261–270 of 305 posts
This guy led Docker's marketing-first approach here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=shykes https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:shykes%20docker&sort=by... I put CloudFlare in a similar boat, but CloudFlare seems more tech-savvy (apart from one giant screw-up that cemented marketing-first for me). I'll always be sad that marketing wins.
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Lulu.com was founded in 2002 after Bob Young left Red Hat.
Okay, I got that the other way around, thanks. Seems there was quite a gap between the two foundings, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lulu.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Young_(businessman)
and it seems he also was a co-founder of Linux Journal! Didn't know. Cool. His work has had quite an impact.
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> Any reasonably smart CEO Sorry but this is extremely naive and I'm sorry that your naïveté has caused you conclude things which are simply not true. This is a very strong assumption, and a lie that is peddled by the media (Zuck is the greatest example of this) to create a novel story. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just a dangerous assumption. For the record, I've interviewed over 75 software founders (CEO/CT…
Of course it’s less than 50%; that doesn’t mean that it’s a negligible proportion, either. Analogy: (far) less than 50% of military officers have what it takes to be a general/admiral/other “logistics at scale” type. But yet still, military officers with experience commanding in smaller engagements are the only good source of those high-level strategists. If people couldn’t grow into roles requiring more responsibili…
Maybe, just maybe, Harvard Business School is the place for teaching better than 50% to do well and expand.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Command_and_Staff_Cou...
It always amazes me how you can convince a founder/CEO is not right man for the job, and slowly push him away. Companies that succeed are driven by burning vision, not by day-to-day operation people. It might make feel the companies run smoother for some time, but day-to-day executives are harmful to a company core vision leading to boring companies if they manage to sustain profitability in the long run at all.
There is a reason why most startups don't go big - burning vision is not even close to being the right formula for success. Running a company of 10 people is VERY different from running a company of 100, which is VERY VERY different from running a company of 1000. Just like precious few individual contributors are comfortable with and able to contribute meaningfully in this wide range of environments, it doesn't make…
I think you are absolutely correct.
I am the MD (CEO elsewhere) of an IT consultancy that is 18 years old. We have around 20 staff and t/o ~£1.5M. I like to sleep at night, I do have ambitions but they'll never be cool. Our business model will never set the world on light but we are one of many companies that you will never hear of that keeps the world turning. We are the boring lot that worry about backups and security. We host some customer systems at our place and run a near comprehensive monitoring system that generally warns us pre failure. We also have a few other skills around the place.
There are other reasons why startups don't go big and that is by design. I do not want my firm to go big. If we hit around 50 staff then I will break it up into bits (budding).
Did I mention that we are boring? I like boring.
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That phrase is widely misused. The intended usage is where a rule is implied by the explicit stating of an exception. For example, a sign labeled "No Parking 9AM - 7PM" states an exception, and implies that parking is allowed outside of the time. The stating of the exception proves the existence of the more general rule. In this case, the appropriate term would be "survivorship bias". Those who survive are noticed an…
The word "prove" has largely changed its meaning, it doesn't mean "test" anymore, although a few usages from previous centuries survive, such as military "proving grounds." So yes, it's very interesting that an old phrase that once meant 'a circumstance that challenges or makes one doubt a rule', gave birth to the modern phrase that means pretty much the opposite: "makes one more confident of the rule, in the end, af…
In general, I try to correct it in order to give the benefit of the doubt. Either somebody is misusing a phrase, which is a charitable interpretation, or somebody has a fundamentally flawed idea of how evidence works, which is rather uncharitable.
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I'm not sure resource scaling is what's needed here. Just good ol' caching. Shameless plug: I built Cachoid[0] for caching as a service (leveraging Varnish mainly) to help with situations like this. [0] https://www.cachoid.com/
I understand that this is a shameless plug but I've met teams where the first response to any performance problem is caching If you're reading this and have performance issues look at caches as a last resort, first figure out why things are slow I'm assuming a traditional stack here but use mysql jet profiler, or SQL equivalent first, then your languages profiler xhprof? If your queries are slow or impossible make su…
Just make sure it's your first step, not your last step.
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The implication is that the (especially American) upper class is trenched on this belief that CEOs of large companies require a certain pedigree that may not be based on observable, empirical evidence but rather on a mythos to keep the upper class relatively "pure" and the number of rich CEOs controlled to (mostly) existing class members, while attempting to appear egalitarian ("anyone" can go to an ivy league school…
What's interesting about what you said is that if one were to look at the CEOs of the Fortune 500, this idea of classism breaks down. CEO of IBM: Ginni Rometty -- grew up in a single parent home, with a mom that worked multiple jobs. Ginni got in to Northwestern and studied computer science and electrical engineering. She certainly didn't have any upper-class advantages. She went to public school. Geisha Williams, CE…
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> Running a company of 10 people is VERY different from running a company of 100, which is VERY VERY different from running a company of 1000 IMO thats a classist lie that keeps people in their place. Any reasonably smart CEO can learn his way from 10 - 10000. Yes, (s)he may not be capable of 10k on day one, but they can grow along the way.
> Any reasonably smart CEO Sorry but this is extremely naive and I'm sorry that your naïveté has caused you conclude things which are simply not true. This is a very strong assumption, and a lie that is peddled by the media (Zuck is the greatest example of this) to create a novel story. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just a dangerous assumption. For the record, I've interviewed over 75 software founders (CEO/CT…
You assume that they all want to scale. There is a place for us boring people. We are the ones who do something well and are reliable. We don't blow the profits on fancy cars and houses. We have shit loads of cash in the bank at all times relative to t/o. In 18 years of trading there was one month that me and my partners didn't pay ourselves - to cover employee salaries without creating an overdraft.
Bugger scaling - I'm happy to sleep at night. Some of our customers are amongst those that you will almost certainly have heard of, regardless of which country you live in.