A decade ago, Steve Jobs sat down at the D8 conference for an interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg . What followed was a masterclass in both company and product management. The whole interview is worth watching, but I thought there were a few segments that stood out. Caveat: Any time someone talks about a tech-titan, there’s reflexive blowback from parts of the tech community: “ He wasn’t really an engineer ”, “ He wasn’t really... ” - This post will ignore all of that. Even if you strongly dislike him, there are lessons to be learnt here. Let’s begin... What matters most: The interview starts with Kara and Walt congratulating Jobs, because Apple had just bypassed Microsoft in Market Capitalization . Right out of the gate, Jobs makes it clear: It’s surreal to anyone who knows the history, but: Jobs: It doesn’t matter very much... it’s not what’s important.. it’s not why any of our customers buy our products.. It’s good for us to keep that in mind, remember what we’re doing an
This year Thinkst Canary crossed the line to $11M in ARR. That number is reasonably significant in the startup world, where Lemkin refers to it as “initial scale” . For us; it’s a happy reminder of Canary's spread into the market. $11M ARR certainly isn’t our end goal, but it provides the fuel for us to keep building the company we want to work at. We got here without raising a dime in capital, shipping a hardware/SaaS hybrid, sitting way outside Silicon Valley. That’s different enough from many startups that we figured it was worth a post with some thoughts on how we got here¹. Bootstrapping To be clear, we’re not anti-VCs. From the beginning though, we wanted to try bootstrapping. In the past we’ve spoken on how founder ego can nudge you towards building VC-backed companies (and why you might not need to), but that’s less focused on VCs and more aimed at founders. ( Bootstrapping, ego, and the path less travelled: 13m48s ) Launch Canary launched in mid-2015, after we worked on i
The recent SolarWinds incident has managed to grab headlines outside of our security ecosystem. The many (many) headlines and columns inches dedicated to the event are testament to the security worries that continue to reverberate around the globe. But we think that most of these articles have buried the lede. Most discussions take the position that our enterprises are horribly exposed because of supply chain issues and that any network running SolarWinds should consider themselves compromised. We think it's actually more dire than that (and suspect it's going to get worse). Let us lay out the case for why SolarWinds should concern you even if their tools are nowhere near your networks. It’s easy to whip up a think-piece in the wake of a public security incident, especially as a vendor. The multitude of vendor mails riding the SolarWinds incident are overflowing our inboxes. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and this is one of those times. An abstracted, low res
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