I met with Yatin Mundkur today, a GP at Telesoft VC, who clued me in on what I am really getting for my MBA dollars. You guessed it, yes: A cheap/free membership to the Stanford Golf Course!
I had heard this before, but sometimes you need to hear things a few times to really get them. I better work on my game.

All kidding aside, Yatin is a great guy. We talked about systems management software and I am a firm believer that there is a lot of money to be made bringing the maturity of management tools seen on other platforms to Linux. Problem is, many of the smaller companies out there have an interesting feature, maybe an interesting product, but that is it. They have a hard time really scaling sales. A very interesting play would be to do a rollup of five or six or ten small management companies/products into one larger entity and turn that into a real systems management powerhouse on Linux. If you see someone doing this, just remember, you saw it here first! If you're interested in doing it, drop me a line; I'd love to work with you and I'm sure Yatin would too.

feinleib AT stanford.edu