Startups

When I’m talking with a startup founder about a possible investment I’m trying to find out a few things: team, scale, timing, product, developer flow, stickiness.

Developers face an onslaught of marketing and an unrelenting velocity of releases to keep up with. This is why we started Console.

What’s next? 1) Console - a free weekly email digest of the best tools for developers; 2) researching sustainable computing at Uptime Institute.

There is scope to start something tackling the problem of data center energy consumption. However, there are significant challenges: how to measure the problem, the uncertainty around the current situation, and the limited number of growth buyers.

Pure prosumer software might be new but the fundamentals haven’t changed. Products cannot be successful without a deliberate commercial go-to-market approach.

E-mail is seeing a wave of innovation. You might think that e-mail is done but opinionated software can appeal to niches of hundreds of thousands of customers. This is how startups can compete today.

There is significantly more value in the long-tail of all the components of a talk than just speaking to people who happen to be present in the room at the time.

Startups are an extreme form of business not suited to most people. Academia is the same in its opposites. This is probably why most people go and work elsewhere! I’m glad to be able to experience both.

The four core needs that every founder must satisfy, in this priority order, before they can be effective at their startup.

In porting a project from Google Cloud Functions to Azure Functions, I found Microsoft’s developer experience is a great example of attention to detail. What does that mean for startups selling to developers?