September 2008
26 posts
Cloud Principle #2: Code over Configuration
At present, the LAMP stack and most other stacks come with a ton of different dials and switches. For my talk at Web 2.0 Expo I pulled together a slide with just excerpts from configuration files and rapidly filled a screen with lots of arcana from httpd.conf to php.ini (and that’s before you get to the db, firewall, loadbalancer, etc). It is true that you can (sometimes) get a working...
Political Spectacle, Market Fallout
I have been meaning to post about principles of cloud computing, but what is going on in the financial world and in Washington is simply too crazy. On a day where we had by far the largest bank failure in US history (WaMu seized by regulators and sold to JPMorgan) we were treated to an absurd political spectacle. Lawmakers convened at the White House to seal a deal on the bailout only to see it...
Inflation vs. Deflation
The current situation in the financial markets is not just scary but also confusing. It doesn’t help that people are talking and writing in ways that further confuse the matter. First, I will try to provide clarity around some terms that people have been abusing. Growth and recession are “real” concepts, which means they can best be thought of as quantities. In a recession the...
Firewall Topology?
And now for something completely different. Late last night I spent a bit of time looking into firewall topology for DailyLit’s growing server infrastructure. When you google the topic, you wind up with a lot of fairly old posts at the top. Wondering whether I am searching for the wrong thing (tried a bunch of different search terms) or this simply hasn’t changed much since I last...
Buffet and the Bailout
This morning I tweeted about what an incredibly good deal Buffett managed to strike for his investment in Goldman (10% dividend, 100% in-the-money warrant coverage). But I am wondering about the interaction between his deal and the bailout. Somehow I don’t think Buffett would have done this deal if he thought it could go terribly wrong based on political risk. That would means he either...
Cloud Principle #1: Post Machine Computing
As previously promised, I am starting to post about the principles that I believe define cloud computing. The first and to me most important principle is that cloud computing from a developers perspective no longer involves machines. This is a much stricter principle than most people are using today. For instance, by my approach, Amazon EC2 is not cloud computing. I should be clear that I am a...
Power to the People
With all the stuff going on in the markets it is easy to be depressed about the future. And while the road will be a lot more bumpy, I find myself optimistic because I believe that we have barely started to see the changes and opportunities made possible by the web. Today I have a post on the USV blog that talks about one change that I am particularly excited by: Power to the People....
NYT Covers USV
Nice article in today’s paper by Claire Miller http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/technology/22venture.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&ref=business&oref=slogin
More on The Bailout, Or Cash for Trash
There are a lot of problems with the proposed bailout. Yesterday I described a scenario where the government winds up causing a rise in interest rates and inflation. But it is also possible that this plays itself out in a deflationary way as it did in Japan following their real estate bubble. That could happen if instead of resuming to lend, the financial institutions hord government bonds and the...
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Let's Hope It Works (And Even Then It's Painful)
So the federal bailout package is taking shape. The President is asking Congress to approve $700 Billion for the Treasury to buy pretty much anything it wants to over the next few years. The theory behind this approach is that buying up bad assets will result in banks resuming business with each other and once again extending credit to businesses and consumers.
Even if this works it will be...
WTF Just Happened?
I am still trying to figure out what exactly Paulson is proposing, but a few things seem clear. First, people had been misled on a massive scale about the safety of money market funds. Even today the New York Times writes in one of their cover story “ultra-conservative money market funds” — as if. Earlier this year we advised all of our portfolio companies to make sure that...
Feature versus Company
“That’s not a company, that’s a feature.” So goes a frequently heard VC comment on business ideas that are incredibly narrow and don’t seem to deliver enough value by themselves. I have certainly made that comment in the past. But I believe that cloud computing is changing what’s a feature and what’s a company: a feature may now well be a company. ...
I Have Seen This Movie ...
… and I sure hope that it ends differently this time! What am I talking about? I am talking about the eerie parallels between 2000 and 2008. I remember attending some of the biggest startup / Internet conferences just at the time as the market started to implode. Now here I am at Web 2.0 Expo with thousands of people while Wall Street is melting down. Yesterday was a particularly weird...
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Cloud Computing at Web 2.0 Expo
Today I get to give a talk about a topic that I am very excited about: cloud computing. As I scanned the program at Web 2.0 Expo I found that there are 10 presentations with ‘cloud’ in the title and I suspect that many more will mention it. While it has become a buzzword and may therefore suffer the fate of other buzzwords, I am convinced that the basic ideas behind it are sound and...
Casing the Startup Joint
Today, Charlie O’Donnell and I are holding a 3 hour workshop at Web 2.0 Expo titled ‘Casing the Startup Joint’. It will be a lot of fun. Both Charlie and I have experience on both sides of the table - as entrepreneurs and as investors. Charlie was an analyst at USV and is now the founder of Path101. I did a bunch of startups and am now on the VC side. As always with events like...
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More of the Same (It was Leverage that Killed...
We may well be going through a 50-year storm in the financial markets. Lots of folks are talking about unprecedented events in the housing market and about the risks of financial innovation such as Credit Default Swaps. With so much change it may well seem like all the old rules are out, but at the heart of Lehman’s demise is a much much older killer - leverage. Leverage kills by...
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Leadership Qualities in Startups and Politics
Two things that make for great leaders in startups are the ability to recruit and motivate top talent and honesty (with the team and with investors). Top talent is critical because that’s how stuff actually gets done and gets done well. There are so many important decisions to be made every day that they have to be delegated. Otherwise the leader becomes a complete bottleneck. Honesty is...
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
This is one of my favorite French sayings - the more things change, the more they stay the same.
We had a great meeting yesterday with the entire leadership team of one of the companies from our portfolio. There was a broad ranging discussion from trademark issues to strategy to business develoment. Throughout, there were two schools of thought present - that on the web everything is different...
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Testing, 1 2 3, Testing in the Cloud
Most of the companies in the USV portfolio started out quite small. Some even with just a single server, many with a couple of web servers and a single DB server. At that stage testing is straightforward. In fact developers generally have a complete setup on their laptops and stuff that works there is highly likely to work in production.
Fast forward a year or two (in some cases only a few...
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Instant On
Much of how users initially experience a service depends on the activation process. It is fair to say that on the net the expectation has become that services will work instantly. For instance, in video, we are no longer willing to wait for a movie to download first. Instead, we want it to start from the second we hit the play button. We try to get all of our portfolio companies focused on...
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Code Reuse and Cloud Computing
In preparing for my Web 2.0 Expo presentation “Forecast: Partly Cloudy,” I have been looking at how existing code can be reused in the cloud. There are several big challenges to reusing existing code in the cloud:
Many cloud platforms support only one specific language (e.g. Python for Google App Engine, Ruby for EngineYard). That excludes a lot of code written in PHP, Perl, Java...
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DreamIt, BuildIt then (Maybe) FundIt
Yesterday I attended the DreamIt Ventures funding day in Philadelphia. Several things were refreshing about it. First, there was a wide diversity of teams from kids still in college to a baby boomer. Second, there was a wide spectrum of businesess from the playful phrazit to the down-to-business Tapinko. Third, almost all of the companies were looking for small sums of money to get them to the...
Grid Infrastructure
One of the big contrasts between Germany (where I grew up) and the US has been the approach to infrastructure such as highways, railways and power lines. In Germany these are all ‘gold plated’ with the Autobahn surface so smooth you could run a drag race on it (and people do accelerate almost that fast). In the US on the other hand I never seize to be amazed at the potholes on major...
First Day of School
Today was our kids first day of school. It is so much fun to see how excited they are about having new teachers, meeting new friends, and learning new things. Hope it stays this way for many years to come including when they are teenagers. I certainly feel as excited about this fall as the kids do. In politics, we will have an exciting presidential race culminating in the first election that I can...
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Google Chrome
Of course the big news yesterday was the (one day premature) announcement of Google Chrome, Google’s much rumored browser. I am looking forward to trying it out today. Based on the comic strip Google used to describe it, Chrome has some nice innovations in it. First and foremost are the use of processes to isolate tabs and significant improvements to Javascript execution. The fact that...
