How to handle being fired
The recession still blazes on, and people are still losing their jobs right and left. A friend of mine was recently fired and as we sat drinking coffee in our other office, the question was “how do I handle this?” Handling being fired is not easy, it is not meant to be easy; it is [...]
Accenture Survey Identifies Companies’ Innovation Improvement Opportunities
Accenture released a survey of 630 executives at large U.S. and U.K. companies, Innovation: a Priority for Growth in the Aftermath of the Downturn. The report discusses enterprises’ view toward innovation during the Great Recession. This information in general is useful for anyone following the field. Just as interesting are the nuances that come out [...]
Reverse Brain Drain to India and China
America is a great place to start a company, there are no questions about that, and when Governments were busy making it harder to start a company, many immigrants came to America. Reports state that 52% of all Silicon Valley companies were started by Immigrants, and we have HP and Google as prime examples of [...]
U, V, W and Informational Dark Matter
Nouriel Roubini, affectionately nick-named “Dr. Doom” for his predictions regarding our recent financial meltdown, has a new op-ed piece out that spells out the risk of a “double dip” recession. It’s worth the read, whether you’re into macro-economics or not, as it very quickly spells out the risks of what has been a pretty rosy [...]
What’s the Influence of the Current Economic Crisis on American Culture
Image by Lone_f via Flickr Andy Sack who is one of the more interesting VC people in Seattle got asked the question “What has been the influence/impact of the current economic crisis on American Culture”. In all this is a very good question to ask just about anyone as we have seen our friends and [...]
TiEcon 2009 – The Bold Entrepreneur
I don’t particularly like large conferences, and I’ve made no secret of it… yet here I find myself discussing yet another one: TiEcon 2009, starting in these very minutes in Santa Clara, CA. One of the differentiators TiEcon has is just how affordable it is: it’s rare to find a two–day conference so action packed [...]
Recession Is Good For Cloud Computing – Microsoft Agrees
Image by Getty Images via Daylife When the whole world was gloomy with onset of current recession, we (the members of cloud computing community) are happy about it in a way. Every single cloud computing evangelist will tell you that recession is good for cloud computing. The reason is obvious CapEx is converted into OpEX [...]
It Is Not A Bloodbath In The Clouds
Image by Laughing Squid via Flickr Steve Rubel, in his blog, has a new post with somewhat provocative title. He talks about recent shutting down of some of the Cloud based applications and calls it “Bloodbath in the Clouds”. A part of his post is a bit of exaggeration but he has some valid points. [...]
Jott Wants Your Lunch Money and it’s OK
Would You Spend Your Lunch Money on a Web 2.0 Service? - I asked in October as part of a recession-related series. The key point was that software startups to turn towards business, offer value and charge for it. The genius in the Freemium model is that it allows new services to gain traction, essentially [...]
So Is It a Good or Bad Time to Found a Startup After All?
Now is a Great Time to Join or Found a Startup –says Bob Warfield, friend and fellow Enterprise Irregular. Now is a Terrible Time to Join or Found a Startup -says Charlie Wood, friend and fellow Enterprise Irregular. Now what? Who is right? And the debate does not stop here, it sparked a pretty good [...]
Would You Spend Your Lunch Money on a Web 2.0 Service?
Today I’m continuing a mini-series started 3 weeks ago with the intro: How Software Can Be Resilient to Recession which I wrote before the bottom fell out of all markets in the world, and recession-doom-talk became popular. Since one of the key conclusions in the first piece was for software startups to turn towards business, [...]
Software Startups: How to Sell to Enterprise in a Recession
Three weeks ago when I wrote How Software Can Be Resilient to Recession I was very careful using the “Big R” word – since then the bottom fell out, the doomsday-chorus started. On my personal blog I suggested we should Turn the Doom-talk into Constructive Business Model Ideas, and that’s what I intend to do [...]
Cloudy News from Startup-Land
Just because I wrote How Software Can Be Resilient to Recession doesn’t mean I’m naive enough to declare that all SaaS businesses are recession-proof – they just have a better model to weather the storm, which is now inevitable. VC Preps Portfolio Companies for Survival Mode OM Malik, who is now a VC Partner himself [...]
Free is Dead, Long Live Freemium
3 weeks ago we launched CloudAve in turbulent times, so barely a week later I ended up writing about How Software Can Be Resilient to Recession. The summary: go where the money is, and that’s businesses (“Enterprise” vs. consumer, even if it means small business) deliver value – useful functionality that improves business charge for [...]
"SaaS as Recession-proofing Software" Theme Picking Up
It looks like I may have started ( actually, just re-started) a trend discussing How Software Can Be Resilient to Recession. Sramana Mitra @ Forbes talks about 'SaaS-ing' Back At The Economy: Some of the robustness of SaaS companies comes from the fact that the sector caters heavily to small businesses. This is because their [...]
