Thoughts on the Trunkclub Acquisition

August 2, 2014

Trunkclub being acquired by Nordstrom is proof that life as a service is a growing concept. — Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) August 4, 2014 I started using Trunkclub for my clothes last year and have loved the experience. Last week Trunkclub was acquired by Nordstrom. It is a fantastic service. They assigned me a stylist. Her […]

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Transition Plan to Move ArrayFire to Open Source

August 1, 2014

I have written many times before about moving from closed source to open source. With my announcement yesterday in mind, tonight I share thoughts on how we will make the transition (written on my phone from a campsite in the woods). The main goal of the transitionary period is to build a curated community. Open […]

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The Decision To Open Source ArrayFire

July 31, 2014

We have decided to open source ArrayFire, our primary commercial product. We are confident this decision will result in better outcomes for our customers, free users, and our entire market. Our current market is rife with mediocre GPU and accelerator software tools that merely get airtime because they are open sourced. ArrayFire is hands down better […]

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Network Effects of Open Source Software

July 30, 2014

Fred Wilson put up a great post today articulating the investment thesis behind social networks. He makes the case that investing in vanilla software companies is lame. They are not defensible. However, investing in companies with social networks is hugely defensible and immensely valuable. These same mechanics are driving our thinking around open sourcing our […]

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Joy in the Journey

July 29, 2014

I ran across a post by Jason Cohen today that says the only way to guarantee startup success it to have joy in the journey. By all financial measures, it is very possible that you could pay yourself meagerly for 5 years like we did and end up closing down the company. It happens frequently […]

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An Engineering Hiring Dilemma We Face

July 28, 2014

Many firms in our space only hire bright engineers and do not hire sales or marketing people. In practice, what happens is that some of the engineers over time naturally migrate into a sales, marketing, or business development role. And since they started out as engineers, they are better able to sell to other technical […]

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$10,000 per employee per month

July 27, 2014

The $10,000 per month per employee budget rule has been so accurate for us. — Danielle Morrill (@DanielleMorrill) July 26, 2014 Estimating a business expenses for a startup is hard. I have long used the back of the envelope rule of thumb that our expenses are roughly $10,000 per employee per month. So it was […]

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Looking for a Battery Engineer

July 26, 2014

One of the biggest bottlenecks to our plans for Brinktop is the need to build an interface to the battery. There is no standard laptop battery, so we need someone that can take existing batteries and build the electronic interface so that we can turn on the battery and send it the appropriate control signals. […]

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Is Hardware Hard?

July 25, 2014

With Brinktop under way, I have been thinking about the debate, “Is hardware hard?” Two opposing views exist as articulated by two famous investors: Chris Dixon says, “Hardware is the new software.” Marc Andreessen says, “Hardware is named that for a reason; it is haaaaarrrrd.” There are certainly costs for tooling and manufacturing that I […]

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Sell To The Person People Wish They Were

July 23, 2014

I was recently with a group of successful entrepreneurs and someone made the statement, “You should sell to the person people wish they were.” That hit home for me. In our recent re-branding effort, one of our main thoughts was that we wanted to make it fun. So many of the environments where our customers […]

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