I spent Wednesday & Thursday last week at the Southeast Venture Conference (also known as SEVC).  The event started last year and was held near Washington DC this year.  It’s primarily for VCs, but a few entrepreneurs attended the event.

You never quite know if these kind of events are going to be worthwhile.  The SEVC folks were kind enough to offer some starving-entrepreneur pricing (thanks Eric!) and DC is an easy drive from Raleigh, so it seemed worth the risk.  One of my favorite bloggers was also listed as a speaker and I had arranged to meet him, although unfortunately he had a conflict and had to back out.

All in all, it was a very worthwhile trip.

Most important news first.  We raised our first VC dollar!  Sadly, it was only one dollar, but the first one is supposed to be the hardest, right?  I had a great catch-up conversation with a VC I pitched last year.  His firm passed, but we’ve stayed in touch and he’s been great at giving straight feedback (if you find a VC like this, hang on to him/her because they are a VERY rare breed).  The subject of customers came up, and I mentioned that we had a couple of folks that had been willing to pay at least a dollar.  He promptly pulled out a dollar of his own and handed it over.  We’ll be framing it and hanging it in our lobby (when we have a lobby)…

There was a great panel that included Scot Wingo (CEO/Founder of ChannelAdvisor) and Jim Steele, (President of Salesforce.com).  I’ve known Scot for a little while now and always enjoy seeing him on a panel — he’s adept at keeping things simultaneously humble, entertaining and informative.

There was also a classic "Oh no he didn’t" moment at the end of the panel with a very VERY pushy entrepreneur who spent 3 minutes introducing his company and 5 seconds on his question.  When he didn’t like the answer Jim Steele gave, he actually proceeded to berate him.  As a fellow early stage entrepreneur, I’d be a little more reluctant to tell the President of a $7B company that he’s a dumb ass… especially when in front of a room full of VCs.  I thought Jim handled it very gracefully.

Jim had another presentation later in the day.  Salesforce are branching out into web services with their "Platform as a Service" concept.  The basic thinking is similar to what underlies Amazon’s web services — "We’ve built all this infrastructure and can package it up so you don’t have to".  In principle, I think it’s a great idea.  From what I saw, Salesforce is a little more oriented towards application developers.  What they offer appears to be more "finished" than Amazon’s offerings, but there are clearly pros and cons to both approaches.

What impressed me most about Jim was that after both his panel and presentation, he hung around answering questions until every question was answered.  I talked to him for a few minutes about the ‘Monkey and picked his brains about channel strategies.  When we were done, he readily handed over a business card.  I’ve met a lot of executives from much smaller companies that wouldn’t be so accommodating.

There was also a fascinating presentation by John Sculley (ex-Pepsi, ex-Apple, among other things).  He started off pretty slowly.  Since lunch was being served, I have to say that my attention was elsewhere.  But when he got going, I was hooked.  Much of his presentation was about virtual supply chains.  Doesn’t sound interesting, I know.  But he talked about mass customization (ordering online and getting a customized product shipped from China to your door in 48 hours… at a profit!!!) and the new breed of companies working with wholly virtual supply chains.  Another company he mentioned was able to prototype a new consumer electronics product for a major cell carrier in 45 days!  The product will be launched later this year at 36,000 retail points-of-sale (those kiosks in the mall).  Back in the day, I did a lot of work with some major toy companies.  Their assembly/supply timeline was measured in calendar years, not days.  The toys for Episode 1 were regarded as a major security risk as they were being shipped from China 6+ months before the release of the movie (and were in manufacturing for many months before that).

I spent a few minutes in an elevator with Frank Bonsal.  Mr. Bonsal is regarded as one of the Godfathers of the VC industry and was a founding parter at NEA.  I was, of course, wearing a disruptorMonkey button.  The big news is that Mr. Bonsal liked the name so much he asked for an overview of what we do and my business card.  Take that, Monkey Haters!

I also chatted with some very interesting folks from the IPO group at NASDAQ.  Clearly some very  smart people working on some very interesting stuff.

On the negative side (you knew I couldn’t keep up this happy stuff for too long, right?), some of the presentations were between average and lame.  I was surprised at how many of the company presentations managed to break every rule of presenting — way too much info per slide, no rehearsal and getting cut off before you’re finished because your timing sucks.  Notable exceptions were local boys  Neal Page of Inlet Technologies and Ben Weinberger of DigitalSmiths, both of whom did an excellent job.

So all in all, it was a productive and useful few days. 

Thanks as ever to the folks at Square 1 Bank for numerous introductions.  Thanks to the folks at Hutchison Law Group too.

Categories: Business, Inside My Twisted Start Up Brain...
No Comments »

Growing up in the UK, I have that reptilian hind brain (sorry, I couldn’t find a good link to explain that one) that inexplicably draws me towards teeny tiny cars that get great gas mileage, like this one.  I think most ride-on lawnmowers here have bigger engines than my first car…

When I see Hummers, Suburbans or other oversized vehicles, my flight instinct kicks in and I switch off.

So as you can imagine, I’m generally not much of a fan of American muscle cars (with the possible exception of this one).

What the heck does that have to do with anything?  Well, let me tell you about the first time in my life I seriously wished I owned a big old clunky beast…  And it’s all thanks to being an entrepreneur.

My wife drives a VW Jetta.  It’s a lease, and the lease contract is almost up.  Since we’re stretching every dollar (and my credit has been repeatedly ambushed, mugged, abused and thrown in the gutter to fend for itself), we decided to buy the thing.  We got an okay deal, much lower payment, and all in all it’s a better deal than buying a car we don’t know the history of for the same amount of $$$.

The Jetta is coming up on 40,000 miles and the warranty runs out soon, so I took it to the dealership and had them fix a bunch of odds and ends.  They were very keen for me to have the 40K mile service, so I dug in to see what they actually did for the $500 they wanted to charge me.

Oil, oil filter, air filter, fuel filter, spark plugs and a bunch of walking around.  For $500.

Jeez.

So my "cheap alarm" went off and I declined the service.  I had them change the oil, oil filter and fuel filter (had a bad experience with one of those once) and resolved to do the rest myself. A day and $60 in parts later (I bought new wiper blades too), I had everything I needed to do the job.

The air filter was easy.

But the spark plugs?

Some idiot designed the engine so that the entire exhaust manifold is on top of two out of the four spark plugs.  For those of you that aren’t car inclined, rest assured that unbolting the entire exhaust manifold is neither fun nor wise.  Especially when you’re armed with knowledge that’s easily 15 years out of date and a set of tools that MacGuyver would laugh at rather than try and use.

It took all of 10 minutes to replace two of the plugs.  It took another 2-3 hours to do the others.  And at the point of my third major bit of skin removal, it occurred to me that there’s probably a bit more room to swing a socket wrench on a big old SUV.

So there you have it.  Years of prejudice re-evaluated thanks to the wonderful world of entrepreneurship…

Categories: Inside My Twisted Start Up Brain...
No Comments »

As I mentioned, I was half-dead last week with some kind of MTD (miscellaneous toddler disease) I picked up from my daughter.

Last Friday I had a meeting I didn’t want to cancel, so I dragged my Nyquil-soaked butt to the meeting.

This was a meet and greet, not a serious pitch.  And thank god the guy we were meeting with had a sense of humor.  I repeatedly referred to the Opera browser as the Oprah Browser (the one product she doesn’t seem to promote yet) along with a number of other mumbley nonsensical statements…

So be warned… Pitches and Nyquil are not friends.  Proceed with caution.

Categories: Inside My Twisted Start Up Brain...
No Comments »

I need a new phrase.  You’re doubtless familiar with the old adage "it never rains but it pours".  It’s usually taken as a bad thing — you don’t just get a drop of rain, you get buckets of water.

But I’ve found that good things happen in much the same way…and I don’t have a good phrase for "sometimes good things happen in bunches".

I’ve consistently found that life, the universe and everything tends to unfold in a rather odd, clustered  & lumpy manner.  Today was a great example.

In just one day:

• One of the investors we’ve been talking to has committed to taking some serious next steps (we’re still some distance from a term sheet, but this was a big formal step forward)
• We gained a provisional commitment for some modest (but useful) friends & family style funding
• I reconnected with a very experienced executive I haven’t talked to in 10+ years.  This guy is a superstar with a ton of experience in some key markets we play in and a rolodex that would blow your mind.  You’d probably recognize the names of all of the companies on his resume.
• We got an email from another person we respect and will be meeting with him soon

and on the personal front, my newly arrived niece is now safely at home and doing well.  She arrived quite a few weeks early but is doing incredibly well.  Go Carmen!

And all of this after weeks of silence on a number of fronts.  The product has been moving forward nicely but in entrepreneur time-warp land, it’s felt as though things have been slow of late.

Not any more!

Categories: Inside My Twisted Start Up Brain...
No Comments »

We had a question come up during a pitch the other week about where we draw the line between buy versus build with parts of our technology.

I’m a fan of not re-inventing the wheel when you don’t need to, which tends to put me at odds with many software engineers.  I’ve often found that software engineers err on the side of recreating everything from scratch on the assumption they can do it better.  But that misses the point — it’s not a matter of skill, it’s always a matter of time.  The exception to the rule are engineers who’ve released a bunch of products.  Experience is a great teacher

Fortunately, Logan (my trusty CTO) is a veteran coder and is more than willing to explore off-the-shelf pieces when it makes sense.  So the short answer is that we creatively use off-the-shelf code whenever we can. 

However, there are two caveats to that statement: 

a)    Critical components.  If we are considering using off the shelf code for a critical component, we have to have a high degree of certainty as to the reliability and efficiency of the tool. For example, we looked at an open source library to generate tags, but the code wasn’t nearly optimized enough for our kind of deployment. 

b)    Security.  Data security is big concern for us.  We must be able to clearly demonstrate that a customer’s data is secure under a variety of circumstances.  If using something off-the-shelf results in the slightest degradation of our security, we’ll pass.

But that’s really not the whole story.  As a startup, off-the-shelf can be deeply appealing.  There’s a huge volume of open source code that is readily available, and an equally vast array of odd little utilities that someone somewhere developed, and all of it is readily findable (thanks, Google).

However, there’s a hidden cost, which was really brought home to me by some events that occurred on Friday. 

Working with someone else’s code is orders of magnitude slower than working with your own. 

For the non-coders out there, it’s like inheriting a marketing plan that was written for similar but-not-identical business and trying to shoe-horn it into your business plan without (a) making changes to it or (b) anyone noticing.  Not as easy as it might at first seem.  Think about all the little tweaks you would need to make throughout the rest of your plan in order for integration to be seamless…

Logan has been working on some email integration functionality so that Unifyr can support email archives, and part of that process relies on off-the-shelf tools and someone else’s standards.  The net result is that what was theoretically trivial has taken much longer than he hoped.

But compare and contrast…  On Friday we had a very interesting lunch meeting.  On the drive home he had an epiphany about some functionality we’ve been dying to show but have been unable to spend the time to develop.  I would guess he got home around 3pm.  By 6pm I had a working prototype.

And this is a big deal piece of the Unifyr puzzle.  So big, I can’t tell you what it is yet.  But it puts us in a league of our own.

And it was accomplished in less than three hours.

Now okay, that’s a bit like the old saw about Picasso drawing on the napkin and charging thousands for it ("It only took you five minutes", "no, it took my whole life").  A lot of work was put in to giving the core of Unifyr exactly the kind of flexibility that let Logan deliver this so quickly. 

But it doesn’t change the fact that moving a mountain with your own code is often faster than shifting a molehill with someone else’s.

Choose carefully!

Categories: Inside My Twisted Start Up Brain...
No Comments »