You are currently browsing the archives for the Entrepreneurship category
This is what I dreamed about when I was 15 years old. Four monitors, 3x 19″ and 1×24″. I actually have to turn my head to see everything. I know it’s a bit excessive.
Notice the wood. My desk wasn’t long enough so I had to get a 5′ piece of wood to put on top so all the monitors fit. 8$ is much cheaper than a new desk 
. Though I am still shopping around for a new desk, good hack for the time being.
“Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) delivers computer infrastructure – typically a platform virtualization environment – as a service. Rather than purchasing servers, software, data-center space or network equipment, clients instead buy those resources as a fully outsourced service. Suppliers typically bill such services on a utility computing basis and amount of resources consumed (and therefore the cost) will typically reflect the level of activity.” (from Wikipedia) Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Rackspace, etc provide IaaS (though with varying degrees of abstraction); Amazon being the leader in being the lowest in the stack and being most successful in that business.
Corn is a commodity… What?! You thought it was food? Don’t be silly.
A kernel of corn grown on one farm is no different than a kernel grown on any other farm. In the end they just become a raw resource in making processed foods (mmmm “corn sugar“). Or as Wikipedia defines it “A commodity is a good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market.“.
Compute resources (MBs of storage, compute cycles, transfer) are like kernels of corn. Once access to these resources can be completely normalized they will have the critical requirement to become a commodity. The litmus test is simple: if you can take an application and host it on one provider and move it to another virtually painlessly then it is a commodity.
This isn’t quite possible today but there is clear evidence that this is where it is headed. If this is in fact true, two things will happen (I should say “are happening”).
First, the price of IaaS will drop. Since you are comparing one kernel of corn to another and they are virtually indistinguishable the only thing to compare them on is the cost. Similarly if one IaaS host is virtually indistinguishable from another, the consumer can only compare them on the cost. Consumers will buy the cheaper of the two, becoming a race to the bottom. With decreasing prices providers will also need to have some type of margins so they will need to reduce the resources they consume (electricity, bandwidth, storage, etc). That might be a plus for innovation in those areas.
What does this mean in practicality? Since Amazon’s EC2 == Azure VM Role, Amazon Simple DB == Azure Table, Amazon SQS = Azure queues, and Amazon S3 == Azure blob storage then each of those services become a commodity and therefore will become cheaper. The caveat here is that the “==” hasn’t quite happened yet. The APIs are still fairly different so you can’t just switch them. This is a problem and the market has already identified this; there are startups that are making it possible to build applications that don’t distinguish these services.
Secondly, this model will not be sustainable to these providers as the margins will shrink. (Maybe those too can be subsidized like farms… I’m only kidding). So like companies that produce raw resources, they will need to sell “value added products”. This means companies that provide IaaS will have to move higher in the stack and start providing Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service if they don’t already.
What does this mean in practicality? We’ll see a whole lot of other value added services. Amazon is building out great functionality like SNS, VPC, FPS, DevPay, MapReduce, CloudFront, etc, all of which complement their IaaS offering. Similarly Azure has Azure SQL, Azure AppFabric, which also complements their IaaS offering. They also have a TON of other cloud offerings. Google doesn’t have a pure IaaS service, the Google App Engine is more like the web or worker role in Azure and they also have some really innovative capabilities on that platform.
I needed some business cards for personal/entrepreneurial purposes therefore I couldn’t use my standard Microsoft business cards. I also wanted something non-standard. This is the net result:
There is a proper way to ask a question or to make a request of someone and it’s all in the punchline.
“I’m OK; The Bull Is Dead” is an article from a Project Manager on communicating status but I believe the main points equally apply to asking questions and making requests. I try to practice this myself and I wish more people used it when making requests from me or asking me questions.
If you need to ask me a question, the question is the punch line. It should be clear from the punchline why you are asking the question; if it isn’t it should be clear from the following sentence.
If you are requesting someone to do work, the punch line should meet the SMART criteria. In addition to the SMART criteria, the value propositions should also be clear, that is, it should be clear why it is in the best interest to fulfill the request.
There has been a little bit of new hype recently with posts like “Enterprise Software is Sexy Again” from the CEO of Box.net and “A Re-Birth for Enterprise Software” by Marc Andreesen which suggests that startups can sell software to enterprises. This of course is contrary to what is popularly believed since startups typically are attractive to early adopters, while enterprises are typically the late majority in accordance to Crossing the Chasm.
I do believe that there is a lot of opportunity for startups to sell to enterprises even though classic thinking tells us the contrary.
There are two lessons that I learned recently that suggest that it isn’t crazy for startups to sell to Enterprise: (1) enterprises aren’t as late adopters as is commonly believed, and (2) the cloud offers new opportunities for enterprises to adopt startup technologies with very low risk (in fact, startups can actually beat well established companies).
Enterprises are not as late adopters as is popularly believed. I came across numerous companies recently that are adopting the Azure AppFabric technology, which isn’t fully baked yet. The AppFabric misses some critical components that enterprises typically expect. For example, there is very little in terms of monitoring and analytics of the service. However, despite these short comings of a new technology (whether it’s from Microsoft or a startup), enterprises are more willing to try new things. First, companies need to distinguish themselves, and to do so they need to look at new technologies like cloud computing, mobile devices, social networks, etc. Secondly, many companies aren’t actually large companies but act more like a collection of smaller companies. The entire organization might be slow to adopt and replace existing technologies, however, a small group within the larger organization certainly will act as an early adopter. And being to get even that one small sell is a big win for a startup.
The cloud offers new opportunities for enterprise customers to take dependency on other smaller companies without the risk. Enterprise companies have built their own custom solutions or they took dependencies on other software vendor server products (e.g. Exchange, SharePoint, etc). However, the problem with many of these large vendors is that they are already successful, which means a few things: they have an existing product and they need to protect that asset, the existing product has been under development for a long time so it is also likely that it is an on-premises product. Because of these factors cloud computing (SaaS in particular), offers a benefit that can’t be beat. If an enterprise customer has to migrate from Version n to Version n+1 and they have a choice between an on-premise offering or a cloud offering, the cloud can provide a number of benefits: (1) no upfront cost for hardware, (2) no upfront cost for the software package, (3) a costing model that scales with the company, and (4) reduced IT costs to run/manage the software. (I’m probably missing a few). With these benefits I would bet an enterprise would be willing to buy into a startup that offers only 20% of the core functionality (which is used 80% of the time since I believe in Pareto’s Principle in software functionality).
I am creating a new platform to enable non-developer types to easily create applications for the iPhone (and other mobile devices) with a simple drag-drop interface and no programming skills required. I want to get more information about the types of applications people would build if they had such a capability.
Please share your applicaiton idea with me in the link provided above.
I started designing and developing websites one decade ago. This was way back in the day when the best options for writing CGI server-side logic was to use C++ with libraries handling the HTTP requests or Perl. PHP was still just an embryo and I don’t think ASP was even on the radar. Anyway, this was a business that I ran as “mojNet” through high school, “Monet Web Solutions LLC” throughout college with Matt Pattyn, and then as “Skierkowski LLC” after graduation.
Once I graduated from college it was difficult to continue growing the business. I still had some incoming cash flow, but that hardly covered the cost of the dedicated server.
Over the past year I wanted to get more serious about entrepreneurship. As such, I realized that I couldn’t have any liabilities. I couldn’t spend the time on supporting existing/old customers, and I couldn’t have the overhead of the dedicated server. As such, I have spent the past six months working with my set of customers on moving them off my dedicated server onto other provider’s servers. Many of the websites needed to be redone considering they were 3+ years old.
While I no longer needed the server to host my customer’s sites, I did need a home for my business site, as well as having a server to tinker with for side projects. As such, my site moved to WordPress (here), and my tinkering server will be Amazon EC2 and/or Windows Azure (been playing with both).
Tonight I submitted a support ticket to finally get rid of the dedicated server. This doesn’t close the doors to Skierkowski LLC, just gets it out of the web design/development business.
This leaves Skierkowski LLC with no specific business goal, just a big idea, and a framework for a business (bank account, Tax ID, License, etc).
I filed the US Patent “Visualizing Key Performance Indicators for Model-Based Applications” on April 17th, 2008, and as of April 30th, 2009 it is available on the US Patent and Trademark Office.
Many people at Microsoft hold patents, in fact, most hold many patents. Most of the teams that I have been on at Microsoft (WCF, “Dublin”, and .NET Services) do file patents, but nearly as many as other teams like Office. So at Microsoft it is commonplace for people to have patents. In the real world on the other hand this is far rarer.
This is personally a big deal considering this is one official acknowledgement of something that is reflective of my personality. My parents and family will know that I have been an inventor since I was old enough to walk, even before I could read and write.
Over the weekend I worked on a project I call TempDump; hence the domain http://www.tempdump.com/. This is no novel idea, just a simple one. There exist many solutions today to enable people to share files fairly easily, email provides (like gmail) a way to send email with attachments, services like folders.live.com are starting up, and older services like xdrive.com have been around for a while. All of them are great, but all of them have limitations when it comes to easily using them.
Scenarios exist where you or someone you know needs to share a file, but they might not have Gmail, so they can’t send large emails. You could ask them to use a collection of services, but sometimes that is a fairly involving process. There are also things like FTP, which are even more involving than any of the web-enabled services.
My design for TempDump is to enable easy file sharing in the least involving form. As you enter the site the very first thing you will see is the “Browse” button which allows you to select the local files you want to share. You press “Upload” the files get uploaded, and after doing CAPTCHA verification you will get a unique URL that for 24 hours (may be subject to change) will allow you to download the files. If you uploaded numerous files, you will get a zip file.
There are a couple cool things I want to call out:
