Listen Different And Learn

For most people, new ideas and perspectives make us uncomfortable. It’s easier and less taxing to surround ourselves with people who agree with our worldview, and reinforce our way of thinking, to make us believe we are correct. We self-select our communities, both in the physical world, and the online space, and these friends or peers become an extension of our own identity.

A byproduct of this selection process is that our communities end up looking a lot like us and behaving like us. Techies follow techies. White guys talk to white guys. Democrats engage with Democrats. While the Internet has a virtually infinite pool of people and ideas to choose from, we easily ignore, unfollow, mute or block those voices and appearances that we don’t identify with or make us question our position.

A Divided Web

Ten years ago, I saw this polarization coming, saying the web was dividing in what I called a “bifurcation”:

“It is human nature to seek out a community of peers and equals, of those who yearn for the same things or have parallel experience… (and thus) polarized and wholly separate communities will grow and thrive.” — Feb. 23, 2006

As a white male in Silicon Valley for the better part of two decades, my world view is a very specific one. I know that my experiences don’t always match people who don’t look like me, or whose LinkedIn profile looks vastly different. And over the last decade of participating in many different social channels, (Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) my established audience I’ve curated has ended up looking a lot like me. It’s very white. It’s very male. It’s full of people from Silicon Valley, who love tech, and, in most cases, vote Democrat.

But I know that’s not good enough. To close ones eyes to the rest of the world means also closing my ears, and my mind. Last May, I was especially struck, and angered, honestly, by how the Silicon Valley community seemed especially blind and silent on the topics of racial bias in our country’s police forces, which sparked unrest in places like Ferguson and Baltimore. While protesters loudly called for improvements in their world that begged for equality, millionaire VCs speculated about unicorn valuations and other techies complained about high rents in San Francisco — which don’t seem all that important in comparison.

Amid this noise and seeming tone-deafness from the public profiles of many active Valley participants, we have an ongoing cry for help and recognition and value from women in tech, who correctly see an uneven playing field that throws roadblocks at their career progress, polluted by landmines of sexism, bias and the good old boy networks — as well as a call for an expanded level attention to increase diversity in all our ranks, with diversity meaning not just women, but people of color (POC).

 Exploring New Streams for New Voices

So over the last year-plus, I’ve actively tried to do a much better job of listening and engaging with people who aren’t like me. And this simple act of listening opens my eyes every day to things I may have missed — while making those topics that I might have previously ignored become critically important to me as an individual.

Twitter Analytics shows my audience is overwhelmingly male. Not a surprise.

As I still love tech, and still identify a geek, my bias and interests remains there, but I’ve aggressively opened my eyes and ears to more women voices and more black voices — especially on Twitter, where the following model is very lightweight, and the stream’s recommendation system smartly brings me new people who I may never have previously discovered.

On Twitter, as of today, I follow just under 600 accounts, including brands. But by no means is my stream a perfect picture of diversity and equality. So I created a list that explicitly expunged all the men and all the brands from my stream — carefully only showing tweets from the 170 or so women I choose to follow, as well as those retweets they found interesting (No Men. No Brands.). And by dipping my toe in this curated stream, the view is remarkably different.

While this may not be rocket science, women don’t always want to talk about what the loudmouthed ego-driven men want to talk about. They bring in topics and conversations that often get otherwise lost in the testosterone flood, and introduce me to even more interesting ideas and initiatives. So when the men annoy me too much, I turn them off by following that list instead.

But as I said above, it’s not enough to count my streams as diverse just because I made a list that follows a bunch of women — because diversity means diversity of thought and backgrounds.

 Diversity Doesn’t Just Mean Women

As the conflicts in Ferguson and Baltimore extended to cover alarming incidents in Cleveland, Texas, and so many other places across the country, those leading the social justice movement, like Deray McKesson, Shaun King, and Johnetta Elzie spoke loudly to me, as did others speaking up about inequality everywhere, like Bianca St. Louis, Jacky Alcine, Yukio Strachan and Trilly Stardust. I started adding them, and each new person brought me a new voice. And, unlike the old days, where the lack of a return follow may have felt like personal rejection, I’ve left the ego at the door, and not expected the same. I have to earn my way into the conversation, and can’t just expect a seat at the table.

In July, I saw many in my stream go in euphoria over Drake and Meek Mill.
But most of you missed it.

Now, it’s not uncommon for my Twitter stream to be overwhelmed by updates from women, and people of color. And it’s excellent. The increased diversity of voices and topics means it’s not a monotonous echo chamber, but one that’s vibrant and has me seeing things I would never likely otherwise see.

All of us who participate online, even if we’re not in tech, have a responsibility to keep our eyes, ears and minds open to people who don’t share the same backgrounds, and may not look like or sound like us. But so many times, that’s the trap we fall into. We may not like looking into a mirror, but we are surrounded by our clones.

 We Have a Responsibility and Challenge

My colleague and great friend, Rick Klau, also spoke on this issue last summer in his post “My unconsciously biased address book”, where he stated the downside of keeping our world homogeneous:

If the majority of leaders at most companies are men and if the majority of their networks are men (as mine are), then this is a self-perpetuating problem.

We have an opportunity to choose our networks. When we unconsciously choose for our network to shut out a segment of people, we are doing a disservice to them and to us — and we extend the issues, which are very real, one generation further, rather than confronting them head-on ourselves.

Without listening, we can’t be learning. If you think you’ve built your networks with blinders, take them down. Cast them aside and rebuild. It’s beautiful over here.

In Storage & Networking, Big Numbers In Dollars and Data

Today, at least for those of us who watch the enterprise space closely, the big news is that Dell Computer has offered to acquire Fremont-based 3Par for $1.15 billion, a premium of more than 80 percent over the company's stock price. In a world where much of the tech news is dominated by small companies taking money from angels, it's interesting to see the gulf between what it takes to grow a successful hardware company and the more ephemeral Web-based or application based companies that play significant roles on practically everyone's smartphone. And while I haven't talked about it too much on the blog, trying to keep a black and white separation between my day job for much of the last decade and my more hobby-oriented interests here, I've lived it, participating in one venture backed storage startup for more than 8 years, from 2001 to 2009, seeing companies raise, rise, fall and fail. In storage, the big winners, with few exceptions, can raise hundreds of millions of dollars before reaching break-even, and may be worth billions on the other side. Others may never find traction at all. 3Par, which took on tech titans like EMC and IBM, proved to have a winning formula.

There are three major truisms in technology. The first, and most well known, is that of Moore's Law, which while it has slowed in recent years, dictates that CPU processing speed increases at a regular clip while reducing in price. The second is that data storage capacities and densities are doubling at practically the same rate. Just look at the gigabytes or terabytes on your desktop or laptop hard drive and compare that with 5 or ten years ago. And the third is the speed of the network, both wired and wireless, increases - from the Kbps-rated modems of yesteryear to the fast-flowing networks of today, including 10 gigabit Ethernet on the client side and high speed Fibre Channel on the back end of many data centers.

These three advances mean simply this - more data can be created, shared, transmitted and stored more quickly than ever. Entire industries have been spawned around managing the data flow and storage, enabling branch office access to centralized data, deduplication and compression, load balancing and virtualizing the resulting complexity. If you watch consumer companies, such as Twitter, Facebook and Google, you probably see each of those companies creating new standards for global file systems and redundancy. You see them eschewing traditional storage companies and building their own devices in an effort to keep costs down as usage spirals upward. The trends are both amazing and incredible.

Back in January 2001, as Web 1.0 was crashing, I left a Web services company (eventually sold to Oracle) and joined a small company called Synaxia Networks, which later launched publicly to the world in March as BlueArc. At the time, comparable network attached storage devices from EMC and NetApp were capable of scaling to a then-massive 7 terabytes, and performance was not a metric either of them dominated. Our approach was simple - by converting aspects of the file system from software to hardware, we could dramatically accelerate storage. We scaled not to 7 terabytes, but to 225. We promised five nines (99.999% uptime) of reliability, and performance that was ten times the competition. And if we were less than that, everybody knows that two to five times the speed of the incumbent is still pretty darn good.

As we debuted, the press attention at the time was incredible - as our launch, backed by $30+ million in funding and our CEO being a former top guy at Compaq computer, gained massive attention. We had headlines in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. George Gilder proclaimed that our product "imperiled" all software based storage devices, and after a successful debut at PC Forum, one reporter at TheStreet.com said it was like offering crack to CIOs. Pretty heady stuff, and not unlike other dramatic booms seen from companies that captured the tech press's attention, including the currently hot Twitter and Foursquare, to those less successful, like Handspring and Transmeta.

But building a storage company takes a lot of real money. BlueArc, which raised another $20 million just last month, has raised $200+ million over its lifespan. 3Par, purchased today by Dell, similarly raised $100 million in 2001 (as we were raising $72 million) and others raised similar amounts. Cereva Networks, whose assets were later purchased by EMC, had raised $137 million and laid off 140 employees back in 2002 after not getting off the ground. Zambeel closed in 2003, having raised $66 million, but selling only a single system. Panasas raised $25 million in 2008, one of multiple rounds for the firm. Maxiscale raised $12 million before coming out of stealth. Pillar Data, funded largely by Oracle's Larry Ellison, is expected to have raised between $300 and $400 million alone. So when I hear tech reporters hem and haw about Web startups raising $10 or $20 million, it doesn't make me blink, considering the world of big dollars I've operated in for a decade.

So why the big dollars? Why are venture capitalists so willing to put such big bets into spinning disk and faster networks? Because when things go well, the customer benefits are very real, and the returns could be even better. Customers will pay top dollar to reduce the amount of time it takes to build special effects or bring pharmaceuticals to market. Fast network storage devices are key in mapping out the earth's terrain from satellites, and combing its ocean floor for potential oil deposits. Fast network storage is being used to collect mountains of data by the government, to simulate nuclear weapons' testing, and build next generation vehicles. And those companies that won't compromise on the speed of execution will buy from new storage startups not named IBM, EMC and HP.

That's why Isilon, a competitor to BlueArc during my time there, is worth more than $1.1 billion today, even after its own public struggles. 3Par earned its way to the discussion and is now cresting above $1 billion. Ocarina Networks, a client of Paladin, was purchased by Dell last month, for an undisclosed sum. Ocarina's competitor, Data Domain, was caught in a bidding war between EMC and NetApp, eventually going to EMC for more than $2 billion last year - simply with the promise of reducing storage capacity!

Today, some of the biggest debates in the Silicon Valley are around angels versus venture capitalists, and whether a $500k round can tip you from one side to another. Some of the best known Web startups today are begging for a $25 million acquisition by Google, or so it seems. FriendFeed, one of the biggest acquisitions by Facebook, was rumored to be "only" $50 million. But on the other side of the datacenter, it is an entirely new ballgame, where hundreds of millions of dollars go in one side, and you could get billions out the other end, or you could get nothing. Companies like 3Par, BlueArc, Isilon, DataDirect Networks, Panasas and others have put pressure on EMC, NetApp and IBM to innovate, and expand their product portfolios. Companies like Data Domain, Ocarina Networks and Permabit are working to optimize storage throughout the datacenter. Emulex, Qlogic, Brocade and Cisco are working on faster networks, cards, adapters and protocols to make sure data can go between client and server and back again at rates previously impossible, and everybody is betting on standards they hope will put them in the best spot.

So congratulations to 3Par for their fantastic exit and sale to Dell. Congratulations to Isilon for fighting a tough battle and living the life of a public company, worth $1 billion and up. It's fun to see companies and people I once saw as competitors, partners and allies, who I rubbed shoulders with at trade shows, and with whom I traded taunts on Twitter, taking things to the next level. There is no doubt in my mind that others will be good stories, and some will go the other way with spectacular flameouts, equally incredible to watch, but for much different reasons. It's a very different ballgame over here.

Disclosures: As a former BlueArc employee and investor, I own private equity stock in the company. In addition, Emulex is a current client of Paladin Advisors Group. Prior to their sale to Dell, Ocarina Networks was also a client of Paladin Advisors Group. Maxiscale was also a Paladin Advisors Group client in 2010. At times, I may seek to do business with or engage with many companies in this list, or their competitors.

Maximum Download Speeds Will Always Vary, Caps or Not

Over the last week, there was a lot of talk around Comcast instituting a 250 gigabyte cap on your downloads for a 30-day period. The Web's collective opinion has always tended to believe in unmetered, unlimited access to just about anything, without censorship, so the news of restrictions had many up in arms. But the truth is, you'd have to really go out of your way to reach the cap, and be downloading around the clock, all while maintaining consistently high bandwidth. And no matter what you're being sold on commercials, real-world download speeds are typically much less than the maximum advertised.

For me, it doesn't seem all that long ago that downloading a 4 megabyte application, like Netscape Navigator, was an intimidating process which could take hours, and download speeds of 9 to 10 kilobytes a second would border on exciting.

But consumers began to demand more from their Web, including more images, more streaming, higher resolution, more videos, and ever larger downloads, in parallel with ever-increasing network speeds, from the pokey 14.4, 28.8 and 33.6K modems, to broadband, either Cable or DSL, from speeds at 384 Kbps to 1.5 Mbps and 4.5 Mbps. As you would expect, consumers are led to believe they will get those advertised speeds, and, that higher numbers are, of course, better.

I don't typically download extremely large files. Most videos come in through Apple TV, or on the TiVo. If I am buying albums on iTunes, it's usually only one at a time, and my BitTorrent use is incredibly infrequent.

This afternoon, I had the rare opportunity to stress out my network by downloading a 3.8 Gigabyte recording of Saturday's college football game of Cal vs. Michigan State - which I had seen live yesterday, but wanted to revisit parts, not having recorded it on TiVo. When I first launched the file in BitTorrent, the speeds were outstanding - more than a full megabyte a second, and after several minutes of this, it looked like the video would be on my laptop in a little over an hour.


I Was Getting Screaming Download Speeds... And Then?
But just as quickly as I had noticed how fast it was going, the speed was decimated, and hasn't recovered - which smacks of Comcast throttling my throughput. What had been 1 Megabyte per second or more almost immediately dropped down to a more pedestrian range of 100 to 200 Kilobytes per second, and at times, much lower - in the 20 Kilobytes to 50 Kilobytes range, making what at first looked like a short download something that will probably be an all day process, assuming I leave the laptop on overnight.

Regardless of whether I've been intentionally throttled, or capped, or not, truth is that nobody ever really hits their advertised maximum network speed, thanks to issues at the remote servers, caching devices, storage, or due to shared pipes that mean your mileage is impacted by that of your neighbors' activity. And unlike a car, where you actually have a direct impact on whether you will reach the listed top speed, when you're on the Web, you're at the mercy of everyone else.

These issues mean you won't really ever know how long it will take to download something, until it's done, and just because you purchased a broadband connection that's "twice as fast" as the competition, you might not see your actual speeds doubling. With the near-monopolistic broadband providers having the option to throttle down your use at a whim, to cap your total usage at a level they deem appropriate, or with so many other factors impacting network speeds, you'll never see a flat-lined maximum, either on uploads or downloads. But if somebody ever gets that fixed... look out... I'd find all sorts of new ways to abuse that power.