Jay Goldman

Don Dodge speaks about airplanes and spaceships at StartupEmpire

Don Dodge is a veteran of five start-ups including Forte Software, AltaVista, Napster, Bowstreet, and Groove Networks. Don is currently Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team. The goal is to help VC’s and start-ups be successful with Microsoft.

• Don Dodge
  • 25 years of experience
  • Alta Vista, Napster
• Why start a company now?
  • Great people
  • Customers want to save money
  • VCs have tons of cash
  • Can’t get worse!
• People are most important
  • Number one hurdle is great people
  • boom times everyone is busy
  • Bad times people get laid off
  • Companies retrench, focus on core, nothing new, people get bored
  • Startups are fun, challenging, and create value
• Customers want to save money
  • Try new things and take a chance on a startup
  • Must demonstrate how you save them money
  • Productivity improvements aren’t enough
  • Have to demonstrate very clear value
  • Is your product a vitamin or a pain killer?
    • Nice to have vs. essential
    • Productivity vs. saving money
• Investors will fund solid ideas
• Me too startups will not get funding
• Ad supported models will be questioned
• Experienced people with great ideas will get funded
• Investors fund people they know and ideas they understand
• Start with investors/angels who know you
• Angles know VCs who will invest
• Target investors who have experience in your business
• VC is a hits business: 1 big success pays for years of losers
• A small software startup can do $1m/month – the CPM to get that is huge
• Angels are easier to convince if:
  • They know you or know people who will vouch for you
  • They have been in the business before or have an affinity for it
  • If not one of the above, they are harder to get money from
• Infrastructure is cheap
  • Everythign is cheap and plentiful
  • Office space is cheap – sub lease
  • Office equipment – buy used
  • Software – BizSpark from MS
    • Less than 3 years old
    • Less than $1m in rev
    • Building SaaS
    • USD $100
    • Global community of support resources
    • Windows Server, SQL Server, Sharepoint
    • Microsoft startup zone
    • Contact David, Mark, Don
• Infrastructure – cloud computing
• Questions:
  • What’s the idea for Microsoft behind BizSpark? What are you hoping to achieve?
    • Group is put together to help startups succeed
    • Can’t succeed without lots and lots of companies building on MS
    • Competing with OSS
    • Tiny little startups don’t have cash and go the easy, free route
    • After three years or $1m they can afford for it
• Is BizSpark available through the cloud?
  • Yes, not just the dev tools
• Do I have to build something specific?
  • No, you can build anything on it
• MS acquired 22 last year, 21 year before, 16 this year to date
  • Generally filling in gaps or holes in the product line
  • Doing things better
  • Creating new markets
  • Usually start with a partnership and a biz dev deal
  • PowerSet semantic search, Fast enterprise search, Advertising aQuantive
• Do we sign NDAs before you develop the product?
  • We don’t get into that
  • Don’t tell me your secrets
  • VCs are the same
  • Never seen an NDA invoked or used