Silicon Valley Minute: Who are you and what do you do?
By Tom Foremski - February 28, 2007
I'd like to introduce a new project, Silicon Valley Minute. It is a sub-minute video pitch by a company that answers: "Who are you and what do you do?"
I meet a lot of startups and it can take them 30 minutes and more (if I let them), to tell me what they do. Often, they will tell me more about their competitors than about themselves.
I know it is not easy to get a pitch right. When I left the Financial Times in June 2004 to launch Silicon Valley Watcher I took most of the summer off in preparation. I spoke with a lot of friends, colleagues and contacts about my venture.
It took me all summer to boil it down from 30 minutes to this: "Silicon Valley Watcher is a news magazine that reports on the business of Silicon Valley."
"Who are you and what do you do?" has to be the single most important answer for any company.
To help startups get their pitch right, I teamed up with Elizabeth Safran, formerly with Trainer Communications, to launch the first Silicon Valley Minute pitches. Elizabeth has worked with many startups and knows the challenges they face in getting their message right.
We have ten sub-one minute videos of company pitches that can be rated, commented, emailed...and maybe improved. They were taken at the recent RSA Security conference. Each one looks well delivered. However, each one took an average of one hour and seven takes - so it is not as easy as it looks.
Here is Elizabeth's introduction:
Silicon Valley Minute at RSA Conference 2007
Here is one of the Silicon Valley Minute pitches, I'll introduce others over the next few days...
Video by Elizabeth Safran, RSA Conference 2007, San Francisco February 2007
About Securent
Securent is the leader in Entitlement Management. It has delivered the industry’s first XACML-standards based Entitlement Management solution that has been proven in mission-critical enterprise environments. Securent’s Entitlement Management Solution (EMS) leverages a number of patent-pending technological advances to allow enterprises to enforce entitlement policies at very high performance across a heterogeneous IT stack and to manage, review, and audit the policies on-demand at a centralized console. The significant cost, time to market, and compliance benefits of EMS have been proven at many Fortune 500 customers. Securent has been recognized by the industry’s leading analysts including Burton, Forrester, and Gartner. Securent is backed by funding from Greylock Partners and Onset Ventures. For more information, please visit www.securent.net.
YouTube Tags: RSAConference2007 SiliconValleyWatcher SiliconValleyMinute
Did you get the pitch? Please leave a comment here and rate stars out of five.
By Tom Foremski - February 28, 2007 | Permalink | Category: New Rules Communications
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