Two VMware executives have left to join Redpoint Ventures to help the firm extend its reach into the enterprise and mobile markets. Their leaving marks a string of recent VMware departures, following the Pivotal spinout of several of the two companies’ product groups.

Both executives joining Redpoint had important roles at VMware. Javier Soltero  was responsible for driving advanced development and strategy for application level cloud services. Soltero joined VMware after the acquisition of SpringSource in 2009. Three months prior, SpringSource, a Java framework, had acquired Hyperic, a large-scale web infrastructure management software provider. Soltero was co-founder and CEO of the company. Soltero has some Internet chops that date back to the earliest days of the web. Early in his career, Soltero worked at Netscape, where he was responsible for early Internet messaging, application servers and e-commerce technologies.

Kevin Henrikson joined Zimbra in 2005 and worked there until Yahoo! acquired the company in 2007. In 2010, VMware acquired Zimbra, where Henrikson directed Zimbra’s engineering and development roadmap planning and execution, including potential company acquisitions. He holds a published patent and a filed patent in conjunction with his work at Zimbra.

A number of VMware executives have left the company in the past year. Last week, Microsoft hired Patrick Chanezon who recently left VMware to join Microsoft as its director of enterprise evangelism. Dave McCrory also recently left VMware to join Warner Brothers. He served as one of the chief developers of VMware’s Cloud Foundry, the platform as a service.

And in January, CTO Steve Herrod left to join General Catalyst as a managing director investing and supporting early-stage enterprise companies.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The following is an excerpt from my new book Don’t Go Back to School: a handbook for learning anything.

To someone who has never tried, it’s not obvious how to learn the things you want to learn outside of school. I’m on a mission to show you how. To do that, I became obsessed with how other people learn best, and how they do it without going to school.

My research based on interviews with 100 independent learners revealed four facts shared by almost every successful form of learning outside of school:

• It isn’t done alone.
• For many professions, credentials aren’t necessary, and the processes for getting credentials are changing.
• The most effective, satisfying learning is learning that which is more likely to happen outside of school.
• People who are happiest with their learning process and most effective at learning new things — in any educational environment — are people who are learning for the right reasons and who reflect on their own way of learning to figure out which processes and methods work best for them.

This interview with Harper Reed is a great example of how independent learning works. Reed served as the Chief Technology Officer for Obama for America during the 2012 election; before that, he was CTO at Threadless. He is an engineer who builds paradigm-shifting technology and leads others to do the same.

I love computers and I’ve always been around computers. I can’t really talk about education without talking about computers. I went to high school and I actually really loved it. I took all the classes I could, I was prom king, student council president. I did everything I could to be more involved in high school and that is obviously not the normal path you’d expect for a computer geek.

But, along with that, I was constantly getting into trouble with computers. Never with the cops, but I was always getting banned from all the computers in the school district. Then, they would let me back in, and I would mess up again for whatever reason. It happened over and over. I was caught in this dichotomy of trying to be involved, but whenever I was trying to get involved with computers, I messed it up because I was curious and experimenting outside what was allowed. After that, I went to a small liberal arts college. I studied history along with computer science, because I knew ultimately I was going to work with computers and I wanted to learn something else, too. I studied Catholic history and the history of science, which overlap a lot. I’m not Catholic. I’m not a religious person at all, but it was really fascinating to learn all of the idiosyncrasies of Galileo and Bruno and all these different weird scientists who got burned at the stake for their discoveries.

I realized about probably three-quarters of the way through my education that in terms of computers, I actually wasn’t learning anything I needed to learn to get a job later on. I did learn some coding concepts in college, but more importantly I figured out that I’m an experiential learner. I need to put my hands on things and really see them, and really chew on them. It was better to do it in a real context, where it mattered if I did it right. Like where there was money at stake. So, I did an internship in Iowa City, IA. I worked for a real company that was trying to make a profit. The company built ecommerce apps. As an intern I started learning web apps to build web pages. Given my way of learning, it was fascinating to see how the management dealt with me. I was a child. I asked questions like a child does. “Why is the sky blue?” They just said, “It’s just blue. Go with that.” I said, “No! Tell me why we’re doing it this way. What is this?” It was client services, so we were just doing it because the client wanted it done, with no thought behind it. But all the questions I asked gave me this opportunity to see how things worked and the value of asking things that seemed obvious to everyone else. It gave me a lot of hope. It really kicked off the career that I have now.

The methods I used to learn technology don’t work for everything. I’m struggling with learning Japanese. My wife is Japanese and I want to learn the language, but I don’t know how. I take classes, I fail, it doesn’t work out. I have to figure that out. With technology, I immediately find a problem I want to solve. It’s usually about learning a new programming language or learning a new technology. If it’s a real problem, I want to get to where I can actually picture the solution and be able to see it through from the beginning to the end. For me, I can’t learn from videos. That just doesn’t do it for me, although there’s a lot of video learning right now. I find it very frustrating. So usually what I do is I just go through a tutorial of some sort and then really start iterating, doing it over and over. I start trying to be creative on top of that, and say okay, now that I can figure out how to do this, how would I use it? So I set a new goal pretty close in difficulty, and when I achieve that, I do that again, until suddenly I’ve learned something. When you’re in that process, it can also be the best time to teach someone else. A tech writer named Mark Pilgrim, who writes manuals for learning coding languages including Dive into Python, and Dive into HTML5 said, “The best time to write a book about something is while you’re learning it yourself.” So you know what’s hard to learn and can talk in an excited, confident, honest way about how you got to the place where it’s not hard anymore.

For me this whole process is really collaborative. I treat everything like I’m the CEO of my life. CEOs have boards of directors and boards of advisors and these are groups of people who they’re using to really rely on for help and advice to be successful. I think every person should treat their life like that. So, if I’m stuck, I know I can reach out to a buddy, or I can reach out to my brother. I know I can reach out to these people who are experts in whatever I’m trying to do. I try to surround myself with incredibly smart people who are often, if not always, smarter than me. Because other people are so important to learning, I also think one of the most significant things about the internet is democratization of access. Anyone can email you about self-learning and you’re probably going to respond. Probably. I think it’s about how you phrase it. We are all very busy, but we’re probably going to respond if you approach it efficiently.

You can learn a lot about this from a really good book called Team Geek by Brian W. Fitzpatrick. It’s actually about project managing software development geeks, but it applies to most things with communication. It should really be called “Interacting with People,” because all it is, is just little tricks on how to interact with people, how to make those interactions better. There’s a section called “Interacting with an Executive,” and that part should be called “Interacting with Busy People.” It says if you want to connect with someone who is very busy, tell them three bullets and then a call to action.

So if someone wanted help from me, it might go like this: “Harper, I’m interested in what you’re doing with the campaign. I’m going to be doing technology for a campaign in the coming election. Do you have a hint for product management or project management software that you guys use?” I can answer that quickly. It’s very simple. Then all of a sudden there’s this person who probably wouldn’t have had an opportunity to talk with me, and I can help them out. I love what that kind of efficient communication does for you.

Kio Stark is a writer, researcher, teacher, and passionate activist for independent learning. She teaches at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. She is also the author of the novel Follow Me Down. You can find out more about her work at KioStark.com.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today in interesting moves comes the news that serial entrepreneur-turned-investor Russell Buckley – who co-founded AdMob (which sold to Google) is joining the UK government to accelerate its policies around startups, mainly funding. Specifically, he’s joining the UK Government’s Venture Capital Unit. The Unit, launched last year, is designed to help UK companies attract funding from abroad and thus help resolve the funding gap which often exists at early and mid-stages. The Unit is headed by veteran entrepreneur Chris Wade and embraces Clean Tech, Life Sciences and Hardware. Here’s Russell’s blog post on the matter:

My New Job

Exciting times!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We all know by now that the right mentor can be a huge boon to your career. But actually finding the right Larry Summers to your Sheryl Sandberg can be awkward at best, and impossible at worst.

A new startup launching today called Everwise is looking to help. The San Francisco and New York-based startup, which was co-founded by tech industry veteran and current Yahoo board chairman Maynard Webb and former Audium founder and Cisco executive Mike Bergelson, has built a tech-powered platform for matching “protégés” with the right mentors and shepherding them through a six-month-long advisory relationship.

In an interview this week, Bergelson, who serves as Everwise’s CEO, said the service plugs data from a participant’s LinkedIn profile as well as a personalized questionnaire into its matching algorithm (which is based on Everwise’s studies of some 60,000 mentoring partnerships) to pair him or her with a volunteer executive from another company in the same industry to serve as a mentor. The idea is that sometimes people aren’t always the best at choosing the right mentor on their own.

“Mentor marketplaces as they exist today aren’t always working, because the people with most compelling titles and sexiest businesses get all the attention, even if they aren’t the right fit,” Bergelson said. “Everwise is like the eHarmony for mentoring… Our aim is to build longer lasting relationships that span with interactions over months.”

In addition to the software, Everwise provides a human element here too. The company has contracted live “relationship managers” who help shepherd the mentoring relationships from day one, checking in with phone calls and surveys to gather feedback and provide guidance.

There’s a price to this. Everwise charges each protégé $150 per month to use the site, and mentors, which are heavily vetted by the site, participate as volunteers. That might seem expensive, but at an enterprise level it’s been received well: Over the past year in Everwise’s private beta, companies such as Hewlett Packard, Direct Energy, and Sigma Aldrich have paid for their employees to find mentors through the program. “When we talk to companies about the pricing, our monthly price costs about the same as one day of management training,” Bergelson said.

Bergelson said that Everwise is different from other services in the mentoring space such as Clarity, since it is focused more on people in the corporate world than on entrepreneurs. Looking ahead, though, the company could look to scale out its technology and service beyond the white-collar sphere. Bergelson explained the vision like this:

“If we can figure out a way to provide a service that’s really valuable for really senior, swtiched-on, engaged Silicon Valley people at the HPs and the eBays of the world, and do that in a scalable way, then the platform and the technology could be used in lots of different contexts. Nowadays people have 11 jobs on average by time they’re in mid-thirties. Careers are ending up in places in infinite numbers of ways. The role of the mentor, the role of guidance, is even more important now than it has been.”

Everwise, which has raised just under $1 million in seed funding, has a full-time staff of 14.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After losing mobile product head and Facebook Home team member Charles Jolley to Battery Ventures, Facebook is facing another departure from a previous Home staffer. Draper Fisher Jurvetson announced today that Facebook’s head of product for Android, Bubba Murarka, has joined the firm as General Partner and Managing Director.

Murarka has been with Facebook since 2008, and has held positions as business development lead, and was most recently head of product for Facebook for Android where he started the Facebook Home project.

Murarka helped scale Facebook’s Android product team to more than 50 members and pivot the mobile development strategy toward native applications. During his tenure, Murarka oversaw business strategy for search, photos, places and helped negotiate a number of strategic deals with key Facebook partners including Microsoft, Netflix and Yahoo.

Prior to Facebook, Murarka spent seven years in technical and product roles at Microsoft. While there, he acted as group program manager for Bing’s Bay Area development team. He originally started his career at Microsoft in Seattle as part of the original threedegrees team, which developed an early messaging app.

At DFJ, Murarka will identify new investment opportunities in the early-stage consumer and mobile space. He will also advise current companies on strategic partnerships, growth, product vision, and strategy. For Murarka, the DFJ role makes sense as he has been an angel investor and advisor to more than 10 companies in the consumer mobile and online education sectors since 2008.

This has been a big week for Facebook engineering and product departures. AllThingsD reported yesterday that engineering director Josh Wiseman has departed the social network for an EIR role at Social+Capital.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

LinkedIn, now at 225 million users, continues to introduce more features to its site to keep people returning to the it and staying there for longer. Today it’s the turn of LinkedIn Today, its social news page, which is getting a new feature called Channels. The feature is rolling out starting today to English-speaking users. LinkedIn says that it plans to announce the service formally on Wednesday.

Channels bring together curated content around general subjects like technology, marketing strategies, retail and healthcare — 20 in all, with more getting added soon — with each one combining popular posts from news sources with those from selected influencers in the given topic.

Channels will be replacing “industries,” a feature that has been around since LinkedIn first launched LinkedIn Today in 2011. Industries were both more specific in terms of what they covered, and also more geared at news that was trending on the site, and specifically among your contacts.

Channels, on the other hand, attempts to be more interdisciplinary, making use of the idea that there will be people interested in “social media” who are not social media professionals. It also gives some more mileage to the list of 250+ influencers that LinkedIn introduced in October 2012, with their posts also getting rolled into the news mix. It looks like over time, this could also include added multimedia such as presentations using SlideShare and more.

“We believe Channels better represents the content and topical conversations professionals are discussing and sharing on LinkedIn, which go beyond specific industries,” said spokesperson Julie Inouye. “Topics like Entrepreneurship and Your Career are applicable to more than just one industry.”

Last week’s quarterly earnings showed LinkedIn still beating sales targets and earnings estimates, but the company’s stock still took a hit on evidence that revenue growth is slowing down. In that sense, the move to enhance LinkedIn today is more about improving the time its audience spends on the site, and the subsequent knock-on positive effect this could have on advertising, rather than as a direct route to revenue itself.

“Our influencers are not compensated to share their unique insights on LinkedIn and we do not have plans at this time to monetize our Channels pages or our Influencer platform,” Inouye said.

In the last several months LinkedIn has introduced a number of changes. They’ve included upgraded, more media-enhanced profiles; a Contacts update to add in more “personal assistant” life organizing features; new iPhone and Android apps; an expanded search engine; @mentions in status updates; Klout-style endorsements; and a Recruiter homepage redesign for the site’s most dedicated user vertical. As with many of these other enhancements, LinkedIn Today, and its new channels feature, offer a more slick look and more functionality.

Product manager Kevin Gu notes that among the new features that will come along with the new channels will be the ability to see the updates from channels on your own homepage stream; the ability to sort content either by most recent news or most popular features; and a look at the top influencer posts on a given day. On top of this, users will also see channels making their way to their LinkedIn email digests, which will now include influencer posts, trending professional news as well as Slideshare content.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

Those who know in the Valley know the name Sam Pullara. Whether it was his time as a repeat entrepreneur and technical founder, or stints as an EIR at some of the Valley’s most premier venture capital firms, or his time as a lead technologist at two of the largest tech companies in the Valley (most recently at Twitter), Pullara has occupied nearly every seat at the table throughout his career. Now, after leaving Twitter and after years of being an angel investor, Pullara has moved himself and his blog, Java Rants, over to the venture capital side as a Managing Director of Sutter Hill Ventures in Palo Alto, a firm which started back in the early 1960s and has focused on investing in SaaS, infrastructure, and other fundamental technologies.

I invited Pullara into the Studio because he isn’t the type to seek out attention, and I let the cameras run longer to capture the full arc of his career. He has started two companies, both of which were acquired, has been an EIR and consultant with Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital, was the Chief Scientist at Yahoo!, and most recently was part of a small, senior team that helped rebuild Twitter’s codebase. In this discussion, Pullara details his career moves, what he learned being a technical operator, a technical founder, and now a venture capitalist (including angel investments), with the hopes of providing an example for many engineers out there today starting out in their careers. Specifically, Pullara touches on how his technical ability gave him C-level access to company leaders to pitch solutions directly to them. On a different track, he also (honestly) explains his lessons as an angel investor and shares details into the unique capital and LP structure of Sutter Hill Ventures, where he is now investing into the next wave of technology startups.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Kevin Ryan has had a lot of variety in his career so far, with a front-row seat building companies including DoubleClick, Gilt Groupe, 10gen, and Business Insider. And recently it’s been reported that he could add another very interesting facet to his resume by running for mayor of New York City.

So when we had the opportunity to talk with Ryan backstage at the Disrupt NYC 2013 show, we asked him about the rumors and whether a leap from business to politics is in his future. While it sounds like he might not be keen to take the seat vacated by Michael Bloomberg in the very near future, he had some great insights on why it could be a very good thing if the next leader at City Hall is someone from the tech world. We also talked about how he keeps balance while running companies in such divergent spaces, from fashion to programming tools and beyond.

Check it all out in the video above.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Another year has come and gone, and with it a brand new class of Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator graduates. At demo day today, we saw ten companies launch out of development and into the public eye. Yes, all of them are interesting, disrupting industries from real estate to big data to financial services. But a handful of companies truly stand out as potential game-changers in the tech world.

So without any further ado, these are TechCrunch’s picks for the ERA Accelerator spring class:

Acquaintable

Online dating is more than a trend these days; it’s how young people make connections. Acquaintable focuses on some sort of common thread, connecting people who have mutual friends. According to the company, Acquaintable has a much lower cost for user acquisition because the friend-of-friends model offers natural virality. Plus, it has a better shot at actually creating relationships that last, as the company says that 70 percent of couples have met through friends.

Using Acquaintable is easy. You hit up the website, give the service Facebook access, and then see pictures of those you might be interested in. It has a similar set up to HotOrNot.com or FaceMash, letting you approve or disapprove of someone’s picture and basic info before moving on to another suitor.

All your “likes” and “passes” are completely anonymous. Only after you and your suitor show a mutual interest can you begin communicating via messaging. Acquantainable has had an Alpha out for a while now, with 15 percent of users returning daily, and 35 percent of users sharing and inviting an average of four people. Plus, since Acquaintable focuses on friends-of-friends, it’s less of a sausage fest than online dating services that don’t ensure that this is a real, normal human being and not a creepy stranger.

Acquaintable is available now here.

Consignd

Consignd is trying to give power back to the social influencers who determine shopping habits, while still providing perks to big brand retailers and businesses. Anyone with a web presence, like bloggers, pinners, and website owners can open up a store on their site. Founder Neil Parikh explained that you can do this without ever having to source or ship inventory. Sounds weird, right? But wait.

Consignd believes that inspiration and discovery play integral roles in shopping. In fact, 48 percent of products that were bought last year were discovered socially. The breakdown between big brand retailers, affiliates, and independent retailers causes problems for all of them. Retailers lose track of where their product is sold, whereas independent retailers can’t focus on their product because of the stresses of SEO and discovery.

The idea behind Consignd is that the responsibility of bringing an audience to a retailer no longer falls on the shoulders of the retailer, thanks to sites like Pinterest and Tumblr. So as pinners and bloggers have more and more influence over shopping habits, Consignd wants to give them the credit, and the cash, by letting them open up their own store front.

Easy Pairings

When you think of NYC, it’s hard not to imagine the thousands of wannabe actresses, singer/songwriters and models who are moonlighting as waitresses until their career takes off. The problem, however, is that their careers do take off, and they leave the restaurant. In fact, most restaurants have an annual turnover rate greater than 50 percent.

Easy Pairings, one of our favorites out of ERA, is changing the way restaurants find their staff. The Easy Pairings service is available as an app, so you don’t have to run to your desktop the second you need to make a hire. Once you download the app, you can choose from the type of worker you need (server, bartender, hostess) and see who’s available for an interview.

So far, Easy Pairings has scheduled 200 interviews, and led to the hire of over 50 workers at restaurants. According to the founders Darren Wan and Peter Lada, restaurants are just the beginning, as the service can work in any industry that experiences high turnover. The company is looking to raise $500k with over $190k committed.

Startist

Startist is a platform that lets professional creatives connect and collaborate on projects with a rich-media experience. Yet, unlike most creative collaboration platforms that focus on a certain genre of artistry, Startist doesn’t discriminate. Projects can range from film and music to games and technology.

The big idea behind Startist isn’t just that creative professionals can work on projects together, but that creative professionals can form meaningful connections. Looking for bandmates or directors for your film project or models for your photography is a tough task. It isn’t just a job, it’s a relationship, and an important one at that.

Classified ads are the alternative. There are 20,000 classified ads posted by musicians every day, yet creatives aren’t able to truly express themselves in this format. Startist lets you showcase your work and search for other interesting creatives with all the originality and creativity you can muster.

Startist is opening up their private beta today, which you can check out here.

The Square Foot

The Square Foot is a real estate platform that focuses on the commercial space. It lets prospective tenants, brokers, and landlords connect quickly and easily. Searching for commercial real estate isn’t easy, especially without a lot of cash to put behind a broker.

But The Square Foot helps small businesses find the right space by aggregating available office spaces. But the Square Foot goes even further than that. For one, the service doesn’t hand you off at the browser. The Square Foot follows the transaction all the way through to completion to make sure you have everything you need to get to business.

Plus, the service connects users with service and product providers to help set up the space for work, buy furniture, move, etc. As of now, the Houston-based company has over 75 percent of the Houston area searchable on the site. The team is now working on expanding this service to the wild world of New York City.

So far, the company has raised $400k, but they’re still looking for strategic angel investors.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In The Studio” ends April by welcoming Tim Sullivan, the CEO of MicroVentures, a San Francisco-based crowdfunding venture firm that connects retail angel investors with startups. While the venture industry itself continues to undergo a long series of shifts, contractions and market corrections, the larger trend of crowdfounding — ranging all the way from the Kickerstarters of the world to modern political campaigns — has also come into play when thinking about limited partners and investors in early-stage companies. Once upon a time, only certain people and institutions had access to invest into funds that could invest into startups, but now with secondary markets like, well, Second Market, and shifting rules in Washington D.C., the door seems to have opened for a new class of retail angel investors.

In this discussion, Sullivan sits down with me to explain his career in startups and investing, how he helped start MicroVentures, how they select investors, how they communicate with them, and how they identify, vet, and perform due diligence on startups his firm invests in. Additionally, MicroVentures purchases shares on secondary markets — not just early-stage startups. MicroVentures also doesn’t lead deals, but participates to help fill out a round. The firm calls capital on a per-deal basis, giving its own LPs a chance to review deals one by one. While there are many different twists to crowdfunding for startups and surely more to emerge, this conversation with Sullivan sheds light on one interesting angle on the trend.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch