitter stats (Klout, Tweetlevel), it horribly fails. Apparently it’s too much work or money to actually measure all…
AWS, Redshift and Co-Opetition
Long time technology commentators understand the tensions between platform companies, intent on both growing their business and creating a healthy ecosystem, and ecosystem partners who leverage what the platform brings, but remain apprehensive about the long term intensions of the platform vendor. Case in point – the growing number of services offered by Amazon Web [...]
Xero Raises a Truckload of Cash from US Funds
Last week the announcement came that Xero had secured a huge investment round from US venture funds Valar Ventures (backed by Facebook founder Peter Thiel) and Matrix Capital Management. I’ve spent time talking with these US investors about Xero’s prospects and areas I thought the company would need to improve
Enterprise Software Needs Flow And Not Gamification
I don’t believe in gamifying enterprise applications. As I have argued before, the primary drivers behind revenue and valuation of consumer software companies are number of users, traffic (unique views), and engagement (average time spent + conversion)…
