A VC in Vacationland

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Start ups today do not need to (nor can afford to) make huge investments in marketing, sales, education, training and support infrastructure.  Web-based capabilities around conferencing, meetings, webinars have allowed small companies to compete without having teams of professionals jump on air planes to visit potential/actual customer offices.  Besides, in the current downturn, who can afford it?

One of the missing links for smaller companies has been affordable videoconferencing systems.  There is nothing like putting your CEO and CTO in front of a key customer at an important decision point, even if the executives are in San Francisco and the customer is in Uruguay. Cisco Systems, Polycom and Hewlett-Packard all offer high-end (read: $500K and up) videoconferencing technologies for the Global 1000. But until LifeSize Communications in Austin, Texas emerged a few years ago, no one cared about offering high quality videoconferencing to the smaller company.

The company offers sharp pictures over Internet hardware for as little as $5,000, or up to $40,000 for full telepresence. To be fair, it's not like watching a HDTV in your living room, since that would require upgraded networks, but it is not a joke like some earlier low-budget offerings. And LifeSize does already have 4,000 users, including Wal-Mart, so they must be doing a lot right to keep fussy clients happy.

Think about the possibilities–you need to train 25 new clients at a company in Uruguay.  The option today is to send an expensive team to the client site for a number of days. Or you could use videoconferencing, with perhaps only one employee on site to make sure the technology (yours and LifeSize) is working. With videoconferencing, many more professionals from your company could be involved in the training, increasing the value substantially to the customer.

Videoconferencing could also be used for potential customer education on your products and services, marketing and sales presentations where you could conference in numerous experts from headquarters, among numerous other uses. 

Virtual, not in-person, is a critical part of new business models for most start ups.