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April 24, 2009
Secondary Marketplace for Private Stock
Fred Wilson has an interesting post up on the soon-to-arrive market for selling non-public company stock. He’s written about this previously; overall it is a very interesting idea. Fred has some interesting data on the secondary market for Facebook stock (which is still private)
VCs need some type of exit to invest. Entrepreneurs need VCs for funding. No exits ends up meaning no ecosystem. Great quote:
Entrepreneurs won’t start companies and investors won’t invest in them if there is no path to liquidity on the company stock. A secondary market for private company stock can fill the gap that the lack of an I.P.O. market has created.
This does bring to the fore a number of issues around retention and keeping the early-in employees motivated (in my experience, the early-in employees are highly motivated people that are “smart and gets things done”). It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Posted by davehod at 05:42 PM | Comments (0)
April 23, 2009
How to Reduce Team Friction/Improve Team Dynamics
I was recently asked to produce a two-slide deck, discussing some easy ways to reduce team friction and encourage management-level collaboration.
My findings won’t knock your socks off.
Seriously though, I’m continually amazed how many teams I’ve encountered that don’t do what I’d consider "the basics" of managing team deliverables and expectations. They stumble along, can't understand why each project is so stressful, are shocked at team attrition levels and seem to think "last minute heroics" are a good thing (instead of realizing that many times this is just an indicator of poor planning).
My slides were as follows:
Part One: Project Management
• What/Why – state the goals/objectives of the project
• Who – list out the specific tasks and resources for each task
• How – produce peer-reviewed specifications
• When – create/maintain/publish delivery schedules. Hold individuals accountable.
Part Two - Collaboration
• Hold a weekly meeting consisting of the leadership team (varies by project/team). Each person should discuss current projects, status, set expectations
• Produce a weekly project status to the entire team. Stress accountability
• Ensure product, design and test specifications are peer-reviewed.
• Broadcast any changes to the plan
If you're team isn't doing the above, give it a shot. You'll be amazed at the improvement in team dynamics.
Posted by davehod at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2009
Gear 6 – Memcached Appliance
GigaOm has an interesting post up today about Gear 6, a company that is now selling an optimized memcached appliance.
Great quote about distributed caching to finish off the article:
Clearly the folks running large web infrastructures understand the importance of memcached, but whether the general web population will stop overlooking the data caching layer remains to be seen
Posted by davehod at 02:29 PM | Comments (0)
April 17, 2009
A Friend Rediscovered - MockRunner
Life is funny. You meet a new friend, hit it off immediately and then slowly you drift away. One day you realize, “Hey, I haven’t seen my super cool friend Bob lately, what ever happened to that guy?”
I realized last night that my “super cool” friend MockRunner had gone missing. We first met a few years back when I was building a prototype of something that we ended up not running with. StrutsTestCase was a one of my favorite testing tools, allowing for true out-of-container testing that made life great for Struts fans. However, there were cases where I needed the ability to mock those beasts known as HttpServletRequest and HttpSession with ease.
Bacon and I are busy working on some new top3Clicks features and I needed to create unit tests that easily created mocks of request objects. A bit of searching reminded me of my old friend MockRunner. In a few mins, I cranked out unit tests (of course verifying the code coverage with Clover) that looked something like this:
public void testBuildListBeans() {
String query = "U2";
String productGroupID = "23";
String error = "Invalid value found";
ValidateListAction vla = new ValidateListAction();
MockHttpServletRequest mockRequest = new MockHttpServletRequest();
mockRequest.setupAddParameter("searchInput", query);
mockRequest.setupAddParameter("productGroupID", productGroupID);
List<ListBean> listBean = vla.buildListBeans(mockRequest);
ListBean lb = listBean.get(0);
assertEquals(error,query,lb.getInputText());
}
Pure Goodness.
Posted by davehod at 09:04 AM | Comments (0)
April 06, 2009
The Death of Print, Part IX
I’ve read a zillion stories about the death of print, specifically newspapers, over the last year or so.
My local paper, the San Jose Mercury News, has gotten so small that on Monday’s I’m afraid a gust of wind will blow the paper down the street.
Today comes the latest strategy to “save” print, courtesy of the Associated Press. The A.P. has decided to sue “web aggregators” like Google who use their content without their permission.
First, this amazing quote:
In a speech at The A.P.’s annual meeting in San Diego, William Dean Singleton, chairman of the group, said, “We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories.”
which is odd given the actual implementation by Google:
Google News shows headlines and a sentence or two of an article, but to read the entire piece, the user has to click through to the news organization’s own site. The company has argued that that limited use is allowed without permission.
I’m not lawyer, but sounds pretty legal to me.
The kicker is this money quote:
In a statement, The A.P. said it would develop a system to track news articles online and determine whether they were being used legally.
So, instead of spending R&D money on creating products that will drive users, they are going to create systems that provide defensive mechanisms? We’ve seen this movie before (starring the RIAA) – this must be the sequel.
Bet it has the same ending.
Posted by davehod at 01:55 PM | Comments (0)