Wanted: Software Architect
Back in the late 1990s I went to a local entrepreneurial event in which a speaker claimed a new startup would fail if it didn’t get its first 15 hires right. I never did ask why 15 , but the sentiment always stayed with me. I’m engaged now in one of my more important hires, and could use your help finding just the right person. The company, CloudPercept, delivers cloud performance management to SaaS companies leveraging public, private or hybrid clouds. The startup is the result of a long Lean validation process that included a series of market experiments and many personal lessons learned. It’s also a combination of my two professional passions: systems management and cloud computing. I’m looking for a highly skilled...
6 Steps To Running a Lean B2B Experiment
Last summer I reread Lean Startup in search of advice on how to run a lean experiment for a B2B business. In rereading, I realized the book’s near exclusive focus on consumer startups (e.g. IMVU, Zappos, Dropbox, Grockit). Unfortunately stories of A-B testing on consumer websites was of no help to my venture, so I set out to learn how to run effective B2B experiments. Here are the results: Step 1: Define Critical Hypotheses to Test Before creating the experiment, define the critical hypothesis you want to test. The key is to focus exclusively on the essential hypotheses and not get distracted by secondary ones. For my first experiment, I chose to test the single assumption underlying the problem and market hypothesis of the...
Avoiding the Open Source Scramble
As a VP of engineering, I have more than once scrambled to reconcile some aspect of my team’s use of open source before closing a major business agreement. While the use of open source is almost never a driver behind the acquisition of a company, more than a few deals have fallen through due to the risk of IP contamination. So here are a few tips that can be applied in your organization to avoid an open source scramble. Step 1: Define a Policy The approach to open source varies by business, and so should be clearly documented and communicated to an organization. I use a simple visual matrix to communicate the business policy, with the goal of providing clear direction to my engineers. A sample matrix is below. The rows of the...
Burning Your Boats and Bridges
A couple years ago I had coffee with a local high tech executive who wanted to vent about east coast venture capitalists. He had what he thought was a great idea for a startup, but couldn’t get the local VCs to bite without him first starting the business. His line of thinking went like this: if you give me the money, I’ll leave my job and start the business – but how could I leave my job without money to start the business? Note to self: apparently west coast VCs don’t have LPs that require the management of investment risk. In my favorite chapter of Sun Tzu’s Art of War (Chapter 11: The Nine Situations), there is a line about how to manage your army when you have entered what is called facile ground: “When...
The $18 Billion Disruption
Introduction A few years back I was VP of engineering of a systems management startup called SilverBack Technologies. Competing in the systems management market in the last decade was much like being a mammal in the age of the dinosaurs: it was best to be small and unnoticed by the giants stomping around you. The giants of course were BMC, CA, HP and IBM, which collectively have owned about 54% of this market. No matter which product category you turned – network management, application management, or configuration management – there was always entrenched market leaders. Something has changed in the last few years though, driven by the white hot growth of public cloud computing. The early adopters of public cloud...
7 More Tips For Your Lean Journey
For the last couple months I’ve been researching a business opportunity using a Lean Startup process. If it’s true that we learn best from our mistakes, I’ve done some really solid learning over the last several weeks. I had previously posted 9 Tips To Improving Your Lean Startup Validation. Here are 7 more tips to share with others on a Lean journey. #7 Start With a Market, Not a Product As an engineer, I naturally gravitate to the product before the market. When I was eleven, I had a plan to bring fine dining to the skylines of U.S. cities through helium-powered blimps (guess who read a book on the Hindenburg?). My plan was not based on the identification of an underserved market (which I guess is this case was people...
10 Steps To a Read Only AWS User
Amazon has released many features in the last two years, but likely no feature more important to my personal peace of mind than Identity & Access Management (IAM). Before IAM, we had two types of access to our AWS infrastructure: none and administrator. It’s amazing I was able to sleep in those pre-IAM days, with an entire team walking around with global credentials. It’s sort of like the President of the United States granting access to the nuclear weapons codes to his cabinet, the congressional leadership, the First Family, and… hey, why not… the First Dog. Below is the 10 steps to creating a read-only user that can view all infrastructure, including monthly bills. Step 1: Login to AWS Console Login...
Joe Kinsella is a high-tech VPE and startup junkie in the Boston area.