Bickel Blog

I get pinged a couple of times per week by people about starting up a business.  Almost always the question is "How do I get funded". My common answer is take money when you don't need it, because that is the only time when people will want to give it to you. And don't take money when you need it, because people won't want to give it to you then. Why I was a Fan of VC Funding Here is an example story. In 1994 Bluestone had created a tool that made it easy to develop applications for the web that were driven from a database.  Today this is how all websites work, but it was the early days.  We were funding the development ourselves out of cash flow, and investors approached us - Bessemer actually gave us a term sheet. The founder declined.  Our competitors (Spider Technology, which became NetDynamics) got funding and we were forced to respond to match their higher levels of spending and go look for venture funds.  Of course when we did, our final term sheet...

We are developing some really great technology at RunSignUp.  So we are starting a separate company to bring some of the technology to market.  I'll be posting more about this later, but this is worth talking about now as it is in production and we have a number of people who have stumbled upon it and are using it. One of the things we developed was a   Zip Code API  (some people spell it Zipcode API ) .  We developed this API to provide a list of Zip Codes within a certain Radius.  We use this for the Running Club/Store widget for providing a list of races within a certain distance of a store or club.  We are also going to be updating our UI so runners can enter their zip code and we will fill in the City and State automatically. The  Zip Code API  provides the following functions: Distance Between Zip Code API  - The API allows you to quickly and easily figure out the distance between zip codes. Zip Codes in Radius API ...

I'm in Paris and Luxembourg for board meetings with eXo and Codenvy.  Also, Adobe just bought Neolane for $600M .  They are based in Paris and were funded by Auriga and Xange - the same VC's who are backing eXo and also have some ownership in Codenvy. (In fact the eXo board meeting had to end early so Phillippe and Nicolas could go finalize the closing of that deal). Several thoughts on this while I have a bit of time: Cloud is Big and Global.  Well, that is obvious these days.  But I find it interesting that Neolane will become "Adobe Marketing Cloud" and be headquartered in Paris. The distributed mode of operating a company is becoming more accepted. We've also seen at eXo, Codenvy and CloudBees that Europe is a strong early adopter of Cloud technology. Having a presence in Europe is becoming a strategic advantage and a good place for selling Cloud solutions. US Tax Avoidance.  It has been well publicized that US firms have a lot of cash overseas th...

There was a recent article in the New York Times about the record levels of carbon in the atmosphere.  This raises lots of thoughts in my mind and I wanted to get them down in writing. Unstoppable Growth in Carbon My first thought is this is unstoppable.  Carbon in the air will continue to increase.  The reason is not just powerful oil and coal lobbies.  It is the Rest of the World.  Even if the US gets as aggressive as progressive countries like Germany , it will not make a dent in the global carbon generation.  The US only uses 18% of global energy and the growth is coming from elsewhere. Economy Tops Morality The growth is bound to continue since economic growth is the key to power (pun intended) structures in the world.  Failing economies elect new leaders (or overthrow old ones).  So asking a country to cut back on cheap energy is a tough one.  And of course private industry is of course simply interested in the least expensiv...

We were so lucky to have Peter, Kesuma and Saingiore visit us from Tanzania last night.  Peter founded the Orkeeswa School  in a rural Maasai village.  My daughter, Allison, taught at the school last year.  It is an incredible place, filled with smart, enthusiastic students. The big discussion topic last night was people's rights in primary school (Orkeeswa is a Secondary School - only 7% of Tanzanians get to go to secondary school).  Kesuma holds the belief that it is OK for the teachers to cane students.  This is a very common practice in Tanzania, and reminded me of stories of my Catholic School friends.  It sounds a bit harsher and more frequent in Tanzania.  Kesuma believed that it was the right of the teacher, and it made the students do better. Saingiore held deep reservations about this practice.  He has started to help as a teacher in a primary school, and he does not use the stick.  He did say there was some peer pressur...

I am working with two other people on launching a new company in a couple of months.  I've been thinking a lot over the past several years on taking some of the lessons learned in open source and implementing them with a cloud based model.  We are going to try something that is a bit new... The Old Open Source Business Model.  Red Hat spawned the basic idea that most open source companies have used.  Come out with a great open source project that gets used by a lot of people.  Then develop some proprietary value-add, wrap a service layer with that and sell it as a subscription.  A percentage of the free users will find the value-add useful and pay you for it.   Freemium Model.  This is a slight deviation on the open source model.  Don't share the code, but offer up a free version with a for pay version with higher value and a service offering of support. Enter the Cloud.  So far the Cloud has been viewed as a simple exte...

I've long been a big proponent of open source - supporting it at companies like Bluestone, HP, JBoss, Hyperic, and Spring.  I still am as witnessed by some of the open source RunSignUp is contributing like our mobile timing app  and our Open API . However, there is an important shift happening with the emergence of cloud services.  The new idea has two parts when it comes to cloud middleware, or PaaS: Wiring together services to develop apps Portability across PaaS so you don't get locked in I wrote about this choice in 2011 and how CloudBees was going to approach it.  The graphic at the right is from that blog. CloudBees has been following this methodology, and had an important announcement with Cloud Foundry today.   As GigaOm put it: So you want to build your software in CloudBees but want to run it elsewhere? With new integration, you can put that application on Cloud Foundry (as well as Google App Engine.) This is the basic mantra of t...