BeyondVC

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

The morning is off to a great start with a few home networking/digital media boxes for consumers. The battle for the home is in full swing between MSFT’s vision of the PC as the gateway to the home and companies like Akimbo, BravoBrava!, and Molino Networks bringing full digital media management to the set top box. It is truly quite amazing how much functionality continues to be added to these consumer devices, and how easy they make it for the consumer to view, listen and share their CDs, DVDs, downloaded video, and pictures. See Jeff Nolan’s blog for more information. If I were Microsoft and Tivo I would be worried.

One of the problems with collaboration via Webx and Placeware is that it is still not easy to use, the pricing is not friendly, and it requires users to schedule meetings in advance. Today’s companies, Convoq, Sightspeed, and GoToMeeting (Expertcity-a portfolio company) are all designed to allow users to take advantage of the daily, ad-hoc and spontaneous meetings that are not currently captured by the incumbents. Not only do they bring disruptive technology to the market making it incredibly simple to organize meetings and web video conferences but also disruptive pricing to increase usage. So if I were Webx and Placeware, I would keep an eye out for these companies which will allow users to host unlimited meetings for fixed monthly costs.

Day 1 is about over and after having sat through a number of interesting pitches, it is funny to hear the PR folks saying that many of the journalists are more interested in consumer/web-oriented companies than the enterprise-related businesses. Has the pendulum swung back to the consumer and web? It seems to me that home entertainment, wifi networks, and blogging are all the rage these days. And yes, they are hotbeds of innovation. Recently enough, the idea of VCs getting excited about the web/consumer area was contrarian, and now I am sensing it is not that way anymore. OK-I loved alot of the discussion in the morning and the agile enteprise afternoon session wasn’t as enlightening as I hoped, but there were definitely some interesting companies that presented. One is Metapa (full disclosure-a portfolio company) which is bringing the power of commodity computing (Lintel) to the data warehousing market allowing companies to realize 10-50x price performance over the standard Teradata, Oracle, IBM and Unix $1mm+ systems. Another interesting company was IMlogic which has a platform to allow you to integrate existing enterprise applications with IM.

I am at Demo 2004, and it is great to feel the positive buzz in the room. There are lots of VCs and press in attendance, and it is clear that entrepreneurship is alive and kicking. In fact, it never went away as a number of companies that presented in the morning have been around for a few years. Hopefully, I will get a chance to post on some interesting companies and technologies that I see but for now please stay on top of Demo through Jeff Nolan’s Day 1 posts.