How Has Product Hunt Become Such a Critical Startup Website?
Product Hunt. It seems out of nowhere it has become the go to website for startup companies to launch their new products or businesses. It reminds me a lot of how TechCrunch felt in 2006. It was the place that every startup knew they HAD TO be in order to attract initial users and also […]
Aaron Levie of Box: “If We Just Sold to Silos-in-the-Enterprise, We’d Only Be a $25,000,000 Business”
Missed the 2015 SaaStr Annual? We’ve got your back. We’ll do a series where we publish both the videos and full transcripts of all the sessions. First up is Aaron Levie of Box, where we had a wide-ranging, 45 minute deep dive on how Box scaled from $0 to $250m in ARR. As you’re reading […]
The Importance of Realism in Startups
I’ve done a lot of video interviews. This is one of my favorite if not my favorite outright. It’s only 12 minutes long and if you’re a first-time entrepreneur (or second time, frankly) I urge you to watch it if for nothing else than to get a sense that your struggles are universal. TechCrunch interviewed […]
Find the data, aggregate the data, make the data useful
I was in New York in March, taking part in GigaOM’s Structure:Data event. As usual on these trips, I spent the day before the event walking around the city, soaking up some air, getting rained on, using coffee to stay awake, and meeting with a number of local companies. Of the companies I met that […]
How Should You Best Launch Your Product at SXSW?
It’s February now. That means a slew of companies will be preparing to launch their new products or announcing their companies at the annual SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. I get asked often how to best launch at SXSW. What strategies to use, how to get attention, how to become “hot.” I get asked many […]
Big Data as Core, Big Data as Context, and Big Data as Buzzword Bingo
It’s neither particularly newsworthy nor insightful to suggest that ‘Big Data’ gets everywhere these days, but two recent items reminded me of the gulf between credible execution of a big data play and the more questionable tacking of the big data meme onto an otherwise useful product. Christmas is coming. Which means skating, and pantomimes […]
4 Good Reasons Not to Start a SaaS Start-Up
There’s been one huge change in “entrepreneurship” IMHO over the past 10 years. >> No, it’s not that it’s cheaper than ever to do a start-up. That’s not even true. In the old days, when software came on a disk, or a CD-ROM, it was even cheaper. You didn’t even need a single server to […]
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.
Nothing Stops the Box Bunny
OK, so I ‘m abandoning my pictorial post schedule, as Box-mania just broke out, and I feel compelled to jump in. But the skipped NetSuite post is coming soon… I’ve been following Box longer than probably most observers and some of the old memories are worth sharing – from an admittedly subjective point of view. […]
Analyst? Commentator? Advisor? Investor? What’s In a Name?
For awhile now I’ve been thinking about how best to describe what I “do”. I run Diversity, a pretty diverse (hence the name) operation which covers a bunch of different things – I spend time evangelizing about Cloud Computing, I opine on the technology landscape, I consult to large technology
In the Quest for TCO, We Lose Sight of the Real Issue–Part One
While it is undeniable that in the majority of cases cloud will be cheaper than traditional models of delivery. The benefits that cloud brings in terms of agility and flexibility far outweigh the cost benefits – looking at TCO alone is a race to the bottom of the cost-cutting hill.
The Shift has hit the Fan – Microsoft, Facebook Slides, Google Rises
In what seems to be from the lower paleothic period but in fact was about a year and a half ago, I wrote a post about the Mean Girls phenomenon and Shakespeare. This in turn was not actually about mean girls or Henry IV, but about the interesting relationship of…
TechCrunch Wrote a Post, Oracle got Pissy. Sigh
So Alex Williams (a great guy, good friend and awesome cloud pundit) wrote a post a week or two ago entitled “Why The Open Cloud Wins And Oracle Loses When IT Gets Virtualized.” (subtle huh?) Oracle wasn’t overly happy at Alex’s comments and counter posted saying that “TechCrunch is Clueless about Oracle Cloud.” So… some […]
OpenStack Seeing the Light of General Availability
The last few weeks have been interesting around the OpenStack ecosystem. We’ve had HP moving object storage and Cloud CDN to general availability. We had Morphlabs introduce an interesting combined hardware and software offering called mCloud Helix. The product is powered by OpenStack, and combines that with SSD-powered nodes to deliver a compact rack mount […]
Cloud – It’s About Flexibility
While at OSCON in Portland recently, I took part in a panel alongside Rishidot Research founder and principal analyst Krishnan Subramanian and TechCrunch writer Alex Williams – the panel was an attempt to get some industry observers together to discuss the future of the cloud. Krish has written about the session here at Cloudave. In his post […]
