August 4, 2005

VC Taskforce on Next-Gen Tools in Global Software Development

Emerging Technology Forum

Global Software Development: Why next-gen tools matter

July 28, 2005

Abstract:

Software complexity has been steadily on the rise. Some persistent problems
have dogged programmers for 60 years, and still need solutions. New problems
arise as the landscape changes. What are the opportunities and maintenance
challenges ahead as teams work faster and collaborate across different time
zones, languages, and countries? What areas might be investable? This panel
of experts will explore these questions and new developments in a spirited
discussion on the state of software development.

Moderator:

Panel:

Notes and Comments by Barney Pell

This document contains my notes taken as an audience member attending this
panel discussion. While it might look like a transcript, and I attempt to
capture everything in real-time, I do also interpret, paraphrase and
summarize as I type.

Personally, I thought this was a great discussion, and one that should be
shared with entrepreneurs, investors, vendors and customers in the software
development community. I worked hard to make this article readable so that
others can benefit.

Highlights and take-aways:

  • John Mashley pointed out that, independent of all the improvements in
    software development tools, individual programmer productivity is always
    nonuniform    . Some programmers are 10 or even 100 times as productive as
    others.

  • This has negative and positive implications for outsourcing. On the
    negative side, if you can assemble a crack team of programmers locally who
    are 10x more productive than you can find offshore, then you actually
    lose economic value by outsourcing. On the positive side, some of the
    best developers are not local. So despite the hassle, and even if the
    labor rates are not much different, you can gain economic productivity by
    taking advantage of these fine programmers wherever they live (whether in
    India or on a boat in the Carribean).

  • While outsourcing is increasingly becoming an imperative for businesses,
    the results of outsourcing are often disappointing. Steve Mezak discussed 7 major
    categories of mistakes in outsourcing and listed potential solutions
    (including methodologies and tools) for each.

  • A recurring theme in the panel was the difficulty and importance of
    getting software requirements right. Despite all the improvements in tools
    and processees for developers, there have been limited improvements in the
    way people create and validate the requirements in the first place. Errors
    in requirements ripple through the downstream flow and get more expensive
    to fix the later they are caught. N8′s David Hartford brought up the
    statistic that requirements errors cost US companies $100 Billion per
    year     in rework and cancelled projects alone. Steve Mezak listed a new
    generation of companies (including N8) that address different aspects of the
    requirements problem in different ways. I am very familiar with N8′s
    Scenario product that David discussed and demonstrated at the meeting. I
    think it has the potential to address the requirements engineering problem
    in a substantial way for the first time. (I intend to write more about
    this in a separate post).

  • There was consensus that distributed development is now working. This has
    been one of the biggest problems with outsourcing, telecommuting, and
    large scale projects. There was discussion that open source tools have
    matured substantially and are now being integrated into cost-effective
    suites. In addition, VoIP (e.g. Skype) has enabled people to maintain open
    voice channels all day long at low cost. As Sam Jadallah said:

    I have a company with 2 people, on in Silicon Valley, one in
    Dublin. Skype sits open all day long, just like two people sitting in
    room together all day long talking whenever they want. The tools,
    workflow, process, and experience level is now working.

  • Sam Jadallah’s discussion of VC investment in software development tools
    is great reading. His fundamental point is that the internet has changed
    the economics of the enterprise software business    , and that this changes
    the success factors for companies. Big enterprise software companies are
    suffering, and most of the large software industry revenues are coming
    from maintenance. Sam covers several major trends in software development
    and in software business models and provides concrete suggestions for what
    software startup companies should do differently. He lists interesting
    investment areas for software tools, including: developer productivity,
    quality and security, application management, and process improvement.

continue reading the VC Taskforce on Next-Gen Tools in Global Software Development

Posted by barney on August 4, 2005 at 2:41 pm | No Comments

July 20, 2005

Snap.com raises $10M in VC Funding, led by Mayfield

Mayfield and Snap announced this week that Mayfield led a $10M venture
capital investment round in Snap.com. I am proud to report that I helped to make this
deal happen. My partner at Mayfield, Allen Morgan, will go on the Snap board of directors.

It might seem puzzling why you would invest in a general
search company (perhaps as opposed to
vertical search companies that might have more specific focus and could be
acquired and merged into offerings by the incumbents), in the presence of so many giants. The article about Snap in USA Today suggests that Snap only wins if they can unseat Google. However, I think Snap
represents an good investment, without any need that they become the new #1 or #2 general search engine. Below are my thoughts about the general search landscape and some major themes that Snap addresses. (Disclaimer: I
am currently an Entrepreur in Residence at Mayfield and have a personal
interest in Snap; the thoughts below are my own and should not be taken to
represent the thoughts of Mayfield or Snap).

Online advertising is today a massive market that continues to grow
rapidly. The U.S. paid search component of this market was $4B in 2004 and
is predicted to grow to $6B by ’06, with a worldwide paid search market
growing to $23B by 2010. The paid search market comprises both search
portals (e.g. Google Adwords), where users go specifically to search, and
contextual advertising, where users are exposed to ads in the context of
viewing publisher’s websites (e.g. Google Adsense ads on NYT.com). The
contextual advertising market is growing even faster than search portals (a
desktop client advertising market is also growing quickly, but represents a
much smaller portion of the market).

continue reading the Snap.com raises $10M in VC Funding, led by Mayfield

Posted by barney on July 20, 2005 at 9:18 pm | No Comments

July 20, 2005

Marc Cuban at AlwaysOn05

Fireside Chat with Marc Cuban, interviewed by Allen Delattre

At Always On 2005

July 20, 2005

I thought it was an interesting
discussion. Here are the points I found most noteworthy:

Below are my (mostly raw) notes from this session.

continue reading the Marc Cuban at AlwaysOn05

Posted by barney on July 20, 2005 at 7:44 pm | 1 Comment

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