Drew Broadley's Bottomless Pit of Rambling

An amazing send off from the Data Ventures @ Stats NZ team and Stats NZ.

Tue, 13 Jul 2021 10:33:28 +1200

An hour of people roasting me about the stupid things I’ve done over the last few years. I was in tears of laughter.

And to top it off, a custom hoodie and t-shirt design gifted to me. So awesome.

Now it’s time to rest, and relax for the next while and try and turn the brain off before thinking about the next thing.

Stepping down as Exec Director of Data Ventures @ Stats NZ

Tue, 13 Jul 2021 10:32:18 +1200

It’s been 3 ½ years and a lot of energy to set up and bring Data Ventures to where it is now - and I am extremely happy with where things are and the opportunities the team has. However, that energy level can only be sustained for a period of time and I’ll be stepping down on the 8th of July to take a break for a while to recover.

It’s been quite a unique journey for all involved, I’m sure they will agree - with two key phases.

The first phase was the start of Data Ventures, where Liz MacPherson (she/her) and Victoria MacLennan where instrumental around initial ideas, guidance and challenges.

And into the next phase of where Data Ventures is right now, we have Mark Sowden and Amanda who have been really diligent around the strategy and direction for Data Ventures and where it’s best as an asset to not just Stats NZ, but to New Zealand.

There are others I want to also tag to show my appreciation for their ongoing involvement and support during the life of Data Ventures where we have had to test some very hard realities: Gary, Emmett, Margaret, Bridgette, and the two remaining OG of DV Robert and Jamie.

Thank you to the current board: Craig, Terry, Julia, and past board members Kelvin and Pip. I know my approach has created challenges for you.

It can’t be missed how amazing the team is that has allowed me to be able to step down: Alice, Meg, Jamie, Rath, Sarah, Blair, Harriet, Taylor, Yao

I personally want to thank all of the people in the relationships we’ve grown, especially those that were tested through key times. Thank you to our business partners, to supporters - especially the ones I haven’t met personally. Data Ventures by itself couldn’t have achieved what we have without these people (and plenty more).

While I’m confident a break is what’s needed after this, I’m unsure what I’ll do next after a break.

However, I do like to reflect, and will follow up with a good summary of the successes, challenges, and opportunities I saw at my time in DV. I hope at least one person can learn and hopefully use it as rationale for doing things differently inside of government, and how government interacts with the private sector and its customers.

Kia ora. Ka pai.

The Before, During and After of your Seed Round capital raise in New Zealand

Tue, 10 May 2016 17:50:27 +1200

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/before-during-after-your-seed-raise-nz-drew-broadley?trk=pulse-det-nav_art

Following on from our last project of creating a starting point for creating an NZ Seed Pitch Deck, we have taken feedback and put together another document that helps highlight the things you should consider “Before, During and After” your Seed Round capital raise.

Here is the link to the living and updating Google Slides document:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12XUQqf2V8NvE72p6eM6lDql4BSldiuNc-c4oJPpaXxQ/edit?usp=sharing

There are the slides with a title, a summary of what information should be included on the slide. Like our first document, the true value starts coming when you read the “Be Frank and Honest with yourself” comments around some hard truths to ensure your company has what it needs sorted before you even approach investors.

Please give us your feedback in the comments below, or todrew@broadleyspeaking.co.nz.

If this could help a company close a round 0.1% faster and more structured at this vital seed stage of a company, it would be a huge success in our eyes.

Helping NZ companies get seed funding

Fri, 22 Apr 2016 17:44:15 +1200

Originally posted: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/helping-nz-companies-get-seed-funding-drew-broadley

As part of a project started weeks ago, I have worked with some amazing investors, founders and advisors to bring you the first draft of a document that helps young companies get the right information across to investors.

Here is the link to the living and updating Google Slides document:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17fj2w1zYqPvqkEUQ5yB5iJcjvOe-dRIqkDO7Y0nWCS0/edit?usp=sharing

There are the typical section titles, a summary of what information should be included on the slide. But the true value starts coming when you read the “Be Frank and Honest with yourself” comments around some hard truths to ensure your company has what it needs sorted before you even approach investors.

This is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end, this is just perhaps the end of the beginning (thanks Winston Churchill), so please give us your feedback in the comments below, or to drew@broadleyspeaking.co.nz.

I hope this can evolve quickly into something people use as a starting point, or inspiration to help increase the quality of companies pitching to investors. If this could help increase the amount of successful fundraising campaigns by 0.1% at this vital seed stage of a company, it would be a huge success in our eyes.

Got an idea to build another document like this, but for another topic? Let me know your thoughts.

Broadley Speaking: Entrepreneur in Residence, sort of...

Sun, 21 Feb 2016 18:37:58 +1300

Originally posted: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/entrepreneur-residence-kind-drew-broadley

I was told to pursue being an Entrepreneur in Residence recently from someone when asking for help to figure out what to do while I’m between ventures, and taking some time to focus on family.

So I launched Broadley Speaking.

What is it? A EiR model is typically used when a Venture Capital/Investment Firm bring a person in they see a future with in their next adventure and invest in them to help be an outside opinion on investments. (see here)

My take on this is different. The focus is not just on VC/Investment Firms, it’s also all types of companies such as Accounting Firms looking to build up their point of difference through advisory.

“Take the risk with us, we’ve already done it before”.

It’s simple, take all the vast types of risks, successes, failures and visions for the future of many markets, which are very vast and wide (see here to get a run down) and offer them to help bring an outside view on your company and teams inside them.

Some examples of where Broadley Speaking can be helpful:

Strategy: Helping validate a new direction or market opportunity for the company. This includes assisting with execution of a new direction, as this is more important than the idea of it.
Workflow: Break down and evaluate the build and delivery of an existing or new product/service on offer, or an opportunity to get advice on new workflow approaches.
Advisory: Give you an outside and “far out” point of view on a pending decision, action or model.
Board: Stand in for 3-6 months on the board to bring a responsible but push the boundaries attitude. An example, if founder poison kicks in on the board, we are the happy compromise.

How is that different to a consultant? Use us only when you really want the Entrepreneur point of view on things. If you’re looking for a safe bet, or someone who will tell you what you want, carry on. We wont accept an opportunity working with your company because you pay the most, there needs to be alignment on values and ethics.

Bonus:

Broadley Speaking is looking for a partner in crime to join my company, someone who has been through different experiences in different markets but has the same passion to want to share their experience. Get hold of me.

Database anology

Tue, 26 May 2015 12:37:12 +1200

So I have had a wide range of experiences with databases/datastores and I like to break things down to keep them simple. It’s how I approach complexity, simplify the past knowledge to quickly be able to revisit the mindset needed for me to understand something new.

I approached this with data, so here’s how I think of it to keep up and how non-technical people can make a generalisation on different approaches to storing data:

A generic database approach is like a spreadsheet, it has rows and columns.

Down the relational database approach (i.e. MS SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL):

Different tables of data are like different sheets in a spreadsheet. You can easily display a column on a row from one sheet into another. That is joining data.

You need to say what each column means, and what should be in it and you can choose if you need to find something in each of those columns quickly.

Down the key/value database approach (aka NoSQL, i.e. Riak, Couchbase, Cassandra):

Different collections/buckets/etc. are like different sheets in a spreadsheet.

You don’t need to say what each column means, and what should be it in. You do need the first column to describe what the other columns on that row mean.

You can have any number of columns per row, and they don’t need to follow any pattern.

You don’t share information between sheets. Instead you write each of the level of detail you want for each scenario on a new line. i.e.

Line 1 is to find out my name and DOB:

“Drew Broadley - DOB”, “01/01/1981″

Line 2 is to find out where I’ve lived:

“Drew Broadley - Locations”, “Palmerston North”, “Auckland”, “Napier”, “Wellington”

If you needed to know my DOB or where I’ve lived, you would know how to find it by the information you put in the first column of that row.

Bye, Common Ledger

Tue, 19 May 2015 11:54:48 +1200

I’m a transparent person, ask anyone who has worked with me. You’ll know my middle name by the time you’ve sipped the drink you’ve just opened. I want to be open and honest about this decision. Some people use that information against me, yet I still do it since it’s helped me make some amazing friends and build formidable partnerships all because people know where they stand. Bringing your high school mentality to my party is an invitation to get escorted out.

A moment over two years ago where a rare opportunity of the stars aligning, and a fantastic venture such as Common Ledger started to exist and with it a great team was built. What is also as rare is the aligning of pressures that has caused me to make the decision to step away from the company.

My last venture was built along with the birth of my first child. It was a very hard time to find any balance at work let alone home. I went through some very challenging moments yet there was only one real challenge at home, to adapt to working long and far away at times while also being an awesome dad to my son.

My first child has since developed health issues that have really pressed my life balance over the years, and the tipping point is I have a second child arriving soon which brings financial pressures.

I’ve felt torn, and it’s like I have a family at home and a family at Common Ledger both need me to give my all.

My wife often says to me in the more trying of times, “at least you can’t say our life is ever dull”. I pride that I bring my family the joy of diversity around different approaches to life, and I bring this to the way I work. If everyone can say that about working with me, I’d be a very happy person.

The diversity sometimes ends up compounding problems, and so after months of working through options with my co-founders and the board, as of 16th of June, I will no longer be involved in the day to day running of Common Ledger.

My family at home needs me more.

Will this affect Common Ledger? Of course. I’ve tried very hard to make sure my knowledge is not only with me. Common Ledger has a culture I’d say its as investible as the opportunity we’re addressing. Everyone knows the direction we’re heading, and the reasons why we’re saying no to building a mediocre company.

How negatively will this affect Common Ledger ? I have confidence in making the decision to leave because the company has a team that is fantastic at sharing knowledge through our amazing culture of transparency and evolving responsibilities.

We have put in a lot of effort over the last year to set the direction, and that has had its many set backs putting us in positions where we’ve been able to confidently say we need to do something differently even if it’s as fundamental as our approach to product and sales.

There’s still a lot left to do, and this is the pain I have about leaving.

So what’s Common Ledger going to do about me leaving? It has options; carry on as is without me involved day to day or I will help them replace me with someone better than me. Both mean the company still carry on the vision I initially started which is no longer mine alone.

I am proud to say that I have been able to be there from the start and been part of the decisions to get the best people. Because of this, I am no longer the best person to write code, nor the only person who can passionately say where the product needs to go.

And what am I moving onto next? I haven’t even thought that far ahead yet. I relish in getting my hands dirty in both markets I have experience in, and also markets I’ve never stepped in any muddy puddles (i.e. I’m not an accountant). I love analysing market patterns, picking something that is hard enough no one else is willing to execute on, then building a strong vision, team, and executing in a manner that shakes the foundations with an idealistic approach.

The direction of Common Ledger, its current team without me and signals in the market, it still feels really good and I look forward to supporting them as an excited and active shareholder.

There’s milk in that? #2

Tue, 12 May 2015 10:01:31 +1200

Watties: Very Special Pea and Ham Soup

Source: http://www.watties.co.nz/Our-Products/Soups/Very-Special

Soup of peas, ham, stock, oats/wheats to thicken up the soup and a lot of salt for the ham. But why milk?

Why am I doing this?

One of the discoveries from having a kid who is allergic to dairy, has been the amount of products on the shelves that have dairy in them.

What I want to do is highlight products as I find them which I cannot logically figure out why there’s milk in them.

Note: The are not products that say “may contain traces of milk”, no, they list them as an active ingredient.

There’s milk in that?

Tue, 05 May 2015 10:01:19 +1200

One of the discoveries from having a kid who is allergic to dairy, has been the amount of products on the shelves that have dairy in them.

What I’m going to is highlight products as I find them which I cannot logically figure out why there’s milk in them.

Note: These are not products that say “may contain traces of milk”, no, they list them as an active ingredient.

Here’s to the first (of many to come)

Bluebird Grain Waves: Salsa Flavour

Source: http://www.shopnewzealand.co.nz/categories/food-beverage/food/snacks/multigrain-chips-%E2%80%93-salsa-grain-waves-%E2%80%93-150g#.VUa8sNOqqko

Why does effectively a corn chip snack with salsa (tomato, onion, maybe some peppers, avocado etc.) have milk in it?

Extra note: I’ve seen that brands selling Salt and Vinegar chips are chronic with milk solid use also, where there are only a couple of brands which are okay. I find this one also equally mind boggling.

Xero Paper Mark

Sat, 02 May 2015 23:55:02 +1200

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/xero-paper-mark-drew-broadley

Xero and Paymark have announced their partnership towards a paperless receipt system.

Background: I once straddled a start-up called PAPERKUT. During that period, I was in commercial negotiations with Paymark for over a year (yes, it had an anniversary and I bought a cake for myself) to forge an agreement to gain access to payment data. I also worked with other payment providers, telcos, banks, accounting software companies, retailers and consumers. In came a perfect storm; an acquisition gone wrong, a business partner fall out including a court case then the cherry on top of a patent troll. It was time to wrap up PAPERKUT. After this, I was offered a well paid consulting job to help make this a reality under another companies wings but without true skin in the game, I turned that down to focus onCommon Ledger.

Upon hearing the announcement, I was inspired to analyse this in my own way. I want to provide facts on the situation and not use the word “I” or “me”. The aim is not to be opinionated.

To start, what are paperless receipts and where does the opportunity lie. Paperless receipts is the change from having that paper in your hand to have it saved to a safe location you can recall them whenever you need, for up to seven or more years down the track.

We can do this in New Zealand, because we have the highest use of digital payments in the world, last figure stated around 67% [source: year 2011] of all transactions were made with issued cards (credit, and debit cards). We need this to launch initiatives like paperless receipts because without an identifiable method of payment, there is no way to connect that receipt to you.

The nature of using identifiable payment methods such as issued cards over the EFTPOS system requires a token to be created. This token is a unique to the card and can be reproduced to the same value each time the same card information is tokenised (the process of making the card information unidentifiable). This means for paperless receipts to work, there is an immediate reliance on payment gateways and processors such as Paymark.

Paymark states it processes 75% of the payment transactions in New Zealand, this is correct though not technically true. Paymark is a proxy for payment providers who use the Paymark system and the data of players in the market such as Smart Pay pass through Paymark in an encrypted way. This means Paymark processes the payment, but does not see the detail of the information relating to that payment. This even includes debit/credit card processing which gets routed overseas to Mastercard and Visa, where Paymark may have no position to use or access this data.

So immediately becomes a requirement to partner with at least two payment gateways to obtain access to all of Paymark’s 75% of data. There aren’t just commercial hurdles, there are issues with tokens too. Paymark and SmartPay both tokenise their cards with their own methods which are each of their own IP. If paperless receipts are to work, there is a need to remember both of these tokens and the card they relate back to.

There is need for even payment processors launching paperless receipt systems to partner with other payment providers to obtain access to the payment data, and will require yet another commercial agreement between competitors.

For the sake of keeping this simple, lets imagine all payment providers create the same token for each card, and work together.

Payment data is now available, and identifiable to consumers who register their card with Paymark. Can IRD acceptable paperless receipts be produced with this? Only low information quality receipts that are of no use to an accounting software. This is a situation of amount, date but no line items (the listing of each item you purchase). Immediately basket analysis is unachievable as the only data available now is data which is already widely available prior to launching any paperless receipt initiative.

The partnership of Paymark and Xero has no value at this point to anyone. What is required to make the value in the partnership to then offer value to accountants and companies using Xero? As mentioned before, it’s in the line items.

This is the biggest value add, and also the largest hurdle to overcome. To gain line items, it is now required to integrate with Point of Sale systems. These, like accounting software vary wildly with online, hybrid, cloud and custom approaches. To gain critical mass of integrations would be impossible and would require strategic partnerships between Paymark and retailers who produce the larger percentages of transactions over the payment network.

This is where the top 10 customers of Paymark come into play. Paymark are not known for their strength in adopting and selling new products as they use partnership models to achieve this. So for Paymark to make this viable will need to rely on their top tier customers. These tend to be merchants such as supermarkets, hardware stores and petroleum stations which there are “sticky” relations where Paymark will be able to leverage their account managers. This will be a large part of keeping Paymark customers happy, while also positioning updated agreements with these customers to create the ability for Paymark to use their transactional data for paperless receipts.

And here we enter the merchant proposition. They are the gateway to the information for the consumer identifier, the line item data, and the payment being processed. Now we need to analyse the value to the merchant in two aspects; how can they use this system to improve internal processes (such as stock management, existing loyalty systems and streamlining returns) and how they can use this new medium to advertise to their customers (an evolved model to the advertising on receipts).

This requires the paperless receipts system to evolve into wider use cases and thus creating itself as competition to existing loyalty providers who range from Point of Sale software that create their own loyalty modules, to companies like Loyalty NZ (Fly Buys) whose bread and butter exist from a loyalty programme. Not to mention there are rocky relationships between Paymark and these players.

Again, for simplicity, we will say Paymark is able to produce the commercials and find the ideal agreement which pleases all parties.

Now we look to integrating that Point of Sale data, remembering the focus on the top 10 retailers and the size of their operations. A good assumption would be that they have invested in their own in-house Point of Sale software. Like all good large organisations, they require time and resource commitments and typically aren’t agile to build these integrations within 12 months of signing an agreement. It now becomes a project management role for Paymark to ensure each of these integrations go to plan and situations like the Point of Sale system being able to tally said data and send it to Paymark without causing critical slow downs as they aren’t all on the latest and greatest NoSQL, High Availability hardware, let alone the “cloud”. Systems like this typically sync their data once daily overnight, and may be available the next day, but that would delay important things like daily taking reports going to management so may end up in weekly spin cycle. There goes Rod’s idea of that receipt as you leave the taxi.

To keep the stone from gathering moss, we will say Paymark manage to collaborate with each of these 10 retailers and there are integrations that happen where real-time receipts are being correlated and sent to Paymark.

So now, Paymark now have real-time paperless receipts attached to around 40-50% of all transactions that are now identifiable to an individual card holder.

We now have to take on the consideration of data ownership. Who owns the data you say? There will be many opinions on this, but the reality is every player involved; the consumer, the merchant, payment processors and the banks own parts of the data. The Privacy Commissioner will now raise its hand to consult in this matter due to the sensitivity and amount of players involved.

The banks, the part of the equation not yet explored.

Banks are required for the adoption part of paperless receipts. They provide a large amount of users who interact with their financial data on an almost daily occurrence through Internet Banking. What better place to present paperless receipts than beside that transaction, it works within existing behaviours of consumers and business owners, it makes sense as banks are always looking to provide value through their digital initiatives/investments and there’s an opportunity to create a new revenue opportunity in real-time advertising using customer purchasing data to generate relevant offers such as micro insurance to insure that new iPhone you bought or an advert for upgrading that old iPhone you purchased last year.

Paymark has stakeholders of the major banks behind them, allowing them to create these discussions around a commercial agreements. The question that remains here is how strong is the bond between Paymark and its stakeholders to ensure they can work together in a commercial environment under a completely new and untested market.

Now, we get to accounting software.

Accounting software needs to integrate with banks for feeds of daily bank statements which are still only retrieved daily. In an effort to start automating Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable, MYOB has Smart Bills, Intuit acquired Invitbox and Xero has a few strong add-on players such as Receipt Bank.

Xero’s vision is to create a single source of truth for accounting data, to create more valuable data that you would find in any other accounting software and do things with that data due to the nature of being in the cloud and the data being in a single location.

So what happens when Xero partners with Paymark for paperless receipts, it’s bringing the functionality into the core of its accounting data.

Paperless receipts would create a new value to the data in Xero, particularly if it’s verified and audited while also creating more competition now with the companies already providing services to process receipts and invoices into accounting software.

Utopia has been reached, your receipts are waiting for you in your accounting software.

Like any innovation, it attracts unwanted but relevant attention. There is a patent issued in NZ [source: IPONZ], AU, South Africa, Russia and a few other countries. The party behind this patent is active and pursuing any activities in this area. Patents can be mitigated with commercial agreements such as royalties, one-off sums, licensing or any other creative manner parties can create to ensure their intellectual property is valued correctly.

The amount of commercial agreements required to ensure this initiative can even launch is staggering. What makes this harder is when an established player such as Paymark who is known to have large revenue and profits approaches a new market opportunity, the entities behind patents that maintain ownership of intellectual property understand they can leverage larger stakes and/or base royalties compared to that of a young cash strapped startup.

To summarise the challenges;

Paymark requires many commercial agreements with payment providers and merchants, which will need to be negotiated on a market value which no one knows the true potential.
Paymark will need to find resolution with patent owner of the paperless receipts intellectual property.
Paymark is yet to be release a working product.
Paymark has not announced partners on the payment processor, merchant or bank side.
Xero is in the position for being a recipient of Paymarks’ hard work.

There is a very large risk riding with Paymark, and a lot of work too with Xero taking the benefits without much commitment. Knowing Paymark typically have an intimidating risk profile to assess potential partners, they would not score well if they applied it to themselves right now.

Who owns all that data?

Tue, 28 Apr 2015 21:49:23 +1200

I’m excited to give a ramble on around interesting run-ins with data access, data ownership, data custody, a $20M lawsuit and ways to avoid this - particularly around the API space.

http://www.meetup.com/Enspiral-Dev-Academy-Meetup/events/221801498/

Products moving to the cloud scare me

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 16:13:00 +1300

Desktop is always seen as a “bad thing” these days. As an integrator I love it more. But moving to the cloud, it’s the future, we hear from the early visionaries.

Now, I love the internet, and I hate the word cloud. That aside, there’s one more thing I hate about “the cloud”, integrations.

API’s are seen as an annoying sibling, that thing you have to feed now and then and give them some of your time to make them go away.

API’s are seen as a security concern, with those crazy ways to get access to these API’s using mechanisms only the refined truly knows how to use and it’s painful to initially understand.

API’s are seen as something you “plug in” later, with little consideration how important the role they play is.

I’ve seen so many cloud products get built, and then the API is built afterwards causing a disconnect not only between the data and the product, but also between the teams that build both parts of that unoiled machine.

So, why is desktop so good?

Desktop has its own basis of API already, you have ODBC. You can swear at me, hate me, retweet how much I’m an idiot, but this ODBC concept allows you to approach most desktop applications and find “a way” to get access to data.

ODBC has connectors to FoxPro, MS SQL, MySQL, heck even the latest cool kid data stores such as Cassandra and ElasticSearch you get a sister approach called JDBC.

So lets look at a case study

Acme Ltd. have a retail desktop product they’ve built for years. 90% of the market uses it, and then they announce they are building a “cloud version”. Yay say the visionaries, boo says the traditionalists.

Fast forward 5 years, where now 50% of their customers are on the cloud version. Their market share has grown to 100% and business is booming.

A startup who builds amazing reporting and inventory for retailers is gaining some momentum. It’s customers who are using Acme’s desktop product love it, because Zacme were able to purchase a copy and build a fantastic integration working with Acme’s data source.

But 50% of them can’t use it because Acme hasn’t put priority on an API for its new cloud based product while it’s focusing on “other market opportunities for integrations that don’t include Zacme until maybe two years away”.

So now Zacme is getting unbelievable customer demand for them to integrate with the online version of Acmes’ product. But guess what, there’s no API.

So what are Zacme going to do?

There’s no API. Screen scraping you say? But don’t hackers do that?

Acme now controls access to customers data.

Business model aside, I think you can see what I’m saying by now if you managed to get this far <easter egg: Drew loves the colour purple>.

I’ll leave it here, I don’t want to offer solutions, I don’t want to create opinion, I just want to raise a real-life barrier integration partners and products are facing or are going to be facing in the future.

API providers, here me roar!

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 22:56:00 +1300

The future is not building your own SDK, your resource is better spent providing an API design / schema so others can auto generate their own.

I’m not the first to say this, and I’ve been integrating heavily with multiple API’s finding others like me along the way.

There’s a horde of us, all looking to get going with your API but can’t because our hipster-languages-of-choice just doesn’t get any love.

We have tools that help us define and test API’s, making us much more power users of what you’re providing.

No longer do we expect a mildly maintained SDK you built back when your API was new, 3 years ago. We expect to be greeted with fantastic documentation, and support so that us, the community, can drive the SDK production line.

So, outsource your need to build SDK’s to us. It’s much less effort to build a schema than to build SDK’s.

sshd: Google Authenticator + SSH Keys

Wed, 13 Aug 2014 23:48:33 +1200

Disclaimer: This was performed on an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS instance running OpenSSH 6.3+, so YMMV.

Common Ledger is growing up, and we take security seriously.

So, we decided to start securing my AWS instances with not just SSH keys, but 2-Factor Google Authenticator verification codes.

Installing Dependancies:

Install `Google Authenticator`:

sudo apt-get install libpam-google-authenticator

Update the `/etc/pam.d/sshd` file with the following line (at the top):

# PAM: Google Authenticator
auth required pam_google_authenticator.so

Additionally, comment out the following line in `/etc/pam.d/sshd`:

# @include common-auth

and update `ChallengeResponseAuthentication` to “yes”

ChallengeResponseAuthentication yes

Update the `/etc/ssh/sshd_config` file with the following lines (at the bottom):

AuthenticationMethods publickey,keyboard-interactive

Set up Google Authenticator for user:

Run the following command:

google-authenticator

You will be prompted to answer a few questions; answer the first two questions with yes (y):

Do you want authentication tokens to be time-based (y/n) y

Do you want me to update your “/home/USERNAME/.google_authenticator” file (y/n) y

You can answer the next questions according to your needs.

You can use the Google Authenticator app to scan the qr-code, or add the account using the secret key and the verification code. Do not forget to print out the emergency scratch codes and store them in a safe place!

Now switch back to root and restart the SSH server. If you added the two-factor authentication for the root user you can skip the next step.

su root

Finally restart the SSH server.

/etc/init.d/ssh restart

That’s it! You should now have a SSH server with an two-factor authentication!

Hat-tip:

Scholarship to The School of Hard Knocks

Thu, 10 Jul 2014 23:06:11 +1200

Source: LinkedIn Post

Disclaimer: this was written with raw appreciation. This post may have random grammar while I tried to express myself as best as I can. I am humbled.

I have been inspired, a situation, not how I imagined it turning out, turned out.

I wont get into details, summary is a debt linked to a business deal “gone wrong” was called up. From the raw survival that was required to live on the optimism and promises the business deal would eventually come through, my resources were not in the positive. This caused a situation where I was caught where I didn’t want to be, nor did I intend to be with another party.

From the time taken to detail the story of how it came to be, created a channel of support like I had never received before. I was offered the ability to relinquish enough of the burden through two amazingly supportive people, and an anonymous unicorn; all stemming from the support of an amazing team who believe in what we’re doing and also the people who have helped me in the past.

These gestures had a profound effect on me, it spurred a concept others to support andbelieve in.

It’s simple; I’d create a fund called “The School of Hard Knocks”.

This fund is not to make money, it’s to help the people who have had an unexpected outcome giving it all to a venture of theirs and just got dealt the wrong cards.

Eligibility for entry to “The School of Hard Knocks”:

An investor in your venture has raised during due diligence/word of mouth that there is a lingering chip on your shoulder, attributed to previous venture outcomes.

This investor then shoulder-taps The School of Hard Knocks and puts in a verbal application over a single phone call along with details of a further contact to follow up and confirm “The Hard Knock”.

Following that, The School of Hard Knocks runs through a casual meeting with said starter-of-businesses, and then makes a gut instinct call.

The source of the money is kept anonymous other than it’s fed through School of Hard Knocks and the person is assisted to allow them to focus on the bigger, better trials at hand.

Funding:

What’s future of the fund without a revenue stream you ask? Easy, those people who it’s helped save, feed back into it when they do finally get that opportunity.

They must pay it forward when a recipient acquires wealth through an acquisition or a large sum of money;

First, by paying back the debt to “The School of Hard Knocks”
Second, by pledging to the fund an additional amount to help grow the reach and ability to help others.

Well that’s my 2 ½ cents, and my pledge to make this happen when I can.

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coledge: The Coledge co-founders travel to #xerocon Auckland...

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 11:31:16 +1300

coledge:

The Coledge co-founders travel to #xerocon Auckland 2014.

Wow, what a crazy trip. First of all our flights on Wednesday night get cancelled due to fog, then our re-scheduled flights get cancelled the next morning as well. Rather than facing the option of not being at Xerocon, we quickly hired a car and embarked on the 8 hour drive, IMPROMPTU ROAD TRIP!

Finally we arrive in Auckland at night and prepare to cram two days of #xerocon into one. But first, it’s off to Food Alley down lower Albert St. for some cheap and cheerful food where we had a chance encounter with bookkeepers who are also attending #xerocon.

Day two begins and we are greeted by a smiling Rod Drury and a welcome pack with a pad and pen in (which Drew passed on to a very grateful accountant who got caught without a pad and pen in theirs). Next up are a lot of presentations, networking, meetings, lunch and more lunch.

Some of the highlights for us:

Rod Drury re-did his state of the nation presentation for anyone from Wellington that missed it on day one because of the fog.

Amanda (Xero’s GM of Sales) Armstrongs’ presentation. We were both very impressed with the fact that Amanda gave clear stats and facts (warts and all) of where Xero is and where they need to be.

Lunch, we had a great healthy lunch pack. In fact, we liked it so much that when we found out they had spare, we both ate two.

We also talked and listened to every accountant and bookkeeper we could find the time to speak with. The message we got was clear: move quick as they are all waiting very patiently for what we are building (and as one person pointed out to us, don’t rush it though as quality is important).

All in all we got a lot out of Xerocon. From the great connections to the wisdom imparted to us by some of the most passionate old school accountants we have met.

After all of this, we unwound in a way that Coledge do best, Mexican food and video games.

Now it’s back down to Wellington to spend some well deserved time with our families before heading back to the office on Monday to continue building a quality product as fast as is possible. Oh, and of course, wait patiently to see if we are part of the Lightning Lab 2014 crew (fingers crossed).

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Mon, 10 Feb 2014 16:44:24 +1300