charrington

This is pretty much my routine as well. I find morning and evening prayer / reflection very useful to help me make small, continuous improvements.

Well played...

Sorry for the delay in getting back to this...

The wind-down cost was very small in comparison to the price Oracle paid.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to this...

All the engineers went to work for Oracle and were given large incentives to stay for 2 years. Most stayed and got their incentive payouts, though they all eventually left later on. I think the longest tenure at Oracle there ~8 years.

I was a Sherwood Partners client in 2010. Oracle bought our startup, DataScaler. However, they bought the core assets of the company, not the corporate entity. That's a fairly common strategy for acquiring early-stage companies. The buyer gets the parts they want (in our case: the team, code, and patents) without any of the hassle or liabilities of the corporate entity or any assets that they don't want or need.

That left us needing to wind down the DataScaler corporate entity. This is a fairly technical process and not something you do casually. We hired Sherwood Partners to do the wind down. They filed the appropriate paperwork with Delaware and California, since we were a Delaware C corp based in Cupertino. They stored our corporate files (lots of paper back then) in their warehouse for 7 years in case of any litigation, tax disputes, etc. The offered to connect us with a liquidator to sell off our desks, chairs, phones, etc. They don't actually do the liquidation themselves. Perhaps most importantly, they were legally the "Stockholder Representative" and ensured that the stockholders were properly taken care of, etc.

We used Sherwood exclusively for the corporate wind-down part, as we already had a buyer. They also can help companies find buyers and they have lots of contacts in the valley.

I am happy to answer questions if anyone has any.

The new "clj" CLI tool is not a javascript tool. It is for Clojure, not Clojurescript.

I am also a happy UTOPIA user. I have a full symmetric gigabit pipe to my house for less than $100 per month. There are huge benefits to open choice networks.

I think that at the rates Twitter is writing counter data (Many TBs per day denormalized, ~0.5TB normalized), a RAM-based solution like VoltDB would be prohibitively expensive. Rainbird allows Twitter to use cheap disk-based storage but still get acceptable (sub-second) latency.