The View from the Eisner Ranch

Wow. Not much else needs to be said.

A Bus Ride With Steve Jurvetson

On the way to the Eisner’s tonight I had the good fortune of sitting next to Steve Jurvetson of DFJ fame. We talked about Broadwick, Silverpop, Feedburner, Meetup, making a company seem larger than it is with blogs (good work Socialtext and Meetup), the potential return requirements of getting DFJ interested in you, and digital camera picture stabilization software. After meeting Draper in 2004 at UNC, Fisher last night at dinner, at Jurvetson today, I have to say they all seem to be pretty good guys. Not sure if that would hold true in the Board Room, but one day I might find out.

- Ryan

Off to Eisner’s Ranch for Dinner

Had a great day so far today. Madeleine Albright, the CEO of Shell, CK Pralahad, and the former US Ambassador to the United Nations were at my table at lunch. Wow. Great sessions afterward on cancer with Lance Armstrong. Best part of day so far was watching Arianna Huffington get into an argument about Hillary’s opinion on flag burning with Hillary’s political consultant that was speaking.

More to come later tonight. Off to Michael Eisner’s ranch for dinner. This is fun.

Here’s a picture from earlier today with Madeleine Albright.

- Ryan

Brainstorm Day 1: What do Ethanol, 50 Cent, Paris Hilton, Poverty, Global Warming, the intent of the Framers of the Constitution, and the Arabic version of The Vagina Monologues Have in Common?

The Answer: They were all talked about at Day one of Brainstorm. The theme of this conference is “Life in a Connected World.” The conference thus has dedicated itself to explore both the promise and perils of connectivity. There was one fascinating moment illustrating of the promise (or perhaps the peril?) of connectivity this morning during the opening session when the word spread that the two rows in the back of the tent had wireless and a power outlet–causing all of the bloggers to immediately get up from their seats and move there to plug in. But it was the moment just after that was more interesting, when a venture capitalist next to me commented (to Reid Hoffman, the CEO of LinkedIn) that the bloggers in the back row were old fashioned. He blogged right on TypePad directly from his Blackberry. At that moment, there was no more connected tent in the world with (by rough anecdotal estimates) about 25% of the audience with a Blackberry, 10% with a Treo, and 15% with a laptop.

The opening session featured Sandra Day O’Conner. She made some great points regarding the intent of the framers of the Constitution, her view of the Supreme Court’s role in the 2000 election (that the Supreme Court could have done things better but that their decision in the end did not change what would have been the final result anyway), and about the attacks on activist judges by certain legislators (she made a great point that an activist judge is simply a judge who made a decision that a legislator didn’t like). She expressed worry that important decisions that were unpopular at the time but history held to be right, like Brown vs. the Board of Education, might not be made in today’s environment.

After the group session, we split up into five concurrent sessions. The one I attended on Global Warming was fascinating. There were 25 people around a roundtable. In the room were Sandra Day O’Conner herself, billionaire Stelios Haji-Ioannou, actress Glenn Close, Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute. Vinod Khosla of Sun Microsystems and KPCB gave a great presentation on why ethanol (and butanol) is the fuel of the future and should replace petroleum in the next 25 years. He indicated that the information out there about ethanol taking up too much farm land or taking more energy to produce that it creates is just plain wrong and not based on the facts and becomes especially untrue when you take into account the technological progress that is taking the output of ethanol per acre from 400 gallons to 3000 gallons over the next few years. He mentioned a company called e3 Biofuels that he is heavily backing and noted that if we can get celluosic ethanol perfected that we will be able to reduce greenhouse gases from fuel by 80% compared to the average 20% reduction with regular ethanol today. With ethanol available at $1.76 per gallon (and available at $0.71 per gallon if we were willing to import ethanol) he sees ethanol as a much less expensive source of energy that is of course much friendlier to our atmosphere.

Much more will come tomorrow… I’d write more about the second session and the dinner tonight with Madeleine Albright, but am exhausted. I’ll try to get the internet access working on my Treo in the morning so I can blog right from there rather than waiting until the night to post a summary.

Thanks to Paulo Gomes, Executive Director of the World Bank in Africa and Scott Heiferman, CEO of Meetup for some great advice and insights this evening. I will share them tomorrow.

Here are some pictures from the day.

- Ryan Allis

Brainstorm attendees met on the flight over

On the flight over from Denver to Aspen this evening and the ride to the hotel afterwards, I had the chance to meet the following attendees of Brainstorm:

• Joe Siglemen - Co-CEO of OfficeTiger, a 10,000 person outsourcing company in Tamil Nadu, India that he started 7 years ago. They just got bought by RR Donnelley. Was good to connect with the guy as he is only about 35–and also is a HBS grad.
• Chao Y. Wang - Chairman and CEO of a VC firm in Beijing called ChinaEquity.
• Sara Bloomfield - Director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum in D.C.
• Alexandre Kalanch - head of the Aging and Life Course department at the World Health Organization in Geneva

Can’t wait until tomorrow. 7:45am hike at Maroon Bells, followed by lunch with Sandra Day O’Conner, two sets of concurrent sessions, and dinner with Shimon Perez.

Moblogging From O’Hare - The Best Ad Campaign in Terminal C

I’m in the middle of a 3 hour layover in O’Hare (cheers to public wi-fi!) on my way to Aspen so I figured there was nothing better to do than blog. I got intrigued by the high quality of print ads here so decided to take some snapshots of the best ones. Each of the best ads I saw had something in common — a captivating campaign. This is something we’re working on right now with IntelliContact — trying to come up with a visually stimulating and attention grabbing way to portray our message that "We Simplify Email Marketing." We’ve gone from the Chuck Norris/Elvis campaign to the customer picture campaign to the Create, Send, Track campaign. Well, anyway, here are the ads. Which do you think are the best and what do you feel are the essential elements of a great, memorable campaign that can influence society and start movements (and in turn drive demand)?

 

Off to Fortune Brainstorm 2006 - I’ll be Blogging It…

Off to Fortune Brainstorm 2006 - I’ll be Blogging It…

I’m off today to Aspen for the Fortune Brainstorm 2006 conference. It is an invite only conference with about 300 attendees from June 28-30. I’m especially excited to have the opportunity to meet and talk to Michael Eisner, John McCain, Shimon Perez, Sandra Day O’Conner, Madeleine Albright, Lance Armstrong, Mark Cuban, Pierre Omidyar, Arianna Huffington, Queen Noor of Jordan, and Glenn Close. These people need no introduction. That noted, I’m also excited about meeting some of the people who might not be immediately recognizable by most but I certainly recognize including…

Alan Blinder (Vice chair of Federal Reserve), Larry Brilliant (head of Google.org), Chris DeWolfe (MySpace), John Doerr (only the father of Venture Capital), Esther Dyson (Cnet), John Fisher and Steve Jurvetson (from Draper Fisher Jurvetson), David Gergen (from Kennedy School of Government at Harvard), Bill Owens (Governor of Colorado), Marissa Mayer (VP oef Search Products, Google) Stelios Haji-Ioannou (easyGroup), C.K Prahalad (Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid), Danny Shader (Good Technology), Peter Diamiandis (Xprize), Antonio Saca (President of El Salvidor), Andy Stern (the guy taking on Wal-mart that is trying to get universal health coverage in the U.S. by creating pressure from the judiciary system), David Sze and Aneel Bhusri (Greylock), Mitchell Caplan (E*trade), Dick Costolo (Feedburner), Scott Heigerman (Meetup), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), and Subrah Iyar (WebEx).

The A Game is now on. Should be a blast. I’ll be blogging.

Limited Beta of The Best Email Marketing Product in the World

We’re launching a limited beta of IntelliContact 4.0 tomorrow morning. It’s truly now a world class product and I’m excited about the potential Broadwick has to grow as a company with it. We’ll be in a limited beta until the end of the month, after which all current customers and trial users can experience the full beta during July. If you’d like to participate in the limited beta, just shoot an email to Brandon Milford at brandon [at] broadwick.com.

In conjunction with the new interface, we’re also launching a new web site on July 1. The below filler copy probably won’t make it out of the review phase, but I wanted to post it anyway. Gotta love it…

“IntelliContact’s got wicked game, but it ain’t no skeezy hustla’. IntelliContact is the only bonified email marketing product endorsed by both Elvis and Chuck Norris. With plans starting at $9.95, we make sure you’ve still got cash for your bling. Sign up for a 15 Day Trial, and you can be Elvis, too! We feel that everyone deserves to be Elvis