Early in my tenure as product manager for the web servers at Netscape, we faced a terrible crisis. We just got our hands on Microsoft’s new web server, Internet Information Server (IIS), and benchmarked against our product. Microsoft’s IIS had every feature that we had, was five times faster and we knew that they were…
Visit Site »In 1950, my Uncle Ed Kalin opened a small designer furniture store. After years of hard work, he saved up and opened a larger one. Growing up working there, I’d observe him doing things that, at first, were hard for me to understand. First of all, when he walked around the store, he was constantly…
Visit Site »A year ago I wrote about a very special entrepreneur, Christian Gheorghe, who escaped Communist Romania, migrated to America, and—after starting here with $27 as a limo driver and construction worker—eventually became a computer scientist and an entrepreneur. I indicated that just as he broke from an oppressive, totalitarian regime, he planned to free his customers from…
Visit Site »Back in the bad old days when I was running Loudcloud, I thought to myself: “how could I have possibly prepared for this? How could I know that half our customers would go out of business? How could I know that it would become impossible to raise money in the private markets? How could I…
Visit Site »Everyone in the technology industry seems to agree that people are paramount, yet nobody seems to be on the same page with what the people organization—Human Resources—should look like. The problem is that when it comes to HR, most CEOs don’t really know what they want. In theory, they want a well-managed company with a…
Visit Site »Call it the enterprise startup conundrum: how do you earn legitimacy if no one will give you an opportunity to become legitimate? The enterprise world is different from the consumer world: barriers to entry are higher, switching costs away from incumbents are bigger, and the risks for failure (for both buyers and sellers) are greater.…
Visit Site »Summing it all up We’ve covered quite a bit of ground together since I started this series. Here’s the executive summary: There are simple steps you should take to lay the groundwork for international expansion from the moment you start your company. Before you launch internationally, you should have an explicit, well-articulated strategy. You should assign a qualified executive to…
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