MarkMaunder dot com

Failure Is Not An Option

If you raise money and fail, you need to consider the opportunity cost of another entrepreneur not having had access to the investment capital you lost. If you fail, you need to be sad about your failure and also be sad about the opportunity cost of your failure. But it’s “risk capital” you say – money […]

March 3, 2015 | Startups | No comments

Try Buying your Hardware

We took a lot of heat from the startup community when we bought $40,000 of Dell servers, a switch and a KVM and racked them ourselves in 2008. Seriously, Kerry (my wife and co-founder) and I hand-racked about 10 Dell 2950’s and a couple of 1950’s in the rack we leased at our data center. We didn’t […]

February 28, 2015 | Startup Hacks, Startups | No comments

Installing Ubuntu 14.10 on a Dell R630 with PERC H730 hardware RAID 10

If you arrived here, you’re probably spending your weekend doing this too, so perhaps I can save some of your weekend for you. Here’s how I did it. FYI, I’m using a PERC H730 hardware RAID controller with a 1.1TB virtual disk made up of 8 physical disks in RAID10 config. As the title says, this […]

February 28, 2015 | Startups | 1 comment

OS X 10.10 Yosemite WiFi Problems Analyzed with Wireshark

I never realized how often I google and how much I rely on sub-second response times until I upgraded my Macbook Pro to OS X Yosemite. After muddling through issues like upgrading VMWare and a few other items and fixing my terminal emulation, I couldn’t figure out why I was in such a bad mood. […]

November 13, 2014 | Startups | 1 comment

Startups that Move the Needle

Something that I’m becoming more cognizant of and that I see in my friends as we all get a little older is the question about whether what we’re doing is actually moving the needle for the rest of humanity. If it’s making positive change by enabling our species or improving quality of life for others. My […]

November 3, 2014 | Startups | No comments

4th of July Post

Posted this on Facebook today and felt like cross posting it here. I feel obliged to post this after seen all the posts in my timeline connecting patriotism with the US military. There are ways to express love for your country without expressing a love for war or the machine that wages war. Omitting an […]

July 6, 2014 | Startups | 1 comment

Liars and Geniuses – Thoughts on Live Jazz

There’s something about Jazz live performance that has bothers me and I think it’s the audience. It’s the beatific smiles on many of the faces that last through the entire performance – smiles that remind me of a congregation in a church that know that it’s the wanting to believe that matters most, not whether […]

July 2, 2014 | Startups | 1 comment

Where the term "Zero Day" comes from

After seeing a FOIA request earlier today that someone created asking for FBI training documents that teach staff how to understand/communicate using hacker leet-speak, I was reminded about something I’ve wanted to put in virtual ink for a while. Leet speak or 133+ sp34k or hacker speak did not actually originate with hackers. Neither did […]

June 16, 2014 | Startups | 18 comments

The Qantas A380 Engine Failure: The story of an ops team pulling through a crisis

[Thanks to ‘evanm’ on Hacker News, here’s a link to the full documentary if you don’t want the abbreviated versions below.] As a low hours pilot I spend a lot of time reading NTSB reports and postmortems on flight incidents to try and avoid repeating the mistakes others have made or learn about how they […]

December 27, 2013 | Startups | 2 comments

Why you should fly United Airlines

We just flew United from Portland, Maine to Colorado and will be flying back in the next few days. We brought 3 pets with us, 2 cats and our Australian Cattle Dog, Joey. Their pet handling was awesome in the midst of a serious winter storm blowing through Maine with very cold icy conditions. My […]

December 26, 2013 | Startups | 2 comments

My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.