Archives / May, 2010

Made your Glue plans yet? It’s not too late!

Our Glue conference is finally upon us. The agenda and speakers are locked down and all the final details are being attended to. We have a great group of speakers lined up this year across a number of different tracks: The  ”Hacking Identity” track  – which highlights user managed access (Eve Maler), federated provisioning (Nishant Kaushik), XAuth (Chris Messina), and Webfinger (Brad Fitzpatrick) and follows it up with a discussion moderated by Ian Glazer (of Burton Group, now Gartner). “Integrating Drizzle” with Eric Day from Rackspace. Rackspace brought most of the Drizzle guys on board when the Sun-Oracle merger happened. I’m anxious to learn more. “On Hadoop” with Todd Lipcon from Cloudera. Hadoop is about as dominant as it gets…

Am I just a greedy VC?

My partner Jason has an impassioned post up about the carried interest debate currently taking place in Congress. No matter how you feel about Congress’ efforts to change the tax classification of VC profits from capital gains to ordinary income it’s worth a read (and keeping an open mind). Obviously this issue is important to me and to all VCs. And while I know there are differences of opinions on the subject (clearly given the intense debate going on right now) I think Jason does a nice job of talking through the personal (this feels overstepping), professional (there are other markets where innovation is taking place where investor are actually being completely exempt from taxes that will draw talent away…

Your reality filter

One of the great joys of working with entrepreneurs is the energy, enthusiasm and aspiration they bring to their businesses. But don’t forget to consider your business for what it is, not what you hope it will be. Which is to say that there’s a balance between planning for the future and recognizing where you are today. And striking this balance is part of what makes a great entrepreneur – the ability to consider in all aspects of your business (sales, product development, engineering, etc.) the right mix of practical current reality and future aspiration.

23 days until Glue

As you can see from the date of my last post, I’ve been a bit tied up. Not to worry – new content coming soon. Including some more thoughts leading up to our Glue conference. In the meantime here’s a repost of some thoughts from Eric Norlin as we near 3 weeks out from Glue. Yes, we are “rounding the bend” — 23 days until Gluecon. I feel like I’ve droned on endlessly about how great it’s going to be (I probably have), so let me just take a different approach by highlighting some things I’m looking forward to — starting at the END of Day 2 and working backwards a bit. David Linthicum’s closing keynote: I’ve never met David,…