Thoughts on Tech Startups and Venture Capital
Seventeen years ago, on April 10th 1991, a plane landed in John F. Kennedy airport. That plane had just crossed the Atlantic carrying, amongst others, passengers escaping the crumbling Soviet empire. One of whom was me. I walked off that plane with a first ever taste of Coca-Cola in my mouth, a lame teenage mustache,…
Read more The American Dream: 17 Years of Engineering Software
Every company is a tech company these days. From software startups to hedge funds to pharmaceutical giants to big media, they’re all increasingly in the business of software. Quality code has become not only a necessity, but a competitive differentiator. And as companies compete around software, the people who can make it happen – software…
Last week Steve Jobs took the stage at the Apple Town hall meeting and announced two major things for the iPhone: 1) support for Microsoft Exchange and 2) the iPhone SDK. The Exchange support was a relatively unexpected move, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense. In order to unseat Blackberry as the number one…
It was 1995 and C++ was the language of choice for building large-scale software systems. C++ was a powerful object-oriented programming language, the successor of widely used procedural language called C. But not only was C++ powerful, it was also quite complicated. Seasoned programmers enjoyed the intricacies and the possibilities, but newbies would get burned…
In 1975, Frederick Brooks wrote a classic book on software project management called The Mythical Man-Month. In the book, he famously argued that adding more people to a development project will hinder rather than help to get things done faster. The reason is that having more people working on the project introduces a non-linear overhead…
Today’s fast changing world redefines how we do business. It also puts into question old business methods and theories. Is “Crossing the Chasm” thinking still meaningful today? Is it even possible anymore? In this post we put this business notion under the microscope and look for answers to those questions. The Classic Chasm Crossing Consider…
