Paola Moretto

One of my favorite people is Bob Van Nortwick. He started & built AWS for Startups in 2010. Let me share a story about Bob. It’s 2012. By this time I’ve known Bob for a few years - he was the AWS liaison to our portfolio at a16z. Credits, technical support, meeting Werner Vogels, you name it, Bob got it done. He built this team to over a thousand people by the time he left ten years later. This is a HUGE role. Startups are a large part of AWS, which is the growth engine of Amazon. You’d expected Bob to have self-portraits adorn his home, start off meetings with grandiose introduction, & relentlessly name drop founders & investors. Not Bob. He’s hilarious & humble, a combo of dad jokes with f-words sprinkled in. He listens to you with complete attention. Even when I call Bob, I can HEAR his focus. He sees me even when he cannot see me. Most of all, Bob was (& is) RESPONSIVE. Anytime I’d email him, he’d reply in five minutes or less. If I explicitly wrote “this can wait” he’d STILL reply in five minutes or less. Back to my story. It’s about 11pm ET on a Tuesday in NYC. I’m in my hotel room winding down. I should sleep but jet lag. Then I see the email no one wants.   A founder emails me about how his entire infrastructure melted down an hour earlier. I’m not technical but I understand adjectives. This is disaster. And, he’s launching his new ipad app this Thursday.   Less than 48 hours.   Which will be featured on the App Store. To millions of people. I immediately email Bob but I’m sure we’ll have to delay the launch and therefore lose the feature. As usual, he replies in five minutes, asks to be connected directly with the founder. I email the founder the next day. No reply. Not a good sign, but understandable. I email Bob. No reply. Shit. What I didn’t know was that Bob & his team were meeting every hour, pulling all nighters, do everything possible. They probably needed a week; they did it less than 48 hours. On Thursday, the founder emails “WE’RE ON THE STORE!!” The launch is a success! Whenever I share this story about Bob, he smiles & says “We’re just doing our job.” Amazingly, everything I just wrote is not the best part about Bob. He’s a fantastic dad with three grown & accomplished children. But of course he’d be a great father! He’s humble, hard working. Even though we’ve never worked formally together, when you work with Bob, you feel like you share an email address with him.   Why did I write this?   Do I owe Bob a poker debt? Is this a sponsored post by AWS? No, I just caught up with him, reminiscing about old times, & he has the same warmth, same deep attention, same dad humor. Our industry has wild & extreme personalities.   I’ve worked with some of them. It’s fun but exhausting. BUT there are very decent people here too.   They don’t get headlines. They don’t want them. But their stories,  their achievements, their character,  deserve sharing. If you know Bob, please tease & embarrass the shit out of him. 😁

432

47 Comments

Nice pgvector post from our friends at Nile https://lnkd.in/gPnZqf4H Personally, this has been one of the biggest learnings of using pgvector and pgvectorscale for me:

15

With Qwak's MLOps solution integrated into JFrog's platform, customers can manage their AI models with JFrog Artifactory serving as the model registry and JFrog Xray ensuring the security of ML models

2

AWS re:Invent is less than two weeks away. Want to accelerate your AI initiatives? Let's connect in Vegas and discuss how Meibel enables your engineering team to build Explainable AI into your products and experiences.

60

I’m less enamored with Lean Startups than I was 16 years ago. I think it was a good philosophy when people were first starting to take advantage of the plunging costs of building software due to open source and the cloud. The idea of product-market fit is the most recognized concept to come out of the Lean Startup movement. Everyone wants to achieve product-market fit even if most people cannot define it.  I guess you know it when you see it... Every startup is in a rush to say they have product-market fit because that is what is demanded of them. Saying you haven’t achieved PMF is like broadcasting you’re incompetent. But the opposite of product-market fit is not failure or incompetence. You could be researching, learning and iterating (or pivoting). For early stage investors especially, those activities sound like they would build a lot of future value. As Steve Blank (quoting Tolkein) says, “not all those who wander are lost.” To build better companies, especially outside of software (eg deeptech) we need to value the wandering. It has to be wandering for a purpose. The timing of when a startup finishes wandering might not neatly line up with how we name funding rounds. True innovation usually resists standardized frameworks. Read my full post, Sceptic Mode Part II: https://lnkd.in/g2HqneVV

34

13 Comments

Who would have thought that "Free to Play" was a risky GTM strategy? https://lnkd.in/gMn3TpJC Personally, I have terrible 1996 DSL with very few options, and only expensive ones. I'd like to see GameStop offer a subscription service that will send me the game on physical media, like a preinstalled version on a USB flash drive. It should run right off the drive without an install. This is absolutely possible, ask me how I know. When I return it, the service can flash the next game image on it. If I lose it or keep it, they charge me $X for the flash drive and they can remotely disable the embedded game key or sell me the drive with game key for tidy profit. It shouldn't be rocket science to shake up the gaming market again. Someone will figure it out. Streaming games or free-to-play ain't it, in my humble opinion.

3

1 Comment

On Wednesday, GitHub and JFrog announced a collaboration to integrate their platforms, making it simpler for developers and their support teams to handle source code and binaries across both services. This features single sign-on, role mapping, code tracing from source to binary packages across platforms, and a unified project architecture. Later, a unified dashboard will display GitHub and JFrog’s source- and binary-focused security scan findings. #github #jfrog #githubcopilot #eltrys ELTRYS. GitHub JFrog

5

1 Comment

Key management needs to evolve from manual processes and centralized key storage to scalable, automated solutions to meet today's operational and security demands. I discuss this shift, the importance of workload-specific IDPs, and reducing reliance on shared secrets in my latest blog post.

34

6 Comments

Remember the days of juggling OS, network, database, and system engineers to keep your infrastructure running smoothly? Those were the days! 🤯 It used to be a complex symphony of coordination, with OS engineers fine-tuning CPU usage and RAM, network engineers ensuring ironclad connectivity, DBAs managing intricate schema updates, and system engineers and architects tackling a myriad of other challenges. It was a juggling act that required constant attention and expertise. Cloud computing has revolutionized IT operations, condensing these roles into one powerful position: the Cloud Architect. Cloud Architects are the modern-day IT superheroes, possessing a deep understanding of everything from infrastructure to applications. They design, implement, and manage cloud solutions, ensuring optimal performance, security, and cost-efficiency. From architecting scalable systems and optimizing resource utilization to implementing robust security measures and ensuring high availability, Cloud Architects are the linchpin of successful cloud adoption. If you're looking to streamline operations, reduce costs, and unlock the full potential of your business, a Cloud Architect is your secret weapon. Let's discuss how cloud computing can transform your organization. #cloudarchitect #digitaltransformation #cloudmigration #infrastructure #integriti

5

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, wrote many years ago: "The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit." How should that impact your thinking as an engineering leader? What do you think you should focus on? How should you deal with the tension between getting there and building things "right"? If you are leading engineering at a startup, asking yourself these questions will help you understand which best practices make sense at your stage and which ones become best practices only after you've cleared that product/market fit hurdle. In my latest blog post, I've tried to explain the approach I've been using myself. You can read it here: https://lnkd.in/eNDUGMuq What would you do differently to get to product-market fit earlier?

4

2 Comments

was recently listing to a podcast on datacenter energy management... turns out there are a LOT of parallels to cloud governance; even a unified function... most (all?) applications can be reduced to (something) like -> exaflops per sec, per $ of capex, per watt of electricity it stands to reason that, if applications are energy constrained (why wouldn't they be?), then when optimizing for application cost, the TYPE of energy you consume is relevant to distance your data has to travel. let that sink in. i might add an additional constraint pertaining to customer expectations, but that formula effectively means there is a relationship between distance data has to travel and the cost per watt / type of energy source used to process it... preliminary research suggest's this is not already a "law" so i'm going to call it "proctor's law" until proven otherwise. 😂 refinement to come. overarching theory first heard on Patrick O'Shaughnessy, CFA's podcast: "invest like the best"; adjusted to fit the cloud governance space; give credit to originating thoughts where due. 🖖

2

1 Comment

Check out this new SIGMOD '24 scientific paper. Our customers love Amazon MemoryDB for its low latency performance, rich flexible API, large scale (up to 500 nodes per cluster), security, availability (4 9s SLA), and AWS's operational excellence. We designed MemoryDB for 11 9s of durability while still providing in-memory performance. My team created a nice technical scientific paper on MemoryDB's architecture. If you would like to learn about what's under the hood, check out this SIGMOD '24 paper. Yacine Taleb, Xingbo Wang, Nan Yan, Allen Samuels, Kevin McGehee, Stefan Mueller, and Jean G. - excellent work publishing this paper! https://lnkd.in/gFXPvci8 #aws #memorydb #inmemory #databases #durability #science #sigmod

192

6 Comments

(Borrowing from Nate B Jones/YouTube) Biggest week in tech ever?! What Elon has done I saw even catch Jensen Hwang (NVDA CEO) comment "As far as I know, there's only one person in the world who could do that; Elon is singular in his understanding of engineering and construction and large systems and marshaling resources; it's just unbelievable." 1) Tesla launch of robot, self driving car/van 2) SpaceX "mechavilla" catches the super heavy booster on 1st try 3) For "X" he builds, turns on the largest super computing GPU (NVIDIA) cluster in the world in 19 days. Nate's question; are all of us not taking enough risks?! Great question.

5

MANGFAN is the new FAANG FAANG is an acronym that has been used widely for five major, highly successful U.S. tech companies: Facebook (now Meta Platforms), Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google (now Alphabet). These companies are known for their significant impact on the stock market and the tech industry. Microsoft and Nvidia deserve to be part of this acronym. Both companies are leaders in their respective fields, with Microsoft excelling in software, AI apps and cloud services, and Nvidia dominating the graphics processing unit (GPU) market and AI chip technology. Both of them have market capitalization ofmulti trillion dollars. MANGFAN is the new acronym that should replace FAANG. MANGFAN stocks are popular among investors due to their strong performance and substantial influence on market indices like the S&P 500.

26

8 Comments

WebRTC can be overwhelming, but BlogGeek breaks it down effortlessly. From basics to advanced concepts in no time. The "fiddle of the week" and real-world examples are game-changers. Embrace BlogGeek's expertise today! 💡 #WebRTC #TechTrends #WebDevelopment #LearningPath

1

We are pleased to announce that you can now achieve up to an aggregate 1.3 million I/O operations per second (IOPS) and 12 GB/s throughput per OCI compute instance with the OCI Block Volume Service. In addition, you can also attach up to 32 Ultra High Performance (UHP) volumes to a single OCI compute instance. This service update is particularly useful for high I/O workloads, such as OLTP, AI/ML, data warehousing and analytics, databases with large data sets and extensive complex processing. https://lnkd.in/eHErX5mC

2

We're excited to kick December off with an announcement that we're taking our partnership with New Relic to the next level! Earlier this year, we teased a number of ideas planned on combining build-time and run-time insights to help developers prioritize vulnerabilities. Today, we're excited to launch this into a reality with a deeper integration with New Relic Vulnerability Management. This integration will give developers: 1. A consolidated inventory of their software security posture that combines scanning from build-time, run-time, and infrastructure 2. Prioritization and actionable insights derived via signals of how vulnerabilities flow from code to cloud 3. Comprehensive operational reporting and compliance Connecting build-time and run-time assets is a huge opportunity to unlock more value in our space. A big shoutout to Krystle Portocarrero, Oren Ben-Shaul, Carlos Cheung and the whole team who made this possible! Read More: https://lnkd.in/e3fAmSjh

73

6 Comments