Organizations and Scaling
My partner Albert has some good (and brief) thoughts on the relationship between organizational dynamics and scaling issues. He posted them on his tumblog this morning. Here’s the lead in to his post:
There is a lot of information out there on various technical approaches
to scaling. What most of those leave out is the interaction between
the choice of architecture and organizational scaling.
If you are thinking about scaling issues, I think it’s worth the minute or less it will take to read.
Comments (Archived):
The current industry dependency on Mid-end or free RDBMS is the ‘chief feature’ that leads to scaling problems in Web Applications gaining large numbers of active accounts. Particularly when the case is applications that generate many small, transient joins.We have raised a generation of programmers and engineers that have relied on getting small, proof of concept applications backed by these toy databases – they are unaware of the solutions that the financial and other high volume data application sectors have used to overcome write saturation. The current fix for these web/database apps (Clusters and Mirroring) are often worse than the problem they seek to solve.While it is an interesting and provocative statement to posit that there is a human, organizational counterpart to transaction scaling (and there well may be something to it) at its root, it is a technical maturity problem that is certainly centered in the Web industry’s workforce – gee maybe I just made your point!
I’m glad you agree it should be called a ‘tumblog’ rather than ‘tumblelog’.
Is there a controversy about that?
A minor one. tumblog seems catchier to me, but the Tumblr homepage calls it a tumblelog.Tomayto tomahto? Sure. But choosing one to push would seem to help SEO/ google juice.
Having gone through a similar situation as Twitter in my last start-up all I can say is hire someone with a DEEP communications and messaging background that has built a multi-tenant platform. If you are interested in a name(architect/engineer) shoot me an email; he is now living in NY. In return you give me some feedback on a new venture. Deal?At a minimum you should talk to him and keep him on a roster of **Rockstars** for future requirements.
How do I take you up on this?
Hi Fred,Just sent you an email to info@unionsquare…..Titled: Fred Wilson – Follow Up Twitter Post
Just started reading the Blog – Dharmesh Shah pointed me to it. And I got to listen to Lou Reed. (Music link!)What a day!Cheers, and thanks for the good stuff!
You always get a little music on AVC
Hi Fred,I have been a passionate reader & listener of AVC for a while now. I have a question for you in your VC role (not about investing) concerning a early stage company that I am consulting for. What is the best place to ask this query as it is unrelated to a blog topic? My email is [email protected], cell 914 462 2645. Thanks, Gabe