Joe Kinsella

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:

This weekend I've been thinking about integrity - specifically the importance of surrounding yourself with people of high integrity, and striving to achieve integrity in all your personal / professional relationships. I'd like to share a story from my past that has always inspired me. Since I did not ask permission

This morning I took a journey back through my blog, reflecting on my three year journey in founding CloudHealth Technologies. It's hard to believe how quickly the time has passed from working out of the entrepreneur space at NBVP to having a fast growing company in downtown Boston. Here is

One of the most common soft skill gaps with software engineers is the ability to influence others. This gap of course is a byproduct of the nature of our work. From the time we graduate college, our influence is directed more at the technology we use than the people with

I read a recent blog post by Adam Pisoni, CTO & co-founder of Yammer, titled I’m Sorry But Agile Won’t Fix Your Products. It’s a great read and drives home a truth that often gets overlooked in our industry: small, empowered and self-organizing teams almost always produce

Over the last few weeks I’ve interviewed many 2015 graduates seeking jobs in software development. The good news is: there are a lot of talented young developers coming into the workforce. The bad news is: too many of these are poorly prepared to find their first software jobs. Here

At a graduation in Upstate New York this weekend, I found myself talking to my nephew’s friend, who was struggling to find his first job in software. This turned out to be a timely discussion, since I’d spent the last few weeks talking to and reviewing the profiles

I’m amazed at how poorly many new college graduates are using LinkedIn to support their job searches. Whether you love it or hate it, LinkedIn is the primary source for companies to find you. While after a few years of work you'll earn the right complain about InMail recruiter