How are companies spying on each other these days? One of the surprising ways I’ve heard about recently is through the webcam in boardrooms.

That’s right, apparently it’s easy to hack into some companies’ video conference systems, because they lie outside typical security measures. Companies sometimes set up video conferences so they can be accessed directly on the Internet—leaving the door open for eavesdroppers to listen in on meetings, or even remotely monitor a conference room via the camera.

One local software company is helping organizations guard against this threat—and many others. Boston-based Rapid7 is one of the leaders in the growing cluster of IT security companies around town. Rapid7’s approach is complementary to firms like NitroSecurity (recently acquired by Intel/McAfee) and Q1 Labs (bought by IBM), which help organizations guard against security threats in their computer networks and systems.

What Rapid7 does is help organizations find security flaws throughout their IT infrastructure, and then test whether they’ve been corrected. To fuel its growth, the company raised a $50 million Series C round from Technology Crossover Ventures in November—one of the largest tech venture rounds in the Boston area lately. (Rapid7 has raised $59 million to date.)

“There’s a lot of cyber-espionage going on in business,” says Mike Tuchen, Rapid7’s CEO (see photo, left). The activity ranges from stealing sales plans, financial information, and intellectual property, to the aforementioned boardroom eavesdropping, he says. And, of course, it’s not just companies spying on each other; it’s governments and nation states as well, all trying to get their hands on everything from Citibank credit card numbers to the special sauce in Apple’s iPad design.

What’s a CEO to do? If you’re Mike Tuchen, you take a promising company and try to make it better. Tuchen joined Rapid7 as chief executive in 2008. (The company has been around since 2000.) Previously he worked at Microsoft as a group program manager and general manager of SQL server marketing. An engineer by training, he also worked at Sun Microsystems and co-founded Paramark, a dot-com-era online advertising startup.

When he arrived at Rapid7, brought in by Bain Capital Ventures (the firm’s original VC investor), Tuchen saw a company that had “a great engineering and sales team” but not much else. He says he didn’t have to tear up the company, just bring in some key additions: marketing, channel partners, new processes, and a broader product roadmap, including a more international market focus.

So far the effort seems to be paying off. The company has grown to about 240 employees (about half in Boston), and Tuchen says revenues … Next Page »

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It’s a question as old as human nature. You’ve heard the stories, you know all the famous examples. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Eisner, the list goes on. All difficult characters with strong personalities—and hugely successful companies.

So, in today’s ultra-competitive tech and business world, does a CEO have to be an asshole to be successful?

First of all, let’s get our terminology straight. There’s no hard and fast definition of the term, but you know it when you see it. Bullying or backstabbing behavior towards subordinates or partners? Check. Public humiliation of employees? Sure thing. Tantrums, abrasive language, egomania, and other unprofessional displays? Yep. (See a related Xconomy story about bad bosses.) But more subtly, there’s stuff like not returning messages, passing people off to underlings, talking way too much, and saying different things to different people. And more generally, not caring what other people think. Which, of course, can also be a very good thing.

Some months ago, a group of prominent Boston-area tech CEOs discussed this question of “assholicism”—rhymes with Catholicism—at their regular meet-up. Some may have felt they should be tougher leaders or negotiators. Some wanted to pick up management tips and strategies. Others were reflective about their own styles that have served them well. So…is it necessary to be a jerk? Apparently the discussion took all day (and even came up in multiple meetings).

The upshot: Yes, a CEO has to be somewhat of a jerk to succeed. At least, it can be helpful—but there were plenty of caveats.

“It was concluded on some level that this was the case,” says Dave Balter, the CEO of BzzAgent (owned by Tesco’s Dunnhumby), who was part of the group. “But there was a huge amount of debate and not everyone agreed.”

One of those dissenters would be Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, the fast-growing marketing tech firm. Reached by e-mail, Halligan said that being a jerk “used to work” for leaders, but that “it is not acceptable today.”

His main reasons—neither of which I would call deeply fundamental to human psychology or the nature of leadership—are that “smart GenY-ers don’t put up with that stuff,” and that corporate information flow and reputations have become more transparent, so CEOs can’t get away with bad behavior anymore. It “used to be that information was centralized at the asshole,” he writes.

I also pinged Brad Feld, the tech entrepreneur-investor, while he was in town. He was unequivocal that good leaders don’t have to be jerks. “Some of the sweetest people in the world are super successful CEOs,” he says.

So perhaps there are deeper trends at work here. … Next Page »

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There’s a new big tech company in town. In fact, it’s arguably the world’s biggest technology company (by revenue), and it’s joining the ranks of IBM, EMC, Microsoft, Google, and, most recently, Amazon, in expanding to the Boston-Cambridge area.

Palo Alto, CA-based Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) has set up a new office in Cambridge, MA. The operation will serve as a center for technology development, licensing, and outreach to local startups, investors, and researchers. The 37,000-square-foot facility at 150 CambridgePark Drive, near the Alewife subway station, is spread over two floors. The building serves as the new headquarters for Vertica, the Boston-area big-data analytics firm that HP bought last winter. Vertica is in the process of moving its 150 employees from its offices in Billerica to the Cambridge facility this month, and it is currently hiring.

HP already had a sizable presence in Massachusetts, with its campus in Andover. But the new Cambridge office represents an unprecedented investment by HP in outreach and partnerships with local entrepreneurs, venture capital firms, and the academic research community in the Boston area. The company hasn’t specified a firm commitment of future dollars, but just setting up the new space—including a state-of the art lab and all its associated infrastructure—has cost more than $10 million, says Chris Lynch, the chief executive of Vertica. (His HP title is vice president and general manager.)

Lynch, who is leading the new facility, calls it a “big-data center of excellence” for HP. The idea is it will be a technology hub for the firm, a bit like HP Labs in Palo Alto—but different. (Lynch wouldn’t go so far as to call it “HP Labs East.”) The center will be a base from which HP could make deals to license its technology or invest in early-stage startups alongside venture firms, he says. The center also plans to bring in students and early-stage entrepreneurs for hackathons and other tech-themed events. And it will serve as a base for other types of outreach, such as to local K-12 schools, Lynch says.

So why Alewife instead of, say, Kendall Square? “We wanted to bridge the gap between getting access to the younger people living in Cambridge … Next Page »

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There’s been very little change in top-level internet domains (like .com, .org, .us, etc.) for a long time. But a number of years ago I started thinking about the possibility of having a new .data top-level domain (TLD). And starting this week, there’ll finally be a period when it’s possible to apply to create such a thing.

It’s not at all clear what’s going to happen with new TLDs—or how people will end up feeling about them. Presumably there’ll be TLDs for places and communities and professions and categories of goods and events. A .data TLD would be a slightly different kind of thing. But along with some other interested parties, I’ve been exploring the possibility of creating such a thing.

With Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica—as well as our annual Data Summit—we’ve been deeply involved with the worldwide data community, and coordinating the creation of a .data TLD would be an extension of that activity.

But what would be the point? For me, it’s about highlighting the exposure of data on the internet—and providing added impetus for organizations to expose data in a way that can efficiently be found and accessed.

In building Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve absorbed an immense amount of data, across a huge number of domains. But—perhaps surprisingly—almost none of it has come in any direct way from the visible internet. Instead, it’s mostly from a complicated patchwork of data files and feeds and database dumps.

But wouldn’t it be nice if there was some standard way to get access to whatever structured data any organization wants to expose?

Right now there are conventions for websites about exposing sitemaps that tell web crawlers how to navigate the sites. And there are plenty of loose conventions about how websites are organized. But there’s really nothing about structured data.

Now of course today’s web is primarily aimed at two audiences: human readers and search engine crawlers. But with Wolfram|Alpha and the idea of computational knowledge, it’s become clear that there’s another important audience: automated systems that can compute things.

There are product catalogs, store information, event calendars, regulatory filings, inventory data, historical reference material, contact information—lots of things that can be very usefully computed from. But even if these things are somewhere on an organization’s website, there’s no standard way to find them, let alone standard structured formats for them.

My concept for the .data domain is to use it to create the “data web”—in a sense a parallel construct to the ordinary web, but oriented toward structured data intended for computational use. The notion is that alongside a website like wolfram.com, there’d be wolfram.data.

If a human went to wolfram.data, there’d be a structured summary of what data the organization behind it wanted to expose. And if a computational system went there, it’d find just what it needs to ingest the data, and begin computing with it.

Needless to say, as we’ve learned over and over again in building Wolfram|Alpha, getting the underlying data is just the beginning of the story. The real work usually starts when one wants to compute from it—so that one can answer specific questions, generate specific reports, and so on.

For example, in our recent work on making the Best Buy product catalog computable, the original data (which came to us as a database dump) was perfectly easy to read. The real work came in the whole rest of the pipeline that was involved in making that data computable.

But the first step is to get the underlying data. And my concept for the .data domain is to provide a uniform mechanism—accessible to any organization, of any size—for exposing the underlying data.

Now of course one could just start a convention that organizations should have a “/datamap.xml” file (or somesuch) in the root of their web domains, just like a sitemap—rather than having a whole separate .data site. But I think introducing a new .data top-level domain would give much more prominence to the creation of the data web—and would provide the kind of momentum that’d be needed to get good, widespread, standards for the various kinds of data.

What is the relation of all this to the semantic web? The central notion of the semantic web is to introduce markup for human-readable web pages that makes them easier for computers to understand and process. And there’s some overlap here with the concept of the data web. But the bulk of the data web is about providing a place for large lumps of structured data that no human would ever directly want to deal with.

A decade ago I suggested to early search engine pioneers that they could get to the deep web by defining standards for how to expose data from databases. For a while there was enthusiasm about exposing “web services”, and now there are all manner of APIs made available by different organizations.

It’s been interesting for me in the past few years to be involved in the emergence of the modern data community. And from what I have seen, I think we’re now just reaching a critical point, where a wide range of organizations are ready to engage in delivering large-scale structured data in standardized forms. So it is a convenient coincidence that this is happening just when it becomes possible to create a .data top-level domain.

We’re certainly not sure what all the issues about a .data TLD will be, and we’re actively seeking input and partners in this effort. But I think there’s a potentially important opportunity, so I’m trying to do what I can to provide leadership, and further help to accelerate the birth of the data web.

[This post also appears on Stephen Wolfram's blog---Eds.]

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Merry Christmas, Boston. You asked for it, and you got it. A big, publicly traded consumer tech company to put us on the map alongside the Silicon Valley bad boys and uppity New Yorkers. I present to you: TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP).

Sure, we already have Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP), Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB), iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), and privately held but well-established companies like Wayfair, Kayak, and Harmonix. But TripAdvisor is different. Although the online travel firm is not new—it’s been cranking here in Boston for more than a decade—it has become one of the biggest consumer-focused Internet companies on the East Coast, with more than 1,100 employees; 50 million-plus unique visitors a month checking out hotel, restaurant, and travel reviews; and, oh yeah, a market cap north of $3 billion. Yet it hasn’t received as much media coverage or tech-community-adulation as you might expect over the years. (An exception to the former would be this in-depth story by my colleague Wade Roush; the latter would be this commentary from investor Chris Dixon.)

I spoke with TripAdvisor CEO Stephen Kaufer on Wednesday, the day his company officially became independent from Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE) and started trading on the Nasdaq under its own stock symbol. Here are my takeaways from our chat:

1. TripAdvisor wants the spotlight now. “We have generally been very, very surprised at how little attention the press have paid to TripAdvisor,” Kaufer said. He pointed to his company’s size, number of employees, traffic, revenues, and profits, calling it “the $3 billion company in our own backyard.” On the local training and ecosystem front, he says college interns are turning down offers from Facebook and Google and working at TripAdvisor instead.

2. TripAdvisor is global. Seventy-five percent of the traffic to the company’s branded websites comes from outside the U.S. Think about that for a minute. “We’re almost unchallenged in most countries in the … Next Page »

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Stephen Wolfram is not one to be summed up in a few pithy quotes. Well, too bad.

Here is his life in a nutshell:

“I grew up in England and went to all sorts of good schools that I thought were completely irrelevant.”

“By the time I was 20 years old, I was a physics faculty member at Caltech, and I was building a big software system that was a forerunner of Mathematica.”

“Along the way, I learned a lot about what not to do in starting a company.”

“For about a decade I was almost a complete recluse, running the company from a distance, and spending every night working on basic science.”

“I don’t really have a boss. I just do what I want to do. The trick is not to have a private company that gets too weird and too pathological.”

That was a sampling of what the distinguished and controversial Wolfram had to say at our Xconomy Forum in Boston last week, called “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas.” For those who don’t know, he is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, and the author of A New Kind of Science. He is also a recently minted Xconomist.

Wolfram, 52, set the table for the theme of our event, which involved some of the biggest ideas in technology and business from entrepreneurs and executives around the country. As only he could, the physics and software guru reflected on his 30 years in the tech industry and his contrarian approach to running big projects and building companies.

A few things really stood out to me in his talk. One was the importance of making mistakes early in his career. While at Caltech in the early ‘80s, Wolfram got into a “grisly early-IP-meets-university” battle over his software tools, he said.

“I ended up deciding I had to start a company around the software system I’d built, and of course I was just a physics kid. I didn’t know anything about starting companies,” he said. “I made lots of mistakes, like not running the company myself, hiring a CEO who was twice my age, and so on. The company quickly started doing things that I thought were silly and boring. In the end, after many trials and tribulations, it did in fact survive and finally went public and was gobbled up by bigger fishes.” (You can read more about his first startup, Computer Mathematics, which was venture-backed and later merged with Inference, here.)

Another thing Wolfram figured out early on was that university work was not for him. After spending time at Caltech and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, he started a research center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study complex systems and complexity theory. “My plan A was to get lots of other people to help work” on the implications and applications of his findings, he said. “It was OK, but it was really slow. I got kind of frustrated and needed a plan B,” he said. “My plan B was to build … Next Page »

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“You will have meltdowns on a regular basis. You will have those moments. Make sure you have people you can talk to when you have those moments.”

That was Brad Feld, the tech entrepreneur-turned-venture-capitalist, on Friday afternoon, speaking to a room of Boston and New York entrepreneurs and angel investors, at an event organized by Silicon Valley Bank. The setting was the Microsoft NERD center in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA. Feld was talking about the experiences that all founders (especially CEOs) go through with their companies.

Feld is the co-founder of Boulder, CO-based Foundry Group and TechStars, the seed-stage startup accelerator with programs in Boulder, Boston, Seattle, and New York. He relates very well to early-stage tech entrepreneurs, because he’s been there and done that himself. In his typical style, Feld spoke casually (and candidly) about the challenges of building a company. None of it was particularly earth-shattering, but it’s interesting to revisit these sorts of tips every once in a while, because different things jump out at you at different times.

Feld’s advice boiled down to two things: products and people.

1. “Be obsessed about your product.”

“The most important thing to focus on, early in the life of your company, is your product. In year two, it’s your product. In year 20, it’s your product,” he said. “If you focus on your product, most of your other problems will go away.”

But he has a broader definition of product—it’s not just the software you release, or your technology, or even your interface with customers. “The whole of the company becomes the product,” he said. “The whole lifecycle of what you do.”

That means entrepreneurs should be totally passionate about what they are building—not just starting a company to be their own boss, say—and they should be true to themselves. Feld admitted that with his first company, he got bored after four years. “I didn’t love the thing I was doing,” he said. (He sold it after seven years.)

2. “You cannot motivate someone.”

“The idea that a CEO can motivate people is a fallacy. All you can do is create an environment where people are motivated or not,” he said. Companies will make bad hires—talented people who aren’t a good cultural fit with the rest of the team—and they should get rid of those employees quickly, according to Feld. “You can’t change them,” he said, and you can’t “try to motivate people to work harder” through things like performance reviews. That simply doesn’t work, at least not for small startups.

Instead, founders need to continually make sure they are bringing on the right people for their team, communicating openly, “building the language of the company,” and tying that formative context and culture very closely to their product, he said. This will mean very different things for different companies, and it’s certainly not an exact science.

Feld said he sees a common mistake in young startups. “The CEO ends up doing a lot of the work,” he said, and “the non-CEOs don’t do the right work.” The CEO’s chief responsibility, over time, is to make sure “everyone is doing the right thing.”

Oh, and one more responsibility: “Don’t run out of money,” he said.

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It is a dark time for biofuels companies—and industrial biotech around Boston, more broadly.

Xconomy has learned that Qteros, a heavily funded developer of cellulosic ethanol technology based in Marlborough, MA, has laid off most of its staff, including its CEO John McCarthy. The news was reported earlier today by Dan Primack at Fortune. Xconomy received a tip yesterday from a source with knowledge of the company.

The source said that Qteros “couldn’t raise money” and was “reduced to a skeleton crew to sell anything of value.” Mick Sawka, who is listed on the company’s website as senior vice president, is the acting CEO, according to the source. Messages left with Qteros and Battery Ventures, one of the company’s lead investors, were not returned.

Qteros started in 2006 as SunEthanol (it changed its name in 2008), out of UMass Amherst. Its investors include Battery, Venrock Associates, Long River Ventures, Soros Fund Management, Camros Capital, Valero Energy, and BP. By our count, the company had raised nearly $30 million prior to its most recent financing, which was a $22 million Series C round announced at the beginning of this year.

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For every tech company that leaves Boston, it seems, another one moves in. In this case, the local security software cluster just got stronger—and a new approach to combating cyber attacks has arrived.

CounterTack, a security company formerly known as NeuralIQ, has rebranded itself and moved its headquarters from Alexandria, VA, to Waltham, MA. The company has just raised $9.5 million in Series A financing led by Fairhaven Capital of Cambridge, MA, with other private investors also participating in the round.

As part of the deal, CounterTack has brought in new management. Neal Creighton, the former CEO and co-founder of GeoTrust (sold to VeriSign for $125 million in 2006), has been named CounterTack’s chief executive. Creighton, a data security and authentication expert based in the Boston area, most recently co-founded RatePoint and AffirmTrust. Other new members of the leadership team include John Adams, chief technology officer; Jim Harrison, chief financial officer; John Worrall, executive vice president of product management and marketing; and Robert Potter, senior vice president of sales. Meanwhile, founder and chief architect Alen Capalik and chairman William Fallon (a retired admiral in the U.S. Navy) are staying on with the company.

Part of what’s driving the new investment is the emerging trend around “advanced persistent threats.” Essentially, these are cyber attacks that target a corporation’s or institution’s software applications, data, employees, or end users. The goal is to steal sensitive information about finances, infrastructure, intellectual property, and so on. The attacks are tough to guard against with traditional perimeter defense techniques like firewalls or virus detection. Instead, they require an organization to look deep inside its own networks and applications and root out problems from within.

That’s where CounterTack, and a number of other security tech companies, come into play. CounterTack uses virtualization software to boost customers’ network intelligence and try to detect attacks that are currently in progress. Exactly how the technology works is a little vague (probably by design), but presumably network operators and administrators can respond to the cyber threats once they know about them.

CounterTack, which started in 2004, has fewer than 50 employees. The company says it plans to hire 12-15 new staff in Waltham over the next year. It is also keeping its Virginia office as a sales outpost.

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In advance of his appearance at Xconomy’s “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas” conference on Dec. 1 in Boston, I did a live tweet chat with Kabir Shahani, the co-founder and CEO of Seattle-based Appature, yesterday. Thanks to all who tuned in and sent us their thoughts; we had a great audience.

Appature is a four-year-old startup that makes Web software tools to help healthcare, pharma, and medical device companies reach hospitals and doctors and build important relationships with them. The big idea, as I see it, is to allow brands to drill down into a huge customer relationship database and quickly target the right people to sell to—and for the right reasons, namely, patient health. Yes, it’s big data, analytics, cloud, marketing, and healthcare, all wrapped up in one.

Which is why I think Boston-area tech companies like HubSpot, Buzzient, Constant Contact, SocMetrics, Kyruus, Ginger.io, Athenahealth, and others should be interested. And young entrepreneurs, who can really relate to Shahani. Plus I hear there are a few pharma and medical device companies (and hospitals) around town…

While some things don’t necessarily come across in tweets (like Shahani’s youthful charisma and CEO hair), other things do. Here are my top takeaways from the chat:

1. Appature knows more about Boston than Boston knows about Appature. “There are some incredible companies in Boston,” Shahani tweeted. “We have customers there and I absolutely love being out there to spend time with them.” Sure, Appature has customers and partners around town (and soon, employees—see below), but the general Boston tech and health-IT community doesn’t talk about this company very much. I’m telling you to pay attention, because Shahani and his crew are potentially on to something big. Whether they’ll execute and take full advantage, we’ll see.

2. The cutting edge of marketing tech for niches like healthcare is moving fast. “The dynamic has changed dramatically in the past 12-18 months,” Shahani wrote. He was talking about pharma companies trying new ways to reach and target customers, rather than just pursuing traditional approaches with their sales reps. It’s no surprise that cloud-based analytics and social technologies are transforming the way most industries work.

3. Growth is challenging for any startup, especially one based on relationships. Shahani, who bootstrapped Appature to profitability before taking a venture round, tweeted that his biggest mistake was “not getting an [East] coast office sooner.” (The company has employees around the New Jersey/Pennsylvania border, presumably to work with lots of pharma customers. It also has people in San Francisco, San Diego, and Chicago.) And here’s a news flash on its expansion: “Stay tuned on news about a Boston team in [January],” he wrote.

For the record, here’s the full live chat stream, via Storify (thanks to my colleague Lilly O’Flaherty for this).

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His last name means “forest” in Norwegian. Which is appropriate, because this guy sees the forest for the trees.

David Skok of Matrix Partners is one of the most talked-about venture capitalists in town, among young entrepreneurs and experienced ones alike. He is best known for his investments in JBoss, the open source middleware company (acquired by Red Hat for $420 million in 2006); AppIQ, the network and storage management firm (bought by HP in 2005); Diligent Technologies, a data protection company (bought by IBM in 2008); and CloudSwitch, a cloud infrastructure startup (acquired by Verizon this year). He currently serves on the boards of tech companies such as HubSpot, CloudBees, Digium, Enservio, and Solidworks.

Critics say he hasn’t had a big exit in a while. Supporters say he has a real knack for building companies and getting them acquired for good prices—and that what he touches often turns to gold.

Whatever you think of him, Skok has carved out a reputation as a hard-working investor with both technical expertise in business software and a deep understanding of sales and marketing from a customer’s perspective. For the past decade, he has been a general partner with Matrix. But when I sat down with him recently, I was more interested to hear about his previous life as an entrepreneur and five-time CEO, and how that shaped who he is today—both the decisions he makes as a VC, and the kind of mentorship he provides to startups.

It’s not quite Batman Begins or Casino Royale, but here is the David Skok origin story—and its lessons—in three parts.

Act I: A New Hope (Software)

The story opens in Johannesburg, South Africa, where Skok was born to an English mother and Norwegian father. His parents didn’t want him to grow up with apartheid, so they sent him to school in England, where he lived from age 8 to 20, in London. From there he went to college at University of Sussex, where he was part of the first class of graduates in England to be awarded computer science degrees. That was 1976.

His father made him come back and join the blue-collar family business, which involved machining equipment. He went to apprentice training school and survived his first week when all the tough guys tried to haze him. By the end of the course, he knew how to use a new tool for machining parts that followed a program stored on punched paper tape. The problem was, if there was a tiny error in the tape, the part would be ruined and “you’d have a huge wreck on your hands,” he says.

So Skok wrote a piece of software to get around this. “If you designed the part on the computer, you’d be able to do the machining without worrying about the geometry,” he says. That led him to start his first company, Skok Systems, which became a computer-aided design (CAD) firm.

“I’m accidentally an entrepreneur,” Skok says. “I didn’t plan to be an entrepreneur, I didn’t have any training in it, I didn’t have any mentors to turn to to teach me how to be an entrepreneur. I’m trying to figure out all the sales and marketing stuff that’s going on.”

The company went through a few shifts, but the pivotal moment happened in … Next Page »

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[Editor's note: Cross-posted from The Economist, 11/2/11]

New York Mayor-entrepreneur Michael Bloomberg, not known for shyness, recently proclaimed New York City as America’s new entrepreneurship capital, roaring past Boston in venture capital and soon to leave Silicon Valley in the dust as the “go to” destination for entrepreneurs. Indeed, the world media are awash with proposals to kick start entrepreneurship as a strategy for economic revival, with support for venture finance at the heart of many programs. Yet the title of Harvard’s Josh Lerner’s recent book, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” is no coincidence, because proclamations are one thing, actual success is quite another.

Fortunately, there is a lot of experience around the world about what works and what doesn’t. Here are some practical principles that the Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Project have been identifying and developing for public leaders who have, correctly in my opinion, identified entrepreneurship as an essential plank in economic policy.

1. Be clear that the objective is to foster an entrepreneurial finance ecosystem, not to directly provide capital to entrepreneurs. Over time, a healthy entrepreneurship ecosystem makes available capital to ventures that deserve it, while denying it to ventures that do not. This does not mean that governments need to revert to selecting the deserving. This idea has regained currency recently, but we learn time and again (Solyndra anyone?) that it does not work. It does mean that the availability of capital, and other resources, needs to be part of a natural process in which the ecosystem elements—in this case, deal flow and capital—continually evolve and adjust to each other, a concept that is consistent with Smith’s “invisible hand.” But the concept goes further by suggesting that enlightened and skillful leadership can play a critical role in encouraging the evolution of a self-sustaining ecosystem, but leaders have to understand how and when to get in, and how and when to get out.

2. Stimulate financing, but stay off of ventures’ balance sheets. Presence of government and government-owned entities as direct debt or equity holders of ventures should be a red flag. The only reason government should be on a venture’s balance sheet is in the rare case when it is absolutely necessary to entice private, profit-oriented entities to get involved as the natural selector of investment targets, and in those cases, government should have a clear plan to get out. Governments can, as have Israel, Finland and some other countries, provide smart, off-balance sheet funding in the form of repayable grants, matching grants and so forth. But presence on ventures’ balance sheets ultimately leads to a conflict of interest between governments’ social priorities and obligations, and the need to provide a positive return to invested capital. Overall, there is evidence that a moderate amount of this kind of financing can be beneficial, but as it gets to be too great, the benefits rapidly turn into liabilities.

3. Make sunset clauses for financial support programs the rule, not the exception. Permanent, or evergreen programs of government-supported venture capital, loan guarantees, startup grants, angel tax credits and so on, risk becoming white elephants and/or political assets, not economic ones, and in the process risk squandering public funds. Sunset clauses, or “sell-by dates,” help focus policy-implementation programs on (a) achieving results, and (b) creating self-sustainability by building capacity and mutually reinforcing systems (for example, by showing private sector players that they can actually make profits.)

4. “Pulse” incentives to foster discovery. An implication of sunset clauses, in general, is that if providers and consumers of risky capital can “discover” that it is profitable to engage, then they will accelerate self-interested behavior when the “visible hand” is removed. Seeing if providers and consumers of entrepreneurial capital “discover” the correct pricing mechanisms to allow them to engage in a profit-seeking transaction is one test as to whether the problem is really a market failure or not, and is not just … Next Page »

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Twitter has already sucked away 20 percent of your life. What’s another 30 minutes?

If you don’t know Kabir Shahani or his startup, Appature, here is your chance. I will be hosting a live Twitter chat with him tomorrow (Thursday, Nov. 3). This open chat will start at 2 pm Eastern / 11 am Pacific Time, and you can ask him whatever you want for 30 minutes.

What’s the occasion? Well, Shahani will be one of our featured speakers at Xconomy’s “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas” conference in Boston on Dec. 1, and I want to give him a hearty welcome.

I got to know Shahani and Seattle-based Appature while I was living in the Northwest a couple years ago. The company has a remarkable story. It started in 2007 and bootstrapped itself to profitability before taking a VC round in late 2009. Appature is also interesting because it is complementary to many companies in Boston’s marketing tech cluster, like HubSpot, Constant Contact, BzzAgent (Tesco), and Buzzient. It works with a lot of healthcare companies and institutions around Boston and the East Coast. And, of course, it is going through many of the same growing pains that young companies around Boston (and elsewhere) talk about, as it expands its customer base across the country.

Appature’s founders are hardcore techies with a social networking background, but they chose to go after the healthcare market—making new kinds of software tools for medical device and pharma companies to build relationships with their customers (mostly hospitals and doctors), all in a fundamentally different way from traditional marketing.

So, in our live chat, I’m interested to hear what the big idea is all about at Appature and why it chose its particular niche. Other areas up for discussion include social marketing trends in healthcare and other industries; startup/VC lessons and tech advice; and maybe a little Boston vs. Seattle talk (in terms of innovation ecosystems, talent, and coffee). I’ll bet the tech and healthcare communities will have some good questions for Appature, too—so please get them ready.

Here’s how it will work on Thursday. I’ll send off a few questions to Shahani from @Xconomy, and then we’ll open it up to everyone’s questions. Shahani will be responding from his personal account, @Kabir, with an assist from his team @Appature. And we will all keep track of the running dialogue using the hashtag #XCappature. That’s the key for you to follow the conversation on Twitter. (You can use TweetChat or another app to focus on the half-hour discussion, or for however long you want to tune in.)

See you online at 2pm ET / 11am PT on Thursday…

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Get a bunch of prominent Boston-area founders and CEOs in a room together, and ask them provocative questions. It’s a tried and true recipe for a good discussion, and that’s exactly what we got at the end of the day on Friday at MassTLC’s 2011 unConference at Hynes Convention Center in Boston. The topic was “the secrets of scaling,” and it was a fitting end to a fun and productive day.

This was the Mass Technology Leadership Council’s fourth annual innovation conference, and the event has really solidified in its “unconference” format, in which hundreds of tech entrepreneurs, investors, execs, and other business leaders meet and create organic sessions to discuss whatever is on people’s minds. Most people are there for the networking and private meetings, but that didn’t stop a few lively sessions from breaking out.

The secrets of scaling session—focused on how startups get big—was organized by journalist Scott Kirsner and was more conference-y than unconference-y, as it was planned ahead of time and had the feel of a big panel. Here are some takeaways from that (before I get to some broader highlights later).

Each of the companies on the panel could be considered a Boston success story: Constant Contact, Gemvara, iRobot, Kayak, LogMeIn, Wayfair (fka CSN Stores), Zipcar. (See photo above by Jeff Bussgang, who noted that you can distinguish the pre-IPO companies from the public companies by who’s wearing jeans.) The idea was to tap into this collective braintrust and draw out some key lessons.

Paul English of travel site Kayak said he routinely asks people, who’s the smartest person you ever met? And then he goes out and tries to hire them. He relayed the story of recruiting Giorgos Zacharia, Kayak’s chief scientist, a process that took several years but was well worth it. “It was transformational,” English said. He also talked about Kayak’s expensive acquisition of rival SideStep back in 2007. Kayak fired all of SideStep’s engineers and created a duplicate version of its site. Lesson: hire and fire ruthlessly.

Niraj Shah from Wayfair talked about his e-retail company’s bootstrapped growth, starting in 2002. Once his team figured out how to make money from niche online stores, it faced lots of competitors and had to decide whether to raise money or stay the course. It chose the latter (until this year, when it did raise a big round). “We just launched new categories as fast as we could, built out selection in each category as fast as we could,” Shah said. “We let the growth compound on itself.” The key was “not letting early successes keep us from letting that compound,” he says. Lesson: stick to your knitting.

Michael Simon from LogMeIn, the remote access and IT management firm, started with the idea of being a lifestyle business, not a public company (it now has 450 employees, about 200 in Massachusetts). The key moment in LogMeIn’s growth was when it “started giving away stuff,” he said. This was before “freemium” was a popular model. The company’s revenues started very small but grew exponentially. “If you have an exponential growth curve, the absolute number doesn’t matter,” Simon says. “You’ll get there.” Lesson: start small and get traction.

Matt Lauzon from Gemvara, the online custom jeweler, represented the younger generation of entrepreneurs on the panel. Although it’s still fairly early for Gemvara (which started as Paragon Lake in 2006), the company seems to be on an impressive growth trajectory. “We didn’t want to … Next Page »

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It is hard to overestimate the importance of Steve Jobs on the American psyche. The co-founder and guiding force of Apple has died, succumbing to a long illness after only recently stepping down as chief executive. 
But his impact continues beyond his life, his business, his industry, his leadership, and his vision. One only needs to go to the Apple flagship retail store in Manhattan to feel his effect on the individual and industrial landscape. On any day of the year, the store is packed with tourists, many of whom are from other countries. In these moments, Jobs and his company personify an American cultural and business ideal of itself: “We invent these kinds of miracle things.”

Since this is the exact feeling (message, if you will) that the U.S. and global pharmaceutical industry would like to leave with the general public—as well as its traditional stakeholders of providers, payors, patients and regulators—what could pharma leadership take away from Jobs’ legacy?

Let’s start with the leader himself. Jobs’ name is listed on 313 patents. This is one of the most eye-opening points circulating around Jobs’ resignation. Can any actions (never mind words) speak louder than that in telling employees and the world how the company’s CEO views innovation? I challenge you to find it.

I realize that it can be difficult to make an apples-to-oranges comparison between the businesses of consumer technology, and that of … Next Page »

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When I heard the news of Steve Jobs’s death last night, even though I was hardly surprised, I felt like I had been kicked in the gut—as if the industry in which I’ve spent my career had lost its soul.

I’m rarely shy about criticizing the titans of our industry, but from the beginning Steve was different: a brilliant businessman whose primary motivation wasn’t money, a CEO who involved himself in every detail of product design, and a restless perfectionist who would change his plans in a heartbeat if he saw a better way to do things.

I saw this first-hand in the 1980s, when he visited my team at Carnegie Mellon. We introduced him to sending pictures, fonts, etc., through e-mail. He saw the value instantly, and tried to hire the whole team on the spot. When that failed, he quickly created the team that built NeXTMail, which eventually evolved into Mail.app on the Mac. Nobody ever “got it” faster than Steve—and when he got it, he made things happen in a hurry.

One of Steve’s least-mentioned talents was his mastery of e-mail. He was surely flooded with it, yet he answered more promptly than I can. I’ve spent my whole career working on e-mail, but if he had written a book on how to manage your e-mail, I would have bought it the day it was released.

I also admired Steve a great deal as a person. When he was the busy CEO of NeXT, my wife once put him on hold for over ten minutes while she hunted for me. He graciously uttered not a word of complaint. And when he famously called LSD “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life,” he risked broad censure rather than betray the truth as he saw it—that LSD had helped open his mind to the insanely great possibilities of the coming digital age.

Steve left us too soon, when he still had much to teach us. But our world is incalculably better for the 56 years he gave us. May he rest in peace.

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Former Netezza chief executive Jim Baum has left IBM, Xconomy has learned. Baum was the CEO of Marlborough, MA-based Netezza since early 2009 and oversaw the “big data” analytics company’s $1.7 billion acquisition by IBM almost exactly a year ago.

Baum was not reachable for comment, but a spokesperson for IBM (NYSE: IBM) confirmed that he left the company a few weeks ago. Netezza’s website no longer lists Baum on its executive team page. The top people listed there are senior vice presidents Prat Moghe, Ray Tacoma, and Tricia Cotter, chief technology officer John Metzger, and chief scientist David Flaxman.

I’ve heard that Moghe is now leading Netezza (he came to the company through its purchase of Tizor in 2009), and that Arvind Krishna, the IBM general manager who sponsored the Netezza acquisition, will be spending more time with the subsidiary.

I’m also told that Baum’s next venture is “non-competitive” with Netezza and IBM, but beyond that details are sketchy.

In an extensive interview in March of this year, Baum talked with me about his formative experiences at tech icons Parametric Technology (NASDAQ: PMTC) and Endeca before joining Netezza in 2006 as president and chief operating officer. He also talked about why Netezza sold to IBM, the future of big data analytics, and the competitive dynamics between IBM, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle in that field.

As for the company integration process with Big Blue, Baum said at the time, “IBM is a pro at this. It starts with a business plan. When they acquire a company, they have a well defined, well understood set of measurable business objectives. They expect to create a return on this investment.” He added, “IBM is very focused on wanting to retain and motivate great people, and add great people to their company.”

So no word yet on Baum’s next stop, or whether he is departing for strategic reasons or merely cashing out on the acquisition. But it sounds like IBM didn’t do enough to retain his services for more than a year, in any case.

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Interesting day for a couple of companies whose names start with “Boston.” Who’s next, Boston Dynamics? Boston Harbor Cruises? Maybe the Boston Red Sox.

—Westborough, MA-based Boston-Power, a developer of advanced lithium-ion battery technology, saw three top executives leave last Friday, including CEO Keith Schmid. The news was first reported by Mass High Tech this morning. Chief financial officer Steve Byram and vice president of marketing Sally Bament have also left the company, according to the report.

Boston-Power hired Schmid as chief executive this past February, replacing founder Christina-Lampe Onnerud (an Xconomist), who took the role of executive chairman of the company.

A spokesperson for Boston-Power declined to offer any comment beyond what has been reported in area media outlets today; the accuracy of the reports was not disputed, however. Schmid, Byram, and Bament’s names still remain on the Boston-Power website as of this evening. The company is expected to announce a new financing round soon, much of which comes from Chinese investors, according to the original report.

—Natick, MA-based Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) has appointed Michael Mahoney, 46, as the company’s new president (as of next month) and future CEO (slated for November 1, 2012). Mahoney, formerly worldwide chairman of the medical device and diagnostics group for Johnson & Johnson, will succeed interim CEO Hank Kucheman. Just to complicate matters, Kucheman isn’t actually interim CEO yet—he’s executive vice president and group president—because current CEO Ray Elliott hasn’t stepped down yet (not until October 17).

Back in May, my colleague Luke reported that Elliott announced his resignation less than two years after he was brought in to help turn things around for the medical device company. “Investors will surely frown on the Elliott era,” Luke wrote, because of declining sales figures and stock prices.

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Some big changes are afoot at an interesting Boston-area laser startup. TeraDiode, a Littleton, MA-based maker of laser systems for cutting, welding, and defense applications, said today it has named Parviz Tayebati the company’s new CEO and board member.

Tayebati, the former chief executive of telecom laser company Azna and photonics firm CoreTek, succeeds TeraDiode’s founding CEO and investor, David Sossen. Sossen is no longer listed on the company’s website as a member of the leadership team, and the firm isn’t taking interview requests today, according to a spokesperson.

Earlier this summer, Sossen told me about TeraDiode’s history and some of its technology’s far-out applications, such as laser weapons that could be deployed on a tank or ship to disable UAVs or blow up incoming rockets. That’s still years away, though. TeraDiode’s present applications include industrial welding, military target illumination, and heat-seeking-missile deterrents.

The company’s technology, based on a technique called wavelength beam combining, was developed at MIT Lincoln Lab to make direct-diode lasers brighter, more powerful, and more focused. In 2009, TeraDiode raised $4 million in Series A financing led by Stata Venture Partners. Last month, the startup said it had secured $3.2 million in new defense-related contracts.

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The best way to get to know Dave Balter is over a beer. The founder and CEO of Boston-based marketing firm BzzAgent (now part of U.K.-based Dunnhumby/Tesco) is known for speaking his mind, but over a beer it’s even better. I’m not sure what he was drinking when he replied to my e-mail yesterday as he flew across the pond at 39,000 feet, but it appears to have loosened him up nicely.

I saw Balter speak at Angel Bootcamp in June, and his straight shooting impressed me then. Basically, he said that many entrepreneurs and execs have an inflated sense of themselves and their companies just because they’ve raised money and have had some success. Savvy investors should look for humble founders who are always learning, work harder than others, and have a fearless, grind-it-out mentality, he said. The following week, Balter came out with an article in Inc. Magazine in which he admitted his ego nearly destroyed BzzAgent; he implored entrepreneurs to stay humble, a process that he calls “the humility imperative.”

In addition to his CEO and angel investor duties, Balter is the author of two books on word-of-mouth marketing and the creator of numerous blogs, so he’s a bit of a polymath. He recently became a co-founder and executive chairman of Smarterer, another Boston tech startup. He’s also a newly minted Xconomist.

But his latest project (back to the beer now) is “DB Tech Prom,” a blow-out gala for the Boston tech community, to be held on October 20. There has been a lot of talk about creating a culture that celebrates entrepreneurship here in Boston, and this event seems to address that. At the same time, there’s no shortage of tech parties and gatherings these days, so I wondered what the real point was. Balter answered that, and much more, below.

Here are some highlights from our e-mail exchange:

Xconomy: Why is Tech Prom important for the Boston startup community, and what are its goals? If it’s about fostering a culture of celebrating entrepreneurship, how do we balance that with the humility imperative?

Dave Balter: After some very non-scientific poll-taking and survey-manipulating, we found that most individuals in Boston’s tech scene didn’t have the perfect prom experience. Some of this is of course due to intense, paralyzing high-school-nerdiness and less-than-impressive early-development social skills (see Sixteen Candles for widely referenced examples), but oh how things have changed. Now the techies have inherited celebrity status, and nerdiness…well, it’s in baby, it’s in.

This event should be a watershed moment that allows Boston to strut its stuff. And we’re not talking about flail-dancing during some Def Leppard song, but rather the celebration of how current … Next Page »

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