Paul Kenny is a regular speaker at the Business of Software. He’s an expert on sales, especially high tech sales, and both Red Gate and Fog Creek hire him all the time to train our sales teams and build our sales organization.
Here’s a video of his talk at last year’s conference:
The next Business of Software conference will be in Boston, October 4th-6th.
My friend Noam at Harvard Business School does annual surveys of executive compensation in tech companies. The surveys are a great way to figure out how much to pay that VP of Sales you were thinking of hiring, or whether your equity grant as CTO is fair.
You can buy the studies for $999, or you can participate in the survey and get free access to the results when they’re published.
Area 51 is now in beta
. This is the promised place where the community comes together to invent new Stack Exchange sites.
Benofsky from Hacker News writes:
Seems overly complicated, I have no idea what's going on when I visit Area 51, I guess this is their strategy for turning away uncommitted users.
Also, how are they going to make money?
I’m glad you asked, benofsky! The answer is simple. Volume.
Well, I’m not one to take Internet chat board comments seriously. After all, the Anonymous Nostradamus’s over at Code Project reacted thus when Stack Overflow itself launched:
I think the UI sucks. I can't imagine this site being around in a year.
We all know how stunningly accurate that prediction was:
Benofsky is onto something, though. Area 51 is not for everyone. If you don’t know what it’s for, or why it’s going to work, or you can’t figure it out, it’s not, actually for you.
Neil has posted a video of Don Norman (most famous for his book The Design of Everyday Things) speaking at the Business of Software conference last year in San Francisco.
“Imagine you’re on the first slide of your powerpoint presentation and want to move to the next slide. Your remote control has two buttons. They are unmarked, but one button points up and one button points down.
“Which button do you press?”
It turns out half the people press up, half the people press down, and everybody thinks their choice is obvious. It’s a great talk.
The early bird discount for the Business of Software 2010 (Boston, October 4-6) saves you $400, but it expires this week, so this is the right time to sign up for my favorite conference.
1110 posts over 13 years. Everything I’ve ever published is right here.
There’s a software company in New York City dedicated to doing things the right way and proving that it can be done profitably and successfully.