Just met with a Minneapolis stealth startup that’s meeting with In-Q-Tel and the NSA next week. (Where do you meet with the NSA? As this guy was told, “Oh, we’ll tell you that when the time comes.”) Man, this harks me back to my days working with the first CEO of Secure Computing, Kermit Beseke, way back in late ’80s. He knew the NSA guys on a first-name basis. And the rest became history (starting in ’95, with one of the top-5 hottest IPOs for several years running). Wow, when you think of how many major technologies we take for granted actually started with the government, it’s amazing. How about a little thing called, oh, *email* for one? And the very Internet itself. I remember the guys at Secure Computing telling me about email, and then Mosaic and the Web, waay before they were much known outside of government circles. This world of stealth startups is so much fun I can hardly stand it! Oh, and by the way, for all you folks now scratching your head and wondering “Minnesota?” — this has nothing to do with government stuff, but, remember, that early search technology Gopher started right here, too…at a great school called the U of MN!
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Interesting juxtaposition. How can you be open and still secret? Well, secret for a while, anyway. I attended a VC gathering the other day here in Minnesota, which was a panel about new trends and developments in software. One of the panelists was Matt O’Keefe, who founded Sistina Software, bought by Red Hat about two years ago. Matt now has a new (stealth) startup, about which I know little more than the name: Alvarri … even after the panel! And his web site sure is interesting! (If it’s even his.) But I sure know open source runs all through this new gig of Matt’s, with his stellar background.
Anyway, later in the panel, Matt came out with a comment about open source that jumped out at me: at Red Hat, only 2-3% of users actually pay for support. Another panelist, the software analyst at Piper Jaffray, said that’s the greatest challenge facing open source vendors, and the guy from Accenture tossed in that he doesn’t see that exceeding 5% anytime soon.
The whole notion of open source and new software startups came back to me when I saw Steve Larsen’s latest post on stealth company Krugle’s blog about the SD Forum’s meeting this week out in the Valley. Wish I could be a fly on the wall at that one.
And here you thought it was all about writing. Wrong! For the business world, anyway, as it slowly gets acclimated to the blogging phenomenon, there’s a whole lot more listening going on than writing. And that’s a good thing. As I noted in my blog post of January 3 on “Intelligence Mining,” companies will increasingly be gathering knowledge and insights from blogs, especially related to consumer research. They’ll be picking up information that was more difficult or costly to obtain pre-blog, and they’ll be doing that by…simply listening. That is, by monitoring what’s being said about them and their products. So, I thought this piece, recently published by Information Week, would be a good follow-on to my previous post — it’s called Companies Go Bloggy For Marketing.
With all the reliance we place on online communications today, it’s so easy to forget how important it is to break away and get facetime with people — and I’m talking specifically with lots of ’em, at events and conferences. Sometimes we have to force ourselves to do this, to leave the routine behind, but the payoff is great. I learned this years ago, when I found that jumping on a plane every now and then to attend (and report on) technology events energized me like nothing else. You just can’t beat getting into the middle of such gatherings of smart people and movers and shakers in this business. It isn’t just the intelligence you pick up at these things, but you meet the greatest people. I’ve compared it before to this, but it’s like to going to camp. Some of my closest professional colleagues and friends today I met at conferences, going back 6, 7, 8 years.
I’m happy to say now that the nice folks at Demo ’06 have seen fit to admit me as a press registrant. So, I *will* be blogging from there (and even posting in advance) — and I’m greatly looking forward to it! I know there wll be big energy at this happening. And I intend to capture as much of it as I can for you, along with lots of juicy details.
Turns out my old Conferenza colleague Shel Israel found this one a day before I did… 🙂 But, hey — he, like Doc, has geographic advantage! Great post, on a great topic: how blogs are impacting launch PR for tech startups.
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