INNOVATION ON DEMAND
I'm James, I partner with innovation groups and startups to build the best teams and products possible. Let's TalkMEET JAMES
I’m James Thomason. I’ve been building startup companies in Silicon Valley for twenty years, first as an engineer, then later as a hands-on innovation and strategy leader. My career started in the earliest days of the public Internet when my focus was on building infrastructure.
As the Internet grew, I moved on to software product development. For the last ten years, my focus has been on cloud computing and virtualization. Right now my technical interests are in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science. I have always been passionate about user experience, product design, and team building.
I’ve led two cloud computing startups in the last few years to successful acquisitions. My career track record as a startup leader and engineer totals $1.1B in value returned to investors. Today, I engage with innovation groups and startup companies to help them build the best teams and products possible.
INSIGHTS
Comic book legend Michael Golden shares his secrets for successful storytelling
This past Saturday, a group of fans and aspiring creatives of all kinds gathered together in the basement level of Silicon Valley Comic Con. Outside this room, the convention bustles noisily with costumed characters, video games, and the murmur of human voices. Inside...
Are Developers Coming Back to Microsoft?
Developer interest in C# has declined sharply since its peak in 2012 according to data from the TIOBE index. As one former .NET developer wrote back in 2015, this precipitous decline in due to the rise of cloud-native application frameworks and mobile platforms where...
Private Cloud is Undead
As I was reading the recent article by preeminent cloud expert Bernard Golden predicting the long, slow demise of private cloud, I was reminded of the “Bring out your dead” scene in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. In that scene, the old man who is still very much alive...
Upwork Makes a Bold and Desperate Play as Hordes of Competitors Descend on the Low End Market
Building marketplaces is hard, just ask Bill Gurley of Benchmark about the complexity of identifying good opportunities for marketplaces in the Internet economy. This was further evidenced today when I received a little email hand grenade from the CEO of Upwork, a...
Startup Entities: Choose Wisely, Founder, for Complexity Will Bring You Stress
When I first started my business in the fall of 2008, I was faced with a classic founders dilemma. What type of entity should I incorporate, LLC, C-Corp, S-Corp? There are hundreds and thousands of articles with mediocre advice regarding the various tradeoffs of...
How Digital Advertisers Destroyed Themselves
It’s one of those weird things. I can remember the exact moment when I stopped using Yahoo forever. It was many years ago on the day that Yahoo placed a new and intrusive advertisement on its home page. This particular ad was at the time beyond anything I had ever...
Silicon Valley Ageism Versus the Productivity of Famous Inventors
A few weeks ago I was having lunch with a friend who half-jokingly asked me if I was ready to retire yet. I half-jokingly quipped that I was well past the age of "fundable" established by Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and would therefore be relocating to Puerto...
Your Startup Can Succeed With Offshore Development Teams
A headline reads “We gave all of our most boring and tedious work to people we never met, and here is what happened next”. Let me guess: a total failure? Recently there have been a few rather nasty articles deriding offshore development teams. As an entrepreneur in...
2015 Year of the Whale and Other Disruptive Trends in IT
The year 2014 was as a very exciting period in cloud computing as several emerging technologies and trends began to shape the future of IT. In late 2014 the overarching trend disrupting technology and industries everywhere is still the growth of software. Software...
Why Docker and Containerization is a Boon for Software Startups
This is a repost from the Dell Entrepreneur Blog. In the 10 or so startups I have helped build since 1995, one of the biggest challenges we always faced was the “scale problem”. Scale is a problem of success, a great problem you get to solve when you succeed at...
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