As most of you will know, the enablers are cloud computing and open source software. Pinterest now supports 18m users with growth running at 50% per month with the following: Amazon costs are around $39k for S3 and $30k for EC2 (I assume per month). They have 275 EC2 instances. They have 31 employees, up from 12 in December. MORE >>

Recently, I wrote a post titled “ When it Goes Right, What Does It Cost to Build a Great Software Company ?" Median revenue at profitability: $48m Median Years to Exit: 4 Software model supports the creation of great companies on The post begged the question regarding the metrics associated with SaaS. 8m $6.9m $21.6m MORE >>

It’s been a little over 4 years since I officially launched my internet marketing software company , HubSpot. In the old enterprise software days, a common model was to have some sort of upfront license fee — and then some ongoing maintenance revenue (15–20%) which covered things like support and upgrades. Not bad. MORE >>

We picked a write oriented benchmark using the standard Cassandra "stress" tool that is part of the product, and Denis ran and analyzed the tests on Amazon EC2 instances. The time taken by EC2 to create 288 new instances was about 15 minutes out of our total of 66 minutes. All instances are created using the EC2 auto-scaler feature. MORE >>

At the time we viewed Amazon’s offering, EC2 as too nascent. Imagine that you can develop software on your local computer but the entire service is delivered virtually through a partner in the same way people consumer energy with all of the scale benefits that go with that. Let me explain. Storage. We raised $16.5 Work it did. MORE >>