Roundtable Recap: June 9 – Silicon Valley: The Next Renaissance

During today’s roundtable, we had the program split into three segments. The first was our usual entrepreneur strategy discussion. The second was a scenario from one of our premium members around lead generation and qualification that we collectively strategized around. And the third was a discussion on Silicon Valley: The Next Decade.

RER
First, Ankit Duggal from Clifton, New Jersey, pitched RER LLC, a firm that currently manages a real estate investment fund, and is working on an investment advisory service catering to real estate investors – individuals and small businesses. Ankit has done a nice job of segmenting his market and focusing on two cities in New Jersey. He has started working with some investment clubs. I suggested offering a discounted service to the members of the investment clubs and going to market with them. In addition, I also suggested testing the wealth manager market. In my experience, wealth managers often refer experts to their clients, and Ankit could position his service through that channel.

We also had a discussion on market sizing. I provided Ankit with the framework for his analysis. You can listen to the recording of this segment here.

Lead Generation & Qualification With a Channel Partner
Next, we went to a discussion on a scenario that a 1M/1M premium company is facing where they offer an innovative customer support solution to large enterprises like Telecom and Consumer Electronics players, and are going to market through a channel partner in the U.S. While they have been able to get in front of some large customers, they need to accelerate this process further and increase the pipeline and feed the channel partner with more qualified leads. We went through a set of lead generation mechanisms and discussed the distribution of roles and responsibilities between the company and the channel partner.

This, by the way, is a real scenario. One of the members of the channel partner team was actually present in the room and shared his point of view as well. He made the point that they had a meeting this week with a very large customer, and the executives from the customer’s organization reframed the use case with which they started.

The moral of the story is that use cases are really important in selling large deals, and often, customers help you frame the use cases. To train a channel, understanding the use cases is crucial. You can listen to the recording of this segment here.

Silicon Valley: The Next Decade
Finally, we had a highly interactive and animated discussion on what the next generation of innovation would look like. I proposed ‘human-centric computing’ as the lens through which to look at the problem. Referring to my recent blog post, Silicon Valley: The Next Decade, I offered the role of the ‘renaissance mind’ in the next phase of our evolution where sociology and insights into human behavior would perhaps be more important than pure geeky intelligence. After all, the technologies (especially Internet related) we’re working with these days are a lot less complex than what the generation that produced bear chips and networking related innovations in earlier decades worked with.

The audience came up with lots of great points, and I strongly recommend you listen to this discussion here.

Recordings of previous roundtables are all available here. We will be holding future roundtables at 8 a.m. PDT on the following dates:

Thursday, June 16, 2011: Register Here.
Thursday, June 23, 2011: Register Here.
Thursday, June 30, 2011: Register Here.
Thursday, July 21, 2011: Register Here.
Thursday, July 28, 2011: Register Here.

And you can sign up for the 1M/1M premium program here.

This segment is a part in the series : Roundtable Recap
. March 25 – A Mixed Bag Of Advice . April 1 – Bootstrapping Tips . April 8 – A Focus On E-Commerce . April 15 – Small Is OK; The Goal Is Profitability . April 22 – The Original Runners . April 29 – Finding The Right Direction . May 6 – Defining Value Proposition . May 20 – Validation, Validation, Validation . May 27 – Is The Venture Worth Your Time? . June 3 – Defining Market Segments . June 10 – Efficient Targeting . June 17 – Online Education Startups . June 24 – Three Startups That Can Hit One Million Dollars . July 1 - Get Your Pricing Model Validated . July 8 - The EJ Methodology . July 15 - A Market Of Late Adopters . July 22 - Bootstrap Using Services . July 29 - Startups In Malaysia . August 5 - Paying Customers =>Validation =>Valuation . August 19 - Niche E-Commerce Is Great For Bootstrapping . August 26 - 85%-90% Of Search Traffic Comes From Organic Search . September 2 - Find High Velocity Channels . September 9 - Open Opportunities In Cloud Computing And Rural BPO . September 16 – 5 Cloud Computing Opportunities for Entrepreneurs . September 23 - Do Not Spray And Pray . September 30 - Investors Don't Fund Broad Ideas . October 7 - Try To Get At Least $2M Pre-Money In Seed Round Valuation . October 14 - Professional Investors Do Not Invest In $20 Million Markets . October 21 - Bootstrapping Comes In Many Flavors . October 28 – Convert Potential Competitors To Partners . November 4 - Premium Lounge Sneak Preview . November 11 - African Tech Entrepreneurs Emerging . November 18 - Not Coming To The Rescue Of Victory . December 2 - Niche Marketplace Businesses Can Be Interesting . December 9 - Where Should You Raise Money? . December 16 - Top 10 Tech Trends To Watch . January 6 - Top 10 Vertical and Social Web Trends For The Decade . January 13 - Top 10 Online Advertising Trends For The Decade . January 20 - Personalization Remains An Open Problem . January 27 - Non-Dilutive Financing Through Revenue Sharing . February 3 - Indian Entrepreneurs Are Maturing . February 10 - When Keywords Are Competitive . February 17 - Indian Company Plugs Gap In Google’s Enterprise Solution . February 24 - VCs, Angels, Incubators, Accelerators – What Are You Doing With Your Rejects? . March 3 - Spotlight On The Northwest . March 10 - Spotlight On India . March 17 - Spotlight On Latin And Central America . March 24 - 75th Session Spotlights The Midwest . March 31 - Microsoft’s $100,000 India Startup Challenge Grant . April 6 - 1M/1M Announces Important Partnership With MAD Incubator, Malaysia . April 9 - 1M/1M Announces Partnership With TiE Chennai . April 16 - 1M/1M Partners With Indian Angel Network Incubator . April 17 - High-Octane Energy In Pune . April 21- Incubators Are Reaching Out To 1M/1M . April 28 - Guerrilla P.R. & SEO Most Profitable Customer Acquisition Strategies . May 5 - Ownership Matters . May 12 - Two Really Cool Companies . May 19, Making Money From Blogs . May 26 - Twitter, LinkedIn - Why Not Affiliates? . June 2 - 1M/1M And Incubators - What We Have Learned . June 9 - Silicon Valley . June 16 - Exciting Companies Lined Up For Microsoft Startup Grant Finals . June 23 - New Assessment Tool For Entrepreneurs . June 30 - Continued International Participation . July 21 - Crowd Sourced Funding Exchanges - An Emerging Trend . July 28 - Investors And Incubators Need To Look At Pre-Incubation . August 4 - How Do You Bootstrap Freemium Ventures? . August 11 - Menlo Park And The Silicon Valley Renaissance . August 25 - How To Use Twitter For Lead Generation . September 1 - Fall Call To Action . September 8 - A View Into Israeli Start-ups . September 15 - Do Your Homework First . September 22 - How Do You Catalyze A Region’s Entrepreneurship? . September 29 - From Poland To Argentina . October 6 - Dedicated To Steve Jobs, Reinforcing Mission To Restructure Capitalism . October 13 - FREE Is Not A Business Model . October 20 - Non-profits And For-profits . October 27 - Check Out Stanzr . November 3 - VCs Are Not Always Right . November 17 - Business Schools And Early Stage Entrepreneurship . December 1 - 1M/1M Premium Company Freshdesk Wins Funding From Accel Partners . December 8 - Three Open Opportunities For 2012 . December 15 - Web 3.0 And Social Dancing; Romania Emerging . December 22 - Free Apps, Ad-Supported Business Models => Dangerous! . January 5 - ERP Galore . January 12-13 - Spotlight On IIT Kharagpur, India . January 19 - Are Media Sites Fundable? . January 26th - Spotlight On Jacksonville, Florida . February 2 - YCombinator vs. 1M/1M . February 9 - Are You Fundable? . February 16 - What’s Happening In Turkey? . February 23 - Microsoft Israel To Offer 1M/1M Scholarships . March 1 - Strategy Gaps Need To Be Plugged . March 12 - Winners Of Microsoft Israel Scholarships . March 15 - Spotlight On 3 Day Startup Tel-Aviv . April 3 - Rendezvous In Bangalore . April 12 - More From Indian Entrepreneurs . April 19 - Tyranny Of The TAM . April 26 - A Rare Women-Only Session . May 3 - Some Wonderful Opportunities With Corporate Partners . May 10 - BlueSnap-Elance Contest Applications Deadline This Weekend . May 22 - Winners Of TechHub-A&N Media Battle Of The Startups Contest In London Win 1M/1M Scholarships