Yet Another (ex-)VC Blog

Would you share anonymized data about the configuration of your systems and networks if by contributing that data you were entitled to review the aggregated data (scrubbed of any personally identifiable information)?

As far as I know, this configuration data is held today primarily by a) vendors (who know it through their customer interactions) and b) industry analysts.    Therefore, questions about ‘best practices’ for IT management and configuration are typically answered by analysts, vendors, or one’s peers.   I’m wondering if the best answers come from the crowd.  If thousands of customers have a certain app (say, Exchange) configured a certain way, wouldn’t that imply a best practice?  Customers always ask “How are others in my (geo/vertical/etc) using your software?” and something like this could answer that question, potentially in a vendor-neutral way.

Are there any non-profit or for-profit companies that doing this today?  Does anyone find this interesting or am I missing some key points?

Loved this snippet from a recent Burton Group blog post…

“complexity makes life interesting and ensures full employment”

via Data Center Strategies: Storage is too complex.

So true…the original post by @cdixon is also great…

msuster wrote:

Chris, I’m so glad you wrote this. Everybody asks the question and now I’ll just send them the link ;-)

We recently hired an associated. I got > 700 resumes and I didn’t even post that widely. 65 of them were of unreal quality in terms of education and job experience. Undergrad: Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Princeton, Yale & MBA: Harvard, Stanford, Wharton. Many had near perfect SATs and GMATs. Many worked for Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, McKinsey or had worked in P/E or VC before.

It was UNREAL. Not that you need these qualifications to be successful. But when you’re staring at 700 resumes (and we VCs don’t have an HR department!) you need some way of filtering quickly. In my process I also gave high street cred to CS undergrads – particularly from MIT or equivalent and for premier tech experience: Google, well-known startups or even one great candidate from Microsoft’s Xbox group.

>From the 65 we did 16 1-hour in-person interviews. We short-listed 6 and did full day interviews including a presentation from the candidate analyzing a market. They were given less than 1 week to prepare. We finalized 3 that we took to dinner to check social fit. We chose 1.

My point is … the numbers are so daunting that anything “standard” won’t work unless you already walk on water. The people who “sneaked into” the process were a) great networkers b) great networkers and c) had other people contact me on their behalf (great networkers). But if you don’t have GREAT street cred already don’t hassle the VCs. Just accept that it isn’t likely you’ll get in without doing great things at a start-up first.

Link to comment: http://www.cdixon.org/?p=732#comment-16630352

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I wish LinkedIn would allow me to forward an email to an alias (like Salesforce, Basecamp, Tripit, and various other services that allow records to be added via email) and then automatically send a connection request to the person who was in the From: line from the original email.  Seems like it would be a good thing for LinkedIn as well, because it would remove the friction of users having to think to visit the LinkedIn website to manually request that someone connect with them.