Powers Unfiltered

I spent the day yesterday at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose where Dow Jones is holding an event called “Enterprise Ventures,” a matchmaking event where many VCs get together to hear many startups give short pitches.  I gave two 20-minute presentations about Digipede this afternoon, which is never bad practice, and I ended up with quite a few new contacts as a result.  (Many thanks to Cliff Reeves for making introductions on our behalf; the Microsoft Emerging Business Team rocks!)

As I was sitting in the “wrap up” session, half-listening to some VC heavyweights (Raj Atluru of DFJ, Jeffrey Beir of North Bridge, Jeff Fagnan of Atlas, Mark Gorenberg of Hummer Winblad, and a couple of Dow Jones moderators), half checking email and trying to catch up on a few crisitunities, I heard the following analysis from Jeff Fagnan (more or less):

“I was looking to see what company was doing the best job of using Internet-enabled sales methods, and I’d say it was Digipede.  And they’re in grid computing!  You never would think of grid computing as being something you could sell online.  But they’ve done a great job of locating leads, making sales, and doing implementations, all without site visits.  They’ve figured out how to sell for a thousand dollars, two thousand dollars, in a market where you usually think of half million dollar sales with long sales cycles and top-down selling.  And this makes Digipede one of the only grid companies that’s positioned to bring grid computing to small and medium businesses.  There’s a nice business to be made there.”

And then the rest of the panel jumped in to add other favorable points about Digipede, including the Microsoft leverage provided by our choice of .NET, the ability to move upmarket to enterprises (more easily than moving down from enterprise to SMB), and many other positive comments.  Many thanks, guys!  It’s good to hear we’re getting our message across.