Jeff Clavier's Software Only

Kleiner Perkins investment criterias for software startups: Consumer ? Enterprise ? Both!

A few days ago, Don Dodge reported on a panel he did at TiECon East with KP's Ajit Nazre, during which Ajit mentioned the 7 rules that  enterprise software startups must meet in order to be considered for an investment:

• Instant Value to customers - solve a problem or create value with the first use
• Viral adoption - Pull, not push. No direct sales force required
• Minimum IT footprint, preferably none. Hosted SaaS is best.
• Simple, intuitive user experience - no training required.
• Personalized user experience - customizable
• Easy configuration based on application or usage templates
• Context aware - adjust to location, groups, preferences, devices, etc.

Friend Jeff Nolan reminded me that these rules were actually introduced by Ray Lane, a Kleiner Perkins Partner, during his keynote of MR Rangaswami's conference, Software 2006. I actually recommend listening to the podcast and reading through the presentation.

What is interesting is that these rules seemed to be focusing on enterprise software companies, and upon reading them they were really fitting consumer-facing services. Yet another data point showing that Consumer and Enterprise 2.0 are getting closer and closer in the way they are built and marketed. Ben Barren from down under had a similar thought.

During my keynote to the Web 2.0 Irish Conference, I talked about similar things - in the form of the key questions that I ask myself when meeting a prospective investment:

• Value ?
• Adoption ?
• Differentiation ?
• Distribution ?
• Business Model ?
• Technology ?
• Team ?
• Plan ?

What is interesting is that fundamental aspects like the the Team and the Plan are not covered by the 7 rules, so I would posit that there were other aspects being discussed.

Tag: enterprise2.0

Software 2006: Mark Bregman on the Dilemna of Innovation and Security 2.0

I am hanging out today at Software 2006, the reference event of the enterprise software market organized by MR Rangaswami  from the Sand Hill Group. It is interesting for me to listen to presentations from players from my previous ecosystem – enterprise systems – as they recognise the importance and the need to take into account the implications of Web 2.0 – a consumer phenomena.

Mark Bregman comes on stage to talk about Symantec plans, and the Dilemna of Innovation. Mark is the former CTO of Symantec, he used to hold the same responsibility at Veritas before its acquisition by the security giant.

The Dilemna of Innovation (that Clayton Christensen made famous under the Innovator’s Dilemna)  is the virtuous circle of startups/upstarts challenging established players in a given market:

> Become a leader through innovation and displace incumbents by acquiring their customers
    > Become the number one player in your space > Stop innovating
        > Watch upstarts displace you 
            > Repeat

Large industry players, particularly Symantec, have been using acquisitions as a way to bring innovation and talent in an ecosystem. This is easier said than done when one considers the challenges - both products and organizational - involved in integrating acquired companies. The side effect is that core groups, inside the corporation, tend to feel devalued because they never are the "latest, greatest, coolest" thing.

Symantec has introduced the notion of "Advanced Concepts" in their organization, creating a startup mentality from within, in order to develop innovative projects engaging with pilot customers that are willing to take the risk of deploying "startup quality" software. The first application of that notion is the "Symantec Database Security and Audit" that was implemented by a small team of 15 people, engaging with ten clients. The product groups would have taken 2/3 years to release the functionality. The Advanced Concepts team took a few month to implement it to a point clients could deploy it.

Mark predicts that large software players have to prepare for the next shift in computing, perhaps less technology led than business and social, due to these forces of change:

• Continued commoditization of hardware
• Broadband is now considered ubiquitous
• Power is shifting to users
• “The world is flat” yak yak yak (meaning Globalization is upon us).

Mark’s challenge: Figure out what Web 2.0 means to Symantec and the industry it is the leader of: Protection. Protection of machines, Protection of information (against malicious attacks, corruption, loss, etc.). The next level for Symantec is the Protection of interactions – including social ones – in what they refer to as Security 2.0.

Security 2.0: Delivering Trust Online

• Establish trust between parties – ensure that “you are you, and they are they”
• Expand beyond protecting the infrastructure and information, to protecting relationships
• Enabled via a combination of client-side technologies, on-line infrastructure and key partnerships

I would have loved for Mark to comment on the latter, especially what sort of relationships or partnerships he foresees happening with consumer Web 2.0 companies as they become widely used in the enterprise. The first batch of technology will be related to content management and self-publishing (blogs, wikis, etc.), as well as identity systems. This is a topic I covered a few weeks ago in a panel I moderated with a focus on Collaboration, and I will pick up again with a broader scope in this IBDNetwork event: What Web 2.0 Means for the Enterprise.

Tags: software2006, security, markbregman, symantec

Thoughts on Shared Nothing Architectures

Buddy Brad Feld has a great post on Shared Nothing Architecture, as a potential solution to performance and reliability issues faced by services I use on a day to day basis: TypePad and del.icio.us (and to some extent, Bloglines - though I don't use it so much now). I had actually spotted that del.icio.us was down as well , and was about to write my own piece out of frustration, but Brad is summarizing the situation well. In the meantime, here is my backup del.icio.us.

On the heals of TypePad’s 18 hour outage this week, there’s been (and will be) a lot of continued discussion about how to build scalable and reliable online / web-based applications.  This is not a new problem (I not so fondly remember major and systemic outages in large services such as eBay and Amazon in the late 1990’s) but it’s gotten new attention as some of the emerging applications have scaled up the point as to have an interesting numbers of regular users (e.g. – it sucks if their service goes down for more than 15 minutes).  For example, as far as I can tell, del.icio.us has been down for the last four hours (“del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. we'll be back as soon possible.”) and on 12/15/05 Bloglines acknowledged that “Bloglines performance has sucked eggs lately.”

Tim Wolters – an extremely capable CTO – has an introduction to how he is approaching this at Collective Intellect.  He’s taking a page from Google’s playbook and developing a web service based on a “shared nothing architecture”.  On Friday, I had two different discussions about scalable architectures (e.g. “we’re going to scale up between 10x and 100x on a meaningful base in 2006 – here’s what we are planning”) and both included elements of what Tim is describing.

The ultimate Shared Nothing Architecture relies on mirrored data centers in different physical geographies that allows a system to switch over in (quasi) real-time in case of any type of failure (power, hardware, database, etc.) - and this is expensive to deploy. Del.icio.us is not there yet, but will clearly benefit from Yahoo's scalability expertise. And as to Six Apart, well, let's hope that they'll figure this out since quite a few of us users have expressed their “discontent” (and I am being soft since many of my close friends are involved with the company). These problems happen with almost every companies as they experience a rapid growth of their online presence, and often their backup solutions are just not appropriate (and remember, don't trust these backup generators).

If you need to substantiate early exits by Web 2.0 companies, beyond generating nice payoffs for company founders, look no further: scaling to tens of millions of users and gigabytes of traffic is no simple feat, and the companies facing these issues will be at risk of losing at least a portion of their momentum if they don't handle the situation properly.

Update: it appears that del.icio.us has had to rebuild their corrupted database after a... power failure - I wonder what happened to the generators...

Check these references before making a hiring decision

Buddy Ed Sim just posted a useful note on the Importance of back channel reference checks. The person you are looking at hiring, or take money from, will volunteer contacts who will provide glowing reports about her/him. In order to get a more nuanced view (nobody's perfect), you do want to find other references in or through your own network. Former colleagues are obviously the most natural sources, and in the case of a senior startup executive, former investors also fit the bill. Services helping with these “investigations” are obviously search engines, specialized databases like Zoominfo (which has an uneven quality of data and coverage) and LinkedIn (that has even developed a specific feature for that purpose).

As Ed states, it is critical to do a thorough job when going through these references, because like software bugs, fixing a mistake costs way more than avoiding one:

A wrong hiring decision for an early stage company can be a killer! All too often startup companies want to run fast and furious and hire that killer executive candidate ASAP without doing the extra work required to determine the right fit. In this particular case, through the back channel references we were able to find a number of inconsistencies about a candidate's effectiveness at a prior startup, his reasons for leaving, and his overall management skills. While the references were balanced and fair, they were far from glowing. In fact, most of the back channel references were consistently mediocre which for me was a vote of no confidence. Sure, you should always expect to get a couple bad references if you do enough of them on someone, but if you see a consistent pattern of concerns or “areas that need to be managed” emerge from those references, it is time to move to the next candidate. In fact, let me extend this message and state that doing back channel references should be standard business practice. Why learn in 3 months that a particular executive, VC firm, or business partner was not a right fit, if you can piece together that information beforehand? Just a little more work in the diligence process can save you lots of frustration in the long run.

Whilst we are at it, I would actually go even further: whenever you are hiring an executive, directly or through a recruiter, you want to check - as in confirm - previous employment, diplomas, etc. I recently talked to an entrepreneur whose company had hired a CEO who seemed to check out during the interview and “references” but quickly fell short of expectations. It turned out that this CEO had doctored his diplomas and employment history. Whilst it is most likely a case of the recruiter doing a piss poor job (technical term), it is ultimately to the board, and investors, to make sure these checks are properly done.

Brightcove's "whole tail" advertising and delivery platform

Brightcove, the company founded by Jeremy Allaire, is disclosing its advertising platform offering in this Clickz piece. This goes a step further from the pre-alpha launch presentation Jeremy gave at the Web 2.0 conference.

The company has developed a platform to allow commercial video publishers of all sizes to distribute their video content over the Internet using Flash. Smaller publishers can use a self-service interface, while larger ones will have access to more advanced tools used by traditional broadcasters. Publishers upload their video, categorize it with metadata tags, choose a design template, create graphic overlays with their brand or an affiliate's brand, and publish the Flash file.

Publishers will be able to monetize their content either by selling and serving their own ads, by running ads from Brightcove's ad network, or by selling their content for purchase or subscription. The Brightcove platform allows publishers to create customized video players to distribute on their own site, or on affiliate sites. Brightcove offers the production and syndication tools, and handles the billing and collection for the publisher.

"We're really trying to find a model that operates across the whole tail," Allaire said, in reference to the "Long Tail" idea that lower distribution costs of the Internet make it economically viable for smaller producers to be successful, or for someone to offer a product catering to a small niche.

Content owners can specify the ad behavior and policies. They can define policies for where ads appear, how frequently they are shown, and limit the maximum number of ads per session. Publishers can also choose to target ads by daypart, by geography, and contextually based on the metadata they supplied.

It is interesting that Brightcove covers the “whole tail” with its tools, allowing small and large publishers them to package, distribute and manage branded video assets whilst supporting three types of business models (content sale/subscription, publisher ads, brightcove network ads). The “big guys” will most likely look at using the service based on its functionality and its integration capabilities with the rest of their back-end, and will probably leverage their own advertising for the bulk of their inventory. “Small guys” will really benefit from the advertising network. Yet to be announced is the commercial model that Brightcove will adopt – since they are both a tool/service provider and ad network.

This other Clickz piece presented a great overview of the landscape, highlighting the fact that the market is tiny (< 2% of the online ad spending) but it is growing at a very rapid pace, with the combined effect of growing content inventory (user generated, MSM, VOD,…), low cost of delivery (cheap/free bandwidth, “legal” BitTorrent usage) and the multiplication of consuming devices (computers, phones, video iPods, connected TVs).

What are your favorite tech startup founder's blogs ?

In a week, I will have the privilege of addressing the Founders Forum SIG to talk about “Blogging for Company Founders”. The session can apparently only be attended by a maximum of 25 CEOs or founders of startup companies, on a FCFS basis. I therefore hope to have a very interactive session, and only plan to have a very brief presentation to jump in questions and issues of the audience as quickly as possible.

One of the things I want to cover at some point during the conversation is what kind of great, and bad, examples, have been seen out there in terms of founder blogs, and I would really like to go beyond the social media “pure plays”: Mena Trott, Caterina Fake, Matt Mullenweg, Dave Sifry, Scott Rafer, Loic Le Meur,… who have all been blogging for a long (and sometimes long long) time and might have started/joined their current venture because of their blogging. They sort of come with the territory, and are expected.

I am therefore interested in hearing from you guys about startup founders outside the pure social media space whose blog has attracted your attention, and has helped establish the visibility and credibility of the company in a space that is not particularly blogging/RSS savvy.

I would also like to hear about this segmentation of tech startup blogs, in which I see four major facets (even though the first two could be combined):

• the PR blog: mostly used to communicate around the product(s) and services offered by the company, it features new functionality, tips, service announcements (booh, we’ve crashed or we’re having a massage),… and is a “disaster recovery” channel (i.e it is one of the elements used to deal with major PR issues).
  I would expect any startup that launches nowadays to have a PR blog, available at blog.domainname.com (?).
• the community blog is an extension of the PR blog, it helps animating the user community, and features examples of the usage of the products. Good examples of a community blog are the Flickr Blog, or BlogPulse Highlights.
• the reference blog: aggregates and editorializes news and links related to the industry in which the startup is operating, it can become a preferred source of information if the point of view is not completely one sided (otherwise it becomes a “PR blog”). A couple reference blogs I subscribe to are Findory’s Greg Linden, who covers search, blogging and RSS aggregation, and WhizSpark’s Peter Caputa who covers the Web 2.0 space and entrepreneurship as it relates to his startup.
• the authoritative blog: mostly contain original pieces describing personal thoughts or experiences of the founder(s), and therefore provide a unique point of view on an industry or a market. One  example is Jotspot’s Joe Kraus.

I actually used the word facets because a comprehensive blog will cover all three aspects, and I would nominate SocialText’s Ross Mayfield as one of the best examples. But once again, I am looking too much at the blogs I read for my own practice, and would love to hear about great blogs that are not related to social media or Web 2.0 per se.

As I did for the Venture Capital session I led at Bar Camp, I will post the presentation and summarize our discussion shortly after the event.

Thanks in advance for your input!Please list those blogs in the comments of this post, or send me an email: jeff [dot] clavier [at] gmail [dot] com.

Talent grabbing war at the GYM

Did you also have this feeling that the “Big 3” (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft – let’s refer to them as the GYM) were not only deploying new features on an accelerated “tit for tat” basis, but they are also on a wide ranging talent grab ? I bet you did.

At BlogHerCon, social media expert danah boyd announced that she was now consulting for Yahoo at the Berkeley Research Center that opened a couple of weeks back, headed by Marc Davis. Two great recruits, amongst the many Yahoo has done recently. At the same event, I gathered that Google had enrolled the services of Prof. Ellen Spertus to work on Orkut.

Every week we hear about a tech figure going to the GYM: Louis Monier (eBay to G), Larry Tessler (Amazon to Y), Gary Flake (Y to M), Kai-Fu Lee (M to G – with a bonus lawsuit), and on and on.
Update: I should have said every day instead of every week - Chad Dickerson, InfoWorld's CTO has announced yesterday that he was joining Y.

BusinessWeek ran a long piece on the topic, titled: “Revenge of the Nerds – Again”, quoting that Google had hired 230 engineers this year, and counting. The article quotes Joe Kraus, the CEO of JotSpot and noticed CEO blogger, on the difficulty to compete against G in recruiting talent. Greg Linden, Findory’s CEO, mentioned having the same issue, and when I asked him about candidate’s reactions to the “financial upside” argument, he answered:

Frankly, Jeff, it can be a challenge.
As you know, that promise of financial upside comes with considerable risk. Certainty can be appealing to some.
It would help reduce the perceived risk if we offered competitive salary and benefits. That is not possible while we remain self-funded.
Hiring difficulties is one of several pressures causing us to more seriously explore external financing.

So on one front, bootstrapping to product launch an online play requires tens to a few hundred thousand dollars. On the other, it is challenging to find a critical mass of engineering talent who will agree to work for equity-only for a (sometimes non trivial) period of time, when they can go to the GYM and enjoy interesting/challenging environments with most of the perks and resources one can hope for. As Greg said, competitive salaries and benefits don’t mesh well with a bootstrapped approach. Not to mention the common wisdom that startups, even after being funded, need to be frugal in the way they use their capital, and therefore will not offer premiums on hiring conditions, offering an upside on the equity side as the main attraction.

At the end of the day, it is also a personal choice to work in a fast moving, agile, startup in which one’s contribution can have a much higher impact on the company. And there are tons of people in that mindset.

I actually wonder how developers who have fully vested in the GYM look at the reverse situation, i.e they have made some money and now can go back to a startup environment for the fun and the potential upside.

Any views from the trenches ?

Any feedback from CEOs like Greg as to how they stand up to that relative talent shortage ? Is this only a Silicon Valley/West Coast issue ?

More:

• Slashdot: Google and Yahoo Creating Brain Drain

 

SuperNova 2005: Innovation Networks Shaping Global Commerce

John Seely Brown (aka JSB) is addressing the audience on the topic of his latest book: The Only Sustainable Edge. I have just started reading it, and it really looks interesting. Below are notes I jot down during his talk.

JSB's main point is that companies need to leverage the capabilities of their suppliers, and innovate at the network level - including suppliers' own innovation.

He mentions a few examples:

• Toyota picks up suppliers on costs and cost structures, as opposed to prices. The company has developed a world class excellence on cost management which allows them to understand at a deep level the production costs of each of their suppliers/partners and help them optimize these. They also expect suppliers to contribute their own innovation on materials, parts and processes to optimize the way Toyota's requirements will be met.
  Any Toyota employee can shutdown an entire production line when a fault is detected. This allows process engineers to review the fault, and its context, as a single unit. All workers then get trained on the fault, and process changes required to avoid it.
  
• JSB contrasts this approach with Detroit big 3's that are typically selecting suppliers on costs, squeezing them as much as possible. Instead of the deep dialog and collaboration used by Toyota, they have a "do as I say" approach. And they won't try and engage in long term relationships, going as far as shopping around ideas from a given supplier to try and get a more favorable price from another one - that would not need to recoup R&D costs.
  
• The Chongqing motorcycle ecosystem drives the bottom up development of  products by swarms of local suppliers - not based on detailed blueprints, but as the results of conversations amongst these suppliers as to how they can make their respective elements fit in. About 40% of the world's motorcycles are developed other there now, using these collaborative processes.
• Taiwanese ODM's process is to assemble products (digital camera, plasma TV,...) from major parts produced by a large network of suppliers. The product will have been specified by the ODM's customers in terms of functionality and price point. Innovation will happen on the fly between the ODM and its suppliers, in order to deliver the right parts at the right price point.

In this context of global innovation, off-shoring is therefore not just about lost wages, but the ability to tap into niche sources of innovation which happen to be built in a foreign ecosystem.

In call centers abroad, ratios of managers to employees are much higher than in the US (25% vs 4%) because of the perception that middle management is enabling/fostering learning in the organization. This allows these call centers to "grow" in sophistication in the type of products/services they can deal with. The example of Infosys, one of India's largest IT outsourcers, is mentioned for the investment made in training its workforce to meet clients' needs, and improve their processes (25% middle managers' time is spent on these tasks).

The challenge for companies is therefore to build an edge through capability building: getting better faster by learning from others within and across ecosystems, and deploy open innovation by engaging with different parts of this ecosystem.

As a side note, JSB needs to change the colors of his slides: bright green on white does not work for me at 8 in the morning.

Tag: supernova2005

Stealth Start-Ups Suck ? Yeah, right.

I have genuine respect for Mark Fletcher and what he has accomplished with ONEList and Bloglines, and therefore consider that he has credibility when writing about entrepreneurship. His ETech presentation on the topic was actually very practical and interesting. That's why I was surprised with  the title and the content of his post: Stealth Start-Ups Suck. Because in most startup cases, I believe in the contrary.

Mark contends:

[...] Here's the thing, stealth mode for a web start-up is the kiss of death.

Stealth mode is when a company is operating in secret for some length of time before launching their product or service. In many industries, creating a new product or service takes significant time and effort. During this time, being in stealth mode may make a lot of sense. But creating a new web service is not rocket science and does not take a lot of time or money. My rule of thumb is that it should take no more than 3 months to go from conception to launch of a new web service. And that's being generous. I'm speaking from experience here. I developed the first version of ONElist over a period of 3 months, and that was while working a full-time job. I developed the first version of Bloglines in  3 months. By myself. It can be done. And I suck at it! Just ask all the engineers who have had to deal with my code.

Why go fast? Many reasons:

• First mover advantage is important.
• There is no such thing as a unique idea. I guarantee that someone else has already thought of your wonderful web service, and is probably way ahead of you. Get over yourself.
• It forces you to focus on the key functionality of the site.
• Being perfect at launch is an impossible (and unnecessary and even probably detrimental) goal, so don't bother trying to achieve it. Ship early, ship often.
• The sooner you get something out there, the sooner you'll start getting feedback from users.

[...]

Why is this post a dangerous generalization ? Because this "advice" only applies to certain types of startups, in certain markets/features, led by certain teams. Mark's "3 months to build" rule does not work with companies having to develop "deep IP" algorithms and complex implementations.

I fully agree that involving users as early as possible in the development process is an absolute must, but doing it too early can also be "the kiss of death". There are so many applications, services, cool web sites out there - crying for our eyeballs and attention - that launching something in front of users that is half baked, limited or too unstable might turn them off for a while, or for good. And will certainly not generate the positive buzz that is required for viral marketing to work.

The second argument for laying low is that your ideas might not be unique, but your overall product approach, and implementation, might be - for a period of time. Since very early stage startups generally don't have a lot of development "manpower", coming out of the closet too early might make it very easy for competitors to replicate some of these (good) ideas.

There might cases where Mark's suggestion is applicable, but I don't see them as being majority. And then I would ask whether these companies are the ones that are "built to flip".

Update: Paul Kedrosky also disagrees.

I have been browsing through the Slashdot thread on the topic, and there seems to be a bit of confusion around building 1) a startup in stealth mode and 2) being open and leveraging standards, 3) engaging with customers/users and 4) using a short/iterative production cycle.

I am advocating that not being stealth until the product is in some form of alpha or pre-alpha form is only applicable to a portion of the startups out there. These might be open source (Monty Widenius announced his intention to build an o/s SQL database to gather requirements, and co-development support), category creators or first movers (like Bloglines as a Web-based RSS readers "for the masses"), etc. Feel free to suggest any other "non stealth mode" candidate.

But I am totally for 2), 3), and 4) as characteristics of early stage startups.

Update: Just came across the account from SiliconBeat on the whole 24 Hour Laundry "saga". Be sure to check the comment left by Gina Bianchini, the CEO of 24HL.

And let's leave them in (stealth) peace.

The "Build It/Flip It" Bubble Discussion

Great post from Ross re  A Flip/Flop Bubble of Microventures? in which he "attacks" the concept of  startups launched and bankrolled by former "bubble entrepreneurs" for the sole purpose of flipping them to large established players.

[...] there are a ton of former entrepreneurs getting back in the game these days. The lure isn't just that markets are opening again. A mindset is developing in the valley that you can and should develop startups for quick flips. If you have your own cash, you can seed a play like this yourself, filling a targeted niche -- both in product, market and engineering expertise. I even heard of a major portal getting into seed funding to encourage it. Perhaps this whole thing was started by Google's micro-acquisitions. I don't have any data on this trend, as it is the most private part of equity, but it is the talk of many a Silicon Valley coffee shop.

I've always believed the VC No of "is it a product, or a feature" is lazy thinking. All great products start as features and great teams evolve them with a mission in mind. The flip approach avoids this entirely. Just focus on the feature. Think for a minute how inefficient a market can be when the spoils of a previous bubble can be invested by seeding flips targeted to buyers instead of companies targeting real customers with real business models. [...]

That discussion is not new, and as I wrote quite a few times, I just don't see how you can successfully build a company to flip it and make reasonable money doing so (reasonable meaning that the founders end up with windfalls of at least several million dollars) - and not just a cool sign-on bonus (which is the case in micro-transactions like the ones Ross is referring to).

What we have seen in the past few months are early takeouts of promising companies that had assets, talents and buzz that justified for their acquirers spending tens of millions of dollars (Bloglines, Flickr, ...). In some cases, a choice was made by the founders to get cash now, and scale the company leveraging much larger footprint and resources, as opposed to playing optionality, accept the dilution of VC financing rounds, and have a go at it alone.

I would venture that you can't build a company solely with the express intent to flip it, because you can never plan where your potential acquirers will be in their own development as you are "getting ready" for a take out. Not even mentioning the fact that if you don't have more than one company interested in what you have, negotiating the price becomes challenging... if ever you get there in a first place.

Built to last, with the option of an early take-out, is where I see opportunities.

I disagree on one point though: "[...] and the amount of creative destruction this (building to flip)  could incent [...]". So many innovative technology or concepts remain at feature stage, meaning they can never be turned into a product or a "real" company, that allowing their inventors to reap some (limited) rewards through such an exit is actually not a bad thing. Better for a technology to get some usage by a large company than accumulating dust (or being "mothballed").

From an Idea, to a Product, to a Company

I have been invited by the Business Marketing Association to lead a discussion on the different ways, and best practices, to bring a software innovation to market and, if necessary, get it financed by VCs.

Here is the description of the topic:

What does it mean to have an idea and wrap it in a product that customers want to buy? What does it take today to bring innovation to market? What does it mean to be able to attract VC money these days, and what do you need to do to get it?

Join us as we explore strategies and share best practices about ways young software and internet entrepreneurs can turn their ideas into successful products and companies.

There is no silver bullet, no magic recipe that guarantees success for entrepreneurs – we all know this. Our speaker will share some Do’s, some Don’ts and offer his hard-won insights into successful company and product creation. And we’ll especially count on the participation of the audience to share their own views and experience.

I really hope that we'll have a rich discussion amongst participants of the session, and that we'll all get something out of it.

The event is on Tuesday, February 15th (7:30AM to 9AM) at Scott's, Town and Country Shopping Center, Palo Alto (Embarcadero and El Camino).

Thanks to Eleanor Kruszewski for inviting me, and to Mike Rowehl to provide an account of what we talked about.