Saturday, October 09, 2010

More Entrepreneurs Should Blog

OnStartups.com: Why Every Entrepreneur Should Write and 9 Tips To Get Started: If you asked me to tell you a list of three of the best decisions in my life, I can certainly tell you that regularly writing is one of them...... Writing on a regular schedule takes a lot of discipline, just like going to the gym or practicing a new martial art. ..... If you keep yourself dedicated to writing on a consistent schedule, those important values will carry over to other facets of life including startups. ..... By putting yourself out there and making yourself open to meeting as many people as possible, serendipity is much more likely to happen. ..... The majority of good things that have happened to me in business can be traced back to my writing
There are more great VC bloggers than there are great entrepreneur bloggers, and I have long wondered why. I have also long felt that situation needs to be rectified.

Social media is so essential. You need to do your own getting the word out. Most of your communication will be small group and perhaps intense. There will be a lot of in group communication. That is why social media is called social media and not mass media.

Updates that can sound bizarre to strangers are necessary staple to intimates.

But then there is also the matter of reaching out to people you might not be able to meet in person. Long form blogging is my favorite social media platform. It allows you to dip into far flung conversations. Meaningful participation becomes possible.

The VCs just have done a better job. I feel like I am half way to becoming a VC myself just from reading the many VC blogs. I have a pretty good feel of the churn that is going on in the VC industry right now.

Even former entrepreneur VCs will tell you, the real action is in creating companies, not in funding them. "All I do is write checks," Fred Wilson once said, which is an understatement, but it is the half truth.

I would go so far as to say every tech entrepreneur ought to blog. None of the top ones do. And I wonder why.

The list is not all that big. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Wordpress/Blogger, and FourSquare, and I think you are all set. If you are active on those five platforms I think you are really into social media. And you are reaching out to people you need to be reaching out to.

Regular writing is like working out for the mind. When you blog regularly, you read your news differently. You also read more.

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HP Keeps Making News

Larry EllisonImage by plαdys via Flickr
Ben's Blog: Ben Horowitz: In Defense of Standards, Ethics, and Honest Financial Reporting at Hewlett-Packard: my business partner, Marc Andreessen, is on the board of directors of Hewlett-Packard. I note that I have no inside information, and this blog post is based purely on published material. In 2007, I sold Opsware, the company that I founded and ran to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6B. I worked at Hewlett-Packard from 2007 to 2008 as an executive in the software business. Recently, my old company Hewlett-Packard has been in the news—and not in a good way. ....... HP employs over 300,000 people. ..... Jodie Fisher had more access to the CEO and was paid more than 99.9% of HP’s workforce, despite having no traditional qualifications. ...... It is not an easy thing to fire a popular, highly successful CEO.
Something tells me this drama is far from over. The Oracle-HP alliance is now a full blown rivalry. This is about money. Like they say, follow the money. Oracle is now firmly in the hardware business as well, and HP feels eaten up. Oracle can do hardware, but could HP do Oracle-like software?

This is not about people getting along, or not getting along. This is about the money. And Larry Ellison might be dramatic, but he is first and foremost a businessman. His flare ups are market signals. Watch them and you are watching an industry churning.

This fight has quite a few rounds to it.

The Leo Apotheker Is Human Drama
New York Times: A Double Standard at H.P.: Oracle and H.P. had once been the closest of partners, with the latter selling the industrial-strength hardware that ran Oracle’s industrial-strength software. But that partnership appears to be dissolving. ..... Larry Ellison, Oracle’s flamboyant founder ..... “Hiring him had nothing to do with fighting Oracle,” said Ray Lane, the former Oracle (!) president who is set to become H.P.’s chairman next month. “The board chose Léo because he was the best available athlete.” .... Apotheker was likely to further traumatize the already demoralized H.P. staff. ..... “If you wanted to find someone who represented the diametrical opposite of the H.P. way, it is Léo,” said Jason Maynard, a veteran technology analyst with Wells Fargo Securities. “He is tough as nails and chews glass for breakfast.” ...... the same board that viewed Mr. Hurd’s minor expense account shenanigans as intolerable has chosen as its new C.E.O. someone involved — however tangentially — with the most serious business crime you can commit. ..... the chance to embarrass H.P. and its new C.E.O. is likely to be irresistible to Oracle and Mr. Ellison. Which will mean yet more egg on the faces of the H.P. directors.

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Thursday, October 07, 2010

Al Wenger Wants To Learn Scala

And so should you.

I came across this post by Al on Tumblr - my idea of TV - not long back and was the first person to reblog it there. Yes!

It is an honest, relatable, inspiring post. And I said so in a comment.

To those of you who might not know - I do have a global audience - Al Wenger is a top notch VC in New York City.

I promptly created a Scala page. This is still early. I first blogged about Scala back in May, and Google still shows only a handful of websites dedicated to Scala. Wow.

Al, I am with you now.



Wait, did I just say a line from The Godfather?

I could hardly call Al a friend, we have met in person but once. And I am strict about using the family metaphor. Some weirdos in Kentucky spoiled it for me.

Al to me is a VC and a blogger, and that is good enough for me.

One small but not unimportant fact I learned about Al during my one meeting with him is that he is Mayor of some horse place upstate.

How My Grandfather Became Mayor The First Time
Scala - Wikipedia: Scala stands for "scalable language", signifying that it is designed to grow with the demands of its users..... Scala code can call Java libraries (or .NET libraries in the .NET implementation). ..... Scala's operational characteristics are the same as Java's. .... Scala is a pure object-oriented language in the sense that every value is an object. .... In April 2009 Twitter announced they had switched large portions of their backend from Ruby to Scala and intended to convert the rest. In addition Foursquare uses Scala and Lift


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Facebook's Location Patent

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - AUGUST 31:  Georgia Lov...Image by Getty Images via @daylife
CNet: Facebook granted geolocation patent: Among the concepts it claims are the sending and receiving of location-based status messages (what are commonly known as "check-ins"), the technology to store these check-ins, the ability to sense a street address to store in a check-in, and the receiving of a friend's check-in.
What just happened? Is this troubling? Some experts are going to have to weigh in on this one. What's going on? Facebook was rather late to the location game and now it has the patent on the whole thing? How does that work?

I am opposed to the idea of anyone getting a patent on the inbox. I mean, I am opposed to the idea of even FourSquare getting a patent on the check in. What the.

What just happened?

The weirdest part of this story is going to be that (literally) the Einsteins at the patent office had never heard of FourSquare and had never checked in anywhere themselves. I will bet you roadside falafel that is the case.




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$1 Trillion In Savings

ceramic piggy bankImage via Wikipedia
CNet: Tech CEOs find $1 trillion in government savings: save $1 trillion over the next decade.
When I read this headline I thought someone came up with an app that will help people lose weight, because if America could somehow go to its 1980 obesity levels - which was bad enough - America would save $1 trillion in health care costs. But no, these tech CEOs have something else on mind.

This headline also made me think that although Obama 08 did a great job of grassroots campaigning, it pretty much wrote the book on it, we are not there yet when it comes to grassroots governing where everybody is involved. Just like Dean 2004 was not there yet when it came to grassroots campaigning, Obama 08 is not there yet when it comes to grassroots governing.
CNet: Tech CEOs find $1 trillion in government savings: First off, the organization believes the federal government should consolidate its many data centers to reduce IT overhead.
No kidding.
CNet: Tech CEOs find $1 trillion in government savings: Secondly, the organization contends that the U.S. government should "streamline" its supply chain and make goods-and-service procurement more standardized.
Talk about business sense.
CNet: Tech CEOs find $1 trillion in government savings: $200 billion could be saved over the next 10 years by analyzing payments being disbursed through Medicare, federal grants, and tax refunds. ..... the government should rely on "electronic self-service" to save $50 billion; sell or auction off many of the "14,000 excess, and 55,000 underutilized buildings in the federal inventory" for a $150 billion savings; cut down on energy use to save $20 billion; and migrate to more shared services for another $50 billion in savings.
The best part of these suggestions might not be that they are totally doable, and they will save a ton of money, but that in implementing them the US federal government will become more transparent, more agile, in short a better government. I say let's go do it.

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