Bickel Blog

I’ve submitted my absentee ballot voting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Election. As I did in  2012 , I am giving my reasons in case it helps others make their own decisions. Here are my key reasons: Life long commitment to making the world a better place Investing in major world changes Agree with her Policies and Proposals I like smart people who work hard Making the World a Better Place This is probably what inspires me the most about Hillary – she has had a lifelong commitment to making the world a better place. This video is her commencement speech at Wellesley College.  She was the first student commencement speaker in the college’s history, and you can see from the President’s introduction the amount of respect she had garnered in her 4 years there. Her speech also shows the core values she was thinking about then, and now. From her early days she has pushed forward to be in positions of larger and larger impact. While most of us are satis...

After my Great Grandfather Lou established our family cabin , My Grandma and Grandpa (born in 1900), Frank and Mary inherited it. They also lived in West Virginia and would make the long trip up in the summer with their children Bob (my Dad) and Barbara (my Aunt, who has since passed away at a way too early age). Grandpa, Dad, Grandma, Barbara My Dad took my Mom up when they were dating in high school. Mom & Dad My Mom and Dad would take us up as kids. This was a very important influence on me.  The anticipation of going to Canada each summer - making the two day trip - my parents letting me out of the car a couple hundred meters before the cabin so I could run ahead of the car - helping Grandma pick blueberries and make pies - helping Grandpa fill the generators to pump water or light the house each night - family fishing/picnic trips "down the lake" - quiet hours doing nothing but waiting for the fish to be ready with my line in the water next to my Grandpa ...

Bickel cabin in the fall My parents are in the process of handing the family cabin over to my sister and me this summer. We went up this past week to plan an addition and some updates. I took a bunch of pictures of the pictures that were hanging in the cabin, and wanted to post them in phases. This is Post 1. You can also see Post 2 . My Dad wrote up this history of the Bickel (now Bickel-Cross) Cabin: "My father, Frank, and his father Louis P. Bickel, went up in 1937, for a stag party organized by Glen Law, a wrestling coach at Marietta H.S. and Illinois. He was at Marietta when Al Rupp senior was the principal. My father and granddad had a connection to Glen thru Glen's relatives in the Oil and Gas business in WV. Granddad was starting to retire, loved the area, walked around the bay, chose our little bay, and bought the land from Al. Bickel Land Purchase Al went there in 1930 to visit friends from Ohio Wesleyan in the town north of Columbus. The Ohio Wesle...

There are some exciting things happening in the Jenkins community and at CloudBees. The first thing is that Kohsuke Kawaguchi has announced the start of the Jenkins 2.0 Roadmap :  " Jenkins is over 10 years old, and it came quite a long way. I still remember the first few plugins that I wrote by myself, and now we have close to 1100 plugins. What's started as a hobby project that had run under my desk today boasts more than 100K installations driving half a million-ish build machines. . . . So I propose we do Jenkins 2.0 to fix this. There are three important goals that I see in Jenkins 2.0. We need to claim our rightful place in Continuous Delivery. We have lots of pieces that address these modern needs, but we are not communicating this very well. We need to revisit out of the box experience, so that Jenkins itself speaks that story and makes it clear what we are aiming for. Our software needs to speak for itself and tell people where we are going, so that...

This notion has been stewing in me for quite a while, and yesterday Paul Krugman wrote an article about this topic of Patrimonial Capitalism . " ...the political spectrum now instinctively accords much more respect to capital than to labor, at a time when capital income is growing ever more concentrated in a few hands — and is surely on its way to being concentrated largely in the hands of people who inherited their wealth." This is somewhat related to my earlier post of how I wish things were - with a balance between owners, employees and customers - called Capitalism and the Three Legged Stool . In Krugman's article, the basic premise is that since wealth and income are concentrated increasingly in fewer people's hands, the society at large is dependent on the patrimony, or direction, of the 1% (or maybe the .1%).  Decisions like Citizens United help to reconfirm this, as those with large wealth can now invest to shape the government. These topics have b...

I finally had a moment to figure out the Whatsapp business model. First year is free and then $0.99 per year thereafter . With 400 Million users, that is about $400M in revenue per year (or per next year).  They do 18 Billion messages per day. Using Amazon AWS SQS or SNS pricing of $0.50 per Million, that is $9,000 per day of approximate cost, or about $4M of costs per year. I know that is probably a bit light because I am not including data transfer costs of about a Nickel/GB.  For employee costs, they had about 60 people at an average fully burdened load of $200K is about $11M. The big cost for WhatsApp are the Apple and Android Store transaction fees of 30% - about $120M. So, a net income (next) year of ~$260M.  Put that net at a 73X P/E ratio and it gets you to the $19B valuation.  Comparatively: IBM has a PE of 12 Red Hat has a PE of 64 Facebook has a PE of 112 Amazon has a PE of 580. Of course it positions Facebook well to address some challen...

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...