High Tech in the Hub

Over the years I’ve observed one common trait across all high performance teams: they have high context. Context is one of those traits that you know when you see it. A high context team knows their customer, what problems they solve for them, how they use the product, what

After 8 years and 325 posts, Joe Kinsella has decided to hang up his blogging cleats and move on from High Tech in the Hub.

Last weekend I decided to add a webcam to my vacation house. I went to Best Buy thinking this would be an easy and inexpensive project, and found myself looking in the security camera section at prices that ranged from $170 (single Arlo camera) to $499 (four node Lorex system)

I received a back reference check this week from an entrepreneur looking to hire a former colleague of mine. I had many positive things to say about him: he was smart, analytic, had strong skills for the role, and very relevant experience. But I had one concern: he had a

It's official: Boston submitted a 218 page bid to be considered for Amazon's second headquarters. I'll confess to having mixed feelings from the start. On one hand, an Amazon headquarters with 50K new jobs would be transformative for the city. On the other hand, I'm not sure we're ready support

When I moved from Upstate New York to Boston after college I brought with me my passion for history. What follows is my personal historic walking tour of Boston, which I have given to friends and family who visit from out of town. This post has nothing to do with

Several years ago I invited a key champion at an early customer to go to lunch with me. This person was an IT director who always provided me good feedback on the early product I was building. While my company in those days had closed some early customers, we were

I’m a big fan of all things tech and Boston. So in a chocolate meets peanut butter moment, I decided to create my own personal Boston Nerd Tour. For out of towners, this will be an intro to Boston from the geek point of view. For locals, this is

I despise story points. Not dislike: despise. I’ve tried to like them, almost always driven an internal evangelist who’s convinced a team cannot truly adopt agile without story points. I’ve used story point poker, fibonacci sequences, and burndown charts in more teams than I care to admit.

Last summer over lunch with the CTO & co-founder of Care.com, Dave Krupinski, we got to talked about the challenge of managing new products innovation inside an existing growing business. Dave, a former colleague from Easel days, had done what every entrepreneur dreams of doing: building his idea into

I like to think you can simplify the building of products in our industry into the management of four things: people, projects, process and content. The people are the engineers, designers and product managers who produce the product. The projects are the initiatives being executed in support of the creation

The big news of the week is the massive DDoS attack against the US internet, which impacted several major cloud providers. The attack was reportedly executed by supporters of WikiLeaks in response to the government of Ecuador taking away Julian Assange's internet link. Yes, you read that right: our internet

Watching the election this year has been like passing a car crash on Route 93. I don’t want to slow down and look, but I can’t stop myself. It has been a year of political firsts: the first time a presidential candidate has singled out a religious group;

Last year on a long drive from New York, my wife and I found the Tech in Boston podcast. If you are in Boston technology and haven't listened to Dave Gerhardt's podcast, you are missing out on one of the best channels for startup shop talk in the area. At

I once tried recruiting an employee from a large tech company who had a great background but one noticeable flaw: he'd only worked in big companies. While this is usually a red flag for me, I thought it was worth a Hangout to see if he might have crossover potential.

I had a couple meetings with entrepreneurs this week, which I occasionally do as a pay-it-forward approach to the support I’ve received over the years. In both cases the hot topic on the entrepreneurs' minds was raising early stage venture capital. I always start by telling my story from

Last summer I did a blog post titled My Startup Anniversary: 3 Years In Blog Posts. The goal of the post was to provide a journey through my personal blog as written while starting and growing CloudHealth Technologies. I thought I'd update this post for my 4th year. And So

In April this year CloudHealth hosted a NewCo Boston presentation called Agility Experienced. Success Realized. Our VP of marketing had signed me up for the session, which I prompting forgot about until I had to scramble to figure out what to present the day before. Below are the slides, which

I sometimes hear the name of a new company and can’t help but appreciate its simplicity and power. For example: Cloudera, Docker, Pinterest, Uber. I like to think that these names came from an HBO Silicon Valley-esque vision quest by its founder, mushrooms optional of course. But in truth

If I were a large tech company that missed the disruption in the cloud, I’d be looking for a fast way to make my business relevant again. The obvious solution is to leverage my size and brand to launch new products that are valued by my customers. Unfortunately the

I am a voracious reader of tech nonfiction, and so it will come as no surprise that I bought Dan Lyon’s Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-up Bubble this week. While it was a quick and entertaining read, with all the news coverage of HubSpot’s Lord of the

A couple weeks ago I attended a conference held by Pacific Crest, an investment banking firm that underwrites many of the tech IPOs in our market (e.g. Wayfair, Hubspot, Apigee). The keynote speaker was Bill Ruh, Chief Digital Officer of GE, who gave a very engaging talk about the

If you’ve worked with me before, you likely know the high value I place on visibility and transparency. I value this not because I like to work in open organizations (I do), but because the free flow of information maximizes the chance of startup success through better informed decision

Stop me if you’ve seen this movie before: an engineer is ready to ship a new feature and issues a pull request. He expects the work to quickly move through internal reviews, and is looking forward to getting it in the hands of customers. But during the PR review,

I have a simple classification mechanism for things I do: passion, interest or job. Passions are things that consume me, for which I can sustain long periods of directed thought. Interests are things that hold my attention for short or medium periods of time (e.g. hobbies). And jobs are