Top 5 Tips For Startups On Surviving The Recession

By raheem

Several great companies were born during recessions. HP began at the tail-end of the great depression, SAP and Microsoft were started in the mid 70s recession. And most recently Wikipedia and Google grew out of the recession of the early 2000s. Recessions are a great time to implement turnarounds and prepare for the next upturn. This is the time to implement what I call a recession workout – tactics that can make your startup stronger, faster, better.

Get the Big Picture – your finances, your strengths and the competition
Get a pulse of your startup’s financial health. Are you spending more dollars than you bring in? Can you slow down the burn rate? How many months of cash do you have left? What are your strengths and weaknesses? How are your competitors reacting to the recession? These things can be done on a notepad or thru a week long strategy session. Armed with the relevant data you can now begin to plug the holes and develop a strategy. 

Give your startup an internal overhaul – reduce weakness and build on strengths
Axe unprofitable marketing initiatives. Prioritize product improvements and get your engineering team focused the core strengths. Move your sales team to a more performance based compensation. Reduce the deadweight. If your cash flow situation is dire, take a sobering look at mergers and strategic partnerships. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he streamlined the product line and sought help form long time rival Microsoft – accepting a $150 million cash infusion. At the same time, Jobs invested heavily on software and used Apple’s design skills to create an early win with iMac.

Communicate & motivate – turn your assets into catalysts
Communicate your plan of action to your staff. Recessions are a great booster of productivity. But maintain morale and motivate your staff. Do frequent one-on-ones and be honest with your team. If you need to implement pay cuts – make them temporary and show them what it will take to return to profitability. An entertainment company in LA recently asked its employees to take one unpaid day-off for the rest of summer so that the company could maintain its credit lines. A tough situation was made better when the CEO promised to pay for these unpaid days as soon as business picks up. 

Grow – Find new users and protect existing ones
For every company that goes thru a recession workout, there are many more that remain in denial. This presents an opportunity to gain new market share from your competition. Use tools such as social media for marketing. Equally important is to ensure the satisfaction of your current users. Nurture your user community to reduce your own customer services costs. 

Build your warchest – Find new investors
Approach new investors. Show them the discipline you have implemented and how it is allowing you to remain strong and a better bet for the eventual upturn. They will either invest with you now or keep you in their radar for future investments. 

Note: The above post was written and submitted to Silicon Alley Insider’s free ticket give away for Startup ‘09. No dice. I ended up winning two tickets  

Quick and easy way to test for conficker

By raheem

There’s been a lot of news about the conficker virus. Most of the news stories give you great advice on how to protect yourself (apply the latest Microsoft patches). But how do you know if you are infected or safe? Usually you’d have to run a long virus scan. Your antivirus software would also have to be uptodate. But I found out thru Mark Minasi’s newsletter that there is a simple test you can do to check whether your computer is safe. The test involves going to the link below and check to see if all 6 images in the page load up – this means you are safe. The page also provides a handy guide on how to interpret the test results. It takes less than 5 seconds. 

http://www.confickerworkinggroup.org/infection_test/cfeyechart.html

The reason this test works is that the conficker worm blocks your computer from visiting security sites that could remove the worm. The above page contains image links to those sites. If those images do not load, its a strong indication that your computer has been compromised by a version of conficker.

When I ran the test, only one of the images did not load. This was likely due to high traffic to the site. I went again later and all 6 images loaded.

Who is better? Billy Mays or this guy

By raheem

Here is a video spoofing the Billy Mays’ sales approach. Good fun!

How Microsoft migrated HOTMAIL from FreeBSD Unix to Windows 2000 Server

By raheem

Its cool stumbling on to nuggets on the web. I started out searching for Windows 2003 architecture diagrams. I found one, and noticed a box called the POSIX subsystem and wondered what it did and why it was there. Found out that the POSIX subsystem allows Unix applications to run on windows. But who does that? I have never heard of anyone running Unix apps on Windows. I searched some more and found another nugget – documentation of how Microsoft had migrated Hotmail from Unix to Windows back in 2000. Based on that documentation, the unix migration was possible due to Windows ability to run Unix services using the POSIX subsystem, specifically windows services for Unix. So it seems that the whole POSIX subsystem has been built for interoperability and to enable migrations from the Unix platform to Windows.

So now to the meat of this post – how Microsoft did it. The project documentation is hidden in technet under interoperability notes. The project involved migrating almost 3800 servers and was conducted over a 4 week period. To make it interesting, the servers were migrated remotely, automated and involved zero new hardware. Here are a some of the more interesting project constraints:

• Zero user impact or downtime. To maintain the availability of the Hotmail service, a zero user impact or downtime was considered the key requirement of the migration.




• Rapid deployment. The migration included nearly 3,800 servers, and was limited to a 4-week conversion cycle. Remain competitive in the Internet space, requires rapid response to competitive situations. This had resulted in new releases of the Hotmail application suite occurring approximately every eight weeks. It was important that the migration to Windows 2000 could be accomplished in Windows so that the development staff would not have to maintain the follow-on release of the application for both FreeBSD and Windows 2000. The same model that was used for the initial deployment will also be used for new software releases, which generally occur once every two months.




• Use existing staff. All staff should remain effective regardless of operating system. This includes staff in system development, QA, and Operations.




• Use existing site hardware and network. The migration would quickly “reimage” each piece of equipment and return it to service. No physical hardware or network topology changes should be necessary.




• Totally remote and unattended. The migration should not require any physical human interaction to migrate the servers. All updates should occur through software scheduling and should report success/failure to a central console so migration can be verified.

Reading the document, you also get some idea of the Hotmail network infrastructure from the diagrams shown in the document. Here is the pre-migration diagram and here is the post-migration diagram. The essential strategy was to reimage the UNIX machines to Windows 2000 Server running IIS 5. The reimage process were automated and remote. The Unix servers were part of a cluster. Unfortunately, the document does not reveal how the cluster configuration was migrated. There is some meat in there for developers on how the Hotmail codebase was migrated. Overall its good stuff. Understandably they dont share all the details, but there is enough meat to allow you to cook up your own massive migration project.

Here are the links:

1. Project Overview
2. The Project Planning Guide – most interesting stuff is here including network diagrams
3. The Deployment Guide – this was not as detailed but still contained some nuggets and details about the actual deployment and code migration

Designing a two-site active directory network

By raheem

Implementing a two-site active directory network is remarkably simple. The following diagram shows a design that I implemented a couple of years back. The client did not have any AD infrastructure at the time and they needed a way to share documents between their two offices in Manhattan and Long Island. The solution involved setting up a single AD domain with two sites. A server was dropped at each location that performed authentication, file and print services. The two sites were connected via site to site VPN implemented thru a Cisco PIX 501 firewall. Each site had DSL access of 3Mb/768Kb. I wanted to implement DFS to make the file-sharing simpler, but it tipped the clients’ budget (they were a nonprofit). Active Directory Sites and Services was used to manage replication traffic between the sites. It worked fairly well and the users were able to share files between the offices.