Continuations

Last Tech Tuesday I wrote about evolving your technology as you grow. As, if not more important, is how you grow your engineering organization. They after all are the ones who need to make the right choices about the technology! Here I have observed three common mistakes: staying flat too long, not investing early on in devops and missing the co-founder to manager transition (if such a transition turns out to be necessary). Most startups begin with just a couple of engineers who tend to be en...

This is the second post in my little project of self publishing my PhD Thesis. Last week I introduced an econometric analysis of the impact of Information Technology (IT) firm size. This time it is a more theoretical paper that presents a model for examining the impact of different types of IT on the structure of organizations. In particular, it compares having no IT, with centralized IT (think mainframes) and networked IT (think Internet and Intranet). I was particularly happy with how this ...

Many of the high growth companies in our portfolio have run into scaling issues. There is a lot of information out there on various technical approaches to scaling. What most of those leave out is the interaction between the choice of architecture and organizational scaling. Some architectures lend themselves much better to organizational scaling than others. A horizontal approach with a Data Access Layer, a Business Logic Layer, and a Presentation Layer suffers from a lot of organizational c...

I have had the privilege of observing a number of founders grow their companies from just a few people to over a hundred employees. Leaving all the other growth challenges aside, I have come to conclude that personal scaling is the most important issue. By personal scaling I mean figuring out how to go from mostly doing to mostly managing. There are many aspects to this transition but the central one would seem to be trust. A map at 1:1 scale isn’t useful. And as I discovered yesterday during...

I started out in business selling development services. OK, so that’s hugely glorified. I was a teenager desperate to get my driver’s license in Germany where that is a costly process (lots of mandatory lessons). So I figured out how to make money programming custom applications for people, including a driving school. Ever since then I have had a love/hate relationship with sales. The hate portion is easy to understand for any engineer. The things you have to do in selling run counter to a lo...