Month: March 2004

Once again, I am not going to blog the panels at PC Forum, but you can find some good commentary on the conference via other bloggers from my post yesterday. Other good posts can be found from Dan Gillmor, Jason Calacanis, or the PC Forum Eventspace.

However, what I would like to share with you is some conversations I had with some VCs and entrepreneurs over the course of the day yesterday. While the panels are interesting and the speakers can stretch your mind, what is great about PC Forum is the high-level networking that occurs during the day. So what did we talk about? There were a number of attendees who were here during the past few years and their businesses raised a fair amount of capital and somehow they managed to survive the nuclear winter during the 2001-2002 period. What allowed them to do it? What are the challenges they face now? One observation that I discussed with some others is that the very principles that made companies successful during the bubble period are the very ones that would land you in bankruptcy court during any other business period. Some of these principles included growing revenue and headcount at all costs with no focus on profitability and spending tons of money on building a larger than life image-lots of money thrown at PR firms and advertising with no idea of who your target market was or what your customer really wanted. In other words, alot of these companies were based on cool technology and not on making customers happy. On top of this, VCs threw too much money at these companies and there was no need for entrepreneurs to be resourceful and creative in order to get things done.

Let’s fast forward to now. The companies that survived this downturn were excellent at cutting costs, repositioning their products for new markets, and being resourceful and creative to survive. While these are some of the business principles I want my companies to continue to adhere to, I also want to caution that there is a danger in being too cheap. Some of these companies were so shellshocked from what happened during the past couple of years that they have become too cautious. For anyone that has been through the tough years, the only thing I can say is congratulations for surviving but now it is time to take some calculated risks. It is time to get out of the bunker and go into attack mode. Go after your competition, take some calculated risks, and focus on creating some revenue growth. What is different now than before is that most companies that survived the nuclear winter know who their customer is, how much they will pay, and what features and functionalities they may want in future versions. While it may sound like idle VC talk, I encourage you to spend that extra $$$ now as long as you can see the real ROI behind a targeted marketing program, the hiring of a new engineer to finish a product faster, or a new sales person to manage more qualified leads. Once again, take it with a grain of salt, as some entrepreneurs may think this is another VC swinging for the fences, but the point is don’t be too cautious because the opportunity may just pass you by.

PC Forum is off to a great start this year with an interview with Eric Schmidt from Google and a panel with the CEOs of AOL, Yahoo, and Google. I do not plan on taking detailed notes so I suggest you view Ross Mayfield’s blog and posts to stay current on the conference. I also suggest visiting David Weinberger and Brett Fausett for more notes.

With respect to the first panel, I took some interesting notes on spam. AOL and Yahoo are doing all that they can to stop spam, catching high 90% of it. The frightening aspect is that the high amount of spam that you do see is only the 4-5% that is not filtered. AOL gets 2.7 – 3 billion spam messages per day which is trying to get into their system. Not a surprise that spam is a huge issue, but these numbers are. No one claimed to have a silver bullet, but rather advocated the use of multiple ways to overcome this issue.

Bruce Schneier had some interesting comments on the security and risk panel. Specifically, Bruce said that security is social and not about technology. Yes, there are technical causes and solutions for security but it is irrelevant if the social and economic model are not fixed. For example, there are plenty of spam filters out there but we still get tons of spam. The economics work for spammers. For users, it comes down to balancing security with the cost to mitigate the risk. People will make decisions based on economic value and cost. I totally agree here.

Next up was the CIO panel (Dawn Lepore, former CIO of Schwab, Shai Agassi, SAP, and Rafael Sanchez, Burger King). Dawn Lepore said that software is one of the biggest issues for CIOs. It is complex and costs are excalating tremendously. Software vendors and customers are diametrically opposed as the software vendors want to lock-in customers and the customers want flexibility. How does seeing an architecture diagram where the vendor’s products are in 12 places in a stack solve her business problem? Given this tension between vendors and proprietary lock-in, it is no surprise that open-source and open-platform technology and new business models like the hosted or subscription sale are spreading rapidly. The more you hear the panel talk about technology and the job of the CIO as being a risk manager, you can clearly see why it is so hard for an early stage company to land a big customer. Who wants to take the risk of buying a new technology from a new vendor? Yes, it happens but it is not easy.

I guess it is not a coincidence that a number of companies floating around sell to/service consumers as the first target market-companies like Onfolio, Eurekster, and Datapod.

As I have said a number of times, I am a big believer that companies should start looking at how to use new technology and standards like blogs, wikis, and RSS/Atom from a product perspective and not solely for news publishing and aggregation. What do I mean by that? In response to a post I wrote about why I blog as a VC and the benefits of it, Brandon Wirth sent me a link to a piece he wrote about the future of customer relationships. In it, he summarizes by saying:

In the very near future there will be a trend to use Social Networking to create product communities. This will replace focus groups, and market research trends of today with direct interaction with those most likely to buy a given product. This is the American Idol for big business. Instead of trying to pick what the best solution is and betting the farm on it, you let the market pick a winner for you and they will already love the product before they have it. The focus becomes on the end user. They feel ownership in the creation of the product, and already know they want it.

Not sure I agree on the “American Idol” for big business, but the point of staying close to the customer is an important concept. I certainly see a world where companies use new technology and standards like blogs, wikis, and RSS to build a relationship with its users and to empower them to participate in a company’s success. This conversational based approach to dealing with customers is a great and EASY way for companies to share information on new features and releases and get constructive feedback on their products, receive new ideas, and frankly hear about the gripes. All this should help companies build a better relationship with customers and gather real-world data. While the example Brandon uses is a consumer one, I also greatly believe that this applies to infrastructure software as well. As I mention in an earlier post, it is too easy for companies to get enamored about their technology and to forget that end users need a great experience. Building fanatical user communities is not a new idea, but the point is that new standards and technology make it easier for companies to create, manage, and leverage them in a frictionless and organized way.

Along these lines, Jeff Nolan just put up a new post on his LinkedIn experiment. And in it, he praises Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn, for paying attention to blogs and dealing with Jeff’s experiment in a highly positive way. I encourage reading this post as Jeff has some great comments on how companies can deal with bloggers and why it is another important source of information and feedback.

As you can see, I have been spending alot of time with my portfolio companies hiring in a number of functions to create growth. That is obviously a good sign. Hiring is such an important skill, there is no science to it, but research and common sense help. I am sure you remember the old adage, hire slow, fire fast. Anyway, when it comes to sales people, let me give you a rule of thumb-never hire sales people that have stuck around in a declining business for too long. Any sales person worth his weight wants to be where the action is, and if the company is not growing, the TALENTED PRODUCERS ALWAYS LEAVE FIRST. It may sound like I am being master of the obvious, but sometimes it is hard to remember this, especially since many sales people interview well. Do your research on their background and the companies at which they worked. Be extremely careful about the candidate that rode a company from $40 million of revenue down to $10 million because you can bet that if the guy was hungry and talented, he would be somewhere else!

Forgive me for being obsessed with customers, but after all, without them, how can you have a business. Anyway, I was interviewing a VP of Engineering candidate for one of my portfolio companies, and when I asked a question about the most significant lesson that he learned from one of his prior jobs, this was his thought-while the core technology is important, focus on providing the customer with an unbelievable user experience straight out of the box. What will the customer see and touch first. Start with the installation process. Make your product the easiest to install. If it goes smoothly and quickly, if you can do it plug and play or remotely, the customer will already begin to have a pleasant experience with your product. Make the GUI as user-friendly as possible. If it is as intuitive as using your email or browser, then it will make it easy for the customer to get the team using it with minimal training. Finally, make it easy to manage. Have a nice management console that allows an end user to administer the system, update it, and manage multiple licenses as simply as possible. So while having great underlying core technology is important, everyone will be selling technology and features and function. What many companies forget early on is that having a great customer experience can provide real differentiation and can often mean the difference between success and failure in competitive markets. As for the VP of Engineering candidate, he is on the shortlist as it nice to see someone with the experience to build product and manage teams but also think from a business-oriented perspective