Events

I have netted out a couple of key suggestions I made to the three presenting companies at Monday’s SDForum Marketing SIG “Marketing Lab” so that they are more generally applicable. I was impressed: all three start-ups were well prepared, they managed their presentations to the time limits and were serious about their businesses. Two key […]

I first met Debra Willrett, founder of Expert Software Consulting, at an IEEE Consultants Network for Silicon Valley (CNSV) when she gave a  great talk on the new CNSV website in February of 2006. Later I learned that she was the  inventor of the Macintosh application MacProject, an application that has defined a paradigm for

Tomorrow we have a first Bootstrappers Breakfast in Milpitas at the Omega Restaurant, 90 S. Park Victoria Drive. Come join us for our shake down cruise at a new location. If you haven’t been to one here are some guidelines for first timers: The breakfast starts at 7:30am and ends at 9am. Your cost is

I spent the day at Structure 08 and–at the risk of getting too mereologic–felt that the whole was much less than the sum of the parts. The conference was focused on cloud computing which I believe is an important technology trend. They recruited several very good speakers–and many poor, or at least poorly prepared, ones.

Interesting panel on “Cloud Computing: Creating Value for Web 2.0 Apps” cloud computing tonight at VLAB. Here are a couple of key things I took away: Jonathan Bryce, a co-founder at Mosso, gave the history of Rackspace’s incubation of a new model that can disrupt their existing business. At a starting price of $100 a

Tomorrow’s “Engineering Your Sales Process” workshop is sold out: we are at capacity and cannot accept walk-ins. We will offer this workshop again in the fall. We are planning our second half and will be offering workshops both on an open enrollment basis and as custom engagements for one startup. There are advantages to both

Tomorrow’s Getting More Customers workshop is sold out. We are at capacity at FortisGC for this workshop and cannot accept walk-ins. We will offer this workshop again in the fall. We are offering a new one, “Engineering Your Sales Process“, next month: Building a repeatable sales process is key to a sustainable business, understanding how

There has been a last minute substitution and Nick Tredennick will be speaking on the next transition in computing: performance per watt. Full details are on the SF Bay ACM website. Date: Wednesday, 16 April 2008, 6:30 PM Location: Hewlett Packard (see directions), Pruneridge and Wolfe, Cupertino, Bldg. 48, Oak Room. Cost: Free and open

We are changing things up next week and offering our “Getting More Customers” on a Friday instead of a Saturday at a  location that’s farther north than we’ve ever gone: Redwood Shores. The FortisGC folks have graciously allowed us to use their main conference room. The Getting More Customers workshop will give you focused time

We hosted a roundtable on SaaS sales issues today at Plug and Play in Sunnyvale over lunch. Here are some quotes I pulled off of our feedback cards: Good Discussion, interesting models discussed. Further info separating metrics from models would be helpful in fueling discussion. Great Roundtable. Lengthen the time. Well moderated, very on point.

Spent the day at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus attending Dealmaker Media‘s Under the Radar Conference on “The Business of Web Apps: Where the Web Goes to Work.” A company that would seem to have a lot to lose from the success of web-based applications with an Office 2.0 focus has taken Michael Corleone’s advice to

Looks like we will be in good company. Whether you are considering leaving you day job for a startup, you are consulting while you develop a product, you are open for business and looking for early customers, looking for smarter customers, or you’ve found your niche and you are looking to scale up, drop by.