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Filtrbox is looking for a few hotshot developers!

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

Over at Filtrbox, we are growing and looking for a few great developers to join the team. After a successful public launch we are now expanding the product and growing a bit. The company’s got a great core team and a “work hard, play hard” culture that is lots of fun and rewarding.

The jobs page has more info but here are the basics:

Java + LAMP Developer
Basic Requirements:

Solid experience with Java and LAMP
Experience developing and operating a web application
Working knowledge of Information Retreival and/or NLP (a plus)
Sys admin/dba skils (a plus)

You Are:

Energetic, motivated and creative
You learn new skills fast and apply them immediately to get things done
Always wanted to work for a start-up, or be part of a nimble, fast-moving team

Flash/Flex/RIA Developer
Basic Requirements:

Working knowledge of Adobe Flash, Flex and/or AIR
Solid experience creating web 2.0 User Interfaces
ActionScript 2 or 3 (must be recent)
Flash 8 or 9 (must be recent)
RoR/PHP/Java/CSS/javascript skills a plus

You Are:

Energetic, motivated and creative
You learn new skills fast and apply them immediately to get things done
Always wanted to work for a start-up, or be part of a nimble, fast-moving team

You can apply directly by emailing jobs (at) filtrbox.com

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409a/FAS157 reporting requirements finally hit home

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Brad Feld and Ask the VC have been talking about the drag that excessive 409a reporting places on VCs and their early stage companies, but it didn’t really mean much to me until the requirements ended up on my desk at Filtrbox. The proverbial ink on the check is barely dry, and we already have to produce quarterly reports to help our investors do a reasonable job of reporting their portfolio’s fair market value.The burden on a venture backed startup can be significant if all of the required docs are not ready to go. The checklist of items required is straightforward and it really shouldn’t be a big deal if the company is organized, but of course this is rarely the case.

Getting everything updated and pulled together will probably take a few hours for a company like Filtrbox, but for bigger companies it could take days. While for us this is an annoyance and distraction during a very busy time, its a good kick in the pants to get everything on the finance and operations front polished. I can only imagine the number of hours it takes the venture firms each quarter to aggregate the data from the portfolio companies. Someone should add up the total hours, and the value of those hours, that a major firm and their companies collectively spend on this stuff. This is the bigger issue…There ought to be a semi-intelligent qualification system for who needs to report, and at what level of detail. After looking at the requirements and the data being collected, this seems to be another case (SOX anyone?) where some stiff requirements are blanketed across and industry and might be doing more harm than good.

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Mozy sells for $76 million to EMC

Monday, September 24th, 2007

Mozy, the online backup service I blogged about recently just sold to EMC for $76 million. That’s a 50x return for the investors. Wow…

First of all congrats to Drew Major, who I used to work with at Novell, Wasatch, and the other investors because this is a truly amazing exit given they only raised $1.5 million. Clearly my experience with the service wasn’t consistent with the majority of people out there or I just have too big of a dataset for online backup.

It’s an interesting move on EMC’s part given they purchased Retrospect back in 2004 for around 50 million. This brings their spend on SMB/consumer backup solutions to over $100 million in the last few years. Will EMC be able to grow revenue in the downstream markets (opposed to the hardcore enterprise storage and software space)? Mozy should act as a good feeder for upstream EMC sales on the business side.

Selfishly, I hope this means Mozy will have more resources and engineering horsepower to address the issues with the service that prevent me from trusting it completely.

Status update of my Mozy usage:

Still using it
Re-Installed it twice
Have had the local database of backed up files get corrupted two or three times
Get frequent connection errors during an backup
Get poor upload speeds that don’t seem to be due to my network

So the bottom line is that despite the problems I don’t feel like trying another service just yet, and eventually I am able to get my entire dataset uploaded (took about a week of wrangling). At $5/month to back up 45 GB of data, it’s a pretty good deal so I guess my pain threshold is high.

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mozy online backup, not so rosy…

Tuesday, July 24th, 2007

So the NVA blog isn’t necessarily for product reviews but after my experience with Mozy the last two weeks I needed somewhere good to post this. I started using Mozy for online backups a few weeks ago, and low and behold my laptop hard drive bit the dust last Tuesday. In a bad way. The good news is I’m now back up and running with a new hard drive and I eventually did get all of my data back from Mozy. The bad news is that it was very painful and frustrating and their system doesn’t quite work as assumed.

The way it works is that they break up your fileset into small chunks (encrypted), and spread it out over multiple servers for security. While this sounds like a smart architecture, it took them over 12 hours to rebuild a 23 gb fileset. Waiting 12 hours for an email that says “you can now download your data” while you are in panic stations because you think you just lost everything isn’t reassuring.
I’m on a 10+mbps broadband connection and regularly get 2-3mbps download speeds. The best I got from Mozy while trying to download said archive was a peak of 700kbps and an average of around 300. This means it took an entire day to download the restore archive, which still failed due to the next issue.
Their system is flawed in that it removed the restore archive from it’s location the instant it thinks the file transfer is complete. I was using a download manager even, to ensure if the transfer got interrupted I could resume, but at 99% downloaded Mozy thought the transfer was complete but my download manager did not. They deleted the file on the server and I ended up with an incomplete archive that would not mount. This means I was sitting with 22 GB of a 23 GB archive, and had to start over! As in request the restore archive again and wait another 12 hours to try to download it, not sure if I’d have the same problem at the end of the process. At this point I was w/o my data for about 2 days and starting to really lose it.

Eventually I figured out a few things that may be helpful…

Don’t request your entire dataset in a restore request. When I broke it up into much smaller chunks it took less time to generate the restore archive and downloading actually worked.
Mozy stores file and folder level permissions in addition to the file itself. This is good in general but creates problems when you have to do a clean install of an OS and the UID/GID are not the same. I had to manually reset permissions on most everything I downloaded to get it to work.
Their system is best suited as a file/folder level safety net. It’s easy to restore specific files/folders via their desktop client, and this doesn’t have to request a restore archive to be built on the server. Perhaps obsolete to Mac users once Time Machine comes out, but given their price it’s still worth using.
They say restore files are available for a week to download. This is only true IF YOU HAVE NOT DOWNLOADED the file yet. They delete the archive as soon as they think you have a copy.
As it turns out, if you have a big dataset, requesting a DVD to be Fedex’d to you might be the most painless way to get your data back, but it’s an additional cost.

So in the end, the system does work. I got my data back and was able to use it. I’ll keep using Mozy as a safety net because it works nicely in the background and automatically saves diffs of files I create or modify. But I’ll also begin doing weekly drive-level disk images and save them on an external drive in case a “bare metal restore” is needed. If your system gets stolen, dropped in the lake, etc, using Mozy to get everything back in a jiffy is not the way to go.

Update 8.7.07 - Since posting this I have been contacted by some folks at Mozy who took my complaint seriously and mentioned they were working on improving the restore process of the service. Also, I came accross this article on CNET from Michael Horowitz. He’s not a fan of the service, and highlights things he doesn’t like about it. Some are personal opinion, and some seem to be service limitations all users should be aware of.

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The NVA Blog

Archive for the 'random' Category

Filtrbox is looking for a few hotshot developers!

409a/FAS157 reporting requirements finally hit home

More blog posts, please…

Mozy sells for $76 million to EMC

mozy online backup, not so rosy…

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