

Announcing Microsoft Ventures for startups - Lightning
http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2013/06/25/announcing-microsoft-ventures-for-startups-to-build-innovate-and-grow.aspx

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kryten
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.

~~~
ethomson
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.)

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

~~~
ethomson
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.

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

~~~
MichaelGG
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.

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

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chasing
Microsoft Ventures' site --
[http://www.microsoftventures.com/](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.

~~~
k3n
To me, it comes across as trying to seduce the desperate.

~~~
throwaway10001
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.

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levesque
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.

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

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

~~~
beat
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.

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kozhevnikov
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.

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

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

~~~
potatolicious
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.

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

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beagle3
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.

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xradionut
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.

