Archives / November, 2010

Time vs. Money

Yesterday I had a long conversation with an entrepreneur about the relative value of time versus money in start-ups. Our conclusion: Time is more valuable than money Of course both are critical assets of any business – particularly an early stage business – but often companies make the wrong trade of time vs. money. This happens in dozens of different ways at businesses every day and ranges from big decisions on accelerating hiring to small ones like how to prioritize product features. I’m not suggesting that companies should run out and double their engineering teams (which would presumably accelerate the timing of their product at the expense of cash burn) but I am saying that in many companies the fundamental…

HR as a core competency

In the world of start-ups, HR is at the bottom of the bottom of the heap of priorities most companies are working on. The vast majority of companies think about HR as a process and compliance function, outsource it to 3rd party providers (payroll, benefits, etc.) and doing their best to forget about it. If there’s any focus on HR as a function it is around recruiting (also typically outsourced and generally treated as very episodic). Sure – there’s plenty of talk about "culture" – of success, of working hard, of some other superlative that’s not particularly interesting or differentiating ("we want to hire great people and expect them to be hard working and successful!" duh) – but little real…

Gluecon and Alcatel-Lucent team – changing the game at Gluecon 2011

[Cross  posted from a piece I put up on the Foundry Group blog earlier today] Our goal for Gluecon has always been to make it *the* gathering place for developers working on the connective technologies that hold the web and IT infrastructure together – from web services to SOA to APIs and cloud computing. Eric Norlin – our partner in Gluecon, Defrag and now Blur – has helped bring together technology leaders for an in depth (and proudly geeky) conversation around the changing landscape of these technologies and the applications they support. As we move towards our third year running Gluecon we’re extremely pleased to announce a hugely important sponsorship with Alcatel-Lucent. ALU will become the Community Underwriter for the…