Report from DEMOgods in the Making: A Churchill Club event

Descending into the depths of the Grand Hyatt Hotel off of San Francisco's Union Square, I went in search of the latest Churchill Club event, “DEMOgods in the Making.” A runup to the venerable and venerated Demo conference next week in Palm Desert, Calif., (which we’ll be covering), the session brought together "four tremendous Demo gods," as host Chris Shipley introduced them, men who each earned the envious label of top demonstrator at a previous Demo conference.

I found the pre-session group in the stygian depths of the Hyatt, where cellphone signals somehow penetrated despite our apparently being near coalminer level. After networking over what attendees thought of as a “minimalistic” set of hors d’oeuvres, the crowd of perhaps 150 people seated themselves inside a room set to “brisk.” The panel roll call included:

. Brett Kilpatrick, President & CEO, Panoratio
. Steve Larsen, CEO & co-founder, Krugle
. Srivats Simpath, President & CEO, Mercora
. Munjal Shah, CEO & co-founder, Riya

Panoratio is enterprise search; Krugle is programming code search; and Riya is image search. That's three out of four focused on Search – which either illustrates that there are many people trying to help Google die the death of a thousand cuts, or that Search just demos well. Or not.

Shipley asked each to talk about how their companies started up. Larsen said that his co-founder, Ken Krugler, was working with Lotus founder Mitch Kapor on the Chandler project, a non-profit building open source office applications. Krugler's frustration in managing his own code led to the idea of creating a code-specific search engine – and a company (somewhat) named after him. "And it was just happy coincidence that [Krugle] rhymed with 'Google'?" asked Shipley rhetorically.

Simpath, the former founder and CEO of McAfee, says he started a new company because his wife basically told him he had to go do something with himself after selling to Symantec. He wanted to create a music-sharing network that was legitimate, in contrast to the pirating networks that existed at the time, going from “…necessity to a project to a company” in three years. Simpath reported 1.6 billion page views last year, and 15 million unique visitors.

Talk turned toward how to lead a company. “Leadership is a large percentage about optimism: People will follow you if you’re enthusiastic,” maintained Shah. “How many people would have followed Mahatma Ghandi if he’s said, ‘I don’t know, man, those British are going to get us…’?”

“First, it’s about getting people on the bus,” said Larsen, recruiting the best possible employees. “And then, sometimes, it’s deciding where the bus is going.” In some cases you’re guiding the bus to a specific address, he said. But sometimes it’s just, “You’re going West.”

Simpath believes that startups rarely need large development staffs. “There’s a myth that you need lots of people to build software products,” he said. “You don’t. You need a few, talented people.” Despite the fact that his company has created 1.5m lines of code, and has what he calls the world’s largest music network, Simpath has a total of seven engineers on his staff.

So when, Shipley asked, do you know it’s time to release a product? Larsen quoted the Silicon Valley maxim: “If your engineers aren’t totally embarrassed by the first launch of a product, you waited too long.” And Shah said he simply signed up to demonstrate at Demo, and that gave his engineers an immovable deadline.

How to get above the competitive noise? Kilpatrick’s perspective was slightly different from the others’, because he is often brought in as professional management at a later stage, as opposed to the frequent founder or co-founder status of the others – perhaps because his focus has frequently been on the enterprise. He countered the other speakers’ reliance on public relations, saying that he preferred lists of customer prospects to glowing reports that, for example, his mother’s friends could read. “My mother’s friends don’t do data discovery on terabytes of data,” he said flatly.

However, talk turned repeatedly back toward the Demo conference itself, with each speaker relating his own war stories about how the show gained them visibility. “I don’t want this session to just be about Demo,” Shipley protested mildly at one point, “But I won’t be upset if it does…” Yet the evening would have been a little more interesting if it had indeed kept its focus more regularly away from the specifics of the event.

In the end, though, the session ended up offering a rare opportunity to hear from a group of talented, accomplished serial entrepreneurs, giving the erstwhile founders in the audience a brief but illuminating bootcamp in startup issues.

End Notes

. Both Shah and Larsen agreed, it’s not the CEO’s job to be the smartest person in the room. Hire key employees who are “company-changing,” and they can solve the tough problems.

. Simpath, a strong and credible speaker who’s started four companies (two went public), admitted he’d Demoed three times – and only won Godhood on the last. “Being a Demo god is much more difficult than taking a company public,” he ruefully admitted.

. Munjal Shah gave a very nice plug for the demo training services of Shel Israel, my business partner in Conferenza. Shel has transformed more stuttering entrepreneurs into Demo gods than he can likely remember, including four of last year’s Demo gods, including Shah.

. Entrepreneur’s conference tip of the day: Before a crucial Demo, Larsen printed up laminated cards with his startups key value proposition and messages for different audiences, and gave them to investors and friends at the conference, so everyone would be “on message.”

. I spent time at the reception with several members of Shipley’s Guidewire Group, a small but talented team of journalists and entrepreneurs, several of whom I’ve known for years. Guidewire tomorrow is launching a paid bi-weekly newsletter, “The Guidewire Report,” offering in-depth coverage of the hundreds of early-stage companies the team sees throughout the year. Check it out here.

gB

Comments

[Steve Larsen]

Thanks, Gary. Great report.

Steve

[Marc]

Very nice writeup. One minor correction, however - it's Srivats Sampath.

Marc

[Gary A. Bolles]

Thanks to Steve for his kind comments, and apologies to Srivats for mangling his name - especially when I thought he was such a compelling speaker.

gB