The Eat24 food delivery weekly emails to customers are quite funny and so is their blog. Worth reading.
How to Advertise on Porn Site
http://blog.eat24hours.com/how-to-advertise-on-a-porn-website/
Why they stopped spending money on Facebook
http://blog.eat24hours.com/breakup-letter-to-facebook-from-eat24/
There is a common myth that for super large scale companies it makes sense to build their own data center instead of using a public cloud.
In many cases I believe this is exactly the opposite. For many companies, time to market, focus and top line are more critical than a theoretical saving 20% on the cost.
The Killing , Wikipedia
Consider Netflix and Zynga. Both companies are large and smart enough to build their own private clouds.
Zynga chose to leave AWS and build their own cloud infrastructure. Netflix chose to stay on AWS, probably with a huge discount.
Their stock price might hint on which company made the right choice.
Netflix Vs Zynga
Netflix focused the company’s energy on moving from a tech company into a movie production studio with shows like “House of Cards” , “Arrested Development”,”The Killing” and “Orange is the new Black”. Zynga was busy in becoming a data center company. Instead of focusing on social games and preparing for the next big change into Mobile.
The more generic point is that the bottleneck in most companies is a person. More specifically, it is management attention. If everyone is busy in building a private cloud and purchasing 1000’s of servers, no one has time to create a new business line.
The thought is that a private cloud becomes attractive with huge scale because the number of devops people to write software has an upper bound.
This might be true, but there are very few people in the world who have already done it, and hiring takes a lot of time.
The other option is to hire inexperienced people, at least on this scale, and they would make mistakes.
Companies like Netflix and Zynga are supposed to have 70-90% gross margin. Reducing cost of hardware from 20% to 15% is nice, but even that is not straight forward. And in any case, it is much less important than losing or creating a new $1B on the revenue side.
The list does not imply any conclusions in either direction. Some of the people below may not even think of themselves as “Jews”, but I still thought it was interesting and maybe inspiring as well.
I left out many famous Israeli Jews in Hi-Tech , as the list would be much longer. The names appear in no particular order. Strangely, the best sources were either Jewish journals or horrible anti-Semitic web sites.
Sergey Brin, Wikipedia
Mark Zukckerberg, Wikipedia
Larry Page, Wikipedia
Steve Balmer, Wikipedia
Zionism in the Negev
During the last two years I had the pleasure of participating in a team that built a new engineering center for EMC in Beer Sheva.
Beer Sheva is only 116.5 kilometers from Tel Aviv, but had five Hi-Tech companies , compared with around 3,000 in the greater tel Aviv area.
The beginning was not easy. There are 500 graduates from Ben Gurion University who are potential software developers. However, because of the lack of employment, many relocate to Tel Aviv after graduation.
Excellent software developers are a rare resource, As I once wrote, great international software products are developed only in five countries out of 196 .
The Beginning
This was a Catch-22 problem. Without potential employees, there are no Hi-Tech companies and without Hi-Tech companies there would be no employees.
To break this cycle, EMC and the Israeli government have decided to create a plan to change the momentum . The idea is to create a great innovation center, that would allow smart, motivated employees to generate a great product in the south of Israel.
Temporary Office
There were quite a few challenges to deal with :
* Lack of the common infrastructure that exists in the center of Israel.For example, recruiting companies, IT professionals, catering services a training.
* Missile attacks 😦 . We had probably one of the very few software development centers in the world that had a missile attack targeted at their city every 4-6 months.
An interesting anecdote is that our employees actually felt they have the best physical security in all of the global offices.
* A relatively small pool of mid level and senior level managers.
First Aid Training
The reason for success lies first and for most in the great employees we recruited and the support of the University, the local Mayor and EMC headquarters.
The employees in Beer Sheva created a great sense of community and belonging from the very beginning.
Employees
Our strategy , unlike previous “outsourcing” concepts, was to treat the center equally to the main office in “Herzelia“.
We offered the same high profile projects and set the same high bar for recruiting, but also offered similar compensation.
The results were wonderful : an amazing acceptance rate for job offers, very fast recruiting and motivated top talent showing fast results.
With the assistance of local community leaders were able to promote a Hi-Tech environment around us as well:
* Multiple research projects with Ben Gurion University, focused on Big Data, Storage and High-End Performance
* First “Start-Up” weekend in Beer Sheva
* “Software in the Negev” meetup group
* Consulting and contribution to MOD move to the south os Israel
At the professional level we focused on few domains:
* High Availability
* Flash Technology and Products
* Data Science and machine learning
* Applied Research in High Performance storage
It was important to focus on few areas, on one hand, and create some diversity on the other hand.
After two years the center has far exceeded it’s original goals in capacity and quality.
It is a core anchor to the Hi-Tech in the south. On July it would be moving to the first company new Hi-Tech park.
The first building has been sold out , and has completely modern “Herzelia\Palo Alto” level of facilities.
I’m moving to a new adventure about 16,000 miles away ,but will keep watching as Maya,Orna,Niva, Oz, Nir and the rest of the team make it much better, bigger and successful!
It was one of the most enjoyable projects I worked in and I’m very proud to have been part of the great team of people.
Beer Sheva Leaders
The Israel based Genome Compiler received $233,451 in Kickstarter to create plants that glow in the dark.
Glowing Plants
Check out this for more information and in popular science magazine.
Pretty cool !
DNA sequencing and engineering is going to change what we are able to do , in multiple ways.
The fastest DNA Sequencer would soon cost under $1000 and plugs into USB…. you probably don’t even need USB 3.0
Sometimes I feel like a character in a Dilbert cartoon. Why would a very senior, smart executive, who is Not a functional idiot make an obviously senseless choice?
Here are few examples
Food for thought
“A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.”
― Thomas Paine
One of the most dangerous leaders to have in a company is the unaccountable #2.
UNANT, for short , is usually a former founder, or a top executive, who is still involved in the company, but has no direct reports, or clear accountability for a specific business line.
It can be the CTO, chief strategy officer,the vice chairman or any other obscure title.
Because of his seniority,status and experience the UNANT advises are actually considered decisions.
Unlike other managers, his decisions don’t have to be backed by budgets or organizational support , as he is not the one executing them or responsible for the outcome. It also makes life hard for the rest of the team. Who wants to contradict a member of the board?
Name this #2
In many cases, the lack of accountability , while the authority exists, makes it hard to distinguish “decisions” from “opinion”.
The UNANT tends use annoying stories from 20 years ago to show he is right (=everyone else is wrong ).
“What’s so hard? We wrote version Three in two hours, we only had a broken typewriter , one chair for four people and we sold 50,000 copies in three days.”
The UNANT also comes up with original ideas like “If every developer puts an extra hour a day on cleaning the office we can fire our cleaners and save lots of money”
The only worst organizational type is the unaccountable #2 spin master .He actually has direct reports and theoretical responsibility , but manages to never pay the price for his decisions. His direct reports are usually being replaced 🙂
Here is a story. I’m sitting in a room with an extremely intelligent person. Our new VP of product marketing – Mr Y. He has an MBA from one of the finest universities in the world ,a track record as a C level executive in a Fortune 100 company. He is articulate and presents an amazing vision for the future of our company. Moreover, he defines concrete examples how we will be using social media and go beyond traditional enterprise marketing. I’m quite impressed. Finally, we have someone in marketing who knows what he is talking about.
One month later, Mr Y Speaks in an executive forum. He repeats exactly the same story with the same social media example and same jokes. I’m getting a bit suspicious , but as the great Jack Welch said – communicating your message is one of the top leadership roles. So, I give Mr Y the credit that he is talking to a new audience.
Two months later, Mer Y is already working with us for four months. We are in a customer conference. The same exact story, word by word 😦 . Two months later he was not working with us anymore …
He is probably a “Type A” functional idiot.
I recently learned the term “Functional Idiot” which I really like. Unfortunately it is not well-defined, yet. The Urban Dictionary definition for “Functional Idiot” is :
A person who suffers from functional idiocy.
Which does not help much. However, almost everyone seems to “Get It”, so they must have worked with some.
Let’s say you are walking around the office and you spot a “Functional Idiot” make a stupid decision. Let me provide you with tools to rationalize it.
Here is a second story. In a board meeting, you realize one of your board members (Let’s call him Prisoner X) suggests the company should release a “simple self-service” version of your costly, sophisticated enterprise product. This could have been a great suggestion. But we already did it six months ago and discussed it multiple times with him.
The challenge is that Prisoner X is quite smart and has a very good track record in the industry. How can we explain the fact he get’s $40K$ a month ,but is not able to remember the main products of his four companies?
Prisoner X is probably a type B functional idiot. He is very smart in the big picture and in identifying opportunities, but he is very bad in operational work and following details.
Type C functional idiots are easier to spot. You would usually find them in the CTO office, they have the word “Strategy” in their title. in a recent example I was observing a very long thread on the pros and cons of C vs C++. The heated discussions was taking place in 2012 by people with an amazing track record in the high-tech industry history. And it was a very interesting discussion to have. In 1996.
To conclude,It is essential to identify functional idiots and tell them apart. Otherwise we are all doomed 🙂
Green Robot – Tomo Hotel,
Snowy Boston
Apple Store,Stanford Mall
Empty Windows Store,Stanford Mall
San Francisco, Fillmore and Broadway
Granola in Boston
The hardest thing to understand in the world is the income tax.
Albert Einstein
As a manager, there are three domains which I try to avoid as much as I can.
Taxes, Intellectual Property and Real Estate.
They all seem to have an arbitrary logic, which is highly non intuitive, non useful, complex and out dated.
In many cases it seems they are controlled by people who make their living from making it more complex, rather than making it simple.
And the worst is when you get a combination of these domains in a business decision:
I understand that “Taxes and Death” are the only two certain things in life. I also understand that Intellectual property can provide big income for patent Trolls. I even realize that selling and buying real estate is a great way to become a rich daddy.
But I prefer to leave these to other people. Thank you very much 🙂
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Evil Fish 