Bogdan Carstoiu' Post

How to Find the Best People for Your Startup

I strongly believe in the power of the right people in the right place. For a startup, this makes the difference between life and death. While there aren’t two startups alike, the things I will talk about in this article apply to all of them.

I was fortunate enough to learn a lot of things the hard way and I want to share them with both early entrepreneurs and people who are wasting their potential instead of joining a startup.

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A Biased Advice To 4PSA Interns

Yes, I love interviewing interns. I’ve met people who were less than impressed about this fact, claiming that I was losing valuable time because interviewing interns is very straightforward. I strongly disagree, I find it somehow more challenging to discuss with a student than with an experienced senior executive. I’ve learned a lot from these interviews and I will never stop meeting interns before they join our team.

This article is dedicated to our interns and comes with hands-on advice that you might find useful before your first day at 4PSA.

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Why Tesla Must Get Back To Edison

Immediately after Tesla released Tesla Powerwall, the Internet was flooded with lots of articles discussing the real pricing of the new Tesla product. You do not have to be a genius to notice that Powerwall is not economically efficient. Even the economics behind lead acid batteries based systems is debatable, although these batteries cost three times less than the Li-Ion batteries used by Tesla.

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New VoipNow Product Management Policy

VoipNow 3.5.0 GA will be released on Monday, 20 Apr 2015. It has been a very long ride for our most impressive release yet. We are very proud of it:

  • more than 2,000 JIRA issues solved (improvements, bugs, general tasks)
  • over 10k commits in the code base
  • over 40k hours of work

You will get a lot more details on Monday about the technical stuff. Meanwhile, you can get hot news from @VoipNowUpdates on Twitter.

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The Sad Truth About Crypto Currencies

There is a lot of debate regarding crypto currency – some think it is the future of money, others strongly disagree, and the debate does not seem to come to an end. I personally have a fundamental problem with them. I was tempted a couple of times to try to solve the problem myself, but I doubt that I will have the time and focus to do it. Maybe someone can pick it up from here.

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My Shameless Plug For VoipNow Mobile

This is a video we’ve shot two weeks ago about VoipNow Mobile. Please excuse my performance 🙂 VoipNow Mobile is at the beginning of its life, there is still much to do and we know it. But at the end of the day, we want our partners to be able to deploy their infrastructure on over 90% BYOD.

Why? Traditionally, BYOD is associated with high risks, poor compliance and so on. Considering the problems our customers face with business desktop IP phones, we believe that properly done BYOD can provide a better experience not only for end-users, but also for specialized IT personnel. While we do not know precisely how many support cases are associated with client issues on the service provider’s end, we know that about 20% of our support tickets contain various phone client problems, starting with provisioning and ending with illegal equipment usage. It’s a big opportunity to hunt these down.

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The Capital 3 Mistakes In Product Management

Apparently a lot of software engineers fail to understand the importance of product management and most product managers are well aware about this. Unfortunately, most of the time, they blame the engineers’ education for the lack of vision, while in fact there is a much simpler explanation – engineers have witnessed product management failures once too many times. Truth be told, relatively few businesses value product management, even if they hire one product manager for every three engineers.

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