Yet Another (ex-)VC Blog

A quick diagnostic I now use for marketing departments: if you are in a startup selling to a specific set of customers and/or industry and your marketing department doesn’t have any people from that industry, your tenure as a VP of Marketing has passed its half-life.

via Steve Blank.

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.

You can find it here.

If you’re interested in cloud, virtualization, or IT management, expect to see a few posts per week on those topics.

Hope to see you there!

David Sze, a venture capitalist from Greylock Capital and investor in Facebook, says he has watched Zuckerberg over the past two years since his investment, and may have underestimated Zuckerberg’s ability to scale. “When I invested, I thought Mark was one in a million. Now I think Mark is maybe one in a trillion.”

http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/02/mark-zuckerberg-the-evolution-of-a-remarkable-ceo/