A year ago, a group of us met in a pizza parlor to discuss how we could bring the social web to every website and business. In January, we launched Ringside Networks with seed funding from Matrix Partners, one of the best VC firms in the country. By the end of March we released into open source an initial beta of our Social Application Server – a very ambitious project. We got some very positive reviews on our approach, our implementation and the need in the marketplace for every website to become social. We were ready for our Series A round of funding, and in late May we received a number of term sheet offers from the very best VC firms. As we were about to finalize our funding, one of the biggest non-evil Internet companies asked if we would have interest in being acquired instead. After a lot of thought and debate, we decided that the larger company would enable us to get our technology to market sooner and with more impact. The story sounds almost too good to be true. And it w...
Wikipedia defines: " Capitalism is an economic system in which trade, industry and the means of production are controlled by private owners with the goal of making profits in a market economy ." This definition has always bothered me. I prefer a different model where there is equal recognition of the three primary drivers behind the success of a company: Owners Employees Customers I like to think of it as a three legged stool, where each leg is as important as the other. One gets too large or small and the stool tips over. The free market is supposed to take care of Employees and Customers. Employees because the Owners will create so many jobs that due to supply and demand, employees will receive competitive pay. Customers because if the owners are not building the right thing, then they can go elsewhere. As someone who has helped to build about 10 startup companies now, I have seen the power in mak...
Launchable announced today that Kohsuke Kawaguchi is a co-founding member along with Harpreet Singh. Why is this important? Well obviously because of two things - Kohsuke and how their company will improve DevOps with a new era of testing. Why is Kohsuke Important? In short, because of a proven background of creating a massively used technology, in an open and inclusive platform and community, and has done so in a humble manner. Kohsuke created Jenkins (then Hudson) while he was a developer at Sun. He saw a chance to have software serve his need of doing continuous integration - automating the cumbersome build-test-deploy cycle. He soon realized it could be used by his colleagues and the rise of Jenkins began. In December, 2019, there were 264,000 locations with 992,000 nodes running Jenkins, running 32,870,000 jobs. Take a look at t he Jenkins statistics page to see the up and to the right trends that Kohsuke started 15 years ago. So Kohsuke might have gotten luck...
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