Write more business ideas… helpful.

I agree, hardcore opinion, just working 14 hour days does not mean crazy financial success after some years. Also successful companies need by far more than 3 years to grow and create value so you should give yourself some time to relax and work on a long-time execution of your vision without any burn-outs and a bloody path of success for only a handful of persons.

Throughout his presentation, he accuses companies who value work/life balance of being mediocre and claims excellence (and millions) only come to those who sacrifice it all for the sake of the almighty dollar.

Unfortunately, Tom Nixon failed to highlight companies like Microsoft, RSM McGladrey and others who are at the top of their game, whose employees have made millions, and who have proved that the longest lasting productivity gains come from valuing both the lives and the work of employees who contribute.

Jason is playing the short-game in an industry that still benefits from tremendous growth. This marks a missed opportunity for a well-known leader to tout values that go beyond money and to offer a vision of the future for Gen Y’s that encompasses both ambition and a personal life. Shame!

This brings up an interesting point, and an ongoing conversation we’ve been having for almost three years now. I usually describe an API as having two parts:

1. the domain-specific stuff that actually IS the API (which is usually the same set of services that power a company’s own website, or that have been previously made available privately to other partners for ‘integration’); and

2. the management layer, that does things like key issuance, self-provisioning, rate limiting, throttling, method usage rule enforcement, reporting, etc.

Clay and the rest of the team at Mashery have done a great job in building a system that in almost all cases can do everything necessary for #2 without needing to make modifications to #1. It turns out that the set of services needed for #2, if done right, are independent of what #1 is doing and how it’s architected. So the same multi-tenant system that runs Netflix’s API can also run Best Buy’s and the New York Times’s.

In Mashery’s early days, we considered an approach that would try to “normalize” API calls across services providing similar capabilities, but quickly rejected that as a “lowest common denominator” approach. That was the right decision, and after nearly three years of development and dozens of implementations we have created a system that has immense flexibility – but is still very straightforward to implement.

Cheers -

Oren Michels
Co-Founder & CEO
Mashery

Cornelius.

Thanks for the mention!

Just to clarify, Mashery’s services have been designed from the very beginning to be 100% transparent. No code modifications or “binding” of any kind is required to leverage the Mashery solution. Some configuration steps during implementation through our management dashboard and a bit of DNS fu, and you’re up and running under Mashery.

Best,
Clay Loveless
Mashery Co-founder and Chief Architect