On the Road to Support Entrepreneurs at DEMO and Around the World

Our new Entrepreneur in Residence Ingrid Vanderveldt’s Twitter handle is @ontheroadwithiv and that’s just what I did last week – went on the road with her to California.

Our first stop was Silicon Valley and the DEMO conference, where we often got the question “What is Dell doing here?” We got a chance to explain it at the Startup America social media lounge in this video:

While there, we got to hear from many interesting startups around the globe – from Dell-like dorm room entrepreneurs to more experienced innovators. More than 90 companies were vying for attention and The Next Web has compiled a list of their 10 favorites.

One of those on that list that I thought would be particularly appealing to service-oriented small and medium business businesses such as salons, dentists, personal trainers, or anyone else whose clients might want to make appointments online was Schedulicity. A slightly more established startup than some of the others at DEMO, they used the event to launch “Pop-Up Offers” that lets businesses post last-minute time slots with a discount in hopes of attracting more customers.

While in the Bay Area, Ingrid and I took an opportunity to visit with the local representatives of Endeavor – a global nonprofit with a goal to transform emerging countries by supporting “High-Impact Entrepreneurs.” Erik Dithmer, our vice president and general manager of Small & Medium Business, Americas, serves on their Global Advisory Board and we’ve helped sponsor activities such as their recent Endeavor Entrepreneur Summit.

Then, when she discovered that I’d lead Dell’s excursion into Second Life five years ago, Ingrid insisted I meet its founder and serial entrepreneur Phillip Rosedale. We stopped by the offices of his new venture Coffee & Power for an all-too-short visit with his co-founder Ryan and team pictured below before I made a mad planes, trains and automobiles dash back to Austin – just before the crowd coming to the ACL festival that Dell’s bringing to the world on Precision workstations

About the Author: Laura Pevehouse

Laura Pevehouse was profiled as one of five “social media mavens” in the March 2009 issue of Austin Woman Magazine and named an AdWeek’s TweetFreak Five to Follow. She has been part of the Dell organization for more than 15 years in various corporate communications, employee communications, public relations, community affairs, marketing, branding, social media and online communication roles. From 2014-2018, Laura was Chief Blogger/Editor-in-Chief for Direct2DellEMC and Direct2Dell, Dell’s official corporate blog that she help launch in 2007. She is now a member of the Dell Technologies Chairman Communications team. Earlier in her Dell career she focused on Global Commercial Channels and US Small and Medium Business public relations as part of the Global Communications team. Prior to that, she was responsible for global strategy in social media and community management, as well as marcom landing pages, as a member of Dell’s Global SMB Marketing, Brand and Creative team. When she was part of Dell’s Global Online group, Laura provided internal consulting that integrated online and social media opportunities with a focus on Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. She managed the home page of Dell.com, one of the top 500 global web sites in Alexa traffic rank, and first brought web feeds and podcasts to the ecommerce site. In her spare time she led Dell into the metaverse with the creation of Dell Island in the virtual world Second Life. Laura has earned the designation of Accredited Business Communicator from the International Association of Business Communicators, and received her Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Louisiana State University. Before joining Dell Financial Services in 2000, she worked at the Texas Workforce Commission and PepsiCo Food Systems Worldwide.