I am David Gildeh, an IT/Business Expert who is founder and Director of SambaStream, an online software company specialising in Document Management and Online Collaboration.
This site contains my blog, interests and CV to hopefully connect me to other like-minded people. Please get in touch here if you want to speak to me directly.
I'm Finally A Chartered Engineer!!!!!!!
As a member of the Institute of Engineering and Technology I applied this year to become a Chartered Engineer (which allows me to put CEng at the end of my name). To pass I had to do a huge application form, followed by an interview, in which we spent considerable time discussing my new start-up SambaStream and other parts of my career.
For those of you who've never heard about Chartered Engineers before, basically its a qualification to recognise that I have gained the essential skills and experience needed to be a competent engineer. From the IET's own website this is how they describe it:
Chartered engineers are characterised by their ability to develop appropriate solutions to engineering problems, using new or existing technologies, through innovation, creativity and change.
They may develop and apply new technologies, promote advanced designs and design methods, introduce new and more efficient production techniques and marketing and construction concepts, and pioneer new engineering services and management methods.
Chartered engineers are variously engaged in technical and commercial leadership and possess effective interpersonal skills.
So you may now call me David Gildeh, MEng CEng and respect my authoritayyy 
Ale & Clarence Leave Accenture
It’s been a long time coming, but finally my two business partners, Ale and Clarence,
have taken the big leap to join SambaStream full time, leaving their full time
jobs in Accenture. To celebrate, we took this photo in front of an Accenture
Tiger Woods poster in St. Pancras. No longer will we all be able to walk
through airports and say we work for the company on all the posters, but
perhaps one day we'll be able to walk past some of our own posters and say we
actually founded that company ;)
Business Start-up Event London 2008
The last couple of days I’ve been at Olympia in London for
the Business Start-up event 2008. Every year thousands of people interested in or
presently running a business descend on the event to see 100’s of exhibitors
offering services and seminars with some well known UK entrepreneurs. I managed
to pop in to see Levi Roots (check out the photo left, his Reggae Reggae sauce
is actually pretty good!) and James Caan from Dragons Den. But to be honest
they were there for more inspiration rather than useful information on starting
a business.
The one seminar that did stand out for me, was by One Fish Two Fish, a marketing agency that helps businesses with their marketing strategy. Their seminar was about marketing to businesses, something particularly interesting to me because of SambaStream. They have a free eBook you can download from their site with a lot of good material so check it out.
For businesses planning to exhibit next year, one piece of advice I got from another SaaS start-up promoting themselves there, was that the people on Friday tend to be the serious buyers and leads, whereas a lot of the people on Saturday were just people thinking of starting a business and probably not good leads to follow up on for a while.
The UK is a really great place to start a business
Today I went with my business partner Clarence to a FREE full day seminar on starting a business by the Enfield Enterprise agency. It’s not the first one of these types of events I’ve been too, the government sponsors loads of these agencies to promote entrepreneurship and support new businesses through their critical first few years. In addition to the British Library, Business Link, and other government initiatives, we also have very favourable tax and laws for starting up businesses in the UK.
For example, in the UK I don’t have to ask any permission to start a business, I just have to declare within 3 months I’m self employed, or register a limited company, and until I hit £67,000 a year in revenues, I don’t even have to worry about VAT. Compare this to Spain, where you have to register for VAT from day 1, and on top of that 13 other agencies before you’re even allowed to start trading, or France, where the town mayor has to approve all new businesses, which is difficult to get if him or his family have a competing business, the UK is really easy to just get up and trading!
All in all, I’m really starting to appreciate the UK as a great place to start a business. You have no excuses if you really want to start one here!
SambaStream.com Finally Online
It is with great pleasure
today we finally got our site, http://www.sambastream.com up online! Small steps towards something
much bigger! For those of you that don't know, I left my job with Accenture in July to found a start-up with 2 workmates, let me take some time to introduce you to our
team and what we do.
Obama Wins - I Can Finally Forgive My American Friends!
After months of waiting and speculation, my favourite to win the US elections, Barack Obama, HAS WON!! I've been following him closely since I was working in the US (Baltimore, MD) earlier this year and my co-worker Sri, who was one of his biggest supporters in Seattle, kept going on about him and how great he was! I wrote a blog here on why I though he should win and what he should do to make the world a better place back in January, and was fortunate to see him speak live in Baltimore in February (see here). He definitely is very charismatic and inspiring, and most importantly SMART (not retarded like GW Bush) but I guess now we will have to see if he can live up to his hype. He has a tough ride ahead; a world economy tumbling, 8 years of damage to repair after the worst, most retarded world leader ever to get elected (but like my Murphy's, I'm not bitter :p) and a huge amount of foreign government borrowing (I believe is or is projected to reach 60% of GDP).
Anyway, I wish him all the best, while I may not be America's biggest fan, a well run and prosperous America is essential for the rest of us.
Drupal For NGO's Presentation - Ashoka Connect Website
Tonight I presented at the Drupal for NGO's event in London that I go to sometimes. Its basically an event to connect Drupal developers to NGOs so us developers can help NGO's build sites and online applications (using Drupal of course). Obviously with my Accenture Development Partnerships background, this is of great interest to me, especially as I am probably the only consultant in Accenture to ever deliver 2 Drupal projects while I was working there for Ashoka and EITI. While you can checkout the EITI site on the link provided, we actually built another site for Ashoka (not their main one) to connect social investors to social entrepreneurs around the world, kind of like a social networking tool with a greater purpose than photo sharing!
Attached is the presentation I did in PDF format (crap quality as I use cutePDF which puts a line through everything) which should explain the project and how we went about building it in Drupal. Interestingly for this project, we needed to connect to another database where all the profile data was stored so that the profile data could be shared with other sites Ashoka plans to do in the future. The site also includes Google Maps integration for plotting fellows on maps in search results and profile pages.
In the project, my part was acting as project lead, acting as technical architect and project manager overseeing and training our excellent team in Bangkok! Because the site hasn't gone live yet and is under test I used screenshots to present the site, but hopefully by the time you read it, the site will be up and running properly here: http://e2e.ashokalab.org.
Selling Software To Enterprises
Finally I've managed to find the time to put up my presentation from Barcamp London last month in the EBay offices in Richmond. It was a fantastic day, and I'm fortunate that my good friend Josh Lui from Minutebox was there to let me know it was happening last minute and get me on the list to turn up!
For those of you who don't know Barcamp (and while I'd heard my Thai developers mentioning the one in Bangkok, I too was also unfamiliar until recently), its basically a geek meetup where lots of developers get together and do presentations to each other on anything they want to talk about. Usually this is about some web development technology, but there are no rules to what you can talk about, just as long as you don't use Barcamp to promote your own business and products. One woman spoke about how to disguise your online identity so you could blog anonymously online. This included fake postal addresses, temporary phone numbers and other counter-measures. Sounded like she was living the life of Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory!
Well being a technology geek, but also a business geek, I decided to talk about my favourite subject, which I feel qualified to talk about after working for Accenture doing exactly that, how to sell software to enterprises. I entitled it "Getting my really really cool software into enterprises". Now I know in many of the start-up events I go to, this would usually get a lot of interest, but to a bunch of tech. geeks, who were more interested in the latest development technologies, I only managed to scrape together a small handful of people to my presentation :p
Anyway, attached to this page is the presentation in PDF format (sorry for the poor quality, I'm using cutePDF which for some reason puts a line through all my slides!), I removed the Gartner stuff for copyright reasons, but hopefully some of you will find it interesting. The key messages to take away are:
- Enterprises don't just look for "cool" technology and software, which is why IBM has been around for years and will continue to be one of the biggest enterprise software companies out there for the foreseeable future. Their software looks crap (a cheap UI designer would really help them improve I think!), definitely isn't as "cool" as many of the things we use on the net, but because they are stable, reliable and can execute on big projects for big enterprises, they will always beat the small start-up with the sexy new piece of software that may even be 10 times better or cheaper! Enterprise buyers are pragmatic, and they want to know if they're going to spend all that money buying your software, you're going to be around in 5 years time!
- The best book I've read on this subject is "Crossing The Chasm" by Geoffrey A. Moore. If you are interested in getting your new software or technology into enterprises read this! This was the book Documentum (a leading content management system for enterprises who's founder John Newton since went on to found Alfresco) used to help plan their strategy. They targeted a niche (legal departments) with a problem they could solve, dominated it, and then used it as a reference for expanding into other niches and more pragmatic buyers. You should think about how to do this too.
- Of course, being a founder of a SaaS business (SambaStream) I had to mention my reasons why SaaS was coming of age and why it may be able to lower the barrier for smaller new start-ups to enter the enterprise market.
Consulting Lessons Learned
- Always take an advance payment, especially for new clients. This can be any size, but I usually recommend between 30-40% of the final fee. This ensures client buy-in before you start slogging hours into project, manages your cashflow to ensure you have funds to live off for the next month, and very importantly (but sometimes forgotten) gives you a chance to see what the client will be like during the project. If a client messes you around with the advance payment, chances are you're in for a rocky road later on. Unreliable clients can kill your cashflow and cause stress and upset trying to get paid! Use the advanced payment to assess how reliable the client is, if they pay straight up with no problems, you know you have a serious, reliable client.
- Get paid monthly. In your contract ensure you are invoicing on a monthly basis, even if the project is just over 1 month and you feel its best just to invoice at the end, using an end date for payment in the contract is risky. Projects inevitably get delayed sometimes, and if it gets pushed another month, you'll have to wait another month to get paid. The client also needs to plan their cashflow, so make it clear that you are invoicing regularly.
- Put late payment penalties in the contract. Most invoices have a 30 day payment period, and if the client misses this, you should stipulate payment penalties such as interest on the monies owed. I stipulate a monthly interest rate of 1.5% on any unpaid monies paid after the 30 day period. It should be in the client's best interest to pay you in a timely manner, or you will get cashflow problems down the line.
- Expenses. All large expenses should if possible, be paid directly from the client to avoid you having to fork out large sums of money upfront and potentially kill your cashflow or worse (if the client doesn't pay) end up losing far more than your time! Most general expenses of a smaller amount can be invoiced in your monthly invoice and paid upfront by you.
Why do start-ups keep re-inventing the wheel?
Recently I've met a number of start-ups who've spent lots of time and money building a custom solution for their new website or web application! Not everyone knows about web technology the way a Geek like me does, so hopefully I'll catch you in time before you go to another developer offering you a custom solution! This is the worst mistake you can do and will result in a lot of extra work and other problems down the line for the following reasons:
- Re-inventing the wheel: Why spend all that time and money building a site that an existing CMS (like Drupal) can deliver out of the box?! So many custom sites I've seen recently are full of features like user management that are standard functionality on any semi-decent CMS! Don't waste your time, build on an existing CMS every time!
- Vendor Lock-In: Imagine you build a custom site that from now to eternity, you were always forced to go back to the original developer to get fixes and new features? That's what so many custom website developers do, great for them, bad for you! You could always get another developer to trawl through the code and pick it up, but you've just wasted a couple of weeks for them to get up to speed when they could have been developing!
- Security: The fact is, any site you put on the web is public and open to attacks. Unless the developer has tested every single use case and feature on the site (very unlikely!) there will be holes in your site open for attack! By building on an existing platform, whether open-source or not, you are building on a system that is used on potentially thousands of other sites, all submitting issues to the developers to fix. After time, your custom developer is going to fall behind maintaining the system, and all the other custom systems they developed!
A few people say they are developing something so unique they had to go the custom route. When I finally see what it is that is so unique about their site, I'm usually shown a pretty standard site with one killer feature! Killer features are essential for making your site stand out above the noise, but trust me, all that time you wasted building the custom backend to support that killer feature, could have been done out of the box in hours, not weeks! While I am biased about Drupal, I honestly believe there is not one website or web application that could not be developed using the CMS! So take my advise - install it and then concentrate your time and money building the custom features that make it unique!