Last week, Guidewire Group  kicked off the Innovate 2010 program with Pitch Slam events in Zaragoza and Madrid.  In all, 22 companies presented their businesses in our fast-paced, 5-minute format designed to quickly tease out a company’s market opportunity, unique differentiation, and execution against plans.  As company’s pitch the business, our esteemed judges evaluate the startups using our G/Score methodology.

To refresh your memory, the G/Score is an assessment of a company’s business opportunity and market traction at a point in time. The seven-factor score looks at overall concept, market opportunity and challenges, product and business execution, team and business model.  The G/Score is not intended to be a predictor of success or to be a substitute for diligence.  It is a gauge of potential and performance.

Since introducing the G/Score (first privately to hundreds of executives and entrepreneurs and then publicly earlier this year), we’ve been asked a lot of questions, as you would expect, about the efficacy of the G/Score.  Is it “accurate”?  Does it successfully predict winners?  And perhaps the most incredulous one: How can you judge a company in just 5 minutes?!

In a world as fraught with execution risk, hard work and luck, it’s difficult to know what “accurate” might mean in the context of a startup business.  The G/Score isn’t a measure like weight or height that can be compared to an absolute scale.  Startups have no absolute scale.  But the G/Score does accurately assesses where a company is today.  At what stage is product development?  How complete is the team?

Does this accurate assessment predict success? I’d argue that the G/Score is an assessment of potential.  Continued execution on the business, smart reaction to the market, and a commitment to product excellent drive success.

Most importantly, it turns out, The G/Score provides a common language and a foundation for constructive conversations between entrepreneurs and the marketplace.  And that’s what makes the G/Score a valuable tool in assessing companies in 5-minute Pitch Slams or in hour-long one-on-one meetings.

Every day, startups submit their businesses to quick judgment from investors, customers, potential partners.  They do it at events like the Innovate!2010 Pitch Slams, at conferences, competitions, and meetups.  Often, the judging criteria is little more than a gut feeling and a wet finger int he air.

What we’ve found in just a very short time is that the G/Score gives a judging panel – and ultimately with the people who are in a position to invest, partner, and otherwise support these young companies – a standardized way of thinking about a company that supplements instincts and directs the conversation to a productive and constructive dialog about the business.

Over the course of two Pitch Slam events in Spain, the quality of comments and questions put forward by the judges and audience was substantive to the company’s position and traction in the market.  Gone were the pot shots and gut feelings that are so often center stage when “experts” sit in public judgment of startups, and along with it the defensiveness that entrepreneurs often project when they’re under the spotlight of such random scrutiny.

In short, the G/Score worked to change the tenor of the dialog and every startup, whether top scoring or newly rising, could take away valuable feedback and constructive advice from the judging panel.

As you might expect, not every company has perfect pitch.  So another key learning from the evening is that entrepreneurs must continually fine-tune their company presentations, and if they tune to the G/Score, we believe they will be communicating more effectively the potential and execution excellence of their companies.

Guidewire Group strives to make the G/Score methodology and criteria transparent so that entrepreneurs understand clearly how they are being assessed.  We provide training videos that describe the score and provide advice on how to present a company for the purpose of being scored. Use these materials to hone your own business presentation, whether you’re pitching for a G/Score or selling your first products.

By tuning into the G/Score, you are stating clearly and as objectively (at least as objectively as a thing as tenuous as a startup can be) what your business is all about, how you will win the market, your commitment to technology and business execution, and the team that will drive your success.

This morning, I kicked off my 24^th and last DEMO conference.  By the end of the day tomorrow, Venture Beat’s Matt Marshall will be the sole executive producer of the DEMO Conferences and I’ll be on to something new.

History shows that companies created in down economies are just as likely to be successful as those started when times are good.  According to research done by the Kauffman Foundation, 51% percent of companies on the Fortune 500 list between 1929 and the present were started during a recession, a bear market, or both. Nearly half the companies listed on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies in 2008 were founded during an economic downturn.

It’s true that funding is less available and some people are unwilling to leave a good job to start a company. It’s also true that recessions can put an emotional damper on startups.  Starting a business is hard work regardless of the economy and this economy doesn’t make it any easier.

Still, many entrepreneurs – and I suspect all of those who are launching products at DEMO today — see even greater opportunity during a recession. They figure that the larger established companies that might pose competition have just as many woes as a brand new startup, which needs less money, can be more nimble, and doesn’t have to answer to Wall Street.

When unemployment rates are high – as they are now – there are really good people available to work in a startup, people who might feel that a startup poses less risk than it might have at other times.

Perhaps most importantly, startups can have a broad impact on the economic recovery and growth by stimulating innovation, and creating new industries and new jobs.

Of the more than 600,000 entrepreneurs in the United States – and many more around the world – who have or will start a company this year, some small number of them will in fact make it to the Fortune 500 list in 10 or 20 years.  And a few hundred will be on the Inc. 500 just a few years from now.  They will have created jobs and economic value not just for themselves, but for their communities near and far.

Bottom line: Now is a great time to start a company.

In many ways, that’s what we are doing at Guidewire Group: we are re-starting our company with a clear, sharp focus on entrepreneurs.   We have always held to a couple of core principles.  We believe in the power of entrepreneurship to drive the economy and, as we move on from DEMO, we’re devoting all our time and energy to helping entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial ecosystem that supports them.  We believe that when entrepreneurs succeed, the entire ecosystem benefits from that success and so we align ourselves with startups to help ensure their success.

Today, Guidewire Group is taking advantage of this unique economic environment to launch new initiatives that will deliver on this promise:  the Guidewire Assessment Framework, Studio G, and Innovate!100.

The Guidewire Startup Assessment Framework assesses a young company’s business viability, business and product execution, team, and business model.  We developed this consistent, objective assessment framework based on interviews with more than 30,000 startups over the past 25 years.  It is the codification of the selection criteria and methodology I’ve used to select companies to launch at DEMO over the last 13 years.

The Innovate!100 is a ranked order list of the most promising early-stage technology, media and telecom startups in the world. The Innovate!100 will be selected from among hundreds of eligible startups by Guidewire Group analysts and a world class network of advisors using the Startup Assessment Framework during the course of the Innovate!2010 Program.

Mike Sigal, Guidewire Group’s co-founder and president, will be leading those initiatives and other soon-to-be announced products, as I turn my full energies to Studio G.

Studio G is a high-performance workspace for high-potential startups.  It is both a physical workspace and a private Web community, guided by the key principles that innovative technology needs business innovation to reach its full potential; that smart people working collaboratively in dynamic workspaces with experts, mentors and community can build business value more rapidly; and that collaborative creative process, coupled with performance-driven metrics, drives innovation and business success.

Studio G is a best-practices community of smart, talented entrepreneurs, mentors, service providers, and investors who work virtually and physically together to rapidly build value into emerging businesses. Engagement in Studio G moves companies from market validation to customer adoption, wrapping smart business strategy around innovative teams and technologies.   Studio G works with both early-stage companies and established-brand spinouts to help them get it right from the start when making the critical transition from developing a product to marketing, selling and creating other business opportunities.

I’m thrilled to usher in this new era for Guidewire Group and hope you’ll watch this space, as we share more about these initiatives in the coming days.

It’s been an exciting morning around here, with the news of Chris passing the DEMO Executive Producer baton to Matt Marshall and DEMO’s new partnership with Venture Beat. Chris has detailed her personal feelings on leaving DEMO after 13 years, but we also wanted to take a moment to share a bit more about where Chris and Guidewire Group are going.

Over the next six months, we’ll continue to work on vetting and selecting startups for Chris’ final DEMO in September. At the same time, we’ll be starting a new chapter at four-year-old Guidewire Group, energized by the thought of having Chris’ undivided attention in the not too distant future! Most of you know Guidewire Group as a partner to DEMO. We are also the world’s leading analyst firm focused exclusively on startups and emerging markets. In that role, we work with young companies at key transition points, when every idea looks good on paper and every decision counts, to deliver unparalleled counsel on a variety of topics – from business and monetization strategies to market validation and competitive analysis delivered through custom and retained projects, events such as Innovate!Europe and our intensive in-residence program for young companies, Guidewire Studio.

And the best part is there’s a growing movement in the entrepreneurial ecosystem that believes “thinking is cool again” – that building companies that deliver long-term value through technology and business innovation trumps the “be here now – be gone tomorrow” mentality of pop culture startups anytime. As this movement gathers steam, we’re finding that Guidewire Group is in demand for our insight into emerging market trends, best practices, and common mistakes and for our ability to bring clarity, focus, and decades of emerging technology experience to the art of transforming ideas into successful enterprises.

Our wonderful experiences with DEMO allowed for short, intense opportunities to engage with startups.  We now look forward to extending those engagements, working more closely with companies to help them validate and strengthen their critical opportunities.  We’re passionate about startups and we know we can help them be more successful.

There’s much to share with you in the months ahead so we hope you’ll check The Guidewire blog regularly, follow us on Twitter, and visit our Facebook page.  New paths are always the most interesting to travel and we hope you’ll be right alongside us.

Who could ask for a better job? For the past 13 years, I’ve spent my days talking with some of the smartest people on the planet. People passionate about technology and the art and science of molding that technology into products and services that address real challenges and bring new capabilities to people’s lives.

I’d be hard pressed to make an accurate count, but I’d guess that since taking the reins of DEMO in the spring of 1996, I’ve met no fewer than 15,000 entrepreneurs, inventors, and innovators, and helped about 1,500 of them launch their products to market on the DEMO stage.

DEMO has given me the opportunity to travel the world; meet with government officials and business leaders; interview certified geniuses and a few certifiable nut cases, and through newsletters (back in the day), blog posts, speaking gigs, interviews, and the DEMO conference itself share back a bit of what I’ve learned and the realizations that learning sparked.

DEMO, with its emphasis on product innovation, is an amazing lens and filter through which to gauge the future of the information technology industry and the markets as they open, undulate, and fold over time. The conference is a tremendous reviewing platform for new ideas and a lookout post for emerging and impactful trends.

It may not be surprising, then, to learn that after all these years, the lookout perch that is DEMO gave me the opportunity to see a new future for myself and for my company, Guidewire Group.

So early last year, I began the process of transitioning from DEMO so that I could start my next career in earnest. The first step, of course, was making sure that this was the right new path for myself, my family, and my Guidewire Group colleagues. DEMO has been a big part of all our lives for a long, long time. We all did a lot of soul searching and determined that, yes, we were ready to put our full energies behind the Guidewire Group business: working with technology companies during the critical transition points in their businesses to identify opportunity, define strategy, and accelerate the path to success.

The next step was more difficult: working with our partners at IDG and Network World to identify a successor. DEMO is a great job and a challenging one, and it’s not an easy post to fill. We found the most perfect fit in an accomplished journalist, entrepreneur, and kindred spirit, Matt Marshall. Over the last year, I’ve had the opportunity to work with and get to know Matt and his team at Venture Beat. He is a talented, smart, deeply ethical journalist and he and his writers have created a remarkable, respected brand and business. And he is the perfect person to pick up the reins of DEMO as I lay them down after the DEMOfall event in September.

Matt and I share many of the same values, foremost of which are the respect for entrepreneurs and the process of innovation and the commitment to act with integrity and fairness as we serve our customers and communities. But Matt and Venture Beat are more than a pin-for-pin replacement for me and Guidewire Group. They bring new perspective to DEMO. While much about DEMO will remain the same, surely Matt will make a wonderful impression on the brand and the business. The new partnership between DEMO and Venture Beat promises a broader platform for the DEMO community and a richer conversation that will span the events. Together, Venture Beat and DEMO have an exciting future, and I’m eager to see it unfold.

I’m equally eager to unfold the future of Guidewire Group, a company I co-founded in 200 with Mike Sigal. In the past four years, Guidewire Group has evolved into an analyst firm laser-focused on startups. We work with young companies in the U.S. and Europe at key transition points, to develop and deliver business strategy and monetization and market validation. Through custom projects, events such as Innovate!Europe, and Guidewire Studio, our exclusive in-residence program, we’re doing the work I love most – helping startups thrive.

We have an exciting future planned for Guidewire Group and I look forward to sharing our vision with you in the months ahead. We have been privileged and honored to work with this great brand and the amazing people who have been associated with DEMO across the last 13 years.

And we’re looking forward to the next six months as we work just as diligently as we always have on DEMOfall 09, while transitioning the Executive Producer mantle to Matt and his team.

As Co-Founder and CEO of Guidewire Group, I usually let Chris and Carla do the blogging, but something happened this week at DEMOfall that inspired me to pen this first post.

When Chris and I founded Guidewire Group, we did so because we believed that there was an enormous opportunity to help entrepreneurs around the world connect with the investors, customers, partners, employees, mentors, service providers, media outlets and other entrepreneurs that can help them realize their dreams. Guidewire Group is committed to fulfilling this need with intelligence, inspiration, and integrity.

Over the last few months, we and our long-time partner DEMO faced aggressive attacks on our business model and questions about our commitment to serving entrepreneurs. While dealing with these attacks and questions was occasionally challenging or distracting, ultimately they gave us renewed energy to keep doing what we know how to do best: support entrepreneurs and those organizations that want to see entrepreneurs succeed.

During DEMOfall’s closing dinner, most of the 72 demonstrators (from 12 countries!) and several of DEMO’s sponsors unexpectedly took the stage, one after another, and expressed their gratitude and support of Chris, Carla and the incredible DEMO team in a most extraordinary way. Thankfully, a colleague was quick enough to capture most of this incredibly gratifying testimonial.

Inspiring this kind of gratitude, delight and loyalty in those Guidewire Group was founded to serve is for me, what it’s all about. So as long as entrepreneurs are building new businesses, Guidewire Group will be there to support them.

Mike Arrington’s post on TechCrunch this morning about bloggers and the capital around them was uncanny, as I spent yesterday pondering the ins and outs of blogging in the current climate. A bit of a ramble and frankly, lacking introspection, his post was nonetheless an interesting perspective on the blogging market and its potential future. It’s prompted me to lay bare some concerns and questions I’ve had of late.

The Guidewire is a relative newcomer to the blogosphere. Not counting personal blogs and the weekly posts on DEMO.com, Chris and I haven’t contributed much to the blog conversation. To be honest, our initial stab at a Guidewire Group blog collapsed under its own weight. We approached it with too heavy an editing hand, too complicated an interface, too… much thought, if that’s possible. We’re industry analysts by nature and trade, a profession that doesn’t lend itself to off-the-cuff musings and breaking news. We spend weeks, sometimes months, weighing market trends and startup viability and only then do we craft our analysis aimed toward Guidewire Group’s primary audience of VCs and C-level execs in technology firms. As we delve deeper into directing some of those thoughts into a blog, though, I increasingly struggle with how to build and maintain an online presence by producing interesting, mindful content that people want to read without turning into a ranting egomaniac. It’s right there in About The Guidewire:

Our goal… is to add to the conversation, not echo it. We hope that when we do wade in on an issue, we can offer a different perspective, one that’s missing from the discussion.

Easier said than done. All the well-intentioned, reasoned thought in the world isn’t worth much when people don’t see it. I think Chris best summed up our abrupt education in blogosphere politics when she said recently, “I’ve become a link whore.”

Chris and I have no interest in becoming another TechCrunch. Arrington has built a hell of a business but his philosophy of “leave no lingering emotional stone unturned” isn’t our style. Engaging in blog arguments “as bloody as possible” seems to me a good way to drive oneself completely mental, but if it works for him, so be it. Personally, I want The Guidewire to engage deeper in tech punditry by contributing both a voice of reason and cutting-edge thought. A perfect storm of Chris’ seasoned industry experience – she’s forgotten more about emerging tech in her 25 years than most of us possess in our pinkies – and my position at the forefront of new technologies.

I parsed over some of this with a blog-savvy friend yesterday, who said something I can’t get out of my head. He believes that when you write a blog post with a beginning, middle and end, – as Chris and I often do – there’s nothing for readers to contribute. Take the pretty little bow off The Guidewire, in other words, and expose a bit of the skeleton of our analysis. Does he have a point? Are we presenting our blog readers with flat content? Is that even a negative? If we focus on being thought leaders, must we sacrifice visibility?

The pre-blogosphere way of thinking would hold that I shouldn’t even post this. Publicly questioning The Guidewire’s direction, some may posit, shows a certain weakness. But my immersion in communities like FriendFeed, Twine, Twitter, and Seesmic is making me question a lot about effective interaction and engagement online. So let’s hear it, bloggers, pundits, and just-plain readers (do those exist anymore?) – what do you want from The Guidewire? Is traditional analysis dead?

I woke up Friday morning to discover that I’d become a cat herder. You know the role: trying to get dozens and dozens of pieces and people corralled into some semblance of order. I should come to expect it in the few days before a DEMO Conference is set to begin. After all, I’ve been reprising this role twice a year for most of the last eleven. Still, it always strikes me that otherwise smart business people can get so caught up in the weeds that they lose focus on their own objectives.

Here’s a case (and would that it had only happened once these last few days): An exec from a demonstrating company scours the news wires, looking for mentions of other companies also participating in the event. Spying a perceived competitor (for the record: we don’t think these companies compete), the exec searches for every mention anywhere in the media, on blogs, on the company site, that might serve as evidence that the company “broke the rules” of DEMO. The “evidence” is packaged into a stern e-mail — usually couched in a tone of “far be it from me to call out another company, but…” — and sent along to DEMO’s PR team. I then get a call, confirm that the assumptions of the exec are, in fact, wrong. This is followed by an e-mail or phone call that assures the exec that we’re “on the case,” politely thanking him for his diligence.

Normally, I’d let this sort of thing slide, and it certainly wouldn’t be fodder for a post. But this time, the predictable tattle-tale thread dropped onto my desk at about the same time my Guidewire Group co-founder at and I were talking about focus. Guidewire is fund raising for the capital to bring to market an exciting (I think), scalable (we’re confident), very large (the comps confirm) product offering.

If you’re raised capital before, you know that the process is, to some degree, pitching followed by objection handling. If you’re not careful, you can quickly bastardize your pitch and your business incorporating VC “feedback,” and trying to anticipate every conceivable objection. And it’s only made worse when the objections are so completely out of your control: “What if Bush declares marshal law to preserve his presidency? How will your user acquisition model scale then!”

So Mike and I were talking about which venture commentary to accept and which to reject. Quickly, the line became apparent. We focus on the things we can control and refuse to waste an ounce of energy trying to get planets to align or otherwise commit unnatural acts that distract from our focus. (Frankly, it’s pretty good advice for life, too.)

So what’s this have to do with nervous demonstrators? I figure that any moment a company is focused on its competitor is, at this juncture in the young life of a product or a company, is a waste of time and energy. (Never mind that it’s annoying to me and my staff.) As I wrote to one person late last week, “keep your eye on your prize.” Focus on the things you can manage and don’t waste time speculating about what others might do.

In a market place that provides immediate feedback via blogs and other means, you’ll find out quickly how you stack up with potential customers and against real and perceived competitors. Agile companies can react quickly to those known conditions. Spending time anticipating, guessing, and supposing . . . well, that’s just borrowing trouble and taking your focus away from the things you really can do to affect the outcome of your business.