Tag: angel

Notes for Infrastructure Post

Notes for Infrastructure Investments blog post:

This is a list of points from my notebook over the past year collected over various meetings and conferences.

Mobility

  • Consumer mobile behaviour matters – leading indicator broadly for mobility
  • Think beyond current devices (3-5″ smartphones, 7-11″ tablets) – what devices/screens matter in 2015 ?
  • Pay attention to the rise of infrastructure apps (How mobility connects information silos)
  • Composite Apps matter more vs. individual apps (IFTTT + hardware + ambience awareness)
  • Role of data in mobile architectures (Virtual cell definitions, moving beyond ‘circuit’ connections to a single base station). Multiple radios (WiFi, 4G/LTE, …)
  • Offloading mobile traffic to data-centers vs. core-networks.
  • Mobile is not a “second screen”
  • Think “Interaction” when you think of mobile screens, not “presentation”

Cloud & Control

  • Management & Control frameworks for heterogenous hardware
  • Service-to-service information exchange with policy/compliance
  • Stupid simple ways to deliver app-aware performance (no QoS please), solve by sufficiency/availability of resources, not strict reservation.
  • Cloud-to-cloud resource signaling/advertisement/reservation
  • Software defined networking v1.0 was MPLS (remember Ipsilon), pay more attention to protocols vs. systems/boxes. Global knowledge neither required, nor assumed for optimal/practical TE.
  • Data-center to network boundary+Control matters.

Custom Hardware

  • Software defined hardware (is there any other kind?)
  • Processor controlled modules for specific workloads (across consumer/enterprise/ServiceProvider/DataCenters)
  • Software-defined Networking hardware required: backplanes, Top-of-rack switches, Data-center fabrics, DC-to-DC core networking vs. CO-to-CO (Flows/mobile-traffic/…)
  • IO bottlenecks need to be solved – scale (Users/apps) begets throughput problems.

Data Intelligence

  • New BI stack on Google/Amazon infrastructure vs. specialized warehouses
  • DI stack = presentation/visualization + Infrastructure-smarts (SW, HW) + Federated DI warehouses + DR/HA + flex-scalable db + Caching + …
  • Optimize cost per bit/byte of [store, manipulate, move, serve]
  • Infrastructure apps play a big role here, as does custom hardware (workload specific compute/store/network)
  • 2000-2010 was v0.1 (MapReduce), think Dremel, Cassovary, Spark & Shark,…

 

my values as an investor: an open letter to founders

dear founders,

over the past few years, i have invested small amounts of money where the founders have given me an opportunity to do so. for each such opportunity to share in their quest, i have learnt something – and i am thankful.

as i talk to the founder(s) and the team, i find that some teams are naturally curious and want to know why i’d invest and what my relationship to that startup would be. one word that rarely gets used in these conversations and questions is ‘values’. i have written previously about startup values and as an investor, want to make sure that founders talking to me about angel/seed investments understand my values.
values
my values are expressions of some simple viewpoints and actions i strive to live by and bring to the table as an investor. these are:

  • are you taking enough risk?
  • optimize for the long term – always.
  • do I identify with, understand, and agree with your mission, not just your idea, technology, products, and startups.
  • the small amount of money ($5K to $50K) i invest carries with it the ability to turn to zero or be padded with zeroes. if it enabled you to make an effort you couldn’t otherwise make, it will be well spent.
  • while i will make an effort to help whichever way I can, you should understand that:
    • i am not your product manager
    • i am not your rolodex. access without context means nothing.
    • i am not a visionary. i am investing in your vision which is tuned constantly, by every day interaction with your users, technologies, products, and your peers. chase what you see, not what i or others ask you to chase.
  • i have failed many times at many things. i have learnt from failures. successes taught me more, but failures caused me to learn more.
  • while you focus on user growth and customer associated metrics, don’t lose sight of personal growth metrics.  i pay particular attention to personal and inter-personal growth within your startup.

and finally, the most important metric for me – your success as a founder isn’t measured in dollars raised or valuation or money earned for investors, it is measured in how many other people did you make successful. this is my yardstick for a founder.