dgildeh's blog

Today I rediscovered an old blog on The Death of the Business Founder by Ben Yoskovitz and as it tied in with some discussions I was having earlier this week with other start-up founders in London, I thought I'd add a few thoughts on this.

I am a Technical Founder. I started programing on a ZX Spectrum as a kid, grew up reading physics/technology books and magazines, studied Electronic Engineering and then went to work as an IT consultant at Accenture before founding SambaStream. And in my experience having the Technical background in the hi-tech/web/software industry gives you a major edge. Although not all Techies have the aptitude to learn the business side of things, for those of us who do, it does give you a HUGE advantage over the Business only founders who can't code, or understand the technology to the same detail.

I first noticed it in Accenture. As a technical consultant, most of us Techies never had a problem picking up spreadsheets and word documents to do Requirements Analysis or Test Scripts, but it didn't work the other way around for the Business Analyst Consultants. They couldn't learn as easily how to code or design complex systems, so as a result most of the business Analysts I know became Spreadsheet Monkies, building up soft skills that were very hard to sell after they left Accenture, at least compared to us Techies. It also meant that us Techies tended to be more valuable on projects, which resulted in us usually getting better, more interesting roles as we were more critical to the success of the project.

Then at SambaStream we had two Technical Founders and one non-Technical. While the two Technical Founders managed to find their roles quickly and were instrumental to building the product we sold, the non-Technical founder found it difficult to find their place and in a lot of cases became the aforementioned Spreadsheet Monkie, doing all the tasks we assigned him that in most cases we didn't want to do like testing (although there were other reasons for this too but that's a whole other story...). As a result, he struggled in 3 years to prove his value to us, because the two of us could always pick up what he was doing if needed, but he couldn't do the technical things we were doing. As a result when he finally left it was far less detrimental to the business than if one of us had left, because without us, nothing could be built or run to sell, but if needed we could also do the marketing and selling (which we ended up doing anyway) as these required soft skills we could more easily learn or at least 'hack' until we could afford to hire someone really good to take over.

I also have a friend who has really good business skills and experience, and a great idea. However he's been stuck for over 6 months now with the product on hold because he doesn't have a Technical co-founder for his start-up, which he needs to keep the product moving and also get investment. He's finally found one and things are starting to move again, but it's been frustrating, he even considered trying to learn to code at one point. Had it been the reverse situation, he could have picked up the development himself, while still networking for new co-founders and investment.

Another common problem I hear from Business Founders is how to work with technical people. When they don't have technical skills, it really is a black box to them, and Techies can sense this. This means Business Founders struggle to know what a good Developer is, or if they're building things in a way that will scale for your business, or worse if the Techies pulling a fast one on you (a particular concern for Business Founders using developers on ODesk and other offshore shops). And on the flip side some good coders, maybe with a hint of "coder-arrogance", may ignore the requests of the Business Founder because they assume they don't know what they're talking about.

And its stories like the one above and several other start-ups I've met this week which makes me feel really lucky to be a Technical Founder. While being a Techie has its downsides, I made mistakes at the beginning of SambaStream by focusing too much on the Tech/development and not on the Business side of things, or getting too involved in internal facing issues instead of external issues like market and customers, now that I've learnt from those mistakes I can see I have a huge advantage over Non-Technical Founders.

Now I'm at Alfresco about 80% of my time is spent on the Business side of things: strategy, hiring, marketing, sales, organisation, budgets, people etc. and while being too Techie can get me into trouble with the Engineers sometimes as I get involved in the details of How to build it, instead of sticking to What needs to be built (I can't help it, I'm a Geek at heart!) I appreciate the huge advantage it gives me in understanding at least how to work with Engineers, stop bad decisions if needed, and in a future venture, just build it myself without waiting from someone technical to join my team.

Also as I'm discovering with my recent hiring at Alfresco, for every 10 business-type people out there, there is only 1 decent Techie. We have a real shortage of Tech talent in this industry, and ultimately that makes people with Technical skills even more valuable than ever. In a competitive market, where Techies are few and are now moving into Business areas and learning methodologies like Lean Start-up, there is an argument that Business Founders are becoming less valuable to start-ups because while Techies can get their hands dirty across all areas of the business, the Business Founder has a significant gap. In the worst case you could end up like the two Business Founders the Winklevoss Twins who had to depend on and ultimately lose to Zuckerberg in creating their Social Network. Or like Eduardo Saverin who got forced out of Facebook while all the Technical Founders managed to stay on. And to prove my point, the Technical Founder Zuckerberg has acquired the business skills along the way to stay as CEO of Facebook even at it's present size.

But here's the thing, the best Founder Entrepreneurs are generalists, they're not the best developer in the world (I'm good, but I'm not as good as some people out there!), they're not the best marketer in the world, or best salesmen, but they have enough expertise in each of them to do them to a good enough level to move the business to the next phase where they can hire really good experts in each of these areas to take over. This means all Business Founders really should take the threat of their existence seriously if they want to get involved in early stage hi-tech/web/software start-ups, and at least learn the basics of coding and software development so they can get their hand's dirty should their Techie leave, or they need to recruit and work with Techies. If Mayor Bloomberg can learn to code at Codecadamy then surely you can!

The fact of the matter is it is easier to move from a Techie background to a Business Background as long as you have the right aptitude, but much harder to move the other way. If you're still young enough to choose courses/careers and want to Found a hi-tech/web/software start-up, I would strongly recommend you start learning to code, as a degree or internship, because you can always learn the Business skills later. If you are already a Business Founder, then I would be extremely paranoid until you move from the start-up phase to the company phase. The problem as some of my friends have seen, is that without money to hire, or even with, you're always reliant on your Technical Co-Founder to stick around, and if they don't, you're stuck up shit alley! So ultimately spend some time coding on Codecadamy to mitigate the risk of you being stuck or seeing your business getting beat by a Technical Founder like the Winklevoss Twins.

Yesterday I read (BBC News Article) that the UK Government is announcing a 'great' new program to get everyone back on the housing ladder again. This includes:

• Mortgages of up to 95% of the value of new homes to be offered with government underwriting part of the risk
• £400m public fund to help developers "unblock" stalled housing schemes
• Largest discounts for social tenants wanting to own their properties under right to buy
• More public sector land to be made available for building
• Planning obligations on stalled projects reviewed
• Up to £150m to help bring empty housing back into use

This for me reads Deja-Vu all over again. Wasn't it just 3 years ago the whole western markets crashed due to a debt crisis, started initially by government programs promising 'home ownership for everyone'?!

We need to dispel the myth that your home is your biggest investment. It isn't. It never was. If you ask any experienced property investor if their home is an investment, they'll tell you right away - it costs them money, it doesn't make them zip, so its NOT an investment. Some people have been lucky riding the appreciation wave, but buying something on the hope of appreciation only is speculative, its not investing. Real investors invest for cash-flow, not capital appreciation that can go up as well as down.

This has been going on for over 90 years in the US and UK, governments have pushed the idea of home ownership for everyone as the dream, pandering to our emotional desires. While it may win votes from unsophisticated voters that don't have much financial education, its essentially poured billions, maybe even trillions of dollars/pounds into an unproductive asset class - housing. And in the process it's created a debt culture, where people speculate on the appreciation of their home to re-mortgage and buy that nice flat screen TV they've been pining for instead of putting money into savings or real investments that make them, and the whole country, wealthier.

Policies like this show a complete lack of understanding of basic economics, complete ignorance about how we got to the financial crisis in 2008, and guess where the money's being lent from to support these policies - well a lot of its coming from the BRIC countries, particularly China. Our banker is now China, who's government don't have a home ownership for all policy, but have some of the highest cash saving rates in the world. We're effectively shipping all our cash over to China and living in their pocket.

Borrowing money isn't a bad thing if the country/person uses it to invest in productive assets - things that actually generate more wealth for everyone. But housing doesn't. The £550m+ that the government is putting forward to this is going to be squandered, our GDP will go down, we'll finally default on our even bigger loans to China, and we'll end up in an even worse position than 2008. That's the long term prediction if the government keeps pushing bad policies like this forwards.

Why not put that money into infrastructure projects that generate more business in the UK, by investing in our woefully inadequate education system so the next generation of kids can actually get jobs and start companies, or take that cash and put it into small business loans to help our businesses grow, increase our exports, increase the tax the government actually makes, and start paying off some of our debt before adding to it!

I'm currently in San Fransisco stopping for a few days to meet with a bunch of companies ahead of my talk next week at Alfresco DevCon in San Diego. It's great to be back and I've been meeting with loads of smart start-ups, entrepreneurs and companies that we may use or partner with for our own Cloud service at Alfresco launching later this year.

The thing that's struck me the most, is that the companies I was most impressed by, not just in their product and technology, but culture and point of view, were all originally founded or are run by great Engineers. I may be biased as I am myself an Electronic Engineer, but as I think about some of the stories recently about DropBox, Facebook, Google, Apple and other hot companies right now, they were all founded by great Engineers and Developers.

And this is why I think it matters. I'm a Cloud guy, I've shifted from Enterprise software on-premise (which I used to deliver in Accenture) to Cloud because this is where I believe the future of our industry lies. And for me Cloud is not just a new delivery channel for the same old software, but a way of creating way better products, that end users actually like, that solve their needs. The Cloud has democratised access to any software for any user, and IT is no longer the gatekeeper.

So in this new world order, the products themselves are becoming increasingly important. When a user can sign up for free or a 30 day trial, and will usually decide in the first 5 minutes if they're going to bother using the product or not, which ultimately determines if they're going to pay, the products become the marketing and the sales combined. Many of the cloud companies I met the past few days have one person who is the sales guy, and the rest is all engineering. And because the engineers focus on building great products, they don't need an Enterprise sales force to push their products into the organisation. Users are adopting their products and pushing them into Enterprises themselves.

And its affecting me and my choice of who to partner with. I've met really expensive companies where my meeting was with a proper Enterprise sales guy. They need to charge more to support the direct sales model, they need to sell to ultimately overcome the poor design of the product themselves. In fact I believe traditional Enterprise software companies have got away with sub-standard products because the sales people have effectively covered up all the holes as they push the products into the Enterprise. I even know this from SambaJAM, I had to sell to overcome the shortcomings of the early product.

On the opposite end, we have the other companies who you call up, and you speak to an Engineer. Sure there are some sales people there, large deals with more complexity will always require them, but the sales guys job is way easier, I'm already sold on the product, the sales guy is there to manage the paperwork so we can sign up and answer any remaining questions. For me its becoming a warning sign if the first person I bump into is a (usually grey) Enterprise sales guy and not an Engineer. Their product probably isn't that great, and I'm going to have to pay loads for it!

I look at Microsoft, founded by two great developers, and how its effectively started going downhill since the developer left and its now led by a former sales guy, Balmer. Just watching his interviews makes me wonder if he really gets it, and if he doesn't, then Microsoft doesn't have a chance in hell. Just looking at their new Cloud offering, Office365, just proves to me that Microsoft doesn't get whats really happening in today's world. And I wonder if the recent change of fortunes between Microsoft and Apple are the biggest signal that something has fundamentally changed in the world and how people and Enterprises will consume and buy the next generation of devices and software.

While there will always be a place for large, salesy companies that will continue to make a lot of money like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, I do wonder what our industry will look like in 10 years, I suspect like Apple overtook Microsoft by focusing on great products and consumers (which are now proliferating Enterprises today already) the IBM's, Microsoft's and Oracles will be a dying breed and the majority of the next wave of Enterprise Software companies will be filled and led by great Engineers building elagent, great products.

I've spent the last couple of days reading a lot about Steve Jobs since he passed away. For someone I've never met I do feel sad about losing him, I wish I'd 'made it sooner so I could rub shoulders with him in the same circles and got to know him personally to see what he really was like as a person. There appears to be two sides to him, one that inspires and charms people into creating genius, the other that pushes people to the edge of crazy, ultra secretive, ultra competitive and has to get what he wants. I wonder what I would have made of him personally.

When I grew up, I aspired to be the next Bill Gates, he was the guy I admired and had achieved what I wanted to do in my life. I never really felt I had anything in common with Steve Jobs. I even remember my partner comparing me to Steve Jobs 3 years ago at SambaStream, and even then I didn't want to be associated with what Steve represented; dictatorial, maybe even an arsehole to a lot of people. At the time my partner wasn't comparing me in that way, but 3 years later that may have changed...

At university, I never used to care what people thought. I was confident, I was provocative, I could talk in front of lots of people, I could sell too. Not every day, but when I was on fire I could nail it. And somewhere along the way of working for Accenture, in a big corporate, I conformed, and became part of the status quo. I probably lost 'some fucking self belief' as Dave McClure would put it, and probably stopped dreaming the impossible. So when I left Accenture to start SambaStream, I lacked clear vision, and I compromised on too many things to accommodate my partners, not easily, but I did. I spent the first year arguing against what I saw was a bullshit 'collaborative style' management my partners wanted, a democracy that didn't work, and in my opinion doesn't work for any company that is under resourced and under pressure to grow fast as democracies by their very nature are wasteful and inefficient. You only need to look at the difference between India, who claim to be the worlds largest democracy, and China, who's single state party are on track to bring the largest number of people out of poverty in 30 years and become the worlds next superpower.

The great leaders, like Steve, and my original favorite, Bill, are dictatorial in many ways. They don't compromise the things they believe to try and make everyone happy. I feel I did that a lot at SambaStream to accommodate one partner in particular that clearly wasn't the right person for our team, and as a result we built a small company, not the great one we originally set out to be, and it made both of us miserable. And while I wasn't right about everything, it turned out in the end I was right about a lot, which is why I'm now in charge of launching a new service with huge potential and scale at Alfresco.

And that's the message that's hit me the last few days after Steve's death. You need to believe in yourself, you can't compromise on the fundamentals without being mediocre and wasting your talents to achieve great things. And yes, you will get in arguments with people along the way, not everyone will enjoy working with you, not everyone will like you or the decisions you make, but its the end result that counts. If Steve had compromised we would never have seen the reaction his death got the last few days, nor the legacy he left. There's plenty of things not to like about him, but I think that will be forgotten compared to things hes achieved.

And I don't think it necessarily makes you an arsehole like I assumed before. Just look at the messages from John Sculley and Eric Schmidt, two people he fell out with along the way, their messages of respect and admiration. I don't think Steve died without a loving family, close friends and loyal employees around him. And because he was true to himself, the respect and admiration of even the people that didn't agree with him. So what have you got to lose if you're trying to do the right thing?

Steve's life has inspired me to never compromise on who I am, or make the wrong decisions just to keep the status quo. I know from experiance that living by these rules makes me happiest, most succesful and ultimately more liked and respected by the people around me, not the arsehole I assumed Steve was 3 years ago. 3 years have taught me that breaking these rules actually brings the opposite, wastes your potential and makes everyone miserable, especially you.

Last night I was talking with my business partner from SambaStream, Ale, about start-up communities. He went to a big start-up event in Rio (Brazil) for his new start-up Kioos and was complaining about all the 'chaff' there with a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs who really had little value to add to the community in terms of experience, advice, network and things that can really help other start-ups be more successful. He compared it to the start-up events like Minibar (which he admittedly only bothered to attend once) that he saw 3-4 years ago in London before he left for Brazil, and how it was pretty much the same experience.

And I have to agree, the first year (2008/2009) of going to those start-up events, which I was a lot more active in than Ale, were generally a waste of time. If we weren't being compared to Huddle.net (like there was only space for them in the entire $14billion market so give up now :p), there were a lot of entrepreneurs that were like us, new to the game and didn't really know much about anything. So after a while I stopped going to them and concentrated on building a business and connecting with the 'grey' crowd of entrepreneurs who could teach us a thing or two.

Fast forward to early this year, and I have to say the whole community has changed - substantially! Coming back into the events, really kicking off with Geek'N'Rolla in April, either the chaff had disappeared from the community and were no longer around, and the ones that were still sticking at it had 3 years of real hard experience and connections under their belt that actually meant we could actually help each other out in some way. I found it a lifeline as we went through some lows, as we started looking for investment, and ultimately in selling to another very successful 'start-up' where I'm now tasked launching their new Cloud Service, Alfresco. (and by the way that never would have happened if Alfresco was not in London and outside in the valley...)

The fact of the matter is, London is maturing as a community FAST! And perhaps Rio is where we were a few years ago and as Ale hopefully has some success out there he will see the same change I have in a few years. But this is what I think is the real secret sauce of 'silicon valley' - its a strong successful community that mentors the next generation of entrepreneurs. We didn't have that 3 years ago, there were very few high profile successes, and to be honest the big companies and entrepreneurs we did have the UK weren't very accessible.

This mentoring is really an important aspect of any community. How can the next generation get better if the generation ahead of them doesn't pass down their experience and knowledge? And the best way to do this is by actually going and joining a fast growing start-up and working directly for the experienced generation and learning from them directly (like I'm doing now). You can't do that when there's not a lot of start-ups around, but in the valley far more people leave university to join a start-up and learn from the best, than here in the UK where the 'smart' kids take city jobs.

If you look at the history of Silicon Valley, there is a direct line back to the original companies that started it all, their founders and the high profile entrepreneurs we know today. But you need a wave of success first before you have enough people to support the next generation of entrepreneurs. It doesn't happen overnight, it certainly has nothing to do with the VC community, and everything to do with the entrepreneur community and their willingness to help the next generation, because there's always money if you have the right connections that successful people tend to bring. I can see it happening in London today, but we still have a long way to go before we catch up with the valley. We need to build a couple of really big companies, that hire and train the next wave of entrepreneurs before we reach that critical mass and to be honest, the founders/leaders of those companies need to see themselves as mentors to the next generation. We don't really do that very well here, but we're getting better...

I still remember where I was 10 years ago today. I was working as an intern at Tandberg TV for one year, and as usual just browsing the internet bored (I was never born to be a test engineer!) when I noticed the desks around me had emptied and the office was all quiet. I carried on for a couple of hours, before leaving my desk to find out where everyone had gone. Being a digital TV equipment manufacturer, we had labs full of rows and rows of encoding equipment and TVs, so when I finally found where everyone was (in the main lab) I didn't just walk in on one TV showing the world trade tower burning, but about 20, all showing the same image. It was surreal, and sad, and we spent the rest of the day glued watching the events unfold in the office before finally going home.

However, beyond the sadness and thought for all the people who died that day, I think there was a bigger tragedy that came out of 9/11. It forced America to become even more conservative, more insular, and do things on the world stage that probably created more hatred for them, and more terrorists to fight. In many ways the terrorists won, they forced the US on the back foot.

Now instead of America welcoming people and ideas from around the world like they had for so many years, giving them a distinct advantage over many countries, they've practically closed their borders. Sure you can still go there, but its a lot harder now, even me as a British citizen needs to pay now to get a visa to go there now - no more just filling out a landing card on my way there. I always though the US was like getting into a bad nightclub, they put bouncers at the door that make people queue and beg to get in, and when you're finally in, its good, but its not that good and you question why you couldn't just go down the road to the other nightclub (Canada?) where they are far more welcoming and are just as good and don't make you feel like you have to prove yourself to get in. That was before 9/11, now its worse.

Secondly, 9/11 gave the conservatives like Bush the green light to do things around the world that have made people dislike the US even more. Invading Iraq, essentially screwing up the Middle East, the rise of ultra-conservatives like John Bolton (who apparently is thinking of running for President??!) who effectively go out into the world with an us or them attitude, where America has the right to do what it wants under the impression of protecting America, when its clear this has been abused to protect America's political and oil interests around the world. These severely wrong attitudes are what make people hate America, and 9/11 gave the worst types of people a ticket to treat the rest of the world as a threat and not as a partner. Worst of all, American went from inspiring the world with the American dream to losing its respect and trust.

Thirdly, 9/11 forced America to stop concentrating on things that are really important to America and the rest of the world. Global Warming seems to have been almost forgotten about as we fight the 'war on terror'. I've always said no one is better placed to lead the solution to this problem than America, yet its focus has been more on fighting Al Qaeda than really tackling this. I also wonder if the Credit Crunch would have been so bad if America focused more on the right things and had been able to spot and address the issues in the banking system sooner. The trillion dollar war in Iraq definitely didn't help American address the Credit Crunch from a position of strength.

And unfortunately its all of these that are leading to the greatest shift of power from the West to the rest (the BRIC countries) and could ultimately lead the US to become a secondary player on the world stage in the next 50 years. For me, this is the real tragedy, that America has become so insular, so focused on the wrong things and its empowered the ultra conservatives in the US to get into power and push their agendas on the rest of the world. For me the last 10 years have been a decline of the US, but it doesn't have to be this way.

I never appreciated how much the media exaggerates things until the past few months. First it was the protests in Syria, immediately from the get go it was displayed as though a civil war was going on, with mass killings, and world leaders were condemning Assad for human rights violations. So I was immediately concerned as half my family lives in Damascus (I'm half Syrian) and spoke with my cousins over there. One of them was more concerned about what new mobile phone she should get (I told her to get an iPhone) and the other one who lives in the UK went for 2 weeks holiday there near Homs where a lot of the trouble is, she said the streets were quieter, but other than that she didn't really see much. And last week, my parents just got back from a weeks holiday in Damascus to see my family. My Mum said all the tourists had left, but apart from that there really wasn't much difference over there.

Then it was the London riots, all my friends from around the world saw the streets of London on fire and people (chavs) smashing things up. Like me with Syria, they saw the whole city falling apart and were worried for everyone over here, for me and most Londoners, and I live 1mile from Hackney, we didn't see much, within a couple of days things were back to normal and its almost forgotten.

Those two experiences have really made me appreciate how the world media really warps people's view of whats going on in the world, and why when you actually speak to people who live in the middle of these stories, a lot of the time they really don't see what the fuss is all about. Its not that they're oblivious to whats going on, and its not that there aren't bad things happening, but that these things happen in small pockets of cities and countries and the way they're presented its as thought that small pocket is actually the whole country, and everyone is affected.

The problem is it polarises the world to believe things that aren't strictly true. How many people around the world probably see London now as a city full of gangs of chavs taking over the streets? We definitely have a problem, but its not something that affects my day to day life and I go across London every day. The West, and funnily enough Saudi Arabia (you can't seriously criticise anyone's human rights when you're Saudi Arabia!) are using the events in Syria to polarise the world into believing that all of Syria is under the tyranny of Assad, that everyone is unhappy and waiting to kick him out, when the reality I see from talking to real people who live there, is completely the opposite! They want what they see as a small minority of people to stop the protests so they can get on with their lives peacefully - and they also want an iPhone ;)

I finally got around to sending out the final email to all our users announcing we will be closing down SambaJAM on October 8th. It doesn't feel as sad today, the saddest day was when our last paying customer did their final migration off SambaJAM to a new system a few days ago, which is why we held off on making the announcement to all our users - so they had a chance to migrate and inform all their clients before hearing it from us directly.

When SambaStream was first acquired I did have the best of intentions, I honestly believed this would be better for us a company, better for Alfresco in launching their new cloud service and better for our customers who could become part of a larger more established company. However selling the company, while almost single handedly running the existing company towards the end, and starting a very demanding new role, all at once in a period of 2-3 months, made me realise I wasn't doing anyone any favours by keeping the service running. It would have let me down in acheiving results in my new very demanding role, it would have let Alfresco down by distracting us from building a phenomenal new cloud service and not just SambaJAM V2, and it would have let our customers down because I couldn't guarantee what level of support they would get or what the new service would be when it launched later this year (although we know that now but not back during the time of the deal)

Usually the right decision, is the hardest one, and the reason it was so hard was because I had built such great relationships with all our early customers, and was extremely grateful for the faith they put in our very new and unproven service over the past few years. I sincerely hope we haven't turned them off ever working with another start-up again, but unfortunately this is the inherent risk of joining a brand new and unproven service.

However, out of destruction, comes creation, and by working on SambaJAM the past few years I've learned a lot about Cloud, collaboration tools and ECM that I never would have learnt anywhere else and are really going to help us launch a phenomenal new service at Alfresco. Principally:

• Coming from an Accenture Enterprise background, where you sell to CIOs/IT with checklists, I completely underestimated the importance of usability for end users at the beginning. As a result, the first version of SambaJAM had lots of features, but no clear use cases or real thought about how to make end users love our application, and in the Cloud, its the end user who decides whether or not to use your tool, not IT, and even more so in the SME space. This epiphany has driven me to be over-passionate about usability, UX and performance, and its completely refocused the way I think about our product design at Alfresco.
• End users hate ECM and collaboration tools that force them to work outside their usual daily work-flow. When I sold SambaJAM, nothing humbled me more than seeing end users struggling to use something as 'simple' as checkin/checkout version control in our document library. For me it was intuitive, but even after 30 years of ECM most users still don't understand what it is without someone telling them, and hence why services like Dropbox have been so phenominal, they don't force the user to work differently or learn something new other than saving a file, and version control happens invisibly.
• There's never ever going to be an 'email killer' anytime soon - just accept it and move on by thinking about how you can bring email into your application as opposed to trying to remove it completely.
• We were fortunate enough to build on top of Alfresco's fantastic WebScript Framework, so we built from day one all of our service as REST APIs with a GWT client that sat on top of them. What that meant was our APIs weren't treated as a second class citizen, whatever you could do in our client, could be done via the API, and I believe this is the architecture for any new cloud services, and Podio also took this approach for their new service. This opens up so many opportunities for other developers to build on top of your service, integration with other services and other clients, and the decision was vindicated when we sold to a great customer that needed APIs for their platform.
• Bake in metrics across your entire application from day one. The tools are there now to really monitor and see how end users are really using your application and help you test and improve your application for end users dramatically faster!
• DON'T UNDERESTIMATE AUTOMATED TESTING. We didn't put it in until far later, so we amassed a huge technical debt, that slowed down releases, wasted a lot of our time manually testing everything, and because of that always meant the quality of the product never quite reached what we wanted or in some cases needed to sell the service online.

Aside from those, like I said in my last blog, there's a lot of other things I learned from SambaStream, but these were the main takeaways from building SambaJAM.

I sincerely appreciate all our customers, and users, that supported us from the beginning and I truley hope to help some of the amazing businesses we worked with again one day with an even better and phenomenal service!

I finally sat down this weekend to do a full revamp of my website in preparation for some serious blogging! It only took a couple of days and it was my first chance to really get to know Drupal 7. The issue with Drupal is that is that it is quite technical, and out of the box it does need a lot of configuration just to setup something as simple as this site, a blog with a few 'about' pages. I did play with Wordpress for a few hours, too many people have been telling me for a while its 'so much better', and it is when you compare its usability and setting up a simple blog with social integration. Drupal unfortunately still has some way to go before it has WYSIWYG editors out of the box and core modules that allow you to automatically integrate your commenting and posts with Twitter and Facebook.

However, Drupal 7 is a massive leap from Drupal 6 in terms of usability and core functionality. While more technical than Wordpress, you do get more flexibility to configure it deeper. As usual, most modules are still catching up with the recent Drupal 7 release even after several months, and so many of the modules I've had to install to do what I want are still only Release Candidates, and others like the Twitter integration module I used to publish my posts automatically to Twitter still don't have a stable 7.X version. The great new feature I love though that will make my life so much easier maintaining the site is automatic updates of modules, so now I don't have to keep downloading modules to keep them up to date! Unfortunately the core modules still need a manual upgrade and hopefully Drupal 8 will fix this once and for all so running a Drupal site doesn't become laborious.

I was fortunate that Learn By The Drop has written this free PDF ebook to get started. It is really well written and I pretty much used it as the basis to get started and add new features like Tagging I hadn't put on my blog previously, and get the WYSIWYG editor up and running properly without all the formatting issues I usually have (and spell checking too!). However I did deviate from not using the core blog module, he advocates creating your own blog content type for more control, all my current blogs are created using the blog module so I had to stick to it, but to be honest I didn't see any disadvantage using it so I would encourage you to use it instead of creating your own 'blog' content type like he suggests.

So all in all here is a summary of the new features on this site:

• New sub-theme based on the Danland Theme. I have modified a few things and eventually will get around to adding a nice banner again with all my photos from around the world like I had previously.
• WYSIWYG editor with TinyMCE and spell checking, so I don't have to use MS Word anymore to write my blogs then hand write HTML like before.
• Tagging using the core Taxonomy module and Tagadelic to show the Tag Cloud on the side.
• The Media Module so I can upload and manage all my files, images, videos etc. and easily embed them in pages.
• Comment Notifications so people can get notified of replies to their comments on the blog.
• Mollum to get rid of the tons of spam comments I get on the site. If its successful I will finally allow comments to be posted immediately without approval.
• ShareThis links at the bottom of each blog so people can easily share my blogs if they want to.
• Views module to create a list of my project pages
• All the usual Google Analytics, Google Analytics Reports and SiteMap modules so I can be sure at least 1 person is reading my blogs...

However, after 'tasting' Wordpress, I would love to see the following modules developed and maintained for Drupal 7 if its really going to be effective for social content like blogs:

• A way for users to login using Twitter and Facebook to post comments and also have related Tweets for the blog shown at the bottom of the comments
• The Twitter module ported to Drupal 7 so I can automatically post my blog to Twitter. A syndication module would be best so I can post to Twitter, Facebook, Digg and all the other social services as soon as I post my blog
• WYSIWYG with a default Drupal editor that all the themes play nice with built into the core like Wordpress

I'm pretty happy with the end result, I think anything more would be 'masturbation' like I used to keep reminding my business partners everytime they went off for several days getting off on building the 'perfect' feature or website. However when I have time I'll probably finish the theme to add a bit more colour, add Google translate to my pages so the rest of the world can 'enjoy' my blogs, and I want to add a 'Bookshelf' with a list of all the books I've read or am reading and may be useful for other start-up/business people. Also I will have some fun putting all my other sites onto this install and running Drupal multi-tenanted and try some affiliate marketing on the other ones (which are paying quite well without me doing anything so I'm tempted to find out how much I can make with a bit of SEO!)

Anyway, now that I've got everything up to date, I plan to start blogging more regularly like I said in my last post, so after this, less geek, more chic ;)

It's been a very long time since I last wrote a blog, and I've got loads of thoughts and advice on start-ups to share after 3 years of SambaStream. A few of my start-up friends are encouraging me to share them, however I couldn't possibly start blogging again without posting a short update on where I've been up to since the last blog over a year ago.

A few weeks ago, SambaStream, the company I Founded and was CEO of, was acquired by the very successful and much larger company, Alfresco, which we had built SambaJAM on top of. As soon as I showed them what we'd been doing in the Cloud with Alfresco, it became clear there was a lot of fit between what both companies were looking for at the time. In our case, funding and resources, in their case experience running Alfresco in the Cloud and building a business around it.

So now I've joined Alfresco as Director of Cloud Services, responsible for taking Alfresco into the Cloud, building both the service and the business around it. In a way, its like building another business inside an existing business from the ground up, and I'm very excited about continuing to build on top of my SambaStream experience and building an even bigger business than before!

Already in the short time I've been here, I've connected with loads of great entrepreneurs and companies, and I am planning a trip to "The Valley" (Silicon Valley) later this year to connect with more and doing the rounds in building the partnerships and learning from the best that will be needed to grow a successful Cloud business here at Alfresco. I've also got a great team and some decent resources to work on some of the ideas we explored at SambaStream but had to put on hold as a small start-up.

Anyway, I will make an effort to start blogging more on my start-up experience and opinions, and also about what we're doing here at Alfresco and opinions on where the Cloud and Content Management/Collaboration technology is moving too!