I find this announcement about Microsoft's plan for the first CRM Incubation Week on November 18, 2008, four days after Sanjay Jain posted it in his blog. After an email exchange and a quick phone call with Sanjay, I submit our application as Support4U Inc., an old corporation I had that we were reviving as a holding company for this new project. And, I'll be damned if I didn't get a notice the day after Thanksgiving that we were chosen from 50 teams as one of the 5 that were accepted. I had four days to get paperwork faxed to Sanjay, rearrange our lives, book travel, and show up 16 days later in Reston, VA to incubate. Steve King's travel was easy — he lives 20 miles from Reston. I came in from Dallas. Alexey Korobko, on the other hand, lives in Russia and is one of the lead developers at Software Technologies, the excellent development company that has written the software that my company, pinpointtools, sells. As I'm clicking like crazy to clear the decks to spend the last real working week of the year at this event, which I don't really know much about, I ask myself, "do you know what you're doing or why?". The answer was, after a hiccup from the MS KoolAid I had been drinking all year, "Not a damn clue but there's a pony in here somewhere". Gotta find that pony...
The stated goal from Sanjay, and really all we had to go on, was this: "This event consists of ½ day of training, 3 ½ days of active prototype/development time, and a final day for packaging/finishing and reporting out to a panel of judges for various prizes." Prizes — oooh, prizes are good! What kind of prizes? Who knows. Why were we going? To find the pony... The idea was to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a development platform to show the rest of the Microsoft community how easy it was to create an application using all the Microsoft tools available. They would provide an experienced MS CRM advisor to help us (the fabulous Jim Steger, partner in Sonoma Partners, and co-author of the definitive Microsoft Press books on CRM). We learned five days before the event, and after booking Alexey's travel from Russia, that Microsoft would provide developers in India to write code for us, for free. We had calls scheduled with them at 9am and 9pm each day of the event.
So, December 15, 2008, 8:00am, we show up at Microsoft's Technology Center in Reston, VA, a veritable wonderland for computer folks. Joan Barrow, its Director, and her First Lieutenant Sima Shahin, were there to greet us and feed us the first of three meals a day for the next four days (Thank You -- great job and food!). We were given badges to get into the secured building and told the heat was turned off at midnight, but it shouldn't get too cold, and if so, go into the server room and warm up. Midnight??? Cinderella and I turn into a motel at 10pm! We spend the better part of Day One listening to the advisors go through some of the benefits of CRM and how we could leverage the platform. We hear about the plan for the week and a little more about the presentation on Friday to this panel of venture capitalists. Microsoft guys, and Paul Greenberg, author of CRM At the Speed of Light. They tell us which rooms we'll be sequestered in for the balance of the week — each of the five teams had a private locked room where we were to develop our applications. We met at meals for speeches from various resources and then back to our caves for more work. Some of the teams stayed there until the middle of the night but we went back to the hotel at 11pm or so each day.
Now, it's 330pm on Monday and we go into the Einstein Room to start developing our application. It's later than we thought and as we start discussing what we want Alexey to build, it becomes apparent that we're slightly disjointed. As the week went by, others saw this whiteboard (picture below) and thought we were very jointed, but we knew what we meant... Our application was conceived by Steve King, Director of Technology and Strategy for Signal Marketing Group, a long time thinker and visionary (as you can see) in social networking, group theory, and the dynamics of Web 2.0. We met in early 2008 when he hired me to work on a CRM project in Washington, DC. Our first call was four hours, best described as Social Networking Meets Dr. CRM.
I had been scratching my head over the last couple of years about the growth of social networking, especially how people are using Facebook and LinkedIn. Every person that invited me to join was peppered with ten questions from me — How do you use this? What do you get from it? How does it work in your daily doings? Most of the answers were either "I'm looking for a job" or "I have no clue but I'm supposed to be doing this, right?". Our next call was another four hours and I saw 200 Powerpoint slides that looked similar to the diagram above. Over the life of the project, we spent many hours off-topic, discussing the opportunities and challenges of trying to harness this elusive but critical next-generation technology. How will people use it? Will they use it? Why are they drawn to use it and how do you change their behavior? Great questions and we had some great answers, but no software. I was convinced that this activity needed to be integrated into CRM. Going to these different sites to manage your network of contacts violated every maxim I had espoused in my 20+ years of working with contact management, SFA, and CRM. Until the CRM Incubation Week opportunity came along, this was just another dream-and-scheme from a couple of entrepreneurs and advanced thinkers.
So, when I saw the invitation to apply for CRM Incubation Week, I jumped at the chance. We'd have a ton of resources from Microsoft and could figure out whether we could use Silverlight for the main part of the app or if we'd have to go the AJAX or Flex route. Steve had always thought that this was a hosted Web 2.0 app — throw it up on the web, people would flock to it, then virally tell their friends about it, and he'd be in bidness (as we say in Texas...). I thought that it was too esoteric of an idea that required behavior change and humans hate change. Making it into a CRM AddOn application and linking it to Microsoft CRM would be a way to get users to really use it, prove the concept, and then take it more horizontal. Steve had built a wireframe prototype that showed the idea completely and demoed very well — it was cool. Being the thinker that he is, stretched over five years of trying to raise venture capital, talking and talking to people about it, Steve had lots of emotion wrapped up in it. It really was his baby!
Now, we're whiteboarding like crazy, burning through colored markers, trying to come up with a plan so we can start coding. Steve's also slightly obsessive/compulsive (OK, not slightly) so we're drilling into way too much detail, thinking way too far in the future, he's just exploding five years worth of ideas, and the hours are ticking by. They tell us that dinner is served. We come out of the Einstein Room, get a plate of food, snarf that down, get more coffee, and then back to the BatCave. Holy Application, BatBoy, it's almost 9pm and we've got our first call with the developers in India and we don't have any idea what to tell them to program for us. We pull it together slightly, come up with a plan, talk to the developers, and stay there another couple hours getting a Spec for them to start working on. Steve finishes the writing, we head back to the hotel, and sleep, thinking that when we have our 9am call the next day we'd see software. Didn't happen — Steve's email screwed up and the Spec is still in his Outbox. Crap - 10 hours down the chute! Back to the BatCave...
Steve has to leave and go back to the hotel. He's not feeling well and seems to have come down with food poisoning. Jim, Alexey, and I soldier on, inventing as we go. Jim suggests that we embed all the data into CRM instead of hosting it externally like we originally thought. I realize he's onto something, especially considering the existing installed base of CRM users. Alexey is working away quietly until late afternoon on Tuesday when he announces, "I've got the Silverlight control we need to work"! This is a big breakthrough after only 10 hours of work from a really smart guy (PhD in Computer Science) and after getting some support from Ashish Jaiman, an ISV Evangelist at Microsoft (thank you, sir!). This gives us lots of confidence we can get this working — did I mention we had to do a live demo of this on Friday? I'm the one doing the presentation and even though I have my MSM degree (Master of Smoke & Mirrors), we've still got a long way to go. But, the Big Question had been answered — Silverlight could do it! Dinner was real quick; we wanted to keep working. On the call at 9pm with India, we thank them for their efforts but we've gotten it handled here. Steve's still back at the hotel with what might be the flu...
Wednesday dawns and we're more excited — we might pull this off. Now, I'm starting to get cocky as I work on the presentation. It's a Guy Kawasaki pitch + Demo — 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font, and demo the app. I've done these before but this is starting to heat up. Film crews are coming in, Microsoft's Managing Director of the Emerging Business Team, Dave Drach, meets with me to listen to my presentation, discuss and advise us on what we're doing. Refocus and revise, Lon (Thank you, Dave!). I meet with Nikhil Hasija of the CRM product team and an advisor to another of the five teams who does a terrific job of refocusing our business strategy and helping wordsmith our pitch into a lean mean business proposition (a tomato soup Thanks, Nikhil!). Steve comes back from sickness late afternoon and sees the application working for the first time and is just beside himself! Five years of thinking, laboring through a prototype and now it's working — that's the power of software development that I just love.
Thursday is a big day... The film crew is crawling around everywhere, Jim and Alexey are cranking away on code, I'm crafting and practicing my presentation, Steve's not over his sickness as much as he thought. Alexey and I work on what to demo and how it will flow. We produce better screenshots, better graphics and icons, polish the mirrors so it looks like more of a working application. Dave takes us out of the MTC for a good dinner with the other teams. We go back to the MTC after dinner and move our PC into the conference room where we'll make the presentation Friday morning. That all checks out but what happens if the hard drive fails — screenshots, let's get enough screenshots so I can still present even if it's not a working demo. We leave around midnight and some of the other guys are still working away.
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Friday — it's show time! I'm suited up for the game. We're scheduled to go second. The format is a long conference table, we're at one end, the panel of VC's is on one side, we sit on the other. The Microsoft guys are in back of the VC's. The film crew is all over the place. Microphones are checked. The director does a pre-interview with us. We do one final test of the PC, now stashed under the conference table, waiting our turn. The first team goes in for a 20 minute presentation, then 10 minutes of questioning, and then we're on. You can watch some excerpts of the presentation in the video below. I nailed it — the demo worked flawlessly, I spoke well, hit the 20 minute limit with 10 seconds to spare, took our questions along with Alexey and Steve (now feeling real good), left the room, did an exit interview with the film crew, and then had a couple hours to unwind. Lunch was served, we got to talk to the VC's, Paul Greenberg (a big Thank You, sir, for your encouragement and support!), and the other folks. Then, time for awards. First award: the SuperCool Award goes to Support4U Inc. Go team, fight, win!!!
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More awards came for the other teams and then it was time to go. It's now December 20th, snow storms are blowing in all over the country, people are trying to get home for the holidays, it's Friday afternoon, airports are closing, and we're tired. Jim somehow makes it into Chicago despite horrible weather. I think that was his reward for doing such an outstanding job as our advisor — you deserved it, Jim! Steve, Alexey, and I meet for a dinner celebration, and then off to bed and an early Saturday flight for me, a later one back to Russia for Alexey.
All in all, quite a week! Again, thanks to Sanjay Jain and his team for giving us the opportunity to participate and for pulling off this event in record time. The depth and quality of resources he made available to all of us was astounding. A huge thanks to Alexey for coming a long way, both physically and professionally. He took that big brain of his and came up with working software in a very short amount of time and under a ton of pressure and distractions. Steve and I are now focused on making this into a real business, getting the software finished and out to market, so you guys can take your business to the next level of social interactions, using Microsoft CRM as its foundation.
And, I found the pony tied to a hitchin' post at the Microsoft Technology Center on my way out...