Yesterday I had the chance to join hundreds of people for a relatively impromptu event put together by Alistair Croll. I say impromptu because Alistair had only announced the event four days earlier! It is abundantly clear that we are in a new world for events from small to large…

Zoom took off because it just worked. And the video was default on. No more, “how do I turn this video on?” “I just worked” meant a simple download and install process was imperative. Yes, Zoom could play by the all the exact rules, but then the installation experience would…

We’re it the midst of collaboration renaissance. In the public markets, we have a new class of companies leading with multi-billion dollar market caps. As of Feb 25, 2020: Atlassian (TEAM) at $35 billion Zoom (ZM) at $29 billion Slack (WORK) at $14 billion Dropbox (DBX) and Zendesk (ZEN) at…

The programming language Go turned 10 this year and one of its co-founders noted that in exploring other other languages like C, C++, Perl, Python, and Ruby, it took about 10 years for a new language to achieve more mainstream adoption. This pattern repeated for almost every language I looked…

In a pre-cloud world, getting new applications deployed took months or even years. Today developers can build prototypes in less than a day. Much of that improvement is thanks to a world of software and cloud infrastructure now readily available for rapid application deployment. For infrastructure startups providing the tools…

As cloud titans battle, each is amassing new data and analytics assets to fuel growth. Some are developed internally, such as Google Spanner, a distributed SQL database inspiring no less than three new startups. Amazon is barreling ahead packaging open source and internally developed software into new database services. Another…

Technology cycles map over five to ten year horizons, especially in the enterprise where group product decisions last years and even old ideas need time to resurface. We’ve seen this recently as the hype of Hadoop has long passed, and even NoSQL has hit certain limits. Today, tried and trusted…

A closer look at San Francisco-headquartered companies across technology, software infrastructure and collaboration. Roundups Everywhere The past month brought three interesting technology roundups my way: The 2019 Data & AI Landscape by Matt Turck at FirstMark Capital The Enterprise Tech 30 by Rajeev Chand and Peter Wagner at Wing Venture Capital The…

Two years ago, I made light of this possibility: Did Google Send the Big Data Industry on a 10 Year Head Fake? Long story short it seemed Hadoop had passed and Spanner was in. Fast forward to last week when YugaByte launched the first Distributed SQL Summit. When describing their…