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Distributed systems are hard. They are hard to set up, hard to program to, and hard to maintain. What is more, this has been the case for decades. And yet, the incredible success of the shining stars of the "Big Data" movement— Google, Amazon and Facebook— has come about directly as a result of their ability to harness massive distributed systems infrastructure for the sake of data storage and analytics. For companies looking to follow these leaders, the Hadoop open source project and its associated ecosystem of subprojects have been an incredibly powerful source of leverage. Read More

Pretty much every aspect of our lives is being changed by software. Software has the power to delight, entertain, help us communicate, simplify our work, enhance our creativity, connect us to old friends, and so much more. However writing good software is still a complex process that takes too long, and requires too much expertise. Addressing that pain is what makes Matrix’s latest investment, Meteor, so interesting. Read More

Before joining Matrix, I’ve had some experience with seed investors – I had a dozen or so of them at Betfair (Flutter), my first company, and then made a number of investments myself when my entrepreneurial investments began to bear fruit. The following advice comes out of my experience, and while I was not terrible at it, I can’t claim I did this perfectly as a founder – you learn from what you do wrong as well as right. Read More