acquia

Yesterday I shared my 2010 retrospective on Drupal along with some predictions for the new year. Today, I want to recap Acquia's accomplishments in 2010, just like I did last year with my 2009 Acquia retrospective.

I recently had the pleasure of serving as a thesis advisor on a work by Marc Seeger, who was completing a portion of his requirements for a Master of Science in Computer Science and Media at Stuttgart Media University. Marc's thesis was titled "Building blocks of a scalable web crawler".

During the past month, I've been trying New Relic on my personal blog. New Relic is a performance management tool. It can help to monitor, debug and optimize a site. It includes features like slow page request analysis, slow database query analysis, error tracking, scalability analysis, performance alerts, weekly e-mail reports, up-time monitoring and even very specialized features like Apache Solr profiling. It's a bundle of developer goodies that can be used on live production websites.

In this post, I want to focus on one of the most difficult questions for entrepreneurs raising money from investors: what is the right amount of capital to raise? We debated this question extensively in each of the three rounds of raising venture capital at Acquia. It's particularly a tricky question for people like me who are relatively new to venture capital. I spent plenty of time thinking about this and talked about it with numerous successful entrepreneurs that have raised money before.