Two Amazing Women Setting Out on Their Startup Journey
Note: if you’re a parent please check out their website. Kara called me on a Tuesday. She was leaving IAC to start a company. “Tasha, clear some space on my calendar tomorrow. OK?” “I want you in my offices tomorrow, Kara. Does that work for you?” Kara came. She didn’t tell me she was bringing [...]
Why Hiring From Your Direct Competitors Usually Doesn’t Work Out
The time will come when you are first tempted to hire someone from your competitor. They must know so many things we don’t. Have so many skills. It’s pretty tempting. People will tell you about the risks in litigation, trade secrets, etc. I don’t think any of those are necessarily a big deal or a [...]
The rise of the bros, and the fall of the geeks
One of my favorite movies when I was growing up was the 1984 classic, “Revenge of the Nerds.” If you haven’t watched it yet, take two hours to do so–yes, it’s available on Netflix: The movie really spoke to me–a guy so nerdy that the kids at my private school for gifted children nicknamed me [...]
SaaS Business Model Competitive Advantage Revisited
What is SaaS? We seem to need to ask this question every couple of years, because the answer is a bit of a moving target. It was simple enough when SaaS was merely software applications pushed through a Web browser, but now we have to contend with the cloud, mobile and even social. Recently, Scott [...]
Bringing to Life an Open Source Software Project via Github & Jekyll – Part 1
Starting with Github, Automatic Page Generation & Jekyll It’s time for another blog series! This is a series I’m starting to outline that crazy complex site I’m building to prove out all sorts of things, all located at http://adron.me. So far it’s just a site that hold portfolio information for my coding, biking and related [...]
Enterprise startups against the big guys: CxO Talk 7
On CxO Talk, episode 7, co-host Vala Afshar (absent this week due to travel) and I welcome venture capitalist Evangelos Simoudis. Evangelos is senior managing director at Trident Capital, where he invests in late stage and growth companies, with a focus on enterprise applications. Here is the entire video conversation: The conversation starts with the venture [...]
5 Non-Obvious Things To Know About VCs
I was catching up with a VC friend the other day and asked him about a company I’d referred to him. They’d passed on the investment (which is of course fine), despite the company meeting basically every investment criteria I knew about the firm. I asked the partner why. His answer was simply — timing [...]
My Favorite Entrepreneur Story in a Long Time
If you don’t like it hot, use less,” he said. “We don’t make mayonnaise here.” This morning I was reading my social media and came across an article that Christine Tsai had posted on Facebook. It was about the founder of Sriracha sauce, David Tran, displaced from Vietnam when the North’s communists took power. As the son [...]
Don’t Count Microsoft Out of the Public Cloud Race Just Yet
Microsoft this week announced the general availability of Azure Infrastructure Services. This marks a notable course correction for Microsoft, which initially provided Azure solely through a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model. While many market observers assume that public cloud IaaS in the enterprise is now a three horse race between Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Google, they may [...]
OpenStack Summit – thoughts from Portland
OpenStack has come a long way since the project was first unveiled at OSCon back in 2010. This week, almost 3,000 people gathered in Portland, Oregon, to continue the job of defining, debating, developing, and delivering the code upon which the OpenStack community depends. Alongside the developers, though, there were some early signs of tangible [...]
Not quite ready to live in the cloud
Google’s impressive Chromebook Pixel is just the latest in a series of devices which are trying to entice users to compute in a different way. With (almost) ubiquitous connectivity, and an increasing reliance upon web-based services for mail, calendars, document creation and more, might we be reaching a point at which the browser really can [...]
Disaster Recovery for Amazon EC2 in a Single Click
In my journey through the cloud I often come across great new initiatives. The interesting fact is that although the cloud is a pure revolution terms such as SLA, TCO and ROI remain valid, new methodologies and techniques are presented to support them in the cloud. I recently met Uri Wolloch, the founder of N2W [...]
Stop Trying to Catch Lightning in a Bottle
I’m sure you’ve all heard saying derived from Voltaire, “don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good” which in a way is encapsulated in the lean startup movement and the ideology of shipping a “minimum viable product” (MVP) and then learning from your customer base. Or to borrow a simple life lesson from Gretchen [...]
The Contact Center in the Sky
Hosted voice continues to grow in subscribers and scope. Many hosted providers have already expanded from dialtone to robust UC solutions, but now there seems to be a frenzy around contact center offerings. Here’s a short roundup of announcements made in just the past few weeks. Interactive Intelligence Has offered a robust contact center service [...]
In SaaS, You Have to Love the One You’re With
Recurring revenue businesses are hard. You need so many different types of people (sales, support, client success, demand gen, product, engagement, dev). The customers complain, especially your most loyal ones. You have to get on planes. You have to grovel. It’s tough. And for a lot of us … well … it just turns out [...]
