I woke up this past Friday (the 13th) to a DM on Twitter saying that Continuations was down. I immediately tried to open the site on my phone and was greeted by an ominous:At first I figured that maybe Tumblr was down. A quick check of other Tumblrs revealed that not to be the case. At this point a somewhat queasy feeling started to set in. After a quick shower I went to my laptop and tried to log into my account only to see a terrifying sight:At this point I was in a full blown state of pani...

It is hard for me to believe that I wrote my post “I Want a New Platform” over seven years ago. At the time that post led to our investment in MongoDB, which was then called 10gen. The company was started by Eliot Horowitz and Dwight Merriman inside of AlleyCorp, the New York based incubator started by Dwight and Kevin Ryan (Business Insider and Gilt Groupe also came out of AlleyCorp). Kevin had previously been an investor and board member in my own incubator and had become a friend. When he ...

The definition of a commodity is a good that is “supplied without qualitative differentiation." You can’t charge more than others for crude oil, you have to turn it at least into gasoline. And if you really want to charge a lot more you have to turn it into a plastic product. CPU cycles and memory are the crude oil of our times. If you want to charge more for them you have to add value. If you are SaaS company that provides a complete solutions you are adding a lot of value (plastic product)....

I have often said that Amazon has done more for startups than all of us early stage VCs combined. I really don’t see a startup anymore these days that is not getting going on either Amazon or sometimes Rackspace’s cloud offering (I have yet to seen a startup on Azure or IBM’s cloud). The idea of racking your own server as a first step, which is what we routinely did in the late 90s and then later managed dedicated servers seems positively quaint. So I am with Marc Andreessen here in what seem...

Last night I managed to fix my ReadyNAS NV+ with a replacement PSU purchased from PC Warehouse (bypassing customer support but shelling out a bit over $100). I updated the forums with the relevant links and am happy to once again have a running RAID array for backup at home. More importantly though, this incident made it amply clear that in addition to my local backup I absolutely need a cloud backup as well. Would love to get recommendations on what to use. Ideally, I would like a single pro...

Historically in the software business high gross margins were considered essential. It is not clear to me that the same logic will apply for cloud-based services. Their cost structure might wind up being quite different. Much smaller development teams can accomplish amazing things on top of a cloud stack substantially reducing the fixed cost component. On the other hand, COGS may increase significantly as the underlying cloud services are paid on a variable basis. With that in mind, it could ...

We were on family vacation through Sunday, so when our iPad arrived via UPS on Saturday nobody was home, which meant that we had to wait until Monday for it to be re-delivered. I wish I could share first impressions this morning, such as Bijan did this morning, but we frankly didn’t get that far. The iPad appears as a beautiful physical object, but when you turn it on it greets you in a very disappointing way: an icon asking you to connect it to iTunes via a cable! What a contrast with my exp...

In January I wrote a post saying that we need a standard for cloud databases. That post is now the #2 search result on google for “cloud database standards” and there are still no results that even hint at emerging standards. So it will be fun today to moderate a panel on this topic at the Glue Conference with Alex Iskold and Stu Charlton. I am planning on a lot of audience participation as there are a lot of technical folks at the conference. Here are some of the questions I am planning to c...

Just as I was bout to start this post, I saw Marco’s Entry “On Database Joins” where he quotes a tweet by @codinghorror on joins being super expensive and explains how Tumblr avoids them. Tech folks at our portfolio companies have probably all heard me say that “joins are evil” because they will make it really difficult for your service or site to scale past a certain level. Of course, once you start to program without joins, you pretty quickly demote your database engine to perform object (o...

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the Azure Services Platform, which is their entry into the cloud computing market. I have spent quite a bit of time reading through the materials, starting with Microsoft’s press release which is full of buzzwords, but otherwise about as uninformative as could be. In usual Microsoft fashion, they have thrown the kitchen sink into the announcement trying to tie together .NET services, with Live Services, with loads of other services that have gone through multipl...