High Tech in the Hub

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

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