Sophia Perl of Wisdom

Best Lady Gaga concert (& tech) experience

Here is my attempt to intertwine my two favorite topics - Lady Gaga and technology.  It’s not a secret that concerts are becoming more and more expensive and company sponsorships are playing a big role before, during, and after the concert.  Earlier this month, San Jose was graced with Ms. Gaga’s presence two nights in a row.  Virgin Mobile is the major sponsor backing Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball tour.

Outside the seating area near the vendors, multiple booths were set up for fans to take pictures (Polaroid, Virgin Mobile).  Polaroid let fans take pics with a metal orb structure like the one from the “Bad Romance” video.  Very chic.  Fans then have to go to the Polaroid website to buy, yes buy, the picture.  Touche for these companies driving traffic to their websites and the same time fans love posing for pics.

So why is Virgin Mobile a good sponsor?  Well, fans with phones now make the concert an interactive experience.  Who best to connect folks, but a telecommunications company.  Before the concert, fans could text messages and upload pics that show up on the globe-o-tron.  During the concert, all you see is a sea of cameras taking photos or video of Ms. Gaga doing her thing on stage.  If you go to YouTube the night of the concert (search “lady gaga san jose concert 2010″), you can re-live the concert through someone else’s lens.  Technology at its best.

Fans can also win contests during the concert.  For instance, my friend got alerted via text (midst concert) that she won a live phone call from Lady Gaga, a call that Lady Gaga makes in the middle of her show.  When Ms. Gaga called my friend on the phone, you couldn’t miss us because we were plastered on the globe-o-trons chatting away with her.  The contest award also included upgraded seats (lower level row 3) and a backstage meet and greet (after the concert, for a minute).  Let’s just say that I’m a huge Lady Gaga fan and now a Virgin Mobile fan.  Best night ever!

Now, let’s talk about Lady Gaga leveraging social media.  She knows have to use it well.  The top celebrities on Twitter garner over 5 million followers with Ms. Gaga as #1 with 5.8 million followers.  Also, she has the most Facebook fans with 16.5 million fans and had the most watched YouTube video (“Bad Romance” music video) with 267 million views (think Justin Bieber just beat her).  This is not by chance.  Her marketing team knows how to cater to the fans.  Exclusive and controlled content is delivered through these channels and the fans want it.  It’s a win-win situation.  How can you apply the same strategy that makes sense for your business?

PS - If you have been to a Lady Gaga concert, please leave a comment about what you thought.  Share with us!

SF New Tech’s Big (Endless) Summer Social

Last Friday night, I attended an SF New Tech event for the first time.  I don’t normally pay a high ticket price, but I happen to know the owner of the house where the event was taking place.  So to kill two birds with one stone, I took the plunge.  The nice thing about the event was that food and drinks were included. Photos from others can be found here and here and here.

When I first arrived, the event was not ready yet.  Note to self, don’t arrive when the event starts.  I wandered around and attacked the Motorola photo booth (I <3 photo booths!).  They had a bunch of out of space toy props so naturally I picked the mechanical robot arm.  About 30 minutes later, I found out that the same Motorola booth was giving out Droid X phones for free.  All that I had to do was do a 30 second video on what interesting thing that I do outside of work.  I hunted down the one guy who was recording the videos, did my pitch and voila!  Phone!  It was the highlight of my night.  Thank you Motorola (@motomobile)!

Some other booths that were there include Dorsey & Whitney LLP law firm and CalInnovates.org.  The Dorsey booth as far as I could tell was unmanned all evening.  I being a sucker for free schwag raided the booth anyways and got some bottom-lit plastic shot glasses and blinking light keychains.  Not sure what the correlation is with party gear and a law firm, but the schwag were cute trinkets.  The CalInnovates.org gave away free iPhone skins of the California state flag (it’s on my iPhone now) and a free t-shirt, womens if I may add.  They asked how I felt about California legislature affecting high-tech companies.  I just commented that California government is doing what the housing real estate market is doing.  There is a high demand to live in certain areas (e.g, SF, LA, near the beach), so hike up the house price until buyers stop buying aka companies stop coming to California.

The description of the event described it as a mover and shaker type of event with VCs and entrepreneurs and enthusiasts (like me).  It was not apparent to me that there were a lot of VCs at the event.  I did notice a bunch of entrepreneurs which was fun to hear their war stories.  The number of people were on the lower end from what I expected although I did talk to people longer AND met more of the attendees (higher percentage).  Not a total lost cause.

In case you were wondering about the food and drinks.  They had Cass winery, Magners Irish Cider, Kicks ice cream sandwiches, a Mexican taco truck, and an Indian/Mexican food truck.  There were plenty of food and drinks.

Question, would I go again?  If the location is cool, then yes otherwise I’ll pass next time.

Things that I learned

• when working with potential cofounders: 1)  before starting, agree to high level plans of the role that person could play and what contribution translate to what equity %, 2) work on small projects and see if working relationship and quality of work are good before moving forward
• you don’t need to be techie to work on a tech idea, in a previous posting, I mentioned the same thing.  as a non-techie, you can do mockups (check out MockApps) to show to your potential cofounder or contractors
• money can come from your extended network.  i met a founder who got some odd millions of dollars (think $5M) from a shared connection with his company’s lawyer
• demo like a salesperson.  one demo booth was uninteresting.  they had 4 youngsters hanging out and when i walked up, asked if i wanted to see a demo instead of just pitching and demoing.  amateurs! j/k
• don’t eat anything messy because you’ll get dirty and people will talk about “that guy” or “that girl” who spilled all over the place.  there was one guy, so I heard, that ate some mexican food and spilled it all over the front of his shirt.

People whom I met:

• Director at Silicon Valley Bank
• Founder of Appfeeds
• Founder of a medical management software system
• Director at Woodside Capital
• Founder of a digital media company
• A lawyer focused on startups
• Founder of SF MusicTech
• Marketing person at a stealth B2C/B2B payment company
• Founder of Chic Meets Geek events

APWT Womens Panel on Mobile Paradigm

Over at HackerDojo, I attended a womens panel on “Mobile Paradigm” organized by Asian Professional Women in Technology.  There were about 50-60 people in attendance, of which I knew about 4-5 people.  PayPal provided pizza and drinks for the event, Thanks PayPayl!  The panel consisted of a CEO of a travel guide app for the iPad, a bootstrap developer of many iPhone apps and an iPad app, and a marketing person from a Shazam-competitor app.  Ishita Majumdar, Executive In Residence at Plug-N-Play, moderated the panel.  I really enjoyed the networking time after the panel (I missed the pre-panel networking time).   I met some cool, interesting gals (and guys).

Panelists and my take aways:

• Georgi Dagnall, CEO, GeoGad
  • chose a clever name that is related to your app idea
• Bess Ho, ninja mobile developer with 10 apps in the app stores and speaker at Web 2.0
  • get inspiration from shopping, movies, and tv
  • read your competitor app reviews
  • if you don’t know how to program, just start drawing out the screens (aka wireframe)
• Kathleen McMahon, VP of Sales, SoundHound, Inc.
  • innovate, distribute, monetize

I was a bit too tired to ask my questions, but I was interested in knowing what strategies they use to get users?  What worked for them?  What didn’t work for them?  Did they think about the business model at the beginning?  Maybe they will read my blog and tell me by commenting.  Hahaha.

Personal observations of people starting up

I had a realization about startup ideas.  A good idea is one that you can’t wait to build and share with others.  During my hay day of being an MBA student, I cranked out a bunch of business plans and entered in some competitions.  I guess that I was searching for fame and fortune.  Instead, I spent spending a lot of time thinking about theoretical ideas that never came to fruition.  In general, I wanted experience in vetting out business ideas, presenting ideas, and getting feedback from investors and peers.  I would say that I have a better idea of what will and will not work now.  In addition to my ongoing learning experience, I try to attend to as many tech/women events as I can.  I want to know who’s who, who’s doing what, and what I can learn.  The best place to do networking is in the Silicon Valley area.  We have the best, brightest people around.  Yep, the best hands down.

Here are my observations of people trying to start up:

• Finding co-founders is harder than you think, there’s a reason why there are events just for finding co-founders.
• You don’t have to work at a startup to mingle with the startup elite.  Everyone’s a geek, just speak geek and look chic.  Ta-dah!
• Networking events happen every day of the week and are mostly in the Palo Alto/Mountain View area and San Francisco, sorry San Jose folks, you have to make the trek up north, but it’s worth it!
• Don’t spin your wheels on finding the perfect solution, just build the minimum viable product.  If you can spark interest with your one-line pitch, you may have something good.  If you can get paid customers before your build the product, you definitely have something good.
• If you are unsure about a startup idea, write a brief business plan to help identify gaps in skills/relationships.  It’s a good exercise if you are clueless on how to start.
• A good startup idea makes for a good business plan, not the other way around.  If you have a bad startup idea, it doesn’t matter how good your business plan is on paper, it’s still a bad startup idea.
• First to market is not an advantage, it just means that you are the first to make all the mistakes so that others after you don’t have to make them.

Good luck with your (ad)venture!

Startup Weekend makes a pitstop in San Jose

What startup would you create in 54 hours if you were thrown into a room with a small group of people?  Last weekend in the heart of San Jose, over 100 people gathered at PayPal for Startup Weekend.  For $100 or less (discounts!), you get to be part of a community that has a common goal of working / creating a startup over a course of the weekend - Friday night, all day Saturday, then all day Sunday.  What more could you ask for?

Before the festivities officially began, Women 2.0 had a pre-Startup Weekend networking event outside.  You know you’re in California if you can hang outside Friday early evening with sun.  It’s funny how small the valley starts to get.  I ran into some women that I met 2-3 years ago at different events and another girl from an event 1.5 months ago.  The Korean Taco truck MoGo BBQ and TreatBot were on hand to sell their scrumptious goodies to attendees.

Now the official Startup Weekend.  Here’s how it usually works.  On Friday night, anyone attending can pitch a startup idea in 60 seconds.  Then you spend about 30 minutes to form groups.  On Saturday and Sunday, you work on your group’s idea and prepare for a demo / presentation.  On Sunday night, you demo and present your startup idea to the rest of the groups.  A winner is announced and they get some prizes.

So let me break down the general stats (give or take a few +/-) from this Startup Weekend - 100 attended, 50 pitched, and 25 ideas were worked on.  If you are one of the lucky 25, then you have convinced a tough crowd (aka hardcore techies and mix of business types) that your idea is promising.  The group sizes ranged from as little as 2 to as high as say 12.

On Sunday, all groups had 5 minutes to present their startup idea.  Most were interesting, some were not so much.  Off the top of my head here are the ideas that I remember (summarized in my own words): Foursquare for music listening, social networking at or before an event, delivery of pre-picked outfits for men, war game of Foursquare mayors, get a map of the parking rules on SF streets, finding the status of a person that you’re waiting for, privacy layer on top of twitter to exchange messages with non-followers, and product recommendation site.  At the end of it, the winner of the evening was EnglEasy, videogames to teach kids English.  The judging criteria consisted of 1) wow factor, 2) investment attractiveness, and 3) team spirit.

Tips to make the most of your Startup Weekend time:

• pitch an idea
  • don’t be afraid to share your ideas because ideas are a dime a dozen, it’s the team and execution that makes an idea different
  • worse case you get feedback and get to work on someone else’s idea
  • don’t pitch an existing idea that is far along, less room for creativity
  • during group forming, sell your idea otherwise you won’t recruit anyone to work on your idea
• make the goal to create a prototype by Sunday
  • people like to see things working, figure out what parts of your idea that you want to demo, for the rest, FAKE IT!
  • related, don’t spend too much time on “business-y” topics like market research, etc., it makes for a boring presentation (the math, 25 ideas x 5 mins = one long @ss time)
• make decisions quickly
  • agree on what not to agree on, meaning there are some things that aren’t needed for Sunday’s presentation (aka outside the scope)
  • time is of the essence, pick a path and stick with it
• identify collaboration and development tools ahead of time
  • save time with figuring out logistics, have a proposal of what tools to use
  • go further, get all of your accounts set up and tools ready to go before the weekend
• network like crazy
  • it’s really hard to find like-minded people (e.g., who want to spend a whole weekend on a startup idea instead of relaxing and/or partying)
  • the people who attend are cool, they come from all disciplines…”with diversity brings innovation!”
  • bring plenty of business cards like it’s your birthday, if you don’t have any, use VistaPrint for cheap biz cards
  • tweet it up!  get a twitter account and tweet with the event hashtag, use twitter to find people or skills during the event
• figure out how you can help a startup idea and sell yourself (during group forming time)
  • can you code? do market research? build the business model? create graphics?  figure it out before you get there, what’s your elevator pitch?
  • understand that a group needs all those skills, but probably more development and UI graphic skills

If you missed the event, go to the next one.  They happen every year in the bay area and sometimes twice a year.

[Update 5/21/2010] Here is a good post on Startup Weekend.  It has the complete list of pitches.

Silicon Valley’s Women of Influence 2010 awards dinner

A couple of weeks ago, one of my ex-managers, a computer science research executive and Fellow at my company, asked me to attend the “Women of Influence 2010” awards dinner with her and her other guests.  I was delighted to have been invited.  The San Jose Business Journal vetted out nominations down to 100 women in the San Jose area who have influenced other women and their community.  The evening included a networking cocktail reception, dinner, awards of course, then dessert.

I got to the San Jose Fairmont Hotel just at the start of the cocktail reception.  I wondered around a bit by myself, then found a nice cocktail table to camp at.  One girl came up and talked to me about her company where they do voice to text transcribing.  She said that they were working with hospitals and touted about how accurate the software is.  Another lady came up and it so happened that I went to MBA school with her co-worker at Intel.  Small world for sure.  Then lastly, I met a Nordstrom’s salesperson turned tech headhunter.  She has my business card now.  :)   Just kidding!

Before the dinner started, I recognized a woman at the table next to ours.  She was on the panel at the Silicon Valley Young Professionals Speed Mentoring event, President of Mission College.  She was an award recipient too.  I went up to her and said that I saw her the week before on the panel.  I don’t think that she recognized me although I did ask a question.  That’s ok.  I at least wanted to reach out.

Alright, the good stuff.  So imagine 100 women accepting awards and all having 10 words or more for their thank yous.  It went by kind of fast actually because there were some funny thank yous.  One tall blond marketing woman started saying, “Thank you to the Academy for my Oscar…oh wait wrong awards event…”.  It was actually funny.  About 50% thanked their dads and 50% thanked their moms.  Some women thanked their sexy husbands and so forth.

My biggest disappointment was not seeing Marissa Mayer from Google and the Chairman of the Board from Intel accept their awards.  They both sent others to accept on their behalf.  Argh!  Oh, all the recipients received an engraved glass paper weight from Tiffany’s.

All in all, the event was fun because I got to spend time with my old manager and old friends from the research organization.  I wish that there were more folks to meet during the networking hour.  Maybe one day I’ll get a Tiffany’s box for being a woman of influence.