On Being First To Market Versus Following

September 24, 2014

Is it best to be first to market with an idea? Or is it best to be a follower in a market? Let’s explore a few commonly discussed items about being first to market (FTM) versus being a follower: Where Being FTM is Bad FTM spends a tremendous amount of money educating the market; followers do not […]

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Variable Compensation

September 23, 2014

One of the areas entrepreneurs always are trying to improve is the way in which they compensate their people. The goal is often to align compensation to incentivize behaviors that grow and improve the startup. Often this is done through variable compensation. For instance, sales people are often commission based so that the salespeople that […]

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Hazelcast Raises $11 Million

September 22, 2014

A few days ago, Hazelcast raised $11 million. This is interesting to me because Hazelcast is pursuing a similar open source business model like the one we are transitioning to at ArrayFire. Hazelcast maintains a leading open source in-memory data grid. It enables high-speed NoSQL. Like ArrayFire, it is a commercially maintained open source project […]

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State of the Art of Computer Vision

September 21, 2014

I have written before about computer vision and machine learning and the boom number of applications (some of them scary) that are emerging in this area. This week my co-founder James Malcolm pointed out an article on the Google Research blog that talks about the state of the art in computer vision. Here some takeaway points: […]

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Tech Entrepreneurs Should Learn Programming Languages

September 20, 2014

I recently saw a tweet by Mark Harris that pointed out GitHut, a small site that visually presents the popular programming languages used on Github. The programming languages towards the top of that list tend to be the most useful to learn. One of my favorite things to tell young people is to start learning to […]

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Thoughts on James Altucher’s Leadership Lessons

September 19, 2014

James Altucher has a popular post today on leadership. I follow his writing. He is often eccentric and weird to read. But this post is a gem. Here are my favorite parts of the post: I totally agree with him that the most important part about leadership is caring more about other people’s success than […]

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Mobile CPUs Speedups Are Getting Harder to Come By

September 17, 2014

Marco Arment posted a chart of the historical benchmarks performed on Apple devices. He appropriately asks, “Anyone else find the A8 step in this graph a bit sad? The party might be ending for mobile CPU advancements just like it did for PCs a few years ago.”   This same chart occurred in desktop and server […]

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Startup Transparency

September 16, 2014

I am always interested about the topic of transparency in startups and management of teams. How much information is shared among team members? Are revenue metrics shared? Are cost metrics shared? Are employee salaries shared? There are examples of all of the above in startups I know. Some are on the extreme end of transparency […]

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Commercialization Options for Addons to a Core Open Source Project

September 15, 2014

After reading more about Eucalyptus, I have thought about their deliberations regarding providing a “core” open source product while retaining proprietary addons to sell. At ArrayFire, we have decided to open source everything we have, without restriction of any sort. We are consciously deciding to be as fully open as we can possibly be. This decision […]

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Shaking the Career Pull of Big Brand Institutions

September 14, 2014

An alternative title for this post could have been, “Doing Startups > Doing Google, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Harvard MBA, Grad School, Academia.” I spoke with an aspiring entrepreneur today who is currently pursuing a PhD at Georgia Tech. The conversation with him reminded me of my own progression towards becoming an entrepreneur. I love what […]

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