Terry Goertz and I posted another AWS article this week.
We frequently get asked if Amazon Web Services are here for the long haul. Some companies worry about committing and investing in AWS if Amazon itself isn’t doing the same.
We also touch on the differences between Amazon’s, Google and Microsoft’s cloud computing offerings. Full article over at Red Canary.
There are still seats available for ExperienceTech!2008 hosted by MaRS & IDC. I’m doing a panel moderated by Stuart MacDonald of Expedia.ca and now TripHarbor fame, Leila Boujnane of Idee and the venerable David Crow.
We did a little pre-conf/pre-panel meeting Friday evening. Stuart, Leila and David were all gathered at MaRS and I phoned in while I chased my son on his bike around our neighbourhood until my BlackBerry ran out of juice and forced me to be confined to our porch. In any case, if our conversation is any indicator of our panel, I think you won’t want to miss it. We’re going pretty much unscripted and hope to rely on the audience to drive the conversation with Stuart playing ring master keeping Leila, David and myself in line.
Even if we suck, there’s lots of other interesting speakers at ExperienceTech. Grover Righter is sharing tips on growing and exiting with less capital. Grover is rumoured to be a kick-ass speaker and a general force to be reckoned with . Tom Kelley of IDEO is talking about innovation and there are even other panels if you dare risk missing ours.
Like I said, not too late to register.
Red Canary just posted the latest Amazon Web Services article by Terry Goertz and myself. In Surviving the Storm we dive into some of the operational and architectural considerations associated with running your solution on AWS and EC2 in particular. This is a follow-up to our first article Scaling with Clouds where we introduced the major components of AWS.
If you have topics you’d like us to cover please leave us feedback here or at Red Canary.
Larry mentioned that he’s not seeing that many opportunities floating around, so I thought I’d list some that I’m aware of in Waterloo.
EDIT: if you know of other (public) opportunities, please just add them to the comments.
Jeff Barr gave the RedCanary article Terry and I wrote on Cloud Computing some nice coverage on the Amazon Web Services blog. Much appreciated.
So I guess we’re committed to writing at least 3 more.
Terry Goertz and I are writing a series of articles on designing, hosting and managing your application using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Our first one, which provides a basic overview of AWS, is up on RedCanary.
We needed a portrait for RedCanary and not really being into the glamour shot scene, my son and daughter pulled together this drawing of the two of us. Yeah I’m convinced my kids have a pretty demented view of what we actually do. They know we do something with whiteboards. My daughter demanded help drawing UML actors and then my son proceeded to draw the hair and Terry’s beard. Finally it’s clear who the evil one is.
Alex Iskold asks Are YOU Replaceable? He says what I’ve been thinking for a couple of years now. The idea that everyone is replaceable just isn’t the case anymore. Sure some people are but for small growing companies, I’d argue the Top 15-25% simply aren’t replaceable without a serious hit to the organization.
Things get really scary when it comes to visionaries and leaders. Alex says it well:
Losing leaders and visionaries is very, very costly. The knowledge, the vision, and the game plan that was in his head is unique and can not be replicated.
What’s interesting is that few if any startups consider this during their hiring strategy. Sure everyone wants to recruit the best talent, usually you’re going to toss in some options to keep the person engaged but then what? Our industry is very cyclic. Right now we’re (ok I’m) seeing some interesting stratification of talent happening. The Top 10% (aka the freakishly good) are now able to command above market rates - significantly above market rates. As the market heats up people really do seem to be willing to cherry pick and to pay for that privilege.
Recently I’ve had a couple of opportunities float by. In both cases the compensation for the year outstripped what I was currently making and the potential upside that I as a non-founder of a startup could expect over the life of a startup. Holy crap.
I can tell you that the super-sized packages make for interesting over coffee discussions but it makes trouble for the startups themselves. It also makes trouble for the person themselves because once $200k becomes the new $100k and then $250k, etc… it’s really hard to roll back to last year’s lifestyle.
I’m taking this as a wake-up call personally. Now more then ever companies really need to consider their retention policies. Clearly retention doesn’t just include raw compensation but the market does dictates rates. So take a look at your team, segment your talent and figure out a plan to keep your Top X% happy and engaged before it’s too late.
I was asked a deceptively simple question last week, “if you could buy your development team just 1 book, what would it be?” After first thinking “that would make a dang fine interview question!”, I started to iterate through some of my fave titles on my bookshelf, err in my boxes (we recently moved).
First I thought of “PeopleWare”, a classic but not really what I’m looking for. Then I rattled through some of the Agile classics such as the “Lean” series by the Poppendeicks and some of Ken Schwaber’s Scrum books. Good but I don’t think so.
Pulling up a layer, maybe something architectural like Martin Fowler’s “Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture” or “Refactoring”? Also good but only 1 book!?!?! Ok let’s go for the “your code is your craft” approach. I know! Mike Gunderloy’s “Coder to Developer” but it is a little .NET centric. What about “The Pragmmatic Programmer” by Hunt and Thomas? Yeah you’re right, it’s getting long in the tooth.
Can I buy 2 or 3 books for the team? No? Ok then I need your help. What book would you buy and why? Blog about it or leave a comment and I’ll write up a summary of the results.
I’m cursing Jim Murphy for tagging me in his 8 things you didn’t know about me post. For the record I didn’t know of few of those, mental note: avoid karaoke bars with Jim. Ok buckle up, here we go…
+1: I failed Grade 10 math for skipping too many classes despite an ok mark — (trust me I calculated the odds). No wonder I love bureaucracy to this date.
I haven’t figured yet who I’ll spread this joy to next. I just wanted to get the 8 item monkey off my back quickly over lunch. I’ll post a follow-up with the victims names.
Thanks to all who commented on my CTO Handbook. Well except for the one from that that Jason guy :-p this post’s title is for you bud.
First to answer the obvious question I’ve been getting “what type are you?” Well, I started out as #1 (technical founder) in two separate startups and transitioned to #2 “Visionary” as I backfilled my team in my last personal startup. Note I define “personal startup” as one where you personally made payroll! I’ve never been chuted-in but I have CTO friends who have had the “pleasure”. My style is probably 70% Visionary and 30% Technical. That doesn’t make me any less of an ass at times but more likely an ass at different times.
Now, there must be something “CTO” in the water; Fred Wilson posted “What to say to a room full of CTOs“. I like a lot of it and I agree that in a small company (< 30 people), the most effective CTOs are ones that can manage dev and drive the technical vision. Several paragraphs jumped out at me because they resonated with me and because they brought back some painful lessons learned.
First this gem:
First and foremost, I see the CTO as a manager. Great managers are hard to find in any line of work. But managing developers is even harder. The better the developer the harder they are to manage. I assume its a bit like managing high maintenance entertainers. The best developers are artists who are often moody, are anarchists who have bursts of creativity and equally long periods of uselessness. They are strong willed people who will fight with their colleagues over anything and everything. The people who have mastered the art of managing these kinds of people are a rare breed and every great technology-based business needs one of them.
Amen brother! But you have to admit, managing developers is never a dull moment. Recently the guys I’m helping out with driving some education on Agile methods here in Waterloo managed to land Scott Ambler. Scott was an awesome presenter and I was in tears from laughter due to his presentation more then once. Note to data management people: if you’ve been booked into a meeting with Scott, I’d find a reason to bail. I’m telling you this as a friend. Non-data management people, you might want to bring some popcorn and a comfy chair to the meeting. Ok I digress again, the reason I bring up Scott is that he had a great point about managing and incenting devs. To illustrate, he used the old herding cats analogy.
Herding cats is tough, if not impossible - if you don’t understand cats. You can send terse memos to your disobedient and non-complying felines but it won’t help a bit. But toss even the tiniest piece of fish in the direction you want your herd of cats to go and you’ll be pleasantly surprised. I think that’s the main reason why the Technical Founder CTO is most effective in early stage companies. They’re pretty much still a cat and they instinctively toss fish around to get the job done. Plus they’ve got the technical chops to be the alpha cat.
Hiring a Player/Manager:
I have found that for young companies a “player/manager” often works best. If you can find someone who is or has been a world class developer who also has the ability and more importantly desire to manage a team of at least ten developers, do it. That person, by virtue of their engineering talent and prowess, will be able to manage a small group effectively. And they can contribute to the development too which at crunch time is incredibly valuable.
Another total truth. I will never, ever, ever hire a development manager who cannot or will not code. Period. At least not at an early stage for precisely the reasons Fred cites above. My best VP Dev experience ever was a guy just like this, though he had prior experience with his own team — Tom Gross kicks ass.
And now the pain…
As companies get bigger, you really need a full time manager. The best ones, like all things in startups, have done it several times before in high growth startups. As Albert said in his post, it’s not usually a great idea to hire a CTO from a super big company for a young growth company. Companies growing from 10 engineers to 50 engineers to 100 engineers over a 2-3 year period are a unique situation and you really need someone who has lived that situation a few times. Again, it’s incredibly hard to find a person like that.
Hells yes. I lived through rapid growth and totally screwed it up. My “cats” were fighting. Code was not happening and we were completely consumed by it. Eventually you figure out what works and what doesn’t . You start to see patterns in your developer types and you figure out what “fish” works and what “fish” stinks.
Hmmmn note to self: “Developer Handbook” is the new black and the next blog post.
