categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
interview
Serial Entrepreneur Zack Rinat on Model N (Part 8)
SM: Besides culture issues, can you talk about the business strategy decisions that helped you survive the perfect storm? ZR: A big key for us was maintaining focus. When we started the company, our two first deals out of the gate were $2M each. Then the perfect storm happened, and we could complain about it.
Eric Benhamou: The Saga Of Palm (Part 14)
SM: This has been a very interesting discussion. Anything else you would like to add before we conclude, especially about your personal situation at present? EB: On a personal level, things have worked out pretty well in the sense that I believe in ten year cycles – at least for me. I think, you can
Eric Benhamou: The Saga Of Palm (Part 13)
SM: What is Elevation’s investment thesis regarding positioning? Is it still a prosumer play? EB: The Elevation thesis is pretty simple. It basically says that smartphone market is at its very infancy, and the arrival of the iPhone is expanding the opportunity, making it more real to more people. It is very clear that it
Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 10)
SM: What kinds of problems have you identified as big open problems you are going to tackle in the labs? TL: We are always working on making the service faster, scalable and more reliable. We have a team of folks that are looking for the 1 in 10,000 to the 1 in 100,000 “nasty thing”
Cracking the Very Small Business Market: PayCycle CEO Jim Heeger (Part 12)
SM: You may have to do some of that equity/liquidity swapping due to the structure of venture funds. JH: One of our funding sources may have to close out their fund, and in that case we will go find someone to help do that. In fact we just recently had a conversation about this amongst
Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 9)
SM: One of the concerns you must be facing now is how big can the CDN business be, and how fast can it grow? I am sure your investors like to see diversification as it is both risk and business diversification. Application acceleration provides that diversification, and I like it. TL: We consider it to
Cracking the Very Small Business Market: PayCycle CEO Jim Heeger (Part 11)
SM: I was reading an article about how a lot of startups are using credit cards to finance their early days. American Express is a very common way of financing startups, and I have used it myself. JH: Rene used to use that as well. It was a big day when he got his name
Speeding Up the Internet: Algorithms Guru and Akamai Founder Tom Leighton (Part 8)
SM: How do you provide fast, reliable service globally? What is the secret there? TL: There are a bunch of things we do for that. In the old adage, having our servers near the end users rewards them. We sit on top of and find better routes on the Internet. We don’t change the protocol,
