David Gildeh

Mining the Sky is a BIG deal

dgildeh — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:54:13 +0000

When I was a teenager I remember lying in my grandma's back garden in Damascus reading "Mining the Sky" by John S. Lewi for several days and since then I've been hooked on starting my own company to mine asteroids and the moon after making my millions in IT like Elon Musk (who's pretty much living the life I imagined back then!). I've been hooked on starting a Space Company since I was a kid, and a huge believer in private enterprise taking humans into Space ahead of the inefficiencies of government space programs like NASA.

I always thought it would take longer for the gold rush to start, but it appears a mix of factors are coming together recently, and once again the West Coast is leading the way:

There's a bunch of dot.com/IT billionaires who share the same dream that are willing to finance new ventures in the Space Industry, or in the case of Elon Musk use a significant chunk of their wealth to start their own private space Enterprise, SpaceX.
With the US Government making huge spending cuts, huge numbers of very talented and experienced Engineers are leaving NASA looking for the next challenge in Space, some to found companies, others to be hired into new start-ups.
NASA is also leaning on private Space Enterprises to fill in the gaps in its program. SpaceX's contract is with NASA for up to $1bil. to replace the Space Shuttle to the ISS since it was decommissioned could effectively fund the initial growth of SpaceX to a commercially sustainable company.
Competitions like the X-Prize have re-invigorated small teams to innovate and bring down the cost of getting to Orbit dramatically with a previous winner becoming Virgin Galactic and allowing Space Tourists to do a sub-orbital flight for ONLY $200k (cheap by previous standards!).
Advances in electronics, computing power and other technology are bringing down the weight, size and complexity of Space systems required to launch new missions. For example. an Apple iPhone now has more computing power than the entire Apollo program did in the 1960's!

It's all these factors that have led to the formation of Planetary Resources last week, about 10-20 years ahead of what I expected! Following my previous post on how the commoditization of technology can severely disrupt industries (and lead to Bubbles), the huge risk to this new venture aside, if successful Planetary Resources has the potential to completely commoditize the basic resources required to create a sustainable industry in space.

SpaceX has focused on the first problem of dramatically bringing down the cost of getting into Space, but even at much lower prices, it will still not be economically viable to lift thousands of tons from Earth for all the materials we'd need to build and launch a new industry in space with large space stations, moon bases and deep space craft. If anything it would even over-stretch the already depleting resources of Earth causing more problems for the population down here and raising commodity prices even higher. If we want to move significant numbers of people into space, find new energy sources and launch new industries in Space, you need to mine the resources in Space already, there's no other way to do it. That's why I am so interested in space mining, it is the key to catalysing the Space Industry, making it economically viable to launch hundreds or thousands of new ventures in Space the same way Cloud computing has bought the economics of launching new IT/web start-ups down to a level where thousands of previously un-viable companies can now exist. It also has the added bonus of potentially solving energy and resource issues down here on Earth too.

While my original dream was to be the person doing what Planetary Resources was doing, between SpaceX and Planetary Resources its viable that by the time I'm ready over the next 10-20 years the basic infrastructure for a Space gold rush could be in place! In fact this company being successful could be key to that, to make it affordable for future Entrepreneurs to get access to Space and launch new ventures that capitalise on the cheap access to resources and energy in Space.

Very exciting times!

Tags:

start-up

space industry

Are we entering another bubble?

dgildeh — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:27:34 +0000

With the recent acquisition of Instagram for a ridiculous $1bil. (and potentially worth up to $3bil. if FaceBook IPOs at $100bil. later this year for the share exchange they took) you can't help wondering if this is the trigger before the boom, the same way Netscape was the trigger for the dot.com boom in the 90's. Today, Splunk, an Enterprise Big Data Analytics company, IPO'd for a market cap of almost $3bil. on revenues of $120mil and a loss of $12mil. Evernote is about to close a new round at a $1bil. valuation apparently, and Box is apparently going for ANOTHER round of funding also aiming for the $1bil. mark on annual revenues of around $25mil (hazarding a guess from what I've heard on the grapevine)

All in all, a lot of activity going on in the market with +$1bil. valuations (it seems to be the magic number now as apparently a million dollars isn't cool since the Social Network movie) for companies with relatively low revenues or in Instagram's case, none whatsoever. It makes me wonder how much Alfresco would IPO for with our high growth and revenue!

So are we in another bubble? We never quite hit the last one people predicted around 2004 with "web 2.0" so its risky calling one now, but for me there are a few real game changers happening that are enabling a 13 person company to get bought out for $1bil. after 2 years.

It's all about the commoditization Curve:

If you look at all the major disruptions in the technology space, there's usually a 20 year cycle from when the technology was first created in the labs, to when it hits the mainstream. This is because it takes time for the technology to mature and the cost to drop to a point where its able to sell to the mass market and disrupt it's industry. For example, the Internet's basic protocols and concept were originally designed in 1974. 21 years later, in 1995, Netscape IPO'd and we entered the boom years of dot.com. What changed? First the technology had matured to a point that it was actually useful for general people, but more importantly the cost of communication dropped through the floor making it possible for consumers to sign up with a dial up modem and use the Internet. The big disruption was the commoditization of communication, enabling new companies like Amazon to launch and disrupt their industry by taking advantage of this commoditization.

Right now we're hitting a huge commoditization curve that is finally coming of age - Cloud. The Cloud itself sits on several other commoditization curves, Open-Source has commoditized the software stacks they run on and enabled the developers that build new services to build them quicker than ever using free libraries and software, and PCs are now so cheap Amazon literally stacks 100's of thousands of them in their data centers as does Google. Now anyone can launch an online service, and distribute it to millions of users, for litterally thousands of dollars in running costs. No need to get huge VC cheques to launch a new company, if you're really good and patient you could even bootstrap your company without any funding!

Tie this in with the explosive growth of mobile devices (which are also powered by the Cloud behind the scenes), and all in all, its a recipe for some pretty disruptive innovation.

Does the Cloud mean another boom?

If Instagram is the tipping point like Netscape was in the 90's, it is definitely a poster child of what is happening in the technology space right now. Powered by Amazon Web Services, a team of 13, with only a few million dollars (which is nothing compared to what they would have required only 5-10 years ago) launched a service that grew to 50 million users in less than 2yrs and was acquired for $1bil.

DropBox has grown to 50mil users initially on only a few million before last years round, Draw Something grew to 1mil. users in 9 days before it was acquired for 120mil. by Zynga, another Cloud powered company. All of these companies, and thousands more have benefited from the commoditization of computing power - the Cloud. You don't need to be a data center expert to buy, setup and run the infrastructure to launch a huge new service, you just put your credit card in and go.

Cloud is a game changer like the Internet was in the 90's and its going to completely disrupt the way consumer services are launched (if it hasn't already) and is now being accepted by large Enterprises that are shifting to buy Cloud services like Alfresco. It's a perfect storm for a boom and everywhere I look I can see the market heating up.

So what should you do?

I'm not the only one asking this question, Adeo Ressi seems to think Instagram is a turning point too. Although I don't agree with everything he says (in a boom you should still focus on building a sustainable business and not hope to be one of the lucky ones like Instagram who sell out without any real business model before the bubble inevitably bursts), this would be a great time to raise some money or do an IPO (like we're planning sometime next year) to take advantage of the jump in valuations. But if you are sitting on the sidelines, this is also a great time to invest, and although their stock is pretty volatile, Amazon is probably going to be the winner out of all of this as every company/start-up I know getting into Cloud right now is pretty much using them, including Alfresco. Basically, any company that is supporting this boom or leveraging this boom to the max. with a sustainable business model will do well if you were to buy their stock soon and hold it for the next 12-24 months.

And if not Cloud, what's next?

In case I'm wrong about Cloud being a real driver for another boom over the next 2-3 years (although I'm pretty bullish right now!), there's a couple of other areas I'm interested in that also appear to be hitting their commoditization curves and I think will be hugely disruptive over the next decade.

First is 3D printing, about 20 years in the making and with the cost of the technology plummeting, I can see this industry severely disrupting the cost of producing and distributing physical goods. The second is Bio-tech. I saw a BBC documentary a few months ago that talked about how the cost of building a lab to produce new genetic proteins was so low you literally had people setting up labs in their garage experimenting with new proteins which they could buy the base ingredients for off the Internet. When you consider some of these proteins can be use to produce things like Diesel Fuel and other commodities, it makes you wonder how long it will be until we see the next garage billionaire appearing from that industry.

Tags:

start-up

investing

Choosing a Digital Magazine Subscription

dgildeh — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 15:21:41 +0000

I have a goal to replace all my books and magazines with digital copies as soon as they become available. I already have most of my paper books listed on Amazon Marketplace (you can check out my sellers profile here if you want to buy any of them, as you'll see I have a myoptic focus on business books: http://www.amazon.co.uk/shops/A2TWMKHT1U9DJK) and others waiting as soon as a Kindle edition is available (I'm still waiting for 'The Four Steps to the Epiphany' by Steve Blank to go digital - come on Steve!).

This is not a new thing, when I was a teenager I used to design my 'dream' electronic book reader, which shocked me when I rediscovered the drawings a couple of years ago and they looked surprisingly like an iPad (proof that execution always beats ideas!), and at Accenture when I was moving around all the time I hated having to carry all my books and update my magazine subscriptions every time I moved. So I was actually an 'early-adopter', reading my books on Books24x7 (you could get a free subscription at Accenture) for ages on my laptop screen since 2004, and subscribing to Business Week Magazine on Zinio since 2006 (which I also had to read on my laptop). As soon as I got an iPad, this was the number one thing I started using it for, books and Zinio.

Now a year later, I've decided the Kindle app on my iPad is the only place to buy books, because it has more choice, was originally cheaper than Apple's iBook store, but primarily because its cross device and I don't want all my books held hostage on Apple hardware if I one day moved to another tablet OS like Android. But this month, my Zinio subscription for Business Week came to an end, and I thought it was best to see where the world of digital magazines had got too. I had a play yesterday, and there was a clear winner, so I thought I'd share the results.

Zinio:

These guys have been my providers of Business Week since 2006. It's cross device, their new iPad app is great, and they only sell magazines. The magazines look exactly like the real copy, with the exact same layout and some embedded audio content in some places. I can read the magazines on my laptop, in a browser and on my iPad & iPhone, but although I used my iPhone for a while, the iPad is the only device I use to read them now. Cons are the navigation is a bit crap, to jump back to the contents page means scrolling back to the beginning and I don't like the content listing alternative, and recently the library is showing 2 copies of all my new downloads. The cost of a one year subscription is US$46.00 for Business Week, approximately £29.

Kindle Newstand:

Wow, words can not describe how crap the Kindle is for magazines. Essentially they treat the magazine like a book, without any layout or pictures. Obviously dumbed down for the eInk black and white Kindle devices out there. A subscription for Business Week is £1.99 a month, or £23.88 per year. Stick to books for your Kindle, and don't bother with this option for magazines, they have a lot of catching up to do!

Apple Newstand:

Now admittedly, as I was testing this on an iPad 2, Apple does have the advantage here with their deeply integrated software/hardware experience philosophy. But WOW...I just finished reading Steve Job's biography (on the Kindle) and there's a part about how he wanted to re-invent the print industry at the end specifically for digital devices, and I think they have. Apple haven't just taken PDF copies of the print magazine like Zinio have, but completely redesigned the whole magazine around the iPad, with video and media, navigation, the lot. It's an extremely rich experience and for only £20.99 for the year, the cheapest of the options but with a lot of extra features and value. You also get an extra month free if you supply your personal details to the publisher, which I guess is how they got around Apple's privacy issue mentioned in the biography. I was happy to do so as Bloomberg already have them as I used to be a print subscriber.

Conclusion:

I think the winner I went for should be obvious, but in case you didn't guess, it was the Apple Newstand. There are some cons to it, my old magazines are still on Zinio if I want to go back to them, and all my future magazines could very well be locked into Apple now as they don't do other devices very well. But the extra value you get in experience and 're-imagining' the magazine for digital devices is extremely compelling.

Getting everything digital isn't for everyone, but for someone that moves around a lot like me and hates throwing away old magazines, this is the perfect solution that I dreamed about as a teenager. My only print magazine now is the IET E&T magazine (as I'm a chartered Engineer member) which is annoying, as I have piles of them lying around the flat which I keep for reference, and because I don't want to update the address and lose copies/letters when I move from my rented flat one day, I still have my mum forwarding them on every month from my parents house. Once I get that digitally, with full search across every edition I've received (and potentially the ability to take clippings into a tool like Evernote) then my dream will be realised and I will never pick up a paper magazine again unless I'm in someones waiting room!

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RE: The Death of the Business Founders

dgildeh — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 21:00:01 +0000

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.

Tags:

start-up

opinion

founders

Why Politicians Shouldn't Run Our Economy

dgildeh — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:25:28 +0000

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!

Tags:

politics

david cameron

opinion

The future of great cloud companies is Engineers!

dgildeh — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 15:10:13 +0000

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.

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Steve Job's Legacy - Be true to yourself

dgildeh — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 01:15:04 +0000

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.

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Replicating the 'Silicon Valley' effect outside the Valley

dgildeh — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 15:56:27 +0000

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...

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The Real Tragedy of 9/11

dgildeh — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 11:13:03 +0000

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.

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middle east

politics

The Circus That is the World Media

dgildeh — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 16:30:22 +0000

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 ;)

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