Acquia

I'm excited to announce that we just closed an $8 million Series B round at Acquia. (Our funding now totals $15 million.) The inside round included North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. We've been growing fast expanding our engineering, marketing, and sales teams. Overall, the company has more than doubled since I first started almost a year ago from about 16 employees to now 40 or so and now have over 200 clients! We've also expanded our product offering to include hosting, remote administration services, Solr Search, and a variety of other services that help people adopt Drupal easily, scale the software, and deploy projects with confidence and the right resources.

It's not only been an invaluable experience learning how to scale a venture-backed start-up, but its also been interesting watching and helping an open source community grow. The adoption of Drupal just about doubles every year, including the number of websites built off Drupal (the number is now around 400,000), core contributors, and the general number of companies building with the software.

Amongst many other goals, Acquia will continue to focus on these core areas:  Continue Reading...

Below is the transcription of the Ultra Light Startup's panel discussion on crowdsourcing business models that took place on Boston on May 4th. The panelists included:

Jay Batson - Co-founder of Acquia, a start-up commercializing open source Drupal .

Peter LaMotte - Marketing Director of GeniusRocket , a start-up crowdsourcing marketing and advertising content.

Doron Reuveni - Co-founder of uTest , a start-up crowdsourcing software testing.

John B. Rogers - Co-founder of Local Motors , a start-up crowdsourcing automotive design.

Moderator:

How can start-ups and companies of all sizes bring crowdsourcing into their business?Continue Reading...

Investment Banking used to be the hot job to land out of school. Now its starting a company or landing a position at a startup.

Maybe its due to my network, but I rarely come across anyone interested in joining the corporate world. On the same token, I rarely come across people who genuinely enjoys the corporate world. Students are quickly realizing that the startup world holds more opportunity. The reasons are obvious; you can build wealth quicker, develop a broader range of business skills, work with the smartest business and entrepreneur minds you can find, and learn how to build and scale a company. By working with a small team, you have access to all departments, enabling you to contribute ideas, provide feedback, and pitch proposals that may actually be implemented. As you can imagine, your simultaneously learning a broad range of disciplines that provide for more flexible career growth.

I predict that the pursuit of "glamorous" corporate jobs such as investment banking will shift towards hunting positions at startups out of school. However, startups usually look for individuals who already have entrepreneurial experience - making it difficult for someone who hasn't tried starting a company while in school. On the other hand, internships provide a perfect opportunity to prove skills, ambition, and "self starting" characteristics. Eitherway, if you land a startup internship, I guarantee you that you'll have invaluable experience to begin developing a unique set of skills.

If you're a student with a PHP/Web development background or interested in marketing (description not listed here, but get in contact with me if you're interested), then I invite you to check out the following internship opportunity at Acquia:

Job Description: LAMP Developer

As member of our engineering team, you will help design, develop and debug and test features and solutions for the open-source Drupal project, a PHP-based content management system (see drupal.org) as well as one or more of Acquia's Drupal projects including http://acquia.com, the Acquia Network, Acquia Fields (Drupal Hosting) and Acquia Gardens (Drupal as a Service).   You will participate as a full-team member in our agile (scrum-based) development process and work with our Jira-based work tracking system, SVN source control and automated testing tools (selenium). 

Educational Requirements

Pursuing a BS in Computer Science

Job Requirements:

Requirements

• Proficient in a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) based architecture
• Proficient in XHTML, CSS, SQL, XML
• Strong PHP programming skills
• Understanding of fundamental Internet Protocols (DNS, HTTP, SSH, SMTP, FTP)
• Excellent analytical and debugging skills
• Experience with source code management systems such as CVS or SVN
• Cross-browser/platform experience
• Excellent verbal and written English communication skills

Pluses

• Contributing to open-source projects
• Java, JavaScript or JQuery
• Object-oriented design and programming
• Software qualty assurance
• Experience extending content management and blogging systems such as Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress etc.

Shoot me an email and I can forward your contact information to Human Resources. If you're looking to post an internship for your startup, then you should get in touch with me as well. My goal is provide resources, tips, and news pertinent for first time entrepreneurs or anyone interested in startups.

Unsure to whether you want to join a startup? Here are 3 questions to ask before joining a startup out of school.

On May 5th, I'll be hosting the first meeting for the Boston chapter of Ultra Light Startups, a group of entrepreneurs and like-mind individuals who meet monthly to discuss trends, ideas, and models that help startups launch quicker and cheaper. The event will bring together a panel consisting of founders who've started some of today's most disruptive crowdsourced startups, an open source expert, and a venture capitalist to discuss crowdsourcing business.

This meetup is in collaboration with the BU Executive MBA progra. Here is some event info:

Where: Boston University
Address: TBD
When: May 5th, 2009
Time: 6:30PM - 9:00PM

Companies:

Local Motors is working on a unique manufacturing system that will design, manufacture, and bring to market innovative, safer, more functional, lightweight, efficient cars through a revolutionary, local assembly and retail experience. They're able to get to a stage in production that usually costs a company like General Motors hundreds of millions of dollars for under $100k.

uTest crowdsources on demand software, application, and quality assurance testing through an international community of professional software engineers.

Acquia provides commercial support for open source Drupal, a leading web Content Management System.

Venture Capitalist: TBD

Panelists:

Doron Reuveni, Co-Founder of uTest [Crowdsourced Software/Application Testing]

Jay Rogers, Co-Founder of Local Motors [Crowdsourced Car Design]

Jay Batson, Co-Founder of Acquia [Open Source Drupal]

Venture Capitalist: TBD

I interviewed Doron earlier about his thoughts on crowdsourcing and how the model will shape the future of business. We'll be discussing many of these ideas and how crowdsourcing can help startups and businesses save money, operate ultra light operations, get products to market quicker, utilize the wisdom of the crowd, decentralize intelligence, overall benefits of crowdsourced models, and how crowdsourcing continues to be a disruptive business model. Our post on Local Motors shows how crowdsourcing can save millions of dollars in the auto manufacturing industry.

Room is limited, so please use the following link to RSVP.

Registration: http://ultralightstartupscrowdsourcing.eventbrite.com/

North Bridge Venture Partners, one of the investors in Acquia where I work, recently conducted a survey on the future of open source software. The 435 respondents consisted of mostly open source vendors, software developers, consultants, integrators, and private sector companies. An overwhelming 96%, up from 81% in 2008, believe the economic turbulence is good for open source software.

Low acquisition and maintenance costs along with freedom of vendor lock-in remained the primary reasons that people choose open source software opposed to proprietary systems. However, lack of internal technical skills and unfamiliarity with open source technologies are the primary barriers to adoption.

Interestingly, people believe that about around 70% of software purchases will be open source 5 years from now. This response remained roughly the same in 2007 and 2008 with a slight increase to 79% in 2009.

Here's a slideshow from the survey:

Acquia is commercializing open source Drupal, a content management system that enables you to quickly build social publishing websites. Currently, we primarily provide support, network services, training, and consulting. However, we have some pretty cool projects in the works. While WordPress makes it incredibly easy to launch a blog, we're in the process of implementing a similar type model, but for social publishing, code named "Acquia Gardens". Here's a brief explanation from Dries' blog:

Many individuals and organizations want a killer web site, but have no idea that Drupal is a great way to build one or to connect with other websites. Even if they did hear about Drupal, few non-technical people succeed in installing and hosting a Drupal site. In much the same way that Wordpress.com and Ning make it easy for people to start blogging or set up a social network, Acquia Gardens will provide an on-ramp for people to experience the awesome power of a Drupal based social publishing website. Our goal is to make the base service free of charge, and to introduce Drupal to millions of new users. Having a free entry point is essential to promoting viral adoption via word of mouth, which will help dramatically increase awareness of what Drupal has to offer. To make the services sustainable, we will charge for premium services and features.

Dries started Drupal while attending University of Antwerp in 2000. It grew out of a project that started as a small news site with a built in web board. He was inspired by his desire to discuss and share simple things with his friends on the web, so he started the site to enable him and his friends to share notes and messages, such as notifying each other of where they were going to dinner. It's since grown into sophisticated platform that is used by brands such as Sony, Nike, Pfizer, and Popular Science, as well as the government who uses it for recovery.gov. You can read more about Drupal's history here.

How do you sell a new product, for a new company, in one of the worst recessions?

Conventional business advice would tell you to hone in on your pitch and pitch to as many people as possible. Sales is a number game after all, isn't it?

I would say otherwise. For the past couple of months, I've had to learn how to sell a new product for Acquia, a startup commercializing open source Drupal. (It's been my first job since I graduated from Boston College a couple months earlier.) Although, we just launched about 3 months ago, we've been able to meet and exceed all of our goals. It's been extremely difficult not only because of my newness to sales, but because its a new product for a new company - during a time when people are scaling back budgets and finding every excuse to preserve their money.

Producing revenue is crucial for the success of a startup. Not only for obvious reasons, but because revenue serves as a proof of concept that your company will succeed. Or, at least proves that you have a product that people are willing to pay for. Generating sales early on is important because it'll inevitably attract more investors, talent, and resources for your startup to utilize while growing.

However, building sales for a startup is more than just a numbers game. Success lies heavily on a willingness to adapt, ability to iterate on your value proposition and product, deploy creativity, and integrate different resources from you company.

Here are 17 tips that I've learned over the past couple of months that have helped me double my quota and exceed projected sales:Continue Reading...

It's a far cry to consider Microsoft as any sort of major player in the search market. They have straight up struggled to the point where they are paying people to use their Live Search - and people still won't use it. I wonder if they will struggle as much with Oxite, their new open source CMS blogging software that emerged out of Alpha today and now available to freely download. It also raises a question to whether Microsoft will begin taking a more open source approach and slowly stray from their propreitary model. I doubt they will ever open up their office suite of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. However, they may eventually be forced down the road with free offerings such as Zoho and Google docs, which continues to improve.

Their pitch isn't too compelling: Oxite provides you with a strong foundation you can build upon - pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting (with optional moderation), gravatar support, RSS feeds at any page level, support for MetaWebLog API (think Windows Live Writer integration made easy), web admin panel, support for Open Search format allowing users to search your site using their browser's search box, and more - so, you can spend time on designing a great experience. Continue Reading...

Are you looking for free advertising space, press coverage, or introductions to venture capitalists for potential investment? If so, check out our elevator video pitch competition on Vator.tv, a social network and media site for start-ups, entrepreneurs, and investors. We've partnered with the funded start-up becasue we share the same goals; to discover great companies and technologies, introduce them to the world, and analyze their models, stories, and impact they may have on you and I.

Are you able to pitch your company in under a minute, or even thirty seconds? Well, you should be able to do it in one sentence. The easiest way to do this is to compare your model to another one (or two if it is a combination) that people already know and understand. Just twist the story to make it specific to your company. You'll likely need a couple different versions if an individual isn't familiar with the other companies. Either way, its important to be able to pitch your start-up in different contexts. The simple reason for this is that people come to understand concepts, models, ideas, or value propositions by examining them from different angles or view points.Continue Reading...

Here's a great survey (see attachment below) of entrepreneurship that can satisfy a veteran or a noob. The report focuses primarily on the implications of poor economic conditions on entrepreneurial activity.

For those who enjoy a good debate, post your thoughts here.

Drupal has won Best Overall Open Source CMS Award for the second year in a row as well as Best PHP Open Source CMS by Packt Publishing. After working at Acquia for the past few months and learning about the Drupal phenonemon, it comes as no surprise. I only wish I knew about Drupal earlier so I wouldn't have wasted time toying with WordPress. WP is a nice platform, and you can build great blogs on the software, but Drupal is able to take content management to the next level. Drupal gives you the ability to build a social network on top of your blog, add group functionality, profiles, blog networks, or build sophisticated social publishing sites.

Although, open source Drupal has tremendous benefits, there has been no central source for expertise, technical support, and network services to help you manage your website. Acquia bridges the gap between proprietary and open source models. Of course, you can scan your valuable time searching the web for your answers, but why do that when you have some of the world's top Drupal expertise at your finger tips?Continue Reading...