His lasted book is THE MACKAY MBA OF SELLING IN THE REAL WORLD (Portfolio, 2011). The wonderful publicity folks retained by Mr. Mackay were kind enough to grant me an email interview after I read the book. His answers below build on a great read and create the basis for a larger conversation that the world desperately needs to have. Harvey is part of an increasingly rare breed of business leader who understands that people, human capital and organizational transformation are vital to success. For our society to survive as we know it, we must rapidly work to reverse this trend and create a new generation of leaders with these all too rare skills. You feel the sense of urgency in his answers below. I can’t wait to spend another day with Harvey Mackay, the mutual learning would be overwhelming.

You stated “Fostering employee loyalty is the first step to creating customer loyalty” in Chapter 4. Over the past two decades, many companies have treated employees as disposable assets. How would you convince management to reverse this unfortunate trend?

Harvey Mackay: Our company mission statement is to be in business forever.  That means no compromising … not compromising your core principles and taking any shortcuts.  It is virtually impossible to stay in business over a long period of time if you treat your employees as disposable assets.  In 50-plus years in the business world, I know of no one who stayed in business with a revolving door of employees.  It’s sad to say, but in these difficult economic times there are still too many businesses that still don’t get it.

Chapter 15 states, “Your past is not your potential” and “Far too many people exist in a world of “what is” rather than applying their energies to “what can be”.” Today skills are dynamic and changing; this has implications for returning to the basics of recruiting naturally curious lifelong learners based with the vision to lead change. How can companies best stop the practice of picking leaders of the past?

Harvey Mackay: I have hired over 500 people in my career, and the single most important word in the dictionary that I look for and demand is trust.  Once I have established that, then I immediately look for capacity and willingness to learn.  I can’t begin to tell you how many people out there in the marketplace and disciples of the Peter Principle.  There has been a seismic shift in the business world.  The great classical business principles still hold true but they need to be fused with cutting edge internet technology.  That’s the kind of leaders that companies should be looking for.

Fred Smith got a “C” on his term paper for his idea for Federal Express. Mike Bloomberg was told his idea for what became the Bloomberg terminal would never work by his former employer. Why is it often so difficult for most executives to grasp paradigm changing business ideas?

Harvey Mackay: It’s way easier to stay in the comfort zone, especially when things are going good than to go out on a limb and take some risks.  My philosophy is exactly the opposite:  Sometimes it’s risky not to take a risk.  And remember, if you walk backwards, you will never stub your toe.  One of the most difficult things in life for any individual or business is to accept and adopt change.

So, as you like to say, “People don’t know what they don’t know?”

Harvey Mackay: The way I like to fine tune this statement that I made up in college is – I know that you don’t know, but you don’t know that you don’t know!  By that I mean there are three reasons why individuals and businesses fail:

1.    Arrogance

2.    Arrogance

3.    Arrogance

There has been a consistent, gradual decline in ethical business practices in the United States for about 50 years, and it reached new extremes in the “daisy chain” of the sub-prime mortgage industry in the period of 2002-2008.  This was caused by executives getting chapped lips from kissing the mirror too much, which is a perfect example of how arrogance set in.

You discuss the importance of listening, what is the best way for a salesperson to use the obtained information to create a successful sales?

Harvey Mackay: First of all you can’t learn anything if you are doing all the talking.  Sales people should always be developing their earQ, not their IQ.  The only way to create a successful sale is to understand that knowledge (from listening) does not become power until it is used.  And ideas without action are worthless.

You talked about enthusiasm, what is the best way to maintain it in the face of adversity?

Harvey Mackay: First of all, I have never yet met a successful person who hasn’t had to overcome either a little or a lot of adversity in his or her life.  If life there is a lot of lumps and bumps … a lot of throttling up and a lot of throttling down.  Failure is not falling down, but staying down.  Therefore, you have to ignite your own enthusiasm.  The ten most powerful two-letter words in the English language are:  If it is to be, it is up to me.  Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and you will accomplish your object.  I agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”

In chapter 67 you cut the world-famous Mackay 66 to the Mackay 25, Please share more about why you changed it…

Harvey Mackay: The Mackay 25 does not replace the Mackay 66.  Rather it is a streamlined version, which gets you to an instant snapshot of the prospect or buyer’s attitude and expectations.  It gets to the heart of what is commonly known today as relationship selling.

In a recent blog post you stated that you are always surprised when you ask who their customers are and they say everyone. Rob La Gesse (@kr8tr) asks who is your customer?  Have you decided who is not?  If so, you have already self-limited your ability to affect change?

Harvey Mackay: You can’t be all things to all people.  In most businesses the company will have what I refer to as nitch-picking.  In short, virtually everyone has their own niche within an industry.

I had the distinct pleasure of spending the day with you during your Chicago media tour in 2010. I was amazed by the way you prepared for each interview. You were seeking to learn about each interviewer and worked to bring that into the on air conversation. What can aspiring radio and TV guests learn from your techniques?

Harvey Mackay: I call this humanize your selling strategy.  I attempt to do a Mackay 66 Question Customer Profile on everyone I meet throughout my life.  That means customers, employees, suppliers, competitors, audiences, radio and TV talk-show hosts and journalists.  This is what I teach our sales force and the people I mentor, and that is that every single person I encounter I have a deep-down burning desire to learn what turns that person on and what he or she is most interested in.  In any relationship, you must find a common denominator.

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Thank you Harvey! Every CEO, board of directors member and business leader should read this interview and distribute it (and his book) to their teams and then talk about these meaty issues! I welcome the world changing conversation.

Learn more about Harvey at http://www.harveymackay.com/

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In the introduction, you discuss how many have a love and hate relationship with Google – at the same time. What it is about Google that allows these emotions to exist mutually at the same time?

Aaron Goldman: Well, I wouldn’t call it a love/hate so much as a love/fear.

I love using Google as a searcher and as marketer. As a searcher, Google helps me find what I’m looking for. And, as a marketer, Google helps me get new customers.

But I’m definitely afraid of Google too. As a searcher, I’m afraid it of what it could do with my data. And as a marketer, I’m also afraid of what it could do with my data but even more afraid that it may one day change its algorithm and leave me out in the cold.

I think it’s general human nature to fear the things we love the most. Once we become reliant on something or someone, we fear that it one day may be taken away.

You discussed relevancy and intent in the book at a few junctures. How do you like to explain these issues to people and why are these concepts challenging for people to understand?

Aaron Goldman: It’s difficult because, by its very definition, relevancy is relative. What’s relevant to you may not be to me. Too many marketers make the mistake of thinking that what matters to them also matters to their target customers.

From a Google perspective, relevancy is the key to search. If Google’s search results aren’t relevant to each individual searcher, he or she will stop using it. That’s why Google looks to collect and keep so much data. It needs to personalize the results to make them more relevant.

For marketers, it’s critical to give off signals of relevancy if you want high rankings on Google. This includes content geared towards specific search queries as well as links from relevant websites.

As for intent. I really think it’s the reason search marketing works so well. People come to Google with the intent of finding something. And, often, that’s something to buy. It’s one of the few places in media where people raise their hands and specifically ask for products, services, etc. It’s the whole pull vs. push thing.

You mentioned how AOL values content differently than most organizations and how Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation, owner of The Wall Street Journal or Fox News accuses Google of stealing content. As content channels become infinite, isn’t media monopoly power also changing and/or even declining?

Aaron Goldman: The point I was making with content is that there are certain topics that are highly commercial and others that are not. What I mean by commercial is that the people consuming the content are in a commercial mindset — they’re thinking about buying something.

For publishers, commercial content is the easiest to monetize. Advertisers want to be wherever there are people thinking about buying stuff. AOL has done a good job of creating content on highly commercial topics — think travel or financial services — that it can sell ads against.

The Wall Street Journal and Fox News are too busy covering the “news.” And news is tough to monetize. People consuming news are not in a commercial mindset and are not open to advertising messages.

All that said, you make a good point that it’s tougher to wield monopoly power as channels become infinite and distribution is spread across the long tail. These days anybody can start a blog or Twitter account and “report” news. And people tend to trust their friends more than the media.

You interlaced a bunch of URLs in the book. This is an interesting experiment. What is your hope for it?

Aaron Goldman: I wanted to make the experience of reading the book more dynamic. Rather than just read cover to cover, my hope is that people will read a chapter and then go to the web to learn more about specific topics covered and interact with other people reading that same part of the book.

With static print, it’s tough to keep content fresh — especially in the world of marketing and Google when changes are happening every day. By including the URLs, I have a way to share new developments.

The URLs also helped keep me from going off on tangents or going too deep on topics that many readers may not care about. For example, rather than recap an entire thesis that David Berkowitz wrote about “Jewhavioral Targeting” in my chapter about “Letting the Data Decide,” I just cover it in a sentence or two and include a link.

There’s a few people in the book that were mentioned considerably more than others, how did you pick the contributors, quotes and subtopics?

Aaron Goldman: Along the same lines as the URLs, I knew it was important to include a wide variety of perspectives on the lessons learned from Google. No-one wants to read 300+ pages of what Aaron Goldman thinks about marketing. But people do (I hope) want to read 300+ pages of what some of the brightest minds in the industry learned from Google as curated by Aaron Goldman.

I interviewed over 100 marketing big wigs in the course of preparing my manuscript ranging from agency types to Google employees to researchers to university professors. The ones who are mentioned more frequently are the ones that gave me insights that were the most compelling, controversial, quotable or all of the above.

The book is part history, part teacher and part tour guide…who is the intended audience?

Aaron Goldman: This book was written for anyone who has a stake in marketing. It covers all areas of marketing — advertising, PR, promotions, media, product development, etc.

And it’s written for people like me who have very short attention spans. The copy is quick and punchy. And there’s lots of fun wordplay. I put the “pun” in punchy.

It doesn’t matter if you work for a small business or Fortune 500 company, the lessons in my book are applicable to your business. In each of my 20 chapters, I share a lesson, discuss how Google puts it into play, cover mini-case studies of marketers that exemplify it, and then walk through an exercise for the reader to relate the lesson to his or her business.

This book will also make great fodder for search engine marketing pros looking to broaden their horizons or understand how their skills can be leveraged across other channels.

What knowledge do you want people to take away from the book?

Aaron Goldman: First and foremost, I want people to take away specific tactics that they can apply to their business immediately. If you read the entire book and don’t find a single thing you can do to grow your business right away, then I will personally refund your money.

That said, I also want to give people a framework for thinking about the future of marketing. I spend quite a bit of time throughout the book — and especially in the last chapter on “future-proofing” — discussing what the marketing world will look like 10 years from now and what Google’s role might be within it.

If nothing else, I hope people will find my book entertaining and enjoy getting a peek under the hood of one of the most fascinating (and profitable) companies in the modern era.
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I wish Aaron the best of luck with his book and look forward to learning from his experiences as I continue to explore my book author aspirations in the future. The constant mutual learning from all of the wonderful people I meet in the digital marketing space as I speak and consult around the world is special and hard to fully describe! Looking forward to seeing the other scheduled stops on the GoogleyLessons blog tour!

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Obviously one must consider that without true reform of advertising models away from CPM driven page view models how display in 2010 can do nothing to further the goal of lowering costs of marketing and sales for companies and improving our standard of living. CPM can only maximize revenue of an ad network with some residual benefits to publishers. A few days ago I considered writing something about this, but thought this was part of something larger than just Google and their display initiatives in 2010.

Surely, less than 48 hours later, Jason Calacanis started a discussion about comScore that has the Blogoshpere abuzz. Michael Arrington also chimed in (as did a bunch of other people) in his post, Jason Calacanis Punches Comscore In The Face. Comscore Punches Back. Fred Wilson Drags Us Into It. $SCOR” rel=”bookmark” href=”http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/24/comscore-calcanis-wilson-punch-face/”>Jason Calacanis Punches Comscore In The Face. Comscore Punches Back. Fred Wilson Drags Us Into It. $SCOR.The buzz around Jason and his conversation is ultimately about symptoms of the current ecosystem, not the root causes of the future end game.  While the conversation about the current state is certainly an interesting conversation to observe, it’s not the conversation I wish to take to the next level. We need to have a different conversation. There is so much more to achieve and limited marketing resources of companies need to be put to work effectively. There are advertising models of the future to consider where offline, mobile and Internet will collide and will someday make this entire conversation look primitive.

Sure enough reading this post brought me back to the conversation about Google and the worthlessness of poorly targeted and untimely display banner ads. You see there was not one but two large banners on TechCrunch that stood out as irrelevantly served by Google. What were they? They were display banners for a company I had interviewed with to be the CMO of in Spring of 2009 that I would have likely have increased the revenue significantly by now.  Unfortunately most CEOs don’t yet fully understand the magnitude of the amount of change  that is necessary to transform a company successfully for marketing on the web while improving customer satisfaction and the corporation’s profitability. I had researched them and their competitors back then. I was never a potential customer of the service. So now, a full nine months later, here I am looking at this completely irrelevant ad on TechCrunch of all places (which is completely unrelated to the vertical). Wasteful. Pathetic. Sad. Not something a rational business leader following the rules of being a Gen X CMO where search marketing becomes the top of the strategic process.  The first decade of the Internet got us to the batters box to start the game of corporate business strategy transformation, I look forward leading that conversation into the first inning during the next few years. The magnitude of the change and the amount of transformation needed is massive, whether it is a small company or a member of the Fortune 500.

You should read those comments in Michael Arrington’s post and think about their motivations – extremely carefully. You’ll also find a link to Jason’s original post there if you wish to read the full details. The future of not only the Internet, but also the future of business organizational structures and marketing strategy budget direction hangs in the balance.

So my question for Jason Calacanis, Fred Wilson, Michael Arrington and EVERYONE ELSE is the following, “Is it time to stop pretending that offline branding models simply converted online is the future of the advertising? If a world migrated budgets from CPM banner ads to CPA/CPL and other emerging forms, who would really care about unique visitors besides site owners seeking an ego boost? ”

Bonus question for Fred Wilson: Wouldn’t your energy be better spent on funding ideas that move the conversation in the direction of innovation of advertising instead of arguing with Jason about a company you exited long ago? (If you are up for it, I’d like to create those realities with you in start ups in that future arena.)

In the end measurement of the type discussed in Jason’s post only matters in an advertising world based on page view based(CPM) or time sponsored impressions. As in my example above, considerable display advertising occurs in an irrelevant way after the fact. For example, I bought a car last September, I’m still seeing increased banners on the models I considered now – after the purchase. Women planning weddings likely have seen related retargeted banners long after the wedding has occurred, possibly even after the divorce is filed in some cases!!! We must do better.

The convergence of offline, online, search and mobile marketing will require entirely new processes to effectively manage them as it becomes a real-time individual decision marketplace. To me, it will have similarity to the changes I made in the 1990′s at BlackRock, where we created new data, new structures, new standards and created better information for us to create strategic advantages.  I actively network with some outstanding nascent start ups, sadly many are ignored as many VCs look for traffic or who is involved rather than focus on revenue models, vision, market size and evidence that there might be paying customers for such a new , disruptive model.

The economy right now is bad, but to state that it is just an economic event is way oversimplifying it. It’s prolonged and drawn out due to the structural effects of the Internet not being managed to corporate advantage effectively. Stated simply, corporations and our society is not allocating resources in an effective manner as it fails to migrate budgets and marketing strategy to the highest ROI activities which attract relevant customers. It’s time for scarce, new and often misunderstood breeds of executives that understand these concepts to be allowed to realign corporations big and small, new and old to these new realities otherwise we will see more corporations destroyed “by doing nothing”. There is certainly a significant cost to tapping new leaders, with new skills to lead organizations into new frontiers in terms of realignment and retraining. However, the costs of doing nothing are far greater to our society as not allocating budgets to the most efficient channels and allowing those decisions to be made by people who understand these new realities is far greater.

All I can ask the both the blogosphere and the world business community is to please stop the bickering about these legacy models so we can move onto the real issue and work ahead – realigning our corporate business strategy and our society to the realities of Industrial Revolution 2.0. It starts with board of directors, CEO, CFO and COO executives asking their CMO and marketing partners the right questions. The journey will be fun.

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However, high rankings on entrepreneurship education alone is not sufficient, the next steps are:
1) To build a transparent, quick and efficient marketplace for entrepreneurs, experienced and passionate management teams and startup capital.

2) Modify the focus toward commercialization of businesses in the model outlined above, ultimately success is measured by the number and quantity of companies that they’ve enabled to scalable, not just lifestyle growth curves. I look forward to participating in this journey.

Here’s the full announcement…

DePaul University’s entrepreneurship program opened the new academic year on a high note Sept. 10 with news that it has again been recognized among the finest in the United States in Entrepreneur magazine/Princeton Review’s annual “Best Schools for Entrepreneurs” ranking.

DePaul moved up three places to second on the list of best rated graduate entrepreneur programs in the national rankings, which are posted on Entrepreneur’s Web site and will appear in the October issue of the magazine. The university placed seventh in the undergraduate entrepreneur education category and was the only Illinois university ranked in that category.

“DePaul offers students exposure to thousands of successful entrepreneurs in a large urban setting with sophisticated financing services available,” the magazine noted. “Entrepreneurial supporters are extremely active in sharing knowledge, resources, contacts and expertise. The program provides very supportive administration and infrastructure through the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center.”

Entrepreneur partnered with the Princeton Review, a leading educational services provider, to solicit surveys from 2,300 undergraduate and graduate program administrators to determine the rankings. The survey covered three areas: academic offerings and requirements; student enrollment and faculty quality; and “outside the classroom,” which examined student organization, mentorship and scholarship opportunities. An advisory board of entrepreneurship educators also provided evaluations of the surveyed programs. Based on the data and review, a total of 50 programs (25 undergraduate and 25 graduate programs) made the list of the best.

“DePaul’s rankings are a tribute to the academic excellence of our program and the quality of our faculty,” said Harold Welsch, Coleman Entrepreneurship Chair at DePaul, who founded the program. “Using their education and start-up experiences, faculty members help students look to the future and identify viable business opportunities. They share their experiences with the students willingly and with great enthusiasm.”

Founded in 1982 at the College of Commerce, DePaul’s entrepreneurship program has grown to encompass 12 undergraduate and graduate courses taught by 16 faculty members. The faculty represents a mix of distinguished scholars of entrepreneurship and successful entrepreneurs.

Courses cover business plan development, entrepreneurial strategy and management, new venture financing, business growth, creativity, innovation and technological change, among other topics. More than 600 students take undergraduate and graduate courses in the program annually. Students have opportunities to participate in a number of mentorship and internship programs, as well as entrepreneur organizations, including Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization, MBA Entrepreneurs Club, Social Entrepreneurship Club and Students for Entrepreneurs.

The program is supported by the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center, which manages education and outreach programs designed to stimulate the start-up and growth of entrepreneurial firms. The center also sponsors Launch DePaul, an annual year-long business plan competition that awards cash prizes and business start-up services for the most promising business plans submitted by students and alumni.

“We believe that today’s students need practical learning opportunities that extend beyond the classroom,” said Raman Chadha, director of the center and a member of the entrepreneurship program faculty. “The Coleman Center creates these opportunities by working with faculty to connect DePaul students with successful entrepreneurs, help them launch ventures and provide real-world experiences. Students are able to immediately apply what they learn in the classroom, acquiring wisdom that only comes with these opportunities. The entrepreneurial spirit at DePaul has never been stronger.”

The magazine’s “Best Schools for Entrepreneurs” top 10 graduate programs were:

1. Babson College
2. DePaul University
3. University of Southern California
4. The University of Arizona
5. University of South Florida
6. University of Illinois, Chicago
7. University of California, Los Angeles 8. Drexel University 9. Chapman University 10. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The top undergraduate entrepreneur programs were:

1. University of Houston
2. Babson College
3. Drexel University
4. University of Dayton
5. University of Arizona
6. Temple University
7. DePaul University
8. University of Oklahoma
9. University of Southern California
10. Chapman University

To view the full rankings, go to: http://www.entrepreneur.com/topcolleges/.

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During Cluecon, I was able to drop in and catch Irv Shaprio’s speech, what follows are my live blogging notes of the session:

What does ifbyphone provide? Phone mashups – combine data from the world wide web with phone inputs and conversations.

ifbyphone goals:
- Technology Agnostic API – any language, host, data or location
- Dialog Support – Voice Forms (IVR), DTMF, Text to Speech, Automated Speech Recognition
- Call Management – outbound (termination), inbound (origination), Scheduling API, Broadcast API, Call Completion API
- Support Services – documentation, blog, user support forum, free development accounts and live support people

Lots of documentation is available, telephone scale

Phone mashup example – getting request from a form

Build a Voice Form Setup Form
Built in grammar allow branching of questions (Survo voice form setup)
ifbyphone uses forms instead of selectors for 100% reliability

Check out phonemashup.com for more examples.

Marketing people are using this to put the telephone into the existing treatment processes.

———————

Analysis: ifbyphone is enabling a bridge between web 2.0 and the phone. What I love about this is I think it’s part of a trend, removing silos to create effective solutions for companies and their customers. It’s small space with the potential to have large business impacts in terms of efficiency and customer satisfaction that will be fun to watch develop and watch who steps up to implement the solutions rapidly.

A recent interview of Irv can be found here. I certainly look forward to seeing and learning more about how ifbyphone will be impacting business results shortly.

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If I were the lead product manager at Twitter, I’d be setting up two primary screens:

1) Keywords across the entire network overall which toggle switches for the frequency compared to normal (it would be cool if this was somehow “normalized” so that less frequent words with huge percentage increases actually got noticed – so that everything wasn’t Angelina Jolie, Barack Obama, Brad Pitt, Michael Arrington, Jason Calacanis, Fred Wilson, etc).

2) Graphs and/or alert spikes of user defined keywords – ie ones that are important to oneself personally or to one’s business or clients. I would dare to say this might actually be a business model that could lead to meaningful monetization – I think alot of web services haven’t thought this through nearly enough. Organizing real-time data for useful decision making as a business model worked out OK for Michael Bloomberg if I recall correctly. Some might say Google Trends does this already from a search perspective, but it doesn’t break down the word clusters to core words with “sidekicks” and is not the leading indicator that Twitter is by an uncertain but definite time margin.

Before I’d get to this though, Twitter would have to become stable and Twitter would have to fix the AIM problem I posted about on June 1 and have not gotten a response to yet. Good luck on getting those items in order first, then feel free to give me a shout Biz.

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Let’s start an exploration of these issues in more detail:

- There is an almost total lack of imagination regarding potential emerging revenue streams – When I attend search engine conferences, I hear over and over how “63% of transactions occur offline after an online search (comScore 2006).” Tying together that transaction with it’s higher relevancy holds the key to a revenue stream potentially larger than Google’s Adwords product. Having once spent 6 months of my life trying to raise capital for a search advertising concept, I have to agree with Robert that there is lack of willingness to engage in serious funding conversations of this type – until half a dozen other people do it…that’s messed up!

- In large businesses, there is an obsession with basing business cases on expense savings rather than the potential for new revenue streams- Going back to that example above, financial services institutions could play a large role in this. However due to the lack of risk management processes that caused the housing crisis, they are risk adverse at this moment and risk removing themselves from this once in a lifetime opportunity. I saw 4 companies give presentations on their business cases on mobile retail banking and they all focused on the reduction of call center costs! Think about that a second, moving things from a PC to a phone will reduce call center volumes? Highly questionable at best form cost savings perspective, certainly missing the revenue opportunities completely.

- Everything in the world is converging, yet most companies have silos and are hiring specialists (set up for failure) – When banks are trying to become relevant in mobile and mobile is trying to get into advertising and payments, can you afford to hire people with one dimensional skill sets? The answer is no, not if you want to win.

- With increasingly rapid cycle times in technology, competitive benchmarking is becoming less useful – If none of your competitors has made a tough decision to reorganize a department, shift financial resources to new ways of doing things in marketing or customer service, how can you improve via benchmarking? Stated a different way, if your process is broken and all of your competitor’s processes are broken, you can’t possibly create market leadership by benchmarking. You have to hire the best and most brilliant people who hold little if any limiting beliefs and give them the authority to innovate based on what customers want. Serving those needs in the Peter Drucker fashion is the only way to create true market leadership. This does not mean that competitive analysis is dead. It does mean that the benchmarks you need to pay attention to are the breakthroughs regardless of industry.

- Existing legacy cost centers in large corporations are creating barriers to innovation and efficiency both internally and externally – These cost centers prevent reallocation of budgets to adopting usage of superior and more efficient technology or Internet/mobile advertising due to their all or nothing nature – smooth and frequent shifting to most economical resources is the unfortunate rarity. There is a large number of reasons for this and this topic is worthy of a post of it’s own (please submit suggestions). Cost centers make the silo problem worse and hard to solve.

- Traditional management consulting needs to acknowledge proprietary technology and data models as strategic and gain an implementation focus – If you come in for 6 months and never implement anything and nobody does any of the suggestions, your net present value is actually negative.

- We need to take back control of companies to focus on the customer as priority #1 – 5 year plans with a stack of initiatives in year 4 are interesting, but no longer practical. Notice I say take back control. This is the way the world used to work before endless Powerpoint and overly large bureaucracy like 18 month committee approval cycles. In fact Tom Peters stated on February 3, 1998 on Charlie Rose show as saying “I got tired of the McKinsey bureaucracy”

- C-level management and boards of directors treat social media, search marketing and Internet advertising like an island instead of integrating it into one’s culture and redesigning processes from scratch to support it – This is disruptive to companies using these products and companies that provide these products alike due to the lack of growth and monetization. But guess what? You can’t redesign these processes without bringing in people with a combination of skills that include both traditional management and the new tools. Right now we have people at the extremes. This doesn’t work.

Carolyn Shelby and I will be giving a talk to c-level executives on these an other related subjects this Wednesday at the Gleacher Center in Chicago. You may RSVP here. It is my first in a series of talks I hope to engage the world in over the coming years as we embrace this great challenge together! I need everyone’s help to help shape this vision and create this reality and maybe some famous quotes around the way. It is the furthering of a conversation that started with my appearance discussing these issues on SEO 101 – it starts at the 13:30 mark. Brian Mark said he’d love to see a Search Engine Strategies session on this, we are still working on fulfilling Brian Mark’s dream (24 minute mark).

I’d like to hear others like John Furrier, Fred Wilson, Dick Costolo and Don Dodge to chime in on this issues first chapter…

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Wow! That was tiring, I stepped on the L at 7:30AM and didn’t get home until 1:30AM the next morning! 18 hours of pure madness! Most people noticed the great speeches by Gary Vee from Wine Library TV and Dick Costolo (aka ask the wizard) and others. But what I really appreciated was the other things that the day brought to me. When Frank Gruber and Eric started TECH cocktail, one of the goals was to enable the interaction of people and removing barriers between entrepreneurs, funding sources and removing the boundaries between Chicago and the rest of the world.

When I sit at the first TECH cocktail CONFERENCE Chicago watching great speeches and meeting people from startups from both the east and west coasts while talking, playfully joking about Internet concepts and trading ideas with a local Chicago angel investor in the back of the room for hours on end – it’s at that moment one can clearly perceive a vision is starting to become reality…

For a first conference, it was very well run. There were those little things with a venue that didn’t go quite right with the elevators and not having enough power outlets (but you could say that about any conference) but those were out of their direct control. You could see that Eric and Frank went out of their way to challenge the audience about topics that too often go ignored at startups, like how to set up a corporate entity properly, partnerships and most of these challenges and experiments went well.

So what’s next? I’d like to challenge each and every person in TECH cocktail community to take things to the next level by taking the following actions:

1. Follow Up – People need to work to get to know each other better and learn to leverage each person’s special gifts and talents and realize that 1 + 1 > 2 when we behave in this manner. For me, I know that creating new business partners while listening to help iterate the product, data model or service is my area of strength.

2. Change TECH cocktail from an event to an everyday process on your own – a three month cycle time is not sufficient to build relationships to the next level – it’s everyone’s responsibility to make an hour here and there to sit down with someone, learn about what they are doing, give them a fresh perspective and potential assistance. Don’t wait for the next TECH cocktail event. If this means you need to organize your contact info, make that important time investment.

3. Listen to what Dick Costolo had to say about Internet company NDAs and then change your behavior accordingly (where is the video of that speech anyway?) – Stop sending people NDAs that serve no purpose other than to destroy your access to people who are the most qualified to help you. Ideas are a dime a dozen, assembling the right people with the current knowledge and future potential to create that reality is what matters.

4. Go beyond lurking, participate!!! During the conference, I had at least 10 people talk to me about a blog post of mine in detail, yet they’ve never left a comment on my blog. That’s sad. Leaving a comment leaves you a hyperlink back to your business or blog and allows distribution of one’s business network organically removing them as the bottleneck, please use this viral tool.

5. Learn to hire people for their current knowledge, network, blogs and future potential - not legacy job titles and brands – this takes work, research and being involved in the community, but it is how you’ll find the breakthrough thought leaders and future superstars.

6. Become an ambassador to expanding the understanding of the tools we all use and expand our base of understanding to new people outside our core – If you have a client or operate a service do they understand what Internet advertising, blogs, rss, social media, twitter, etc do? If they do is their organizational culture and structure set up to handle it to serve a customer’s needs? Many people know there is a problem but do not know where to start to fix it – I want to help those people as it will ease the adoption and enhance demand for disruptive new Internet services. I’m planning a series of future posts on this important, yet highly untouched topic. If you have examples of success stories or learnings in this area, I’d love to hear from you.

What else would you add to this list? I look forward to your contributions.

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4 startups including Feedburner

Feedburner all founders had same equity percentage – very important to teamwork dynamic and success

Entrepreneurs worry too much about valuation

Market Opportunity – sizing, does the market need it, team, product, market

Location – No Black Swans

Funding
Cash – Don’t kid yourself

CCs, your misunderstood friends – finding the right one

Options/Equity – options, pool, common stock, dilution

Board Meetings – Should be strategic discussions, not operations, board package, timing and who should attend…

Hiring – Best Available Athlete, Roles and Flat Organizations, Hierarchy begets bureaucracy, replace with tools (eg SFA)…Don’t hire for position…hire people that can do almost anything…a jack of all trades…this reminds me of a lot of what BlackRock was like…I sat at 23 desks in 4 years, I don’t know how many projects I worked on during my time there, I understood every process in the company.

No offices. Open culture and communication are critical…

Experience or Enthusiasm?

Performance – performance reviews and subjectivity

KPIs

Growing the team
- Sales and Marketing – don’t hire until you are ready to sell
- Interview process – long

Product Development and Business Strategy
Serendipity and Adjustment – visit to the eye doctor

Launch Late to Launch Often – data models and programs architected for extensibility can beat point solutions every time (I agree this is critical)

Focus and Speed of Execution are a competitive advantage
- Internationalization
- Early biz dev can hurt you, so can any biz dev

Competitive advantage
- Be first to market, not most sophisticated, not the best product, be itirative and fast

Let people you don’t know help you win (open/api) and provide your products/service with the best opportunity to evolve in the market

Startups who ask people to sign NDAs are stupid! Gave a great (and way too fast!) discussion on this…I wish he’d write a detailed blog post of his rant. ?

Quantum barriers to entry and market share – Get market share, market share is the only thing you should focus on.

Revenue plan: Don’t kid yourself. Revenue ALWAYS ramps slower than you think it will.

Don’t do unnecessary things because you think you’re supposed to

Try to let the business model come to you
- Easy to say, not easy to do
- It’s easier to lower the price than to raise the price?
- Look for always on opportunities

Don’t worry about an exit strategy, worry about everything else

Be a big small company
- Public face of the company
- Have a specific voice, have a culture

Be competitive on your merits

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Without further delay, here’s their tips on designing with users in mind!

Be Yourself – informal, fun

Be Fast – the perceived time when people see speed, they perceive the experience and organization as reliable. Image sprites can help this. Steve Souders is a good source on this topic.

Be Willing to Give Up Control – Give yourself permission to outsource certain tasks.

Be Engaged – have a blog, more importantly, be engaged in other blogs. It’s important to get the early adopters and beta testers to help you. It allows you to iterate.

Be Polite – Try to be considerate…from the users perspective.

Be Surprising – Do things outside the norm. Hackathon. Had new feature coding retreat days. Engage random users.

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Problems

Scaling…printers, vendors, etc

Inventory is hard….

The Internet is Serious Business

Dealing with problems that we are not prepared to deal with… (can be an advantage too)

Advantages

Our Users – Do they care? Do they help?

Technology Agnosticism

Awesome Staff – “Innovation comes from the bottom up” – Golden advice on how to build a culture…

Harper then ended with an interesting comment about Bin Laden….implied that he saw some false flag elements…

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It gives me great pleasure to announce these items as best of show:

VinJus – A unique non-alcoholic grape juice drink! Not yet publicly launched, it is scheduled to be distributed shortly. It’s a unique drink. They describe it as:

NAPA VinJus™ – the perfect non-alcoholic aperitif! Refreshing virgin vineyard grape juice – created for your sophisticated palette as an alternative to soda, water or energy drinks. It’s unique balance of crisp, tart and sweet lingers with a hint of green apple, honeysuckle, wildflower and lavender.

Made in the beautiful Napa Valley from early picked varietals, such as Chardonnay and more, this delicious drink is but one single ingredient – mouth watering virgin vineyard grape juice and nothing more! Compared to wine it’s almost half the calories and compared to regular grape juice it’s about half the sugar! And it’s made by a GREEN company!!!

Lucy’s – Smart Cookies. Made with Love. Norfolk, Virginia based Dr. Lucy Gibney M.D. has a son with major food allergies. Lucy describes it best on their website.

Every crispy, crunchy, delicious Dr. Lucy’s cookie is baked without wheat, gluten, dairy milk, butter, eggs, casein, peanuts or tree nuts. But you’d never know it. They taste delicious! We use only high quality ingredients in our carefully controlled bakery to be sure our products meet our tight allergen testing criteria.

Lucy was amazed at the lack of food available to serve that market. Lucy turned to the kitchen in order to change that and once a few varieties were perfected she decided to solve the problem for others without her unique combination of talents. They weren’t even supposed to be at the show, they got added to new items section at the last minute. I’m glad they did, Lucy is a wonderful person and I know her niche product will succeed. Terry Starbucker is already a huge fan.

Blackwing Meats, Inc. – A variety of elk, buffalo, ostrich and other exotic organic meats as wide as I’ve ever seen! They get bonus point for having an highly functional e-commerce site to ship Roger Gerber’s creations directly to you. Even in the down economy Roger says 1st quarter sales were up 77% over the previous year. These items have momentum and the distribution to match it.

Bionade is a unique German based, non-alcoholic refreshment drink that is scheduled to be introduced in the United States later this year. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever tasted, but it is truly outstanding. In Germany the Elderberry is most popular, however I like the Herbs flavor the best (see picture here). If they are able to get shelf space and have an affordable price point, it could easily be a hit in the USA.

Leggio’s herb infused olive oil - Chef Joseph Leggio creates an “amazing” herb infused olive oil product. While there were others at the show with offerings in this vertical, none match the taste of Leggio’s. Joseph started experimenting with the concept several years ago. Then one day asked his wife to ask her dad, a wine maker, to bring over some bottling equipment for him to test with. Though she thought he was crazy, she did it anyway and his hunch paid off, his business is growing quite briskly and he claims to have some other innovative ideas up his sleeve, I can’t wait to see what they are.

Sheila B’s Popcorn (web site under development) – awesome butter flavor, ultra high pop rate, doesn’t dry out upon popping, no aftertaste like most popcorn has and best of all, not really more expensive than other popcorn on the market! Really nice folks too that taught me about the current state of agriculture.

BigHorn Extreme Foods – Peter Andrews has unique sausage offerings as well as tasty buffalo and elk burgers for restaurants and retail outlets.

WowBacon – Amazing clean cooking micro-wave bacon preparer. 6 years to perfect as an invention. Works extremely well the first few times you try it. Durability is a question.

Tre Bella Foods Organic – Gail Tiburzi’s organic Italian foods were inspired by her grandmother’s original recipes. It’s not everyday you meet a former investment banker turned food distributor, my time with Gail was all too short as she had a meeting. I told her to call me if she had time during the rest of the show to compare projects, I guess she was too busy taking orders as I never heard from her!

For those needing last minute Mother’s Day gift ideas, there you go!

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Venture Capital Speed Dating

Date:
Friday, February 29th

Time:
1:00-3:30 PM Student pitches
3:30-4:30 PM Mixer

Location:
Wallenberg Hall Learning Theater (Building 160)

For more detailed directions, please visit the Searchable Campus Map
Host:
Asia-Pacific Student Entrepreneurship Society (ASES)

Student Application/VC Registration:
http://ases.stanford.edu/vc3/
No registration required for mixer

Cost:
Free

Overview:
Students, pitch your business ideas to Silicon Valley venture capitalists (VCs). Apply in advance for 3-4 opportunities to give three-minute pitches to VC pairs and receive three minutes of feedback. This portion of the event is closed to pre-registered students and VCs (see above for registration information).

At 3:30, the event opens to the public for a networking mixer. Come join us to meet entrepreneurial students and VCs. Event will end promptly at 4:30; continue networking at Arrillaga as you wait for the Innovation Tournament Showcase to begin.

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This is a really smart tip.

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What’s upsetting is that just like the mismanagement of the CTA for decades, many of the comments allude to years of neglect and mismanagement by the government of the City of Chicago. CBS put together a story on how to file a claim for damage. Why must everything become a crisis before anybody does anything about these things? Maybe the city and state will put in resources to fix the lack of easy access to entrepreneurial grants and angel investor tax incentives like Wisconson has next – while we still have an economy…

Here are a few answers Chicago Tribune readers gave (some make you laugh and cry at the same time):

Potholes on my entire way to work on Devon Avenue Between Northwest Hwy and Caldwell Ave. Noticed several vehicles with flat tires this morning causing a traffic jam

Westbound on North Ave, there are are at least 2 or 3 massive potholes just before and after Elston Ave. Stay out of the right hand lane

On Webster between Clybourn and Ashland. There is a fifty foot section with about 25 potholes

One more vote for Lincoln Ave. between Petersen and Devon — avoid at all costs if you care about your car

Central Road, from Milwaukee west to River Road. It is like driving a road in a third world county. Cars bob and weave into oncoming traffic. You can’t driver over 20 mph. Someone at county should be fired for letting a road deteriorate to this degree

Just as you get off LSD on to LaSalle North exit going south right lane is full of potholes

Park Ridge: Cumberland Avenue between Devon and Higgins

Worst — take your pick, LSD Irving Park Road to Foster. Second worst — Oak Street underpass northbound to LSD. Third worst. 47th underpass to LSD. Some of these above holes are a foot deep and several feet across

Cicero Ave and Lawrence, in the left hand turn lane on Cicero… it’s like an unavoidable abyss

On westbound Lake Street between Ashland and Western there are so many little potholes the drive seems like you are off-roading

Under the pass to get on Lake Shore Drive from Oak it’s been like that for over a year! Disgraceful! The CTA ride is awful and 311 doesn’t do anything about it! The drivers try to drive on the left side when possible as the busses bounce horribly!

Western bridge going over Belmont, southbound, west lane. They’ve been there for at least a month

Have you seen the pothole on the bridge at Division and Halsted… Big enough to make a person disappear

Westbound on Grand just east of Milwaukee Ave. The whole thing is one series of huge potholes

The pot hole at Archer & Cicero in the northbound lanes just cost me $550 in repairs – yeah lets spend some more $$ on the Olympics -idiots

Like others have said, Cicero between 21st and 51st is a landmine. It’s so bad, I saw a small car driving along and it just disappeared into a hole….lol

I CANT BELIEVE DALEY HAD ALL THAT MONEY TO USE TO TRY AND BRING THE OLYMPICS TO CHICAGO BUT DOEST HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO FIX OUR STREETS. WHAT ABOUT THE BRIDGE ON 31ST BETWEEN PULASKI AND CICERO IT LOOKS LIKE MINES WENT OFF

Southbound on N. Clark Street, just north of Upper Wacker Drive, right lane swallowed my car. Still can’t find it

Right lanes of Ridge Road in Evanston. Very bad in both directions

The worst pothole is on the east edge of the southbound Fullerton entrance ramp to LSD. A close second are numerous potholes on Halstead between Chicago and Erie. You have to drive like you are going through an obstacle course

Almost all lanes of LaSalle Street between the Lake Shore Drive ramps and the intersection of LaSalle and Clark

4200 South Ashland. Even the CTA bus won’t go near it! And avoid at all costs Pershing Rd. between Halstead and Ashland

Bridgeport – 31st street between the Dan Ryan Expressway and Halstead (especially under the viaduct near Canal St) and the ENTIRE 31st St ramp getting onto the inbound Ryan. I’ve already replaced two tires this year.

Try driving on Cicero Ave. anywhere near the Stevenson. Pot holes deep enough to strand tanks. Been this way for weeks.

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In the late 1990′s dot.com era, the web was slanted too much towards wall street involvement that led IPO’s that were questionable and in retrospect not advisable.

A force outside the web, namely Sarbanes-Oxley in the Enron aftermath, has made the IPO considerably more challenging to achieve and costly to navigate – even for highly legitimate ideas.

In the web 2.0 era, the slant often went way too far to the left in terms of engineering. Some ideas with little actual business purpose have received unwarranted acclaim and without artificial sources of acquisition, some might not even exist.

Before I go onto explain why that development might create an alignment that I’ll tentatively call the functional web, let me state that I think there are plenty of other companies out there that could emerge to pick up the slack such as Fox, Intuit, Apple or any of a number of traditional media companies who “get it”.

This web might emerge even if the Yahoo! acquisition does not take place. If the functional web emerges a place where engineering and business purpose mix in equally important parts instead of the excesses in one direction or another, who potentially gains and who potentially has something to lose?

Potential Gainers:

- Strong Internet business skill generalists with strong system architecture, product management and the ability to network with geeks and non-geeks alike and iterate from feedback will be in higher demand.

- Companies who would like to challenge the big three who would get an opening.

- People who understand how to create revenue models that could provide for great stand alone businesses.

- People pushing for Sarbanes-Oxley reform to reopen the IPO spiggot a tad. They will push even harder.

Potential Losers:

- Funding sources who either fund ideas in a me-too fashion or just because they’ve known the people since the dot.com era and/or those who can’t define and lead a path to monetization or bring strong execution partners to the table.

- Domain name squatters and sellers.

- Passive executive recruiters who will have to actually analyze comprehensive skill sets instead of simply poaching from a direct competitor.

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I’m planning a series of venture capital interviews in the near future, I’d be flattered if Josh was one of the participants in that series.

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No other words are necessary, you should know the drill by now.

RSVP now.

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Quick points:
– a Black Swan is 1) a rare event, 2) with high impact, 3) that is hard to predict (pattern attributed post event)* examples include 9/11, stock market crashes, discoveries like Penicillin, start-ups (eBay, etc)
– most of mankind’s development has been driven by black swans (unstructured randomness) — black swans key in driving big entrepreneurial successes (payoff inverse to predictability)

Speaking of Ray Kurzweil, a few months ago he was in Chicago for Transvision 07, I had a chance to sit down for a chat with Ray at that time (scroll to the bottom for the podcast), but I’ve had some problems with my WordPress audio software that I fixed over the weekend. My apologies to both Ray and his many fans for the delay.

Listen to the interview: daviddalka.com_Ray_Kurweil_2007

Ray Kurweil talks about some of the following:

hedge funds

reading device for the blind

dietary supplements

his newsletter and web site

by the late 2020′s artificial intelligence eventually matching the ability human brains

becoming non-biological

seeing the intersection of artificial intelligence and biology

the ability to track history and information to create predictive models and time device introductions properly

exponential growth

his passion for ideas

developing his own treatment solution for type II diabetes

health and biology has not become information technology

pocket computing technology to help the blind with OCR readers

Second Life’s potential and indication of things to come and his breakfast with Philip Rosedale

Second Life’s potential to be as real as real life

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Generally speaking, experience counts for something. So you’d expect entrepreneurs who’ve been through the ups and downs of a tech startup to have an advantage over the newcomers. Or at least have an equal chance at success. But in fact the opposite may be true. A number of venture capitalists I’ve spoken with have said that too many “old guard” entrepreneurs are not being bold enough in their business decisions, and it’s hurting their startups.

Here in Chicago this is even more pronounced. There are a number of people who talk about amounts of funding they raised in 1999. They live off that first mover advantage. Why aren’t people judging each deal independently of the personalities involved?

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Charles Knight from Alternative Search Engines also blogged this session

Websitepros, Tobias Dendel

255,000 customers/providers, 700 employees

It’s a mess to figure out how to position a small business online.

Do I spend money on radio, newspaper, whatever?

Even for a small business a web site is a critical factor in creating trust.

We don’t believe per action will be effective as it’s too complex.

Example, roofer in Indianapolis 15 unique calls and 15 qualified emails.

Local.com, Bruce Crair

1 million people advertising online, 18 million listings which shows the great opportunities still ahead.

Too many choices, the small business owner is confused. Even if they do understand the choices, the cost is hard. Then how do they create an ROI?

Most businesses don’t have websites, they need them to do the job. They need to figure out how to make the data accurate. All too often, it’s not.

Any business can do it. Just doing paid without organic is a waste of time.

Pay for placement, click bundles, pay per click, make sure you start witht eh simple stuff first.

Locallaunch, Justin Sanger

150 people, thousands of orders per week.

We intended to create the SME (Small Medium Enterprises).

Innovation outpaces adoption.

The innovation is amazing and significant. The SMEs don’t feel this. These enterprises are not yet able to take advantages.

Destinations and inventory abound.

Yahoo! local and Google local  provide new experiences all the time. Vertical search plays nice together with geos. This is pretty complex.

Who is winning?

Yellowpages are winning due to directional relationships

Pure Plays

RH Donnelly is a sales company. Google and Yahoo! realize this and are partners.

Margin pressure is intense and unsustainable.

Marketplace trends

Sales Organizations are driving the experience for SMEs

Content aggregation is a strategically vital business strategy

SME aggregators strive to collect and store richer, vertical-specific local business content

IYP is an old heading. It is now simply local search

Pure sales organizations are selling at non-sustainable margin – this is a critical driver of consolidation or service pressure

PPC pricing pressure will further compound an already fragmented marketplace

Marchex, Scott Finholm

We are a local online advertising company and leading publisher of local content.

Advertisers of all sides, we work with sales forces to teach them how to sell search.

Sites:

SEM and SEO aren’t the same thing

A great site isn’t necessary..but a “good” site is…

Services:

Can’t automate creativity

All businesses are not created equal

Clicks and calls both matter

Sales:

Small businesses look to trusted, proven providers

Simple product = more sales

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Should organizations be smaller like tree trunks instead of the traditional pyramids?

How can this change take place if most leaders don’t know it’s necessary and are not up to speed about what to do or how to do it even if they acknowledged the issue?

How will recruiting morph to put the generalist thought leaders in place to lead this change – perhaps those with competencies derived in other industries or through accelerated self learning?

Other coverage of Seth Godin’s Search Engine Strategies Chicago speech:

Meatball Sundaes and the Smelly Old Guard

Seth Godin Tells Marketers How to Avoid Meatball Sundaes

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It seems like a collaborative offering that could be highly effective when utilized with other parts of the multi-channel ecosystem. Maybe one day I’ll get to utilize it in my toolbox! Many people in the Internet society have forgotten about the effectiveness of phone conversations to drive collaboration, interaction and create actions. I recently had a conversation with my 82 year old great aunt in this regard.  She stated that, “I lived for 72 years without the Internet just fine. I’m not sure my life is truly better with it.” A non-mainstream view perhaps but one that elements of how to be a successful marketer in the multi-channel sense.

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Yet Internet startups who focus on the following business issues closely will always have a good chance at succeeding:

1. Have a clear value proposition that meets some area of unmet need: Something that says, “We provide a first in industry solution to the problem of blah, blah, blah”. Not “This is kinda like part Digg, Youtube with a bit of Facebook – just way better”. I meet lots of people that say this stuff in the second category, I cringe when I hear it.

2. Realize that Internet companies are marketing companies first and technology companies second: I can’t tell you how many startups I see who hire a programmer, program something and then go hire a salesperson. They go through the whole process without a well crafted, customer focused value proposition.

3 . Have a clear data model that focuses on data integrity and creating a monetizable store of value:
Does your Internet startup attempt to focus on data integrity issues? Will it eventually create a monetizable store of value? I ask this question in the startups that I’ve assisted. It comes from my background in financial services where not having accurate information can cost you millions in an instant, the true Internet time.

4. Have a business model for the company as a stand alone entity. Key partners invested in your outcome? Good.

5. Have people that have worked in high performance startup cultures on your team who understand that real-time iteration of your offerings are critical to your success!

6. Look at and study the history of business and technology innovation. Then use it in your transactions and execution.

These are the five that are most critical, though I’m sure you can think of more critical drivers. Please join the conversation. I can also think of several blogs that focus on buzzwords instead of business principles that are now more than a bit obsolete. It’s time to focus on business success principles at the party. it’s a smaller party, but one that will drive hundreds of new Internet startups for years and years.

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Limited Partners
Limited partners are the big, quiet kahunas at the front of the technology finance food chain. Venture capital firms are just one thing they invest in, but they’re what provides most of the money VCs have under management.
1 TIAA-CREF
2 CalPERS
3 CalSTRS
4 Harvard Management Co. (HMC)
5 Yale Endowment
6 University of Texas (UTIMCO)
7 Stanford Management Co. (SMC)
8 Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO)
9 MIT (MITIMCO)
10 Ford Foundation

Venture Capital – Early-Stage
You have a business plan and a bunch of code. Now you need to raise a million dollars or two to productize your concept and get an office. Besides providing operating startup capital, early-stage VCs will help you form your board and build your team.
1 Sequoia Capital
2 New Enterprise Associates
3 Benchmark Capital
4 Draper Fisher Jurvetson
5 Bessemer Venture Partners
6 Accel Partners
7 Charles River Ventures
8 Matrix Partners
9 Greylock Partners
10 Doll Capital Management
11 Lightspeed Venture Partners
12 Index Ventures
13 Norwest Venture Partners
14 Madrona Venture Group
15 Hummer Winblad

Venture Capital – Late-Stage
You’re hiring a sales force, building a channel, upgrading your executive team, and bringing products to market. At this point, until you’re fully profitable, get acquired, or raise public equity through an IPO, your operating capital comes from late-stage venture investors. Some VC firms do both early- and late-stage VC, as you’ll see in our picks below.
1 Sequoia Capital
2 New Enterprise Associates
3 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
4 Greylock Partners
5 Menlo Ventures
6 Mobius Venture Capital
7 Draper Fisher Jurvetson
8 Benchmark Capital
9 Accel Partners
10 Bessemer Venture Partners
11 Oak Investment Partners
12 Redpoint Ventures
13 U.S. Venture Partners
14 Mayfield Fund
15 DCM – Doll Capital Management

Venture Capital – Corporate Investors
Corporate VCs are a little different. They can invest in early- or late-stage deals, but they usually focus on sub-sectors and investments with potential business benefits for their limited partner – the corporate parent.
1 Intel Capital
2 Comcast Interactive Capital
3 Hearst Corporation/Hearst Interative Media
4 Time Warner Investments
5 IDG Ventures
6 Qualcomm Ventures
7 Motorola Ventures
8 Cisco
9 Adobe Ventures
10 SAP Ventures

Corporate Law Firms
First, let’s call the lawyers – at least, that’s a good plan in the world of technology finance. Some of these firms have done well by providing low or deferred-fee incorporation services to brand-new startups, sometimes for shares, and some not only provide counsel but also introductions during mergers, IPOs, or other financing events.
1 Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati PC
2 Latham & Watkins
3 Fenwick & West
4 Gunderson Dettmer
5 Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP
6 Goodwin Procter LLP
7 Cooley Godward LLP
8 DLA Piper US LLP
9 Cravath Swaine & Moore
10 Manatt Phelps Philips

Investment Banks
When the time is right to take your company public or get bought, you work with investment banks. If it’s an IPO, they underwrite you – helping prepare your prospectus, setting the share price, promoting you to institutional investors, and once you’re public, providing analyst coverage of your stock to keep public investors up to date on your financial performance. If it’s an M&A, they act as advisers to either party, structuring the deal, and providing acquisition capital. There are two types of ibanks: the bulge brackets, that deal with any and every kind of company, and the boutiques, which are smaller and focus on a few sectors.

Investment Banks — Bulge Bracket
1 Morgan Stanley
2 Goldman Sachs
3 Lehman Brothers
4 Credit Suisse
5 JP Morgan Chase
6 Merrill Lynch
7 Citigroup
8 Deutsche Bank
9 UBS Investment Bank
10 Banc of America Securities

Investment Banks — Boutiques
1 Jefferies & Company Inc
2 Evercore Partners
3 Thomas Weisel Partners
4 Needham & Company, LLC
5 Montgomery & Co. LLC
6 Cowen & Company LLC
7 William Blair & Co., LLC
8 Wachovia Securities
9 Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin
10 Greenhill & Co.

Private Equity
Private equity, or leveraged buyout, firms are the ones that take public companies private, or buy their stock with the goal of turning them around and selling them.
1 Carlyle Group, The
2 Texas Pacific
3 Blackstone Group, The
4 Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company
5 Silver Lake Partners
6 General Atlantic
7 Hellman & Friedman LLC
8 Vista Equity Partners
9 Vector Capital
10 Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe

Institutional Public Investors
Asset management firms of all stripes (mutual funds, hedge funds, etc.) fall into this category. Besides investing in technology stocks, they may also become limited partners in private equity firm funds.
1 Fidelity Management & Research
2 T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.
3 Wellington Management Co. LLP
4 Capital Research & Management Co.
5 AllianceBernstein LP
6 Capital Guardian Trust Co.
7 Vanguard Group, Inc.
8 Gilder, Gagnon, Howe & Co. LLC
9 Goldman Sachs Asset Management LP (US)
10 Wells Capital Management, Inc.

Corporate Buyers – Global Tech
Big companies want to acquire successful startups that have a strategic fit, breakthrough technologies, masses of customers and profit margins.
1 Cisco Systems, Inc.
2 Oracle Corp.
3 Microsoft
4 Motorola, Inc.
5 LSI Logic Corp.
6 International Business Machines Corp.
7 Siemens AG
8 Google, Inc.
9 Seagate Technology, Inc.
10 EMC Corp.

Corporate Buyers – Media
Big companies want to acquire successful startups that have a strategic fit, breakthrough technologies, masses of customers and profit margins.
1 Publicis Groupe
2 CBS Corporation
3 Lagardere SCA
4 Dominion Enterprises
5 Axel Springer AG
6 Walt Disney Company
7 Hearst Corp.
8 MTV Networks
9 Pearson Education, Inc.
10 EMAP plc

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eComXpo is the premier virtual Internet Marketing conference that is FREE to attend. I’ve also had the honor of speaking there previously. It’s a great resource for learning Internet marketing concepts and networking. Register now.

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Marketing Speakers:
Ian White, CEO, Urban Mapping
Shawn Riegsecker, Chairman & CEO, Centro
Justin Sanger, CEO, LocalLaunch
Alfred Chow, Head, Yellowbook

Justin Sanger, Local Launch

I can’t help but get caught up in some of the hype. “Context galactic scale” – thanks Google. He then said, “Talking about local search in 10 minutes is like spitting into the grand canyon.” Then said a few words to get Greg Sterling to actually blush! Really funny stuff.

Tremendous opportunities in the IYPs. Local and vertical are merging. Social networking is also converging with local. What is the differentiation of these local search sites? Even within Yahoo! you have a multitude of options. SMEs are overwhelmed and confused. The mission of marketplace consolidations – our goal is to remove the complexity not only for our small businesses but for our sales forces as well. The traditional relationships

$                                             Cost of Traffic                     $$$
Content>>Proprietary>>Organic/SEO>>Paid Placement>>Paid Search / SEM

Silos and advertisers don/t mix in local search!!!

You need to be inventory agnostic…

Shawn Riegsecker, CEO, Centro

Brand marketing increases future clicks. Newspaper growth is slowing in terms of rates of growth, national advertisers are exploding this year. Next will be the regional advertisers, which now comprise less than 3% of advertising.

Ian White, CEO, Urbanmapping

? Where the hell is the money?

7FTE, San Francisco based, geo-spacial data to enable advertisers

Why and what?

Technical limitations

User behavior

Search Engine “Keyword Lockdown”

GEO IP lookup “geotargeting” SUCKS

99% accuracy country level

95% accuracy state level

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TiECon Midwest is the premier event organized by TiE-Midwest held every two years. Join us in Chicago this October 5th for TiECon ’07 Mentorship: Boosting Tomorrow’s Business Leaders, a half-day event for leading Midwest entrepreneurs to share thoughts and ideas on business and innovation.

Over 400 attendees will hear a keynote address by local, successful, serial entrepreneurs Glen Tullman and Howard Tullman. Following the keynote, distinguished panelists will present topics aimed to increase Entrepreneurial IQ through a series of sessions. Panels topics are: Right Dollars at the Right Time, Business Model Refinement, Attracting and Retaining Talent and Executive Coach for the Entrepreneur. The event will conclude with a cocktail reception designed to foster networking.

TiE stands for Talent, Ideas and Enterprise and is a not-for-profit global network of entrepreneurs and professionals. Founded in Silicon Valley in 1992, TiE is an open and inclusive organization that has rapidly grown to more than forty chapters in nine countries. TIE Global is the world leader in cultivating and nurturing entrepreneurship.

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I had a few brief moments to download it and bang on them a bit. So without further delay here is a quick and dirty rundown of the four new Enso beta products, you can download them here in a nice little bundle, I’ve ranked them in the order that they interest me and my typical readership:

Enso Web Search Anywhere v0.1 – Simply select your document text, hold the caps lock, type goo and presto a new browser with that query executed in Google appears! After doing that only three times, I kind of find manual entry or cutting and pasting to be kind of ancient and stone tablet like. A distant memory. Maybe even downright lame!

Enso Translate Anywhere v0.1 – Translate languages on the fly in Enso. With a little refinement, I think the last reason I ever visit Alta Vista will meet it’s ultimate demise!

Enso Media Controller v0.1 - Now you are getting it. It controls your media with ease.

Enso TeX Anywhere v0.1 - Nothing to do with the lone star state, I think they state the value proposition quite well, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a way of creating stunning equations quickly and simply?”

Again, this is just a brief overview, be sure to visit the Enso micro pages above for vivid detail and screen prints.

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When: Thursday, September 20, 2007 from 6:30-10:00pm
Where: Mullen’s Bar & Grill 3080 Warrenville Rd., Lisle, IL 60532

An opportunity to connect in an informal setting with like-minded people in technology; whether you’re an upwardly mobile professional, a job seeker, an entrepreneur, or a VC. We welcome everyone, including IT workers, e-commerce companies, Internet and Web 2.0 startups, mobile and mobile marketing, and B2B services.

The event is free to attend, free drinks and food will be provided. RSVP is required at http://siliconprairiesocial.eventbrite.com.

For more information see www.siliconprairiesocial.com or call Tim Courtney at 630.983.6064 or tcourtney at xnet.com.

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There are good summaries of his speech on blogs and feeds lurking about. Important stuff! Especially now in the universal search era. Speaking of blog and feeds, I recently changed over to the Feedburner Mybrand product and my new feed is http://feeds.daviddalka.com/DavidDalka , please update your feed readers! Thanks.

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So I’d like to ask the blogosphere, “How does one judge this inflection point of being better off with this asset, person or money infusion?”I’d say this is an especially tough question when the many startups aren’t focusing on the priorities in the correct order. When I advise a start up or look to join an Internet, Web 2.0, search engine or mobile start ups, I look for the following things:

1) A workable revenue plan either now or that can be communicated in a believable timeline and/or a data model that collects opt-in data that would allow monetization once scaled.

2) An understanding that bringing in a person with strong knowledge of data models and marketing methods early in the process is critical to success and to reducing the revisions to applications later. A CTO without a logical end goal is all too often a wasted resource that could and should wait until there is a clear execution vision.

3) People that have a passion for creating, implementing and executing on an idea first and foremost.

4) A willingness to march into a new direction without limiting beliefs. This is where breakthroughs originate.

Again, in the end it’s all about judgment and knowing the current teams strengths and weaknesses! I wish you well in your start up ventures.

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Alan Warms, former CEO of Participate and now Publisher of Real Politics (Buzztracker)

Matt Moog, CEO of Viewpoints

James Malackowski, CEO of Ocean Tomo

First up is Alan, founder of Buzztracker. Was part of Freeloader, eShare, Participate Systems, Realclearpolitics.com and now Buzztracker. The opportunity is to build the custom content feeds that can be delivered and used by the entire ecosystem of the Internet domain owners and management companies. I kept waiting for an explanation of how his site(s) added value to the Internet ecosystem from the user’s perspective – I’m still waiting for him to distinguish it significantly from a MFA Splog network.

Matt Moog, CEO and Founder of Viewpoints. Used to work at Q Interactive and Microsoft. We raised $50 Million and then $25 Million in the market and blew through that in 6 months. Recovered to be cashflow positive (2003) and net income (2004). Viewpoints has raised $4.7 Million in series A, currently 7 employees. The business is about reviews in different verticals.

James says that 79.2% of the economy is driven by intangible assets in 2005 and up from 16.2% in 1975. We created Ocean Tomo after we sold our first business. We are the Sotheby’s of intellectual property. People recognize it. Ocean Tomo 300 is now published. Innovation actually outperforms commodities. Ocean Tomo has not taken outside capital at this time.

Throughout the evening one could not help but be impressed by the uniqueness of James Malackowski’s ideas and execution and Matt Moog’s perseverance, transparency and desire to build anew.

What is the best way to become an entrepreneur?

Alan: Live for some period of time without a W-2. Test out a new hypothesis. Go to conferences seeing what people are doing. Start building some things, hire a developer, and try to get a customer or two. How do you decide whether the idea is big enough? Is the market ready for it?

Matt: I was working at Microsoft and was 25 years old. On the side, I took some money and built an application. It was on CD, pre-Internet. Speed up ten years, I wrote the initial plan in 2005 for Viewpoints. Then I left to found it 2006.

James: Unique combination of greed and panic!

Is it about the money?

James: Yes. It’s about sacrificing family and other things.

Alan: You care about the money.

Matt: You have an informal formula. I have not paid myself anything for the past year. I’d be currently willing to do this for up to 3 years.

James: People don’t hedge their bet. There is market space and risk. You can recover your investment.

Matt: With Coolsavings we raised angel money, then got on the hyper growth track of raising more money. A well known investment banker was telling us to raise more money. Then I had $15 Million in debt and $100,000 in cash. I needed to raise some money to hire a staff to do the stuff I couldn’t do. The later you spend the money, the smarter you’ll spend it.

How do you raise too much money?

Matt: I didn’t set out to raise as much as I did at Viewpoints. It’s possible to lose control. Each dollar raised the higher the investor expectation. This is kind of a funny dynamic.

Alan: You’re at point A and you want to get to point F. We try to raise $3 Million and got $13 Million. You get scar tissue.

James, you did it the smart way?

James: Over three years, I was burning up that non-compete, I went to institutional side looking for loans, Harris Bank told us no. Then we asked if they’d lend us $15,000 for a car and there were five of us so we raised $75,000. It’s all about the capital structure and how you communicate a request.

Matt: Always be transparent in everything you do.

Ron May brought up that Moog’s dad had invented the Moog synthesizer. (Matt seems to have a strong desire to stand on his own accomplishments). There was then a question on hiring.

James: The smartest person we hire at Ocean Tomo is the person we hire today.

How do you keep the group in tact?

James: We try to take people outside our industry. That is a huge attraction. You will be richer for the experience even if it doesn’t work. They not only have to believe in the vision, they have to believe in you.

Matt: Lon offered an office out of the blue. Most of the people come from Orbitz. People have to be jazzed about working at our company. I like the people who like to ask questions.

Matt: Lon Chow gave me a book. It’s a “The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executives”. Are people aligned and communicating? In terms of the revenue model figure out how much do ads sell for, what do they look like? On the west coast, build an audience then figure it rules the day. Businesses never grow at the rate that they say they do. Sometimes you’ll grow three times as fast other times not as fast.

Great conversation and event by TiE!!!

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See you around town sometime soon!

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I’ve attached the picture of Jono with skewered Cicadas. We prepared them by marinating them in white wine before roasting them over smoldering coals. They tasted like freshly roasted peanuts, but with a slightly bitter aftertaste. If you closed your eyes, you wouldn’t know that you were eating a cicada except that the legs scratched a bit on the way down.

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Here are some blog summaries of the event(you guys need to link to each other more!):

Vegigun

Nixternal

Ken Vandine

Joi Podgorny

Dave Bost

It would be impossible to summarize all the great people that were there, but here’s a few:

Michael Carruth, I got to see a different side of him with his talk about domains today, he’s more than a software trainer and startup enabler!

Matt McCall, a summary of his talk is here.

Aza and Jono from Humanized. I had a great sit down conversation with Aza regarding their product and their plans for it. Wonderfully positive and visionary guys see many things that fit into the elusive obvious.

Individuals like Scott Van Den Plas, Hencry Hwangbo, Victoria and David Naylor were there.

Andy Sernovitz, Aaron Williams and Mike Mangino also gave talks.

Thanks to everyone for the good times and personal growth! I appreciate it deeply.

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This past Sunday, Matt gave an informal speech during Barcamp Chicago. It was a great pleasure to see him talk in such unstructured detail. You may wish to see my past TiE entrepreneurs venture capital discussion panel writeup to learn more about Matt as he moderated an excellent panel back in 2006. Be sure to click through to the link of the full transcript in the Wiglaf Journal.

I was busy asking Matt questions during the talk. I noticed that John Mascarenhas was taking notes and invited John to be a guest blogger with his notes. John has been on the founding teams of three startups, including Fullaudio (Musicnow). John is looking for opportunities with early stage tech ventures including clean tech and has had experiences in strategy, business development, financial modeling, marketing and early sales roles – in operations and as consultant.

Here are John Mascarenhas’ guest blogging notes on Matt McCall’s talk on venture capital at Barcamp Chicago 2007:

Matt McCall, a partner with Draper Fisher Jurvetson Portage, speaks about venture capital. In the spirit of BARcamp, keeps his presentation informal and open, answering questions with the perspective and insight of an experienced investor in early stage technology.

Following are my notes, based more on what is interesting to me than attempting to cover everything that is said. [My comments are in brackets]

VC is right for a minority of start-ups – self-funded or angel investments are right for most tech start-ups. Remember the 10x rule. VC’s need every investment to have a potential for a 10x return, because of the high-risk nature of early stage investments.

Entrepreneurs should ask themselves:
1. Is my idea/nascent business a ‘business’, a ‘product’ or a ‘feature set’
2. How big is the pain I’m solving? Has anyone ever paid for this? (Evangelizing is tough.) Generally, either behavior or infrastructure drives the inflection point. (e.g., widespread broadband made web-video business viable) Who is paying and how much

Size the market from the bottom up. Need to know – we have sold or can sell this widget for $X to Y number of customers. Then, there are x thousand other target customers with the same needs/pain.

Matt likes pay for performance lead generation. Everyone is already trained to give you a cut. It’s not just ad dollars.
Harder models to make work are a) productivity gains…hard to quantify and b) cost savings. Hard to set a test and say here are the cost savings. For cost savings the best route is often outsourcing, so customers do not have to pay a lot of $ to get started

In response to a question, Matt discusses why NDA’s aren’t appropriate for a VC to sign. For example FeedBurner has been successful not because of a proprietary technology, but more because of the excellent customer experience.
1. They cycled very fast, improvements, great customer service.
2. they focused. One thing: syndication services for publishers

FeedBurner would continually iterate to keep ahead of the competition, and not let them get a foothold. The point is you have to know what the comp is doing, [and looking ahead to what could become a competitive advantage for them if you don’t focus on getting there first] Jonathan Wolter of Feedburner was here confirming and adding to what Matt says.

We’re in an era when tech is a commodity. Need to out-execute, and become a standard. (e.g. ruby on rails) User experience is the key. Simpler, no change in customer behavior. Michael Moritz, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful VC’s is highly focused on the user interface.

More advice for entrepreneurs from Matt:

Find teams that are plugged into the network they are dealing with:
- Shows in good understanding of the revenue model
- Shows in knowing your competition doing it now. (if vc asks you about it, don’t say they are no good…shows lack of diligence)
- Don’t quote Gartner etc…it’s meaningless (or worse) to a VC

Response to a question. As VCs use their network to poke around the market place and know more than what the entrepreneur said, that’s not a good sign. With FeedBurner, Matt and his team did early due diligence, checking around the space before investing. What they found confirmed what they were being told by the Feedburner team.

Responds to question asking why he invested in Viewpoints. Matt loves the idea of consumer reviews and re-syndicating it back out. Matt believes that Matt Moog will be continuing star in our region. They are proactively engaging communities and iterating quickly.

Thinking of Viewpoints and other opportunities, Matt talks about the growing model of consolidating content (like reviews) from pools, building community interaction, and re-syndicating that back out. As the Internet evolves, some of the major ways to monetize traffic evolved from banner ads, then search, then/now social networks. Matt thinks the 4th wave is interactive cascading of markets in IPTV, web, mobile etc…two way communication.

Pitch – business plan should be as detailed as you need it to be to get your thinking straight. For VC, 5-7 page summary and 25 or less slide presentation. VC’s all have ADD. Going to win or lose in the first 2-3 slides.
Funding Process: couple weeks to get meeting, few weeks, then one more pitch, then term sheet – then massive due diligence. 4-6 weeks. Assume 6-7 months from start of looking to closing on money.

Market research: loves to see this – we sell x product for x money or something similar for something close to x money. Go deep in a given vertical…how you productize and sell. That is how it works. Prove P, then give visibility on Q, in that vertical. Think in terms of Account worth = y heads $x per month…pipeline of next 100. Matt wants some visibility of how the company will get to $50MM or $100MM revenue.

Responding to a question – says focus will be on one vertical, but also look at analogs to show how you can move into other verticals.

Thanks again to John Mascarenhas for sharing his notes as a guest blogger in the section above.

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Liz Strauss says that Jeff is looking for ways to describe “The Herding Cats”. I’d say an “exhilarating and uplifting rock power trio” from my days writing at Musicfrisk.com.

Jeff – Based on watching The Herding Cats, I think you’d really like this band Red Wanting Blue check them out the YouTube video below. They are at the Lion’s Den in New York City on August 3rd. I’d be only too happy to make the introduction to the lead singer so you could attend as a guest.

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There was a good size crowd and many faces I recognized along with a great food spread. I met some new ones as well. Fortunately the event was in an area not frequented by cicadas. Pictured below are Bob Geras with Ron May and then Ron “Watermelon” May with Al Wasserberger serving up the bowl.

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“All brands outlive their useful life, often to the detriment of the consumer and newer value propositions.”

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Jason Jacobsohn wrote a nice summary of the May awards event, so I won’t add other details other than to say that Rania El-Sorrogy is in amazing entrepreneur who will likely create many companies in her lifetime and that I hope to get to know her better over time. Keith Schacht was also in attendance at the event and said a little bit about it.

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Date: 23-24 June 2007
Where: 1464 n Milwaukee (Wicker Park)

Sign up

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1. Google had already acquired the color orange when they bought Blogger!

2. Feedburner’s symbol is fire, which some folks relate to hell. If you believe this, Google will actually be acquiring evil.

3. Eric Olson of Feedburner (along with Frank Gruber and others) organizes Techcocktail, a tech community quarterly networking party in Chicago. Google could come to Chicago and throw a party all by themselves!

4. Google already had all of Feedburner’s IP because Rick Klau, VP of Publisher Services uses Gmail and Google Docs & Spreadsheets for all business deals! (Second source: talk at ABA TECHshow2007)

5. Google already has had adsense for feeds for a long, long time.

6. Once Google has access to the keys of legitimate RSS sources it will be able to determine the original source blog if it is using a Feedburner feed. When combined with Google Blog Search, Google could likely better control splogs in it’s blog search index which will reduce (MFA) made for Adsense site revenue!

Hey what is done is done though, I hope that funding for many more Chicago startups is now available!

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First the Dmarc founders left Google.

Now http://www.dodgeball.com/ (dead link 11/2010) founders, Dens Crowley and Alex Rainert (please drop me a note if you read this guys), not only have left Google but they posed for a thumbs down photo that they have posted on Flickr, a Yahoo! property. The photo already has over 26,000 views and appears to have a viral element based on the view count growth, the interesting comments on the Flickr photo and a lot of blogosphere reaction. I’m trying to imagine how frustrated someone must be to post of photo of this nature, announce new project associations and state that they are throwing a party “to celebrate our escape”.

Putting my investment management hat on, I’d like for independent analysts to be allowed on the earning call this Thursday. If allowed to do so, I’d like to ask the following question, “Why is Google having such a hard time with HR and staffing issues, whether it is regarding hiring new employees, retaining pre-IPO employees (see podcast) or integrating acquisitions? Has Laszlo Bock’s background proven not to be the right style of leadership and is it time for a change?” The “all big companies are always ineffective” is a major cop out as there are big companies that are admired and in fact some cases adored.

Ideas on what to do with Dodgeball are everywhere you look. The comments on the Flickr photo are fascinating to read. P.S. When searching for these entries on Google Blog Search I found considerable splog/spam (MFA Made for Adsense) sites – Google should work to solve that issue.

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

http://www.blogator.com/g/2833510 (dead post 11/2010)

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

http://www.electrolicious.com/archives/2007/04/did_twitter_kill_it.html (dead post 11/2010)

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

http://mcmanus.typepad.com/grind/2007/04/two_dodgeball_f.html (dead link 11/2010)

“http://topicstop.blogspot.com/2007/04/google-alert-google_1007.html (dead link 11/2010)

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

“http://ipfreaks.com/dreamscene/?p=2258″ (dead post 11/2010)

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

“http://www.tmesolutions.co.uk/web_design_kent/Marketing+News/2007-04-16/Google+dumped+by+Dodgeball+founders/3800849030″ (dead link 11/2010)

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

http://yummy.vermontconnect.com/cool/dodgeball-founders-leave-google-and-that-leaves-dodgeball-probably-dead/ (dead link 11/2010)

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

http://www.teknolife.com/tech-news/disgruntled-dodgeball-founders-leave-google-infoworld/ post removed

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

Dodgeball Founder Departure – April, 2007 post

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I’m hoping it’s the first of many! There are many fine upstart companies here in Chicago starving for capital. I know David Weinstein and his crew worked hard on this and I’m hoping it’s a great success.  

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I first met Peter Harkins in person at Barcamp Chicago in the Summer of 2006. As I’ve gotten to know him, he knows far more than just coding, as he appreciates and participates constructively in conversations about business strategy and monetization. It’s a winning combination.

The response has been incredible to the Sociable plugin, so you’ve been slammed with inquiries…

Peter: I’ve gotten dozens of mails about Sociable in the last week, from sites wanting to be included, users testing it out in unusual situations and last-minute feature requests. I’ve promised to get 2.0 out by Midnight February 1, so it’s been a race to the wire to get in new features.

Peter: I’ve added 26 sites at last count in this version. Just this morning a Hungarian programmer sent me at least a few more, so I may have as many as 60 sites in the next version.

You’ve add new language translations with this version, that is exciting…

Peter: Yes. It looks like this version will have support for Spanish, Czech, Italian, German and French with more to come. Before 2.0, interested users were just picking it up, translating it, and offering it for download on their blogs. It was a bit frustrating to track bug fixes between different branches of Sociable. Now we’ll have a unified project to share resources and drive development faster, I want to have releases at least every other month in 2007.

You keep the installation and interface pretty simple…

Peter: Deliberately, so, yes. As a programmer, it’s really easy to think of the UI as “that last bit I have to add so people can use my beautiful code” instead of what it truly is: the most important part of the application. So I spent a lot of time making sure that you can install Sociable just by unzipping and uploading it, rather than try to provide complicated install instructions. I spent time on a feature most people never see: when you install Sociable, it checks a manifest of files to make sure it was uploaded right, and it tells you what files go where if it’s not perfect. It provides help right when you need it most, and plainly enough that you understand it.

Peter: The drag-and-drop in the admin interface is just a delight to use, and deliberately so. I want blog owners to feel safe playing around with the different options to see what works on their site. So I’ve spent most of my time on making the UI really nice as well as fixing up the insides.

So you also reprogrammed the internals of the Sociable application for future development and expansion beyond WordPress?

Peter: I want to start porting Sociable over to work on other blog engines like TypePad, Movable Type, Mephisto, and more. So I’ve cleaned up the internals of 2.0, laying the groundwork for 2.1 or 2.2 to support more engines. It’s also going to start doing a little stat reporting when it checks for updates. I know there are roughly 10,000 blogs out there using it, but I’d like to know more exactly and maybe cross-reference to traffic rating services to find out what kind of positive effect it has.

You have an alert system for updating?

Peter: Yes, Sociable checks for new versions when folks view the admin console and notifies the blog owner to go download it. Without it there’d still be people using Sociable 1.2 in five years, hopefully with it everyone will be upgraded in a month or two.

In the past you mentioned that there are three different types of users of Sociable…

Peter: First up, there’s beginning bloggers. They’ve just started a blog, and they’ve got stars in their eyes of being the next BoingBoing or something. Sociable is a tool they’ll use to get the word out about their new blogs, and I’m really glad to help out. As much trouble as some have had spelling “Sociable”, it’s been most rewarding to talk to them because they’re new to blogging and are so happy to be able to easily drop in Sociable.

Peter: Then there are the established bloggers. They’ve got an audience and they want to start leveraging it. Sociable makes it easy for their audience to start getting the word out and growing the blog. I get most of my feature requests from this group, and they’re the people who send me the code to add their favorite bookmarking site.

Peter: I get a lot of links from the SEO crowd, who really put the word out about Sociable. They’ve found Sociable to be a useful tool, so they turn around and install it for their clients. Oddly they’re group I hear the least from, they almost never mail me. But they’ll be the most unusual mails sometimes.

So how are the SEO emails unusual?

Peter: I’ve gotten a really bizarre feature requests like – “You should make Sociable automatically submit each blog post to every bookmarking site! And then vote it up!” – or other crazy schemes! It’s frustrating, Sociable is a tool to help blog owners by reminding readers to bookmark good content. “Sociable should make other blogs using Sociable link to mine with the link text I fill in!” Ugh! I should mention that this is a tiny minority of the SEO folks, I’ve only gotten a half-dozen “Help me spam!” mails.

Sounds like we could monetize a Sociable SEO Pro version together?

Peter: There are definitely a few customers waiting, but I’ve got plenty of other projects ahead of it.

Like what?

Peter: I just recently launched NearbyGamers, a social site for tabletop gamers to find other folks to play card, board, and role-playing games with. It’s been a real blast, but my to do list is as long as my arm so it’s eating up my free time. And I’ve been trying to keep updating my own blog with web coding tips but it’s easy to slip out of the habit.

Sociable has created great networking for you. What are some of the better stories?

Peter: I ended up doing CrunchBoard for TechCrunch because I met a guy via a guy via a guy who used Sociable, and that was a real fun project.

What are some of the underused or misunderstood features of the tool?

Peter: One minor frustration has been writing CSS for Sociable that can deal with all the odd things different blog themes do. I’ve had dozens of people mail me asking (sometimes quite forcefully) why Sociable doesn’t look right on their blog, and so far none have thought it’s their own site doing it.

What else should the people know about Peter Harkins?

Peter: You should never ask him to sing anything…

Good luck with the release Peter!

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It’s a great opportunity to talk with people and seek relationships of partnership, introductions I’m looking for:

1) Angel or Venture Capital funding for a startup I’m advising and would like be a part of

2) Startups, ecommerce companies or search engines seeking Sales, Marketing or Business Development leadership (open to relocation)

3) Ways to utilize my financial services background in the financing channels of this space

4) Progressive large companies seeking transformation of process and interaction with customers

I will be arriving early at 5:30, I would welcome detailed conversations of any of these issues with anyone who would like to meet up early to talk. Please reach out to me if you’d like to do this. See you there!

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A friend of mine communicated a better idea for him and other venture capitalists. Why not spend more time looking at original ideas – real detailed business plans with actual revenue models? The dead pool would be a lot smaller if people did hard work instead of chasing “existing businesses” which are little more than a web site with some content. So why not spend more time looking early stage companies that have real, independent, revenue producing business models with strong strategy? You’ll find your industry default rate will go down. Don’t know where to find these fledgling companies? Just ask me (my referral fees are quite reasonable).

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On another front, I know sound volume normalization can be challenging, but some reasonable range should be a goal. Especially with the feature that starts to play a new podcast when you are done! I’d urge Robert Scoble and others at Podtech to try improve in this arena.

Lastly, I’m confused by some of the offerings on the about page. It states:

PodTech’s suite of morecasting™ services help companies reach targeted audiences of influencers and strengthen customer relationships.
PodTech delivers a complete package of customized social media services including:

• Targeted audio and video podcast series
• Event & tradeshow videocasts
• Blogging campaigns

What exactly is meant by a “blogging campaigns”? Is this outsourcing and helping with other entities blogs? I think this is what they mean. But I could see where someone could read this as blogging campaigns on Podtech itself, which would just be PayPerPost. The page should be more clear about what this service is so that it is not misinterpreted!

Overall, Podtech is becoming a good resource, with these small changes it will become even better.

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I’ve not yet integrated with it’s global community however as (to the best of my knowledge) the organization does not have a global message board. I would love to interact with the people of TiE internationally (hey, drop me a note if you read this!) as it is a great community.

Podtech’s Kamla Bhatt interviews TiE Global Chairman Apurv Bagri here.

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The problem seems to be fixed as of this morning but it’s disturbing to me as it’s obviously happened to others before and the process to fix it is not transparent. I don’t know whether it was my name, e-mail or domain that was a problem, the IP address didn’t appear to be the problem as I used an Internet connection on another ISP and got the same result.

Last week, this issue caused Danny Sullivan to post this regarding a conversation with Blake Ross:

“For some balance, below is the comment I added to Blake’s post. Akismet seems to have eaten it initially, as it routinely does to my comments on blog that use that system to catch comment spam [I commented about this here. Can't see it? Ironically, it was probably eaten].”

If people like Danny Sullivan and myself are having significant trouble with this problem, imagine the frustration of the average blogger, who likely has no clue what Askimet even is let alone the organizations involved. The post by Matt Mullenweg seems to be a cop out(I hope this is not the case). False positives in any number regarding spam are simply unacceptable. They can cause frustration as a poster, they can cause also serious damage to your reputation if people wrongly think you are deleting their posts. This is an unacceptable state.

Is WordPress listening to what customers want? I don’t know and will take a wait and see attitude. So let’s wait a month and see if this problem still exists before drawing any conclusions.

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AI Gateway is currently seeking angel funding and or an aggressive venture capital participant willing to fund a predevelopment concept based on a unique business plan that starts to generate revenue quickly upon completion of a beta product.  

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1. NASCAR is intensely focused on relationships and partnerships.

2. NASCAR has always been focused on customers.

It’s no wonder that they are so successful!

The thirty-one degree banking at Daytona built with customer experience in mind – being able to see the whole track at once! I never thought about it before, maybe the best customer experience involves things you don’t even notice. 

NASCAR is now the #2 sport on TV only behind only the NFL, 75 million viewers

Mr. Helton  believes that access to the drivers is critical piece of the success.

Recently opened a new LA office, NYC office, creating opportunities of NASCAR drivers to be in everyday life and making appearances in show business.

All of the sponsors work closely with licensing and headquarters. Sponsors are critical not only to underwriting the costs, but to other aspects of the sport as well.

NASCAR has always taken advantage of technology. (what a great mantra and it’s true)

NASCAR has racetracks, car owners and drivers who are independent – Mr. Helton expressed amazement that it all works sometimes. 

All in all, when I saw Mr. Helton on the agenda, I truly had no idea what to expect, I saw a new side of NASCAR, one that made me appreciate the other side of NASCAR.

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If you scroll up a bit you can also hear a podcast from my friend Tom Casale.  

In future interviews on Chicago tech, I’d like to see the Chicago community talk about how do we get passionate business talent injected into these businesses to accelerate the growth process. Tech is about enabling a business purpose.

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Some selected images of the evening:

Two Amsterdam tourists, Maryam Scoble and Robert “Will you link to me please?” Scoble

Lou Calamaras, Brad Spirrison and Katie Spirrison

Frank Gruber and Eric Olson

Ron “Can I have your card?” May

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