On beyond DEMO with Chris Shipley

So you've got this great job, one you've been doing for well over a decade. You get to see cool new stuff before anyone else -- in fact, you made that a core part of the gig. Would-be competitors sink their teeth into your kneecaps and you shake it off. You are quite possibly the most successful literature major ever to graduate from Allegheny College.

Who the heck leaves that job? And in the middle of economic madness, no less?

Chris Shipley's announcement last week that she's turning over the reins of the twice-yearly DEMO conference to Matt Marshall, currently CEO and editor-in-chief of VentureBeat, resulted in predictable uproar in certain circles, and a few suggestions that a) the show and/or b) the show-new-products-to-major-players concept and/or c) the industry itself is in Terrible Terrible Trouble.

So we asked, and Shipley agrees that industry-wide, things are in flux. However, it's not what you think, and it's not trouble unless a person is unprepared to take it on.

"It's an exciting time," says Shipley, who on Friday afternoon was readying her second-to-last DEMO (her final turn at the helm comes in September) and preparing to turn her attention to Guidewire Group, the analyst firm she co-founded in 2004. "A tough market. But you can hover in the corner and wait it out, or you can take steps to change reality." The change from directing proceedings at Demo to doing sustained work with early-stage startups makes sense now, while the timid folk lay low.

Guidewire works exclusively with early-stage startups and emerging markets, and attempts to strike a balance between the Silicon Valley echo chamber and the needs of Middle America, which is (brace yourself) pretty much entirely uninterested in tech hipness-qua-hipness. "We're not hip and groovy!" Shipley says cheerfully. "And we want to work with people who think that's good."

Which, she believes, puts Guidewire in alignment with change afoot in the culture: "We think deep thinking is gonna get cool again."

The recent changes in Washington and the new cultural emphasis on considered thinking and accountability gives her reason to hope, she says, that as a culture we're moving away from our tendencies toward short-attention-span thinking and off-the-cuff "criticism as entertainment," which can unfairly inflate lightweight ideas and sink those that require a little concentration to develop.

Fair enough; DEMO itself has changed as the tech scene matured. In its earliest days, when founder Stewart Alsop was running the show, it had a definite insider vibe (read: cool stuff stuff Alsop had discovered) that matched the relatively small parameters of the tech community back then. That was 1991; massive centralized tech information sources such as PC Magazine and Computer Shopper roamed the earth, and Comdex was the biggest trade show in the galaxy. Shipley took the reins in 1996, as the Web exploded and a welter of new-breed tech mags sprang up. In 1997, she tweaked the DEMO formula to make it an all-premiere event (that is, no product could be demonstrated unless it was premiering at DEMO).

Time passed. Mega-shows such as Comdex died or dissolved into smaller niche events. The Web made it easier for obscure companies to tell the world about their wares. Long-lead publications (that is, magazines that take weeks or months to disburse their information) found themselves competing with the Web in general and the blogosphere in particular to report tech news. Some of those blog-based efforts, feeling their oats, declared that they were the right guys to do DEMO's job, claiming that the conference's cost of entry -- it costs $18,500 to present at DEMO, if your application is accepted -- was keeping out possible worthy contenders for attention. (Shipley has in other interviews defended the financial barrier to entry, noting that companies in any position to deal with the kind of success DEMO can bring won't find the fee a critical impediment.)

(And the obligatory disclaimer goes here: Your writer once worked for a publication owned by IDG, the company that also owns DEMO. I had, however, no contact with the show or even the division that managed it. Onward.)

The hip-and-groovy vibe that Guidewire lacks is something that has been cultivated by the "right guys" mentioned above, and Shipley's had to deal with a certain amount of noise from that quarter (including, at one point, a snarky "job offer" from one of them; the other has since gone into temporary retirement after being Touched By A Loogie at another conference). If that kerfuffle's in any way part of her decision to move on, it's not apparent; as she shrugs, "it's a matter of [having] only so many hours in the day."

Even the venture-capital scene, with its endless pressure to pay off its investors and thirst for new ways of making that happen, is in flux according to Shipley, leading to further opportunities for a more measured approach to business.

"I think the venture-capital business is going to go through a lot of changes over the next few years," she said. The circumstances that led to great growth in the aftermath of the first dot-com boom are present now, though the economic problems are of course far broader.

"People are cautious... But people who are innovators, they innovate [regardless]. And entrepreneurs by nature identify problems and solve them." She describes a few of Guidewire's upcoming goals over the next 12-18 months, including a project that would bring promising businesses to "in-residence" programs in the Valley. "The kind of entrepreneurs we want to work with," she says, "are the ones who aren't flipping companies so much as building businesses."

DEMO '09 runs March 1-3 in Palm Desert, Calif.