One of the email addresses that intrigued me the most a while ago was the one I received from Whoisylvia@aol.com. I immediately thought of Schubert’s song based on Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (”Who is Silvia”) and this is the only reason why I opened the message. Good that my love for music saved me from discarding an email from somebody I only knew by her real name, Sylvia Paull. She is a “Silicon Valley Public Relations Icon,” as Alan Deutschman puts it in an article for Fast Company: “One of the most effective behind-the-scenes connectors in the Valley, Sylvia Paull, started out throwing some of the hottest parties at computer-industry conventions in the ’80s. Now she links the hard-core geeks, entrepreneurs, media insiders, and the political activists, too (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/115/open_features-innovation-scouts-who-is-sylvia.html). She landed “accidentally,” as she says, in the high-tech industry in 1986 at Software Ventures, the provider of MicroPhone, a best-selling telecom software for Macintosh, became their Marketing Director of Software, co-produced Science Editor, a CBS radio show about science, freelanced for Wired — until she started Berkeley Ventures in 1994, an umbrella company hosting the amazingly varied PR, party-organizing and connecting activities for which she had already become famous. She is, just by herself, a huge organization. She knows everybody in the high-tech industry and while, for most, PR is about skillful schmoozing and opportunistic networking, Sylvia genuinely loves people, remembers them with a stunning precision — and is equally excited whether she speaks of a still unknown entrepreneur (even Halsey Minor used to be one of them), a celebrity or a cause. Granted. She doesn’t like everybody — in fact, she dislikes impostors (and successfully avoids them).
Be honest with me, or I can’t be your representative to the media and the public…I had a ” catch up” lunch with Sylvia at Eccolo in Berkeley a few days ago. I hadn’t seen her for almost a year — suffice to say that it’s an eternity in her life. She quickly took a sip of sparkling water and started full speed on the Meridian International Sports Cafe’s next event, a big gathering on the 4th of July: “They have a great place with seven big screens. We’ll look at the 15km trial race of the Tour de France. Lance Amstrong is back in the Tour. He supports Levi Leipheimer, a Santa Rosa resident… The Tour starts from Monaco, goes through gorgeous places such as La Turbie or Roquebrune-Cap Martin to come back to Monaco. I have invited every single East Bay bicycle club to come, and then the Berkeley Fireworks starts at 9:30 P.M. It’s on the same street. So I am going to lead all the cyclists on a promenade down University to the Berkeley Marina where we are going to all watch the Fireworks. We want to make it an annual event.” Yes, Sylvia is “crazy about bicycling.” She even used to race competitively. “This year I did the PR for Bike to Work Day. Got big story about it in the East Bay Express. Any bicycling advocacy, I do for free.” And her son, Evan, currently working towards his Ph.D, in Bioinformatics is an experienced cyclist amateur bicycle racer for the Palo Alto/Webcor team too!
Fifteen years ago, she decided that she would have one major pro bono client. The reality is that, fortuitous serendipity, she often has more than one at a time — for they overlap. One day, Richard Stallman who had launched the GNU Project in 1983 and set up the Free Software Foundation two years later (http://www.fsf.org), walked in the Cybersalon that she started in 1994 and has since welcomed dozens of industry pioneers (Marc Pincus, Philip Rosedale, Garrett Gruener, Ray Ozzie, Rick Falkvinge, Esther Dyson to name a few). “I asked him: ‘Who are you?’ ‘How come you haven’t heard of me,’ he responded. I told him: ‘You need more publicity!” He hired me, but he didn’t pay me anything and I have been doing his PR on and off for over 10 years.”
Sylvia is as entrepreneurial as the entrepreneurs she represents and as dedicated and devoted to their mission as the entrepreneurs themselves. But if your company doesn’t know what it stands for, don’t expect her to act as an ersatz. Great PRs and communicators help companies stage their story, but won’t make it up — unless they have no credibility as PRs in the first place. “I often ask entrepreneurs why they think they need more money than they have right now. And most of the time, they don’t know. They just say ‘Oh well we need a few millions just in case, because, you know, if the product doesn’t work or doesn’t sell, we need a backup, we need a cushion.’ A cushion to do what? No one else thinks that way. It’s a strange mentality. So, I sort of have of preview of what VCs are going to see before agreeing to represent them. I challenge them. I ask ‘Why would any one care about your product, who would want it, who’s the competition. Why is it any different than what’s out there on the market’. Some people resent that. That’s good. My whole premise is that you have to be honest with me, or I can’t be your representative to the media and the public.” You only get the PR you deserve and if you want Sylvia, get your act together: “I recently spoke to a freshman class at UC Berkeley entitled Entrepreneurship 101,” she wrote on her blog last April. “They all asked me questions in an attempt to figure out why some of my high-tech clients were successful, as if there were a magic formula they could follow. I told them basically what the Austrian author Robert Musil told all of us: check out what you really want to do and what you’re good at. That’s all you need to know, and the rest will follow. (http://whoisylvia.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/04/the-human-condition-parallax.html).
Navigate inside and through this zoomorama (you can zoom-in/out the pictures as well as see them in full screen).
Sylvia’s Magic… There may not be a magic formula for success per se, yet, there is some magic somewhere, Sylvia’s magic. The unusual breath and depth of her culture enables her to understand an amazing range of domains, get into and to the mind of the most diverse set of people — and identify the real innovators, those who do not reinvent the wheel. Her personal style, a uncommon cocktail of baroque and minimalism, laid-back sophistication and go-getter DIY, as well as her down to Mars and down to earth traits, makes her feel comfortable anywhere she wants to be — and makes people around her feel comfortable. Plus, no matter how serious she has to be, her ability to laugh and her witty commonsense brighten up the most high-strung faces.
She is the ultimate Berkeleyan in two ways. She is hyperlocal; the Hillside Club (http://www.hillsideclub.org), founded by a group of Berkeley women at the end of the 19th century is where she hosts her Cybersalon; deeply involved in her community, she is a typical representative of the InBerkeley life (http://www.inberkeley.com), a site that that Lance Knobel and Dave Winer started a few weeks ago. Look at the title of her own blog: “Berkeley Blog, a sane place within an insane society.” She is hyperglobal too, as Berkeley has always been, thus attracting people whose heart can be anywhere in the world. Sylvia was the first US citizen born in a US Army hospital in Germany after WW II. Her father, Oliver Margolin, a Jew from Long Island who had graduated from Oberlin in viola and become a conductor, had joined the Army to make a living and was then Eisenhower’s band conductor (he met her mother, a German Jew born in Poland and a Holocaust survivor in Frankfurt). She fondly recounts the family’s trip with the band throughout Northern Europe when she was a child, before settling in Los Angeles and San Francisco, while the t-shirt she thought up, A Woman’s Place Is on Top, to help finance the first American all-women’s climb to Annapurna I, led by Arlene Blum, her roommate at Reed College, dangles in her memory — which leads her to tell me of another Berkeley event. She is still thrilled by the success of the first Multicultural Women’s Leadership Conference she helped publicize for EngageHer (http://engageher.org) last March, and for which they had legends of feminism such as Gloria Steinem and Dolores Huerta. Yes, no matter how ubiquitous the Web, Berkeley remains a place of choice for people with causes — and Sylvia, as she tells their story, becomes part of the story. She supported Move on (http://www.moveon.org), co-founded by Joan Blades, who also created MomsRising (http://www.momsrising.org ) in 2006; she founded Gracenet, a networking group for women in tech that launched the successful “disgraceful award in advertising” campaign to eliminate sexist advertising; she helped the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org), co-founded by John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor in the 90’s and living unabatedly with our time, she is hosting a Cybersalon on July 29th for Scott Rosenberg’s book, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, to be released on July 7.
Time goes so fast when you chat with Sylvia! Her reserve of enthusiasm seems infinite. As we were finishing our beignets with a chocolate sauce, she told me about the Big Ideas Fest that she helps organize for the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (http://www.iskme.org) in Half Moon Bay on December 6-8… and a few minutes later, I found out that her father, who after 20 years in the Army and after working toward a Ph.D. in musical education became a music therapist, and had one of the most remarkable violinists of the 20th century as his client, Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987). I asked Sylvia if she had ever met him: “Of course!” she responded cheerfully.
Coverage of the situation in Iran may be a significant turning point in the overall recognition of the importance of social media by a larger public. Over the last few months, social media has got a head start for promptness over media networks on several occasions. How many times have we heard that Twitter broadcasted information about the Sichuan earthquake 45 minutes before CNN reported! So, no wonder that “Twitterverse spoke-out in exasperation and opposition against traditional media networks (CNN specifically) and the absence of instantaneous coverage of the Iranian election”, as indicated by Brian Solis in his report of the 140 Character Conference (http://www.140conf.com/) that took place in New York City on June 16/17. Does our love for social media makes us slam traditional media too much (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/17/is-twitter-the-cnn-of-the-new-media-generation)?
Real-time responsiveness is definitely what we want. Yet, what does failure to show such ability primarily prove? Maybe that TV channels don’t “break news” and that any claim to the contrary is a deceiving form of advertisement. For truth’s sake, traditional media should only speak of “update,” “ongoing coverage,” “developing story,” or whatever. So, they may only get flak for setting wrong expectations — or continuing to hope to get by with a claim that was never really accurate in the first place.
Traditional media cannot compete with social media as far as up-to-minute and continuous information is concerned. How could they? Do we expect large corporations to mobilize as quickly as startups? Can we hope the RedCross to be on site as quickly as locals? On top of this, traditional media produce shows with a specific focus for a defined audience. Sure, it’s kind of odd to zap through channels and come across “Girls in Trouble” on MSNBC when somebody is severely injured on a street in Tehran. But this is the way TV stations were designed to be. In addition, what is pressing news for some isn’t necessarily a priority for them, or even for the entirety of the world. Families with relatives in Afghanistan may also want to have real time coverage about soldiers killed in attack on an Afghan base… Can’t we simply admit that TV is just TV, and be pleased with the fact that if we want something else, we have lots of choices, ranging from buzztrackers to sites whose mission was to reflect “global voices?”
If you want real-time information about anything, use one of the best Twitter search engines, Twazzup! http://iran.twazzup.com provides all the real-time, unfiltered tweets related to Iran? It’s now commonplace to admit that citizen journalism is a reality and that TV channels still have to figure out how to factor in grassroots reporting. It’s also annoying to hear them issue disclaimers about information that they could not “authenticate,” did not “independently verify,” or must be handled with a ‘pinch of salt.” We all know that timeliness does not mean quality, that not all messages are equal, that word-of-mouth can be manipulated by activists and cynical propagandists — and that actual tweets by real eye-witnesses could even become a minority after some time. We all admit that great journalists are first and foremost great investigators. Is all of this the right debate, though?
Even if all TVs had fully mobilized to report on Iran, there would have been no way for them to beat a Twazzup approach. One-third of TV time is advertising. So here is what we should demand:
1) That news feeds be displayed at the bottom of our the screen even during advertising time, and
2) That we have the ability to customize such news feeds with tweet streams of our choice at any time.
Instead of complaining about TV channels and sinking into an irrelevant debate, we should simply request providers to make multi-play a simple and free service — and more than a marketing package to make us buy TV, broadband Internet, telephony and wireless in one subscription. We should ask providers to deliver on their “Grand Slam” claims — and make technological and media convergence part of our daily life.
Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back starts with a telling anecdote: the author, Douglas Rushkoff got mugged on Christmas Eve in from of his Brooklyn apartment, and instead of getting sympathy, he was basically urged to shut up by local residents, afraid as they were that the incident would damage the reputation of their neighborhood, i.e. reduce the value of their home. “When faced with a local mugging, the community of Park Slope first thought to protect its brand instead of its people,” Rushkoff writes. The anecdote is Rushkoff’s starting point to analyze how, since the Renaissance, “the market and its logic have insinuated themselves into every area of our lives.” He argues that they mediate every single aspect of our existence, disconnecting us from everything that surrounds us. The book is quite expectedly somewhat controversial — yet may also be one of the most inspiring recent books for entrepreneurs and innovative marketers.
The Age of Simulacra: Chapter after chapter, the author recounts how charters disconnected us from commerce, how by mistaking the map for the territory, we got disconnected from place, how the real estate business disconnected us from home, public relations from one another, consumer empowerment from choice, a unified financial architecture from the meaning of currency, big business from the creation of value – and how many of our attempts to combat corporate power are likely to disconnect us even more. “Brands were invented to substitute for the real connections we had to people, places and values.”
The system that we have created for ourselves through a “six-hundred-year-old-business-deal” is a “progress” that translates into a loss. The book reads like an inexorable dispossession of connectedness to people and our environment, and like a sobering appendix to the five ages of man that Hesiod outlined in Works and Days in 700 BC. From one tectonic shift to the other, we have landed ourselves in the Age of Simulacra: “Step by step, place became property, property became a mortgage, and mortgages became derivative instruments;” we depend on brands and ad-agencies for our self-presentation and identity; our “positive thinking” and self-confidence result from intense packaging efforts and “corporate-enabled self-improvement.” We can buy Disneyland souvenirs in any shopping mall without ever having been to LA. Spiritual centers, from Esalen to the Omega Institute, are well-oiled businesses, and our speculative economy has deprived us from the ability to perceive the value we create or to even create value. Even the buzz and word-of-mouth is now mediated: “In Apple’s earlier days, Macintosh enthusiasts could be counted on to go into CompUSA stores when new products were released and demonstrate their benefits to consumers. But today’s brand enthusiasts are paid spokespeople, faking their loyalty for money. It’s big economy. New firms such as Buzz Marketing and industry groups like WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association now conduct word-of-mouth campaigns on a scale unimaginable before. A study by PQ Media, which collects econometric data and researches alternative media, estimates that companies paid outside agencies $1.4 billlion for word-of-mouth marketing in 2007, up from less than $100 million in 2001.” So much for our friendly social sites — also an ideal arena for marketers to leverage the advice of scholars, marketers themselves! Rushkoff appropriately reminds us that in 1923, a group of academic psychologists formed the Psychological Corporation to apply their behavioral research to American business interests: “Like the newly-minted George Gallup and Elmo Roper, they used ‘electronic tabulating machines’ to record and analyze the purchasing behavior of individuals.”
An inspiring book for entrepreneurs and … marketers: The book is phenomenally well documented and provides fantastic insights into some of the roots of the current financial debacle. The way the story is recounted is fascinating — even if you may have questions about the angle taken by Rushkoff. One can argue that while it may be true that local trade using local currencies did foster more interactions between people and a thriving economy between the eleventh and thirteenth century, and that “real people did the best when prosperity was a bottom-up approach,” the idea that the corporatist economy initiated by the Renaissance also initiated a downward spiral that all subsequent innovations only enhanced feels somewhat simplistic at times — along with the assumption that mankind has somehow strayed from a better stage to a worse one. After all, the fact that Paris Hilton is a highly successful brand today does not mean that she would have been more than that in the Antiquity or Medieval times. In the end, the evaluation of what connected/disconnectedness may depend on the frame of reference. Plato/Socrates fought the Sophists’s ability to brand anything as a result of their disconnectedness from the essential, the realm of Forms and Ideas.
The book is also an insightful approach to the history of the United States, full of interesting reminders. Mirroring the techniques of the railroad barons of the century before, GM crafted the legislation that made highways federally funded and controlled - and idealized suburbs. Yes, Teddy Roosevelt, fighting corporations, may have been more progressive than FDR when the latter endorsed the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) that changed the perception of mortgages (from a stigma to a plus), but ended up empowering appraisers as they assessed the quality of neighborhoods (and this to the detriment of Jews and blacks). The magic of PRs in the country has a unique ability to reframe or gloss over history. PR artists such as George Creel and Edward Bernays enabled Woodrow Wilson, who had run for reelection in 1916 on the platform that “he kept us out of the war,” to persuade everybody “to make the world safe for democracy” a year later. In the same fashion, it’s stunning how fast we forgot that IBM sold punch-card tabulators to the Nazis, that GE partnered with Krupp (a German munition firm) and that GM and Ford, which already controlled 70 percent of the German automobile market, retooled their factories to supply Nazis with war vehicles. As I say that, I can only suggest that you read a few foundational books in the history of marketing persuasion (of which many currently successful marketing books are spin derivatives), mentioned by Rushkoff, especially Edward Bernays’s Crystallizing Public Opinion, Public Relationsor Propaganda. While at it, also read Larry Tye’s book, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and The Birth of Public Relations. Also consider another classic: Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders or The Status Seekers. Also, Douglas Rushkoff has written several other interesting books. One of them,MEDIA VIRUS - Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture, is the origin of the expression “viral marketing.”
The last chapter of the book, “Here and Now,” subtitled “The Opportunity to Reconnect,” is in fact better than any marketing book, and may give you great ideas of companies that can make a difference. As the author reminds us in the previous chapter, PayPal’s original plan was to offer an alternative payment service. True, the business model changed as Paypal activity was perceived as a violation of the banking laws. But you may have other ideas… and it’s when they read scouring, abrasive books that entrepreneurs invent new rules — and eventually might pave the way towards a new economy, or creatively revisit Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. “Like the founders of America, who may have differed on almost everything else but this,” notes Rushkoff, “Smith saw economics as characterized by small, scaled, local economies working in interaction with one another.”
A 140 Sec Pitch: At TWTRCON, attendees were invited to vote for six of their favorite vendors. ObjectiveMarketer (http://objectivemarketer.com) was one of them. Amita Paul, the company’s founder, got the opportunity to pitch her product in front of the audience.I am not sure she used up her 140 seconds, actually, but one thing was clear in less than 30 seconds and 30 words: ObjectiveMarketer enables you to define the right message for your buzz channels – yes “objectively” — listen to, analyze and measure what really comes back from what you send out there. If you don’t completely understand what you do, you will go unnoticed or preach in a desert of deaf ears likely to unsubscribe at some point. “If you ask five social media ‘experts,’ you get eight different answers,” Guy Kawasaki told me. “ObjectiveMarketer’s product helps you truly figure out if, and how, your social media marketing is working.” He has close to 130,000 followers. He listens to his followers and in turn wants to talk meaningfully and effectively to them.
The Art of Laconic Marketing: Weigh your Words before and when you say them: Social Media Marketing is not the simple addition of three words Marketing + Media + Social. Marketing and Media Marketing are the art of pushing messages to an audience. It’s a primarily a top-down approach. Social Media Marketing is a more complex game: You start from your message, sure, but real-time interaction does not simply require that you know “about” your “target,” but that you also listen to people (more precisely a collection of individuals) and improve your understanding of them immediately and, eventually, fine-tune the way you address them — and this, in real-time.
And you have 140 characters to do that! You can’t be “conversational” per se. You have to be concise – but not sloganish or buzzwordy, because you will turn off your followers. You have to be laconic like a Spartan, i.e. terse (sometimes witty) and provide an url. Now how can you prepare for message effectiveness and measure the exact impact and performance of your messages in real time, know what works, why, how, and how to optimally schedule your tweets? You need a completely new type of dashboard, an intelligent listening machine that guides your decisions — a control tower of sorts for your campaigns. The core value of ObjectiveMarketer is to provide guidance and analytics for your campaigns.
While Internet marketing focuses on getting visibility in general, effective social marketing focuses on message transportability and repeatability. The purpose is to scale a grassroots marketing approach, i.e. foster the storytellers that will feel like communicating your message to their friends/followers — retweet them — within their various neighborhoods, as well as to understand the actual efficiency of the levers. ObjectiveMarketer provides the statistics, the trends and comparisons across campaigns and channels, i.e. the social insight that enables campaign designers to assess the quality of their messages and the actual impact of their amplifiers. Subtle and thorough measurement is the only way to ensure wide reach.
More about Amita: Amita is passionate about her product. For a good reason: I believe that there is no similar product today. She launched the private beta and her first users are thrilled. They also like this: she listens to their suggestions and understands what they say right away, because she is both a techie and a sharp marketing brain. As a result, when you suggest a feature, you can see that she is already cogitating on how to best implement it. She is a fast speaker and a fast thinker who grasps that, in marketing, “facts, not speculations and assumptions derived from trends or impressions, are key to success. I love marketing,” she adds. “In my career, I have often felt bad for marketing folks. They never seem to have the right tools to make informed decisions. They have lots of out-and-out marketing applications for brand awareness, promotional offers, and various other programs, but nothing that helps them before something has taken place. In the real-time and personalized engagement economy fostered by social media, they need a platform to pre-empt, strategize and execute — and the ability to gauge results.”
Amita came to this country at the end of 2005 and worked as a product manager first at StrongMail Systems and then at H5 (http://www.h5.com). She loved every minute of it, demonstrated how skilled and efficient she was — eager as she was to show the high quality of her training in India. She got her Masters in Computer Sciences from the Engineering College in Raipur, which enabled her to work as an analyst at Computer Science Corporation and Seacom Solutions – and then, she went for her MBA at XLRI in Jamshedpur (http://xlri.com). The more she learned at school or in companies, the more she wanted to become an entrepreneur. She is definitely jumping in with the right product at the right time. She works around the clock with her team here and in India. So, I couldn’t help asking if it was hard for her to juggle work and family, knowing that she has a six-month old daughter, Eisha: “Not in the least,” she responded with her bright trustworthy smile. “My baby is a breath of fresh air and my husband is very supportive.” Amita’s husband, Shekhar Yadav, who recently graduated with joint MBA from Columbia Business School and London Business School, works as Director Technology at StrongMail Systems.
While the media may have found Twitter, only 5% of Americans are currently using it, according to a research performed by Harris Interactive in April. This doesn’t mean that Twitter is a fad. The adoption of new behaviors is generally a much longer process than is usually anticipated by innovators and early adopters. The truth of the matter is Twitter is still very new – and significantly enough, TWTRCON SF09 that took place on May 31, 2009, was the first conference focusing on Twitter as a business tool for marketing, customer service, PR, or to make money. Quite a few companies explained how they already use Twitter today. The conference was very well organized, very well attended and had great speakers and panelists. Here are some of the highlights for me (for a more complete survey, you may want to check http://search.twitter.com/search?q=TWTRCON).
Operation Smile: Let’s start with a NPO. A great sign (albeit rare) is when a business conference starts with an inaugural party to help a humanitarian cause and provides updates on the money raised throughout the day. Presented as a live case study of a twitter-centric marketing initiative, Operation Smile launched a Twitter 140 Smiles with the goal of raising money to help fund 140 reconstructive surgeries to repair childhood facial deformities, including cleft lips and cleft palates. Check out http://www.140smiles.org and http://twitter.com/operationsmile! Twitter is not just an American thing! It helps change the life of people thousands miles away from the Silicon Valley.
Navigate inside and through this zoomorama (you can zoom-in/out the pictures as well as see them in full screen).
Great speakers: The main characteristic of the major individual speakers was their authentic spontaneity.
Laura Fitton started with a pre-conference keynote, Twitter for Business 101. The first time I heard about Laura Fitton was when I read Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us . In less than two years, she has become a real social media guru (although she views herself more as a “Twitter student” than an expert), and her company, Pistachio Consulting (http://pistachioconsulting.com) focuses on ways to connect businesses to new ideas and innovations using microsharing platforms. So, find the right followers, leverage this huge opportunity to connect to customers, and integrate Twitter into your operations – just as Salesforce is integrating Twitter. Her book Twitter For Dummies (coauthored with Michael Gruen and Leslie Poston, to be published in July) will certainly convince even the most skeptical.
Twitlebrity is not the point. Efficiency is. Guy Kawasaki is a most famous twitterer, not for the sake of fame, but for business. His interview by Gina Smith was a great moment of humor and honesty. “I’m not on Twitter to make friends,” he acknowledged unambiguously, “but to promote Alltop.” View this as spam (but, you willingly subscribed!) but do not forget that Spam is a delicacy for Hawaiians. And what is perceived as ghostwriting by twittering lone-riders is teamwork potency in business. We knew that already: Kawasaki is no macho. His team: four women who have real names and are real people.
Shel Israel announced his future book, Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods, to be published in September. His speech featured the stories of like-minded people, who assemble through Twitter, build personal global neighborhoods - in other words, a diverse Twitterville population, ranging from business folks to Janis Krums, who sent an image of the US Airways plane moments after it plunged landed on the Hudson River. “If the Pulitzer judges don’t consider an iPhone photo next year,” he comments, “I’ll eat my hat.”
The last individual speaker was Steve Rubel. He created a life chart using Mind Note, a mind mapping program, of where Twitter stands in the industry ecosystem and the directions the product might possibly take as a social OS that enables to a site to make social or a marketing OS. The diagram, inspired by Brian Solis’s Twitterverse, is now published at http://www.micropersuasion.com. Here below is a zoomable version of it:
Steve Rubel was definitely more exciting than the conversation with Anamitra Banerji, from the Twitter Product Management team, who rehashed that Twitter’s corporate motto is “We don’t know” for about 30 minutes. I truly wondered if I was watching the Silicon Valley aesthetization of cluelessness, a repeat of the “no-business model” snobbishness of the Internet bubble – only adapted to social media, or the elaborate staging of a revolution-to-come. Strange when there were a number of companies eager to discuss the viability of Twitter for their businesses.
Great panelists: The various representatives from large corporations were significantly more eloquent and enthusiastic about Twitter than the Twitter representative that appeared. What some of them do is already quite remarkable. Virgin America, Intuit, Phoenix Suns, PR Newswire, Boingo Wireless, Well Fargo, Comcast, Carl’s Jr,. Kogi BBQ, Dell Outlet, eBay, Cisco, and FutureWorks see Twitter as a platform: companies can strengthen their brand by engaging with their customers in real time, inform and support them better, create user communities, and generate more revenue. In doing so, each of them insisted on the necessity of defining clear strategies and measure actual results using different methodologies and various products (Radian6 was the most frequently mentioned), define rules of engagement and ways to personalize their brands, and eventually manage potential liabilities (while taking into account that the Twitter universe already has its own codes of conduct and is in many respects governed by its members — as is the case for most social tools). Even though many of these efforts are still at a fairly early stage, it is obvious to them that Twitter has the potential to drive real business, as was clear from the remarks of Stefanie Nelson at Dell, or Beth Mansfield, from Carl’s Jr. Beth has a real strategy on when is best time to tweet (the tweetspot), and she made a few people smile when she described herself as “a chubby 42-year-old wife and mother” interacting with her followers, “18-35 young hungry males.”
They are also all aware that “Twitter is dramatically changing the era of top-down management of corporate communications in real time,” as Brian Solis said at some point, and that if Twitter is a great environment to turn customers into evangelists, it also enables them to scream when they are unhappy — which turns out not to be such a big deal, as it enables marketing to better escalade problems and solve them faster. Forward-looking companies understand that the era of hidden dirty secrets is over, anyway. With platforms such as Twitter, customer-centricity is more than the one-to-one deal of the 1990’s and early 2000’s. It’s a public commitment in a world that has morphed into a public tribunal: When a first class passenger on Virgin writes a tweet to say that he is hungry, you have to feed him!
Most of these companies are also looking at leveraging Twitter within a global social media perspective and working at the its integration with not only their Web sites using products such as Hootsuite, but their overall operations and IT environment. (We can only hope that Twitter will be able to hire the right folks to address their reliability and availability problems).
On the lighter business use side, “Your Brand is a Person,” I can’t help mentioning MC Hammer on the stage with Stefanie Michaels (http://www.adventuregirl.com). While agents try shield to shield entertainers and athletes and build their mystery persona, the life of celebrities is so exposed in the media and sometimes beyond recognition, that MC Hammer doesn’t see the risk he tales. “There was socializing before there was a platform,” MC Hammer said plainly; “embarrassing yourself on Twitter is not a new risk.”
Let’s Cut to the Chase: This was the title of the last topic of the day. The Twitter concept is here to last one way or the other.How big will Twitter is going to be? That’s everybody’s guess. I believe that Jeremiah Owyang (http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/) could be quite right in assuming that the approach will turn into a universal protocol that will make it normal stuff. As far I am concerned, I tend to believe that the company’s somewhat complacent procrastination about defining its business model (even if it’s to find out the best practices nuggets, which is often absurd in a startup) may accelerate the commoditization of the concept. I hope this does not jeopardize the business prospects of the multiple — and often bootstrapped — companies that have created beautiful, interesting and useful products around Twitter. Here are some of the ones featured at the Conference: ObjectiveMarketer, PeopleBrowsr, UserVoice, ThumbFight, Jobaba.com, or Twitfunnel.
“Cisco TelePresence. Bringing people and countries a little closer together. That’s the human network effect.” A company mantra is good when it can be memorized outside the company, and even better when it is also embraced by its employees. This is clearly the case of 22-year old Marie Gassée, who joined Cisco in August 2008 as a Project Specialist in Small Business Solutions Marketing, two months after she graduated in Business Economics (with a minor in Global Studies) from UCLA. In April of this year, she spent seven days in Sierra Leone: “When you join a large company right after your undergrad years, you feel somewhat lost at first, but pretty quickly you realize that you can be part of its internal human network. One day, I saw an email from one of the Cisco groups mentioning that World Possible (http://www.worldpossible.org) was looking for volunteers to go to Sierra Leone. Word Possible is not officially associated with Cisco, but was created by four Cisco employees, Neil Radia, Megha Jain, Norberto Mujica and Pranav Rastogi. Their mission is to improve education and development in poor countries, and in order to deliver on their goal, they have built alliances with various companies. Cisco is one of them. I had heard of their successful mission in Ethiopia. So I signed up for this one”
Why Africa? I have always wanted to go Africa, on the one hand. I have always wanted to participate in a non-profit mission, on the other. So I saw this email, and my decision was made almost instantly.
How do you prepare for such a mission? There are several aspects.
First, I updated my knowledge about Sierra Leone. It’s one thing to know about the Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990’s; it’s another to get some understanding of where the country is at in 2009. So, I read as much as I could to get a feel of the country I was going to visit. Needless to say that no matter how much you prepare beforehand, you find out that you know nothing the minute you arrive. So I would say that you have to research as much as you can, while making sure to be ready to discover ten times more when you actually are in the country.
Second, you want to build support for the idea. I presented the project to my boss. He liked the idea. The truth of the matter is that Cisco truly cares about humanitarian non-profit initiatives. I involved my boyfriend, Jeremy Schwartz, who is a financial analyst at Wells Fargo in Los Angeles as he is also interested in travel and humanitarian work. Then we had to find people to donate six computers. We got our respective parents to give us miles from their mileage programs to pay for the trip.
Third, we had to be ready for our mission. We had to deliver these computers to an orphanage and train the children on how to use them. We also had a Rachel server loaded with information ranging from Wikipedia to MIT OpenCourseWare, which is a free publication of MIT undergraduate and graduate courses taught at MIT. Word Possible gave us all the guidelines to set up and deploy that Rachel Server. We had to do this because we were going to an area with no Internet. We also checked that all the computers, both Macs and PCs were working well, and were loaded with all the relevant free programs. When you are to spend seven days with kids in an orphanage, you can’t improvise and find out at the last minute that something is missing. Careful planning is key to success.
Did everything work as planned? Not quite. The trip leader who was supposed to assist us fell very ill and had to fly back to the US and the additional people who were supposed to join us could not come. We realized that there would only be the two of us to do the job. We felt somewhat awkward when we arrived, but we were able to take the boat from the airport to the location where the head of the orphanage was waiting for us. Also, my personal luggage was lost. I assumed it was stolen, yet I just recently got it back (almost a month after my trip). So from the start, I knew that I would have to wear the same clothes for the whole stay. None of these incidents, though, affected me. In a sense, the mission I had what the only thing that really mattered to me, and no mishap could get in the way. And everything went well and this was a fantastic experience.
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So what did you do? We arrived at the DOVE orphanage (http://www.internationaldove.com), founded by an extraordinary Canadian woman, Judy Nelson. She has lived in Sierra Leone for 20 years. At first, she was a missionary, and about 10 years ago she created DOVE to take care of children who had lost their parents during the war. Most of them are from the Freetown area, but a few are from Kabala, the largest town in the Northern part of Sierra Leone. Now these children are actually teens and young adults. The youngest is a 10-year old girl and the oldest are 19 or 20. There are fifteen girls and five boys. Judy has one person to help, but she manages most everything herself. She takes care of the children’s education, their health and well-being, and their security. As if they were her own children. She sends the girls who want to be nurses to the nursing school and two of the boys will hopefully join the British Army. Basically, she helps them build their future. She needed us for a reason: she is trying to obtain the donation of a Cyber classroom, but the requirement is computer literacy. So our mission was to train the orphanage as efficiently as possible. Although not all of them were equally interested in computers per se – and sad to say, but the boys seemed more interested than the girls, they all worked seriously and they all realized that learning how to use a computer was a skill that would make a difference in their lives. The youngest were the fastest to get it, especially the 10-year old girl. The first day was harder for her, but by the second day she had understood how a computer works and she wanted to know more. One of the boys, Samuel, who is 19, had already had a few classes in town but had not been able to continue because this was way too expensive. For him, these seven days were invaluable. We taught him everything we could, first because he wanted to know everything, and second, because it was key to the success of our mission to train a trainer there. Incidentally, we took him to town and went with him to an Internet Cafe. We showed him things like Google, Wikipidia, Facebook, and although they only had low-speed Internet, he was literally dazzled. We had never realized that we could bring so much joy to somebody who is just a few years younger than we are. It was incredible. So rewarding. His dream is to go to the University in the United States one day. I don’t know if he will ever be able to afford this, but I know he is the intellect to do that.
What is your takeaway from this trip? Sierra Leone is about 7,000 miles away from San Francisco. It’s very far, because it is a very poor country. At first when we arrived, we wondered if it was relevant to bring computers and if food and medicine would not be more appropriate. The reality is that they have some subsistence agriculture that enables them to get by. It’s not great, far from it, but people do not seem to be starving. And yes, as they were using computers, they knew that computer literacy would help them get better jobs. And as they were learning and despite the fact that we live worlds apart, we felt that we were helping overcome a divide, bridge a gap that is possible to bridge. In reality, when you see people so happy to learn, you can’t help reflect on everything you take for granted. For example seeing Samuel’s eagerness to study, and his dream to go a US University one day, makes you wonder how we can possibly drag our feet to attend any class. After seven days only in Sierra Leone, you know very little about the country and you still travel through the villages, looking around, speechless, because you don’t have the words to describe a whole different way of life, and a completely different environment, but you know that people are people, just like you. You can even relate to the teenage girls at the orphanage, who know their luck to be taken care of by such a wonderful woman, and yet can behave like American teenagers at times! In the end, it’s worth to give one week or so of your live to help others. You feel their gratefulness every day. But you are also very grateful to them for helping you to reflect on yourself and expand the meaning of your own life.
The May 9thOsvaldo Golijov and Dawn Upshaw Young Artists Concert, the first of two showcasing eight young composers and their original commissions (unfortunately, I was unable to attend the second concert), was an experience that is seldom afforded to audiences. The atmosphere in Carnegie’s Zankel Hall was familiar and excited – here were rows of seats filled with the devotees of the composers and performers of the evening. We were all partners in crime.
Attending a concert of new music is a tricky affair and represents polar opposite possibilities: will the program be the discovery of an exciting new voice? Or… not. As I am used to new music evenings that are, at best, uneven in their ability to hold my interest, I was happily surprised to find that I was never bored by what I saw and heard before me — far from it, in fact. I was consistently curious to see what would unfold in each of the four pieces. Even in those instances when I did not like a compositional or interpretational decision, I remained connected. This is the testimony to the four works on the docket; if there was a theme in style for the evening, it was each composer’s compulsion to grab the audience. We were not alienated by artists too caught up in their ideology to care whether we were along for the ride or left on the doorsteps following the program notes to pass the time. Kudos to Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin for his Niña Dances, Paola Prestini for her Oceanic Verses, Matti Kovler for Here Comes Messiah!, and David T. Little for his Scenes from Dog Days. All four premières were supported all the more by strong performances from the vocalists as well as the workshop ensembles, and remarkably conducted by Alan Pierson.
Matti Kovler’s Here Comes Messiah!
It is not surprising that I felt a particularly strong connection to Matti’s piece: I was there namely as part of his retinue. I am also familiar with his compositional idiom, and Here Comes Messiah! was clearly marked with the Kovler stamp. Matti’s instruments are not merely textural tools, but characters themselves. As the piece began, the breaths and physical movements of his solo singer, Tehila Goldstein (see picture with Matti), were echoed and magnified by the ensemble. From this point, there was no question that we were not watching a poem with orchestral accompaniment, but instead the group effort of a large cast of players – in which extraordinary poet-translator, Janice Silverman Rebibo unambiguously belongs. It was particularly in the second part of the piece that this group dynamic gained a strong hold over the audience’s attention. In the climax before the third and final part, the performers’ grip on the room was visceral, tangible, in a series of fortissimo pulses (labor pangs) from the instrumentalists, and exclamations from Tehila Goldstein. Here the expressivity she had already demonstrated earlier intensified exponentially, in her face, her stance, the timbre of her voice. Matti was at the piano, and he brilliantly made use of it in this passage, as both a harmonic and percussive instrument, driving the sound of the others around him.
Although his part in Here Comes Messiah! is less central than in his Cokboy (performed earlier this year in Boston), and the work revolves around a woman’s experience in child birth, it is, nonetheless, entirely an extension of Matti himself. He is wholly present in his music, and not simply because of his compositional language or aesthetic. The audience does not need to be introduced to the composer, or his thought process, to become privy to his internal world – he wills us to come in.
Great title: Yes, small companies and mom-and-pop businesses are the very texture of this country (as they are all over the world), and some of them can be grown to a significant level and address sufficiently large markets to be funded by institutional investors once their products and business model have been put to the test of reality.
Great content too: We are swamped with books about entrepreneurship. Yet, haven’t you noticed that most of them seem to be copied out of the Silicon Valley’s virtual Scriptures, telling the same sensational tales over and over, and featuring the same people with narratives that have turned bloodless because they have been hammered too often? Sramana’s book is refreshing. She picks heroes who are not (or not quite) as wildly famous and insanely wealthy, yet are very successful (and rich too) or already renowned, but not that rich - characters such as Greg Gianforte (RightNow), Ramu Yalamanchi (hi5), Manoj Saxena (Webify), Lars Dalgaard (SuccessFactors), Om Malik (GigaOm), and quite a few others. Their stories sound true. They live in a world where raising money is not a CEO’s “badge of merit,” as Saxena says, but where incremental progress ends up being the most efficient shortcut to actual market recognition. The big plus of this book is that it will help many entrepreneurs to keep away from shibboleth and preachers, and entice them to pick their phones, and sell because, as Gianforte puts it: “Sales are the lifeblood of a business, period.”
Ultimately, this book is written by a person who has a real, extensive hands-on experience. An entrepreneur, Sramana founded three companies: Dais (Off-shore Software Services), Intarka (Sales Lead Generation and Qualification Software, which was funded by NEA), and Uuma (Online Personalized Store funded by Redwood). As a strategy consultant, she has consulted with a large number of companies. She also writes a weekly column for Forbes, and she has a fantastic site: http://www.sramanamitra.com. For her, entrepreneurship is more than a business. It’s a lifestyle.
The entrepreneurial tribe and the kathaka: Interview-based books often reflect what I would call the “haphazard writer’s laziness syndrome,” typical of people who just want to have a book out there as their auto-marketing platform. Nothing wrong with that, but this is not at all what Sramana’s initiative is about: if you look at Sramana’s prolific writing, you will immediately notice the quality of her style, that she loves to write, has the courage to express her opinions - in short, that she a full–fledged author. For more proof of this, take a closer look at the epigraph that she offers at the beginning of her book: a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, Asia’s first Nobel laureate, in 1913. Definitely not your typical quotation, hastily abstracted from Quoteland or similar sources. The truth of the matter is that, because she is a good writer, she is also a thoughtful translator. Incidentally, a native Bengali speaker, she provided her translation of some of Tagore’s poems, with photographs from world famous artist William Carter (http://goldenraft.com).
The Entrepreneur Journeys is a series of interviews, designed to help entrepreneurs learn from other entrepreneurs. In the process, Sramana learned too: “The interviews and personal success stories that I compiled are just as much to teach me as they are to teach others,” she says. “When I was running my companies, I was doing things constantly. I was always in action mode. I had no time to think, no time to learn. Everything was happening so fast. It’s when I started consulting that I was able to begin to organize what I had seen and experienced from a framework point of view. Then I started a blog in 2005, totally by accident, a suggestion of my friend Om Malik; initially viewed as a notebook it became a meeting point for entrepreneurs. I invited them to talk to me and develop their story. Entrepreneur Journeys is a combination of my own learning, my synthesis as well as the synthesis from all these different stories that I wanted to put together as a complete body of work.”
This body of work is actually more than a series; it is a saga, a narrative that recounts the peregrinations ”into ever-widening thought and action” of the “Entrepreneur.” The Entrepreneur, always adventurous, often solitarily rattled by hopes and agonies, encounters virtual mentors within an international entrepreneurial tribe that Sramana echoes as a storyteller: “I believe that people learn best through stories,” she comments. “You can give them lots of dry advice. It just doesn’t have the kind of recall value or resonance unless you can do it through stories. I took screenwriting classes at Fort Mason about eight years ago and one of the things, I guess, all screenwriting classes deal with, is this notion of a character arc – so you have a protagonist who is working towards something and building up that story. Entrepreneur Journeys - the whole series - deal with protagonists building towards something, and finally they succeed, and that is the character arc of an entrepreneur. So the way I have tried to approach this Entrepreneur Journeys project is from the perspective of a storyteller, a business person, yes, but very much from the perspective of a storyteller.” As Sramana was telling me this, I was thinking of an interesting coincidence. Sramana was a classical performing dancer, specializing in kathak, when she lived in India. She was still performing four or five concerts per year as she was working towards her bachelors degree in Computer Science and Economics at Smith College, in Northampton, MA. After that, she went to MIT, earned a Masters degree in EECS, and started her first company, so she couldn’t keep up. The thing is, though, that katha in Sanskrit means “story,” and that in the ancient days, the kathakas (story-tellers) used to recite and dance stories from epic folktales.
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What’s next? More books, of course, and in the very near future: Positioning to test, validate and bring ideas to market, Innovation need of the hour, and Visioning year 2020. In the latter, she will take India as a backdrop. After all, Sramana is the daughter of an entrepreneur: “I grew up in an environment in which risk-taking and swinging for the fences was accepted as a virtue. My father founded Himalaya Shipping, one of the early container shipping ventures in the seventies,” she writes in the Prologue for the edition of Volume I in India. A quintessential business woman of the Silicon Valley, Sramana also wants to give back to her community. She cannot help to feel ”a national mission of sorts, a recurring theme in [her] life,” regardless of her nostalgia for an India that is unabatedly destroyed by shortsighted promoters. I recommend that you read a beautiful essay that she wrote in 2007: http://www.sramanamitra.com/2007/04/30/as-india-builds-part-1/
Expressions such as “seasoned entrepreneur” or “industry veteran” are so worn down to the thread that most people forget what they really mean. Deidre [sic] Paknad is definitely both. She is the CEO of PSS Systems (http://www.pss-systems.com), the company that created the legal information governance software category to reduce legal risk and lower the costs of e-discovery and data management in 2004. She led the company from idea to a customer base that counts most of the Fortune 100 today. As she’s done in prior entrepreneurial stints, she started the industry’s first practitioners learning forum in 2004, the CGOC (http://www.cgoc.com); that forum counts 750 corporate members and its own professional network and is central to the company’s market strategy and leadership. Before she joined PSS Systems, she was at Nth Orbit/Certus where she launched the company’s Sarbanes Oxley compliance strategy and solution. Prior to Certus, she was the founder/CEO of CoVia Technologies, which launched the first enterprise portal back in 1998 and was inducted twice for its innovations into the Smithsonian Institution. And before that, there were quite a few other companies too, and these are the ones I want to speak about today. What makes great CEOs is not a collection of achievements, but the coalescence of multiple professional and personal experiences powered by a deep desire to innovate and the ability to breathe life into whatever they do.
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Turning inauspicious beginnings into a springboard: Deidre wasn’t exactly born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Her father, who was in the military, was killed in a plane crash over Alaska when she was nine days old. Her young mother remarried and she lived with 4 siblings in Stockton, where several generations of the family had been born. Modest means. Simple blue-collar lifestyle in a still closely-knit, primarily agricultural environment of the Central Valley (forty-five years ago, the population of Stockton was not even one-third of what it is today). Virtually the only place she’d been outside of Stockton was Santa Cruz where she had relatives; her family had no college history or means to assist in her pursuit of more education and opportunity, so UC Santa Cruz was the only school she applied to. She wanted to be a lawyer, and got her B.A. in Politics. She expedited her undergraduate years for a simple practical reason, her only way to finance college was through the survivors’ benefit plan provided to her because her father had died in the military, a limited amount of funding with an age limit. So, she graduated a year early from both high school and college. “I tried to go through undergraduate and graduate school before I turned 22, because I didn’t have another way to afford school. I was intent on more opportunity in my life and in a rush,” she says, and revealingly adds that she had to do this “before the capital ran out.”
So, off she went to Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. She was stunned by the post-modern acropolis that Frank Gehry had started to build, “an amazing architecture smack in the middle of a slum,” that she could not quite “yet process,” she says. She felt out of place not so much because she ever had any real comfort zone, but because it was difficult to engage in social activities with an older student community as the under-age odd ball. When the woman she was living with had a massive stroke at the end of her second semester, she decided to stop the race to 22. She took was what was supposed to be a “year off.” In retrospect, it was a major learning event in her life — she had worked single-mindedly to get through high school, college and law school on limited college funds. The experience gave her the agility to adapt in uncertainty and some practice re-setting big goals. Short takeaway: Never stick to a goal whose meaning had hollowed out, no matter how hard you pursued it, and be willing to reset the jumping-off point!
Creative fearlessness, the tenet of success: You don’t become a CEO overnight, even when you start your own company (people grow their CEO skills as they grow the company they founded). Most of the time, people earn their spurs through a variety of rides.
After she left law school, Deidre took a job as a technical writer in the operations group of a semiconductor company (Elmo Semiconductor, based in Burbank) for her year off. Less than three months into a job, she felt the typical “there is a better way” entrepreneurial syndrome: “I was watching how they were making the assembly instructions for custom chips for the Aerospace and Defense industry. It was so primitive! We were destroying parts because the instructions were wrong; chip assembly is very small scale and needs to be quite precise. I had seen MacDraw and MacDraft. I thought there was a better way to do this. We could create a library of chip images, draw all the ceramic packages to scale using software and if somebody needed an 8 pin DIP or whatever, we could quickly produce the correct assembly instructions. I suggested that we use these great tools to improve the process and reduce the defect rate. I had my own 128k Mac and bought a digitizer that worked like a reverse print cartridge in my printer, so I was pretty sure it would be a big improvement. My boss told me to write a proposal. And the next thing I know, I had a department of eight people with eight Macintoshes working for me and we had a fully automated process. We became a showcase on the customer tour.” Common sense (not whacky ideas) is actually the most powerful trigger for leadership. Common sense allied with a deep understanding of where modernity (not fads) takes us. Yes, Deidre bought her own Macintosh in 1984, when this meant spending a fortune (almost $2,000 – today’s equivalent to $5,000 to $6,000). Way more than her car. Probably more than her first paycheck after taxes; this was her first real “adult” existentialist bet – which proved to be a good one in less than six months: “I had my first taste of how applying technology to business problems can change the economics considerably,” she summarizes.
OK now. After two years, it was obvious that career growth at Elmo required an electrical engineering background, so she looked for new opportunities. “I went to work for a company with the proverbial two guys in a garage in 1986 in Long Beach; at the time the surf industry was very vibrant. They had the first sample product of a colored zinc oxide sun block, Zinka. They were about to launch and were looking for somebody who could take care of marketing, PR, finance, operations and retailers. In short, they needed somebody ready to work around the clock. The business boomed immediately. We were everywhere, the Today how, Business Week, the LA Times, the NY Times, and hundreds of ski and surf shops. A year later, I had 35 people working for me and was running the shop. Schering Plough’s Coppertone division eventually acquired the majority licensing rights and I had no stock in the company. But I had an amazing time.” Speak of a hands-on crash course in basically everything that makes a company work, and more specifically, on managing a supply chain and a retail channel!
She moved to Silicon Valley and went to work for another semiconductor company, Altera, three years old and growing fast, to work on new and custom product launches in Operations. Not the best time of her life, for sure, yet memorable: “I learned a ton about manufacturing operations and got a chance to implement new systems including MRP — both were important opportunities.” It was a tough work environment for an ambitious young woman in the 80s, where the culture involved management screaming at each other, but she honed her (already proven) survival skills and reinforced her intensity to succeed. After three years, she made a move to Consilium (acquired by Applied Materials), the company whose software she’d implemented and began her career in the software industry. As a Product Marketing Director, she had the opportunity to apply the operations, systems implementations and company growth experiences from her prior posts to defining, launching and selling enterprise software to companies to reduce operating costs and improve regulatory compliance. It was the first of many experiences taking new software products from conception to customer and her real professional “sweet spot.”
The rest is an ideal resume and personal happiness… Deidre transformed her “temporary” technical writer job into a career passion thanks to her Mac at Elmo. She transformed two surfers’ ideas to a brand that captured the attention of the F100 industry leader in one short year at Zinka. She learned all she could in the “angry boys club” at Altera and transformed that to innovation and market leadership at Consilium … where she hit her true career stride as a software entrepreneur. Where was her personal life in all of this? Deidre divorced her first husband after Zinka, as her professional goals hit an uncomfortable ceiling in the marriage. She remarried, Daryoush Paknad, a serial CTO and entrepreneur (he founded Mizoon, a location driven social networking service in 2007). She left Consilium to give birth to Zoe in 1993 (a freshman at Castilleja in Palo Alto), and went on to her well-documented career at CoVia, Nth Orbit/Certus — and of course, PSS Systems for the last five years. Her company is one of few enterprise software companies making a market and doubling each year. It helps reduce legal risks and operating costs from tough new discovery laws and is championed by the GC, the last C-level exec unserved by strategic business applications for control and transparency.
Incidentally the little girl from Stockton speaks Farsi fluently and has traveled the country and the world big time.
After an engineering degree in Applied Mathematics and a master in Computer Science from the University of Grenoble, Neil joined Bull, where he stayed 12 years, starting as a software development engineer and quickly becoming a “Large Systems Product Marketing Manager.” Moving in 1983 to Apple France was a radical change. The subsidiary had been started by Jean-Louis Gassée in 1981 and was garnering interest quickly. Of course, participating in the launch of the Macintosh in France was ten times more exciting than anything Neil had ever experienced. He was definitely in the thick of it as the Developer Services Manager, which entailed, among other tasks, promoting the Macintosh to third-party software developers and assisting software publishers in their marketing and distribution efforts in France. He was extremely busy, of course, but never behaved as the super-occupied guy that you have to beg to for a meeting. Just like most remarkable people, he had the art and the courtesy of making himself available and was never giving to anybody the impression that he was in a rush. Such kindness is invaluable when you are a new company and look at the manufacturer of the product on which you bet your life as a holy place! His technical background enabled him to analyze products carefully, ask very precise questions, and make relevant suggestions. Very relevant, as far as I am concerned. In 1985, I was walking with him in the yard of Apple France late in the afternoon; the company I had started, ACI (ACIUS in the US in 1987), was still quite small. We had published a game and a file manager, ABCbase, and had begun the development of the first graphical relational database. We didn’t have a name yet, and as I was telling him that we were providing a new dimension in the way to organize and present data, he suggested with his always soft-spoken tone: “Why not 4th Dimension?” And the product was named 4th Dimension – quickly nicknamed 4D by our users. Incidentally, the company also became 4D in 2000.
I lost track of Neil in 1993. I left ACI and soon after, ACIUS. Neil left Apple at about the same time and joined Hachette as the Director of a Multimedia Products Division, where he stayed until 2007. Living in the United States, I did not even know that he was the man behind the Hachette Multimedia Encyclopedia, Hachette Multimedia Dictionary and Atlas – I guess one of the first products of the kind. Now, as a consultant, he selects the companies he helps and is dedicated to his students at l’EPITA, a Graduate School of Computer Science and Advanced Technologies located in France, where he recently started to teach Project Management in English. This gives him the opportunity to progressively add information to his Web site: http://www.anglaispratique.fr, carefully thought-out for French-speaking people.
One of the email addresses that intrigued me the most a while ago was the one I received from Whoisylvia@aol.com. I immediately thought of Schubert’s song based on Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (”Who is Silvia”) and this is the only reason why I opened the message. Good that my love for music saved me from discarding an email from somebody I only knew by her real name, Sylvia Paull. She is a “Silicon Valley Public Relations Icon,” as Alan Deutschman puts it in an article for Fast Company: “One of the most effective behind-the-scenes connectors in the Valley, Sylvia Paull, started out throwing some of the hottest parties at computer-industry conventions in the ’80s. Now she links the hard-core geeks, entrepreneurs, media insiders, and the political activists, too (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/115/open_features-innovation-scouts-who-is-sylvia.html). She landed “accidentally,” as she says, in the high-tech industry in 1986 at Software Ventures, the provider of MicroPhone, a best-selling telecom software for Macintosh, became their Marketing Director of Software, co-produced Science Editor, a CBS radio show about science, freelanced for Wired — until she started Berkeley Ventures in 1994, an umbrella company hosting the amazingly varied PR, party-organizing and connecting activities for which she had already become famous. She is, just by herself, a huge organization. She knows everybody in the high-tech industry and while, for most, PR is about skillful schmoozing and opportunistic networking, Sylvia genuinely loves people, remembers them with a stunning precision — and is equally excited whether she speaks of a still unknown entrepreneur (even Halsey Minor used to be one of them), a celebrity or a cause. Granted. She doesn’t like everybody — in fact, she dislikes impostors (and successfully avoids them).
