The San Francisco Chronicle is not exactly the planet’s leading source of technology news and analysis.  So many of you probably haven’t yet seen Deborah Gage’s excellent article today about Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft’s ambassador to Silicon Valley.  Dan’l is among our most important contacts (and favorite people) at Microsoft, and despite his high-visibility role, many people (including many entrepreneurs) still don’t understand the value he can bring to a startup.

In a single sentence containing at least three significant understatements, Ms. Gage writes:

Microsoft still gets criticized sometimes for being slow to the Internet or hard to do business with, but Lewin has won praise over the years for his courtesy, efficiency and ability to connect outsiders to the right people inside Microsoft, which is not an easy task.

Whew.  Let’s parse that.

“Microsoft still gets criticized sometimes for being . . . hard to do business with . . .”  There is no question that doing business with ANY huge company is hard.  Building a close relationship with Microsoft (or any tech giant) is not for the faint of heart.  Microsoft presents some special challenges that I could go on about at length (oh wait, I’ve done that multiple times…), but let’s just stipulate that some of these criticisms are justified while some are not.

“…but Lewin has won praise over the years for his courtesy, efficiency and ability to connect outsiders to the right people inside Microsoft…”   Bingo.  Dan’l Lewin has done more to expose the helpful side of Microsoft to startups, entrepreneurs, and VCs than anyone would have thought possible just a few years ago.  His Emerging Business Team is the API for startups that want hooks into Microsoft.  Digipede has received numerous tangible and intangible benefits from working with the EBT; the group brings the attitude that they can’t wait to help interesting startups, and it’s Dan’l who sets the tone and agenda for that critical group.

“…which is not an easy task.”  No kidding.  I’m back to my API analogy.  If you would rather to try to reverse-engineer the Microsoft org chart from the outside, good luck — but a single call to the EBT can get you to the right person within Microsoft faster than any other method I know.

The Bay Area is teaming with “experts” who would have us believe that Microsoft has become irrelevant.  In my experience, entrepreneurs ignore Microsoft at their peril.  Far better to understand what they’re doing and why than to pretend they aren’t there.  Dan’l and his team are great resources for entrepreneurs who want to understand and work with Microsoft.  So — good job, Ms. Gage, for profiling Microsoft’s local champion of innovation.  Well worth reading.

Tags: Digipede, Microsoft, silicon valley, startups, venture-capital

OK, Digipede might no longer properly be called a startup. It’s been two years (next week) since the release of the Digipede Network, and we’ve got more customers and revenue and growth than a true startup — but we still think and act like a startup. In particular, when it comes to travel — we’re cheap.

Oh, we love to travel — I’ve always been a big advocate of getting in front of customers and prospects as often as possible. But it’s far better to make two trips than one on the same budget.

Which brings us to the New York problem. If you travel to New York, you know — some cities are expensive, and then there’s New York. A very, very ordinary hotel room that might cost under $100 in another town can easily cost $300 in New York - and far more if you don’t book WAY in advance. And often I don’t. Yet some of you see me in New York quite often these days.

So what’s the secret? Priceline? Hotwire? Nope. Those work great in some cities, but in New York, when the supply of rooms gets tight (i.e., almost always), these don’t save that much and you can end up in some highly dubious rooms.

No, the secret is the Pod. The Pod Hotel (formerly called the Pickwick Arms hotel) requires some attitude adjustment (unless you think like a startup!). Basically, if your college dorm had the same advertising agency as Apple, it would be the Pod Hotel.

The rooms are quite small, the beds are small (OK, they’re twins, but I’m 6′4″), you don’t get your own bathroom (there are four per floor), and there’s no room service (but come on — you’re in midtown Manhattan! Go out!). But the whole place is newly refurnished, very clean, comfortable, equipped with a nice little flatscreen TV plus a clock radio with a dock for your iPod, conveniently located in Midtown (on 51st Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues) — and even if you book just a few days ahead, it’s $129 or less per night, including free wireless internet access.

The startup mentality says hotel rooms are for sleeping in — the rest of the day is too valuable to spend in the room anyway — so if you can give up a bit of space and luxury, you can save a bunch of money for the next trip.   Now you  know.

Tags: Digipede, new-york-city, pod, startup, the-pod-hotel, travel

The Microsoft Emerging Business Team (EBT) has been a staunch supporter of Digipede for the past two years.  The EBT is run by Dan’l Lewin, sometimes referred to as Microsoft’s “Ambassador to Silicon Valley.”  As Digipede has grown from a raw startup to the leading provider of .NET Grid computing software, the EBT has provided guidance and support — inside of Microsoft and out. 

They just featured us in a success story on their excellent Web site.  I think the story  came out well.  The only thing I regret is mentioning how many paying customers we had when their writer interviewed me — because we’ve got a LOT more now!

If you’re a startup looking to partner with Microsoft, run do not walk to the Microsoft Startup Zone.  Lots of good advice, provided by people you should get to know.

Tags: Danl-Lewin, Digipede, Microsoft, startup

I’ve planned a series of posts on the opportunities and perils of growth, with non-Digipede examples.  Here goes.

The first example comes from, of all places, my new home PC.

Last summer, my reliable old Gateway began to suffer from the same fate that eventually afflicts every PC — it was getting old, slow, and cranky.  I limped along with it until late fall, but enough was enough.  Five years of use and all the associated waxy buildup had brought it to the end of its useful life as the Top Dog computer in the house.  Oh, it’s still useful (I’m typing this on it now, more on that later), but it was time for a hot new PC.  I shopped around, decided not to go boring / mainstream, and settled on an “upper-middle” performance PC from boutique vendor Velocity Micro.  A little pricier than a Dell / HP / Gateway / whatever, but they got good reviews, looked cool, and claimed engineering, attention to detail, and support far above those of mortal huge companies.  And their blog, to which CEO Randy Copeland contributes, proclaims in the heading:  “Velocity Micro — Obsessed with building the perfect PC experience.”  I decided to find out.

The buying experience was quite good.  I configured my machine online, placed the order, and began receiving timely updates on progress — order received, released to production, built, shipped.  The steps took a few days longer than forecast, but that can happen, and at least communication was good.  My machine arrived, set up and ready to rock — and it rocked.  Fast, beautiful, quieter than expected, NOT overloaded with stupid trial bloatware (are you listening, Dell and HP??), very nicely built.  Ahhh.

I went through the (non-trivial) migration process to put all relevant files and applications on the new machine.  Then I reformated the old Gateway hard disk, did a clean install of Windows XP, and sent it off to a corner to serve up music files to the house network.  The Velocity Micro box took its place under the desk in the den as Top Dog computer in the house, where it performed flawlessly — for about 60 days. 

Then, quite suddenly, it suffered some type of misfortune (most likely some sort of hardware failure, more on that below) that caused frequent application and OS crashes.  Frequent as in every hour, then every half-hour, then every few minutes.

OK, that can happen.

My first call to tech support was excellent — smart guy, can-do attitude, did not treat me like an idiot — and we worked out a plan.  I got a memory test utility, which I ran overnight, and sure enough, found many, many memory errors.  A couple of quick experiments moving RAM around made it seem like it wasn’t the memory sticks but the motherboard.

OK.  That can happen.

My second call to tech support was excellent — I reached the same guy (we’ll call him Guy One), and he agreed that it was most likely the motherboard, but said he’d have both a new motherboard AND new RAM sent out right away, just in case.  When the parts came, I could schedule a tech to come out to my house and fix the whole thing (I can swap RAM, but I’m not going to mess with replacing a motherboard.)

Wow, things are going great.  I would NEVER get support like this from Dell or HP or Gateway (yes, I know this from personal experience).  No wonder Velocity Micro is experiencing “triple-digit” growth (to quote CEO Randy Copeland on the company’s blog).

But — and here comes the tie-in to my earlier “growth” comments – the parts were never sent.  I called three days later, got a different guy, who found that despite Guy One’s best intentions, “Shipping” had never bothered to send my parts. 

OK, that can happen.

But it shouldn’t.  This is where the growth-induced strain in Velocity’s internal systems and culture began to show.  Guy Two is also smart, has a can-do attitude, and did not treat me like an idiot, and he was clearly upset that his company had failed to deliver for a customer – but at this point the customer (me) had lost interest in the difference between “Guy Two” and “Shipping.”  The customer wants Velocity to function as one unit and to deliver — instead, I was learning about how somebody I could NOT speak to was screwing up the life of the guy I COULD speak to.  Quite possibly, to handle triple-digit growth in orders, Velocity’s processes and systems for coordinating customer support and shipping have changed; I imagine that both functions have grown, new people are working both new systems, and some person, process, or system had slipped, and my parts were just sitting around in Richmond as a result.  Guy Two went off to kick some ass, but my good will was rapidly being used up.

So pretty soon my parts arrived, and the process of scheduling a tech was amazingly quick and smooth (thanks again, Guy Two), and the tech came out the next day (a Saturday). 

Wow!  Things are going great again!

But wait.  The tech swapped the motherboard, and everything still crashed left right and sideways.  Not exactly the same way as before, but close enough.  He spent over three and half hours here, reached the end of his troubleshooting skills (and far more than the end of the hours alotted to the problem), and he threw in the towel. 

OK, that can happen. 

It’s notoriously difficult to troubleshoot hardware from 3000 miles away, and it’s possible that this was not a problem with the motherboard, or RAM, or that the new parts were defective too, or, well, you get the idea.  But it’s also possible that the tech (not a Velocity employee) was not quite the right guy for this type of problem, or did not bring all the diagnostic equipment / software / skills / whatever to my house on a Saturday afternoon for a full-blown troubleshooting session.  I don’t know — I’m just the customer, I don’t build or repair computers for a living.  As the customer, this was another disappointing interaction with Velocity, because I had to spend Saturday afternoon at home while my problem was not getting fixed.

And on Saturday night, Velocity support is closed, and I had to leave on a business trip on Sunday.  No main computer for the Powers family this week. 

Guy Three at Velocity called while I’m away.  Velocity decided it was time for the machine to come home to Richmond for factory troubleshooting and repair.  Sadly, I agreed — there’s no point sending out random parts so that non-Velocity techs can turn my desk into a test bench.  On my return, I called to make arrangements for shipping.  Guy Four said they’d email me a UPS shipping label, and that the process for this happens mid-day each day, so I should get it by email the next day.  I said “OK, but if I don’t receive it I’ll be shipping it anyway and billing Velocity,” and he agreed.

The machine was backed up relatively recently before the crashes began, which is not the same as saying it’s current.  I at least wanted my email identities and recent documents and so on backed up before I shipped the beast away.  I spent hours and hours and frustrating hours between crashes and spontaneous re-boots trying to get a decent backup of those files, and only partially succeeded.  I pulled the old Gateway out of music-server status, re-installed Office, and re-commissioned it as the main household computer.  Email files are out of sync, a bunch of other settings could not be recovered from the Velocity Micro box — life sucks, but goes on.

Next day, no shipping label.

I decided to wait one more day because it’s a hassle to go to the UPS store and figure out all the options, so I packed it up and got it all ready. 

Next day, no shipping label.

I grumbled down to UPS to ship it myself, and notified Velocity of this, and faxed the receipt to the person they designated. 

Two days later (as the PC was arriving in Richmond), sure enough, I got a shipping label via email from UPS.  (I’m inclined to believe Guy Two’s assessment of where some of the problems may be — are you listening Shipping?  How about you, Randy?)

I emailed this information back to Velocity so at least they don’t have to pay UPS twice.

My computer arrived in Richmond as scheduled, and my machine now sits on a bench there on life support; today is its sixth day in intensive care.  Guy Two (I’m back to him now) calls daily to explain that it’s still failing, and we discuss various theories and chat about the difficulties of troubleshooting hardware, and how a hardware failure on Part A can cause Part B to fail, and when you replace Part A, Part B can cause the NEW Part A to fail, and so on.  I like Guy Two, he’s smart and connects well with customers and no doubt has a tough hardware problem on his hands — maybe next time I’m in Richmond, I’ll go get a beer with him.  Or not.

It was after one of these status calls that I saw Randy Copeland’s February 5, 2007 blog post, called “Watching the PC Industry.”  In this post he takes a few shots at his competitors, points to Velocity’s own “triple digit growth,” decries industry trends that he feels do not serve the customer’s interests, and generally pounds the table insisting that Velocity has it right while everyone else has it wrong.  I was particulary struck by the assertion that:

A simple formula of premium components, fair pricing, and my dedication to the ultimate support experience have made our company a national contender.

On another day, I might have considered this type of post a great example of the sort of entrepreneurial optimism and assertive attitude I often admire (and sometimes project).  But given the circumstances, it struck me as self-congratulatory and out of touch.  The premium components failed, the pricing can only be considered “fair” if the machine lives up to its billing (which it has not), and the “ultimate support experience” is, well, documented above. 

Listen Randy — my $3000 machine has done no useful work in over three weeks.  I know the status of my machine pretty much every day, which is good (seriously), but not good enough.  This is the Main Computer for the Powers household, and it’s been out of commission since January 18.  I’ve twice had multi-day delays in the repair process attributable to snafus in basic systems and procedures.  While your team is filled with smart, hard-working, technically competent people who understand the importance of customer communication, they are struggling with your rapid growth to deliver on their promises.  And no one has offered a date on which I can expect to get my machine back (or a new machine with my old drives in it, for example). 

Velocity can still recover.  I still remember the attractive box, the apparent build quality, the great performance, the positive references from other customers, and the positive interactions I’ve had with individuals on the Velocity team.  I am favorably impressed by the professionalism, intelligence, and customer focus of everyone I’ve spoken to at Velocity.  But none of that means anything if I don’t have a working computer.  I’m happy for your triple digit growth, your industry awards, and your obsession — but you have not delivered anything close to the “perfect PC experience” for me. 

So the next few days are critical — if I get a reliable high-performance PC that I can use for years to come, then the memory of the past few weeks will quickly fade.  If the slip-ups continue, and I remain unable to use the PC that Velocity sold me, well, our relationship will end badly.

As for lessons at Digipede, our own triple-digit growth company is hard at work reviewing QA and customer support systems and processes.  Have we slipped up?  Yes indeed.  And we recently had a customer call us on it.  (And now, all is well with that customer.)  But we also all (and I mean all) see the opportunities and the peril, and are working steadily to maintain the highest levels of quality and service as we grow.  The good news is we have been here before — the whole Digipede management team has experienced very rapid growth before, and we’re ready for it.  We are committed (I use that term advisedly) to getting it right for our customers, and in creating the “perfect grid computing experience” for them.  And if we don’t, let me hear about it!

Tags: Digipede, Entrepreneurship, grid-computing, Growth, QA, randy-copeland, support, velocity-micro

I have been fortunate to be part of rapidly growing companies throughout my career, and it’s happening again.   

Growth is fun.  With growth comes opportunity — often, opportunity to show what you can really do. 

Growth is perilous.  With growth comes new expectations, new responsibilities, public exposure of warts, new processes (as “winging it” fails to cut it anymore), and a general raising of the stakes.

Digipede is growing, at a pace that is generating plenty of fun, opportunity, and peril.

I have in mind a series of posts about entepreneurship and growth, but I’ll never get it all done.  But I’ve seen a few examples lately outside of my own company, and I’m trying to learn some lessons, so I’m at least going to start.  Let’s see how far we get.

Tags: Digipede, Entrepreneurship, Growth

OK, here’s where I get to tell the real story about the new release the Digipede Network that I could not fit into the somewhat restrictive form of a press release earlier this month.  For the facts, you can go see “what’s new.”  But for the STORY, well, read on.  First, let’s go deep into the history of Digipede, and into what the Digipede Network is all about.  Hang on — this will be fun.

When we started Digipede back in 2003, we could see the market for distributed computing getting ready to take off, and we could see where we would fit into that market.  Before we started writing code, I went around and interviewed current and former CEOs and CTOs of successful and not-so-successful software companies in distributed computing.  We read, we went to conferences, we shopped the competition.  We went to see customers and prospective customers with real distributed computing needs.  And everywhere we looked we saw — layer after layer of needless complexity.  Customers were clearly being frozen out of the market by what they perceived as an insurmountable threshhold of technical and commercial complexity.

We set three criteria for ourselves and our product very early in the process:

1. The Digipede Network must provide dramatic improvements in application scalability and performance.  This is what grid computing is all about.  Sure, it’s also about asset utilization and virtualization and automation and provisioning and federation and flexible policies and IT agility and a side of fries, but we had to start somewhere.  The Digipede Network v1.0 would be all about improved application scalability and performance.
2. The Digipede Network must be radically easier to buy, install, learn, and use than any other grid solution.  I realize this sounds like marketing language.  Before it ever became marketing language, though, it was a battle cry in our office.  From the moment we started specifying our product until the moment we released it, we kept focussed on simplifying grid computing.  Before this was marketing language, this was hundreds of individual design, development, licensing, and pricing decisions.  Simple is better.
3. The Digipede Network must be the slam-dunk choice for anyone wanting a grid computing solution on the Microsoft platform.  We saw lots of grid work being done on the Linux platform (based in part on grid computing’s academic roots, and in part on IBM’s early recognition of grid’s potential), and very little commercially interesting grid activity on Windows.  An ecosystem of grid startups had formed around IBM; we declared ourselves charter members of the Microsoft grid ecosystem, and set out to make that mean something.

With those principles in hand, we went to work.  Version 1.0 was the product of more than two years of hard-core startup work — long days, long nights, passionate arguments, inadequate resources, testing and more testing, benchmarking, documenting and more documenting, beta feedback, head scratching, and more testing.

Released June 28, 2005, the Digipede Network Version 1.0 soon won critical acclaim and a critical mass of customers, We felt like the market had validated the path we were on — so we went back to work.

Version 1.2 (don’t ask where 1.1 went) made us compatible with Microsoft .NET 2.0; we also added some cool features like easier distribution of .NET objects, integration with Visual Studio 2005, job dependency, and better — you guessed it — scalability and performance.

And then we did something else — while Version 1.2 was out there doing well, we decided to release our SDK to all developers, in a special Digipede Network Developer Edition, for free.  After all, we’d just spent all that time on some pretty developer-friendly features, and we wanted to see what clever things developers could do with it.

And developers just went nuts.

They started to try out the Digipede Network as a way to increase the scalability and performance of their applications.  Word got around (I still frankly don’t entirely understand how), and developers from Bangor to Bangalore started coming at us with every scale-out problem under the sun.  Can we use the Digipede Network to process millions of large image files?  Can we scale out tax return processing?  Can we put a bioinformatic search algorithm behind a Web site and maintain quality of service?  Can we price fixed income assets faster?  Can we predict storm damage more accurately by increasing the number of scenarios analyzed?  Can we embed the Digipede Network inside our genetic algorithms for finding new asset trading opportunities?  Can we create visual If we have SharePoint, and we publish compute-intensive spreadsheets using Excel Services, can the Digipede Network scale out the calculations in the Excel user-defined functions?  And to their surprise and delight, the answer usually came up — yes.

And so we came to a decision for Version 1.3 — time to double down.  Time to focus even more on developers.  We took our already-great APIs and opened them up further, documented them better, wrote up more examples, baked in finer-grained control of jobs and tasks, and took the suggestions of some of our smartest developer-customers to make the grid computing system of developers’ dreams.  (Face it — developers dream about some weird stuff.)  All for the simple reason — the more applications are adapted to the grid, the more everybody needs the grid.

So that’s it — Version 1.3 is about developers, developers, developers.

And it couldn’t come at a better time.  Microsoft announced general availability of Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS) last month (earth’s best way to deploy and administer many high-performance Windows servers together), and we’ve got earth’s best way to adapt .NET and COM applications to a grid of Windows machines (running CCS and every other Windows OS since 2000).  It’s never been a better time to develop scalable applications on the Windows platform.  So what are you waiting for — come and get it!

Tags: .NET, ccs, Compute Cluster Server, developer, developers, Digipede, Digipede-Network, distributed-computing, dotnet, grid-computing, Microsoft, scalability, Windows

Kudos to Dan Ciruli (our Director of Products, and also Product Manager for the Digipede Network, and also Bug Hunter, Documentation Czar, Demo Application Coder, Stand-in Sales Engineer, frequent Webcast Demo Guy and probably half a dozen other things I’m leaving out).  He’s been working late into the night on the release of Version 1.3 of the Digipede Network (as has everyone at Digipede with the possible exception of me).  And then he got sick (he’s got some moderately nasty cold he picked up from travel and late nights).  And now he’s got to sort out what might have to go into a 1.3.1, what can wait for 1.4, what’s 2.0 going to look like…  Basically, he’s pegged.

But while he’s pegged, and sick, he still just can’t stand it — he’s got to think of yet another way to show the world how insanely great the Digipede Network is.  So he’s crashed on his couch at home trying to kill this damn cold, and instead of (while?) watching poker reruns, he’s figuring out how to capture video of our Mandelbrot demonstration so that he can post it on YouTube and link it to his blog.  Basically, the demo is a drag race between a single machine and a testbed of five machines running the Digipede Network.  That demo is now accessible to anyone who has a minute and nine seconds to spare (go ahead, you’ve got 1:09 to spare — go look).

How cool is that?

Tags: Dan-Ciruli, demo, demonstration, Digipede, Mandelbrot, YouTube

Today marks the beginning of a new tradition at Powersunfiltered.  Each month (or more likely, whenever I feel like it) I will present the Powersunfiltered Ferdinand Foch Award to an entrepreneur whom I admire for, well… you’ll see. 

Ferdinand Foch, the French general, field marshall, and hero of World War I, issued a famous dispatch from the Marne, which translates (approximately) as:

“My center is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I shall attack.”

It is difficult to come up with a more fitting quote to put at the top of the entrepreneur’s day planner every single day.  “Good morning!  Everything still screwed up?  Cool.  We still badly outgunned?  Excellent.  Charge!”

(And for the PC crowd preparing to berate me on my lack of sensitivity to the horrors of war, I provide this convenient link to the definition of the word “analogy.”)

For August 2006, the entrepreneur who embodies this ”bring it on” attitude best is Mr. Matt Heaton of Bluehost.com.  I’m Matt’s customer at Bluehost; Digipede CTO Robert Anderson recommended Bluehost as a place to host my blog, and I know better than to debate Robert on such matters.  I don’t know Matt, and have never even corresponded with him — he’s got enough on his mind.  He’s got a new baby (about six weeks old), a growing business, numerous voracious competitors (large and small), puny margins, hardware failures, software failures, and a genuine customer service crisis.

There are lots and lots of value-added goodies that a hosting service can provide to differentiate, and Matt’s been very innovative in providing those; more are in the works.  But in the final analysis, hosting is about reliability — whatever I put online needs to be online, or nothing else matters.  Bluehost has had several outages in July and August.  Matt’s been beset by flakey routers, power failures, Linux bugs, firewall nightmares, and I think a plague of frogs.

Matt’s response?  Expand.

While buying replacement routers and compiling their own Linux kernel and changing out firewall software and generally rebuilding the plane in midair, Bluehost is also acquiring more space, more customers, more equipment, more employees.  Matt keeps his customers in the loop about all these decisions, through his blog and through direct email to customers.  He’s passionate, direct, and he’s this month’s winner of the Powersunfiltered Ferdinand Foch Award. 

I wish him all the best in delivering on his many promises — and in the meantime, keep your damn service up, OK Matt?

[Nominations for future awards are welcome; keep in mind this award is for both attitude and achievement — few would now remember Foch if he had not attacked, but no one would remember the quote if he had lost.  The awards committee is me.  I accept nominations from anybody, but I actually pay attention to nominations of entrepreneurs by other entrepreneurs.  All decisions by the awards committee are capricious, arbitrary, and final.] 

Tags: Award, Awards, Bluehost, hosting

Here are a few more observations based in part on Digipede’s experience at the Securities Industry Association (SIA) Technology Management Conference in New York this week. I posted about this earlier today; this post is less fact, more perspective.

For a small company like Digipede, a trade show can be a frightening investment. Travel is expensive, and disruptive – taking three or four people away from other activities for three or four days can throw off schedules for weeks. Booth space is pricey, the booth itself is pricey to buy or rent, shipping the booth and any other equipment and collateral is a pain, and renting a big monitor and power and internet connectivity and chairs and tables and trash cans and whatnot is vastly more expensive than it ought to be. (OK, we’re not crazy — we used other vendors’ trash cans.)

And for what? What will we demonstrate? Will anyone care? Who will attend? Will there by any potential customers, or just “vendors talking to vendors?” Will the press be there? If so, will they notice us? Is it really worth it?

Having represented small to medium growth companies at trade shows for 15+ years, John’s One and Only Rule of Trade Shows is as follows:

Work it, or it’s not worth it.

I see firms put up a nice booth, and then wait for a stream of juicy leads to walk up and present themselves. They staff the booth with folks who sit around and say “there’s no traffic” or “there are no buyers at this show” or “we should get a better location next year” or more likely “what time does the bar open?” Losers. I love it when these folks ask me why so many people are talking about us.

Any startup that commits to a trade show had better work hard to make the investment pay off. I’ll give you a few examples of what we did before, during, and after this particular event to make it pay off for us.

We decided on a message right up front, before we even made a final commitment to go. Our message was “extend the cluster.” We wanted to take full advantage of the release of Microsoft’s new Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, which was to be demonstrated to the financial community at this event. We decided to emphasize the compatibility of our own product, the Digipede Network, with CCS, and to show how we add value to this new offering from Microsoft. We knew Microsoft would be spending big bucks to unveil their new product to an important market, and we wanted to leverage our own puny investment with theirs.

As a result of my incessant whining and begging and pleading and favor-cashing, Microsoft provided us with a kiosk in their large booth on the main exhibit floor. (I made the first request for this a full year in advance, and was still begging right up until the last slot was filled.) We got our own little booth, too, where we could do more in-depth demonstrations.

There were 11 Microsoft partners in their booth, none of whom compete with us, so during the introductions before the exhibits opened, I promised the other Microsoft partners that we’d refer relevant leads to them and hoped they’d do the same for us. By the end of the show, that simple step generated several additional visits to our booth, and one qualified sales prospect – someone who would never have found us otherwise.

We wrote special demonstrations that would appeal not only to the potential customers at the event, but to our partners Microsoft and HP. We helped our contact at Microsoft load and test those demos on a new cluster, and debugged interactions among our own product, the just-released Windows Compute Cluster Server, and the not-yet-released Excel 2007. We arranged a pre-event press release with authorized quotes from both Microsoft and HP (try herding cats THAT size some time). We got into the Microsoft show press release. We arranged to be not only present, but featured prominently, in the presentations given by Microsoft’s Financial Services Group in the special Microsoft / HP break room. We chased the press around for a week before the show, and a few ended up at the reception Microsoft threw on Wednesday evening. We ended up with favorable coverage.

We created new collateral, including a new white paper, a new brochure, a new press kit, and a new datasheet describing how you can buy our product bundled with an HP cluster (OK, it’s pretty loosely bundled, but it’s progress!). We burned a zillion mini-CDs with everything an architect or developer needs to get started with our software — a complete installation of the Digipede Network Developer Edition (free!), full documentation, informative videos, white papers, and so on. We brought seven out of a zillion back home with us. (Contact me if you want one!)

Naturally, we gave demonstrations in our own booth — but we also flagged people down in the Microsoft booth, HP booth, and anywhere else we could find them to entice them up to our inconveniently-located booth. We knew we had a crappy location, so before we left Oakland we printed up stickers to put on the literature we handed out from the Microsoft and HP booths — “come see us in Booth 4506 on the third floor.” People did.

We found time to take an important client out to dinner, to meet with a prospective future employee, to pitch to a new prospective investor, to line up a new consulting partner, to identify several likely ISV partners, and to check out our competitors’ offerings. We used the show’s buggy lead retreival system, annotated each lead with specific information on the spot, expanded those annotations on the plane in Excel on the way home, coaxed all of the leads into our CRM system the minute we got back to the office, and started banging away at those leads right away — ninety-nine of them, I believe, excluding the usual recruiters, outsourcers, marketing consultants, foreign-subsidiary-creation facilitators, life coaches, and the like. And it still might not be enough.

So a trade show is like anything else — it’s an opportunity, and you get out of it only what you put in. Many thanks to our friends at Microsoft and HP, who provided generous support and exposure, and gave us every chance to succeed.

Was it worth it? Ask me in six months.

Tags: ccs, Compute Cluster Server, conference, Digipede, finance, HP, Microsoft, SIA, trade-show

Don Dodge and Cliff Reeves of the Microsoft Emerging Business Team (EBT) continue to crank out good advice about partnering with Microsoft, especially for ISV startups – but I think it’s time for some of us ISV startup partners to weigh in, too. 

“Partnering with Microsoft” is an easy thing to say, and, superficially, an easy thing to do.  The basic decision process for an entrepreneur should be:  Am I developing at least in part for the Microsoft platform?  If no, go away.  If yes, become a Microsoft Registered Partner.  There’s a mildly maddening Web enrollment process, then you’re done.   Then join Empower; it’s the “starter” program for ISVs, and you can get a little bit of software and some other excellent resources for $375.  If you’re on the Microsoft platform, it’s the best bargain in town. 

Then if you’re serious, if you’re using Microsoft’s development tools, if your main target is Windows, you should become a Certified Partner.  This requires a few more bucks and a bit of work on certifications, plus some additional maddening Microsoft Partner Web Site experiences, but you’ll get through it.  Then you get all kinds of goodies.  Microsoft showers you with software, and newsletters, and meeting notices, and training offers, and so on.  The software alone is worth vastly more than the price of the program.  So sign up.

But do more than sign up.  One of the benefits you gain is access to early releases of upcoming Microsoft products — pay attention to these!  Cliff tells a chilling tale:

Just this week, a VC contacted us to get an opinion on a company (let’s call them X) looking for funding. The company had a great product and had made a big sale at Global 50 company. Unfortunately, some of the features overlapped what we have announced for the next release of Office — Office 2007. Our partners have been getting code drops and detailed product plans on Office 2007 for a year or more, but X hadn’t joined our partner programs and hadn’t realised the overlap.

So sign up — AND pay attention, or you’re quite likely to get hit by a train.  (Seriously — Cliff is right.  Some team, somewhere at Microsoft — right now – is working on something much too close to your idea for your own good.  It is YOUR job to find out who it is, and be nice to them, and study their roadmap.  And duck.  Find a way to add value to what they’re doing, or prepare for trouble.)

But that’s the easy part.  The big decision for a startup ISV is this.  Are you joining the Microsoft partner community to get some free / discounted stuff (and to watch out for the occassional oncoming train), or are you partnering with Microsoft?  If you’re really going to partner with Microsoft, then you have to work like hell to get attention (guess what I’m doing right now?), work like hell to bring value to Microsoft, and work like hell to extract value in return. 

Partnering with Microsoft is like any other business relationship — what you get out of it is proportional to what you put in.  The people at Microsoft are like people everywhere — eager to help those who are engaged, and mostly too busy to bother with those who are not.  When I ask for help from someone at Microsoft, I might get it, and I might not.  But when I take the time to understand who that person is, what he or she can gain from working with us, and how I can help them — we’re off to the races. 

If you want to really engage with Microsoft, and really reap the benefits that they can provide — in terms of access to customers, access to product roadmaps, access to other partners at the right levels, and more — then it’s worth becoming a Gold Certified Partner.  The benefits of being a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner are nominally not all that different from being a Certified Partner — but the signal it sends internally at Microsoft is powerful.  You get preferential treatment, which is better than free software any day.

If you “go for the Gold” AND work like hell, there’s no better partner in the tech world than Microsoft.  While partnering with Microsoft sounds easy, it is actually only easy at a superficial level.  Do the easy stuff, because it’s useful.  But do the hard stuff, and then you’ve really got something.

And lest you think I’m just a pawn of the Microsoft machine, please read the NEXT post, too!

Tags: Emerging-Business-Team, entrepreneur, gold-certified, ISV, Microsoft, partner, startup