One Last Glance at DEMO

Last Wednesday afternoon, after all 56 companies had demonstrated their products and each of the 14 Alpha Pitch companies told their stories, after 15 outstanding entrepreneurs accepted their Lifetime Achievement Awards and seven companies collected DEMOgod trophies, after Liaise and Emo Labs received grand prizes totaling $1M in advertising and marketing support, after two-and-a-half days of networking and demonstrating and fun, I said goodbye to DEMO after 13 years at the helm.

I would say that it was a bittersweet moment, except that there has been nothing bitter about these last 13 years, and certainly no bitterness in passing the torch to VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall.  He will take DEMO and make it his own and he will do very well.

I was humbled by the response of the audience on Wednesday afternoon, giving a standing ovation as I said farewell.  Humbled, certainly, but I suppose not surprised by the kindness in that gesture.  As I told the audience last week, it has always been the people that have made DEMO so special.

I didn’t understand that at the start.  I’d been to DEMO a couple of times and enjoyed the conference. Stewart Alsop set the tone and Lia Lorenzano, who managed the business for many years, taught me that DEMO was all about the experience.  She embedded that idea so deeply into every person she enlisted to work on the show that her ethic persists today.

I’ve been honored to have nearly 20,000 companies trust me to listen to their pitches and provide a fair critique.  And I’ve been privileged to be a part of some 1,500 product launches, many of them the coming out party as well for the companies that created them. The fact that so many meetings took place with so few calendar screw ups is a testament to the time management skills of Alice Mar, and before her Joanne Donn.

These products and companies have been generously received by my peers in the media.  DEMO often felt like a twice-yearly reunion of some of the best journalists and analysts covering technology.  Folks like Ed Baig, Mike Miller, Walt Mossberg, Amy Wohl, Steve Wildstrom, Arik Hesseldahl, Janet Rae-Dupree, Jan Ziff, Allan Davidson, and Rafe Needleman were the stalwarts of the DEMO media list, joined more recently by the bench at c|net and the crew from VentureBeat, along with bloggers such Jean-Baptiste Su, Graeme Thickins, Eliane Fiolet, and even a couple of guys from TechCrunch.  And for many years, there was Shel Israel in the second row reminding me before the opening of each conference to “just don’t say anything stupid.”

For a couple of days at each DEMO event, the media and PR folks seem to get along just fine.  DEMO’s amazing media relations team made sure of it.  Susan Thomas in the early days of my tenure mentored Becky Sniffen and Carla Thompson, who subsequently filled the job for many years.  Erica Lee and Kristi Kilpatrick took a year off from launching companies at DEMO to handle media for the conference until the team from Porter Novelli in Austin  – Laura Beck, Lisa Peterson, Caroline Traylor, and Josh Dilworth – took on the job.  The able assist from PRNewswire’s team assured that the demonstrators’ news reached the ends of the earth.

While journalists filled the front rows for the power outlets if not the best views of the stage, the seats behind them filled with “regulars” who made DEMO a reunion of friends.   John Landry, Mitchell Kertzman, John Jordan, Lois Paul, John Patrick, Steve Larsen, Scott Sangster, Christine Herron, Philip Korn, Phil Sanderson,  Don Dodge, and IDG Chairman Pat McGovern, who always took a seat midway in the room so that he could gauge the audience as much as the stage.

These were among the many faces I could see from the lights of the DEMO stage.  Of course, many, many more people, literally thousands, came through the doors of DEMO over the past 13 years.  And while they saw me on stage, they were really looking at the handiwork of dozens of the most professional crew one could ever hope to work with.   In the early days, Matt Hrdlicka and his crew at The Trillium managed the staging.  More recently, Evergreen Creative’s team lead by Rob Lee, Chris Jeffries-Dowling, and  Blake Brown , along with Wayne, Stacey, Brian, Steve, and a dozen  of the greatest crew always made sure I looked and sounded good on stage. Our networks ran flawlessly thanks to the diligence of Dave Washburn, Arthur Gressick, and Chris Angerame.

In the pavilion, Gretchen Walker assisted Jackie DiPerna who, as demonstrator manager, is the lynchpin of the demonstrator experience.  When I told the staff I’d be leaving DEMO, Jackie was the first to ask about my successor, “Will he be good to the demonstrators?”  That’s the spirit of the DEMO team Jackie so fully embodies. We’ve always been fortunate to have great professionals in that role.  Elizabeth Parsons, Alexa Hanes, and in the earliest days, Donnie Burke.

IDG has always fielded a strong team on this project.  Lia brought on Jeanne Campos, who hired Karyn Williams, who brought on Karen Daitch.  They all had a hand in managing DEMO from soup to nuts over the years.  After DEMO joined forces with IDG’s Network World, Robin Azar and then Neal Silverman lead the charge, with brilliant oversight by John Gallant.  They built dedicated teams in marketing (Mike Garity, Deb Becker, Christina Butkiewicus, Christina Spano, Buster Paris, Mark Hollister) and operations (Dale Fisher, Caroline Keough, Renee Corine Arnold, Karen Bornstein), sponsorship (Andrea D’Amato) and finance (Betty Amaro-White).

And I must say this about Karyn Williams:  She is a tremendously talented events professional, a great friend, and a blast to work with. For ten years, she took on the burden of my stress, perfectly organized every minute of every general session,  wrestled with countless crises, smoothed a ganglia of nerves, all with incredible grace.

Lastly, but in no way least, the Guidewire Group team has been a tremendous support to me and DEMO’s brightest fan club.  Mike Sigal has been an advocate for the brand, an unseen extension of the marketing team, and a pitch hitter on the sales team.  Carla Thompson is an outstanding analyst and carried more of the burden of demonstrator selection than most people know.  Alice Mar was first point of contact for many companies, ably juggling calendars to ensure that every applicant got fair time for a pitch.  Susan Thomas and Mike Rogers are dedicated advisors and strategists.  And former colleagues Charlotte Ziems and Julie Learmond-Criqui so often kept the wheels on the cart during my preoccupation with all things DEMO.

There are, no doubt, countless others who have worked on, presented at, reported, and attended DEMO these past 13 years.  The oversight of my bad memory in no way mitigates their contributions to this incredible institution.

Yesterday, October 1, was the first day in more than 13 years that I had no official capacity with DEMO.  It will take some getting used to, I’m sure.  But as should be evident from this litany of appreciation, DEMO remains in very capable hands.  Matt Marshall and his VentureBeat team, to be sure, but as importantly to the many, many more fine people who make this event the leading product launch platform that it is.