Scott Duffy interviews Jim Brisimitzis: Microsoft & Your Startup Business & Burgers: Season 1 Ep.19

I'm Alan Taylor. My buddy Scott Duffy and I are in search of the best burger in America. Each month we visit a new city to try some of the top restaurants, pubs, and brewhouses while sitting down for a candid conversation with some of the top entrepreneurs, athletes, entertainers, and celebrities. I don't know about you, but I love talking business over a burger. Welcome to Business and Burgers.

We're back in Seattle, Washington, for another round of Quinn's unique Burgers. Joining us is Microsoft Jim Brizomitzis. Jim is the general manager of Microsoft Startup Program, and he is an intrapreneur who develops new products and technologies from within Microsoft. Microsoft offers an array of tools to startups to help them succeed. And Jim is here to tell us how you and your startup can take advantage today.

So, Jim, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Always wanted to have somebody on the show from Microsoft because it's such a huge organization and so many entrepreneurs watch our show. We interview so many entrepreneurs. But I understand you're an intrapreneur.

I am.

And so many people, when they hear the word entrepreneur, they don't realize that you can be an entrepreneur inside of a big company, which you call an intrapreneur, and really have that kind of that startup mindset, taking a product to market.

Right.

But doing it inside of a bigger company.

Absolutely.

I'd never heard of this before. I always thought you're either an entrepreneur or.

Or you're corporate. Well, it's kind of a blend of both, really. You're an entrepreneur, but you're still in a corporate setting. And Satya, our CEO, likes to refer to as growth hacking as well. And so that's what I did. Me and four other colleagues, we came together and we decided we wanted to find a better way to help our customers deploy our cloud solutions. And it started off like most startups, as a small idea, and then we pivoted several times and it became cps, which is kind of fun.

And like a lot of entrepreneur startups, you know, you effectively raise money because you have to sell the idea internally in order to get it funded.

Right.

Tell me about that process.

Entrepreneurship is actually harder than entrepreneurship because the business I was managing was an $850 million PL. And so while I was building this side project, I still had to manage the business. We still hit our numbers. I had all the same stresses of an external entrepreneur startup, but I had the additional risk of if I didn't hit certain metrics or requirements for the role, who knows what would happen?

For the current thing and the new thing.

Absolutely. So when we start off the ideation of our idea, we had to go raise some funding to be able to build prototypes and actually start funding the sales process. And so we ended up raising $1.3 million, which was awesome. There's a certain freedom to entrepreneurship in terms of your ideas. With a great idea and solid execution, miracles can happen. You can bring really interesting technology to market. And so for me, because I love Microsoft so much, I wanted to be able to be on that bleeding edge of bringing new ideas to the table, but also working with the startup ecosystem in the US to help them understand that we can help them take their brilliant ideas to market as well. And so that's the funnest part of my job. In my 11 years at Microsoft, this is by far the funnest opportunity I've had.

Help our audience understand what is the difference between what is a platform versus a channel versus customers.

Yeah, certainly. So we work with software startups primarily. These are the future Pinterest or Facebook's, if you will. If I'm a cto, I'm a software developer and I'm building the next best whatever it ends up becoming. Choosing the platform for which you start to run those services or build your product on is really, really important. And so one thing that I'm quite proud about with Microsoft is we have Azure as a platform for cloud computing, but we've also got a full set of APIs. And so if I'm a startup building foo, I can run my services on Azure, I can pull API services from Bing, I can present my product through Office, there's just a whole litany of opportunities beyond even just cloud platforms. That sets us apart, I think, from some of our other competitors in the marketplace. That's what's pretty cool.

How does an intrapreneur like you communicate your message to entrepreneurs like me?

There's a few programs. There's a program that has been started at Microsoft that's been running for about eight to nine years now called BizPark. BizPark was started by Microsoft a long time ago, and it was a way for us to give access to our software to startups. At the time, before even cloud computing existed, you could sign up for BizPark as a startup. You would get access to all of our on prem software for free for three years, which was great. So you can prototype, you can build, you can run your business on our products through BizPark and not have to pay a penny for it. That product and offering has now evolved to also include Azure credits. And so we have two levels of bispark, the Basic and the Plus. And the plus program is really sweet because not only does it give you access to all of our MSDN products or on Prem products, but for startups who are in the plus program, they get $120,000 worth of Azure credits. That is good for two years. They can use it as often as they like.

Where would somebody go, an entrepreneur that wants to access BizPAR and learn how to do? You have to qualify.

There are some requirements for qualifying for Bizpark. So typically we're looking for companies that are less than five years old, less than a million dollars of revenue, because we have to filter out. There's a lot of demand for the program. But my team and I, there's about 13 of us around the country. We're in 11 metros or cities, which include Seattle, the Valley, Los Angeles, Chicago, Kansas City, Austin, Atlanta, Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. and so we're in some of the larger startup ecosystems here in the US and our team does a really good job of connecting both with the ecosystem by way of our partners, but also in being active in the ecosystem itself. And so if you're a startup and you happen to be working through a partner like a Techstars or 500 Startups or Y Combinator, chances are we already know you. If you're out in the ecosystem just learning about the startup community and trying to connect, chances are we're going to run into you at some.

All right, burger time.

Burger time in the house.

Oh, my gosh. I'm going to give this to you, Scott. Look at that.

Look at that. Thank you.

That's beautiful.

Thank you, sir.

So, Chef Scott, what do we have here?

So this is a Korean version of one of our burgers. So we've taken the ground beef, and we've infused it with chard, ginger, scallion, and shallot and shiitake mushrooms, and then a little bit of ponzu sauce. And then the salad on top of that is cress, radish, cilantro, napa cabbage tossed in a kimchi aioli. Wow, really good. And then the bun we made in house, and it's our version of a steam bun.

And tell us what you got going on here.

Our seasonal vegetable tempura. So we have shiitake mushrooms and green beans with a spicy aioli.

Thank you very much.

Absolutely.

Thank you, guys. Bon appetit. Yum yum.

On 3.

There's a party happening in my mouth.

Right now.

So I actually have a lot of friends that I think could benefit, would really benefit from the BizPark program. So how do they do it?

Yeah, so if they go up to Microsoft.com WAC, BizSpark, B I Z, Spark, there's an enrollment processor they click through. When we first engage early stage startups, which is what my team focuses on, we're all about helping them on the ideation side and the technology side and the platform side and then just helping them get into marketing. So it's not just about getting access to technology.

You guys actually get in there and you roll up your sleeves and you help them. You help them as mentors to develop their project.

Absolutely.

That's killer.

While technology is important, we truly care as a team about helping founders take their visions to market.

Are there any resources that Microsoft makes available or introductions to seed stage funds or venture capital funds?

Absolutely. So there's a group called Microsoft Accelerators that's actually the former team that I was part of. They run their own accelerators, one here in Seattle and six other locations around the world. But they also do a lot of VC and angel relations, more on the VC side. Through their network, we're able to connect startups who otherwise are struggling. Connecting with investors to get connected to investors. Then the Microsoft Accelerator team is taking Series A companies and going even deeper with them. So getting them in front of our technologists, our product teams, getting in front of our customers and helping them really go well past an MVP into scaling their business and growing. And then we have just launched, as of a few months ago, our own fund. It's called the Microsoft Ventures Fund. It's run by a former executive over at Qualcomm Ventures in a garage. And that fund is targeting Series A companies and above. And so whether you're ideating, whether you've got a product and you're looking to grow and scale it, or whether you're looking to raise your next round of funding, Microsoft's got a plethora of programs that startups could leverage and benefit from.

See, Scott wrote the book Launch, right?

Yeah.

So he's familiar with all this. But as an entrepreneur, I'm like, shocked about this.

Most startups are when we get to sit down. In fact, I was in Atlanta meeting with 13 Techstars companies who've just started, and when we sat down and started sharing with them stuff that we were doing, they were blown away. Hold on. Is this the same Microsoft? No, we're different.

You've got technology mentorship, potential, access to capital all in one place. One of the questions I have is what if you need to convert from one platform to another?

Sure.

So let's say you're an entrepreneur and you started to develop on a particular platform, and you really want to take advantage of these programs. The company is the right fit for you. Do you guys provide any assistance to help move move over?

We do. So my team is primarily comprised of what we call tech evangelists. They're software developers at heart, and so they'll help the CTO or the founding team with any of the conversions that are interesting to them. And we have a set of resources that are available that could help them think through architectures and such. One of the areas that I personally get excited about is cloud computing and SaaS architecture. So different than how services, or, sorry, rather, software packages have been developed in the past. Right. And so with some founding teams, not all, but with some who are actually getting into that SaaS world for the first time, it's a really cool experience to sit with them and talk to them about web scale. Right. Building a service that can serve potentially hundreds of millions of people. And it's those early conversations that we have that ensures that the architecture they're building against is ready for web scale. The last thing you want to do as a startup founder is to commit to a technology roadmap that doesn't allow you to scale, then realize, shoot, there's so much interest. My architecture can't scale.

If there was one piece of advice, you talk to startups all over the country. You work with venture capital firms all over the country. If there was one single piece of advice you could give to today's entrepreneur, what would it be?

Passion matters. Passion for what you're building matters. In fact, I was watching one of your videos of the gentleman who's the artist, and he talked about how important passion is. I can't agree with him more. I think passion really matters. And the difference between an entrepreneur that's going to actually move his or her agenda forward and one that doesn't isn't necessarily the product. It's the passion that drives the execution. It's the passion that gets somebody past seven VCs, like in the case of Airbnb, that said, you're not fundable and look where Airbnb is today. Right. And so there's a world out there that will always struggle with whatever an entrepreneur is bringing to the world. Right. If you have passion about that idea, great greatness comes from it.

That's right.

Right. And so if you look at founder stories from Lyft, Airbnb to Facebook to name the famous startup of today's era, guaranteed everyone has faced some diversity.

I would guess that most of the Inc 500 companies that I get a chance to interview have heard no. More than anything else.

Sometimes to me, no is a validation you're on the right path.

Thanks for helping us entrepreneurs sir.

Thanks for.

Hey, thank you.

Appreciate it.

I had no idea that Microsoft so many tools for startups Everything Jim shared left us with some real food for thought. Startups can utilize BizPark to get access to free Microsoft software for three years. BizPark is more than just free tech. Microsoft will actively mentor startups and help develop their project. Microsoft can help your startup connect with investors and they may even become an investor themselves with the Microsoft Ventures Fund.

Check out more episodes of Business and burgers and our BB blog at our website, businessandburgers.com and don't forget, visit Business and Burgers on Facebook and give us a big thumbs up. We'll see you next time right here on Business and Burgers.