The Fast Track pitch

American jobs, Entrepreneurial thought and Startups

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_28/b4186048358596.htm
Andy Grove, concerned with the alarming job situation in the US, wrote an op-ed piece that made some key points for reversing the situation. The key thrust of his argument was that startups today are overrated when it comes to job creation. Furthermore, even startups with job creation potential have a china strategy when it comes to job creation. He also argues that sending low value jobs abroad (like television manufacturing for example), cuts us off from the next generation innovations in that area of technology

I believe that this is indeed true. Another point that he does not really touch upon is the fact that R&D teams working closely with manufacturing or service teams in outsourced locations have a better chance of getting the next generation innovation right because they get feedback from real customers. Losing those jobs also causes the US to lose direct contact with those customers and any further developments in that domain.

His solution, is to levy taxes on companies that outsource jobs to other countries. That I am not sure is the right approach. Other luminaries, responding to the piece, highlight the fact that a lot of growth these days comes from those very locations whose standard of living has gone up thanks to outsourcing. The other thing that it does not address is that business does not recognize national and international boundaries when it comes to profitability. Intel itself has offshored thousands of jobs to countries like Malaysia, China and India, rightfully enjoying all of the tax benefits that the investments in those countries have provided.

Somehow the idea that innovation can be locked up behind national boundaries, even as companies and governments work hard to open new markets to cater to consumers internationally is not a very viable proposition, certainly not in the long term

So if that does not work, what could work?
The first fallacy of this thinking is that the opportunities for a strong job driven economy are limited to industries that currently exist. It does very little justice to our creativity as a society. To argue that everything that can be done is being done right now has been disproved by history, time and again.

As Grove argues in his book, strategic inflection points visit us time and again, creating opportunities that we cannot predict even a few years before they occur. Who would have thought that VMWare would come out of nowhere and own 80% of a market that did not exist until they got ensconced in it. If anything, the guys who were closest to the hardware, Intel should have been the ones creating this innovation. Opportunities exist as long as there are problems.

The opportunities that have gone offshore are best left alone.

The second reality that we need to address is that health care costs make it very hard to do business in the United States. The quality is fabulous, but so is the wasteful expenditure. Hiring employees is simply too expensive, especially if the talent is available outside the US and Europe.

The third reality is that primary education in this country is too easy and higher education is more difficult than in most other places. The first one increases our drop out rate, and the second one deters too many people from getting a education, especially if the parents are the tax paying type that hold down jobs.

How about preparing children for higher education by having a more rigorous program from the elementary level?

Instead of levying taxes on companies, what if we figured out a way to lower education costs, or created a fund to provide scholarships based on merit.

What if we could cut through the lobbying/ special interests and make some real headway on insurance costs?

Most successful entrepreneurs see problems as opportunities to capitalize on. Would we benefit from creating more entrepreneurs instead of churning out managers who are so removed from reality that most engineers dismiss them without giving them a second look?

Maybe we could teach people the mantra of "Problem = Opportunity", show them how to be entrepreneurs, and if we scaled it up, may be we would get better employees, more innovations and a population that took pride in its achievements. Success begets success and it would allow the continuity in innovations for our future generations.

Globalization is a genie that cannot be put back into the bottle. But maybe we can figure out how to harness its power to power our economy.

Marketing on the cheap

So you launched your dream software startup and got going. You built the product or have the capability to offer the services that will make your clients really happy. But there is one problem. Really, there are two. You have no clients and you have very little money to let them know that you exist. You remember the days when you were employed and the marketing guys there always seemed to have the money to reach out to the media, talk to analysts, get press releases out and best of all, money for all those junkets that they labeled as conferences. You wistfully think of how you could have changed the world if only, you had some money. You then start a futile search to attract money, which is easier said than done. Because nobody has heard of you, and you have no customers yet.

But don't despair.There are things you can do, if you learn to persevere (A little hunger never did anyone any harm). There has never been a better time for cash strapped entrepreneurs like you.

You can start to make yourself relevant with just a few hours of effort every week.

1> Dust off that old blog that you post to once every year. If you want the world to know, you better start saying things every week.

2> Identify your buyers or their influencers, and identify forums where they frequent. ServerSide, InfoQ, highscalability are a few examples of forums if your product or service is in the enterprise software arena. But there are many more. Engage in discussions, always striking the right balance between friendliness and correctness. Nobody likes dealing with pompous *arts, and at the same time, people like to read posts if you are making relevant comments and moving the discussion forward.

3> Write articles for relevant magazines. Nothing makes you accepted as an expert faster than getting published. And when you get comfortable, see how you might be able to write a book. Self-publishing may not even be necessary but if you have useful things to say, chances are someone will benefit from it.

4> A rolodex is something that everyone needs, whether you are a 19th century salesperson or a newly minted entrepreneur with no recognition. Social media is the new word-of-mouth and followers are the multiplier force in the equation. Don't be disappointed at the dubious types that follow you on twitter. If you cross promote your various social media offerings, eventually it does get noticed by the right followers

5> Your web site is still your calling card, whether you want to add new employees, or when prospects look you up after you have made contact. It does not cost a bundle to get a decent site up these days. Liveness is key. Brochure ware is so 20th century. Update your site content regularly to keep people coming back.

6> You can't hire ad agencies to do your you tube video, but you can certainly get decent talent at multi-media art schools to do the job for a small fee. Offer to give them referrals and write them a testimonial. Promote your product on youtube and as with everything, cross link.

7> People will buy your product or service primarily because they are ok dealing with you. Don't shy away from meeting people whenever you can. Present at local industry forums, go to local chapter meetings and make your voice heard.

8> Can't afford the big booth at the conference? (Just kidding!). See if you can get a day pass and try to meet up prospects who are attending competitor's booths ( This one came from my prof).

9> Get email addresses for every contact you make and build a database (your online rolodex). Use it judiciously to send out information, taking special care to not make it look like a bulk mailer

Bottom-line is that promoting your product or service on a shoe string budget is both feasible and doable. The general rule of thumb is that you have to spend anywhere from 4 to 5 hours every week to see any impact whatsoever. But if you don't try, don't worry, no one will ever know.

Cheers
Suds

On Sway: The irresistible pull of irrational behavior

Airplane time is slow time. You can either look out of the window and admire at how little the scenery changes and how temporary the human effects to the landscape appears to be, at least by day time, or you can read a book and focus on nothing but the book.

I happened to read Sway: The irresistible pull of irrational behavior, by the Brafman brothers on a cross country flight and it made for fascinating reading. Of the many astute observations made by the authors, the chapter on Compensation and Cocaine stayed with me. We have all experienced first hand the joy of doing something simply because you believed that doing it was the right thing to do. You were motivated, went over and above the call of duty and usually sacrificed comfort, ego and personal gains to make things happen. At the other end of the spectrum is a financial rewards system in the corporate world where the rewards are meant to motivate you to behave a certain way. The authors describe the altruism center and pleasure center as two distinct areas of the brain only one of which can function at any point in time. Whenever the pleasure center is stimulated (with greed, cocaine, rewards etc.), the altruism center goes dormant.

As a leader trying to motivate people, I have seen this first hand. Teams will work hard because they believe that they are doing the right thing. If you introduce a notion of financial reward for the work being performed, then people tend to revisit everything and see whether it makes sense to spend the time for the reward. I guess if the reward is obscene it will drive behavior, but most rewards are simply carrots so that makes the whole approach of trying to motivate someone on that premise somewhat questionable.

Rather than compensation driving behavior, maybe it ought to be that behavior drives long term compensation. That way, the teams and their managers do the extra yards because it is the right thing to do , and rather than showing any immediate appreciation, you make sure that those teams are compensated correctly on a long term basis.

The book on the whole is an easy read while being insightful at the same time. Like with other books of this genre (Outliers, Blink etc.), you wonder how much supporting research material was discarded by the authors because it did not fit the theory. But all in all, there is something very aha! about this book.

It takes a community to build a community

It's been fascinating to be part of an exercise to build an information portal around our flagship product, GemFire Enterprise. Since the product is in its fifth year of existence, we knew that there would be a lot to say. Rather than try to regiment how information was put together, we took the approach that they say was used when the Taj Mahal was built. Craftsmen from all over the engineering team were given broad guidelines on things we wanted to cover and then given full reign to describe anything they wanted to communicate to other developers and architects, as long as it was factually correct. The review process involved peer reviews with a view to enhance or cross link with other articles or notes on the portal. It was good to watch different engineers working collaboratively, critiquing each other's work and adding examples that enhanced the document under review. Given the sheer number of articles that were developed, it was impossible for any one person or a small group of people to review everything. Feeble attempts made by some to sanitize the content , robbed it of some of the originality but the vast majority of content came through unscathed. The result? The most transparent product literature that I have seen put together in such a short period of time. It tells you what you can do with the product, what you can do but shouldn't and what you cannot do at all. It tells you why the product is good at doing certain things and what things would be difficult to do architecturally.

I watched my friends struggle with producing screen casts and struggled to do the same myself but none of us had any plans to give up until we were satisfied with the outcome. Much like baboons in the waterlogged Okavango, we gingerly found our way across the swamp, by being hard on ourselves and polite and encouraging to those around us.

My team and I are done with our out of body experience and ready to return to the world of mere developers and architects.

Took a workshop on creative leadership. The instructor played this youtube clip which I thought was very informative

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U

Why overcast skies are the way forward

No, I am not referring to the economy, which probably tanked since you started reading this. I am talking about enterprise applications and how independent irreversible forces are shaping the future of enterprise applications and leading them to run in a cloud. Cloud computing has been around long before the term came into vogue. There are several government initiatives (Singapore and Malaysia to name a couple) that provide large on demand computing capabilities for furthering all kinds of research. Universities around the world have also had such capabilities for a while now. More recently, private enterprises have jumped into the fray with companies like Tata (with their CRL facility in India) providing state of the art computing capabilities for large scale engineering problems.

What has generated the buzz around cloud computing however is that the technology is now available to all comers at a very affordable price. In many ways, cloud computing is a leveler and puts scale within the reach of a small enterprise, much like the Internet made universal reach possible for the small business, much like blogs spawned a million new authors and a new fan following for these hitherto unknown authors.

Just like EBay created a slew of businesses that provided the picks and shovels for the EBay community, cloud computing will create its own PayPals without which the business of cloud computing cannot succeed or grow.


Cloud computing is a new capability that removes upfront cost barriers for a growing enterprise. And like any new capability, it requires the creation of an eco-system before it can go mainstream. The next two years will see the emergence of dominant players in the eco-system who will then guide the evolution of cloud computing in the years to come.


So what are the forces that are shaping cloud computing today?

• 
  Emergence of public clouds from Amazon, IBM, Google,Microsoft, Sun, and others to name a few. The capability exists today and the players are not fly by night operators.


• 
  The ability to invest huge amounts of money upfront is problematic even at the best of times, not to mention the pain of doing that during a recession.


• 
  In house hardware becomes obsolete, making it a bottleneck even as the software evolves to higher levels of complexity during the same period. And there are the usual problems with airconditioning, cabling, power capacity, rack space etc.


• 
  The availability of increased connectivity and increased information demands granular decision making that propels most enterprise applications to consider migrating to the cloud.


• 
  Smaller players in an industry segment that is information driven no longer are constrained by capital expenditure costs, requiring true innovation in those industries since the playing field is a lot more level than before. (As a leading CTO of a financial services firm once told me, "I want my competition to beat me at trading because they executed a better trade, not because they had better hardware or a bigger database")


• 
  Reduced hype cycle for most new technologies. The time it takes for something to go from obscurity to ubiquity has gone down considerably. This requires companies to execute faster and deliver faster than conventional internet time metrics

So what are some of the pre-requisites for this technology to become truly mainstream. For one, the picks and shovels need to be tailored to this environment.

And that entails

• Platform neutrality


• Language neutrality


• Open Protocols for communicating with the cloud eco-system
• Ability to manage large amounts of data with the lowest possible latency (The higher that number, the longer your application has to run to complete its work and the more you pay)


• Monitoring capabilities for online systems


• Analysis capabilities for runs that have completed

Most of all, it requires a change in mindset, for everyone associated with the process of building, testing, deploying and architecting applications that are designed to run in a cloud. Scaling, performance, HA and volume characteristics have to be designed into the enterprise application and cannot be deferred to version 2.0 or later.

And it is as cataclysmic a change as the one client server applications had to go through with the advent of the web.

Data Management: The elephant in the room

Once you have the hardware, the provisioning system, state of the art network, on demand acquisition of computing resources, and applications that are multi-threaded and can take advantage of the available computing power, there is just one thing that prevents you from completing your work quickly enough and releasing the resources back into the cloud (Whether it is CAPEX or OPEX, the guys who are responsible for PNL statements are always looking to bring the costs down). And that is latency. The typical application spends more time acquiring the data than operating on it. And if you are tied to disk page based data storage and retrieval systems, your latencies are limited at how fast the slowest piece of the application runs. Cloud computing is not necessarily cheaper, if anything, it puts a premium on failures and poor quality software, but only more affordable in that you pay for what you use and you can amortize the cost over a longer period of time. Being able to provision your data so that is readily available or even pushed to you ahead of time is the only way of ensuring that you can cut down latency, and making sure that the data is managed in-memory rather than disk.

A distributed data management solution like GemFire (the one that I am most familiar with) from Gemstone Systems fits this requirement very nicely. Built for scale, with dynamic resource management (ability to expand and contract in response to load characteristics), with the ability to partition data and route behavior to nodes that have the data, GemFire provides one of the more important shovels for the cloud computing community. And while this aspect of cloud computing still needs further validation before winners are picked, being the most scalable data management platform certainly does not hurt. Throw in support for multiple languages, and multiple interfaces like objects and SQL into this elastic cluster and you have something that has been in production for years in high profile instituitions.

Candidate applications for the cloud:

Applications that need elastic scaling capabilities, like online gaming

Simulation runs for risk management

Portals, Software as a service kind of applications

Collaborative applications with bursty characteristics that need to provide good QoS to their end users

Design and rendering based software

Animation studios

Note that all of these have to be designed to be seamlessly scalable from the ground up in order to benefit from the cloud. As the years go by, and large scale economics reduce the cost of running in a cloud, many more will get added to this list.

Overcast skies are here to stay and I think that is a good thing for the software community.