Writing my first mobile app

By Leave a Comment

I’ve decided to try my hand at coding a Mobile App.  I sit on the board of a non-profit and I see a need for them to connect with their users, and there’s no better way than to do it via a mobile app.    It’s been a while since I’ve coded – in my college years, I wrote code for my CS courses in C++ and then dabbled in HTML for some personal and work related web pages I built.   In my career, I’ve mostly focused on writing utilities or other automation scripts using vbscript.  I’ve also done some basic SQL programming.

My initial research shows that I should write my app in JScript.  I don’t know this language, so I’ll probably start by familiarizing myself with the syntax.  I think the best way to do that is to just practice on Codecademy.   I might also take a course on General Assembly.  I’m still not sure how to actually get started though, so I’ll have to do a bit more research.

I will start off with writing the app for the Android OS.  I understand there’s segmentation issues here, but since I have an Android, and I am running KitKat on it, I think it only makes sense to start there.   If I have any success, I consider porting it over to IOS.  I think that would be a good problem to have.

The Future of IT Personnel in the Enterprise

By Leave a Comment

McKinsey’s Business Technology Office published it’s latest global survey on IT trends today. It is an interesting read and I suggest checking it out if you have a few minutes to spare. The summary of the results are as follows:

  • Firms are recognizing the importance of strategic value that IT brings to making the overall organization more efficient.
  • Most organizations do not feel that their IT current staff is capable of capturing that value. This thought is driven primarily by the IT executives in the organization, followed by the business leaders.
  • Organizations envision shifting their IT spending away from infrastructure and more toward analytics and innovation.


I found these points contradictory. Although I believe there is a sentiment that there is a strategic purpose in IT, IT departments are still looked at as a cost center, and rampant cost cutting in IT departments continues on a yearly basis. This cost cutting isn’t necessarily due to the movement to the cloud as the survey suggests – in fact it’s quite the opposite. Moving data into the cloud still requires heavy infrastructure. As a firm consolidates their hardware, they are just buying more complex and thus more expensive hardware to support it. Furthermore, the data explosion that continues to happen as firms keep most of their data electronic, coupled with the compliance laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley which require data to be kept for a certain number of years is only increasing infrastructure costs.

Yet, businesses still aim to cut IT as much as possible. Most of the large financial institutions are cutting their annual IT spending budget anywhere between 10%-15%. Unfortunately, when these firm’s can’t cut out the infrastructure, they instead cut their personnel. It is quite easy to cut IT personnel. There hasn’t been a major disruption in IT since the introduction of virtualization technology, and instead, the technologies that are used heavily have become mature to the point where they are very simplistic to implement. Couple that with the proliferation of knowledge on the internet, where one can just Google for any issue they are trying to solve, and it has made supporting IT infrastructure very easy. It’s essentially commoditized IT.

This commoditization of IT has naturally led to downward pressure on salary. Companies are also not investing in their IT personnel by giving them training, even though the survey alludes to the fact that organizations believe they should. Even if the company does invest in them, they only send those employees to courses/seminars which teach administrative tasks. As these employees gain seniority, their salaries increase, but their skill sets didn’t match the salary. That’s when the companies realize their IT budgets are too large and look to outsource. This is especially true in the operational roles within the IT department (e.g. server admins, database admins, helpdesk, etc.). These roles are then being increasingly outsourced to India where firms like Wipro and Genpact have been the main beneficiaries. The downside to the outsourcing is that roles will never bring added value to the organization – they are there to perform the operational tasks and that is it.

So in short, firms see the value of IT, yet are not investing in it, are outsourcing their staff, and then complaining that IT is not brining strategic value to the enterprise.

This actually leaves the IT personnel in today’s global businesses in dire straits. With those employees now out of a job, they are stuck in a very difficult position – they don’t have the skill set that current IT firms are looking for, and they are too expensive. This, unfortunately is the ugly side of “growing up” within IT – at some point, you become too old and too expensive and don’t have a specialized trait. There will always be someone younger, and willing to work much harder for a cheaper salary. Companies know this, even if they don’t publicly speak about it.

How do we solve this problem? Well, we already know that operational roles will no longer be necessary in the future. Either technology will evolve to automate those tasks, or they will just be outsourced to the lowest bidder. Instead, what can’t be outsourced is the design of these infrastructures, along with the architecting of solutions. McKinsey’s survey alludes to this also, as demonstrated in the following chart:

 

image

*Exhibit 6 from McKinsey’s Global IT survey

 All of the roles mentioned in the chart above point to the same thing – creating solutions that help the business become more profitable. Of particular interest is the the “Joint business and IT expertise” category. Companies will need IT executives with MBA’s or other strong business experience. Sending IT personnel to business oriented classes, instead of the pure technical classes is one way to address this. If the firm won’t do it, then I suggest that IT employees take the initiative to start learning basic business principles and applying them to their work.

You can easily move away from being a “cost” to a business to becoming a valued asset, once you can show the business how you can help it improve, and thus make more money.

Key Takeaways:

  • Companies are beginning to understand the strategic value of IT, but have not found a way to capture this strategic value.
  • Even so, IT is still looked at as a cost center. Firms are not cutting cost on infrastructure and instead cutting cost on personnel.
  • The IT employee has become commoditized; operational roles will continue to diminish to the point of obsolescence.
  • IT personnel must begin understanding business principles and applying it to their jobs to become an asset instead of a liability.

Small Businesses and Online Presence

By Leave a Comment

I’ve been going to the same barber for the past 14 yrs. in NYC.  We had a strong relationship and I never had to find a replacement for him.    For the past year though, my work has kept me in Central NJ, and as such I haven’t been able to visit my barber.  I did not have a recommendation from a trusted source to rely on, so all I was able to do was research the business online. I performed a quick Google search and although I was able to find a few listings of barbershops on Yelp and through Google plus, I was surprised to only find one barbershop with an online presence.

No matter how small the business and how far removed it may be from technology, an online presence is critical to the exposure and generation of new leads for that business.     I was able to build up a comfort level with this business because I was able to spend some time on their website, learning about their service offerings and their employees.   The convenience of this far outweighs the little amount of time I would’ve had with a person on the phone at any business I would call.   I am sure that the majority of people prefer this method of researching businesses as well, especially with the instance access an internet enabled mobile device gives them.

The cost of putting up a website is only a few hundred dollars, and you can have it up and running in a few hours.   Sites such as iPage, GoDaddy and Yahoo! Small Business make it very easy to setup and host a website.  WordPress offers many free and easy to use templates (and some premium ones for a nominal fee) to build your website.  You can get assistance  from 3rd party sources by visiting ELance or 99Designs.  A simple cost breakdown to set up a website is:

  • Website hosting and domain name registration – ~$50 to host a website and register a domain name*
  • WordPress theme – free for the basic template, $30-$100 for a premium theme.
  • Set up time – A couple of hours to customize the template to your liking and adding content about your organization to it
  • 3rd Party services for website build (optional) – Less than $500, depending on the vendor you choose.


You can have a complete website built and hosted for less than $600, and within a few hours.  There’s really no excuse not to do this.   I’m positive that the investment would pay itself off in a few months, if not sooner.

While getting my haircut, the barber told me that they had only been in business for about seven months, and the majority of their new business is being driven via their online presence.   Their online presence got me in the door.  All in all, I was there for about 30 minutes, got top notch customer service and a great haircut.  Their website got me in their door, their service will make me a repeat customer.

The barbershop is called Razorsharp.  Check them out if you’re in the area.  I highly recommend them.

Key Takeaways:

  • Having an online presence, no matter how small the business, is critical to gain exposure in today’s age.
  • Setting up an online presence has never been cheaper/easier.
  • While an online presence will get customers through your doors, you still need to produce a great product to get them to come back.

 

* The $50 price tag is based on the latest offerings on iPage.com and may be different when you perform your research.

Is WhatsApp really worth $19 billion dollars?

By Leave a Comment

I was shocked to learn that Facebook purchased WhatsApp for a total of 19 billion.   My knee jerk reaction was that Facebook overpaid, especially as I contemplated that currently WhatsApp is charging $1 per user per year, and have 450 million users.   450 million dollars in revenue in quite negligible to Facebook’s overall bottom line.    Thinking back to Mergers and Acquisitions class, our professor kept pounding on finding the synergies in a deal… 1+1 = 3 in order for a merger or acquisition to work.  So, searching for those synergies, I think there are some ways where this acquisition will be justify the purchase price and ultimately generate more revenue that was used to purchase it:

  • Recurring Revenue and increasing the user base – The management team at WhatsApp believes that they can increase their current install base from 450 million to about 2 billion.   And although the subscription price is just $1 per year, this is recurring revenue and the subscription based model of revenue generation is a gold mine.   If WhatsApp can generation 2 billion dollars of revenue a year, they will be well on their way to becoming a solid acquisition.  And that’s before Facebook introduces their advertising platform into the program.  I realize that Mark Zuckerberg is on record saying he doesn’t believe in advertising in messaging platforms, but I expect that to change in a few years as the firm matures and looks for for revenue channels to increase shareholder value.  But monetizing isn’t the big question today.  The big question is:  How will they get to 2 billion users?
  • Reach into emerging markets – WhatsApp is signing a whopping 1 million users each day.  Think about that for a minute.  Entire cities of people are signing up to use WhatsApp every single day.   It appears the vast majority of those users are in emerging markets, markets that Facebook does not have as deep a reach in.  This acquisition gives Facebook access to those markets.

  • User Engagement – Facebook’s active daily engagement is 61%, WhatsApp’s is 70%.   What’s more is that WhatsApp has become the de facto way to communicate and share pictures in the emerging markets, where it more likely that a person will have a smart phone than a computer.   Facebook’s late entry into the mobile space hurt them here, and although they have been making strides, WhatsApp was too far ahead.  I couldn’t find any data which discussed how long a person stayed, but I imagine that it’s a significant amount of time.  The longer an application has eyeballs on it, the more ads it can see and the more potential for revenue generation occurs.

Essentially the folks at Facebook believe that they will make way more money than the 19 billion to be paid.   Will they reach that?  Only time will tell.   Another point that my professors kept making was that 70-80% of mergers and acquisitions fail.  There are definite hurdles for WhatsApp/Facebook deal to overcome.  We wont know for a few years as to how successful it is.

I’m sure the folks at SnapChat are very happy, as the valuation of their product went through the roof after this announcement.

Remembering Sanya and how short life is

By Leave a Comment

I’d like to take a break from the normal business musings I put up here  and speak about a sudden and tragic death in our family.   We lost a beloved daughter, cousin and friend today.  Sanya was just 20 yrs. old, in her last semester at Cornell University.   She was just walking home from her last class of the day and collapsed.  We don’t know exactly what happened after that, but we do know that the paramedics said they were at the scene within 5 minutes and she was at the hospital within 10.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough time.    The official cause of death was brain death, but we really don’t know what caused her to collapse in the first place.  She did have some sever allergies but the doctors tell us that those wouldn’t cause this type of reaction.   The family fought hard to keep her alive, holding on to the smallest thread of hope that she would come out of it.    But looking back on this, it appears that she was probably already dead when she came to the hospital.

Sanya was truly special.  She had an artistic side, which shown through in her drawings, her photography and her music.  She wanted to be a neurologist, and wanted to start clinics for the poor and needy with her parents, who are also scientists.  When I first met Sanya, I knew her to be a very shy person, who had real difficulty opening up.   Then she went to college and blossomed into this dynamic person.   Her time at Cornell really brought out her personality.

She was an only child.  Although we have all felt the effects of her passing, her parent’s grief is something that can’t be matched.  I am not sure if they will ever get over this, but it will take them a very long time to pick up the pieces and try to put their life back together.

The outpouring of love that Sanya and her family received during this time was overwhelming.  There must’ve been at least 50 people in the ICU waiting room at any given moment while we were there.  Most people camped out in the waiting room and stayed for days at a time.  During the weekends the number of people staying in those same  waiting rooms swelled up to at least 100.   A mixture of friends (both Sanya’s and Sanya’s parents), family (both near and far), and even co-workers came to give their support.   Even now, the amount of people coming to Sanya’s home to offer support has not subsided.   It is very easy to just pay your respects and move on with your own lives, but these people have taken time out of their lives to support the family.   Even if they just sit there and not say a word, it is very helpful.  All of your support is truly appreciated.   I’d also like to give our thanks to the doctors and nurses at Cayuga Medical Center.  They were very patient with us, as we constantly broke the rules on the amount of visitors allowed.  They even offered us beds, pillows, blankets and rooms to sleep in.   We are truly grateful for your compassion during that difficult time.

This has been quite the wake up call for me.    Life is really short, and it is so easy to get caught up in your work, especially when you are building a business.   But, I believe in the truism, that at the end, you won’t regret that you didn’t spend more time in the office.   Sanya woke up that morning, and she fully expected it to be a normal day.  She was going to go to class and come home to hang out with her friends.  I doubt that it ever crossed her mind that that day would be her last day.   It’s truly amazing that you don’t know, when, how or where you will die.  But we are all mortal’s and our life is finite.  All we can do is make the most of our time here, and leave a mark on those we leave behind.  Sanya left a mark.  It was evident on the amount of love and support she got during her last days.  Her parents are leaving a mark, as evidenced by the amount of support they are getting now.  I hope that I can leave even 1/10 of that type of mark, and will work to do so.

But before all that, I’m going to go home and hug my family extra tight tonight.  I hope you will to.

Key Takeaways

  • Life is short.
  • You will never know how, where or when you will die.  It can’t be controlled.
  • What can be controlled is how you live your life and what kind of mark you will leave.
  • No one ever regrets not working enough in the office.  They do regret not spending enough time with loved ones.
  • You can still change that and leave the mark that will last way beyond your years.

Casetext

By Leave a Comment

Yesterday, Clippership announced the close of another venture investment.  The company is Casetext, founded by Jake Heller.   This investment is particularly close to my heart, as it is attempting to disrupt the legal technology market.  I’ve had the pleasure of working with attorney’s through my previous company Simplegrid, and one of the biggest pain points for these attorneys (especially the smaller law firms) was the exorbitant costs of legal research websites.  Pricing can range up to thousands of dollars per attorney per year.   This data often times became stale, and essentially led a law firm to pay for research that they may not even use in their cases.

Casetext aims to change this by providing case annotations for free to everyone, that will stay up to date and analysis to help one understand judicial opinions.   Think Wikipedia/Quora for legal research.  They are working with top professors and law firms to annotate cases and otherwise showcase their work.   They are already seeing tremendous traction on their site and they only launched six weeks ago.      

Casetext is truly coming at the right time.  We’ve seen the success that Wikipedia and Quora have experienced, thus lending credence to the open source format of sharing knowledge.   We believe that as the knowledge economy grows, we’ll see more of these industry specific knowledge sharing sites grow.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see something similar to happen within health care that would make understanding diseases, prescription medication and their interactions much easier to understand than it is today.

It’ll be very exciting to see how Casetext matures; if early results are any indication, attorneys will be changing the way they perform and share legal research in the near future.

Simplegrid Technology, Inc.

By Leave a Comment

Today, I am excited to announce the sale of some of the assets of Simplegrid Technology, Inc.    Simplegrid started off as a dream for me; when I first started the company, I knew I was a good consultant, and I thought that is all it would take to run an IT consultancy.  Boy was I wrong!  It took a lot of hard work, perseverance and failures to help mold me into a business man that can actually build and sell a company.     It’s a bit bittersweet, as we are selling off a portion of something that we created from scratch, with our own blood, sweat and tears, but at the same time I am very proud of the efforts and accomplishments that my team and I have put together to get us to this day.

IT Firms in NYCYou may be asking what an asset sale is.   When I had first started contemplating the sale of Simplegrid, I just assumed that I would sell off the entire business – all of our client contracts, the Simplegrid brand, and our employees and management team would then work for the acquiring company.  As we were negotiating with potential suitors, I quickly realized that a complete company sale wasn’t in the best interests of myself our employees.   Instead, we chose to sell off some of our assets – in this scenario, our Managed Services division.  I’ll get into details about the valuation of the company and other factors to consider when selling a company in later blog posts, but in short, we found the highest value in selling off our Managed Services contracts, as both Simplegrid and our acquirer were able to quantifiably value the worth of those contracts. 

As for the future, I’m very excited.  In the short term, I will be a consultant for the new company as I assist them with the transition, and some of our team will be joining them as well.  In the long term, the sale of these assets will allow me to free up more time to work on Clippership International, LLC, our seed investment fund.  It will also allow me to dedicate more time to the non-profit organizations I work with.  Lastly, graduating from the Kellogg School of Management in May also makes a great transition point into new opportunities.  The future looks bright, and I am thankful for the opportunities in front of me.

Before signing off, I realize that there is no way I could’ve done this alone.   The sum is always greater than it’s individual parts, and that cannot be truer for the Simplegrid team.  I couldn’t have done this without them and the appreciation I feel for all of their efforts knows no bounds.  We started off as professional contacts, but we quickly grew into close friends, and then into family.  Thank you. 

And lastly, thank you to my family.  My wife and children have been very patient with me over these past four years, as I worked late hours, traveled almost every week for both work and school.  I missed many dinners, and  cancelled last minute on many of our family events.  To my lovely wife Naveen – not once did you complain (ok, well maybe once or twice).  But believe me that your patience and understanding didn’t go unnoticed.  My success is your success.   I couldn’t have done it without you.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • Sometimes selling your entire business isn’t the best option.
  • Your team plays a critical role in the success of your business.
  • Having a strong, supportive family is tantamount to your career goals.

The Lean Startup Methodology will change how Enterprises build products

By Leave a Comment

In this hyper-competitive age, enterprises are not only dealing with stiff competition from their peer enterprises, but also dealing with competition from startups that are trying to disrupt the market that those enterprises dominate.   It is for this reason that Enterprises need to get better at building products. And they need to be able to build them faster, and at the same time, fail faster in the event that a product doesn’t work out.  This is especially critical as most startups are very nimble and can pivot quickly to build a better product.  Enterprises have difficulty doing anything quickly.  In fact, it is so difficult that this according to this Harvard Business Review article, 75% of consumer packaged goods and retail products fail to earn $7.5 million in their first year!

We have many examples of failed products right in front of us (see: Microsoft Vista or Blackberry Playbook).  So, how can enterprises become better at this?

Enter the Lean Startup Methodology.   Although this methodology was primarily created for helping startups build a product quickly, it is beginning to be adapted to work in different industries. .  As such, enterprise are beginning to adopt the Lean Method to help them build successful products faster.

James Donnelan has an excellent blog post which explains what the Lean Startup Model is all about.  He writes:

…the lean startup model, when you boil it down, simply says that when you launch any new business or product you do so based on validated learning, experimentation and frequent releases which allow you to measure and gain valuable customer feedback. In other words – build fast, release often, measure, learn and repeat.

The ability to “build fast, release often, measure, learn and repeat” is the core principle to the Lean methodology, and is a critical element that many large corporations are missing today.   James goes on to list the principles of the Lean Startup Methodology:

    • “Use a continuous delivery model to release new features quickly with the least amount of friction.
    • A/B test different versions of the same feature on different user segments to identify which is more valuable.
    • Act on metrics – if you can’t measure it you can’t act on it to ensure that you are always improving the product.”

We’ve already seen some companies adopt this methodology.  Facebook and their release of code 2x a day being a very popular example of how this methodology is working in the enterprise.   But companies like Facebook and Google are quite innovative and therefore not the best example of your common enterprise.  The typical company will need assistance in learning how to implement LSM and will need access to tools that will keep them committed to this methodology.

I strongly believe that most companies will have to adopt this methodology, in order to succeed in today’s competitive market, and that is why I’m thrilled to announce Clippership’s investment in a company that is at the forefront of this movement.   Along with Upfront Ventures and others, we are proud to be investing in  Lean Startup Machine.   Trevor Owens, the founder and CEO of Lean Startup Machine has been a thought leader in this area, and the company is already offering hundreds of Lean Startup workshops over the world.  Trevor and his co-founder/CTO Obie Fernandez have also written a book about how the LSM can be implemented in the enterprise.  It is a must read for all those that are looking to get a head start on learning this methodology.

Key Takeaways:

  • Enterprises are facing stiff competition not only from their peers, but also from startups that are trying to disrupt markets.
  • Enterprises will need to get better at creating/updating products quickly.
  • The Lean Startup Methodology will be the new de factor methodology that enterprises will use to create and deliver successful products.

Simplegrid named to the MSPMentor 501

By Leave a Comment

NYC IT Consulting

Our IT consultancy, Simplegrid Technology, Inc. was recently ranked as one of the top 501 firm IT Firms in the world by MSPMentor.   It’s quite an honor to be ranked within this exclusive list, and this the second time we’ve been included.

You can read the official press release here.   Thank you once again to the folks at MSPMentor for recognizing the hard work we put in.   And thank you to the entire Simplegrid team, for all of the hard work you’ve put in.  Your effort shows, not only in these awards, but also in the appreciation our clients show to us as we help them grow their businesses.

Launching Clippership International – A Seed fund based in NY/NJ

By Leave a Comment

Back Home

Today, I’m very excited to announce the launch of my new venture, Clippership International.   Clippership is a seed based venture fund based out of New Jersey.  Our investing thesis is pretty straightforward.   We are looking for companies creating disruptive solutions, primarily in the following areas:

  • FinTech
  • Healthcare IT
  • Legal Technology
  • Enterprise Software


We chose to focus on those areas for two man reasons.  First, the general partners in the firm deep experience and a strong network of contacts within those industries.  Second, we believe that each of those areas are ripe for disruptive technologies.

Initially we plan on investing in NYC based startups.   We are big fans of the vibrant startup community based in New York, and we also feel that NYC is the best city in the world.  With that said, we would never turn down a startup because they are not based in NYC.

It seems like there’s a ton of seed and venture capital readily available these days.  Platforms such as AngelList have made it very easy to raise funding for startups.  Startups have the luxury of choosing where to source their seed capital from, and the top startups can always choose from the cream of the crop.  We aim to be a part of those top seed venture firms that the top startups covet.  We believe we can offer the following to any startup we work with:

  • Expertise – We are a team of businessmen, PhD’s, politicians and technology enthusiasts.  Our diverse backgrounds allow us to bring unique viewpoints on how to solve the biggest challenges your startup will face.
  • Ecosystem – We’ve focused on a few specific technology areas – areas that we have deep experience in, and strong relationships with the user base.  We can help further solidify solutions to problems in these areas, but also help convey the message within our networks.   Introductions to key players in the industry is tantamount in helping a startup become successful, and we can help facilitate those introductions.
  • Quick decisions – We will aim to try to meet startups while they are still in the idea phase.  We know that this is a very risky time, but believe this is where we can help startups succeed the most by helping them formulate their idea into executable plan, then into a marketable product, and finally into a business.  With that said, I don’t think every startup will be an ideal fit.  We’ll let you know if we’re going to invest quickly or not, and if not, try to put you in touch with investors who may.
  • Getting our hands dirty, and not -We have deep experience in building and selling companies, and in rigorous financial analysis.   When needed, we can get involved and get our hands dirty in helping the startups we work with in solving difficult problems, setting strategy and recruiting top performers.  We can also help our startups make the tough decisions that always come up during the growth stages in the company.  But most importantly, we have the foresight to know when to get out of the way and let the management team keep on rockin’.

We’re very fortunate that we have LP’s that believe in our vision and am happy to also announce that we have closed our first round of funding and are actively looking for startups to work with.    If you have a great idea that’s going to change the world, we’d love to hear from you.