sharpcloud at the European BizSpark Summit
2 June 2010 | Sarim
sharpcloud at the European BizSpark Summit May 25th 2010, Paris, France
3am Sunday 23rd May:
We travelled bleary-eyed (@sarimk, and @rustysharpcloud) in the batmobile (to Heathrow, cancelled BA flights) to Luton, EasyJet and thankfully no #ashcloud in sight.
Monday 24th May, Orientation & rehearsal day:
Straight into a whirlwind of a day meeting lots of other young companies, smart people and a variety of business models.
Lunch, networking and then our audience with Guy Kawasaki, you think you know some stuff and then you meet someone like Guy and you realise that you can be so much better with a just a little bit more focus and direction.
This was an important 20 minutes for sharpcloud, key take-away – stand out and try to be different, everyone has a proven management team, $bn market size, competition etc… Great slides from Guy at (http://holykaw.alltop.com/microsoft-bizspark-slides)
We’d already spent some invaluable time on confcalls with Mike Sigal of Guidewire helping us to structure concisely for a 5min pitch, dovetailed with Guy’s comments we felt confident about how best to pitch.
We decided we’d keep the structure but added what others felt was a somewhat risky element, a live demo of sharpcloud. Hurrah! We always love the wow effect of our software and we never felt it was actually very risky.
Terrific steak and red wine for dinner at the River Café, great fun with @johnDennehy and Zafar from @sordu and an interesting first peek at the HTC WP7, very cool to see it in action.
Tuesday 25th May, Conference day:
We were in the last group of 6, late in the afternoon. We set up our booth said hello to our neighbours and started our chatter in the throng.
During the day the speakers we’re excellent, and the business pitches had improved dramatically from the previous day, in this respect @artesians we’re definitely the early pace setters and Christian Zander (protected-networks.com) the most enthusiastic.
Highlights from the day for me were:
- GuyK’s inspiring keynote: Meaning, Mantra, Curve jumping, Be Crappy & remember 10,20,30
- Terrific double-act by @douglasp and Jonathan Carter talking about Dallas and it’s data platform; we’d like more discussion on this one with @douglasp and the Azure product team maybe at Tech.Ed or WPC.
- How cool are Captain Dash (@captaindash) they also demoed live, used a wad of marketing reports to enforce their message and had been through a previous exit … we starting feeling a little less unique about our upcoming pitch.
3:00pm Oops final changes:
We decided to simplify a few slides, based on the 30 of Guys’ 10.20.30 rule.
4:30: Mic’ed up, on stage, adrenaline pumping and going live:
Rusty’s demo wasn’t exactly according to our script, it’s a long-story … nevertheless his off-piste went extremely well, as usual; with time against us I played our joker “Rusty’s French mother” hurrah some laughter and an extra 30 seconds from Guy. The last few slides felt rushed but still great fun under pressure.
Panel questions we’re interesting and mostly thoughtful, great insight especially from @loic on our B2C attraction, top advice from one of the elite.
As an aside; from my experience there is always at least one VC in the pack who believes that arrogance is part of being “hard-nosed and business-like”. In my book it’s just rude and it’s unlikely we’d take cash or partner with people that we don’t like.
We closed out the conference with a few great off-line chats about opportunities with; @loic, Lars Lindstedt, Sam Rosenbalm, @jyotib, Neal Gandhi and others.
In short, a terrific 2 days for exposure, learning, networking and identifying new opportunities and thanks to @bindik and the MSFT team and looking forward to more of the same!
Sarim (@sarimk)
PS: congrats to the winners @Artesians @Kobojo, both thoroughly deserved and I’ll certainly be watching their progress and that of all the new businesses we met.
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