Tag: startups
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making money, taking care of people
The counter-point to all those Europe is decadent economic charts people put out: After roaming the Earth for 35 years, my conclusion is the U.S. is the best place to make money and Europe is the best place to spend it.” … In terms of moving bits, the Netherlands is one of Europe’s key connection…
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Software Defined Talk #122: Emily Long, VCs, startups, Edera, etc.
In this episode, Whitney and I talked with Emily Long, CEO and co-founder of Edera about their hardened container runtime – the kind you can swap in without re-platforming or kicking off yet another zero-trust migration. The pitch is basically: stop chasing detect-and-respond alerts and just fix the foundation. We also got into the messy…
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Relative to your interests, Friday afternoon
What’s a software CEO to do in the current climate? Here’s the urgent 2026 playbook – Playbook for software companies that are (forced to) switch from growth mode to normal company mode. Anthropic raises $30 billion in Series G funding at $380 billion post-money valuation \ Anthropic – “Today, our run-rate revenue is $14 billion,…
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Lots of yes-but’ing here, inc. this gem for y’all security folk: Wall Street doesn’t understand the reluctance of enterprise CIOs to trust startups with mission-critical data or value the expertise needed to run SaaS reliably at scale as much as the shiny new thing. 🔗 A day of reckoning for the AI boom
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SaaS businesses not looking good now: Traditional estimates for this scope of work: Method Estimate COCOMO (lines-based) ~20,000 hours Feature decomposition ~9,000-12,000 hours Industry benchmark 5-6 years solo, 12-15 months with 5 junior engineers Traditional cost $750,000 – $1,500,000 What I spent: $1,800. That’s a 99.8% cost reduction. It’s also not a fair comparison—traditional development…
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Platform engineering for AI stacks
Your AI stack needs to have DevX, thus, a platform: I think it’s a sign of maturity that even when you mix in cloud native development with the current AI hype, organizations are actually realizing that developers are still the internal customers who need platforms as products. You can’t just say ‘get on with it’…
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Would you like to hug a cow?
Cows, IoT, and ML On this week’s Software Defined Interviews, Whitney and I talked with my friend Saad. We mostly talked about the irresistible topic of monitoring cows, which he did at his previous startup: In this episode, Whitney and Coté speak with Saad Ansari, a product manager at Databricks, about his fascinating journey from…
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🤖 San Francisco’s AI Gold Rush: High-Agency Hustlers vs. NPCs in the Great Lock-In
This is a summary from ChatGPT. Source summarized: are you high-agency or an NPC? San Francisco is in the throes of an AI-fueled renaissance, buzzing with wealth, 22-year-old techno-prophets, and absurd $100M salaries, even as anxiety simmers beneath the surface. In a city caught between triumph and precarity, the culture has splintered into “high-agency” hustlers…
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“the great murderer of boredom”
My Content Two Software Defined episodes this week: “I used to eat 7-Eleven pizza,” startups, open source, and more, with Sarah Christoff – After an extensive discussion of 7-Eleven pizza cuisine, in this episode, Whitney and Coté talk with Sarah Christoff. They discuss working at startups, the point of startups, working in open source and…
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Oxide’s Compensation Model: How is it Going? – You know, I bet it has the effect of encouraging people to focus on the product as the product instead of the product as their comp. // Of course, the next step is to publish and then equalize the cap-table, but, hey, we can’t go full socialist.
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20+ years of all this cloud, DevOps, and platform engineering stuff, interview with Purnima Padmanabhan, GM of VMware Tanzu
Code to Production: From Cloud to DevOps to Platform Engineering, with Purnima Padmanabhan There’s not that many people who’ve worked through the early years of cloud, the rise of cloud and IaaS, DevOps, cloud native apps, and now platform engineering…but my colleague Purnima Padmanabhan sure has. So, it was fun to talk with her about…
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Commoditize your condiments, or, open source business models considered
Business models are fascinating. Most business models come down to a type of arbitrage, at least as I understand it. You find something you have that you can sell to someone else, crucially, at a price above what it cost you to make that thing.1 In, let’s call it, The Capatalist Upbrining, there is a…
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About Placemark.io – Is there room in the TAM for a startup like me? Seems representative of starting a software-business, there needs to be room in the market, a chance to make it big: “As I’ve said a bunch of times, the biggest problem with competition in the world of geospatial companies is that there…
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The real story of how Facebook almost acquired Waze, but we ended up with Google – “Acquisitions are the first moment when founders and investors have diverging interests. This is the one time when you should be wary of feedback from your investors. And, of course, like any negotiation, whoever is willing to walk away…
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The Cult of the Founders – Operating a large tech company is a different set of skills than marketing a small company.
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Why Are You Doing This? (Wrong Answers Only) – Some of these are mostly (only?) for companies focused on profitless-growth and raising their valuation (startups and recently IPO’ed tech companies). If you’re at a company focused on cashflow and more long term share price, many of them are what you should be doing. In the…
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Surviving the New Social Media Startup Boom
The FFS Social Media Rebound Twitter Sinks. I got an invite to Blue Sky (thanks Ashley!). Now I have Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, some Slack channels, a newsletter, and a mostly dead blog – other stuff probably (what even is a “Facebook Page”?). I haven’t bothered with those other ones that popped…
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Link: lots of capital, little control
With all the money sloshing around looking to find a home, startup funding might be a bit of a sellers market: Venture capitalists are now relatively less in the business of choosing the best startups in which to invest, and relatively more in the business of getting the best startups to choose them as investors.…
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Link: Elizabeth Holmes and her firm Theranos show why we must stop fetishising entrepreneurs
As well as capturing enduring gender anxieties, the Theranos story is also a reflection of the technological zeitgeist. Gibney believes Holmes was so successful because of Silicon Valley’s “fetishisation of the entrepreneur”. Holmes’s entire persona, after all, seems to have been an exercise in myth-making. She dropped out of college, like Mark Zuckerberg. She borrowed…
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Link: Singapore Airlines employees urged to innovate, fail without fear
There needs to be a place where you can fail and there’s no implication to your career. [The innovation lab] is a safety net. Anyone in the company can take a day in a week to work with the team [at the lab] and innovate together and talk through the idea. Original source: Singapore Airlines…
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