OpenNMS Group

Happy Money

Posted on by tarus

Happy Money

As someone who has dedicated most of his professional life to open source software, it may seem strange that I think about money a lot. With respect to the company, the decisions I make not only impact myself but all of our employees, and personally money provides a certain amount of comfort and security.

Awhile back I was reading on Dan Ariely’s blog about a new book called Happy Money. I bought it on impulse (which I found ironic) but it took me a little while to get around to reading it.

It’s my kind of non-fiction book, meaning that about a quarter of it is references for the copious footnotes. If you are planning to change my mind about something, it helps to be able to back it up. I am still blasted for my review on Amazon about Life, Inc. which made sweeping and sometimes nonsensical generalizations and the author just expected us to take his word for it (or more likely, he just wanted to make a buck by telling people what they wanted to hear).

The authors of Happy Money, Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, start off with the premise that there are a lot of books out there that tell you how to make money, but few that tell you how to become happier with the money you have. Their book details numerous studies undertaken by them and others, and they found five main things one can do with money that can have a large impact on one’s happiness.

The first thing was to buy experiences versus things. The studies they cite show that people get a lot more happiness out of, say, a trip to an exotic locale than in buying something like a fancy car. While owners of expensive cars reports a higher level of happiness when thinking about the car itself, when thinking about the last trips they took most car owners report about the same level of happiness no matter what type of car was used. So if you are driving to the store in the rain behind a dump truck because you are out of milk, it doesn’t matter if you are in a BMW or a Kia.

One example given in this chapter are the Tough Mudder races. These events are hardcore obstacle courses designed by British special forces. People who complete the course report a very high level of personal satisfaction, and it is in part because these events require teamwork and thus the experience fosters a sense of connectedness with others. While buying a new TV is for the most part a solo experience, working with others to get over a 12 foot wall requires teamwork. There is a bond created among finishers that can’t be purchased.

I occasionally play the lottery. I never win, but I do it for the daydreams I can have while I wait to find out that I’ve lost (I file it under “entertainment”). My rule is that I can spend $1 for every $100 million in jackpot. My spouse and I have talked about what we’d do if we ever won big, and the recurring fantasy would be to move to someplace like Positano, Italy, for a year and immerse ourselves in the culture. Then we might move on to Germany, or Argentina or Japan. Our lottery fantasies rarely include a big purchase.

The second thing they talk about is making things treats. They credit the comedian Sarah Silverman for this wisdom. She loves “pot, porn and fart jokes”, but she insists that you have to make it a treat. To truly enjoy something it helps if it isn’t available all the time. To go back to the car analogy above, most car owners report the same level of happiness with their vehicles, but when asked about a time they drove their car just for the fun of driving it, those with more expensive vehicles reported a higher level of happiness even if it didn’t happen as often.

The book talks at length about this issue of how availability results in “diminishing returns”. One example is candy corn, which tends to be easily available only certain times of the year (the Internet makes year round acquisition of almost anything possible year round, but let’s discount that for now). Or, as I just saw on television, the McDonalds McRib sandwich, which comes and goes off the menu, is available again. There is even a McRib Locator website to help people find them.

One example that I experienced talks about how people are more likely to savor something if they learn it won’t last. I lived in Northern California from 1994 to 1995, and when we decided to move back to North Carolina we rushed to visit Monterey, Alcatraz, etc. even though we had months to do so before the moving deadline appeared. When access to something is presumed to be always available, people are less likely to use it.

The third tip presented is the idea of buying time. I never have enough time, but I’m also cheap and tend to do a lot of things myself. One thing we always did on Saturday morning was clean the house. A couple of years ago, when my bride’s career took off, I was talked into hiring a cleaning service that comes in every other week. While they don’t do the job as well as I would, they do give us back our Saturday mornings, and that time is worth much more than the money I spend on the service.

Studies have shown that wealthier people tend to feel like they have less free time. In my lottery fantasy, having lots of money would give me more free time, but this book points out that people, especially those in my position who bill out their time on a hourly basis, seem to have issues doing things that don’t directly result in revenue. Why take a walk along the lake if that time could be spent helping a client?

The solution suggested by the book is to find ways, such as volunteer work, in order to purposely give time away. Giving time away reduced the feelings that time not spent working is wasted time, and thus increases happiness.

Step number four is to “Pay Now, Consume Later”. In the US our culture is geared heavily toward “Get It Now, Pay Later” which both fosters consumption, such as a new TV, and adds a future burden of payment. Not only is the happiness created by the purchase fleeting, as covered earlier, the added onus of having to come up with money to pay for it later greatly decreases the pleasure obtained by getting the thing in the first place.

However, the anticipation of an event can increase its happiness. Prepaying for, say, a beach trip and then thinking about it as the date approaches provides more pleasure than the trip alone. The book refers to the example of a Virgin Galactic flight. A woman and her husband both dreamed of going into space but couldn’t afford it. Unfortunately, the husband died. His wife decided to use the insurance money to pay the US$250,000 for a seat on a Virgin Galactic flight.

While the time spent in space will be measured in minutes, she gets to experience a number of things before the trip that both increase the anticipation and add to her happiness. There are astronaut-only events, trips to view the test flights and the training for the trip itself.

In my own experience I can think of a number of things where the run up to the event was as fun as the event itself.

The final step was called “Invest in Others” that shows that people tend to get a lot of enjoyment out of spending money on others more than just on themselves (the most pleasure came from spending money on others while with them). They even discuss a study where pre-verbal children seemed happiest when giving things to others (have you ever visited a friend with a small child who insists on bringing you things like their toys?).

While the book gave me a lot to think about concerning my own life, I was happy to find that working with OpenNMS tends to hit on all five. Working with OpenNMS users has provided me with a number of amazing experiences around the world. Due to the fact that I’m almost always traveling, revisiting my favorite places is a treat, from macarons in Palo Alto to Schwarzer Hahn beer in Fulda. I do a crappy job of buying time, but as we grow as a company I’m trying to learn to delegate more. Just this morning we got a notification that the drink machine was low on Fresca, and Tina was there to take care of it instead of me. As for “pay now, consume later” I like to think that all the hard work we put into the company will pay off in the future, and it is exciting to see our product grow over time, and finally the whole basis of free software is the idea of sharing and helping others.

Happy Money is a short read if not an overly easy one, and if you find yourself focusing more on getting money than being happy, you should check it out.

Rackspace and San Antonio

Posted on by tarus

I can’t remember if Rackspace was our second or third commercial support customer (Children’s Hospitals was our first, but I can’t remember if NASA was second or third), but I do know that it is doubtful OpenNMS would still be around if it wasn’t for them. They were an early adopter of the platform and their support kept our company going until we could reach the critical mass needed to remain profitable.

Now that we are beginning to think about how we can use utility computing (sorry, “The Cloud”) to better serve our customers, I wanted to visit San Antonio to learn more about OpenStack. I also wanted to work with the team there that’s using OpenNMS to make sure their needs were being met, so my two day trip had a bit of a schizophrenic aspect in that one day I was the customer and the next day I was the vendor.

I started working with Rackspace in April of 2002, when they were about 100 times smaller than they are now. I’ve always admired them, since at their heart they are a services company and I’ve always viewed the OpenNMS Group as a services company. A lot of people think services companies can’t grow, but Rackspace is a shining example of how wrong that is.

My first contact there was with a guy named Eric Evans, who is both a friend and now a coworker. Even though he left Rackspace not that long ago, things are changing so fast that we had trouble finding the new visitor’s entrance. The Rackspace headquarters building is called “The Castle” and it is in a shopping mall that the company bought several years ago. It is amazing to watch how fast it has been built out, and while I hear that New Relic’s headquarters really hark back to the days of the first Internet bubble, The Castle is a contender for “nerdvana” (plus is it full of Level 8 Ingress Enlightenment portals).

We had a little time between my plane landing and our appointment, so Eric took me to a barbecue joint called Smokin’ Joes.

I’ve liked Texas barbecue ever since being introduced to Rudy’s in Boerne all those years ago, and every time I bring up how much I like Rudy’s it embarrasses Eric a little bit, because while good he doesn’t think it represents true Texas barbecue. He was determined to provide an authentic Texas barbecue experience.

He didn’t disappoint.

I knew when we walked up that I would like the place. Every amazing barbecue place where I’ve ever eaten has been something of a dive. The focus should be on the food and not the decor. I opted for a pulled pork plate (those of us purists from North Carolina understand the truth that “barbecue” means “pork”) and it was amazing. If I wasn’t so afraid of gaining back the 50 pounds I lost I would have had seconds.

After lunch we headed over to The Castle. For our meeting we were ushered into the new “experience” center, which is a state of the art meeting space to showcase Rackspace products (and yes, they have cookies). The meeting was lead by John Engates, who is now the CTO, as well as another “original Racker” named Tom Sands who runs the network infrastructure. Tom used to yell at me when OpenNMS reported 1.2 ms latency as his network is almost always sub-millisecond by a large margin. I was also introduced to a number of other people who demonstrated that Rackspace has done a good job in hiring top notch talent, and we had a great discussion of their services and our needs.

Rackspace, along with NASA (which is a bit ironic), created an open source cloud platform called OpenStack. I am not well versed in the subtleties of the Cloud market, but I think Amazon is still the leader with OpenStack companies in second. There is Eucalyptus, which is a fauxpensource play on Amazon’s APIs, and the CloudStack initiative from Apache. I believe VMWare has its own cloud offering and I’m sure there are hundreds more.

What I like about OpenStack is that it plays to the strengths of open source. Don’t like the service you are getting from Rackspace? Move everything over to IBM or HP, or host it yourself. You can use shared resources (the “public” cloud) or build your own on top of dedicated hardware (the “private” cloud) or mixed the two (the “hybrid” cloud).

The storage aspect of OpenStack is called “Swift” and while I don’t believe Eric worked directly on it, according to John his early work on something similar proved its viability to the company and resulted in them dedicating a team to develop it.

After the meeting, John, Tom, Eric and myself went to a place called The Boiler House for dinner. It is in a complex that used to house the Pearl Brewering Company, but is now home to a number of shops and restaurants.

While they had no draft beer, they did have Shiner in bottles and lots of good dishes to sample. While my normal diet is nominally vegan, within seven hours of landing I’d eaten pork, beef, lamb, bison and quail. I had a great time as we spend a couple of hours talking about tech, beer and firearms.

Welcome to Texas.

The next day we met with the monitoring team. While we were waiting I noticed an interesting looking car in the parking lot. It turns out it was a Fisker Karma, which is a plug-in electric sports car.

That meeting went well, and I’ll probably be back in San Antonio before the end of the year. Before heading to the airport Eric took me to a cool little coffee shop called Olmos Perk (which is impossible to get Google Now to recognize as it wants to replace it with “almost”).

This is near the Olmos basin, and in driving there I got to see the Olmos Dam. It is the weirdest damn I’ve ever seen, as there is no water near it – just this huge concrete structure. Eric was telling me that in the 1920s the city flooded, so they hired this Dutch guy to create a plan to keep that from happening.

Now the problem is that this dam is literally in the middle of some prime real estate, so calls keep coming to tear it down and sell the land around it. Luckily for San Antonio, a flood comes around every decade or so that shows how brilliant the Dutch guy was at his job.

It was a fun trip (and it wasn’t even that hot). I look forward to coming back.

Silicon Valley

Posted on by tarus

Ron and I had some meetings scheduled in Silicon Valley last week. It was an interesting trip, so I thought I’d put down a few thoughts.

The trip out was a little painful. Due to storms in Dallas they closed DFW and so our plane got re-routed to Waco. Now the Waco Regional Airport is not the largest in the world (it has two gates) and so they weren’t really set up for handling the few jets that got diverted there, and I’m sure the plan was just to refuel and head back to Dallas when the weather cleared.

Unfortunately, the MD-80 we were on experienced some sort of mechanical issue and it wasn’t getting back to DFW that night. They didn’t announce that publicly (if a delay is caused by weather, the airline isn’t held responsible, but if it is related to maintenance then American would have been responsible for hotels, etc.) and all we were told was that we’d have to take a bus back. I heard about the maintenance issue from the crew, but they wouldn’t give specifics.

We ended up exiting from the rear of the aircraft, something I had never done in years of flying.

It was a little frustrating, specifically because Ron checked a bag. On the plane they told us that he could get his bag if he requested it from the desk, but once we got there we found it wasn’t staffed. By this time we had left the secure area and couldn’t get back to talk with the original person, and later it turns out that the four American Eagle staff decided to hide in the office instead of dealing with questions from our crowd. We were finally told that we couldn’t get his bag and that it would be delivered to San Francisco with our next flight.

I have watched Planes, Trains and Automobiles enough that as soon as we landed in Waco, I called and I booked a room at the DFW Marriott. We managed to get there about 1am, and considering that we were rebooked on a 7am flight we didn’t get much sleep, but at least it wasn’t on the floor of the airport.

Upon arriving at SFO we went to the Admiral’s Club to check on the status of Ron’s bag. They said it had been scanned at DFW and should be on the next plane, which was due to arrive in about three hours time. We decided it was worth it to wait.

It wasn’t.

The bag wasn’t on that flight, the one 40 minutes after it, nor the one 10 minutes after that. American seemed incapable of locating the bag or telling us when it might arrive, and I couldn’t help but think that we could build them a better system using OpenNMS. Heck, the bar wouldn’t be all that high, as pretty much anything would have been better than what they have. That afternoon we gave up and decided to head out and just stop by Target to buy some clothes.

The rest of the trip was much better. We met a friend of Ron’s named Mark for dinner and had a really great conversation about pretty much everything, but with a focus on tech and the business of tech. We then called it a night due to having little sleep the night before.

The next morning while Ron was on the phone with American, who were still having issues locating his luggage, the hotel brought the bag to his room. Resupplied with clothes, we were ready to tackle our now completely booked two days of meetings.

It had been awhile since I was on Sand Hill Road, and it seems that things have changed for the better. Most investors seem eager to at least learn about a company like ours that has both customers and profit, and most of the meetings we took were fun.

One wasn’t. It was the same old tired “If you aren’t in Silicon Valley, you can’t be successful” spiel I used to hear every time I came here. The premise is that if you want tech talent, i.e. a talented Director of Sales, you can only find them in the Valley. This contrasted with another person I talked to this trip who said he was having trouble finding people because no one wanted to go to a Series A startup. With Facebook, Google, Twitter and others hiring, the top guns are either going there for the security and high salaries or are off starting their own companies.

I couldn’t help myself (it happens) and I had to point out that in the case of OpenNMS being focused on open source, there is more talent in RTP than in California. Red Hat’s revenue is over a billion dollars annually, and I would like to see the Valley’s equivalent. With all that talent ‘n such there should be several companies, right?

Didn’t think so.

On the flight back I was seated next to a woman who was a bit of a hired gun in business consulting and she pointed out that quite a few Valley startups take off like wildfire but then quickly plateau. Her theory is that the area is very insular so business plans tend to target companies in that area and they don’t do well outside of it. I think there is a grain of truth in what she said, although there are notable exceptions such as the companies I named above.

The one thing that is hard to recreate is the sheer density of interesting people. Perhaps it was because I’m now traveling with Ron who knows everybody, but I had some great conversations, one after another. I have had conversations of a similar level in Raleigh, but not in a row like that.

But I am willing to experience that via airplane versus living there. Spending over a million dollars for a small house and then having to deal with the traffic, parking and other issues is enough to make me appreciate my current standard of living. Plus, I would have to have a really nice job to afford the Telsa sedan which seems to be the car of choice in the area. At one point in time we were passed by two red ones on the 101 (one with a dealer tag). I did see only one coupe but the sedans were everywhere.

We’re off for meetings in other parts of the country (and world) over the next few weeks, so it will be interesting to compare that to my trip West. I’ll try to post my thoughts so that my three readers can experience the wonder that is business travel from some place that isn’t Waco.

Joe’s Last Day

Posted on by tarus

When Joe, our summer intern, came to interview he wore a suit. This is rarely a bad idea, but we thought it would be funny to all dress up on his first day in the office.

Well, he decided it would be funny to wear a suit on his last day, which was Thursday.

We decided it to return to the same restaurant and take another picture. Of course, he looks sad in the first one and happy in the last one, so I don’t know what that says about our work environment, but we sure enjoyed having him around this summer.

I Lost My Job!

Posted on by tarus

Okay, please forgive the sensationalist title, but it is true: I am no longer the CEO of the OpenNMS Group. That honor belongs to a man named Ron Louks. We have a press release and everything.

When I took over OpenNMS in May of 2002, I had no idea it would become as big as it has, even to the point of outliving the company that started it. I knew my goal for OpenNMS – to make it the de facto network management application platform for everyone – was huge, and the only way to go about it was to heed our mission statement, which is:

Help Customers – Have Fun – Make Money

That, some luck and a lot of sweat equity has seen the OpenNMS Group through nearly nine consecutive profitable years, and we have built a great community as well having the best customers on the planet (in 26 countries, no less). But I knew the day would come where we would need someone with more experience to take the reins to get OpenNMS to that goal, and that someone is Ron.

I’ve known Ron for longer than OpenNMS has been around. He, David and I used to work together, and while the two of us went off to focus on network management, Ron went out in search of huge challenges. He was always focused on the mobile communications industry, and he worked his way up to become the Chief Technical Officer of Sony Ericsson, and then the Chief Strategy Officer at HTC. He managed engineering teams of over one thousand people, and has been responsible for the production of over 200 million mobile devices.

And while he is too modest to point this out, the most successful times in the history of those companies was when Ron worked there.

Ron will be directly responsible for the next phase of OpenNMS. We plan pretty aggressive expansion to better serve our customers, as well as improved Windows support and the introduction of some software as a service products to help our users get the most out of OpenNMS. He is fully on board with my two requirements for the OpenNMS platform: it will never suck and it will always be free.

With Ron’s help we have developed a wonderful business plan that will see some phenomenal growth in the OpenNMS software. Yes, this means the ever talked about but rarely seen, OpenNMS “Nukem Forever” Version 2.0, will become a reality (it is, in fact, a key part of our future). With a focus on a new, state of the art user interface and taking the already impressive scalability of OpenNMS and making it virtually unlimited, OpenNMS 2.0 will position the platform for the coming “Internet of Things”.

But this didn’t happen overnight – Ron has been on our Board since January and we have spent hundreds of hours making sure this is the right thing for us to do. At one point in the process David deferred a decision to me, saying that no matter how long he has worked on OpenNMS, he still considers it “my baby”.

Well, my baby is all grown up and ready for college. OpenNMS, and the OpenNMS Group, has always been much more about the team than me. All I did was shelter and nurture it, and now it is time for me to just take pride in watching the project reach its full potential.

Seriously, any credibility I have in this business is from standing on the shoulders of giants. The only true talent I have is attracting amazing people to work with me, and I plan to put that talent to use as we grow over the next year. While no longer taking the lead on the direction of the company, I have been named the Chairman of the Board, and I have chosen to focus on what I love to do best: help our customers. While we aren’t much on titles, I think mine will read Chief Operations Officer.

But in my heart I will still think of myself as Julie, the Cruise Director, here to make you OpenNMS journey as pleasant as possible.

OpenNMS Gets a Grown Up

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There are lots of exciting things going on here in OpenNMS-land and I want to tell you all about them, but it seems that there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

I am excited enough about our latest hire that I wanted to take the time to share the news. Raeford Wall has joined The OpenNMS Group as our Controller. We are about to enter a high growth phase of our company and our needs have grown beyond my abilities with Quickbooks and that one semestre of accounting I took at Duke.

Note to CJ Skender: Debit left, credit right; dividends are not expenses; depreciation is not cash.

Ray is the real deal. He has an MBA from the renown Kenan-Flagler School of Business at UNC-Chapel Hill, and he has been involved in commercial banking for over 27 years. He’s also no stranger to growing businesses, having been the organizing Executive Officer for Patriot State Bank in 2005 (recently sold to Capstone Bank).

He will be taking over all financial duties, as well as HR, and will use his experience to continue our focus on profitability through customer satisfaction. I am looking forward to both getting a better handle on the health of our business as well as relying on Ray’s experience to make sure we can continue to deliver the best products out there. I call him a “grown up” because he is not a tech geek but a seasoned businessman, and that’s what the company needs right now.

He is also a bargain hunter, and today I used my truck to transport a bunch of office supplies that Ray located from another company in the area. With his help, we should be able to fill all of those chairs we just got, someday soon.

Sign o’ the Times

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I started working in our building on June 3rd, 2003, so we’ve been here for over ten years. Granted, while we have several rooms now, when we started out the three of us share one 10 foot by 15 foot room (currently my office), it is still cool to know that for a decade the OpenNMS goodness has been in this spot.

So I thought it was time we had a sign.

All Dressed Up

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Today was the first work day for our summer intern, Joe.

When he came to interview, he was all dressed up in a suit. I strongly recommend wearing suits to interviews unless told specifically not to. It demonstrates that you own a suit and can put on a tie, and thus we are likely to imply that you are conscientious, chew with your mouth closed, bathe periodically and don’t pass gas in public. These implications may or may not turn out to be true, but it is nice to see someone make the effort.

Since today was his first day, we decided as a joke to come to the office all dressed up.

( Click to embiggen )

The non-smiling, non-tie-wearing guy is Joe. Next to him are Emily and Carolyn, our account managers, Ben, Donald, myself and Matt.

Seth and Jeff, who were remote today, dressed up for the daily scrum call.

MC Frontalot to Perform at Southeast Linuxfest

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Hot on the heels of last year’s amazing Ohio Linuxfest, we at The OpenNMS Group are excited to be able to bring the musical stylings of MC Frontalot to this year’s Southeast Linuxfest to be held 7-9 June in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Front has been confirmed to perform Saturday night, and I want to stress that this will be his only Carolinas appearance on June 8th. So if you are jonesing to see the man who coined the term “nerdcore rap” up close and personal, be sure to save the date and register for the conference. I repeat, there will only be one place to see MC Frontalot on June 8th, and that will be at SELF.

Hope to see you there, and bring some ducats for the merch table so he can buy food.