Last year I lead my birthday post off with the same quote I cited above and spoke of striving to retain the spirit that no dragon is unslayable.  29 has struck me with a bit of urgency and this year I’d like to reflect on action.

The “appetite for adventure over the life of ease” is the most romantic way to put that need for action.  The reality is that if your adventures are in the world of business and entrepreneurship it’s an appetite for sleep deprivation and stress that will be prevailing over that life of ease.

It’s only by accepting that life of adventure (and stress) that the dragon becomes ACTUALLY slayable.  Last year’s post missed this point and could be read as encouraging a life of believing you could slay a dragon without actually taking one on.

So look for me to grab my sword and put in a lot of extra hours this year.  It’s time I met one of these dragons.

P.S.  I wrote this entire post sitting up on my hotel bed while taking a break from my side project.  I then did a search for images with “Knight” in the title and LOOK what I found.  Is that not the perfect image for this post?

I’m not planning to invest in Facebook, but if I were, I would be hoping he sticks to his guns and wears the sweatshirt.  Better yet, I’d hope that he pulls some stunt, maybe something like a wool suit-like two button hooded sweatshirt.  If it were my company going public this morning, I’d be strutting to the bell (yes, I would fly there instead of doing it from California) in a brand new, hand-tailored, $10,000 suit that I’d probably never wear again.  I’m not Zuck though (closes his eyes and day dreams for a moment), Mark Zuckerberg has craftily built his sweatshirt in to a brand.  It’s a brand that’s worth a lot with developers.  The fact that he’s both a capable CEO and an extraordinary developer with developer cred, is a ridiculously valuable asset for Facebook.  In a world where top developers are worth millions per year, the last thing an investor (even a dapper dan wall street investment banker) should want is for Mark to do something to sacrifice his brand in the tech community.

I have spoken before about the potential for, and profitability of, dating sites.  Over the weekend I spent a little time fooling around with OKCupid and I came away pretty impressed.  I suppose the world may always need Match.coms for simplicity, but OKCupid does something very interesting with questions.  They ask you a ton of them and then use those to match you with other people.  They’re questions about how you like to date, the kinds of jokes you like to tell, the lifestyle you lead, even how you like your sex.  They also have a pretty brilliant way of getting you to answer the questions; you can see if someone you’re interested in has answered a question, but you can only see their answer if you also answer that question.  Great Ideas.

Also, after a day or so of being a member and answering maybe 60 questions, I got an email with the charts above.  I’ll bet they could create some pretty interesting correlation charts with the kind of data that produced those.

1. There’s a shortage of quality programmers and technologists nationwide.
2. In Pittsburgh there is a shortage of big companies doing sophisticated projects.
3. Pittsburgh’s tech startup scene, while healthy for a city our size, is lacking in funding.
4. The economy, while recovering, is cautious at the moment.  Most companies have seen a turn around in earnings, but are still trying to reduce costs.

1. In the hype about cloud it’s easily to lose track of just how immature we are so far.  The fact that with all the cloud options out there in the world, a company as new as Zynga would choose to leave some of its processing internal is worth noting.  It’s not that what older companies do doesn’t matter, but I think the new companies are the ones to watch.  They’re not burdened by legacy computers, datacenter leases, employees, etc… They make their decisions based on what technologies are best/cheapest and apparently Zynga does not yet believe that that is public cloud.
2. We’re all used to the security concerns associated with public cloud, but Zynga (who, as a gaming company, doesn’t have quite the security concerns of a bank or a company with lots of IP) has a different reason to prefer internal cloud sometimes, “Zynga dissected how its game logic ran in the public cloud before designing its zCloud data centers and found many ways to eliminate bottlenecks and improve performance, he said.” and “Zynga also is able to order arrays of servers that are designed to perform particular functions in Zynga’s data centers. The company’s ability to order hardware optimized as Web servers, data base servers, and application servers allows it to operate with a higher degree of efficiency in its own data centers than it could on Amazon servers.”  To me both of those problems are solvable, and it’s probably only a matter of time before PaaS and IaaS companies mature with specialties in web or gaming.

In conversations the past couple weeks this point has really been hardened for me, but I’ve found a more useful analogy then the toolkit one.  I’ve found it’s easiest to look at deploying your workload in the cloud as a meal.  You can get differing levels of help with your meal, but at the end of the day you can eat no matter what:

1. If you’re developing and deploying your own software in your own datacenters you could think of yourself as a farmer.  You don’t have dependencies on the outside world (nor the security exposures and counter-party risks associated with them), but you also have to plant, harvest and cook just to get your meals.
2. IaaS is more like shopping at a farmers market.  There’s still quite a bit of work involved to turn the raw ingredients you pick up in to a meal, but at least you’re not farming.  In this step though, if the farmers at your market don’t raise the cows the way you’d like, you’re going to be stuck with a crumby steak.
3. What Amazon has created is a supermarket.  You can just buy the beef, the pasta, and the tomatoes if you want, but you can also buy hamburger helper, a bottle of Ragu or even a frozen lasagna.  There’s still some work involved on your end with all of these options, but less then there was before.  You increase your risk because if the grocery store accidentally breaks every bottle of your favorite Ragu (or worse yet stops carrying it) you may have to adapt quickly to an inferior solution.
4. True platform as a service is like eating at a restaurant.  You can pick your restaurant, but once you’re there you are stuck with what’s on the menu.  There’s always a risk that meal will be horrible and if it is, all you can do is send it back.  You can’t add more oregano or try again next week with the same ingredients, if the restaurant you selected makes awful ravioli, you’ll eat awful ravioli, nothing at all, or pay for dinner twice.  On the other hand, there’s very little work on your part and often the costs are quite low compared with buying all the ingredients and investing all the labor to cook.  Also, while there is some risk that the restaurant won’t have what you like, how many of us are skilled enough cooks that we are less likely to burn our dinner then a guy who has sat in that kitchen and made the same entrees every day for the last 6 months?

On to the purpose of Sauerkraut Sundays… As I go through the week, I use Twitter to send out little updates and links.  I realize that I do this quite a bit and that not all of you use Twitter, so with that in mind I’d like to take Sunday to do sort of a week in review.  I’ve selected the most useful of my tweets from the last week and placed them in to the categories that I use in this blog.

Me

Fireworks night after a great game! (@ PNC Park w/ 131 others) [pic]: http://t.co/ZTpz4BbC

May 6, 2012 2:13 am via foursquareReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

One upside to working outside Pittsburgh is that the second I get off the plane the bullshit is over. http://t.co/ms2IafbU

May 4, 2012 7:42 pm via foursquareReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Walking through lower Manhattan is a trip tonight with the occupiers. Cops, helicopters, road blocks, crazy

May 2, 2012 12:10 am via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Pittsburgh

Highmark, UPMC reach agreement until 2015 - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette http://t.co/uEUYt9Bg via @pittsburghpg

May 2, 2012 7:36 pm via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@Sara_pittPG

Sara_pittPG

Social Media

Thrilled and honored to be presenting at this year's #WDS event on the state and opportunities of indie/self publishing!

May 3, 2012 11:30 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@MattGartland

Matt Gartland

Tech News

Three high profile litigations involving Oracle. What are they doing over there? No more companies to buy so sue the rest?

May 3, 2012 12:27 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@cyreynolds

Chuck Reynolds

Other

'Those who conceive, develop,& understand software are the new masters of the universe' @medriscoll http://t.co/CkghywcG the new reality

May 6, 2012 2:18 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@VanessaAlvarez1

Vanessa Alvarez

Blog Posts From This Blog

Blog Post: Why am I excited to get on an earlier flight home from NYC? The Pirates of course... http://t.co/qm6QKXnG

May 4, 2012 5:41 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Blog Post: http://t.co/2cNgGaV5 is releasing APIs... could be a bigger deal than when Facebook became a platform: http://t.co/pNd5rz1A

May 1, 2012 10:19 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

Blog Post: In the world of 2 year / $1B Instagram sales, @Vivisimo_Inc's sale shows that patience also pays. http://t.co/SlHBB2Rk…

May 1, 2012 4:30 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@BurgherJon

Jonathan Cavell

1. The pitching staff (before about 3 days ago) had been amazing (now we’re just settling for pretty frickin good).  Not only have the team’s 5 starting pitchers only had 2 bad starts so far this season, Jeff Locke pitched a no hitter in AAA, Rudy Owens has a 2.26 ERA in AAA, the team’s best starter last year is on the DL, and Brad Lincoln (who is stretched out to start) has looked pretty good out of the bullpen.  Last year’s pitching was good in the early part of the season, but it faded because we didn’t have enough arms.  This years team has a stock of starting pitchers 9 deep.
2. Pedro Alvarez.  If there’s a reason to watch this team it is that Pedro Alvarez has hit 6 homeruns and batted well over .300 since 4/16.  He may always be hot and cold, but when he’s hot there is no one in the league with more raw power.
3. The team is 3 games under .500 but take a look at the competition and the number of home games vs road games.  This team is better than last years and has a much better chance to win 81 games (maybe even make the playoffs) then last year’s even if they do have a slightly (and very slightly) worse record.
4. I am from Pittsburgh and I do love fireworks.

Once in a while something comes along and you’re like CRAP, why didn’t I see that coming.  Box.com being the NAS of the web (not just for their apps but for ANYONE’s) is frickin brilliant.  Releasing their API isn’t just storage as a service, it’s something more than that.  It’s File System as a Service.  But since it’s not directly hitched to another service (AHEM, GDrive and Google Docs), literally anyone can plug in to it.

Well done Box.com, well done!

A great recent example of this is Vivisimo.  The local Pittsburgh company sold last week to IBM for an undisclosed amount.  I have no insider information about the deal, but I’m going to take the optimist point of view and guess it was a favorable deal for Vivisimo.  The company was founded in 2000 when Enterprise Search was a somewhat fringe market.  As recently as 2008 (actually as an IBM employee) I was consulting with clients about how they could benefit from enterprise search, but most of them were trying to come up with more structured ways of looking at all their data.  Vivisimo had a loyal, satisfied group of customers and a reputation as one of the best Enterprise Search companies in the business.  The market just hadn’t popped yet.

This year, people started to realize that one of the values that the cloud drives is that much of your companies data (even the unstructured bits) will exist in central repositories where it can be indexed and searched.  Most enterprises have realized that they won’t be able to manually tag and organize these huge messes of data and have come to the realization that they’ll need to be able to search through it.  It lead Amazon to deploy CloudSearch a couple weeks ago.  It’s a main driver behind GDrive that was announced last week.  And, much to Vivisimo’s advantage… IBM realized it was a capability that they lacked.  The moons came in to alignment and after 12 years of working hard Vivisimo’s well deserved reputation and highly tuned technology was something IBM needed.

Sure, the investors that put in millions in 2008 and the early investors who funded it even earlier had to be patient, but they got far more last week then they would have if they’d followed the Instagram model and sold in 2 years.