My long time friend Alan Shimel, Chief Strategy Officer at StillSecure, has started a blog.
I first met Alan in NY when I was co-chairman of Sage Networks. We had started to acquire web hosting companies in 1997 and Alan’s was one of the first that we talked to. At the time, he and his partners were running a very rapidly growing shared web hosting company. We had our first meeting at a GE office in Manhattan that I was camping in that day – me in my long hair and jeans; Alan is a lime green jacket (looking like he’d rather be wearing jeans). We connected immediately and were able to put together a deal quickly.
We then proceeded to go through plenty of ups and downs, but became good friends in the process. When Raj Bhargava started StillSecure, he recruited Alan to join him – it’s been great to work with Alan again.
Alan has been spending a lot of time thinking about open source, especially in the context of security software and some of the actions of several of the companies that have been formed around popular open source projects. Among other things he’s got a strong and well reasoned point of view that’s worth listening to. Of course, if you are interested in security software, Alan is a great guy to talk to about it.