Latest News from John Gannon

Shrink Before You Grow and Sales 2.0

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 13:29:01 EST

This past Thursday I left the friendly confines of VMTurbo HQ and attended Highland Capital Partners‘ “Sales 2.0″ conference in Cambridge, MA. The conference was dedicated to sharing knowledge about the “low touch” sales model - a sales model that does not depend on an army of direct sales representatives knocking on customer doors and [...]

SEO Tips from a Guy Who Doesn’t Know SEO

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST

Aside from not blogging recently, I have been spending alot of time speaking with folks in the online marketing space as I work on building the go-to-market strategy and machinery for VMTurbo. One area which I knew little about when I started having these discussions (although now I do know a little bit [...]

Is it Time for You to Earn or to Learn? (via @msuster)

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 14:04:07 EST

I often have career discussions with entrepreneurs – both young and more mature – whether they should join company “X” or not. I usually pull the old trick of answering a question with a question. My reply is usually, “is it time for you to earn or to learn?” via Is it Time for [...]

A diagnostic for startup marketing departments

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:35:15 EDT

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. Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: marketing, steve blank [...]

Crowdsourcing system configuration data

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:50:27 EDT

Image via Wikipedia 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) [...]

A thought on why IT is so complex

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:04:30 EDT

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. Posted in Uncategorized

Just launched the blog for my company VMTurbo

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:25:00 EDT

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! Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: vmturbo

Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook Culture

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:59:00 EDT

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.”

VC associate role in NYC

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:54:56 EDT

Interesting VC associate role in NYC for someone with ‘big data’ experience and an MBA. Brief snippet below and more details here. I am currently spending a lot of time evaluating companies targeting “big-data,” predictive analytics, anomaly detection, machine learning, high-performance computing, data visualization and related fields, and am seeking an Associate to be involved in [...]

Insightful Comment on the VC Hiring ‘Funnel’

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:43:00 EDT

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.

My New Company – VMTurbo

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 07:15:00 EDT

We just launched a very simple website for my new company, VMTurbo. If you’re interested in VMware, virtualization, or cloud, drop in and register so we can keep you up to date with what we’re doing. We also just grabbed the VMTurbo twitter account, although we’re not using it yet. Feel free to follow us and [...]

Feature request for Linkedin – email-to-connect

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:23:53 EDT

Image via CrunchBase 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 [...]

VMware Went Shopping and Came Home with SpringSource

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:45:00 EDT

As a member of the virtualization startup ecosystem, it was good to see one of our own (Springsource) get picked up by VMware for a cool $400MM+ this week. The private market and public market (really any market) are terrible right now so it is encouraging to see one of the tech industry [...]

3Par Has A Tough Objection To Overcome

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:15:00 EDT

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 [...]

Going Away From the ‘Dark Side’ and Into the Startup World

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:15:00 EDT

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.

The Learning Test « Thinking About Thinking

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 10:24:48 EDT

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 [...]

Good follow up article on vCenter Chargeback

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:35:53 EDT

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 [...]

One of my operating principles

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 12:22:21 EDT

My favorite portfolio CEO quote of the day – “Pleasant persistence overcomes resistance.” via Joe Medved (joevc) on Twitter. Posted in Uncategorized

Why isn’t VMware giving away chargeback for free?

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:49:36 EDT

Image by DavidDMuir via Flickr 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, [...]

Social Networking Tip For Programmers – and Everyone Else

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:15:00 EDT

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. [...]

Building a business before raising money

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:56:20 EDT

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 [...]

Amen!

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:26:37 EDT

Using techniques perfected by consumer web companies, a generation of enterprise IT companies will emerge that deliver a vastly superior user experience to IT professionals and employees alike. Improvements in ease of use will liberate employs from terrible software, server-side software development will increase the pace of product improvements and lower support costs, and the [...]

Vertical integration as a cloud competitive weapon

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:23:10 EDT

Image via Wikipedia When will the cloud providers begin acquiring product companies in order to keep the technology out of the hands of their competition? Is that a strategy worth pursuing? Many clouds are using open source technology to power their solutions, but I assume many of them have reliance on commercial products as well. Could one cloud [...]

Jurvetson on Moore’s Law and innovation

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:19:45 EDT

Notice that the pace of innovation is exogenous to the economy. The Great Depression and the World Wars and various recessions do not introduce a meaningful change in the long-term trajectory of Moore’s Law. Certainly, the adoption rates, revenue, profits and economic fates of the computer companies behind the various dots on the graph may [...]

Technologies I wish we had in 2001

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:39:13 EDT

Image via Wikipedia The best and worst thing about working in the technology industry is that you constantly build custom solutions to problems, sometimes quite expensively, and then years later see the same problems get solved through affordable (or free) off-the-shelf products. Recently I’ve been thinking about solutions that we could have really used during my stint [...]

Using Metrics to Vanquish the Fail Whale (Twitter)

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 20:55:00 EDT

You really want to instrument everything you have,” Adams told an audience of 700 operations professionals. “The best thing you can do is have more information about your system. We’ve built a process around using these metrics to make decisions. We use science. The way we find the weakest point in our infrastructure is by collecting metrics and making graphs out of them.”

I especially like the last sentence…

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 11:18:03 EDT

Convenience is hugely attractive in organizations because it is easy to defend and easy to approve. You don’t need to call a meeting to try something new, because the convenient option has already been approved. The problem is that convenient approaches rarely break through or generate extraordinary returns. via Seth’s Blog: Circles of Convenience. Posted in Uncategorized [...]

Cloud supply chain? Quite interesting…

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:12:03 EDT

I think the cloud computing industry will borrow some of the best practices of previous generations of tech partnerships to solve today’s revenue sharing challenge. The rapidly evolving cloud environment is creating a new set of supply-chain relationships which will be governed by the same partnering principles of the past, but with a different set [...]

Founding, co-founding, and working in startups

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:11:27 EDT

Yet another brilliant post from Steve Blank, this time about what it takes to found, co-found, or work in a startup at various stages of development. I don’t really have any commentary other than to say the post is spot on and extremely informative, especially for folks who are just starting to think about making [...]

Cloud Computing Cash Cow

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:00:00 EDT

Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA) has announced the Cloud Strategic Planning Service to provide cloud know-how to companies of various sizes that want to implement a form of cloud computing. The planning service will be provided through Sun's consulting arm, Sun Professional Services. It will evaluate a customer for cloud-readiness, determine whether a public or private cloud is appropriate, and identify opportunities in the cloud in terms of the nature of the business, the corporate culture, and the existing IT environment. Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA) has announced the Cloud Strategic Planning Service to provide cloud know-how to companies of various sizes that want to implement a form of cloud computing. The planning service will be provided through Sun’s consulting arm, Sun Professional Services. It will evaluate a customer for cloud-readiness, determine whether a public or [...]

Say Goodbye To Bad UI Thanks to the Cloud

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 10:45:00 EDT

New entrants, however, have a great opportunity to leverage UI and user experience to make their management apps more sticky and to appeal to a broader market. For example, the Bluebear guys have built a snazzy, intuitive multi-hypervisor virtualization management tool written in Adobe AIR. If I’m an SMB who is dipping my toe into the waters of virtualization, maybe a tool like this makes it easier for me to get started. Or take a company like Cloudkick, that is looking to “make the cloud easier to use an accessible to everyone.” That’s a great misson statement, and one that’s certainly achievable given the software development technologies available today.

Planning for unplanned downtime

Wed, 27 May 2009 10:09:26 EDT

Image via CrunchBase Via D7: The Twitter guys speak | Beyond Binary – CNET News: 7:37 p.m. PT: They open it up for questions. Venture capitalist Roger McNamee offers a couple of comments. “Don’t ever do another planned maintenance in the middle of the day on a week day.” I remember the day Roger McNamee is talking about, [...]

Don’t pitch the product

Tue, 26 May 2009 12:59:14 EDT

Image via Wikipedia Having seen this come up a couple of times over the last couple of weeks, I felt it was worth blogging it. Don’t give the product sales pitch when you’re pitching an early stage investor. An investor presentation, although technically a sales presentation (you want the investor to buy equity in your company), should not [...]

A Yorkshire Man sounds off on virtualization

Fri, 22 May 2009 10:47:15 EDT

Image by Chris Breeze via Flickr My buddy Steve Chambers has started blogging at View Yonder. Steve’s an awesome guy who I got to know pretty well while working with him at VMware. I think you’ll enjoy his take on virtualization, VMware, and fine beers :) His most recent post debates the notion that VMware products [...]

Cloud App Store Hype

Fri, 22 May 2009 08:00:00 EDT

With the rise of virtual appliances as a software delivery and deployment model, people are beginning to talk about the idea of cloud computing app stores (a la iTunes) where admins can find virtual appliances and then easily deploy them onto a cloud or a server in their data center. Although this idea sounds cool (”Hey, I can search for apps like I’d search for songs on iTunes and then deploy them almost instantly!”), I’m not convinced it is something that is going to create a dramatic market shift within the enterprise. Why not? With the rise of virtual appliances as a software delivery and deployment model, people are beginning to talk about the idea of cloud computing app stores (a la iTunes) where admins can find virtual appliances and then easily deploy them onto a cloud or a server in their data center. Although this idea sounds [...]

Why Do SaaS Companies Lose Money Hand Over Fist?

Tue, 19 May 2009 16:03:41 EDT

It seems pretty clear these (Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors) SaaS companies could be just as profitable as SAP if they were prepared to dial back significantly on their growth. SaaS companies spend money hand over fist because they’re engaged in a land grab. The big players like SAP are extremely slow getting to SaaS for [...]

Backup your data passively, or don’t backup at all

Wed, 13 May 2009 17:56:13 EDT

Image via Wikipedia I’ve finally come to realization that the idea of an end home/SoHO/SMB user being actively involved in backup of their data is a losing proposition. Foundry Group just funded Cloud Engines, a company that makes a product (Pogoplug) which allows you to passively share data from your hard drive and make it available as [...]

Maximizing Rewards

Mon, 11 May 2009 22:05:00 EDT

Last night I spent a couple of hours going over our personal finances which included me spending some time on the American Express customer portal. Amex does a good job of letting you on their portal where you could be buying to maximize your membership rewards points. They will often tell [...]

What the cloud is all about

Mon, 11 May 2009 14:08:16 EDT

Image via Wikipedia IBM is fixing the one thing it really needed to get its head around to do well in the cloud- simple pricing models, without needing to call a third party expert to unravel them. Forget technology – the cloud is about simple pricing and billing. via James Governor’s Monkchips » IBM in the Amazon [...]

Finally getting started on the VC Careers eBook

Sun, 10 May 2009 10:33:58 EDT

Image by Feuillu via Flickr Here’s the first stab at the forward for the VC careers eBook. I’m going to build the content around this, so please let me know if there are topics that you think I missed or that you want to make sure are included in the chapters I’ve outlined here. Comments are [...]

Get crushed

Thu, 07 May 2009 20:20:47 EDT

Image via CrunchBase NY entrepreneur Mark LaRosa has been writing some amazing stuff on his blog QuotaCrush. Although the blog is focused on how to improve your selling abilities (with the net effect being that you will crush your quota), I have found the advice contained within it to be tremendously applicable to business development, venture [...]

VC Deals twitter feed

Fri, 01 May 2009 10:18:02 EDT

Image via Wikipedia If you visit the blog fairly regularly, you may notice that I removed the M&A Funding Pipe feed in the right column and replaced it with the @vcdeals twitter feed. @vcdeals tweets any financing or M&A announcements that get posted to a variety of blogs and then provides a bit.ly link where you can [...]

SaaS squeezes the SI ecosystem

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:55:25 EDT

The SaaS model squeezes the SI ecosystem. The normal meat and potatoes business around just getting on-premises software installed is greatly reduced. The business of just keeping the lights on is almost non-existent for SaaS. Yet SI’s have a lot to bring to the table. A good SI often understands the [...]

We’re looking for an intern at L Capital

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:57:35 EDT

Better late than never, but L Capital is looking for a summer intern to assist us over the next couple of months with some portfolio corporate development projects. This would be a great fit for a 1st year MBA who is still looking for a summer internship, or an i-banker who has some time on their [...]

Words to live by

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:57:38 EDT

There is no doubt that we are in a tough market. Lots of people have lost their job and many others are facing the risk & reality of losing their job. That sucks on so many levels. Like many VCs, I am getting a ton of resumes and inbound interest for a variety of our portfolio [...]

New Kid on the Block: How a Junior VC Can Contribute to Portfolio Companies

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 08:00:00 EDT

As a junior staffer at a VC firm, I think its important to understand where and how you can be helpful to portfolio companies. The advice I received from my venture capital teachers Stuart Ellman and Will Porteous of RRE Ventures (blog) has stuck with me, and I’ve tried to operate using that advice since starting my VC career. As a junior staffer at a VC firm, I think its important to understand where and how you can be helpful to portfolio companies. The advice I received from my venture capital teachers Stuart Ellman and Will Porteous of RRE Ventures (blog) has stuck with me, and I’ve tried to operate using that [...]

Cloudslam panel now available for download

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 21:17:23 EDT

Wanted to quickly post to let you know that if you missed the Cloudslam panel regarding cloud adoption, you can download it here. I was a member of the panel along with a variety of industry and investor folks. If you listen, I’d love to get your comments on the discussion. Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: Cloud computing, [...]

Maybe I should start managing my email this way?

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:47:32 EDT

Image via Wikipedia I just sent an email to someone who I just met and received the following (slightly edited) response: Attention: Email policy update. Partners, Colleagues, and Friends: In an effort to increase productivity and efficiency in 2009 I am modifying my personal email policy. I’ve recently realized I have slipped back into spending more time shuffling through [...]

Come visit me (online) at Cloudslam on Monday April 20 2p ET

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 10:54:47 EDT

I’m sitting on an online panel Monday April 20 2p ET where I’ll be discussing cloud computing adoption with a group of vendors, investors, and practitioners. I hope you can join us online. Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: cloud, cloudslam, panel

Facebook raising more money, has termsheets, but what of anti-dilution protection?

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 21:14:47 EDT

Image via CrunchBase I just read the Techcrunch report on Facebook’s latest fundraising activities( Decision Time For Facebook: Term Sheets Received At $2 Billion Valuation). The report talks about the potential heavy dilution that common stockholders might suffer because of 1) a fairly significant down round (taking pre-money valuation down from $15B to $2B) and 2)anti-dilution [...]