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Why Startups Shouldn’t Bother About NDA’s

Posted on March 17, 2008 ·

OMG, this must be Recurring Themes Day.  smile_wink  Just done with the Your Blog is Your Resume theme (this one pops up about once a year with almost predictable regularity), and am now worried about Alexander Muse’s health.  He’s a healthy strong man, but wants to shoot himself if he receives another NDA.  He quotes Rick Segal (sorry, Rick for taking it verbatim, it’s just too entertaining…):

VC firms typically do not sign NDAs for first looks/meetings.

VC firms typically do not sign NDAs with promises not to evaluate the same or similar businesses included.

VC firms typically do not sign NDAs with 5 year no contact clauses included.

VC firms typically do not sign NDAs with promises to report any contact with competitive businesses included.

Rick is a Canadian VC, and his firm has received 35 NDA’s so far this year. But here’s the best part from his post:

Repeat this 10 times before you go to bed tonight:

I will not send an unsolicited beautiful leather bound binder with 600 hundred pages of detailed business, marketing, competitive, and financial information about my business along with an unsigned NDA and a request for it to be signed and returned to any VC.

It arrived in my office on Thursday and the binder was off the charts nice.

Don’t ever do it. Really. Just send the nice leather binder without all the crap. smile_tongue  Unless you’ve discovered a new Conspiracy Theory (but you wouldn’t send that to a VC, would you?) don’t send hundreds of pages.  Your page limit for first contact is one, perhaps two.

Back to the NDA theme, now that we’ve  seen how VC’s hate them, let’s look at why startups shouldn’t bother about them anyway:

  • As an Entrepreneur it is often in your interest to share WHAT you do, as a way to solicit feedback, concept validation
  • If there is a “secret sauce” of HOW you will do it, you should not share it anyway, NDA or not – not until further down the road as part of due diligence with a committed investor
  • Since it’s commonly known that investors do not sign NDA’s, asking for it is akin to displaying a banner: “Newbie Here”

These were originally Dharmesh Shah’s points, and my addition:

  • If the information you reveal during the presentation is enough for a competitor to jeopardize your position, than you really don’t have anything substantial to justify an investment. Your time would be better spent on product development.

 

Finally, a side-note to Alex (and all):  RFP’s are also a waste of time.  Extraordinary effort on formalities, and most RFP’s are issued as CYA,  to cover up the fact that the prospective Customer already has a preferred vendor / solution provider.  If you’re in the public sector, there’s no way around them, otherwise avoid RFP’s – there’s always other business to go after.

Filed Under: Business, Startups · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Oops, They Fired All Their Workaholics

Posted on March 8, 2008 ·

Wow, quite a firestorm on a weekend over whether startups should hire only workaholics or not. It’s tip #11 on Jason Calacanis’s How to save money running a startup list that ticked off many readers:

Fire people who are not workaholics. don’t love their work… come on folks, this is startup life, it’s not a game. don’t work at a startup if you’re not into it–go work at the post office or starbucks if you’re not into it you want balance in your life. For realz.

The edits show how Jason re-wrote this point after harsh criticism like Calacanis Fires People Who Have A Life on TechCrunch and Fire the workaholics by 37Signals. I don’t think he had to edit it, anyone who had been at a startup, who understands startup dynamics should “get it”.

He is talking about the need to have highly passionate team members, who at a certain stage of their life and the startup’s life are willing to – and happy to – shift their priorities. You can’t force people to be workaholics, all you get is slaves in a sweatshop, and that not only causes burnout, it does not produce quality results anyway. David at 37Signals is right:

If your start-up can only succeed by being a sweatshop, your idea is simply not good enough. Go back to the drawing board and come up with something better that can be implemented by whole people, not cogs.

Agree. But great founding teams are often made up of workaholics – it has to come from the fire within, not forced. These guys locked up in a live-and-work apartment probably did not have 8-hour workdays, yet didn’t look too unhappy. A year later they are growing, picked up two rounds of funding, have 20 employees and even put TechCrunch in the toilet.smile_wink I don’t expect their 20th employee to be just as passionate as the Founders, but it can’t be a 9-5 type person either. At this stage they still need driven Team Members, not simply employees.

Most startups that grow to a certain point will lose this team atmosphere at some point. They will start to hire more “regular employees”, many of whom are opportunity seekers, in for quick ride, ready to jump ship any time. Too bad, but it’s a fact of life.

Not everywhere, though. 37Signals is still a small team (by choice) but not really a startup anymore. They seem to have found the golden balance between work and life, having introduced 4-day workweeks, funding team members’ passions, be it flight lessons, cooking classes…whatever. I don’t think they whine if (when) the occasional crunch comes. Another “startup” (not really, anymore) I often write about is Atlassian: at $30M revenue and 130 employees they still preserve a unique culture, do a lot of programs together, and generally working there is a lifestyle, not just employment.

The above two have something in common, other than having good products: they did not take VC investment. They can pretty much do whatever they like. Maintaining a great team is no just a means to business, it’s part of their ultimate purpose.

The weekend firestorm comes completes a full circle: in a second TechCrunch article Mike Arrington comes to Calacanis’s defense: Startups Must Hire The Right People And Watch Every Penny. Or Fail. This is a very good article, I wholeheartedly agree with it. And while at it, let me also refer you to Startups: Executive Hiring Challenges or Beware of the Suits.

On a lighter note, the CEO of another self-funded former startup, Zoho apparently heeded 37Signals advice, and fired all his workaholics.

(Not really… Watch out for a major product announcement next week.smile_wink)

Update: This quick rant by Bob Warfield is worth reading:  Startups Need Starters

Filed Under: Startups · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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TechCrunch in the Toilet

Posted on March 7, 2008 ·

No, I am not implying that TechCrunch is bankrupt, or heading into their own Deadpool.  TC has all the signs of doing just fine, with 700K subscribers and loads of advertisers.  But they are in the toilet, nevertheless – at least in a certain toilet.

Online file-sharing and collaboration startup Box.net is changing the ancient habit of reading your newspaper in the toilet.  (Frankly I never understood this habit, personally I prefer getting out of there as soon as possible, but for many people it’s a true ritual.)   The company, which just a year ago was 4 guys cramped together in a two-bedroom live-and-work apartment has grown to 20 employees and picked up two rounds of funding.   Flush with VC money, they equipped their restroom with a flat screen that shows an auto-refreshing display of technology news from TechCrunch.  No more newspaper in the bathroom!

I can’t help but wonder about the screen position though.  For all I know, this is only for the guys’ entertainment, gals usually face the other way – is Box.net still an all-male team?  And, without getting into the very material details, even we boys only perform one “operation” facing that way.., and that’s normally the quicker one. (?)

Aaron, care to clarify? smile_eyeroll

Filed Under: Humor, Startups · Tagged: , , , , , ,
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Enterprise Software: from ERP to BRP

Posted on March 5, 2008 ·

I had already spent half a decade implementing SAP solutions in the 90’s when I finally got enlightened, learning the “proper term” for what I was doing: ERP, as in Enterprise Resource Planning. The term was coined by then Gartner Analyst, now Enterprise Irregular Erik Keller. Now another fellow Enterprise Irregular, Sig Rinde introduces a new interpretation of ERP: Easily Repeatable Process. Of course he contrasts that with his new acronym, BRP (not to be confused with BPR, another 90’s favorite), which means Barely Repeatable Process. BRP is what Thingamy, Sig’s lightweight, extremely adoptable system attempts to address. But it’s a very-very tough sell…

ERP traditionally addresses the core, standard, and as such repeatable business processes. Whatever it can’t handle are the exceptions: processes to be handled by knowledge workers outside the realm of ERP, by traditional means: phone calls, spreadsheets, creative thinking and a lot of emailing back and forth. Exceptions may be a fraction of business volume, but they are what corporate employees spend most of their time resolving. If that’s the case, knowledge workers who come up with innovative solutions may consider it a good practice to document them just in case the “exception” ever occurs again… and if it does a few times, well then it’s no longer an exception, but a (Barely) Repeatable Process.

Wikis in the Enterprise are a simple yet effective solution to manage such BRPs: they facilitate collaboration of all knowledge workers involved, allow some structure (structure is helpful when not pre-imposed but flexibly created) to organize data and finally, as a by-product they serve as documentation of the solution for future re-use.

Neither process-driven heavyweight systems like ERP, nor innovative, lightweight collaboration tools like wikis are the one and only mantra for most businesses (see my previous rant on “you can’t run your supply chain on a wiki“), they have their own place and should complement each other. Standard business processes and exceptions are not black-and-white opposites either: it’s a continuum, and halfway is BRP. If ERP (in the traditional meaning) tries to address to many of theses BRPs, it gets overly complex (it already is!), hard to configure and use.

This is the dilemma Sig’s system, Thingamy addresses. It’s neither free-form collaboration, nor ERP: it’s a business system framework, that allows you to model and define business processes: a tool to create your own custom-made ERP, if you like.

And therein lies the rub. Most business users don’t want to create software. They want to use it. This was the problem that caused the demise of Teqlo: the unfunded, unproven belief, that users actually want to interactively create their tools. No, they want to deal with the urgent business problems (the BRP), using whatever tools are readily available.

Thingamy’s dilemma is finding the customer: it certainly won’t be the business user. A modeling tool, simple it may be has a learning curve, dealing with it is a distraction to say the least. Thingamy’s likely “owner” would be corporate IT which would have to create processes on demand. But we all know what happens if you need to call IT to create a “program” for you.smile_omg Thingamy could possibly be a handy tool for consultants, system integrator firms – but they all have their own army of programmers, toolsets..etc, which makes it an awfully hard sell, IMHO.

Thingamy is no doubt an elegant solution, I just don’t see the mass market need for it, because it does not solve a mass market problem. Or I should say, it does, but there’s a mismatch between whose problems it solves and who can use it. Sig himself defines collaboration as a workaround for the Barely Repeatable Processes in the Enterprise: my bet is that this “workaround” is here to stay for a long time.

Update (3/18): CIO Magazine interviews Ross Mayfield, Founder and Chairman of Socialtext, an enterprise wiki company:

Most employees don’t spend their time executing business process. That’s a myth. They spend most of their time handling exceptions to business process.

… the greatest source of sustainable innovation is how you’re handling these exceptions to business process.

… So I’ve always looked at it as we’re doing the other half of enterprise software: making this unstructured information transparent.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Enterprise Software, ERP / CRM, Startups · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Google Gears goes Mobile – Zoho First to Take Advantage

Posted on March 3, 2008 ·

Mobility is supposed to be about 24/7 connectivity, isn’t it?  I’m writing this on a a 7.2Mbps HSDPA mobile connection while visiting my parents in Hungary.   HSDPA is like 3G on steroids, and we’re not even close to universal 3G coverage in the US.  What’s more, forget data, I’d be happy with just universal voice coverage right here in the heart of Technology.  I get measly coverage (half a bar only right next to the window) in my house, but what’s a real shame, try talking on a T-mobile phone on the long walkway from Parking to the International Terminal at SFO: zero, nada, no signal at all.

Until that’s fixed, mobility isn’t about 24/7 connectivity, it’s about 24/7 access, online or offline.  Which is why it’s great to see Google Gears Mobile released today, initially for Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Mobile 5 and 6.  Now you don’t lose vital information when your phone goes offline. 

The first two apps taking advantage of Gears Mobile are Buxfer a finance tracking application and Zoho Writer.

 

The current Zoho Mobile Offline version (wow, that’s a mouthfulsmile_tongue) is view only – if you recall, it did not take long for Zoho to add edit capabilities to the Gears-based offline version on the desktop, so we can likely expect the same here, too.

This video presents Zoho Writer Offline in use.   As a reminder, Zoho also works on the iPhone, at at izoho.com – offline support will come just as soon as Google Gears will support it.

 

Related posts: Google Mobile Blog, TechCrunch,  TechMoz, VentureBeat, Mashable, The Buxfer Post, Zoho Blogs.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, SaaS, Startups · Tagged: , , , , , , ,
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NetBooks: Integrated SaaS Suite for Very Small Businesses. Almost.

Posted on February 19, 2008 ·

When I started this post 2 months ago, it had a more tongue-in-cheek working title: NetBooks – the Little Gem in Hiding – clearly a play on Dennis Howlett’s  post, NetBooks – a little gem.  That’s because despite Dennis’s positive review of this new SaaS solution for small businesses I found their website a major turn-off .   I did not find a feature-list, screen prints, demos: the closest they had was a contact form to request a scheduled demo.  Failure!  You can’t reach the “long tail” of the market via outbound sales; your site needs to be absolutely transparent, so potential customers can find all feature / price information at their fingertips, then just try-and-buy. 

But what a difference a few weeks make!  Having checked back, now NetBooks offers decent product information, online videos, in fact you can now set up a free trial account with sample data in minutes.  (While it looks like just another contact form, the process is automated, I received my email confirmation within a minute.) Self-navigation definitely beats just watching vid’s. Kudos to NetBooks for fixing a major shortcoming so fast!  (Note to self: don’t leave half-written posts, they may have a short shelf-life…)

Let’s look at the actual system now.  NetBooks aims to be an On-Demand integrated business management solution for small manufacturing businesses – in fact for other types of businesses, too, as long as they hold inventory and ship tangible products.  They cater for  what they call True Small Businesses (TSB), which I referred to as  VSB – very small businesses, the “S” in SMB / SME.  Typically companies with less then 25 employees, sometimes only 3-5, and, most importantly, without professional IT support, hence Software as a Service is a life-saver.

NetBooks tries to cover a complete business cycle, from opportunity through sales, manufacturing, inventory / warehouse management, shipping, billing, accounting – some with more success then others.  Manufacturing, Inventory, Shipping and their integration to Accounting appear to be a stronghold.  If you’re in sales, you’d like to see a Sales Catalog, if you’re in the warehouse, you want an Inventory List, and if you are in manufacturing, you need a Production Elements list: they are all one and the same, allowing you to define a product structure (Bill of Materials, BOM) with different physical characteristics, reorder points, pricing levels, warehousing requirements, marketing notes…etc.   In other words, different functions can update their own slice of the same information and it’s shared with others (of course in a small business several of these functions may very well be carried out by the same person.)

Not having any procurement / purchasing functions appears to be a glaring omission: after all, if you’re in manufacturing, you will likely need to buy some components / materials. 

Another function, nominally present, but rather weak is CRM.  I can set up a Revenue Opportunity list, track contacts, events, even financial terms per record, but what’s the point if I can’t turn these into a Quote, later a Sales Order?  In fact I have to start a sales order from scratch, and it does not update the opportunities: unless you close them out, they will show as prospects long after you shipped the order, invoiced the customer and received payment.

Sales Order creation appears to be  a watershed event in NetBooks: that’s when the system comes alive, integration gets better from here, with information flowing through nicely.  Completing the order creates a shipping document, confirmation of the shipment creates a a billing request, invoice.  Even external services are integrated well, like UPS for Online Shipping and PayCycle for payroll .  There’s a complete “document trail”, you can start from the accounting side, too: from Accounts Payable (invoice) you can trace all actions back to the shipping doc, sales order…etc.

I understand why Dennis with his accounting background considered this system a gem:

As an accountant by training I often make the mistake of taking the number cruncher’s view. On this occasion I don’t have to. The way NetBooks is organized, you enter it according to the role you fulfill. That means you only ever need use the screens that are pertinent to you.

Real-world people record their real-world transactions: manufacturing, physical movement of goods, and the system records the facts in Accounting.  NetBooks  is an accounting system at it’s heart, but one without the need to deal with accounting screens.  This should not come as a surprise, given Founder Ridgley Evers’s own background: he was co-founder at QuickBooks, the de facto standard for small businesses.

Most of the sample data in the NetBooks trial system appear to have come from Evers’s real-life business: Davero Ingredienti, a purveyor of olive oil products, and I think this very well represents the type of small business NetBooks may be ideal for: relatively stable, has a good repeat customer base, receives a  lot of inbound orders and needs to execute on manufacturing and shipping to these customers.  It badly lacks stronger Sales features, and a more flow-oriented thinking to support aggressively growing businesses.

The User Interface is nothing to call home about. You certainly won’t find the lively charts and dashboards seen at Salesforce.com, NetSuite, SugarCRM, Zoho CRM …etc.  But having a simplistic UI is one thing, making it outright boring is another, and hard to use is a capital crime.  In NetBooks you basically navigate through small text lists, then double -click on an item to drill down to more details, wait long (the system, at least the trial one feels very slow) for several overlapping screens to pop up. You have to close or move around some of these pop-ups to see what’s underneath.  And whoever came up with the idea of clicking on those tiny arrows should be banned from web design for life.  

 

Seriously, this isn’t just the lack of rounded-corners-gradient-colors web 2.0 goodness: the poor UI, the microscopic arrows to click on render NetBooks a pain to use. 

Although I’ve been quite critical in this review, I still like the NetBooks concept: give very small businesses an integrated system they previously could not afford. NetBooks starts at $200/month for 5 users, additional users seats are $20.  That’s a fraction of the current “gold standard” in the space, NetSuite – although the step up to NetSuite also brings a wealth of new functionality.  Finally, SAP’s Business ByDesign is worth mentioning: when it becomes widely available, it will be the most function-rich SMB SaaS solution – but their entry point is about where NetBooks’s upper limit is.

Filed Under: ERP / CRM, SaaS, SMB / SME, Startups · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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The Dawn of SaaS-on-SaaS – Even While Amazon S3 is Down.

Posted on February 15, 2008 ·

TechMeme is great in threading together relevant posts, but is largely based (so I think…) on direct linking, so of course it could not auto-detect the ironic relationship between:

Phil quotes Greg Olsen, CTO of Coghead, a web-based development platform which moved its servers to the Amazon infrastructure recently:

“As ironic as it may be, we continue to see software applications deployed as a service but which fail to use any service-based infrastructure themselves”

“The move to SaaS applications built on SaaS is a much more profound shift than the move from on-premise applications to SaaS applications …”

“Ironically, some of the first victims of this new economy may be some pioneers of the software-as-a-service movement. Today, many established SaaS application providers are applying much more of their precious focus and capital to infrastructure issues than newer competitors that are aggressively utilizing service-based infrastructure … the build-it-all-ourselves SaaS application vendor … will ultimately end up as [an] anachronism.”

Today’s Amazon outage appears to rebuff Phil and Greg’s point. Reality check: this is the first time Amazon S3 went down, and it’s already back up. Salesforce.com had its fair share of outages, so did other SaaS providers, and so did just about any in-house systems companies run their own installed software on. I’m a big believer in focus, specialization and I trust the few mega-cloud companies that will emerge can maintain a more robust infrastructure than we could all do individually. (So yes, if it’s not obvious, I do buy into Nick Carr’s Big Switch concept.)

Another approach is to look at where value can be added: the consensus view from a quick Enterprise Irregulars chat is that infrastructure will be commoditized faster (or it already is) than software, where there is a lot more room for innovation by new and – thanks to outsourced infrastructure – smaller players.

And if acronyms were not ugly enough already, here’s to entering the age of SaaS-on-SaaS. smile_shades

Update: What better confirmation of my point than today’s rumors about EMC hosting  SAP’s system  – I assume it’s Business ByDesign, the new On-Demand offering for the SMB market. (Side-note: I’ll be traveling and be time and Internet-challenged for the next three weeks, but SAP’s BDD is one of the subjects I will come back, as it seems to be largely misunderstood. Oh, and I just love the fact how Mozy, my favorite online backup service is often referred to in the EMC story).

 

Related posts (on the Amazon outage): Rough Type, mathewingram.com/work, LinkFog, Data Center Knowledge, Web Worker Daily, TechCrunch, Moonwatcher, Project Failures, SmoothSpan Blog, Enterprise Anti-Matter.

Filed Under: SaaS, Startups, Technology · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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How to Hire Bill Gates to Demo your Startup’s Product

Posted on February 12, 2008 ·

Actually, I don’t know how, but Xobni apparently does: Bill Gates presented Xobni for Outlook as “the next generation of social networking” (is that why he quit Facebook?) at the Microsoft Office Developers Conference yesterday (video here).

Now, let’s think for a minute. What does it mean when Bill Gates presents your product, a super-cool Outlook plugin to his crowd of developers?

  1. Gates’s message: now go back and copy this fast. That would be the classic Microsoft style, as many software startups can attest to. It would also put the market introduction to somewhere … around 2015? Unlikely.
  2. Microsoft will acquire Xobni in no time. Sweet and fast deal. Congratulations to the Xobni team and investors! martini

Update (2/15): Xobni has a new CEO: Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo’s vice president of social search until now. Did he just escape from one Microsoft acquisition and get into another one? 😉

Update (3/2): TechCrunch has sources confirming the Microsoft negotiations.

Update (3/20): Bob Warfield believes Microsoft is about to close the deal with Xobni.

Filed Under: Personal Productivity, Software, Startups · Tagged: , , , , , , , ,
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Web Forms Gain Popularity

Posted on February 7, 2008 ·

Web forms are increasingly popular, as they provide an easy way to solicit user input, manage a database in the background, and display data in a controlled form. Typical uses are contact forms (this blog has one), surveys, signup-sheets.   Wufoo is perhaps the most popular standalone form builder, but as popular as they are, Google’s entry to the space will likely bring more visibility to Web form use cases. 

I set up a very rudimentary web form to demonstrate their use, but I am cheating: I took the data from Google Operating System and populated my database – sorry, Ionut, I don’t get anywhere close to your huge reader base.smile_wink   Please fill out the form below.

Although the form captures the time of entry, I am not displaying it below, to demonstrate that once can control the re-use of data after user entry.

You can manipulate the above data, filter it, sort it by clicking on the column headers, search the contents…etc. 

Oh… is this more than you’ve seen on the other Google forms?  And they’ve told you the lists were not embeddable?  Sorry .. I’m cheating: I’ve re-created Ionut’s  form in Zoho Creator. smile_tongue  (Disclaimer: I am an Advisor to Zoho – but I am making a point by doing this.)

 

Different people will always prefer different tools.  I don’t have any statistics, but I would assume the number of users for database-like tools (MS Access, Dabble DB, Zoho Creator & DB) is by an order of magnitude less than the number of spreadsheet users.  A lot of basic spreadsheet users don’t perform calculations, don’t use pivot tables – they just  create tables to track lists. (See my earlier rant on why JotSpot’s tracker is not a real spreadsheet).  For their sake it’s nice to be able to have simple form support inside a spreadsheet, which is what they can now get from Google.

Several reviewers of the new Google Forms were missing field verification, calculated numeric fields…etc. These features and more are supported in Zoho Creator, which in fact allows you to build mini-apps by dropping script elements, without actually coding.  Those who want more database manipulation can use Zoho DB. These are powerful applications, but which one to use when can be confusing to less technically inclined users (like yours truly).  Hence simple forms in a spreadsheet are a good idea.   But let me dream a little – here’s how I’d like to see web-based collaboration some day:

It won’t be about formats and applications – it will be about free-flowing thoughts and the data encapsulating them.  Of course there will be differences in application capabilities, but it’s entirely likely that what you can manipulate in your database application, I will access using a spreadsheet. Likewise, I may write something in a wiki, and you want to edit it in an online word processor.  It’s not a dream, we’re heading that way.  For example Zoho’s wiki and Writer apps share a basically similar editor, Zoho DB introduced pivot tables which will show up in Sheet in the near future.  I am impatient, would like to see this sharing happen faster, but have to accept the realities of how the leading Web companies work: individual products first, integration later.  But we’ll get there… to the vision of format-less web-collaboration.

Oh, and until then, Welcome Creator Mini Google Forms.smile_teeth

Related posts: Rev2.org, Download Squad, Digital Trends, Sunny Talks Tech, Webware.com, Compiler, Search Engine Roundtable, Googlified, Search Engine Journal, CenterNetworks, Google Operating System, TechCrunch, Google Blogoscoped, SEO and Tech Daily, Lifehacker, Gear Diary and Techmamas

Filed Under: Collaboration, SaaS, Startups · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Matt Mullenweg and other Celebs on the SVASE Panel: Funding 2.0, How To Build A High Growth Startup Fast And Cheap.

Posted on February 6, 2008 ·

  For all my love and support of SVASE, I sometimes complain that the monthly “Main Events” are a bit cut-and-dry.  Well, that will certainly not be the case tomorrow: star-power, money, frugality are all well represented on the panel discussing  Funding 2.0 – How To Build A High Growth Startup Fast And Cheap.

Matt Mullenweg started Automattic on a shoestring, and his product, WordPress became the most popular blog platform  before he and his company accepted major funding.  

Peter Yared, ActiveGrid’s Founder isn’t exactly unknown, either, although he is no listed as Founder & CEO, wdgtbldr.  WTF? – you might ask, but that’s a company name. His website says: ps: pls snd vwls.  We don’t get a lot smarter from this… but his LinkedIn profile reveals the company name as iWidgets, and his motto is:

The first rule of iWidgets is you don’t talk about iWidgets.

Naval Ravikant has been called a lot of names: Venturebeat labeled him: Crazy Man, his website is StartupBoy, and he is a Partner, at The Hit Forge:

The Hit Forge is a group of entrepreneurial engineers building mass-market web properties. We are owners of our companies, share common tools and code, and have enough money to fund dozens of attempts to find the next big hit. We don’t get locked into failed projects, we replace pointy-haired MBAs with modern web marketing, and we share stock so that if one of us wins, everybody wins.

Oh, and since I am a SaaS fanboy, here’s another acronym: CaaS, as in Capital as a Service (although Shai Agassi would disagreesmile_wink) .

Mike Cassidy has co-founded and sold three companies: Stylus Innovation, Direct Hit and Xfire. He is currently Entrepreneur in Residence at Benchmark Capital, one of the Big Brand Names on venture capital.   Traditional VC firms have to change: the capital efficiency of software startups means they cannot easily invest tens of millions in one startup anymore, and their traditional model is does not allow them to participate in much larger portfolios.  But Mike is not a Partner: the Entrepreneur-in-Residence title means he is there fishing for his next Big Hit, and will jump back as entrepreneur quite soon.

If you’d like to hear these four superstars discuss issues like:

• Can any fundable startup really get to breakeven on less than $1M venture capital?
• What does a “Capital Efficient” startup look like?
• Where do you find the people & resources for next to nothing?
• How can you generate revenue straight out of the gate?
• If I can generate revenue, and I have minimal expense, why do I need Venture Capital?
• If $1M “hardly moves the needle,” what returns are VCs now looking for?

– hurry, register here, before the event sells out.  See you tomorrow, at 6pm in Palo Alto.

Filed Under: Bay Area, Software, Startups, Technology · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,
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