Generated Transcript

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Hello, this is Craig Severson with a few notes about this episode of VentureCast, which we recorded in the halls of the Demo Conference last week. This is another marathon show. It clocks in at about 90 minutes, but as before, I think it’s better to jam the whole experience into one show rather than split it up over a multiple set of them. I also want to remind those of you who are listening by way of itunes or on your ipod that this is an enhanced podcast, which means we’ve separated out each conversation with chapter markers, which gives you a quick and convenient way to skip around. Now, if you’re not familiar with enhanced podcasts, here’s how they work.

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When playing venturecast or any other enhanced podcast using the itunes client on your Mac or PC, when you do click on it, a new top level menu item appears at the top called Chapters. It appears between the window and the help menu, and if you pull down this menu you’ll see a list of all the chapters in the program that we set and you can jump to them right away. In fact, this intro has its own chapter, so you can skip over right now if you want to and move on with the show. When playing on the ipod, you can hit the center button until the navigation menu appears where you’ll see chapter markers indicated by little black tick marks. And again you can jump ahead or back by clicking on the appropriate buttons.

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And finally, if you’re listening to this from our webpage, you’ll see a chapter pull down list in the transport control of the embedded QuickTime player. For those of you listening to the Pure MP3 version of the show, which by the way, we finally added. I’m sorry to say we can’t embed chapter markers in these files, so you’re on your own. As with other conference programs, this one is presented in the order that it was recorded and none of the conversations had been prearranged. Our method for recording these conferences can be best described as random and happenstance, and the conversations themselves were subject to very minimal editing.

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And I also want to give out a few acknowledgments. First, to the entire demo organization for putting on such a professional show and for being very accommodating to those of us in the press corps. Secondly, to the guys at Gigavox Media who developed an amazing piece of free software called the Levelator, which I used with great effect on the post production of this show to get all the levels relatively the same and just really enhance the sound of the show. It saved me hours, if not days of Labor. And finally, as always, to cachefly for providing us with the bandwidth for our distribution.

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You can find them@ cache flashly.com.

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welcome to VentureCast 16. My name is Craig Severson of Grunt Media and I’m David Hornick from August Capital. And we are not in the offices. We are in Palm Springs, baby. Beautiful, beautiful Palm Springs.

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Yes, it’s quite idyllic out there. It’s kind of weird if you ask me. It’s almost like it’s been painted. The world’s painting. It is painted.

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Particularly what we’re staying at. What is this place, the Marriott? Yeah. It’s some country of its own, practically. Yes, exactly.

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It’s the mega hotel where you get up to the floor you’re supposed to be on and then you walk for three quarters of a mile to get to your room. And then you look out the window and you see artificial rivers and reservoirs. And yes, we are in our own world here, but we are in demo as well. The demo conference, which is bigger than ever. Bigger than ever.

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This is the first morning. We are at this particular point in time between the first session, coming up on the second session soon. So we saw, I don’t know, 12, 8, 12, 600 presentations. Felt like a dozen. Yes, right.

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At least. Yes. And so we’re gonna go wander around and see who we can harass. That sound like a plan. So, absolutely.

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You know, I’ve been to. I think I’ve been to the last six demo, six years worth of demos in a row. Yeah. And you can imagine. So that’s sort of maybe even seven since 2000.

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So you can imagine, kind of 2001. 2002 demo was not so exciting. It was sort of quiet. Was it kind of geeky? It was, you know, it was just.

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It had this sort of down feeling. And it was. Now, don’t get me wrong, there were lots of interesting companies, and actually, if you had invested in those companies, then probably would have done better than sort of running around today looking. But there weren’t a lot of VCs who showed up. I was one of the very small VCs.

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Yeah, exactly. They’re everywhere. They’re like rats. And it was, you know, it just was a much calmer, smaller experience. And then it’s been building since.

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And this just feels like a really. A big crowd. It’s huge. Way too many venture capitalists like myself, typically too many of us. But we won’t talk to them.

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No, we’ll avoid them, Snub them. I think that’ll show them yeah, I’ll show them. We’ll call them. This will be the Venture snub version. That’s right, exactly.

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So. But otherwise, I think it’s pretty exciting. So let’s. Shall we go into the fray? Let’s go attack.

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Does that count as singing theme music?

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Actually, we’ve started Craig at station number one. It’s a good place to start, which is a. It’s a very good place to start. And we’re here with Gina Jorash of Nexo. Gina, how’s it going?

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It’s going very well, thanks. So Gina and I could pretend I don’t know Gina and kind of interview her, but we do. But we go way back. We go way back. In fact, we spend a great deal of time sort of standing on the periphery of skateboarding children.

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And in fact, Nexo is truly. And broken collarbones, in fact. Oh, yeah. Well, it’s the territory, I think, right? In fact.

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Yes, that’s Gina’s kind way of putting it. Which is to say that I broke her son’s collarbone sort of indirectly. I didn’t personally break his collarbone, but it was broken in my presence. He’s fine now. He is.

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He healed amazingly quickly, which is more important physically. But every time he sees you, he bursts into tears. He’s scarred. But now, the thing about Nexo is this is, you know, we talk about the startup that starts in the garage. Well, I can say that this is a garage startup because above the skateboarding ramp that sits in the driveway is the Jorah Ash’s garage, where Gina and Craig, in fact, work on Nexo.

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So that’s kind of, you know, you’re really going to the heart of Silicon Valley, right? Yes. And Craig and Tom have been doing these startups since they were six years old. Seriously. They have been friends since kindergarten.

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Yes, they have. In Palo Alto. And they started stuff when they were in high school, and this is their third startup. That’s awesome. So I’m a relative newcomer to this relationship, knowing them for only 20 years.

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Right. You’re an outsider. This is sort of like in law school when my now wife had sort of been hanging out around my apartment, and my then roommate said, it’s either her or me. Yes. And she won.

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Yes. I moved in with her and he’s, you know, he’s moved on. So easy to live with. Oh, exactly. Precisely.

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Now I’m going to get in trouble. From my podcast, one of my very good friends, Pamela. So you guys have been. Yes. Let’s talk about Nexo.

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I’m too loud now I’ve gotten to. So. So one of, one of the things that I’m curious about, I’m going to ask a bunch of people I think is. So how’d you come up with Nexo? The name Nexo?

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Well, Nexus means the center of things. And we wanted to imply this is a place where people could congregate and meet and share. This can be the center of their lives. So we took Nexus and turned it into Nexo. Cool.

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Well, I’ll tell you this, it looks awesome on a license plate. It fits very nice, which actually I think is not a bad measure of a good name. Right. Well, it’s very hard to find four letter names that you can take on, you know, a Nexo.com, it’s very hard to find four letters that actually spell something that’s legible. Legible and also hard to mispronounce and hard to misspell.

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And we didn’t put a Q in there. Yeah, right. Don’t forget it’s with a Q. Xo, not any Q, U, O or something. Right, exactly, exactly. My partner Vecat’s company was Cobalt and he has the Cobalt license plate, which is great.

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I like, I like seeing those license plate. I pulled up behind a Guy with the LinkedIn license plate and it wasn’t my friend Reid Hoffman, who started the company, said, reid, you know whose car has LinkedIn? It was actually his co founder. So it made me feel better. Yes, we have a Nexo.com license plate.

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NEXO. Right. Nicely done. A few years ago in Whole Foods, I saw this big Mercedes pull up and license plate said next. A long time ago.

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No, it couldn’t be. Yeah, sure. And it was, it was whole food. So it’s not right. It was a black turtleneck with a black beret.

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Yes. Well, let’s talk about Nexo. I can say this. I have bumped into, into Mr. Jobs in that very Whole Foods in Palo Alto. He and his wife.

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And so that was exciting. I said nothing to him because he was shopping. So Nexo. So tell us about. We’re happy to hear about Nexo.

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Nexo’s for free and easy online groups. It’s sort of a Yahoo Groups meets MySpace. So taking the paradigm of groups being able to email each other, but also wanting a very personal, personalized, highly collaborative space on the Internet where they can share information, it allows you to sort of take the circles of trust that you have in your own life and put them on the, on the web and share information appropriately. So whether it’s a sports team for your kids, our kids baseball team, or whether it’s an event that you’re planning with a group of people, a work team that you’re working on, could be a board you’re on, could be sort of your family. So everybody’s a member of at least one like their family or 100 different groups.

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And right now they have to go to a lot of different places to communicate or collaborate with those groups. They might go to Flickr for the pictures and they have to define certain who’s going to see these pictures. They might go to MySpace for some things, they might go to E teams for sports teams. And what we’re trying to do is make it easy to put your groups online, define who you want to share with and then share anything, whether it’s videos or blogs or pictures or polls or files, et cetera. It’s the idea to bring in places where people store things externally.

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So if you have Flickr photos or you have video on YouTube or whatever, you can bring it, suck it all into the Nexo world. Yes. And in the demo you can see we’re sucking in pictures from Flickr. We have YouTube videos we link into. You know, we want to work with whatever people are really already comfortable with.

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So we have tons and tons of widgets that allow you to bring different kinds of media and other things into your Nexo world. So basically, Nexo is different from a lot of what’s out there in a number of ways. It’s highly secure in the sense that we have fine grained permissions that allow you to find many different kinds of users, what users can see or do, and define them at any level of Nexo. So whether it’s at their group or add a page or even add any particular piece of information you can share with the whole group except for one person, or limit it in any way you want. So we’ve taken that sort of idea of trust and made that a central part of Nexo.

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It’s also real time. So in that way it’s very different from say Yahoo groups. We can have multiple people, 10 people collaborating on a group and as one person is adding information, everybody else in the group can see, comment and respond immediately. And we have version control so you can see what’s going on. So it’s very dynamic, highly secure, and also very personalized.

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So you can make your sites look however you want them to look. So the updating is the Person doesn’t have to refresh the page. That’s right. There’s no refresh. Everything happens instantly.

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There you have it. We’ve got a lot of groups already using it today, so it’s kind of fun. We’ve just launched at demo and we’ve got a number of groups already using it for real. Real uses, whether it’s, you know, their nonprofits that they’re working on or teams. And so we feel really good about how it’s going.

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Our kids are. Our kids are doing a kid pitch this year and so hopefully the team will be on Nexo so we can have a better way to collect the photos and know where the team dinner is. All that. Will that all happen on Nexo? Snack parents.

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Exactly. Snackers, all that. Schedules. Who to call. The emergency rain hotline.

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The rain. The rainy field problem. Well, we could. Could you do an alert? Maybe just an RSS rain hot light alert?

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I mean, one of the things that Nexo does is this integration of the website and the email. So when you make alerts or changes to the website, you can push it out to the team so you don’t have to. It’s not just group emails, but you can have. They can respond with an email. So if we send out a poll or an alert, people can respond right from the email without having to go back to the website.

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So that’s another way we’re pretty different as well. So the website people know the website’s up to date because they’ve been responding via email. They see things in email and they know. They know when it’s up to date. So, yes.

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Very cool. All right, well, we’ll look forward to you. You’re on sometime tomorrow. We’ll be there. Thank you, David.

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Thank you. See ya.

[00:12:42]
So, Craig, this is Ellie Javarti. Ellie. Hi, everyone. Ellie’s with Recall, with a Q. With a Q.

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We call with a Q. So we were just over chatting with the folks from Nexo. So the Nexo founder’s son is friends with my son Noah. Ellie’s son friends with my son Julian. What are the odds?

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See, there you go. So, you know, it’s all in the family here. It’s actually this horrendous, incestuous Palo Alto thing. Yeah, it’s pretty bad here. I got.

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It’s pretty ugly. So about the name. All right. Yeah, so tell us. So actually, do you know that.

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Do you know the story where asking people how they came up with the name and so, well, the name actually describes the product. So the product is a voice activated system. You would dial into and speak your thoughts. It would basically, if you have an event or a task you want to remember, you’re in your car, you’ve got a whole thing. List of things that comes up, you would call into the system and then you would recall it.

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Thus the name recall. And it’s a way to help you remember your events and tasks, you, Your life. We’ve heard a lot of people talking about life blogging and how it could be a tool for that. But we started with the notion that the technology is something to help you actually organize your life. And it’s not just a voice note that you would call and listen to.

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It actually tags to an event and a date and eventually we’ll sync it up with your calendar. So you call right in, say, I’ve got an event on Monday at 6 o’, clock, get my dry cleaning. Boom, it goes right in. And will it get my dry cleaning for me? Yeah.

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Right. Well, you can recall. That’ll be recapture. Re. I don’t know.

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Quest. So we’re really into the queue. What? The queue thing. We were challenged by already taken names and URLs.

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So you said we go with the queue. We can only own the URL and then we can brand it as part the of. Part of the identity. And it’s catchy, I think, you know? Yeah.

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I mean, you know, the good news is you see a Q in a name not often. That’s true. And if. And if all goes well, it could become common parlance and help all of us Scrabble players. Yes.

[00:14:51]
Which would be nice. Just like TiVo recall. No, I understand. I mean, I appreciate that. And.

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And what I most appreciate about it’s not silent. Those silent letters I find the most troubling in names. It’s a tricky letter. It’s a silent Q. What would that be Real.

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That’s real. Which is real. Thank you for that translation. Is that right? Iranian money is the real.

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See, we learned something new every day. Wow, this is great. The groups in the brain have gotten deeper. All right, well, very cool. Well, we appreciate it.

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Now sign up for our beta. We’re in a limited beta now and it’s free. Free. And you can use it to remember things. So now I should mention, I should note that as we walked up here to check out Recall, we were here to check out Recall.

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We weren’t here as stargazers, we were here at Recall, but we were interrupted. Our demo and our conversation with Ellie was interrupted because Barry Bonds Was here. Literally, Barry Bonds, not an impersonator. Barry Bonds is here. He’s at demo and he’s checking out the products.

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How cool is that? Which is cool. And so you have something to do with this, I understand. Another company that is funded by the same VC firm is working with Barry to demo. Very interesting.

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So my question is, I can’t imagine how you get Barry here. It must be with equity. What do you think he owns in the company? I actually think it’s through friends and a network of people that know each other, just like us. There you go.

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Exactly. Well, you know what? If you want, say, my son Julian to appear in a demo, you let me know and I’ll bring him on. I think that would be fabulous because he’s so talented and so adorable. So.

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Yes. Well, thank you. See you. Fish for that. How good was that?

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You are just like, shameless. Shameless. All right, thanks. Well, have a fun day. This is.

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It’s good. Exciting. We’re off to a good start, don’t you think?

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So, Craig? We’re here with Bill Tighe. You know, the thing about Bill, Bill is now sort of, he’s investing in these web 2.0 things and all that. Only he actually understands real deep technology. Has invested in really interesting, hard to do technology in the past.

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Well, I mean, video, I guess, super hard. But that was very innovative. The Flash encoder in the browser was very innovative. It’s cool stuff. So, yeah, so Bill was an angel investor in video egg, which I then invested in, as you well know, because I constantly talk, but also sort of interesting, deeper stuff.

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But now. But the other thing we’ve talked a lot about on venturecast is your Quick Start program. Yeah. So, you know, Bill’s the guy and I mean, I assume that it was collective decision. But yeah, George and I on the west coast, you know, that Quick Start really happened because of the market forces that are pretty obvious in this space and the whole venture business as it exists today.

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And as it turned out, we had done four of the last five projects we had financed at that time had been done with seed bridges and when 80% of your run rate is being done with convertible bridges, because, you know, one, you find some compelling entrepreneurs with, you know, two, a really interesting idea, but no evidence yet that there’s a segment or a wave, but you’re interested in putting them to play, what else do you do? So we, we were willing to do that, and after a lot of projects like that were financed, we said, you know what, let’s Just formalize the program. So we announced it. No, it’s cool. I mean, it shook things up in a big way.

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So here’s a. I mean, I was in this debate, this sort of online debate about whether Web 2.0 was a bubble and all that stuff. And one of my, one of my arguments was that we’d learned our lesson and that it was less expensive to get these businesses started and you could learn a lot and then we would cut them off when it turns out that they didn’t bear fruit. And so I think you guys are going to have to see this in spades. Right. One of the reason VCs are reluctant to invest early in small amounts of money is because they often feel once they’ve invested in a company that they have to continue to support the company as it searches for its business model, searches for its technology, et cetera.

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And I don’t think that’ll work with this model. Right. I think this model is about here a group of things and they might work, let’s get in early, but presumably got to cut off a bunch of them that don’t work. So this is a, it is a philosophical argument. And so if you start at a very high level, the venture business is kind of two different businesses.

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Now, one which is based on, I’d say the, the pre existing for decades model of finding really disruptive technology that you apply to an existing revenue market. And these days when you go in, because the cost of development on stuff like that is still very high, you go in knowing it might be a five to seven year project and might take 50 to 100 million bucks. So you make a very, very calculated bet thinking that you understand the market dynamics and understand the foundational technology. Then there’s this other, other piece which we loosely call Web 2.0, which is, well, there is no technology. In a way, it’s not necessarily about having disruptive technology because it’s the application of existing technology with very little cost structure.

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And in that area, it’s really about getting to market fast, having a really good user interface and proving that your customers will use the product. So in that case, it very much is about putting something to play to see if it gets traction or not. And if it doesn’t, I think the entrepreneur is also today conditioned to know, one, you don’t raise a ton of money and just layer yourself a liquidation preference so that there’s no way you’ll ever make money if anyone gets sold for what you’ve done. And two, I think you expect you do Expect a higher fallout rate because it’s a very every wave in web 2.0 because competitive really fast. And I think the entrepreneurs are also really smart about that too and know that, you know, if you’re out there paddling on a surfboard and you paddle a little bit and you watch someone else get up and ride it, you don’t paddle to try to catch the wave.

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It’s a waste of time. Right. So they’re much better off just letting the wave go. Missed it. And you try again because there’s another wave coming.

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So the opportunity cost of staying with something forever and slogging away is just too much. So I think the cutting off of projects, it’s not a discipline we have to enforce upon people anymore in that space. They know the market does it itself. Really? Yeah.

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And you just back good people to ride. You know, if they miss a wave, you go for the next one. I think the interesting thing is you see this reemergence of all the deadpool. Oh. Which companies went out of business.

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And I think that you’re absolutely right and we need to not. I mean, we could talk about it. Right. Which ideas didn’t work because it’s valuable. On the other hand, I don’t think we should celebrate this as some indicator of the failings of the market or the failings of Web 2.0 as a business.

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Whatever. I think we should just view it as this is a natural piece of the evolution of Building Web 2.0 businesses. It is. Well, I think there are a couple of structural changes in the market that make Things in Web 1.0 or 15, whatever you want to call the old stuff, there were cost structure issues and really a lack of revenue opportunity compared to today. So you know, AdSense has changed everything.

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Right. So you get a little traction and you can not quite self fund. Well, maybe you can self fund depending on your traction. So today the opportunities afforded to things that we thought would never work after that first wave, they’re there. You know, you look at, I funded a browser company, you know which.

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The browser. You’re mad. Yes. The browser wars were over 10 years ago. What are you doing?

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You know, but, but I funded a little company that you may or may not have heard of called Maxthon. Okay, cool. 75 million downloads growing 100,000 a day. And they have never not been profitable. They were profitable the day they incorporated because people were sending money to the founder on donations.

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Wow. Yeah. And so the thing is just, it’s, it’s just rocketing, you know, I don’t know how long Firefox took to get to 200 odd million. Now though it’s probably five years. And these guys are, they’re growing about 3x faster which is just amazing.

[00:23:04]
No, that is amazing. And there’s no question, I mean the browser, owning the browser or having real estate, look how much effort, money and etc is going into getting your toolbar. Yeah, yeah, forget about the browser now you own the browser. That’s just an incredible position to be in. Right.

[00:23:17]
You should meet these guys, you know they would love meeting you. And they’re, they’re actually, it’s a, it was a three person company in China of all places whose business development was run out of Tel Aviv because the first original investor is Martin Lund who was the individual investor in Skype and he put a friend of his named Nat Jakobson who ran BD for ICQ into the role and he is a Swedish guy that married some Israeli gal and now he lives in Tel Aviv and now the company’s got seven people. But there’s 450 plugins now that have been developed by outsiders that just don’t want the distribution. So for your companies there’s a plugin for Technorati, there’s a plugin for. Are you in Bloglines or Digg?

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I’m a fan of both. Okay. But yeah, so there’s plugins for all that stuff and there’s a Facebook plugin coming and there’s another 400 and something odd. So check it out. I’ll put you in touch with the guy.

[00:24:11]
No, that’d be great. Very cool. Do you think also that turn back to the your program that the fact that there’s far less IPOs means that people really don’t necessarily aren’t trying to build as big a company and then your funding works out well for those smaller endeavors. Yeah, you know so I do tell when our investors into CRV ask me, you know, what’s the environment like? I say well, it’s a little bit like 19, 1998 without the exits.

[00:24:37]
Right, exactly. You know, the activity level is extraordinarily high. Sometimes the decision cycle is compressing to you know, 48 or 72 hours or less if it’s a quote hot deal. The one thing that is the saving grace is that we don’t have the pricing methodology that we had in 4Q98 to the beginning of 2000 which was, you know, deals that happening at 100 preference. And I think that is actually because the IPO market has not Been that robust.

[00:25:05]
So I actually like that. And I tell MLPs, you know, I would love the IPO window to be kind of closed for another five or six years and just pack another couple of funds and then uncork it all in about, you know, 10 years. Exactly. Yeah. Well, you know, and I’m sure you see this, right?

[00:25:20]
I’m watching my portfolio companies. The thing that they need to do is get to cash flow positive on an interestingly large business. And any business that can do that will have a good outcome in the long run. And for Charles river, for an August, it’s not about getting an outcome in two years. It’s about having a great outcome at some point where, you know, where the equity that we buy is worth a lot of money.

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So timing’s not the issue. Then. Great. Let’s have these companies, you know, march forward and build real interesting businesses. So I agree.

[00:25:48]
Sustainable businesses. Yeah, and I agree. I think the discipline that’s been put on these entrepreneurs, because they are a lot smarter. The entrepreneur of today is incredibly sophisticated compared to five, six, seven years ago when you had to explain to them why is a preferred share a preferred share compared to a common share. And what’s this 8%, you know, cumulative.

[00:26:09]
What? You know, and, and I think now they, they understand the notion of liquidation preference. Well, it’s, you know, that it’s all about Venture Blob. Yeah, there you go. And Venture Wire.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it’s true. No, it’s absolutely true. Right. I mean, there’s just a lot more information and people are way better informed and they appreciate the economics of, you know, little of this, more of that.

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And, you know, it, frankly, is allowing programs like our Quick Start to really work. Because I think if you told an entrepreneur five years ago, well, we’ll give you 250k, like, well, that’s a rounding error. You know, what can I do with that? You know, but. But now I think the interests are aligned because they might be thinking, I’ll take the 250k and maybe I’ll sell the business for 20 to 40 million and I’ll own most of it.

[00:26:55]
Exactly. So the Quick start part, it’s an allocation of an existing fund. Is that how you’re. Yeah, it’s not a separate fund. It’s just, it’s a way we are doing business in a certain subsector of the things we invest in.

[00:27:08]
Excellent. Very cool. Take care, you guys.

[00:27:14]
I said that we see each other everywhere. A little here in Paris. Oh, I know. We’ll do this one in English. How about that?

[00:27:20]
Right? Yeah, please. Exactly. You guys have to stop meeting this way. Yeah, right.

[00:27:23]
No, no, it’s true. So Alex and I were both at Le Web and Alex did the sort of splashcast demo. They had essentially a startup presenters. What did they call it? Startup Room.

[00:27:35]
Okay. They called it Startup Room. Oh, that’s clever. They called it the Startup Room. Anyway, and the impressive thing was Alex got up and did the beginning of it in French, which of course then left me completely without a clue what he was saying.

[00:27:45]
I felt so bad for all these people there. You know, they’re like trying to speak in English and, you know, French is such a conversational language. And like, you know, it’s Americans all about the show. You know, putting on the facts. Done.

[00:27:57]
So you’re telling me that speaking in French was not part of the show? All right, you guys know, you guys are fishing. Officially launching here. We actually launched yesterday. I saw that.

[00:28:07]
I saw that on TechCrunch last night. I was very impressed. Yeah, we’ve got a wonderful coverage. We’ve been in like 160 blogs and BusinessWeek has covered us and we’re very excited to be here. Now, venturecast.

[00:28:19]
And that right now you’re on venturecast. Yes, the Pinnacle. Yes, the Pinnacle. Okay, but so now what’s the. What’s the elevator pitch on spot?

[00:28:30]
And what you guys are, what’s the pain point that you’re solving all that business? Well, we’re essentially a mixed media syndication player. And so the front end, you have a player, but on the back end you have this console where you can mix any media into one show. And so you can take photos, images, video, text, you can do searches across YouTube or Flickr, you can create an RSS show, you can place them in this editor, you can change the order if you wish, you post it to a player and then put it on your website. The beautiful thing is that, for instance, if, like I wanted to get a video off of YouTube, I can take the embed tag and place it into my blog.

[00:29:08]
Well, you have to do that for every different video that you see. Splashcast is a player that. Where you can put all those different shows into one player itself and those can be part of different channels. And that’s with the syndication comes in so custom channels that the user creates, right? And then people then can subscribe to those channels and place them inside their player.

[00:29:29]
And so the player is a beautiful, rich experience. It’s skinless. And so people can brand it as they wish. They can create their own shows. But even beyond that is the real, I think, the sophistication of that technology and the new ways to syndicate.

[00:29:44]
So in some ways you’re much more about a publishing platform, a media publishing platform, than you are about this player experience. The player is, as I understand it, just a flash window that has nothing around it. The flash experience is what the media you push to it. And that the real secret sauce is the stuff in the back where you get to program channels or allow this cross syndication or those sorts of things. Right.

[00:30:09]
And so that console, I mean, thinking of it, it’s like, you know, you had the traditional networks where in New York at Rockefeller center, you know, people are doing the programming. So like this show appears at 12 o’, clock, right? Well, here in the player network, you’re back, you’re in the console and you can change the channels. So this shows appearing on this player on this side or another show’s appearing on another side in a player. And so it allows you to kind of really broad end people themselves, then continue take those channels and do the same thing.

[00:30:43]
Yeah. And so really I think the beauty is in that console environment. So sharing the channel, it’s a lightweight little thing you send to somebody in an email. Is it a link? You can send it in an email.

[00:30:53]
Email is one way to do it. You can send them a link to it. For instance, you can subscribe from someone’s blog. So you’re experiencing the channel on someone else’s blog or someone else’s page in a social network and you go, wow, this is really great content. Boom, click.

[00:31:06]
You subscribe. Now you can. Now not only can you watch it elsewhere, but you can then put it in your own. You could put it in your MySpace page, you can put it in your blog. And what’s wonderful about it is I think it comes from our E learning background where it’s really simple to do.

[00:31:22]
These guys have like really had to develop. They’ve developed products in the past where they’re developing a product that people can like create shows very easily for learning capabilities. Really see that in the product. It’s very simple, very intuitive. So it’s great for the beginner user, but it’s also very effective for the power user.

[00:31:38]
For instance, for a podcaster, can put like an mp3 file as background music, put images on top of that. Now they have a player where it’s not just, you know, just a little bar going across the webpage, but you have something that you can see, see, that’s what we need, we need the Venture cast slideshow of us, you know, making face like, ooh, ah. And they’d fly ashes, you know. Wow. You know that.

[00:32:01]
Wouldn’t that be good? That’s a great idea. Yeah, right, that be good. Your face all over the place. We’re going to get right on that.

[00:32:06]
We’ll help you right out with that. All right, well, we appreciate it. Thanks. Congrats, congrats on the launch. Thank you.

[00:32:11]
We’ll check it out. Good to see you. All right, cool.

[00:32:18]
So can you come over and do my people? Oh, listen, so this is. So we’re. See, I’m standing here. Hey, we’re here.

[00:32:23]
I don’t know. Craig, have you met Renee Blodget before? Correct. So we’re standing here with Renee. Renee is, if not the hardest working PR person on the planet among them and she’s trying to work us.

[00:32:34]
Yes, I feel worked. I know I’m sitting here talking to you guys and actually really want you to be talking to my client. Well, see that she’s doing her job. So you’ve just. So for those of you who haven’t been to demo or haven’t been to a demo like experience, but particularly demo, don’t really appreciate what it is that Renee is here to do.

[00:32:53]
And the, and the other people who, the lesser Renee’s who are running around, there’s a lot of media here and there are lots of interesting companies and Renee is trying to make sure that her company, SalesWorks, gets as much attention as possible. Right, that’s your correct. And so what does that entail? Like what do you. Does that just.

[00:33:12]
Is it sort of dragging me by the ear or do you do. Or is there more sort of in advance of this thing that you’re doing to make that happen? Are you asking for a bribe? No, I’m not. I’m not asking for any.

[00:33:22]
I’m not. It’s not about that. I’m just trying to understand like this is, this is a big piece of the demo ecosystem. Is the pr, the PR machine trying to make sure that these young startups get a bunch of attention. So what, what does that entail?

[00:33:35]
Well, I think, you know, there’s a lot that you need to do on the ground. But for example, if you don’t do your prep work up front, you’re really not going to be successful at demo. So I do a lot of outreach to venture capitalists in advance to press, to bloggers, to industry analysts. We work a lot with our messaging and positioning and get the CEO on track. And I even get to tell the CEO what to wear on stage.

[00:33:58]
It’s a great. So you’re for the CEOs. You’re the equivalent of Pamela for me. My wife instructs me what to wear. You instruct them what to wear.

[00:34:07]
It’s all good. And I instruct which venture capitalist to go their way. For example, David. Interesting, Interesting. So now, so much for my bribe, right?

[00:34:16]
The press, right? It’s the new pr. So, yeah. So you’re. So you’re emailing folks in advance.

[00:34:21]
You’re kind of giving them a ring. Hey, you should really check out, you know, sales works is cool, interesting stuff when you’re at demo. Check it out. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, things hit for us on the day of before, before the CEO was even on stage.

[00:34:34]
So we had meetings lined up in advance. We were talking to analysts in advance. So a lot of it is in the preparation and on site, pulling all the right people, such as yourself and, you know, the appropriate media and bloggers that make sense for them. There’s a lot of sauce. And a lot of the blogs, they go for hardware and gadgets and so forth.

[00:34:54]
You know, what I have here is a much more useful tool for the small office. Right. So it’s a little bit of a harder sell. Easier sell for the VCs, harder sell for the. The press.

[00:35:02]
Yeah. Well, I. I get it. Have no fear. Thank you, Renee. I appreciate it.

[00:35:08]
Be think, be round.

[00:35:16]
We’re good. We’re good. So we’re here. So Steve Rosenbaum is here from magnify.net. hey, how are you?

[00:35:22]
So Steve and I, I guess we bumped into each other at the TED conference last year. A couple years ago, every gear or. I think Lisa sicked me on you as a text. Ah, that makes perfect sense. The lovely Lisa Gansky, I imagine.

[00:35:35]
So you’re here launching Magnify. That’s correct. And one of the things that Craig and I have been chatting with folks about is how they came to the name. And so this is a great question for you in the sense of, okay, talk about the name, but also talk about the fact that you’re magnify.net and how you think that’s going to. Does that matter anymore?

[00:35:51]
I mean, I look at it like the TiVo ification of television has made the actual time slot and channel not really matter. I’m wondering if.com matters anymore. And how did you get to the name? And what do you think? So no one’s ever asked me that.

[00:36:04]
And we thought about the name A lot. And it went through four different iterations before we got to where we are. So originally, it started as magnifymedia.com because we thought alliteration was cool. And then we realized people didn’t want to type that many letters and they had spelling errors. So we’re struggling with.

[00:36:20]
All right, well, the company’s about finding small things that are special and making them big. So lens. And, you know, we thought about a lens idea, but Squidoo kind of beating us to the punch on these lens models. So we really liked magnification as kind of the ethos of what we do. And then it was like, okay, can we get magnify.com?

[00:36:38]
no, it’s taken by a company that’s not really using it. But secondly, we really aren’t a destination. I mean, we’re not a place people go to find video. We power sites. So we really think that.

[00:36:48]
Net is what we are. We’re a network of magnified sites, and we think that’s the right story. And the way you can test the name is you start kind of taking it out. It’s like a dog, right? You walk it and you see how it feels.

[00:37:00]
And the more that we’ve taken magnify.net out and walked it around, the more it feels like us. So I don’t think you’re going to see us changing names anytime soon. You’re not going to add a Q to the name? No Q, no Z, O. I will say we did briefly consider. We had the dibs on M, A, G, N, I, F, I from Finland.

[00:37:22]
Oh, my. Which we thought was like, ooh, that’s kind of hip and cool. Very delicious. Y. Very delicacy.

[00:37:27]
And then we went, we’re not that hip and cool. We just can’t do it, I don’t think. And you were smart, too. Finland. And you had to pay in Finnish dollars.

[00:37:35]
And it was very complicated. Well, the other thing is. And I love Joshua and I love Delicious, but even Delicious came to the realization that they needed to own delicious dot com. You know, they bought it as well. So it is challenging when you have randomly placed dots that are hard to describe.

[00:37:50]
And maybe if we could come up with, like, you know, like these African languages that include clicks. If we could come up with a language that included, you know, like, Meg Fi, then you would, then at least we’d know when you speak it. Right? I’m spelling. I have, like, a spelling deficiency, so I still can’t quite spell Flickr.

[00:38:05]
Right. I still end up in the Google Toolbar going flicker like, find it for me. Oh, no, me too. Absolutely. I can’t spell anything.

[00:38:13]
So Magnify people can spell. That’s a good thing. And I think it tells people what we do. And it looks really good on a T shirt. Hey, I think that’s important.

[00:38:21]
In fact, when can I get one? It’s on the way. We’re shipping it today. Names and T shirts tell us what Magnifynet does. I love the T shirts.

[00:38:28]
I’m all about the T shirts. So Magnify allows individuals and websites to gather videos from across the web and organize them around contextual storylines. So, for example, if you have a fishing site or a sailing site or a rock climbing site and you want to add videos, where do you get them from? Well, Magnify goes and searches YouTube, Revver, Blip, Google, and soon AOL and soon everybody, and basically brings those videos back and organizes it for your site. And it’s plug and play, simple and fun, and it’s free.

[00:38:56]
So then it comes to my site, and then I have a way to modify. I don’t want this one. I do want this one and sort of create my own world, as it were. Pick your metaphor. Either you’re the network producer or you’re a curator, which seems to be kind of what it is.

[00:39:07]
But it’s. These are the videos. We don’t believe that there’s such a thing as a good video or a bad video. We believe it’s all about context. So, for example, if you said to me, here’s two videos about nascar, show me the good one.

[00:39:19]
I don’t like nascar. They both are the same to me. Well, for NASCAR fans, and I have friends who are passionate NASCAR fans, it’s really obvious that difference between good ones and bad ones. So within the NASCAR context, good and bad videos are defined, and that’s how Magnify operates. And then each user, when you create these groupings, do you have each user has a website for that particular group, or is there a link to it on your website?

[00:39:41]
How does it work in terms of communicating that link? So we really think of ourselves as the daughter page behind people’s homepages or video pages. So we’re really not interested in being a guidebook or a navigation system solution. Although you can find sites through magnify.net, that’s really not our mission. Really.

[00:39:58]
It’s looking at every website and knowing that two years from now, are you going to be the guy with a website about lawn and garden that has no videos on it, probably not. So well, how do you get them and how do you organize them? And we think that peer review is kind of critical to video sorting. So that’s really what we’re doing. Good stuff.

[00:40:15]
Well, thanks for coming by. No, it’s good. So it was great to get to see. Build a Magnify Channel. Build the Dave Hornick Magnify Channel.

[00:40:22]
Put it out there. Because if you don’t build it, someone else will and they’ll choose all the worst angles. By the way, there are worse ones. This is an interesting question, though. This issue of who gets to curate videos about you or me.

[00:40:34]
We’re in some new territory here. So there could be the Friends of Dave Hornick channel, and there can be the bad angles. Dave Hornick. So actually, in my intellectual property class that I teach over at Stanford, every year we have the General Counsel from GoDaddy come and speak and she talks about, you know, the how URLs work, et cetera, et cetera. But one of the things she starts with is, do you own davidhornicksucks.com and if you don’t, you better get it.

[00:40:57]
Because if you don’t get davidhornicksucks.com well, then someone’s going to get it. Which is why I bought craigseversonsucks.com. hey, you’re the one. Yeah, well, I bought David Hornick is a really loud guy. Dot com.

[00:41:10]
Yeah, well, that’s a lot of letters. I have. I have that dot org.

[00:41:16]
It’s a rat hole. You can just keep going. I got to be careful. All right, cool. Thank you.

[00:41:20]
Talk to you soon. Talk to you soon. Thanks. Meeting you. Likewise.

[00:41:26]
Right. Exactly. Exactly. So how can I help you guys? We want.

[00:41:30]
We’d like to interview you, if you don’t mind. Okay, good. Well, it’s not an inter. I don’t think this is an interview, Craig. It’s a podcast.

[00:41:36]
It’s not really. Yeah, right, exactly. It’s a. It’s a. It’s an interchallenging and provocative.

[00:41:42]
It’s an intervention. Oh, excuse me. We’re here with Andy Halliday of our story and, you know, we’re just wandering around. Well, well, ordinary. We’ve actually been asking people about the name of their company, but yours is a little more obvious than some of the others.

[00:41:56]
But maybe, but you could talk about it because maybe it’ll give the context of what you guys are working on. Yeah, well, we originally thought of a wide range of names and a lot of people wanted it to be my story. Because you’re talking about yourself. But that really missed the point, which is this is really about collaboration and connection with your family and friends. Community.

[00:42:15]
And so bringing the collective into it led us naturally to our. And we were really amazed that we could get our story as a name. It happened through a really interesting connection. Person who I had actually worked with before owned it, but I didn’t know that I actually made a bid on it. And he calls him, hey, I know you.

[00:42:34]
And then it was a very friendly kind of thing. So we’re really lucky to have. It’s a million dollar name. Exactly. That you paid less for.

[00:42:40]
That’s right. We didn’t. Oh, good. And you didn’t have to spell it funny. That’s right.

[00:42:43]
Yeah, that’s right. Yes. Right. Our story, core story. Oh, you know, poor recall.

[00:42:51]
We’ve been just. We’ve just been trashing them all day. Well, It’s a web 2.0 thing. We got to trash them. It’s.

[00:42:56]
Look, recall. It’s not about you. Really. It isn’t. It’s not about you.

[00:42:59]
We like what you’re doing. Oh, yeah, we do. It’s just the Q thing. It’s not. Yeah, it’s not that.

[00:43:05]
So you guys are a stand up comedy, routine comedy venture, we call it. Yeah. Right. By the end of the day, the thing about demo is it is a long day. The demo thing, it’s not like, you know, a little light content here.

[00:43:18]
Go have a snack. You know, the typical conference is, okay, we’ll have a bad panel, but then we’ll give you a networking and snack break for two hours. And then another panel here. It’s okay. Here are 14 demos, new companies, then a stretch break, and then, you know, six more or whatever.

[00:43:36]
One other aspect of our story is that people are sharing authentic personal life experiences. And what immediately happens in other people’s experience and mind is, oh, I connect with that. I understand that. And so it really is transitively our story. Right.

[00:43:54]
Because there’s not that many things that happen. I mean, you can find some unique experiences in the world, but it’s happened before. The human condition is pretty universal. And so it really is an exposition of everything that happens to everybody on the planet. And capturing those essential moments and memories and sharing them publicly has turned out to be a really dynamic and connecting way of communicating on the net.

[00:44:17]
So you and I met some time ago when you were just getting started. And so I’ve had the good fortune of being able to see the stuff you’re posting. And my sense of it. One of the coolest things, maybe it’s the coolest thing is this going back and finding the old photos, taking you actually back to the past to look back. I think that’s not only is it cool to see the photo, but it sort of triggers a whole bunch of thinking about the history in the past.

[00:44:40]
So have you found that people are doing that or are they at least getting motivated to find some of their old media and get it on there? Absolutely. And in fact, a couple of examples I’ve done here in my own family, I think are representative of what others are doing. And I’m going to encourage that people take a succession of photos from their very earliest picture all the way to the present and chrono sequence them so that you can actually see the facial progression over time. And that’s actually playing in the background here.

[00:45:06]
You see, that’s me. This is around 1970. Mustache. Got the mustache. It’ll keep going.

[00:45:13]
Here you are skiing. More facial hair and significant beard. Oh, yeah. Now we’re up to 1981. Large hats, apparently the graduation gown.

[00:45:25]
That’s right, the fedora. And I get progressively more bald. And then, and then as the. As the hair had grown over time. You know what it is?

[00:45:34]
It’s really. It’s sort of a bell curve of hair that you’ve. You’ve established here. The life progression plays out in the photos just as it does in the perspectives that you share. And shall we say, you’re in the long tail of hairness at this point.

[00:45:47]
That’s sort of. That’s right. Now we’re back to the beginning. Well, it is pretty excellent. I mean, I. I just happened upon some old hard drives where I’d pulled together where I’d stored pictures from.

[00:45:57]
From the past. And it was just nice to look. And, you know, this isn’t a long past. I mean, this is looking at my seven year old when she was six months old. Right.

[00:46:05]
So on the other hand, it was incredibly fun and to watch and the kids get them to go back and look at it. But the interesting thing, I think, you know, I used to work with Ofoto and Ofoto. You could send your film and they would, you know, process it and then whatever. But what I. What I’m wondering is maybe there’s a way for you to hook up with a service or engage a service whereby you could send your photos and have them digitized and put up in a way that might encourage some of that.

[00:46:29]
Because I still think that there aren’t really. There aren’t scanners. I mean, if even I don’t have a scanner in my house, the scanner thing is not. I mean, I have every other gadget. Yeah, actually I have a beautiful Canon Pixma scanner.

[00:46:41]
It’s the top rated one to put a little plug in for them. It’s so easy to use and this is how these pictures got in there. It’s very cool. So how, how’d you think it went on the stage? First of all, I’m just relieved to be on the other side of the, of the nervousness of that presentation because it, it, you know, concentrates all the risk and reward of presenting in front of such an august audience into six minutes and you really can’t mess it up either on the technical demonstration or on your presentation verbally.

[00:47:09]
So hopefully I came across and got the word. I think it went very well. I thought it was nice. A good one. Craig.

[00:47:16]
Craig likes everyone but me. That’s not true. He continue up there. Oh, all right. Maybe when I demonstrate up there.

[00:47:22]
As long as you don’t sing, I think it’d be great. No, no, it was great. And I mean, I think that, I think it is brutal. I mean, I think it’s. On the one hand it’s a brutal format.

[00:47:30]
On the other hand it’s really entertaining and it encapsulates what lots of people are doing in a short period of time. And so it’s good, I mean, certainly great for me to get a lay of the land. So. Excellent. And then being a venture capital show, where is your company in terms of how you’re in the money thing?

[00:47:48]
Yeah. So we, we got a Series A at the beginning of 2006, 6.3 million from Eric Benamu, Benimu Global Ventures, Venrock and El Dorado. And we’re going to raise a Series B in the summer. So so far it’s been a positive experience to be a venture capital supported company. Yeah, when I started the company company I wanted to do a textbook VC funded startup.

[00:48:10]
I wanted to do it by the book and do it the right way. And you know, there’s a lot of people out there doing it the scrappy way and trying to avoid venture capital. It’s just not my, my view of how it would be done if you’re going to create a world class service. I’m really proud of our investors and I really enjoy working with them and I’m looking forward to bringing on some new ones. Very briefly, what’s the difference between the scrappy way and the way that you did it, do you think?

[00:48:31]
Yeah. So you, there are small startups with the new environment, you can get by on a very small amount of money. Don’t take any salary, do everything outsourced, as much as you can and you can get by on even with a company building a pretty nice web service for 50,000amonth. Our burn’s a little bit higher than that. Obviously we have 15 people on the payroll and we’re doing a world class execution here.

[00:48:56]
So to do that, unless you know you’re deep pocketed and I’m not personally, you’ve got to go to VCs and thank goodness.

[00:49:07]
Look, it’s absolutely the case that there are circumstances where the venture money will help accelerate and help you grow your business. And the fact that there are people who are in a position where that, like yourself will say this is the right way to grow a business is why we exist on Sandhill. It’s why we’re sitting around. It’s called risk capital. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.

[00:49:27]
But you know you can build the company in the best way you see fit and that’s a win win. And the other thing I’ll say about this one is this particular venture for me is not about me finalizing my professional career. It’s really about implementing on a passion that I’ve had in my personal life and it’s an execution that takes advantage of all my professional preparation. So it really is the culmination of my career. But I didn’t go after it with a sense of greed.

[00:49:54]
I believe that this is something that has to be done and done well and I want to have the best resources to support that. Excellent. Great. Well, good use of Series A in my opinion. Good luck on your B route.

[00:50:05]
Pleasure seeing you, Jim. Good to see you.

[00:50:10]
We’re here with Roy now. It’s a Bling media but this Bling software. But you’re showing the Bling player, the Bling player here. Yes. And you just.

[00:50:18]
We’ll start, just start right in with the fact that earlier I took a photo which I placed on my blog saying what is Barry Bonds doing, doing here at demo? And we discovered. So tell us about that. Sure, sure. We’re very, very excited about having Barry join us at demo.

[00:50:35]
We started working with Barry when Barry and his lead web designer wanted to go mobile. The breakthrough that we, what we’ve done is created a client that is small enough yet robust enough to do all the kinds of cool things you see on a website. Now you can do on the mobile Handset, and that is the Blink player. So what do you need? What’s it running on?

[00:50:57]
On the cell phone? On the cell phone, it’s a AJAX client we call the Blink Player. And for the technical types that listen, this is a JavaScript interpreter. Okay. It’s JavaScript.

[00:51:09]
Now JavaScript is the, the lingua franca of the World Wide Web. Millions of web developers and everyone does logic and web pages on desktop web pages. With JavaScript, no one’s been able to figure out how to go, how to make a general purpose, fully extensible client that renders JavaScript with stunning visuals and data rich kinds of things. And that’s the breakthrough that we’ve come up with, the AJAX client for the mobile handset. Very cool.

[00:51:34]
So like, you had Barry come up because you were showing his Barry Bond site and you pulled together sort of quickly this JavaScript widget that’s going to go on the cell phone that showed the Barry Bond’s home run count. Yes. And now is it a dynamic experience? So when he hits another one, it changes on the website. Boom.

[00:51:50]
It pings your cell phone. The client that we have interacts with a web server without any kind of special server plugins. So once Barry’s web designer loads up a new blog entry in his website and once that video gets posted on barrybonds.com we stream it right down to our client, just like all the desktop browsers stream it to their browser. So. Good question.

[00:52:13]
And once that’s held on the web, it’s now activated for the mobile handset, if you will. So is Barry a techie? Does he get this stuff or is he. I mean, he clearly is an incredibly good marketing guy, but is he a techie? He’s a great marketing guy.

[00:52:26]
He’s probably not as techie as our engineers to figure it out how to bake this into a small footprint, but. Yeah, but I bet you they can’t play baseball either. They can’t hit, they can’t hit a 90 mile an hour fastball. You’re right. You know, I, I can’t either, actually.

[00:52:42]
I’m shocked. But okay. Well, that’s cool. Well, I appreciate it. Well, thank you.

[00:52:46]
You’re very good. Thank you. Thanks. Good to meet you.

[00:52:51]
We’re here with Jim Lanahan, founder of Vuvox, who just did an amazing demo and I’m really into this product, so I had to stop by and say, so, hey, how you doing? Very good, thank you very much. And I really appreciate the enthusiasm. We heard clapping that was going on out there. So that was very exciting.

[00:53:05]
Yeah. So give our non viewable audience the rundown on what you guys are doing. Well, we set up shop about a year ago and very smart, talented team from Macromedia, Microsoft, Yahoo and I was from Apple originally, among other places. And we looked to see how we could really go to the next level on personal expression, how we could raise the bar for what people can do with their photographs, their videos and their music. And we think that the market right now is kind of to some degree a little bit left in the 20th century.

[00:53:34]
They have a lot of passive slideshows and passive video watching and we just think the world can be much more immersive and dynamic. And so what we’ve done is we’ve built a platform to allow for anyone, but we’re really kind of targeting the 14 to about 30 year old crowd to be able to very quickly find their media, bring it into our system. We then make what I would call a suggestion of a grouping of media to help them start to tell a story and then we ultimately give them into our create module, the same media. And then that media can then be put into a number of different interactives, what we call styles, which have really high level personalization and can be tailored to just about anything 14 to 30. I just missed the demographic.

[00:54:17]
Yeah, just by a hair, by a nose. I can’t use the product either actually. That’s right. We’ll let you use it though. We’ll get a special pass.

[00:54:25]
Okay. We’ll get dispensation. So sort of I saw this mash up idea of really quick ability to take photos and videos, create a show or create a piece and then distribute it out there. And it’s all web based, is that right? Yeah, absolutely.

[00:54:38]
Good point. So we’re basically based in a browser. It’s all Flash based, so it’s portable and anybody can use it that has availability of Flash and lightweight. So we’re looking at scalability. It can scale really easily for us as a company, so we can move it around.

[00:54:51]
It’s very portable and the key thing is to make sure that there’s nothing in the way of what the user wants to do. Whether it’s the browser base is the first step and then the actual application continues that process. Very easy. So the blow away moment for me in your presentation was when you took a picture that had a set of images but included sort of a poster on a wall. You said, hey, marked out here’s the location of the poster on the wall and said in this location I Want to project other things and then had a slideshow then that was playing, or maybe you could play movies, whatever.

[00:55:22]
But I’ll tell you, that was definitely the kind of, you know, apex like, wow, that, ooh, ah, that was, that was an aha moment for us, you know, it really was. Dane Howard, who’s our chief experience officer, has a lot of experience in creation. Well, I should hope he’s the chief experience officer. He’s got a lot of experience and we all had experience using Photoshop and Illustrator and things like that, which are great programs for high end authors to do really great work. But it takes a long time to do things.

[00:55:50]
So we’re really looking at how we can simplify the process as far as the workflow goes and to make it just seamless, make it easy as possible. What, okay, kids really want to do, what do any of us really want to do? We want to cut a hole out and we want all our media to go into that hole. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do. I think the other point there is that any photograph can become really like the starting point for an entire environment.

[00:56:11]
And that’s really important because it means that anyone can take a picture of their world, their environment, their landscape, and then ultimately bring that into our system and then be able to start to create what I would call a true media portal out of that. Well, and the other cool thing is that particularly for this demographic you’re talking about, they have things that they relate to. Okay, you know, here’s my favorite skateboarder or my favorite band or whatever. And here’s the ability to draw in your stuff, the stuff that’s close to you and associate with these individuals or experiences that they gain some kind of reputation from or whatever. And so that’s pretty cool the way you can bring those together.

[00:56:46]
I appreciate that. Well, okay, you’re talking D demographic, right? I know that’s what everyone wants for business. They want the demographic. But I like demographic schmemographic.

[00:56:54]
This is a psychographic. I like this thing. Yeah, well, you are a psycho. Very funny. I set you up for that.

[00:57:00]
But I mean, I don’t see it as a thing for kids. I, I think it’s gorgeous. Now David calls me a design whore. And you know, maybe, maybe I’m not being rational here, but the interaction on this side, the design is stunning. It’s truly stunning for Alpha product.

[00:57:15]
Wow. Well, I think we agree it is for everybody. As I said, I’ll be using it myself. I started out as a photographer in College, literally. So I love it that way.

[00:57:25]
But what I like about our demographic is I know where they are and I know who they are and I can get to them and I think that they’re going to be pretty excited. We’ve done a lot of user testing obviously in the last few months and the kids response to this is just like holy smokes, when do I get this? And I want to take it to wherever I live, meaning they want to take it to their MySpace page or their Facebook or whatever. And that’s perfect. We want to be in the middle of all that.

[00:57:49]
We want to be known really as the creation station, if you will, an engine for that. And then that’s super for us. So speaking of when and where, when is it up and where can they find it and spell it for us? We’ll be releasing in the next month and very close to doing it here. But we want to get a couple more things in and we kind of raise the bar and so you can look for it in the next month.

[00:58:10]
What’s the web address again? It’s viewvox.comv u v o x dot com. Thanks, Jim. Thank you.

[00:58:23]
I’m here with Paul Martino from Aggregate Knowledge. We, we are here with Paul who is giving me a hard time about being inappropriately unvc. Like I wasn’t giving you a hard time. I was just saying it might be difficult to get another job. Okay.

[00:58:37]
In the venture world, right? In the venture world, what else? But I hear Furriers hiring. Oh great. Oh good, you’re gonna send me over to PodTech in the stand up world maybe.

[00:58:46]
Or maybe it’s a sit down world. At your age, what do you think? I mean, is podtech our competition or. No, there’s no competition here, man. We’re all building an industry together.

[00:58:56]
All right. Don’t you loving all of the demo things. It says competitors and I’m like, look, I’m going to list some competitors because everyone else says no direct competitors. I’m like, come on guys, you could be with somebody. Right?

[00:59:06]
Exactly. Somebody’s out there competing with you. Plus one of the favorite things that VC say about competitors. Oh well, you know, you, if you have competitors, that validates the market, right? That’s what we say.

[00:59:16]
Which is basically our way of saying, well we can’t, you know, crap, we have competitors now. But that’s good. It’s all good. It’s all right with it as long as they’re not too good at what they do. Yeah, right.

[00:59:25]
They, there’s nothing Better than incompetent competitors that spend a lot of money building the market. Right? That’s good. Right? So do you have any of those?

[00:59:36]
No, not really. I mean, we’re in a spot where our competitors are in different genres. So people nip at us from one side. An omniture who does analytics nips at us from one side, and a choice stream who does media recommendations snips at us from another side. And a commerce platform guy like a Mercada snips on us from the other side.

[00:59:57]
So we can’t sit there and go, oh great, that guy’s marketing message is really helping us out because none of those guys are really doing what we’re doing, which is what we call discovery. And we’re hoping that we really can get people to understand discovery is the thing that’s not search. When you don’t know what the thing is you’re looking for and you kind of want to serendipitously bump into it. That’s what we’re about. Right?

[01:00:17]
And the reason you’re called aggregate knowledge is that it’s the wisdom of the masses. Like, oh gee, since we know something about you, we can then intuit from it the other sorts of things that you might find interesting. Is that right? Right. And importantly, if we know nothing about you, we can take the context of how you landed there and where you are to help you.

[01:00:36]
So our service works for an anonymous user on the first page view. Very important. Because if you go to a major newspaper or a record label, their whole problem is one and done. If they had a second click, they wouldn’t need us. Right.

[01:00:48]
So you better work for the anonymous guy on the first page view. Gotcha. So the big pain that you’re solving is people show up and they’re delivered the wrong content and they say, huh, what do I care? And they leave. So this is your.

[01:01:02]
You get one shot at them and you’re going to make it more likely that they get stuff that’s interesting and valuable to them in that instance. That’s right. Think about the math right now. You spend all the time, this money to acquire the click in. And no one’s spending any money making that click actually convert.

[01:01:14]
And one of my predictions, when I’m on panels, I say this. I say things like, look, all this money goes, spending the 40 cent to get the click in. How much of that $0.40 are you going to spend to keep the click? Is it worth another 2 cents, an incremental click on your own site or something? Because the Math is kind of pretty clear.

[01:01:31]
I spent 40 cents to get them in. Maybe I’ll spend another dime to keep them. And I think there’s going to be a whole market in kind of engagement optimization after search engine optimization. And we think we’re going to be right at the beginning of that market. And what product are we talking about in all this?

[01:01:46]
What’s the name of the product that does this? Do you have a product name or is it just aggregate knowledge is the name of the overall service. We call it discovery. So the product is discovery for retail and discovery for media. Gotcha.

[01:01:57]
So collective discovery is another phrase we use to describe the fact that all the data we have goes in the same pot. So overstock, product data goes in the same pot as Washington Post news. And by taking a look at the mass behavior patterns on each site individually and then collectively, we actually end up getting better behavior patterns for both participants in the network. Yeah. So do you think that in some ways StumbleUpon is in a related space to you?

[01:02:20]
I mean. Yeah, no. Stumbleupon certainly is in the serendipitous discovery space. And the real difference between us and that and first round capitals in both of our companies, they’re going with the direct to consumer play. And I’ll give you a piece of data about why we elected not to go direct to consumer.

[01:02:36]
In our first month of operation, when we were at scale, we had 29 million uniques. See our box? Our first month of scale. So, yes, you can go acquire customers or you can go, hey, overstock, why don’t you put me on your site and I’ll do it for you. I’m going to get.

[01:02:53]
So my learning curve is way shorter than the direct to consumer guys. And that’s why we’ve done our business the way we have. Gotcha. You get big distribution and then you can learn a lot more by virtue of having millions of consumers interface with the system in a short period of time. That’s right.

[01:03:08]
And that’s what Stevens said to you, Mark Stevens, our attorney, when you interviewed him, he said he called it Web 2.1 and he was actually in that way referring a bit to us, which is the Web 2.0 companies that are B2, B2C as opposed to the direct B2C plays make money right away. And that’s really one of the things we’re excited about. You know, we were able to sign commercial deals for more money than we had spent in the lifetime of the company. Well, you know, as a venture capitalist, I like that it’s crazy. You know what I don’t like is when you spend a lot more money than you can get in contracts, that’s less appealing than the alternative.

[01:03:45]
That’s very valuable. See, and this is. Yeah, it’s this kind of financial savviness. Yes. That keeps people coming back.

[01:03:51]
Right. That people come coming to me saying, hey, David, give us some venture capital insight. Sometimes it’s buy low, sell high, but other times. Exactly. We’ve already given that one away.

[01:04:01]
We give that one away for free. Yeah. Anyway. Well, very cool. It’s good stuff.

[01:04:05]
Thank you, David. I appreciate it, Craig. It was nice to see you again as well. Thank you. Thank you.

[01:04:12]
We were putting this whole curriculum together and we needed a musical instrument for the kids to play with. And we had found a piece of software and it would turn the QWERTY keyboard into a musical instrument, a MIDI instrument. And I was playing around with it one day and I said, you know, God, wouldn’t this be great if we could connect the kids, connect people with this kind of computer to computer and let them play in real time over the Internet, not knowing how hard it was, how difficult it was. A company called Res Rocket, then Rocket Networks had tried to do it. In fact, Paul Allen had invested a lot of money with a lot of other investors to do this.

[01:04:49]
And they weren’t able to really crack it back. To be fair to them, it was time when the, you know, it was 56k, 56k worldwide wait time, if you remember back to those days. That’s prehistory, folks, for those of you who don’t remember that part. But here’s an example. Downloading.

[01:05:06]
Downloading. Still waiting. Still waiting. Waiting, waiting. This is the modem speaking.

[01:05:11]
One, zero. What? Zero. What? Exactly.

[01:05:15]
Remember those old modem sounds? Anyway, so we not knowing, again, we couldn’t do something. We were introduced to a real, really brilliant guy named Bill Redman who had done a lot of networking projects. He built the first hardwired computer system, game system for Tim Disney at Virtual World. If you remember, those were eight pods hardwired together.

[01:05:42]
You could sit in them and you could play games against other people. BattleTech was one and a racing game was another. He’d also worked on the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland. So those motion vehicles were careening through the building to avoid them crashing into each other. He had designed the Real Time networking system.

[01:05:58]
He was also a musician, so he was the perfect person to sort of help us do this. So we went to lunch at Bob’s Big Boy, his favorite restaurant. In Burbank. And we sat down and I told him what we wanted to do. And he said, it’s impossible.

[01:06:10]
And I said, nothing’s impossible. I said, what about, you know, the computer games, network games, people play against each other? And he said, well, there are predictor correctors in network games. I mean, if you’re sending a tank in this direction or you’re shooting in a direction, it stays in that direction until you move. And you know, there are so.

[01:06:26]
There are these. So you can hop forward, you can, you know. Exactly. Exactly. But he said, in music, you never know where the next note is going.

[01:06:33]
You never know where the next note. You never know where the next nuance is going to be. You may decide to crescendo. You may decide to sforzando.

[01:06:43]
I hate it when I do that, but man, oh man, Tutti frutti. So the. So I said, think about it. And two weeks later he called and said, I have this idea. And that idea formed the basis of our prototype, our patent.

[01:07:00]
We were awarded our patent 18 months after we filed, which Bill said, never expect that again. That’ll never happen. That’ll never happen again. But that synchronization patent was the basis of our MIDI product and now our audio product. So how’d you get.

[01:07:14]
I mean, this is not a typical venture funded kind of company. So how did you guys manage to get it financed? Today? Initially, it’s friends and family. We met some wonderful people in the Florida area through Allen, and some of my family also got us started.

[01:07:34]
But then quickly as we got to each new level of prototype, we started to meet some angel investors.

[01:07:44]
When we had our alpha of the MIDI product, we hooked up with New York Angels and they funded it today. They funded, and Golden Seeds funded us and some other important investors. People, smart money, who didn’t have to come in for a whole lot. But that, that small amount was significant to us. They saw our vision.

[01:08:10]
It seemed to be a clear vision to them. And I think they trusted our capability to execute that vision. And we, I think, you know, at this stage now that we’ve implemented both MIDI and audio, we start to now expose a product that’s viable to all musicians. Because MIDI is great, keyboards are everywhere, but that’s not a full band. You gotta have the guitarist, you gotta have the singer, you gotta have the sax player and everything in between, whether it’s, you know, kazoo, as Alan says, or, you know, a cellist who wants to put a microphone right in front of that cello, just like you’re in the studio, it’s not an expensive proposition to buy.

[01:08:55]
And an audio interface to plug into your USB or FireWire, and you can play with your friends who you’ve not played with before. And now we’re in that wonderful position of having a product that’s viable with a big market opportunity to raise Series A. And so did you come to demo? Demo has this nice set of features. There’s a whole bunch of press, there are a whole bunch of investors, there are a bunch of smart entrepreneurs.

[01:09:26]
Which thing did you come for? Did you come here to get out the word or to get money and raise money or. I would say both. I think that what attracted us to come to demo was an opportunity to launch audio. So people would see it, certainly the press would get excited and put the word out.

[01:09:41]
In fact, I talked to one of our investors this morning who said he’s getting Google alerts every three minutes on eJabbing. I thought, well, that’s good. And then, of course, to meet more of the investors interested in Series A, because we’re embarking on our Series A round, we’re raising $6 million, and we have a number of investor. VC groups have already expressed interest, both prior to our coming here and especially since we’ve come here. More VC groups are coming up and saying, and we’re looking for people to be the lead.

[01:10:10]
We want the smart group to be the lead. A lot of other people said, hey, there’s a lead that we like. We’ll come in. So that seems to be happening to us right now. After we finished the original seed round, we raised a bridge round to get us through the completion of the seed round that just closed.

[01:10:25]
So that’s where we’re at. I think when we, you know, when we met Chris Shipley in early November, that was my first. Our first introduction to Chris. She’s very smart and we saw that. When you’re among.

[01:10:39]
I had not been that aware of the conference. You know, we’re. We come from another community, so we’re learning all the time. We do not understand your crazy world. It’s like, which conference do we participate in?

[01:10:52]
Right? You’d have no idea. This is obscure. Credit to the woman standing behind you over there, Barbara Hagan, who said to. Who told us about demo, and she said, you should meet Chris.

[01:11:02]
She convinced Chris to come to San Jose because usually that doesn’t happen. Chris drove to San Jose when Gail was speaking at the Dow Jones Consumer Conference, Consumer Technology Conference, and Chris came down and saw our demo there and on the spot, invited us to demo. So thank you, Barbara and thank you, Chris. Yes. Yeah, we’re very grateful that she invited us.

[01:11:22]
And as we asked people, friends and associates, investors of ours, when we told them that we were invited to do demo, they went yo. Well, they didn’t say yo. Yeah, you want to talk to him? No, we’re good, thanks. But I need to do an intro because we didn’t.

[01:11:40]
We didn’t get to an intro. We didn’t do an intro. The other thing I particularly enjoy is we’re sit. We’re standing here at booths number 69 and 70. 70 with.

[01:11:47]
With the folks from E Jamming. And then 69 is actually the Jamaican translation of 70 jama. There you go. So it’s nice to say they get two booths. This is the jam and corn.

[01:11:57]
It’s very stands up VCs. Exactly. We’re taking the show on the road. That’s right, people. Yeah.

[01:12:06]
So what do you think about those debentures?

[01:12:10]
Adventure business. Yeah, it’s just full of laughs. Yeah, right, exactly. That’s what my partners have to say. So we are at the egming booth with Gail Cantor and Alan Gluckman.

[01:12:20]
Glickman. Glickman. That was close. And they have an amazing product that helps people play music over the Internet together in real time. Hit in the pocket.

[01:12:28]
And it’s really, really cool technology and I love for you to tell us about it. And cuts. Hey, thank you guys.

[01:12:38]
So Kathy Brooks, who I’ve known for quite some time, although in various incarnations, you are now with Guidewire Group. I am. I’m a senior analyst with Guidewire Group. Senior analyst now. Guidewire Group, for those of you who don’t know, is involved in the production of the demo conference.

[01:12:52]
You guys are the content. We are the content people for demo. So Guidewire Group is Chris Shipley’s market intelligence firm formed less than a handful of years ago to focus purely on emerging markets, early stage technology companies. We meet with something on the order of about a thousand startups a year, largely pre funded or very, very early stage. And yeah, I know it’s a lot of meetings.

[01:13:14]
It’s a lot. Well, what I always say when I’m talking with a venture capitalist is wouldn’t you like the ability, don’t you wish you had the time to meet with a thousand pre funded startups a year? And since you don’t, that’s what we do. See, it would actually hurt my head. Oh, you’re assuming it doesn’t hurt ours.

[01:13:30]
Big assumptions. No, it’s a lot of data. But one of the things we’ve been able to do with that is create this market map that outlines a full taxonomy of all of the different areas that we evaluate. And then we think plug the companies into that market map so that they have some context. Because that’s one of the challenges.

[01:13:49]
As you gentlemen know, in the venture world, one of the biggest challenges is context. Lots of great companies, where do they fit? Why do they matter? And there’s a lot of echo and there’s a lot of database listings, but there’s not a whole lot of wrapper going around it. And so that’s where we slip in.

[01:14:03]
So your market map is sort of the Google Earth to my market map, which is sort of like the map to sunken traffic treasure to buried treasure. Yeah, it’s a little bit of a line here, a little dotted thing there, a little skull and crossbones. Right. Danger. Right.

[01:14:15]
Don’t. Careful of the crocodiles. Don’t go over there. Careful. The crocodiles.

[01:14:18]
Exactly. When you publish reports that people subscribe to or how does, how does all this data mapping collect up to become. It manifests in a couple of different ways. We did just launch the Guidewire Report, which is a bi weekly newsletter subscription newsletter. You should subscribe if you don’t already.

[01:14:33]
Get right on to that. And you can find the subscription button at the Guidewire Group site, which is guidewiregroup.com that would be my shameless plug. I was gonna say using your PR pass. I know this is what we’re here for. Oh, come on.

[01:14:46]
It’s helpful information. It’s not a piss informative. I didn’t say go now. Operators are standing by. That would have been different.

[01:14:54]
Right? She didn’t do that. She will, trust me. Craig, before this conversation. The conversation is young yet.

[01:15:00]
So it’s a. It’s a bi weekly newsletter and the front piece of that newsletter is a market analysis. So we look at a particular slice of the market or a trend that we’re seeing and then behind that are 12 to 15 high level overviews of companies that we’ve seen in that space. And then we also provide the piece of the market map, the slice of the market map that represents that sector as well as those companies and shows them in relation to each other as well as in relation to bigger name companies that are in the space that you might know. So, so again giving that context, then what the subscribers can do, if they are so inclined, if there are companies that they find super interesting, they might want a deeper look at one of those Companies.

[01:15:38]
So then on a one off basis you can then actually purchase deeper profiles of individual companies that go into everything from who are the people, what market are they in, what’s the underlying technology, what’s the customer base, do they have funding? If so, from whom and how much? If not not, what are they looking for? Whole nine yards. Diligence in a box.

[01:15:56]
In a box. Diligence in a box. Don’t make him sing, don’t encourage him. Don’t miss the jam session last night though. Yeah, I kept him away.

[01:16:06]
Well, I was there briefly. I was gonna play some bass. Every year I say I’m gonna have one though. I know. I say every year I say I’m gonna play some bass.

[01:16:13]
And then I looked over there and it was like two guitars, a keyboard and. Huh. Didn’t appeal to your base instincts. I’m here. Very nice.

[01:16:21]
We’re here till Thursday. Actually, we’re here till approximately nine at night. So demo. So that’s one of the manifestations is the Guidewire report. We do have our blog, guidewireconnection.com.

[01:16:35]
he said it, I didn’t. Yeah, okay. That’s his shameless plug, not mine. That was my five bucks you just left. Yes, right.

[01:16:40]
Ten bucks. Oh, right, great. It’s two fives together. And we also have our own conferences. So we have a conference in Europe in the spring called Innovate Europe.

[01:16:50]
So it’s really a demo meets agenda. So it’s not a product launch conference. That’s what demo is, commercial product launch. This is a company’s launch there and they do show products, but it’s not a product launch conference. When’s that?

[01:17:02]
When’s that going to happen? May 8th through May 10th. May 8th through 10th. And is it Spain again? It’s in Zaragoza, Spain.

[01:17:08]
And it starts on my birthday. Did I mention that? It starts on my birthday. When’s your birthday? May 8th.

[01:17:14]
Kathy’s birthday. For those of you listening, 35 again, actually. Well, 35 again. Nice. Wait, what’s the name of the greeting card site that’s here today?

[01:17:22]
Something to print 2. Ink 2. Excuse me? Oh, I’m sorry. Go to the Ink 2 website and send me a birthday card.

[01:17:28]
Right, so if you want to do that, go to Ink 2, make cool photo cards and send them to Kathy. I like that company. There’s some really cool stuff here. I sent myself a couple card. You did?

[01:17:37]
Yes. What did you say to yourself? I sent myself a card. It was a picture of my fam. My children.

[01:17:42]
Yes. And in the inside it Read too many Hornicks. Sorry about that. That’s, that was the card I sent myself, so I think I should send it to everyone really. Just sort of a generic apology to the world.

[01:17:57]
Too many hornets. Stop populating the planet, David. Right, exactly. And then of course demo. Last but certainly not least, demo.

[01:18:05]
So we meet with, we get about 250 applications for demo, both demo and Demo Fall. And of that we meet with about 100. So we screen down based on the applications and of that hundred sixty eight of them are here. So that’s a lot of companies, some very interesting trends. A lot in it’s all about user generated information and user generated content and taking your content where you want it, when you want it.

[01:18:29]
And yeah, it seems more and more that a lot of companies are forming around that. What’s the difference between Demo Fall and this demo? Well, in the beginning, in the beginning when Demo Demo was launched, we’re now going into the 17th year of the conference and it was held traditionally for a second week in February. And then about five years ago they launched a second demo conference called Demo Mobile that they held in the fall because it was spaced out enough that it didn’t cannibalize the business. And mobile was really just starting to emerge as a special thing.

[01:19:07]
So now that mobile is ubiquitous, it didn’t really make sense to call it demo mobile anymore. So now it’s just demo and demo phone. So the idea is the same, the format’s the same, new product launches, same exact format. Anywhere from 68 to 70 companies, all that are making their public debut. So what you’re seeing won’t have been seen publicly prior to their showing up on the stage.

[01:19:28]
They each get six minutes. At the end of the six minutes if they’re not done, we haven’t had anyone. There’s a rubber chicken and there’s a hook behind the stage and I’m waiting for the rubber chicken or, and, or the hook. What’s the difference between the chicken or the hook? Do we have to ask Chris?

[01:19:41]
I’m thinking pain points. I’m thinking about how the chicken is probably just to catch your attention and then the hook is what actually takes you off the side stage. Right. So Kathy, I just want, oh, I just want to point out my hit calendar here. Innovate Europe and Kathy Brooks birthday.

[01:19:54]
That’s excellent. You know it’s Kathy with a C, right? Yeah, I knew that. Look, you know what? Details, details.

[01:20:03]
So by the way, you know, if you need a venture capitalist kind of panelist out in Innovate Europe. You should. You know where you can find one? Well, it’s interesting that you bring that up because there is a panel that we’re looking to discuss, talking. Talking about the new.

[01:20:14]
The evolution, the new power angels, the new generation of investors in Europe, many of whom were actually entrepreneurs to begin with. Venture capital, as you gentlemen know, in Europe, is a far different beast than it is here. There aren’t many international, lots of regional, lots of local players, but not many that really go across a lot of the borders. Only a couple of firms that really do. And then, of course, people such as yourselves who hop over the visit.

[01:20:39]
We occasionally visit. Yes. As a matter of fact, we may have to drag you kicking and screaming to Zaragoza. Darn, that would be horrible. And my wife would hate it, too.

[01:20:47]
Oh, such a terrible thing. And she’d be there for my birthday. Did I mention that? The conference. Well, see, that would be exciting because last year at PC Forum, it was my wife’s birthday.

[01:20:57]
It turned out that my wife and Mike Arrington had the same birthday. We had a little party for my wife and Mike Arrington. My wife was less convinced that it was for her. She thought it was really a networking event, which I thought was very rude. And this surprises you, right?

[01:21:11]
Because I invited 30 of my closest. Her closest technology friends. I’m not buying this either. You’re gonna stay out of this conversation anyway. Well, very cool.

[01:21:21]
How are you gentlemen finding the event? Are you seeing cool, interesting, fun things? Absolutely. We’ve seen a number of lovely cool things. What’s your favorite so far?

[01:21:31]
Oh, we don’t play favorites. Oh, we can’t do that. Yeah. Hold the record. When you turn that thing off, we could talk about what you.

[01:21:38]
By the. You know, particularly since they’re. None of my portfolio companies are here. In the past, it’d be easy. Oh, yeah, that.

[01:21:43]
Six apart, they’re cool stuff. Or, man, that video egg. But this year, I have nothing to pimp. Except yourself, right? Except myself.

[01:21:53]
It’s hard out here for a pimp, you know? Pimpin. Pimpin’s hard. You caught that. You got that, didn’t you?

[01:21:59]
Thank you.

[01:22:02]
See, now, Kathy will always sing, by the way. But you didn’t take. You didn’t take the opportunity. No, that was. Maybe that was a little outside my genre.

[01:22:09]
I didn’t see the film, but I, you know. Oh, yeah, the film’s great. Gotta say it. Yeah. It’s on Showtime right now.

[01:22:15]
It’s one of the rotating films on Showtime, so. Not that I watch television much. Anymore. I just don’t have time. This reminds me sort of tangentially of my favorite new musician who.

[01:22:25]
Who is a big user of the Internet. Guy named Jonathan Colton. Have you heard of him? He did Code Monkey, but he has this really great version of Big Butt. I got big butts and I cannot lie.

[01:22:36]
I love it. Whatever. I’m sorry, Jonathan, but, you know, it’s. It’s. It’s taken.

[01:22:41]
Taken this.

[01:22:44]
Never mind, Never mind. Go. JonathanColton.com. all right, I’m done. Done.

[01:22:48]
Are we done with that? You have a singing child. I do. Have you seen his music video? Oh, did I just open up a camera?

[01:22:54]
No, no, no, no. I think I might have. Turn it off.

[01:23:01]
Okay. Introduce our guest, Chris Shipley. She requires no introduction, but we’re here at. Enjoying your empire, your experience here at the. The Demo conference.

[01:23:13]
So how’s it going? What do you think? You know, I think it’s going well. There’s tremendous energy here. About 700 folks who are just having a blast looking at great new products.

[01:23:22]
There are awful lot of VCs here. There are. And that’s the only thing I can think of that’s wrong with this event. Don’t you think maybe you should limit it? You could charge more.

[01:23:30]
Have you thought about this? Why don’t you do an auction model for venture capitalists? You’d wake. Make more money and have fewer of us cheapest people in the industry.

[01:23:39]
Yes, but scarcity, it scares us. I see. Okay, that’s what I’m thinking. You might be right, Chris. All right, so what year demo is this?

[01:23:46]
This is our 17th demo year. Really? Holy macanole. How long have you been. Have you been working on it?

[01:23:52]
I joined right after the 96 conference, so this is my 11th year producing the event. Very cool. Excellent. And is it still. I mean, the nice thing about the format, I would think, from your perspective, Right, because if you do something for a dozen years, it can get boring.

[01:24:06]
That’s just sort of how things go. But this conference, at least it’s dependent on all the companies that you’re showing on the stage. And so, you know, most of the. I assume most of your work is sort of the year preceding it, where you’re meeting with dozens and hundreds of companies to try and figure out who goes on stage. So.

[01:24:19]
Well, at Guidewire, we meet with about a thousand companies a year, and some of those companies are perfect for demo, and we channel them into one of our two events a year. Either demo in first of the year January, or demos fall in September. And yeah, because it’s always new, it’s always fresh, there are always interesting companies. Demo doesn’t get boring. Yeah.

[01:24:39]
So anything, you know, any sort of spectacular flame out in the 12 years or spectacular success. I mean, I don’t want to be dwell on the negative. You know, there have been a couple and of course I forget who they are, so that’s probably part of it. Good for them. But you know what it taught me is that because you get a lot of companies who really want to be here, they think this is the greatest platform and I would have to agree with them.

[01:25:02]
But they aren’t ready. And so they come, if they come here too soon, they try to launch, they can’t take advantage of that propulsion that you get from the event. It will hurt a company. So some bit of what I have to do is counsel these companies not to come to demo and obviously not invite them to be here. Well, it is, I mean, I’ve talked about demo a lot over time and the thing that I think is great about the demo experience is okay, you have the VCs and frankly that’s a good part of the ecosystem because a lot of these companies are looking for funding.

[01:25:32]
You have really great press coverage. So you have Walt Mossberg’s in there chatting with folks, as are the folks from Business Week and you name it and then some of the smartest entrepreneurs on the planet then end up here. And so I look at it as the kind of three legs of the stool of this conference. So I don’t know how you’re able to continue to keep that going, but it’s certainly a virtuous circle. Yeah, I think the magic of demo is that every constituency you just named and I’d also add to that business development folks who are coming from companies like Yahoo and Google and the like and then some of the early adopter customers.

[01:26:06]
Everybody who comes here thinks this event was designed just for them. So for the companies there’s going to be great media there, there’s going to be a great VC audience, there might be some customers. This is great for, for the VCs, it’s deal flow. You can see these folks. No, no.

[01:26:21]
And for the media it’s get a fresh look at one place. I can see all these things and I don’t have a whole bunch of shirt sleeve tugging PR people who are annoying me at a trade as I would have at a trade show. So everyone really, it’s for them. Yeah, there are a few, but we counsel against that. Is it always out Here in Palm Springs or has it moved around?

[01:26:40]
Demos started here in Palm Springs and was here from 91, it’s first year through the 2000 event and we moved to Phoenix for six years and we’re back here now. So. Excellent. That pinpoints one, because I was trying to think when I started coming. I joined my firm in 2000 and the first demo I went to was here in Palm Springs.

[01:26:59]
So that I guess that means this is what last hurrah is what I think that was. It was like a week before the bubble burst and boy, did we have fun. Yeah, it was great. It was absolutely. And then it was, it was an interesting time.

[01:27:10]
I mean, 2001, 2002, 2003, the conference continued and I think it was high. You know, the energy was high. On the other hand, there was a real sense of it’s tough to get companies funded and it’s tough to keep them alive and all that. It was definitely a little more sober through those years. But, you know, I think new products, new technology is always fresh.

[01:27:30]
And so you had a smaller event in 2001 by a Fair bit, but still, I think great networking, great products, great companies. And because that’s the focus, we were able to, I think, plow through that tough time. We were talking earlier with Kathy about Innovate Europe. And do you get a sense you’ve been going out there a bit, first looking at startups in Israel and then Europe, and now with your conference out there, is your sense that the ecosystem that makes Silicon Valley work and makes the startup culture of the US work, is. Is it growing in Europe?

[01:28:04]
Are you seeing more of that? I think it’s growing, but it’s also very fractured. And so what we’re actually trying to do is knit those fractured pieces together. And it’s fractured geographically, it’s fractured where the relationship between entrepreneur and investor is a little bit different. The attitude about investing is different.

[01:28:21]
Customers are harder to persuade in a lot of ways. But I think this idea that there is an ecosystem and it does need to come, come together and your business is going to be global from day one is starting to really catch hold. And so our innovative end has been a platform to make that bring those communities together and knit those pieces back together. I’ve noticed, I’ve been back to Europe for the past few years and it’s been interesting to see the difference, that there are entrepreneurs, that there is a sense of the energy in the lobby as opposed to the energy in the event, which wasn’t the case. Right.

[01:28:52]
I mean, it really was not the case in Europe. It was. If you go to an event, it’s to hear a speaker and then you go and you do your business. And very polite audiences. Right.

[01:29:00]
If you’re somebody speaking, no one gets up and walks out. He wouldn’t dream of doing that. But not quite so much here. Right. Well, and the other thing is, I’ll make these irreverent jokes and you kind of, hello, hello, business.

[01:29:14]
It’s supposed to be serious, right? We don’t laugh at those sort of things, Mr. Hornick. Yes, exactly. My favorite is when you’re doing simultaneous, synchronous, asynchronous translation and you tell a joke and then you hear, da, da, da, da, da, da. And then the room really screws up that stuff.

[01:29:30]
You better have a good. In fact, you have to interview the translators. How’s your comic timing? I couldn’t have a translator with no comic timing. The best story that I ever heard was translators.

[01:29:39]
Businessman who was translated in Japan. And the translators said to the crowd, he’s telling a joke now. It is not translatable. Please laugh. That’s so cute.

[01:29:51]
You gotta love that. Oh, man. Well, you know, I. It’s sort of how I took the bar exam in New York where I would write, there is a law that would apply to this scenario, which I can’t recall, but if I did, I’d apply it and I got half credit. So that was good.

[01:30:04]
You know, I passed the bar. Talk your way out of anything. Yeah, you can be a lawyer. Right? Exactly.

[01:30:09]
I’ll look it up later. Right, Exactly. Well, hey, we appreciate. Chris, go. They got to start up a new session indeed.

[01:30:15]
Thanks very much. Thank you. Thanks for having. Listen to next week. Thanks, Chris.

[01:30:20]
Thank you.

[01:30:23]
Once Mary Jones has seen iron, right. Breeze through every conceivable type of garment in the laundry basket, she will begin to see it as more than just an appliance in a larger sense. She will see it as a magic key to greater freedom and happiness.