Doing the Happy Dance

After a review with SomaSe last week in which we demoed what I'll just call "our stuff" (though the credit belongs to Adam Nathan, who really needs to update his blog), we went yesterday to present to Bob Muglia. The last time I presented to Bob in any way, shape, or form, I was a director of marketing and the conversation was about branding. This time, the conversation was about technology and opportunity and truthfully, up to about five minutes into the meeting I didn't know what Bob was going to say. He kept looking at the projection screen where Adam was setting up to do the demo and I kept saying, "Pay no attention to what's on the screen. We'll get to that." But by about the third bullet on the first slide, we had him. I often forget how folks like Bob come alive when they're presented with an interesting problem space, but Bob got precisely what we were talking about incredibly quickly. By the time we got to the demo, it was ours to lose and Adam pulled a few rabbits out of his hat (adding features that weren't there the night before) and by the end, Bob was asking, "How did you do that? Can you do this? When can you launch?"

In the grand scheme of things, a good exec review isn't like solving world hunger, but getting positive feedback on your work always feels good, especially when you're a small startup team that seems to be challenging a lot of conventional wisdom.

Next up: more VPs and some customer councils to get feedback.