July 30
By Seattle 2.0
Follow Friday (known as #FollowFriday) is a Twitter meme where a Twitter user recommends other Twitter users for his friends to follow. The Seattle 2.0 automatically generates suggestions from our Twitter Directory every Friday based on the number of entrepreneurs and startup people following that person. Today we recommend: Find more Entrepreneurs, CEOs and Investors of Technology Startups on our Twitter Directory.
July 30
By Seattle 2.0
List of interesting blog posts from the Seattle Startup community on the last week: Joseph M. Wallin/Startup Company Law Blog Today (see floor schedule ) the United States Senate will resume consideration of the Small Business Jobs and Credit Act of 2010 . The bill will exempt... The Name Inspector/The Name Inspector The Name Inspector’s getting local. He’s decided to take a look at all 409 names in Seattle 2.0’s Seattle Startup Index. In his grand vision, this is the... William Carleton/William Carleton, Counsellor @ Law If Don Draper's going to make it as a founding CEO, he's going to need help. If they mentor Don effectively, Bert Cooper and Roger Sterling may actually earn... OVP Here is a surefire bet: Gather together a bunch of entrepreneurs to talk about venture capitalists, and before long the conversation will turn to the issue... Iron Yuppie/David Aronchick New post up today on Seattle 2.0 : Professionally produced media is undergoing dramatic changes driven by recent major business development deals. Some... TechFlash Ever wanted to track down a funny line from a TV show, movie or comedy act? If so, then you'd feel right at home with Entertonement founders David Aronchick... Dave/TeachStreet Imagine 1,500 passionate and influential entrepreneurs and business leaders in Seattle, New York and San Francisco gathered together to strengthen each other... Brent Frei/Smartsheet.com Blog Coupling Smartsheet Simple Sales Pipeline, Customer Support and Marketing Campaign Management into Google’s Email, Calendar and Docs makes for a very... Luke Timmerman/Xconomy Seattle Seattle-based Immune Design has raised $32 million to develop a new generation of vaccines. It’s the second big round for the company, founded in 2008 with... Anil Batra/Web Analysis, Online Advertising and Behavioral Declaring things dead is nothing new. Every day someone declares something dead. For example, in 2007 many people were declaring page views and even web... From Seattle 2.0Sasha Pasulka I knew I wanted to meet Monica Harrington as soon as I heard her name. I first came across it while reading about Intersect, the top-secret Seattle startup that can’t stop creating buzz. Monica was... David Aronchick Professionally produced media is undergoing dramatic changes driven by recent major business development deals. Some examples: Netflix signed an enormous deal with Relativity Media... Alyssa Royse A guy and a girl walk into a bedroom. The guy looks at the girl and says, “don’t worry, I’d never screw you, we don’t need protection.” She smiles and says, “ok, I trust you.” They get all into... Andy Sack The 10 TechStars companies have been selected but not yet announced. We won't announce them until they've been in the program for a couple weeks and have had a chance to improve their first...
July 30
By Seattle 2.0
Upcoming Events for Startups and Entrepreneurs in Seattle: | | | Recurring | | FRI | July 30 |
| | | SAT | July 31 | | | | SUN | August 1 | | | | MON | August 2 | | | | TUE | August 3 | |
| | WED | August 4 | |
| | THU | August 5 |
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| | FRI | August 6 | | | | SAT | August 7 | | | | SUN | August 8 | | | | MON | August 9 | | | | TUE | August 10 | | | | WED | August 11 | | | | THU | August 12 | | |
More Startup Events in Seattle... Don't see your event? Submit your Startup event to our calendar.
July 29
By Sasha Pasulka
 I knew I wanted to meet Monica Harrington as soon as I heard her name. I first came across it while reading about Intersect, the top-secret Seattle startup that can’t stop creating buzz. Monica was listed as the Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer. “No one even knows what this company does,” I thought to myself, “and it’s already being brilliantly marketed. Who is this woman?”
I discovered that Monica has a near-perfect record in marketing. She was an integral member of the Microsoft Word team that displaced the seemingly impenetrable WordPerfect. She was the Chief Marketing Officer of Valve, the creators of the wildly successful Half-Life. She later spent two years as the Senior Policy Officer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, advising the Gates directly. She left to become Chief Marketing Officer at Picnik, the online photo-editing company acquired by Google in March of this year. In April, Monica joined the Intersect team.
I couldn’t wait to pick her brain, and I wasn’t disappointed. There’s plenty to discuss, so this will be a two-part piece. Today’s segment focuses on the revolutionary marketing approach the Microsoft Word team used to displace WordPerfect during the transition to graphical computing in the late ‘80s. Next week’s will focus on how these marketing strategies can be applied in a startup context.
The Power of a Platform Shift
In 1987, WordPerfect owned the word processing market, and Lotus owned the spreadsheet market. Word had a miniscule market share, but the market was in flux. The days of the text-based editors were ending as graphic interfaces inched onto the scene.
“Any time there’s a platform shift,” Monica tells me, “there’s huge opportunity. And oftentimes the people who are most vulnerable during a platform shift are the entrenched leaders.
“Lotus and WordPerfect thought they owned those markets, so they were complacent. It’s a classic innovator’s dilemma. They didn’t want to move [from character-based] into graphical. In the DOS-based world, they were the leaders. So why would you want to go through this transformation? They were reluctant. And Microsoft was aggressive.“
Monica found herself uniquely positioned to be part of the team that won this battle for Microsoft and changed personal computing forever.
But let’s start at the beginning.
The Foreign Correspondent
Monica didn’t always intend to be a hotshot thought leader in tech; she grew up in Portland and studied journalism at the University of Oregon, planning to be a foreign correspondent. Her boyfriend was still in school when she graduated – a situation she refers to euphemistically as a “geographic constraint” – so she took a job in Portland as a technical writer at a software company called Timberline.
At Timberline, she worked closely with developers. “They would tell me what they were trying to do,” she says, “and then we’d do a release of the build and I would write about it.”
If she couldn’t figure out how the software worked based on the screens, she worked with the developers to modify the design.
“I was actually a usability specialist – but it wasn’t called that.”
“Oh my God, I Have to Work Here”
She fell in love with tech but realized that product management would be a better fit than technical writing. She set out to interview with tech companies.
“I planned to talk to Microsoft, Lotus and Ashton-Tate,” she says, “because they were all about the same size. I started with Microsoft, and once I went through the interviews, I thought ‘Oh my God, I have to work here.’”
I ask her why.
“There was this hum – an excitement – like everybody felt like they were working on something that was potentially going to change the world. You could pick that up. I hadn’t seen that kind of excitement – excitement tinged with confidence that we could really do it.”
In 1987, she joined the Apps group at Microsoft as a technical editor, with plans to be a product manager. “I assumed that [Microsoft] would recognize that I wanted to be a product manager and just let me do it,” she says, laughing. “But it wasn’t like that.”
Fighting for a Career Transition at Microsoft
She went through the interview process for a PM job, competing against freshly minted MBAs from the top schools in the country.
"We don’t know what to do with you," her interviewers told her. "You did well in the interview, but you don’t have any background or training in this.”
She didn’t get the job they had open, so she took a different approach. She proposed a project to a friend who was a PM – helping Microsoft develop a mutually beneficial relationship with her former employer – and he encouraged her to move forward with it.
“I was a technical editor by day and a product manager by night,” she explains.
After eight months of working on that project, she scored another set of product management interviews, one of which was with Jeff Raikes. “I knew that if Jeff didn’t think I was a fit for marketing at Microsoft, that was the end of my marketing career there.”
Jeff offered her a job as a product manager on the Word team.
Overthrowing the Old Regime
Monica was a perfect fit for the Word team in late ‘80s, because the shift toward graphical meant personal computers could now create broader value for the average person, but only if the usability factor was high – and she’d spent her years at Timberline as a stealth usability specialist. She’d also worked with graphical computing in its very earliest days.
“A lot of people now think that the innovations in graphical computing came out of Apple,” she says, “but they didn’t. They came out of Xerox PARC.”
Monica had worked with the Xerox Star system – the first commercial system ever to incorporate a window-based GUI – at Timberline.
“The things that made Xerox Star so powerful,” she says, “we were going to do on PCs. Apple had done it after Xerox, and Microsoft was going to do it first on OS 2 and then on Windows, and I just so strongly believed in that. It was easy for me to be an evangelist.”
She still speaks of her work at Microsoft using “we” as the pronoun, and she still speaks the word with excitement and compatriotism in her voice, and I picture a line of bonded-by-fire Roman soldiers: They stand shoulder to shoulder, shields up, marching personal computing forward together.
This is not what I hear when current Microsoft employees tell me about their jobs, but you can hear, smell and taste it in the halls of any great Startup Weekend. This is what we’re all hungry for: to be a part of something like those early days at Microsoft; for our voices to carry, twenty years later, still the excitement and creative genius of a team we loved, a team in which each member worked as a natural extension of the others, a team that could do superhuman things, like slay a Goliath.
Winning Over the Influentials
Monica saw that the overall PR effort for Word required her team to change the way the market influentials evaluated products. Reviewers at the time valued products for the length of their feature list, but, if personal computing hoped to be truly revolutionary, the focus needed to be on usability. The average person needed to be able to use personal computing tools to do his or her job better, and this person would not need to use the bells-and-whistles features that a handful of professionals might find marginally useful.
But the spreadsheet and word processing reviewers at publications like PC Magazine and PC Computing still needed to be sold on this paradigm shift.
“You can’t overestimate how influential these people were, “ says Monica. “They determined what could even be considered as an application for corporate America.”
The team focused PR efforts on these people.
“We brought reviewers in over a two-year process and had them observe the usability work that was going on at Microsoft. It was changing the mindset. These products were going to be adopted throughout organizations, and ease of use was going to be important.”
I only need to glance at the name of the software I’m using to write this article to know how this particular war ended.
As I converse with Monica about the teams that created enormous successes for Microsoft in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I’m surprised by how many of the names that come up are female. Ruthann Lorentzen. Leslie Koch. Marianne Allison. Mary Dieli. And Melinda French -- who would, in 1994, change her name to Melinda Gates, but to whom Monica still refers by her maiden name.
During a time when women were still something of a curiosity in the tech world, Microsoft was anything but an Old Boys Club. Bill Gates and his team were hiring brilliant women and putting them in leadership roles, and it was working.
Next week: Monica Harrington brings her marketing prowess to the startup world.
Editor's note: Monica Harrington will be speaking about marketing and branding at StartupDay. Register early for priority advisory slots!
July 28
By Alyssa Royse
A guy and a girl walk into a bedroom. The guy looks at the
girl and says, “don’t worry, I’d never screw you, we don’t need protection.”
She smiles and says, “ok, I trust you.” They get all into their time together
and next thing you know, she has a baby. Turns out, they got carried away, and
she got screwed.
A guy and a girl walk into a boardroom. The guy looks at the
girl and says, “don’t worry, I’d never screw you, we don’t need protection.”
She smiles and says, “ok, I trust you.” They get all into their project
together and next thing you know, he has a company. Turns out, they got carried
away, and she got screwed.
I’m never sure whether trust plays too great or too small a
role in our business relationships. That’s likely because it means different
things to different people, which is part of the problem. But, at the end of
the day, having unprotected business isn’t a whole lot smarter than having
unprotected sex. I won’t have sex without condoms, and I won’t do business
without contracts.
What is the role of trust in our business relationships? For
me, trust isn’t just one monolithic thing that applies equally to all aspects
of a business venture. I assume that if two (or more) people are to the point
of discussing contracts about a business venture, there are already several
layers of trust.
-
They all trust the idea enough that they want to pursue it.
They have some degree of shared vision and energy that has brought them to this
moment, and they “believe” in it, whether they call it trust or not. By this
point, the venture itself is it’s own emotional entity, worthy of it’s own
trust and value and concern separate from the players and other personal
relationships.
-
They all trust each other’s skills and dedication enough
that they want to help grow the venture together. They think they can do it.
That trust is implicit in the momentum that got them this far.
-
They all believe – as all entrepreneurs do – that this is
going to work, and that everyone is going to be as committed as they are to the
venture, and to their own happiness. And this is where things start to fall
apart.
Unless you are doing business with Mother Theresa, then whoever you are
doing business with is likely more concerned with their own happiness than with
yours. It’s human nature, and there is nothing wrong with that. This is the
moment at which you must be responsible for saying, “this is so exciting, do
you have a condom?”
I have literally had someone look at me and say, “I wont’ do
business with someone who doesn’t trust me. Why do you NEED a contract?” I find that question both stupid and insulting, but
I’ll answer it, and see what we can learn. - I would not do business with someone who was afraid to
have their good intentions codified. To me, that means they are already trying
to wiggle out of the “deal.” (I would not have sex with someone who wasn’t
prepared to be responsible for his actions.)
- I would not do business with someone who was unwilling to
honor my own need and right to feel safe and protected. (I would not have sex
with someone who didn’t mind risking my life or my future for his
gratification.)
- I think that the process of codifying a business
relationship is very useful. It helps everyone involved clarify their intent,
expectations, process and starts the business off on a foundation of mutual
understanding. (I would not have sex with someone with whom I didn’t feel
comfortable saying, “you need to wrap that rascal because this is only about
sex, I have no intention of dying for you or raising your progeny.”)
- I believe that sometimes the best-laid plans go wildly
awry, and a contract can provide a baseline for rectifying the situation in a
less emotional manner. (Condoms break, at least you know I wasn’t trying to get
pregnant.)
When is the right time to whip out a contract? We’re all
different on this one, I tend to wait until the last minute. I’m a big fan of
emotional and intellectual foreplay, in all arenas. But I start discussing
intent fairly early. - When you first start discussing an idea, just run free
with it. Brainstorm, have meetings over and over again, email ideas, see what
happens. This is the fun and flirty stage, during which you find out if you’re
compatible in any real way. Ideas, even good ones, are a dime a dozen, play with them freely.
- Once you realize that you actually want to do this
together, say so. Even these conversations can go on for a protracted period of
time, and that’s okay. There’s rarely any reason to rush headlong into this
union. Discuss it and be clear about your intentions and desires. “I think we
should be co-founders of this, and after we reach X milestone, we’ll hire Y
people and…..” Do you need a contract at this point? I don’t, but other people
may be different. (I do, however, like a nice long email thread in which these things are discussed in writing.)
- Once you get to the point that assets of any sort are
changing hands and working towards the fruition of the union, then I’d get
contracts in line. Be damned good and clear about what your intentions are, and
get it written down. And just because the other party doesn’t want to, doesn’t
mean that you shouldn’t be proactive and protect yourself. If you are handing
over assets of any sort – whether it’s money, IP, work product – you need to
know that you are putting them into a union in which your interests are
protected.
To me, that is the ultimate form of trust. It means that you
trust the idea, trust the chemistry, trust the people, and trust that the
future is going to be what you make it. You trust it all enough that you want
to be totally prepared to do it as best you can. You even trust the people
enough that you aren’t worried about the could-be-scary process of negotiating.
That’s a lot of trust. But it would be stupid not to have contracts to protect your
interests, no matter how you feel about the people or the product. It would be
just as stupid to have unprotected sex with someone just because you were
afraid they’d think less of you if you told them that you were smart enough to
protect yourself and still get what you want. Trust is great, but it’s not worth getting screwed for. ________ Alyssa Royse promises that her next blog post will have
nothing to do with sex, love, dating or romance. She trusts her team and her project, and respects them all enough to want them to be safe and happy. And those aren’t mints in the Hello Kitty tin.
July 27
By David Aronchick
Professionally produced media is undergoing dramatic changes driven by recent major business development deals. Some examples:
However, in the rush to disrupt the existing models, people are forgetting the lesson learned in the music industry; aggregation of content provides the best experience for users and the biggest profit opportunity for the owners. Simply said: aggregation wins. One of the biggest problems with professionally produced video today is that it reveals too starkly the seams between the different organizations involved. Viewers do not care one iota about the subtleties involved in what, when, where, and how a movie is released, they just want to watch content on their schedule on their device of choice. And, worse than that, they certainly do not want to wander the Web, searching site after site with completely different user experiences, billing models, and content catalogs to find what they’re looking for. Anything superfluous that gets between the users and the content makes it that much more likely that they will abandon looking altogether. There is a strong parallel to the music industry of the late 1990s and early 2000s. As the industry struggled to make the transition to digital distribution, each label tried a model that fit their artists, but left everyone else out in the cold. Then, in 2003, the iTunes store rescued everyone. With a single product launch, users now had one place to go, behind a single user interface, and a single billing method, and all was right with the world. But the real genius here was because the catalog was nearly complete (despite hold outs like the Beatles & AC/DC), it simplified things enormously. If the big four labels had each launched their own iTunes, it would have been a disaster. By providing a single place to find, listen, and buy nearly ANY content, Apple increased the size of the pie for everyone. This powerful form of aggregation extends to other media types as well. When someone wants user generated content, they do not have to think for a nanosecond before they type in Youtube. Ditto for Flickr and pictures. Or Scribd and documents. Or Wikipedia for knowledge. Users adopt aggregators very quickly when they understand that it simplifies their lives – if users say “when I want X, I go to Y” then it makes everyone’s lives easier. We’ve seen this aggregation strategy work in our favor at Entertonement. By providing an extremely simple way to upload, find, and share all the content on the site, users quickly understood that if they wanted audio, they knew where to go. Even better, we’ve been lucky enough to work with partners who got it too. There are huge libraries of phenomenal content out there and the owners have read all the success stories of those who embrace this model, rather than avoid it. As they brought their hundreds of thousands of hours of sounds into our platform, we’ve seen everyone’s experience get better and better. So, who is going to win for professionally produced video content streaming? The winner will be the company that is able to bridge all the gaps for the users and make available the broadest possible catalog. My bet is on Netflix. They have a profitable business model that does not require being supported (or beholden to) the content creators. They’re aggressive enough to go around anyone necessary to get at the real value–the content–and can write huge checks to make it happen. And, finally, every additional customer who streams a piece of content from them is a huge cost savings, which makes it extremely motivating to move every single customer online. Combined with the fact that, unlike Hulu, they don’t ever have to worry about the ups and downs of the advertising market, Netflix has the inside track to victory.
July 23
By Seattle 2.0
Follow Friday (known as #FollowFriday) is a Twitter meme where a Twitter user recommends other Twitter users for his friends to follow. The Seattle 2.0 automatically generates suggestions from our Twitter Directory every Friday based on the number of entrepreneurs and startup people following that person. Today we recommend: 
| Danielle Morrill (@DanielleMORRILL)
wefollow.com/DanielleMORRILL
entrepreneur, Twilio.com employee #1, blogger, marketer, college dropout, Objectivist, and happy
| 
| Michele Mehl (@michelemehl)
www.buzzbuilders.net
PR for biz and consumer tech startups. Current/previous clients: Cheezburger, Zulily, WhitePages, Wetpaint, Adapx, Twango, Napera, & Socrata. Wife and mom.
| 
| Peter Boctor (@boctor)
theappvine.com
iPhone, Rails & Twitter developer
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Find more Entrepreneurs, CEOs and Investors of Technology Startups on our Twitter Directory.
July 23
By Andy Sack
The 10 TechStars companies have been selected but not yet announced. We won't announce them until they've been in the program for a couple weeks and have had a chance to improve their first impressions. In other words, we want to give the companies a chance to work on their pitch and to work on their web sites before making lots of noise about them.
Next week, we have the first mentor only dinner and we move into our new offices in South Lake Union. I hate moving and I especially hate moving offices. But in a weird way, I'm really excited about this move. The new office is super sweet and has a speakeasy in the basement -- no kidding -- it was the syncher on the negotiations.
The TechStars program officially starts Aug 16! Not far off. I write another update in August.
July 23
By Seattle 2.0
List of interesting blog posts from the Seattle Startup community on the last week: Joseph Sunga's Thoughts Today will be my 2 year anniversary at TeachStreet . I don’t really pay attention to these milestones, but a couple of my friends reminded me. I have to... Iron Yuppie/David Aronchick New post on Seattle 2.0 today: Fanatic users are not as hard to find as you may think. A successful entrepreneur could do worse than spending all day... TechFlash Dave Milesi has worked in biotech and banking. But now he's giving online real estate a try, operating the five-month-old startup Comient.com. The Seattle... William Carleton/William Carleton, Counsellor @ Law FourSquare's recent Series B Preferred Stock financing was famously competitive. FourSquare had negotiating leverage most startups and emerging companies... noreply@blogger.com (DaveSchappell)/Dave Schappell (TeachStreet) Last week, Fred Wilson had a guest post from Andy Swan entitled "Who are we plowing for today?". It summarizes why I love to encourage new... nic/eVenues Blog Recent surveys show many of today's workers plan to launch a business soon. But many of them won't be "opening" businesses in the traditional... Brian Goffman/Optify Lead Generation Blog Real Time Marketing Software Provides 4X Boost to Sales Pipeline and Prioritizes Prospects SEATTLE – July 21, 2010 — Optify , a leading provider of... Thea Chard/Xconomy Seattle Last week the Northwest Energy Angels—a group of over 45 private investors who have banded together to invest exclusively in cleantech and energy companies... Glenn Kelman/Redfin Watching Steve Jobs’s primary reaction — annoyance – to the iPhone 4 antenna debacle, it has been hard not to think about it in terms of the decisions Redfin... Charles Seybold/LiquidPlanner Project management is currently undergoing its own Cambrian era, the geological period some 500 million years ago in which an epic explosion in diversity and... From Seattle 2.0Andy Sack Entrepreneurs are often looking for money to grow their businesses and frequently looking for alternatives to venture capital. Well, that's why I started both Founder's Co-op . Lately, people... Anthony Stevens Quality is a funny characteristic. It requires constant attention to maintain it. Even then, there’s no guarantee that some unknown, systemic problem might crop up just when you least expect it... David Aronchick Fanatic users are not as hard to find as you may think. A successful entrepreneur could do worse than spending all day and night recruiting them. Yet, all but a few entrepreneurs fail miserably... Gerry Langeler Here is a surefire bet: Gather together a bunch of entrepreneurs to talk about venture capitalists, and before long the conversation will turn to the issue of control. Here's the common refrain... Jennifer Cabala We all know them, the attorney, marketer, accountant, consultant, web hosting service or other person that helped make your startup the best it could be and saved you plenty of headaches along the...
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