Thursday, June 12, 2008
Guest Speaker Series: Tom Des Jardins and Dave Markley
Tom Des Jardins and Dave Markley, formerly of LightningCast, spoke to the LaunchBox08 group on June 3rd about architectural design, early stage technology platforms, and scaling requirements.
Virtualized servers are the way to go. Tom recommends outsourcing load balancing and not stressing about database scalability until a company has revenue. Instead, a startup should focus on having scalable services by building the appropriate architecture. As for hosting, a good service for startups is Amazon's Web Services - Enterprise Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3).
Distributed development. Teams working in different places creates a new set of obstacles, which may outweigh the benefits. Tom believes that distributed development generally only works when you know who you are working with. Otherwise, it can be difficult for a small company to handle when it comes time for integration. Another consideration to acknowledge is that any hiccups or minor problems will result in a full day delay due to time zone differences. Finally, a startup should avoid any red flags resulting from ineffective relationships when it comes time to raise financing.
Top things to do when planning your IT. Use well-established technologies for your corporate services and save the cutting-edge stuff for your innovation. Don't bother running your own email - use Gmail or outsource instead. Don't waste resources on your intranet. Don't pay for marketing until you have real revenue.
Top mistakes made. Don't use fancy hardware - your battle is with the market, so don't bother having a religion. Avoid shareware documents - sending documents to your VC in formats that they can read is part of your job. If a deal sounds good to be true, then it is - be afraid of companies that offer options to pay for hardware.
Virtualized servers are the way to go. Tom recommends outsourcing load balancing and not stressing about database scalability until a company has revenue. Instead, a startup should focus on having scalable services by building the appropriate architecture. As for hosting, a good service for startups is Amazon's Web Services - Enterprise Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3).
Distributed development. Teams working in different places creates a new set of obstacles, which may outweigh the benefits. Tom believes that distributed development generally only works when you know who you are working with. Otherwise, it can be difficult for a small company to handle when it comes time for integration. Another consideration to acknowledge is that any hiccups or minor problems will result in a full day delay due to time zone differences. Finally, a startup should avoid any red flags resulting from ineffective relationships when it comes time to raise financing.
Top things to do when planning your IT. Use well-established technologies for your corporate services and save the cutting-edge stuff for your innovation. Don't bother running your own email - use Gmail or outsource instead. Don't waste resources on your intranet. Don't pay for marketing until you have real revenue.
Top mistakes made. Don't use fancy hardware - your battle is with the market, so don't bother having a religion. Avoid shareware documents - sending documents to your VC in formats that they can read is part of your job. If a deal sounds good to be true, then it is - be afraid of companies that offer options to pay for hardware.
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