If you have been following this blog you would know that I mainly blog about enterprise software, cloud, and big data with a few occasional posts on design and design thinking. That’s what I am most passionate about. Having spent my entire career building enterprise software I have realized that success and competitive differentiation in market place boil down to an organization’s unique ability to get three things right where management plays a key role: 1) people who can continuously learn and adapt to change 2) processes that are nimble and evolve as the company evolves 3) products that solve a real problem and delight the end users. While I continue to blog about enterprise software I have decided to evolve this blog further by adding a few management posts going forward.

There are a series of management topics that I am interested in but let’s start with the basic one which is about my core management philosophy. My management philosophy is “lead, follow, or get out of the way.” In any situation I ask myself whether I should be leading in this situation or following someone’s lead and extend my full support to do so. If neither make sense I simply get out of the way and let people do their job. Building, selling, and supporting software, like many other things, require a loosely-connected (to put it in software terms) organization where there are leaders who lead and follow other leaders at the same time. This gets more and more complicated as the size and portfolio of an organization grow over years. People draw artificial boundaries and lose sight of the mission and the big picture.

Leading is hard, following is harder, and getting out of the way is the hardest which requires a conscious attempt to empower people to do their job without getting into their way. But, it is an approach that does work and I encourage you to try it out and share it with others.

Photo courtesy: Pison Jaujip 

(Cross-posted @ cloud computing)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

This may very well be true; it certainly is true that to date, Microsoft’s attempts to enter the touch and mobile markets have been poorly received.

Yet much of the time, the smart folks have it wrong.

In the 1980s, Apple’s Macintosh product introduced the graphical user interface (GUI).  It was light years ahead of Microsoft’s DOS, and Apple’s brilliant founder, Steve Jobs, openly sneered at Microsoft’s crappy software.

Microsoft tried to catch up by introducing Windows.  It was a failure.

Microsoft brought out a second version of Windows.  It was also a failure.

Finally, Microsoft brought out Windows 3.1.  It was still a crappy knockoff of the MacOS, but it was executed well enough to be a major upgrade over DOS.

The rest is history.

In the 1990s, Netscape’s Navigator introduced the commercial Web browser.  Everyone agreed that the Web would change everything, and doom desktop software.

Microsoft tried to catch up by releasing Internet Explorer.  It was a failure.

Microsoft brought out a second version of IE.  It was also a failure.

Finally, Microsoft brought out IE3.  It was still a crappy knockoff of Netscape, but it was executed well enough so that people didn’t really care.

The rest is history.

My point is that it’s very easy to write off Microsoft.  It’s never been a cool company.  Here in Silicon Valley, it’s the closest thing we ever had to an Evil Empire.

But Microsoft has vast resources, and armies of smart people.  Even today, when it is supposedly in its death throes, it has double the staff, revenues, and profits of Google.

And it has a history of bumbling its way to “good enough” when tackling new markets.  Bill Gates may yet have the last laugh.

Related articles

• Can Microsoft Get It Right This Time? (fool.com)
• Gartner: Microsoft is dead, Windows has expired, Office has ceased to be (plus.google.com)
• Microsoft, the Walking Dead (cloudave.com)

(Cross-posted @ Adventures in Capitalism)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Technological advances and shifting business requirements affect Government just as much as they do the enterprise. Fragmentation and siloisation can be used to explain sprawling data centre estates, which officials now work hard to consolidate. Shifting requirements, over-engineering, cronyism and politics can all take the blame for massive cost-overruns on boil the ocean projects that rarely realise their promise. Lighter, nimbler, more responsive, more accountable and more cost-effective approaches to Government IT are undeniably required, and it’s true that cloud can — and should — play a role here.

But simply proclaiming that the cloud is Government’s first choice moving forward misses the point. The system’s current weaknesses (and strengths) are deep-seated. They are ingrained, and institutionalised. Imposing cloud by decree from on high simply gives the mass of public sector IT buyers a new religion to blindly follow… and provides the thoughtful and the recalcitrant with a new bogeyman to loathe.

As the Cabinet Office press release this month states,

In future, when procuring new or existing services, public sector organisations should consider and fully evaluate potential cloud solutions first – before they consider any other option.

Huddle (which, deservedly, has done well out of the UK Government’s cloud push) co-founder Alastair Mitchell blogged about the UK’s Cloud First announcement at the time, and I was uncomfortable.

A tweet last night from the Open Data Center Alliance reignited that discomfort. The tweet wasn’t actually addressed to me at all, but to my friend Ben Kepes.

@opendatacenter I’m still not sure #CloudFirst is a good idea. Cloud by merit, not by dictat! /cc @benkepes

— Paul Miller (@PaulMiller) May 20, 2013

My grammatically suspect response gets right to the heart of my concern, despite the 140 character limitation of Twitter.

Cloud computing has a powerful role to play in Government and in the commercial sector. But it should build market share on merit — by being the best or the cheapest or the quickest or the most interoperable or the most flexible. By being — demonstrably — the best tool for the job. Dictat, decree, mandate; all of these are market skewing pieces of positive discrimination and, at the end of the day, positive discrimination is still discrimination. And unhelpful.

Some Government users will always find and choose cloud all by themselves. Huddle’s been racking up Government successes for years, without a Government enforcer to kick down the doors for them. But others (probably the majority) will prove harder to engage and persuade. Build it and they will come is almost certainly a strategy that will lead to burning cash far faster than you sign up customers. So there is certainly a need for evangelism, and demonstration, and the liberal use of carrots to entice the unsure, the unwilling and the unconvinced. Let’s show Government buyers the ways in which cloud-based solutions help the Government to do its multitude of jobs. Let’s implement programmes that ease the pain of moving from current practice to cloud-enabled practice. Let’s help SMEs (like Huddle) get heard by buyers and decision makers used to being wined and dined by Accenture, IBM, HP and Microsoft. Let’s smooth the path to the cloud, not force everyone along it.

Maybe Francis Maude’s next cloud pronouncement could be “Cloud, please,” rather than the current “Cloud, or else.”

‘Police State‘ image by Flickr user ‘katesheets‘

Related articles

• Press release: Government adopts ‘Cloud First’ policy for public sector IT (gov.uk)
• Cloud must now be your first choice for big IT projects, says UK government (zdnet.com)
• U.K. Government Mandates Cloud First IT Procurement (informationweek.com)
• UK Deputy CIO Attacks EU Plan To Certify Cloud Providers (misco.co.uk)

(Cross-posted @ The Cloud of Data)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

What does it mean to connect to work?

The notion of having to go to work is dying, in fact for some it’s already dead.  Work doesn’t have to be done at an office anymore.  The only thing that most of us need is an internet connection that allows us to connect to the people and information we need to get our jobs done.  This is what it means to “connect to work.”  The many collaborative platforms out there are making this possible and what is particularly fascinating is the transition towards mobile work!  We can now access virtually all of the same people, files, conversations, tasks, and other types of information on our mobile devices that we can on our computers.  The power of these mobile devices that we carry around in our pockets is, for lack of a better word, awesome and it’s enabling and empowering a new type of employee, the future employee.

Connecting to work means that you can have access to everything and anything you need whether you are at a cafe, in an airplane, in a cab, or sitting somewhere on the beach.  You don’t have to go to work, work now comes to you.

This shift is forcing organizations to rethink some of the core assumptions that were made during the creation of these institutions, for example, do we now need offices or a central headquarters for our company?

I’m seeing more and more organizations implementing flexible work policies and our recent survey on the future of work (which you can still take and share!) is already revealing some very telling results on this which I will be sharing soon.  The giant elephant in the room is that we (including mangers and executives) all know that we have the ability and the capacity to enable this type of work to happen and we all inherently know that it is beneficial to do so.  It’s a virtually palpable shift that we can’t deny when looking at the future of work.

I’ll be exploring this theme in much more detail in the future but for now I just wanted to introduce it and I’m sure many of you are already quite aware of it.

The future of work is “connecting to work.”

(Cross-posted @ Social Business Advisor: Enterprise Collaboration Strategy)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

I was entertained for two reasons.  The first is that it’s quite possible for a startup to provide great customer service.  JP Etcheber, who runs customer support for us at PBworks, manages to support millions of free users and thousands of corporate customers with a team of three (highly dedicated) people.  If you build a good product, and commit to supporting it, even startups can provide good support.

But the other thing that entertains me is the fact that the same people who complain about poor support are the same people who won’t pay an extra dime for better support.

Let’s say you use Gmail for your email.  When something goes wrong, you might curse Google’s name.  But you’re not likely to find a commercial email provider.  In fact, there are no commercial email providers!  Why?  Because we’re too damn cheap to pay for what is probably the single most critical online service we have.

Enterprise customers have long understood this; they’re willing pay enterprise software vendors because they know that there is a throat to choke.  In fact, they know that startups might provide better support–at their scale, a single customer is far more important.  It’s less likely they’ll simply tell a customer to pound sand (which seems to be Google’s standard practice).

At one point, I was spending $250K/year with Google, but that wasn’t enough to get me a telephone support number.  You can bet that a smaller startup would be happy to give you their founder’s cell phone for that amount of money!

The fact is, consumers don’t value support, which means companies don’t bother to provide it.  If you want that to change, you need to change your buying habits.

(Cross-posted @ Adventures in Capitalism)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

If you can get to $2m in ARR in 2 years, you can get to $4m the next.  From there, it’s on to $10m in ARR.  And if you can get to $10m in ARR in say 4 years … and that compounds, as it will … you have a real shot at $100m.  For real.  It’s will be incredible hard, yes.  You may not get there, yes.  But if you can get to $10m in any reasonably amount of time … your market is big enough to get you to $100m.

As we’ve talked about before, it’s a 7-10 year journey to get there (~$100m in ARR) for most SaaS companies, outliers aside.

And it’s better than that, these days.  Because SaaS markets are just continuing to grow.  It was just a little while ago that Salesforce was doing $1 billion in ARR revenue.  Now they’re a good chunk of the way to $10 billion.  Same software, dude.  Some solid updates, yes.  But same software.  The SaaS markets are growing faster than ever …

So when you’re trying to figure out how big it can all be for your SaaS start-up, I know you’re gonna put together a nice “Total Addressable Market” slide.  It’s going to show us all how you’re playing in a Billion Dollar Market.  That’s great.

But quickly, move on.  The #1 best recommendation I can give for you to learn, at Day 0, and in the early days, is — Build a REAL, Bottoms-Up Model, That Shows How You’ll Get to $100m in ARR in 7 Years.  And make sure you believe it.  Build it for you:

• How will you get your customers?  And what mix?
• What will your ACV really be?
• How can that scale over time?
• What evidence is there that you can charge what you think you’ll be able to?
• How many sales reps, how much marketing spend, how many engineers will you really need?
• What will it really, truly cost?
• How will your conversion funnel work?  Does it make sense, and scale, from an input-output perspective?
• How will you fund it?

And then get help.  Make sure your assumptions are crystal clear, and then have really smart, experienced SaaS executives (including marketers) review them and challenge you.  And make sure you really, really understand the public company comps.  Because you can learn so much from comps … just read their S-1s, 10Qs, and the like.

I did this myself, not as effectively as I could do today, but it was eye-opening:

• It showed that we’d never get there ($100m) on freemium alone.  Ever.  And true enough … freemium only ended up being 20% of our revenue, at least strictly defined.

• It also showed me we needed more money than I’d thought.  So we raised an extra $600k.  We probably should have raised $2m more, since it was offered.  And the model said we’d need it …

• It also showed me that, barely, if you squinted, and the market grew just right … by 2013, there’d be $100m in ARR in our space.  And so it is, although we didn’t capture 100% of it

My point: If you want to do something really worth your time in SaaS.  Worth hiring a sales team, raising some venture capital (even a modest amount).  Worth investing 7+ years of your life in.   Then at least believe you can hit $100m in ARR in 7 years.  For real, from a real bottoms-up model.

Even if you come up short, and/or even if it takes much longer, you’ll then have a real solid chance of creating something of value.  And if you don’t know how to get there … if you can’t honestly build a real, data-driven model that proves it at least to you … then that’s awfully telling.

—–

For a nice example, take a look e.g. at Hubspot’s growth and data – they share a lot for a pre-IPO company:

(Cross-posted @ saastr)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Our wait has ended. Not because they have actually done anything, but the opposite. It’s time to stop waiting.

Last week perhaps the biggest news out of Google IO, Google unveiled a new messaging platform centered around Google+. The name is Google Hangouts (version 2). The new expanded Hangouts is a separate application for Android, iOS, and a web interface that supports IM and video chat. It replaces Google Talk and G+ Messenger. Well at least that’s the plan. The feedback hasn’t been so great so Google now allows users to migrate back to the old Talk application in case they still want to communicate with others.

The basic problem is Hangouts is a step backward. It’s claim to fame is better synchronization among devices – also it supports 10-15 (different figures in different places) simultaneous video chat participants. Its list of problems is a bit longer. For one, the Google Voice integration is gone. Users that “upgrade” to Hangouts will lose ability to make calls to the PSTN, and won’t be able to send SMS messages. Hangouts supports video calling, but not voice (which do you use more?). Another point of contention is that Hangouts won’t support XMPP server relationships like Talk did – there goes enterprise integrations to platforms from Cisco, Microsoft, Avaya, and others.

Google positions the new Hangouts as its strategic future – something likely modeled after Skype and Facebook’s messaging solution. It is intended to be cross platform – unless you happen to use a Blackberry or Microsoft phone.

Google Voice has been bothering me for a while because I don’t see Google doing anything with it – and its service quality is degrading. It languishes in the GooglePlex as a cost center that hasn’t been monetized. Though costs are down with the two principals Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet gone. Not to mention any costs of development to integrate it into other Google products.

The fact that Hangouts was arguably one of the biggest announcements at the Google IO conference, and somehow forgot to include the highly visible features of Google Voice is quite the Freudian Slip.

After reviewing web comments over the weekend, Google+ updated its page stating “Hangouts is designed to be the future of Google Voice, and making/receiving phone calls is just the beginning.” You can read that multiple ways, and I might recommend to start considering a replacement search to Google Voice users.

Google simply isn’t serious about voice. It hasn’t done much with Google Voice and it is an afterthought with the new Hangouts. There are ways to integrate business class voice services into the Google Apps cloud solution. From a premises perspective – check out Esna and AVST. Also, some UC vendors, such as Siemens Enterprise, support Apps integration. From the cloud perspective Verizon has integrated Google Apps into its hosted UC offer. Also, check out startup gUnify, which offers a clever integration between Google Apps and hosted UC from BroadSoft based providers.

Related articles

• New Hangouts App Conflicts With Google Voice Feature; Fix Coming (allthingsd.com)
• Hangouts is ‘the future of Google Voice,’ full calling functionality will return to desktop soon (theverge.com)
• Hangouts in Gmail dumps Google Voice integration (pcworld.com)
• Google Hangouts upgrade removes ability to host Google Voice calls on your computer (theverge.com)
• Reports: Google Voice incompatible with your iPhone 4? (reviews.cnet.com)
• Don’t Upgrade to Hangouts If You Use Google Voice on Your Computer (gizmodo.com)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

I have talked about this publicly a great deal – how I prefer “missionaries” over “mercenaries.”

But lately I’m more swayed by the wise words of Reid Hoffman.

“Founder is a state of mind, not a job description”

We all love the mythical stories of our great founder heroes who drove startups from scratch and led their businesses many years later: Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos and so on.

Very few founder CEOs go into the job ever expecting to give up their seat. It’s your baby. Your idea. You took the biggest leap of faith. It becomes an extension of self rather than a job.

So give up the CEO role?

Fuck no.

But it’s actually not that simple.

Jonathan Strauss took this issue head on in a blog post that I believe every startup founder should read on “Replacing Oneself as CEO.”

“After 3 and a half years of fusing my self-worth with the success of the company in the crucible of startup survival, it was impossible to tear them apart without pain.

But while my first reaction was disappointment and failure, it was almost immediately washed away by a wave of relief.

I knew change was inevitable, but I had no idea how stressful and exhausting maintaining my internal reality distortion field had been until they gave me permission to turn it off.”

I can’t imagine many founding CEO’s who don’t read Jonathan’s words and know exactly what he means.

I saw this first hand. The confidence, energy, passion and humor that are hallmarks of Jonathan became muted in the pressures of needing to show financial successes to match one’s enormous product vision and ambitions.

I told Jonathan (and believe) that this would be the best year of his professional life. He gets to return his focus and energy back to what got him so passionate in the first place – product – while now having a seasoned leader and enough capital to fulfill his vision.

I spoke with TechCrunch TV recently about the decision to give up the CEO seat, the stresses of the job and my perspective of the situation as an investor. You can watch it here.

I have never felt prouder of the team & product at awe.sm (please visit to check out our latest & be ready for our next big product announcement due out in next month or so) and yet we just brought in a new CEO to the company, Fred McIntyre.

How could these statements live in the same sentence?

*******

An Awe.Sm story

I first met Jonathan nearly 4 years ago. I know because I marked the occasion with a blog post on how to have a great VC meeting. I wrote about Jonathan’s visit (but never named him by name until now) because it was so memorable. His vision for social analytics and tracking the conversion funnel was better than any I had heard at the time (or since).

He talked about how we were going through a period of time in which people were measuring “likes” and “followers” but not the real value of social media conversion by tracking what actually converts into business and that few people understood the catalyst of what drove a successful campaign in the first place. It is what he set out to build and he had huge initial success in landing big clients like Disney, Zynga, Gilt and TopSpin.

I funded Jonathan’s first $500,000. For the entire first year after I funded the company he refused to take a salary and I had to admonish him to make sure he paid his expenses. He worked his ass off and delivered an amazing technical infrastructure to support a “big data meets social analytics” platform that could be used by any developer.

Yet our initial customer success didn’t translate into big revenue growth and we faced issues such as:

• Do we support developers, end-users or both?
• Do we price for volume of consumption or for enterprise integration with other platforms?
• Do we have a heavy-touch implementation and support or a lightweight one by integrating with products that white-label us?
• Do we optimize for “social sharing tools” or merely for back-end analytics?

The decisions were endless, the choices not obvious and the VC involved a pain in the ass. The financial pressures of running a startup started to hit Jonathan. I saw it first hand.

I have a very public seed stage investment policy  and awe.sm was definitely in the bucket of amazingly talented founders with a great product that hadn’t yet proved product/market fit.

So I wrote another check to extend our runway another year. The second check was $400,000 out of a $500,000 round. And I forced Jonathan to start paying himself.

Our product really started to show its strengths in attribution as we were able to prove publicly that Twitter was driving more traffic than people had acknowledged but it wasn’t showing up in referral logs due to what is known as the “last mile problem.”

We had inbound M&A requests from some of the biggest names in tech. We did a gut check and I asked Jonathan what he wanted to do. He knew that I didn’t want to give up on his journey but I would if that’s what he wanted.

He told me he couldn’t give up when there was so much more to prove. He remained as committed to the company vision as when we first met.

We had VCs show interest in funding awe.sm and settled on Foundry Group and raised $4 million ($1 million more from me).  It was great to get some new ideas around the table and to have some money to execute on our plans with more resources than before.

Yet with major advances in our product infrastructure we still hadn’t proven we could scale sales. It was really hard to look at the situation and know that the answer was that Jonathan needed help and that what he really needed was a boss. The board was unanimous in our opinion of this including outside director Ian Rogers who has served as Jonathan’s mentor and friend.

We knew what was right for the company and wanted to see the company succeed more than protect Jonathan’s short-term ego hit. Jonathan shared that experience in his blog post so I won’t repeat it.

But we did offer Jonathan his second gut check. We knew we had a valuable product that an acquiring company would gain greatly from and a world-class engineering and product team that would be valued by a buyer. If he wanted to sell we would enable it, but if given the choice I preferred to see the team fulfill their dream and I never lost confidence that our market was there. Nobody has stepped in with as complete of a vision as awe.sm has.

Jonathan went through a reflection period and chose to continue the journey. We have spend the last 6 months working on our next generation product and as one of the main beta testers I can tell you it’s the best stuff we’ve put out to date so I was very pleased with his decision to fight on.

We set out to find Jonathan’s “co-founder.” Somebody who had lived with the marketing consequences of trying to track online conversion from websites, google, mobile and social.

We found Fred McIntyre who had worked with Ian Rogers in the past and therefore we had a strong connection with his past skills, drive and determination. He has joined the team as CEO and shown an immediate desire to “live the company” in the way that founders did. To be a founder in state of mind.

*********

My Own Journey – And Replacing a CEO

I actually don’t talk about it publicly much but I am one of those people who gave up the CEO role in my first company so I know the emotional roller coaster it can be.

I had never even considered it, it wasn’t an option. But I was part of a networking group called YPO, which has a subsection called “forum” in which a small group of your peers meets monthly to discuss life. Topics range from aging parents, marital strife, infidelity, disease, stress, life’s true mission, giving back – you name it. I was staggered to hear people talking so openly.

I wish the tech community would found its own version of YPO Forum. It might help us better prepare for the enormous pressure & stress of being a founder, it might help us realize when there are people with serious depression in our midst (and try to spot people considering suicide), and frankly it might just be a great outlet for all of those insecurities you can’t tell your team, your co-founders and your VCs.

In my case it was the encouragement to hand off the role of CEO of BuildOnline before the company was eventually sold.

I had stayed for 6 years. I loved the entire journey – good and bad – and the employees and customers. But I was also in a rut where I felt I had lost the ability to be innovative and I had lost a bit of the passion & fun that came with the early days that were more existential and involved more intellectual challenges and less managerial ones.

The truth is I have never enjoyed running team meetings, managing processes & procedures and deciding HR policies, promotions and org structures.

There is no better article on the topic than Reid Hoffman’s post about giving up the role of CEO at LinkedIn.

“CEOs need to derive satisfaction from the nuts and bolts of building a company, not just building product and articulating the vision.  They need to be passionate about leadership, management, and organizational processes as the company scales.”

In this day and age many people will tell you that you can have your cake and eat it, too. You can simply hire a COO to do these things while retaining the CEO title but focusing mostly on product.

I have previously written why I don’t believe in the COO role at early-stage startups.

Reid weighed in eloquently on this topic.

“[to be CEO you need to] devote substantial time to time consuming things like running meetings and other business process. You can’t just do the exciting stuff like making the final call on product and speaking at conferences, while shuffling off everything else to the mythical COO who loves doing all the dirty work and doesn’t want any of the credit

… I had thought about the COO option, but I knew that the company needed someone who felt like they “owned the ball.””

Mythical COO who loves doing the dirty work with no credit. Kind of like a mythical Vice President of the United States who wants to be behind the scenes but doesn’t want the top job.

Therein lies the dilemma.

The best people almost always want the top job if they’re going to put in the real work effort. Of course there are exceptions – the most obvious one being Sheryl Sandberg.

Reid’s admission of his interests sounds like something I would have written myself verbatim

“I’d rather be solving intellectual challenges and figuring out key strategies, not debating which employees should get a promotion, or configuring project timelines.”

So Reid set out to hire a CEO. His first attempt was Dan Nye who had some success but apparently one key missing ingredient. Reid believes that you need a CEO who is also passionate about product and he later found that person in Jeff Weiner.

Jeff joined early enough to feel like a “founder” even though he wasn’t there at the “founding.” He was as passionate about the product as Reid and became the biggest eater of the LinkedIn dog food. He had founder mentality.

This seems to be the exact situation at Twitter. While Dick Costolo wasn’t there at the founding it seems clear that he has become the reasoned voice of the growth of Twitter. And while it was another team entirely that sparked the product adoption that is now Twitter, there is no doubt in my mind Twitter would not be its current success without Dick at the helm driving product, user engagement, capital raising and revenue growth.

Again, captured eloquently in the words of Reid Hoffman

“Being there at the start isn’t the only path to being a founder.  “Founder” is a state of mind, not a job description.”

So true.

So I look forward to watching the next awe.sm chapter unfold. To watching Fred lead our sales, marketing and implementation efforts and driving the recruiting & financing of the company. And watching Jonathan to continue to build on the product vision that started 4 years ago from his desire to fix a large part of the Internet’s inefficiencies.

(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Image credit: rambling anymouse

The always insightful Mark Suster recently tackled the subject of acquihires–the practice of large companies buying small startups simply to acquire their people.  Mark lays out an excellent argument for why the acquiring companies are actually losing out when they make acquihires:

“You have been at Google, Salesforce.com, Yahoo! for years. You have worked faithfully. Evenings. Weekends. Year in, year out. You have shipped to hard deadlines. You’ve done the death-march projects. In the trenches. You got the t-shirt. And maybe got called out for valor at a big company gathering. They gave you an extra 2 days of vacation for your hard work.

And that prick sitting in the desk next to you who joined only last week now has $1 million because he built some fancy newsreader that got a lot of press but is going to be shut down anyways.

What kind of message does that send to the party faithful who slave away loyally to hit targets for BigCo?

I’ll tell you what is says.

It says if you want to make “real” money  - quit.”

I couldn’t agree more.  Acquihires create incentives for a host of undesirable behavior.  It’s not just the fact that you’re encouraging people to quit–it’s also that you’re sending the message that the hard work of serving customers in a real business–what creates the actual value in the economy–is a job for unambitious suckers.  Far better to focus on building sexy demo products and collecting an acquihire bounty.

But there’s an even worse problem–acquihires contribute to the startup industry’s problems with truthiness.  Every time I see an acquisition announced on TechCrunch, it’s full of compliments and congratulations.  Yet the simple fact is that unless a price is announced, the acquisition is just an easy way for investors and entrepreneur to sweep failure under the rug.

Many people would be amazed to learn how many “successful” people are actually failures, at least in terms of the return to their investors.  But investors have no incentive to disrupt the game–investing in failures hurts your reputation and your fundraising.  Better to keep quiet and play along.

The result is that our entire culture is built on evading the truth.  We like to criticize the financial services industry for dishonesty, yet we’re guilty of much the same.

That being said, I’ve signed off on a number of acquihires of my portfolio companies–better to get something back, rather than lose all the money.  I guess my honesty has a price too!

(Cross-posted @ Adventures in Capitalism)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Cloud services are increasingly being used as a foundation to drive business, functional and IT transformation.  And while the concept of transformation isn’t new, there are though several factors that make cloud-enabled transformation in the enterprise uniquely challenging.   Here’s some specific issues I’ve seen with several recent enterprise cloud transformation efforts:

1. Executive sponsorship and risk – any successful business or IT transformation effort requires executive sponsorship.  What’s different about cloud is the profile and nature of execution risk.  Cloud transformation often requires executives to bet their careers on cloud service providers and their ability to deliver.   In conservative enterprises where cloud is still perceived by many to be risky, insecure and not “enterprise-ready”, it’s a rare breed of executive that will make that bet.
2. Frontline alignment – most enterprise transformation efforts historically have been top-down exercises driven by centralized strategic planning.  Cloud transformation efforts are unique in that they required both executive mandates as well as incentives for frontline employees.  Take for example application development transformation.  In the old world a standardized set of platforms, services and tools could be mandated by corporate IT, and developers would have little choice.  Today if the services incentives aren’t right, developers can still easily go rogue and take their apps to Amazon or Rackspace.  That’s why recent successful app dev transformation efforts like the one at JP Morgan Chase have relied on a combination of top-down mandate and bottom-up adoption.  This example can be extended to broader business and IT transformation efforts.  If incentives aren’t aligned with employees, they’ll often drive their own transformation efforts on their own terms.
3. Time and tempo – cloud-enabled business transformation typically involves using agility and time-to-market acceleration as sources of competitive differentiation.  This requires not just rethinking business processes and platforms, but also core skills and capabilities.  Cloud and big data dramatically compress the time required for enterprises to observe, orient, decide and act in response to the market (or in fighter pilot speak the “OODA loop”).  The wide scale use of time and tempo as competitive advantage is a relatively new one for many enterprises, one they’re not familiar or comfortable with yet.  The concept of being first to market certainly isn’t new, but the intensity and pace it currently takes to be first is.
4. Skills shortages – it’s a mundane topic that no one still really likes to discuss, but the lack of cloud skills is a real issue stopping organizations from doing more with cloud.  This is certainly becoming apparent to service providers, which is why you see things like Rackspace’s Open Cloud Academy and Amazon’s AWS Training and Certification.  This isn’t just an operational and support issue.  Without talent it also becomes difficult to evaluate opportunities and develop a roadmap, let alone determine how to drive a wide-scale transformation effort on cloud services.
5. Pace of innovation – the interplay between cloud and open source is driving a pace of innovation that is difficult for even the earliest of enterprise adopters to keep pace with.  This is certainly true at the IaaS and PaaS layers, and may eventually play out in SaaS as well.  While committing to cloud as a foundation for transformation is one thing, recognizing the ongoing investments in talent and skills required to leverage cloud platforms is another.  Taken together with the skills gap mentioned above, the pace of innovation poses a significant challenging for those deciding whether to drive a wide scale transformation effort.

While it may come as a surprise the some, the critical factors for success in driving cloud transformation have little, if anything to do with technology.  People, skills and incentives are becoming the name of the game in cloud transformation.

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

But the thing is, you get 5/6ths of your SaaS revenue from your customers AFTER you close the deal, AFTER the first contract … and that’s all customer / client success my friend …

If you haven’t “done” customer success before yourself … if you don’t know how to manage and engage customers over the long term … learn.  It’s an art and a science.  Don’t wing it.

There’s a lot of ways to learn Client Success … but I’ve got to say, this conference on May 30 in San Francisco has a killer list of speakers on client success, and I don’t know where else you’d connect with so many of them.  I’m up on stage (I think) with our VP of Client Success who’s speaking.

It’s not free, but I’d spend a few bucks if you want to learn about Client Success.  Where else you gonna get this horsepower?

Trust me, if you don’t know client success yourself — just learning from Bill Binch at Marketo (just IPO’d, up 67%); Kathy Lord at Intacct; and Eitan Saban from Adobe EchoSign alone is worth the $195-$295.  All three are geniuses here.  I don’t know everyone on the list, but man, it’s solid.  [There are some decent CEOs and VCs on the list, too, but you can see them anywhere ]

More here: http://customersuccess.eventbrite.com/ and http://www.customersuccess.org/

Go.  If I’m wrong and it’s not worth it, I’ll buy you lunch or a drink or three to make it up to you.

————————————–

Over 200 executives from industry leading organizations will share best practices on developing a customer-centric culture across the entire organization, and how their companies are organizing, planning, staffing, training, analyzing, cost justifying and automating Customer Success efforts.

Announced Speakers:

• Geoffrey Moore, Author of Crossing the Chasm
• Aaron Levie, CEO at Box
• Dan Steinman, Chief Customer Officer at Gainsight
• Bernie Kassar, VP Customer Success at Xactly
• Kathy Lord, VP Sales and Customer Success at Intaact
• Tien Tzuo, CEO at Zuora
• Lori Wright, VP eCommerce Retention at Symantec
• Roger Lee, Partner at Battery Ventures
• Chris Cabrera, CEO at Xactly
• Nick Mehta, CEO at Gainsight
• Aaref Hilaly, Partner at Sequoia Capital
• Dr. Fred Van Bennekom, Customer Feedback Architect
• Byron Deeter, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners
• Kia Puhm, VP Customer Success at Oracle Eloqua
• Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, SVP Distribution Chief of Staff at Salesforce.com
• Bill Binch, SVP Sales at Marketo
• Abhay Rajaram, VP Customer Success at YouSendIt
• Amanda Schmidt, Senior Director of Customer Success at Marketo
• Jon Herstein, VP Customer Success at Box
• Eitan Saban, VP Head of Client Success at Adobe Echosign
• Mikael Blaisdell, Customer Relationship Architect
• Ping Li, General Partner at Accel Partners
• Greg Higham, CIO at Marketo
• Laura Lederman, Principal at William Blair
• Anjanette Hill-Mendoza, Director, Customer Engagement at YouSendIt
• Jeff Kaplan, Managing Director at THINKstrategies
• Lincoln Murphy, Principal at Sixteen Ventures
• Mike Rutz, VP of Sales at Angie’s List
• Bruce Felt, Former CFO at SuccessFactors
• Bryan Plaster, Director of Customer Success at Informatica Cloud
• Chad Horenfeld, Director of Customer Operations at Influitive
• Chris Stewart, AVP, Global Client Success Services at Cornerstone OnDemand
• Catherine Blackmore, VP Account Management at Badgeville

We hope that you’ll join us on Thursday, May 30th at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco, California from 9:00 AM to 6:30 PM and help define the future of this developing industry.

(Cross-posted @ saastr)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Adam Baldwin is presenting…

Introducing NodeSecurity.io

Adam Baldwin

Adam Baldwin is a web app hacker, team lead at ^Lift Security and the CSO for &yet. Adam has presented at various security & dev conferences in the past including, DEFCON, Djangocon, Toorcamp and RealtimeConf.

The node.js community is growing at an amazing rate. At the time of writing there was 27,757 modules publised on npm. Have you ever stopped to think just what you are putting into your project when you npm install somebody else’s module? Do you trust that code? This is an insane project to find out the answer to that question.

This talk will introduce the nodesecurity.io project, it’s goals, current results in hopes of inspiring involvement and receiving feedback directly from the node community!

James Halliday is presenting…

beep boop

James

Oh hello. I write too much code. I co-founded browserling. Here are some pretty pictures.

Unix philosopher and methodological reductionist etc.

Learn how to make computer sounds in node and the browser with the same api.

Using just a single function that takes a parameter t, time in seconds, and returns an amplitude between -1 and 1, inclusive, you can create music!

You can use this basic approach to write songs and synthesizers. In javascript. Yay!

Ryan Jarvinen is presenting…

Clustering Node.js on OpenShift

Ryan

Ryan Jarvinen is an Open Platform Advocate working with RedHat’s OpenShift team. He lives in Oakland, California and is passionate about open source, open standards, open government, and digital rights. You can reach him as ‘ryanj’ on twitter, github, and IRC.

Learn how to automate builds, deployment tasks, and application scaling as we use OpenShift’s platform architecture on-demand to build your own git-based release pipeline, including: development, testing, staging, and cloud-scaling production environments for node.js.

Slides:

• http://darkslides-rjdemo.rhcloud.com
• https://github.com/ryanj/darkslides/

Posts:

• https://www.openshift.com/blogs/secret-free-source-on-paas
• https://www.openshift.com/blogs/release-management-in-the-cloud

An adaptation of this talk was presented recently at HTML5DevConf in SF - http://html5devconf.com/sessions.html#r_jarvinen

Intro to Sails.js

Mike McNeil is presenting…

Mike

Mike autobiogrophies himself as, “I’m Mike, a developreneur based out of Austin, Texas and connoisseur of fine code. I’m also the creator of Sails.js, the open-source BaaS framework which allows front-end developers to build robust, scalable APIs using only JavaScript.

My first startup was in social television, where I saw the need for more efficient, easy-to-use solutions for realtime social features. Because of that, I got involved in Node.js early on, and after building a few early apps, recognized the need for an MVC solution to normalize patterns. Early last year, I founded Balderdash, a UX-focused mobile and web studio, which has given me an excellent opportunity to build out and utilize Sails.js in production.“

Sails.js makes it easy to build custom, enterprise-grade Node.js apps. It is designed to resemble the MVC architecture from frameworks like Ruby on Rails, but with support for the more modern, data-oriented style of web app development. It’s especially good for building realtime features like chat.

Sails empowers UX and design teams to build hi-fi prototypes in no time without waiting for the back-end to be finished. This means focusing more resources on the user experience, which means better products. One Sails.js project at a time, companies move their legacy architecture over to a simpler, more efficient Node.js cloud. Each new client-side code base is more maintainable, since it’s built using the universal language of the internet: a RESTful JSON API.

Chris Dickinson is presenting…

Implementing Git in JavaScript & the Browser: A Case Study

Chris

Chris describes himself as “I make silly things with JavaScript: I particularly love bit-twiddling and WebGL-based projects. I live in Portland OR and work at Urban Airship as a JavaScript engineer.”

Git is one of my favorite things to hack on. It’s long been my goal to get a working (workable?) implementation of git running in pure JS, in the browser. My first attempt two years ago failed; and for a long time I’ve let the thought bounce around in the back of my head.

Spurred on by the recent interest in js-git, I recently restarted the journey towards an in-browser git, in order to help creationix deliver the best possible js-git. Newly armed with browserify and the small-module ethos, I’ve come much closer to a working git in browser and Node, and in the process have really put browserify and its shims through their paces.”

This talk will be comprised of:

A quick intro to the git object model and transport protocol
How browserify and the small module ethos have enabled great successes in the project.
Difficulties encountered in the process, both with Node.JS itself and with browserify, and how I’ve worked through them.
How I’ve diagnosed and worked through various performance issues.
Where is this project going?

Horse JS is presenting…

JavaScript, This is Confusing

….Horse JS Tweets, nuff’ said.  Horsing around…

Are you signed up?  BUY YOUR TICKET FOR NODE PDX HERE

Want to learn more? http://nodepdx.org/

Want to know the dates? http://nodepdx.org/

Want to know who else is speaking? Stay tuned here or go check out http://nodepdx.org/!

(Cross-posted @ Composite Code)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Some acquisitions thrive.  YouTube, PayPal, Android.  Others of course die.  GeoCities, Broadcast.com.  Perhaps most actually meander in the middle.  Flickr.

Take a look at this interesting chart on Google’s acquisitions from ArsTechnica:  in fact most acquired companies/products do survive and make it, at least for quite some time, if they pay for themselves, at least at Google:

But let’s put the products and companies aside.   Let’s talk about people.  What it will take for you, and those on your team, to make it post acquisition.

There’s one thing I’ve learned at the people level, why people don’t thrive after acquisitions (assuming they still want to succeed):  they can’t, or won’t, move from Persuasion as their way to drive decisions and change — to Alignment.

What do I mean?

Well, in most start-ups, even when you get pretty big … here’s how senior leaders Get Things Done:

• Identify a problem, an opportunity, or something that needs to change; then

• Get together the key players, physically, or by email, or whatever; then

• Explain their position, with data and experience.  Convince the rest.  then

• After convincing, new path is agreed upon.

And Then

• And this is the key part — once everyone is convinced — then everyone in a start-up just goes out and executes on that new path.  They just go do it.  (Yes, probably with prodding by the CEO and all that — but they go do it).  Both because that’s what you do in a start-up … and also because everyone is on the same team, with the same goals.

The thing is, in the BigCos, those last 2 points don’t really happen naturally the way they do in start-ups, at least if some of the stakeholders aren’t your direct reports, and especially if they are in different departments.  There’s too much risk to think through, in brand, in budget, in opportunity costs.  Also, people in BigCos just don’t go execute on the new path.  They don’t report to you, they are in different departments, and they have their own priorities.  So they wait until they are told to act.  Even if you’re right and everyone agrees you are right.  In fact, it doesn’t really matter if you are right, until you achieve Alignment.

So the senior start-up people that are most frustrated post-acquisition  … they make great arguments … pretty much convince everyone they’re right, or at least that action needs to be taken … and then beat their heads against a wall when nothing happens after that.

“Is everyone so stupid?” these frustrated, post-acquisition employees think?

No, they aren’t.  In fact, the senior folks in every tech BigCo are probably just as smart and most likely smarter than you (after all, they’ve gotten further than you in most cases).  Though of course, they aren’t as smart as you in your domain.

The problem, such as it is — is that you have to learn the skill of Alignment.  I know it’s an annoying concept if you haven’t had to live it.  Call it Politics, if you must.  It’s getting everyone at a reasonably senior level to go along with the New Path, or a different path than they are planning to go down.  It’s almost like guerrilla warfare, and you have to do it stakeholder-by-stakeholder, both 1-on-1 (to gain support) and then again in larger forums.  Probably, again and again.  And again.

This takes a lot of time.  You likely will even have to convince people who don’t care at all about your product or what you’re doing.  And you’ll have to find a way to get people to do things for you that don’t report to you.

It’s a hard skill to learn, especially when you’ve had success doing things your way (after all, this is why you got acquired).  Most start-up execs lack these skills unless they came from a BigCo at a reasonably senior level.

But you need to learn it, Alignment, if you get acquired.  Or at least, help your team learn it.

I’m proud of how we did after our acquisition.   I had some good, early success in Alignment, especially around maintaining our proven sales strategies.   You can see the results below:

But it is hard, learning Alignment — and practicing it.  Making that change is hard.  I wish I’d done a little better job at it.

(Cross-posted @ saastr)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Image © Mission Bay Conference Center

Last month, RightScale’s State of the Cloud report got me thinking about the rise of multi-cloud solutions. Next month, I’ll be moderating a Mapping Session at GigaOM’s Structure event to work out how, where, when, why and if this trend is going to prove significant.

Hybrid clouds, in which one public cloud and one private cloud are used together, are becoming increasingly common solutions to a range of business challenges. RightScale’s figures suggest growing interest in something more complex and, potentially, more interesting; multi-cloud. In a multi-cloud arrangement, customers build solutions combining one or more public clouds with one or more private clouds. This has the potential to significantly increase complexity, without necessarily delivering a comparable increase in value.

In my post last month, I suggested that many of these multi-cloud deployments were essentially accidental. A quick email exchange with RightScale shows that their survey respondents would appear to disagree; multi-cloud, for them, is a conscious business decision.

I’m intrigued, and so were GigaOM. So we’re putting on a Mapping Session at next month’s Structure conference to explore the issue further. I’ll be joined at the front of the room by fellow GigaOM Pro Analysts Ben Kepes and David Linthicum, as well as GigaOM Research Director Jo Maitland.

A GigaOM Mapping Session is more like a workshop than a regular panel. Although there are analysts at the front of the room, they’re really there to stimulate and guide a conversation with every single person in the room. We don’t have all the answers. We’re there to explore the topic, and to work out what — if anything — it might mean. The perspectives of customers, practitioners, suppliers and investors are an integral part of the process. When it works well, everyone comes away with a broader perspective than when they entered the room. Ideas are born, perceptions are sharpened, the germs of deals are done, and directions for future GigaOM research are painted. Mapping Sessions are free for registered Structure attendees, but separate registration is required. Numbers are capped, to ensure plenty of opportunity for discussion. If you’ve got perspectives to share, please do register to join us on 20 June in San Francisco.

Multi-cloud clearly throws up a host of intriguing issues for cloud vendors, their customers, and the ecosystem of cloud management-type providers (like survey author RightScale). What, if anything, do cloud vendors need to do in order to encourage, support, or hinder multi-cloud adoption? What’s the value proposition behind multi-cloud for customers, and what do the providers of cloud management services need to do in order to capitalise upon an emerging trend? Is this a long-term trend, or a short-lived opportunity?

Many of those stakeholders will be in the room, speaking, listening, and interacting. Do join us, and them.

(Cross-posted @ The Cloud of Data)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

From time to time, I write about Open Data. This has nothing to do with that. The Open Data Center Alliance is interested in data centres, not data. The Alliance was established back in 2010 with Intel driving things forward, and now claims over 300 member organisations, including the likes of BMW, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Deutsche Bank and Marriott Hotels.

According to the ODCA website,

we came together to deliver a unified voice for emerging data center and cloud computing requirements. Our mission is to speed the migration to cloud computing by enabling the solution and service ecosystem to address IT requirements with the highest level of interoperability and standards.

Much of the Alliance’s work involves identifying customer requirements and capturing these in a series of usage models. In theory, prospective customers can modify these usage models in defining their own requirements, and suppliers can tap new business by aligning their offerings to the models. I’ve not seen much evidence that this is happening at scale yet, but the Alliance site does state that

we anticipate quick industry response to the requirements, initial POCs of solutions beginning in 2012. This could accelerate over $50 billion in cloud service investments and is expected to save $25 billion through IT operational efficiency due to cloud adoption.

One of those usage models is concerned with Virtual Machine Interoperability in a Hybrid Cloud Environment (pdf), and last month it was augmented by the release of a Proof of Concept document (pdf) which

outlines testing criteria and procedures for documenting how hypervisor and VM solutions from both ODCA members and non-members interoperated in real-world enterprise cloud scenarios.

Quoted in an April press release to mark publication of the PoC document, ODCA executive director Marvin Wheeler commented that

true interoperability of hypervisor and virtual machine solutions between clouds is critical to advancing enterprise ready cloud implementations. We encourage global IT managers and cloud solution and service providers to join us at the Forecast 2013 VM interoperability panel on June 17 to take part in the collaborative discussions that will help drive the next phase of VM interoperability in the enterprise cloud.

The basic premise is a simple one; a virtual machine started on one hypervisor or class of physical server should run equally well when moved to run on a different hypervisor or physical server. Further, there is a presumption that there is a credible business requirement for this capability. As enterprise users of cloud increasingly find themselves adopting a hybrid approach spanning their own data centre, co-location facilities, hosting sites and diverse public clouds, the likelihood of them needing to run their standard Windows or Linux virtual machines on top of more than one hypervisor certainly increases. It’s less clear, though, that an inability to reliably move a Linux VM from the KVM hypervisor in your own data centre to the Xen hypervisor at a cloud provider is causing significant business pain today; it’s often reasonably straightforward, for example, to simply select a different cloud provider able to support your chosen KVM hypervisor.

But even if a lack of VM interoperability isn’t presenting an insurmountable barrier to business right now, it’s still one more thing to think about when pulling a set of disparate services together. If we can cost-effectively and pragmatically remove or diminish its ability to complicate, then that’s presumably a good thing.

ODCA’s PoC work took the usage requirements the organisation had already defined, and applied them to a specific set of documented tests. As IDG’s Joab Jackson notes in his InfoWorld piece, the results were not great.

Running through all the different possible combinations of hypervisors and OSes, the researchers found that 13 test cases resulted in warnings, and 19 test cases failed entirely. Only in two cases did the VM work flawlessly across two different hypervisors. In both of these cases, a VM created with Xen worked without troubles on a Microsoft hyper-V environment — in one case running Ubuntu and in the other case running Windows Server.

The researchers do note that they set the bar for success pretty high, and that several of the ‘warning’ states would still result in a functional VM. It does appear clear, though, that customers with a real need for multi-VM interoperability face significant challenges in efficiently managing workloads across different virtualisation infrastructures.

And that brings us to the panel at Forecast, which can hopefully help quantify the true scale of the problem… and indicate some of the ways in which vendors are working to fix the broken bits. In terms of the panel discussion itself, I look forward to delving into at least the following:

• how big a problem is the current state of VM interoperability?
• do the ODCA VM Interoperability use cases prioritise the right things?
• what do customers really need, and are they getting it?
• how are vendors really responding to requirements such as those defined by ODCA?

If you have opinions to share, perspectives to offer, facts with which to illuminate, or questions to ask, I do hope you’ll join us.

ODCA has given me a couple of free passes to Forecast. If you want to come along and we know one another, then please do get in touch.

Note: ODCA is covering my flight to San Francisco, and accommodation during the event.

Image of event venue, San Francisco’s Westin St. Francis, by Flickr user ‘prayitno‘

Related articles

• Open Data Center Alliance Tackles Cloud Lock-In (datacenterknowledge.com)
• Virtual machines inching toward portability (infoworld.com)
• 5 Key Essentials of Cloud Workloads Migration (cloudave.com)

(Cross-posted @ The Cloud of Data)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

The one word the best entrepreneurs never accept.

I said it.

Now let me walk you through a broader story because avoidance of the word in and of itself will seem cliche. Stay with me.

When I was little I had a role model for entrepreneurship – my mom. She was a natural leader. She was president of the UJA in Sacramento. From this I saw civic involvement and leadership first hand.

She was a nurse but was never graduated from a 4-year college. Still – she can do the NY Times crossword puzzle better and faster than I. Even today.

She was a hustler. And a ball buster. And a natural sales person. She was never afraid of the word “no” even to the point of embarrassing me.

My youth was filled with her arguing with vendors if they tried to pull a fast one. As my wife will tell you – arguing is cultural – you grow up with it or you don’t. I did. It’s very Jewish. For better or worse. She’s learned to embrace it in me. If a maitre d’ tries to seat me at a table in huge traffic flow or a corner she knows not to bother sitting down.

My mom bought our family’s first computer and encouraged me to learn it at 13.

She opened 2 businesses – a bakery and then a restaurant. I worked in both before leaving to work in a software company at 17. I never knew a world in which you weren’t supposed to work and make money. Even though my dad was a doctor and in retrospect I probably didn’t need to earn my own money. My mom always taught me it was my responsibility to do so.

When I was younger my mom taught me something I never forgot

“You don’t ask, you don’t get.”

It’s simple. I know. But it amazes me how many people don’t really get it.

2 stories.

One.

When I lived and worked in London my wonderful assistant was Deborah Halliday, who was raised a very “proper” British young lady. Her brother played rugby for the English rugby team and went to Oxford. That’s kind of like having a brother in the NFL in the US.

If there was any society in which being a hustler was out of step with the norm is was England. Yet I was a foreigner so I got away with being different.

I used to ask Deborah to book my travel plans in France and Germany were I went 1-2 times / month. There were online tools to book this stuff but the Internet booking sites were early.

I would tell Deborah, “I found this hotel near the Champs Elysees for 170 Euros. But I don’t want to pay that much. Tell them I’ll stay if they’ll give it to me for 120 Euros.

“What? You want … what?”

“Mark. You can’t do that! You can’t just name your own price.”

Me. “Of course I can. Tell them you found a hotel down the street for 100 Euros but I prefer to stay at their hotel. Haggle. See what you can do.

Deborah. She was mortified. Bless her cotton socks. I put her outside of her comfort zone.

Me. “Deborah. You don’t ask, you don’t get! What’s the worst they can tell you? “No?” If so, we’ll call back an hour later and pay 170 Euros. It’s not like they’re going to tell you ‘no’ in an hour. You might as well try!”

Classic Mexican Road strategy.

Here’s the thing. They NEVER said ‘no.’ Such were the times. They weren’t fully occupied.

She began to love it. It was liberating. I taught her to make it a game. I would challenge her to see how cheap she could get rooms. I can still hear her giggle at how ridiculous it was in her mind’s eye. And yet how eye opening it was that you could have almost anything you wanted. If you just asked.

Story two.

Fast forward. My son Jacob. He’s now 10. When he was 7-8 my wife used to sit down with him to do homework and train him the importance of getting it done early and well. Luckily I have such a terrific and organized wife. Or Jacob would be screwed.

They sometimes did homework at Le Pain Quotidien. And if Jacob was good he could get a treat.

Tania once took him up to the couter to pick out a treat. He pointed at a chocolate cake and told Tania he wanted a piece.

“No, honey. That’s a whole cake. You can’t have a piece. It’s not cut. Why don’t you find something else?”

Jacob, “Of course I can have a piece. Just ask them!”

Jacob has IJ. He knows to ask for what he wants. He is respectful. But he has an inner compass that in stead of saying “ok” to adversity he says “why not?”

My wife thinks he’s an over negotiator but she secretly loves it. I always take it as a compliment.

Both stories have something in common. Not being ashamed to ASK. As I tell people almost weekly, “What’s the worst that could happen? That they would say, ‘no’?”

And I mean it. I promise you that 95% of the people I meet are afraid of people telling them no. They are personally embarrassed by it. Or insulted. Or view it as failure.

I’m told “no” all the time because I often ask for more than others do and therefore you need to be willing to hear “no.”

I was on a flight last year from DC to LAX. I had a business class seat due to status of flying a lot and my family was in economy. I felt bad and was planning on rotating.

But when I sat down I asked if my family could upgrade since there were 3 open seats. I assumed the answer would be “no” but I figured I had nothing to lose.

The flight attendant said “ok. but you’ll have to pay a small upgrade fee and I can’t move them until after take-off.” But move them she did. And she decided it wasn’t really important to make me pay since the seats were unoccupied.

Score!

We had also just been upgrade from London to Baltimore.

2 times in a row – unreal. My wife was a bit incredulous (but grateful). I simply pointed out that our kids learned a more important lesson than the downside consequence of their expecting to always sit in business class (which isn’t going to happen!).

They learned to ask, “who not?”

You don’t ask. You don’t get.

And here’s the thing about “no.”

I know first hand just how chicken people are about hearing it. I’ve sat through so many meetings where sales reps didn’t ask for the order. I’ve been pitched by hundreds of entrepreneurs who never actually asked me whether I would invest. Very few people do.

Here’s an experiment for you.

Hold interviews with tech people, marking people, ops people, finance people – whatever. They always finish the interview with a “thank you” and barely ask next steps.

Any great sales person will ask you at the end of the meeting, “So, how’d I do? Who else have you spoken with? How do I stack up? What do I need to convince you of to get an offer? What is the next step in the process?”

Great sales people are trained to “ask for the order.” If you interview a sales person and they don’t ask for the order, be worried.

I like to flip things on their heads. I like to ask in reverse in interviews, “If we did get aligned to offer you this role, do you plan on accepting? What other offers do you have? What do we need to do to win? What steps do you still need before you decide to go with us?”

I want to know. And I have nothing to fear in the answer.

My favorite (not) is dealing with lawyers (or VCs) who say, “as a firm, we never do a, b, c.” Let me tell you now that often this line is BS. But my standard response is, “I don’t care what you normally do. I think it’s right for our situation. So unless you explain to me logically why it doesn’t make sense at our company, my assumption is that it’s a good idea.”

In summary, I recommend some honesty with yourself. How comfortable do you feel with asking for the order? How confortable do you feel with asking awkward questions or asking for things that are out of the norm, “Could we have your room for 120 Euros so we don’t have to stay down the road?”

If you don’t find it within your confort zone – practice in small ways for asking for slightly unreasonable things just to get used to it. It’s a skill you’re going to need as an entrepreneur.

After all – you don’t ask, you don’t get.

(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

But the #2 most important thing you can do is retain your team.  And I don’t see enough talk about that.  Today, frictional unemployment for experienced tech engineers, salespeople, marketing stars, and other leads is … about -9.0%.  Negative, near as I can tell.  If you’re great in SaaS, just email me.  I can get you 3-4 job offers by the end of the month.

I did many things wrong as a CEO in both my start-ups.  But one thing at least quantitatively I did well was retain the team.  I tried to copy my old boss, whose motto was Zero Voluntary Attrition.  In my first start-up, not a single person left.  In my second, I only lost one person that I really wanted to keep.  A few of the early folks who were absolutely terrific, needed to do the next thing after we hit Traction, after several years of the very early-stage grind.  You will lose some pure start-up people once things scale up.  But after that, I lost no one that we needed to keep but one.

Now I’m not saying it was all roses.  Some of them could barely stand me at times.  Others needed to find a way to change or modify their roles.  And — importantly — a number of the best folks on the team almost left.  Really, really close.

So what are some tips and tricks here?  Let me add a few thoughts:

#1:  By The Time You Give Them a Raise, It’s Too Late.  They’re Already Out the Door.   You have to get comp right, as best you can, all the time.  These days, anyone good is going to get a 10-20% (or higher) raise to move — and maybe a bonus on top of that.

The thing is — you can’t counter.  It’s too late by that point.  Once they tell you they have another offer … they’re already out the door.  A raise won’t do it, at least not for the good ones.

#2.  Always Pay Market or Above As Soon As You Can Afford It.  At Least to the Great Ones.  The other night I was at an event with a number of other CEO founders.  One CEO told me the story of how he lost a top up-and-coming engineer, who was making a five figure salary … to a real boooooring company that doubled her salary.  That boring company had to.  How else can a boring company steal a star engineer from a hot start-up?  Lots of money.

My point here is this engineer should not have had a five-figure salary, even if it made sense in historical context (joined as a very junior person, consistent with prior salary).  Pay market, or above, as soon as you can.  It’s a sign of respect.  And most of the best ones won’t ask.  They’ll just eventually get frustrated and leave.

#3.  It’s Probably Not Too Late When They Interview.  So Be Paranoid.  And Intervene.  There are some very tell-tell signs of someone interviewing.  Out of the office at weird hours.  Talking on their mobile phone on the sidewalk – and moving away from you if you approach them to say Hi.   Signs of frustration in their posts on Facebook, in new connections on LinkedIn.

Now by the time they take another job, it’s too late.  Even if a raise would work then, which it won’t … the relationship is damaged at that point anyway.

But it isn’t necessarily too late when they start to interview.  It may be, in its own way, a plea of exasperation as much as anything else.  If you can fix that issue, you can keep him/her more times than not.

#4.  Find a Growth Path for Everyone, Especially the Great Ones.  You have to find a growth path for the great ones.  They join a start-up to grow, to learn, to do new things.  If they can’t grow, they die a little every day.  It’s your job to understand the career path for at least your first 50 employees.  Know it.  And do whatever you can, within the boundaries of reality, to help them achieve it.

#5.  Talk to People.  For Real.  Get Real Feedback.  At least Once a Quarter.  I know you probably hate annual reviews and the like.  I agree.  They are generally pretty wasteful in a start-up.  But you do need to do something different here.  You need to meet 1-on-1, in a unstructured way, with all your best people — at least once a quarter.  Quietly.  And ask them what’s frustrating them about their job.  What they want to be doing — but aren’t getting to do.  Be friendly — but blunt.  You need to learn.  Get it out of them.

You may think you know if you have drinks together, or go see movies together, or whatever, that you know.   But you don’t.  Even if people complain in that context, it will be general complaints.  You won’t learn, or know, what your top people need to find their growth path at your company.  Where they feel stalled out and frustrated.  You have to ask.

Just some ideas.

Because there’s absolutely, positively, nothing worse in the pre-Scale days than losing a rockstar employee that you could have kept.  It just kills you.  Later, when you have 100, 200+ employees, $20-$30m+ in ARR … well … you sort of can swap people out, at some level.   Including maybe even you.  Everyone should be redundant at that scale or you’ve failed as CEO.   But until then, every key player is critical.

If nothing else – address retaining your top troops at least as seriously as you do recruiting them.  And whatever you do, don’t ignore the ones that don’t complain.

—————–

And on that note, don’t just take it from me.  Take it from Don Draper.  Don’t let it happen to you.

(Cross-posted @ saastr)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Zach Bobb is presenting…

Building a Computer In Your Browser

Zach the TriMet Ticket Man!

Zach is a mobile engineer with GlobeSherpa working hard to bring you the app that will let you buy TriMet tickets on your phone.

Want to learn how computers work under the hood while learning Web technologies? Come learn about the Von Neumann 51, a series of tutorials that will take you through building a computer from the ground up in JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3.

The talk will start by laying out some of the motivation behind the project and then demonstrate some of the components people will build through the tutorials: logic gates, adder circuits, displays, etc. The end of the talk will demo a prototype of the vN51.

Some of the technologies in this talk are:  D3 | A JavaScript library for dynamic data-driven SVG graphics HTML5 Canvas | Pixel manipulation for display output

Paul Jungwirth is presenting…

Handling Errors with Cluster and Domains

Paul

Paul will jump into,

“Node’s callback pattern makes error handling difficult: throwing an exception kills the entire node process, terminating all current requests, and every callback initiates a new stack, so stacktraces are terse and don’t indicate how you got where you died. You can solve these problems using some newer features of Node called clusters and domains. This talk with explore using these tools for better error handling.“

Forrest Norvell is presenting…

Do as I say, not as I do: Node in the real world

Forrest

Forrest is a software engineer who has spent the better part of the last two years working with Node full-time, first working on bringing Singly’s Locker Project up to web scale, and then exploring the wilds of monitoring the performance of Node applications for New Relic. He has learned an unreasonable amount about JavaScript, V8, libuv, and making it all work well in the real world.

Forrest has spent the last year plumbing the depths of Node for New Relic, as he brings support for Node to New Relic. It’s a process that has required ingenuity, guile, and the willingness to break a lot of otherwise very sensible rules. He will take you on a tour of some of the more powerful but dangerous tools in the JavaScript toolbox: monkey patching, working with Node’s internals, and mixing synchronous and asynchronous code without setting your hair on fire.

Charlie Key is presenting…

Building a Multiplayer World for Pillow Pets

Charlie

Charlie is Co-founder of Modulus, a premier Node.js hosting solution. He has spent the last six-years working in the software, where he has created over a dozen production websites and applications for many global brands.

He is also a core contributor on Pulse game engine and one of members of the team who developed Pillow Pets World.

The talk will dive into the design goals, architecture and end result of creating this massive virtual world. Come see how Pulse (a HTML5 game engine) and Node.js were combined to create a fast, expandable, mobile ready world. Targeting a game at 10,000,000 people? Then come and find out how Pillow Pets World was built. Pillow Pets World is a virtual world built for millions of kids. Scalability and performance were aspects that were included from the start.

The technologies included in this talk are:

Pulse | HTML5 Game Engine Node.js | Scalable small servers Socket.io | Real-time communication using Web sockets Redis | Small in memory storage used for pub/sub communication between servers

Are you signed up?  BUY YOUR TICKET FOR NODE PDX HERE

Want to learn more? http://nodepdx.org/

Want to know the dates? http://nodepdx.org/

Want to know who else is speaking? Stay tuned here or go check out http://nodepdx.org/!

(Cross-posted @ Composite Code)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Q1: What is a cloud workload and cloud workload management?

A cloud workload is dependent on the cloud layer (i.e. infrastructure, compute unit, storage unit, etc.). In infrastructure the workload is the compute or storage units that are being utilized by the cloud consumer during a period of time. In PaaS, the workload refers to the software stack processing efforts while in SaaS it refers to the usage and demand habits of the end user or system. One method of measuring workload throughput is by analyzing the utilization efficiency. Cloud workload management requires an understanding of resource demand in order to ensure efficient capacity utilization at all times. Additionally, it means having the visibility and tools to utilize fixed capacity for steady demand as well as the ability to burst on-demand peaks while aiming for ideal throughput of IT and cloud resources.

Q2: What are the cloud consumer’s considerations for switching between clouds?

Having had this conversation multiple times, I’ve discovered that there are many considerations that need to be kept in mind when contemplating switching between clouds. Workload migration, whether it is between private and public clouds or between cloud vendors, should be driven by the business values gained by the cloud user – reduced costs, enhanced security, improved availability, or decreased vendor lock-in. Workload migration automation, or workload transportation rules, must be established based on full transparency of the dynamic cloud environment. Today, there is a rising debate on the feasibility of workload transportation between cloud vendors.

Q3: How does the perspective of the workload differ between the cloud vendor and its consumer?

From the vendor’s perspective, the cloud workload refers to the physical machine compute units that are utilized in a period of time (second, minute, hour). It is the vendor’s goal to eliminate idle physical capacity. Alternatively, the consumer’s workload refers to his/her utilization of the cloud compute utility in order to meet demand and terminate idle capacity. Essentially, both sides are aligned with the need to be efficient and to ensure that capacity meets demand while maintaining maximum throughput of resources at all times. A good example of this is Amazon Cloud spot instances that incentivize users to use lower priced resources at peak times and thus maximize the AWS underlying physical compute resources utilization.

“…the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), a global member-led organization, has brought together hundreds of end user enterprise IT organizations to work together in an attempt to drive broad scale requirements for the enterprise-ready cloud. The group recently announced the release of a new POC (Proof-of-Concept) paper developed to determine where the virtual machine (VM) industry currently stands in meeting interoperability requirements outlined in an ODCA VM interoperability usage model.” Resource: Forbes.com

Q5: What’s the degree of cloud vendor lock-in?

Cloud vendor lock-in is a significant consideration when adopting a specific cloud vendor or platform. Vendor lock-in is dependent on assumed costs of switching clouds. Taking that into consideration, the discussion should compare traditional data center “lock-in” with public or private cloud vendor “lock-in”. Based on this, it seems that public cloud consumers prefer not to be locked-in simply because there is no initial hardware investment. Heavy reliance on proprietary APIs, however, can create greater lock-in that drives costs up and undermines the savings that can be achieved through portability and technical efficiency.  Past experiences and the new cloud perception has led experienced IT leaders to better measure their vendor’s lock-in level. Vendors that don’t lock-in their customers may be perceived as a better option for organizations that are considering cross-cloud deployment.

Q4: What is Interoperability? Are there Cloud standards?

Cloud interoperability is the ability to use the same tools, process, and compute images on a variety of computing providers and platforms. For the ability to migrate cloud workloads between environments or between clouds there must be common concepts across the board, all the way to the actual API standards that enable and facilitate cloud integrations.

To learn more about managing cloud workloads, sign up for the live webinar, Managing Cloud Workloads: Back to Basics with Joe Weinman of Cloudonomics and Patrick Pushor of CloudChronicle.com on Thursday, May 16th at 12pm EST.

This article was cross posted on iamondemand.com

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Adam Ulvi is presenting…

Put a Sensor On It!

Adam Ulvi

Adam is a Portland native (straight out of the Simpsons) with a penchant for software and systems integration. 8-bit gamer, seasoned professional, perpertual noob. Specialization is for insects.

Learn how easy it is to create your own monitoring system! Hobbyist components and a rich ‘maker’ community puts advanced system designs well within the reach of your average software wonk. Stop planning and start building!

Our case study is ‘GroMon’, a solution for monitoring a tiny indoor lettuce garden. Our wireless sensor keeps track of temperature and humidity, if the plants get too hot or too cold then we are notified via text message.

We will discuss the design goals and architecture, as well as component selection, prototyping and debugging steps. With a little bit of programming skill and patience, anyone can build this network. Learn how to easily extend this solution for your own use.

Our stack is Node.js running on a Raspberry Pi. We connect over Bluetooth to an Arduino hosting a single sensor. All components can be purchased off-the-shelf, no soldering is required and the total cost is around $80. Code and bill of materials is available on GitHub, let’s hack!

Aron Racho is presenting…

Jive Purposeful Places SDK – A NodeJS Bromance

Aron

Aron Racho is a Senior Software Developer at Jive Software. Aron’s background has primarily been in Java, about 10 years in. He is a relatively recent convert to Javascript, and server-side Javascript in particular. Though relatively new to NodeJS, he has been smitten by its fluency, flexibility, and superb design. One might even say a Bromance has been started.

Ok, get ready, this description for this sessions is HUGE!

Jive Software’s latest cloud release enables 3rd party developers to easily push data marshalled from external systems of record such as Salesforce into Jive. Our aim is to publish a developer framework and API which makes it drop-dead simple — and fun — to get up-and-going from scratch, or easily integrate into an existing framework. We chose NodeJS precisely for those reasons:

• High developer adoption
• High velocity development — javascript! no compilation required
• Best-in-class IDE support (IntelliJ for example)
• Native support for REST and HTTP
• Excellent package management system (NPM == maven the Good Parts)
• Tons of great libraries
• Amazing documentation, well organized, very easy to get started instantly

Our framework is built on Express, and is designed to be programmed by “convention: fill in the blanks with logic specific to your application, and as long as you’ve satisfied the contract, the framework automatically:

• Wires up routes required for configuring your integration
• Notifies your listeners for integration life cycle events (integration created; destroyed; updated, etc.)
• Executes recurrent tasks you’ve scheduled
• Handles persistence of required objects. We have support for 3 types of persistence out of the box — in-memory, file, and MondoDB.

The framework is designed for developers who want to as quickly as possible start integrating a 3rd party service with Jive, with minimum setup.

For those interested in integrating Jive into an existing NodeJS Express app, we are going to make the underlying API available to developers, allowing them finer grained control over the setup of their integration. This API will be the same one underlying the mechanics of the aforementioned framework.

For my presentation, I will be describe how we used NodeJS as the basis for this framework and API. Please note at the time of this proposal, we’ve created the framework, and are now in the process of refining the API so that it can be used independently of the framework.

Christopher Meiklejohn is presenting…

An Introduction to Functional Reactive Programming

Chris Meiklejohn

Christopher Meiklejohn is a Software Engineer with Basho Technologies, Inc. where he focuses on building rich web applications for Riak using Erlang and JavaScript. Before joining Basho, he worked at Swipely, a loyalty program startup based in Providence where he maintained critical infrastructure components written in Ruby. Christopher currently serves as one of the maintainers of Rubygems.org.

Chris also knows a thing or three about this show… called The Wire… he could probably speak entirely in quotes solely from The Wire and still make complete sense. So throw a quote out, I bet he’ll catch it.

There is no doubt that todays web applications continue to grow in adoption, replacing their desktop counterparts in all areas of computation. Essential to their growth is their ability to provide near-native performance and rich user experiences. As these applications grow in essential complexity, they also grow in accidental complexity due to the imperative callback processing style found in most web applications. The asynchronous nature of most of these applications also further compounds the issues due to guarantees around message ordering, and a level of indirection required in callbacks handling events.

Functional reactive programming is one approach for mitigating accidental complexity, using a declarative and composable data-flow model. During this talk, we’ll look at the history of functional reactive programming, some JavaScript implementations of FRP, and finally some ClojureScript implementations of FRP and examples on how to get started with using functional reactive programming.

Max Ogden is presenting…

Minecraft.js

Max Ogden – Penciled and colored!

Max used to live here in Portland, and at some point defected to work on noble causes with Code for America. Since then he’s been an Oaktown Coder (Oakland, the other city near San Francisco).

In January of 2013 he started the Voxel.js Project. Since he and contributors have generatored nearly 100 node modules related to 3D game development and distribution. Examples including voxel rendering and first person controls and physics. On the main voxel-engine the project has received over 50 pull requests from 20 contributors. All of this since January. Max is going to dive into this effort and what inspiration people have taken to dive into game development with JavaScript.

Brock Whitten is presenting…

Mighty Messaging Patterns

Brock Whitten

Best know for having co-created PhoneGap, Brock went on to work at Joyent where he created the Public API for the beloved (and now sunset) No.de Platform. He’s now working on the Harp Platform where he’s worked with a team to have created a dead simple publishing platform that uses Dropbox as its deployment mechanism. Much has been learned, he’s read to share.

He describes his course as, “Messaging is the lifeblood of distributed systems yet it is often treated as an afterthought when applications are architected. Few get passed the point of tacking on a message queue to fire and forget tasks with no visibility into what is happening on the system. I’m here to tell you we can do better. That Messaging can do more for us than just put tasks in the background. By combining basic messaging paradigms we can build powerful distributed systems with full awareness of what is happening around the network. And we can do it all in pure JavaScript.

In this talk, I will start with a crash course on the basic messaging patterns push/pull, pub/sub, and request/reply and then show a real example of how we have combined these patterns to build a custom message broker that we have used to build a fully distributed and modular architecture for the Harp Platform. I will share details about what we have learned and common pitfalls to avoid when building a messaging system for your needs.

Basic outline for the talk:

• how messaging can be useful
• crash course on the basic message patterns
• how to get started with zeromq/axon
• common pitfalls when in production
• proven trade secrets we have learned

By the end of the talk, my hope is that everyone will have a new appreciation for what can be achieved with massaging and will know where to begin when attempting to integrate messaging into their next project. I feel this aspect of building modern web applications is often overlooked and viable techniques need to be shared and discussed.“

Are you signed up?  BUY YOUR TICKET FOR NODE PDX HERE

Want to learn more? http://nodepdx.org/

Want to know the dates? http://nodepdx.org/

Want to know who else is speaking? Stay tuned here or go check out http://nodepdx.org/!

Have a last minute request, idea, comment or a speaking proposal? http://nodepdx.org/

(Cross-posted @ Composite Code)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.