cloud

Minnesota Serial-Entrepreneur Rockstar Phil Soran Is Now a VC

March 15, 2013 By Graeme Thickins

News broke today about the founding of a new venture capital firm composed mainly of Minnesota names, including partners from a VC firm with a name familiar to many here in Minnesota that is now being retired. Four Minnesotans, plus a transplanted one, form the core of the new firm, Icon Venture Partners (no web site yet), which it appears will be co-based in the Twin Cities and Silicon Valley.

In a story just published a few hours ago, Icon Ventures Forms from El Dorado’s Ashes, Fortune venture capital reporter Dan Primack wrote:

“El Dorado Ventures is kaput, after 27 years of investing in early-stage companies. But two of its partners hope to continue working together, on a new platform that they’re calling Icon Venture Partners.”

He said the cofounders — longtime colleagues Jeff Hinck (top right, based in Minnetonka, MN) and former Minnesotan Charles Beeler (below right, based in Menlo Park, CA) — are seeking to raise $80-100 million for the firm’s initial fund. As general partners in El Dorado Ventures (Charles for a dozen or more years, and Jeff for the past few years), the duo was instrumental in Series A funding rounds recently for two Minneapolis-based startups: TST Media (known for its Sport NGIN platform), and enStratus — which also just changed its name, to enStratius. It’s more than a name change for the VC firm, however, as the Fortune story clearly says El Dorado is done, with Icon being formed as a brand-new entity, albeit with some of the same players.

What’s more interesting is that three other Minnesotans are mentioned as part of a “large group of venture partners and advisors” in Icon Venture Partners, including Zenas Hutchinson (at left below), Jeff Hinck’s longtime colleague and fellow partner at Vesbridge Venture Parters (now apparently inactive, so Primack’s story implies).

The other two Minnesotans named are Phil Soran (below center), who some 10 years ago cofounded storage company Compellent, acquired by Dell in 2011. Prior to that, Soran cofounded Xiotech, which was acquired by Seagate in the late ’90s. Soran’s longtime associate Dennis Johnson (below right), who served in senior sales positions at both storage firms, is the other Minnesota venture partner named in the story. Icon Venture Parters’ Hinck and Beeler were early investors in both of Soran’s startups, Hinck then a partner at Palo Alto & Minneapolis-based Crescendo Ventures, and Beeler at Menlo Park-based El Dorado.

(Disclosure: Crescendo Ventures was a client of my consulting firm some ten years ago. Compellent was also a client in early 2011.)

(Note: A version of this story appeared minutes ago on my blog, Graeme Thickins On Tech™.)

Robert Stephens Rocks the #DefragCon Crowd

November 13, 2011 By Graeme Thickins

The 5th Annual Defrag Conference was held November 8-10. 2011, in Denver, and I was there once again reporting on all the action during this much heralded meeting of the Internet’s big minds. One of the highlights this time for me was the keynote on the final day by Robert Stephens, CTO of Best Buy and founder of Geek Squad. Robert was a huge hit, as I’d been telling all my Defrag friends for years that he would be. (A selection of the scores of tweets during his talk is shown below — screenshots I grabbed from my Defrag 2011 Live-Blog archive. The hashtag #defragcon was lighting up the web over the three days of the event, and still is with the afterglow. One of my favorite tweets, not shown below, was someone quoting Robert saying, “Everything at Best Buy is an accessory to your mobile phone – including your car.” Hmmm, and maybe even your electric motorcyle, a product category that’s been expected to show up in Best Buy stores, and may finally be coming soon — the first hint: there are actually reviews for one already posted on BestBuy.com — but Robert didn’t touch on this topic.)

In a 10-minute video interview I did with Robert while we were having coffee and rolls before the general session started Thursday morning, we covered a range of topics — including the recent announcement that Best Buy is acquiring managed services provider MindShift for $167 million. I also got a sneak preview of other topics Robert was going to talk about in his opening keynote:

… [Read More…]

George Reese on “The Cloud’s Shining Moment,” Four Days Later

April 25, 2011 By Graeme Thickins

(Note: This post first appeared earlier today on the writer’s personal blog, Tech~Surf~Blog.)

The major Amazon Web Services outage that began this past Thursday morning was unlike anything before it. Countless AWS customers, big and small, went down, many for days. Surprisingly, other biggies like Netflix, SmugMug, and Twilio had little or no disruption. One hungers to know why…

Over the weekend, George Reese, a cloud expert and author (and CTO of cloud-management tools company enStratus), wrote a fascinating post on O’Reilly about what some would call a cloud disaster — entitling it, ironically enough, “The Cloud’s Shining Moment.” George has a unique perspective on the cloud, and a large following. His post got huge play, and that continues — so I decided to message him on Twitter and set up a coffee so I could interview him Monday morning. I was anxious for him to elaborate on his post and share more of his thoughts, now that the outage is (mostly) behind us.

Click on the link below to hear the whole chat. What follows here are some snippets from that 30-minute conversation (it was recorded in a busy coffee shop, so there’s background noise, but you can hear us fine):

• Thursday at 3:00 am: “We knew something significant was going down.”
• What happened, who was affected, and why.
• What about SLAs? “They’re not an insurance policy, they’re a refund policy… SLAs are a joke.”
• The “Design for Failure” approach vs. traditional application architecture gives you “control over your own destiny.”
• Why the AWS outage was a shining moment: it’s about learning what you can do in the face of an event like this. “So many survived.”
• The “cloud haters” came out after the O’Reilly post. Flame wars erupted in the comments. George pre-empted what they thought was, ahem, their shining moment!
• In large corporations, the “Department of No” is the real problem.
• George guarantees that CIOs who say their companies are not in the cloud actually are, and just don’t know it. Many others realize the cloud “genie is out of the bottle,” and are now coming to his firm, to be their window into what’s really going on in the cloud.
• George’s company now makes it possible to do “cross-cloud” backup and disaster recovery. Not only can customers do automated DR, but automated DR testing, too.
• He says his company is at “the most important point” in its life and the evolution of the cloud. In the last six months, “enterprise has gotten it.” He noted that he’s never spoken to so many Fortune 100 companies as he has in the past week.

• Download or listen to my interview of George Reese, CTO of enStratus … (MP3)

Two other excellent blog posts we touched on that came out over the weekend:
• “How SmugMug survived the Amazonpocalypse,” by Don MacAskill, Cofounder & Chief Geek
• “Seven lessons to learn from Amazon’s outage,” by Phil Wainewright, ZDnet

(Here’s more about my interview subject: George Reese has been delivering software as a service since 2003 when he founded Valtira, a suite of web-based marketing tools. Prior to Valtira, George held a variety of technology leadership roles with J. Walter Thompson, Carlson Marketing Group, and startups Ancept and Imaginet. George is the author of several O’Reilly books on Internet and enterprise technologies, including Java Database Best Practices and Managing and Using MySQL and the recently released Cloud Application Architectures. He has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a B.A. in Philosophy from Bates College in Lewiston, ME. Follow him on Twitter @georgereese.)

Full Disclosure: As mentioned during the recorded interview, the writer had a consulting relationship with enStratus in 2009.

Andy Morgan Leaving Internet Broadcasting to Join Godengo as CTO

June 30, 2010 By Graeme Thickins

A longtime local technology infrastructure guru and head of development at one of Minnesota’s largest Internet firms has joined an emerging Bay Area startup — but will continue to live in the Twin Cities. Godengo Inc. today announced that Andy Morgan is joining the firm as Chief Technology Officer (PR Newswire). Andy has been with St. Paul-based Internet Broadcasting (IB) for the past five years, most recently as Vice President of Platform Technologies, where he was responsible for delivering 500 million page views and 70 million on-demand and live video streams per month, to 15 million monthly unique visitors. He also led a development group at IB that has numbered more than 40. You also may remember Andy as the key tech guy who managed two Olympics sites for IB client NBC.

Morgan joins a former colleague at Emeryville, CA-based Godengo: Peter Stilson, CEO. Stilson served for several years as COO and Chief Revenue Officer at Internet Broadcasting during it strongest period of growth. He moved from the Twin Cities to the Bay Area in September 2008 to take the reins at Godengo. Andy tells me he starts his new position July 16.

Godengo provides print and web publishers a strong online presence and networked advertising inventory, enabling them to more effectively compete online. Godengo’s Rivista™ content management system (CMS) is designed from the ground up for multiplying traffic volume, enhancing search engine optimization, and increasing profits at magazine publisher’s web sites. The Godengo™ Online Ad Network harnesses an affluent, upscale consumer audience that reads the premier city & regional and lifestyle publications, providing advertisers national reach with deep expertise in local markets. One of Godengo’s investors also has a Minnesota connection. Chairman George Lawson was VP of Corporate Development for Dayton Hudson Corporation earlier in his career, and also held senior operating and corporate positions with Levi Strauss & Co. and General Mills.