The online whiteboard of Kristofer Palmvik
By now, I have a pretty clear picture of what a CTO should be all about, what makes you a successful CTO, and what doesn’t. Still, even now, I find that the role of CTO is one of the most misunderstood roles in tech. For a part, this might have to do with the rise of the so-called “startup-CTO”, a role name that seems to have been introduced by VCs, and is actually more of a tech lead for early startups.
Rails 7.1 adds the ability to define the local variables a template can accept. This helps in precompiling templates during application startup rather than at runtime. To achieve this, we have to add a locals magic comment inside the partial.
Startup CTOs or founding developers are the first technical people in the business. It is natural to think your job is to write code and build software. This is backwards. Your first job is not to build software. Your role is to use your technical expertise to help the startup figure out fast if you have a valid solution to a compelling problem, and then a valid product for a big enough market. You might do this through building software, but you might not need to.
In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.
One way to simplify your stack and reduce the moving parts, speed up development, lower the risk and deliver more features in your startup is “Use Postgres for everything”. Postgres can replace—up to millions of users—many backend technologies, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Mongo and Redis among them.
I’ve led infrastructure at a startup for the past 4 years that has had to scale quickly. From the beginning I made some core decisions that the company has had to stick to, for better or worse, these past four years. This post will list some of the major decisions made and if I endorse them for your startup, or if I regret them and advise you to pick something else.
As a company grows in revenue, customer base, venture capital and therefore executive teams members — things need to change. Many CEOs I know are control freaks and thus struggle with delegation.
As organizations transition from startup to scale-up, and eventually to established enterprises, the leadership mantle may need to shift to individuals whose personality traits are congruent with the altered operational dynamics.
If a founder without the requisite expertise tries to build a remote culture, they layer on an additional level of risk which they can't see, let alone manage. This is a great way to dig your company into a deep grave.
Rust is a great language for building performant production systems. If you are prototyping, iterating with customers, or just unsure in the product direction - you are probably going to waste valuable time with Rust.
I am working now for a startup as well and I enjoy it, but I also realise I couldn’t provide such a good service if it wasn’t for the valuable skills I learned working for big corporations.
As an entrepreneur, you would typically want to rely on your team rather than be permanently suspicious. This is precisely why you’ve hired trustworthy professionals in the first place.
OKRs don’t work for pre-PMF startups. Here are two other frameworks that are a better fit early stage projects.
With the expanded product basket, the Startup Plan v2.0 provides four times the value of the original program. As an added bonus when new Cloudflare products are in beta, participants on the Startup Plan are welcome to share their use case and potentially receive early access.
We collect evidence of various types and gradually build a better understanding of the idea. We start with cheaper modes of validation (assessment, data gathering, early-stage tests), and move to more expensive ones only if the idea still looks good.
A good idea is not just the one sentence which gains you entrance to the maze. It’s the collection of smaller tweaks that defines a path through the maze, along with explanations of why this particular combination will work while others nearby have failed. Note that this requires an extremely detailed understanding of your current and potential competitors; if you believe you don’t have any competitors, think again until you’ve found the most obvious adjacent market. This exercise is of crucial importance; as Larry Ellison said, "Choose your competitors carefully, as you will become a lot like them."
Sally and Jim don’t have any customers. Nor do they have a product. But this directional goal allows them to start interviewing people who match their target customer profile
Stop reading it. Stop following it. Stop doing what it recommends. It’s outdated, and there’s a 99% chance it wasn’t written for the type of company you work at.
If we really want to learn about our business, we need to start by figuring out what we want to learn. Identify the Learning Goal. Specify the Data. Select a Method
How do employees looking for a startup job think like a VC to make a strategic decision? What is the VC-style due diligence process that employees should be doing?
Meet CourtCorrect a new startup that wants to help people to know what rights they’ve signed away when they tick that ‘I agree’ box online – and to then keep track of what is really provided to you by that contract.
The startup lingo of killing, crushing and smashing things is all so negative, and the irony is it actually doesn’t represent the startup ecosystem at all. As builders and makers, we are nurturing, crafting and growing.
Worrying about the hosting costs you might incur if a horde of zombie toasters decide to attack your service doesn’t need to be one of them
Now that we understand important concepts like scheduling, state management, and resource allocations, let’s see these in action by actually running a service in ECS.
In a sense, Airbnb became an interactive lifestyle magazine.
Roam, a new network of co-living spaces, offers a lease that lets you continually move: After a couple of weeks or months in Madrid, you can head to Miami, or Ubud, Bali. By 2017, the startup plans to have 8-10 locations around the world.
Hantera rekryteringsprocessen som du hanterar en potentiell ny relation. Ät lunch, promenera och kanske ta ut hela teamet på en middag? Det är i de alldagliga samtalen du verkligen förstår en persons drivkrafter, intelligens och inställning.
Don’t go work at a startup making significantly less than market rate salary just to get stock options.
In 2011, we moved our global headquarters to San Mateo, CA. Now, with 120 employees in 12 countries and $50 million in funding, here are some things I’ve learned along the way.
Get ready for our first ever Pop-Up Job Fair! This is an event for startups hiring tech talent for iOS / Android, Backend, C/C++, Database, Data, DevOps, Full Stack, Go, Hardware, HTML/CSS, Java, JS Frontend, JS Node, Mobile, .NET, PHP, Python, QA/Testing, Ruby, Scala, Security, UX Design...and more.
Att det finns gott om entreprenörer med rötterna i Uppsala råder det ingen tvekan om. Svenska miljardbolag som Skype, Klarna och MySQL har alla grundare med bakgrund i studentstaden och mängder av unga startups är idag på framfart. Men någon utpräglad startupkultur har det däremot länge varit brist på. Det menar åtminstone Jason Dainter som arrangerar eventet Uppstart, en Uppsalabaserad motsvarighet till Sthlm Tech Fest.
The reason I want to know first whether a startup is default alive or default dead is that the rest of the conversation depends on the answer. If the company is default alive, we can talk about ambitious new things they could do. If it’s default dead, we probably need to talk about how to save it.
The best place to learn about tech events and open positions at startups in Uppsala.
James Pember lärde sig själv att koda och byggde en digital plattform som låter organisationer skapa säljtävlingar. Hans startup Sparta backas upp av tunga investerare och har nyligen byggt in stöd för det amerikanska kundvårdsföretaget Salesforce.
Cultivating gratitude in the workplace is probably one of the best thing you can do. If you are the founder, take the lead and thank your colleagues and co-worker for the hard work they have done. That little act of appreciation and recognition will go a long way.
A friend and I hosted a "Finish it! Weekend" once (as opposed to a "Startup Weekend"). The idea was to get people together for one weekend and finish that last 10% or whatever of a project.
1. Be great at an important skill 2. Refine your skills faster than your peers 3. Take your skills to a startup 4. Take on every project from the CEO 5. Teach everyone around you everything you’ve learned 6. Never be negative 7. Get as much equity as you can 8. Bring order to the chaos
Almost every new tech startup needs knowledgeable JavaScript application developers on staff. This book exists for one purpose: to help you gain the knowledge you need to build complete JavaScript applications that are easy to extend and maintain.
A lot of "progressive" corporations end up creating mini-Innovation teams internally with their best & brightest, who are told to "act like a startup" and end up basically creating 75% of all the new stuff ... until it requires an interface to a legacy system and the devs outside the team refuse to cooperate out of fear.
While technical debt is an understood problem, it turns out startups also accrue another kind of debt – one that can kill the company even quicker – organizational debt. Organizational debt is all the people/culture compromises made to "just get it done" in the early stages of a startup. Just when things should be going great, organizational debt can turn a growing company into a chaotic nightmare. Growing companies need to understand how to recognize and "refactor" organizational debt.
Find your perfect Tech Startup match this April 16th at SUP46, Regeringsgatan 29, Stockholm. Welcome to Join a Startup (Tech) - a matchmaking event that aims to connect talented and skilled candidates (like you) with fast-growing potential startups looking to expand their teams.
Linus Lennstrand lämnade sitt CTO-jobb på Hemnet i Stockholm för att bli CTO på en startup i Nairobi. Här fann han nybyggaranda och möjlighet att testa idéer.
Global hospitality startup Airbnb is launching a major update to its mobile web experience today in an effort to reach more users accessing the site on their smartphones. The update not only will make the mobile site more attractive and usable for potential guests, but will also make future development easier as Airbnb moves to more responsive design.
Vietnam’s business capital, Ho Chi Minh City continues its ascent. "The city has spawned Flappy Bird and with 70% of the population under the age of 30, the energy and buzz in this country will continue to build on its growing startup scene,". (via...
Både små startups och riktiga jättar vill då och då komma ut i media. Som journalist tar jag dagligen emot pressmeddelanden och telefonsamtal från hoppfulla företag i alla stadier av sin utveckling. Här är mina tips för dig som försöker nå ut i media.
There are, however, five things I wish I had asked myself before starting this painful journey. Five questions I believe every future entrepreneur should ask himself before taking the first step to entrepreneurship:
Twice in my career I have left corporate jobs for startups. The first time I left was because I wanted to be in an innovative work environment where we would be inventing and creating technology that never existed. I tasted what it was like to work in a fast moving amazing technology company. I felt alive and the energy from my team was amazing.
Integrating startup acquisitions is challenging and can fail for any number of reasons including lack of attention. As it turns out, successfully integrating an acquired company teaches us a lot about keeping any team engaged and productive.
This isn’t a rant; instead I’m trying to highlight some of the current challenges I see in the Australian startup scene – which could be a reason why we don’t see more successful startups or investments in our lovely country.
– Vi vill visa att Göteborg är en het startupstad att räkna med. Vi vill uppmuntra folk att ta tag i sina idéer och utveckla dem. Det finns en förlaga som heter Stockholm Startup hack som vi tar inspiration ifrån.
Java totally rocks compared to what the rest of us have to use. I once spent six months working in FORTRAN on a Gould/SEL. The only editor I had access to was "ed", God help me.
Webbyrån Fröjd, som bland annat står bakom den tekniska utvecklingen av Sweden.se, drar nu igång Fröjd Ventures, en satsning som ska hjälpa startups inom digital tjänstutveckling att växa och bli bättre – men kapitalet som lånas ut är inte pengar, utan tid. Under 2014 avsätter de 750 timmar som ska gå till en eller flera startups som får hjälp att utveckla en idé eller tjänst.
– Varje stad har olika förutsättningar. Men att du har utvecklare, ett hem för gemenskapen med event och möten, och någon som dokumenterar allt och är en spindel i allt som händer är otroligt viktiga delar.
Spotscale is a company based in Linköping, founded by Ludvig Emgård and Jonas Lindqvist. They started out back in January 2013, by developing products to build hyper-local 3D models of buildings, blocks and surroundings captured using hexacopters. Through extensive experience of 3D mapping and multi-rotor helicopters – the company have already managed to land 15 customers using their products.
Stop telling yourself that you can’t come up with business startup ideas. You can, and here are 6 proven methods to do just that.
It bears repeating that ultimately what failed Everpix was the belief that they should be The Next Facebook (or even Instagram?).
Everpix was great. This is how it died.
Här är fem tydliga trender vi ser i ett av världens just nu mest spännande startup-klimat.
Christofer Karltorp och Taaniel Jakobs har gjort mycket för att hålla sin startup Zerply vid liv. Som att köra taxi i San Francisco och sälja sina egna kontorsmöbler. Följ med när Internetworld träffar dem i ett "hacker-hus" i San Francisco.
Malmö är en entreprenörstad där de amerikanska jättarna och en öppen kultur bidragit till miljön. En ny generation startup-företag samlas bland stadens gränder, byggd på exitpengar från förr.
It’s been 6 months now since I moved from Amsterdam to Asia to work remotely. I chose Thailand for its low-cost of living and safety. Since my visa will run out soon, I’ll have to leave the country and I’d like to sum up what I learnt from working here over the past 6 months and if it might be an option for more people.
Det är startup-företag och offentlig sektor som driver utvecklingen framåt på området öppna api:er. Åtminstone i Sverige. Internationellt kommer nu även storbolagen.
So, you want to ditch the corporate life and go work for a startup. Cool, but do you really understand what that would mean?
Today, Zookal, a textbook rental startup, is announcing that by using unmanned aerial vehicles to ferry textbooks to renters, it will cut delivery times from two to three days down to a matter of minutes, while shaving shipping costs down to a tenth of their normal prices.
Lessons Learned from the rise and fall of @Sonar
PLEASE DON’T pitch a startup concept showing boring mockups and fancy power points. Because a hackathon should be all about hack and fun!
Young companies die by the hundreds in Silicon Valley, but you would hardly know it by reading your local blog. Flowtab, now a shuttered product, did something following its demise that I’ve never seen before — released a death chronicle of sorts. Their timeline and notes showcase the mistakes that the company made during its short life. Contracts, failed television appearances, deals that fell through, and more were published. If you work in technology, it’s a compelling set of documents.
Kris Gale, VP of Engineering at Yammer, argues the key to building fast at scale lies in small teams. He explores intricacies of organizational design in engineering and explains how making intentional decisions throughout growth ensures that you don’t lose the things that are unique and special about being a startup.
Vill du göra ett exjobb där du får möjlighet att utveckla och forma en ny IT-platform som en del av ett startup-team från allra första början?
I regularly get emails from young people, usually those with an interest in programming, who are trying to make decisions about school and/or their professional futures. This post is for those young people.
Thinking about joining a startup, or working at one already? That’s great! If you play your cards right, it will be one of the best decisions you’ve ever made in your professional career.
As humans, we need to solve big problems. If you graduate Stanford at 22 and Google recruits you, you’ll work a 9-to-5. It’s probably more like an 11-to-3 in terms of hard work. They’ll pay well. It’s relaxing. But what they are actually doing is paying you to accept a much lower intellectual growth rate. When you recognize that intelligence is compounding, the cost of that missing long-term compounding is enormous. They’re not giving you the best opportunity of your life. Then a scary thing can happen: You might realize one day that you’ve lost your competitive edge. You won’t be the best anymore.
Med låga hyror och ett rykte om att vara "poor but sexy" har staden lockat människor med mer idéer än pengar, och på så sätt byggt upp en kreativ infrastruktur. Nu drar entreprenörerna till glödheta Berlin. Många av dem är svenskar.
Startup inspiration from the crowd
Jolt-colan och pizzorna uteblev på Stockholm Startup Hack ett 12-timmars hackmaraton under lördagen. Men evenemanget samlade 70 hackare som med frukt och godis gav sig på att bygga nya tjänster på ett halvt dygn.
Välkommen till teknikutvecklingens högborg, där startup-kulturen är starkare än någonsin. Det som händer här påverkar vår vardag förr eller senare. Följ med Internetworld under två dagar i San Francisco och söderut i dalen.
"Cloud paging" instantly "cloudifies" any software, even an operating system like Windows itself, says founder and CEO Osman Kent. It lets any software, with no modification, be delivered from the cloud and run as fast or faster than if the app was on your desktop.
For example, at a personal finance startup I previously worked at, development servers were named after different types of currency. I also remember The New Yorker profile of Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that Facebook named conference rooms after bad ideas ("Subprime Mortgage" and "Beacon" stick out in my mind).
All of the stories are written by the founders themselves, rated highly by the Hacker news community, and handpicked by myself. Among all the articles, I enjoyed reading the part where founders talk about the ups and downs of running a startup, especially the sweet taste of the first sale (how could anyone forget that?).
Is your startup hiring? Post it on the job board!
The name of your startup is critically important to its success, and in this email I am going to help you land an amazing name.Think of Google, Yahoo, EBAY, Mahalo, Meetup, Yammer and Mint – are all six letters or under, generally easy to spell and certainly unique. This is not a coincidence.
here’s a quick list of things I think Larry could do to bring the startup feel back to Google
You’re going to change the world. The only problem is that your vision is based on having hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of happy users and, currently, you have zero happy users. If your startup plan is directly based on this vision, you will struggle.
As the startup community is taking shape it is at the same time looking for an identity, a soul if you like. It is easy to just look at the startup Mekka of the world, Silicon Valley, and say "we should have it like that here". But Skåne is not Silicon Valley and Sweden is certainly not California.
Programming, especially with databases, used to be challenging. I remember having late night meetings about tables, normalization and migration and how best to represent the data we have for each packet capture. For a startup, these kinds of late night meetings are critical in establishing a bond amongst the engineers who are just learning to work with each other. NoSQL destroys this human aspect in a number of ways.
Att leda ett startup-företag är tillfredsställande – men också otroligt krävande, tycker Marcus Bäcklund. Och han borde veta, för han har under sin karriär varit engagerad i ett tiotal startups i olika roller. – Att vara vd för en startup är som att segla en läckande båt. Och utan sjökort, så båten går på grund hela tiden. Det är en stor utmaning!
DailyPerfect, an Estonian startup, has launched an interesting predictive news service. We wrote about DailyPerfect earlier with a quote: "it predicts users’ interests through an automated semantic analysis of information publicly available on the web." Now the time has come to validate whether that holds true.
Is it possible to start a business from scratch and have it ready to sell the next day? Almost, if you ask the 40 or so participants of Startup Camp Australia in Sydney. By 7pm on Friday night, they were in lockdown: complete strangers had been rounded up into teams - on one side of each table were the programmers, the other, the marketers. All knew that the next day their ideas would be scrutinized by traditional media, the blogosphere and financiers. The journalists, bloggers and venture capitalists had already been invited.
Förutom presentationerna på scen pågår även en startup-tävling där 30 företag har blivit uttagna att presentera sin affärsidé för en jury. Efter förmiddagens session under första dagen är några av domarna inte så imponerade. Le Webs internetuppkoppling har svajat rejält under dagen och startupens webbaserade presentationer funkade inte. – Det var ett bra test, menar Freddy Mini, vd för Netvibes. – Har du en bra idé då behöver du inte internet för att visa det, tycker Marc Samwer grundare till European Founders.