Quan Zhou

Case Study – 37signals

            David Heinemeier Hansson is partner in 37signals. He is the guy behind Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Writeboard, and Ta-da List. They run a popular weblog at Signal vs. Noise.

Davis is also the creator of the web-application framework Ruby on Rails. This was the infrastructure software that they used to build all our applications at 37signals.

37signals is a privately held web application company based in Chicago, Illinois, United States. The firm was co-founded in 1999 by CEO Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim as a web design company with a self-described focus on usability, simplicity, and clarity in design and writing. 37signals also produces a blog, Signal vs. Noise. Carlos Segura left in 2000 and Ernest Kim left in 2003.

Case Study – Adobe Systems

                        At Xerox PARC, Chuck Geschke and John Warnock developed a language called Interpress that would allow any computer to talk to any printer. When Xerox seemed slow to commercialize this technology, Geschke and Warnock started their own company, Adobe, to produce a successor of Interpress called PostScript.

            Adobe was founded by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who established the company after leaving Xerox PARC in order to develop and sell the PostScript page description language. Adobe's first products after PostScript were digital fonts, which they released in a proprietary format called Type 1.

            I have learned from Charles Geschke and John Warnock that it is important to have teamwork. I have also learned that you need to cooperate with your worker so that you can accomplish nicely your goal. I have also learned that you must what you believed and not what others’ opinion.

Case Study -  Hummer Winblad

                        Ann Winblad is the co-founder and a Managing Director of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, the first venture firm to focus exclusively on software.  She is a graduate of Business Administration from the College of St. Catherine, as well as an M.A. in education with a focus in international            Economics from the University of St. Thomas and also received her doctoral in Law from the same school. She started Open Systems in 1976; it is an accounting software company with a $500 investment borrowed from her brother.

                        Hummer Winblad Venture Partners was founded in 1989 as the first venture capital fund to invest exclusively in software companies. Through our history, we’ve had the opportunity to invest in the pioneers and leaders of several generations of software applications, architectures, delivery methods and business models.  They are helping entrepreneur build companies desktop software, embedded systems, client-server, distributed network computing, internet, and software as a service.

                        As a top advice from Ann Winblad “Think like a big dog and then figure out how you find leverage to get there”. It means that we should have our own tactics to get to strategies, but we have to have our strategies and put it to your goal. Because in this life, everything is limited, we don’t own things forever. We have to have our strategy to keep them for long even for keeps.