Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

As I continue to have my thinking cap on regarding cloud computing for the enterprise, I’m trying to come up with the different “pins” that will need to get knocked down for real enterprise adoption. I was turned on to a post on ElasticVapor on a cloud computing interoperability effort via a CNET post. The basic tenant of the article is that in order for enterprise to get really excited about moving applications/data into the cloud that they will have to be able to easily port data between different cloud computing providers’ systems.

Since my relatively dense previous post on cloud computing adoption and the enterprise wasn’t all that well loved by this blog’s readership base, I thought I’d post another… Read the rest of this entry »

In how to choose the right business idea, I introduced the concept of the Idea Funnel.  Like me, you could use the idea funnel to narrow down a bunch of startup business ideas into few viable ones. I talked about stage 1 of the due diligence process, namely, “Is the idea viable?”. In this post, I will present the second and final stage, namely, “Can I execute on it?”. 

Stage 2: Can I execute on the business idea?

In stage 2, you are focused on things that you need to successfully take your business idea to the market. Here are the few things you need to have:

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I gave a talk on “Starting a Business upon Graduation”  to a group of Harvard Business School students. In addition to sharing my experiences in starting Pixily right after graduating from Wharton, I shared my approach on how one should zero in on a viable business idea. 

I approach the idea development process similar to how one approaches sales leads within a sales funnel (see below). I start of with a number of rough business ideas and put each idea through the due diligence funnel. Some make it through the funnel and some don’t. Ideas that make it through the funnel are more viable and have a higher chance of being successful.

Read the rest of this entry »

Is the US ecommerce market nearing its long term penetration rate, as a percentage of total retail sales? ComScore recently released data indicating that ecommerce retail sales in the US grew by only 6% in Q3 2008, a meaningful dip from the growth rates seen earlier in the year and much lower than previous years’ growth. Additionally, Q2 data from the US Census seems to show that retail ecommerce in the US has flattened out at about 4% of the US retail sales total. (next graph is from the US Census pdf linked above.) 

Some additional figures you might find scary (ComScore is source, again) Q3 2007 Year over Year online retail sales growth was 21%, vs the 6% Q3 quarter 2008.

Are we nearing a peak? Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday MSFT announced their new cloud computing service, “Windows Azure.” I’m not going to get into detail here on it because it has clearly been beaten to death by much more talented writers, and I’m also a day 

late to the party. However, given the recurring theme on this blog about cloud computing I feel the need to comment. I believe that the Microsoft cloud computing heralds the enterprise’s acceptance of the cloud – and that is big.

My prediction is that enterprises will dip their toes into the cloud by taking advantage of the cloud’s compute power, putting computationally intensive crunching into the cloud first. Likely this will be non-core or lower sensitive data in a non-mission critical process. As SLAs are better understood and security is, well more secure, other things like backup and redundancy will likely scoot towards the cloud. Eventually we’ll get full blown enterprise applications in the cloud. 

Here is a good post on the MSFT cloud effort if you want to learn more.

Your startup can survive this recession. The stock market might be crap and financiers may be pissing themselves with fear, but other entrepreneurs before you have fought through these tough times and had tremendous success. In the light of depressing powerpoint presentations on the state of the market created by some venture firms, I thought I’d highlight companies that you may have heard of that got going when the economy was hurting.*

The Late 1930′s – Europe is at war and the US economy is limping through the Great Depression. Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett conduct some experiments in a garage in Palo Alto… and in January 1, 1939 formally launch the Hewlett-Packard Company. Yes, that’s right. The cornerstone corporation of Silicon Valley was founded during the Great Depression.

Early 1980′s – Read the rest of this entry »

You probably read quite a few articles on how to answer this question. You have heard extreme things like, “your idea is not worth anything unless you implement it” and “this is how you calculate the true value of your idea”. Well, I am not going to spend anytime addressing this question from that perspective. Instead, I want to share my thoughts on what I think an idea is worth during a firm’s lifetime. I believe the value of an idea diminishes as time passes and instead, is replaced by the value of its execution.

Day 1: Firm’s value = The idea’s value

On day one, all of you have is the idea. You do not have a product, customers, revenues and of course profits. Most likely, you don’t have a team either. The firm’s value is same as the value of your idea. It could be $0, $1000, or a $1,000,000. Whatever that number is, your firm’s entire value is the number.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is just a quick post to let startups who are using Amazon’s web services know about “AWS Startup Tour.” Amazon’s web services team is on the road meeting with startup CEOs this month, and will be in Boston on September 22nd. I think, besides me, several other venture capitalists will be there as well.

Prasad has posted on the cloud computing revolution and how it is enabling a new wave of startup innovation. As the cost of launching a new business drops we are seeing some very interesting web-based companies that would not have been possible just a few short years ago. AWS seems to be dominating the startup cloud services market. Here is a great chance for startup CEOs and CTOs to interact with the team behind AWS. I’ll be there and I hope you are too!

Pixily presented at last night’s Web Innovators Group meeting and walked away with the Audience Choice Award. Congratulations to Prasad and the team for the great showing! Pixily is on a roll…

I’ve continued to play with Chrome and think about its implications, as any good* venture capitalist would do, and I’m starting to wonder if the real target for Chrome is Apple, not Microsoft. Stick with me for a second while I brainstorm on this (we are in the trust tree here, so I’m thinking while posting, always a dangerous thing…)

There has been a remarkable change in many of the Web 2.0 presentations that I have seen recently vs. those that I saw a year ago. One year ago, startups presentations to VCs had a bullet that said “Mobile strategy, blah blah.” In other words, the startup CEOs recognized that mobile was going to be a real part of their company’s product and marketing strategy, but were only at the articulation stage. All that has changed. Mobile demos are now a regular and important part of the VC pitch, and startup founders are spending just as much time showcasing their working mobile applications as they are demonstrating their pure web based product. Read the rest of this entry »