… well, maybe not the world, but I know four guys who took a bit of a breather before jumping right back in. Stuart, Michael, Jon and I have all been busting our butts to hit the product launch target for Silent Dispatch of December 1. The product is a bit tardy getting out there, but we think we’ve done a lot of things right in making sure the product was ready for the market.
Technology-wise, Silent Dispatch is very current – a cloud computing model that makes the best of client / server just work like it’s supposed to. Thin, lightweight clients and all the heavy lifting done on the back end in a way that insulates the user from the burden of server farms and all the rest.
The marketing model is all social media with some regular activity, like conference thrown in, but it’s really been about connecting to the community online and offline.
We’ve learned a lot in the process too – the lessons you learn as entrepreneurs about developing, marketing and shipping a product with the kind of capability this one has.
The next step is to gauge the markets reaction to the new version and see how we can drive the adoption rate from the free product to the premium product. We have [people that have been waiting so the next few weeks will be a really teller for us.
What else is happening? Well I’ve been so heads down on putting together all the pieces We’re still talking to people who want to invest in our growth and we’re looking at marketing relationships that will matter so we still have a long way to go.
I have not had much time to share what the experience has been like. Ask me out for a cup of coffee and I’ll share my thoughts – otherwise, just subscribe here, it should make a good read.
This also my third year working with the team to put on the event and it went as smooth as I might ever have wished for; the general session speakers provided really excellent presentations, the catering was expertly handled by the Marriott team, the AV was good (sorry about that snafu Howard, you handled it well though) and the team responded every time when and where needed to make sure the audience enjoyed the event. I’ll add my thanks to those of my associates and point out special recognition of the vision of Francine Hardaway, the talents of Brian Shaler and Rhonda Lintner as our core team.
The sponsors deserve a lot of thanks – you all helped make the event possible and you contributed generously to the mission of OTEF; Microsoft BizSpark, Infusionsoft, Wells-Fargo, Osborn Maledon, C-Scan Technologies, City of Tempe Community Development, Arizona Department of Commerce, Deru Internet, Phoenix Business Journal, HSL Financial, Gangplank, Digestif, Sacks PR, BusinessWire, and BrainSavers all made meaningful contributions. Metro Studios and Essential Event Technologies made service and in-kind donations as well
The speakers, the breakout session presenters, the staff at ASBA and Joan Kerber-Walker all deserve some thank too. Chuck Reynolds did a great website, Justin Crossman produced a great logo, Melissa Balkan / StrongDesign gave us a program I know I used every minute.There are probably a dozen or so other people that made contributions I did not mention, but the sponsors all helped make the event possible with their generous donations of money, resources or in-kind products and services. All of which I know are mentioned at www.AZEntreprenurship.com
What’s next? a well deserved rest (I’m in Claypool Hill, Virginia as I write this, visiting friends) and then back to the work of launching Silent Dispatch, looking at next years event (promising to be event bigger & better) and enjoying the upcoming holiday with my family. OTEF’s work for next spring is set it seems, looks like the event did it’s job by raising enough to fund a program next year in the community.
See you all soon.
The 3rd Annual Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference is in the books now and I am very grateful to have had a part to play. My disclaimer is that I am on the Opportunity Through Entrepreneurship Foundation (OTEF) Board of Directors and I’ve been a co-chair of the conference since it’s inception, I suppose you’d have to say that I have an interest in seeing many more of these events staged to support the mission of OTEF. With that disclaimer, here is what I saw happen at the event that made it meaningful for me.
Generational / Cultural Connections - I have often been called somewhat of an anomaly in my career before, so it’s not to weird for me to have people say so now. Early on, I was the youngest of the team and brought a lot of energy and creativity to an effort. Now I am one of the older guys sitting around the social media technology table and I still bring creativity to the table that has been tempered with experience. I hang out with both a traditional entrepreneurial community and I’ve also been working more and more with what I’ll call a new generation and culture of entrepreneurship, a culture exemplified by social media and it’s impact on marketing and it’s ability to create community. One is often represented by slacks / suits, collared shirts, hard shoes and ties and the other by flip flops, jeans and silk-screened tees. This event saw both of them mixing and mingling in the pursuit of knowledge in the entrepreneurial equation. I think we need to see a lot more of it and we need to look for way to connect the two, not drive generational or cultural wedges between them.- Passion by Gary Vanerchuk – My favorite presenter of the day was Gary Vanerchuk. It was not so much his stories about WineLibrary.TV or the family business’ trials and tribulations that struck me, but his emphatic encouragement that we all have to do what we’re passionate about, the thing that is meaningful to us individually. Not just doing the thing we think is going to make us some money. In this age of social media, what you’re passionate about WILL come through – either by you delivering it to your audience or from your customers, suppliers and competitors doing it. People will find you out if you’re just posing and they will talk about whether or not you’re passionate about what you’re doing. Gary suggested that even if that approach does not make you a million, you will be happier with your life than if you gave up your passion for a buck. I liked Gary’s message. I have my own story about why I do the work I do and how it fills my life with a passion to learn and do what I do in social media.
- Microsoft BizSpark - BizSpark is one of the biggest announcements of the year, I am not sure a project of this scope and caliber has even been launched in the history of business. It is a project that only a company the size and depth of Microsoft could have launched. At it’s core is the ability to provide the start-up entrepreneur with integrated enterprise-quality tools at little or no hard cost. The low-cost alternative has been the development and deployment of solutions using OpenSource Solutions (OSS) technology with the integration left to the entrepreneur. OSS is not necessarily a bad alternative, but the addition of the Microsoft suite to the decision process means that now the tech entrepreneur can make the best possible decision, not just the best OSS-based decision. Silent Dispatch was announced as an early adopter / inductee of the program, so again I am in full disclosure here – I like what they’ve done and have some perspective after 25 years in tech.
These are the things that made the event significant for me; I’m interested in hearing what made it worth the investment of time and dollars for you
(Update – Chance Carpenter / EET just post a bunch of YouTube videos on what many of you thought about the conference – thx Chance!)
I’ve been really blessed to be a part of one of the first companies to be selected by Microsoft to join the BizSpark program for startups that has been just launched a few days ago. I wrote about it on the corporate blog at Silent Dispatch here and I have said thank you more than once to Dan Willis and Francine Hardaway for their support.
Here is how I see the program being structured; first from the business side beginning with the startup. The startup is just bout any company out there, the criteria is pretty liberal (you can read the criteria at the BizSpark website here) so if you’re a new company, you may want to look at it pretty quickly. Those startups are vetted by a local Network Partner, in our case it was Stealthmode partners. This process allows companies to find out if they are eligible and how it might help them quickly before being forwarded to the next level, the MSFT Champ. When I spoke to the Phoenix Champ yesterday, he was being overwhelmed with companies looking to find our more on the program. he is signing up Network Partners as fast as he can I think. The last part of the program and one I’m still exploring is the Hosting Partner relationship. I’ll share more on this element as i find out more.
Yesterday I spent the better part of the day finishing up the registration process, filling out online forms, connecting the various accesses to my Live ID and reviewing the MSDN access that comes as part of the program and all I can say is ‘Wow’. The resources being provided by this program are amazing. Of course the software is helpful, but not jst to the dev team, as the biz guy at the company, I am especially pleased with the CRM access, the hosting company support and the local Champ we’ve been assigned.
What I see in this push from Microsoft is their interest in connecting their enterprise class development tools to the startup entrepreneur when they’re typically making a dev tool selection. The model of the tech entrepreneur has been to use a low / no cost open source dev tool first and by the time they grew up and came onto the radar of Microsoft, the dev tool / database decision had been already made – often too late for MSFT to be a legitimate consideration; BizSpark changes all of that in a huge way.
Beyond the dev consideration though, I again want to point out that from a business dev perspective, the rest of the MSFT offering is very supportive of the beginning entrepreneur. The Office suite, Project, CRM, Dynamics & Solomon accounting, Expression design studio… the list goes on and on.
I think that this project will carve thousands of dollars out of the monthly burn of the company and for other companies, may mean the difference between if they launch and how fast they can make it to profitability.
My verdict - BizSpark is good for business and it demonstrates how much Microsoft is willing to do to support the startup entrepreneur.
Yesterday I dropped in on the really (really, really) smart guys at Integrum during their weekly event ‘Hacker Night’. Brian Shaler had invited me and he introduced me to Derek Neighbors, the ‘Pragmatic Idealist’ (title on his biz card) who might be the guy you’d identify as attempting to ride herd on this crowd, that is between sessions of World of Warcraft and visits from people who want to know more about what they’re doing.
In the midst of a darkened room, thumping music, video games projected on a wall 6′ wide and clicking keys from programmers collaborating on quick idea projects. we sat and chatted about what he and Jade Meskill are doing and the philosophy behind the project.
Darek and Jade are looking for the guy sitting at a desk today, with a great idea and they just need a bit of help to get going. Perhaps just a few months of expenses or so – I’d call it micro-fundinEditg almost. Neat idea.
What I learned also is that we share a common perspective on the entrepreneurial community here in the State; that it is, at best, a dysfunctional environment that drives the best and brightest in the state to Silicon Valley and the bay area for development and funding. We also agreed that we, as a community, have to find a way to stop the exodus.
Incubators are not the only way, to be sure, but they can be a resource for early stage companies as they tryout their ideas and test their assumptions about the market. They have made a difference in other states and I think we could handle a few more here in Arizona.
Keep in mind that Arizona is a state that has the 6th largest city in the country, and has three of the top 100 business schools in the world.
If we count Integrum as a proper entrepreneurial incubator, which I am not sure Derek does, it brings to my attention that the state harbors only eight (8) entrepreneurial incubators; California came up with 22 incubator locations in about two seconds in a Google search, all listed at Gaebler Ventures.
I did not try to include bio-tech in my count, I not too involved with any of them and they functions in an different realm than I do.
The Arizona list includes the various university-based efforts with two at ASU (SkySong & the WP Carey Spirit of Enterprise Center), Two at UofA (Arizona Center of Innovation & Eller College of Management at UofA) , and Two at NAU (Northern Arizona Center for Emerging Technologies & W. A. Franke College of Business at NAU).
Now we can add to that list private efforts, such as the newly opened ClubE Factory, and then Integrum rounds out the list at eight. Please share any others you know of and we’ll extend our resource list.
So what are we missing here in Arizona? Why is it that our best and brightest are leaving in droves and why cannot we sustain a more effective entrepreneurial economy? I am not sure I have the answer yet.
If it is funding, it may be that this real estate bust may be one of the best things to happen to the local effort to source local capital for local businesses. The allure of steady returns on land has diminished and now investors are looking elsewhere. I remember hearing that the Arizona Angels have more investments in the last year or so than the prior 10 years.
If it is government support, I think they are listening. I applaud the State in their efforts; the Arizona Angel Investor Tax Credit Program, administered by the Department of Commerce is a gleaming beacon of hope in this area. The program was lobbied for by the Arizona Tech Council and enacted back in 2006. It supports the growth of the Arizona entrepreneur by providing a 30% tax credit to the investor for any qualifying investment in an Arizona start-up.
With this great incentive program available, you have to wonder what’s up and why do investors / start-ups not use it? Are Arizona investors making so much they can’t use the extra 30%?
I counted the list today and there are 40 companies have been certified by the program. I just did the work to get Silent Dispatch, Inc. on the list and the process is not hard, or tedious or demanding.
Is it a reflection of the mentality / reality that you have to go to San Francisco or NYC for funding a tech startup? I have a friend who counsels trains entrepreneurs here in Arizona and if / when they need funding, they are bundled up and introduced to Sandhill Road VC’s. They simply do not believe that there is a viable funding option here in Arizona
So how do I see the entrepreneurial culture in Arizona? Difficult but better than is was and still improving.
