High Tech in the Hub

The inauguration has me in a patriotic mood. Instead of writing my planned post on leadership, I’d like to tell a story from American history. For those of you who don’t know me, in addition to being an entrepreneur and a technologist, I am also a bit of

With a global pandemic, a disrupted economy and social turmoil, the year 2020 has been a rollercoaster ride without a seatbelt. But as it comes to a close, I am realizing that for better or worse, I am exiting the year a changed person from the one I was in

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit

I learn more from my failures than I do from successes, and so as a result, I have done a lot of learning in my career. My list of failures is long and growing. Among my more notable ones include not being able to get a software job out of

I had a great idea for a feature in the early days of CloudHealth: enabling customers to collaborate around their cloud resources. For example, a manager might want to let their DevOps engineer know they forgot to “turn the lights out” on some infrastructure; a developer might want to let

One of my early Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) in the founding of CloudHealth Technologies was to test the value proposition of cloud cost optimization. I needed to validate two critical assumptions to my product idea: (1) I could drive a meaningful reduction in cloud costs for customers, and (2) there

I joined my first internet startup in the mid-1990s, a company located in a two story red brick building off Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square. Our mission was to provide collaborative filtering - the machine learning of its time - for the rapidly growing sites and portals on the internet.

The Lean Startup movement popularized the concept of Build-Measure-Learn (BML) as a means to reduce the risk of the creation of new products and businesses. The concept is simple: build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), measure the product’s effectiveness in the market, derive critical validated learning, and then start

October is the two year anniversary of the acquisition of my company, CloudHealth Technologies, by VMware. CloudHealth as a private company was definitely a labor of love for me, starting with the irrational decision to leave my job with two young kids in 2012, and ending with me in front

This evening I spent some time helping a former colleague find a new job. He joined a startup a few months back that has been particularly hard hit by the Covid-19 economic slowdown. While I am generally happy to support the job search of a trusted colleague, this one was

Our offices around the globe went to work from home March 11th, making today my 11th day in captivity… I mean operating remotely. The transition has gone surprisingly smoothly, with technology enabling me and my team to be very productive. But it is also clear the high anxiety that exists

As the CTO and founder of CloudHealth Technologies (acquired by VMware in 2018), I am intimately familiar with the razors edge existence on which startups live. A startup typically derives its revenue from a single product or service, spends more cash than it takes in, and lives on the law

I was at Dell when the 2008 Great Recession started. I hadn’t thought much about the housing market in the years leading up to the crash, and certainly had never heard of Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs). I did think it odd the number of people I knew that were

With the coronavirus, a volatile stock market, shrinking 401Ks, and the upcoming US election, it’s hard not to be a little on edge of late. I’m not saying we are headed for a recession, but it’s hard not to sense a change in the winds right now.

When CloudHealth was still a private company, I would regularly get congratulations from people over the performance of our business. If we were raising money, it would be common for a potential investor to say: “Congratulations on a really impressive business.” Or if I were at a networking event, I

Early in my career I worked on a new service called Venues at an MIT Media Labs spinout called FireFly. The service was an early version of a social network like MySpace that was focused on engaging consumers in chat, message boards, and content around user-driven topics. I poured my

There is a truism about all disruptive innovations: when they are first introduced to the market, they almost always appear like their predecessor technology. It is only after a disruptive innovation has fully matured and customers are familiar with it that we see its true form. It is then that

In spite of the fact the Red Sox are playing like they're in spring training, I'm glad to have baseball back in my life. My interest in baseball and technology have been intertwined since I wrote my first serious software at age 11: a simulator to predict how Babe Ruth

I re-listened to Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale episode 4 (Imperfect Is Perfect) on the walk from the office to North Station last night. This episode highlights the criticality of putting your product in front of customers early and often. The topic is an obvious one for Reid, who

I was on Cape Cod with my family when my CEO called to tell me the time had come to make a decision. In the anatomy of a deal, there are many points at which you can safely safely hit the eject button, but this perhaps was the most important

A year ago I made my Last Post to my blog. Over the previous eight years I had made 325 posts on topics that ranged from the cloud to product management to software development. But last March I decided to make it official: I was tapped out. I’m sure

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