To borrow a phrase from my favorite movie from the time period in question… a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… budding entrepreneurs had a few options for starting a business. Our options back then were pretty simple:

• Newspaper Route
• Collecting Pop bottles – if you don’t remember bottles made out of glass, don’t worry about trying to understand this one.
• Lemonade Stand

Lucky for me, I grew up in a family business and did not have to worry about starting a business since I had one already – I was head dishwasher! Aside from that, my biggest concern was what bait to use to catch the bass that hid under the dock near our restaurant and when the parking lot would empty out so we could play baseball under the street lights. Of course, I did wash my share of dishes and bus an equal share of tables over a 13 year period. Still, life was pretty simple back then. Comics were $0.25, a pack of gum was $0.10, and you could go to a movie and have a drink and popcorn for about $3.00. A former colleague of mine would fondly refer to these as the salad days. But, times have changed… a movie is easily $20 and I am not sure any comics exist under $3.00. There are also very different “start-up” options available to the current generation of 10 year old entrepreneurs. Mom and Dad may still be out there shuttling kids around in the rain to deliver newspapers, or carving up and decorating an old box to sell lemonade (I did that too, but that was to raise money for Jerry’s Kids) to people wandering past a sidewalk-based store front, but I doubt it. I can’t in fact remember the last time that I saw anyone undertaking such a venture. Instead, it seems that this generation has fully grasped the value of the Internet. Whether it is our youngest blog contributor, or our youngest customer – a 13 year old web host who’s Mom did her part by setting up a PayPal account for him to run his new business. Not to be outdone, we have a slightly older generation of entrepreneurs that have taken inspiration from a number of areas, including turning hobbies into viable businesses. Take a look at www.mmoguildsites.com as an example.

The mantra at SoftLayer has always been to enable business through innovation and by empowering the customer with our delivery of Serverless IT to businesses everywhere. But, I am not sure that any of us ever envisioned the impact that this approach and vision would have. Who knows, we might be helping to stimulate the ideas that could lead to the next Microsoft, Google, or Apple.

So, here’s to entrepreneurial spirit at any age! And if you are one of those young entrepreneurs out there, best of luck and please continue to create new ideas. We are all relying on you. SoftLayer will continue to do its part to help you make your ideas real.

Outsource IT – Part III
Third in a series of three! In other words you won’t have to read this stuff anymore after this one. I will get back to the fun ones. I might try to make this one fun along the way. So I left off on the last one discussing some of the financial reasons and technical reasons to outsource your servers. This blog will be geared towards some ideas floating around in my head on what would be some good examples of outsourcing.

You have to step back and look at it from a different angle. If you aren’t ready to outsource the whole farm just yet, then you can go about it in a couple of different ways. One, you can outsource your sandbox, development, and/or test environment. We all know that with SAS 70 and SOX you have to have all of these (or most of them anyway). And outsourcing might be a good way of getting them in place. The cool thing about outsourcing any or all of those are you have a pristine environment and if it does get polluted somehow you can just reload the OS quickly and painlessly and try to tear it up again. Outsourced servers are great for this type of scenario. You can even get a few servers and carve them up virtually and have even more toys to play with. Now, you can just go buy new servers and have this in house but when they break or they are obsolete then you get to buy more. With an outsource model you can buy 1 or 100 and have them for 1 month or 2 years, it’s up to you, your needs, and your budget. You can add hardware, memory, change the OS daily, and only buy the License for a month instead of having to buy it outright when you buy your own servers. I personally believe this is a really good way to get acclimated to outsourcing and test the waters both with yourself and your boss. You always have to make sure they are ok with the way you are doing things. Well, sometimes anyway.

Another option with outsourcing is outsourcing production. Some bosses out in the world aren’t ready for this yet, but they will be. They like keeping their data close by and having multiple copies and instances and USB keys with copies on it, etc. That’s just the nature of data. Now we all know that you can have the same if not more redundancy in the outsourced model too, it is just hard to explain to them sometimes. I have to give them credit. Think about all the data in the world and how much of it we need to use every day. If folks like them didn’t demand that we techies keep it safe the world might have a bad day, I know I would. I use tons of data everyday (might be a fun blog).

If you decide to outsource dev/test or production you have the ability to scale quickly and accordingly when dealing with technology. Not having to be bogged down by worrying about hardware lead times, dealing with accounts payable, the receiving dock, and all the other worries you have when buying hardware is a liberating feeling. I know what you are thinking; I have been over this side of it a few times so I will just leave it at that but the numbers and today’s technology make it all come together and make good business sense.

Outsource IT!

Over the last two years, SoftLayer has grown from nothing to over 10,000 servers and by the end of this year could surpass 30,000 servers if growth continues on its current track. A key component in managing this growth is finding leaders with the ability to scale as the company grows. More often than not, entrepreneurs are good at starting businesses but not good at growing them. In that vein, if you are the leader of a startup, what traits does your management team needs to have if one is to build the biggest, baddest and most valuable company in an industry?

Battle wounds: We all have read the stories about Bill Gates quitting Harvard to start Microsoft, Michael Dell selling servers out of his dorm room, and Larry and Sergey leaving Stanford to start Google. It is very rare that someone can come out of college and start something that becomes the dominant player in an industry. The majority are an amalgamation of our experiences of years of operating any one of a number of businesses. Look for the managers with some scars. Even the aforementioned entrepreneurs are pretty much battle tested by now.

Visionary: As fast as SoftLayer is growing, we better have a pretty good vision of where we are going so we don’t run this Porsche off a cliff and into an abyss. We have seen many potential customer IT managers come to us in a panic upon their sudden realization that no more servers can be added to their datacenter because of inadequate planning for power and cooling. And I am not just picking on IT; this applies to the finance function as well. As the CFO, I have to have a vision for what my organization is going to look like all along the way, from the startup phase to an IPO, merger or acquisition or whatever other path this journey takes us.

Communication skills: Today’s CFO must be more technically proficient than his predecessors; however, this does not negate for the financial or any other executive to be able to communicate not only with company staff, but customers, vendors, bankers and shareholders as well. As discussed in other blogs, the internet has given all of us the ability to communicate in so many different ways than in the past. The challenge of any manager is to figure out which method of communication is the most effective in a given situation to get the job done and keep the organization moving forward.

Je ne sais quoi: It’s a French phrase we as Americans have used over the years to refer to a certain quality someone has that cannot be explained. A good manager has to have this “Presence”. While the internet and email and all forms electronic communication have made the world smaller, to have an impact a leader still needs to be out communicating, listening and understanding to keep the team on the right track. The leader who sits in his office all day can review a lot of data but needs to get out to find what is really going on inside a company. The “Ivory Tower” manager is doomed to failure in today’s fast paced business environment.

Rock in times of adversity: For all of us who have participated in startups (and I have done four now), there are going to be tough times. You can count on that. How you react in those situations sends a message about your ability to lead to your staff. As a leader, you have to be the go-to person in tough times. Are you prepared to handle the adversity?

The team: Much like a professional hockey team (I would use football but my son plays hockey and this is my blog), you can’t do it all alone. From the general manager on down, the owner/president of a team has to have the ability to attract top notch staff to who he can delegate the work of moving the organization toward the ultimate prize in hockey, The Stanley Cup. If he can’t and tries to keeps all the work for himself, he will find himself on the outside looking in.

Do we have the team to scale? So far it appears that we do. Are we going to have to add additional leadership along the way for us to achieve our goals? Absolutely. We have just added a Chief Strategy Officer to the executive management team.

We continue to be confident our management team can provide the leadership needed to grow SoftLayer into an industry leader.

Are you as confident in your team?

– Mike Jones (Who?)

117 Servers in one day. That’s right — We sold and fully provisioned 117 servers yesterday. Words can’t express how proud this makes me as we’ve come a long way from when I started at Softlayer just over a year and a half ago. When I got here I was the 25th employee and we were in a very small, weird office and I was always within (literally) arms reach of Lance and Steven and a good (great) day was selling and provisioning double digit servers. Now things have gotten much bigger and we are still humming along coming out with new products, new datacenters (Seattle and more to come) and innovating new and never before seen ideas and services in the hosting world.

We now have over 100 employees, nearing 15,000 servers in production, a new (bigger) office and record revenue being generated daily. Two years ago when we opened our doors for business we had zero (0) in all of the above categories. We have grown up fast while continuing to be the best out there with our innovation and services.

I’m just so proud. *tear*