HP Hatchery panelist alongside Gilt CTO + Blip.tv CTO

Being a panelist at the HP Hatchery Startup Ecosystem alongside CTOs from Gilt Groupe and Blip.tv was both fun and enlightening! Our CTO challenges were each unique but also had substantial commonalities.

For instance, Mike Bryzek, CTO of Gilt Groupe, encounters daily moments of intense bursts of traffic whenever Gilt posts up a new product and millions of users attempt to purchase it at the same time.

Justin Day, CTO of Blip.tv (the world's largest independently owned video network,) has to contend with monumental amounts of bandwidth consumed by every single show as they get streamed to users in HD-quality video.

In my CTO-role, my largest overhead is maintaining a rapidly-fluctuating database of half-a-million products from dozens of vendors. In any typical week we could have 50,000 new products added and 15,000 old products discontinued; each product has array of images from thumbnail to print-quality resolution that are custom-processed to unify the product-appearance between vendors; this is generated automatically by a self-scaling farm of cloud-servers that typically has 20-40 servers operating at any time.

HP Startup Ecosystem at The Hatchery