June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
October 2018
Launched
November 2017
Along with Phil Telio and the team at Embrase, I launched FWD50, a conference on digital government. The name combines our nonpartisan focus—neither left, nor right, but forward—with an invitation to participants to think about what policies they can change in 50 days; what platforms they can build in 50 months; and what society they want in 50 years.
The first event happens in Ottawa’s Aberdeen Pavillion, an old agricultural barn, in an attempt to get participants out of the government-as-usual downtown core. Things went really well.
June 2021
Started working on Stroll, a better way for people to have productive, healthy experiences with people they really know.
February, 2013
Lean Analytics came out. We analyzed the book launch, of course. It did pretty well.
April, 2012
Ben Yoskovitz and I signed an agreement with O’Reilly to write Lean Analytics, part of a line of books that expand on Eric Ries’ book. We stood up a website, and started blogging in creative ways.
April, 2011
BMC acquired Coradiant, and rebranded their management product line using the TrueSight brand. Twelve years is a long time.
February, 2011
Launched Solve For Interesting, which started as a philosophy: Herbert Simon said that information consumes our attention, and that which is scarce is valuable—so I concluded that what captures our attention is what’s interesting, and solving for that, rather than what’s lucrative, safe, or popular, leads to good things. It’s worked out well so far.
Solve for Interesting also became my company.
December, 2010
Building on Complete Web Monitoring, and the work of Year One Labs, I start talking more about how to measure startup progress with things like viral coefficients, reach, churn, long funnel abandonment, cost per engaged visitor, and sentiment. Here’s a deck from Le Web in Paris, in the middle of a mad snowstorm.
September, 2010
Ray Luk, Ben Yoskovitz, Ian Rae and I launch Year One Labs, an early-stage startup incubator designed to apply the lessons of Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup to founding new companies. We put a ton of emphasis on measurement, iteration, experimentation, and de-risking.
August, 2010
O’Reilly announced the Strata conference on big data, with Ed Dumbill and I as conference chairs. The name, which we cooked up in marketing and planning meetings during the preceding year, referred to the strata of earth through which we mine, reinforcing the notion that data is the new oil.
March, 2010
UBM spins the Enterprise Cloud Summit, which I’d chaired for them at Interop, into a new standalone event focused on the new field of cloud computing. We run the first one in Santa Clara, California. The lineup of cloud performance, scaling, and security folks includes some of my favorite humans, including Jeremy Edberg, Hooman Beheshti, Chris Hoff, Shlomo Swidler, and Ian Rae. We spend four years arguing about the definition of clouds.
November, 2009
I launched a new track at Interop, UBM’s big networking conference, called the Enterprise Cloud Summit. It was early days for cloud computing, and we had the tech heads for Amazon, Microsoft, Red Hat and Google in the same room. These were amazing events, well before the veneer of vendor positioning took over. Here’s the opening talk on the state of the cloud.
June, 2009
O’Reilly published Complete Web Monitoring, a book about measuring the Internet. Sean Power and I initially wanted to write about web performance, based on what we’d learned at Coradiant, but half-way through realized this new thing called Social Media probably needed measuring too. Here’s a talk on community analytics, which we insisted on calling communilytics, from Web2Expo in May 2010.
September, 2008
Having run enough events for other people, I decide to run one for my friends, at a loss, in the woods a bit North of Montreal. This becomes Bitnorth, where the only rule is everyone has to give a 10-minute talk about something they nerd out about that isn’t their job. It remains my favourite weekend of the year.
June, 2008
GigaOm launched Structure, its conference on internet infrastructure. Om had suffered a heart attack that sidelined him from chairing the event, so I took the podium—though he soldiered through a couple of superb armchair interviews on stage.
January, 2008
I left my full-time role as Chief Strategy Officer at Coradiant to launch Rednod, a startup accelerator. Mostly equity consulting for startups and drop-in marketing and tech strategy for VC firms. Tagline was “We help companies understand their markets, create great products, and communicate what they do, clearly and convincingly.” The weird name came from red—the color of attention—and nod—the gesture of approval, since attention and approval are the two essential ingredients in marketing.
October, 2007
I started writing for GigaOm. My first post was called Your bad code is killing my planet. Eventually became a staff writer for them for two years. I learned more about technology, writing, and skepticism from its founder, Om Mailk, in that time than at any other in my career.
December, 2005
I launched Bitcurrent, “somewhat current thoughts on networking,” a blog about tech infrastructure, because bits and current make the Internet. Pretty quickly realize it’s not a great name when people start asking me where they can get BitTorrent files of music and movies.
Here’s an early talk on the fundamentals of cloud computing.
January 2004
We launched TrueSight, a standalone appliance version of Outsight, at Networld+Interop. It wins Best of Interop, kicking off a new category of product called Real User Monitoring. Here’s a 2006 writeup from Network Computing in case you care.
September 2001
We turn Networkshop into Coradiant, a managed service provider competing with Sitesmith, LoudCloud, and others. Armed with $20M in Series A funding, we launch OutSmart, managing the firewalls, load balancers, SSL accelerators, and other network infrastructure that sit between web servers and the Internet. We called the management part of this OutSight.
May 2000
Following up on the SSL report, Networkshop tests ten load balancers, which are basically big routers that spray web traffic across a bunch of identical servers. We publish a 256-page study on the load balancing industry, which leads to a lot of consulting and advising on the acquisitions of Arrowpoint, iPivot, and Alteon by Cisco, Intel, and Nortel.
January 2000
Networkshop publishes a cover story in Information Security Magazine about cryptographic acceleration. Nobody knew crypto was going to be a currency back then.
July, 1999
Prentice Hall publishes Managing Bandwidth, a book Eric and I wrote about deploying QoS in enterprise networks. It’s pretty dry, but apparently it was a textbook for a while.
April, 1999
Networkshop publishes a big study on SSL performance that makes headlines because everyone’s worried that secure web pages will slow down the Internet so much it will ruin Christmas. Really.
August 1997
Returned to Canada to launch Networkshop with my lifelong friend Eric Packman, who was working with me at 3Com on stuff like Ethernet. No, really, once people used to work on Ethernet. We had no idea what we were going to do, so Eric spent a bunch of time under desks pulling cables while I wrote technical marketing reports for networking companies.
July 1995
I get a call from my old boss, now running product management for Primary Access Corporation in San Diego. He hires me to to manage the dial-up access systems Sprint was running for AOL dialup. Primary Access gets acquired by 3Com, and I start working on bandwidth management and Quality of Service technology. Back when the Internet was really slow, this was important stuff.
August 1993
I get a job as a product manager at Eicon Technology, a Montreal tech firm that connects PCs to mainframes. My first job is to manage the release of foreign language versions of the software. When I don’t mess that up, they give me the DOS product line, and then the new Windows.
May 1993
Finally graduate from Dalhousie University with a B.Comm. Publish an honours thesis entitled Evolutionary Theory and Product Lifecycle. Along the way, I run the Commerce Society, mostly because it comes with a legal student-operated bar in the middle of campus.
1992
I run marketing and content for the Dalhousie Business Seminar, my first foray into conferences. With the help of my uncle, an ad man for Leo Burnett, I convince Kensinger Jones—a giant of the advertising world who created the Pilsbury Doughboy and Jolly Green Giant—to make the trip to Halifax.
1991
I spend a year as the editor of the Dalhousie Gazette, a university newspaper with a distribution of 15,000 copies. Over many late nights around an old Varityper typesetting machine sticking strips of letters to paper with wax, I learn a lot about journalism, bias, and the editorial process. I also see firsthand how the Mac is changing publishing forever.
1987
After high school I spend my summers running the Senneville Yacht Club’s junior squadron, which mostly involves teaching teenagers to stay hydrated and wear sunscreen. It’s an amazing job, and I still don’t get to sail anywhere near as much as I’d like.
1983
One evening I hear Simple Minds’ Theme for Great Cities when Claude Rajotte plays it on CHOM FM’s New Music Foundation. There isn’t much electronic music in suburban Canada, so I look for it everywhere—in the demoscene, trackers, video games, and soundtracks. If you think this isn’t worth including in a timeline you haven’t met me.
1982
I launch my first online community, a BBS on an Apple //e with a 300 baud Hayes modem. After experimenting with a bunch of different ways to stop people complaining about one another by putting them into their own groups, I realize that software platforms are petri dishes for human behaviour. I should have called it Facebook.
1981
Shortly after returning to Canada, my father dies. I’m eleven, and my sister is two. Our incredible mother raises us from that point, even as she finds a new career and goes back to school to help teach education at McGill.
1978
My sister Rebecca is born. A few weeks later, she and my mom get on a plan, because we’re moving to Florida so my father can complete his MD (at 35!), adding to his existing M.Sc, Ph.D, and D.Sc. After a semester in Florida’s not-so-great school system, I’m summarily dispatched to Taunton, England for school.
June, 1974
The Croll family moves to Canada, where my father heads up McGill’s Institute of Parasitology.
November 1969
Born in Windlesham, England.