Digging In

Boards have come up a lot recently; I'm expecting to rejoin the Mission Research board, the School Board is reorganizing in a week or so, I've advised a few startups on board management, and my wife just asked me about boards because of something she's involved in. Here's my take from my limited point of view, having served on maybe 10 boards: Board members are either there by agreement or by election. Agreement can supercede typical rules, meaning an investor might ask for a perpetual board seat regardless of future % of ownership. The only downside to that is that sometime in the future the tail might be wagging the dog, when that member represents a relatively small % of ownership. Board members have both authority and power. Their authority is limited to what happens in the context of board meetings: discuss, make motions, second motions, and vote. Their power is what they are able to get people to do simply because they are board members and people listen to th

I've spent the past three days diving into MongoDB and jQuery. Mongo is a document database that makes it very simple to work with data--it's basically object oriented vs SQL's rigid table structure. Smarter people than I can tell you about its flexibility and built-in scalability.   I'm attracted to it because I have a mildly complex page that crawls with SQL Server. L0ts of reasons for that--methods, choices, joins, amount of data, cursor, shared hosted machine,etc. I can improve the performance through a parameterized stored procedure and moving stuff into arrays intead of working through recordsets. But the real attraction is the ability to work with syntax very similar to Javascript and JSON from client to server to database. Just better for my relatively weak, pan-fried brain. PROS clearly very simple to create, add, and query incredibly flexible, of course. consistent with client-side js using the doc/obj model makes working with data very easy I'm

If you run a startup or small company, please visit Steve Blank's blog. It's incredibly insightful. http://steveblank.com/  

I've never considered starting a search company. Somehow that's what I've ended up with. The process of discovery only happens in doing the work, and in the past two months, something's evolved that I'm excited to pursue, if only for the great pleasure of being crushed by Google, or a hundred stealth startups likely doing something similar. That's the game. My work over the past year fits in nicely with the new stuff. But the one thing missing is a team. I've got a shortlist of people I'd like to work with, and still need to round it out. Too tired to finish this post...will add to it later.