Ben Behrouzi

I was once asked by Forbes to offer up some experience around some actions companies can take during tough economic times like these to maintain or even increase employee happiness and wellbeing. We all know that without a happy and thriving team, there's no growth, especially in a recession. At DotNext we strive to employ a two pronged approach to increasing team happiness and wellbeing during recession times like these. First Method: First, we immediately roll out substantial, structured and predictable performance based compensation in the form of bonuses and spiffs. Nearly anyone, including managers and directors, can earn additional compensation if they are able to perform above general standards on a challenge by challenge basis. As a result, regardless of economic slow downs, team members are still able to maintain control over their financial destiny. Second... (more)

Startups and Progressive Governance

Startups and startup executives all over Silicon Valley intensely debate around how, when and how much governance startups should apply to their operations when considering the challenges facing them at the moment and the challenges that lie ahead.  These sometimes grueling discussions take place at executive meetings, board meetings and manager meetings when a startup moves form one phase of growth to another. The inflection points between each phase of growth manifest challenges and hurdles that begin to frustrate managers as they operate.  It is important to note that these c... (more)

Rumor Mongering, The Mob and Web 2.0’s Ugly Side

Recently there have been big uproars regarding the growing lack of responsiblity of some blogs and the mob attacks that are set to follow their posts.  For some peculiar reason some bloggers seem to believe they can post whatever they want to, running around like cowboys from the wild wild west shooting from the hip [...] ... (more)

ChannelWeb : LeapFish Tries To Make A Big Splash

With all the publicity around WolframAlpha’s engine there has been a lot of buzz in the search space around what the next successful search engine will look like. It was great to get some coverage today from ChannelWeb as they covered WolframAlpha, LeapFish and the Search space. Here is a snippet from the post : “With [...] ... (more)

25 Years After Escaping Iran

Its hard to imagine that its been almost 25 years since my parents secretly smuggled many of our family members out of Iran due to brutal religious persecution.  Persecution that is unfortunately picking up once again in todays time. A reader asked me to provide more info about this portion of my background and so I offered this short post. The 1979 revolution of Iran put in place a theocracy that among many other horrific things, directly executed over 200 Bahai's, destroyed Bahai holy places, burned thousands of homes, denied everyone access to higher education and spread ma... (more)