Announcing Microsoft Ventures for startups | Hacker News Reader

Announcing Microsoft Ventures for startups

blogs.technet.com

73 pointsLightning32 comments

No way.

I'd take dirty cash from Larry Ellison before I signed up to anything related to them these days. This is after 20 years of working with Microsoft on large enterprise products, some of which were built in partnership with them.

If you've ever been on the end of a partner agreement, which is what this probably amounts to with much more lock-in (as they're channeling cash to you as well), then you'll understand what I mean. It's overbearing and you're treated like a criminal after about 3 months if you don't spend, spend, spend.

Also, I worked for a startup which was spun up in conjunction with them (no funding but support, advice and endorsement). It was quite successful circa 2005. We switched out to Python/PostgreSQL as to be honest it was getting expensive throwing SQL boxes out and the time to market for ASP.Net was high.

The moment this happened, everything was off the table and we had the license police on our arses, even though we were in compliance and they knew it.

You know the film: The Firm? Not far off it from experience.

That's interesting. I had the exact opposite experience. I was part of a small startup that received exactly what you describe as "support, advice and endorsement" (like you, we did not receive funding) for developer tools.

We developed Java software using Eclipse. Most of our team used Linux or Mac OS, only one of our developers used Windows. We shipped software for HP-UX on HP-PA RISC and IBM mainframes. Our web site was written in Ruby on Rails and backed by PostgreSQL.

Microsoft liked this arrangement enough that they acquired us. (Full disclosure, I remain a Microsoft employee.)

Out of curiosity, what was the name of your company?

Teamprise was the name of the company. (To be pedantic, it was not my company in that I was not a founder; I was an employee.)

I'm embarrassed to say that I'm not certain that I know the new name of the product. Microsoft product names can get a little, em, verbose when you start talking about small parts of bigger products that are also small parts of still bigger products. I think that the name, officially, is "Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Team Foundation Server Team Explorer Everywhere".

While the acquisition was better for the product (more resources!) and better for customers of it (it's free!), the new name is regrettable.

Right, it's the cross platform TFS Explorer (basically Source Control View in Visual Studio, but pulled out as an app)

We must have been blessed with an asshole rep or two!

That would be difficult. Our positive experience was certainly a direct connection to the welcome nature of the product development team and the sales and evangelism teams. Without them, we would have had a much more difficult time making inroads into a sales channel.

I'm sorry about your experience and I really hope it's the exception and not the rule.

Which country? We were in the UK and is was the guys from Reading (partner support).

United States.

In my personal experience, the foreign subsidiary care about nothing except screwing as much licensing out of people as possible. I've dealt with a local MS that told people it was _illegal_ to use a non-regional copy of Windows inside the country. (So, technically, travelling with a laptop using US Windows wasn't allowed.) This was incorrect, they didn't care. In another country, the regional MS office was flat-out corrupt. I have a feeling the incentive structure for the other offices is very different, and the lack of R&D happening there skews the work environment.

I've met good individuals, just haven't seen good overall management. Then again, I'm not looking at total sales as my evaluation metric.

Thanks - that makes sense. That matches our experience exactly.

Microsoft Ventures' site -- http://www.microsoftventures.com/ -- has this nugget right at the top, in large lettering:

"You have an idea so brilliant it burns. You can’t sleep. You can’t eat. You just have to make it happen—now."

There have been plenty of posts on Hacker News about entrepreneurs and hackers being bad at work-life balance and/or trying to create better work-life balance with varying degrees of success. It's a real issue, and I think the common consensus is that entrepreneurs with poor work-life balance are more likely to experience burn-out (or other problems like alcohol or drug issues -- or depression) which will ultimately make them less effective at whatever they're doing.

So I wonder two things:

1) How much of this "work at the expense of all else" mentality is, in fact, driven by marketing like this on the Microsoft Ventures site? (Edit: Not that it's Microsoft's fault, but that this attitude is common in marketing relating to start-ups and entrepreneurship.)

2) Should having this kind of "work at the expense of all else" language in the most prominent position on the Microsoft Ventures site make me conclude that they actually kind of don't "get it" as far as start-up entrepreneurship goes? Or, at least, that they are trying to take some "cool" stance and "appeal to the kids" with some slightly more sophisticated form of the "EXTREME" everything marketing aimed at teens and twenty-somethings about a decade ago? Because it makes the site feel more like an ad for Mountain Dew or Red Bull than an advertisement for an organization that really cares to understand how start-up culture should work. Which, I guess it is, since the end-game for Microsoft is most likely to get more cool new companies to use their (otherwise struggling?) software platforms.

I understand I'm judging based on one throwaway tag-line, but it's literally the only non-menu-item piece of text on the screen when I visit their site. So I feel I have to give it a fair amount of weight.

You could apply the same logic to almost any passion that a person can have. Tennis, racing, singing, pick your choice. I was up till 1am last weekend playing tennis under lights. Overdo anything, and you're likely to get messed up.

I think you're reading too much into it. It's just a pitch, effective or not and I think it relates more to deciding to go for the idea and the "Eureka!" moment rather than the weeks and months working on it after doing so.

I agree -- work isn't the only thing you can burn out on.

But I do think it totally relates to the weeks and months working on the start-up after the "Eureka!" moment. I'd say "having the idea" is the "Eureka!" moment in their slogan, and they're referring to eschewing eat and sleep in order to make that idea a real thing. Which takes weeks and months. Which sounds like a recipe for burn-out.

And, honestly, I think entrepreneurship should be approached soberly rather than like some extreme sport or gameshow. Because start-ups can lose you hundreds of thousands of dollars in opportunity costs, potentially, and interrupt other parts of life. Not that they aren't potentially rewarding as well, but the stakes are high and should be treated as such.

I read that as "you can't sleep/eat because the fact that you're not working on your idea bothers you so much". A bit like how you might have been totally nervous the first time you asked someone out on a date, so much so that you were unable to eat or sleep. However, once you're in a committed relationship with the person that nervousness goes away.

Of course, that's just my reading and I don't know how that stacks up with what Microsoft intended to communicate or what others will read into it.

To me, it comes across as trying to seduce the desperate.

Most startups and founders are like that, either because they want to get the product out yesterday, they are broke as hell or both. So MSFT is not targeting the desperate, but real start-ups.

I don't get the can't sleep/eat thing. But I do the intensity because without it, the company won't take off and there won't ever be a product to sell.

Slavery to my own business is the price I pay for freedom, right?

I think this is a smart move. Microsoft has a lot of cash and doesn't seem to know where/how to spend it. I mean their latest product launches have met pretty cold receptions. Curious to see how this will play out.

As a Bizspark member I'm a little perplexed at not having received an email first...

Not sure, but this looks like the first major global approach by an in-house tech VC fund - 5 accelerators around the globe.

I noticed that too. It looks like MS is taking advantage of their global reach to get the benefits of accelerators to places that the mainstream "startup" community isn't going. It's their chance to be firstest with the mostest, when they're coming into this venture accelerator thingy late in the game.

I wonder if rounds A, B and C would cover the licencing cost of a SQL Server cluster? But in all seriousness I hope this would result in more interesting .NET based apps and will give Microsoft more reason to support Mono, new open source frameworks and middleware and better integrations/bindings with existing ones.

WHAT??? Anyway, good news for the startup scene, as long as they don't force everyone to code in .NET. ;)

You only have to code in .Net if you don't agree to put in an NSA back door.

I know yours is just a pithy joke, but I think a lot of this community has extreme NSA-fatigue, including myself. It's not enough that 50-90% of the stories on the front page are all related to the NSA scandal, but it also has to infest completely unrelated posts like this one.

I'd like to pretend that we're still a forum about technology and startups, as opposed to an ever so slightly higher-level form of /r/politics.

There there, it isn't good to lie to yourself like that.

Don't laugh - they probably will.

You should check out the Windows Azure website, .NET is but one column among 5-6 open languages / platforms. Microsoft realizes that it needs to be where the developers are, which is a broader world than .NET.

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/documentation/

I'm using node.js on Azure and it is impressively good product.

But I actually like .NET.

I have my misgivings about a lot of other MS products, but C# is just plain nice.

Anecdotal, but the only positive experience I've ever heard that someone had with Microsoft was being acquired. Every other interaction turned sour (and often fatal) for the 2nd party.

Back in the late 1990's and early 2000's, the Microsoft Kiss of Death was well known. The concept is not well known today, but I'm not sure anything else about it has changed.

Sounds like they are priming the pump for Metro and Azure as well as trying to get some new blood on their side.

I've been tempted to go down this road, but then my memory of previous startup experiences and the number of times I've been pissed off about shit from Redmond stops me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com