Private Equity Funcast

Second part of our two-episode series on the Operating Partner role in private equity.   In this second episode Devin and Jim talk about engaging with the portfolio companies and their management teams on projects and initiatives.   At the end of the day there are only three types of projects that we work on; cost cutting/efficiency, revenue enhancements and risk mitigation.

First part of a two-part episode focused on the vaunted "Operating Partner" role in private equity.  In the first part, Devin talks to Jim about his experiences as an operating partner within a private equity group -- dealing with the other partners, working on deal teams, etc.

The last of a four-part series.    Jim talks with Kamela Arya about the most common mistakes that companies make when implementing Salesforce.com.  

The third segment in our four-part series on Salesforce.com for the middle market.  In this episode Jim and Kamela talk about the implementation process.   Which department should be tackled first? Choosing your implementation partner and selecting your project team.  Implementing prototypes and incremental builds, mapping out business processes and migrating data into the new system.

Part two of our implementing Salesforce.com series. This time around we talk with Kamela Arya about which modules to license, how much they cost to license (on an annual basis), and what it costs to implement Salesforce.com in a mid-size organization, with 10 - 20 SFDC users. We even discuss the dreaded data migration problem.

Jim spends an hour with Developertown's Michael Kelly and Aaron Lerch talking about Ruby on Rails -- why Jim hates it and why they love it.

Part one of a three-part series on Salesforce.com.   Jim talks with longtime SFDC collaborator and implementer, Kamela Arya about everything you need to know about customer relationship management software and implementing Salesforce.com in the middle market enterprise

Devin and Jim finally cover the most important thing a PE fund can do -- find deals. They cover how they source deals, the banks and brokers they target. Plus they talk about their lifelong search for the white whale -- the elusive proprietary deal. Do they really exist?  Listen and find out!

A lengthy discussion with Alan Williamson on the "perfect technology stack".   In today's environment do you HAVE to be running on Linux, or is Windows Server just fine for some shops?   C# or Java?  Java or Ruby on Rails?  Should you be getting rid of all of your old perl and PHP code?  Is this the end for relational databases?  AngularJS or jQuery?

Alan and Jim talk about the ins and outs of making applications run faster and scale to handle lots of users.  We compare the two choices for scaling applications: Vertical scaling (adding more resources to existing machines), versus Horizontal scaling (spreading the load across multiple machines).  We also discuss Amazon's AWS and EC2 platforms versus Microsoft Azure.