Business of Software 2010

Joel Spolsky

Fog Creek Software

Talk - "My VC Year" - After ten years of running a slow-growth, bootstrapped software company that was profitable from day 1, I found myself running a fast-growth, VC-funded internet company that is actually trying to get unprofitable. I’ll reflect on some of the differences and some of what I’ve learned from going over to the dark side.

Bio - Joel Spolsky is a globally-recognized expert on the software development process.

His website Joel on Software is popular with software developers around the world and has been translated into over thirty languages. As the founder of Fog Creek Software in New York City, he created FogBugz, a popular project management system for software teams. He is the co-creator of Stack Overflow, a programmer Q&A site.

Joel has worked at Microsoft, where he designed VBA as a member of the Excel team, and at Juno Online Services, developing an Internet client used by millions. He has written four books: User Interface Design for Programmers (Apress, 2001), Joel on Software (Apress, 2004), More Joel on Software (Apress, 2008), and Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent (Apress, 2007). He also writes a monthly column for Inc Magazine. Joel holds a BS from Yale in Computer Science. Before college he served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a paratrooper, and he was one of the founders of Kibbutz Hanaton.

View Joel's BoS 2008 talk.

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Seth Godin

sethgodin.com

Talk - "Are you afraid to truly make an impact? The opportunity for linchpin organizations and the people who run them."

Bio - Seth Godin writes the most popular marketing blog in the world. He is a renowned speaker and bestselling author of 10 books that have been translated into 20 languages, and have transformed the way people think out marketing, change and work. He is responsible for many words in the marketer's vocabulary including permission marketing, ideaviruses, purple cow, the dip and sneezers. His latest book, Tribes, is about leadership and how anyone can become a leader, creating movements that matter.

View Seth's BoS 2008 talk.

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Eric Sink

SourceGear

Talk - "Stuff I Learned from Selling Our Company to Microsoft" - Over the years, we've been approached by several parties interested in acquiring our company. I learned a lot from those discussions, even though none of the deals happened.

And then I found out how little I knew.

Microsoft acquired the assets of our Teamprise division in November 2009. Taking a deal all the way to closing was, er, very educational.

I obviously can't share any specifics about our deal, but I learned a lot about M&A that I think may be of interest to others looking to sell a small software firm to a big company.

Bio - Eric is the author of Eric Sink on the Business of Software. He is the founder of SourceGear, a source control system vendor. He also founded the AbiWord project, and lead the team that built the SpyGlass browser, now known as "Internet Explorer". He's the first to have coined the term "Micro-ISV".

View Eric'c BoS 2008 talk.

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Paul Kenny

Ocean Learning

Talk - "Engaging Dialogue" - In his presentation Paul will build on the material covered in 2008 and 2009. In this session Paul will explore how best to get the customer really talking about their needs their concerns and their aspirations. We will explore how best to use our questioning and listening skills to engage the customer in a meaningful dialogue, which will help not only to identify an appropriate solution, but also to enhance the customer experience.

Bio - Paul Kenny is one of the UK's top sales trainers, consultants and speakers. He has worked with many customers in three continents, including IBM, Perot Systems, The Guardian Newspaper and tens of others. Paul has developed a portfolio of nearly 100 sales, management and personal development courses. He won a national training award for his work with The Guardian.

View Paul's BoS 2009 talk.

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Dharmesh Shah

HubSpot

Talk - "Building A Great Software Business: Notes From The Field" - Dharmesh (who is not used to writing about himself in the third person) is obsessed with software companies. When he’s not working on his own startup, he’s reading about building software companies, investing in software companies, blogging about building great software companies or engaged in passionate debate with fellow entrepreneurs as to how to go about building great software companies.

In this session, he will attempt to condense many of the lessons learned from pretty successful companies like Constant Contact, DropBox, Kayak, FreshBooks, ZenDesk – and of course, HubSpot. He’ll talk about all sorts of things but mainly how to get customers, keep customers and grow revenues and profits. [Note: This description has been intentionally left sufficiently vague so as to allow a complete rewrite of the content at 2:00 a.m. on the morning of the conference. That’s just how Dharmesh rolls.]

Bio - Dharmesh Shah is the founder and CTO of HubSpot, a venture-backed software company offering a hosted software service for inbound marketing. Prior to HubSpot, Dharmesh was the founder and CEO of Pyramid Digital Solutions. Pyramid was a three time recipient of the Inc. 500 award and was acquired by SunGard Data Systems in 2005. Dharmesh is also the author of OnStartups.com, a top-ranking startup blog with over 20,000 subscribers and 100,000 members in it's online community. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the UAB and an M.S. in the Management of Technology from MIT.

Dharmesh is co-author of the recently released book Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs. The book has been in the Amazon Top 100 business books for 21 consecutive days.

View Dharmesh's BoS 2008 talk.

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Giacomo 'Peldi' Guilizzoni

Balsamiq

Talk - "Do Worry... Be Happy!" - One thing they don’t tell you about quitting your job to become a startup CEO is how much you’re going to worry about things.

From “Should I really quit my cushy job?” and “What if someone steals my idea?” to “How can I keep a global team working as a unit?” and “How long before people notice that I really don’t know what I’m doing?” - the list is long and ever-changing.

I’ll share some stories and tricks that I’ve used to overcome my fears, and how I’ve learned to welcome these feelings as a sign of imminent personal growth.

Bio - Giacomo 'Peldi' Guilizzoni is the founder and CEO of Balsamiq, makers of Balsamiq Mockups, a fun little wireframing tool for programmers, UX experts and yes, even business types.

Balsamiq has been a bit of a poster child for a new wave of tiny but ambitious bootstrapped tech startups, netting over $1.6M in sales in the first 18 months of operation and gathering rave reviews.

Peldi is a champion of the "radical transparency" trend that's sweeping the Internet, through his posts on the popular Balsamiq Blog. You can read Peldi's story in this blog post, or get to know him more through these interviews and his LinkedIn profile.

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Jason Cohen

Smart Bear Software

Talk - "From Geek to Entrepreneur" - As a geek who has started three successful companies, I’ve had to move from “coder” to everything else -- salesman, marketer, accountant, and changer of the pellets in the urinals. In the process, I’ve found that some widely accepted advice lead to failure while trusting my inexperienced gut lead to success. Through stories I’ll give you six ways to figure out whether specific advice is right for your situation, and then workshop those lessons against the 37signals philosophy.

Bio - Jason is the founder of Smart Bear Software and author of Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review. He blogs weekly on startups and marketing from a geek's point of view at http://blog.asmartbear.com.

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Eric Ries

The Lean Startup

Talk - "The Lean Startup: A Scientific Approach to Innovation." - Most software projects fail. Most startups fail. Most new products are never used. But it doesn't have to be that way.

The Lean Startup is a disciplined approach to imagining, designing, and building new products. By testing our assumptions earlier, faster, and with more rigor, we can stop wasting people's time.

Bio - Eric Ries is an author, speaker and consultant at the Lean Startup. He blogs on StartupLessonsLearned.com on issues concerning startups and entrepreneurship. Previously, he served as Venture Advisor at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and co-founded IMVU. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech.

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David Russo

Eno River Associates, Inc.

Talk - "Company Culture and its DNA: “For Better For Worse, For Richer For Poorer …" - Summary - The presenter, David Russo, who consults with high tech companies regarding high performance management, and growing attractive and sustaining employer brands, and who is the author of the book 17 Rules Successful Companies Use to Attract and Keep Top Talent (2010 Financial Times Press), will use research conducted by top business school professors and his own experience as both executive and “trusted advisor” to show how the way the company sets itself up from inception to find, hire, engage, reward, and keep its “talent” plays a large part in whether a company grows, finds success, rewards investors and incumbents, and even lives or dies … regardless of the quality of the science, technology, innovation, or discovery.

Bio - David Russo is Founder and President of Eno River Associates, Inc., a coaching and consulting practice which advises companies and executives on employee engagement issues, “Employer of Choice” initiatives, optimizing executive search efforts, and Human Capital Management best practices including HR technology choices. He is also the author of a “wake up call” talent management book, 17 Rules Successful Companies Use to Attract and Keep Top Talent. Previously, David was Chief People Officer for Peopleclick, Inc., the world’s premier vendor of strategic workforce acquisition software and services. He is also a past Vice President and Secretary/Treasurer for the world’s leading human resources professional association, The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), and served on the Board of The SHRM Foundation.

Before he began his consulting practice, David was the president and chief executive officer of Empliant, Inc., providers of ASP-delivered employee self-reliant human resources technology solutions.

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Scott Farquhar

Atlassian

Talk - "From Bootstrap to $60m. What I've learnt" - Atlassian has been a successful software bootstrap, right up until we took $60m funding from Accel Partners in July 2010. Scott packs some of what he's learnt about running a software company into thirty minutes. You'll hear about how to pick a business model, how to get free marketing, how we hired 32 people in 6 months, and how we built a workplace that has won numerous HR awards.

Bio - Scott Farquhar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Atlassian, an innovative, award-winning enterprise software company. Atlassian produces tools that help technical and business teams collaborate, plan projects and build software. Based in Australia, Atlassian currently has over 17,000 enterprise customers around the globe and has been named one of the "Fastest Growing Companies" by both Deloitte and BRW Magazine.

Scott was awarded the 'Australian IT Professional of the Year' in 2004. In 2006 Scott was the youngest person to ever be awarded 'Australian Entrepreneur of the Year' by Ernst & Young.

Scott loves encouraging budding entrepreneurs as well as speaking to many university groups.

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Derek Sivers

MuckWork

Talk - "Profit Models" - Explore many wildly different profit models from a bird's eye view. Abstracted to memorable shapes, it's simple and inspiring to apply them to your business.

Bio - Derek Sivers is best known as the founder of CD Baby. A professional musician (and circus clown) since 1987, Derek started CD Baby by accident in 1998 when he was selling his own CD on his website, and friends asked if he could sell theirs, too. CD Baby was the largest seller of independent music on the web, with over $100M in sales for over 150,000 musician clients. After he won the 2003 World Technology Award, Esquire Magazine's annual “Best and Brightest“ cover story said, “Derek Sivers is changing the way music is bought and sold... one of the last music-business folk heroes.” In 2008, Derek sold CD Baby to focus on his new ventures to benefit musicians, including his new company MuckWork where teams of efficient assistants help musicians do their “uncreative dirty work”. His current projects and writings are all at sivers.org.

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Rob Walling

SoftwareByRob.com

Talk - "The Primary Goal of Your Website" - What's the primary goal of your website? Not to sell software. With most visitors returning multiple times before making a purchase, your primary goal should be to draw visitors back to your site. In this talk, Rob looks in-depth at why this is the case, and how to make it happen.

Bio - Rob Walling is a serial entrepreneur and author of Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup. He blogs at SoftwareByRob.com about building self-funded startups and runs the Micropreneur Academy, an online learning community of like-minded founders designed to get a startup from zero to launch in six months. Walling runs 11 one-man technology businesses and has been building web applications professionally for 11 years.

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Youngme Moon

Harvard Business School

Talk - Different - If there is one strain of conventional wisdom pervading every company in every industry, it is the importance of competing hard to differentiate yourself from the competition. And yet going head-to-head with the competition—with respect to features, product augmentations, and so on—has the perverse effect of making you just like everyone else. Youngme’s message is simply: Get off the competitive treadmill that’s taking you nowhere. Aspire to offer the world something that is meaningfully different. Different in a manner that is both fundamental and comprehensive.

Bio - Youngme Moon is a Professor of Business Administration in the General Management unit at the Harvard Business School. At HBS, she teaches the Consumer Marketing elective in the MBA program. She also teaches in a number of HBS Executive Education programs, including Consumer Marketing Strategy, Strategic Marketing Management, and Marketing Innovative Technologies. Professor Moon has received the HBS Student Association Faculty Award for teaching excellence in both the first-year and her elective course on multiple occasions; she is also the inaugural recipient of the Hellman Faculty Fellowship, awarded for distinction in research.

Professor Moon's research and course development focuses on innovative consumer marketing strategies. Her ideas have been published in numerous journals, including the Harvard Business Review, Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Consumer Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Psychology, and the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. She has published case studies on companies ranging Microsoft to Sony to Intel and she consults with a range of consumer marketing companies in the area of innovation. She serves on the Board of Directors of Avid Technology, and the Board of Governors for the American Red Cross.

Professor Moon received her Ph.D. from Stanford University. She holds an M.A. from Stanford University, and a B.A. from Yale University. Prior to joining HBS, she was on the faculty at MIT. She currently lives in Brookline with her husband and two sons.

Her first book, Different, was recently published by Crown Business/Random House.

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Mark Stephens

IDRSolutions

Talk - "(Don't) Panic" - Something is wrong. Maybe you are just not checking your emails enough? Actually, it’s not you. The software universe really has gone mad and you need to step back and re-evaluate big time. This is your chance. The talk aims to take a long, cynical look at both the past and the future, give you some new ideas, and pose lots of those awkward, searching questions you try to avoid. All in 42 slides. And with kittens.

Bio - Mark Stephens is the founder of a small UK based software company (which co-incidentally shares his daughters initials). IDRsolutions started in Newspaper publishing at News International in 1999 but now produces a Java PDF library which they are particularly proud to have licensed to Adobe. He enjoys speaking at conferences and was a Lightning Talk speaker at Business of Software 2009 as well as previous performances at Seybold and JavaOne conferences. He has a very dry sense of humour and an MA in Medieval History for which he has not yet found a practical use.

View Mark's BoS 2009 talk.

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Dan Bricklin

Software Garden, Inc.

Bio - Dan Bricklin is currently president of Software Garden, Inc., a small consulting firm and developer of software applications that he founded in 1985.

Mr. Bricklin is best known for codeveloping VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, while he was a student at the Harvard Business School. VisiCalc is widely credited for fueling the rapid growth of the personal computer industry.

Until early 2004, Mr. Bricklin served as CTO of Interland, Inc., after it acquired his previous company, Trellix Corporation, in 2003. Prior to founding Trellix in 1995, he served as president of Software Garden, Inc., where he developed a variety of software programs, including Dan Bricklin's Demo Program. Mr. Bricklin also cofounded Slate Corporation, a developer of application software for pen computers, as well as Software Arts, the developer of VisiCalc. Prior to forming Software Arts, he had been a market researcher for Prime Computer Inc., a senior systems programmer for FasFax Corporation, and a senior software engineer for Digital Equipment Corporation.

Mr. Bricklin is a founding trustee of the Massachusetts Software Council and has served on the boards of the Software Publishers Association and the Boston Computer Society. Mr. Bricklin has received many honors for his contributions to the computer industry from the ACM, IEEE, MIT, PC Magazine, the Western Society of Engineers, and numerous others. Mr. Bricklin holds a BS in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science from MIT and an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. He received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Newbury College, and was elected to be a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

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Jennifer Aaker, Haas School of Business
Bill Buxton, Microsoft Research
Chris Capossela, Microsoft Business
Ryan Carson, Carsonified
Rick Chapman, Softletter
Mat Clayton, Mixcloud
Jason Fried, 37signals
Paul Graham, Y Combinator
Seth Godin, SethGodin.com
Luke Hohmann, Enthiosys
Tom Jennings, Summit Partners
Steve Johnson, Pragmatic Marketing
Guy Kawasaki, Garage Technology Ventures
Paul Kenny, Ocean Learning
Steve Krug, Advanced Common Sense
Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild
Jessica Livingston, Y Combinator
Michael Lopp, Rands in Response
Hugh MacLeod, Gapingvoid
Matt Mason, The Pirate's Dilemma
Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse Foundation
Geoffrey Moore, TCG Advisors
Don Norman, Nielsen Norman Group
Dan Nunan, Red Gate Software
Heidi Roizen, Skinny Songs
Alberto Savoia, Agitar
Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot
Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users
Eric Sink, SourceGear
Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford University Graduate School of Business
Joel Spolsky, Fog Creek Software
Richard Stallman, Stallmann.org
Noam Wasserman, Harvard Business School
The Cranky Product Manager, Crankypm.com