Sramana to Moderate AMITA’s Women Entrepreneurs Panel on July 16 in Palo Alto

Have you ever considered starting a company or joining a start-up? How do you evaluate opportunities and decide when to take the plunge? How do you finance your startup? Come and learn from a panel of women who have started companies in a variety of industries and taken different paths to success:

– Stephanie Fohn, CEO, WhiteHat Security
– Nina Pflumm Herndon, Founder, Sage Elder Care
– Eileen Gittins, CEO, Blurb
– Bibby Gignilliat, Founder & Executive Chef, Parties that Cook
– Jodie Bourdet, Partner, Cooley Godward Kronish

Sramana will be moderating this AMITA (Association of MIT Alumnae) event on Thursday, July 16, 2009, from 6pm to 8:30pm (panel begins at 6:30pm) at Cooley Godward Kronish, 3175 Hanover Street, Palo Alto, CA.

The cost is $25 in advance, $30 at the door, and $5 less for MITCNC members. Register here.

Sramana will be available to sign copies of her books Bootstrapping: Weapon of Mass Reconstruction and Entrepreneur Journeys afterwards. However, books will not be sold at the event, so be sure to purchase your book beforehand from Amazon.com and bring it with you.

June 3 Roundtable Recording

In case you missed it, here is the recording for this morning’s roundtable:

Deal Radar 2009: Marin Software

Marin Software offers a paid search management application for advertisers and agencies to enable them to manage large-scale paid search campaigns across search engines such as Google and MSN in an easy and effective manner. Through its main product, a SaaS application called the Marin Search Marketer™, Marin offers advertisers campaign set-up and management, bid optimization, keyword expansion and complete business-level analytics. Advertisers are able to manage all of their search programs under one roof, thereby reducing the time spent as well as eliminating replication and complexity. >>>

Toward Zero-Energy Buildings: Kevin Surace, Serious Materials (Part 7)

SM: How did you fix your sales issues after you fired your first VP of Sales?

KS: I went and got a new VP from the semiconductor industry. She had built $300 million businesses and knew solution sales. >>>

Intuit’s SaaS Roll-Up Begins With PayCycle

I have been calling for Intuit to start rolling up a SaaS portfolio for a while. [Read: ADP and Intuit Should Acquire Some SaaS, Intuit Needs To Acquire Into SaaS and SaaS Acquisitions Recommended For ADP and Intuit].

Well, Intuit just acquired PayCycle for $170 million, which was right at the top of my recommendation list. René Lacerte, CEO of Bill.com, is the founder, whose story I covered in 2007. The CEO is an old friend, Jim Heeger, whose story you’ve also read here. CFO John Eichhorn just called me to share the news.

Congratulations Jim, John and René. You deserve every bit of this win!

Toward Zero-Energy Buildings: Kevin Surace, Serious Materials (Part 6)

SM: How do you view Serious Materials in the cleantech space?

KS: Going forward, cleantech probably means a lot more building energy savings than it does solar, wind, and bio fuels. That is because the cost of carbon mitigation is a positive cost with all the supply-side dynamics. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: CAST

Today’s Deal Radar focuses on a company that has used an alternative financing path than what we normally see. CAST makes an application intelligence platform that acts as a software assessment engine, going far beneath the business process layers of an application to analyze its architecture. The company claims that its product, CAST, has the ability to analyze entire mission-critical applications from the inside out and feels that their unique proposition is that they “fill in a real pain for IT managers” in helping them track quality and measure developer output. >>>

Toward Zero-Energy Buildings: Kevin Surace, Serious Materials (Part 5)

SM: How long were you at Perfect.com?

KS: I did that for three years and left in 2002. I enjoyed every bit of it. We did several acquisitions and then decided to do a merger of equals with a company called eScout, with the headquarters moving to Kansas City. I left the company at that time. >>>