SSE Labs Announces Impressive List Of Advisors, Offers Sneak Peek At Latest Startups

Stanford’s SSE Labs Creating Entrepreneurial Buzz In Silicon Valley

AOL Tries for Some Silicon Valley Cred

Watch out YC…There’s a new accelerator in town and they don’t take equity

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ByteBite Team

systems and software. Before joining RTI, Supreet was responsible for the development of Agile Software’s strategic product line, while also managing platinum accounts. Supreet started his career at Microsoft Corporation in the Multimedia System groups. At Oracle Corporation, he held various technical and line-management positions over a seven-year period developing web-based Enterprise applications for the CRM and Server Technology divisions. Supreet was also a founding member and director of Engineering for Trading Dynamics, which was acquired by Ariba for $740 million. He has patents in customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management and product lifecycle management (PLM).” (RTI Speaker Biographies Webpage)

Supreet Oberoi visited us today to give a Company Culture Workshop.  Supreet gave an amazing workshop, as he spoke to our entrepreneurs about developing a company’s vision and values.  Supreet spoke of how vision encompasses such questions as what an organization looks like, how big is it, what they are famous for, how do people who work at the company feel about their jobs, and several other questions.  Additionally, Supreet spoke of creating a correct vision requiring introspection, defining values, and identifying a mission of higher good.  We thank Supreet for his time and helping our companies answer such important questions.

We had an awesome workshop with Peter Cohan, a Demo Guru, who gave our companies a talk about  creating and delivering compelling software demonstrations. Thank you Peter!

The objective of the workshop was to help companies “Establish a framework, including skills and processes, to create and deliver improved software demonstrations and increase success in the sales and deployment of your organization’s software products.” You may find more at his website: http://www.secondderivative.com/

A short bio:

“Peter Cohan is the founder and principal of The Second Derivative, focused on helping software organizations improve their sales and marketing results – primarily through improving organizations’ demonstrations.”

We would like to thank Dan for coming in for office hours with our companies today. These chats have been consistently helpful for our companies and we look forward to doing more.

From the Accel website:

“Dan joined Accel in 2010 and focuses on early stage investments. Prior to joining Accel, Dan founded chart.io, a Y Combinator-backed company specializing in visualizing data. Before chart.io Dan was at TechCrunch where he conducted industry research and published quarterly reports about industry trends, funding and M & A.

Dan graduated from Yale University, where he was a sprinter on the track team. He now lives in Palo Alto, California.”

Read more…

Brian Helmick, founder of employee administration service Algentis, ran a Management and HR workshop for our companies. Brian gave very useful advice on the hiring and firing process, as well as knowledge regarding performance evaluations and management.  A couple of the key takeaways can be found below:

1. Hire slowly in identifying and interviewing good candidates, but fire quickly in performance evaluations, determining when to coach vs. when to fire, and termination discussion/process.

2. Use a quarterly review process and score people accordingly – determine when to coach vs. when to fire.  Know that nobody ever complains about firing somebody too quickly, and an underperformer is incredibly costly.

We had a great office hour session with Jason Putorti today who came in to help our companies with UI and UX issues.

From his CrunchBase profile:

“Jason Putorti is the Co-Founder of Votizen, a company bringing the authenticity of registered voters to social networks. He was the first Designer in Residence at Bessemer Venture Partners, which he joined in late November of 2009. It was through BVP partner David Cowan that he met his co-founder David Binetti.

Jason is best known as the Lead Designer of Mint.com from March 2007. He was responsible for the user experience, visual design, and user interface for the product, as well as the brand image. He briefly stayed on as the Lead on Creative Direction for the Personal Finance division after Mint was acquired by Intuit.”

Kirk Bowman is a Lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he teaches a course in sales organization. He also serves on the boards of five private companies, including Coverity (software integrity), PanoLogic (desktop virtualization), Zetta (cloud storage), Nimble Storage (next generation storage technology), and Librato (cloud and application management). Kirk also advises several other private companies in sales strategy.

Kirk’s most recent operational experience was as sales executive at Equallogic, a storage system company, which was acquired by Dell, Inc. in early 2008. In the 20 years prior to Equallogic, Kirk held executive sales and general management positions at VMware, Inktomi, Model N, Object Design, and Parametric Technology Corporation. This diverse background has allowed Kirk to develop extensive industry experience with multiple technologies and associated sales strategies, including: enterprise software, embedded database software, enterprise search software, internet search, storage systems, internet infrastructure, and virtualization software.

Read more…

Professor Kirk Bowman of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business visited us today to advise our companies in a biz. development in enterprise sales workshop.  Kirk’s expansive experience in sales and business development was evident in the useful advice he gave to our ambitious entrepreneurs.  We appreciate Kirk’s time, and look forward to seeing him again in the future.  Below are some of the highlights of the workshop:

1. The first step of the enterprise sales process is understanding what your market is, what companies you need to target, and who specifically within the company you need to target.

2. There is no typical sales cycle, but ideally the initial transaction should be as low as possible and the product as viral as possible, with a low cost initial deal that allows them to come back and expand upon the deal. Make it easy for the enterprises to see/test/buy your product.

3. Entrepreneurs need to have the mindset that their products won’t merely be an add-on to an existing product – they must have the ambition in creating their company as a sustainable, independent corporation.