Bickel Blog

Why Kohsuke and Launchable are Important

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 14:05:00 +0000

Launchable announced today that Kohsuke Kawaguchi is a co-founding member along with Harpreet Singh. Why is this important? Well obviously because of two things - Kohsuke and how their company will improve DevOps with a new era of testing.

Why is Kohsuke Important?

In short, because of a proven background of creating a massively used technology, in an open and inclusive platform and community, and has done so in a humble manner.

Kohsuke created Jenkins (then Hudson) while he was a developer at Sun. He saw a chance to have software serve his need of doing continuous integration - automating the cumbersome build-test-deploy cycle. He soon realized it could be used by his colleagues and the rise of Jenkins began.

In December, 2019, there were 264,000 locations with 992,000 nodes running Jenkins, running 32,870,000 jobs. Take a look at the Jenkins statistics page to see the up and to the right trends that Kohsuke started 15 years ago.

So Kohsuke might have gotten lucky by creating a product that a lot of people use today. But if you think about it, the trick is not necessarily just thinking about a product, but creating a community where people are drawn to help each other grow. Kohsuke created the technical underpinnings in his architecture where over 1,800 other software products have created "plug-ins".

In many ways, he created much more than a solution to a problem and a technical foundation for community. I remember meeting Kohsuke first in early 2010. What I remember most was thinking "this is a person I want to work with". And I was lucky and have been able to work with him these past 10 years at CloudBees. Kohsuke himself became the lightning rod of the Jenkins community. His intellect, open nature and humble listening skills drew people to him.

The picture on the right is from the second Jenkins conference in Santa Clara in 2013 when we handed out Jenkins bobblehead dolls (shown above). This shows Kohsuke in the image I have of him that leaps to mind whenever I think of him. He is squatting and signing the bobblehead packages. There is a line of dozens of people waiting for his signature. As each person comes up, he asks them how they are using Jenkins and how it can be improved.

With the founding of Launchable, he is joining his original partner from Sun who helped launch Jenkins (then Hudson) to the world at large, Harpreet Singh. Harpreet was another early member of the CloudBees, joining to help make Jenkins and our commercial offerings successful. Like Kohsuke, he is focused on solving problems with real solutions in an open manner.

I truly love both Kohsuke and Harpreet. These two incredible people are the foundation of why this announcement is important.

Why is Launchable Important?

They have picked a too-long-ignored problem. Testing.
And they have picked an emerging technology to help bring a whole new type of solution. Machine Learning.

Ask any software developer where they spend the most time, and they will tell you testing. Ask any software developer where their least favorite time spent and they will answer the same - testing. Somehow, this has largely been ignored by the rush to DevOps.

Testing is obviously part of the typical Jenkins pipeline. Kohsuke and Harpreet have had many years of seeing the struggles of organizations trying to get software released and seen the bottlenecks at the testing phase. Launchable provides some practical solutions to that bottleneck.

In typical fashion, they have picked a problem that everyone has. A problem that software automation can solve. A problem where there is a new technology to be leveraged to help solve that problem.

You can see why so many investors, including myself, were happy to help support Kohsuke and Harpreet in this new venture. The other thing you will note, is that all of the investors know Kohsuke and Harpreet personally like I do. It is not just the track record it is knowing these two people and that they will have an impact on others with their efforts.

Hanging with Kohsuke and MoHair in Japan in 2018

CRM Version 6 – This time for Races

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Thu, 05 Jul 2018 16:06:00 +0000

I’ve been lucky to use CRM in various ways over the past 35 years. The RunSignUp implementation is the 6^th major implementation of CRM I’ve been involved with over the years.

From the beginning, RunSignUp has implemented many of the key concepts of CRM so that races can maximize customer satisfaction and retention and lower costs of customer support – all with the goal of engaging their various communities to maximize the impact of their race. Right now, we are consolidating our various features of Participant Management, Marketing Automation, and central consolidated database to bring a comprehensive set of CRM benefits to races.

It might be interesting to see my personal journey and compare how CRM has matured over the years.

1. 1987 - Digital Equipment Sales Tracking. I did a side project to help the District Sales Manager and her 50+ sales people do a better job of tracking their prospects and sales. This was back in the days of Act!, which was built on PC’s, but we had a shared database concept where all of the sales reps could report into a common application and the District Sales Manager could see up to the minute status on all of the sales opportunities. Back in those days CRM was defined by sales reps taking care of their typically large $ sales transactions until they closed, and then move on to the next deal effectively.

2. 1993 – Bluestone Tickler System. Again, we built our own pre-CRM CRM. The purpose was to help an inside sales team effectively handle hundreds and thousands of clients and prospects. It kept track of each contact and reminded the sales rep when to call next. We also used this database for marketing purposes with mailing (US Postal!) software catalogs.

3. 2003 – JBoss. We implemented an automated Sales & Marketing Funnel using Salesforce and Marketo. We were very early adopters of this approach thanks to David Skok introducing the concepts and Joe McGonnell leading the implementation.

This was one of the more fortuitous points of my career as it was the first of several chances I’ve had to work with David, JBoss was a roaring success, and I learned early about Salesforce and invested in them soon after they went public in 2004.

4. CloudBees. CloudBees has a modernized version of what JBoss implemented, with a similar core of Salesforce. We invest quite a bit of money into the Salesforce and various add-on tools like Marketo in licenses and also invest quite heavily in customization and automation – probably close to $1M per year if training and so forth are included. This makes sense for CloudBees because we are a business focused on enterprise level sales with large transaction sizes and a huge base of free users of the Jenkins Open Source project. Optimizing the funnel, and making sure we spend time where there is a good return are very important to the fundamental business model.

5. Metaverse. This company sells hundreds of thousands of pieces of artwork on the web each year with average transaction sizes of less than $100. As the examples above show, CRM systems like Salesforce have been designed (and priced) to be used more with enterprise or large sized transactions. Trying to keep track of individual customers on a personal basis with sales people is not cost justifiable. What is more important is the automation of marketing and using analytics to guide behavior. Metaverse has optimized their business to use a full suite of web marketing and advertising tools to drive loyalty programs and reach new buyers. Email is a double edged sword as you can target repeat buyers, but you do not want to cause email fatigue. But this is where they have the their “CRM” to customize the emails to different buyers (someone who bought a Van Gogh gets different ads than someone who bought a Spiderman movie poster). It accounts for less than 10% of their business. Google Adwords drives most of their business. Remarketing with Criteo is another decent source and has a good return on ad spend.

At RunSignUp, we have invested in the areas that are more similar to Metaverse – having an integrated system for managing race across the various lifecycle. Relative to CRM, we have automated the main interaction points of Participant Management, and we have given a wide variety of powerful marketing tools. Our new efforts on CRM are making these features more accessible and sim

CloudBees - The Pipeline to DevOps

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Wed, 13 Jun 2018 03:26:00 +0000

Sometimes a combination of market forces, technology changes and people coalesce into a rare opportunity. That is happening for CloudBees now.

DevOps has been hot for the past few years, but the recent GitHub acquisition by Microsoft put an exclamation point on it that reverberated in the industry and beyond.

In 1913, Henry Ford put together the idea of the assembly line to produce cars faster with higher quality.

Today, almost every business and organization on the planet is based on software at some level - to track orders, to win new customers, and even to replace old business models. And the key competitive advantage is creating better software, faster.

Several years ago, the idea of DevOps emerged - basically cutting the overhead and shrinking the time to market. Companies like GitHub were created to allow developers to share code and make changes faster.

A clever guy at Sun, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, saw a personal and organizational problem way before the DevOps revolution - back in 2004. Every time he made changes to his code, he had to go thru the laborious, manual task of compiling, building, testing and deploying his code. He created the predecessor to Jenkins to automate this. Eventually he founded the open source project Jenkins (based on a name of a fictitious Butler that took care of things for him).

It is not an exaggeration to compare Kohsuke with Henry Ford for creating the equivalent of the software assembly line. The DevOps "Pipeline" is the software assembly line. At one end, developers write code and share and store that in GitHub. The basic function of Jenkins is to watch code repositories like GitHub for changes. And on each change any of the developers makes, go thru the whole process of taking that code thru the laborious and complex process of making it into a running application.

Today, over 170,000 organizations across the globe use Jenkins to automate their DevOps Pipeline. At any point in time, there are over a Half a Million servers running the Pipeline to create the software all of us use for tens of millions of software projects. If you think a Ford assembly line is busy - think about the Billions of software releases flowing thru the Jenkins Pipeline.

Just like different car companies have different assembly lines with different points of automation and integration, people developing software have many different points of automation and integration. 10 different car companies will have 10 different types of seats, and 10 different companies will have 10 different types of testing tools. Since Jenkins is the defacto standard, over 1,400 tools have been integrated into the Pipeline - so each of those 10 testing tools is available to each of those 10 different customers to integrate into their pipeline.

CloudBees started as the company to take Jenkins to the enterprise. And we have met with amazing success, with many customers adopting our solutions for improved security, automation, sharing, and management. Now, companies are starting to ask for more. They realize the importance of their software factory Pipeline. They want improved speed, improved control, improved consistency and quality.

Just as the Assembly Line was the key to the flow of cars at Ford, the CloudBees Pipeline is the key to making software. To take a later day example, no manufacturing company can run today without their ERP system - enabling them to monitor and control each step of the process. As CEO's begin the realize the central role of software to their organizational success, they will need that same level of control, visibility and optimization.

CloudBees has made a series of strategic moves in the past year, bringing on key talent (including Anthony, Matt and Christina) making a strategic acquisition, and taking a leadership position in the emerging Kubernetes market. Over the coming weeks, CloudBees will make a series of exciting announcements that will further solidify our position as the Hub of DevOps. Stay tuned!

Our Better Side

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Wed, 28 Feb 2018 13:23:00 +0000

I'm a glass half full type of guy. And lately I have been feeling better and better about the US because I see all these good, common sense things happening like #metoo. I woke up this morning feeling so much better because of the simple step taken by Dicks Sporting Goods.

“When we saw what happened in Parkland, we were so disturbed and upset,” Mr. Stack (Dicks CEO) said in an interview Tuesday evening. “We love these kids and their rallying cry, ‘enough is enough.’ It got to us.”

45.7 - Switzerland Second

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Sat, 04 Feb 2017 21:33:00 +0000

45.6 - International Support for America First

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Sat, 04 Feb 2017 18:19:00 +0000

From: http://magazin.spiegel.de/SP/2017/6/index.html

The rest of the world has a new image of America. I'm not sure this is the real way to put America first...

45.5 - Warren Buffet vs. America First

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Sat, 04 Feb 2017 14:56:00 +0000

I've been bothered by this "America First" slogan. Part of this is the fact I work with a very diverse set of people.

I watched the new "Becoming Warren Buffet" movie on HBO this week. And one of the things he said really crystallized my problem with the "America First" slogan. To paraphrase he said:

"I won the lottery. There was a 1 in 40 chance that I was born in the US. And there was a 50-50 chance that I would be born male. So I have a hard time understanding why my life is worth more than anyone else on earth."

45.4 - To Friend or Fight or Hide?

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 13:53:00 +0000

One of the big choices facing not only politicians, but businesses and other Nations will need to choose which strategy when working with Donnie. Like the bully in the playground, the choice is to:

compliment him and give him your sandwich at lunch
fight him publicly
try to avoid him

Putin, most Republican politicians and the business leaders who heed his calling out on the playground yard are "trying to work with him". Just like the bully, he is easy to out-smart by playing to his ego. Tell him you will keep workers in the US, tell him you are creating jobs in the US and he gets his ego rush and thinks it is all because of him.

On the other hand, there are businesses who are trying to avoid - Uber and Nordstrom are the two stories in the news today. But with boycotts going both ways Pro Donnie and Anti-Donnie, most smart businesses who want to take this strategy will just cover up for a while.

For politicians - both leaders of other nations as well as US politicians, there is a similar version of the decision to be pro or anti (or hide from) Donnie. Of course it is expeditious for Democrats to fight - they have a lot to gain if the pendulum swings back from Donnie. For Republicans it is clear he is giving them enough that they will keep bringing him their lunch money. For other Nations who are not under autocratic rule, it is much more complex. While they may receive benefits from their relationship with the US (protection, trade, tourists), politically at home getting too close to Donnie is not politically smart (16% popularity in this poll).

Figuring out how to play with bullies is tough. Just ask the Australian Prime Minister...

45.3 - President Loses Lawsuit

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 13:41:00 +0000

How do citizens of the US and World take the news that Donnie lost a lawsuit against members of a golf club he bought?

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-01/trump-wins-by-losing-a-court-fight-over-debt

For me, it makes me upset that someone abuses the legal system like this instead of doing the right thing in the first place. It makes me upset that the leader of our country bullies people who have a signed agreement.

He is now playing on a much larger stage. Trying to intimidate world leaders and going back on promises made by our country. It is just embarrassing and "Sad".

45.2 - 17 Metrics to Watch

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Sat, 21 Jan 2017 14:39:00 +0000

We will see how Donnie's measurements go over the next 4 years. This is a very quantifiable list of 17 metrics to track:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-20/17-metrics-to-watch-in-the-trump-era.

45.1 - Give and Take: America First

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Sat, 21 Jan 2017 14:36:00 +0000

As 45 takes office, I happen to be reading Adam Grant's Give and Take. The central premise is that Takers can have short term success, but over the long term Givers have much higher degrees of success.

Obviously Donnie is a Taker (I'll refer to him as Donnie because you can just imagine what he was like in the sandbox as a kid and there was one dump truck toy to play with).

He has to be the "winner". This has resonated with a majority of the Electoral College, so he gets to set the public persona of America. And his "America First" approach is clearly the "Taker" approach that Grant writes about in his book.

This works very well for short term negotiations, which seem to be Donnie's focus. He wants to renegotiate all trade and defense agreements to save us a few dollars. There are two problems with this approach.

First, people see right thru the charade and play to the ego. This is seen by the march of CEO's to Donnie's Castle. Even Jeff Bezos has said "Donnie, you are right, we will create 100,000 jobs right here in the US." This is not a change in plans, and Donnie had no effect on things like this, or hiring an additional 10,000 Walmart employees for their already planned store openings. It serves to raise Donnie's ego, but does little to really make America First.

Second, he has ceded America's leadership position in the world. As Noah Feldman writes in Bloomberg, "there’s no simpler route to renouncing leadership than saying you don’t care about your followers for their own sakes."

Sadly "America First" will not keep America First, nor will it help advance the world in the direction of freedom.

Sad!

Micro Globalization

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 07:49:00 +0000

I was in Switzerland this week for CloudBees 2017 planning meetings. One night we went out to dinner and there was a Jazz bar next door.

Our group consisted of French, Swiss, Belgian, American, Indian, and Japanese people.

We listened to an Italian guitar player and piano player sing a British musician's Illegal Alien:

I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien

I'm an Englishman in New York

Modesty, propriety can lead to notoriety

You could end up as the only one

Gentleness, sobriety are rare in this society

At night a candle's brighter than the sun

Takes more than combat gear to make a man

Takes more than a license for a gun

Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can

A gentleman will walk but never run

If "Manners maketh man" as someone said

Then he's the hero of the day

It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile

Be yourself no matter what they say

Small Business Thoughts in the Trump Era

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Sun, 13 Nov 2016 21:52:00 +0000

As a small business owner (24 employees), our little company has been on a roll since starting in 2010. We are profitable and growing with thousands of happy customers and growing market share. My tendency has been to continue to invest in the business because the fundamentals are so strong.

For me, Trump brings uncertainty in several ways:

I wonder if other businesses will be a bit cautious on spending and investments until there is more certainty on the moves he will make. That could cause some headwinds that could push us more towards a recession.

While I have been in favor of more government spending, the coming tax cuts promise to be less efficient in terms of the multiplier effect of fiscal intervention. The basic concept is that money going to rich people will not be spent very quickly and therefore does nothing to improve the velocity of money, which is a primary factor in the slow recovery over the past 7 years.

Also, between the tax cuts and Trump’s promised infrastructure and defense investments there is uncertainty around what will happen with interest rates, and the long term impact of the federal budget deficit. While I am not overly concerned with the budget deficit with such low interest rates, and increase back to 5% is another recessionary risk factor.

So I will be delaying hiring and investments over the next 6 months to see how things start to evolve in this new era.

Why I Voted for Hillary

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 14:14:00 +0000

I’ve submitted my absentee ballot voting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Election. As I did in 2012, I am giving my reasons in case it helps others make their own decisions.

Here are my key reasons:

Life long commitment to making the world a better place
Investing in major world changes
Agree with her Policies and Proposals
I like smart people who work hard

Making the World a Better Place

This is probably what inspires me the most about Hillary – she has had a lifelong commitment to making the world a better place.

This video is her commencement speech at Wellesley College. She was the first student commencement speaker in the college’s history, and you can see from the President’s introduction the amount of respect she had garnered in her 4 years there. Her speech also shows the core values she was thinking about then, and now.

From her early days she has pushed forward to be in positions of larger and larger impact. While most of us are satisfied making little donations to charities or volunteering, she has risen to positions of power where her work has the leverage to have large scale impact. Take a few minutes to scroll thru the Wikipedia page that lists her various activities and accomplishments - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton.

As a politician (including her political partnership with Bill), she has been in a position to have impact and is close to being in a very powerful position again to have a positive impact on the world. With Bill and Chelsea, she has created one of the most respected and impactful non-profit foundations in the world – raising $2B and employing 2,000 employees to positively impact millions of people.

Hillary believes government is not the bad guy, but is instrumental in advancing our country and the world. She has a pragmatic approach to understanding and trying to solve problems. She understands that there is a need for collaboration between government and business.

Investing in Major World Changes

Thomas Friedman wrote two of the best books on the transformations that are taking place in the world, including “Hot, Flat and Crowded 2.0” - http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/hot-flat-and-crowded-2-0/. Hillary understands these transformations and is embracing them. The world is getting smaller with the US driving much of the change. The Internet, faster and cheaper travel and interrelated commerce means that borders need to decrease and collaboration needs to increase in importance. Moving from fossil fuels to clean energy is an opportunity for the US to lead. Hillary has progressive goals in technology - https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/technology-and-innovation/ and in climate change - https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/climate/.

Policies and Proposals

Having a liberal view of the world, I support most of Hillary’s policies and proposals - https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/. Of particular interest to me are:

Common sense gun laws to do things like background checks and close gun show and Internet sale loopholes. https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/gun-violence-prevention/.
Woman’s right to choose and support of Roe v. Wade.
Fair taxes with higher taxes for large earners (things like the Buffet Rule and large institution risk fees). And I like the idea of a 6 year wait period for full capital gain tax treatment to encourage businesses and their owners to think more strategically than next quarter’s earning. https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/a-fair-tax-system/.
National Service. This reflects Hillary’s core values. https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/national-service/.
Suport for small business. https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/small-business/ (the thing I would like here is to eliminate the confusing maze of 50 separate states and countless local entities rules, filings and taxes on small businesses)
Infrastructure investments paid for by tax increases. https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/fixing-americas-infrastructure/.
Continued strong intelligence and defense and keeping "the fight” in other countries. https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/military-and-defense/.

I am a bit disappointed she does not talk more about increasing budgets for the State Department, USAID and International Relief efforts (The defense budget is almost 10X the State Department budget). Given her work with the Clinton Foundation, she clearly has a concern for the rest of the world. Her years at the State Department also gave her a view of the positive impacts of investment in education and economic support with other countries. And her famous “Women’s rights are human rights” speech demonstrates that she would balance military strength with more strategic investments.

Smart Hard Worker

Finally, I am voting for Hillary because I like smart people who work hard. She has shown a continued ability to listen and learn and adapt. One of the very interesting articles on Hillary is titled “How Hillary Became ‘Hillary’”. It recaps the 1980 loss of Bill Clinton as Arkansas Governor. Many would have accepted that defeat and moved on to legal careers that had a much higher probability of making money. Hillary figured out what went wrong and made big changes (like adding “Clinton” to her last name 5 years after they were first married).

But What About. . .

Of course Hillary is the best known woman in the world. Being at a position of power for so long brings on lots of slings and arrows. And in building a long resume, there are always losses and things that were not done right. So let me go thru the common issues that people bring up about what they do not like about Hillary and how I make sense of them.

The biggest thing she has going against her is that she is a woman. A smart woman. A driven woman. A powerful woman. And the first woman to break the glass ceiling in a very big way. The fact is there is a cultural bias against strong, successful women. Women won the right to vote less than 100 years ago. Male/Female pay is still greater than 1. Think back to high school and how kids made fun of the “smart girl”. At the 1992 Republican Convention:

"Patrick Buchanan derided Clinton’s “radical feminism.” Marilyn Quayle — a lawyer who gave up her career to support her husband’s — presented herself and Dan Quayle as an alternative vision of the husband-wife partnership. “Most women do not want to be liberated from their essential natures as women,” she said. But the convention drew poor reviews; The New York Times’s conservative columnist William Safire complained that “the party displayed the basest of its base.” From then on, the Bush campaign team confined its direct attacks to Bill Clinton."

From http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/magazine/how-hillary-clinton-became-hillary.html.

I’ve got nothing but respect for a person who has stood up to that sort of headwind her whole life. And I think her success is a watershed for future generations of women. Both of my daughters told me how meaningful Hillary’s Democratic Nomination was to each of them earlier this year. As Sarah Vowell said:

“When the D.N.C. rolled that montage of non-dame presidential faces I wept so hard I had to open a new box of tissues. Feeling represented does matter in a representative democracy."

Email

As a person with 6+ email accounts – I have some sympathy for Hillary on this count. Sometimes I send CloudBees or RunSignUp or Running store emails from my personal account of vice-versa. Like Hillary, my emails are a thing of history and momentum and familiarity (I still use Outlook and not Gmail on my computer for example).

Of the 62,000 emails, only 110 were classified at the time of sending. If you add the number of communications that were sent via State Department mechanisms over her 4 years as Secretary of State, the % of classified emails on her server was very, very small. I tend to think of these as mistakes, not something she was purposely doing to put American security at risk.

In addition, the State Department has been hacked to such an extent that people with security clearances and their families have been advised to protect themselves by doing things like putting freezes on their credit reports. So it is likely her personal email server was less likely to be attacked than the State Department.

This article has a fuller description of the email issue based on (and including links to) the FBI study. https://medium.com/the-curious-civilian/admit-it-the-clinton-email-controversy-bothers-you-yet-you-dont-actually-know-what-the-clinton-511dc1659eda#.212l10kb0.

Benghazi

To put the blame for the tragedy of Benghazi on Hillary is shameful. Clearly the blame goes on the people who attacked the State Department outpost that night. Were there things that could have prevented it? Of course. Were there better ways to respond? Of course. Are there things that could be done today to improve the security of all of our foreign outposts? Of course.

The sad fact is that there are dangerous places in the world and the US has a presence in those places for our own interests as well as in the interest of making the world a better place, like Chris Stevens and his team were trying to do. But bad stuff can happen, and it did.

This article is a pretty good summary of the hearings and has links to the raw hearing conclusions (actually there were three of them). http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/chris-stevenss-family-dont-blame-hillary-clinton-for-benghazi. Anne Stevens, the sister of the Ambassador, had this to say:

"It is clear, in hindsight, that the facility was not sufficiently protected by the State Department and the Defense Department. But what was the underlying cause? Perhaps if Congress had provided a budget to increase security for all missions around the world, then some of the requests for more security in Libya would have been granted. Certainly the State Department is underbudgeted.

I do not blame Hillary Clinton or Leon Panetta. They were balancing security efforts at embassies and missions around the world. And their staffs were doing their best to provide what they could with the resources they had. The Benghazi Mission was understaffed. We know that now. But, again, Chris knew that. It wasn’t a secret to him. He decided to take the risk to go there. It is not something they did to him. It is something he took on himself."

Wikileaks

My perception of the Wikileaks information shows what is really happening in the Clinton organization – what happens in every organization. Understanding the competition, evaluating alternative plans, getting feedback from the electorate, making friends with the right people, etc. In fact, I like many of the things that have come out in terms of her interest in having government-industry collaboration. I like her discussions about breaking down borders.

To quote Thomas Friedman again, "Hackers exposed Clinton as a smart politician with a vision and a pragmatic approach to getting things done.” - http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/19/opinion/wikihillary-for-president.html. Or as the Washington Post says “Scandal! Wikileaks reveals Hillary Clinton to be . . . Reasonable.” - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/scandal-wikileaks-reveals-hillary-clinton-to-be%E2%80%94reasonable/2016/10/10/bbad509c-8f19-11e6-9c52-0b10449e33c4_story.html?utm_term=.f27c61c479ba

Bill’s Infidelities

A woman is not responsible for her husband being an idiot. Period.

Summary

I’m a proud supporter of Hillary Clinton for President.

Bickel Cabin - Frank & Mary

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Tue, 28 Jun 2016 23:43:00 +0000

After my Great Grandfather Lou established our family cabin, My Grandma and Grandpa (born in 1900), Frank and Mary inherited it. They also lived in West Virginia and would make the long trip up in the summer with their children Bob (my Dad) and Barbara (my Aunt, who has since passed away at a way too early age).

Grandpa, Dad, Grandma, Barbara

My Dad took my Mom up when they were dating in high school.

Mom & Dad

My Mom and Dad would take us up as kids. This was a very important influence on me. The anticipation of going to Canada each summer - making the two day trip - my parents letting me out of the car a couple hundred meters before the cabin so I could run ahead of the car - helping Grandma pick blueberries and make pies - helping Grandpa fill the generators to pump water or light the house each night - family fishing/picnic trips "down the lake" - quiet hours doing nothing but waiting for the fish to be ready with my line in the water next to my Grandpa - borrowing my Grandpa's worn pocket knife (still a cherished treasure) to whittle some wood or scape off some birch bark to write a letter home. I was so lucky.

Mary Ellen and me on the "MaryFrank" big white wood boat with the 18 horse Johnson

Mary Ellen and me with a "string" of bass in front of an old wood boat my Grandma would plant flowers in each summer.

We were good fishers!

Dinner!

Gotta clean those fish if Grandma is making dinner...

I learned patience in waiting for the marshmallow to brown perfectly and evenly on all sides...

One year we overlapped with our cousins - Barbara and Woody's kids - Brian and Marianne

Unconditional love for and from a Hillbilly

My favorite picture. I would always sit next to Grandpa and he would teach me everything.

While we were fishing, Grandpa had ideas to keep Mom and Dad busy building a boat house...

Dad had hipster glasses before they were hipster...

I always hated this time. I was usually crying. We were leaving Canada for a whole year...

When I was in high school I got to go up just with my Grandparents to help them open up and do some running.

This is how I remember Grandpa. Guiding the big white boat down the lake with a pipe in his mouth and a smile on his face.

Here's another great one by the fish cleaning rack.

Grandma loved staying in the kitchen. That is the old wood stove where she used to make breakfast and dinner every day.

In 1979 the cabin was struck by lightning in the early spring and burned down to the ground. We lost all the old stuff like that wood stove. The real "ice box" that my Dad filled with blocks of ice when he was a kid (we had an ice house in the early days where Canadians would cut blocks of ice out of the lake during the winter and drag them up with horses to the ice house). An old long two handled wood saw used to cut down the old wood forrest that created the town of Blind River. And many more.

My Grandpa was determined to build the house exactly like it was. I graduated in June of 1979 and went up to Canada to help for a week.

Grandma and Grandpa outside the rebuilt cabin.

"Deed" Latarout rebuilt the cabin. He was a good friend of my Dad.

Our dock with the Beaver House on the far side of Bickel Bay.

While I was growing up, my Grandma and Grandpa spent their whole summers in Canada. While they did not have much money, they were happy...

Grandma and Grandpa

Bickel Canada Cabin Beginnings

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 02:09:00 +0000

Bickel cabin in the fall

My parents are in the process of handing the family cabin over to my sister and me this summer. We went up this past week to plan an addition and some updates. I took a bunch of pictures of the pictures that were hanging in the cabin, and wanted to post them in phases. This is Post 1. You can also see Post 2.

My Dad wrote up this history of the Bickel (now Bickel-Cross) Cabin:

"My father, Frank, and his father Louis P. Bickel, went up in 1937, for a stag party organized by Glen Law, a wrestling coach at Marietta H.S. and Illinois. He was at Marietta when Al Rupp senior was the principal. My father and granddad had a connection to Glen thru Glen's relatives in the Oil and Gas business in WV. Granddad was starting to retire, loved the area, walked around the bay, chose our little bay, and bought the land from Al.

Bickel Land Purchase

Al went there in 1930 to visit friends from Ohio Wesleyan in the town north of Columbus. The Ohio Wesleyan people started an enclave on Dubourne about 1900, and they are still there. Descendants actually. I think they call it Battle Point because of supposed Indian battles in the area. Probably found a lot of arrow heads.

Al liked the area, went around looking, and came upon what is now Rupp Bay. All of the land was owned by the Spooner family, and Al bought all of the area from Spooner including the land on the western side of Little Lake.

Granddad cut in in current road and built the cabin in 1938, and we were there that summer when I was four. The rest is history.

Cabin and Powerhouse/Pumphouse from Water Tank Cliff

Lou cleaning fish

Lou with my Dad

Dad on right, Aunt Barbara (his sister) on left

Lou with my Dad on right

Dad

Lou was in the oil business

Grandpa Fishing in Bickel Bay

Grandpa (Frank) and Al Rupp Senior

Walleye were the fish on Lake Lauzon in those days

Grandpa

Glen Law, Frank

Bickel Bay

Larry, Ivan, Evan and Verna Shanahan from left

The old fireplace

Grandpa on the left and Lou next to him.
This boat was built by John Emil Carlson

Glen Law and Grandpa

Grandpa on left and Al Rupp on right

Lou Bickel
Knew how to pick a site for a cabin...

Continuous Delivery and Jenkins 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 13:53:00 +0000

There are some exciting things happening in the Jenkins community and at CloudBees.

The first thing is that Kohsuke Kawaguchi has announced the start of the Jenkins 2.0 Roadmap:

"Jenkins is over 10 years old, and it came quite a long way. I still remember the first few plugins that I wrote by myself, and now we have close to 1100 plugins. What's started as a hobby project that had run under my desk today boasts more than 100K installations driving half a million-ish build machines.

. . .

So I propose we do Jenkins 2.0 to fix this.

There are three important goals that I see in Jenkins 2.0.

We need to claim our rightful place in Continuous Delivery. We have lots of pieces that address these modern needs, but we are not communicating this very well.
We need to revisit out of the box experience, so that Jenkins itself speaks that story and makes it clear what we are aiming for. Our software needs to speak for itself and tell people where we are going, so that the community can better focus efforts on the important parts.
And we need to do this while keeping what makes Jenkins great in the first place, which are the ecosystem, the community, and the extensibility that recognizes that one size does not fit all and let people do what they want to do."

The second important thing is that the advent of Docker and containers is making this transition MUCH easier. CloudBees has contributed significant efforts to the open source community with the release of Docker plug-ins that make Docker and Jenkins work together very nicely to make Continuous Delivery real.

And I love this animated GIF:

Patrimonial Capitalism

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 01:17:00 +0000

This notion has been stewing in me for quite a while, and yesterday Paul Krugman wrote an article about this topic of Patrimonial Capitalism.

"...the political spectrum now instinctively accords much more respect to capital than to labor, at a time when capital income is growing ever more concentrated in a few hands — and is surely on its way to being concentrated largely in the hands of people who inherited their wealth."

This is somewhat related to my earlier post of how I wish things were - with a balance between owners, employees and customers - called Capitalism and the Three Legged Stool.

In Krugman's article, the basic premise is that since wealth and income are concentrated increasingly in fewer people's hands, the society at large is dependent on the patrimony, or direction, of the 1% (or maybe the .1%). Decisions like Citizens United help to reconfirm this, as those with large wealth can now invest to shape the government.

These topics have been beaten to death, but I wanted to expand on my own experience of how this plays out in helping to determine the probability of financial success. I want to point out two examples of how the tax system is set up in a way to help people with wealth.

Capital Gains as a Tax Break for the Wealthy.
This is the primary issue that Warren Buffet is referring to when he talks about income inequality.

I am lucky to have been a small part of several companies that either went public or were sold. The primary way I have made money over the past 15 years is via capital gains, which were taxed at either 20 or 15% rather than the marginal tax rate of 35-39%.

In two ways, that seems fair. I chose to be paid in stock rather than income, therefore taking the risk these companies would not become valuable. Second, I was part of teams that created something out of nothing and created jobs, which is what the American Dream is all about.

However, it bothers me that people that chose to work at these companies did not have a similar choice. First, because only the top people are offered this type of incentive. But also because they did not have enough money to forgo a salary.

Also, most of the venture money came from either wealthy individuals or from non-profit funds like private and public pension plans and University endowments. Obviously the non-profits would have invested no matter the tax rate. And the wealthy individuals were looking for those big 10X returns as the reason they funded these companies, so tax rate was a relatively minor part of their investment thesis.

My point is that this capital would have been available to fund these companies even with a higher or non-existent capital gains rate.

Capital Gains Treatment Does Not Encourage Building Businesses for the Long Term
Although the Capital Gains tax is designed to encourage long term investing, there are a number of ways it does not. This is seen today in venture capital backed companies. The VC backed companies are mostly designed to grow fast and be attractive to a buyer so that the principles can cash out with low tax rates.

Let's take it from my view as the founder of RunSignUp. Unlike my other companies, this one is not venture backed, and was funded solely by me (another advantage of having money). We have grown fast and are now a profitable company. Since I own it, that profit is now taxed at the marginal tax rate of 39.6%. For me, that is fine and I am happy to pay that given the fact that the company would not exist without the wonderful infrastructure, people and wealth of our amazing nation. I also happen to really enjoy the work we are doing and want to continue for hopefully a couple of decades.

But we have already been approached about being acquired. Think about the advantage of the 20% Capital Gain rate. Greatly simplified, it would allow me to keep an extra $20 out of every $100 of value of the company to sell it. And if I were the type of person to maximize my profit, I would try to grow the business unnaturally for today and leave future investments until someone else had to worry about it to maximize the sale price.

That does not sound like the basic idea of building long term businesses via a capitalistic system to me. It sounds like a system that maximizes the wealth of the wealthy.

To bring this back to the topic of Patrimonial Capitalism, the wealthy who are looking after the interests of the country have seriously stacked the deck in their own favor. I see this personally, and like Warren Buffet, it bothers me. And I just wanted to get that out of my system...

WhatsApp Valuation Model

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Sun, 23 Feb 2014 13:54:00 +0000

I finally had a moment to figure out the Whatsapp business model. First year is free and then $0.99 per year thereafter. With 400 Million users, that is about $400M in revenue per year (or per next year).

They do 18 Billion messages per day. Using Amazon AWS SQS or SNS pricing of $0.50 per Million, that is $9,000 per day of approximate cost, or about $4M of costs per year. I know that is probably a bit light because I am not including data transfer costs of about a Nickel/GB.

For employee costs, they had about 60 people at an average fully burdened load of $200K is about $11M.

The big cost for WhatsApp are the Apple and Android Store transaction fees of 30% - about $120M.

So, a net income (next) year of ~$260M.

Put that net at a 73X P/E ratio and it gets you to the $19B valuation. Comparatively:

IBM has a PE of 12
Red Hat has a PE of 64
Facebook has a PE of 112
Amazon has a PE of 580.

Of course it positions Facebook well to address some challenges it has. The two big ones that come to mind is that the Facebook app is too big now and therefore they need some other brands and apps to get to market if they want to continue to grow. The second one is that they have set Facebook up to be an advertising driven model (although there are some huge opportunities still to do things like payments and identification). The WhatsApp subscription pricing gives them some diversity in their revenue model moving forward.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure Zuckerberg did not make a huge mistake here. And I think Facebook will continue to bring new brands to market thru development or acquisition just as Google has.

Capitalism vs. the Three Legged Stool

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 22:56:00 +0000

Wikipedia defines: "Capitalism is an economic system in which trade, industry and the means of production are controlled by private owners with the goal of making profits in a market economy."

This definition has always bothered me. I prefer a different model where there is equal recognition of the three primary drivers behind the success of a company:

Owners
Employees
Customers

I like to think of it as a three legged stool, where each leg is as important as the other. One gets too large or small and the stool tips over.

The free market is supposed to take care of Employees and Customers. Employees because the Owners will create so many jobs that due to supply and demand, employees will receive competitive pay. Customers because if the owners are not building the right thing, then they can go elsewhere.

As someone who has helped to build about 10 startup companies now, I have seen the power in making these three stakeholders equal partners.

Employees who are true stakeholders - both financially and in shaping the company - are much more valuable to the other two stakeholders since they have high motivation. In addition, employees who take true responsibility make better decisions and work harder.

Making customers true stakeholders is similarly productive. I have seen Customer Advisory Boards have real and meaningful impact on companies. Customers know their needs the best - employees still have to listen and interpret and make bets on where the customer will be in the future. Being able to have honest dialogs is important, because new ideas stem from these interactions when there is true collaboration. Companies need to charge a fair price to their customers and deliver true value for that price.

There is a requirement from all parties to share the power and have empathy for each other. That means customers must understand an employee's need to earn a good living, and an owner's need to get a return on invested capital (and time).

As owners, employees and customers, we all share the individual responsibility to make the organizations more equal across these stakeholders. I like the recent commercial on TV about the employer who gives 20-30% of profits to employees.

We work hard at RunSignUp to make this true, and it is certainly a competitive weapon that helps elevate our business above the typical pure capitalistic companies in our little market. Hopefully it is an approach more and more businesses take to heart.

Options

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 19:06:00 +0000

Alex McCaw wrote an excellent blog explaining stock options - http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/an-engineers-guide-to-stock-options. Everyone getting options (an engineer or not) should read this - especially the tax implications of converting your options.

I thought there were several common issues that could use some further explanation using an example.

For our example, lets say a VC investment made of $10 M at a valuation of $50M.

Pre Money and Post Money Valuation. Since people like big numbers, so this is usually expressed as post-money. So the company was valued at $40M before the investment, but now that they have another $10M in the bank, they are now worth $50M.

Dilution. Before the investment there were 4,000 shares/options, each worth $10, and each representing 1/4,000th of the company. For the investment another 1,000 shares were created and sold to the investors at $10 each. Each share/option each employee had was worth $10 before and $10 after - so there was no economic dilution. Each share/option is no representing 1/5,000th of the company - so there is a % ownership dilution.

Dilution can be an emotional topic. For founders as they go thru rounds they drop from 60% ownership to 30% to 15% and feel a loss of control of the company. But this is the deal for getting those financial resources into the company. Dilution for most employees does not impact "control", but a feeling of "worth". They may start with 1% but at the end be at .2%. The fact that each round was needed and valued "fairly" means it was just part of growing the company. Just like adding another superstar developer or VP of Sales.

The point I would like to make is that company leadership should explain this during the growth stages and when new investment comes in. It is a simple fact and should be treated as such. Don't wait to sell the company and people think they have 1% and they actually have .2% - too much heartache when there should be celebrations.

Option Valuation. In our example the valuation is $50M, but that valuation is for Preferred Shares. The reality is that Common shares (which options are tied to) are NOT worth that much. The reason is covered in Alex' blog. Boards will try to get a valuation done for the company at the lowest possible price. These days that is about 20% (and it seems to have gone up over the past 10 years and continuing to head upward). Boards have a reason to try to get the minimum valuation because it is an incentive to hiring people, so in this case boards are definitely on the side of the employees!

So that means if you are issued options around the time of this funding, your options will be priced at $10 * .2 = $2. So, if the next week the company is sold at $50M, you are in luck because your options will be worth almost $10 a piece! (it is "almost" because some preferences may wind up giving some of that first $50M to the preferred shareholders). Of course if the company sells for $10M in a year, then the preferred shareholders get all $10M and you get nothing - hence the reason for the decreased value of your options.

Who Deserves How Much? This is one thing I have learned - no one gets what they feel they deserve. At some very successful IPO's and Exits I have been a part of I have seen unhappy people from the founder to the CEO to the Exec team to developers to sales people - well, everyone. It seems some people always have a high opinion of themselves!

The fact is that there are four key things that determine how much you get:

When you join. The earlier the better.
How much appreciation to the value of the company happens after you join.
Accepted Market Practices. All the VC's will have a chart for what % each type of job function gets they will share with their CEO's. That provides ranges, like .7-1.5% for a VP Marketing. The interesting thing about most that I have seen really focus on the people that report to the CEO, so the typical % going to a developer will be much below 0.1%.
How critical the open spot is and how good you are.

So negotiate the best you can, but the big wins come from being part of a company that grows really fast and increases their valuation 10X while you are part of the team. Good luck on finding that opportunity.

In the mean time, enjoy your job and live within your existing compensation!

JBoss Recollections - Part 5 - The Business Team

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 01:48:00 +0000

My daughters, Mollie and Allison, in
Neuchatel, Switzerland waving the JBoss flag

I have covered other JBoss Recollections previously: 1. Early Years, 2. Forming the Strategy, 3. Tech Team, and 4. VC Funding.

Of course any real business needs business people to drive success and growth. Here were the key hires by date and some stories behind each. Looking back, I still think we made the right decisions on each of these great people as well as the timing and order of their hiring. That was one of the many lucky things that happened to make JBoss successful.

Marc and Ben

Ben Sabrin - 2001 - Ben was at JBoss before I got there. I've talked about Ben in the earlier recollections, but I would be remiss to not mention his significant contributions to JBoss. He figured out that customers wanted to buy from JBoss before almost anyone.

Tom Leonard - 12/03 - I knew that the key thing about making JBoss successful as a business was credibility. And there were two major ways to earn that credibility from a business perspective - Significant Partnerships and Significant Deals. And I happened to know the one person in the world who could help us the most - Tom Leonard. Tom and I had worked together at Bluestone where he had almost single handedly

Tom

brought in most of the Partner business. He also had the ability to close large deals. And best of all, customers loved him. He closed Unisys, HP, Novell, Iona, McKesson and many others. Tom and I were also the ones to establish the relationships with Red Hat and Oracle that led to the eventual acquisition. I went with him on many of those meetings and never paid for a meal ;-)

Cary Smith, CFO - 1/04 - So we had a bunch of money from VC's, and we needed someone to start having some ownership of that as well as the budgeting process. Cary came from Earthlink and brought the discipline and experience needed to plan and run our operation. This was critical because we tried to operate the business on a relative cash flow break even basis, and knowing where we really stood on cash, collections, planned expansion when growing from 6 to 200 in less than 3 years is tough.

Joe

Joe McGonnell, Marketing - 2/04 - David Skok, our lead VC, had helped develop the strategy of a marketing driven funnel. I had worked with Joe at Bluestone as well. He not only knew the middleware market, but he was a pragmatic marketer that who was responsible for putting together the people, systems, and processes of a market driven funnel approach. Joe made a major career bet on this company at a very early stage and moved from New Jersey to Atlanta to be one the keys to our success. He somehow implemented David Skok's scratchings below:

Rob

Rob Bearden, Sales & Marketing to COO - 4/04 - It was clear that JBoss was growing fast and significant companies wanted to do business with us. We needed to put in place a way to keep up with the demand and take advantage of the opportunity in front of us. I still remember meeting Rob in the Atlanta airport the first time. I instantly fell in love with him. I felt he was so right for the job of getting us organized, disciplined and aggressive in going after the market. He would bring the right amount of professionalism to our organization and make us credible. He did many smart things in his early days like leverage existing talents like Ben and Tom. He also asked Matt Quinlan to put together training for sales and SE's so we could scale the organization. As the company grew he became the COO, which was exactly the plan that Marc had laid out when he was hired. I remember lots of stories about Rob. Between taking a vow of no meat or alcohol during Lent, to his farm truck he drove to work with 4 tires in the back, to his Monday morning sales team calls he was a colorful driver of the JBoss business culture.

Brad

Brad Murdoch - 7/04 - We were growing so fast, we needed help in organizing the operations of the company - especially our delivery of training and support. I still remember my first interview on the phone with Brad - the energetic Scotsman practically leapt over the phone from San Diego with his enthusiasm and drive. He was a key person in creating the type of credibility with customers to earn major contracts for our young company. For example, he was critical to gaining what was the largest deal of the company from Nokia by committing his personal support and giving their executives his personal cell phone number.

Shaun, I think...

Shaun Connolly - 10/04 - I had tried to convince Marc of the need for Product Management for quite a while, and I finally wore him down by introducing him to Shaun (another former Bluestone guy). Shaun learned the open source game at JBoss, and how to work with open source developers who were very head strong and geographically dispersed. He later helped Spring in their very similar growth efforts, and is currently at Hortonworks. There are two great things about Shaun. His humble nature, and his son. Billy has built two apps now for RunSignUp while in high school. He is far, far brighter than his father. Shaun and I are a lot alike in that we have both gotten to the point where neither of actually do anything.

Rich Friedman - 12/04 - Rich is the guy that made JBoss scalable as a business. He created the JBoss Operations

Rich's baby...

Network, which was the key value-add that made JBoss acceptable and enticing to the Operations departments in many organizations. It allowed the sales team to justify the value-add of our Subscription Services. I still remember meeting Rich when he was interviewing at Bluestone and him opening the trunk of his car and getting out a book - there must have been a dozen programming books in his car. I am lucky to still call Rich a friend and actually collaborate with him still on RedLine13 as a side endeavor that we use as an excuse to get together still.

There were many more that I was fortunate to work with. I guess my point to this series of recollections is that there is not one single point in time, no single decision, no single person that makes a company truly successful. It is the accumulation of a lot of hard work, a lot of learning and adapting, a real sense of a team, and of course having fun along the way.

KK, Jenkins and the Triumph of Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Thu, 24 Oct 2013 04:08:00 +0000

Kohsuke Kawaguchi is the most brilliant developer and creator I have gotten the chance to work with (we work together at CloudBees). I just got back from the Jenkins Users Conference, where 450 people from around the world (literally) attended and another 500+ watched via live video stream.

In his keynote, KK reviewed his concerns with having created Jenkins. (It is the defacto "Continuous Integration Server". Many, many companies use it to "build, test and deploy" their software - meaning it winds up being the glue that glues the pieces together of many of the applications people use today like Yahoo, Netflix, EBay, Amazon Kindle, cell phones, etc. Not to mention big companies like Cisco, AMEX, Macy's, Nordstrom and literally tens of thousands of others.)

To "build, test and deploy" all of these applications, he estimates it takes 3 Facebook sized data centers running pretty much full time 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. He was concerned about contributing to global warming. He rationalized it when he found a very large wind farm that produces enough energy to run these three Facebook-sized data centers, and has promised to continue to work on this great project.

KK created Jenkins when he worked at Sun under it's original name of Hudson. There he incubated it and started an open source community. I've always liked open source and had tremendous respect for those developers who created successful projects. Open source is like showing everyone in the world exactly everything that you have done (how many people are willing to show all of their work in public?). It takes a lot of courage to do that, and if you are able to create a project that people use enough to fill up 3 FB data centers then you have really done something.

I respect KK more because of how he saved the project from Oracle back in 2010. Oracle had purchased Sun and there was a mindless manager who tried to corrupt the project. KK stood his ground when Oracle started doing really stupid things, and "forked" the project. This was a huge decision on his part since Hudson was his baby, and he would have to restart many things (thank goodness for open source and he did not have to re-write the code).

Jenkins was born in late 2010. Oracle fought this hard. By February it appeared that Jenkins was going to be the winner. This was a very, very trying time for KK.

With the success of Jenkins that was aptly demonstrated today, KK made the right decision.

There are two key reasons for the success of Jenkins. First is KK's brilliance in seeing a problem and creating great code that solved the problem. The second is the community that has built up around Jenkins. There are two aspects to this community. One is the fact KK architected Jenkins to make it easy for others to "plug into". This has led to hundreds and hundreds of plug ins that provide a solution far broader than any single company could offer. The second aspect of the community is people's willingness to help. Whether it was Tyler Croy's support and help or Andrew Bayer's calm guidance and graphic capability to create the new Jenkins logo.

And this is where KK separates himself from the amazingly few other brilliant developers. His ability to build that community. The picture at the top of this blog shows KK kneeling down to sign autographs today on a butler bobblehead (he signed these for over an hour today). His humble bearing - kneeling at the feet of others, selecting the butler icons for his project to demonstrate the fact his software was meant to serve others, or giving the shy, embarrassed smile when he sees the line of autograph seekers getting longer all are the essence of why he is successful.

Thank you, Kohsuke. For giving us the chance to learn from you and sharing your creations in the unselfish way you have.

Venture Funded vs. "Lifestyle" Startups

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 21:04:00 +0000

I get pinged a couple of times per week by people about starting up a business. Almost always the question is "How do I get funded". My common answer is take money when you don't need it, because that is the only time when people will want to give it to you. And don't take money when you need it, because people won't want to give it to you then.

Why I was a Fan of VC Funding
Here is an example story. In 1994 Bluestone had created a tool that made it easy to develop applications for the web that were driven from a database. Today this is how all websites work, but it was the early days. We were funding the development ourselves out of cash flow, and investors approached us - Bessemer actually gave us a term sheet. The founder declined. Our competitors (Spider Technology, which became NetDynamics) got funding and we were forced to respond to match their higher levels of spending and go look for venture funds. Of course when we did, our final term sheet with Patricof and Adams was lower than the original one from Bessemer 18 months before (and we had lost a year and a half of time).

I became a pretty big cheerleader for getting venture capital. In addition to being able to be more aggressive in development, marketing and sales, it also brought a discipline with outside board members that was healthy to challenge and motivate and bring structure to the business. When I joined JBoss, Marc decided to take venture investment. It is safe to say that David Skok of Matrix added a lot to the company, in addition to giving us the capital to move forward aggressively in the market. Similar positive experiences happened at Hyperic and Spring. Currently I work with several companies including CloudBees and eXo who are venture funded (appropriately because they are going after big problems in big markets). And from a personal basis, I have enjoyed making most of my money from capital gains of appreciated stock.

Why I now like "Lifestyle" Businesses
When talking with VC's, they will kind of look down their noses and ask founders if they are interested in a "lifestyle" business. It is almost presented as a choice between being lazy or taking funding.

I think the world has changed quite a bit, though. The cost of creating a product and bringing it to market are drastically lower in the technology space. The Cloud allows people to develop a service that can be used by Billions of people instantly. If it does not catch on the cost is minimal, if it does catch on it is very low cost to expand. The cost of marketing and sales has also dropped tremendously - there are fewer and fewer "enterprise sales reps", and the best marketing is viral and true word of mouth.

In essence, it is cheap to start web based businesses today. And funding will not improve the chances of your idea being good or not.

I am going the "lifestyle" way on my two latest startups - RunSignUp and RedLine13. The first started in 2010 and we have grown on a grass roots basis. We develop features in an incremental fashion. As we add features and capabilities, we are able to address more and larger races needs. It is a self-fulfilling realization of success. Our desire is to create a great service for our running community and build a solid, profitable business. This is not saying that Eventbrite is bad for taking $140M of capital and building a very large business - just that this alternative is a very good one for a lot of entrepreneurs.

In the case of RedLine, we just launched this service as a part time effort. It costs us about $3,000 per year to operate it as a free service. We are seeing encouraging signs of early adopters coming to us. Perhaps we could go get venture funding for it, but then we would be like all the big competitors and wind up with similar pricing. If we stay small, then we can have a nice little profitable business that helps customers.

With both of these companies, I get that dismissive, "oh, a lifestyle company, isn't that cute" kind of feeling when talking about them with my friends in the industry. In reality, I have a lot of fun with both businesses and will make a lot of money with both.

My Recommendation
I was on the phone with an entrepreneur yesterday who was looking for $500K. I told him if he went to professional investors they would basically string him along until he was producing cash, at which time he would not need their money. In his case, he is better off taking his time with development and not hire another developer right now. Build the product his first 3 customers want and then move to the next set of features from the next set of prospects. In a couple of years he would have a profitable business that would either produce a nice flow of income or be very attractive to acquirers. And he would not have wasted 6 months of his time chasing funding rather than figuring out creative ways to build the business.

While it makes a lot of sense for some businesses to seek funding, there are a growing number of opportunities that you can grow with very small capital needs. The goal is building a business, not getting funded. Even if people think it is a lifestyle.

Zip Code API

noreply@blogger.com (Bob) — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 13:15:00 +0000

We are developing some really great technology at RunSignUp. So we are starting a separate company to bring some of the technology to market. I'll be posting more about this later, but this is worth talking about now as it is in production and we have a number of people who have stumbled upon it and are using it.

One of the things we developed was a Zip Code API (some people spell it Zipcode API). We developed this API to provide a list of Zip Codes within a certain Radius. We use this for the Running Club/Store widget for providing a list of races within a certain distance of a store or club. We are also going to be updating our UI so runners can enter their zip code and we will fill in the City and State automatically.

The Zip Code API provides the following functions:

Distance Between Zip Code API - The API allows you to quickly and easily figure out the distance between zip codes.
Zip Codes in Radius API - You can use this API to find all zip codes within a given radius from another zip code.
Zip Code to City and State API and Zip Code to Latitude/Longitude API - The API can convert a zip code to the primary location for the zip code. This includes the city, state, latitude, and longitude for the primary location.
City to Zip Code - This API looks up the Zip Code based on the City and State.

We already have a number of developers on the web who have found it. For example, a major retailer’s web site uses it to see how far you are from the nearest stores.

We love developing technology and see people using it. Instead of keeping it bottled up inside RunSignUp, we figure this is a good outlet! If you click around a bit on the links above you can figure out the rest of the story on the company we are creating...