Tag: business
A Quality Benchmark for Accelerators: The Global Accelerator Network
When David Cohen and I came up with the idea for the Global Accelerator Network (GAN) in 2010, we counted roughly 100 accelerator programs around the US that were founded following the Techstars model. We labeled Techstars a “mentor driven accelerator” and reached out to others who were using the same approach to create what became GAN. From that initial outreach, 16 high quality accelerator programs joined us to launch the network.
Since then, accelerators have appeared all over the world. Some accelerators are incredibly high quality. Others are not. Some are major contributors to their startup communities. Others are detrimental to it. As with everything new that grows quickly, it’s a chaotic system with lots of innovation, creative destruction, and rapid change and learning that – if done well – is a great example of the power of the Lean Startup approach to entrepreneurship.
Today, the Global Accelerator Network is a worldwide organization of 52 accelerators located in over 60 cities around the world. We’ve maintained a high quality across the membership while expanding the network by being selective. Not every accelerator is/could be/would be a member in GAN, nor is it designed that way. To become a member, each accelerator must meet the following strict criteria:
- Operate a 3-6 month long program.
- Provide some sort of seed capital to their founders.
- Take a small amount of equity (usually ~6%) and overall have terms that are favorable to entrepreneurs.
- Take no less than 5 and no more than 12 companies at a time.
- Surround those companies with 40-80 mentors.
- Have funding for a two-year runway of the program.
- Have physical space available for their program.
- Have a strong management team who are typically proven entrepreneurs
In addition to these eight criteria, all members follow the established ethos (give before you get; put entrepreneurs first) of accelerators in GAN, including a thorough review of an accelerator’s term sheets and numerous conversations to vet accelerator founders’ intentions and operational practices. We also review their leadership and mentor pool to ensure value.
Becoming a member in the GAN is not easy, but neither is operating a quality accelerator program. Feel free to drop me an email if you want to learn more about joining GAN.
An increasing number of companies we are investors in are focused on DevOps. A year or so ago I read an early draft of a new book titled The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win. I really enjoyed it and asked Gene Kim, one of the authors to write a guest post on DevOps. He wrote it a while ago and it has sat in my draft queue waiting for the perfect moment to emerge. That moment is now. Following is a guest post on DevOps by Gene Kim, Multiple Award-Winning CTO, Researcher, Visible Ops Co-Author, Entrepreneur & Founder of Tripwire.
Since 1999, my passion has been studying high performing IT organizations. On this journey, we benchmarked 1,500 IT organization to understand what differentiated the highest performing organizations and allowed them to do what the others only dreamed of. Our findings went into a book that we published in 2004 called The Visible Ops Handbook, which described how these organizations made their “good to great” transformation.
Since then, this journey has taken me straight into the heart of the DevOps movement. Although I initially dismissed DevOps as just another marketing fad, my friend John Willis corrected me, in the way that only true friends can do, saying, “Don’t be dense. DevOps finally proves how IT can be a strategic advantage that allows a business to beat the pants off the competition. This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for.”
In that moment, I saw the light. Over the years, I’ve come to believe with moral certainty that everyone needs DevOps now, especially software startups where the successful execution of Development and IT Operations preordain success or failure.
Today, we can see how DevOps patterns enable organizations like Etsy, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and Google to achieve levels of performance that were unthinkable even five years ago. They are doing tens, hundreds or even thousands of code deploys per day, while delivering world-class stability, reliability and security.
DevOps refers to the emerging professional movement that advocates a collaborative working relationship between Development and IT Operations, resulting in the fast flow of planned work (i.e., high deploy rates), while simultaneously increasing the reliability, stability, resilience of the production environment.
The culture and practices that enable DevOps to happen cannot be delegated away. In a growing startup where teams start to specialize and multiply, the chaos of daily work often starts to slow down the smooth flow of work between Development and IT Operations, sometimes even resulting in outright tribal warfare.
In this blog post, I’ll describe what this downward spiral looks like, and what everyone in the company must do to break this destructive pattern and ensure that Development and IT Operations work together in a way that creates such a competitive advantage that it may almost seem unfair.
Why Everyone Needs DevOps
There is currently a core, chronic conflict that exists in almost every IT organization. It is so powerful that it practically pre-ordains horrible outcomes, if not abject failure. It happens in both large and small organizations, for-profit and non-profit, and across every type of industry.
In fact, this destructive pattern is the root cause of one of the biggest problems we face as an industry. But, if we can beat it, we’ll have the potential to generate more economic value than anything we’ve seen in the previous 30 years.
I’m going to share with you what this destructive pattern is in Three Acts, that will surely be familiar to you. (You can get the whole story in my book, The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win).
Act I begins with IT Operations, where we’re supporting a large, complex revenue generating application. The problem is that everyone knows that the application and supporting infrastructure is… fragile.
How do we know? Because every time anyone touches it, it breaks horrifically, causing an epic amount of unplanned work for everyone.
The shameful part is how we find out about the outage: Instead of through an internal monitoring tool, it’s a salesperson calling, saying, “Hey, Gene, something strange is happening. Our revenue pipeline stopped for two hours.” Or, “the banner ads in my market are being served upside down and in Spanish.”
There are so many moving parts that it takes way too long to figure out what caused the problem du jour, which means we’re spending more and more time on unplanned work and increasingly unable to get our planned work done.
Eventually, our ability to support the most important applications and business initiatives goes down. When this happens, the organization suddenly finds itself unable to achieve the promises and commitments made to the outside world, whether it’s investors, customers, analysts or Wall Street.
Promised features aren’t delivered on time, market share isn’t going up, average order sizes are going down, specific revenue goals are being missed…And that’s when something really terrible happens.
In Act 2, everyone’s lives gets worse when the business starts making even bigger promises to the people we let down, to compensate for the promises we previously broke. Often, the entire organization starts dreaming up bigger, bolder features that are sure to dazzle the marketplace, but without the best grasp on what technology can and can’t do, or fully realizing what caused us to miss our commitments in the first place.
Enter the Developers. They start seeing more and more urgent date-driven projects put in the queue, often requiring things that the organization has never done before. Because the date can’t be moved (because of all those external promises made), everyone has to start cutting corners.
Development must focus on getting the features done, so the corners that get cut are all the non-functional requirements (e.g., manageability, scalability, reliability, security, and so forth). This means that technical debt starts to increase. And that means increasingly fragile infrastructure in production.
It is called “technical debt” for a reason—because technical debt, like financial debt, compounds.
When technical debt begins to accumulate, something very insidious starts happening. Our deployments start taking longer. What used to take an hour now takes three hours, then a day, then two days—which is okay, because it can still get it done in a weekend. But then it takes three days, and then a week, then two weeks!
Our deployments become so expensive and so difficult that the business says that we have to lengthen the deployment intervals, which goes against all our instincts and training. We know that we need to shrink the batch sizes, not make them bigger, because large changes make for larger failures.
The flow of features slows to a trickle, the deployments take even longer, more things go wrong, and because of all the moving pieces, issues take even longer to diagnose. Our best Dev and Ops people are spending all their time firefighting, and blaming each other when things go wrong.
I’m guessing that most of you can relate to at least some portions of this story? As I said, this happens both in large enterprises and growing startups alike. In my fifteen years of research in this area, I’ve found almost all IT professionals have experienced this cycle.
Act 3: How DevOps Breaks Us Out Of Our Downward Spiral
We know that there must be better way, right? DevOps is the proof that it’s possible to break the core, chronic conflict, so we can deliver a fast flow of features without causing chaos and disruption to the production environment.
When John Allspaw and Paul Hammond gave their seminal “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr” presentation at the 2009 Velocity Conference, people were shocked and amazed, if not outright fainting in the aisles at the audaciousness of their achievement.
It wasn’t a fluke. Other organizations such as Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and the ever-growing DevOps community have replicated their performance, doing hundreds, and even thousands, of deployments per day. DevOps is not only for large, established companies. It’s for any company where the achievement of business goals rely upon both Development and IT Operations. These days, that means almost every company.
We all need to be putting DevOps-like practices into place. This is why Kevin Behr, George Spafford, and I wrote The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win.
A novel, you might ask? How is a novel going to solve my problems?
As a friend once told me, “Before you can solve a complex problem, you must first have empathy for the other stakeholders. And story-telling is most effective means of creating a shared understanding of the problem.”
Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt demonstrated the power of a novel as a teaching tool through his book, The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. It’s a novel written in the 1980s about a plant manager who has 90 days to fix his cost and due date issues or his plant will be shut down. When I read this book nearly 15 years ago, I knew that this story was important, and that there was much I needed to learn, even though I never managed or worked in a manufacturing plant.
It isn’t an overstatement to say that The Goal and Dr. Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints changed my life—in fact, it probably was one of the biggest influences on my professional thinking. For eight years, my co-authors and I wanted to write The Phoenix Project, because we all believed that IT is not a department, but a strategic capability that every business must have.
As you can imagine, I was incredibly honored and thrilled when Jez Humble, author of the award-winning book Continuous Delivery recently told me, “This book is a gripping tale that captures brilliantly the dilemmas that face companies which depend on IT. The Phoenix Project will have a profound effect on IT, just as The Goal did for manufacturing.”
Prescriptive Steps
For those of you are looking for some places to start your DevOps journey, here are my three favorite DevOps patterns:
- Make sure we have environments available early in the Development process. Enforce a policy that the code and environment are tested together, even at the earliest stages of the project.In the ideal, IT Operations is able to create an environment (that is, everything except for the application code: databases, operating system, networking, virtualization layer, etc.) with one step. That can be as simple as copying a virtual machine, or as complex as an automated build system that generates the environment from scratch (e.g., puppet, chef, etc.)Furthermore, use the same build mechanism to build the Production, Test and Dev environments at the same time. If we modify the Agile sprint policy so that instead of merely having shippable code, we have shippable code and the environment that it runs within, we’ll have done code deployments many, many times when it’s time for the real-life production deployment.
- “Wake up developers up at 2 a.m. when they break things.” Yep, you heard me. This quote came from Patrick Lightbody, the CEO and founder of BrowserMob. He continued, “When we woke up developers, we found that defects got fixed faster than ever.”The goal is to shorten and amplify feedback loops, and to bring Development closer to the customer experience. In DevOps work streams, developers often deploy their own code, and fixes forward when things go wrong. By doing this, developers can see the consequences of their decisions and actions.(Note the symmetry here: the previous pattern #1 about making environments available early is all about embedding IT Operations into Development, while this pattern is about putting Development into IT Operations.)
- Create reusable deployment procedures: When every deployment is done differently, every production environment can become different, like snowflakes. When this occurs, no mastery is ever built in the organization in procedures or configurations. As Luke Kanies said, “If your infrastructure is special, you’re doing it wrong.”To make this reality, create reusable user story for IT Operations, such as “Deploy app into high availability environment,” which then goes on to define exactly the steps to build the environment, as well as how long it takes, what resources are required, etc.By doing this, we codify the deployment and engineering procedures requires to build reliable, resilient and properly configured environments, and can then factor that into our planning processes, such as in the PMO.
Conclusion
If you enjoyed this taste of DevOps and believe it can help achieve your goals, “The Phoenix Project” is available now, or you can download a free 170 page excerpt of the book. And of course, you can always find the latest writings on DevOps at the IT Revolution blog, where you can get our free whitepaper “The Top 11 Things You Need To Know About DevOps.”
Long live DevOps!
My first business partner, Dave Jilk, emailed me our original partnership agreement for Feld Technologies. It’s one page.
We incorporated a month later as an S-Corp. It cost us $99 to do this – I remember using an organization called The Company Corporation – we called an 800 number, gave them some information, and the documents were automatically generated and filed. A short letter agreement specifying the equity splits and the boilerplate legal docs were the only legal docs we had until we sold the company in 1993.
As my partner Jason Mendelson told me after I sent him this the other day, “If things go well, it’s fine. If they don’t, it’s a fucking disaster.” And he’s completely correct – in this case things went well so there were no issues.
I continue to try to do deals this way. I lay out the terms, will negotiate a little, but am clear about what I want. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, I move on. Once the simple terms are agreed to, I let the lawyers generate hundreds of pages of documentation to support the deal. I used to read every word on every page myself (I learned that from Len Fassler, who bought Feld Technologies). I still look through the documents, but I only work with lawyers who I deeply trust to do it right (like Mike Platt at Cooley) so I focus on the stuff that matters for the specific deal.
Trust matters more than anything else to me in a deal. Sure, I occasionally get screwed in a deal, but never more than once by the same person. And, for people like Dave Jilk and my dad, I’ll work with them over and over and over again because I trust them with my life.
Keep it simple. It’s much better.