52 Bicycles

Or something. One premise of SAAS type services is that computation takes place in the cloud, so software does not need to reside on the client. Single-instance, multi-tenant blah blah blah.
But we have these increasingly powerful computers with a lot of cycles at their disposal. SaaS may be a powerful trend, but there is going […]

Douglas Burke wrote a neat article extolling the virtues of “Bootstrapping 2.0“.
Ask a group of Silicon Valley veterans to talk about their early mistakes and you’re likely to hear a boom-era story about a small, VC-funded start-up that failed because it was more focused on spending capital than finding a stable way to turn a […]

Hoping that this will get me back in the habit of writing. Appreciate those who decide to take a read after my multi-month hiatus.

Byron Deeter at Bessemer has Top 10 Laws for Being “SaaS-y”:

Your key business metrics are: CMRR (Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenue) and Cash - “Bookings” is for suckers.
It takes at least $300K of CMRR to climb the Sales Learning Curve - Stop at three sales reps until at least two of them are making $100K MRR […]

Dharmesh has another always-insightful post, Why Startups Fail: Run Out Of Cash, Run Out Of Commitment, which is leading him to ruminate on VC vs bootstrapping. He comes to an “interesting idea:”
Perhaps startups should simply be trying to give themselves enough time to figure out what will work. And, the time available is not a […]

Alex Muse has a new post, Getting Small Fast Revisited, that illustrates three requirements for investors that are all about focus:

Investor Requirement #1: You’ve got to know your market
Investor Requirement #2: You’ve got to have a practical business development strategy
Investor Requirement #3: You need a plan that you can execute

His point is that all three […]

It occurs to me that advertising has a high beta - it does really well when the economy is up, and totally craps out when the economy dips. Brad Feld’s musings on What Happens To CPM’s When The Economy Turns Down? made me think about my friends running businesses predicated on the idea of selling ads on […]

I am apparently missing FOSSCamp because of my high workload, but I offer these notes from the excellent MIT Enterprise Forum Event on Open Source from last year, excerpted from my post MITEFC Open Source Conference Notes
Open Source licenses gemerally fall into in three buckets (Props to Simon Philips for his clear description):

“A”: market forming models allow […]

Phil Wainewright may belittle the approach, but it seems there is good reason that Workstream prefers virtualization to multi-tenancy.
The firm has seven reasons their customers would rather not move to a multitenancy platform (slightly paraphrased from the quote to make a nice ordered list:

security and inappropriate data access,
impact of other clients on their system performance,
inability […]