Disqus - Latest Comments for graysky

Re: The Next Silicon Valley Will Be On The Internet - The Gong Show

Mike Champion — Mon, 12 May 2014 09:38:22 -0000

I think about this with some frequency -- my friends and I joke about how we'll say "remember how we used to commute daily to an *office* and we each had to separately configure our laptops to have a working code environment, those were the days". Like early cell phones, it is worse in most ways (call quality, battery life, etc) but has a killer feature.

We have a similar Cisco unit and it looks great, but I've also heard good things about a Chromebox setup at a fraction of the cost.

Re: Snapchat and that old no revenues debate

Mike Champion — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 09:43:54 -0000

Well written.

If you were trying to put a price on SnapChat, how much would that be a function of projected user growth and some expected CPM (basically extrapolating), vs an option value on that they might the one to "nail telcos to their cross"? Or something else in that equation?

Re: Ads as Communication The Red Sox ownership took... - The Gong Show

Mike Champion — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 10:11:08 -0000

Can they just re-target the hell out of everyone from St Louis so they see the same little ad all over the web for a week? ;)

Re:

Mike Champion — Sun, 03 Nov 2013 15:25:10 -0000

Agree with the critique of the the analysis, although the conclusions she reaches seem like the conventional wisdom.

- Only a handful of "super unicorns" in a given year. A16Z has said something similar -- like there are only a handful of new investments per worth being in.

- There are basically 4 business models (consumer e-commerce, consumer audience, SaaS & enterprise)

- SF reigns supreme.

- Little diversity among founders.

A lot of that seems similar to typical "pattern matching". What investors do you see investing based contrarian views to this? Such as outside of SV/NYC, business model innovation, etc.

500 Startups sorta fits that with a "moneyball" approach as opposed to unicorn hunting. Would be interested in who you think is taking an investing bet (either on sector, or geo, etc) that is significantly different than the standard approach?

Re: Smartwatches Must Overcome Their Name There has... - The Gong Show

Mike Champion — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 22:10:14 -0000

I hope you can lay claim to have coined the phrase "wrist-native" - I like that.

Re: Jekyll on a root domain on cloudfront

Mike Champion — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 08:37:15 -0000

I followed these to move my blog and it all worked with the exception of needing to use the S3 point (myblog.com.s3-website-us-ea...) and not the S3 bucket when creating the Cloudfront distribution. Choosing the s3 bucket lead to various AccessDenied errors.

Thanks again!

Re: Jekyll on a root domain on cloudfront

Mike Champion — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 22:54:03 -0000

Hilarious, I've been looking for just this answer and found it 2 days after I moved off an older server for hosting jekyll on Heroku. Now having to run rack under the covers is going to stick in my craw until I move to s3.

Thanks for writing this up! Hadn't seen ANAME before.

Re: The Solidity of Software

Mike Champion — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 10:25:00 -0000

Kevin, you're right (as usual). I was being a little glib. As you suggest, if you "freeze" the environment software doesn't necessarily decay. It is just difficult to make robust in the face of change or unseen conditions.

Re: Some thoughts on the iPhone contact list controversy and app security

Mike Champion — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:52:43 -0000

I thought for #2 it was so that they could more easily do the "Your friend Steve just joined" push notifications.

Re: Can Boston Do Consumer and Does It Matter?

Mike Champion — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:08:26 -0000

Yes, it is B2B-ish in a way similar to DropBox I think. Businesses might be the ones who pay but get growth out of the free side aimed at individuals.

I volunteered it as an answer to "What was the last Boston product that you thought was a beautiful product?" I think it is a well designed, minimal app that solves a problem.

Re: Can Boston Do Consumer and Does It Matter?

Mike Champion — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 11:35:32 -0000

One that I'd missed is join.me from LogMeIn. Very well designed (both visually & how it functions) & much faster than the GoToMeeting ilk. Definitely a consumer product that I've been recently impressed by.

Michael Simon gave a fascinating talk at HubSpot how they leveraged their simple design & inexpensive service delivery to get organic growth without the huge marketing dollars of other online meeting services.

Re: The Boston Success Project - 10 Ways We're Winning

Mike Champion — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 21:34:48 -0000

On the exits list I'd include Endecca and Conduit Labs.

PS - Yay for Disqus comments!

Re: (Mostly) Good Times for Software Developers - graysky

Mike Champion — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 23:23:07 -0000

I think joining a funded startup (as opposed to founding one yourself) is pretty low risk. Most funded startups pay pretty well, likely less than ~10-20% difference in total compensation from bigger companies for younger folks. Primarily I think startups give engineers a chance to work with current technology, get to participate more deeply in product creation/direction and hopefully let them get experience in other areas like team building, customer interaction, coordinating with other functions like marketing or sales, etc.

If one assumes that most people these days stay between 2 and 5 (at most) years at a job, then there isn't that much more volatility in job turnover. I did meet folks at IBM who had been there 20+ years, but I think they are very much the exception these days.

I think startups have more uncertainty which can be unsettled, but not more serious risk. As I wrote above I'm more concerned about avoiding long-term skill atrophy than short term job volatility.

Re: (Mostly) Good Times for Software Developers - graysky

Mike Champion — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 23:11:42 -0000

It was primarily because of having done tourb.us as a side project and being more interested in Rails and "web 2.0" than more enterprise software. As Kevin suggests above, some of the perks -- vesting of masters tuition & a pension (if you can believe those still exist) -- probably kept me there a ~1 year longer than I might have otherwise been.

Re: (Mostly) Good Times for Software Developers - graysky

Mike Champion — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 15:44:03 -0000

Joe, wholeheartedly agree on the issue of job postings. I have a half-written blog post on all the ways companies hire poorly (focus on hiring for a technology instead of recruiting problem solvers, lame descriptions of why the position is interesting, etc).

Re: (Mostly) Good Times for Software Developers - graysky

Mike Champion — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 14:49:37 -0000

Thanks Rob. When I've talked to college students, I've encouraged them take classes to get a strong understand of the fundamentals of CS -- it is only harder later -- and don't worry too much about learning the latest language/framework from a class. Also to use their free time to hack on passion projects along with getting a few internships to see if they like the working in the field. (I'd give different advice if they wanted to get a PhD perhaps.) And finally to join a startup / small company ;-)

Re: The Entrepreneurial Lottery

Mike Champion — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:41:12 -0000

I've been thinking about this issue a bit. Do you think there is less of a "lottery " in areas that are based on harder tech? Or less in B2B space compared to consumer markets?

Re: The Illusion of Stability

Mike Champion — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 15:56:07 -0000

In the time that I worked for a massive company it is was even worse because they operate on their own internal logic. So they are often both expanding in some areas and de-investing in others, which may or may not be obvious based on internal numbers that are shared with employees. I've had several ex-coworkers be very unpleasantly surprised by a round of layoffs despite the company overall doing well. They tended to be more nervous than those at smaller companies where there is at least usually some amount more of transparency.

Re: Measuring your Personal Investment Returns with Blueleaf

Mike Champion — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 10:37:41 -0000

I've been using this feature of Blueleaf for a little while and it's the best place for me to see a snapshot of how our family's finances are performing. Our investments are spread across several institutions (Vanguard, TIAA-CREF, etc) and it is difficult to get a benchmark of how they are growing without our contributions confusing the picture. Now I tend to check on a weekly basis because it is so much simpler. Really helpful feature!

Re: http://restrictionisexpression.com/post/5861619035

Mike Champion — Thu, 26 May 2011 09:44:57 -0000

Good points. On free services I would love to see the developer have a big picture of themselves and a caption that says "I made this for you to use for FREE". Maybe that would generate more civility?

Re: Build a great brand experience

Mike Champion — Thu, 05 May 2011 16:01:08 -0000

Good post. Do you see a difference between having a "great experience" and having a "great brand experience"?

Re: Backwards Goals

Mike Champion — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 13:06:37 -0000

Well said. I think of the over-focus on launches & exits in terms of chess -- there are lots of studied openings & end games, but the middle game is where it mostly won or lost. The challenge is to understand that part but it is harder to discuss abstractly because there are many more possible situations & unknowns.

Re: The Unpaid Intern: All Grown Up

Mike Champion — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 23:23:09 -0000

Well articulated. This prompted me to look up that Diane Sawyer got her foot in the door by working for Richard Nixon!

Also, we're totally doing Tuxedo Day now.

Re: Reverse the Startup Curse - graysky

Mike Champion — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 11:38:33 -0000

Yup, agreed. Part of the point I was making is for folks in Boston to stop beating themselves up so hard. As you point out, unlike baseball, this situation doesn't have to be zero-sum.

Re: Every entrepreneur needs a "local"

Mike Champion — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 22:21:48 -0000

Nice post! Via Lago is one of a not-so-long list of things I miss about working for a big company in the area. Good food, nice place & they catered a lot of events. Now where I am in Central Sq., I have similar associations with Andala Cafe & 1369 for out of the office meetings.