Track News & React

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: it’s a mistake to think that Silicon Valley is the only place to find great technology products and companies. No doubt, Silicon Valley remains the center point of innovation.  Yet as companies become increasingly distributed, the Valley is transforming into a hub with spokes of innovation reaching broadly across a global market.

Read more

DEMO co-executive producer, Matt Marshall is in DC this week and is hosting a meetup on Thursday night from 5:30 to 8 pm along with DEMO’s SVP and GM, Neal Silverman and Social Time’s founder, Nick O’Neill.  If you live in the DC area, come on by Hudson Restaurant and Lounge in Dupont Circle for some cocktails and casual conversation.  First drink is on DEMO for the first 30 thru the door.  

Read more

Last Thursday, DEMO hosted a breakfast roundtable in Silicon Valley, where fourteen prominent institutional and angel investors shared their perspectives with Matt Marshall and me.  It was a ranging conversation about the hot button issues for venture capital.  These are a few of the highlights:

Read more

DEMO Co-Executive Producer Matt Marshall will be heading to NYC next month to participate as a judge at the Startup 2009 conference taking place on Wednesday, June 3.  Co-hosted by Silicon Alley Insider and New York University's Stern School of Business, Startup 2009 will showcase 10 top startups competing for bragging rights, buzz, and a $50,000 prize. 

Read more

As I write this, my flight is beginning to makes its approach into Denver.  This afternoon, I’ll meet two companies that are planning ahead to a September product launch, and hoping that DEMOfall will be the right platform for them.  Later, I’ll mix it up with entrepreneurs and product managers at GlueCon, a new conference about managing enterprise cloud-based applications architectures.   Tomorrow, I’ll moderate a panel, then head back to Silicon Valley where I’ll attend two more conferences before the week is out, each time looking for smart companies developing smart products

Read more

A number of cool new program features were announced today for our upcoming DEMOfall 09 event.  The biggest being the addition of AlphaPitch - a platform for early stage entrepreneurs in pre-launch mode to showcase their innovations to the massive amounts of media, investor and corporate buyers that attend DEMO.  Companies considered for AlphaPitch must be in the prototype or development stage of their product lifecycle, be pre-revenue, and have received no more than a seed round of funding (<$500k).

Read more

For those of us who spend our days in search of the latest innovations, nothing is more exciting – professionally speaking – than spending time deeply engaged with entrepreneurs.  The enthusiasm, optimism, and – yes – even idealism is palpable.

Read more

Here we go again.  For the 24th and final time in 13 years, I've begun the search to identify game-changing products to present at DEMO.  As always, I embark on the process with the anticipation of a youngster in December: it's never certain what surprises await, but they are sure to be exciting.

Read more

It’s fitting to wrap up this series on pitching your company by talking about the product. After all, this is DEMO.

Each year, I hear hundreds of company presentations, and a surprising majority of them gloss over the product that they are planning to bring or have brought to market.   Indeed, in most investor pitch deck templates (including the one we use at Guidewire Group), the product gets one slide of seven or ten.  On that slide, the product is reduced to a handful of bullet points, and maybe – but not often enough – a screen shot or photo of the product.

Read more

You might be surprised at the number of times we hear that a company "has no real competitors."   It is one of the biggest mistakes an entrepreneur can make when positioning his company. Dismissing a market as free of competitors demonstrates naiveté, ignorance, or arrogance - and sometimes all three.

You always have competitors.  And if you don't, you probably don't have a market because there is no real problem big enough for anyone to be concerned about fixing.

Read more