Yes, it's true - for the first time, First Round Capital Office Hours will actually be held in our offices. Our San Francisco doors are open and entrepreneurs are welcome to drop on by for a few minutes of conversation. The entire First Round Capital investment team will participate, and Josh, Howard, Chris, Rob, Kent, and I will all be available for micro-meetings.

The details:

Thursday, June 11, 2009
12:00 - 2:00 PM

First Round Capital
217 Second Street, Fifth Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105

Walk-ins are welcome. That said, we'd like to load balance as is possible - so if Office Hours is a definite on your calendar, please do visit our sign-up sheet to let us know you're coming. Questions? E-mail us here.

•    Launching Your Own Startup
•    Women and Open Source
•    Breaking Through the Digital Ceiling
•    Tech Marketing in a Recession
•    Social Networks and Diversity Barriers
•    ROI of Social Networking

Panelists will include Joan Blades of MoveOn and Moms Rising, Allison Fine of Personal Democracy Forum, Shireen Mitchell of Digital Sistas, Amy Muller of Get Satisfaction, Lynne D Johnson of Fast Company, Charlene Li, Holly Ross of NTEN, Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare, and Lisa Stone of BlogHer.

For more information, visit womenwhotech.com, and feel free to drop by a live afterparty that evening if you're in Washington, DC, NYC, San Francisco, or London.

1. Crap offline is still crap online. ‘If you put crap on Twitter, it won’t smell any better.’ Really no need to elaborate further on this point.
2. Your audience is not an audience. Recognize that they’re people, and find common ground if you want them to respond to your call to action. Both Microsoft and Brian Solis have articulated this quite nicely. Net-net: If you don’t need a conversation, then don’t use social media. If you don’t want a shallow relationship, then don’t use broadcast media.
3. Convey a humbling vision. Or in Buddhist terms, ‘give profit and gain to others, take the loss upon yourself.’ Can you share credit with your supporters and clients? Put the members of your community – your customers and clients – at the center of your marketing story.
4. Emotions rule. Why do technologists suck at storytelling? Stories are fundamentally emotional, and technologists work in a left-brain community. (I must admit, I was surprised to come up 'right-brain' in the controversial spinning dancer test, though the Hemispheric Dominance quiz claims I'm split-brain.) But overcome your fear of feeling - the consumer’s right brain decides, while the left brain justifies decisions. And for nonprofits, ‘emotion powers the fundraising engine.’ By telling stories with emotional (rather than statistical) impact, you’ll be more likely to connect with your supporters.
5. Humor is a basic human need. Have you noticed how easily humor can form a personal connection? Try using humor in your next campaign...but make sure to test it out on a funny person before springing your attempt on the general public. There’s a lot to be gained by making people laugh. And even if humor isn’t a fit for you, it’s still a good idea to lighten up in your campaigns. 'If you can’t be hilarious, be hopeful.' Fear messaging only works if there’s a clear and simple solution being offered. Intractable problems are paralyzing.
6. Keep it simple. Lots of choices + too much noise = paralysis. No matter how many balls (marketing messages) you throw at someone, they will still just catch one...or if you throw too many, they’ll catch none. If you want someone to catch multiple balls, try throwing them one at a time.

Here are the presenters, roughly in my order of personal preference:

Twilio helps developers to build and run voice applications cheaply. Their core XML API offers the basics used in most voice applications. Grand Central uses Twilio, as does Earth 911, which turned a six-month project into just a few hours. Telephony in the cloud changes the typical telephony business model, just as Amazon EC2 changed the cost of online app provisioning. Most telephony is based on the number of lines you have, and how frequently those lines are being used, so you pay for capacity you aren't using and can't handle spikes in demand. Twilio transforms this into an EC2-like model in which clients pay as they go for what they use. I was easily charmed by CEO Jeff Lawson (who no doubt could sell snow in Alaska), and bought his argument that there's emerging demand for voice integration into web applications.

New Relic supports Ruby in the cloud, in what the company claims is the 'first application management solution offered via SaaS.' Need to know what your app is doing at runtime, and how you can fix them in production. Real-time visibility while running production applications.  Independent developers and hobbyists are drawn to Ruby, and New Relic aims to capture those users as they get started in their development careers. Launched in Hune, now over 1600 customers, inluding businesses as diverse as github and Hot Topic. Average customer paying 50% more than they did six months ago for their New Relic subscription. Though the company has raised $11M, they're being frugal - they've only used $3M of that to date and still have three years of cash in bank.

Heroku offers a multi-tenant platform to 'enhance developer productivity and make deployment trivial.' Heroku, a Y-Combinator company, supports enterprises, web 2.0 companies, and individual Ruby developers with provisionless hosting - over 25,000 applications are now deployed over the Heroku platform. The metered service ranges in cost from $50/month for an individual developer, to $10K/month for an enterprise, and the company compares this to $5K/month for a sysadmin and server resources. I like Heroku - its simplicity is seductive - but they will have a fight on their hands as existing enterprise vendors develop offerings for their Ruby customers.

RunMyProcess offers business process management (BPM) in the cloud. They address the challenge of SaaS integration with 'workflows as a service.' Design, execution, traceability, and analysis are all part of RunMyProcess-enabled workflow. A basic subscription is 50 euros/user/month, and RMP partners can earn a 20% revenue share. I see the need for the service, but have many questions on their competitive landscape and differentiation.