Action Proposal:

I propose the following:

The SDForum Showcase for VCs and other potential partners makes a motivating target date. It's in March or April, far enough away to allow time to generate some demos and alliance agreements with name-brand partners for legitimacy and marketing punch. Plus there is a deadline one week from today by which to stimulate commitment action for the the necessary work and trade fair fees.

The action required by next Friday is a request for invitation to be among the 10-16 firms for special showcase for presentations to VCs in private room settings, as well as booth feess. Ponying up of some cash for a booth, and willingness to commit time to host the booth (with requisite study-up time commitment) will force a near-term demonstration of serious intent to do something rather than talk in descriptive terms and draw pictures.

To wit: An Executive Summary including Value Proposition, with succinct product descriptions, target market, market size, and net profits for first five years.

That can be backed up with Business Plan discussing product suite modules, with forceasts of adoption rate at various levels of product pricing, specific examples of target sales prospects, possible and likely units per year, gross revenue spreadsheets, less costs of production and marketing to be ballparked after next week, including staffing charts for programmers, marketers and adminstrators, licensing fees, manufacturing contracts for CDs or DVDs with shrink-wrap, documentation writing and printing, advertising scales, etc. And some trendlines showing explosive net profits that will attract investors.

For my part, I have been assembling directories and lists of venture capital and angel sources, meeting funders, learning their target criteria for investment, and proposing joint marketing efforts to funders.

I need to find out the parameters of what to keep secret, or at least what is possible to disclose, how close we are to a marketable product, and how much funding will be required.

Conclusion:

Whether Stanford or some other organization funds start-up, these administrative actions like target schedules and budgets need to be developed for review by SRI, IBM, VCs or angels. My intererest is in seeing a position description for me built in to the org chart, budget and HR profiles, but also in getting the funding rolling by a target date. I need to demonstrate progress toward a real position to maintain the faith of people who are cooperating by funding me.

The rest of you might need to demonstrate such progress too.

Could you please get back to me this weekend about whether this front-burner action schedule proposal is exciting to others? It's a 3-day weekend, so a short week next week, with IBM's Jim Spohrer on one of those 3 days, (19, 20, 21) plus SDF evening meeting, so there will not be a lot of time in the week.

At least Jack Park will be down here, so we could meet with him and Doug and flesh out what schedule for each of their modules. The meeting with IBM and/or InfoInPlace could yield important info, so I expect that the work would be back-end loaded in the week. Therefore we should ask Dr. Spohrer for the earliest day possible, to make max time for working together.

We'll need to spend a lot of time together to generate draft plans. Or at least in online writing and reviewing proposed document versions. Maybe conference calls or NetMeetings is a fall-back position if Jack has to be at the office. I

Hope everyone has the time to spend. Front-end semi-formal commitments to spend that time will be of help. I will commit to the time if there is a high probability that I will be included in the eventual project. Perhaps your next email or phone call could confirm this aspect before I spend a lot more time on it. There are competing meetings that week that could carry me in another direction that I would be giving up by spending time on this, so I need to start getting a feel for if there is anything imminent or at least real here in the potential for production funding.

Thank you,

Matt

Sincerely,

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