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 leading online marketplace for freelancing. In the wake of the ODesk-Elance merger, Upwork […]
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 these entities. In this article I will share some real world […]
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 experienced before. A few seconds […]
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 Rico in the near future. Jokes aside, ageism […]
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 Silicon Valley I want to set the record […]
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 is now nearly ubiquitous due to the proliferation of general purpose processing […]
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 creating some initial value for […]
A PaaSing Trend: Why enterprises will finally adopt PaaS in 2015
If there is one universal truth in IT, it is that businesses are always slower to adopt new technology than expected. Way back in March of 2011, Gartner declared that it would be the year of Platform as a Service (PaaS), predicting that by 2015 most enterprises would have part of their critical software leveraging […]
Automating application deployments across clouds with Salt and Docker
If you have not had the chance to work with Salt yet, it is a very exciting new configuration management system that is easy to get up and running, powerful enough to support distributed command execution and complex configuration management, and scalable enough to support thousands of servers simultaneously. Recently, I wrote about how a […]
Why Docker and Containerization is a key enabling technology for PaaS
Last week at the Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, CEO Jim Whitehurst called out containerization during his keynote as a stunning new development in open source, declaring that last year he “didn’t even know what Docker was”. Mr. Whitehurst was in good company no doubt, since nothing like Docker’s meteoric rise has been seen […]