Yet Another (ex-)VC Blog

3Par, a Fremont, Calif.-based maker of storage arrays for data centers, pre-announced lowered earnings for the first quarter of its fiscal year 2009 yesterday, blaming, among other things, the fact that customers don’t have access to the electricity needed to add 3Par gear to their data centers.

via Constrained Power Grids Zap Sales at 3Par.

I definitely feel bad for the 3PAR sales guys, that is a tough objection to sell around…

I have found that there’s a simple test for whether you are learning in your career. Look back 3–5 years from today and ask yourself if you could have been substantially more effective at your past job in your present form. If you look back a few years and feel like in comparison to who you are today, you had little idea of what you were doing and would have done things a lot differently given what you now know, that’s a telltale sign of learning and growth.

Larry Cheng of Fidelity Ventures -  The Learning Test « Thinking About Thinking.

I recently decided to make a career change and at the end of the month will be leaving the world of venture capital (as some affectionately refer to as ‘The Dark Side’) for the maybe greener and definitely more uncertain pastures of the startup world.  My time at L Capital over the last year has been great, and I’ve learned an incredible amount about startups and investing, but I recently came upon an opportunity which was just too good to pass up.

I’m joining an early stage software company in the virtualization management and automation space and will be involved in all manner of customer development, biz dev, and marketing.  I’m going to work with a great team and a stellar set of investors, all who are laser focused on building a great company.  Needless to say, I am very excited about this move.

I’m not going to post details about the company publicly at this point, but will certainly do so after I have spent some time in the new job.  If you have a strong interest or background in virtualization technology and would like to discuss what we’re working on, feel free to reach out to me directly.

Thanks as always for reading, and although I’m no longer a VC at the end of the month, I hope you still keep reading!

Is VMware’s new vCenter Chargeback dead on arrival? At its current list price of $750 per managed processor, it may well be. Even though some VMware users understand how Chargeback could help them better utilize resources and reduce sprawl, its price tag will make it a hard sell.

“At $750 per processor, there’s no way in heck I could get management to sign off on what’s basically improved power and cooling,” said Kent Altena, infrastructure architect at Farm Bureau Life Insurance Co. (FBL) in West Des Moines, Iowa.

via Price, politics working against VMware vCenter Chargeback.

My favorite portfolio CEO quote of the day – “Pleasant persistence overcomes resistance.”

via Joe Medved (joevc) on Twitter.

VMware announced GA for a bunch of products today, including the vCenter chargeback package.

I’m a little surprised that they have not priced it lower, or decided to give it away for free.

Most enterprise IT shops talk a good game about doing chargeback, but they rarely do implement, and if they do, its typically implemented on a very limited scale.

Better cost transparency will help VMware’s customers justify their virtualization investments while at the same time allowing internal IT make a case for why their workloads are better off running in an internal cloud versus with external cloud vendors.

Perhaps you find a way to bundle this functionality into a service provider pack (and maybe that’s who they really want to buy this stuff) but I think for typical enterprise IT shops, you go cheap or free.

Thoughts?

Set aside one hour daily for active marketing: Software developers love to spend days and nights coding great stuff. Focusing on marketing, sales and customer activities is not quite as exciting. Put some discipline in place. A good starting point is to devote one hour per day of your time to work exclusively on marketing. And I don’t mean read the Web to learn about SEO.

Spend one full, active hour contributing to forums, pitching to people, e-mailing journalists and other key influencers that may be interested in what you do.

Does your web site have a success story from a real customer? Did you follow-up with the people you met at those meetings?

The first week, send at least two e-mails a day to people you have never met. By the third week, your goal is to receive one e-mail a day from people you don’t know. Once you figured it out, just scale.

via Good Programmers Don’t Need No Marketing « FairSoftware’s Blog.

SEOmoz was also helped in this deal by an important factor I think every startup should consider – WE DIDN’T NEED THE MONEY. We were already profitable and growing, already had a brand name in the industry and had attracted interest from multiple investors. I think that every entrepreneur who’s considering startup-dom should think about establishing those goals before they go for institutional capital – a profitable, growing company with a product that’s on the market and a brand name that’s well known makes you:

* A) Lower risk to investors

* B) Interesting to multiple parties and multiple kinds of investors (angels, VCs, private equity, etc.)

* C) More confident in every step of the process

* D) Able to walk away from a deal you don’t like

This psychology is so powerful that I can’t imagine doing it any other way. If I wanted to build a travel portal to take on Kayak.com, I’d start a great travel site (maybe even just a really interesting blog), build up some brand recognition, use advertising or low-cost premium features to drive revenue and only after those numbers made for a compelling story, approach investors. I’d use that same formula even for a capital intensive business – start with cool ideas, great writing and valuable resources, become a hub for your industry, show web traffic and positive interest, then go fundraise.

via SEOmoz | My Startup Experience: VC, Entrepreneurship, Self-Analysis & The Road Ahead.