Late last year, I spoke with Andy Plesser, founder and CEO of Beet.tv, about Microsoft’s IPTV efforts and how they related to startups in particular. Andy and I had a follow up talk looking into the process of partnering with Microsoft, and our engagements outside the United States. Here is the full transcript of our talk. The video can be seen here.

Dan’l Lewin: The way we look at it, we have a core group that's a set of corporate resources that I have responsibility for, and then that kind of syndicates or federates out into market areas where classical, if you will, Silcon-Valley-centric, or Silicon-Valley-style entrepreneurism and venture capital plays.

So, clearly, in the US, it's not just the Valley, it's Austin, Texas; it's Boston; it's Seattle; it's everywhere else where we have these skills and typically major universities, et cetera. Around the world, there are 15 countries where we're doing this work, probably five or six that are very, very capable and we're tightly integrated. So there's great things going on in Israel, particularly in this area. There's incredibly interesting things going on in the UK.

We've actually engaged aggressively in France. We've purchased two companies in France in the last six months, which is really interesting, one called Screen Tonic, for example. India and China, again, big market opportunities, tremendous entrepreneurial zeal. So that's a system that we've got in place and, again, we're a global company, and we see the activity everywhere, and we try and enable that wherever possible.

In terms of our global outreach and working with entrepreneurs and startups around the world, we have a Web site, www.MicrosoftStartupZone.com, and we have a program associated with that where we're—what we call "accelerating" the top 100 companies that we're able to see around the world doing interesting things in and around our ecosystem. Many of them are working in online video and related spaces, but that's really the resource place, the landing page where a startup can go. And from it, you know, discern the best way to work with and engage with Microsoft.

Andy Plesser: So how does a company go about being a part of that?

Lewin: Well, the first thing is they engage. They step up and let us know what they're up to within some context. And then we have a selection process. They get nominated by one of the team managers, a portfolio manager, who's looking at a particular area. And then from that, we'll provide a set of online services and related cost offsets and things. We're not direct investors, but we actually do a significant amount of people, time, and energy investment in helping these companies.

Typically, we're looking for companies that have some—what we would call a "win win win," right? They're clearly focused on customers that matter to us, and they're using some of our highlighted technologies where we can help them as we launch our products and services around the world.

It's very hard to see what an entrepreneur sees, right? An entrepreneur suspends disbelief and has a vision of what's possible. Occasionally that resonates with me personally. What we—you know, you've given them all the encouragement you can. As a company and as a group that I oversee, we spend a lot of time guiding entrepreneurs through the maze, if you will, which is a large company like Microsoft. And we can be really clear very quickly about whether or not we can be helpful, and give them context on if we can, how, or if we can't, why. And that usually provides them with some insight into what a company of our size and scale with our focus and commitment on this huge market opportunity of online video.

So we have points of view but, again, the empowering thing that we do, I think, is to give people a context on where we see things. So it's their idea that we put in context of what we know. It's not us, you know, advising them to go do this and you'll be successful. But as you said, there are so many different opportunities. There are entrepreneurs focused in so many different areas that it's exciting for us to see that and to figure out where we can help.