Ian McCaig’s History of Lastminute.com
Ian McCaig, lastminute.com’s Chief Executive Officer, told the history of this online travel and lifestyle retailer to the Edinburgh Entrepreneurship Club.
From a stereotypical “dot com” baby in 1998, to the rapidly maturing teenager of 2010. Ian charted the way in which the business’s strategy, structure and ownership had evolved as it matured from something with the turnover of a small local pub, to a multi-billion enterprise. Covering the problems of merging acquired companies, the need to scale costs, and the change from a public (stock market) ownership to private equity.
This article is based on Ian’s talk. It concludes with some personal analysis of the future, with particular reference to my favorite topic, public transportation information… Read more of this article »
Taking El to the Clouds
On the internet, success is most likely to cause failure.
That’s a paradox that can take entrepreneurs by surprise. Maybe it’s true about everything? The internet simply makes it happen faster. A web server that was happily serving 100 people today, probably isn’t going to happily serve 100,000 tomorrow. At the very moment the world has finally discovered your solution to life-the-universe-and-everything, that solution dies in a heap of technical errors, and the world goes away again, suitably unimpressed.
This article describes my personal experiences of scaling a website up to serve tens of thousands users each day, most recently by hosting Gnomish literature in a “Cloud” environment. Read more of this article »
