Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • DOES IT MATTER? HEROES When I was quite young Pinocchio was my favorite book and

    DOES IT MATTER? HEROES

    When I was quite young Pinocchio was my favorite book and my mother would read it to me over and over again. I have very clear memories at maybe, age four or five, of her reading that big blue book sitting on my bedside.

    The sword and the stone came out, and mom took me to see it. It was, well… it was like that feeling of seeing the opening sequence of Star Wars.

    The next ‘biography’ that grabbed my attention was the novel Johnny Tremain. Must have been third or fourth grade. And from that book I became pretty evangelical constitutionalist. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood that just perhaps, the British were right, and the colonists were trying to skate on paying Britain’s war debt for defending the colonies.

    I read the biography of Samuel Colt, a good ten times, every few months or so, through about seventh grade. It was sort of a life-recipe for me. Not intentionally. I just found the inventiveness and persistence fascinating. And the fact that stuff went bang made it even better. I had no one else to imitate.

    Like a lot of nerds I read encyclopedias. Over and over again. I wish I could say why but it think it was boredom? The info-vore problem. Its probably also that encyclopedias use the Neutral Point of View and it’s less challenging for me than trying to understand all the emotions in literature, or all the loading in intra-disciplinary language – most of which is obscurant.

    Out of encyclopedias I got the unconscious philosophy of aristocracy. I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know that NPV was an attempt at scientific speech. I just sort of developed this idea that there was a sort of superior way to think about the world. But what affected me most was that I became aware of just HOW LITTLE most people know about the world. And that became a source of power for me. I was pretty consistent in the choice of my ‘three wishes’ if I ever were to get them: (1) to know the contents of every book in the library (2) to drive a little red sports car. (3) To have personal freedom to explore the world. (Although that last one I had a hard time articulating)

    And then, science fiction, or at least hard science fiction became a natural obsession. Science fiction was, and its classics remain, a libertarian mythology. The best mythology I’d found. The fact that aristocracy and technology are interdependent wasn’t that clear to me at the time. Small numbers of people need technology to compete with bigger numbers. That’s one of the west’s great incentives – sitting out on the periphery of the land mass.

    Later, I was fascinated by Alexander the great, like a lot of young men. He and his mother struggling for power and survival. Taught by Aristotle. And the idea of such a vast world to explore. It was awe inspiring. The closest to a religious experience I can ever recall.

    When I was in college I studied the Mongols. Read about everything that there was. It’s not hard to be fully educated about them. There isn’t that much to read really. The life of Temujin fascinated me. Because I saw him as struggling to protect his mother, and his family. Trying to add order to a bitter and painful world.

    I read quite a bit about Napoleon, because to some degree I work by similar methods: bury myself in information until I have a model of everyone’s incentives. From that point on, it’s pretty easy to use indirection, misdirection and inception to reduce the costs of achieving your objectives. I ended up disliking him tremendously for his principle role in undermining western civilization in practice just as the french philosophers had done in theory. But what I empathized with, was his ambition driven by the need to protect mother and family. It isn’t lost on me that this is probably one of Adolph Hitler’s drivers as well.

    In adult life, I don’t remember many heroes. I suppose I didn’t have many. If I had the choice to have been Aristotle or Alexander, I would have chosen alexander. Although that doesn’t seem to be the wise choice. It is the most interesting one – at least for me.

    At this point in my life, I kind of feel an emotional love of Hayek, who, when I read him sounds like I’m talking to myself – he was just a nicer and more reserved German man than I am as a rather unreserved, obsessively silly Anglo American. 🙂

    But if I had to say who influenced me most, that’s an artificial question. I don’t have a favorite color, flavor, or hero. I’m a pagan after all. 🙂 The more the merrier. 🙂

    One thing I am sure of though: subject a boy’s mother to stress and fear, and there will be very severe consequences: he will conquer the world to compensate for it. To demand restitution for it. To punish for it. To control for it. 🙂

    Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-12 08:58:00 UTC

  • Um…. We’re libertarians. It’s not just that we have the best political philoso

    Um…. We’re libertarians.

    It’s not just that we have the best political philosophy. It’s not just that we have the best articulated political philosophy. It’s not just that our political philosophy corresponds to human behavior as it is, rather than as we wish it was. It’s not just that we’ve solved the problem of formal institutions. Its not just that our political philosophy is a system for achieving economic prosperity that humans demonstrably prefer. It’s not just that everyone seems to prefer to live in more libertarian countries.

    It’s that, other than the marxists, we’re the ONLY political position that has an articulated political and economic philosophy; it’s that we have the ONLY political philosophy corresponds with the human beings as humans actually ACT in real life; and it’s that we have the ONLY political philosophy that’s solved the problem of monopoly bureaucracy and formal institutions; it’s that we have the ONLY articulated philosophy that gives precedence to prosperity instead of power.

    It’s hard being the only rational person standing. 🙂

    People aren’t rational tho. Their moral. At least. In their own terms.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-11 13:26:00 UTC

  • DECLINE OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION Cause? 1) The loss of relative technical advanta

    http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/11/the_decline_of_4.htmlTHE DECLINE OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

    Cause?

    1) The loss of relative technical advantage due to world adoption of consumer capitalism, and abandonment of marxism, socialism, and communism.

    2) Export of production and jobs due to high domestic taxes and cheap foreign labor.

    3) The distortionary effects of credit on innovation – favoring short term speculation rather than long term innovation: a general shortening of time horizons

    4) The misallocation of capital to reinforcing short run sectors including housing.

    5) The misallocation of human capital to finance, government, and housing.

    6) The failure to reform the education system out of its labor origins.

    7) The dilution of the work force by third world immigration

    8) The policy emphasis on consumption growth rather than innovation growth.

    9) …..

    I’ll just stop there…

    HOW MUCH ARE ECONOMISTS RESPONSIBLE?

    A lot actually. Because economics, as it is practiced, is a positivist enterprise incapable of measuring ‘what matters’: informal institutional capital.

    Civilizations fail, for very simple reasons: the instruments of production, calculation, coordination, and cooperation, cannot adapt to changes in circumstances, nor can they resist regressive results under the auspices of ‘innovation’. The reason we get wealthier is in fact ‘science’ or rather ‘extension of empirical tools of calculation’ that allow us to create increasingly complex divisions of knowledge and labor. Accounting is a far better weapon than cannon because one cannot produce a lot of cannon without accounting, nor an army and supply chain to support it. Laws are important but common laws are more important than other forms of law. Geometry is important but calculus is more important than geometry for many categories of problems. Perhaps most importantly, OPERATIONAL LANGUAGE is more important than mystical or allegorical, or moral language, and operation language requires the presence of scientific, operational, evidence. And further, operational language requires quite a few more IQ points than allegorical language.

    WILL TECHNOLOGY SAVE US FROM PROGRESSIVE DESTRUCTION OF THE WEST?

    It is an act of faith. You cannot extrapolate a trend. Most of our gains have been largely the product of harnessing fossil fuels so that we could teach people to read.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-11 01:55:00 UTC

  • ON RACE AND DIVERSITY IN LIBERTARIANISM (cross posted for reference) (insights)

    ON RACE AND DIVERSITY IN LIBERTARIANISM

    (cross posted for reference) (insights) (important)

    METHODS

    Methods of justification for libertarianism (or any other political and moral bias)

    1) Sentimental (I like it)

    2) Moral (it’s better)

    3) Historical (it works)

    4) Empirical (direct experimentation)

    5) Economic (indirect experimentation)

    6) Ratio-scientific (cumulative evidence and theory)

    TWO SOURCES OF LIBERTARIAN THOUGHT

    1) Conservative and Classical Liberal Land holders (christian)

    2) Anarchic and religious non-land holders (jewish/gypsies)

    FOUR SOCIAL STRUCTURES

    1) German (Kant/hierarchical/duty/nuclear family)

    2) French ( Rousseau/equalitarian/care/traditional family)

    3) British (smith-hume+ / aristocratic egalitarian / empirical/ absolute nuclear family)

    4) Jewish (ricardo-mises-rothbard/tribalism)

    FOUR AMBITIONS

    1) The british saw free trade as an international means of achieving peace and prosperity for all europeans.

    2) The germans were trying to resist british consumerism’s disruption of ‘social order’ implicit in german ‘duty’.

    3) The french were trying to extend the family to all of society, and demonstrate their nobility having failed to conquer Europe.

    (The failures of the world wars and transformation from demonstrated material achievement, to the use of generosity and diversity to maintain status, explain current european behavior.)

    4) The jews were and are, trying to justify their participation in a host society without integrating.

    THE ANSWER

    There are two basic reasons for ‘tolerance’ in the libertarian movement.

    1) Jewish authors justifying right to inclusion but denial of the necessity of payment into the commons.

    2) christian authors arguing for payment only into non monopolistic commons, while retaining a homogenous moral commons.

    3) feminist and postmodernist influences.

    DOMINANCE OF JEWISH THOUGHT

    I think that Rothbard brought his heritage to the table (just as Hayek stated of Mises) and he conflated the two ambitions.

    This is actually, the reason why rothbard failed to give us a morally tolerable libertarianism. And it is why libertarianism fails to gain traction. Humans are tribal. Immigration is a political problem. And human seek political power. So it is better to have a homogenous, liberty seeking people, for whom no seizure of power is of any group benefit, because the group is already in power. And there is no incentive for status achievement, because in a homogenous society, there is no status value to trying to gain power.

    HOPPE’S CORRECTION

    Hoppe, through admittedly interesting logic, has shown that rothbard was wrong. I have I think, with rather scientific rather than purely rational terms, demonstrated that Rothbard was wrong.

    CHRISTIAN ARGUMENT

    There is a very great difference between ‘we will not fight despite our differences if we trade’ and ‘we are all equal and can politically cohabitate without conflict’. Politics is a family matter. Trade is a cross-family matter. We can easily trade, but we cannot be politically diverse without replacing conflict over trade with conflict over politics.

    ROTHBARD WAS WRONG.

    THE STATUS ECONOMY RULES. We don’t ‘need’ much as human beings, except to hold onto our status, improve our status, and prevent loss of status. Loss aversion is more applicable to status than any other human trait except perhaps life and limb. We accumulate status, and desperately hold onto it.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-11 01:52:00 UTC

  • PROGRESSIVES ARE IN DENIAL…. ….over the immorality of GROWTH via CONSUMPTION

    http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-generational-injustice-of-social.htmlWHY PROGRESSIVES ARE IN DENIAL….

    ….over the immorality of GROWTH via CONSUMPTION and IMMIGRATION, rather than GROWTH via CONSTANT POPULATION and INVENTION.

    Because if they don’t stay buried in denial, they have to admit that their greatest ‘achievement’ of the 20th century was a catastrophic failure that destroyed the inter-GENERATIONAL system of calculation, cooperation and incentives.

    You know, there isn’t much difference between the necessity of money and prices for temporal coordination, and for the necessity of credit and interest for short inter-temporal coordination, and for the accumulation of wealth, and borrowing for long term, intergenerational coordination. These means of calculating are necessary, not arbitrary.

    FACTS

    The following are true;

    (a) consumption requires that population increases.

    (b) growth requires that innovation increases

    (c) consumption is not growth it is expansion – there is a difference.

    (d) consumption can finance growth.

    (e) the limit of consumption to finance growth is determined by the rate of invention produced by the financing of consumption.

    (There is a tidy graph defined here, but I”m not interested enough to go draw it, so I’ll leave it up to your imagination.)

    I don’t need to bring up that growth via consumption is dysgenic, and growth via invention is eugenic. We have to think about THE PLANET after all.

    I also don’t need to bring up that growth via consumption is the (mindless) female reproductive strategy that depends on regulation by nature, and that growth via invention is the (mindful) male reproductive strategy, and that this largely provides the explanation for the differences in voting behavior.

    NO FREE LUNCH

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-10 02:31:00 UTC

  • ENTREPRENEURSHIP: PAIN TOLERANCE I’ve said this before, but it seems to me that

    ENTREPRENEURSHIP: PAIN TOLERANCE

    I’ve said this before, but it seems to me that the difference between entrepreneurs and other people, is largely (a) pain tolerance (b) extraordinary competitiveness and (c) unhealthy confidence bordering on ruthlessness.

    I mean, I’m burning through a tremendous amount of money building Oversing. It HURTS just to think about it. It hurts largely because of how hard I had to work to make that money.

    But the flip side is that I can control it, and make it what I want it to be, without compromise. And If I’m reasonably successful, my return on investment will be about 100x or so.

    Entrepreneurship isn’t for the weak or the timid. That’s for sure.

    Edison said mentioned Inspiration and Perspiration but somehow he forgot to mention risk and pain tolerance, myopic and obsessive dichotomous thinking, and the desire and ability to sell ideas. ‘Cause selling is what it takes to do almost anything.

    “SCHUMPETERIAN THINKING” : the love of creative destruction.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-09 15:12:00 UTC

  • THE “BIG FIVE” WORKPLACE TRAITS IN CONSULTING People are not a commoditized “mea

    THE “BIG FIVE” WORKPLACE TRAITS IN CONSULTING

    People are not a commoditized “meat” that is reducible to P&L Numbers. It takes a variety of skills to produce excellent service work. And Oversing measures (at least) those five different properties:

    —TRAIT————————-Measurement———–

    1) “Like-ability” (Peer 360 system

    2) “Soft Skills – Trustworthiness” (Skill System by Peers)

    3) “Revenue value of hard skills” (Skill System / Peer Skill Ratings)

    4) “Customer Trust and Retention” (Net Promoter Score)

    5) “Profitability” measured as:

    a) Utilization and b) Chargeability (Standard financial metrics)

    So, any individual is always represented by oversing using all these ‘metrics’. Their “Personality Profile” so to speak.

    THE WORKPLACE AS EXTENDED FAMILY RATHER THAN LABOR POOL.

    We found that feedback from PEERS was MORE ACCURATE and MORE RESPECTED and produced GREATER BEHAVIORAL CHANGE than all feedback from management combined. In fact, management opinion of any staff member was usually a CONTRARY INDICATOR of the individual’s value to the business.

    So, our use of these measures helped us create a culture of a ‘family’ by giving honest feedback, the purpose of which was to ‘advance the individual and the family’ as a whole. Not through threats, not through incentives, not through pressure, but through advice and counsel. Humans want to do the right thing to fit into groups. And you just have to give them to tools to do so. Reliable information is the best tool.

    Like the original meaning of ‘confession’, almost all feedback is publicly visible. Your sins are public, as is your heroism.

    ONE OF THE SECRETS OF ANY BUSINESS IS NEED FOR EACH OTHER.

    One of the secrets is “IDLE HANDS MAKE ILL WILL”. And people will naturally free-ride and rent-seek, which creates animosity in the ‘tribe’. The best way to prevent bad behavior is by minimizing the potential of it. The best way to minimize potential, is to always be marginally short of staff, so that everyone has to chip in to keep everyone else successful and happy. Furthermore, the incentive to overstaff is usually crated by the most populous RENT SEEKERS in any business : middle management. Oversing reduces the ability of middle management to rent seek, hide information for the purpose of obtaining political power. Our experience was that we needed only talent leadership, not ‘management’ per se. Because the feedback and ‘management’ of individual behavior was democratized into a marketplace of voluntary exchanges of assistance, appreciation and complaint.

    Oversing is revolutionary if you use it as we intend that you do. It will transform not only your ability to manage your business by looking forward, and by increasing utilization but it will transform you business by making the ‘family’ manage the business, and thereby feeling PART OF IT, and able to INFLUENCE IT.

    Management hierarchy is, just like government, little more than rent seeking and obfuscation of facts.

    And just like government, management hierarchy is the primary reason why individuals feel resentment toward the business.

    Make them LOVE IT INSTEAD.

    IF TALENT IS YOUR BUSINESS, THEN USE IT, AND TAKE CARE OF IT.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-06 06:29:00 UTC

  • YOUR INTELLECTUAL JOURNEY You know, you start out on any subject and it just see

    YOUR INTELLECTUAL JOURNEY

    You know, you start out on any subject and it just seems like there is this vast literature, an infinite amount to learn, and that you’ll forever be ignorant. You struggle to gain each new concept, and master its application. You find some niche and sort of master that, then expand out from there to learn more.

    At some point you grasp, that in any field there are a very small number of basic principles. And that you must simply master the permutations of those principles. And that, really, most writing is other people trying to LEARN themselves, by applying those basic ideas or trying to refute them. And so there is an awful lot of ‘chaff’ and very little intellectual ‘wheat’. The problem is learning how to separate wheat from chaff. Other than that, each field isn’t very hard.

    (Math is interestingly like this. I mean, you can understand all that there is to know about math from the very basics to the most complex. The problem though, is like chess. The basic rules are really simple actually. But the sequence of moves is pretty enormous, and the consequences of those moves more so. And the art is in actually PRACTICING all those various transformations until you gain an insight from the practice of transforming. Myself, I find it boring as hell. But some people love puzzles and I love problems and that’s what a division of labor is for.)

    At some point you begin to grasp the intellectual struggle of each person back into ancient history as trying to wrestle with and within his or her limited knowledge paradigm, and doing the best he or she can. (And that’s when you realize that Aristotle was godlike.) But you can empathize with each of them and their circumstance.

    (Philosophy is like this. You see that basically everyone has a bit of fragmentary knowledge and is trying to apply it before they have sufficient empirical means to do so. Worse, that most philosophers are trying somehow to get power, justify power, or undermine power. And in that way, philosophy is a sort of middle ground between religion (norms) and science (laws). But it becomes quite clear that most of the time, they just don’t have good scientific tools to work with, and they ‘re stuck with religion’s model of thought.)

    At some other point you begin to see yourself in some paradigm of limited knowledge and and begin to think about what assumptions that you make might be wrong given the most recent increases in knowledge. And at that point you’re usually crushed and humbled.

    (The internet has done more for knowledge accumulation than I had ever dreamed of before. I almost can’t reconstruct life before it. Its so horribly SLOW by comparison. So TEDIOUS. I mean, ordering BOOKS from LIBRARIES? Ungh…. It’s hard to be an info-vore in the age of paper, without patience. For those of us with ADD like symptoms, it’s awesome that you can drink from the fire hose CONSTANTLY. )

    And then you realize that all of us, even the best, really are fighting against the dark forces of time and ignorance, each of us but a bit of kindling upon the pyre of those who came before us. Some work with diligence their entire lives and serve to maintain by not extend our understanding. Others manage a single marginally useful idea. And others shovel them out by the wagon load as fuel for a coal fire.

    And it seems a random game at times. But you can’t win if you don’t play. And it matters more that you play hard, than that you desire to win.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-04 15:52:00 UTC

  • WE CANNOT THINK WITHOUT METAPHYSICAL BIASES Given that Don Finnegan has just hit

    WE CANNOT THINK WITHOUT METAPHYSICAL BIASES

    Given that Don Finnegan has just hit a nerve by reminding me about Friedman’s perspective on Irish Law, I’m going to throw something out here that may not be as obvious and important as it seems.

    As usual it might take me a bit to get there. But I think it’s worth the journey.

    1) MAN MUST SENSE

    2) MAN MUST PERCEIVE

    3) MAN MUST REMEMBER

    4) MAN MUST CALCULATE (PLAN)

    5) MAN MUST CHOOSE.

    6) MAN MUST ACT ON HIS CHOICE, AND HAS NOT EMPIRICALLY DEMONSTRATED HIS CHOICE UNTIL HE HAS ACTED.

    7) MAN MUST CHOOSE WITH INSUFFICIENT INFORMATION, BECAUSE OUTWITTING NATURE IS HIS ONLY CHANCE FOR PROFIT.

    It is impossible to make guesses without some basis for decision. And every civilization constructs a set of narratives that contain those metaphysical means of decision making. Those rules or guidelines, or recommendations not only make decisions possible, and rational, in the presence of insufficient informaiton, but the biases contained in those metaphysical assumptions allow us to FUND by micropayments, of all kinds, our norms. We create a reality with them. And we cooperate at the metaphysical level. (We have to.) We couldn’t think otherwise.

    The truth is that in almost no circumstance can humans make decisions as a group without shared metaphysical assumptions. Sure, without property man cannot form a division of knowledge and labor. But without metaphysical value judgements groups cannot cooperate at all.

    We have a healthy literature of cultural differences in cognition. Cultural differences in verbal and spatial intelligence, and cultural and genetic differences in the distribution of intelligence. The east and west differ between emphasis on verb and noun, on connectivity versus particularism. On constitution versus Shape.

    Most importantly, they differ ON BALANCE VERSUS TRANSFORMATION: “The purpose of man is to bend nature to his will, and to leave the world better for having lived in it”. That is the western metaphysics. Almost everything can be reduced to that statement of individual action. “Truth and debate mean the rapid resolution of differences by conflict” (See Donald Kagan); versus deception and delay until matters resolve themselves in the eastern sense (See Kissinger and Huntington.)

    And for example Jewish civilization and western civilization vary between the rebellious ethics of the bazaar and ghetto (Rothbardian ethics) and the land owning ethics and morality of the aristocratic egalitarians in the high trust society. These are metaphysical group assumptions that constitute the primary means of decision making for each group given it’s evolutionary strategy.

    LIBERTARIAN ERRORS

    For example, in the we often talk about Bouridans’ ass. The problem when you must choose between two orange vendors both offering equal oranges at equal prices. How do you choose? The only thing interesting about any exchange is this very question. Why? Because in large, any commodity is chosen not on price, or on consumption value, but on signal value, and the signal we most often pay for is contribution to our commons.

    ie: price is meaningless, since it is rarely what is purchased. We largely pay for signals and norms, and we pay for our factions and our preferences. And therefore all the Misesian and Rothbardian ordinal arguments to price are meaningless outside of commodities trading, and nothing at all to do with social order AT ALL PERIOD. In, fact, it is quite easy to case Rothbard and Mises as continuing the cultural tradition of intentionally ignoring the normative economy of land holders as a means of rebelling against it.

    When I first heard this argument from Dr Herbner, I was kind of stupefied that Misesians thought clearing preferences was ordinal predicated on price rather than a network (technically a graph) predicated largely on signals on norms, where price was merely the first marginal criteria. IN fact, the only way to argue for the ordinal versus the graph, was to argue AGAINST payment for norms, which puts Mises, Rothbard and Hayek into perspective. (And is why I criticize Mises and Rothbard. It’s why they failed.)

    IN OTHER WORDS

    WE DID NOT KONW OUR METAPHYSICS NOR WRITE IT DOWN. As such we have been largely defenseless against jewish rhetoric, and franco-germanic counter-englightenment figures, desperate to restore the church under the authority of the educational institution. Desperate to wrest control of society back into obscurant language and moral mysticism, and away from the hands of the engineers, scientists, lawyers, accountants, entrepreneurs and consumers who create and maintain the society we live in.

    Conservatives are largely right. But WE HAVE FAILED TO ARTICULATE FREEDOM AND LIBERTY in rational terms with MORAL DEPTH sufficient for they and their numbers to adopt in favor of the west.

    We can be free amongst a majority of conservatives. But we cannot be free amongst a majority of statists. The state and democracy are just communism and are antithetical to liberty, private property, common law, personal sovereignty.

    PROGRESSIVE LIBERTARIANISM IS TO LIBERTY WHAT THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL WAS TO CLASSICAL LIBERALISM.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-11-03 15:07:00 UTC

  • COMPARISONS ; OVERSING VS ???? (biz) (markets) So, as you can see, our market is

    http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/13/atlassian-earned-150m-in-revenues-last-year-but-competition-intensifies-with-collaboration-providers/MARKET COMPARISONS ; OVERSING VS ????

    (biz) (markets)

    So, as you can see, our market is certainly above $10M, and probably above $50M. The number of organizations that use INTERNAL tools is larger than the number of organizations that bill by the hour. So we probably can’t hit the 150M mark as it stands. But it isn’t unreasonable to hit the 50M mark pretty conservatively, largely because we can serve the largest organizations.

    You CAN use oversing as a single site out of the box without modifying it much. But you can also organize a multinational corporation with it, over multiple jurisdictions with crazy reporting structures and business rules.

    What may not be obvious to the rest of the world is that the shift to iterative project management has passed critical mass and the mature tools on the market are the old school. Secondly, it probably isn’t obvious that the financial products let you analyze your business but not DRIVE IT.

    OVERSING DRIVES YOUR ENTIRE BUSINESS: sales, recruiting, and delivery by looking forward. You can control your business, You can control it going forward, not looking backward.

    BUT!!!! — The old guard isn’t really growing and the new agile systems are. SO there is an OPENING here in the market that isn’t getting filled. The empirical question is, how big is that market. And really we can do a lot of surveys (and the’re very positive) but that doesn’t mean much.

    THE FIELD

    -Microsoft Dynamix AX + Project Management- ??

    “…estimates that Microsoft’s ERP business grew 4% in 2012, “mainly driven by Microsoft Dynamics AX”. “Gartner puts Microsoft’s ERP revenue at $1.1 billion in 2012, up from $1 billion in 2011.”

    (Now, most organizations in our market use Dynamix. ANd those that don’t should. We designed Oversing with the intention that larger customers would use AX in finance and buy Oversing for running business operations (sales, delivery, recruiting). Nothing better really that you can do than that.)

    -Atlassian– $150M

    (Jira workflow, Confluence collab)

    http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/13/atlassian-earned-150m-in-revenues-last-year-but-competition-intensifies-with-collaboration-providers/

    Aging product. Not good architecture without major rewrite.

    -Github (collab and source)- ?? (but it’s profitable)

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/07/09/cash-for-code-github-raises-100-million-from-andreessen-horowitz/

    Good for devs. Does nothing for the business end.

    “GitHub Inc is a flat organization with no (middle) managers – or in other words, “everyone is a manager” (self-management). As at Valve Corporation, another flat organization, employees can choose to work on projects that interest them (open allocation). “

    –NetSuite– $92M

    “NetSuite reported a 32 percent jump in revenue to $91.6 million”

    (Favorite quote from their Q3 report: “These two divergent results show that as mission-critical software moves to the Cloud, it is far

    safer for customers to turn to committed leaders like NetSuite rather than bet on the PowerPoint presentations of last-generation providers like SAP, Microsoft and Sage.” (Customers have lost faith in the old line or products. And the new generation is shifting.)

    -CA Changepoint (IT Portfolio Management)- $48M

    “For FY ’12, Changepoint increased total revenues by more

    than 20 percent to $48 million, driven by growth with existing nameplates and adding new customers. 15 percent of this year’s

    software license billings were delivered via a SaaS model.

    -Tenrox- $10M?

    Glendale CA / Private / 50-200 Employees

    -Workamajig- (creative workflow management)

    14021 NE 20th Avenue Suite 2208 Vancouver, WA 98686 United States / Privately Held / 1-10 employees (That number doesn’t make sense to me)

    $38/user

    -FunctionPoint-

    200-1622 West 7th Avenue Vancouver, BC V6J 1S5 Canada

    Privately Held / 11-50 employees

    (I can find 22 employees on linked in, so I guess the’re about 30. They won’t give me revenue numbers. If I play it out as 6000 users x $20, that’s not a lot of money. Maybe a 2M bottom and 30x100K/employee = 3M top. Although it sure looks like a 5M company to me.)

    “Over 6000 users”

    http://www.functionpoint.com

    15 / 20/ 30 per user.

    –BIgTime–

    Nice product. Light. Feature. Not PSA. Not our market.

    -Targetprocess-

    about 40 people. Russian. NY sales offices.

    No revenue numbers.

    Feature. Just a feature. Very nice board. Thats it.

    We tried to keep oversing away from the Targetprocess style of UI for a variety of reasons. MOst of them training and using spatial memory. We wanted to keep the ‘wall’ feeling. If you put Oversing on a projector or big touch screen it’d be awesome.

    — Wrike (new) — (trivial workflow) Yet they just raised 10M (ack!)

    Boring.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-29 16:36:00 UTC