The Baydin Blog | Email, Startups, and Search

Selling into the Enterprise is still a big business. I attended the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston this week. Besides the excellent booze and hors devours (I consider all free booze excellent) I came away with three lessons.

Customers or the C level executives that ultimately foot the bill for a product/service need to see their return on investment quickly. Amy Vickers, VP of Global Enterprise Solutions at Razorfish says that they expect to see signs of progress within 6 months. The better the product/service can provide them that information, the easier it is for the implementers to justify the project.

The key to success is in integrating a variety of technologies to meet business objectives according to Laurie Buczek, Social Computing Program manager at Intel. The days of closed, all encompassing solutions, are limited. There are many, many enterprise software solutions out in the market. Companies have adopted a variety of them. It takes a significant amount of work to put information into those systems and to get employees to use them. A better product is not going to displace something that works. This point was re-affirmed by talking to some other attendees at the show. Companies want interoperability between software packages. It’s a strong message to enterprise vendors that is best surmised by one of the panelists, “co-exist or fail.”

Stand out. A lot of the demos looked the same. They have what looked like a CSS styled dashboard with news feeds, social media and wikis. One company, caught my eye: Artus Labs. They focus on life science. Yeah, they have collaboration features like everyone else but what the others don’t have is the ability to search through molecular chain drawings. Very cool. Everyone else’s demo has static text next to some sort of instant messenger. Artus Labs in contrast has beautiful molecular compounds drifing across their screens. I had a chance to talk to their Founder and CEO Robin Smith. He’s been around the block and knows what he’s doing. Enterprise 2.0. Good stuff.

Small Talk business, market research

Congratulations!  You aced the phone screen, survived the (potentially grueling) interviews, and your offer letter is in the mail.  Awesome!

You should absolutely go out to celebrate, but before you mail in your acceptance, you may want to figure out what if any strings are attached to the offer.

I was too naive when I got my first job offer to think about things like employment agreements (or even to do a good job negotiating my salary!), but you shouldn’t be.  As part of the program we’re in for startups, we’re meeting with a bunch of lawyers and a bunch of entrepreneurs who left corporate America to start companies.  We’re learning as we go through the program that the employment agreement we signed after only halfway reading it could have caused a lot of trouble.

When my partner and I started at Big Semiconductor Company as part of our first-day schedule, we met with HR.  In addition to handing us a giant stack of documents about the 401K plan and health insurance benefits, they asked us to sign agreements that were incredibly restrictive and waived an awful lot of our rights.   At this point, having accepted their offer and stopped interviewing months before, we had no leverage.  We both needed the money, had no idea what those forms really said, and had no other job offers on the table.  We signed the forms.

I think that was a mistake; if we had started a company doing anything related to our previous work instead of something in a totally different industry, it would have been game over.  According to that employment agreement we signed, Big Semiconductor Company owned any ideas we came up with that related to their business while we were employed, regardless of whether or not we worked on them during work time or free time.

That’s not a big deal at a startup company, where the scope of what relates to the “business interests” is pretty much the product you’re working on – where the company HAS to own the IP you create.  But an agreement with a huge semiconductor company has a much broader scope – pretty much any circuit, big or small, relates in some way to some part of their business.  And if we’d worked at an absolute behemoth like IBM or Cisco, our startup options that don’t relate to their business would pretty much consist of biotech and opening a bar.

If I had it to do over again, I would have asked for all of the agreements up front.  I should have negotiated the terms in the employment agreement when I had the high hand, instead of when Big Semiconductor Company KNEW that they had me where they wanted me.

The moment I received my job offer was my moment of maximum leverage with the big company.  When a big company makes an offer, they’ve already spent all of the effort to screen, interview, and make an offer to someone.  They don’t want to have to spend that effort again.  I hadn’t yet stopped looking for work and interviewing, so my ability to walk away was still reasonably high.  Had I gotten a copy of the employment agreement and crossed out all the parts that were objectionable to me before I accepted their job offer, I wouldn’t have needed to worry.

I also should have done a much better job negotiating my salary.  According to a friend who worked in the hiring department of a big consulting company, it’s not much of a stretch for a new employee to negotiate a 20% increase in starting salary.

Negotiating the salary and the employment agreement will definitely be an awkward conversation, but I’ve never heard of a company that retracted a job offer for negotiating.  It can’t hurt to ask, and it might make things easier down the road.

Small Talk employment agreements, negotiating

Before Baydin, Alex and I started another venture. Without going into too much detail it was a mobile, social game with an end goal of making users feel camaraderie with their fellow guys and gals. Who doesn’t want to make friends and feel the exhilaration of potentially meeting a significant other? We were on a mission to do great things for society, and by society, I mean the 18-30 year old singles who feel alienated after graduating from college and moving into a new city. You know who you are.

At first we were a bit reticent to talk about it. This was the hot segment at the time. What we discovered was that there are very few people who will steal your idea and do something with it. The important part of that last statement is “do something with it.” Turning a concept into reality is hard. Ideas have their own value but it’s worth exchanging that idea for feedback.

We discussed the product concept with our single friends. What we found was that they supported us because they are our friends. However, the concept did not resonate with them because it did not meet their needs. They would have had to change their behavior to use our product. Techno-geeks would have done this but the majority would not. We wanted a large, vibrant, diverse community. The problem was that many of our single friends had limited leisure time and wanted to spend that time actually talking to their date over dinner instead of playing a video game with him or her. Finding a significant other is haphazard enough so they wanted to get to the essence of it immediately.

Our mobile, social, game was retired and we re-directed our effort into a new direction. We’re still talking to people but this time we’ve made it a little further. Our alpha, Baydin ForONE was released on Thursday. It is open to limited users. If you want to be involved in something great, sign-up and we’ll put you on our alpha testers list.

Small Talk experience, ideas, Small Talk

What do an irrational fear of rejection, the inability to talk to girls at a bar, and a startup in “stealth mode” all have in common? 

I was riding the Orange Line en route to our Central Square offices last week, and I saw a sign advertising a study on Social Anxiety Disorder.  They asked if you worry too much about what other people think, worry that people might secretly think you’re stupid, and get more nervous than seems appropriate before meeting people for the first time. 

To be honest, my first thought was that if I didn’t have a company to start, I should go try their study.  But on my second thought, I realized that the same symptoms seem to apply to a lot of startup companies, ours included.

We were very shy at first about sharing our idea – maybe a competitor would get there first, or maybe we wouldn’t be able to deliver.  We got over that one, but it is still terrifying to think that we might do all the marketing right, get press and customers excited about our product, then end up disappointing and/or angering them.  It’s also in the back of our minds that we might “peak too early” and get all of our buzz before the product is ready to impress anyone. 

But the more I think about it, the more I’m starting to think that we shouldn’t worry.  There is so much noise and so much going on that nobody cares what some dinky startup does.  If we put out a product that doesn’t work very well, we won’t get bad press – we just won’t get any press. 

We’re not Microsoft; nobody has the energy or the time to skewer us.  And if they do, nobody has the energy or the time to remember it after they read it.  If we make something subpar, we won’t be noticed.  And if we make something great, then we’ll get customers today.

Some of the evidence from other startups backs this up.  If you tried the first version of Loopt on the iPhone 3G, it was incredibly easy to inadvertently text message every single one of the people in your phone’s contact list with a your location and an invitation for Loopt.  Several of the early versions of Plaxo made it incredibly easy to accidentally email everyone in your address book and ask them to give all their contact info to Plaxo.

Loopt apologized.  So did Plaxo.  Neither of these companies is in the deadpool.  They still have funding, and they still have users.  Aside from a handful of people who make knowing these things their business, my guess is that nobody even remembers. 

An even better example is Hyundai. In 1986 when they released the Excel in the US, it was nothing to write home about. 

Yeah, it looked like that.  I wouldn’t have bought one either.  But by iterating and improving, they’ve turned into an elite car company.  One of our mentors mentioned hearing about how cool the Genesis is on a golf course.  Hyundai really is now a company people associate with luxury cars.  And they had a sense of humor about the whole thing too.

So why are we so worried that our product will fail to impress?  If we make a bad first product, but get better, people will give us another chance.  If our third or fourth version is incredibly useful, they just don’t have time to hold a grudge that our first version wasn’t.  Our biggest problem is going to be apathy, not grudges.  It’s just not personal.  And if we never make the great product that will earn us a second chance, then we shouldn’t succeed.  I believe we’ll get there.

Of course, I have an ulterior motive for bringing this up now.  We’re sending our Baydin ForONE Technology Preview to friends and family on Thursday.  I’ll be honest – it’s not ready.  We have tested it on a whopping two configurations, the results need some work, and the UI isn’t as polished as we’d like.  It also comes with the caveats that it might insult your mother in law, or start crashing some untested, semi-patched versions of Outlook.  Before we’re ready to call it a 1.0 release, we’ll make sure it doesn’t do any of these things.

My arguments about SSAD were only so persuasive, though.  Despite my best efforts to make us a wild man company that releases it to whoever wants it and lets God sort ‘em out, we’re doing a limited release Alpha launch.   If you want to give it a spin, shoot us an email, and I’ll see that you get a download link.

Small Talk experience, philosophy, startup life

I was at a talk, recently, where the speaker mentioned “a lot of data driven people fall into the trap of wanting more information to make a decision. The problem is that the world does not always give you complete information.”

I thought about my own experience. I remember at times presenting a new product idea and getting the feedback, “we need more *fill in the blank* information.” Usually, they asked for more market information. The product concepts we were proposing were in a burgeoning field. We could only show the customers we visited or contacted who demonstrated interest, the competitive solutions out there, how much customers currently pay and the total available market.

Now that I think back, I think I would have had much better luck if I took the decision-makers on strategic customer visits. I remember traveling to several medical accounts with one marketing manager. He was exposed to our customers’ challenges. Enthusiasm would have been an understatement for his reaction. He understood the problems that our customers faced because he stood in their shoes, albeit briefly. When we got back to our headquarters, I didn’t even have to pitch the concept anymore. He was telling everybody that we should build products for that application.

Now that we are pitching products at Baydin, these little experiences bubble back up to consciousness. If I can’t show market numbers because it is nascent, I can at least help investors stand in our customers’ shoes.

So getting back to that talk. Baydin can’t help someone who is not ready make a decision. But we are thinking about and working on the problem of giving you more complete information.

Small Talk baydin, experience, market research