Archive for October, 2008
October 13th, 2008
Ed Lee and I have been pulling together another EDA Bloggers’ Birds of a Feather, this one at the 2008 ICCAD Conference. It will be on Wednesday November 12, 4-6pm in the Fir Ballroom. It’s listed in the ICCAD program as an additional meeting: EDA Bloggers’ Birds-of-a-Feather sponsored by IEEE CEDA and organized by Juan-Antonio Carballo of the IBM Venture Capital Group in San Mateo, CA.
Purpose
- Promote blogging in EDA / ASIC Design Industry
- Allow bloggers to meet and get to know one another in a community of practice setting.
- Educate interested parties, readers and others interested in blogging.
Agenda
- Opening remarks Juan-Antonio Carballo (our sponsor for the event at ICCAD)
- One Minute intro by each attendee: Name, Company/Affiliation, Blog; Can Suggest Issues or Discussion Topics.
- Three minute Lightning Talks (targeting 8-12 depending upon who volunteers)
- Open Discussion
If you are interested in giving a Lightning Talk (3 slides in 3 minutes) please contact me.
Possible Topics for Lightning Talks (many of these came from prep for DAC BoF)
- Why I started a blog…and what I’ve learned since I started.
- Blogging on topics that are not covered enough (e.g. DFT)
- Online magazines, vendor communities, “DeepChip”, and blogs: what each is good for.
- Blogging Standards Efforts
- Tips for blogging Conferences
- Good Topics that I really want to write about, but am afraid to.
- How to build and track audience.
- Pros and cons of comments.
- Team blogging. (multiple authors contributing to one blog)
- Micro-blogging: Twitter, Tumblr and others
- Lessons Learned from Blogging
- For readers: how to find and follow blogs.
Confirmed presenters (in alphabetical order by last name, this list will be updated as speakers are added)
You are also welcome to attend without giving a lightning talk, this will be an related event at ICCAD but will not require ICCAD registration to attend. I think we can support about eight to twelve lightning talks and still have time both for attendees to introduce themselves and plenty of discussion.
There is a mailing list for EDA bloggers at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/edabloggers/ It’s is a very low traffic (1-2 messages a month) moderated E-mail distribution list for announcements and other notices of general interest to EDA Blogging community. It’s intended to help coordinate Birds of a Feather and other events for bloggers at EDA related conferences and other venues.
Please contact me if you are interested in attending and/or giving a talk. If you want to use slides (max 3) I will need them by November 5 (a week in advance) so that we can stage them on one computer for easy changes between speakers.
Related links on this blog
Other Blog coverage:
Update Wed-Oct-14: John Blyler has been added as a speaker, addressing “Blogging, a Publisher’s Dilemma” which will be a lightning talk on Staffer vs Guest bloggers, group bloggers to cover functional topics, ROI schemes, community building.
Update Wed-Oct-27: Rick Munden has been added as a speaker.
October 9th, 2008
After blogging about how “User Communities are Critical for Complex Products” two days ago I thought I would offer some quick tips on how to get started:
- Be clear on the benefits to the members. So many social networking groups are very clear on how members bring benefit to a user site, but not very clear on the benefit to the members.
- Treat it as a conversation, and it’s not just with customers. It’s as important to have a dialogue with non-customers.
- Don’t forget face-to-face dialogue. They are critical to on-line communities and ecosystems.
- Blend on-line and face-to-face events in complementary ways: typically a face-to-face kickoff with inject a lot of energy and useful context into ongoing on-line interactions.
- Consider using on-line content and interact to prepare for a face-to-face event.
October 8th, 2008
I had the occasion to send the following e-mail in July of last year after a series of conversations and e-mail exchanges with a struggling founder. I thought it was apropos the current angst in Silicon Valley.
Sent: Tuesday, July 03, 2007 3:32 PM
Subject: Please be healthy
It’s a challenge to maintain work life balance, whether it’s the driven by the demands of success or the need to make changes that will make your business work. Please take it easy and make one or two changes that stick (whether it’s walking or diet or meditation or spending more time reading). For me it takes months to change habits, so pick just one thing and make it stick: then a second might be easier.
Just a thought.
We work with a lot of folks who are restructuring or rethinking their business. The stress you feel is not at all uncommon. I have a quote from Gerald Weinberg that I keep handy “What looks like a crisis is only the end of an illusion.” I don’t pass this along to demean or diminish what you have accomplished, but to stress the need to see things clearly as they are.
One other thought: traction is the ability to set and hit targets reliably.
If you find that you are setting goals for things that are under you control (e.g. closing business is not under your control, placing calls or sending e-mails is) that you are not hitting, scale back until you are able to get traction. Free advice from someone who has been there (and returns periodically).
I leave you with a quote from J. R. R. Tolkien that I have found to be an inspiration when I am wandering, worried that I am lost:
“All that is gold does not glitter,
not all those who wander are lost;
the old that is strong does not wither,
deep roots are not reached by the frost.
October 7th, 2008
User communities are not just a low cost way to market and support your product, they are essential to complex technology products. The 1999 Cluetrain Manifesto offers a number of observations that are still very relevant. Take a look at the first seven (of 95) “Manifesto” theses and consider how they relate to your business and to your conversations with prospects and customers:
- Markets are conversations.
- Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
- Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
- Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments, or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
- People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
- The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
- Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
When you are thinking about the how a user community could impact your business, we believe you should take a long-term view of each partnership and build a strong ecosystem. We believing that establishing close, mutually beneficial relationships with users as partners will allow you to deliver the best products and services possible.
Here’s an interesting bit of wisdom from Adam Fields on The First Rule of Community:
There’s really only one rule for community as far as I’m concerned, and it’s this – in order to call some gathering of people a “community”, it is a requirement that if you’re a member of the community, and one day you stop showing up, people will come looking for you to see where you went.
One final quote on communities:
“Communities already exist…think about how you can help that community do what it wants to do.”
Mark Zuckerberg (quote from slide 29 of Neil Perkins slide show “What’s Next in Media“)
We spend a lot of time with firms helping to make sure that not only their offering but their internal metrics and scorekeeping mechanisms are keeping them aligned with the purposes of communities they wish to serve.
More on Cluetrain: Sean blogged about the Cluetrain Manifesto last year in the “CINA Blog Panel Wrap-Up” where he suggested that the following were key theses:
1. Markets are conversations.
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
8. In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.
10. As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.
11. People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.
12. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies
17. Companies that assume on-line markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.
18. Companies that don’t realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.
19. Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.
20. Companies need to realize their markets are often laughing. At them.
61. Sadly, the part of the company a networked market wants to talk to is usually hidden behind a smoke screen of hucksterism, of language that rings false and often is.
62. Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.
Update Oct-9-2008: See “3 Tips for Developing User Community Sites” for some practical ways to get started.
October 6th, 2008
I had the pleasure of attending Steve Blank’s talk on “Customer Development for Startups” on Wednesday, September 17 at TiE and I wanted to offer some pointers both to content he referenced and some related information on Customer Development.
The focus of the talk was how to organize sales, marketing and business development in a high technology startup to address the following key issues:
- Where is the market?
- Who are the customers?
- What is the minimum feature set needed to satisfy these customers?
- How to scale sales?
He offered insights and concrete examples for why some startups are successful and others are left to sell off their furniture–having some experience with the latter I can advise you that Desk Depot will not only deliver they will pick up. Some simple rules of thumb from the talk:
- Understand “a day in the life” of your customer: in particular
- How they will determine they can benefit from your product?
- Who will be involved in the decision to evaluate or purchase your product?
- Focus on minimum feature set so that you can get an adequate solution in front of customers as rapidly as possible.
- A PowerPoint slide or a datasheet is as useful as a working prototype in the early market, more useful since it’s easier to change.
- Don’t add features unless it’s absolutely essential.
- The founders must sell.
- Don’t hire more than one sales person before you start to reliably close business.
- If the founders aren’t involved in early early sales they cannot balance whether it’s the sales presentation or the product that needs to change.
Some additional resources for Customer Development:
Update Tue-Oct-7: Philip Mikal E-mails:
Came across your blog post on Steve Blank’s recent talk at TIE. I’m also a fan and thought you’d be interested in his recent talk at Stanford: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2048
It’s a good talk and the only on-line recording I am aware of where Steve talks about Customer Development. It’s downloadable as an MP3 and worth listening to a couple of times.
October 5th, 2008
Sean is speaking Thursday November 6 at the Santa Clara Valley Chapter of the IEEE Technological Management Council on “Ten Business Books in One Hour for the Busy High-Tech Executive.”
Spend an hour and leave with a summary of key business insights and some rules of thumb for successful innovation in Silicon Valley. You might even identify one or two books that you haven’t read that will be worth your time. Sean will cover ten books that form the basis for conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley. They provide the terms, the metaphors, the parables–in short the language–that successful businesses use to develop their plans and monitor their execution. Some of these books are old, but still provide succinct guidelines for adoption decisions organizations have to make when deploying or introducing new technology.
Authors like Clayton Christensen, Geoffrey Moore, Peter Drucker, and William Davidow provide a strategic framework for high technology business; they explain how the world works. Steve Blank’s “Four Steps to the Epiphany”, Doug Hall’s “Jumpstart Your Business Brain” and Michael Gerber’s “E-Myths Revisited” offer valuable perspectives on business; they explain how teams need to view the world. Finally, Peter Cialdini, Al Ries and Jack Trout offer useful insights and rules of thumb for how to influence and act as a change agent both within a company and externally.
If you are
looking for a speaker for your next Silicon Valley meeting
contact us.
October 2nd, 2008
I first met Sam Schillace at an Under The Radar event on “The Business of Web Apps: Where the Web Goes to Work” in March of this year. Sam co-founded Upstartle, the firm that developed Writely, with Steve Newman and Claudia Carpenter. I had been a user of Writely before it morphed into Google Docs and was delighted to meet one of the folks who had made it possible.
We put up a short interview with him on the Bootstrapper Breakfast blog yesterday. For more information on Writely, the Writely–The Back Story by Peter Rip makes for interesting reading, key extract:
I’ve known Sam and Steve for about nine years. They have been in the application software business for nearly 20 years. Two important themes arise from this. First, they aren’t generic applications software guys. Every major product they have shipped has been about “documents” but on successive platforms.
- They were the authors of FullPaint and FullWrite — the largest selling third party word processing and painting apps on the original Macs.
- They developed the first cross-platform (Mac, Windows) WYSWYG HTML editor which came to market as Claris Home Page.
- They developed the re-design and built the underlying platform to Macromedia’s re-write of DreamWeaver.
- Now they have built Writely.
He is coming to tomorrow’s Bootstrappers Breakfast, please RSVP as we have limited space. He has prepared a couple of remarks and then, like all Bootstrapper Breakfasts, it will be a serious discussion on growing a business based on internal cash flow. I hope to see you tomorrow at 7:30AM in the back room at Hobee’s in Palo Alto (4224 El Camino Real Palo Alto, CA 94306).
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