Posts filed under 'Events'
February 15th, 2010
Join us tomorrow, Tuesday, February 16, in Sunnyvale where George Grellas will present a short legal guide for entrepreneurs. George is a veteran Silicon Valley startup business lawyer who heads a boutique firm that specializes in early-stage technology startups. Since 1984, as a founders’ lawyer, George has worked with thousands of entrepreneurs in helping them with their strategic planning, entity formation, IP protection, funding, acquisitions–the range of their startup legal needs for both deals and disputes.
George’s style is practical, direct, and down-to-earth, emphasizing a strong working knowledge of technical issues (including tax) explained in a manner that is made understandable and helpful for those new to startups as well as for seasoned entrepreneurs. He is the author of the Startup Law 101 series of tutorials for founders and entrepreneurs.
Bring your questions for George and the other entrepreneurs around the table. As always, there will also be time for your general questions and concerns.
Update Feb-17-2010: George made some thought provoking opening remarks on his visit, in particular:
Startups are interesting. It’s a rather grim time in a macro-economic sense but for early stage startups it’s a pretty amazing time because the infrastructure has been built out. There is a lot of opportunity to launch companies creatively without the capital intensive needs that were there a decade or two ago.
Of course there are many situations where you have capital intensive needs and that occupies the traditional VC realm. But there is a huge and expanding area in the last decade, and the last few years in particular, where with creativity and innovative focus on areas like enterprise people can leverage very interesting business models in ways that used to be unthinkable without a lot of money.
Related Links:
February 5th, 2010
Special Offer for Groups and Organization Members
Discounts are available for members of Bootstrappers Breakfast, Business Marketing Association, Women In Consulting, and organizations sending three or more employees: please contact us for discount codes.
Create and Deliver Surprisingly Compelling Software Demonstrations
“Do The Last Thing First” — the recipe for a Great Demo!
When: Wednesday March 17, 2010 8:15 am – 5:00 pm
Where: Moorpark Hotel, 4241 Moorpark Ave, San Jose CA 95129
This is an interactive workshop with Peter Cohan geared especially for you who demonstrate B-to-B software to your customer and channels. Bring a copy of your demo and be prepared to present it — we’ll help you turn it into a surprisingly compelling demo!
Cost (includes breakfast, lunch, copy of Peter Cohan’s “Great Demo!” book):
- Early Registration: $536
- After March 4: $560
This seminar outlines a framework for the creation and delivery of improved demos and presentations to enable increased success in the marketing, sale, and deployment of software and related products. Whether it’s face to face, in a webinar, as a screencast, or as a self-running demo the ability to present the key benefits of your software product is essential to generating prospect interest and ultimately revenue. Peter Cohan of The Second Derivative gives us the recipe for a Great Demo!
“I am confident that with the insights gained from your workshop we will land more customers in fewer iterations.”
Lav Pachuri, CEO, Xleron Inc.
“Peter Cohan’s Great Demo method really works. It helped us win DEMOgod, and it has allowed us to explain our offering much more clearly to prospects.”
Chaim Indig, CEO, Phreesia
(See “DEMOgod Winner Phreesia Praises Peter Cohan Training“)
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About The Speaker: Peter Cohan, Principal at Second Derivative
Community Web Site: www.DemoGurus.com
Peter Cohan is the founder and a principal of The Second Derivative, a consultancy focused on helping software organizations improve their sales and marketing results. In July 2004, he enabled and began moderating DemoGurus®, a community web exchange dedicated to helping sales and marketing teams improve their software demonstrations. In 2003, he authored Great Demo!, a book that provides methods to create and execute compelling demonstrations. The 2nd edition of Great Demo! was published March 2005.
Before The Second Derivative, Peter founded the Discovery Tools® business unit at Symyx Technologies, Inc., where he grew the business from an empty spreadsheet into a $30 million operation. Prior to Symyx, Peter served in marketing, sales, and management positions at MDL Information Systems, a leading provider of scientific information management software. Peter currently serves on the Board of Directors for Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. and the board of advisors for Excellin, Inc. He holds a degree in chemistry.
Peter has experience as an individual contributor, manage and senior management in marketing, sales, and business development. He has also been, and continues to be, a customer.
Agenda:
- 8:15 AM Breakfast & Registration
- 8:30 AM Workshop begins
- Noon Lunch & De-brief
- 1 PM Advanced Topics
- multiple solution demos
- presenting to a mixed audience with different needs or information requirements
- vision generation demonstrations
- handling bugs, crashes, and time challenges.
- 5 PM Wrap up
Seating is Limited These are intensive sessions and we ask that you arrive at least 15 minutes before 8:30AM start time to ensure you will have a seat and won’t disrupt the session once it is underway.
For more information: Theresa Shafer 408-252-9676 events@skmurphy.com
January 18th, 2010
Create and Deliver Surprisingly Compelling Software Demonstrations
“Do The Last Thing First” — the recipe for a Great Demo!
When: Wednesday March 17, 2010
- AM Session: 8:15 am – 1:00 pm
- PM Session: 1 – 5pm Advanced Topics (see below)
Where: Moorpark Hotel, 4241 Moorpark Ave, San Jose CA 95129
This is an interactive workshop with Peter Cohan geared especially for you who demonstrate B-to-B software to your customer and channels. Bring a copy of your demo and be prepared to present it — we’ll help you turn it into a surprisingly compelling demo! AM Session Cost (includes breakfast, lunch, copy of Peter Cohan’s “Great Demo!” book):
Early Registration: $336
After March 4: $360
See also Feb 5 Announcement, Group Discounts Available for All Day Sessions
This seminar outlines a framework for the creation and delivery of improved demos and presentations to enable increased success in the marketing, sale, and deployment of software and related products. Whether it’s face to face, in a webinar, as a screencast, or as a self-running demo the ability to present the key benefits of your software product is essential to generating prospect interest and ultimately revenue. Peter Cohan of The Second Derivative gives us the recipe for a Great Demo!
“I am confident that with the insights gained from your workshop we will land more customers in fewer iterations.”
Lav Pachuri, CEO, Xleron Inc.
“Peter Cohan’s Great Demo method really works. It helped us win DEMOgod, and it has allowed us to explain our offering much more clearly to prospects.”
Chaim Indig, CEO, Phreesia
(See “DEMOgod Winner Phreesia Praises Peter Cohan Training“)
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Peter Cohan, Principal at Second Derivative
Community Web Site: www.DemoGurus.com
Peter Cohan is the founder and a principal of The Second Derivative, a consultancy focused on helping software organizations improve their sales and marketing results. In July 2004, he enabled and began moderating DemoGurus®, a community web exchange dedicated to helping sales and marketing teams improve their software demonstrations. In 2003, he authored Great Demo!, a book that provides methods to create and execute compelling demonstrations. The 2nd edition of Great Demo! was published March 2005.
Before The Second Derivative, Peter founded the Discovery Tools® business unit at Symyx Technologies, Inc., where he grew the business from an empty spreadsheet into a $30 million operation. Prior to Symyx, Peter served in marketing, sales, and management positions at MDL Information Systems, a leading provider of scientific information management software. Peter currently serves on the Board of Directors for Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. and the board of advisors for Excellin, Inc. He holds a degree in chemistry.
Peter has experience as an individual contributor, manage and senior management in marketing, sales, and business development. He has also been, and continues to be, a customer.
Agenda:
- 8:15 AM Breakfast & Registration
- 8:30 AM Workshop begins
- Noon Lunch & De-brief
- 1 PM Wrap up
Seating is Limited These are intensive sessions and we ask that you arrive at least 15 minutes before 8:30AM start time to ensure you will have a seat and won’t disrupt the session once it is underway.
PM Session: Advanced Topics
In response to requests for assistance on demo delivery we have added an afternoon session to our Great Demos workshop. If this is your first exposure to the Great Demo come for the morning and get a great overview of the methodology and stay for the afternoon if you would like an opportunity for more interactive training on advanced topics such as multi-solution, multi-player demonstrations, and vision generation demonstrations. The advanced topic session as covers real life issues like handling bugs, crashes, and time challenges.
This is an interactive workshop with Peter Cohan is only available to people who have already attended the morning session or a previous Great Demo session.
When: Wednesday March 17, 2010 1:00 – 5:00 pm
Where: Moorpark Hotel, 4241 Moorpark Ave, San Jose CA 95129
Cost $200 Register for the Advanced Topics
Advanced Topics Agenda:
- 1 PM Advanced Topics
- multiple solution demos
- presenting to a mixed audience with different needs or information requirements
- vision generation demonstrations
- handling bugs, crashes, and time challenges.
- 5 PM Wrap up
For more information: Theresa Shafer 408-252-9676 events@skmurphy.com
January 17th, 2010
Second day at the Foresight 2010 conference on “Synergy of Molecular Manufacturing and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)”
Tiny Tech Jobs was a conference sponsor, they not only list jobs on their site but also conferences and consultants.
About tinytechjobs: This site is dedicated to jobs using tiny technology, including careers in MEMS, nanotechnology, microtechnology, biotechnology, and information technology. Here you will find employment in such disciplines as chemistry, physics, materials science, MEMS and NEMS, microelectronics, microfluidics, microarrays, information technology, chip design, semiconductors, optics, photonics, optoelectronics, mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering, and other relevant fields.
Robin Hanson reprised his IEEE Spectrum article “Economics of the Singularity” but neither he nor David Friedman’s talk seemed to address what molecular manufacturing and embedded AI might yield. So I went and looked up Bruce Sterling’s “When Blobjects Rule the Earth,” his keynote at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles in August 2004 and have included a couple of trends he identified 6 years ago that have only gathered force:
- Artifacts are made and used by hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers.
- Machines are made and used by customers, in an industrial society.
- Products are made and used by consumers, in a military-industrial complex.
- Gizmos are made and used by end-users, in whatever today is – a “New World Disorder,” a “Terrorism-Entertainment Complex,” our own brief interregnum.
- A Gizmo is not manufacturable by any centrally planned society. A Gizmo is something like a Product, but instead of behaving predictably and sensibly for a mass market of obedient consumers, a Gizmo is an open-ended tech development project. In a Gizmo, development has been deputized to end-users.
- End-Users, who are people like practically everybody in this audience, do a great deal of unpaid pro bono work in developing Gizmos. The true signs of a Gizmo are that it has a short lifespan and more functionality crammed into it than you will ever use or understand. A Gizmo is like a Product that has swallowed a big chunk of the previous society, and contains that within the help center and the instruction manual.
- A Gizmo, unlike a Machine or a Product, is not efficient. A Gizmo has bizarre, baroque, and even crazy amounts of functionality. This Treo that I’m carrying here, this is a classic Gizmo: it’s a cellphone, a web browser, an SMS platform, an MMS platform, a really bad camera, and an abysmal typewriter, plus a notepad, a sketchpad, a calendar, a diary, a clock, a music player, and an education system with its own onboard tutorial that nobody ever reads. Plus I can plug extra, even more complicated stuff into it, if I take a notion. It’s not a Machine or a Product, because it’s not a stand-alone device. It is a platform, a playground for other developers. It’s a dessert topping, and it’s a floor wax.
- Now, I could redesign this Gizmo to make it into a simple Product. But then this Gizmo would become a commodity. There would be little profit in that; in an end-user society like ours, Products come in bubblepak or shrinkwrap in big heaps, like pencils. There is no money in them.
- So there are good reasons why a Gizmo is almost impossible to use. It’s because a Gizmo is delicately poised between commodity and chaos. It is trying to cram as much impossible complexity as it can, into an almost usable state. It is leaning forward into the future.
- This is not a vision of utopia. This is a historical thesis. Like all previous history it is fraught with titanic struggle. We are facing a future world infested with digital programmability. A world where our structures and possessions include, as a matter of course, locaters, timers, identities, histories, origins, and destinations: sensing, logic, actuation, and displays. Loops within loops. Cycles within cycles.
January 16th, 2010
Great presentation by Larry Millstein on “Sequencing Singla DNA molecules.” Cost per Human Genome sequence has been dropping rapidly and is on track to hit $1,000 in two to four years and $100 could happen this decade. This is enabling companies like Knome to offer complete genome sequencing and analysis for individuals. Another firm offering low cost DNA based testing (but not full sequencing) is 23andMe.
Some of the firms driving the sequencing revolution are
Another outstanding presentation was by Hod Lipson on “Adaptive and Self-Reflective Systems.” This video from TED on “Self-Aware Robots” includes short video segments that were included in his presentation; the videos page of the Cornell Computational Synthesis Laboratory contains more interesting videos. Some key points:
- If you give the controller the ability to run experiments you don’t need to give it as much information and it can actually climb out of “local minima” through experimentation more easily than existing controllers searching much larger databases.
- This also gives the robot the ability to respond either to damage or changes in the environment since it will continue to run experiments and refine it’s model of itself and the world.
- “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.” His Eureqa program helps you make sense of data sets detecting hidden relationships and equations in the data. It was featured in Wired last year: “Download Your Own Robot Scientist.”
- He made these same remarks in his talk from his paper “Evolutionary Robotics and Open-Ended Design Automation“:
IMAGINE A LEGO SET AT YOUR DISPOSAL: Bricks, rods, wheels, motors, sensors and logic are your “atomic” building blocks, and you must find a way to put them together to achieve a given high-level functionality: A machine that can move itself, say. You know the physics of the individual components’ behaviors; you know the repertoire of pieces available, and you know how they are allowed to connect. But how do you determine the combination that gives you the desired functionality? This is the problem of Synthesis. Although engineers practice it and teach it all the time, we do not have a formal model of how open-ended synthesis can be done automatically. Applications are numerous. This is the meta-problem of engineering: Design a machine that can design other machines.
Brad Templeton gave a good talk on self-driving cars. They are much closer than you might think due to efforts by the Japanese and the US Military in particular. The last few entries for the “RoboCars” category of his blog provide a lot of the very interesting material and videos he worked into his presentation.
Brad notes in his blog: “I will also be doing my general Robocar talk on Wednesday, February 24th at the “Homebrew Robotics Club” of Silicon Valley. This is a great group of people who hack robotics as a hobby, and it means at the CMU building at NASA Ames Research Center. This event is free and open to the public.”
January 15th, 2010
I will be at the Foresight 2010 conference on “Synergy of Molecular Manufacturing and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)” this weekend and hope to blog some of the better sessions and anything else I learn. There is a twitter hashtag “#Foresight2010” you can use to follow conference tweets and the talks will also be broadcast on http://www.techzulu.com/live.html
Four good sites to track new technologies:
January 12th, 2010
Recapping on my earlier “Federated Entrepreneurship” post from January 5.
A federation is a union of partially self-governing units with a constitution that does not allow unilateral changes by a central governing body. I think it’s also a good model for what’s required to create an economically dynamic region. One parallel would be to a barn raising or Finnish talkoot, where a community comes together to solve an urgent problem that is beyond the means of a member or family in the community. As one of my old clients once remarked “it takes a village to raise a startup” and I think it takes a federation of entrepreneurs to improve the economy in a region.
Justin Bacon described this as a goal for his Minnesota Lean Startup Group in a comment on the LinkedIn Group
What we all hope to learn, the encouragement and advice that we give and/or receive, the lessons learned that we share and the relationships that we build, are as much about building this kind of community here locally as it is about helping us foster our own bootstrapped tech-startups.
Two other well known entrepreneurs have shifted their focus to entrepreneurial education.
Sramana Mitra outlined an ambitious New Year’s Resolution for 2010
Through the Entrepreneur Journeys project, I have come to conclude that the most vulnerable phase in an entrepreneur’s life is the pre $1 million revenue stage. This is where numerous ventures fail. Once the $1 million revenue milestone is crossed, entrepreneurs find it easier to find additional customers, manage working capital, and access funding, whether it is credit or equity.
In my roundtables, the vast majority of entrepreneurs I work with are in this rather vulnerable pre $1 million revenue stage.
Thus, I have come to the conclusion that if I could help a million entrepreneurs globally reach $1 million in revenue (and beyond), that would be the foundation of a robust, distributed, and sustainable economic value creation that would add up to a trillion dollars in global GDP. It would also result in creating at least 10 million jobs around the world.
Through my efforts — blog, books, columns, roundtables — I am trying to develop a scalable entrepreneurship education system that entrepreneurs from every corner of the world can access. I am sure, in 2010, this work will gain further momentum.
But I do need your help in getting the word out that this resource base is available for entrepreneurs who wish to access it. Each of you — if you believe in this vision — can directly or indirectly influence, perhaps, another hundred entrepreneurs, and help them clear the all-important $1 million revenue hurdle. By using bootstrapping, crisp positioning, and laser-sharp focus, entrepreneurs can, each in their individual domains, build small businesses with solid foundations.
Eric Ries also outlined a desire to move Towards a New Entrepreneurship in his first post of 2010:
When I started writing about the lean startup, my aspiration was to do more than just share a handful of tips and tricks that work for consumer internet startups. I believe the only way to improve our chances as entrepreneurs is to develop a working theory of entrepreneurship.
Like other industries – from publishing to automobiles – entrepreneurship is in the process of being disrupted by globalization. On the whole, this is a good thing for America and for our civilization. The cost of creating new companies is falling rapidly, and access to markets, distribution, and information is within the reach of anyone with an internet connection. The result is a profound democratization of the digital means of production.
In a subsequent post today Eric did a roundup of Lean Startup Resources; there is also this list of Meetups.
Related posts:
- “Continuing Education in Entrepreneurship” from October 2006 suggests networking offers “knowledge that isn’t written down” (and not to be found in Mr. Google’s basement):
“I had this epiphany that I had spent the last dozen years or so, since I started attending Software Entrepreneur Forum (now SDForum) and Churchill Club meetings, in this ad hoc program in continuing entrepreneurial education. Books are valuable, and not enough entrepreneurs do enough reading, but there is also a category of knowledge that hasn’t been written down yet. And you can gain wisdom from listening to someone whose has played the game–even if it’s just their mistakes–that you would otherwise have to gain from your mistakes experience.”
- “Breakfast with Tom Anyos of Technology Ventures Corporation” Between 2002 and 2008 TVC offered a set of six monthly classes twice a year in Silicon Valley:
- Entering the Entrepreneurial World
- Market Research & the Marketing Plan
- Financial Management
- Preparing & Presenting the Business Plan
- Operations Startup, Monitoring & Human Resources
- The Term Sheet & Lessons Learned
- “Startup Epicenter Offers Intensive Workshops, Challenge, and Festival“
December 14th, 2009
We have added two Holiday Bootstrapper Breakfasts in the week between Christmas and New Years. This year Christmas and New Years fell on the fourth Friday and first Friday of the month which collided with two regularly scheduled breakfasts (which have been canceled).
Which means that we will have a total of four breakfasts in the last three weeks of December:
- Tue-Dec-15 7:30am in Sunnyvale at Coco’s
- Fri-Dec-18 9am in SR at Boudin Bakery
- Mon-Dec-28 9am in Sunnyvale at Coco’s
- Wed Dec-30 9am in Mtn View at Red Rock
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And as we reminded you eight weeks ago in “Eleven Weeks–or Less–Left in 2009” here are some logistics issues you should take care of now instead of playing catch up in early 2010:
- If this is your first year in business get your accounting system (in most cases in the US this will be QuickBooks) in order now, schedule a meeting with your accountant (or interview candidates and select one) before December 11. If you are based in Silicon Valley we are huge fans of Ogden Lilly.
- If you’ve been working on a startup but haven’t incorporated yet, you may want to get all of your paperwork in order but postpone filing until the first week in January, in some states this will save you paying 2009 annual fees for a few weeks of operation in December and then 2010 annual fees. We like to see teams incorporate sooner rather than later if only because it gives you a vehicle to do business with that’s better than a collection of sole proprietorships.
- Take some time to do both a recap of 2009 and a look forward for 2010, assessing what are appropriate goals in light of continued economic difficulties in most industries. The two Holiday Bootstrapper Breakfasts would be a good opportunity for this.
December 13th, 2009
John Carter CEO of TCGen is speaking on “Doing the Math: How to Estimate and Manage Results” at IEEE-CNSV on Tuesday December 15 at 7pm at KeyPoint Credit Union, 2805 Bowers Ave., Santa Clara, CA 95051. The event is free and open to the public.
His talk will focus on estimating the effort required to achieve results on a technical project, a key task for entrepreneurs who need to estimate budgets and manage customer expectations. Mr. Carter will present some best practices for estimation that apply to projects that involve some degree of organizational, workflow, or IT changes, and where there is vested interest in making the change quickly and ensuring it is on track.
He gave an outstanding talk at BayChi in May of this year on “How to Fire Your Boss and Become a Consultant”
His presentation style was interesting, he asked questions at the beginning and then stopped the presentation about 12-15 minutes in to take questions and engage the audience before continuing.
Key points I took away:
- This was really for consultants selling to large companies
- Happiness is the difference between reality and expectations
- Unique specialty: charge by the project
- Write a project plan (statement of work) with client together
- Give advice in advance that is specific and actionable to give them an idea of what it will be like to work with you
- Use automated time records (Time Slips)
- Spend at at least 10 hours marketing a week (15% of a 65 hour work week)
- marketing includes developing articles, preparing presentations
- Public speaking communicates your personal chemistry and offers insight into what working with you would be like
- Key account selling: always look for referrals to adjacent divisions of larger firms
- To be a successful consultant, you must have recognizable intellectual property distinguishing your services from others.
- Successful consultants listen for what the person is actually saying: people will tell you what they want, what their pain is.
- Focus on marketing not selling: future-oriented in time, one to many, create demand
Note: the talk will be preceded by the CNSV Annual Meeting and election of 2010 officers.
December 6th, 2009
We have a few seats left for our Jan 12, 2010 Idea to Revenue workshop in Redwood Shores, CA. If you are in formation or the early days of your startup this is a good opportunity to spend four hours on your business with your team members. We help you ask each other the hard questions so you can leave with a one page plan for your next steps.
This will sell out, register now.
Update Jan-3: Sold out.
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