Product and sales- all else is expendable

Following Jonathan’s insights was a venture capitalist, Beau Laskey from Steamboat Ventures who invest equity capital in private companies at early stages and stay very involved with the companies they invest in. Beau shared a list of lessons learned with quick bites like be all in all of the time, lots of talent on the street these days with high unemployment so go out and get the best, have laser focus and a sense of urgency.

There may not have been a lot of how to in Beau’s presentation with suggestions like have infinite return on investment and it’s about product and sales, all else is expendable. Suggestions to make these ideal conditions come true came in the form of never, never, never quit, hope is not a strategy and know the data but trust your gut and the art. Not a lot of personal experience as examples but they were all good points…and business book titles.

Critical Insight: Beau is optimistic that we are going to find more innovation that we really haven’t seen in last couple of years were we’ve mostly seen “me-too” companies and web 2.0 marketers.

Focus, focus, focus on a limited product offering

Tom McGovern is from snap.com which owns Snapshots, an enhanced pop-up that allows browsers to view a pop-up with content from other sites while remaining on the site of choice. Snapshots is on 10 million sites said Tom and used the companies bumps and bruises through the development process as an example of focusing on the right product.

The company began with a visual search engine that burned through lots of capital and consumers enjoyed but were not loyal to. Next evolved into the Snapshots widget and marketed to other sites. Loyalty increased, revenue increased and they are now hyper focused on getting the product out there and making money from it, finally close to break even. Tom recommended using tech startup boot camps to get established and to use the economic downturn as an opportunity to renegotiate everything.

Critical Insight: “Internet models of building audience first before a revenue producing business model are he’s optimistic that we are going to find more innovation that we really haven’t seen in last couple of years were we’ve mostly seen me too companies and web 2.0 being punished,” said Tom. “Focus on monetizing and don’t pursue large size, long term development cycle products in today’s economy.”