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on how Chinese motorcycle manufacturers have marginalized Honda in the Vietnamese market by making knockoff bikes for $200 each.
"You can do a lot more incremental innovation without fear of ripple effects," Hagel said.
Added Seely: "The concrete implementation was an implicit coordination structure for thousands of people to swarm around it."
The great part about this is that it captures the natural speech rhythms of Chinese mechanics, as so often evidenced in language guides.
"Basically, we can go up or down the fractal scale, Lin," says one co-worker to another. "Can I borrow your blowtorch to light my cigarette?"
The audience ate it up.
• Use the most current buzzwords. In your pitch, mention "the long tail" at least three times, even if it is to say "The albino opossum of Australia can be identified by a musky scent and the long tail."
Other catchphrases that seem to attract money include "personalization," "presence" and "discovery is the new search." Using "convergence" will typecast you as a poser.
• Get a good name. Rearden Commerce presented at the show, but the main question in the conference hallways was whether the company had any relationship to Rearden Steel, the set-top box outfit started years ago by WebTV founder Steve Perlman. It doesn't, but the association made many wiggy.
" Impinj," the name of an RFID company, looks like it contains a typo. "Endeca" sounded like a diet supplement to some. The best name, at least in my opinion, was "Send Word Now," which broadcasts mass phone messages. It's beefy and direct. Even Australopithecus could understand it.
• Have a good tale from the dot-com days. Silicon Valley loves disaster movies.
Case in point: Pando Networks is working on a way to deliver large files easily over the Internet, but the best part about the company is that the CEO, Robert Levitan, started iVillage and Flooz.
Remember Flooz? It sold dollars that could be exchanged for gifts. Whoopi Goldberg stumped for it. Flooz survived the implosion of 2000. Then in 2001, one of its biggest customers, Cisco Systems, wanted to renegotiate a multimillion-dollar contract. Flooz survived that.
Then the company noticed that gift buying didn't slow down after the Mother's Day/Father's Day/graduation season. The FBI informed Levitan that the Russian mobsters were buying Flooz credit as a way to launder stolen credit card purchases. Flooz survived that, too. Then the large credit card companies decided to withhold payments, in part, says Levitan, because Flooz was able to garner a higher percentage of each transaction than they were.
The company was forced to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. It had 325,000 creditors, the largest number of creditors ever. The court allowed it to notify creditors via e-mail, a first. Levitan expected to face a hostile audience of several angry consumers at the first court hearing.
"No one showed up," he said. The company called it quits on Sept. 10. On his first day of unemployment in years, Levitan decided to go to his Manhattan gym, where he saw the disaster of Sept. 11, 2001, unfold.
Whatever the merits of Pando, the story sets them apart from the pack.
Biography
Michael Kanellos is editor at large at CNET News.com, where he covers hardware, research and development, start-ups and the tech industry overseas. He has worked as an attorney, travel writer and sidewalk hawker for a time share resort, among other occupations.
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- Great perspective on pitching Michael Kanellos. If anyone is interested in more pitching resources I just wrote up a blog post detailing 5 must read resources before pitching your company, including posts by Venture Hacks, Paul Graham, and more check it out at http://bit.ly/17JuP
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