Successful Entrepreneurship
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As developers we work with various clients to build the technology for their business. Sometimes we even get to work on own business ideas. While we may not have the Sillicon Valley start up lifestyle we will see businesses come and go. We’ll see ideas within business come and go. We may even get to be a part of that process. We’ve brought David Hirschfeld on to talk with us about his experience in the industry. He’s going to share the insights he’s gained about what makes a successful entrepreneur, or intrepreneur, and how that can be you, your clients, or the person you work for.
David Hirschfeld’s software career spans 33 years with expertise in executive management, business management, software development and strategy, workflow automation, technical architecture, and user experience engineering. In the late 80’s through early 90’s, David provided business development and technology consulting for both commercial and government sector business related to IBM datacenter automation with Computer Associates and Texas Instruments, as well as consulting engagements on projects for several fortune 200 companies. In the early 90’s, David founded and operated VSS, an inventory management and route logistics software company. Over the next 8 years, the company grew its customer base to over 800 companies in 22 countries until it was ultimately acquired in 2000 by a publicly held Canadian logistics firm, where he remained for 2 years as VP of Product Strategy.
In 2006, David founded Tekyz, Inc., a software design & development firm focused on user experience visualization, responsive web and mobile app development, as well as workflow automation. He has helped design, plan, manage and implement projects for a broad range of startups existing businesses across many business sectors including e-commerce, sales lead management, medical systems, internet auctions, real estate, logistics and inventory management, social networking, mobile gaming platforms, law enforcement, accounting & finance, streaming technology, and many others. David is also the Chief Technology Officer and a managing board member of Anzu (www.anzumedical.com), originally a Tekyz customer. Anzu has quickly become the leader as a surveillance monitoring platform of implantable products for the aesthetic surgery ecosystem by combining IOT, medical data aggregation, business intelligence, and workflow automation.
As developers our job involves making dreams come true through technology. Sometimes those are our dreams and sometimes those are the dreams of others. These insights are from a man with experience making those dreams come true.
Book Club
The Elements of Computing Systems
The second half of the book focusses on the software hierarchy. It starts with a chapter on assembler. Throughout chapter 6 you will build an assembler that generates binary code to run on the hardware built in the first half of the book. This is really cool because now you are getting to control the things you’ve built. Chapters 7 and 8 talk about building a compiler so you can create high level code that will compile down and be translated by the assembler you built in chapter 6. It focuses on the idea of running the intermediate code on a virtual machine, hence the titles of the chapters. Next week we’ll conclude the overview of The Elements of Computing Systems.
Tricks of the Trade
Will didn’t write anything.
Editor’s Notes:
We experienced some audio difficulties when recording this episode. Because we had to use our backups the audio quality is not the best.
Tricks of the Trade:
When you are developing software, if you can tie a problem that you have back to the financials that created the problem and work backward to fix the financials first, a lot of the times you can get rid of the problem. A lot of developers miss this, since they take the approach of “how do I code around this”, whereas a lot of times what you want to do is ask yourself: “What would happen if I pulled some levers to get more money into the company to get more staff, better technology or more training to solve the problem?” You can solve a lot of problems by looking at the financials first, instead of looking at the code first.