IT

David Cohen coined the phrase “do more faster” and then we made it popular when we published the book by the same name back in 2010. We wrote the book because it was becoming clear that doing more faster was exactly what businesses were striving to do and it subsequently became the Techstars mantra . As technological advancements gave both the entrepreneur and businessperson a new framework for productivity, goals across industries and departments started taking a new shape, but singing a similar tune: fit more into the day, produce more results, better results, cheaper results, and all in a shorter time frame than ever before. ...

On today, the first day of the new year, I give to my wife Amy Batchelor the gift of a lifetime of uncomplaining tech support. While in Bora Bora, one of the books I read was Stewart Friedman’s Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life . It was “ok” so I ended up skimming a lot of it. But I picked up one great thing from it which made the entire book worthwhile. ...

Our portfolio company JumpCloud is running a survey to dig deeper into the professional lives of IT folks and their move to DevOps. If you are open to sharing your thoughts and experiences, please take their survey . It’s only about five minutes long and they are sharing all of the raw data (anonymized, of course). The survey ends at the end of June. The IT sector is undergoing some interesting transformations as a result of the cloud, DevOps, and mobile. I’m interested to see what the data tells us. ...

Two of the themes we love to invest in are Protocol and Glue . We’ve especially been interested in companies that make software developers and DevOps lives better. Some examples include SendGrid, Urban Airship, VictorOps, Pantheon, MongoLab, and Cloudability. To that end, Raj Bhargava and I created a company called JumpCloud late last year (our eighth venture together). After being involved in hundreds of technology companies, we know that young and fast growing technology companies have little time to devote to the details of managing their server infrastructure. Often, there is a perception that things are fine, until they aren’t. And then much pain ensues. ...