fantasy vc - care givers

My grandparents are immigrants, which is fairly common enough that I think this is important--- they're alone. The same seems to be true for many non-immigrants. For those who come from or grew up in a culture where the young took care of the old on a kind of quid pro quo for having been supported until they go off to university (and maybe even past then).

But today's old generally are left to their own devices. Kids and grandkids don't live in the same town, rarely visit, and certainly don't provide any help or relief of the day to day troubles of age. If my grandmother hears from me once a week, she's thrilled. This is just a fact of life. But it's not really a good one.

Elders are forced to be more self-sufficient, which is exactly what they can't do as time goes on. So small issues become big issues because they're not caught or stopped early enough. Example. Noticing that an old man has started to have trouble with balance can lead to preventative care that would prevent a fall. But if no one is there to notice and the old man has no one to call on for help, or he just doesn't want to bother his kids who have busy lives, he eventually falls. And that's the beginning of a steady decline in health and life experience.

I look forward to not having any fucks left to give about all the silly things that occupy life when young that don't really matter.

I don't look forward to being alone and uncared for.

Isolation is not care.

What seems inevitable is personal, care giving robotics. Baymax, but in real life. So hopefully care—not just medicine--becomes universal and trivial. Given the mass of boomers, or demographics in places like Japan, the market is immense. I'd put a bet on anything that looks remotely promising in this field in the first wave which is coming. Then I'd place a bet on anything that looked promising in the wave after that. And after that.

But ultimately, I think the isolation of our elders has to change. They should be integrated into society. Into communities. "Downtowns" are for the young and the old. Places where you don't have to drive, where you can be a regular at many shops, where more than one person will notice when you're not there, etc. It's nothing that needs inventing. It's a culture that needs changing.

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This is part of an occasional series about products and companies that I would place a bet on. 

fantasy vc - grand rounds

Continuing a series on startups I'd put a bet on if I could.

A few months ago, my friend James joined Grand Rounds. Most of Silicon Valley spouts a fountain of bullshit claiming change-the-world status. This team actually does it.

Consider this: 

• It takes a very long time for studied, tested, proven and well known advances in medical and surgical practice to actually become conventional and prevalent—as in, a decade or more

• The industry, as a whole, is set against advancement because advancement usually means more precise diagnoses and less money due to fewer surgical procedures, even though quality of life improves

• There is no way to connect those who need information about new discoveries, new test, new procedures with those who lead the field and discovered the advances—people go to the doctors and practitioners they have access to

• Those PhD/MDs doing the research, creating the studies, going through FDA approvals and fighting to make a better life for all of us want to accelerate the process—they’re desperate to get the life-saving discoveries, tests and procedures they’ve developed adopted by the world

• What is a second opinion from one of those experts worth?

• What is it worth to us, as individuals?

• What is it worth to the companies that fund their own insurance programs (every big one)?

• What happens when $1M worth of unnecessary procedures and hospital visits are replaced by a $10,000 outpatient visit? How much is that worth across an insured employee base? What if that happened a dozen times a year? A hundred times a year?

10% of the cases drive 66% of the costs for employers, and employers don’t have the right tools for resolving them. Obesity or smoking cessation programs are great, but the reality is that a small number of truly complex and expensive cases emerge in the workforce every year and account for a majority of a company’s overall healthcare spend.

As I’ve said, there are two ways to disruption: either you disrupt by doing something new or you disrupt by changing the supply chain, removing middlemen, disintermediating or consolidating intermediaries. Grand Rounds short-circuits the supply chain of medical information. And by so doing they’ve already saved lives. How many other startups can you say that about?

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None of this is to say that they're guaranteed success. Or won't get crushed by entrenched interests. Or even scooped up before they become too successful. Just that I would've placed that bet.

fantasy vc - knodes

Continuing a series on startups I'd put a bet on if I could.

At New York Tech Meetup last year I saw a presentation by the founders of Knodes. It got me then and, eight months later, I still think about it.

Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, etc., are utilities [eventually] optimized for advertising revenue. This means they must generate noise to make money from our captured attention. I’ve asked: what if we were paid directly for our attention rather than those middlemen?

Knodes asks: what if we could use those noise generating systems to generate signal?

Put these things together:

• It’s become a truism that there’s too much information, too much of which is noise and most of which is filtered out automatically by people on social media, in searches, etc
• Word of mouth, recommendations from friends and trusted advice have the greatest leverage when it comes to commanding high-value attention, the kind that leads to actual action and stickiness
• "High-value" attention because all attention is not made equal, which is (hopefully) intuitively self-evident
• The social capital of trusted networks (or whatever)—a friend you know knows a thing or two about something—can turn something from a bit of noise into a bit of signal
• The demographic, interest and activity profile matching used for ad targeting can (and should) be used by trusted networks to reach each other with greater leverage
• For example: I don’t know who in my network is really interested in supporting autism research, but some of them must be so instead of hitting all of them with noise—support this because I want to—I can target the ones that care with a signal—support this because they want to—without having to know who they are ahead of time

In generating signal I wrote:

 

Instead of us filtering out all the noise to find the signal, the signal filters out everyone to whom it is noise. The signal finds you.

Jeff Jonas has been saying this for more than a decade: the data must find the data and the relevance must find the user. Go read him. If you get the chance, talk to him.

That is the promise of Knodes.

Generate signal.

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None of this is to say that they're guaranteed success. Or won't get crushed by an incumbent or other party. Or even scooped up before they become too successful. Just that I would've placed that bet.

fantasy vc - virtustream

This fantasy vc post comes from something I wrote about in “what we don’t know about private cloud” and “the three cloud questions you have to answer”: 

The line between what we do in the public cloud vs what we do in the private cloud vs what never goes to a cloud model will be moved—both in time and in scope—by the cloudification of legacy applications.

In the space between public cloud for cloud-native applications and on-prem virtualization plus automation for non-cloud-native applications lies a big space for remote hosting of non-cloud-native applications. 

Some of this is satisfied by what can best be called managed hosting for virtualization, which is what most VMware-oriented service providers (even those that use the word “cloud”) do. And some of it is satisfied by VMware-oriented service providers that actually have managed to build a self-service, usage-based service model (like the very successful Tier3, recently acquired by CenturyLink).  

Yet despite the promise of being able to forklift a legacy app to a cloud provider and switch from a perpetual license model to a usage-based model to pay for a particular bit of software as a service—that is something that is rare. Enter Virtustream.

Put these things together:

• Many enterprise apps cannot be re-architected to be “cloud-native”
• There is demand to forklift enterprise apps to hosted infrastructure
• There is demand to pay for those apps on a resource-consumption model
• Many of those apps are only supported virtualized on VMware
• Many enterprises don’t have the expertise to do the forklifting
• Many service providers don’t have the expertise to do the forklifting
• Many (most?) VMware-oriented service providers can’t figure out how to get the automation and resource-consumption parts done in a way that generates a sufficiently cloud-like experience for their customers
• VIrtustream solves for this

The interesting thing about Virtustream to me is the apparent focus they’ve had from the beginning: these exact customers, this exact problem space, those exact applications. And nothing else. Period. 

The technology they built is fundamentally an enabling mechanism to make the resource-consumption model granular enough on VMware to achieve the cloud-like experience. The model they built is predicated on doing the hard work of the full life-cycle of an enterprise pre-sales/sales/post-sales consultative service. And they do the hard work.

That's not to say that they're guaranteed success. Or won't get crushed by an incumbent or other party. Or even scooped up before they become too successful. Just that I would've placed that bet.

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Disclosure: Virtustream, as a whole, was adjacent to my coverage area at Gartner—but their xStream cloud management platform was squarely in my coverage area once it was commercialized.

fantasy vc - apprenda

Considering the press and recent funding round for my friends at Apprenda, it seems a bit disingenuous to fantasy vc them. But no matter.

I’ve been convinced of their success since the first explanation of the product and target. There were plenty of PaaSes at the time, but they were mostly targeted at developers and mostly public. Press releases from analysts firms like this notwithstanding, the market wasn’t taking off and didn’t look like it was going to take off any time soon.

Put these things together:

• There is a lot of in house development in the enterprise—though no one knows how much exactly, it’s at least enough to support a couple of private PaaS players
• That development is mostly Java or .NET on Linux or Windows
• And it runs on fleets of servers, storage, networking, and data centers that are not at end of life
• What’s developed is custom apps for core business/ops, paperwork apps, extensions to COTS with SDKs, glue to connect together these things and/or legacy apps and/or cloud apps and/or cloud services and/or…
• There was and is very little “private” PaaS competition
• There was no private PaaS for .NET applications at the time that I knew of and there are only a few today 
• There was little that provided the experience of a distributed runtime on prem out of the box
• Virtualization is not required
• Apprenda was (and is still the only?) private PaaS supporting .NET that doesn’t predicate itself on some hypervisor

You offer a runtime, so you may or may not have VMs--but who cares since what you need to expose is the runtime, a management console for that runtime, and (hopefully) APIs to connect to and operate it

- me, provided vs exposed

To me, that last point was the killer. Before the renewed popularity in [the old technology of] containers, Apprenda leveraged Linux container tech and figured out how to get a workalike on Windows to underpin their PaaS. Thus totally foregoing the overhead of hypervisors and the overhead of VMware’s margin.

That's not to say that they're guaranteed success. Or won't get crushed by an incumbent or other party. Or even scooped up before they become too successful. Just that I would've placed that bet.

Disclosure: Apprenda is not in my former coverage area and I have no financial interest in them. But Sinclair and I do share an alma mater.

fantasy vc - cumulus

Continuing a series on startups I'd put a bet on if I could. 

Pundits and analysts like to cite SDN, NFV, Open Compute Networking, and the ever greater capability (thus usage) of merchant silicon as harbingers of commoditization. I think "commoditization" is the wrong word, used loosely without any regard for what it actually means. Rather, what we're seeing is [maybe] the onset of a kind of x86-ification or open-systems-ification of networking. Given networking (telegraph, 1844) is historically behind compute (Babbage, 1830) systems, this is not without precedent. ;-)

So my second Fantasy VC bet is Cumulus. My introduction to Cumulus was JR pulling up the OS on his laptop and handing me a bash prompt.  

Either you disrupt by doing something new. Or you disrupt by changing the supply chain, removing middlemen, disintermediation (or consolidation of intermediaries unto yourself?). When was the last time any significant disruption happened in networking? Arista looked like it was going to stir some things up, but has more or less ended up as a niche version of the typical vendor. But it did take a step in the direction Cumulus continues down by abandoning spinning it's own silicon and focusing on Linux-based OS and hardware packages. 

[This is where people with history in networking start berating me for glossing over all the other attempts and examples and acquisitions and research and….] 

Put these things together:

• Network management is a mess, has been a mess, and continues to be a mess
• Config automation is ascendant
• Application-centrism is ascendant
• Network gear is made up of specialized computation machines; why should it be isolated from the same historical progression as has happened with other kinds of computation machines?
• There's precedent for OS/hardware independence
• Has anyone ever cut out OEM's before and made distributers/VARs into the only packagers for product? What happens when Channel gets to command the margin?
• There is a market [small but potent] for mix and match network hardware and operating systems
• Every network incumbents' margin structure is someone's opportunity and those margins are fat
• Mainframes, Power Systems, Superdomes, etc., are niches while most servers sold are a variety of x86 hardware + standard OS packaging exercise

That's not to say that they're guaranteed success. Or won't get crushed by an incumbent or other party. Or even scooped up before they become too successful. Just that I would've placed that bet.

Disclosure: Cumulus is not in my former coverage area and I have no financial interest in them.

fantasy vc - metacloud

Kicking off a series about bets I would've placed if I had the money. This is something I very much wanted to do--very much could not do--when I was at Gartner.

I don't know the numbers on "real" (read: revenue generating) OpenStack adoption, growth, etc. . 

I do know there's real traction. 

Suspicion: it's with very very few vendors. Money is being made but success is concentrated.

There are only two startups in the space I would bet on. One, I have a conflict of interest regarding. The other is Metacloud. Both aren't really OpenStack companies. OpenStack is just a vehicle for the thing they actually do.. In Metacloud's case, what they do is remote ops (as a service!)

Put these things together:

• There is a market for private cloud (whatever that is)
• There is a market for AWSish public cloud
• There is a market for AWSish private cloud (Eucalyptus are still in business, aren't they?)
• There is an existing use case for AWSish private cloud in most enterprises (web, mobile, dev)
• There is a fundamental our-bottom-line-at-stake use case for AWSish private cloud in some subset of enterprises (a few hundred?) today
• There is a general lack of operational skill for AWSish private cloud
• One of the core things public cloud provides is a managed service
• There is a market for on-prem remote-managed AWS (the three letter agency thing is a public example)
• The Metacloud guys are ops guys who understand enterprise, scale, web, mobile, open source, AWSish cloud
• There just aren't a lot of hats (big or small) in this particular ring right now 

That's not to say that they're guaranteed success. Or won't get crushed by an incumbent or other party. Or even scooped up before they become too successful. Just that I would've placed that bet.

Disclosure: They're in my former coverage area. But I believe with some certainty that I'd come to the same conclusion without that background. I have no financial interest in Metacloud. I really like them. Would have a beer with that crew any day.