Lou Franco's Software Business Blog

Had a great time at the Business of Software Conference in Boston the last two days.

I twittered it in real time -- Look up my updates from Sep3/4 here.

Highlights:

I've seen most of Seth Godin's talk before, but seeing it live still blew me away -- this presentation Seth gave at Google will give you a feel for it.

The Pecha Kucha was very fun -- Alexis from reddit won with his hysterical parody of Web 2.0 VC madness -- very reminiscent of what the v1.0 dotcom version was like, but with AJAX!

Dharmesh Shah was brilliant pretty much off the top of his head, it seemed.

The last session of the first day was Paul Kenny -- I kept wanting to get up and take a break, but I was completely drawn in to his presentation -- great high energy presentation, which was just what we needed at the end of the day.

Second day -- The Summit partners guy, Tom Jennings, should probably have done 10 minutes of slides and 50 minute Q&A -- people were dying to ask questions.  Huge crowd around him when he was done.  From the VC breakout session I was at, it was clear that people have some basic questions, that a 101 type session would have helped clear up. Even though there was definitely an anti-VC vibe at the event, people are still curious.

Noam Wasserman -- if you get one thing from this update, go add http://founderresearch.blogspot.com to your RSS reader. He's been collecting great data -- if you're a founder, go fill out his survey to get access to great data. The talk was on the choices that founders to make to either keep in control or to grow the company (Rich vs. King), and highlighted some of the choices that lead to company instability.

Steve Krug did a live user test -- you can get a sample script on his site (look for the downloads section on the right).

And, of course, Joel was great. Talked about the difference between being number 1 and number 2 (or a number greater than 2), and why it matters, and what number 1 products seem to have in common.