A business school classmate and great friend, Todd Dewett, has recently published a new book Leadership Redefined
Month: February 2008
Solve problems, don’t state them
This certainly applies to how I manage (reference my "spot it, got it" post) but is also one of the more interesting notes made in a small notebook during the launch of Idapta in late ’99 by one of our early investors. This was recently re-discovered along with the PRD cover sheet I just posted on and is an interesting trip down memory lane. I’m not real sure how I ended up with it or managed to keep it over the past ~9 years but there are some valuable (and blunt) points in these few short notes. We were still a very new company (~6 mos old) and our messaging and value proposition were not strong. We wanted to tell people "how" and not "why" and had prospects telling us our value (the last note on the page calls this out).
My first PRD
Marel found a box of stuff that included a few items from the wayback machine including the cover sheet to the first product requirements document I ever prepared in my first gig as a product manager. If you follow this blog and worked at IntelligentDigital/Idapta, your signature may be on this PRD cover sheet dated 9/21/99. The goal was to get the entire exec team to buy into what we were building and in what time frame by signing the cover document.
This was my first start-up experience and I learned some harsh but valuable lessons. It was during the last boom/bubble so sound business principles were not at the forefront of decision making. The company re-branded as "Idapta" after a very expensive and useless branding project – at least the number syllables in the name was reduced.
The experience was formative and I am blessed to have met my wife there as well as made many great friends. I believe that everyone needs one of these experiences to truly "get" what it takes to start, grow, and run a new venture. For those really interested in nostalgia, here’s the last version of the website (hosted by talented designer and alum Jamie Martin) after we repositoined to attack the enteprise market.
Headed to SaaS Summit and Pacific Crest Securities conference in SFO
I’m going to be at both events end of this week. If you are there and want to connect, shoot me an email – robertcpease at gmail dot com.
More on SaaS integration
Loraine Lawson over at ITBusinessEdge continues to cover the issue of SaaS integration and her latest post adds some additional perspective to the issue as well as references a thoughtful post from Dennis Hall over at Pervasive Software on it. He lays out how extended sales cycles, implementation delays, and the challenges of integrating to legacy applications are the common pain points suffered by SaaS application companies as they face the integration hurdle. As large enterprises embrace these on-demand applications and their usage becomes more ingrained in core operations, the integration question will have to be addressed.
Bringing on-demand to the client side
Interesting write-up on the notion of a SaaS client or a "serviced client" via Phil Wainewright at ZD Net. The line between pure on-demand and what takes place locally is blurry especially if you look at the capabilities of Adobe’s AIR announced this week or Microsoft’s Silverlight. Makes me think of my post last year on the cycles of computing – centralize, decentralize, centralize, decentralize. So what say ye Jim – ready to admit I may have a point here?
Update: More on this and Salesforce.com’s take on AIR here.
Looks like I didn’t make the cut for Seattle’s most influential entrepreneur bloggers
Oh well…there’s always next year. This is an interesting list put together by Marcelo Calbucci of Sampa over on the Seattle 2.0 blog. A few I already subscribe to plus a few new ones.
Integration on the mind
The folks over at Forrester Research recently released a new report entitled "The State Of Enterprise Software Adoption: 2007 To 2008." Here’s an article on it (thanks Michael) and a couple of interesting quotes related to the priority around application integration as well as moving to a business process focus:
"The No. 1 software priority for 2008 is improving integration between applications, cited by 33% of IT senior executives surveyed by Forrester."
"If we take all our survey data, we see people looking at integrating applications, people looking at upgrading packaged applications, people moving from a function to a business process perspective,"
What do you do when you must put capital to work?
Invest in an undersea cable system linking Japan to the US like Google! Six companies are pitching in $300MM for the project, so not much of a capital outlay. Maybe somebody had a deal quota or there are a whole lot of Powerpoint slides describing how adding bandwidth to the world will help sell more ads. Regardless, this is a pretty interesting data point on the continued interest in infrastructure shown by Google including the recent 700MHz spectrum auction.
Out of the ashes Iridium soars towards an IPO
Wow. Everything old is new again, just this time with maybe a valid business model? This story from Barron’s highlights how Iridium is planning an IPO in 2009. This is after Billions of dollars of investment (mostly from Motorola), being picked up for $25MM, and actually understanding the target market was being eroded by terrestrial cellular coverage. Oh..and that little bit about the phone being the size of a shoe box and not working indoors certainly didn’t help. For full disclosure, I worked on a handful of market studies for the then "hot" mobile satellite communications market in 97/98 while at Arthur Andersen and, although our forecast was also on the rosy side, we identified cellular erosion as a key threat and dispelled the myth of the village phone in our results. That is where I learned about teledensity.
"…the original Iridium business plan – to be a cellular replacement for consumers – was “a misguided proposition that Motorola created.”
Ouch. Although the plan to supply this to "business customers" sounds eerily familiar, at least there appears to be some focus on defined use cases in maritime, trucking, oil and gas, etc. And of course the Billions of dollars in investment capital has long since been written off so the hurdle is much lower at this point. I look forward to watching the progress.
Venture Vice 