Entries from March 2008 ↓

I received the following email a few weeks ago:

I graduated with an MIS degree while serving in the Military. I took some programming classes like JAVA, C++ etc… I am now back in Boston, MA and find it difficult to find employment where I can learn to become a better programmer. I don’t have the experience but I am willing to learn. Can you please provide me with some direction on what to say on my resume, to gain the experience in the civilian workforce so I can become a better programmer?

My response:
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“Obviously, there’s no magic bullet. First, Google is investing in brains. Every company has a bell curve, right? It’s different here. The odds are pretty good that if you bump into someone in the cafeteria, they are world-class at something.”

- Google Engineering Director David Glazer in a recent Fast Company article

Lately I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about internet startups and entrepreneurial software developers (or as I like to call them, “developer entrepreneurs”).

And lo and behold, no sooner did I sit down to write about it than I received an email with my “prompt” for this post. It went something like this:

For several years I have been refining a business idea to be conceived as an Internet startup. I have met with numerous developers over time and even after they express support for the business concept, my challenge has been in persuading web developers in partnering in the opportunity as entrepreneurial venture.

Could you suggest to me an approach I could take to persuade Developers, to see such opportunities as business ventures instead of a project/job?

How should I go about selling the business concept enough to have development of the application without initial funds?

If you’re a non-technical founder looking for a developer entrepreneur, these are questions you should ask yourself. Having been on the developer side of the coin a number of times, here is my take.

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If you apply for these jobs tell them Rob sent you!

(Palo Alto) Social Gaming at Hive7
The first 3 openings are for a startup social gaming company (they are funded) called Hive7 in Palo Alto. They have over a million users, run on .NET, and are in need of a lead web designer, a lead DBA and a web games developer. Check out the job postings for more details, but their main selling points are:

• Massive amounts of creative freedom
• Insanely flexible working environment
• Great team of mad technologists, elitist designers and prima-donna artists with healthy bent on world domination

(Greater D.C. Area) Counter-terrorism Software at Abraxas Applications
The other opening is for a startup technology company in the Greater D.C. Area called Abraxas Application (3 developers and growing). They are a .NET (C#) / SQL 2005 shop developing a counter-terrorism application. Relocation assistance is possible for the right candidate.

You have to love the job title: Do Stuff That Matters (Software Engineer).

This is a fantastic idea.

I’ve heard of full disk encryption before – when I worked for a credit card company all of our database servers had full disk encryption and it was very expensive and required a massive deployment effort by our IT staff. But Data Guard Systems’ AlertBoot is a managed service that’s trying to bring this enterprise idea to the masses. At least, those technically savvy masses who care to protect the information they carry on their laptops and PCs.

Targeted at IT departments and marketed at $12.95/month I think this product has a real chance of success – having worked in the financial sector for 3 years this would have been a no-brainer option for securing the laptops we all carted home. We were never supposed to have critical information on our laptops, but I’m sure it happened more often than it should.

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