CloudAve
Software in Business. The Business of Software.
Want to Really Understand What all the Hype of Cryptocurrency is About?
If you read the headlines you may well think cryptocurrencies are a either a radically new way of paying that is our savior from ossified, corrupt governments or on the other side that they are speculative Ponzi schemes. The reality of course is that cryptocurrencies can be both and can be liberating and corrupting at […]
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When to Stop Doing It All Yourself
Perhaps the biggest difference between most first-time founders and most second-time founders is how long they try to do it all themselves. This isn’t a criticism first time you usually sort of have to. You have less capital to hire a team, and less experience building teams. But then after that there are at least […]
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IT heroes: Use customer service to build business relationships
Image from iStockphoto The importance of building bridges between IT and business stakeholders is obvious, but getting there is hard. In his book, Driving Digital, veteran CIO Isaac Sacolick describes the need to build these relationships from the bottom up: The solutions and transformational practices that I helped implement across these organizations had more similarities […]
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Equifax : Disturbing Developments
Credit-rating company Equifax’s data breach, which involves an estimated 143 million people, may not be the largest that we have seen, after all Yahoo lost billions of emails in a series of data breaches, most of them brought out to the public much later. Given the nature of data at play here, this is clearly […]
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SaaStr Tower unveiled!! The Annual has officially been upgraded!
We’ve already announced our first 70 speakers, and now we’re excited to share the biggest SaaStr Annual announcement of the year… we’ve upgraded the event venue for 2018! With ticket sales tracking at over 1.6x our 2017 numbers, our attendees are going to need a bigger and better experience than anything we’ve ever offered. SaaStr […]
What Do Boards Actually Do?
There’s a lot of mystique about what happens at board meetings and a lot of imagined board-room drama. I read commentary or Twitter or blogs and realize that there are also strongly held convictions that there are these evil VCs who do terrible things to mostly altruistic founders. The image of boards and of investors […]
AI on the high seas: Royal Caribbean sets a course for “frictionless and immersive” vacations
Royal Caribbean, the world’s second largest cruise line, operates in 47 different countries with over 50 ships, each of which is a floating city transporting and entertaining between 2,500 to 7,000 guests at a time. Running a cruise line at this scale presents massive logistical challenges. I caught up with Royal Caribbean’s Chief Information Officer […]
Time to Drop LastPass? The Most Irresponsible, Idiotic Post Ever!
<rant> I have not blogged for a while, but I feel my blood is boiling at such an irresponsible call by MakeUseOf, a site I used to respect: It’s Time to Drop LastPass: How to Migrate to a Better Password Manager As a long-time LastPass user, my first reaction was panic: yet another breach? But […]
Details of Upfront Ventures New $400 Million Fund
I am so proud and humbled to be able to formally announce that Upfront Ventures has raised its 6th venture capital fund in the past 21 years. Upfront VI is our latest core fund and is $400 million to invest in early stage entrepreneurs. This brings our combined funds under management to nearly $2 billion. […]
Artificial intelligence and privacy engineering: Why it matters NOW
As artificial intelligence proliferates, companies and governments are aggregating enormous data sets to feed their AI initiatives. Although privacy is not a new concept in computing, the growth of aggregated data magnifies privacy challenges and leads to extreme ethical risks such as unintentionally building biased AI systems, among many others. Privacy and artificial intelligence are […]
What is the Right Burn Rate for your Startup?
One of the hardest decisions entrepreneurs make when they start a company and raise outside capital is figuring out what an acceptable “burn rate” is. That is, how much should your company be willing to lose in cash every month as you make investments in staff and equipment that funds technology, sales, marketing and management. […]
One Simple Rule on When to Build a “Custom” Feature
“Custom” features … I feel this is perhaps the point founders get the worst advice of all. Especially from VCs, B2C folks, and folks that have never sold bigger deals and into the enterprise. One-off customization per se is bad. This is SaaS, not a services business. But Being paid a lot to build something […]
Should Startups Care About Profitability?
There are certain topics that even some of the smartest people I talk with who aren’t startup oriented can’t fully grok. One of them is whether profitability matters. It’s common cocktail party chatter to hear people confidently pronounce that some well known startup is sure to blow up because, “How could they succeed when they’re […]
Augmented reality: Field service proof points in the enterprise
A demonstration at Oracle’s Modern Customer Experience conference shows why augmented reality is here to stay in the enterprise. Watch AR help repair a slot machine in Las Vegas.
Business
- The Two Things to Do. When You Don’t Know What to Do.
- One Tough (But Rewarding) Job: Being the First Sales Rep at a SaaS Startup
- Jyoti Bansal and The AppDynamics Story: From Idea to $3.7B (Video + Transcript)
- Getting Your Head in the Game for Fund Raising
- How MakeSpace Recently Closed $30 million in New Funding
- Last Minute Tips & Tricks for The SaaStr Annual!
- Why The Law of Large Numbers is Just an Excuse
- The Top 10 Worst Pieces of SaaS Advice
- Digital experience and white glove customer service at Brooks Brothers
- A New Chapter In My Life; Google
Technology
- CIO Report: Cloud first in financial services
- McKinsey: AI, jobs, and workforce automation
- Oracle in the cloud: The analyst conversation
- Why Computer Vision Tracking the Flow of People Will be a Huge Market
- Why Computer Vision Has Become a Major Investment Theme for Me
- #CXOTALK: Technology innovation advice from Accenture’s CTO
- #CXOTALK: Design for innovation, digital transformation, and organizational change
- Half Lives. Social Media. And Snapchat Stories.
- Introducing Snapstorms.com. Why, oh, why Snapchat?
- #CXOTALK: Open data and APIs at The New York Times
