Posts filed under 'Bay Area'
May 14th, 2012
On June 19th, Shelly Gordon, from G2 Communications Inc., will share her insights on the ‘How to turn my problem solving idea into a remarkable story.’
Great PR is about developing great stories of influence that journalists, bloggers, etc. want to write about and your market wants to read/view/listen to. Bring your questions on:
- How to approach journalists & bloggers
- Crafting your story
Location: CoCo Restaurant 1206 Oakmead Parkway Sunnyvale, CA
Time: 7.30 am
Date: June 19, 2012
Come prepared to tell us a story about your fledgling idea; product; solution to a problem; or new service. Rather than simply describe your new business venture; tell us a story. Remember composition 101? Every story has these basic elements:
- Theme
- Setting
- Plot
- Conflict
- Character
- Point of View
Example: Once upon a time people could only call people from a phone connected to a jack and an outlet in the wall (theme: plain old telephones). One day Bob (character) was driving to a meeting with a new client. It was a multi-million dollar deal (plot). Suddenly his trip down 101N came to a screeching halt due to a triple car pile-up 4 miles down the road (conflict/drama). Bob was reduced to a weeping pile of protoplasm. During the 3 hrs he was trapped in his car, Bob got out his notepad and said, this has got to change. I need to be able to reach clients, especially during an emergency, when I’m away from my phone (point of view/new idea out of the conflict). That’s when Bob created the idea for a car phone… and the rest is history (happy ending!).
See if you can turn your problem solving idea into a story and come to the next Bootstrappers Breakfast meeting and share it with us.
About Shelly Gordon, G2 Communications Inc
Public relations leader Shelly Gordon creates innovative PR and social media programs for health care organizations and small to mid-sized B2B companies in the San Francisco Bay Area and across the U.S. Going beyond launching products or writing press releases, Gordon generates media coverage and builds trust in the marketplace for her clients by positioning them as credible leaders in the forefront of social media conversations that make a difference in people’s lives – and the bottom line. On top of her 20+ years of PR experience, Gordon also brings to her work a warm sense of humor honed as a solo performer and leader of laughter workshops.
October 14th, 2011
Disha Bheda is our coordinator for the San Francisco Breakfasts. She interviewed Carl Ludewig, CEO of Ludewig Multimedia and a frequent moderator at the San Francisco Breakfasts.
Carl Ludewig is CEO of Ludewig Multimedia. Carl wants to change the way applications are developed by empowering designers and business users. In a world where the cloud, mobile and desktop need to fit together, Ludewig Multimedia looks to take a holistic approach with the next generation of software design tools. Carl’s prior venture was the mobile advertising company Ad Infuse, which was sold to Velti in 2009. Carl is a software engineer and musician who believes
that creative talent is the key to success.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about your background?
I’m a UC Berkeley computer science graduate whose first job was with the company that invented index funds and evangelized computer-driven passive investment strategies. I watched it grow incredibly fast and saw first hand how technology could create a whole new market. Since then, I have worked with a number of early stage startups, including a mobile advertising company I co-founded called Ad Infuse, which we sold in 2009.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about what led you to found your company, what was the problem that motivated you?
My entire career, it has bothered me that many applications that seem simple are surprisingly hard to build. I believe that there’s a certain class of application that should be as easy to create as using Microsoft Word or Excel, and it should work across platforms and devices.
Q: How did you get started?
Rather than seek angel or VC funding, I decided to leverage consulting opportunities to bootstrap the business. I look for projects that teach me something I need to know and provide experience with the technology we’re using in our products.
Q: Can you give me a brief overview of where the company is today?
We have 3 employees and a technical advisor. Revenue has grown around 50% year over year. Although consulting still accounts for the bulk of the revenue, about half of our customers are subscribers to services rather than consulting clients.
Q: What are the two or three things that you have been able to accomplish that you take the most pride in or satisfaction from?
The number one is team building. The talent and enthusiasm of those who have joined so far is impressive and gives me hope for our future prospects. The other is that bootstrapping and customer development has allowed us to get started without taking on outside investment.
Q: What has been the biggest surprise?
Even after years of experience, I am still surprised at how difficult it is to develop software, which, ironically, is the problem we are trying to solve.
Q: What development, event, or new understanding since you started has had the most impact on your original plan? How has your plan changed in response?
I have needed to learn patience. Given that product development can take time, we’ve adopted a “sell what you have” attitude and offered hosting and related services in order to engage with potential customers sooner rather than later.
Q: Any other remarks or suggestions for entrepreneurs?
Know yourself and why you want to be an entrepreneur. Do you want to start and flip your company quickly? Are you building a business for the long haul? Your goals will guide you to the path you might take to get there.
Carl recently spoke at the “Working For Equity” panel with two other bootstrapping CEO at Silicon Valley 2011. See “
Slides from Working For Equity Panel at SVCC 2011” for his presentation.
October 13th, 2011
Francis Adanza interviewed Geva Solomonovich, an early employee at Fraud Sciences which was acquired by Paypal for 170M.
Francis noted:
Geva joined the company while it was still a startup and played a significant role in helping the company grow. I thought the Bootstrappers Breakfast community might benefit from Geva’s lessons learned. In addition to this Q&A blog post, Geva will be joining the round table discussion as a featured guest speaker on Friday, November 4 at the Palo Alto Bootstrappers Breakfast. Come join us and ask Geva your own questions.
BB: Hi Geva – Thanks for taking the time to share your entrepreneurial insight with the Bootstrappers Breakfast community.
Geva: Hi Francis, glad to be here.
BB: Prior to Fraud Sciences, what were you doing?
Geva: Before Fraud Sciences I worked in several other startups. One was SofaWare which built small office Firewall and VPN appliances. SofaWare was partnered with CheckPoint and the initial code base was derived from CheckPoint’s Firewall code. Another company was Savantis – a pioneer in Database Virtualization systems. Savantis closed down after 2.5 years. I learned a valuable lesson there – it’s almost impossible to sell datacenter critical solutions to large enterprises when you are a small startup. Duh. Even though the startup didn’t succeed, it was a great experience, and I was even able to get an algorithm I built filed for patent.
BB: What did Fraud Sciences do?
Geva: Fraud Sciences did e-commerce credit card fraud analysis. E-commerce merchants would send us the details buyers provided in the checkout page (name, address, credit card number, etc.), we would analyze the transaction information, and reply to the merchant with a green or red light. The interesting part of course was how we were able to make good decisions… this was a combination of outstanding technology and outstanding fraud analysts who understood and defined legitimate and fraud behavioral patterns. Let me give an example of what I mean by outstanding technology: in a typical e-commerce situation, an American credit card is presented at a checkout page of an American commerce site like amazon.com. A quick geo location checkup shows that the buyer’s IP address is actually in Romania. Most fraud systems would automatically decline such a transaction as the IP geo mismatch here is severe. Our technology enabled us to automatically analyze the buyer to see (and confirm) he works in an international corporation which has a branch in Romania. All of a sudden, the story looks completely different and some of the red lights dim.
Overall, our technology was so great we offered 100% fraud chargeback guarantee. If we “approved” a transaction and it was later chargedback, we covered 100% of the item cost. It was that simple. The value prop for merchants was outstanding – they could now sell to new risky markets they were avoiding before. Think about the ability to ship a $10k diamond ring to Russia without having to worry.
BB: How big was the company when you joined?
Geva: I joined the company when we were still sharing half a floor of a small building with 3 other startups. I was the fifth employee at the time with one other developer, an analyst and the two founders. Seeing the company grew from this early stage to being acquired has been really inspirational.
BB: What were some the early sales/marketing challenges you faced during the first couple of years in business?
Geva: The biggest challenge is getting through the first door. Online merchants are pretty busy people and they get a lot of offers from startups to fix/change/improve/solve/expand their business. Then comes the question of trust: who is this small startup that wants us to share our checkout information? How can I trust their recommendations to approve/decline a transaction? “I have my own fraud management system…”
BB: What did the company do to overcome these challenges?
Geva: To overcome these challenges we started selling to very eccentric and non-mainstream merchants – people who really have high-fraud and funky businesses. Some of our initial merchants were selling anonymous web-browsing services. As you can image that attracts a lot of fraudsters who want to be anonymous on the web. We actually saw that fraudsters are using the anonymizer services to fraudulently buy more subscriptions from them! Another genre of merchants we integrated with were e-gold brokers. E-gold is like a virtual currency – where there is money there is always fraud. After we had a proven record with these types of merchants we continuously worked to revisit and improve our offering. We simplified the integration process to a 10 minute exercise. We simplified the feedback to the merchants to a simple Yes/No. We slowly grew to the 100% fraud chargeback guarantee. In parallel, the sales force continued improving their sales pitch, and we worked very hard to get supportive feedback from top-notch merchants (like www.ice.com) that we used in order to reduce new merchants objections.
BB: As the company grew, what were some of the operational challenges you faced as you gained traction?
Geva: One of the biggest challenges we had was scale. For a long time our analysis process was 100% manual human review. Technology played a big role by scanning through 1000s of data sources, scraping the web, running sophisticated algorithms and aggregating data to make the decision process easier for the human analysts. But it was still a human analyst who made the final decision. Hiring these human analysts wasn’t scalable either – these were top notch, super intelligent, high SAT, highly analytical kind of people. There is no standard job posting nor school education that you can look for.
By far, my biggest contribution to the company was in building the automated decision platform. My team and I spent hours interviewing our human analysts to try to quantify and frame their thought process into something we can let a computer do. We studied machine learning algorithms, data mining processes, statistics etc. and then started implementing. In 3 months we had the first version out. This version outperformed most of our human analysts, and of course worked much faster. It was a great success…
BB: How long was the company in business before you raised venture capital?
Geva: The founders worked 3-4 years by themselves without raising venture capital. They then raised a small series A funding before they started recruiting employees.
BB: What risk reducing milestones did the company achieve that merited risk capital investment?
Geva: On the business side, we worked very hard to have a repeatable and predictable sales cycle. That was of uttermost importance. New merchant acquisition had to be streamlined and efficient, while trying to reduce the paperwork as much as possible. On the technology side, we needed to show that we can grow our maximum transaction processing volume by x10, and then by another x10, and then to a point where to scale would only mean buying more servers.
July 28th, 2011
Francis Adanza moderated the July 15th breakfast in San Francisco and offered this write-up.
We had a great conversation and a full house for the SandBox Suites’s location for Bootstrappers Breakfast. It was a mix of entrepreneurs; social gaming, mobile apps, B2B solutions, and video platforms. We had several thought provoking conversations on the topics of finding early employees/co-founders, marketing to small businesses, and how to partner with big corporations.
Steve Mock, our featured guest speaker, shared a few tips on how to get someone else to pay for your marketing and how to develop a win-win value proposition to make that happen. He gave three examples from three different companies on how he structured deals with Fortune500 partners to fund his companies marketing efforts. Below is the core of his three examples.
1) Major media companies. We had a great product that we wanted them to resell. Every major media company agreed it was a great idea, but seemed to lack the impetus to actual do a deal with us. Something was missing. We finally made a deal (loss leader) to one company to get things going. Once one was on board, the others fell like dominos. It took getting that first deal to ‘bless’ us to get the others motivated. Nobody wanted to be the first, so we offered the ‘first’ a deal they couldn’t refuse to get going.
2) Enterprise networking company. Starting with the “customer in common” in mind, we reached out to customers of all the major players in the networking space. Once we had customer validation, we reached out to the big networking companies to see if our solution would help reduce their sales cycles. All agreed that the solution was beneficial to their customers, but it only helped reduce the sales cycle for a few of the players. Those are the firms that we ended up partnering with. We actually partnered with the sales team in the field, got their buy in, and got them to take the mutual solution into their own internal product and marketing groups. We made the sales team our internal champion.
3) Enterprise software company. We wanted a giant Israeli company to resell our product. After showcasing our technology, we asked for product feedback and they would not provide us with any information. They were a very opaque organization. We could not gauge their thought process. We got their major customers to ask for the mutual solution. Still nothing. As a last ditch effort, we managed to meet the CEO for five minutes and pitch the idea. He loved it and made it happen. In this case, getting to the top of the organization is what got the deal done.
July 11th, 2011
I had the opportunity to sit down with Steve Mock (@steve_mock), Executive or Co-Founder of five venture backed companies. I thought the Bootstrappers Breakfast community might benefit from Steve’s lessons learned. In addition to this Q&A blog post, Steve will be joining the round table discussion as a featured guest speaker on Friday, July 15 at the San Francisco Bootstrappers Breakfast, held at Sandbox Suites. Come join us and ask Steve your own questions.
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Date/Time: July 15th, 2011, 8-9:30 am
Venue: Sandbox Suites, 567 Sutter Street, San Francisco, CA |
Q: Can you share a little bit about the start ups you’ve worked for? Maybe touch on the industry each company was in, the problem each company was solving, and whether or not it returned for the investors?
A: Two of the companies were in enterprise software (IP routing software and network control solutions) and the others were in consumer web and services (mobile email, children’s adventure games, online math games). Two were sold at a profit; one is profitable and growing; one failed fabulously; and the other is TBD.
Q: What are your thoughts about having co-founders compared to going at it alone? If so, how do you find the right person?
A: If someone measured the data, I bet most successful start ups have more than one founder. You want to have people with complimentary skill sets. If you are a sales person, grabbing your buddy who is also in sales may not be the best person. Get someone who can bring a different skill set and perspective to the table. The founding team will do most of the work and have to make the tough decisions, especially early on. Ask yourself with each person you consider whether you want to be locked in a room with them if you have to make the most gut wrenching decision in your life, because that is exactly what will happen.
Q: In terms of getting started, how do you reduce the investors’ perception of risk?
A: Instead of phrasing it as reducing risk, I like to think of it as eliminating reasons for investors not to move forward with your deal. In particular, I think you should make as much progress on the non-capital intensive items as you can before you try to raise outside capital. Get all the little stuff out to the way and make the financing the only thing standing between you and moving forward. Build a non-production prototype. Know the competitive landscape like the back of your hand.
Another type of progress:if your business relies on a distribution channel, talk to people in that channel and get their feedback on your idea. Maybe even make a key person like an advisor. Talking with them isn’t capital intensive, so do it. Don’t be in an investor meeting pitching a business that relies on a distribution channel you haven’t spoken to. It gives the investor an easy out not to move forward: “Why don’t you go talk to them and come back…”
Do everything you can do before you meet the investor, so they only missing piece is the capital required to get your business to the next stage.
Q: Of your company that “failed fabulously,” did the team do a postmortem? If so, do you mind sharing what you believed were the reasons why the team did not hit their growth expectations
A: I learned an interesting lesson about partnering on this one. We started as a B2C model. The product sold for $19.95. Our customer acquisition cost ended up between $100-150. It was completely upside down. We involved many SEO, PR, SEM, and social media marketing experts, but couldn’t get the math to work. We then pivoted into a B2B model, in which we managed to do deals with over ten major media and e-commerce companies to distribute our product, thereby completely eliminating our customer acquisition costs.
It looked really good at that point. The problem is Fortune500 companies move really slow.
So, we spent another year or so waiting for the Fortune500 companies to integrate the product into their respective offerings. When they ultimately came back and said the offering didn’t work for them, I was like, wow, I just spent a year of my life waiting for that feedback. Owning your own customer base is much better than being dependent on someone else to get there.
Q: If you could’ve done things differently, what would they be?
A: I think raising much more money would’ve helped. We could’ve done a lot more awareness building for the product category which would have helped both the B2C and B2B models. The timing was really bad. I was actually able to close my financing for that company in December, 2008, right in middle of the financial crisis. I barely raised the money I did. Raising more wasn’t an option for that business at that point in time.
Q: What are the things that worked?
A: The product iteration process was quite good. We spoke to our trial users intensively, got their feedback, baked it into the product and iterated a lot at the beginning. We really built something that people enjoyed and saw value.
Q: What are you up to now?
A: I’m looking for a great team with a great idea, in which I can jump on board and add value. I’m also consulting for two start ups on their fundraising and go-to-market strategy.
June 28th, 2011
Mr. Rao will join us for a brief discussion on his thesis from his book: Tempo: Implications of Narrative Driven Decision Making for Startups.
Date: July 19th, 2011
Time: 7:30 -9 am
Venue: Coco’s Restaurant 1206 Oakmead Parkway Sunnyvale, CA
“Narrative-Driven Decision Making for Startups”
Startups already make limited use of narrative concepts such as “Product Market Fit” (a classic example of a tempo shift in a story) to make sense of their evolving, chaotic, roller-coaster experiences. Narrative thinking can arm us with a far richer vocabulary of concepts to help make sense of the entrepreneurial journey and manage it more thoughtfully. I will introduce some of the more intuitive and basic concepts, such as archetypes, doctrines and tempo epochs, and challenge breakfast attendees to assess their experiences, current state and future prospects using those concepts.
Venkatesh Venkat writes a blog (Ribbonfarm) http://ribbonfarm.com looking at topics such as philosophy, art, sociology, and business innovation and technology from unusual perspectives. He also consults, does research and has recently published his book Tempo. http://tempobook.com The book has been praised by many including, John Hagel, co-author of The Power of Pull who notes “Tempo is highly original and engaging…In a world where timing is increasingly central to success…an essential read.” Before turning to full-time writing and consulting, he worked in startup, corporate and academic environments for nearly a decade. He holds a PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan.
May 22nd, 2011
We did some brainstorming at a recent breakfast about events and co-working facilities where you can meet other potential co-founders or look to join an early stage startup. Here is the list that we came up with.
- Hacker Dojo costs $100 a month and will give you access to the co-working space and a chance to meet a lot of other founders on a informal basis and compare notes.
- PlugandPlay is another space that has a lot of entrepreneurs, it’s more expensive but has several hundred teams either on-site or affiliated.
- Co-Founders Wanted Meetup gets together at Hacker Dojo
- Hackers and Founders is a meetup devoted to founders. It’ a chance for informal conversation about technology and business subjects.
- Startup Weekend is also an event worth attending when they come back to to the Bay Area, it’s a 54 hour “stress test” that let’s you see how folks perform under a small amount of pressure.
- FounderDating is devoted to helping folks find co-founders
- Startup2Startup is another group focused on getting early stage technology entrepreneurs together for a talk and networking.
- The Founder Institute runs a structured program for entrepreneurs that is getting a lot of positive recognition. They run a four month training
- SVASE runs Startup-U events several times a month with speakers who address startup issues, they would be an opportunity to network with attendees for co-founders
- The MIT/Stanford Venture Lab runs monthly events that attract a lot of early stage technology entrepreneurs.
April 11th, 2011
On Monday, May 23, 2011 in San Francisco, CA is the sequel to last year’s inaugural event, which brought together nearly 400 entrepreneurs and executives interested in building and supporting lean startups. The day-long event will feature a mix of panels and talks focused on the key challenges and issues that technical and market-facing people at startups need to understand in order to succeed in building successful lean startups.
More information www.sllconf.com
Get your early bird ticket for $250 now through April 23.
Register at http://sllconf2011.eventbrite.com/?ref=ecount
April 4th, 2011
On Tuesday, April 19 we have a special quest K.V. Rao, Founder and Chief Strategist of Zuora, a leader in subscription billing and payment solutions — will answer questions and give us insight on how he has made his company successful.
Today, I had the opportunity to sit down with K. V. Rao, Chief Strategist and Founder of Zuora. Before founding Zuora, K. V. joined Webex Communications while it was still a startup and played a significant role in helping the company IPO. I thought the Bootstrappers Breakfast community might benefit from K. V.’s lessons learned. In addition to this Q&A blog post, K. V. will be joining the round table discussion as a featured guest speaker on Tuesday, April 19 at the Sunnyvale Bootstrappers Breakfast. Come join us and ask K. V. your own questions.
BB: Hi K. V. – Thanks for taking the time to share your entrepreneurial insight with the Bootstrappers Breakfast community.
K. V. – Hi Francis, glad to be here.
BB: You began your career at NASA, GM and SGI – all very big companies. What was attractive about Webex that lead you to join a startup company?
K. V. – The founders! The destiny of a startup is defined by its founders. You want to know if you want to invest/bet on the vision and capabilities of the founders. In the case of WebEx, it was an easy decision to join them, as they had two remarkable founders who had a big vision for changing the world and the drive to build a really valuable business around their vision.
BB: Next to founding the company, you have essentially lived the Silicon Valley dream of joining a company on the ground floor and helping it IPO. Could you share a little bit about your experiences at Webex. Maybe some things that you planned for that worked perfectly or some things that caught you by surprise.
K. V. – First, I would say that nothing works perfectly in any company. From inside any organization, WebEx or others, you are exposed to and confront all the challenges of building and growing a business – from hiring, to funding, to competition. What surprised me a bit was learning to deal with all these challenges by having the right focus and having the right priorities, i.e. don’t try to solve all the issues all at once. The CEO of WebEx used to say, he could only address three issues at any time effectively, and his skill and judgement in picking the right issues was key to WebEx’s success. At the same time, don’t shoot for perfection – make a decision and correct it later if you need to…The one thing that did catch me by surprise was how quickly we became a verb! Today webconferencing is synonymous with WebEx, much like photocopying is with Xerox!
BB: I have heard some entrepreneurs say do not quit your day job until you are generating enough revenue to survive. I have also heard some entrepreneurs say, unless you can work on your startup full time, you will never move it along. What are your thoughts on these comments and which approach did you take in starting Zuora?
K. V. – The short answer is there is no one formula for success of a start-up. Having said that, I do have strong views about ‘my’ way – which is by no means original. Startups are successful if there is passion, vision, and commitment by the leadership team to its success. If founders are not willing to commit to their vision by devoting their energy, time, and passion to it, who else will? Would you expect to be married to someone, and have a committed relationship with someone else? This speaks to character and integrity of the founders. Needless to say, I started Zuora after I had left WebEx and was not working for anyone. When I left WebEx, I knew I wanted to start a business, but did not know what that was going to be – but I planned in advance to give myself up to 12 months to figure out what that would be. Like all the best laid plans, in my case, it took 24 months to come up with the idea for Zuora, but I was very fortunate that I was able to go that long both financially and emotionally – and importantly that my family was very supportive as well.
BB: Now as founder of Zuora what are three things from your Webex experiences that you are incorporating into Zuora’s marketing strategy?
K. V. – First is translate a vision into a message that resonates with your target audience. Second is to communicate that message through a variety of appropriate media. Third is to keep your message fresh all the time. This sounds simple, but what it requires is intense effort and investment in building a team that can execute on this strategy well.
BB: A common question that comes up a lot at our breakfasts is finding a co-founder. How did you find your co-founders and do you have any recommendations for those trying to figure this out? Maybe some considerations or requirements.
K. V. – Finding a co-founder is like finding a spouse. You should have a shared vision, and complementary skills, and you have to like each other! In the case of Zuora, I had a technical co-founder initially, and then a rockstar executive who brought much needed leadership skills and management experience to the table. We made sure we were aligned both on vision and values before making the commitment to each other to do our part for the success of the startup. If you have not worked with your co-founder before, then make sure to invest the time and effort to really know your co-founder: I recommend long dinners, breakfasts, lunches, drinks on a regular and frequent basis to ensure you stay aligned on vision as well as on working style.
BB: Well K.V., it was great learning about your entrepreneurial experiences. Do you have any last words of wisdom?
K. V. – My advice for entrepreneurs is to view their startup much like investors do – is the vision big enough, do you have the right leadership/team, both in skills, and in passion, and do you have the resources to commit to its success? Make the effort to have clarity on your own role, both in the beginning as well, but more importantly the role in the future as the company grows and you bring more people along. While personal and business success go hand in hand, roles and responsibilities can change and you are better off driving that change rather than have someone else drive it for you. After all this is your startup, and personal/founder satisfaction is one of the reasons for doing it, while at the same time, realizing that satisfaction can be derived from being in different roles. This may also include stepping aside at the right time – but drive this, rather than let it happen to you.
K. V. Rao Bio
Founder and Chief Strategist, Zuora
K. V. founded Zuora after five years at WebEx Communications where he reported directly to the founder and President with strategic marketing and business development responsibilities and played a key role in the growth of this successful start-up. Prior to WebEx, K. V. worked in sales and customer support at SGI. He started his career as the proverbial rocket scientist (Associate Scientist) at NASA and then spent several years developing products at General Motors. K. V. obtained his Ph. D. in Engineering from Iowa State University, an M. S. from the University of Missouri-Rolla, and a B. Tech from IIT, Bombay. K. V. is a US patent-holder in computing technology.
March 18th, 2011
Steve Blank will discuss Practical tips and experiences — “Customer Development for Entrepreneurs”. Bring your questions and join other Entrepreneurs Who Problems for Breakfast at our morning round the table discussion.
Join other entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast.
About Steve Blank
Steve grew up in New York City and was lucky enough to arrive in Silicon Valley in 1978 at the beginning of the boom times. Since then, he has been a founder or early employee in eight start-ups, both winners and losers, which include: two semiconductor companies, Zilog and MIPS Computers, a workstation company Convergent Technologies, a consulting stint for a graphics hardware/software spinout Pixar, a supercomputer firm, Ardent, a computer peripheral supplier, SuperMac, a military intelligence systems supplier, ESL and a video game company, Rocket Science Games.
Steve currently calls himself a ‘retired entrepreneur’ and is a lecturer at Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley. He has been recognized with awards from both universities. In 2009 the San Jose Mercury News listed him as one of the “10 Influencers in Silicon Valley.” Outside of entrepreneurship Steve has an interest in conservation. He has served on the California Coastal Commission, and currently is among the directors of Audubon California, the Peninsula Open space Land Trust, California League of Conservation Voters and is a Trustee of University of California, Santa Cruz. Follow Steve at his website: http://steveblank.com/.
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