Party with a cause

Help the cause of several poor kids in the developing world by donating new kids book or cash at the TiE-Rockies holiday party on Dec 12th at Dazzle. Details of the event is on TiE-Rockies website. TiE-Rockies has partnered with Room To Read during this holiday season to help spread hope and make the world a better place. I mentioned Room To Read in one of my earlier blog here.

PS: Here is the list of the books that Room To Read recommend to help the cause.

Moderating an exciting Panel

Many of us who either moderate a session or be on the panel – I like the following two recommendation from Guy. Here is the one if you are moderating a session and this is another one if you are one of the panelist.

Bootstrapping

Entrepreneurs alike who are either looking to bootstrap their business or work with an investor will find reading “Bootstrapping” book by Greg Gianforte helpful. Greg is a serial entrepreneur and currently the founder, CEO of RightNow – which is a SaaS/CRM play in the enterprise arena. Although the book is written in the context of bootstrapping – but every entrepreneur should find it helpful.

Not having much to spend and being frugal teaches key life lessons. It forces an early startup to focus on the true priorities – taking care of customer, sales, quickly adjusting to the “need”, etc. Also, it takes away the general distraction that comes along with any investors and the need to keep them happy.

Bootstrapping is a harder run and not for the faint of an heart – but so is true about a persistent entrepreneur.

Check it out for yourself…

CIO Panel

Yesterday, I co-hosted a CIO panel session organized by the local TiE-Rockies group. We had quite an accomplished group of CIOs in the panel. It included:

• Kamalesh Dwivedi – CIO of TeleTech. A public company in global BPO space
• Tim Graumann – CIO of McData. A public company in Storage space.
• Kumud Kalia – CIO of Direct Energy. Growing energy firm in the North East and Canada
• Patrick Hellman – CIO of Mercury Company. A private company in real estate business
• Session was moderated by Jim Conboy, a partner at Wolf Venture and a local VC.

All are accomplished individuals in their own right and shared some insight of their challenges. Hopefully entrepreneurs were paying attention for opportunities that they can create to help ease CIOs pressure.

Some discussion – pay attention entrepreneurs, if you are looking for ideas or pitching to CIOs – were:

1. Challenge in keeping up with the turn over of employees in certain industries. Having a solution that can enable fast employee on-boarding and quick ramp up of knowledge will ease pain.
2. Integration with various suppliers and systems remains a challenge – particularly in the unregulated industries. Discussion was standardization, common vocabulary and integration. How to quickly enable 360 degree view of customer.
3. Skillset demand in the IT industry is shifting from programmer to more of an analyst who understands business process has business skills, knows/configures/tests the functionality, etc. is more in demand than a programmer.
4. If you are targeting CIOs to sell – don’t start with them. Start with their reports or managers so that you already have a relationship established with the people who will actually do the work and influence the approval process before reaching out to CIOs. This will help you since CIOs anyway will delegate the task of review/analyze to their reports. So start at the right level.
5. CIOs are going to be risk averse from the get go. They are hard at work balancing risk between keeping the business running on everyday basis (can’t stop the business and get fired) as well as ensuring their company can grow/launch/penetrate new market/product (can’t have systems that will prohibit company growth or get fired). So tailor your pitch to CIOs need rather than just another cool invention.
6. CIOs are not too concerned about outsourcing since much of the development anyway is done by Oracle, SAP and Microsoft of the world. They are typically configuring and using a system to the best use for their business processes – which is not a common skill to outsource. Also see #3.
7. CIOs are waiting and watching hosted/SaaS model. On one hand it is good for them as they have a service provider that can be held accountable and need to conform to their SLAs of quality, availability and security. On the other hand of loosing control – CIOs are just too good at deflecting question for now.
8. CIOs are increasingly confident of the secured perimeter around the company. It is strong and hold back external agents from penetration. They are more concerned about fraudulent use of company property by internal folks or company employees leaving their personal data outside of the company – like when visiting a doctor.

A good session with accomplished individuals – who shared their insight for budding entrepreneurs to understand and fulfill CIOs need.

Startup Ideas

Anyone looking for startup ideas that will get famous VC backing – look no further. Here is a list of compiled startup ideas actually suggested by well known VCs that they would like to fund.

A view on Indians immigrants

A BusinessWeek.com columnist and businessman, Vivek Wadhwa shares his views on why Indians are such a successful immigrant group. Ignore the catchy title but the stats thus far remain good to prove his point. Also, US immigration rules helps as typically it attracts somewhat better part of the crowd (educated, skilled, speaking english, etc.) from India to start with.

I am sure many first generation Indians who immigrated to America can relate to several points identified in the article. Vivek has highlighted the following points :-

1. Emphasis on education
2. Upbringing – expectations
3. Hard-work
4. Determination to overcome obstacles
5. Entrepreneurial spirit
6. Recognizing Diversity
7. Humility
8. Family Support
9. Financial management – Spending within means
10. Networking
11. Giving back
12. Integrations and acceptance

Ignore the Indian title and most of these traits now become the proven recepie of anyone from any background who have been successful in life.

Colorado Gubernatorial debate update

Today I attended the Colorado Gubernatorial event at Brown Palace hotel during lunch. Forum was good and we had over 200 people – mostly CEOs and executives from local technology companies, in the room. My friend, Vic Ahmed, President of TiE-Rockies opened up the debate. Both VCs Jack Tankersley and Brad Feld did a good job moderating the event.

Much of the discussion between the two candidates was cordial – Bob Beauprez made his statements and Bill Ritter made his own. However, on few points there was some disagreement that showed the partisan split. Particularly around Referendum C.

Some of the questions asked were around:-

1. Education

2. Renewable Energy and growth

3. How to attract big technology companies head quarters in Colorado. Seems like a trend where big Colorado technology companies gets picked up by large corporations from outside Colorado. Recently, McData, StorageTek, etc. were acquired. Resulting into not too many big technology companies in Colorado now.

I was hoping there would be a question around outsourcing and understand candidates stance. Also, what would they do to help ease the pain that gets affected by the outsourcing. Anyway, no such question was asked.

Since I am politically inactive and have no previous knowledge of either candidate – personally, I left the place without picking any favorite. I am not sure any candidate will do better than other to cultivate technology/entrepreneur environment. My vote on either of the candidate will be on some other factor than just today’s discussion. Just could not pick my favorite – not that I went there thinking I will pick a favorite.

Just a logistics note - serving lunch at the same time when candidates were debating was not a good idea. Too much distraction and noise from servers while taking away dishes or serving the food. There was much activity on the floor throughout that could have been avoided by starting 30 min earlier.

On a disappointing note to myself – I carried camera with dead batteries. I was hoping to post at least one photo here of the debate. Oh! well – some other time.

Colorado Gubernatorial Technology Forum – 2006

On Sept 8th, candidates for the Colorado governor race – Bob Beauprez (Republican) and Bill Ritter (Democrat) will provide their perspective on the technology landscape at Colorado. This will be a great event to hear from both the candidates on how they see the health of technology industry in Colorado.

Colorado has one of the highest concentration of technology workers. It will be good to hear what candidates have to say on how Colorado can create more successful entrepreneurs – attracting more investment and technology companies needed to keep a healthy eco system for its technology citizen.

The event will be held at Browne Place @ 11:30 AM. For more details on the event and to register visit TiE-Rockies. Event will be moderated by local VCs Jack Tankersley (Republican) and Brad Feld (Democrat).

Life is not a Zero-sum game

Tuesday on 22nd, TiE-rockies organized a speaking engagement of Ralph Peterson. Ralph is CEO of CH2M-Hill. $3.8Bn company headquartered in Colorado. The company has an outstanding growth year over year and almost been doubling every few years. One can see real hockey stick in action. Company is 100% owned by its employees. Anyway, a good company with good fundamentals and good people on-board. Also, it is hard to miss how humble and gracious person Ralph is. Kudos to him for making CH2M a good company that was is now in the Fortune Best 100 company to work for.

However, what caught my attention was Ralph’s emphasis on how life is not a zero-sum game. An interesting perspective these days where much thought prevails on the winners and how for each winner there are loosers. One doesn’t have to be a looser for others to win. Win-Win situations do exist and how one should attempt to find win-win situations. Much on non-Zero-sum and how it has shaped human destiny can be found at Robert Wright page. Ralph mentioned this book during his chat – one book that is now in my list to read soon.