Joe Kinsella

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

If you have kids involved a FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team, you are likely familiar with a common issue: since there are more students than robots, it's often hard to get novice programmers enough time on a robot to learn. I decided to see if I could address this issue

While in truth there is no singular moment in which you start a company, I still mark the official start of CloudHealth to a Lean experiment that took place three years ago. It’s a story that reveals the power of experimentation, the value of taking managed risks, and the

My mind has been distracted of late by the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It’s hard to think about The Cloud when The Force is back in my life. So for this week’s review, you’ll have to bear with me as I update you in

You’ve all heard of the PayPal Mafia: the group of founders and early employees of PayPal who went off to found other technology companies (e.g. SpaceX, LinkedIn, Tesla Motors, Palantir Technologies). While there are not many to compete with PayPal, technology mafias are a surprisingly common occurrence in

I'm a big fan of listening to startup founders tell the stories of how their companies came to be. These narratives often read like tightly written short stories, with a protagonist, a conflict, unexpected plot twists, and always some kind of resolution. Founding stories can give you insight into the

One of my favorite chapters of Peter Thiel’s Zero To One is called “Secrets”. It reads like a late night revelation, that wanders from the Unabomber to HP’s business failure in the 2000s to Fermat’s Last Theorem. Thiel outlines the premise that secrets about nature and/or

There are few companies that should be better positioned to own the cloud than Google. Google was building planet-scaling cloud infrastructure while most of the rest of us were still excited about our type 1 hypervisors. But over the last several years, Google has executed its cloud business as though

I attended Structure 2015 this week, the conference formerly sponsored by Gigaom before their untimely demise this summer. Due to the popularity of this and the two other conferences they sponsored, a small team scrambled to create a new business entity that could carry the conferences forward. This team did

Enterprise IT In the 2000s I still remember my first experiences with enterprise IT in the mid/late 2000s. I’d arrived at a 70K person company post acquisition and been given my first company-issued laptop. The first task I set out to do with the laptop was install the

For those who haven’t heard of “tulip mania”, I’ll give you a short recap. The time is the 1630s, the location the Netherlands. While the tulip had been imported to Europe in the mid-1500s, the interest in the flowering plant had only really started to grow around the

With the volume of bubble talk increasing to a fever pitch over the last few months, I've been wondering why this bubble feels like it's passing me by. Don't get me wrong: my company is doing great, the Boston tech industry is booming, our entrepreneurial community is as vibrant as

It’s good to be back in Boston after spending the last few days at re:Invent 2015. While the event was a great success for Amazon and its partners / customers, the increase in attendees from 12K last year to over 19K this year made this re:Invent much more

Identity & Access Management (IAM) remains today one of my favorite services from Amazon Web Services. It’s sort of a Swiss army knife for security, with a tool for almost every challenge you encounter. But I recently encountered one challenge I struggled to solve with IAM: managing read only

Before my company achieved product market fit, we had certain unspoken values within our software team. These included: move fast, take risks, minimize process / management overhead, empower individuals, prioritize features over infrastructure, find the MVF (Minimum Viable Feature), execute in the presence of customers, self-organize, obsess over customers, and deliver

Two weekends ago my 10th grade son and I made our way to the Kendall Square Cinema to see the recently released Steve Jobs: The Man In the Machine. I didn't tell my son the documentary was available through Amazon Video for fear of not being able to convince him

I use Hangouts pervasively across my day, from hiring, to making phone calls, to engineering meetings, to talking with customers. My fondness for Hangouts is based on its elimination of the friction that comes standard web conferencing. With a single click I am in a meeting; two more clicks and

An Irish entrepreneur I know asked me yesterday how I’ve dealt with the ups and downs of starting a company. For all the books, articles and blogs on entrepreneurship, there is surprisingly little discussion on the emotional side of being an entrepreneur. Until I read Brad Feld’s post

A few weeks ago one of my engineers sent around a link to the project JAWS, an open source framework for building server-less applications using JavaScript and Lambda. While at first glance it might seem as though it’s just another interesting cloud project, for me it signified something else: