We are excited by the opportunity to invest in a company that we believe is on track to be a significant player in the storage market.

Over the last nine to 12 months, they've been growing into an enterprise software company. Today, we're seeing some growing pains. They are going to grow their top line but there is low visibility as to how rapidly they are going to grow it.

Despite posting a high-quality September quarter and beating consensus numbers, Yahoo's guidance continues to be cautious due to a challenging near-term business environment.

The general takeaway from our moonlighting is that Amazon is executing on its near-term and long-term financial and operating goals. Customers are plentiful and active, customer service levels are high, and operations are becoming more efficient.

While it's imprecise to extrapolate trends from a single distribution center, in our view the activity levels at this facility demonstrate that Amazon is highly likely to meet or exceed our December quarter revenue estimate of $1 billion. Shipment levels appear to be at least on plan, with a very high backlog of orders to be filled.

[If that weren't enough of an incentive to stay put, the company offered Cross the opportunity to enroll in MBA courses and in various executive development programs.] They took a view that one of the challenges for an organization like ours was to foster a feeling of everyone being a manager of the business, ... Their desire to have me become more of a businessman kept me interested in spending my career there. There were times when IT was at a standstill, but at those times there was always something happening on the executive level that made the job worthwhile.