The 200 billion dollar chatbot disruption
In 2014, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion. That astronomical number set off waves of speculation as to what value Facebook could possibly see in a company with just 55 employees and roughly $20 million in revenue, although it had 500 million users. At last week’s F8 conference, that vision became a lot clearer, and it’s big. Chatbots will cause a near-term disruption in how businesses interact with consumers, and a long term paradigm shift in how people will interact with machines.
How to Choose Your Tech Stack
An MVP is all about getting a product into the hands of your customers quickly and learning from their feedback. Importantly, it also serves as a foundation for your engineering team to build on as your company grows. Before any code gets written, you will need to select the tech stack that will power your application.
Encryption Everywhere
Security matters. This is a short essay written by Silicon Valley-based Snowflake Computing’s Director of Security, Mario Duarte.
Is Technical Debt Killing your Company?
Too much debt, whether financial or technical, can cripple an organization’s freedom to move forward. However, unlike financial debt whose cost is spelled out in a statement, the burden of technical debt to a company is not immediately clear, as it cannot be measured by simply reading the code.
Pre-seed vs. Seed Fundraising
At SVSG, we regularly talk with early stage companies about a myriad of topics. One topic that comes up most often from first time founders is fundraising — how much should we raise for our seed round? My answer is always the same: Before the founders can raise a seed round, they need to ensure that they have built the foundation for doing so — what we call meeting the Five Pillars of Successful Seed Stage Fundraising. If they have not, we recommend that the startup step back and raise a pre-seed round in order to build their minimal viable product (MVP).
Managing Technical Debt
Operating with debt is a normal component of doing business. Just as financial debt must be controlled and leveraged to take advantage of market opportunities, any software project maintains a level of technical debt as well. Let’s explain what this is and clear up some misconceptions.
Lean and Agile: Partners in Customer Delight
Lean Startup and Agile (whether the latter is Scrum, Extreme Programming, or Kanban) share common roots in Lean Manufacturing, the work Deming did with Toyota beginning in the 1950s to increase quality and throughput through teamwork. (Lean was virtually synonymous with the word Kanban just a few years ago, in programming, until the advent of Eric Ries’ book Lean Startup usurped the word.)
Innovation in the Enterprise Done Right
Technology in it of itself is not a cure all to innovation. Technology needs to map to business objectives which in turn are derived from the changing market landscape. In this post, we highlight one impressive example of corporate innovation done right: namely Target’s efforts in leveraging its mid-market consumer brand to take advantage of the trends happening in the Internet of Things (IoT) technology space.
Agile for SMEs
Many small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) as well as larger, established, companies are augmenting their brick and mortar presence with an online presence. Concurrently, Agile Software Development Methodology (“Agile”) has been almost universally adopted by venture-backed software companies. In the following, SVSG offers a primer to SMEs on how to get started with Agile: what must be done right at the onset, and what to avoid.
CTO Panel Highlights Video
CTO panel event video: Highlights from our September 2, 2015 “Finding Your CTO” event. Host: Matt Swanson, Managing Partner of Silicon Valley Software Group. Panelists: Chakri Uddaraju, VP engineering at Hired, bethanye McKinney Blount, reddit’s first VP of engineering and Roger Toor, CTO of simplifund.
CTO Panel Reflection: Farhad Farzaneh
A few nights ago I attended a SVSG panel discussion, which focused on the attributes of a successful startup CTO. Broadly speaking, there was agreement that the CTO has to have business sensibility, understand the product, and take a primary role in the development. However, based upon some of the questions that followed, it seems there may be some value to further elaborate on what the role entails and how it co-exists or overlaps with the roles of product management, VP engineering, lead developer and software architect.
CTO Panel Series: Finding Your CTO (WeWork)
Everyone knows that finding great engineers is difficult, but even more challenging is finding a great technology leader. For a technology company, there are many important software decisions to be made. Getting them wrong can cost you big down the road. Thus, finding...
How Bias Can Derail Your Startup
The Lean Startup is now a ubiquitous, well understood approach to business innovation, but it often unravels when put into practice. The bias of the entrepreneur or technology executive can lead to delays, expanded budgets and aimless results. This should not be wholly unexpected, as misuse has long plagued Lean’s forebear, the scientific method.
Inc. Magazine puts SVSG in top 10 web development companies you want to work with
Finding web developers that will work is difficult enough, and that's why these 10 companies are worth keeping an eye on. Despite seemingly everyone having a web product, it's borderline impossible to find someone reliable, who actually answers and who actually does...
WeWork – It’s Not About Office Space
Last month, WeWork announced a massive ~$450M fundraise that values the company at $10B. As with much of the recent fundraising news, the immediate speculation from media outlets was that this is yet another sign of “the bubble” forming in Silicon Valley. We would like to offer a different perspective.