Movin' to Chicago!

It has been a nearly-indescribably busy few months. A lot of exciting stuff going on at Apprenda with SaaSGrid; barcamp Albany 2011 at HVCC; and now, I am in the process of moving to Chicago for a WCF role with Redbox.

I have most definitely enjoyed working with the team at Apprenda -- to a person, they're the hardest working people in tech. Unfortunately the Client Services role I was in turned out to be waaaay more help desk type work than initially expected, and anyone who knows me, knows I'm not a help desk type guy. Even the desired consulting/implementation/architectural type work I was actually doing was, unfortunately, often ignored by clients and dev teams who had other priorities, like budgets and deadlines. ;)

A longtime friend of mine from Rochester has been living in Chicago about four years now himself, and had this Redbox opportunity come across his desk; it was something he thought I'd be a great fit for, and taking a look, I had to agree. After a phone interview week before last with two of the team members, Redbox made an offer. I will be joining the fairly new Platform Services team: 100% WCF, and NO, I repeat NO, GUI work! Platform Services supports the entire enterprise, and I understand we will be playing a large part in the upcoming streaming and digital distribution initiative that Redbox has been talking about for some time.

Yes, I recognize that Redbox is something of an underdog, and will have to come from behind in establishing a streaming offering that can compete with Netflix. I'm happy to be a part of that, and excited to see what challenges lay ahead. I think it's an exciting space to be in, and will enjoy working for a talked-about consumer brand.

I believe Apprenda is on the right track to a successful exit, and I wish them luck -- though they hardly need it, they're the kind of team to make their own luck. Thanks for a great year guys!

My turn! 2009 wrap-up

WHAT A YEAR!

First few months of 2009 were pretty ho-hum. Then I unexpectedly lost my fulltime contracting role at the end of May. A week later, I had work on Times Square's biggest, coolest electronic billboard. My consulting work has BOOMED since! Overwhelmingly so! I've gone from nearly a fulltime coder to 25% management 25% sales 25% architect and 25% coder. It's good to grow ... but there are almost always unavoidable growing pains! Great learning experiences however. I miss the days of 100% geeking out a bit, but everyone's gotta move on and experience new things!

Had some family drama. Wish it hadn't happened. Wish I could ignore it. Unfortunately those things simply aren't true. Life happens. Life goes on.

December came in like a lamb and is going out like a lion! Just this week, I considered an offer from Blackbaud Inc. to join their team as a .NET Solution Architect. While I _love_ Blackbaud and the work they do, unfortunately their start date needs were a bit incompatible with my current set of consulting obligations. Today, however, I accepted an offer from Apprenda, Inc., a local .NET startup, creators of SaaSGrid, to come on-board as their Senior Client Services Engineer. VP Matt Ammerman and I will be building out the Client Services unit, working to ensure the best possible customer experience for our clients! The role will be ~50% code, with the rest of the time spent traveling on-site, including internationally, to help clients get off the ground or resolve persistent issues, doing project scope and planning, as well as architecture, type work.

Finally, best of all, I am, after years of hiding in my cave and burying myself in work, in a relationship with a pretty awesome woman. Thanks for being the frosting on the cake of my 2009! Onward to bigger and better!

Apprenda closes $5M round

Congratulations to Tech Valley startup, creator of SaaSGrid, Apprenda, on closing a five million dollar ($5M USD) round of financing! Along with seed-round investor High Peak Ventures, Apprenda has brought New Enterprise Associates (NEA) on-board for some major VC firepower!

Apprenda is located about 15-20 minutes north of Albany, and uses some verrrrry cool .NET technology to automagically convert your single-tenant apps to multi-tenant without you having to change your code or data model. SaaSGrid also facilitates granular monetization of your offering.

Congrats Apprenda team!

Very Interesting SaaS Consulting CTO work

For about a month or so now I've been serving as consulting CTO for a stealth mode NYC startup in the SaaS/SCM/BI space. We've been researching and vetting a suite of products for integration as a SaaS offering. Lots of vendor phone calls, trial installs, conversations with industry leaders who really know their stuff.

My client has now inked some licensing paperwork. With the clock ticking on some expensive software licenses, it's time to move on to the rapid prototyping stage. We're looking at utilizing VPS (virtual private server) images -- perhaps "in the cloud" on EC2, perhaps at a more conventional datacenter -- to allow quick and flexible server provisioning as we explore the caveats of integrating these disparate architectures in varying configurations.

This prototype will serve multiple purposes: as stated above, we need to get to know the gotchas of operating and offering these products as a suite, as well as gain domain- and product-specific knowledge. We need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of various arrangements of the products and the supporting/surrounding infrastructure. The CEO of course needs something to put in front of potential investors and early clients.

I am really looking forward to this -- it's going to be a lot of fun. And, as always, a great learning experience.

re: Hank Williams' How Much Is an Idea Worth, and the Tech Market

Hank-

Replying to:

http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/10/what-is-idea-worth.html

and


http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/10/tech-market-failure-of-ideas-not.html

I believe what I said on-list was that success is "1% idea 90% team/connections 9% luck", and that 9% luck figure is important in putting context around my perspective.

A crappy CEO can take a crappy idea, and with a lot of luck hits 10%. 10% gets you prototyped, gets you seed funding, maybe gets you a Series A. It gets you users, it gets you news coverage, it gets you hype and buzz, but none of that constitutes success -- not in real world business terms.

Success is sustainable profitability. Success is a high-value exit. A brilliant CEO can take a crappy idea, mature it, and turn it into a hundreds of millions of dollars acquisition in under five years.

A crappy CEO can take a brilliant idea and get further than 10%, but a crappy CEO is going to result in a low-value exit, or is going to end up replaced, probably after a lot of pain and wasted investment.

The strongest indicator of success is the team, not the idea. Obviously, however, the right idea, a matured idea, a well thought through idea, carries more weight, vastly improves chances of success.

I think we're saying a lot of the same thing here, but I will insist that a subpar CEO can easily ruin the most brilliant, bound-for-success idea, whereas it's much more likely that a killer CEO can make a success out of a subpar idea, or one that needs massaging, maturation, etc. And yes, a slick CEO can BS their way to a limited degree of success -- but not sustainable success, which I think we're in agreement on. My definition of a killer CEO isn't the sales guy with the biggest shovel, but the one with the greatest ability to do the most with the least, make the right moves, and please stakeholders along the way.

"idea = 1%" isn't an exact figure, but it's highly demonstrative of proportionate value.

And yes, the market the past few years has made for some fat and lazy management teams and backers with a plethora of redundancy getting funded. That's inevitable, it happens with every peak. It's those who can stay lean and agile even in fat and happy times that will of course have the greatest chance of sustainable success over the long term.

--Andy Badera

Note: you can, and perhaps should, substitute "management team" or "founders" for "CEO" throughout this piece.

Back-and-forth: Microsoft's cloud data offering, SSDS

Quick, raise your hand if you're writing code using SQL Server Data Services right now.

How about, raise your hand if you've even heard of SSDS?

Microsoft's nearly-spanking-brand-new cloud data offering, SQL Server Data Services (SSDS) is a Google BigTable-like horizontally-structured data cloud, still in beta.

Horiztonally what? The basic data model is authorities, containers and entities. Using authorities, one is able to geographically distribute one's data -- not unlike Amazon's Availability Zones, and something Google App Engine and Google's BigTable betas don't yet offer.

Truly scalable web applications beg for this sort of backend. For a slight trade-off in latency, you have extremely affordable, dynamic, distributed capacity.

My friend Michael O'Neill over at crisatunity, one of those DBA guys, isn't a big fan of the data cloud model, at least not at the oustset of this conversation. We're going to have a blog back-and-forth on this topic over the next few weeks, as we both test out the beta, and I prepare for a couple of presentations for an upcoming Code Camp and local user group.

Not only do I come at this from a Developer (vs DBA) perspective, but this sort of service is the sort of thing that's helping drive down the cost of starting up a new business. As CTO of Change Round-Up, I believe cloud services offer us the ability to address a Top 50 retailer's peak transaction volumes, without having a lot of over-priced under-utilized in-house capacity.

I look forward to seeing where this conversation takes us, and if anyone's opinion on SSDS, or cloud services in general, is swayed.