After a small hiatus, the popular event StartupSF is now back! I’m pleased to announce that BizSpark is now a proud sponsor of this event series. We’re all about supporting the startup ecosystem in the Silicon Valley, and through this event entrepreneurs will have a great opportunity to connect with and learn from other entrepreneurs.

StartupSF

StartupSF will debut at its new location in Microsoft SF on June 4, 2009 from 6-9pm. And our guest speaker for this opening event is Loic Le Meur, Founder and CEO of Seesmic. Loic’s presentation is titled “How to Launch a Product with your Community” – learn first hand how to use various community building techniques to build your product, service or brand from the ground up.

Date: June 4th, 2009 (Thursday)

Time: 6-9pm

Location: Microsoft, 835 Market St, Suite 700, San Francisco, CA 94103

Registration Link: http://startupsf0609.eventbrite.com/ (see below for a chance to win free passes)

Price: $10 online in advance / $20 at the door (StartUpSF is a not-for-profit event with all proceeds going to charity. All proceeds from this event will be going to GreenPeace)

Note: Food & Drink included

Open Mic for Startups

A few startups will have the opportunity to utilize 5 minutes of “open mic” time to give their company’s elevator pitch, as well utilize demo tables where they can showcase their product or service. We are currently accepting applications for Demo Companies for this event and those interested should fill out the Contact Form over on StartUpSF.com.

Free Passes?

Would you like a free pass to StartupSF? I have a handful of passes, if you’d like one please email me: anand.iyer@microsoft.com. First come, first serve.

Follow us

To keep track of StartupSF updates:

• the StartupSF blog
• StartupSF on Twitter
• BizSpark on Twitter

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A couple of months ago, I met Dan Merritts from RSWP, Inc. at a coffee shop in South Park, San Francisco. It was a short meeting, but as soon as Dan described the idea that RSWP had been working on, I got really excited. Eduify is a web application that lets students edit and store documents, capture and discover research, find writing tutorials and safeguard against plagiarism. I remember spending countless hours in school looking for quotes and finding the right way to cite them.

Anthony Ha, from VentureBeat, has a good way of describing a student’s typical paper-writing process:

To illustrate the Eduify concept, the company offers this outline of how a normal high schooler might write a paper: They’d start thinking about the paper at home, then start writing on a word processor at school, then search for sources while at a friends’ house and copy the quotes down by hand, then write the bibliography at home, then proofread the paper while on the bus, and finally turn it in. In other words, the work is scattered across a number of locations, which makes an often-challenging process even harder. With Eduify, a student can start writing in their web browser, find guidance from some of the paper templates available (so there’s less head-scratching about “how do I write a compare and contrast paper?”), do their research within the editor, have those sources automatically formatted, run their paper through a proofreader and plagiarism checker, and ask for help from family or friends when necessary.

I was even more excited when Dan told me that Eduify was using the .NET stack. I pitched Microsoft Azure, our new cloud computing platform, to Dan and almost instantly we saw synergies. Eduify needs to be able to scale on demand and given that they are a small startup, they’d rather not deal with managing infrastructure in a typical hosting environment. I introduced Dan to Aashish Dhamdhere and some key members of the Windows Azure team. In just a couple of months, RSWP was rolling with Eduify on Windows Azure, our compute platform. And to think all this started when Eduify joined the BizSpark program to be able to leverage the software resources the program has to offer. To quote Dan’l Lewin, our Corporate Vice President:

“Eduify’s web service demonstrates how a startup can take advantage of Microsoft technologies to create an innovative solution and in this case work to improve education. Through the BizSpark program, Microsoft is helping startups like Eduify by providing them with a wide range of end-to-end software and Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform, a set of cloud platform technologies, to help them build a scalable and sustainable business.”

What struck me as particularly exciting was RSWP’s commitment to the education space. To quote Dan Merritts, VP of Marketing at Eduify:

“Eduify’s mission is to give every student the tools and services they so critically need to become better writers. We are enthusiastic about President Obama’s impetus to re-invigorate education in America. We’re excited to join the cause by helping students everywhere significantly improve the often under-taught, yet critically important skill of writing.”

I’ve been watching from the sidelines as this young company that I met just a few months ago has gone from scratching the surface to a full blown launch announcement with all this amazing press coverage from MIX09 in Vegas. I’m having myself a Jerry Maguire day.

Here are some other articles covering Eduify’s beta announcement:

• VentureBeat: Eduify tries to make writing less painful for students
• TechFlash: New online student writing app, Eduify, based on Windows Azure
• PRWeb: Eduify Answers Obama’s Call to Help Students With New Service
• Eduify Blog: Launch :: We’re Answering President Obama’s Call to Help Students

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I’m off to Palm Springs this evening to attend DEMO09. The BizSpark team will be there, so feel free to come by our booth if you want an invite code, or if you want to play with Live Mesh or some of our other technologies.

Which one of these  companies do you think will win DEMOgod status (list borrowed from Brian Solis):

7 Billion People, Inc.; Austin, TX
Always Innovating, Inc.; Mountain View, CA
AppZero Corp.; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Asurion Mobile Applications, Inc.; San Mateo, CA
Avaak, Inc.; San Diego, CA
BitGravity, Inc.; Burlingame, CA
bluBuzz, LLC; Holland, MI
Cc:Betty, Inc.; Palo Alto, CA
Citrix Online, Goleta, CA
Coveroo, Inc.; San Francisco, CA
deskNET, Lausanne, CH
Document Depository Corp., LLC; Wayne, PA
eFormic, Ltd.; Stuttgart, DE
Ensembli, Ltd.; Sheffield, Great Britain
Evri, Inc.; Seattle, WA
Gazaro, Inc.; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
HAM-IT, Inc.; North Andover, MA
Home-Account, Inc.; San Francisco, CA
HowSimple, LLC; Huntington Beach, CA
Jadoos, Inc.; Sunnyvale, CA
Kutano Corp.; Burnaby, BC, Canada
Liquid Media, LLC; Arvada, CO
Ontier, Inc.; Portland, OR
Primal Fusion, Inc.; Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Promptu Systems Corp.; Menlo Park, CA
Purewire, Inc.; Atlanta, GA
Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, Inc. San Diego, CA
Qubes, Inc.; Taipei, Taiwan
Silverstone Solutions, Inc. San Francisco, CA
Skout, Inc.; San Francisco, CA
SmartyCard; San Mateo, CA
Symantec Corp.; Mountain View, CA
Technicopia, LLC; Carmel Valley, CA
Transformyx, Inc.; Baton Rouge, LA
Vokle, Inc.; Santa Monica, CA
Xandros, Inc.; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
XMARKS; San Francisco, CA
Zipadi Technologies, LLC; Bluffdale, UT
Zuora, Inc.; Redwood City, CA

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First, I must preface my post by telling you that I’m a fan of Cuban’s. I was shamelessly giddy when I got the chance to sit down with him a few months back at TechCrunch50. The man is a visionary.

Cuban just wrote about “Open Source Funding” (I wish he hadn’t called it “the Mark Cuban Stimulus plan”, for obvious reasons). Jokes aside, essentially Cuban wants to fund a few ideas that will be self-sustaining and profitable soon (in 90 days). And the best part is, he wants the ideas to be public.

Now there’s a (good) chance your idea will not get funded by him, probably because of the sheer volume of submissions that he will see and the finite time the man has. But even the worst case scenario isn’t a bad one – let’s say Cuban doesn’t fund your idea after you post it publicly, your idea could still be discovered by someone else – possibly another investor, or a co-founder (or a plagiarist, sure).

Cuban hasn’t been shy to invite business proposals in the past. He made it pretty clear at TechCrunch50 that he is open to receiving emails from potential startups and that he will consider them, as long as you don’t have him sign an NDA.

I think this is an absolutely brilliant move by Cuban. I can only hope that more capitalists who are sitting on some cash can help invigorate this market the way Cuban is. Not only can Cuban’s plan help the market and some startups in the short term, hopefully it’ll give others ideas about how they can invest cleverly and pump some vigor into this market. I want Cuban’s idea to get all the attention it can possibly get.

I want to add to Cuban’s proposal and offer up a code to BizSpark for ideas that entrepreneurs are investigating – if you’re looking to put your startup idea in to motion and you like our tools and products but can’t afford to spend the money right now, shoot me an email to join BizSpark.

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[photo courtesy SomewhatFrank]

Since the launch of BizSpark in November, we’ve hit the road and spent time in several cities in the US.

We participated at the New York New Tech Meetup in New York City on 11/11/2008, where I got to present to pitch ‘BizSpark’ to 300 entrepreneurs, alongside Steve Barsh of DreamIT Ventures (a BizSpark Network Partner)

I want to send special thanks to Scott Heiferman and Dawn Barber from the New York New Tech Meetup.

We followed that up with a cocktail hour where we had around 400 people in attendance.

We were in Austin on 11/20/2008 and partnered with Austin Startup District and did a ‘pecha kucha’ style pitch to the Austin crowd.

I want to send out a very special thanks to Tammy Gilmore and Hugh Forrest from SXSW for helping us promote the event to the Austin area. SXSW is absolutely one of my favorite events of all time, and we’re surely going to participate at SXSW 2009. So please be sure to register and attend!

In the next couple of weeks we will be visiting cities in the West Coast, specifically

• Los Angeles on 12/10
• San Francisco on 12/16

We’d love for you to join us!

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[pictures courtesy Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us]

We officially launched BizSpark last week. Since then, we’ve seen a surge of startups and network partners requesting access to the program.

There are two types of entities that can join the program:

1. Startups – In BizSpark speak, a startup is a company that
   • is less than 3 years old,
   • has less than USD 1 million in annual revenue,
   • is privately held, and,
   • is creating a software product.
2. Network Partners – Network Partners are organizations that can provide startups with the software via BizSpark (and MSDN). Some of these organizations are chartered with providing services and support beyond just the software. These organizations can be one of the following types of organizations (not a restrictive list):
   • Academic Institutions that have entrepreneurial sub-organizations or venture arms
   • Community Entrepreneurial Organizations (either for profit or not-for-profit)
   • Startup Accelerators or Incubators
   • Investors
   • Government Agencies

If you’re a startup, here’s what you do to join the BizSpark program:

A startup needs an enrollment code from a Network Partner to sign up for BizSpark.

1. Read the Startup Program Guide
2. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/FindNetworkPartner.aspx to find a Network Partner. Select your country of residence and select a Network Partner that you would be comfortable working through
3. Contact that Network Partner via email or via phone and request access to the BizSpark program. Please note that some Network Partners may require that you be a member of their organization or they may enforce other rules as it pertains to their organization’s function. The Network Partner also has to verify that the Startup meets the program’s requirements (see above).
4. If the Network Partner sees a fit, they will respond to you with a unique URL that has a BizSpark code embedded in it. Clicking on the link will take you back to the BizSpark site.
   
   You will notice that the enrollment code (fuzzed out) has been automatically populated. Be sure to read the “BizSpark Startup Agreement” and the “BizSpark Program EULA“.
5. Fill in the requisite information about the company and the primary contact information.
   
6. Following this, the primary contact listed for this startup will receive an email he or she can then use to setup their MSDN subscription (MSDN subscriptions provide a cost-effective way to license Microsoft platforms and tools, receive technical support, and gain priority access to new versions of Microsoft products, including Microsoft operating systems, server software, and productivity applications.). MSDN online will be the portal using which the startups can access the software. The MSDN account setup could take up to 24 hours. Click on the link in the email and sign in using your Windows Live ID. Please keep in mind that the MSDN account setup could take up to a day.
7. You will be directed to MSDN where you will be asked to create an account
   
8. Your MSDN account is now setup and you are ready to download software. The primary contact listed for the startup is the “BizSpark Administrator”, other developers at the startup will be “BizSpark Members”.
   
   
9. To give more developers in your company access to BizSpark, go back to the BizSpark dashboard and click on the “Set up and manage BizSpark memberships for individuals at your Startup“. Provide their email addresses and they will get an email to setup their MSDN account.
   

If you cannot find a suitable Network Partner to sponsor you to join the program please send me an email.

If you want to be a BizSpark Network Partner:

A (potential) Network Partner needs an enrollment code from a Microsoftie to sign up for BizSpark.

1. Read the Network Partner program guide.
2. Go to http://microsoft.com/bizspark and click on “Become a BizSpark Network Partner”.
3. A Microsoftie will then respond to your request via email to join the program. He or she may ask for more information or give you an email link that will route you to the BizSpark portal to sign up. Clicking on the link provided will take you to a BizSpark page that looks like this:
   
   You’ll notice that the Champ ID has been pre-populated.
4. You will be presented with a questionnaire. Please be detailed as possible in providing information about your organization as startups will use this information to find you.
5. Once you’re done with the questionnaire, you will see the BizSpark Network Partner dashboard. You’ll see links here to Get Reports, Manage your organization’s information and to invite Startups to join BizSpark.
   
   Clicking on the “Invite a Startup to join BizSpark” link will give you a way to generate a unique URL (one per startup) that you can then email to a startup.

Check out our FAQ if you have other questions. If you want to learn more about BizSpark or meet local Network Partners, come join us at one of the BizSpark events we are doing around the US over the next few weeks.

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With the launch of BizSpark yesterday, we will be visiting a few cities in the US and partnering with Stephanie Agresta and Brian Solis of The TechSet, as well as local entrepreneurial organizations to talk about BizSpark. We encourage entrepreneurs, current startups, investors, business accelerators or incubators and students to come to our events.

• 11/11/2008 in New York, NY - we will be doing a pitch at the New York New Tech Meetup, followed by a reception at One Little West 12. Register to attend.
• 11/19/2008 in Phoenix, AZ – partnering with Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference to talk about BizSpark
• 11/20/2008 in Austin, TX – partnering with Austin Startup District where we will have 10 startups present each. Register to attend.
• 12/2/2008 in Los Angeles, CA (mark your calendars)
• 12/4/2008 in Silicon Valley (mark your calendars)

If you want to learn more about BizSpark as a Startup or as a potential Network Partner, you need to come to one of our "Ignition" events.

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Over the years, we have built a good sturdy platform with .NET. .NET is a  scalable, secure, and reliable  platform that supports good application performance. With the advent of "Web 2.0" and the surge of new and emerging companies betting their business on the web, we want early stage companies to be able to use the .NET for implementing their ideas. Typically startups have been concerned about costs of new tools and products. Today, we are announcing the availability of a new program for early stage startups called "BizSpark". BizSpark offers early stage companies Microsoft products at no up-front cost.

What is a startup to Microsoft? Do I qualify?

We have four pre-requisites for a startup to join BizSpark. To join BizSpark, a startup company

1. must be building a software based product,
2. should have been in existence for less than 3 years,
3. makes less than USD 1 million (local flavors apply for other countries), and,
4. is privately held.

BizSpark is meant for companies building web applications, or delivering web based services. A startup can be a part of the program for three years (they will have to renew their membership annually), unless they get disqualified because they have gone public (or have been acquired by a company that does not qualify for BizSpark) or if their revenue is greater than USD 1 million.

What kind of software is BizSpark offering?

We are offering development tools as well as production licenses of our server products.

For development, testing and demonstration, startups can download the software included in the Visual Studio Team System Team Suite (VSTS) with MSDN Premium, plus VSTS Team Foundation Server (Standard Edition).

For production use (that is, to deploy and host an application over the internet), startups can download and use Windows Server, SQL Server, BizTalk Server, and Office SharePoint Server for Internet Sites hosting, as well as Systems Center for managing hosting server operations.

(please refer to the BizSpark Startup Program Guide for full details)

"No up-front cost" – do I pay when I leave the program?

Yes, we will assess a $100 fee when a startup exits the program.

What happens after three years of participation in BizSpark?

After three years in BizSpark, a startup will exit the program. A startup can continue to use the development tools they would have obtained through the program even after the three years of being a part of the program. If a startup wishes to continue receiving updates to development tools however, it has to renew it’s MSDN subscription at usual rates and terms.

To continue using the production licenses, a startup may choose to take advantage of a licensing program like Microsoft’s Services Provider License Agreement program (or other Microsoft licensing programs that may be available at the time) but is in no way obligated to do so.

How do I join BizSpark?

As we launch this program, we have been partnering with select organizations to help us build out a startup ecosystem. This ecosystem will comprise of Network Partners (academic institutions, entrepreneurial organizations, business accelerators or business incubators and investors etc.) who will help startups enroll in to the BizSpark program. Find a Network Partner near you.

How does this help me, a startup?

• Software – via the program
• Support – via MSDN (two support incidents per startup) and the resources that the Network Partner has to offer for startups
• Visibility – via BizSparkDB. Startups can profile themselves on BizSparkDB.

Is Azure going to be a part of the BizSpark offering?

Windows Azure, announced at PDC last week, is a natural platform choice for early stage companies. As I’d mentioned in my post last week,

While Azure is appealing to everyone from large enterprises to hobbyists, it is going to be particularly interesting to startups and Web 2.0 companies as well who want to take advantage of a rich, highly versatile web-based platform to build scalable applications for the web.

BizSpark program startups will receive preferential access to the Azure Community Technology Preview. To sign up for the CTP, BizSpark participants should enroll on the Azure site and profile with the same Windows Live ID they used to enroll in BizSpark. During the CTP, access will be assessed and assigned on a company-by-company basis and will be confirmed as capacity becomes available.

What startups are using .NET today?

We have several startups that have been recruited in to the Startup Accelerator Program. Here is a list of just some of the startups we have been working with.

Why the name, BizSpark?

Last year, we launched this program called DreamSpark for students. BizSpark just seemed to be a logical extension to that name for businesses or startups.

Where can I get more information?

http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark

We will also be visiting several cities in the US as a part of our "Ignition" event series, and partnering with local community organizations to talk about BizSpark:

• Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA 11/5-11/7
• Flashpoint Innovation Awards in Chicago, IL on 11/6
• New York New Tech Meetup in New York, NY on 11/11
• AZ Entrepreneurship Conference in Phoenix, AZ on 11/19
• Startup District Austin, TX on 11/20 (link TBD)
• Los Angeles, CA on 12/2 (link TBD)
• Silicon Valley on 12/4 (link TBD)

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Plug and Play is one of the valley’s most popular startup incubators. They house several hundred startups in their facilities. Plug and Play has been doing a great job of complementing their business acceleration efforts with offline events. Their next big event, called the “Plug & Play Acceleration Collaboration Track (PACT)” will be held on October 20 and 21, 2008 at their main offices in Sunnyvale, CA. The speaker list is extremely impressive.

Dan’l Lewin, corporate VP of the Emerging Business Team at Microsoft will be doing a keynote at the event on October 21. And I will be participating on a panel called “Completing the Ecosystem” alongside key representatives from Cisco, Sun, Yahoo!, Orange and Symantec.

The agenda looks brilliant – I strongly encourage you to come check it out.

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Dan”l Lewin kicked off Microsoft’s Annual Venture Capital Summit at our campus in Mountain View, CA today. Dan’l spoke about the Strategic and Emerging Business Team (SEBT), our Innovation Centers worldwide and our work with Students with programs like Imagine Cup and DreamSpark. The Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program is one that the SEBT launched in Oct 2007. The program touts 161 companies worldwide, over $100m in software licenses granted, about 2100 hours in workshops in 80 Architectural Guidance sessions and 107 industry events.

The main attraction was of course, Ballmer. I loved it that Ballmer was communicating in “valley speak”. He emphasized heavily on Cloud Computing, Mobile, Online Advertising, and “Consumer this and Consumer that”… Ballmer started off by discussing how he thinks the bar is set really high for us – that people always expect something different, something new and something innovative. But he believes in this natural steady progression to a Software + Services world.

(stating the obvious a bit) Ballmer is a seasoned veteran, the CEO of one of the most popular countries in the world – that said, I was looking for “sound-bites” accompanied with words of wisdom. Here’s what I caught:

• People screw up more by giving up than doubling-down.
• Build from the present and embrace the future.
• The Mobile market is where the PC market was back in 1984-85.
• The PC market is growing in double-digits.
• (in reference to Windows Mobile and the Mobile strategy) How do you provide choice without compromise?
• (in reference to the state of the economy) “… feels like technology and telecom may be living in a different world from the CNBC crowd”

I liked that he was really having an open dialogue, and posed many rhetorical questions that would raise eyebrows. That said, I think a lot of the questions he raised will get answered at PDC this year. Who’s going?

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I’ve been perplexed for a few days about TechCrunch50’s winning pick, Yammer. I finally started to use it, and I’m not all that impressed. Clearly, winning at TC50 has done wonders for Yammer, but I don’t think this spike will last long.

Yammer is NOT an “enterprise product”. Can we please stop calling it that? Yammer is just twitter for private groups with the domain name of your email address as the common denominator. I’ve joined 3 different Yammer networks already – microsoft.com, alumni.purdue.edu and employees.org. I can see Yammer being useful for a university, for example. You could get to meet new people, but I really don’t see it being useful for a company as much.

1. It’s not innovative. The UI and the design look exactly like twitter’s. The idea sounds a lot like SocialCast’s.
2. From a study that involved interviewing over 500 executives done by Avande:
   “The key barriers to adoption of social media technologies are concerns about security (76 percent); senior management apathy (57 percent); and, fear of using unproven technologies (58 percent).”
   Yammer poses security risks that companies should take seriously. For example, there are over 100,000 people with an @microsoft.com email address, and I can only imagine that a thing or two is bound to slip and people who are not supposed to seeing certain yams (?) will be seeing them. As of now there are about a 100 ‘softies on Yammer already and from my brief time on the site, most ‘softies have been very prudent about not talking about internal projects and several have thrown the security caution flag. Also, if for some reason there were to be a vulnerability, internal yams could be exposed.
3. As an evangelist, I care more about having conversations with my friends outside the company than I do on the inside. I’ve started using Twitter, and so far, I like it.

I find no benefit in Yammer, and I find no need to use it. I just don’t understand why Marc Benioff said he’d buy Yammer. Do you?

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This week, TechCrunch reinforced itself as the most powerful tech blog on the planet. TechCrunch50 was everything it was made out to be. Startups, press, speakers – these guys were the crème de la crème of their respective contingents. The TechCrunch50 crew received over 1000 applications from startups wanting to demo their product at the event.

My favorite startups

Most of the companies that made the 50, were consumer facing software products. Here are 3 of my favorite startups (when I was picking these, I was thinking of products that I could use right away):

My favorite talk

Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban has been my hero for over a decade. I wish I had some specific highlights from the talk I could talk about, the whole talk was quite memorable and amazing. Cuban also stopped by our booth and I had the chance to have a pretty good chat with him about the Surface and applications we could develop for it. We talked about practical applications of the Surface for fans in the stadium, or maybe even for coaches to analyze game data.

[Mark Cuban at the MSFT Booth]

Here’s Mark Hendrickson’s report on the chat.

My favorite moments

1. During Mark Cuban’s chat with Jason Calacanis, Cuban said, “when I die, I want to come back as me”.
2. Ashton Kutcher mentioning the Microsoft Surface as the most exciting thing he’d seen at TC50.
3. Of course, Cuban stopping by the Microsoft lounge.
4. And, last but not least, this:

[MC Hammer]

It’s hammer time!

“ai”

Ashton Kutcher launched his new startup, Blah Girls, at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco this week. Ashton walked by the Microsoft lounge several times, in and out of interviews as you can imagine. From Ashton’s most recent blog post, I think he liked the Microsoft Surface we have on display here:

“The coolest thing I’ve seen so far is Microsoft Surfce. Its a coffee table thats like a giant iphone.”

[photo courtesy: magerleagues]

Now, it would have been icing if Ashton had called the iPhone a small Surface ;)  His comment’s understandable, the iPhone is a consumer facing device that has gained immense popularity.

We also had some other celebs come by the booth – I’ll be blogging about those experience later.

“ai”

I’m pretty damned stoked about TechCrunch50. I spent most of today setting up the Microsoft lounge area at the venue. The idea for the lounge started when I was sitting with the Qik team brainstorming ways in which we could partner to do some fun things at the event. In the midst of that, Michael Arrington calls and says, “get a Surface Table [for TechCrunch50]”. And so, we did.

Aside from the “Big Ass Table” (which, by the way, has been getting “ooo”s and “aah”s from everyone who has stopped by, including Ashton Kutcher), we have a couple of XBox’s with Halo and RockBand set up. We are also going to be using the FlotZam application to show off Tweets, Flickr photos etc. about the event. By the way, here’s a Qik video of Megan Asha using shot at our lounge:

I also got a sneak preview of some of the products that startups will be demo-ing tomorrow and I was really blown away by what I saw. What I can tell you is that the Tablet PC being developed by TechCrunch is not one of the 50 startups demoing tomorrow. And neither is Ashton’s Blah Girls.

If you are at TechCrunch50, be sure to stop by our booth. I plan on (almost live-)blogging, twittering, flickring and qiking from the event, so, stay tuned for more.

“ai”

I’m in Boulder today at TechStars’ annual Investor and Demo Day. The energy level is high, the startup teams are knocking their demos out of the park, and the who’s who from VC-land is here. And I’m sitting next to one of the most prolific bloggers, Don Dodge, which leads me to want to do this pseudo-post of sorts. I’m live blogging twittering the event:  http://twitter.com/anandiyer. Alternately, you can watch for the keyword ‘techstars08’. Come join the conversation.

“ai”

Photo courtesy: Andrew-Hyde

I’ve worked with several funded and non-funded startups during my time here at Microsoft. Having seen what works and doesn’t, I thought I’d throw together a series of posts on how to startup a software company.

First and foremost, you need to have an idea. Once you have an idea that you want to execute on, the flowchart for launching your company looks fairly straightforward:

Idea –> Prototype (Alpha) –> Beta –> Release

In this post, I’ll talk you through some of the necessities as well as ancillary things you’ll need to be thinking of as you start out getting to the first phase, the prototype.

Initially, you’ll need

• (to borrow from Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start) a Mission Statement – Sounds simple enough, right? You’d be surprised how many times startups are unable to articulate what they are trying to accomplish. This one-liner will also help you with your co-founder(s). If at any time it seems like the team is veering of course, refer to your mantra, your mission statement to bring the project back on track.
• a Developer, a UI Designer, Tester – It’s very likely that all three of these could very likely be the same human. Some of you may disagree that the UI designer and the developer need to be different people, and that’s perfectly understandable. Most startups only have finite resources.
• a Product Manager (to gather requirements), a Program Manager (to execute and monitor the timeline) – It’s very likely that your product manager may very well be your program manager, which is also fine. While it sounds preposterous to have one PM for one developer, think of the PM as the “yin” to the “yang” – simply put a developer needs to have a partner who is not a developer. If you decide to add more people, ask yourself how you see them contributing. And remember that your founding crew has to be a stellar list with a good amount of experience and passion.
• a name, and a web domain to go with it.
• to understand the business landscape. Do you have any competitors? If so, why would users want to use your product? What problems does your product solve that no others do? How many competitors do you have? Backing up your answers with numbers will also help you.

Why a Prototype?

• Building a prototype for your startup is a lot like building a prototype working at any other (medium or large) company – it requires the same steps with probably 1/Xth the number of resources (where X > 1)
• You get to validate your idea and create a proof-of-concept for your own sake.
• A live demo speaks volumes – a working prototype will make it so much easier to sell the idea to others (when the time is right).
• Help raise money – I remember Seth Sternberg from Meebo speaking at a conference not too long ago. (paraphrasing) He emphasized that you will be unable to raise money without a working prototype. Unless you are Marc Andreessen (Sternberg didn’t say that). In fact, some investors occasionally ask for how many users you have been able to acquire and they use that as a basis to fund the business. Your prototype will be what your future investors will use to fund your idea.

Getting to a Prototype

1. Keep Things Dead Simple – I can’t emphasize this enough. You’ll have plenty of complexities and complications to deal with, so plan to keep everything else as simple as you can.
2. Your Prototype is not your Product. A prototype is just that, a prototype, a working example, a proof-of-concept. Don’t over-engineer. (as much as it pains me to say this) Some amount of kludgy hacked up code is ok. Create a simple product requirements document that will help you identify your milestones and throw it on a simple Excel spreadsheet, but enumerate it nicely.
3. Create a Timeline – Take a first crack at a timeline. You’ll probably revise your timeline several times before you get to your prototype. Be sure to give yourself lots of cushion when you’re planning. If you think you can code feature A in 40 hours, put down 50 or 60 instead. I wouldn’t advocate using Microsoft Project (just yet) for managing your timeline. A simple shareable Excel spreadsheet is plenty to manage this at this time.
4. Keep tabs on everything you spend, and use a simple Excel spreadsheet to track your expenses.
5. Identify your goals and write everything down. Setup a private Wiki. Make a note of everything, categorize it and prioritize it. Try ScrewTurn Wiki or Mindtouch Deki or FlexWiki. If you’re lazy and don’t want to host your own wiki, try PBWiki.
6. Start Wireframing – Use a product like Expression Design to start wireframing what your application needs to look like.
7. Ask yourself what is going to make your prototype complete? What do you absolutely need to have in here to validate your idea, to make a good demo, or to sell this idea to someone else? This could include :
   • Tools and Platform – Given that your prototype is your immediate short-term goal and that your prototype has to be coded, picking a software platform is probably the most important decision you will be making. However this is really very easy to accomplish and can be boiled down to just 2 factors (in order) :
     1. Knowledge of the Platform – your goal is to get to a prototype in X months. You don’t (or your developer doesn’t) want to spend time learning a new language or a software platform that you are not comfortable with.
        • ASP.NET (includes languages such as C#), PHP and Ruby on Rails are examples of web platforms.
        • IIS & Windows Server is an example of a web server platform.
        • SQL Server is an example of a database platform.
     2. Cost – The cost of development can be attributed to the following necessities. Of course, this doesn’t include the cost of time or salaries that need to be paid.
        • Development Tools, Design Tools and Database – You may be able to work around paying for development tools. Visual Studio Express, for example, is a great free dev tool. It is mostly good enough in terms of features to help you get to a prototype. If you’re neurotic like I am, you can always use ‘vi’ or ‘vim’ (or ‘gvim’) and hardwire a function key to compile your project for you. While SQL Server Express is a popular SKU that is also free, it may not suffice. To build a good overall experience, you may want to consider using tools to help you design your site well. Tools like Expression Design and Expression Blend will help you polish your application’s look and feel.
        • Operating Systems – If you are working on a web project and you want to self-host for starters, typically you would need a few instances of you operating system. Operating systems like Windows Server 2008 Web Edition cost (only) USD469.
        • Hosting for web apps – (see “Hosting Provider” below)
        • There are also programs out there that provide you with a decent amount of software with a minimal dollar commitment. The Empower Program is one such example.
        • On GigaOm, I came across this article: “F|R Crib Sheet: 15 Sites to Cut Your Startup Operating Costs”
   • User Experience – The user experience for any product is paramount. UX is what differentiates a good site from a great site. A good UX will also help you think of a good and clean UI (keep in mind, UI != UX).
   • Project Management / Source Code Control – Hosted source control and project management services like CVSDude (don’t let the name scare you, they do Subversion as well ;) and Unfuddle sound very enticing (I haven’t used either of these personally). But if you have a spare box sitting around and your team isn’t overly geographically dispersed, throw Subversion on there and code away.
   • Services – Depending on what your application does, you may have the need to access a online services. The Windows Live Platform comprises of several APIs offered to you at no or minimal cost*.
   • (Cloud) Hosting your Web Application – Server Intellect, Discount ASP.NET, RackSpace etc. offer solutions for hosting. On the other hand, we are definitely seeing an interesting shift in applications being hosted in the cloud. For a startup, hosting in the cloud makes a tremendous amount of sense, especially when the need for scale arises. Hosting in the cloud also makes sense from a cost perspective. GoGrid, for example, offers a pay as you go plan where you pay nothing upfront. This would work tremendously for a startup in their first few months where they see little to no traffic. However the startup is ready if and when they get TechCrunch’d or Digg’d.  Mosso is another example of a company that offers cloud computing options.

Suggested Reading (in no order)

• Paul Graham
• Microsoft StartupZone
• TechCrunch
• VentureBeat
• Don Dodge
• Guy Kawasaki
• Jeff Atwood
• Joel Spolsky

In future posts, we’ll discuss (again in no order)

• Open Source Solutions for Startups
• Incorporating your company
• Investors
• Revenue Models
• Getting to a Beta
• Community and PR
• Startup related Events
• Startup Programs

Ready? Start coding. Go!

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* – Please refer to the Windows Live Terms of Use to understand at what point you would start paying to use the APIs

I’m proud to announce the beta launch of thatsWhatSheTwittered.com. The co-founders gave me an early preview of the site. This has to be one of the most brilliant ideas I’ve ever come across, and I’m proud to be a part of this new venture.

thatsWhatSheTwittered (starts with a small ‘t’) is an amazing concept. Here’s how it works :

1. You follow ‘_twst‘ on twitter.
2. For every tweet that you twitter, you will get an automatic reply from _twst that says "thats what she twittered". If you think about what that means contextually, you’ll understand that nothing has ever made more sense. Ever. For example, check out this thwead (thats a ‘twitter thread’, also a cute way to say ‘thread’) :
   
3. Every interaction with _twst will automatically make its way on to thatsWhatSheTwittered.com and will appear in a threaded fashion (that is much friendlier than what appears on quotably.com). The site is currently in private beta.

I hear the co-founders are currently to raise a round in the 50-100 mil range. If you want in on the beta, please send an email to ‘thatswhatshetwittered@gmail.com’. 

I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank Dan Lyons for his support on this project, but sorry Dan, I’m out of time.

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A few years ago, I’d made a new year’s resolution – the resolution was to not make any more resolutions. This year, I had to break my pact. I made some resolutions.

I’m tired of being a victim of circumstance. Oh, the market’s slumping, oh, the economy is not booming as much as it should, oh, I have vasovagal syncope (I really did). What I’ve realized is that its one thing to feel down because you are a victim of something you have no control over, its commending to take charge and make change because you are down.

In 2001, I started at Cisco Systems as a Software Developer. I’d joined Cisco two months after it had announced massive layoffs. There were major re-organizations, but the conditions forced us to focus on what was important. I ended up being a part of a key project that was vital to the business and Cisco’s customers. It was meant to be. I think everyone followed suit (Cisco was a NASDAQ bellwether/sweetheart). Everyone refocussed and reprioritized. The pendulum started to swing.

Maybe I’m feeling so positive because thanks to Shaherose of Women 2.0, I got to attend the Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner at Google last night. I got to hear from the likes of Irene Au (who I think is one of the most humble and modest executives I’ve ever heard) speak talk about their experiences. The panel comprised of several women luminaries who’ve set out to make a mark for themselves and the communities they serve. Some of them were accidental entrepreneurs. Some of them really demanded to be co-founders and retrofitted that need into a project, but either way, their presence on that panel was because of their accomplishments, which in turn came about because they were trying to solve some problem.

So with that said, I must say I’m pretty excited about this year. Sure the market’s slumping, everyone including their dog is having this unhealthy (somewhat unwarranted) paranoia about everything, there’s talk about an economic recession, but the situation’s exciting because conditions like these make way for some new things to happen. Some people are going to step up and make change; new ideas, new prodigies are going to be born and discovered. The pendulum’s starting to swing.

And let’s face it, who likes a stationary pendulum anyway?

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* – Credit goes to my friend Jas Sandhu – Jas can relate almost anything in the universe to a pendulum swing.

More companies, more demos :

LiquidTalk

The name gives you very little information about what the product is about (I’m not sure if LiquidTalk is the name of the company or the product). LiquidTalk’s product gives mobile employees of a company to stay engaged with their companies. If there are internal training videos for example, LiquidTalk gives these mobile employees a convenient way to access these videos.

Voyant

I was pretty impressed by this product and demo, but I ask myself how many users will actually use all the things this product has to provide? This JRE based tool is a DIY financial planning solution. The business model was apparent – there are relevant ads that show up in a smartclient desktop app that you will use for financial planning. The question is, who will buy these guys out? ;)

Acesis

This Flex3/Adobe AIR based app is a HealthCare technology application. The demonstration was very swiftly, very well done. Once you get past figuring out how to pronounce the name, you’ll see that the application is a way to manage details in a very efficient way from incoming patients at the point of care. The tool seemed easy enough for anyone to use, and that was very impressive.

Blist

Probably the best demo this afternoon. Seattle-based Blist, short for weBlist, claims to be the world’s simplest database. This Flash based app has a visual query interface and helps anyone build a list (database) very easily. It is designed for mainstream users and even if someone doesn’t know what a database is, they can easily latch on to the concept.

Cellspin

San Jose based CellSpin helps you publish media or text content from your phone to your favorite websites like eBay or Facebook very easily. I caught up with the founders of the company and asked them about their compeition, ShoZu for example, which I use on my phone. Their response was that CellSpin was designed with simplicity in mind, which I totally get! I’m actually going to download CellSpin right now and give it a whirl.

On a separate note It turns out Bobby Singh and Marcos Klein are both ex-Cisco. Marcos and I were even on the same team. Small valley!

FlyPaper

Another very impressive demo! FlyPaper is a Flash based app that lets you make presentations easily. You don’t need to know Flash or Powerpoint, but the app gives you templates using which you can customize your data into a presentation fairly easily. The demo was rather whiz-bang!

Redux

Redux helps you meet new people. It’s not necessarily a dating site, but it could be. The site analyzes who you are multiple levels, including finding out things like which events you’re attending (by aggregating this data from event sites like Upcoming etc.) thereby providing a nice matrix.  My opinions are a little tainted considering I’d read this TechCrunch review on Redux just a couple of days ago. If I hadn’t read TechCrunch’s review, I’d be asking myself how Redux is different from these dozen other facebook apps that help me meet friends, and friends of friends.

TubeMogul

TubeMogul helps you publishes your videos to multiple video sharing sites, like YouTube, Y! Videos etc. What’s really impressive about this tool is the analytics it brings back. It can also give you detailed demographics information, and apparently there are 15,000 content creators using TubeMogul, including Romney and Obama.

VisibleMeasures

Another very impressive demo! VisibleMeasures gives you detailed analytics about your videos. It tells you how your video is being used. The demo really drove the point home. The tool measures the behavior of internet video audiences and how people are engaging with the content. With this information content creators can understand how they can better create and distribute content and how they can make money off of it. I’m guessing their business model involves having to charge large companies for this kind of information?

More later…

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I’d written about LeapFrog’s Tag earlier today. Here’s a video demonstration of Tag from Demo’08 :

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