Saturday, October 09, 2010

Not Your Usual Yoga Guru


I am in talks to do social media for a yoga studio out there in Dumbo. I hope the talks go through because I sure am interested. Dumbo just so happens to be New York City's own little tech hub. There is no Silicon Alley. There is Dumbo.

Looks can be deceiving. I am Indian, so sure, I do know my yoga, but not as much as you might think. But I will learn. More.

Al Wenger Wants To Learn Scala
Meeting Fred Wilson In Person
Freehand Exercise: 1,000 Push-Ups, 1,000 Squats, 1,000 Crunches

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Putting My Money On Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison cropImage via Wikipedia
BusinessWeek: HP, Oracle Lead Acquisition Spree Tearing Down Tech Barriers: broken down decades-old barriers between industries ..... HP, Oracle, IBM, Cisco Systems Inc. and Dell Inc., with a collective $100 billion in cash, have said they plan to keep making acquisitions. ..... The buyers are pursuing a vision of cloud computing, which lets customers store their software in massive data centers, rather than in the computer room down the hall. Record- low borrowing costs have helped spur the deals. ..... “Nobody wants to be Californicated by Cisco.” .... Oracle, the world’s second-largest software company, snapped up almost 70 companies in the past five years
I am putting my money on Larry Ellison. The guy, for one, has a track record, and a loud mouth, and a big stick. I don't know if you have been following, but the dude spent the past few years eating up all the small fish in his pond. He bought company, after company, after company. PeopleSoft made news, the rest did not make the same kind of news.

Now the shark is after the big fish. This guy has an attitude about him. He will jump into the water first and learn to swim later. Only, he knows how to swim. But the attitude is he would jump in even if he did not know how to swim.

The underbelly of this whole drama is that Larry Ellison is seriously trying to emulate his best friend, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs has always integrated hardware and software, and so Larry Ellison was going to do the same thing. Steve Jobs got Apple to surpass Microsoft in market value, and now Larry wants Oracle to surpass Microsoft's market value, never mind that Bill Gates long retired.

HP is in for some tough times. And they just stepped on their own foot by hiring Thepo. That was not a good idea. When I say that was not a good idea, I am talking "strictly business."



This fight could last a few years, and most definitely will be worth watching.

Larry, give me data centers that are the size of servers.

HP Keeps Making News
The Leo Apotheker Is Human Drama
Larry's Antics
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Venture Capital Segmentation

Caterina, Chris and meImage by Zach Klein via FlickrChris Dixon's is a good blog to follow if you want to keep abreast developments in the fast churning VC industry. He is an entrepreneur and one of those angels that you will read about a lot, people who are changing the face of the game.
Chris Dixon: The segmentation of the venture industry: Venture capital has only existed in its modern form for about 35 years. ...... “customers” (entrepreneurs) have flocked to more specialized “products.” ...... segmentation by company stage. ..... The segmentation of the venture industry is healthy for startups and innovation at large, even if at the moment it might be uncomfortable and confusing for some of the people involved.
I like his conclusion here. He says, and I agree, that the churn has been healthy and the segmentation has been welcome.
Chris Dixon: If you aren’t getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren’t ambitious enough: My most useful career experience was about eight years ago when I was trying to break into the world of VC-backed startups. I applied to hundreds of jobs: low-level VC roles, startups jobs, even to big tech companies. I got rejected from every single one..... I had a strange resume .... I probably got rejected by someone once a day last week alone
And I am thinking the guy still has a strange resume.

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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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