Life on earth relies on migrations, the cycle of feeding, reproduction, and death. I have been privileged to witness this in the wild: during summers, I travel to Bristol Bay, Alaska, for the Chinook (King), Sockeye (Red), and Coho (Silver) salmon migrating from the ocean back to the local rivers. Standing at the Nushagak and Togiak banks, I probably watched a million salmon swim upstream to spawn over the past decade.
Animal migrations in large numbers depend on safety, even the shared knowledge that the herd or school provides. Humans have migrations, too, whether local movements to schools, entertainment, work…
In tech, we undergo tectonic shifts at frequent intervals. At each stage, there are large groups of late arrivals, even naysayers, death-gripping the status quo. Market leaders — and careers — are, in juxtaposition, built on identifying and building on the shifts, ignoring the skeptics, and moving with passion and focus. Effectively, buying a one-way ticket to the market upheaval. For the past few decades, they included:
Each transition creates enormous architecture and financial shifts: it mints new winners and losers. This is an important point. While legacy technologies last for decades for good reasons — there are still mainframes…
BY ALAN COHEN 11.19.20
Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.
- Wendell Berry
Sometimes the world’s great innovations are right in front of us, right under our nose or the ground upon which we tread. When DCVC introduced me to Pivot Bio founder and CEO Karsten Temme a few years ago (even before I joined the firm), he shared the company’s vision for more efficiently feeding the world and being more climate neutral. Karsten is a person with a farmer’s heart (a steward of the land) and a scientist’s brain. …
Like many people sheltering-in-place during the coronavirus pandemic, I absorbed The Last Dance docuseries about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls chasing their 6th and final NBA championship. The wickedly incisive series — peppered with telling raw, behind-the-scenes footage of MJ and crew — reflected a seemingly bygone era in a traditionally competitive sport, one where an alpha imposed its will on the pack. In Jordan’s world, winning was everything: more than the love of the sport (or was it love of the sport?). Most players were not friends. Teammates were the most important relationships and winning was the binding…
On this Father’s Day, I remember one of the last serious conversations I had with my father before I lost him to brain cancer, glioblastoma to be precise. The cancer is an aggressive, certain death sentence for the patient and an extended symposium on mortality for family and friends. I was in the fourth year of my fourth startup, an extremely successful cybersecurity company. …
Is the information technology party over? Reading daily about the industry’s general malaise — the pulled IPOs, the bad executive behavior, etc. — you might feel like examining your mutual funds or calling your brokers to rebalance your portfolio.
While some commentators act like the party just got started, traditional IT is in fact more of a Boomer and less of a Millennial. Fifty-five years ago, IBM introduced the System 360, a commercially successful general-purpose mainframe that launched the juggernaut of information technology (IT) economy. Since then, tens of trillions (in today’s) dollars have been invested in tech. In 2019…
Some Brief Thoughts on GTM, Positioning, Start-Ups, and Marketing
Over the past 10 years, I have had a chance to publish some of my thoughts on startups and marketing. Here is a brief selection of my favorites.
GTM strategies
https://pando.com/2012/12/18/the-wrong-argument-enterprise-v-consumer-startups/
Positioning Companies in a Tech Shifts
https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/14/artificial-intelligence-can-contribute-to-a-safer-world/
Metaphors for big shifts/industry change
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/opinion/is-google-god.html
https://www.vox.com/2014/1/24/11622700/downton-valley-computing-enters-the-third-era
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/opinion/sunday/friedman-collaborate-vs-collaborate.html
https://thenewstack.io/new-stack-not-stack/
Start-ups
https://pando.com/2013/02/18/understanding-your-creation-myth/
https://www.vox.com/2014/11/13/11632818/more-maslows-hierarchy-less-maslows-hammer
https://gigaom.com/2013/11/30/when-building-a-company-its-the-destination-not-the-journey/
https://venturebeat.com/2017/03/26/7-criteria-for-choosing-a-startup-advisor/
CMO’s Journey
https://www.idgconnect.com/idgconnect/interviews/1006373/cmo-files-alan-cohen-illumio
https://www.idg.com/blog/interview-alan-cohen-illumio/
https://readwrite.com/2013/04/10/the-innovative-power-of-fiction-for-entrepreneurs/
Bonus Feature Blogging in a Large Company (Cisco)
These are about pages of blogs I wrote as the VP of Mobility and the VP Enterprise
In a Disaster, The First Responder May Be You
Alan Cohen | June 27, 2011 at 6:30 pm PST
3,322 3
On March 11, when Japan suffered a one-two punch — first from an 9.0 earthquake and then a devastating tsunami — more than 1,200 tweets per minute were sent from Tokyo, according to Mashable. …
Every 17 years, the Cicadas come out from hibernation, a polyvalent symbol reminding us of the powerful forces of nature taking flight in a spirit of renewal. In 2002, Mist founders and leaders Bob Friday, Brett Galloway, Jeff Aaron, Matt Barletta and Tom Wilburn (to name a few) and I were creating Airespace, the then leading centralized WLAN company built around a “controller” architecture. The product theory was that networks needed a device (a box) to centralize Wi-Fi operations to achieve scale and security versus managing access points one at a time (autonomously). With a great team and a technology…
I clearly remember meeting Matt Ocko and Zack Bogue over 6 years ago when I was joining Illumio. Supporters of the company from its founding, they were different: at the time, DCVC [KH1] was less focused on the raging IT infrastructure wars — as the enterprise re-platformed from client-server to cloud architectures — and more catalyzed around how machine learning and deep tech impacted every industry. …
Alan Cohen
Partner at DCVC (Data Collective)
