I love going to the movies and I love science fiction. This summer is bringing a bumper crop of scifi movies (broadly defined). One of the fun aspects for me of going to see a movie is that I will get to see trailers for upcoming movies. Some people seem to dread this part as they just want to get on with the movie they have come to see, but I love trailers. Except when they wind up being spoilers and that’s increasingly a problem. Too many trailers seem to feel the need to reveal pivotal sce...

The last two posts on Tech Tuesday were both about growing your engineering organization. Someone wrote to me saying: it’s all well to talk about best practices for organizational design, but we can’t find enough qualified engineers in the first place! So today a post about hiring. I have been able to observe many companies over the years and even in the toughest markets some have a steady flow of high quality candidates and others always seem to struggle. The main distinction between the two...

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...

Fred wrote about tenacity this morning prompted by a post from Mark Suster about tenacity being a key trait for an entrepreneur. As per usual there is a long comment thread on Fred’s post and also quite a few comments on Mark’s. There is, however, only a limited discussion of the potential conflict between tenacity and the ability to “fail early and often” (before and after this comment). With the low cost of operating many startups these days, it should probably be called “iterate early (and...

In 1997 I started a company with two professors from MIT in the emerging Internet healthcare field. We made a lot of mistakes, but probably the biggest mistake was made at inception. We did not have the right DNA in the company for what we were trying to accomplish. The two professors were academics and I had a consulting services background (albeit a consulting startup). Their research had been on using lightweight web based systems on bringing information on the same patient from disparate ...

For some startups partnerships are essential to execution, for instance by giving access to an audience, a technology, or a process. In those situations I have a rule that is based on a fair bit of experience: try to avoid partnering with other startups (David) or the biggest players in the respective market (Goliath). Partnering with other startups is problematic because they may change direction and wind up competing with you, or dropping whatever it is that you are relying on, or possibly ...

Call for Topics (Web 2.0 Expo Workshop): Looking for topics and issues to discuss at a workshop that I am doing with Charlie O'Donnell at Web 2.0 Expo.

Several of the companies in our portfolio have gone through extended and often heated internal discussions about which programming language to use for backend development. In these discussions I have encountered a bunch of arguments that I find myself disagreeing with based on experience. I am presenting these generically even though they are often made with respect to particular languages. The point is that I disagree with the logic of the argument applied to any language. NEW language has a...