Last night I attended the Venture Capital SIG of SD Forum. I was really looking forward to it since it was canceled from the previous month. The topic was “Term Sheet Negotiations -Do’s and Don’ts“, which is always a hot topic in Silicon Valley.

The people on the panel were top notch and represented all sides of the term sheet transaction. It had a VC who was formerly an entrepreneur, David Rolf of VantagePoint. Mixed in with a banker and a lawyer was Lawrence Coburn, an entrepreneur that had just closed Series A funding for his startup, RateitAll.com.

I had prepared before I arrived. I had read some books on term sheet fundamentals. It allowed me to follow the basic language even if it did take me a couple of seconds to translate “2 for a pre-money 8″ into English. I really felt vindicated on my extra credit homework when I overheard two people in the audience talking about good books on term sheets. I could proudly say that I was reading both of the books being recommended at that moment.

This high point was, of course, balanced by a low point.In an earlier post I had mentioned that Sean Murphy of SKMurphy had suggested the book “The Four Steps to the Epiphany“. Before the SIG, I drove to Barnes and Noble since I could not find the book in the local libraries. Imagine my surprise when Barnes and Noble’s computers had no record of this book. It was so unbelievable to me that I called a local library and had the librarian give me the author’s name, Steven Blank. Even that additional info was no help. In frustration, I called Borders while I was still at the Barnes and Noble. They had no record of the book either.

I tried the librarian again. She tried to find the book at another library. Turns out that there are only 17 libraries in the ENTIRE United States that have this book. Only 3 of them are in California. ARGHHHHH!

The hunt goes on.

I attended a talk given by Dave Nielsen entitled “Marketing to Web 2.0 Developers” at the Marketing SIG of SD Forum. I spoke to another CEO of a widget making startup, so the crowd was interested in the topic. But the talk was more a disconnect with what the crowd was expecting.

Dave Nielsen is best known as the author of PayPal Hacks, a great book if you want to use any of PayPal’s more advanced features on your site. The info in his talk was at too high a level for most people. That CEO that I mentioned above left the talk early. It just did not give him the practical info that he wanted. The talk was spent mainly defining terms. Ironically, the speaker did not even mention Web 2.0 until the last 10-15 minutes of the talk. Mostly it was ancient history. In Nielsen’s defense, ancient history for the Internet is last year, and his audience was a mix of technical and non-technical people.

The biggest issue that I had with his talk was his definition of “developer”. Nielsen defined developer very broadly as anyone who uses an interface to customize something. Our biggest disagreement is that he seemed to use “developer” interchangeably with “early adopters”. By this definition, the first users of YouTube to upload and share videos with their friends were developers because they “created” their own YouTube page with the YouTube interface and spread the gospel of YouTube to their less technically sophisticated friends.

In my point of view, such early adopters are your first customers who are using the product that your engineers designed in the way that it was designed to be used. They are customizing the product to their wants into something that has not been produced before, but they are not developers. I would think that a better word than developer might be content creator since that is what these customers are really producing that is unique.

On the other hand, I do believe that a person that creates a new widget or app for Facebook is a similar site is a developer. While they are using an interface developed by, for example, Facebook engineers for third parties to develop apps on Facebook, these new apps really are like new programs being built in the “Facebook programming language and interface.”

Yesterday at the Mobile Internet SIG of SD Forum featured a talk by a new mobile social site called Wichro. Its product is called ZKOUT. It is currently in private beta that became unexpectedly public when ZKOUT was selected as an Apple staff pick. They have had about 2000 users sign up a day. Not bad for a private beta. Just wait until it goes public.

What is interesting about ZKOUT is that it has been designed to run on the regular web and three mobile platforms, low-res mobile Internet, high-res mobile Internet and a mobile site customized for the iPhone. They decided not to create an iPhone app but to use the mobile web instead.

You can completely create your account on the mobile web without having to create a account on the regular web. With Facebook, you create your Facebook profile on the web and then link your account to a cell phone and network. ZKOUT seems to get around this by completely separating the different layers of the site, such as email, mobile Internet, SMS, MMS, etc. from each other. As a result, they can run on up to 10k phones. They are able to run on 10K phones because they have access to an online list of cell phones and cell phone features that let them tailor the mobile web site to each phone. One such site with this type of info is Phone Index.

The speaker from Wichro was not clear on how they plan to make money. Mobile ads were mentioned as was subscriptions. I could not tell if Wichro was trying to keep their revenue model secret or if they are still working it out. My guess is that they are still sorting it out.

I attended the SD Forum Marketing SIG last night.  The topic was How to Jump-Start Your Strategic Planning, and the speaker was Brad Reddersen. 

Maybe the talk was too general, or he did not have enough time to go into his important examples and points.  But I did not get much out of this talk.  His main theme is that all organizations need to figure out their business ecosystem.  Once this is understood, then they need to figure out their place in it and where they want to be in the ecosystem in 5 years.  The important thing is not to try to build the entire ecosystem on your own but to leverage strategic partnerships, alliances, standards, patents, intellectual property, and government regulations to give your business a competitive edge that is sustainable over the long term.

Since I have been thinking along these lines for over a year with Geogad, it did not provide any new insights.

Technorati tags: SD Forum, Marketing SIG