Shel Israel on preparing for Demo

Shel Israel, blog here, is the guy who coauthored Naked Conversations with me. I’ve never had him on my show before today. But, you might not know that Shel has helped launch countless Silicon Valley companies. He’s been to Demo (the conference coming up next week) more than anyone I know. The companies he’s helped have won “DemoGod” awards seven times. He wrote a newsletter about conferences, too, so knows what he is talking about.

Anyway, we talk about lots of stuff in this half hour conversation. Hope you enjoy it. If you’re a company going to Demo you should listen to his advice.

I love any conference that bans PowerPoint. I recently started out a speech saying “I used to work at Microsoft and sat through my share of boring PowerPoint presentations so I promised myself never to do that to an audience again.” That got me my biggest applause line.

Anyway, this conversation goes south a few times, but that’s just how Shel and I work together. Stick in there and there’s some good stuff.

I gotta go back and find out if you can win a DemoGod award with a crappy product. Shel’s dog interrupted his answer on that. I’ll try to get him to write the answer here.

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