I’ve been watching founders of small tech startups pitch their companies in 60 seconds. One thing I learned is that a pitch this length must be committed to memory; there’s little room for forgetting a key detail or losing your train of thought.
The successful pitches hit on these points:
This essay by Ray Lane of Kleiner Perkins offers some useful models of the software industry that could easily apply to similar industries in a state of major transition.
This year, many software companies will be busy trying to convert their offerings from products into services. In fact, I would estimate that last year, software-as-a-service (SaaS) was the number one item on the agenda of 70 percent of software executives.
I’m here to tell you that this is a mistake.
…The enterprise software companies that move to innovate and dominate today will be the most successful companies five years from now.
…No one can really beat us on the low end. It’s just what you need, and nothing you don’t. You’re always going to have more people on the low end who just need a few things.”
I love that Jason Fried quote, he’s proving out the worse if better argument.
One benefit he didn’t cite was disintermediating IT departments. I’ve seen this happen: IT departments spend months deciding whether to offer a service, evaluating packages, and designing a scalable offering. Meanwhile, individuals and teams simply sign up for a web-based service and get their jobs done.
Gotta love a CEO who isn’t afraid to argue technical architecture in public…
…The suggestion that “a single integrated software architecture may be perfect for [firms as centralised as] Oracle”, but not for companies that are more operationally devolved is quite wrong. The point of running applications designed and built around a single shared database is to provide a single place where managers can easily find and access accurate up-to-date information about the state of their business. The one-database approach puts the information in one place; it does not dictate decisions or the degree of autonomy given to managers in local markets…
Last night, modifying this here blog, I shot Mark Bernstein an email after having tried about ten variations of Tinderbox syntax that I thought should work (I was mistakenly making an assumption instead of paying attention to the docs, prolly some decade old Pascal knowledge rearing its ugly head). This morning in my Inbox was a message from Mark with the corrected syntax. This afternoon, before I had a chance to change my code, was a new version of Tinderbox that made my syntax valid. That’s service!