Engineers and an expert sales team are valuable to entrepreneurs, but the most important members of the team are supportive members of your family, says Frank Levinson, founder of Finisar. In this talk, given as part of an entrepreneur thought leader lecture at Stanford University many years ago, Levinson recounts a Christmas day when his family postponed opening presents to help customers – and keep the business moving forward.

(Editor’s note: Jim Nichols is a senior partner at Catalyst:SF, a marketing capital firm focused on entrepreneurs. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)

Many start-ups have trouble making an impression. They make a lot of noise, but no one seems to hear them. It’s the business equivalent of a dog whistle – inaudible to human ears.

There are, however, some simple ways to avoid this. Here are three reasons why people may not notice you – and what you can do to be heard.

Speak $&#^ing English! Prospects don’t want to whip out decoder rings for buzzword-bingo sales pitches. Tell them, in simple terms, how you will make lives easier, better or less expensive.

I once worked for a start-up that told potential clients it offered “professionally managed virtual personal computing information technology services for distributed workforces.” What we actually did was outsourced IT, which saved clients time and money.

By contrast, two companies I recently encountered know how to deliver a message beautifully.

Track Simple’s  reporting and insights dashboard dramatically reduces the time that media planners spend producing and analyzing performance reports. Reporting takes up two days of every planner’s week. So as it put together its marketing, the company went with the claim that it “gives media planners their Tuesdays back.”

OKCupid, a dating site that makes money through advertising, is another good example.  I asked their CEO how they stood out in the crowded online market and he said, “Single people spend their money differently from marrieds. We help advertisers reach free spending singles.”

In both cases, the benefits were described in plain English – and were infinitely more effective than polished, but overly wordy, pitches.

Talk to people. There’s a misconception that B2B marketing is totally different from B2C – that a 100 percent rational sell is the way to get through to businesses.

Bull.

Your decision maker is a person. Rational benefits are important, but don’t forget to appeal emotionally to deciders.  Will picking you make them feel safe? Smart? Innovative?

Big business gets this. Consider Oracle’s  “20 out of 20” ads. Seemingly dull facts, but the implication—that if you don’t pick Oracle you are clearly imbecilic and will probably be fired—is there in the subtext. Like us or not, the campaign says, we’re the safe choice.

Use reason, but also touch spirits – and you’ll be heard.

Are You Real? There are hurdles to clear before you’ll matter to most customers. For example, in online advertising, most companies won’t give you a second glance until you have a million unique users a month.

Focus first on scale. Find those prospects that like to be first. In virtually every industry, there are blessed souls who like innovation more than scale. Find them. Sign them. Reach critical mass. Then build from there.

Sometimes entrepreneurs believe so much in what they’re doing that they miss thinking about the prospects. Prospects don’t care about your goals. When you put their needs first, though, you might be heard.

Photo by adgray2k via Flickr

(Editor’s note: Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany. This column originally appeared on his blog.)

Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers.

Last week, as a favor to a friend, I sat in on a board meeting of a fairly successful 3.5 year-old startup. Given all that could go wrong in this economy, they were doing well. Their business had just crossed cash flow breakeven, had grown past 50 employees, just raised a substantive follow-on round of financing and had recently hired a Chief Financial Officer. It was an impressive performance.

Then the new CFO got up to give her presentation – all kind of expected; Sarbanes Oxley compliance, a new accounting system, beef up IT and security, Section 409A (valuation) compliance, etc. Then she dropped the other shoe.

“Do you know how much our company is spending on free sodas and snacks?”  And to answer her own question she presented the spreadsheet totaling it all up.

There were some experienced VC’s in the room and I was waiting for them to “educate” her about startup culture. But my jaw dropped when the board agreed that the “free stuff” had to go.

“We’re too big for that now” was the shared opinion. But we’ll sell them soda “cheap.”

Uh oh

I had lived through this same conversation four times in my career, and each time it ended as an example of unintended consequences. No one on the board or the executive staff was trying to be stupid. But to save $10,000 or so, they unintentionally launched an exodus of their best engineers.

This company had grown from the founders, who hired an early team of superstars, many now managing their own teams. All these engineers were still heads-down, working their tails off, just as they had been doing since the first few months of the company. Too busy working, most were oblivious to the changes that success and growth had brought to the company.

One day the engineering team was clustered in the snack room looking at the soda machine. The sign said, “Soda now 50 cents.”

The uproar began. Engineers started complaining about the price of the soda. Someone noticed that instead of the informal reimbursement system for dinners when they were working late, there was now a formal expense report system. Some had already been irritated when “professional” managers had been hired over their teams with reportedly more stock than the early engineers had. Lots of email was exchanged about “how things were changing for the worse.” A few engineers went to the see the CEO.

The exodus begins

But the damage had been done. The most talented and senior engineers looked up from their desks and noticed the company was no longer the one they loved. It had changed. And not in a way they were happy with.

The best engineers quietly put the word out that they were available, and in less than month the best and the brightest began to drift away.

Startups go through a metamorphosis as they become larger companies. They go from organizations built to learn, discover and iterate, to predominately one that can execute adroitly having found product/market fit.

Humans seem to be hard-wired for numbers of social relationships. These same numbers also define boundaries in growing an organization – get bigger than a certain size and you need a different management system. The military has recognized this for thousands of years as they built command and control hierarchies that matched these numbers.

The engineers focused on building product never noticed when the company had grown into something different than what they first joined.

The sodas were just the wake-up call.

As startups scale into a company, founders and the board need to realize that the most important transitions are not about systems, buildings or hardware. It’s about the company’s most valuable asset – its employees.

Great companies do this well.

Despite what today’s young entrepreneurs might think, Silicon Valley didn’t launch with the Internet – or even Steve Jobs. It goes back to the World War II days. Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank has given talks on the evolution of the Valley to both the CIA’s Venture Capital firm In-Q-Tel and the American Business Associaton of Russian Speaking Professionals.

His full lecture is below – and we’ll warn you, it’s a lot longer than the usual video clips we host here in the Entrepreneur Corner — over an hour long. It’s full of fascinating information about the Valley’s history, though (and let’s be honest, who’s working hard on the Friday before Christmas)?

(Editor’s note: Chris Drake is CEO and founder of FireHost, Inc., a secure Web hosting company. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.)

Many entrepreneurs have preconceptions about their place in the cyber crime world – usually wrong ones.

Some feel that if large organizations like Sears can easily fall prey to hackers, there’s really nothing they can do to protect their own small business. Other think their company is too small to hold value for cyber criminals, making them safe from attack, as it wouldn’t be worth the hacker’s time.

The truth is: Security measures in place at most small- and medium-sized businesses are “easy pickings” for hackers, and there is a booming community of C2C (criminal to criminal) interactions focused solely on stealing customer data from SMBs that conduct business online.

The same way you work every day to develop new, enticing products and easier ways for your customers to shop, cyber theft “shop owners” fuel this underground economy (valued at more than $276 million) by devising faster, easier and more effective methods to steal your company’s data.

Preventing data leakage takes an ongoing, concerted effort, so it’s important that you take proactive control over your immediate environment. Here’s how:

Only run software you need. Thoroughly review all third-party applications before introducing them to your environment. Only install third-party applications if they are absolutely necessary. Remove all inactive programs at once. Paring down your list of installed programs alleviates your susceptibility to any known or future security threats they may pose.

Stop ignoring those updates. Install every software update, and do it quickly. Addressing security vulnerabilities is a top priority of software patches – so don’t get versions behind.

S = More Secure. Traditional FTP connections are insecure. Look for “SSH” and “SFTP” connections as they are in an encrypted format and are the minimum standard for eCommerce Web site administration.

Manage change. Terminate access credentials for former website administrators and employees immediately after (and sometimes before) they exit the company. Open logins create an extremely popular data leakage point. Implementing strict, consistent, change management protocols will reduce the chances your website is compromised by a password breach.

Check configurations and permissions. Regularly check that server configurations and file permissions are set correctly, and that there are no open permissions on directories.

Cheaply outsourced labor could cost you. Do you really want to outsource your livelihood to the lowest bidder? Websites require ongoing maintenance, bug fixes and enhancements – and working closely with a local developer that you can meet in person might be the best solution in the long run.

Hire a hacker. Hire a hacker to try and penetrate your environment to find its vulnerabilities. I’m serious.

Achieve PCI Compliance if you conduct eCommerce. The payment Card Industry has devised a succinct list of requirements to which every organization must adhere if they accept credit cards as a form of payment.

Vulnerability audits. Have professionals perform regular vulnerability audits. We recommend monthly or quarterly (at minimum). Vulnerability audits can identify weak logins, data leakage from forms, SQL injection vulnerabilities, DDoS activity, spam relaying, order manipulation, admin control panel tampering and more.

Hackers pose a real threat to entrepreneurs – and they find value in stealing customer records, even from the “one-man shops” out there. Give these preventative measures the same priority as the way your site looks and works. After all, an ounce of prevention…well, you know the saying.

Photo by gutter via Flicker

I’m traveling to Atlanta tomorrow, in the lastest trip I’m making to major cities to meet with local start-ups and entrepreneurs.

Atlanta gets overlooked as a technology and business center. While it’s a small city — at only the 33rd largest in the nation — it has the third largest concentration of Fortune 500 companies headquartered within its borders.

And there are reasons why entrepreneurship should percolate well here going forward. There’s Georgia Tech, its research institute and the incubators associated with it, such as the ATDC. There’s UGA, Emory, and Savannah College of Art and Design (which has a successful gaming program). There are industry leaders such Turner Broadcasting, and well, AT&T Wireless (cough, I traded in my iPhone for a Droid recently because of AT&T’s awful coverage, but I won’t dwell on that for now; at least AT&T had the foresight to sign an early exclusive deal with the iPhone, one of the most revolutionary pieces of technology today). There’s a good overview here of Atlanta’s tech promise and of the challenges it faces.

We’ll be at the Palomar Hotel;l Wednesday evening from 7pm to 9pm, if not later. The first 40 people to show up will receive a free cocktail. Make sure you register. We’ve already got a good list of people signed up. Join me, local entrepreneurs, investors, startup professionals, and DEMO alumni companies for cocktails and conversation.

It will be the first time I’m bringing VentureBeat and DEMO to Atlanta. As founder of VentureBeat, I’m looking to cover the stories of entrepreneurs who are building great technology companies. And I wear a second hat, as Executive Producer of the DEMO conference. As such, I’m also on the prowl for the most promising technology products we can find to showcase at the upcoming conference in Palm Springs, Calif., in March.

As I’ve written before, DEMO surely isn’t right for every company, but if a company is looking to grab market share quickly and needs a very loud bang, there’s probably no better place. Major companies and products have launched there, from Salesforce.com, to VMWare, TiVo, Palm Pilot, Netscape, Sun’s Java, Adobe Acrobat and ETrade, to name a few. Some 93 percent of the companies that have launched at DEMO in its 20 year history have either gone public, been acquired or are still alive.

DEMO offers professional event standards unmatched by any other. There’s a long list of reasons mentioned here (download PDF of DEMO facts) and there are more links on this page too. Sometimes it’s the small things that count: For one, the Internet works without fail. You’d think that would be obvious, but it’s not. Time and again, I’ve seen it go down at other conferences, and that can ruin a company’s big launch day; DEMO invests serious dough into making sure the network stays up. DEMO also offers high-definition video, coaching, and PR help. It also offers a level playing field, so that a small company gets the same treatment as a major company (a Cisco, for example, can’t come in and buy 100,000 square feet of demonstrator space). As for the audience, the world’s media shows up, corporate developer officers from major companies are there, and top investors come too.

I’ve written more about what we’re doing lately with DEMO here, here, and here. But I’ll be writing about a few great testimonials in the coming days.

See you in Atlanta!

I’m delighted to announce the relaunch of our VentureBeat Job Board.

Lots of people are looking for jobs right now, and there are plenty of Silicon Valley companies looking to hire.

So we’re looking to serve our readership with a specialized job board targeted at them. The job board now features a better selection of relevant technology, business development and marketing jobs, useful new features, and more flexible posting options. We’ll be looking to make it even better over time.

Notably, we’re returning to partner with JobThread, which was one of our earliest partners when we we launched our job board in 2007. In those days, JobThread was still a small startup, and we turned from them to partner with several other different companies that made outlandish promises to deliver us more revenue if we switched. When we did, they each failed to deliver. So now we’re returning back to JobThread, which has continued to grow and innovate.

If you’re an employer, here’s a way to get your 2010 hiring off to a great start: We’re offering a 50 percent-off coupon good through Jan. 31, 2010. You can also send the coupon code to your HR department, which will love you forever for it. You have your choice of 50 percent-off to the VentureBeat Job Board or 50 percent off JobThread Network postings. The JobThread Network has a price that is a tad higher, but it includes VentureBeat, paidContent, The Business Insider, ReadWriteWeb, Marketing Pilgrim, Social Media Jobs, Wired, Ajaxian, Computerworld, CIO.com, Zend, PHPJobs.com, Linux Magazine and dozens of other publishers in technology, digital media, green/environmental and more. The network allows you to reach multiple targeted sites including VentureBeat with a single Pay-for-Performance posting.

If you want to be up to date on the latest jobs, be sure to sign up for an email job alert or subscribe to the RSS feed. You can also get a custom RSS feed after searching.

Even if you’re not in the market for a new job you can make some extra dough and help your friends out by sending them jobs with Referral Rewards. If your friend (or their friend) gets hired you get your cut of the referral reward — up to $1,000 or more! You can even subscribe to an email job alert that only sends you jobs that have referral rewards.

And if all that wasn’t enough, anyone that signs up for an email job alert or sends a job to a friend between now and January 1st will be automatically entered to win a $150 NewEgg gift card.

Interesting jobs on the site now:

Public Relations Manager – Mozilla (Mountain View, CA)
Vice President, Community Products – MTV Networks (New York, NY)
Messaging/Integration Engineer – Kaztronix (Atlanta, GA)
Lead Designer – Electronic Ink (Philadelphia, PA)
API Developer and C++ File Systems Developer – YouSendIt (Campbell, CA)
Director of Business Development and Sales – Propane Studio LLC (San Francisco, CA (Bay Area))
More Jobs >

I’ve just arrived in Austin, Texas, and look forward to meeting local entrepreneurs.

I was here just five months ago (see pics of that event), and there’s a good reason why I’m returning. Austin may be merely the 16th-largest city in the U.S., but after Silicon Valley there are almost no other high-tech regions that rival its prowess.

Austin is just the latest in a bunch of stops we’re making to major entrepreneurial cities, on the prowl for the most promising technology products we can find to showcase at the upcoming DEMO conference in Palm Springs, Calif.

We’ll be at J. Black’s Feel Good Lounge, from 6pm and go to 8pm, if not later. The first hundred people to show up will receive a free drink. Join me, local entrepreneurs, investors, startup professionals, and DEMO alumni companies for cocktails and conversation. Sign up here.

Every year, we find at least four or five start-ups here in Austin that are hot enough to invite to DEMO. There’s no one ingredient that make a place become a high-tech center. But like Silicon Valley, Austin’s high-tech industry took root here in part as a result of an early focus on the defense industry. Dell is a large employer here, and chip, biotech and communication startups have been strong here too. And once you’ve fostered a critical mass of innovators, they keep coming.

Recently, we hit New York, Seattle, San Francisco (see pics of our SF event), London and Boston, and in each place we’ve had hundreds of people show up. Entrepreneurs are still building companies, even in the downturn. We’ve got at least 140 people signed up to come tonight, and I haven’t even posted about it until now.

As I’ve written before, I’ll be chatting with entrepreneurs here about how DEMO works. DEMO surely isn’t right for every company, but if a company is looking to grab market share quickly and needs a very loud bang, there are few better places than DEMO. That’s why hot companies and products from Salesforce.com, to VMWare, TiVo, Palm Pilot, Netscape, Sun’s Java, Adobe Acrobat and ETrade have launched there, just to name a few.

Why are they launching at DEMO? Professional event standards unmatched by any other, for one. The Internet works (you’d think that would be obvious, but it’s hit or miss at most other conferences, and when audio visual and Internet are down during your big launch day, well it sucks; the media can’t cover you), you get a high-definition video, coaching, PR help and more. In the audience you get unparalleled media representation, corporate development contacts, top investors and more.

I’ve already mentioned how we’re spicing things up a bit at DEMO. We’re extending DEMO’s reach to showcase very early stage companies, called alpha-stage companies, something we debuted at the last DEMO in September. Second, we’re inviting the very best business plans from the nation’s colleges and universities, a new part of the next conference in March. And we’re creating more disciplined theme areas for startups, too. See more in my recent post about this, and more.