Dion Almaer of Ajaxian.com writes:

The Bay Stack: Ever notice how Silicon Valley stacks up just like technology?

I was sitting in a session at Web 2.0 Expo last week with Salil Deshpande, one of the original investors and advisors to Ajaxian and a former boss at CustomWare. (Salil is now a VC at Bay Partners, and you can follow his new blog here).

We started on the observation that the bay stacks up with technology somewhat similar to a stack of technology itself. We then took the analogy to the extreme as we plotted it out, as seen below.

At the bottom of the stack you have the hardware crud, such as chips (Intel), networking (Cisco), disk drives (Seagate) and hardware (Sun). The operating system should go next, but that was a tough one to squeeze in. Oracle and the database is up in Redwood shores. BEA is further down in real geography, but Oracle has now bought BEA, so it also lives in Redwood shores (phew, thanks for the purchase!).

Then you get up into the city itself, where the hipsters define Web 2.0 (Twitter) and design cool things (Adaptive Path).

Tags: Salil Deshpande

Nick Gonzalez, previously of TechCrunch, now at SocialMedia, uses me as an example (for some unknown reason) in this piece on building your career by trolling Linkedin. Appreciate it, Nick.

Let’s face it, getting a job is a piece of cake compared to “building a career”. There’s a big difference between the two. A job pays you today, while a career pays you tomorrow through better positions and opportunities. It’s like investing in yourself.

However, it can be devilishly hard to plan out what the right moves are for getting where you want to go, or even where you want to go to begin with. But alas, like most things, the internet provides a great resource.

LinkedIn is not only a good place to network, but also to learn about the journey’s some of the valley’s best and brightest took to get where they are today. Lets look at some different career goals and see the paths people took to get there: Venture Capitalist, CEO, and Marketing Guru.

VC

Salil Deshpande - currently partner at Bay Partners, Masters in EE from Stanford, Hardware Engineer - Hewlett Packard, Software engineer - Sun, Project Lead - Enterprise Integration Technologies, CEO - CustomWare, Director Professional Services - Borland, CEO - New CustomWare company, (skipping some more), EIR at Bay Partners, Principal at Bay, Partner at Bay.

Katherine Barr - currently partner at MDV, Stanford Masters, Senior Product Manager - HSA, Negotiator/Senior Consultant - Vantage Partners (Boston based firm), Partner - MDV.

CEO

Gina Bianchini - CEO - Ning, Stanford MBA, Financial Analyst - Goldman Sachs, Director of Biz dev - CKS group, Co-Founder and CMO - Harmonic Group, Co-Founder CEO - Ning

Heather Harde - CEO - TechCrunch, Harvard MBA, Financial Analyst - Brown Brothers, SVP M&A - Fox Interactive, CEO - TechCrunch

Marketing Guru

Dave McClure - BS - John’s Hopkins, Consulting - Various large companies, Founder/CEO - Aslan Computing, Startup Consultant - 500 hats, Director of Marketing - PayPal, Director of Marketing - Simply Hired, VP Evangelism - SimplyHired, adviser to dozens of other companies

Jeremiah Owyang - Business and marketing - SFSU, Intranet designer - Exodus Communications, UI Designer - Extranet, Intranet Architect - World Savings, Manager Global Web Marketing - Hitachi, Dir Corp Media Strat - Podtech, Senior Analyst - Forrester.

So What Can We Learn?

After looking at a lot of profiles I’ve noticed a couple of things. These people didn’t spend that long at a single job (2 years usually). That means don’t waste time at a job you don’t like. Jeremiah jumped through a bunch of positions before he found his calling.

They also went to some pretty good schools. Howard Hartenbaum of Draper Richards told me that pretty much every VC at the firm went to Stanford for their MBA (he was the exception and got involved with the firm because of his European expertise, and natural talent too, I’m sure).

Finally, studying these profiles is a way of familiarizing yourself with who you should approach for mentorship. I got lucky and had the opportunity to work under Michael Arrington. When looking for someone to get career advice from, know their career, know what questions you’re going to ask when you approach them, find people on their way up (people who have made it are sometimes just too busy), and engage them where they engage others (twitter, FBook, LinkedIn, Blogs). I’m sure you’ll find most people in the valley more than happy to give some guidance. Just ask.

Tags: Salil Deshpande

David Hornik wrote about the breakfast he and I had:

I was having breakfast this morning with Salil Deshpande from Bay Partners. Salil and I were talking about assessing company progress and how best to measure that progress. Salil invests in super early-stage deals and has his companies report to him on their progress on a frequent basis. He said that he had one CEO who would report on his progress in such florid language that eventually Salil had to forbid his use of adjectives in his progress reports. Salil said that he didn’t want to hear that things were going great. He wanted to hear precisely how things were going.

I nearly jumped out of my seat. Salil had articulated one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to company pitches (and board meetings for that matter). I hate adjectives. I don’t want to hear that one of the company founders is a “fantastic sales exec.” I want to hear that she was Presidents Club the last twelve years running. I don’t want to hear that the product is “revolutionary and paradigm-shifting.” I want to hear about the specific features of the product that are differentiated and how. I don’t want to hear that the company has “massive market traction.” I want to see a graph of progressive quarterly sales and a giant sales pipeline.

Adjectives are not convincing. Facts are convincing. I may not agree with the conclusions a company draws from those facts. But I will at least be in a position to appropriately assess those conclusions. Whereas adjectives are all about conclusions without the underlying facts. As an entrepreneur, you are far better off having me determine that your market is “massive,” your founders are “brilliant,” and your product is “elegant,” than to tell me that your company has “an elegant solution serving a massive market designed by brilliant founders.” So reread your pitch and remove all of the adjectives. It will go massively, monumentally, gargantuanly. colossally better that way.

Tags: Salil Deshpande