I’d heard rumblings of this before but now the news is out. Tony Antoniades is leaving ATDC to join Autotrader. I don’t have many more details than what is in this blog post by Lance. Good luck Tony in the new position!
Archive for the 'Jobs' Category Page 2 of 3
I’m a big fan of doing offsite backups. So much so that I compared a number of offsite backup services a long time ago. But backup solutions that require user intervention is a recipe for disaster. Personally, I’ve tried to automate as much as possible. I’ve set up a RAIDed storage server in my house (for the geeks, it’s RAID 1 with 2 live disks and 1 hot spare, each drive is 250GB) that gets the backups from the other machines in the house (everything executes automatically on a set schedule).
As I mentioned in my post on backup services, I was a fan of Mozy. I still think Mozy is a pretty good solution (more on why below) but having support only for Windows and Macs, it isn’t a complete solution. So I started looking at JungleDisk.
The Background
JungleDisk was started by Dave Wright who is an Atlanta based entrepreneur. Dave was previously one of the co-founders of GameSpy which was then bought by IGN where he was then Chief Architect. Dave started JungleDisk as a side project in 2006 after Amazon announced it’s S3 service. By creating an application that easily allows users to access and backup their files to the Amazon storage cloud, Dave had a hit on his hands. He continued working on the product and released a commercial version in August 2007. He announced pricing at $20 for free lifetime upgrades and support and use on any platform - Widows, Mac, or Linux. Oh yeah, you can use your licensed software on as many machines as you want too. Users pay for usage of the Amazon storage cloud (pricing here
The Technology
Now for the geek stuff. The one interesting aspect of JungleDisk is that Dave releases clients for all three platforms simultaneously. When was the last time you saw a startup do that? Normally when you see people do that, it’s software written in Java. Personally, I hate full blown applications that are Java based. Sure they are fairly speedy with current interpreters but still, they’re interpreted instead of being fully compiled code. I’m a performance freak and I love my compiled code (don’t get me wrong, interpreted languages do have their place and I dig Ruby). Dave has taken the approach of doing fully compiled code across all three platforms. He does this by writing in everything in C++ and maintaining as much of the code base as possible as common through the platforms (I’d assume everything but some network interface stuff and some filesystem work). He uses wxWidgets to maintain a cross-platform GUI and then some open source libraries like libcurl and openssl.
The Competition
With my previously favorite program, Mozy, I could backup my Windows machines but not the Linux server that houses my RAIDed drives. So I still use Mozy since they give you some free space (if you signup for Mozy using this link, you’ll get an extra 256 MB of free space [so will I] for a total of 2.2 gigs free). It costs $5/month per computer to get unlimited storage on Mozy. Compare this to the flexibility of JungleDisk and the cost I’m paying per month to Amazon (less than $5/month for about 26 gigs of storage plus daily backups across four machines - no per machine cost), JungleDisk is overall a better deal. I still use Mozy for random secondary backup purposes (I mean, come on - it’s free!).
Also note, Mozy raised about $2m in venture capital and was recently acquired by EMC for over $70m. Another JungleDisk competitor, Carbonite, has recently raised $15m to bring their lifetime total to $21m in venture capital. Over all the competitors, I think JungleDisk is not only a better solution but a more cost effective and flexible solution.
The Future
JungleDisk is an absolutely phenomenal story. The company has been completely bootstrapped by Dave and now has significant revenue to continue its growth path. In fact, Dave just announced that he’s hiring. If you think you’re a hot shot C++ developer, C#/ASP.NET developer, or product manager in Atlanta, drop a note to Dave and let him know you heard about it through this blog. This is an absolutely phenomenal ground floor opportunity for someone looking for an entrepreneurial experience.
Note, Dave has released JungleDisk Plus which gets him into a recurring revenue stream and provides users with a way to do block updates of incrementally changing files. Given the length of this post, I’ll discuss this service in a future post so I can fully delve into the technical bits.
Disclosure
I paid for my copy of JungleDisk on August 12, 2007 (9 days after it went for sale). This was before I know that Dave and JungleDisk were Atlanta based.
UPDATE: I’m an idiot. I didn’t include a link to the actual company’s site. Sorry about that.
I had the opportunity to go by MFG.com’s offices and meet Mitch Free yesterday. I’d heard great things about Mitch from Scott Burkett and the opportunity to meet Mitch arose after the recent fund raising announcement.
MFG.com’s office are pretty swanky. Nicer than anything I ever had in my Digital Envoy days. I didn’t take any pictures of the inside of the office but when you walk in you’re greeted with hardwood floors and nice wall hangings. There was a display in the lobby with rotating quotations about entrepreneurship, leadership, and selling.
I sat with Mitch for a bit as we chatted about our backgrounds as well as his company and my old one. The immediate comparison I saw between MFG.com and Digital Envoy was the nice, hefty recurring revenue stream that has been built. MFG.com’s service helps manufacturers find buyers (and vice versa) for whatever they need built. The beauty of what MFG.com has is that it helps manage the entire requisition, manufacturing, and logistics process of getting manufactured goods. Otherwise, once buyers found manufacturers, MFG.com could get cut out of the equation. Given the pricing model (annual membership fee paid by manufacturers) and the scale (both in terms of buyers and manufacturers), MFG.com has a natural monopoly position just like eBay.
One of the most interesting topics (at least for me) was the discussion on the MFG.com domain name. MFG.com originally started as MFGQuote.com (in fact, MFG.com redirects to MFGQuote.com to this day). MFG.com was owned by Microfield Graphics but Mitch noticed that they were acquired in 2005 and offered to buy the domain name. Like I’ve mentioned before, three letter domain names are highly coveted. Mitch got a hold of the technical contact and offered… wait for it… $2,000 for the domain name. And they accepted! Mitch agrees that this was a ridiculously low sum for this domain and has even been offered $1 million for the name. Clearly, he isn’t selling.
The other amazing thing about Mitch and his business is that it was totally bootstrapped. When Jeff Bezos invested and during this most recent funding round, the company has been profitable and didn’t really need the money. But through these connections, Mitch has built a company that now spans three continents and 11 different countries.
So what does the future hold? MFG.com has engaged a recruiting firm to help them fill one open executive position. Mitch is looking for a CTO who has the chops to build a next generation platform that will integrate a lot of new ideas and services that they want to provide to their client base. This isn’t a ground floor opportunity given the two fairly sizable funding rounds but it hasn’t been acquired or gone public yet. So if you think you have the background to provide them with some great developmental vision, reach out to them and see what happens.
Yeah, I know. You thought this post was going to be a diatribe about some CTO in Atlanta. Well, not exactly. The CTO is in Alexandria, VA and it isn’t exactly a person - it’s a job opening!
The job in particular is an opening at the Motley Fool for a CTO. So why am I talking about this? Well, the Motley Fool is a venture backed capital backed company (not sure why there aren’t press releases on the U.S. version of the site).
I’ve been a big fan of the Motley Fool. They have great content and more importantly, interesting and insightful advice. Any of you out there who are looking to move (or are already in Virginia) and have the credentials to land this job should take a look. The folks at the Motley Fool seem to be nice and fun.
We often don’t think about the number of non-profits headquartered in Atlanta, but there are quite a few. The list includes CARE, American Cancer Society, Arthritis Foundation, and Hands on Network among many others I’m sure.
Today I noticed an interesting job posting from Habitat for Humanity. The job, for a Vice President and Chief Information Officer, is based in Atlanta. This is a great opportunity for all those folks who are looking for jobs such as the EarthLinkers who were recently shown the door. But one thing disturbs me about the position. This position reports to the CFO.
The job of the CFO is often put at controlling and reducing costs. Most technology initiatives take a period of time to payoff that is longer than the current quarter. Therefore, I’ve often seen non-tech savvy CFOs curtailing helpful initiatives for the sake of cost reduction today. I’ve seen this play out to disastrous ends for a number of companies. Fortunately, startups are usually never hobbled by such issues since the whole organizations goal is to create something new. But the startup still has to face this issue when you sell into an organization with just this structure.
What should you do? Obviously if the finance people are in your meetings you need to spend some time on the cost savings that your product/service will provide. But just like in a technology demo, be prepared to have your proposed cost savings challenged by the finance people in the room. I’ve seen this done for no reason other than to drill the presenter and show off to colleagues. Your best bet is to be as nice as possible and try and explain why you think they’ll save money. There are so many permutations to how accounting can be done within a company that there is no way you’ll win an argument during a meeting. Your best hope is that your meeting champion comes to your aid and shuts down any nay sayers.
Latest Comments