Business on Bulrush Labs — Richard Tibbetts

Making the Best of Your Time Resting and Vesting

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 21:07:17 +0000

First, go on vacation for a few weeks, to the south of France or something. For a while, you will likely focus on ensuring your team lands nicely and navigating integration processes. You could try climbing the corporate ladder, but you probably won’t if you plan to start another company.

After a few months, you’ll wonder what to do with yourself while you wait for a vesting cliff or finish building your dream home. You can do several valuable things at a large company while resting and vesting.

There Can Be Too Many Suckers at the Table

Sun, 12 Dec 2010 23:25:00 +0000

Everyone knows the old saw about poker: If you can’t spot the sucker, it’s probably you. It’s nice to think you could sit down at a table with incompetent players and take their money. It probably works in poker. Mark Suster applies the aphorism to angel investing in his post Dealflow – Are You Sitting at The Right Poker Table? It’s a good post, dealflow is really important. But the poker metaphor falls short. Too many suckers actually ruin a startup market.

Yes Virginia, You Can Work on Great Technology at Startups

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 02:17:00 +0000

You can work on great technology at startups. You wouldn’t think that would be a controversial statement. But it is if you believe Ted Tso’s defense of Google, “Google has a problem retaining great engineers? Bullcrap.” Ted dismisses the engineering that goes on in a startup, saying:

Similarly, you don’t work on great technology at a startup. Startups, by and large, aren’t about technology — at least, not the Web 2.0 startups like Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Groupon, etc. They are about business model discovery. So if you are fundamentally a technologist at heart, whose heart sings when you’re making a better file system, or fixing a kernel bug, you’re not going to be happy at a startup. At least, not if the startup is run competently.

Three Months Without Cable

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:03:00 +0000

As was widely reported in the media, the second and third quarter of 2010 show a steady decline in cable subscriptions. This is earth-shaking for the cable companies, who have seen growth in US subscribers over their entire history. It’s a key indicator of not only consumers being more careful with their spending, but the rise of Internet-delivered media as a compelling alternative.

In August of this year I joined the ranks of people “cutting the cord”. I was moving, and when we set up Verizon FiOS at the new house we left off video. Three months later, I’d like to fill you in on how it has gone and what I see in the future of consumer video delivery.

Lean Startups and the Theory of the Firm

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 23:28:00 +0000

If you spend much time in the entrepreneurial corners of the blogosphere, you’re certain to have heard about lean startups. If you haven’t, check out Eric Reis and Steve Blank. The core of the lean startup is two related ideas: continuous validation and building the smallest company that can validate an idea. The result is dramatically reduced costs, reduced time-to-failure, and reduced risk. A lot has been written and can be written about validation. But what I’m concerned about now is how small the smallest possible company is, and specifically why it is usually more than one person.

Apple is a Luxury Brand, Android Will Never Be

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 22:48:00 +0000

Recently I’ve had several good conversations about exactly what business Apple is in. They have clearly transcended their traditional role as a computer maker. Some people think that Apple has become a media company, or a telecommunications company. What they have really done is to become a luxury brand. As a luxury brand they are shielded from feature- and performance-based competition, enjoying higher margins and more stable revenues than other consumer electronics firms. The future of the iPhone and iPad and their strategy for competing with Android will be based on Apple’s luxury brand.

Passive Personal Networking: How to Let Others Network for You

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 18:46:00 +0000

Talking to some friends recently, I’ve realized that many people don’t think of themselves as networkers. They are reluctant to get started playing that “game”. Even when they are highly capable engineers looking for a new position at a startup, they don’t want to “ask their friends to find them a job.”

Everyone knows that networking is the best way to get a job. Not everyone is prepared to attend “networking events”, hand out business cards to people they meet, or spend all their time maintaining professional relationships. If you are one of these people, I have good news. You can still benefit from networking to find jobs and other opportunities. Merely by being non-hostile, open to the possibility of networking, you can benefit from the networks of people you already know, your friends and coworkers.

Buy It Like You Mean It and Vendor Relationship Management

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 21:14:00 +0000

I just got back from the launch party for Buy It Like You Mean It, a startup non-profit that is “enabling the socially conscious consumer”. I’m a big fan of what they are doing. As a free-market capitalist, I like to think that the power of markets can solve all kinds of problems. As a realist (and Wall Street technology vendor), I realize that market actors can have wildly different information and expertise.

Bungee Connect: What I learned about platform evaluations

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 21:50:00 +0000

Catching up on email this Saturday, I got the opportunity to take a survey about my experience evaluating Bungee Connect. Evaluating bungee connect has been something that has popped onto my radar several times. They purport to be an application platform for web applications. They have their own language, their own ui toolkit, their own (browser-based) IDE, and their own code library and source control system. In my day job I create and sell a novel application platform (for streaming applications), so I like to look at new platforms on many levels. I signed up, and was shortly invited into the bungee beta.

Information Wants To Be Half Price

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 09:32:00 +0000

If you haven’t heard already, Steve Jobs is expected to announce on Monday that iTunes will begin offering 24-hour movie rental for $4. This is widely reported not just by traditional rumor sites, but by people like Salon. And, by and large, people have been complaining about the price. Including me. Digging deeper, I have an armchair economist answer as to why this price feels wrong.

I am a long time Netflix customer and former Netflix shareholder. I got out of the stock because I don’t think they are positioned to win in online-rentals. The recent announcement with LG about a set-top box might help, but it’s far from a solution. Right now, customers have yet to find a business model they really like. And so companies are serving up a wide variety of business models, hoping to find one that works. As a result, we are in a tornado of different pricing and contract terms. Now Apple, who has gotten this right before, has thrown their hat in.

The Lemons Meme in Software

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 07:52:00 +0000

A few weeks ago Bruce Schneier discovered a classic economics paper, “The Market for Lemons”. The paper describes the behavior of markets where sellers have detailed information about the products, particularly the quality of the products, that buyers do not have. It uses the example of used cars.

In these markets, the price buyers are willing to pay is defined by average quality of good. Buyers lack information, so can only assume they are going to get a product of average value. Unfortunately, this lower price drives the best products out of the market, because sellers (who know they have the best goods) won’t accept that price. When the best goods are removed from the market, the average quality drops, the price drops, and the next best goods are removed from the market. The conclusion is that in these markets quality falls until it matches the amount of information that buyers have.

ETech Voyeurism: Coder to Cofounder

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 17:18:00 +0000

Just came across Phil Windley’s summary of the tutorial Coder to CoFounder at ETech by Marc Hedlund. I didn’t make it to ETech, so I can’t give any first-hand account, but even Phil’s summary is worth reading if you are interested in startups and trying to decide between being a founder and going to a more established startup.

My personal experience at StreamBase is that you get a phenomenal amount of education out of being a cofounder. Being involved in the early stage exposed me to all aspects of the business, from finance to marketing, sales to recruiting, all when I was just out of grad school. Of course, if you don’t choose wisely (and get lucky) this can be an expensive lesson.

Pricing Enterprise Software

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 09:30:00 +0000

I find the economics of enterprise software to be quite interesting, but have never had a theory of pricing that I really felt comfortable with. I’d like to present a new (to me) explanation for how price is deterimined.

Many people are uncomfortable with the concept of “enterprise software” as some how different from other software. To me, the important difference is that enterprise software is purchased by a large organization for use in a business-critical system that they will be stuck with for many years, possibly decades. The “enterprise” isn’t so much in the software, as in the company that is selling it, from their sales and marketing through their services and support.

Adventures in Retail

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 08:38:00 +0000

Had a few hours to kill in Midtown Manhattan today, and so took the opportunity to check out some retail that can only exist in New York.

First I went by the Apple Store on 5th Avenue, which I like to call the Mother Church (standard mall Apple Stores being known as the iShrine). I hadn’t been there before. In person, it is quite impressive. The glass cube occupies the center of a previously open plaza. Reminds me of a NeXT box crossed with the Louvre, which is probably the point. Entering the cube, you are standing on glass over an open hole. In front of you is a cylindrical elevator, and around the elevator curves a glass spiral staircase. A worker (acolyte?) seems to be constantly cleaning the glass steps by hand. Decending the staircase, you enter the underground store.

Steve Vinoski on Extreme Programming at Iona

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 21:06:00 +0000

Thursday at StreamBase we had a lunch talk by Steve Vinoski, Chief Engineer at Iona Software. Our CEO (Barry Morris) is former CEO of Iona, and he asked Steve to talk to use about Extreme Programming (XP). Iona switched to the extreme programming model nearly 10 years ago, and was the first large product company to change over. Their experiences were documented in a paper by Jim Watson.
At StreamBase we use several agile development techniques, but are not faithful to any one methodology. I expected the talk to be about how being faithful to XP was a great thing for Iona. From my reading, I understood that XP demanded total fidelity in order to succeed. Every one of their twelve points is supposed to be critically interdependent and synergistic.
What I learned from Vinoski was that drinking the koolaid is not required. Iona worked directly with Kent Beck, originator of XP. Apparently in person he is a lot more laid back than in his writing. For example, Iona didn’t find pair programming particularly worthwhile, and ended up giving their engineers back their private spaces. They never implemented a 40 hour work week. They do test first programming, but not religiously. They try to fit development into 2 week iterations, but again are not strictly attatched to it. For example, documentation work generally lags behind development, and frequently their iterations don’t actually result in customer-visible functionality.
The other thing I found interesting was that Iona was another example of a pattern I see in extreme programming success stories. At Iona, engineering was a mess before they switched to XP. They didn’t have nightly builds, good testing, or a consistent view of the source tree. Releases were made in an ad-hoc manner, and there was little or no visibilty or feedback in the engineering process. With the introduction of XP they were able to get many of these issues under control. Like many XP stories, things started out really bad. With the introduction of XP they got much better. I can see two plausible explanations for the frequency of this story. It may be that only companies in a lot of pain are able to marshall the resources to change to XP, and so only troubled companies try it. But it may also be that XP is only worth attempting if your organization is on the rocks. Otherwise, moving to a more moderated agile process may be the way to go.
At StreamBase we use many agile techniques. We benefit greatly from automated testing, and have good test coverage. We use a branch driven development model, and keep trunk in a shippable state. We break projects into small milestones (a few weeks, and we keep making them smaller) so that development can be visible. We keep developers as close to customers as possible. And we remain introspective, looking for other opportunities to improve on our process. Many innovations in software engineering come under the banner of agile development today. I think any engineering organization can benefit from learning more about extreme programming and other agile methologies. But I think taking a moderate approach is prudent, unless your organization is in a great deal of pain.

StreamBase DaVinci Coder – Free Software and Valuable Prizes (Cash)

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 11:23:00 +0000

In case people have forgotten, I work at a company I helped start called StreamBase that came out of my graduate research. The product is a stream processing engine, meaning it consumes and processes tens to hundreds of thousands of events per second, from sources like sensor networks, stock markets, or the global interweb, and computes results with very low latency, which are then delivered as more events. I happen to think that event driven architectures, stream processing, and declarative (SQL-like) languages for stream processing are the next big thing, which I am happy to talk your ear off about.

Google Takes College Recruiting to the Next Level

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 17:35:00 +0000

I dropped by MIT this weekend to check out the CalTech cannon hack. This is campus preview weekend, when admitted students are invited to visit the MIT campus to be wooed by admissions officials and current students alike. As a rule current students drop what they are doing to provide entertainment for themselves and occationally even for the visiting high school students (who are generally called prefrosh). It’s usually a good time to see what exciting things current students are up to.

MacBook Pro – Killing the PowerBook Brand

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 19:58:00 +0000

When Apple announced the MacBook Pro, my first reaction was not to any of the hardware changes but to the name. This machine represents the end of the PowerBook brand name, a brand that dates back well before the PowerPC processor, to the first Apple notebook computers in 1991. I believed that PowerBook was one of the strongest brands in the high tech industry, and thought it was remarkably stupid to change it.
Yesterday at the University of Michigan Futuretech conference I got a chance to ask someone from Apple about it. They gave an interesting justification: Apple wants the names of all of their computers to have “Mac” in them. It is important that unsophisticated consumers have a single identifier for all Apple computers. He repeated this justification like it came off a sheet of talking-points. And it does make sense.
Which leaves the big question: What are they going to rename iBook to? My guess is we will have MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Maybe we would have seen them already, if not for rumored last-minute changes to the keynote.

Google Just Isn’t Very Good

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 17:17:00 +0000

I was reminded again today of the number of smart people that have been swallowed up by Google. Google seems to have hired everyone in San Jose, according to Indeed.com’s new job numbers. They have offices in New York, and I hear they are opening new offices in Philadelphia and Boston. They seem to be willing to acquire entire companies just to get their employees.

The big question is, what are they all doing? The stock market seems to think that they are secretly working on The Next Big Thing. Based on Google stock price, investors expect that any day now we will see a beta of cancer.google.com. “Just click here and our AJAX-enabled Web 2.0 service will cure your cancer.” That isn’t too far from the truth though. Google seems to be adopting a similar model to big pharma. They are doing drug discovery. But what they are trying to discover is the next big idea.

Deconstructing the Ann Arbor News

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 20:28:00 +0000

A new article from Jeff Jarvis on Deconstructing the Newspaper really hits the nail on the head for me. I’ve been constantly annoyed by the Ann Arbor News for trying to be a national newspaper, trying to be all things to all people. I want a local newspaper that covers local news. I get the New York Times, and between that and the web I get plenty of national news. I depend on the AAN to give me local election coverage, tell me about upcoming local issues, etc.