I was invited by Inc. magazine senior editor Rod Kurtz to participate in the magazine’s Knowledge Series panel last night in Austin. The event, titled “Growth, Guts and Glory” was part of a four-city series being hosted by Inc. The topic was raising capital. I was on the panel along with Joel Trammell, CEO of NetQoS; Larry Warnock, CEO of Phurnace Software; and Patrick Durbin, CEO of Planview.
There were a group of local entrepreneurs with a wide variety of questions concerning the details of raising capital including the appropriate time, source and amount. There are no easy answers to these questions, since most scenarios have to be analyzed on a case by case basis. Some common concerns that were discussed were current low valuations amid the turbulent economic conditions. The consensus was that start ups must not lose focus on their product or services during their efforts to get capital. A strong product or service, including revenues and enthusiastic customers, will only help a company’s position when trying to raise capital.
Ultimately it would be optimum if a company does not need capital and can fund growth organically, but this is not the usual scenario. A lot of these decisions are dictated by the business model, the market conditions, and the effective implementation of the desired capital. Obviously there is a tremendous amount of market research and planning required to closely estimate your burn rate, runway and needed capital. Even if you decide not to raise capital, that’s a worthwhile exercise. And lastly, partnering with the right investors, whether angels or VC’s, can be a make or break decision, so choose wisely.
Mumboe CEO Bill Kane was chosen to present recently at the SIIA On-Demand Conference in San Jose, CA. Watch the video of Bill’s 5-minute presentation here: Mumboe SIIA On-Demand Preview Presentation
The conference provided attendees a good overview of the SaaS marketplace, and included keynotes from Omniture CEO Josh James and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff. To check out the presentations, visit http://www.siia.net/ondemand/2008/presentations.asp.
Mumboe CEO Bill Kane will be on stage at the Software & Information Industry Association’s (SIIA) OnDemand Conference tomorrow, Nov. 18th in San Jose, California as part of OnDemand’s showcase of early-stage companies that provide Software as a Service solutions. The format: a five-minute presentation on Mumboe’s application and business model to attendees, which include ISVs, platform vendors, systems integrators, venture capitalists and other bankers, analysts, press and other influencers in the SaaS market. The presentation will be followed by a 30-minute networking session. If you’re planning on attending the conference, be sure to stop by and say hello!
More than 9,000 people attended Dreamforce last week, a mix of Salesforce.com customers, partners and vendors, as well as press and analysts. To see a crowd of that magnitude all gathered to learn about the latest developments in SaaS was nothing short of impressive. The production was over the top, with cloud graphics evoking the Cloud Computing theme racing across the ceiling and permeating every aspect of the conference. In this economic climate, it’s surely a testament to the growing power of the SaaS market to pull in so many folks from all over the world. CEO Marc Benioff asked customers who came from outside the country to stand up, and although it’s tough to judge what percentage of the crowd they were, it was significant.
The general sessions on both Monday and Tuesday included the usual procession of industry luminaries, including guest keynotes from Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook; Dave Girouard, President of Google’s Enterprise group; and Michael Dell, whose curiously irrelevant and blatant pitch for Dell products sent the otherwise engaged audience members streaming from the room.
And of course, no lavish customer conference would be complete without its celebrity appearances, and this was no exception. The Foo Fighters played at the reception on Monday night, and rocker Neil Young made an appearance onstage to talk about his LincVolt, a 1959 Mark IV Lincoln Continental that Young has spent $100,000 converting to run on a hybrid electric/natural gas engine.
The Foo Fighters
Marc Benioff and Neil Young show off Young’s LincVolt car.
Some of the more notable presentations included:
Salesforce.com and Facebook: for all us that have been trying to figure out how to leverage Facebook for business, the new partnership between these two is a welcome announcement. The partnership will allow Salesforce.com developers to integrate Faceblook’s social media capabilities into their applications.
Salesforce.com and Google: The companies continue to expand the integration between SFDC and Google’s suite of productivity apps, including Google Docs, Calendar and Gmail, among others. According to Benioff, more than 5,000 salesforce.com customers are using Google Apps since the two companies announced their partnership in April 2008.
Force.com for Amazon Web Services: With Force.com for Amazon Web Services (AWS), enterprises, ISVs and developers can build powerful new business applications and run them entirely in the cloud, leveraging both the database, logic and user interface features of Force.com and the storage and compute capabilities of Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 services.
Overall it was a good conference, with lots of information to soak up, other vendors to meet and insights to be gained, and a fair dose of entertainment thrown in as well. I can’t begin to imagine the budget for an event like this, but I’m encouraged that so many folks found the topic of SaaS applications for the enterprise compelling enough to spend the time and money to attend.
We’re looking forward to attending what Salesforce.com is billing as “the largest gathering of SaaS providers on the planet” next week at the company’s Dreamforce event in San Francisco. As a Salesforce.com customer, we have an interest in attending this event purely from a user’s point of view. But we’re even more interested in meeting and talking with the collection of over 225 SaaS vendors that will be exhibiting at the Dreamforce Expo. It is a unique opportunity to learn from the innovative companies that, along with Salesforce.com, are fueling adoption of the new generation of SaaS business applications. Like these companies, Mumboe is working toward joining Salesforce.com’s AppExchange one day soon, and we look at this event as a great opportunity to learn from the companies that have used this platform to successfully launch and grow their own businesses. Hope to see you there!
After seeing some interest in our customer base from nonprofit organizations, Mumboe decided to exhibit at the Greenlights for NonProfit Success 7th Annual Crossroads Conference. We met a lot of great people and helped get the word out about Mumboe as an easy, affordable choice to help manage all kinds of business agreements.
Mumboe Booth at Greenlights nonprofit conference
We were pleasantly surprised to see a number of other technology companies exhibiting at the conference. And there was actually another locally based company specializing in Ruby on Rails called Donor Tools. I thought our new Mumboe shirts looked good, but Ryan showed us up by having his kids show up in Donor Tools shirts.
We held a drawing for an iPod Touch, anyone who visited the booth and took a quick survey was entered into the contest. Didn’t win the prize? Be sure to look for us at our next event on October 16th at InnoTech Austin.
Working in the microcosm of an Austin startup, it is easy to forget that there are many developers across the world that develop in the same spirit as Mumboe. Seeing literally thousands of Rails developers come together here at RailsConf 2008 is truly inspiring. There is a definite camaraderie and understanding that is shared amongst us.This was definitely highlighted this morning with Joel Spolsky’s keynote speech.
When you think of a programming conference, what are the first things that come to mind? Jargon? Gibberish? Pocket protectors? Yeah, that’s what I expected too (and I am sure I will get my fair share of that), but not this morning. Words like “beauty”, “passion” and “love” were thrown around a lot more than “ruby”, “framework” or “tubes”. That, I believe, is the quintessential thread that ties Rails developers together. We do what we do because we love it. It is as much an art form as a science. Rails is merely the best tool for the job (right now). Find us in 5 years and I am sure that over half of us will be using Widgets on Weebles.This spirit is not exclusive to Rails developers either.
It can become pervasive in a corporate culture as well. Just look at Apple or, on a much smaller scale, Mumboe. About 9 months ago, our entire application was written in a different language and had a different user interface (and was painfully slow). It wasn’t working and no one at the company was happy with it. So, instead of patching it or trying to get something together that worked just well enough, the company implemented a compete usability and code rewrite.
The strange dichotomy of programmers working on websites that they would not otherwise use is pervasive. This has made user input absolutely crucial to any websites success. It is your opinions, requests & criticisms that make all great websites great.
So, I guess what I have taken away from my first day at RailsConf is: This is not your father’s internet. Most of the websites you visit nowadays have small armies of people just like me that are dying to know what you think. So, please, talk to us anyway you can. If you’re already a Mumboe customer, log in to our user forum at support.mumboe.com and tell us what you think. Let us know what you want.
If you are on another site and see something that you think should work differently; tell them. Behind the veil of the internet, their are teams of people working day-in and day-out to create the best products we possibly can, but nothing will ever replace knowing what you, our customers wants.
Continuing on with the Web 2.0 Expo Launch Pad event in San Francisco today. Launch Pad consists of six companies presenting to a panel of VCs. They only have 5 minutes to pitch.
Acquia is first up. They are an open source software company providing products and services to the Drupal community. The judges don’t seem thrilled. I really don’t know enough about them or Drupal to have an opinion.
Triggit says they make it quick and easy for web publishers to monetize their sites with advertising across pretty much all platforms. The presenter does a cool demo that gets a round of applause from the audience. Pretty slick. They’ve got something there. The judges seem mildly impressed. Triggit scores as the early favorite.
Chirp presents their desktop viewer/screen saver called ChirpScreen. The judges don’t like it. Looks cool but not sure what their monetization plan would be. Why would people use it?
Oortle: love the name. It’s like a live version of flickr called photophlow. Again, visually catchy but is it a must have?
JobScore “empowers employers to recruit cooperatively”. Looks interesting, I wonder how they will get critical mass? Not sure the judges like it. If they get some momentum, this would be a cool service. And they are charging for it, so at least they have a monetization plan.
TradeVibes presents its community site for ”researching hot new startups”. Not sure about this one. Judges and audience seem unimpressed.
There is a quick text-in vote at the end of the presentations, and Triggit wins with 45% of the vote. Nobody else is close. I’m not crazy about text voting as a way to determine the winner of these events, especially when the companies are only given 5 minutes to present. I’ve seen a few of these this year and the product that can show a slick visual demo quickly always wins. I do think Triggit has a very clever application. I was surprised by how few people there were in the room for the presentations. It was held in the main keynote area, which is HUGE, but only a few hundred people showed up. I guess at the end of the day, it’s good press for the companies involved.
That’s all for today. We’ve got to catch a plane back to Austin.
This is our first day at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. They have nine tracks going simultaneously, so there’s plenty to choose from, but you certainly can’t see everything you’d like. Scott D and I split up to cover as many sessions as possible.
First up is a panel discussion on Community Building: Good, Bad, and Ugly featuring speakers from Jive Software, Forrester Research, Intel and PC World/Macworld. Nothing earth shattering here, maybe a bad first choice. I’m 0 for 1.
Next up is a session titled Creating a Coherent Social Strategy for Business, presented by two Forrester analysts who wrote the book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Some interesting slides which they have available online. Pretty good.
Things start to get more interesting in Consumer 2.0: How Web 2.0 is Changing Moods, Metrics, & Monetization. Some good data from Erin Hunter at comScore, including some pretty scary thoughts on how cookie deletions and other factors can really skew your web site analytics.
Wow, Stephan Spencer, the SEO guru from Netconcepts, is great. Very impressive presentation. I’m 3 for 4 and gaining momentum heading into the final preso: Emerging Ad Exchanges. Swing and a miss. Ended the day 3 for 5. I hope Scott had better luck.
The morning sessions are followed by a couple hours of keynotes. First up is Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media. Wow, he’s good. Tough act to follow, but next up is Max Levchin (formerly of PayPal and now the force behind Slide). He seems like a genius and the interview by Forrester analyst Charlene Li is very well done. She asked why he is still involved with startups, since he obviously made a killing on PayPal. He says that’s just what he does, he enjoys launching small companies and expanding clever ideas. Slide just got an investment that put their valuation at $500 million. Not bad for 2.5 years of work. Another interesting story from Max: he went through four failed startups before hitting the jackpot with PayPal. I’d say he’s on a hot streak lately.
Clay Shirky, the guy who wrote Here Comes Everybody, is presenting now. I saw him on the Colbert Report. He’s funny and interesting. I like the rapid-fire format – they have people presenting for no more than 20 minutes. Keeps it lively. Shirky was very good, but Levchin was the highlight for me.
Overall, it’s been a pretty good conference so far. Lots to choose from and plenty of good speakers. Now it’s off to a pub crawl in South Park.
