Sh*t To Pay Ratio
I once worked for a Fortune 100 executive who introduced me to a useful metric to judge the quality of a job: the Sh*t To Pay Ratio (or STPR for short). By his own definition, STPR was the level of compensation required to justify staying in or taking a particular job. If the job was particularly interesting, the compensation needs were low; if the job included onerous duties and/or working with difficult personalities, the compensation needs suddenly increased. I should note that this was the same executive who once described a new opportunity he wanted me to take as his “Chernobyl” – so clearly this was a man who could turn a phrase (let’s just say my STPR for that opportunity never quite worked in my favor ). I...
6 Tips To Taking Advantage of the Boom
For those of you who lived through the mid to late 1990s, you should smell something familiar in the Boston air: a technology boom. I know Massachusetts has a 6.7% unemployment rate and is still recovering from the worst economic downturn in a generation. But the evidence of the boom is all around us: new startups being formed, companies being acquired, and even a few companies preparing for IPOs. Sitting in a coffee shop downtown can remind you of Cambridge in 1997, with technology business being transacted all around and a sense of optimism in the air. The last boom in the 1990s lasted long enough for some of us to ride one and maybe two companies to a successful exit. This means that if you are considering making a career...
Product Management Is a Company, Not a Department
Over my years in startups, I’ve found the single hardest role to fill with a quality candidate is product management. Ask any industry professional to name the best software developers they have worked with, and they will have at least a few names to share. But ask the same question about product managers, and more often than not, you will be met with a confused silence. Why? I’ll give five reasons. #1: It’s a Hard Job In the best of circumstances, being a startup product manager is a difficult job. A startup PM needs to assist the company in charting a course from a founding vision to a growing business, all within both the constraints and extreme uncertainty of a startup. A successful PM needs to reconcile the...
The Skeleton In My Closet
Over the years I’ve learned there are technologies I value, and technologies I do not. I value fast laptops, productive software development tools, consumer products that make my life easier, and great open source. I do not however value cell phones.I guess should correct that slightly. I have valued one cell phone in my life: my Blackberry 7200. My first Blackberry came to me around 2002 via SilverBack founder, John Igoe, who extorted two free trials from an overly hungry T-Mobile representative. John wanted to see what this “BlackBerry thing” was all about, and decided there was no better way than to test it than our upcoming overseas trip. After arriving in Europe and meeting in a restaurant, we both promptly pulled out...
My Lean Startup Journey
For the last several months I have been on a Lean Startup journey. Last summer when I left my role as VP of Engineering of a fast-growing cloud storage startup, I had an idea and a goal. The idea was to combine my two professional passions: cloud computing and systems management. The goal was to start a new Boston company that incorporated some of the best attributes of my previous companies. Here is the retrospective of my Lean journey to date, with the upfront acknowledgement that my journey has only just begun. Phase 1 – The Commitment When Dan Phillips and I first started talking about startup ideas in the spring of 2012, I went on a reading binge on entrepreneurship. There is one theme that came through in every book:...
Recommended Reading For Entrepreneurs
Last spring when I first starting seriously thinking about launching a company, I went on a reading binge. I read everything from how-tos to case studies to business fiction. While a lot of books in this genre are without value, there were a few I would recommend to anyone looking to start a company. The Intelligent Entrepreneur by Bill Murphy This HBS book follows the story of three entrepreneurs from the Harvard Business School class of 1998. Each starts a company, two in the waning days of the Dotcom Boom. It follows their challenges, near failures, and eventual success. At times I will confess it reads like a commercial for HBS (new drinking game: take a drink every time you encounter the phrase “elite business school”)....
Cloud Fratricide
Introduction Thursday night I was shutting down AWS instances on which I had enabled termination protection. Since automation is useless when confronting termination protection, I went old-school and disabled termination protection one instance at a time through the AWS Console. The experience brought back memories of my first encounter with cloud fratricide (a.k.a. friendly fire incidents in the cloud). The Incident It was late evening when one of our search clusters had gone into a degraded state. The on-call engineer concluded the cluster was being overloaded and recommended a routine operation: adding four nodes to the cluster. We called in a DevOps engineer to execute the plan, and here is a rough replay of what happened...
Joe Kinsella is a high-tech VPE and startup junkie in the Boston area.