Pivotal NYC was lucky enough to have Ben Stein in the office to give a beta presentation entitled "Beyond the Hype: What it Really Takes to Build a Technology Business on the Cloud". Ben has built his own successful startup, Mobile Commons, using some of the principles he discussed.
Boiled down to its essence, Ben's theme was (with apologies to Chris Carter): Trust No One.
More specifically, Ben talked about ways to build your business and technology to better handle the inevitable failures of your vendors, partners and infrastructure providers.
Technical highlights from Ben's talk included a recipe for constructing a vendor-agnostic library (heretofore known as the "Stein Stack"), and actionable rules-of-thumb to make API consumers and producers more robust and debuggable.
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