Archive for October, 2009
October 31st, 2009
Posted as I find them on http://www.twitter.com/skmurphy and then collected into a post at the end of the month.
“Some mornings in the shower I remind myself ‘This is the life that I have chosen’ because it’s never easy and it’s never dull.”
“The recognition and understanding of the need was the primary condition of the creative act.” Charles Eames
- “The recognition and understanding of the need was the primary condition of the creative act. When people feel they had to express themselves for originality for its own sake, that tends not to be creativity. Only when you get into the problem and the problem becomes clear, can creativity take over.” Charles Eames
“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” Milton Friedman
“A ‘window dressing’ advisory board is often as phony as an undersized glass eye that spins randomly with every blink.” George Grellas in Hacker News
- The “window dressing” variety of advisory board is often as phony as an undersized glass eye that spins randomly with every blink. This often involves the so-called industry luminaries used to make the startup look much more impressive than it really is. In essence, such advisors hire out their names…
- Full Quote in “George Grellas on ‘Insightful’ vs. ‘Window Dressing’ Advisory Boards“
“Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except for what you’re going to do right now and do it.” William Durant
“Capital is not wealth pure and simple, but wealth considered from the point of view of future as opposed to present use.” Sir Alfred Zimmern
“Use your intuition to ask questions, not to answer them.”
John Ousterhout in “Favorite Sayings”
“It’s not even a jobless recovery; it’s a recovery with more job losses.”
Lee Ohanian
- “It’s not even a jobless recovery; it’s a recovery with more job losses,” said UCLA economist Lee Ohanian. “The idea of having essentially no net job creation after a remarkably severe recession is a real pathology for the U.S. economy.” in “Experts See Rebounding Economy Shedding Jobs“
“Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.”
Soren Kierkegaard
“There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.” Norwegian Proverb
October 27th, 2009
Sometimes paradigms do shift. Amazon announced today that its Elastic Cloud Computing now supports high memory instances:
High-Memory Instances
Instances of this family offer large memory sizes for high throughput applications, including database and memory caching applications.
- High-Memory Double Extra Large Instance 34.2 GB of memory, 13 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform
- High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Instance 68.4 GB of memory, 26 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform
From Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud overview of instances:
| High-Memory On-Demand Instances |
Linux/UNIX Usage |
Windows Usage |
| Double Extra Large |
$1.20 per hour |
$1.44 per hour |
| Quadruple Extra Large |
$2.40 per hour |
$2.88 per hour |
These 34.2GB and 68.4GB virtual machines should enable a number of new job types that required more memory than was available from standard instances:
- Small Instance (Default) 1.7 GB of memory
- Large Instance 7.5 GB of memory
- Extra Large Instance 15 GB of memory
In particular for Electronic Design Automation applications this makes the cloud much more viable as a fourth generation computing paradigm:
- Turnkey / Custom Hardware / Minicomputer
- Engineering Workstations
- X86 architecture PC
- Virtual Machines / Cloud Computing
Sometimes paradigms do shift.
Update Nov-23: The Amazon Web Services Blog announced “The New AWS Simple Monthly Calculator” available at http://aws.amazon.com/calculator
October 25th, 2009
George Grellas is an attorney in Cupertino whose firm has specialized in business and corporate law for more than 25 years. He has a number of excellent articles on startup legal issues “Startup Law 101 Series” including “Ten Essential Legal Tips for a Startup Team in Formation” that any team of two or more entrepreneurs should read.
He posts on Hacker News from time to time and in response to a question “Should Your Startup Have an Advisory Board” posted a very cogent set of tips that have yet to make it to his website. So that his answer is not lost to bit rot I am including it here.
I have worked extensively with startups in Silicon Valley since 1984 and have seen every shade of advisory board, ranging from those set up for pure window dressing to those used extensively by founders for insightful continuing advice.
The latter usually arise from pre-existing relationships between one or more of the founders and the advisors. Normally, the advisor is someone who wants to assist the founders and whom the founders accordingly want to reward by small equity grants via the advisory director role. These types of advisory boards, in my experience, tend to be of significant value to early-stage startups and are well worth the small equity grants involved (which, by the way, tend on average to be more like .1%/yr of service rather than the higher number suggested by the author of this piece). The informal nature of the relationship also avoids many of the hassles associated with trying to have such an advisory board meet from time to time in some formal manner. In essence, what you have with such boards is a healthy working relationship from which all parties benefit.
The “window dressing” variety of advisory board is often as phony as an undersized glass eye that spins randomly with every blink. This often involves the so-called industry luminaries used to make the startup look much more impressive than it really is. In essence, such advisors hire out their names (and, yes, they will insist upon larger equity grants and often for some form of cash compensation as well, as for example for every meeting attended). While one can never say categorically that such advisors do not add value to a startup, their primary function is to add name-value and hence the value of their contributions apart from name value tends to be limited. There are exceptions but, in my experience, not many. In general, these types of advisors are a clear mis-match for most early-stage startups, though they often help later-stage ones needing “company profile” dressing for IPO, etc.
By the way, founders still occasionally confuse the role of advisory director with that of a board director. There is no connection whatever between the two roles. The former is basically an outside consultant only and has no management-level authority; the latter, of course, has tremendous management authority (and corresponding liability risks as well, which the advisory director does not).
Here are some blog posts where I talk about the value and appropriate use of an advisory board or kitchen cabinet:
- Nov-23-2008 “Unfamiliar Pain”
If you don’t have a kitchen cabinet or board of advisers that you are accountable to, I would encourage you to create some mechanism for independent outside advice from folks with relevant experience. I have several other independent consultants that I compare notes with, we also take turns kicking each other in the ass encouraging each other to make hard decisions and do the things we know we need to do that are getting neglected. We having a meeting with all of our partners together for the first time in early December. I hope to use this as both a joint planning and joint accountability mechanism.
- Jul-16-2008 “Common Questions About Advisory Boards“
- Jan-21-2008 “Forming an Advisory Board“
VentureHacks has three relevant posts from 2008 that, while they are more focused on VC related issues than bootstrapping, are still worth reviewing:
October 24th, 2009
We had a good “Getting More Customers” workshop today, here is the feedback that we gathered and a heads-up on some plans for 2010. We added three numeric ratings to our feedback form this time (which shrank the space for comments).
Numeric Ratings (1 Poor to 5 Excellent)
- Importance of Topic: 4.75
- Content: 4.75
- Quality of Speaker: 4.75
Comments (here are comments from Mar-31-2009 workshop)
- “Too much text–overwhelming.”
- “A bit fast, exercises and group discussion held us accountable, which is good.”
- “It’s very direct and to the point with an action plan to follow, keeping it simple.”
- “Nice wake up call.”
- “I picked up a number of ideas I can employ. I was impressed.”
We announced at the end of the workshop that we will be offering a new format next year, a small group format that meets for 90 minutes a week for six sessions. Our plan is to provide support in both an individual and small group setting for focused execution of half of the one page plan that entrepreneurs develop at a workshop. For early stage startups we think having peer entrepreneurs in a small group will act like “workout buddies” to help them to follow through on the plans that they have made for improving their businesses.
We had a couple of folks who had conflicts and we are considering scheduling another “Getting More Customers” class before the end of 2009. If that would be of interest to you, or this new six week small group program sounds like a good fit, please contact us or sign-up to be notified of upcoming events.
October 23rd, 2009
Someone with the label selfemploy posted the following question (note the fact that he is in Bangalore appears later in the thread, I have included it in the body of the question) on Hacker News earlier this month. As the recession continues to affect not only in Silicon Valley but many engineers around the world may remain concerned over this same set of issues and potential missed opportunity:
Background: I am a hacker/developer in Bangalore with over 10 years of experience working with cutting-edge software consulting company. Clients list includes fortune 500 companies many of them banks and some product companies. Skill set includes technology and project execution but not marketing and people management.I am married with kids.
Problem: Always wanted to be an entrepreneur, right from the college days but never got myself to do anything about it. Now it seems time is running out.
Is it too late to get into startup mode?
My answer was four suggestions and an observation:
- Save your money.
- Adjust your lifestyle to allow you to live on a lower spending rate.
- Make sure your spouse is supportive of starting something.
- Take your time and find at least one co-founder. If you don’t know them well do some smaller projects together first.
Older entrepreneurs bring social capital, commitment, and an ability to focus and persist.
October 22nd, 2009
I was pleased to join the eMobus advisory board, it’s a good team with traction, energy, and domain expertise in cellular spend management. eMobus offers software-enabled services to help firms control cellular expense on an ongoing basis. They have been steadily announcing new customers this year, many in industries that have been hard hit by the recession. For the most part the cellular carriers treat businesses as unusually large families: eMobus allows businesses to monitor spending, correctly allocate costs, and adjust cellular subscription plans as their needs change.
I have been assisting the eMobus team on strategies for pricing, new customer acquisition, leveraging their cloud computing infrastructure, and effective differentiation of their services. I think that software enabled service firms that are able to differentiate themselves with expertise complemented by automated analytics are going to become more popular as cloud computing moves from technologists and early adopters to pragmatic users.
October 21st, 2009
A blog post from October 2006 “Administrivia in Startups” made the following points
I had lunch with Sylvia Nessan, a veteran of Synopsys, CoWare, and several high tech startups and she made an observation that I thought was worth writing down: the founding team, and CEO in particular, don’t pay enough attention to how much time they waste on administrivia. Hiring an admin or other outside service providers to take care of the four to eight hours a week of work that they really don’t need to do–basic e-mail networking, taxes, finances, office management / operational issues–reduces the number of different balls they have to juggle at once and increases your effectiveness by 25-40% when you take into account that, although it’s an important set of tasks that must be done, the founders don’t have to do it.
If anything, more folks are interested in part time work now than in 2006. Last year I concluded “Odd Jobs with an Even Temper” with
I think every startup above a certain size needs someone who can do “odd jobs” with an even temper. Especially as things get tougher in Silicon Valley, don’t underestimate the value of small kindnesses, a sense of humor, and cultivating calmness.
October 20th, 2009
I attended an interesting talk by Marc Smith on August 4 “New Metrics for New Media.” Sponsored by Bay Area CIO IT Execs it was a thought provoking talk. I had heard Marc Smith speak at the 2003 O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and was curious what he was up to at Telligent. The video and slides are available on the CIO IT Execs Blog.
He made some remarks about unpublished research, I believe based on work by Howard Welser that built on “Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in On-line Discussion Groups” but addressed the four different roles that every successful Wikipedia article requires. One but of background, every article has a “talk page” where the different contributors may discuss changes to the article itself, this allows a discussion to take place backstage without affecting the content of the article by embedding the discussion points in the article itself.
- Domain Experts provide the key or core content for the article, and who often contribute to the talk page. They will make large changes, typically adding blocks of text, to a small set of articles.
Value: core content for a page
- Diplomats mediate disagreements among domain experts, most of their edits are to the talk pages.
- Editors makes small changes, typically these are copyedits (e.g. fixing typos, punctuation, grammatical errors). They correct small errors and improve the look and professionalism. They will make small edits over a large number of articles.
- Vandal Hunters perform rapid reversions or undos to the article, normally in response to spam or other harmful edits. They have a very short time between last edit and their edit, and they have high percentage of actions that replace a page with an older version. They increase the chances of additional contributions by lowering the chance that a potential contributor reads a page that has been defaced, and then worries that their own contribution would be defaced.
I thought that there were some interesting parallels to how change happens, or is snuffed out, in a corporation.
I also think that most groups trying to reach a working consensus on a document, especially against a deadline, end up creating both document pages and discussion pages for the group to be able to hash out the final content and managed any issues or disagreements that need to be resolved. Archiving the talk pages is a quick way to make post mortems or after actions more useful, as they should contain a decision record for why certain decisions were reached and what options and/or issues were discussed and considered.
October 19th, 2009
Many entrepreneurs planning their first software startup get stuck on funding and ownership issues. Here are some simple rules of thumb that may help you reframe an issue:
- Revenue, especially break even revenue, is never dilutive of your ownership.
- The right co-founders, while dilutive, substantially increase your chances of success: they give you a smaller piece of a much more valuable pie.
- Paying customers are real proof that there is demand for your product. Getting funded is proof that an investor thinks there will be demand for your product.
- A software startup in 2009 normally doesn’t need more than 10-25K to get started, if the founding team can provide the bulk of the labor to develop and market the first version of the product.
- If the founding team cannot provide the bulk of the labor to develop and market the first product, think about adding co-founders not seeking funding.
- If you need a salary from day one of your software startup don’t seek investment. Instead keep working at your day job, save your money, lower your burn rate, and work on your startup part time. This is hard.
- Your most important investors are your spouse, friends, and family who will provide you with emotional support on the entrepreneurial roller coaster.
- Professional investors don’t want control of your business, they want a return on their investment.
October 18th, 2009
With Synopsys announcing Synphony, a high-level design compiler that reads in MATLAB M code and generates RTL and some other useful outputs, and Mathworks listed in Gary Smith’s ESL 2009 Wallchart, I wonder if it doesn’t make sense to define MATLAB as an ESL language and Mathworks as an EDA player. Harry Gries provides a good overview in “Synopsys Synphony Synopsis” (say that three time fast)
Basically, Synopsys is introducing a high level synthesis (aka behavioral synthesis) product that takes as its input Matlab M-Code and produces RTL Code, a cycle accurate C-model, and a testbench for simulation.
Ron Wilson offers this assessment in “Synopsys introduces Matlab-to-RTL synthesis path for datapaths”
On the whole, it appears that Synphony is not intended to be a direct competitor to the other high-level synthesis tools in the industry, such as those from Cadence, Forte, or Mentor. Rather, it is an IP-library-based tool for converting M-files into fixed-precision models for Simulink, coupled to a synthesis engine to convert these fixed-point models into RTL datapath designs for input into Synplify or Design Compiler. It is a rather specialized tool, but a sorely needed bridge between the worlds of Matlab algorithm exploration and RTL development.
Mathworks has been attending DAC for many years, although it is not a member of EDAC [see below]. The Matlab language was also a supported input by AccelChip (now part of Xilinx) and Agility (now part of Mentor, although the tools for going from Matlab to C were sold to the Mathworks). These were some of the reasons that I had included the Mathworks blogs in my July 11 “EDA Bloggers 2009” list.
It would be interesting to see the Synopsys Interoperability Forum address Matlab interoperability at some point, they clearly have a significant stake in it with the Synphony announcement.
Sanjay Srivastava, the CEO of Denali, offered some excellent advice to startups in his Jul-23 “Can We Afford for Startups to Wind Down” (although he now is blogging on “A Conversation on Innovation” ) outlining two areas where startups have prospered in the last few years and one where they have not:
- New platform creation. Typically, this happens at the edges of an existing platform (at least in EDA). One of the mistakes we can make is in under-funding the creation of platforms because you are asking the customers to move to a whole new methodology, but they are only going to do it if the platform is complete. Leaving big gaps like “availability of models/libraries” can often render a promising platform useless. [...]
- Provide components to a significantly growing platform. This is where lots of EDA startups have flourished since the last big disruption of synthesis. They provided point tools. The platform owners were growing and could afford to pay big premiums to improve parts of the flow or add to them. [...]
- Improve components for mature platforms. This is the trap startups have been in for the last few years. [...]
At first blush Matlab looks like a growing platform, at least in terms of the opportunities for full integration into established EDA flows. It’s not clear where all of the opportunities might lie, but a few come to mind:
- Timing analysis across Matlab, RTL, and gate
- Register management across Matlab, RTL, C, and design documentation
- Power management across Matlab, RTL, and gate
- Functional Partitioning into Chips / Floorplanning for Chips for Matlab, RTL, and gate
- High level synthesis tools: certainly Synphony offers a “proof by example” for Oasys and other next generation synthesis tools.
This is part of an ongoing series on “Growing the Pie in EDA”
- Getting Back to “Growing the Pie in EDA”
- Growing the Pie in EDA Part 2: As Revenue Shrinks So Does Analyst Interest
Update Mon Oct-19: Daniel Payne points out that Mathworks has historically been a member of EDAC even if they are not currently listed as a member. They are listed as a member on slide 29 of the January 14, 2009 presentation by Bob Gardner at the CEO Forecast and Industry Vision meeting. I will seek clarification from Mathworks and EDAC.
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