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Sun's Schwartz at Startup Camp: Learn from users who outpace biggest IT budgets

To kick off Startup Camp yesterday, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz delivered a short opening keynote that we captured on video tape where he talked about the greenfield opportunities that startups have to make technology into a competitive weapon.
Written by David Berlind, Inactive

To kick off Startup Camp yesterday, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz delivered a short opening keynote that we captured on video tape where he talked about the greenfield opportunities that startups have to make technology into a competitive weapon. He basically advised startups to be thinking in that way -- to be grouped into the category of businesses that deliver services to users instead of just being a business that consumes those services (and technology) and that sees IT as nothing more than a cost. But the most interesting part of the keynote came when he told two stories, each a reminder of how the latest wave of innovation has been difficult if not impossible for some of the largest IT budgets to tap, and how ordinary users are basically running circles around them with far fewer resources. The first had to do with the US military and is literally a matter of life and death:  

How backward is it that a teenager walking around downtown Nashville has a better shot at finding his buddies than one of his soldiers does [on the battlefield].... Just the idea that the community has made more progress in the marketplace than the largest IT budgets in the world (a reference to the Pentagon's IT budget), proves that this is not about resources. It's about access to talent, access to innovation, global innovation and global communities and those were buzzwords a few years ago and from my vantage point, those are not buzzwords anymore. That is very much our corporate strategy.

The second story, and the one that drew quite a bit of laughter when Schwartz was done (given the inefficiency it exemplified) had to do with the paper trail that must be created any time Schwartz publishes information in his blog that might be considered material to investors:

Every once in a while when I write something that's close to our earning statements, our general counsel comes over and knocks on my head and say we actually have to do an SEC filing for that.  The irony in all this is that I post something on my blog, it is then printed out and a little "Sign Here" sticky is put on the bottom and I have to sign that, and it is then Fedexed over to the Securities and Exchange Comission and then they post it so it can be broadly available for investors.

Here's the video:

Startup Camp took place on the day before Sun's biggest annual event: JavaOne. Disclosure: Startup Camp is a Sun-sponsored unconference, the logistics and Web operations of which are outsourced to Mass Events Labs, Inc., a company that I am part owner of. 

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