Amr Awadallah Blog

I frequently find that I have to explain to candidates joining Cloudera (and existing employees) how not to be overly concerned about dilution of their percent ownership when a company is experiencing strong growth.

Towards that end I created the chart below to illustrate how percent ownership is just a small part of the total equation. The core concept is that the “paper” valuation of your stock options is equal to twice the area of your sector under the pie, and the area of your sector is proportional to your angle (i.e. your percent ownership) multiplied by the radius squared (where radius is the stock price). Hence if a startup raises a new round of funding at a large radius then that quickly out weighs any shrinkage in the angle of ownership due to the to the squaring of the stock price. I am not saying that you shouldn’t worry about dilution at all, you should obviously try to get the best deal and keep dilution low, but don’t be overly obsessed by dilution, it is just one factor in the grand scheme of things.

Fortunate startups that demonstrate repeatability/efficiency of their business model raise additional funds at a large radius so that they can fuel further growth thus making the pie larger for everyone. On the other hand startups that get overly concerned by dilution and avoid raising money (depsite being in a growth market) can fall in a penny-wise pound-foolish trap where they end up being a zombie company that goes nowhere (I know many such startups, and by the time they realize their mistake it is usually too late).

Cheers,

– amr

PS: For stock options, the “paper” value is (area of sector) minus (cost of sector), where cost of sector is angle * strike-price^2.

This is pretty much your last chance to signup for Hadoop World, it is happening this Friday (Oct 2nd) in Newyork City. The registration prices are higher now since these are the last few days, but if you are interested in going then shoot me an email, I have a special deep discount code for “friends of amr”.

Below I highlight a number of news/blog articles that covered some of the use cases that will be talked about at Hadoop World:

• “Hadoop buzz continues to excite the cloud”. CNET, Dave Rosenberg, September 4th, 2009.
• “What’s the New York Times doing with Hadoop?”. InfoWorld, Savio Rodrigues, September 11th, 2009.
• “Telecom operators get the scoop on Hadoop”. Telephony Online, Rich Karpinski, September 15th, 2009.
• “Q&A: Visa dips a toe into the Hadoop pool”. CNET, Matt Asay, September 17th, 2009.
• “The Tech Behind eHarmony”. PC World, Eric Lai, September 19th, 2009.
• “Hadoop World Shows Diverse Uses”. SD Times, Alex Handy, September 21st, 2009.
• “Cloudera and Facebook Shed More Light on Hadoop Integration”. TechCrunch, Leena Rao, September 23rd, 2009.
• “Welcome to Hadoop World”. Network World, Jon Olstik, September 24th, 2009.
• “FeatherCast – Aaron Kimball on Hadoop”. Apache Feathercast, Rich Bowen, September 24th, 2009.

I look forward to meeting you there,

– amr

First, I can’t believe it has been three months since I last blogged, all I can say is that a startup will suck the life out of you

I still see many startups creating free online services and expecting them to generate hundreds of millions of dollars from advertising. I might be stating the obvious here, but that will only work out if these services get tens of millions of users, with those users returning to the service almost every day, and that will only happen if the service meet the essentiality criterion. Essentiality is the litmus test that differentiates a life-style business (e.g. a super popular blog that makes a few million $/year max) versus a venture business (i.e. a business which generates hundreds, if not thousands, of million $/year). By essentiality I mean both the ability to amass a large population of users, but become necessary to these users such that they need to visit the service almost every day (if not many times a day).

For example, here are some essential online services:

• E-Mail/Chat/IM: It is essential that you communicate, almost continuously
• Search: We all need to find stuff many times a day
• News: Almost everybody needs to know what is happening. Facebook is news about your friends, it is communication too.
• Music/Movies/TV/Videos/Games/Sports: A decent population needs their daily entertainment “fix”, however very few destinations are able to aggregate a large enough audience due to content fragmentation

I was then going to list the many services/sites that I don’t think will make it due to failing the essentiality criterion. Many of these services will collapse due to fact that they are small/life-style businesses but their VCs expect them to hit venture scale (the ones structured as small businesses will live and prosper). But, to avoid alienating such businesses (since some of them are potential customers for Cloudera) I decided not to list them here . That said, the common pattern among them are: either they have a lot of users but are not essential to any of them, or they are useful but to a very small group of users, in both cases this means they will not be able to amass the huge volume of pageviews required to make venture-scale money based on advertising.

Cheers,

– amr

I seed funded a company called Diagnosoft a few years back, mainly because one of the cofounders (Nael Osman) is a life-long friend of mine, but also because the technology was very intriguing and came across as something that could save my life one day

In layman terms, Diagnosoft develops a program that analyzes cardiac MRI video sequences to generate quantities that show where the heart is weak. These measurements greatly augment the “eye balling” that physicians do today, which leads to faster and more precise detection of problems that can otherwise go undetected. The software also does visualization and integrated reporting, but the core differentiator is the proprietary quantification algorithms. The founders are from John Hopkins University and are the leading experts in this field.

The funding for Diagnosoft comes from a VC firm called “Technology Development Fund (TDF)“, which is based in Egypt. BTW, many of the life sciences VCs that we contacted in the US wussed out from investing in Diagnosoft, the reason they usually gave us was “it is too risky”! Well, yeah, inventing a new disruptive technology is risky, but Diagnosoft is ready to cross the chasm, it is already being used by early adopters at hundreds of research institutions all over the world. Diagnosoft HARP is now the de facto standard for cardiac tagged MRI analysis (more than 22 published papers involving more than 3000 test subjects).

The key premise behind this market opportunity goes as follows: the previous wave of heart treatment was heavy cardiac surgery, the current wave is non-invasive surgery, and the future wave will be pro-active treatment for which precise detection tools like Diagnosoft HARP will be a must. You can find out more by reading the press release announcing the funding and Diagnosoft’s new CEO:

http://news.prnewswire.com/DisplayReleaseContent.aspx?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/01-29-2009/0004963069

I am very passionate about Diagnosoft, not just because of the market size potential, but rather because it can truly revolutionize prediction and prevention of cardiac diseases, the number one killer of humans in the United States.

Congrats to the Diagnosoft team on this very important milestone, onward and upward.

Cheers,

– amr

Cloudera just launched a Hadoop and Big Data blog, you can access it at the following URL:

http://www.cloudera.com/blog

The purpose of the blog will be to post tips and tricks on how to tune Hadoop system performance and how to work with big data in general.

Jeff Hammerbacher just posted his latest “Open Source Data Management Software” presentation on the blog. In the presentation he covers Thrift, Scribe, Hive, and Cassandra, you should check it out.

Cloudera also launched Hadoop Support, Hadoop Resources and Hadoop Training sections, we are still in the process of beefing them up.

Cheers,

– amr