Our new Entrepreneur in Residence Ingrid Vanderveldt’s Twitter handle is @ontheroadwithiv and that’s just what I did last week – went on the road with her to California.
Our first stop was Silicon Valley and the DEMO conference, where we often got the question “What is Dell doing here?” We got a chance to explain it at the Startup America social media lounge in this video:
While there, we got to hear from many interesting startups around the globe – from Dell-like dorm room entrepreneurs to more experienced innovators. More than 90 companies were vying for attention and The Next Web has compiled a list of their 10 favorites.
One of those on that list that I thought would be particularly appealing to service-oriented small and medium business businesses such as salons, dentists, personal trainers, or anyone else whose clients might want to make appointments online was Schedulicity. A slightly more established startup than some of the others at DEMO, they used the event to launch “Pop-Up Offers” that lets businesses post last-minute time slots with a discount in hopes of attracting more customers.
While in the Bay Area, Ingrid and I took an opportunity to visit with the local representatives of Endeavor – a global nonprofit with a goal to transform emerging countries by supporting “High-Impact Entrepreneurs.” Erik Dithmer, our vice president and general manager of Small & Medium Business, Americas, serves on their Global Advisory Board and we’ve helped sponsor activities such as their recent Endeavor Entrepreneur Summit.
Then, when she discovered that I’d lead Dell’s excursion into Second Life five years ago, Ingrid insisted I meet its founder and serial entrepreneur Phillip Rosedale. We stopped by the offices of his new venture Coffee & Power for an all-too-short visit with his co-founder Ryan and team pictured below before I made a mad planes, trains and automobiles dash back to Austin – just before the crowd coming to the ACL festival that Dell’s bringing to the world on Precision workstations!
