David Cummings on Startups

Author: David Cummings

  • Comparing PHP/symfony and Ruby on Rails

    I’ve had the opportunity to develop SaaS products in both PHP/symfony and Ruby on Rails over the past year. Being very popular development frameworks, there have been numerous discussions comparing the two, along with anything else to make web apps. With first-hand experience, I wanted to offer my thoughts from a technical CEO perspective. Here are the pros of both frameworks:

    PHP/symfony

    • PHP language – PHP is a mix of a variety of languages like C, C++, and Perl making it is easy to pick up for classically trained programmers and newbies alike
    • Developer availability – PHP, an all purpose and wildly popular web programming language, makes it easy to find experienced developers
    • Deployment – symfony apps are very easy to deploy without bringing the web app down using rsync, assuming your script caching isn’t checking file timestamps every request (which isn’t the fastest)
    • MVC separation – symfony’s approach to the Model-View-Controller is very intuitive and logical being based on OOP and folder structures

    Ruby on Rails

    • Ruby language – expressive and readable language that has amazing flexibility to do things like modify a class at run-time
    • ActiveRecord – extremely elegant Object Relational Mapping that requires very little code to layout table relationships and enforce constraints
    • Lines of code – yes, it’s true, you can develop a sophisticated web app in RoR with fewer lines of code that you would expect
    • Plugins & gems – RoR’s plugins, as well as Ruby gems, provide a wealth of modular functionality

    I’m a big fan of both platforms — you can’t go wrong with either.

  • More Patrick Lencioni – Three Signs of a Miserable Job

    So, I’m still on the Patrick Lencioni kick reading as many of his books as I can. His most recent one, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, does a great job articulating the human-side of successful managers. The three signs of a measurable job:

    • Immeasurable – if nothing is measured, then nothing can be improved
    • Irrelevant – it is critical to know who the work affects
    • Anonymity – knowing and caring about personal life is important

    I recommend it for any manager.

  • 3 Tips for Building a Professional Sales Organization

    Building a professional sales organization is one of the most important things an entrepreneur must do. Unfortunately, for me anyways, it is more difficult to build a sales organization than it is to build a product. Here are some tips I’ve learned over the years:

    1. Sales-ready lead – write down the definition of a sales-ready lead and make sure everyone is on the same page. If a lead is passed to sales and it isn’t sales-ready, it should be immediately returned back to marketing for automated nurturing.
    2. CRM process – there are many affordable CRMs out there from companies like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM with all the bells and whistles you need. The important thing is documenting what is expected of sales reps and sales manager and defining usage standards. It is very difficult for a company to plan as well as manage growth if the CRM is not truly adopted by the sales organization.
    3. BANT consistency – a consistent definition of Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline is critical for creating opportunities in the sales pipeline. Too often, different interpretations of these characteristics specific to an individual organization cause serious problems.

    Embracing these three tips will result in a more successful sales organization.

  • Upcoming Talk – Bootstrapping an Inc. 500 Company

    I have the honor and privilege to be the next guest speaker for theTAG/ATDC Entrepreneurs series at Georgia Tech this Thursday, February 7th in Midtown Atlanta. Please sign-up and attend.

  • VC Dukies Blogging Away

    Two guys I knew from Duke have popular VC blogs online:

    Duke isn’t normally thought of as a very entrepreneurial school but has lots of sharp people. Congrats to David and Mark for making their voices heard.

  • Thoughts on Patrick Lencioni’s “The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive”

    I just finished reading “The Four Obsession of an Extraordinary Executive” by Patrick Lencioni and must say that I really enjoyed it, as I have with all his books. Without further adieu, here are the four obsessions:

    1. Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
    2. Create organizational clarity
    3. Over-communicate organizational clarity
    4. Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems

    At Hannon Hill, we had a leadership meeting for seven hours straight on a single day last month to create our organization clarity document. It isn’t a document of what we want to be, but rather a document that articulates what we already are, so that we can hold ourselves accountable, and provide a clear position of where we stand as a company. I would highly recommend it for any leadership team.

  • Promoting the Atlanta Technology Community

    A group of Atlanta technology entrepreneurs that I’m a part of just recently launched a new blog to promote our community:BigThinkr.com. Take a look at my first post:
    Atlanta is the Best Place for My Startup.

  • Inaugural Blog Post

    It’s that time of year to be implementing New Year’s Resolutions, and that’s exactly what I’m doing. This blog is meant to be an exploration of business ideas, commentary on entrepreneurship, and musings on technology. I’m passionate about the aforementioned topics and view this blog as a great way to solidify my thoughts and share them with an audience of one: myself.The blog also serves as an archive of topics and links that I care about. Too often I find myself looking for previously consumed information and thought processes without a map. Welcome to my map.