deal architect

Burning Platform 110: Market Engineering, not just Product Engineering

For the 110th episode of Burning Platform we host Bruce Cleveland of ForzaGroup Consulting. You may remember Bruce from his influential roles at Siebel, C3.ai and Oracle and as an investor at Wildcat Venture Partners.

You know I am constantly encouraging vendors to explore new markets – GenAI use cases, vertical edge applications, emerging countries etc. It was nice to have Bruce put guardrails around enthusiasm for new market opportunities. Good product engineering is table stakes these days – what you need in addition is what he calls “market engineering” – to include thought leadership, category creation, messaging, positioning, and storytelling.

He explains the shockingly high rate of startup failures and even that of new products of successful tech vendors. Every company goes through 3 phases - go-to-product, go-to-market, and go-to-scale. Over the last couple of decades the investor community via angel investors, incubators and accelerators has provided plenty of guidance for the go-to-product phase. Strategy firms like McKinsey can help you scale a business. The support for the third phase has been elusive.

Bruce met over a thousand startups in his time as VC and came up what he calls “slide 29”

“I would find the 29th slide of their 30 slide deck was often the financial one. Usually showing a hockey stick. I would go “you were able to go in great detail about the product, your new build, tell me about the market you're going to engineer because that's going to end up costing more than what it takes to build the product”. And so I call this slide 29, (riffing on) the famous Sydney Harris cartoon which has a bunch of math, then a miracle occurs.  “So what miracle is going to occur that goes from you building the product to you having a billion dollar plus company, as an outcome”, and typically, most of the startups I started to work with didn't really have great answers to this”

He had distilled his 25 years of operating experience and a decade as a VC in his book, Traversing the Traction Gap and he summarizes the concepts in the 40 minutes below. I had interviewed him in 2019 when the book was released and you can see his passion for the topic has not waned.

My favorite part starts around 13.40 where he explains the many TLAs, pillars and metrics in the book. He also explains how they relate to the jargon of funding rounds (A, B etc.) and also to Geoffrey Moore’s “Cross the Chasm” terminology – both of which the technology world is intimately familiar with. You can download many of the infographs he uses from this site.

The conversation below is just a teaser on his font of knowledge which he will be sharing soon in a course at Stanford and through his consulting assignments. However, it is 40-minute thought-provoking primer for anyone exploring new markets. And it is a great way to present to someone like me who is always pestering vendors to talk about new use cases, verticals and global markets.

SaCS baby steps

A few weeks ago,  Lawson announced its version of "SaaS". Ok, so it is not multi-tenant, and it is only one application, but I was impressed with IBM's pricing of $ 75 per user per month for the hosting and application management services.

I have written before incumbent customers of SAP, Oracle, Lawson and other enterprise apps cannot just toss their existing implementation and just move to a NetSuite. They would be better off with what I call SaCS.

Of course, in the same announcement Lawson says customers would need to "purchase maintenance contracts as they do currently". My definition of SaCS includes significantly lowered maintenance.

In the end what Lawson and IBM charge together has to be competitive with the single consolidated price of NetSuite or salesforce.com.

Still a ways to go.

Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2007

James McGovern, an enterprise architect at an insurance company, critiques Gartner's list for 2007 and provides his own.

I do need to ask him what John Kerry has to do with the list -)

MIT Technology Review - 2006 Emerging Technologies

The MIT Technology Review lists its top 10 emerging technologies. The May 2005 list was here.

Epigenetics -detecting cancer early by monitoring subtle changes in DNA
Cognitive Radio - exploiting unused radio spectrum
Nuclear Reprogramming - a more ethical way to derive stem cells
Diffusion Tensor Imaging - for brain imaging
Universal Authentication - for a safer Internet
Nanobiomechanics - measuring tiny forces acting on cells
Comparative Interactomics - maps of body's molecular interactions
Nanomedicine -to guide drugs directly into cancer cells
Pervasive Wireless - making all wireless gadgets get along
Stretchable Silicon - teaching silicon new tricks

Building the A380 in 7 minutes

Courtesy of Sadagopan I saw this 7 minute video on the process to produce the mammoth new Airbus. I love big birds. With all the travel I have done over my career, I still look forward to flights on Boeing 747-400s.

Of course, the A380 is even bigger (555 passengers in all double decker format) (click on this interactive site to compare it to the 747 or to a VW Golf and an elephant), can fly further (8,000 nautical miles), embodies more technology advancement (from composites to engine efficiency to over billion lines of software) and has more creature comforts (from entertainment systems to even showers). Read about them here and here.

A big annoyance: Not one major US airline has signed up as a charter customer. In the days when Pan Am was a dominant international airline, it was a charter for the 747. Nowadays, the global leaders are Singapore Airlines and BA while our majors struggle for survival. 

Frequent flyer miles are not going to be enough to make me fly on a Delta 767 when the competing choice is A380. With the world getting flatter, the A380 is going to be the bus for the changing trunk routes around the world.

Orgasmic about Origami...

...not

Om Malik
Tom Foresnki

yawn.

apparently Microsoft realized the buzz had got out of hand...

"In an interview yesterday, Mika Krammer, a Microsoft marketing director involved in the project, explained that Origami was merely meant to be the code name. She said the volume and breadth of buzz created by the cryptic Origami campaign caught the company by surprise."

But credit Scoble at Microsoft for creating the buzz and feeding it in blog world (though  on his blog he deflects the credit/blame). There is a new channel out there (courtesy of Google!) and Microsoft is learning how to use it.

Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids

..in fact it's cold as hell...

Rocket Man, Elton John

Sir Elton wrote that in 1972.  The US Government would like to make Man on Mars a reality by 2030. That and a number of other factoids and other space opportunities show up in Business 2.0's cover story on The Entrepreneurs Guide to the Galaxy. Tech  billionaires such as Paul Allen and Jeff Bezos are funding  some of the space  startups.

For a picture gallery of likely opportunities from Asteroid Mining to Space Hotels to the Moon again (as a prelude to the Mars manned mission) page down in this article.

Maybe by 2050 we will be as cynical as Elton's Rocket Man, but for the next couple of decades space looks pretty exciting.

March Madness in Hanover

CeBIT. The world's biggest technology show with 4 million square feet of floor space.  As CNET reports both Microsoft and IBM will show off new products. And may be I will shut up for a while about the low productivity from their combined $ 12+ billion a year in R&D.

The World Cyber Games Euro Championships are also happening at the same time. No games planned on Microsoft's hush hush Origami. Or on the EA NCAA March Madness 2006.

Cancel home phone line - and broadband?

The New York Times reports technology for WI-FI to go. Basically, these are devices from Kyocera, Junxion and Top Global that can convert cellular signals (e.g from the Verizon EVDO card) to a WI-FI signal that can be shared by multiple laptops or accessed by Apple or other machines which do not have the card slot for the EVDO)

What caught my attention was:

"Other people are canceling their home D.S.L. or cable modem service altogether. Instead of paying twice for Internet access — for a cable modem and a cellular laptop plan — they use the cellular card at home and on the road and save a lot of money."

As we know many consumers have cancelled home lines and made their mobile number their only line.

More Sticking it to the Men?

The Next Net 25

Business 2.0 (subscription required) lists 25 hot Web 2.0 start ups in 5 categories

Social Media - Digg, Last.fm, Newsvine, Tagworld, YouTube
Mashups and Filters - Bloglines, Eurekster, Simply Hired, Technorati, Trulia, Wink
The New Phone - Fonality, Iotum, SIPphone, Vivox,
The Webtop - Jotspot, 30Boxes, 37Signals, Writely, Zimbra
Under the Hood - Brightcove, Jigsaw, salesforce.com,SimpleFeed, Six Apart

17 of the companies are in Silicon Valley, another 2 in rest of CA. Should Arnold take credit?

Update: Jason Wood questions the list. As have many others. When there are so many more Web 2.0 start-ups,  any list like this is bound to.