Bickel Business Review 2012

To try to keep my streak alive (2011, 2010, 2009), here is the latest installment on what I was up to during 2012.  And as foretold in those earlier posts, the focus continues to be in the Cloud!

While there were a number of important steps forward in all of the businesses I am involved in, there was one major change worth talking about up front.  I sold my half of the Moorestown Running Company to my partner, Dave Welsh, in November.  As I said earlier, this is a very good thing for Dave, the store, the employees and our customers.  I'm really happy that the store has accomplished all of the goals we set out for it nearly 6 years ago listed on the right.  And Joe, Ralph, Ed, Colleen and Dave will ensure it keeps going strong into the future!

One of the reasons for selling the store was that I was not spending the amount of time and effort on it as I thought I would 6 years ago.  In 2012, a big reason for my distraction was RunSignUp.  We started this Cloud Service up in 2010 and this was a very big year.  The number of races, clubs, race directors, timers and runners using it grew about 3.5X 2011 (of course fast growth is easier when you are small), and it looks like we are going to continue on that path moving into 2013.

The biggest impact of the year at RunSignUp is having Stephen Sigwart back full time after his graduation with his Masters in Comp Sci this past spring.  He is truly brilliant as witnessed by the recent completion of our Scalability and Availability project where he hardened our Cloud Service to handle 50,000 registrations in 7 minutes. The team also includes Andrew Burke, Jordan Desilets, Erik Ramstad, Jeff Keisel, Andrew Sigwart, Eric Hagman, Brian Robinson Sue Lindeboom and Billy Connolly.  Take a look at the number of innovations we have brought to market in 2012 on www.facebook.com/runsignup or runsignup.wordpress.com/. Dozens of really cool things like an Open API, advanced Results, comprehensive participant management, mobile timing app, new easy to use User Interfaces and much more.  We are positioned well to grow and serve our customers - who seem to love what we are doing for them!

Metaverse has gone thru some big changes this year.  Two of the founders, Doug and George, have moved on to new endeavors after nearly 10 years of effort.  The good news is that Tom Novellino, who came to the company several years ago as the CFO and was promoted to the COO is now the CEO.  The team is refocusing on the core e-commerce business and implementing a number of projects that are bringing some good profitability to the company.  The big lesson that I have learned here is that while Google Adwords continues to compress profits (since companies bid against each other until there is no margin), there are a number of business basics that are the keys to running any business - all centered around making customers happy.

eXo is in the process of spinning off the fast growing Cloud-IDE business, and refocusing the rest of the company on the base Platform business.  This will make sure that each business is able to reach the maximum value by focusing on particular markets.  Watch for the news in early 2013.

CloudBees had a marvelous year.  The management team has been together for most of the year and the business is really maturing.  Again, it is small, but seeing growth of nearly 4X was impressive proof that the company is heading in the right direction (complete, Open Java PaaS).

I'll conclude with the observation that the Cloud has become the mainstream.  In November I made a trip to the Amazon Web Services Conference.  Each day Amazon the amount of compute power it used in total as a business in 2003 when it did $5B in sales.  In several years Amazon will be adding more compute power than HP or IBM will ship to all of their enterprise customers. At RunSignUp we were able to use hundreds of servers for tens of dollars to test our scalability.  The advantages are truly incredible and are enabling a whole new generation of applications and exciting new businesses.  I'm lucky to be able to experience this special time!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ringside Winding Down

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...
Read more

Capitalism vs. the Three Legged Stool

Image
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...
Read more

Galbraith Revisited

Image
To follow up on my post from a while ago, Galbraith sited 5 key reasons for the 1929 crash and following depression: 1. The bad distribution of income. 2. The bad corporate structure. 3. The bad banking structure. 4. The dubious state of the foreign balance. 5. The poor state of economic intelligence. To compare this to today: 1. Bad income distribution. 1929 - Top 5% received about 33% of all personal income. 1929 - Top 1% held 44% of all wealth. 2000 - Top 1% received about 20% of all personal income. 2004 - Top 1% held 34% of all wealth. Here is a picture of the real income gains between 1979 and 2005 by percentage. It is clear that the top income groups are gaining ground faster than lower income groups - creating an income distribution that approaches 1929. 2. Bad corporate structure. In the 1929 era there had been a large rise in a "vast structure of holding companies and investment trusts... In particular the dividends from the operating companies paid the interest on t...
Read more