Is your product a heart pump or a blood test?

Last week I went to the Venture Capital in the Rockies conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was going to go to DEMO Fall in Santa Clara, but my team had that event covered and I decided to show some love to the Rocky Mountain region. Mark Solon (who can golf pretty darn good in sandals), Michael Bearup, Brian Birk and Stephanie Spong all did a great job putting on the event in Santa Fe and the weather was just perfect.

The conference was well attended and had a single "pitch" track where all the companies, healthcare, IT technology and clean tech presented in the same session. I sought out a power outlet, got my laptop spun-up, and settled down to do some e-mails during the pitch's that were not IT focused. But, I ended up paying attention to every single pitch, as the markets and opportunities had many parallels to my typical webby world.

Two of the more fascinating were SynCardia, a manufacturer of a portable artificial heart, and High Throughput Genomics who manufactures a simple blood test that can detect and identify bacteria. Both had great presentations, causing a term sheet request from one of the review panel members, and both seemed to have more 00's associated to them than the typical IT funding presentations that I see, but they got me thinking about an analogy to our industry.

SynCardia has a narrow, relatively predictable market, but when you need the product, you HAVE TO have it. They showed a happy patient, alive and mobile, simply because their product existed. But the market is complex to deploy, requires a certain amount of support infrastructure (such as heart transplant surgeons), and requires a high degree of precision and oversight to manufacture. High Throughput Genomics essentially is an analytics tool. It solves in hours, what normally takes days, and allows doctors to prescribe the proper antibiotics regiment quickly and effectively. As opposed to growing germs in a petri dish, which takes days, their tools tag the DNA and can call out the microbes in the blood sample. In business, this is like getting the month end report vs. seeing in real time your business's performance attributes. That's a business that can scale, but the sales pitch is quite different.

I was pleased that two of our BizSpark One companies Graphic.ly and NextPage were also pitching at the event. Both of which are fantastic companies. NextPage is more in the heart pump category as it focuses on documentation compliance and is simply a must have, you either use NextPage to do it easily and electronically or you use some other technique. Graphic.ly, well, it's hard to categorize them as a blood test, but they do have the potential for massive global scale and bring a staid, paper based, slow industry into the real time world of online entertainment and social media.

So, are you building a product that is a heart pump or a blood test? There is plenty of room in the world for both, but make sure you understand how others, your prospects, and your investors, will view your company and your company's products.

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