Promising athenahealth

In a season in which so many companies are producing disappointing results, gems like athenahealth still exist. athenahealth (NASDAQ:ATHN) is a leading provider for the healthcare industry’s billing and practice management solutions. athenahealth just completed its first year as a public company. I recently spoke with Jonathan Bush, athenahealth’s CEO. You can read the interview here. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Greenplum

We kick-start this week’s Deal Radar with the San Mateo, CA-based data warehousing company, Greenplum. Scott Yara and Luke Lonergan merged their two independent ventures to create Greenplum in 2003. The two saw that with the rise of the Internet, companies began to collect a thousand times more data than they did just a few years ago. At the time, the database and data warehousing market was controlled by the two leading proprietary, expensive, packaged software vendors, Oracle and Teradata. Yara and Lonergan saw that though traditional software solutions were sufficient when data volumes were relatively slow-growing, companies couldn’t afford to purchase enough traditional database software to keep up with the data deluge. >>>

Green Grants To Xunlight: CEO Xunming Deng (Part 5)

SM: What happened when you came out to Silicon Valley to raise money?

XD: We were successful because we showed the venture capitalists that the company, for free, built a production line for the university using grant money. In essence, we had already proven our ability to succeed once, and I had the same team ready to do it again. >>>

Smallbiz America Radio Interview on EJ1

David Wolf interviewed me on Smallbiz America about Enterpreneur Journeys. Have a look.

Capitalism 2.0: The Welfare State

I have written quite a bit already about my aversion to the welfare state philosophy, the chronic deficit spending, and the ensuing entitlitis and affluenza. Here’s Ayn Rand on the problems with a welfare state and guaranteed economic security: >>>

Catching Up On Readings: Nobody’s Buying Diamonds

Here is a summary of the posts from this past week, in case you missed them:

Technology Stocks:
Blue Nile Struggles Amidst Luxury Industry Collapse
EDA Industry Update
LeapFrog Lows
Oracle and SaaS: Inevitable
Samsung Balances In Two Major Markets

 Deal Radar 2009: MindTouch, MuleSource, Medsphere

Entrepreneur Journeys:
Critical Innovation In Healthcare Claims Processing: athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush
Green Grants To Xunlight: CEO Xunming Deng

Roundtables: March 25 Strategy Roundtable Recording

Forbes Column 2009: The Smart-Grid Dilemma

Guest Author Post: Is It Time For Your CEO To Go? (Part 2) A New Model for Silicon Valley by Tony Scott

And a new series on Capitalism 2.0.

Green Grants To Xunlight: CEO Xunming Deng (Part 4)

SM: A $2.9 million grant sounds like real money. What was the project?

XD: It was to build a hydrogen generation system using solar. At that time fuel cells were very hot. Of course, a fuel cell needs fuel, which happens to be hydrogen. >>>

Capitalism 2.0: Intellectual Laziness

Here’s another interesting discourse from John Galt’s speech which is a good lens through which to examine several of our recently discovered “bugs” in capitalism: sub-prime lending and borrowing, Madoff’s scam, etc. >>>