Venture Adventure

Elevator Speeches Made Easy
Date     Wednesday February 21, 2007
Time     5:30PM
City     San Carlos
Event Type     Seminar / Workshop / Class
Event Area     Marketing
Hosted By     You Who Branding
Description     If the thought of standing and introducing yourself at a
networking function has you running for the door, here’s your
chance to get some help!

Branding Expert/Presentation Coach Susan Schwartz will give you a
very simple formula for creating stand-out elevator speeches.
You’ll be able to craft yours on the spot! (If you’re brave, you
may even get to practice in front of the group!)

By the end of the evening, you’ll know how to present yourself
with clarity, confidence and command.

Refreshments will be served.
Cost     $15 in advance $25 day of the event
Organization
Description     Susan Schwartz founded You Who Branding to offer entrepreneurs and executives the strategic positioning and communication coaching they need to present themselves effectively in person, in print, and in public.

With twenty years of combined experience in advertising, image management and public speaking, Susan has finely tuned her skills both to understand who someone really is  and to create a memorable message to let others know.

Over the course of her career she has helped position products for a broad spectrum of national accounts, has worked with high-level executives to manage their professional image and has coached dozens of speakers on polishing their presentations.

Event Contact
Info     Mary Lou Manlove, maryloumanlove@sbcglobal.net
Venue     Chimere
Venue Address     300 Industrial Road San Carlos, CA, 94070
Contact Phone     650 400-2230

Consumer Products Innovation 2007 

Consumer Products Innovation 2007
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
6:00 – 7:00 PM Networking/Hors d’oeuvres reception
7:00 – 8:30 PM Presentation and panel discussion
Location and directions

>>Register now…

Speaker:

Martin Eberhard, CEO, Co-Founder, Tesla Motors

Moderator:

Robert Scoble, VP of Media Development, PodTech

Panelists:

Robert Acker, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Dash Navigation

Dave Blakely, Director of Technology Strategy, IDEO

Dave Mathews, Director of Product Innovation, Sling Media

Event Description: Product innovation — the art of taking an existing product and significantly improving it — has brought us some amazing advances. For example, the iPod replaced the Walkman, HDTV increased the picture quality of existing cable TV’s, and the ubiquitous mouse completely revolutionized a user’s computer experience.

One product that has not fundamentally changed since its inception (and was in dire need of innovation) has recently undergone more than just a facelift. In fact, it has been totally redesigned. Tesla Motors has developed a car that can outrun a Ferrari for a third of the cost, without the use of a combustion engine, and it looks simply spectacular.

Please join Martin Eberhard of Tesla Motors (Founder and CEO), and panelists Robert Acker of Dash Navigation (Sr. VP of Marketing), Dave Blakely of IDEO (Director of Technology Strategy), and Dave Mathews of Sling Media (Director of Product Innovation) in a discussion featuring the new Tesla Roadster and other products at the forefront of consumer innovation. Robert Scoble of Podtech (VP of Media Development) will be moderating the event.

AeroBot Labs: Next Generation Autonomous Systems

We’re going to be working in the autonomous systems space – most likely UAVs – unmanned aerial vehicles and systems for search and rescue.  Big military market, but I think there’s an equally large civilian market, expanding past SAR and into exploration and infrastructure inspection.

The domain aerobotlabs.com has already been acquired.   Basic website to be in place by the end of the week.

Focus, Organization, Project Planning

These are the hallmarks of how I work. So, first up, over the weekend, was getting a basic project plan in place.

Of course, none of this matters without the basic concept for a company. My original thoughts, based on what I keep doing for my consulting clients, was to combine blogging, wikis, and web 2.0 concepts into a tool useable for a sales and marketing team as their fundamental CMS system. There were only 2 basic problems: first, the competition, especially Ross Mayfield’s SocialText. Second, and most important, it wasn’t really interesting to me. Lack of motivation goes a long way to killing a concept.

I discussed my predicament with my informal advisor network, and came to the conclusion that I really needed to work on something that was very interesting to me. Motivation is everything!

So, I’ve finalized on the basic concept and the basic company. Which allowed me to put together the basic project plan. The next 4 weeks are going to be spent developing a finite understanding of the overall market, the competitors and their products and positions.

Next up is developing the entire industry value chain and understanding exactly where in the chain we want to play. This will allow us to develop a business that’s in a profitable portion of the value chain, and to develop a profitable business model. From there, we’re going to develop the MRD/PRD and first product specs.

Now that I know what industry and basic product, I’m happy, motivated, and making forward progress.

Dick Costello, CEO of Feedburner, has an excellent discource on bringing in outside directors into your startup.

This brings up a tangential point, which is the number of VCs that bring in big company execs in to run startups, especially troubled startups. I saw this at one startup where the CEO was having trouble negotiating through three changes of direction in about two years. The CEO was replaced with a new CEO, and he brought in his buddy to be VP Marketing.

Although they claimed startup experience, their joined their prior startup at approximately 500 employees and many millions in revenue. Before that, they both hailed from very big disk drive companies.

One of the first things the new guys did was do an office move, spending many thousands of dollars to rearrange the cubes, and to ensure that they had the biggest hard-walled offices available. It was more than a week before they talked to the Marketing staff to understand what products they were buiding and (attempting to) selling. The end result was, of course disastrous.

The end result was, of course, disastrous. The real question, however, is why bring in these folks?

I’ve asked Dick, and we’ll see what his response is.

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